HARRY CREWS, who has died aged 76, was a former boxer, bartender, fairground barker and jailbird who drew on his upbringing in the “worst hookworm and rickets” part of the Deep South to become the author of 17 acclaimed novels about the freaks and outcasts of American culture.
In books characterised by profane language and unrestrained violence, Crews wrote about the South’s poor whites, a world he knew well. It was a world in which actions speak louder than words: “Knowing, like thinking, accomplished nothing,” says the hero in All We Need of Hell (1987). “Thinking always left you precisely where you were. You couldn’t think your way out of a gas chamber or across barbed wire. The act was the thing.”
Crews’s characters often become freak show artists in an effort to escape their lot. Herman Mack, the hero of Car (1972), sets out to eat an entire Ford Maverick, four ounces at a time, live on television. In The Knockout Artist (1988), Eugene Biggs exploits his ability to knock himself out. In The Gypsy’s Curse (1974), a teenage deaf-mute with deformed legs lives in a boxing gym where he makes a living performing fingerstands and other acrobatic tricks for money.
Crews’s characters do not operate within conventional moral boundaries; their rules of conduct derive from blood relationships, gang friendships, feuds and superstition. Yet beneath their disordered lives they become heroic by fighting to maintain their dignity against the odds, drawing on reserves of black humour to keep themselves going.
The deformed hero of The Gypsy’s Curse, for example, recalls how he once got into bed with a “deaf-mute lady”, only to discover, on closer inspection, that she was a hermaphrodite: “That’s the thing about deaf mutes, they almost always have something else wrong with them, too,” he muses. “I went ahead on with it though,” he recalls. “It’s too hard to get laid if you’ve got my disadvantages without going around turning it down.”
Many considered Crews’s masterpiece to be not a work of fiction but A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), an account of his upbringing in Georgia. Crews found it so difficult to write that it precipitated a descent into alcohol and drugs from which he almost failed to emerge. As the memoir made clear, the gothic horror of his fiction was nothing when compared to the facts of his own life.
Harry Eugene Crews was born on June 7 1935 at Alma, Georgia, a dirt poor rural community near the Okefenokee Swamp. His father, a sharecropper, died before Harry was two, and shortly afterwards his mother married her late husband’s brother, a violent alcoholic. There was seldom enough to eat, so Harry and his brother supplemented their meagre diet by chewing clay for the minerals it contained. They went to sleep every night to the sounds of their parents’ fights.
When Harry was five he was paralysed by an unspecified illness, probably polio. While he was bedridden, people came from all around to stare at his legs, which lay cramped and twisted beneath him: “I knew that they were staring with unseemly intensity at my legs, that they wanted most of all to touch them, and I hated it and dreaded it and was humiliated by it. I felt how lonely and savage it was to be a freak.”
About a year later, after recovering from this illness, he became involved in a horrific accident during which he was hurled into a “hog boiler” full of scalding water. He had to spend another year in bed recovering from his burns.
Harry’s only means of escape was through a Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue: “Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.”
When things were bad at home, he found refuge in fantasising about the people in the catalogue: “They all looked so good and clean and perfect, and then I’d write little stories about them.”
At 17 he joined the Marine Corps. Three years later, on the GI Bill, he attended the University of Florida, where, determined to become a writer, he took a degree in Literature followed by a master’s in Education. In 1960 he married a fellow student, Sally Ellis. They divorced after a year but remarried in 1962. They had two sons, but when one of them drowned in a neighbour’s pool, aged four, the Crews moved out of the family home: “I didn’t get my books, anything, just left like a dawg ’cause I felt so bad.”
While working in a series of dead-end jobs, Crews tried to establish himself as a writer, but all he got was a pile of rejection slips (“Burn it, son,” one of his teachers advised him after reading an early manuscript. “Fire’s a great refiner.”)
Success came with The Gospel Singer (1968), about a travelling evangelist who meets a grisly ritual death when it turns out he is not everything he claims to be. Other novels include A Feast of Snakes (1976), centred around a rattlesnake rodeo, and The Hawk Is Dying (1973). There were also collections of essays and short stories.
Crews had always been a heavy drinker, but the effort of writing A Childhood almost tipped him over the edge. He stopped writing fiction and went on an extended bender around America writing features for magazines such as Esquire and Playboy. One day he woke up in Alaska to find a new tattoo inside his elbow. On another occasion he ended up in jail after a bar-fight. “Alcohol and I had many, many marvellous times together,” he recalled. “Then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, ‘Hey, man, the ball game’s up’.”
In 1987 he checked himself into a rehabilitation centre, after which he never touched another drop.
Although he never achieved widespread fame, Crews won a substantial “cult” following. In 1999 he was the subject of Getting Naked With Harry Crews, a collection of interviews conducted with him between 1972 and 1997. For nearly 30 years he taught creative writing at Florida University, where one former student recalled his classes as being “like taking a fiction workshop with Captain Hook”.
Harry Crews is survived by a son. Harry Crews, born June 7 1935 died March 28 2012