COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud
by Colette Bancroft

The Artist As Scar Lover

WHETHER IT'S THE SKELETAL fiancé of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the good ole boy fetishist of Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," Tennessee Williams' man-eater in "The Masseur" or Harry Crews' sheriff in a rattlesnake condom in "A Feast of Snakes," Southern Gothic fiction has been giving its readers cold chills, belly laughs and wonderful writing since Mark Twain sent Huck Finn down the river into a world of bloody murder and human folly.
That gloomy sobriquet "Southern Gothic" is something of a misnomer for a fictional form that, at its best, bursts with elements of traditional tall tales, magical realism and the rowdiest kinds of humor. Its world view balances a cold-eyed recognition that life can be unspeakably brutal and stupid, a tender compassion for all the poor souls caught up in it, and an irresistible notion that a roar of laughter may be the last best way to survive.

Harry Crews: Blood and Grits

Perhaps the best current practitioner of Southern Gothic in all its weird glory is 61-year-old Harry Crews. For most of the last three decades, Crews has been on the faculty at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where his classes in the creative writing program hold legendary status.
He also manages to write at quite a clip. Since 1968, Crews has published 18 books, 13 of them novels. The first eight novels were published between 1968 and 1976, at the rate of one a year. After a ten-year hiatus from fiction, he has published five more novels since 1987. In addition to his fiction, Crews is an accomplished journalist and essayist and the author of a remarkable autobiography.
Despite his talent and productivity, Crews has rarely gotten the academic and critical acclaim afforded some notably lesser writers. Though he has plenty of fans, he's too often dismissed in literary circles with that dismal pejorative "regional writer." Given the richness and craft of his prose and the originality of his imagination, one wonders why.
Unless, of course, one has spent some time toiling in the academic and book-review rackets. Then the reason's a little more obvious. Harry Crews doesn't play the game.
For one thing, Crews writes about people not usually found in the polite circles of literary fiction. His characters range from unabashed rednecks, dangerously obsessed athletes and coke-snorting ex-cheerleaders to the kind of people most of us turn our eyes away from in the street -- cripples, freaks, emotional and physical mutants of all varieties. And he writes about them not with patronizing sentimentality or minimalist snickering, but with understanding, dignity and wicked humor. Crews is nothing if not politically incorrect.
Crews' outsider status may also have something to do with his hyper-macho public image -- his hard-drinking, hard-drugging, brawling, womanizing, black-belt good ole boy persona is the real thing (though he's rumored to have grown a little more sedate with age, as have most of us). Novelist Jim Harrison, not exactly a creampuff himself, said to me in a 1994 interview, "Crews is one of the few writers I ever met who's really a tough guy. Most of them who think they're tough, they're tough for writers. But he's really a tough guy."
Like Harrison, another first-rank writer, Crews has suffered from a wrong-headed perception (a lingering snap of the Hemingway backlash) that tough guys can't be real writers. The kind of folks who think an author photo ought to feature a moony guy in a black turtleneck with a pipe and a cat just can't dig Crews' pitbull scowl, his black-and-white Mohawk and the tattoo on his biceps that reads "How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?" That very photo (above), featured on the jacket of the hardback version of "Classic Crews," was replaced for the trade paperback edition with a photo of Crews in grade school, a grinning (and thoroughly non-scary) little towhead.
If you're one of the readers put off by that big bad boy, get over it. You're missing out on one of the best novelists -- not best Southern novelists, just flat best novelists -- writing in America today. Here are four examples.

The Gypsy's Curse (1974): This book begins with an epigraph from Diane Arbus: "My favorite thing is to go where I've never been." It might be the official motto for Crews fans, and this novel is a perfect example of why. How many other books have you read whose protagonists are deaf-mute legless weightlifters abandoned as children and raised in gymnasiums?
"The Gypsy's Curse" takes place in and around Clearwater, Florida, where Marvin Molar was raised in the Fireman's Gym by old-time strongman Al Molarski. Marvin walks on his hands, boasts upper arms that measure 20 inches around, and makes a living doing a bizarre hand-balancing act. He suffers the gypsy's curse of the title -- "May you find a cunt that fits you" -- when he meets Hester. She's one avatar of a type that appears in a number of Crews' novels, especially the early ones: a gorgeous, naturally athletic, sexually voracious, preternaturally self-assured, completely batshit woman with a bad case of bloodlust.
Hester is, in Marvin's phrase, "a normal," but one who speaks with her hands in more ways than one. Marvin's life has never been ordinary, but Hester teaches him more about love and jealousy than he ever wanted to know. In "The Gypsy's Curse," Crews does a virtuoso job of making an outlandish and not exactly lovable character both sympathetic and comprehensible.

A Feast of Snakes (1976): Football, weightlifting, dog fighting, cheerleading and sex are all blood sports in Mystic, Georgia. Mystic is also the home of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, a savage rite involving the capture of thousands of diamondbacks -- which the celebrants then eat.
Crews is obviously dealing in mythic archetypes here, but he also recreates, in its grittiest, most scarifying details, real life in a backwoods Southern town.
Ex-quarterback Joe Lon Mackey, just a few years ago the golden boy of Mystic, is now a rage-filled failure, stuck in a trailer with two screaming babies and a wife who's aging before his eyes, helping to run his brutal father's liquor business, and overseeing preparations for the roundup. The love of his life is back in town, too * Berenice Sweet, "the meanest cheerleader the State of Georgia had ever seen," a beautiful, stone-crazy rich girl whose fate seems inextricably tangled with his.
As the serpent roundup approaches fever pitch, Joe Lon's life unravels in ways that are sometimes blackly hilarious, sometimes heart-wrenching, always surprising. Ruthless, disturbing and brilliant, this is perhaps Crews' finest novel -- a full-tilt nightmare crafted with cold, exacting beauty.

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978): If you thought Harry Crews' novels were harrowing, wait until you read his autobiography.
Crews was born in 1935 in Bacon County, deep in "the rickets-and-hookworm belt of South Georgia." His folks were sharecroppers, poorer than most of us can imagine (lucky for us), living what he calls "a way of life forever gone out of the world."
Crews' father, Ray, died of a heart attack at age 32, when Harry was not yet 2. His mother Myrtice, who had married Ray when she was 16, remarried less than a year after his death. Her second husband was Ray's brother Pascal, whom Crews believed was his father until he was half-grown.
In some ways, Crews' childhood was a litany of disasters. He came down with a crippling case of polio at age 5. Treated in turn by a doctor, a gypsy herb dispenser, a faith healer and a conjure woman, he recovered the use of his legs after a couple of months. At 6, he fell into a vat of boiling water at a hog killing and was severely burned over two-thirds of his body. Thanks in part to the ministrations of a man who "talked the fire out," he likewise recovered from the burns, literally growing a new skin. Later the same year, after a drunken Pascal fired a shotgun at Myrtice -- "If I'd a been six inches taller, you'd be talking to my ghost" -- she left him and took Harry and his brother Hoyet to Jacksonville to live. There Harry witnessed a gruesome suicide and his mother divorced Pascal. And all that happened before Crews was 8.
Despite all those horrors, recounted in compelling prose, Crews also recalls a childhood filled with the boundless love of a huge extended family and with lessons learned in the bones about courage and blood and sex, about the utter stupidity of racism and about the value of a good dog.
And he writes with insight about what made him a writer. Among his earliest memories is a game he and his best friend played with the Sears, Roebuck catalog, making up elaborate stories about the men, women and children pictured on its pages, inventing family relationships, feuds and marriages, a game that kept them entranced for months at a time. He recalls the stories told at quilting bees and family gatherings, all the horrific and rollicking and heart-breaking stories that gave shape to his world.
"A Childhood" ends when Crews leaves Bacon County for good, after he returns from a hitch as a Marine and sets off to become a writer. But it's clear that a part of him never really left, never unlearned those lessons and tells those stories still. And that's a good thing.

Scar Lover (1992): Pete Butcher has heard too many tales of woe; he never wants to hear another one. Chief among the ones he knows already is his own family's: His younger brother institutionalized after an accidental hammer blow by Pete rendered him brain-damaged; his parents dead in a fiery truck collision; his older brother, blaming Pete for everything, lost to him.
So when Pete gets out of the Marines and then quits the University of Florida after four days because it reminds him too much of the Corps, he finds himself a boarding-house room and a back-breaking, mindless papermill job in Jacksonville, hoping only for numbness and quiet.
Not a chance. First there is the endless gossip spouted by a meddling fellow roomer, elderly Max Winekoff. Then there are the twisted stories that flow all day from his work partner, a gigantic Jamaican named George but called by the other workers the "Burnt Nigger" because of the 10 horseshoe-shaped scars across his shoulders.
Complicating matters further is Sarah Leemer, Pete's strangely lovely neighbor. Her own life is another symphony of scars, but Pete finds himself drawn into it, and to Sarah. Most inescapable, though, is George's terrifying wife Linga, a powerful Obeah woman with a beautifully scarred face -- the woman who put those burns on George's shoulders, one for every year they've been together.
The cast of characters and plot here are just as bizarrely original as those in any of Crews' early books. But "Scar Lover" and the other novels written after Crews' ten-year break share a quality much less evident in the earlier works: redemption. Crews still writes unflinchingly about the pain and loss and horror of the human condition, but he finds among it all the eternal, irrational, invaluable surprise of love.

Titles discussed in Colette's List
may be purchased at a discount from The Bookstall.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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