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One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was only unusual if he hit her.” Crews and his older brother heard the shot, which blew the mantelshelf off the fireplace, from their shared bed. The shot—and the silence that followed. They fled on foot, mother and sons, down the dirt road to an uncle’s house, and the next day boarded a Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, Florida. In A Childhood, Crews recalls the details of their escape: the hurriedly packed straw suitcase, his father’s fury and frantic pleading, the sight of him frozen in the doorway under a kerosene lamp. And then, in the darkness of the road, a bizarre vision: “I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.”
It’s an idea that Crews, the author of fifteen novels and countless pieces of long-form journalism, often returned to: there is the life that is lived, and then its rival, a counterlife, where every flaw is hidden and one can feel whole. “The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making,” he writes in A Childhood. “Fabrication became a way of life . . . not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but also a defense against it.” What began as dissociation, a kind of trauma response, would become a program for art and life.
Crews was drawn to people who believed in self-creation, showmen who came from harsh places and thought that with a bit of artifice and money they could become someone new—on television, in politics, on the page. His own life seems to have been a series of guises or mismatched masks. “I have always slipped into and out of identities as easily as other people slip into and out of their clothes,” he admitted. Foremost among these identities was that of the “crazy motherfucking freak from Georgia,” as one friend described Crews’s calculated public image. He was also a college professor and inveterate brawler, a scrupulous journalist and legendary drunk, a Marine who boxed in his spare time and once wet his pants when punched. He admired James Baldwin and André Gide, claimed to read Madame Bovary at least once a year, and could recite Shakespeare at length; he bragged that he had never set foot in Texas without being arrested, and said he’d “like to write a thing called Jails I Have Known.” Late in life he wore a Mohawk, had lines by E. E. Cummings tattooed down his biceps, and was described as looking like “a cross between G. Gordon Liddy and Vanilla Ice.”
Since Crews’s death in 2012, A Childhood has been widely recognized as a masterpiece, a Dickensian document of survival and blight in Depression-era Georgia. But the novels for which he was once notorious have found a narrower legacy: mocked when they aren’t outright dismissed as the minor works of a windbag regionalist. Crews has become, alongside his contemporaries Larry Brown and Barry Hannah, an avatar for a gin-soaked, testosterone-fueled subgenre of latter-day Southern gothic known as Grit Lit. “Flannery O’Connor on steroids” is how the critic John Williams described Crews’s work, not incorrectly.
Even his most passionate defenders must concede that many of Crews’s novels have aged poorly, and a number of them weren’t very good to begin with. He could lapse into the most shopworn tendencies of Southern writing; the best of his books are marred by a dull misogyny. (Crews tends to write two types of female characters: conniving nymphomaniacs and pathetic nymphomaniacs. Neither inspire his most artful descriptions.) But among the dross there gleam a few brilliant exceptions—deceptive, slippery books that defy the constraints of region and genre. They begin as pulpy entertainments but soon veer into murkier, more philosophical waters.
Many of the hustlers and fabulists who populate Crews’s fiction are typical American strivers. “We don’t want to be bettern nobody,” explains a doomed guitar player in The Gospel Singer, Crews’s 1968 debut. “All we want to be is famous and make a million dollars.” But in the strangest and most accomplished of his novels—Car (1972), A Feast of Snakes (1976), and The Knockout Artist (1988), the latter of which was reissued last year by Penguin Classics—what these strivers are after isn’t so material, and their pursuits are anything but slick or bloodless. Their obsessions are wild, dangerous, and grotesque. Their attempts to transcend their circumstances only bring them closer to death. This, at his best, is Crews’s subject: the relationship between art and self-annihilation—and whether the price of becoming the boy in the picture is too high to be paid by the one stumbling through the dark.
Crews was born in 1935, in the county seat of Alma, just north of the Okefenokee Swamp and some two hundred miles south of Atlanta—the “hookworm and rickets belt” of the South, as he liked to say. His great-grandfather had been a slave owner and large landholder; his parents were tenant farmers. In the intervening years, Crews writes in A Childhood, just about everyone in Bacon County had “fallen on evil days”: “There wasn’t enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man’s eyes.”
True to its title, A Childhood is a record of Crews’s first six years, almost every day of which was passed on the sandy-soiled plot where his family eked out their subsistence with corn, tobacco, and cotton. They had no electricity; according to one of Crews’s neighbors, that didn’t come to town until 1947, the same year that Bacon County got its first tractor. The portrait Crews draws of life there is at once dreamlike and implausibly precise. Here is his description of one of the family’s cows: “Her lifeless hide cleaved to her ribs and hung in folds down to her widened, shriveled udder which had been torn on one side and was now alive with worms.” Or this, about a family friend: “Cecil was six feet seven inches tall and weighed between 250 and 275 pounds depending upon the season of the year.”
His was an exceedingly brutal upbringing. Once, he saw a man walk into a grocery store, take a knife from the butcher block, and plunge it into his own chest. “It feels good,” the man said, as Crews watched him bleed to death. And never mind his mother getting shot at—the most memorable incident of his childhood occurred a few weeks before. It was deep winter, hog-killing season, and neighboring families had gathered for a day of slaughter. Crews describes a raucous scene of work and merriment, the scent of blood in the cold air. Playing with the other kids, he tripped and fell into a vat of scalding water that was being used to slough hair from the hogs. Someone pulled him out, and Crews watched as the skin on his hand slid off “like a wet glove.” The burns all over his body were nearly fatal. He passed the days of his bed-bound recovery looking at the models in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. There was something dishonest, he believed, about their apparent perfection: “It was all a lie. I knew that under those fancy clothes there had to be scars, there had to be swellings and boils of one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world.”
These memories are so pristinely preserved, so novelistic in their rendering, that at times it seems Crews must have invented them. But whether they were real or not is beside the point. (Indeed, facts could be as strange as fiction: not long after the shooting, Crews learned that the man he knew as his father may have been his uncle, and that his biological father had died before he turned two.) What’s impressive about A Childhood is not how it faithfully documents the past. It’s how, through stories, it grants some coherence to an otherwise rootless existence. Writing, Crews seemed to believe, was a thread through the maze, a means of imagining a place and a people to whom he could lay claim.
At seventeen, he joined the Marines, following the path of his older brother, who had served in Korea. After three years on a Navy base outside Miami, Crews enrolled at the University of Florida, where he studied English on the G.I. Bill and later joined the creative writing faculty. He rarely returned to Georgia, except in his fiction. He married and had a son with a woman named Sally Ellis; they divorced soon thereafter, then remarried and had another son. In 1964, their firstborn drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool.
Crews’s first novel, The Gospel Singer, is set in the fictional town of Enigma, Georgia. Its unnamed protagonist is a tormented singer whose talent has carried him into a life of itinerant celebrity and unbridled vice. He tours tent revivals, seducing crowds, saving souls. But despite his success, he still feels the smothering demands of home and kin: “He had sprung from them and that was their pride. Out of their blanched flesh and hookwormed children and leached soil and poor-bone cattle . . . ” He returns every six months in a spasm of guilt, dishing out favors and making amends, always plotting his next escape.
The Gospel Singer was an assertion of Crews’s Southernness, of his claim both to the lofty inheritance of Faulkner and O’Connor and to the clipped, enchorial rhythms of Bacon County. (It was also a fantasy of being welcomed back to one’s hometown, an experience that Crews did not know firsthand. “They act like I’m a goddamn leper,” he groused in 1977, after a visit spent conducting research for A Childhood.) Crews had hoped the book would please his mentor, the novelist Andrew Lytle, an early champion of O’Connor’s work who, in 1930, had contributed an essay to I’ll Take My Stand, a reactionary manifesto defending white Southern culture. All the most obvious and noisome elements of Southern gothic are present in The Gospel Singer, from the Christ-haunted villain to the traveling freak show to the novel’s basic premise, a variation on the primal myth and originating anxiety of American white supremacy: the Gospel Singer returns to Enigma just as a local black man has been accused of raping and murdering a white woman. (In a florid twist, he’s innocent of the former but guilty of the latter.) But Lytle didn’t care for The Gospel Singer. It “ended in a lot of noise and violence,” he sniffed. “An end ought to bring everything together, purge the reader . . . the ending should fall off the tree like a ripe pear.” (Elvis, on the other hand, apparently loved it, and wanted to star in a Hollywood adaptation.) Between 1969 and 1971, Crews published three more novels, all in a similar vein. Each has flares of humor and surprise, but there is something cramped about them too, a sense of exhausted expectations, of a genre being pared down to a bundle of tropes. “You don’t intend to make a career out of midgets, do you?” his wife asked him.
He didn’t. In 1972, the same year that Sally divorced him for the second and final time, Crews came up with something new: Car. A satire of consumerism, or more precisely of consumption, the novel is the story of a man named Herman who is so obsessed with cars that he decides to eat one—a Ford Maverick. He figures that going piece by piece, at a half-pound a day, it’ll take ten years. Herman’s father runs a car-wrecking company, and in a sense this scheme is Herman’s quite literal-minded attempt to find his place in the family business. “I wanted to be somebody,” he tries to explain. “A man has to take the chances that come to him.”
It’s an existential quest, but it’s also a publicity stunt: Herman eats the car on a stage outside a local hotel whose owner charges admission and signs a deal for television rights. Herman’s twin, Mister, arranges to get the family 25 percent of the profits. Crowds—this is Crews’s great novel of crowds, of their mindless delights and savage whims—come to bear witness to Herman’s undertaking. Many of them see it as heroic, “an act of great courage.” But they don’t just want to watch him eat the car. They want to see everything, down to the last painful passage of each bloody lump:
Someone had cut a flap—a trap door—in the bottom of [Herman’s] white shorts, and then sewn on black buttons to hold the flap shut. The crowd knew what that meant, and the screams of delight and anxiety were so great that Mister could no longer make himself heard.
Car is a hasty romp, barely 150 pages—but stylistically it seems looser, shaggier than the novels that came before. At times the language is rambling and exuberantly experimental; at others, Crews plays with scouring away all sense until what remains is as jagged and bare as a heap of scrap metal. After Herman has given himself over entirely to his task, his thoughts are winnowed to a litany of the Maverick’s specifications, passing through his “dulled and dimmed mind like leaves in slow wind”: “3-speed synchronized manual transmission Locking steering column Flashing side marker lamps, four, located on front and rear fender sides . . . ”
As Car unfolds, and the physical reality of Herman’s unreal project becomes more concrete—how the car will be broken into bite-size pieces, how the little clumps of metal that pass through Herman’s body will be pressed into car-shaped key chain souvenirs—the novel swerves from a straightforward satire into a fretful parable of obsession, then into something even more searching and strange. Herman wants money and fame—that much is clear. And he wants to outdo his father, or perhaps gain his approval as a car wrecker of a different sort. He’s also grieving: he has never forgiven himself for the death of a little girl who died in his family’s junkyard when he was a child. But none of this adequately explains why a person would ingest an automobile. “Why would I want . . . to . . . eat . . . a . . . car?” Herman asks. “I’m going to eat a car because it’s there.” Eventually, his mission comes to seem to be about not so much the desire to consume the car as the desire to get over it, or to get entirely outside it. Though getting outside something, in this case, involves getting that thing inside you.
The only one who seems to understand, even obliquely, is a melancholy prostitute Herman befriends named Margo. On the novel’s final page, after Herman fails to finish off the Maverick—after chowing through the front bumper, the grille, the fenders, and part of the hood, he gives up, saying, “I can’t stand that kind of pain from something I love”—Margo explains to him why she took up sex work: “I thought I could get rid of fucking by fucking,” she says. “But I found out that won’t work.” Herman agrees. “You cannot fuck everybody,” he replies. The tone is maddeningly ambiguous, somewhere between stupid and serious, hammy and apocalyptic—in other words, consummate Crews. In his lesser novels, the tragedies are maudlin and the jokes mere punch lines. But here he’s after more than just entertainment. Car is about desire—the desire to consume, but also the desire to change one’s life, to transcend the pettiness and violence of the past. The novel can’t convey Herman’s reasons for wanting to eat the car; only that doing so is what gives his life meaning and shape, and what nearly kills him. Herman becomes a new type of hero for Crews: brave enough to pursue desire into the void, wise enough to quit while he still can.
For Crews, the Seventies were a time of astonishing, feverish productivity. Car was followed by The Hawk Is Dying (1973), The Gypsy’s Curse (1974), and A Feast of Snakes (1976), about another grisly spectacle, an annual rattlesnake-catching competition in the backwoods of Georgia. In 1978, he published A Childhood to the best reviews of his career. All the while, he was churning out long, exquisitely deranged pieces of New Journalism. These were often portraits of people at work—jockeys, preachers, movie stars—that showcase the indiscriminate pleasure Crews took in shoptalk. (“You work hanky-panks or alibis or flats?” he asks a carnival hustler in one piece.) By the decade’s end he had published eight novels in eight years.
It would be eleven years before he published another. He had long flirted with oblivion—“I am one of the all-time sloppy, disgusting drunks,” he wrote in a 1975 essay for Playboy, “the kind mothers can point out to their children as an example of the final evil of alcohol”—and now it overtook him. He’d come to see his writing life as a punishing exercise in “perpetual failure”; his typewriter finally tapped out after years of colliding with the wall. He stares out in photographs from this period with a drawn and thievish look. Journalists would come to interview him only to leave horrified by what they found. “Violence,” one wrote, “follows Harry Crews around like an oversized lapdog, eager to spring upon him with bone-crunching love.” Another speculated, in print, that Crews would soon be dead. In gasps of sobriety during what amounted to a decade-long binge, he sweated out one novel, All We Need of Hell, a limp, nervous effort pulled together mostly from earlier fragments.
In 1986, some friends set Crews up in a barn in northeastern Louisiana to dry out. He lived there alone with his dog for ten months, mostly sober, working on something new. The novel he got down, The Knockout Artist, may be his best, and is certainly the last piece of sustained and worthy writing he ever did.
It’s a boxing novel, sort of. The protagonist, Eugene Biggs, is a former fighter wasting away in New Orleans. Unlike Crews’s earlier protagonists, he exists not in the frenzy of obsession but in its aftermath, life’s dull and shapeless coda. Eugene is quite a bit like Crews: he grew up on a small farm in Bacon County, left at seventeen for Jacksonville, and now—like the hero at the outset of any good boxing story—he’s washed up. Boxing had initially appealed to Eugene as a way “out of being a nobody,” but after thirteen wins, he started losing. The same story each time: one shot to the chin, lights out. His trainer, Budd, fled after realizing that Eugene’s youthful promise wouldn’t translate into mature success. Finally, after his fourth straight loss, staring at his reflection in the dressing-room mirror, Eugene punched himself in the face and knocked himself out. When he came to, he realized with horror that he’d found his true talent.
Two years and seventy-two self-knockouts later, the novel begins. Eugene has joined the ranks of the many enterprising freak shows working the New Orleans party circuit, where rich people pay him to dress up like a boxer and beat himself senseless. The money’s decent, but he sends almost all of it back home. He lives in an apartment paid for by his girlfriend, Charity, a beautiful oil heiress and graduate student in psychology. Of all the femme fatales who populate Crews’s fiction, Charity is surely the weirdest, and the most comically sinister—something like a cross between an evil scientist and a catalogue model, with “teeth so perfect they should have been false” and eyes like “little delicate calipers.” She calls Eugene’s apartment her “living laboratory” and mines his life for material, believing it could prove to be the key to her academic breakthrough.
As for Eugene, he’s miserable, hounded by the knowledge of how different life could be. Sometimes he tells people he’s an actor, which “was not exactly a lie.” He’s become a name, a character rather than a person: “You haven’t been a Eugene in a year and a half,” Charity insists, when he begs her not to call him “Knocker.” “You’re a Knocker now. It’s what makes you special.” He nurses a vague hope of escaping back to Bacon County—but this, he knows, is “so much bullshit.” Instead he lives out his fantasies in the letters he sends home, lavish fictions about a successful boxing career.
Eugene is not quite a boxer, and so The Knockout Artist is not quite a boxing novel. It partakes of the pleasures of the genre, from the meaty blood-sport chatter to the familiar narrative of a comeback that’s destined to fail. Still, there is something conspicuously postmodern about Crews’s material: Eugene performs to the Rocky soundtrack, and scorns Raging Bull for not being true to life. Eugene, like Crews, knows he is wearing a mask. But even if you aren’t really a boxer, can it be enough to look and act like one? If you write your lies insistently enough, will they start to be true?
For about a hundred pages, these questions simmer beneath the surface. Then, in an extraordinary moment, they come crashing to the fore. Eugene has never had much interest in Charity’s research, until one day, wondering if she might “know something about himself he did not,” he breaks into her filing cabinet and finds a stack of pages inside: case history of eugene talmadge biggs, a.k.a. knockout, knocker, k.o. The pages contain Charity’s analysis of Eugene, but they also provide, in windy, swaggering, humorless prose, an extended meta-mockery of whatever interpretations a critic might have been scribbling in the margins as they read:
Every time he knocks himself out, he dies a little death, descending much lower than the son of Hypnos, Morpheus, the god of dreams. But he is resurrected. He resurrects himself. . . . Here in the twentieth century is a living example of Man’s recurrent, archetypal pattern for working out the Role of the Hero and at the same time denying the inevitability and finality of death. . . . Biggs’s audience has the same emotional bath, a bath that lays claim to immortality, that Christians have on Easter morning. “Hallelujah, He is risen! Even now He has healed Himself of death! All praise!” Has there been any religion reaching back to the beginning of recorded history that has not had the same primary goal and objective: how to bear the end of life? No! A thousand times, No! Any wonder that Henry James called death “the worm at the core” of man’s existence? None.
This goes on and on. It’s a good joke, even if it protests too much. But it is also a moment of utter disorientation, for the reader as much as for Eugene. He emerges with a nauseating realization: “This folder . . . was himself. He held himself in his hands.” From here on, the novel reconfigures itself as a confrontation between two lives, or two conceptions of a life, one that is experienced and one that is narrated. Charity might be a bad writer, but she has also gotten down a more truthful account of Eugene’s life than he could ever have mustered himself. Her conclusion is that Eugene is stuck—in New Orleans, in perpetual self-defeat—because he never got over his abandonment by his surrogate father, Budd. What Eugene has experienced as obscure, listless suffering becomes a case, a diagnosis: there he is, as if held by Charity’s little calipers, pinned in place.
But if Charity’s case history imposes some order and fixity on Eugene’s life, the rest of The Knockout Artist reads like an attempt to thwart this, to replace the tidiness of explanation with something more formless and free. Stylistically, the book becomes a motley, contaminated thing, a mix of Crews’s many modes—chatty, terse, demotic, detached, priapic, noirish, gnomic. Various tawdry plots are picked up and discarded as the story staggers onward. The result is thrilling. More than anything else he wrote, The Knockout Artist is unpredictable, unkempt, utterly hostile to interpretation, summary, or genre. It achieves, in form and in style, a sense of blazing, anarchic, profligate freedom.
Delusion is the stuff of tragedy, and what ravaged beauty Crews’s books possess comes from their deluded sense of hope. It’s there, always, just beyond reach: a world without hurt. After The Knockout Artist, Crews seems to have retreated once more—into resentment, addiction, the lonely bluster of persona. He wrote a few more novels, but nothing good. The end of his life was marked by the same sort of brutality that plagued its beginnings. He was no longer able to hide his flaws. One day, in 2008, alone in his house in Gainesville, he stabbed himself in the stomach with a hunting knife and yanked the blade up toward his heart. He was found in a pool of blood some hours later and taken to the hospital, where he told doctors that he’d been attacked by an old rival. He lived four more years.
