If a cult writer’s aura endures long enough, their work might be elevated to Penguin Classics status. At leas, that’s what’s happened to Harry Crews, the author of many southern gothic novels populated by freaks and grotesques, including his most well-known novel, A Feast of Snakes. Born in Georgia in 1935, Crews died in 2012 and claimed to have sold only a few thousand books in hardback during his lifetime (a series of celebrity admirers including Sean Penn and Madonna failed to translate into mainstream popularity). Having published eight novels in as many years, beginning with The Gospel Singer in 1968, in his 40s Crews turned to nonfiction to recount his first six years alive and testify to “a way of life gone forever out of the world”. His memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place was first published in 1978 and is now reissued (along with The Gospel Singer) with a loving foreword by Tobias Wolff. In the US, there has been a corresponding surge of enthusiasm for Crews and his work, with the New Yorker recently describing A Childhood as “one of the finest memoirs ever written by an American”.
Childhood memoirs (and novels) face a formal difficulty relating to the essence of childhood itself: if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Whereas adult life, differentiated by profession, sexual career and cumulative experience is infinitely diverse, all childhoods are basically alike – which is why the subtitle to Crews’s book is crucial. Bacon County, Georgia, in the 1920s and 30s is depicted as a violent, pre-modern backwater of poverty and squalor inhabited by the variably disfigured: scars, missing fingers, chewed-up ears and mangled extremities are more common than wholeness. Harry and his friends pore over the Sears, Roebuck catalogue in wonderment at how “all the people in its pages were perfect”, though he “had known for a long time that it was all a lie” and there surely couldn’t be a way to live in this world without mutilations.
