Product ReviewsA Childhood : The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews (2022, Trade Paperback)

Heavyweight with compelling details of another time and another place.

Harry Crews’ A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is a book I discovered last month. It is a memoir about Crews early childhood. It’s not a pretty tale. Indeed, in many ways, Childhood is about surviving, by the skin of his teeth, a hardscrabble, painful childhood in Bacon County Georgia during the Great Depression. In powerful, taut prose he credibly describes near fatal accidents, a bout of polio, domestic violence, fights and flights and escapes. To escape Bacon County he joined the Marines. After his Marine service he took advantage of the GI Bill and studied literature and writing, taught at the University of Florida, and wrote many short stories, memoirs, novels and essays. His childhood and youth shaped the man he became and while he was not, perhaps, always a good man -he was a macho, drank and took drugs, brawled and enjoyed ‘blood sports,’ philandered and caroused- he wrote like an angel. And he’s honest to the bone.

Suffice it to say, this book is not for the faint-hearted. But it is spot-on in finding a voice for a small child experiencing life in rural Georgia, full of details of black and white lives led, of a Jewish peddler, of faith-healers, of hell-and-brimstone preachers, of folk medicine, of the kindness, cruelty, and cupidity of neighbors, of the magnetic importance of a home-place. Beyond that he describes the lives of mules, pigs, dogs, cattle, the rigors of picking cotton, the joys of fishing and hunting, the beauty of nature, trees, water, swamps and hills, and he limps and runs through the countryside, breathing deep and swearing and figuring out the secrets of life. He imagines, based on talking to older relatives and neighbors, the lives of his father and mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts. He writes of all this and more in economic yet vivid anecdotes and mesmerizing and exquisite prose. Chapter six is particularly brilliant in its evocation of Bacon County.

One of the first ‘grown-up’ books I read was Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I had been primed for the book because both my stepfather and my mother were brought up poor and in desperate straits during the Great Depression. They told me stories of hunger and abandonment, squalor and despair, resistance and cruelty. But their stories ended, no matter how difficult, with inexplicable grace notes. Both could tell tales, tall and otherwise, that vividly evoked spin tales, the past before I was born. Later I would read B. Traven’s Death Ship [1934], Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy [1930-1936], Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker [1954] and Billy Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues [1956.. All of these tales moved me and fired up my curiosity about the world, about history, and about the craft of story-telling. All of them introduced me to people and places that, otherwise, I could never have imagined. And as Ken Kesey once said, whether the tales happened or not they were true.
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