On Harry Crews’s CHILDHOOD

In Harry Crews’s memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,  the author sets his authority firmly and quickly. After opening with a second-hand story about his father who died too young for the author to know, Crews writes: “Did what I have set down here as memory actually happen? …I do not know, nor do I any longer care.” This abandonment of exactitude follows throughout the memoir, putting narrator and reader on solid, fair ground. Rightfully so. The stories in this memoir feel hyper-realistic, shorn of the ordinary in the manner of good fictions. It’s the stuff of reverence and romance: Harry Crews pens a love-letter to the time and place he considers home.

As such, the book begins with the idea that home is partly what we tell each other it was. Part One is largely the story of his father, what he’s cobbled together from “stories I have been told about him, stories told to me by my mother, by my brother…and the men and women who knew him while he was alive.” In fact, most of Chapter Two is young Harry with his Uncle Alton being told stories about his daddy by the men who knew him.

I walked away from Part One thinking about how our individual stories mingle and stray from the larger stories we inhabit: the places and people we are a part of, and the power of family legend.

Part One of A Childhood feels like it’s own little book. It does the technical work of introducing the time and place when Crews was born. There is a brief and precise history of sharecroppers in rural Georgia circa 1920’s, and Crews makes the place vivid despite his not being old enough to recall much from those very early years before his daddy died. It becomes that much more apparent by the end of the book just how little things change in a single lifetime for these southern farmers. But, mostly, Part One is a love letter to his daddy whom he never knew and a spotlight and head-nod to all the folks who helped Crews build an image of a man he must very much wish he’d gotten to know.

Part Two is the true memoir of the book, the retelling in a memorable and inimitable voice of the life of a very young boy in a very rough time and place. We’re introduced to his family and several friends, as well as the other father he would also eventually lose.

Crews has the kind of power in his voice that makes you sit up and listen. Part Two opens thus: “It has always seemed to me that I was not so much born into this world as I awakened to it. I remember very distinctly the awakening and the morning it happened. It was my first glimpse of myself, and all that I know now…” I sat straight up when I read that. I felt like I needed to be awake, too.

Much of the memoir is told about the time the narrator was between five- and six-years old. Crews’s childhood is visited by all kinds of hazard: in close succession, he is temporarily and inexplicable crippled and, shortly thereafter, he’s scalded over two-thirds of his young body. There is, too, the impoverished, monotonous life on a farm, the perpetual fear of an alcoholic step-father who would return from a whiskey bender in a whirlwind, and the apocryphal stories from Auntie, the old black woman who helps nurse him.

Throughout the book, Crews reveres the physical world of Bacon County. He describes the farming processes and mind-sets of the characters here in loving, accurate detail. The weather, the rituals, and the voices of his childhood farms and kinfolk are simultaneously legendary and pastoral.

If I had read this book about two years ago, it would probably be one of my all-time favorites. In a memoir, it’s hard to incorporate the mystical and the mysterious, and yet Crews does it here, and to memorable effect. Crews also has such an authentic voice that you can’t stop his accent from running through your head. He cherishes and celebrates that southern dialect, playfully selecting which vernacular to define and which to let you just figure out.

As it is, this memoir has the brevity and the wit to be one of the best memoirs I’ve read throughout this True-Thousand Sixteen experiment. Crews proves that having a life with remarkable and sometimes shitty things happen to you makes for a good book. But he also proves that having a careful eye and, most importantly, a legitimate yearning to capture and share the essence of a place and a people can also make for a powerful and beautiful story. Consider me inspired.

 

Some Things About Mary: The Liars’ Club & Mary Karr’s Lessons

I came to Mary Karr’s work in a way unlike I’d arrived at any other writer’s work. I’m usually pretty linear about the writers I read: an author I like mentions this other author in an interview or on their acknowledgements page, or the internet aggregates me a list of writers whose work I might like based on liking this other author, etc.

But Mary Karr seemed to haunt me. I’d first read her name a while back when I was googling alumni from the MFA program I dropped out of (turns out she went there, too). From then on, she pretty consistently showed up on internet lists and in interviews or research for my classes, usually linked somehow with other authors she’d cut her teeth with in the writing world. So she was chimerical until she wasn’t.

I picked up her third and most recent memoir, Lit, the week before my daughter was born. I hadn’t bought a memoir since The Glass Castle, and this book was total chance. With the baby pending, I was curious about alcoholism and this book was being sold as a recovery story. It’s a family condition of mine and, as I was about to start my own family, I needed to hear from someone else about what alcoholism looked like.

Lit, which is also billed as a kind of conversion memoir in addition to a recovery piece (Karr discusses her sobriety and her eventual enchantment by the Catholic church) is about grief and age and relationships. Lit introduced me to the distinctive Karr voice. It also introduced me to a narrative approach that was so much whimsy and folklore and absolute precision that I knew I was learning from someone with a lot to share.

The memoir itself I can’t speak upon too much, only the writing impressions that it gave. This is not because the book itself is not memorable. It was simply overshadowed by the birth of my daughter: this was the book I was reading just before my wife went into labor–and I mean just before, as in Lit was the book I read while curled up on a squeaky leather recliner in the delivery room next to my epidural-sleep-induced wife. I might not recall too much specifically, but my sense memory of this book is that it was exactly what I needed at that moment: wise and honest and just snarky enough to remind me to keep my feet in my boots.

Before I decided to revisit nonfiction writing  I frequently suggested to my wife that she write about her childhood (this may turn out to be a classic case of giving out the advice that you,  in fact, need to heed.) So when Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir came out this autumn, my wife ordered a copy for herself. She’d later tell me, when I began reading the as-yet untouched hardcover, she knew when she ordered it that the book was really for me.

But I haven’t finished The Art of Memoir. In fact, I stopped about halfway. For two reasons: one, I have been in enough writing classes and read enough writing guides to already know the basics (which is sort of how that book starts); the other reason was that she was so smart and authoritative in the early chapters that I wanted to be on the same page as her. Karr talked about her own decisions as a writer so fluidly and taught the work of other authors in a way that I just had to get into some of the work she discussed. I stopped after her chapter on Nabokov, went to the back of the book, and made a list. I’ll get back to The Art of Memoir after I knock a few titles off of my reading list, and get some of my own chapters down.

At the top of my reading list was Karr’s first memoir, The Liars’ Club. Official review: holy shit. As someone who aspires to write memoir, reading about her youth made me feel absolutely unqualified to write about my own life. (To which I quickly reminded myself: fuck that.)

I don’t want to summarize what she goes through because that’s not going to do anything other than diminishing Karr’s efforts on the page via my shitty summary. From this memoir, I learned that–just as Karr purports in the early chapters of The Art of Memoir–voice is crucial to telling the story. And she is so dexterous with this faculty as an artist that she weaves in the most powerful voices–her mother’s and father’s–in the most purposeful and affecting ways. As the story of a girlhood, Karr utilizes a voice that slips and slides from her own pre-adolescent goofiness into zingers from her mother before standing long and strong in the drawl of her Texas oil-worker daddy. This memoir taught me how important it is, if you come from a heritage of story-tellers, to try and let them tell their stories. At least that’s one of the things I think this memoir does masterfully: she demonstrates the keen hurt and awe inspired by her parents and their decisions while also building their personae to the larger-than-life people they must have seemed to young Mary. And while the memoir is not sentimental, it is still emotionally devastating. Karr’s memoir is really an unsentimental love letter to her mother and father. And it’ll wreck you in that way, too.

Voice is the engine of this piece, and much has already been said elsewhere about Karr’s ability to pull poetry from Texas colloquialisms. But, for me, the real power of the memoir is the way Karr suspends reality in a book that is based on reality. And, again, it’s not the surreal nonfiction events, per se. What pushed this memoir from great to masterpiece for me is how deft Karr is at highlighting moments and elements of her life to build the tapestry of the story. She so carefully positions her family’s dysfunctions among the town’s distinctively brackish hue that you can’t seem to remember you are reading about folks who are not always as wild as they seem. She isn’t lying, she’s telling the story in the way that the best story tellers–the Liars’ Club and its chief raconteur Pete Karr–tell stories: deliberately and dramatically. And while she has a good deal to say early on in The Art of Memoir about honesty, in The Liars’ Club shows us how to shade your details via images and language and scene to present a narrative world so specific and moody and believable that this story could only have happened in these places. This is an essential element for any kind of prose or poetry, and Karr puts on a clinic for all kinds of writers in this book.

So. That’s Memoir #1 for True-Thousand Sixteen. I’m into this. Next up: Townie by Andre Dubus III. See you in a week or so, friend.

 

 

 

Introducing: The Dusty Book Review Series

Like most manic reader/writer book people, I own more books than I’ve actually read. Because sometimes it’s just Saturday morning and you’re in the used bookstore and maybe you’ve had two iced-coffees already and, no way, there’s that book from that author who you think is writing the kind of books you want to write and, damn, this other author is supposed to be really avant garde and you’ve been struggling with avant-garde writers lately so you’ll pick up just this one title (it won a National Book Award anyway) and give it a shot. And another Steinbeck because you swore–swore–this would be The Summer Of Steinbeck and all you have is Travels with Charley and Tortilla Flat and that’s not going to cut it. But also, lately, you’re really feeling the need to branch out beyond prose so, sure, Tracy K. Smith, I’ll pick up Life on Mars. And then you go home and toss all the books from last Saturday onto any flat surface not already covered with by-now forgotten books and replace the old stack with the new. So it goes.

Hence: The Dusty Book Review Series. This is an attempt at reconciling all those books purchased and discarded because the ordinariness of real life is more consistent than the fleeting nature of my book-buying manias. Part mea culpa, part necessary clean-up, the Dusty Book Review Series will function as follows:

Each week or so I will post a new Review. Reviews will include, to the best of my ability, notes on when and why the book was procured. There will also be an actual review and a rating that will determine the fate of that book. Fate/rates will include:

• Donation Bin (let someone else deal with it because it’s not worth my time)
• Sell It Back (so someone can enjoy or disdain the book as they see fit)
• Bottom Shelf (because it’s worth keeping for at least a few merits)
• Middle Shelf (because there’s some great moments here but I don’t love it)
• Trophy Shelf (because I need to be reminded of the excellence of this book at least daily)

Follow along. It’ll be fun.