Charles Postell and Harry Crews were contemporaries and Georgia boys, growing up only a county or two apart in the Deep South’s seediest underbelly.

Original Title:

WHY DOESN’T HARRY WRITE IN GEORGIA?

(NOTE: This was written in 1983 and published in Charles Postell’s short-lived but trail-blazing magazine, GEORGIA MONTHLY. Postell had also written about Crews for The Albany Herald, where he was an investigative reporter and state editor. The two were prone to taking drives with windows down so they could throw out the liquor bottle caps they unscrewed off their respective pint- and fifth-bottles.)

“I’m in and out of the bottle so much now, I don’t know when I’m in or out,” Harry Crews cried excitedly.

He was mostly out of the bottle when this interview was conducted (January 1983), primarily because he was on deadline with some movie people concerning a screenplay about the famous circus clown Emmett Kelly.

Crews, the rogue Georgia novelist who was born and reared in the wilds of Bacon County, had just proofed some pages and was on his way out the door to put all of it in the overnight mail.

“These deadlines, they killing me,” he whispered now. “This screenplay is called ‘Clown.’ That’s pretty good, ain’t it? I’m just a tad behind schedule here. Shit, how you spell ‘familiar.’?”

“A-i-r, or i-a-r,” the interviewer tried to help out.

“Hell no, it ain’t spelled f-a-m-i-l-e-r. Even I know that,” he said.

“I ain’t familiar with pounds or…” he was reading from the screenplay. “I got to proof this shit, Photostat it and get it in the mail, try to go buy some groceries, just trying to take care of business, you know.”

“Yeah.”

He listens for a moment or two to the trials and  tribulations of another writer, but it does not take Crews long to get bored with the troubles of another writer.

The roots of Harry Crews are in South Georgia as much as watermelon vines. His mama, a grand lady who was never quite understood her boy, lives in a brick house a block from the Turner County Courthouse in Ashburn, Georgia. Yet Crews, as Georgia as he is, claims he has to be removed from his state  in order to write about it.

He lives and works in Gainesville, Florida. He can walk anywhere he wants, a 20-minute stroll to his two favorite bars, Lillian’s Music Store and the Winnjammer. He is only 10 minutes from a cute little park the townspeople call Plaza of the Americas, with grass and trees and lots of red bricks and bus stops. Right across the street from this patch of park is the Santa Fe Regional Library, which is a pretty good place for a town the size of Gainesville. “Me and  my boy’s going up to visit my mama pretty soon,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in about a year, so we gonna drive up and see what’s going on.”

Up there where his mama lives, some people still aren’t happy with Harry Crews and his first novel, “The Gospel Singer,” which was set in Enigma, much less his later book, “A Feast of Snakes,” which is set in Mystic. For the most part, though, the good old boys that hang around the joints like Gladys’ on the Berrien-Irwin County line wouldn’t know Crews of Wilalee Bookatee Hull of “the Gospel Singer” if they walked in and kicked them in their draggy asses.

Like not long ago one of them found out he was a pretty famous author and wanted to know if he could help his mother, who was said to be a pretty good country song writer, even if she never had had one published. Crews tried to explain that he didn’t think he could help her too much, that he was into writing fiction.

“Fiction?” the man asked.

“Fiction,” Crews answered. “Shit you make up.”

The man was thoroughly confused, for if country music wasn’t shit you made up, what was it? Depends on how you look at it, he thought.

His prose often can wilt an acre of Confederate daisies, but he is definitely Georgia. Some will tell you he is the best from Georgia, whether he is writing how he loves the steamy musk that comes off a mule’s sweet shit or how he nursed an ailing hawk back to health.

Or something like this:

“Those fucking jocks are over at my house and they start beating my goddam  refrigerator to death.” He takes three short, swift slugs from the Wolfsmidt bottle, chasing it with a Bud. “They beat my  icebox right out the back door and into the yard. Beat my icebox to fucking death.”

He was questioned about other stories about himself, some more outlandish than the refrigerator story, like the time he visited the staid Agnes Scott college for a lecture and got drunk and  had to be toted home by a covey of co-eds.

Indignation creases his ruddy face then he shouts:

“I ain’t gonna spend my damn life setting people straight. I mean, you can be defensive about those things or you cannot. You can quote me on this, or you can make it up if you want to.”

He looks a little dangerous. Kind of reminds you of Charles Bronson. His eyes are set deep in his head, and if you take a picture of him, you’d better use a flash – or else his eyes are going to look like little black wells. He squints like a pissed-off coal miner. These things combined with his walk – modified as it is by a childhood bout with polio and a penchant for losing on large motorcycles, give him the look of a wounded Doberman.

“I got the shit beat out of me by a one-legged man one time,” Harry said for the second time that afternoon. Getting beat by an amputee must make you mumble to yourself.

Later we were standing out by the statue of Uncle Billy Jackson Royal, who was supposed to be the man who started the Royal Singing Convention, whatever that is. The low light played upon his face, discernibly electric.

Mystic. That was the name of the town where he stood with Uncle Billy’s statue, the setting for his eighth novel “A Feast of Snakes,” which is a sick piece about Harry’s people and a rattlesnake roundup. The interviewer was grating his nerves just a little bit by wondering out loud why he can’t hit, why he can’t hit, why he can’t become a best-selling author.

“How the hell you think I feel?” he shouts again, his viper-like skull kind of vibrating now. “Man, let’s get out of here, I’m going crazy.”

Back in the car, he talked about the South, his South, his life. “I got into trouble, I can’t cope. I fuck things up, wreck cars, lose money. You know what I mean?”

“Aw man, I feel like I’m gonna fucking die. Here we are off drinking, and my mama – she’s a fine lady – I promised her I’d take her over to Albany and buy her a seafood dinner and all that.”

“You want to know some truth, Buckshot?” he asked. “There ain’t a million guys left in this frigging country who can find their way out of a 10-acre woodlot, much less the big woods. In terms of the American male, I’m Daniel Boone. M and Charne and a boy I know walked 800 miles one summer.” Charne Porter is a beautiful lady, a prize-winning sculptor  and photographer. He talked on. He had been divorced seven or eight years now. Married 12 years before that. Or was it 13? Lost a child, you know.

Sometimes he sounds like a man with a heart you could strike matches on, and then he’s a pussycat, a deep-down moralist.

But back to the theme of this piece. Why does the Georgia Writer Named Harry Crews Choose to Write Where He Writes?

“I’ve tried to write in Georgia, but I couldn’t,” he said. “I tried to write at my mama’s farm, but it was all too much for me. I was too deep in it, too close to it to use it, to make anything out of it. My memory doesn’t even seem to work when I’m writing in Georgia.”

Things are coming down on him pretty fast, like the screenplays and all that, out-of-South things that hang with a cerebral albatross.

Something was said about editors who try to tell you what to write and where to write and everything else.

“Good writers, good editors, they are always telling me, there are some things you ought not to write about; you look bad when you do that. That’s what they tell me. Well, fuck that shit, buckshot. I’m gonna always be naked, because that’s the only way I know how to do it and do it in the most vulnerable way possible. You know what I mean?”

This speaks for itself. Written in 1977, and found by “accident” floating around in my office the other morning, I cannot overlook it as anything but a sign.
R