A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (review)

84 biography Vol. 3, No. 1 Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. 171 pp. $8.95. What I enjoy most are the good popular autobiographies—those that somehow make it onto the paperback racks. In the last ten years the ones I remember best are Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, Charlie Mingus's Beneath the Underdog, Brooke Hayward's Haywire, and Lillian Hellman's Pentimento. And now, Harry Crews's A Childhood. Somehow, put together, they give a slightly bizarre but more truthful portrait of America than most formal biographies of presidents and other public figures. While Conroy's Stop-Time is probably the classic among these, Crews is by far the best writer. His memoir covers a very small part of his childhood in Bacon County, Georgia, as part of a sharecropper family—the time when children are formed forever by tradition and fear. But it is really a book on how to hear stories, how to tell stories, how to make rumors and fragments of memories part of the truth. In a remarkable passage he discusses the different ways men and women tell stories: When I was a boy, stories were conversation and conversation was stories. For me it was a time of magic. It was always the women who scared me. The stories that women told and that men told were full of violence, sickness and death. But it was the women whose stories were unrelieved by humor, and filled with apocalyptic vision. No matter how awful the stories were that the men told they were always funny. The men's stories were stories of character, rather than circumstance, and they always knew the people the stories were about. But women would repeat stories about folks they did not know and had never seen, and consequently, without character counting for anything, the stories were as stark and cold as legend or myth. (93-4) Crews follows this remark with two stories—one by women and one by men. Both are tragic, but the first is absolutely chilling and the second hilarious. In many ways, Crews, as a writer, moves between both these styles. Crews the novelist is tough as a sharp pair of scissors. His novel A Feast of Snakes is vicious and brilliant, apocalyptic and funny. But we don't know any more about his characters than Crews tells us—and we don't really want to know. It would upset the balance of the well-told story. We cannot imagine any of his characters doing anything else for we know that Crews can outdo our imaginations. The novels are quick, he keeps the show moving—he steps into a room, does what he reviews 85 wants to it, and moves on. With A Childhood, however, he slows down. He comes to the fragments and memories of his parents gently and takes his time listening: It would have to be done naked, without the disguising distance of the third person pronoun. Only the use of 7, lovely and terrifying word, would get me to the place where I needed to go. (21) The book also parades marvelous precise portraits caught in a few lines: He favored very clean women and very dirty men. He thought it was the natural order of things. One of the few things I ever heard him say, and he said it looking off toward the far horizon, speaking to nobody: "A man's got the right to stink. ..." Hollis always smelled like his pockets were full of ripe chicken guts. ... (116) Or his step-father trying to court his mother after an argument: ... he was squatted out in the moonlight, his hat pushed back on his head, singing an old Jimmie Rodgers song. He had one of those good country voices: part drunk, part hound dog, part angel. (131) But something more comes across in this book which in a way clarifies Crews's work in general. It is the sense of order and resignation and yearning—all of which strangely go together and grow naturally out of this blasted landscape. They focus in three sections scattered throughout the book. In one...