Nature, Phosphate, and Harry Crews’s Naked in Garden Hills

In an interview with French literary critic Anne Foata, Harry Crews explained that the inspiration for Naked in Garden Hills (1969) arose as he drove through the phosphate mining country around Mulberry, Florida. Crews describes the scene he encountered on that trip:

[T]he sky was a brilliant blue, the air was beautiful, and then way ahead I began to see this awful yellow pall hanging in the sky; then I began to smell it, and the air began to get gritty, and then the landscape became ruined; as far as the eye could see, there were ponds of scummy water, broken tracks, barbed wire…. It looked like war…. Then I began to see the refineries, some of them abandoned, some of them still working. It depressed me and I thought: “Oh my god, here we are again right in the middle of man and what he is capable of on the earth.”

(45)

Crews transformed this appalling scene into the ravaged natural world surrounding the fictional phosphate town of Garden Hills, the primary setting for Naked in Garden Hills.¹ This novel is Crews’s strongest expression of his concern with nature—animals, plants, and the physical earth—and the relationship of humans to their natural environment. The novel uses nature in two ways: to represent the spiritual or psychological condition of the characters and to suggest that the degradation of nature by the phosphate industry has damaged the characters who live in its environs.

Crews wrote Naked in Garden Hills at a time when concerns about the destruction of nature were spreading. Crews was most likely familiar with marine biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 landmark text Silent Spring, which meticulously documented and analyzed the harmful effects of chemical pesticides, especially DDT, on wildlife and humans. Silent Spring remains highly admired and widely recognized as ushering in the modern era of environmentalism in the United States. After its publication, public awareness of environmental issues increased, political debate followed, and some important changes took place. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, a year after Naked in Garden Hills was published, and crucial legislation followed, including the Clean Air Act of 1970, and the Clean Water Act of 1972. Arch Frederic Blakely, writing in The Florida Phosphate Industry, published in 1973, wrote that “Few informed people would maintain that there is not a real environmental crisis facing the world today; indeed, the decisions and actions we take now may affect the survival of the human race within a few generations” (xvii).

While Harry Crews is most widely recognized as a writer of dark, violent Southern Gothic novels peopled by grotesque characters, his interest in nature has a significant, yet largely unacknowledged, place in his writings. Crews set forth ideas about the natural world in nonfiction writings throughout his career. For instance, in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), he expresses his attitudes about the relationship between humans and nature developed during his childhood in rural Bacon County, Georgia. Much of this book deals with his growing up in a family of sharecroppers among crops and domesticated animals, a way of life that encourages using resources wisely and respecting life. His time spent exploring beyond the farm further developed his appreciation of the natural world. Although A Childhood leaves out many of the crucial experiences that Crews mentions elsewhere in his writings, such as his lengthy excursions into the Okefenokee Swamp, in this autobiography, Crews fondly recalls fishing and hunting in the wild with his Uncle Alton. He further describes the personal importance of unspoiled nature to him as an adult in his 1997 essay “Swamp as Metaphor.” Here, speaking of his memories of the Okefenokee Swamp, Crews sounds almost Wordsworthian in his passion for nature:

This incredibly wild and strange swamp, combined with the madly twisting and turning Suwannee, has made it possible for me to keep writing at times when nothing else can…. These waters and all that grow in them or on their banks, and fly above them, have been an influence on and a constant support of the...