Blood, Bone and Marrow by Ted Geltner review

Blood, Bone and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews

By Ted Geltner, University of Georgia Press, 456 pages, $33

Harry Crews had a look. There was some “Deliverance”-era Burt Reynolds in his bearing. He had a bit of Lee Marvin’s darkly appraising gaze. Behind Crews’s blue eyes, you sensed voltage.

It was a look this Southern writer cultivated. He wore a Fu Manchu moustache and a skull earring. There was his Elvis sideburns phase, and his Mohawk haircut period. Of tattoos, he was an early adopter.

Even clean-shaven, Crews, who died in 2012 at 76, unnerved people. In his taut new biography of Crews, “Blood, Bone and Marrow”, Ted Geltner writes: “He had a face that when viewed by bank security guards, he said, caused them to immediately unholster their weapons.”

This sense of menace bled into fiction. Crews wrote about snake handlers, boxers, geeks who ate live chickens, attention-seekers who consumed entire Ford Mavericks. He became, in no small part, a gifted and satirical mayhem artist.

What pushed his novels further — what made them more than jangly carnivals of Southern grotesquerie — was how in touch Crews was with shame and resilience and life lived on the margins of society. The combination of emotional registers made him one of the most original American voices of the second half of the 20th century.

It’s possible that Crews’s best book is “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place” (1978). It’s a sharply remembered memoir about his impoverished upbringing in Georgia near the Okefenokee Swamp. Anyone who has read it (do so now, if you have not) knows a fair amount about the varieties of pain that informed this writer’s sensibility.

Now we have Geltner’s biography to authoritatively fill in the gaps, and to trace the many stories behind the Crews legend — the drinking, the drugs, the bar fights, the women, the vase-throwing at faculty parties. These stories get messier than you might imagine. This outlaw did not always make it to the outhouse. Crews’s lawyer remarks, “Harry did not have good bowel control when he was drinking.”

Geltner is an associate professor of journalism at Valdosta State University in Georgia. He’s written a lean and pleasingly consumable book by sticking to essentials. He’s delivered what Vladimir Nabokov said a biographer should: “plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions, no Marxist bunkum, no Freudian rot.”

Harry Eugene Crews was born in rural Alma, Georgia, in the middle of the Great Depression. His father, a tenant farmer, died when Harry was not yet 2. His mother remarried, to a violent alcoholic.

Crews had polio when young. His feet drew back, horrifyingly, and stuck to his rear end. He was told he would not walk again. (He slowly recovered use of his legs but retained a slight limp.) A year or so later, while playing, he fell into a vat of boiling water. His skin slipped almost entirely off, as did his fingernails. He survived because his head did not go under. He was not yet 6. Scars would become a prominent theme in his work.

There were two books in the Crews household, the Bible and the “Sears, Roebuck” catalogue. Crews made up stories about the unscarred men and women in the Sears universe; he figured they all knew one another.

After serving in the Marines, he attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill and fell into the orbit of Andrew Lytle, the head of the school’s creative writing department. Lytle was a Southern Agrarian who had taught Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey.

Lytle became a father figure to the young writer, but Crews felt he couldn’t please him. There are excellent and moving scenes in this biography that detail their interactions. The teacher wanted the student to slow down, to become more contemplative. Crews knew he had to write fast and hard.

One evening, while drinking in a backyard, Lytle told Crews to give his work more meaning. Geltner writes: “Harry got up from the table and began pulling up grass from the yard, putting pieces of grass in his mouth and violently chewing on it. ‘I don’t know how to give it meaning!’ he blurted. ‘I don’t know how!’” Crews never dedicated a novel to his mentor. He felt Lytle never quite approved of his work.

The suffering in Crews’s life did not abate. One of his sons drowned in a neighbour’s swimming pool at the age of 3. He wrote through years of rejection slips. He wrote several early novels that were not published. His work ethic never wavered.

Crews’s apprenticeship included breaking down Graham Greene’s novel “The End of the Affair” (1951) into its parts and studying every aspect of it. “He reduced the book to a series of numbers,” Geltner writes. “How many characters were there? How many days, weeks, years did the action take? How many cities? How many children, adults, women, men?”

Crews’s first published novel, “The Gospel Singer”, came out in 1968. He then joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Florida, where he would remain for most of his life.

This biography comes to weird, florid life in its middle sections. As Crews’s star rose in American fiction, he revelled in his outsider status. At an expensive restaurant, to make an impression, he’d eat a steak with his hands. At a bar, he’d swallow a necklace.

He was a raconteur whose life slowly and then quickly careered off the rails. Geltner catalogues the classes missed because Crews was on a binge, the students he slept with, the DUIs, the bar fights he lost with masochistic glee.

There are good cameos in this biography. Elvis Presley wanted to make a movie of one of Crews’s books. The editor Robert Gottlieb, the ultimate insider, brought Crews, the ultimate outsider, briefly to Alfred A. Knopf. It did not work out. The novelist Padgett Powell tangled with Crews while both taught at the University of Florida. Madonna and Sean Penn befriended Crews and, divorcing, fought over his first editions.

Harry Crews led a big, strange, sad and somehow very American life. It is well told here.

–New York Times News Service