The US South : Harry Crews

I grew up in the south and to be honest, I don't know a thing about him. The name rings a bell, though. He certainly talks (or acts) like some of the characters I knew growing up. I actually watched the clip thinking that the actor was pretty damn convincing (especially the accent), but apparently that's Harry Crews himself!

Crews seems to be well regarded in academic/literary venues, but he is not a "bestseller". Most good bookstores seem to carry his work. Alas, I have never read him.

If you travel in the "South" you will find, even as an outsider, that there are many Souths, one for each state, and divisions therein particularly the rural/urban divides. Then there are states like Louisiana, Texas, and Florida which are as distinct from what in the U.S. is sometimes called the "deep South" (nominally the old Confederate states) as they are from any other region. In a real sense, although all are obviously contained within the body of the U.S., states in many ways have identities as distinct as European countries even though they, more or less, share a common language. Act fast. The U.S. behaviorally melds together more every day under the pressure of the overall culture.
Harry Crews was from Georgia which would be as good a place as any to start. If you're after real state flavor though stay away from the big metro areas which look and feel much like any other urban zone in the country. One thing's for sure. If you take a driving tour across this country you will meet a lot of wonderful people and you will be stunned at its incredible natural beauty and its bloody enormous size. It is easy to forget, even for us sometimes, that the U.S. is the fourth largest country in the world.

To illustrate further there are only four states with areas larger than Finland but one of them, Texas, is the size of France. Recently some crazy guys set a new record for driving across the continental U.S. of less than 29 hours. That means that they had to average nearly 160 kph. The distance is about like driving from Helsinki to Paris, and back.

Jarit:
First ran across Harry Crews forty years ago taking taking a few Southern Lit undergrad courses from a very prejudiced Ole Miss Ph.D. He used to hammer Faulkner down our throats, but being introduced to Erskine Caldwell, Robert Penn Warren James Dickey and Harry Crews weas worth the punishment.
I looked up Mr. Crews on Wikipedia and was not aware he'd passed away. But I was fondly reminded of the short lived "Grits" column he wrote for Esquire magazine back in the early 70's. Those columns were really something and I'd suggest Jim Harrison as another good read. I'd also highly recommend Crews' autobiography, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place." It's a wonderful read and his tales of bell hopping in various Oklahoma hotels really struck a chord with me.
Odd to think a very regional author like Crews would resonate with a European, Jarit. But, why the hell not? I've got a couple of German and French authors I've carried around with me for more than a few years.
Fnord

jarit, if you come to the US and feel a bit home sick you can go to to Minnesota where many Finns settled 150 years ago.

Jarit funny you should mention Lawrence, Kansas. Both fnord and I live not far from there and around here it's considered the Berkeley of Kansas. It's an ultra-progressive college town in a very conservative state.

Hellfire 'n damnation, ain't never read no Crews but now I feel like I must, dirtdobbed barefoot muddy red earth upside my skull inna tung sung lonely cold with ghost song, a rumble gone thru bones like armaggeddin isself, shakin' snakes 'n drippin' with piss, dirt roads dusty with death, yes.
Thanks for reminding me that I need to read his stuff.
The fact that he had an excerpt from an e.e. cummings poem tatt'd on his arm is very intriguing,

“How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death?”
Here's the poem in full:

{Buffalo Bill's}
Buffalo Bill 's

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

Click to expand...

I've always liked that raw edged broken openness with tough shit grumble, so real and right to the point, yet still conveying keen observation and acute vulnerability.
I'm gonna get me one 'o his books.
Like Darwin said about the divisions therein of each state is on point. For instance, Georgia has a pretty diverse landscape, the swampy south is quite different from the mountainous north, and there are small cultural notes that go along with that - up north they talk more hillbilly, down south more of a slow drawl, the coast proper of Savannah has oldtimey dialect characteristics left over from the Colonial era and often associated with the "aristocratic plantation class" and it's a good bit different from the Southern Appalachian dialect that is more ruff 'n tumble with a heavy Scots influence.
It's weird how we find our touchstones,

how they find us,

and resonate

be yond

lang

u ag

e,

or

pl

ace.
(some

how)
One of my favorite Finnish poets was Edith Södergran - heavy, deep, rich, brooding, both simple and complex. She wrote in the minority Swedish, being a suomenruotsi, but she also once wrote in a notebook, " Ich weiss nicht, in wessen Sprache schreiben" - (‘I don’t know in which language to write’). Her later work was important stuff for modernism in Finland, but all of her wordwork carries a certain weight which I deeply enjoy.

:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu3k6qu90u4

Not to steal a bit of thunder from Harry Crews, who is something of a classic, but a great Southern

lyrical poet of immense talent, who has just been selected belatedly as the North Carolina poet laureate

is Shelby Stephenson, an incredible lyrical poet. He grew up on a tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina

at Benson, where he now again lives. As a child he plowed behind a mule, but he doesn't rely just on

rough and rustic, but captures the near-religious quality of the land, its people, the nature, the animals,

the people who lived and worked in slavery as well as his own Scottish ancestors. You have to seek out

his work, since he hasn't been nurtured that well by publishers, but he's the real deal, the voice of the

place and its people.

I grew up in the Midwest but have lived for the past 23 years in the South (Georgia) which is almost half of my life. I had a similar fascination with the region until I moved here. There is a great deal of romanticization of the South almost all of which is complete bullshit unless one pines for the good ole days of chattel slavery, Jim Crow racism, poverty, and ignorance. The South certainly has its good points but I greatly prefer the people and culture of the Midwest where I grew up (Indiana) which we hope to move back to someday.

jarit,
As darwin has said, there are quite a bit of regional differences in the South. For instance, I'm a Virginian, born and bred, my ancestors settled in Virginia back in the mid-17th Century from England and Ireland, and I had ancestors who were Confederate soldiers who fought for Virginia during the American "Civil War" or "War of Northern Aggression" (as many Southerners will tell you). Yet, if I were to go down to the Deep South, I'd be considered a "Northerner". Southern dialects vary quite a bit as well from region to region. Even here in Virginia, the "Southern drawl" in my neck of the woods in Tidewater Virginia is very different than the drawl you'll hear in Southwestern Virginia or from that you'll hear across the Blue Ridge Mountains. Most of the rural South maintains quite a bit of its traditional culture and values but as Darwin has eluded, you tend to lose that in the more urban areas. Still, I'm definitely a proud Southerner and will always consider myself a part of the South.

I married into the South after attending a writing program at Greensboro, N.C. My wife's family was amazingly

accepting of me, although I knew I wasn't in suburban Chicago anymore. My late wife was a brilliant poet and

teacher, and a cosmopolitan global citizen, vastly well read and certainly well traveled. Later in life, I married

a former classmate at U Missouri who grew up in remote rural Missouri, though she spent her life working in and

around Manhattan, but kept her farm roots in the Midwest, far northeastern Missouri, a tiny town in the Mississippi

flood plain. In fact, she was nearly killed (beheaded) covering the 1993 flood. So I have deep roots in both places.

I cannot say I am a Southerner, but I have have a foot in several worlds.

I was born in Georgia and still sound as if I walked in off the farm. I love our drawl, by the way. Our language and the way we speak separates us from the rest of the world.
As a young man, I moved to Memphis, Tenn., to take a reporter’s job with the old Press-Scimitar.

One of my aunts wrote to ask, quite candidly, “Why in the world would you want to move up there with all them Yankees?”
I didn’t have a good answer, other than I had a landed a good job on a southern newspaper, where I understood the people and everyone else understood me.
And, yes, Harry Crews was what I call a good 'un, a writer of the dust. He wrote the guts out of a story, whereas Mr. Faulkner told us about ourselves because of who we are and were.
The South is a beautiful place. We have our warts, just like any other region in the nation. My folks were Confederate veterans, those who lived through the war, or as my aunts used to say, “our recent unpleasantness.”
Mr. Sherman burned down my great-great grandfather’s farm and house and my family never really recovered. I am the only one of my family to go to college and earn a degree.
I have been trying to, as Mr. Faulkner said, “tell about the South” ever since.

Had a good friend, now deceased, who grew up in Weldon, N.C., whose family were railroad people. He was

an Army veteran who had sung with an Army choir, and an opera buff, railroad watch and table ware collector,

linguist, Civil War student, model railroad buff, and interesting all-around intellect. He had an amazing cultivated

Southern accent, which I would have mistaken for upper-crust Virginian, but this affronted him. His great grandfather

was a Confederate cavalry officer. He had several wives, the last of which was a woman from Michigan whose

ancestors had fought with the Grand Army of the Republic, so their world came full circle. They walked various

battlefields together. I was glad to go to the movie Gettysburg with him and he had many astute observations about

the accents, the military protocols, and much else.
Had a friend in the Navy from Rome, Georgia, who had a definite Southern lilt to his speech who did a spot-on

imitation of Northern speech. You often hear Northerners "doing" a Southern accent, but rarely the other way.

This guy could really hit those consonants and speed up the cadence. It was both humorous and informative.
When I came to school in the south, I simply had to learn to slow down the cadence. Otherwise I may as well have

spoken Rumanian. I couldn't order a meal. People tried but they couldn't pick up the meaning.

When I attended that wonderful university in Ann Arbor, Mich., the University of Michigan, on a NEH Fellowship, my wife had to act as an interpreter for me.
Those people could not understand a word I said. And I, of course, understood nothing they said.
It was as if I were from another planet!