Harry Crews - Grit Lit Hero

If you don't know that name, you damn well better look it up.

“Being a fiction writer is a good way to go crazy, it’s a good way to be a nervous wreck, it’s a good way to become a drunk. You continually pick at yourself, the little sores that you have. They scab over and you pick them open again. Other people not only let them scab over, they let them scar over. They leave it alone. Writers don’t do that. They can’t keep their fingers out of the sore. They’ve got to keep it bleeding. And it’s off that blood that they make their stuff.”

~ Harry Crews

I really don’t know what made me think of Harry Crews today, except that maybe I was in one of those moods. My grandfather called it having a case of the “red ass”, which for you non-Southerners is when somebody is ready to either get roaring drunk or cuss somebody out - or break something.

I’ve been sober for four years so I wasn’t about to get drunk, and I’ve been alone for the past week working on this novel that keeps getting longer as I try to pare it down, so there was no one to cuss. Instead I picked up A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews, grabbed that old paperback, dog-eared copy of mine that I bought years ago from Thrift Books, and turned right to the page I was looking for.

“It was not any one thing that scared him. It was everything. It was his life. His life terrified him. He didn't see how he was going to get through the rest of it.”
Harry Crews A Feast of Snakes

I love those four sentences because they are full of truth. I feel like that every day, or so it seems.

Hemingway always said his best short-short story was this: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” Six words that will really get you thinking. Square that up.

Harry Crews was that kind of writer, the kind of man, that should have never been a writer. He had to fight for respect, had to fight for everything he ever got in this incredibly crazy world where rich men send poor men off to war and never even say thanks. His iconoclastic characters were mirrors of everything he had seen in life, and while he coined the term “Grit Lit” it was those dead end people that he knew best. Ol’ Harry didn’t grow up at the country club worrying about what he was going to wear to the prom. His upbringing was just a little bit different.

But that’s enough about Harry. If you really think you know something about writing or literature or dragging yourself through hell just to get it on the page AND YOU DON’T KNOW THE NAME, well you damn sure need to look it up.

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