Like It Was

By James Atlas

A CHILDHOOD: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE

by Harry Crews

Harper & Row; 171 pages; $8.95

Marvin Molar, who walks on his hands and can balance on a finger; Herman Mack, who eats an entire car; Joe Lon Mackey, a homicidal sadist. This gallery of grotesques could only have been invented by Harry Crews, a Southern gothic novelist who often makes William Faulkner look pastoral by comparison.

In A Childhood, Crews turns to non-fiction and grants his landscape something it never had before -- credibility. The place is Georgia; the time, the Depression, when "there wasn't enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man's eyes." His people are the forlorn, gaunt sharecroppers fixed in the grim photographs of Walker Evans. James Agee, whose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men accompanied Evans' work, portrayed his subjects with the sympathies of an outsider; Crews evokes them with a familial intimacy.

His parents' lives were unimaginably cruel. Plowing by hand, laboring in the fields from dawn until dusk, his father died of a heart attack in his early 30s. when Crews was not quite two. Not long afterward, his mother married his father's older brother Pascal. The result was catastrophic. Pascal drank, the couple quarreled, and after he discharged his shotgun six inches above his wife's head, she fled with her children to Jacksonville. A few months later, she returned to work the farm herself.

How does one write an autobiography confined to the first six years? Crews listened. The image of farmers sitting on their front porches in the sun and reminiscing is more than myth; it was from these garrulous sources that Crews acquired both his material and the lively idiom that animates his narrative. "A way of life gone forever out of the world" is recalled in these pages, enriched by a wealth of unlikely lore: how to estimate a mule's age, cook a possum, butcher a hog.

Crews' penchant for the bizarre has been subdued in A Childhood. His father, whom he could not remember, becomes in retrospect a heroic if desolate figure, "fond of lying out with dry cattle" -- that is, women who had never given birth. The minor characters are equally memorable: Willalee Bookatee and his family, their black neighbors; the Jew, a peddler whose wagon was crammed with exciting goods; Mr. Willis, the stoic hired hand, who "moved as slow as grass growing" and once extracted a tooth from his own mouth with a pair of pliers. Even the animals -- Daisy the mare; Sam the loyal dog: the two mules. Doc and

Otha -- are endowed with personalities.

Inspiration, it would seem, consists in memory and a will to escape the sorrows of childhood: "The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making." As a boy, Crews created a country drawn from the photo graphs of models in Sears, Roebuck catalogues, and the characters he conjured up were no doubt precursors of the people who dwell in his novels. But this memoir depicts them as they truly were and situ ates them in that inexhaustible literary arena, the bitter, impoverished South.

"Only the use of I, lovely and terrifying word, would get me to the place where I needed to go," Crews writes. American literature is fortunate that he made the journey.

-- James Atlas

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