A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews

A hard-living son of the South who wrote like an angel

Anyone who's read a Harry Crews novel doesn't need me to tell them what an incredible writer this guy was. I'd never, until now, gotten around to reading his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, probably because it had fallen out of print for some time and first-edition copies were pricey. When I saw the new Penguin reprint at a local bookstore, I had to pick it up.

Review

It's a short book (174 pages in the Penguin edition) and a fast read. Except for a couple of brief skips forward in time, it only covers the author's life up until around age six. But what an eventful six years they were! Harry Crews was born in the Deep South in the middle of the Great Depression, and his early years chronicle a harsh level of poverty that is hard for most of us to imagine today. For many in the rural South during the Depression and World War II, electricity and flush toilets were marvels heard about but not experienced. Even the world-expanding miracle of radio was unavailable to the desperately poor. I often wonder how a few people who come from such limited circumstances are able to become such fine writers. That in itself is a miracle and a mystery not amenable to explanation.

A theme that runs through much of the book is Crews' early-childhood love of storytelling, both the hearing and the doing of it. A tenant family of black farmers lived on the land where Crews grew up, and his best friend at that time was their little boy, Willalee. Harry, Willalee, and Willalee's little sister Lottie Mae would entertain themselves by sitting on the floor with the Sears "wish book" and making up stories about the flawless people in that catalog, with their perfect clothes and many possessions. "The federal government ought to strike a medal for the Sears, Roebuck company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people."

The old woman who lived with Willalee's family was known to all as Auntie. While his mama, Myrtice, would never deign to cook possum (it's "just like a buzzard"), the way Auntie made it was the best thing Harry ever tasted -- first parboiled, then stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in the oven. Auntie was the only adult who would join the children in making up stories about the people in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. "Auntie was too strange -- weird even -- for the big people. She belonged with children, being as she was, full of the most fantastic stories and marvelous comments upon the way of the world and all things in it, whether of the earth or air." When Harry was bedridden because of a terrible accident that left burns all over his body, Auntie would sit up with him for hours and tell him stories. "She loved to talk about anything with snakes in it," he wrote. Auntie's often grotesque and fantastical stories made a deep impression on the young writer-to-be.

Harry's daddy had died when Harry was only two years old. His mama then married his father's brother, Pascal. Harry admired Pascal greatly, but his new father eventually became too enamored with whiskey and would disappear for weeks at a time. When he returned, loud and often violent fights would often ensue between his mama Myrtice and Pascal. One night, the fight ended in Pascal firing a shotgun into the mantlepiece, narrowly missing Myrtice. she gathered up the boys, left the house, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she got a job in the King Edward Cigar Factory spreading tobacco leaves flat on a metal plate so they could be filled and then rolled. Harry never went back to the farm or saw Willalee and Auntie again. In Jacksonville, Harry became friends with a boy named Junior Lister, who taught him the art of stealing and selling ill-gotten goods. When the stealing got too dangerous, Harry talked his way into a job sweeping up sawdust in the back of a butcher shop; but the job didn't last a day. A man ran into the shop, grabbed a butcher knife from the knife block, and stabbed himself to death with it while Harry stood there watching with his broom in hand. "You don't have to worry about this," the man told the frightened boy as he was dying.

"Why?" I said.
"The knife feels good."
"Godamighty," I said.

Amongst the book's many tales of desperate people doing desperate things to survive, here was one who decided to give up. "I'm through with it all now," he concluded. "Somebody else gone have to look after it."

Five months after moving to Jacksonville, Harry's mama moved back to Georgia with him and his brother and made a down payment on a small farm not far from where they'd lived before. The memoir relates some of the events that happened after Myrtice and the boys moved to the small farm, hired a hand named Mr. Willis, and bought an old mule named Pete; but it does not go much beyond that point. Crews joined the Marines during the Korean War and was able to get a college education thanks to the G.I. Bill. At the very end, Crews briefly relates a story of coming back to visit his kin in Bacon County, Georgia, and realizing that he had grown apart from the place but that the place would always be a part of him.

I think the most powerful writing in the book comes in chapter 10, which tells the story of the terrible fight which led to Harry's mama gathering up the boys in the middle of the night and walking with them to her brother Alton's place. It goes on to recount the shocks of adjustment that came with leaving behind a rural life that could have belonged to the previous century and moving to a city with running water and flush toilets, neighbors living side by side in row houses and apartment buildings, mothers going off to work in a factory, and children roaming the streets on their own. "The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making," Crews wrote. "For a long time after that, the next six months, from March to August, lived in my memory as a series of scenes, flashes of actions lit down to the most brutal detail under a blinding light." It would be hard to find a better description of the work Harry Crews left behind.

Monster Midway by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham admiring the midway

William Lindsay Gresham's first novel was his most famous. Nightmare Alley was published in 1946 and adapted into a movie in 1947. An unsuccessful and now forgotten second novel followed in 1949. It was seven years after the publication of Nightmare Alley, in 1953, that Gresham published his third book, Monster Midway, a non-fiction collection of essays about the world of the carnivals. His most famous novel had, in fact, been born of a lifelong fascination with carnies, psychics, and magicians. Gresham shared that fascination in Monster Midway.

Review

Perhaps the most notorious passage from the novel and both movie versions is the sequence where Clem Hoatley explains to Stanton Carlisle how a geek is made. In the opening pages of Monster Midway, Gresham tells us how he learned this bit of carny lore. Gresham, like many young men in his generation, volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As he was waiting to muster out of the conflict, he got to know a fellow American who shared his interest in carnival life. "Clem Faraday was a sergeant of medics and my immediate superior... And he was also an old-time carny." The real Clem, it turns out, had worked a ten-in-one in the South that featured a geek show as a blowoff. (If I just confused you with some of that carny lingo, don't worry; the book includes a glossary.) When Gresham pressed for more information about the geek, Clem launched into the explanation of how you find an alcoholic or an ex-soldier who's addicted to morphine and use his addiction to gradually lure him into full-on geeking. That speech went straight into Nightmare Alley.

Each chapter in the book details a different aspect of carny life. Early in, Gresham goes into some detail describing the business side of running a carnival, which I admit I found a little boring; but he quickly moves on to describing the rides, the games, the freaks, the gypsy mind-readers, the motordromes and hell drivers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, snake handlers, and other exciting sides of the carnies. He devotes a long chapter to Houdini and other escape artists. (Houdini would be the subject of Gresham's next book.) Throughout, Gresham treats the reader to glimpses behind the scenes, explaining how it all works, and even revealing the secrets of some of the gaffs and grifts. Want a roadmap for doing the psychic mind-reader act? Gresham gives it to you.

All of his stories are backed up by interviews with real-life carnies, whose names Gresham shares. The chapter on freaks is revealing because it's clear that Gresham had gotten to know many of them personally, and many wisely used the money they earned in the carnies to build comfortable, normal lives for themselves afterward. Gresham also shares tales of how he tried out doing mind-reading and magic acts on his own, gaining some first-hand experience. It all adds up to a fascinating memoir of a world that is long gone. The carnivals, fairs, circuses, and amusement parks that exist today are far more wholesome and legit than the shows that would scrounge their way across America back in the days of the Depression and the War.

The Magic of My Youth by Arthur Calder-Marshall

Calder-Marshall hard at work on a novel

Review

This memoir was originally published by the venerable firm of Rupert Hart-Davis of 36 Soho Square, London, in 1951. In the author's foreword, Arthur Calder-Marshall thanks Rupert (later Sir Rupert) for encouraging him to complete the work. The book opens with an anecdote, a tale told to the author by a friend about an unlikely, seemingly coincidental encounter related to the occult magician Aleister Crowley. Looking back, Calder-Marshall notes that, once you've heard Crowley's name, you tend to hear it everywhere. Indeed, "The Beast," as he was known, becomes a touchpoint whose name recurs throughout the book. 

Calder-Marshall writes about he and his older brother growing up in the small, southern England town of Steyning in the 1920s. Central to this narrative is the friendship the two brothers developed with a local eccentric whom they called Vickybird. The boys' father strongly disapproved of Vickybird, calling him "a crank. And I'm willing to bet you anything you like he's introspective." A former poet who wrote no more, owner of a small press, Vickybird (and his wife Kathleen) lived in penury but were great sources of fascination for the boys. Though never mentioned in the book, Vickybird's real name was Victor Benjamin Neuberg. As poetry editor of a newspaper called Sunday Referee, he had been the first editor to publish Dylan Thomas. Years later, on learning of Neuberg's death, Thomas said, "Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done." Neuberg was also, in his youth, a collaborator with and lover of Aleister Crowley. (Also spelled Vicky Bird, the nickname referred to his halting, birdlike gait.) 

When Arthur went off to study at Oxford, Vickybird insisted that the younger man call upon an old friend known as "Auntie Helen," another aging eccentric who had, through Vickybird, become enamored with magic. The author recounts amusing tales of Auntie Helen, including his own strenuous efforts to keep her ahead of the bill collectors. Her philosophy when it came to borrowing on credit was always "go big," an attitude that eventually forced her to leave town in a hurry. 

The author's musings include the story of former Oxford student Raoul Loveday's suspicious death while staying at Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù. Loveday's wife, Betty May, followed him to Sicily, where she engaged in a "struggle with The Beast for the possession of her husband's body." Ultimately she lost that battle. Loveday's death may have been accidental, or it may have been Crowley's sacrifice to Adonis with the complicity of the victim. 

Betty May was, herself, quite notorious, and her autobiography Tiger Woman is still in print. I think it admirable that she did try to kill Aleister Crowley in revenge for her husband's death, but her first shot missed and the gun jammed on the second try. 

I won't recount all the stories told in The Magic of My Youth, but I will describe one more if you'll forgive my wordiness. A fellow student founded the Oxford University Poetry Society (at an earlier date than is currently claimed on the OUPS website), and Arthur Calder-Marshall became its Secretary. Having learned from Betty May that Crowley had returned to London, Calder-Marshall arranged to meet him at a restaurant and was surprised to find "a bald and elderly stockbroker, apparently working on the back of a menu calculations" which turned out to be a shopping list with estimated costs. Calder-Marshall invited The Beast to come to Oxford to deliver a lecture to the Poetry Society. Crowley astutely ridiculed the idea that the University would ever allow it, but Calder-Marshall convinced him to accept. Of course, in the end, the Oxford authorities forbade the lecture. Crowley demanded that it at least be printed or else he would sue. Calder-Marshall subsequently arranged with the Oxford Mail to have it printed as part of an exclusive-to-the-Mail story about the banned event. "You don't expect me to print this trash," protested the Mail editor when he read the lecture. But he had promised and was compelled to print five hundred copies, of which Calder-Marshall estimates about fifty were sold. 

Crowley was impressed enough with Calder-Marshall's initiative that he asked the younger man to visit him at Knockholt. "There are Matters of Grave Import we should discuss together..." The author and his wife met The Beast and his lover, an exotically dressed Brazilian woman, in a modest, borrowed cottage that was filled with Crowley's recent paintings of "trance states." What followed was a tremendous test of wills in which Crowley tried to banish the author's wife, who was of no interest to him, and persuade Calder-Marshall to spend the night and become his new assistant. In the end, Calder-Marshall managed to pull back and to eventually conclude that The Beast was "little better than a pedlar of spells as phony as quack medicines." 

There's more, but I've already gone on at great length describing this slight tome. Arthur Calder-Marshall wrote lovely prose full of insight and wit, and I plan to look for more of his work. (Orson Welles optioned one of his novels to turn into a movie but, as happened all-too-often with Orson, the financing for it fell through.) The Magic of My Youth provides a charming glimpse into a time and place far removed for most of us, along with a small sense of some of the minor actors in the drama that surrounded the famous occultist who was once known as the wickedest man in the world.