Diary: Tobias Wolff on Harry Crews’ “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place”

(1) One of the houses in which Crews lived as a child in Bacon County, Georgia (from Ted Geltner’s Blood, Bone and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews); (2) the Swisher plant in Jacksonville, Florida, where Crews’s mother rolled cigars; (3) house in Jacksonville, left, where the Crews’s lived. Compiled by Tim Gilmore for his Jacksonville blog, “JaxPsychoGeo”

To enter the memoir A Childhood by novelist Harry Crews is to enter another world. Though set in an American state—Georgia—in a time not so distant from our own—the first half of the twentieth century—any temptation to feel ourselves on familiar ground is continually revealed as illusion. The way of life Harry Crews describes here, its culture, relation to the land, its employments, trials, pleasures, and dangers—dangers that he himself barely survived—forbids the comfort of recognition. At times, but for the distinctive American music of the voices Crews records, and the occasional mention of a truck or tractor, we might well imagine ourselves in feudal Europe, or the Russia of serfdom. Or, given the eruptions of interfamily violence begetting revenge begetting more violence, Sicily. His past is indeed another country.