GR Harry Crews

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an excerpt from

“A Writer's Face”: The Letters of Harry Crews*

With commentary by Douglas Carlson

Harry Crews and John Landis worked on five books together for William Morrow from 1967 to 1972. The partnership was an easy one until Landis read the manuscript “Jefferson Davis Is Alive and Well and Training in Atlanta.” In his twenty-seven-page report, Landis wrote, “There are times when I got concerned . . . that the underlying themes are not complex enough . . . that more could have been done with them.” Page one of Crews’s lengthy response first hints at the roots of his sensitivity to criticism, then indirectly addresses his editor’s reservations. Understandably, Landis might have been left a bit confused by this early attempt to articulate a theoretical approach, as yet undeveloped.

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May 1970

Dear Jim:

How to begin? Always the question. I’ve been sitting here and sitting here wondering how to start. And I realize that I’m scared. I hope that won’t strike you as too melodramatic. True regardless. I’m scared because the thing that editors and writers must do in the final stages before a book goes into production is reduce the book to something they can talk about. There is nothing wrong with that. I’m even convinced that it is a good thing for the writer to attempt. But I think the writer probably always feels the impossibility of success in such an attempt. (It’s obvious I’m running tight because ordinarily I couldn’t write such a stilted sentence as the last one.) Virginia Woolf, so Leonard says in his biography of his wife, always had a nervous breakdown when it came time to do the galleys of a book. And we know who was afraid of Virginia Woolf: Everybody. So what did she have to be afraid of? Well, nothing, except that she was doing something that was as important to her as her life, that was her life, and she didn’t want to blow it. Other than that, there was nothing to worry about.

I am a conscious writer. That is to say I think fiction is written with the heart and the head. Fiction is form imposed upon chaos, which means, of course, form imposed upon life where no form exists. The head has to order what the heart knows. But the problem is that the heart sometimes knows what the head cannot deal with. And to the extent that that is true any writer that is any good at all will at times be unconscious. I think, Jim, that I am probably a good deal less conscious of what I do in my fiction than you think I am. I don’t really think about symbolism very much, although I am assured by those who should know that I write allegories. That certainly doesn’t mean that symbols are not in my work (a stupid assertion because it would be impossible for it to be otherwise), and it is true that I think of naked as an allegory. At least I think of it so now that it’s finished, looking back; but that it was an allegory never crossed my mind while I was working on it. I don’t know that such things need to cross a writer’s mind or what difference they would make if they did.

If all of this seems obvious or irrelevant or whatever, it is probably because I am writing it as much for myself as I am for you, trying to prime my pump to talk about the book at hand. And it seems to me that the best way to proceed would be to consider how the book happened to come to hand. . . .

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*From the Harry Crews Collection, courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries.