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“My Malformed Bones” – Harry Crews’s Counterlives

Harry Crews’s counterlives

He admired James Baldwin and André Gide, claimed to read Madame Bovary at least once a year, and could recite Shakespeare at length; he bragged that he had never set foot in Texas without being arrested, and said he’d “like to write a thing called Jails I Have Known.” Late in life he wore a Mohawk, had lines by E. E. Cummings tattooed down his biceps, and was described as looking like “a cross between G. Gordon Liddy and Vanilla Ice.” Crews had hoped the book would please his mentor, the novelist Andrew Lytle, an early champion of O’Connor’s work who, in 1930, had contributed an essay to I’ll Take My Stand, a reactionary manifesto defending white Southern culture. Of all the femme fatales who populate Crews’s fiction, Charity is surely the weirdest, and the most comically sinister—something like a cross between an evil scientist and a catalogue model, with “teeth so perfect they should have been false” and eyes like “little delicate calipers.” She calls Eugene’s apartment her “living laboratory” and mines his life for material, believing it could prove to be the key to her academic breakthrough.

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