Triumphant Victim

By Nelson Canton

BLOOD AND GRITS

by Harry Crews

Harper & Row; 213 pages; $10.95

Fear, hate and exploitation are themes that haunt Harry Crews. His fiction (Car, A Feast of Snakes) is peopled by grotesque and tragic victims of the rural South. As his autobiography, A Childhood, reveals, Crews earned his vision. He is, to use his own term, a "grit," a poor white brought up on a Depression dirt farm in Georgia, fearful of landlords, Government, floods, of life itself. Maturity has brought courage, but the shudders of childhood remain. So does the gallery of odd personae who enliven his latest book of personal essays, Blood and Grits.

In the first piece, "A Walk in the Country," Crews and some friends carouse through Tennessee. Stopping at a roadhouse, they meet Jake Leach, a man obsessed by a horrific memory. As a child of five, he had witnessed the hanging of an elephant named Alice, which had gone berserk and killed a little girl. Justice, absurdly satisfied, has left Leach traumatized for life: "That little girl and Alice were the same age ... That's what gets me." In the essay "The Most Kindest Cut of All: Vasectomy," Crews humorously plays with a castration fear. "Suppose," asks his doctor, trying to dissuade him from the operation, "the woman you wanted to marry wanted children of her own and you couldn't give them to her?" "Then obviously," replies Crews, "she'd be the wrong woman for me to marry."

In the author's company, everyone turns into a Crews character. The actor

Charles Bronson confesses to a belief that his mother sold him when he was a boy:

"She took me to upstate New York. I saw the money change hands. It was two Polish onion farmers she sold me to. When she left I knew, I mean I knew it right away."

If there is a kindred spirit who mirror's Crews' fear and passion, it is another actor, Robert Blake. In "Television's Junkyard Dog," Blake confesses a Freudian nightmare that might serve as an episode on his TV series, Baretta. "I have a dream, and I bet I have it once a week," he tells the author. "Wherever I am, what ever I'm doing, I'm naked. And I can't get no clothes on. Sometimes I'm at the airport and sometimes I'm at school in a hall way. Can't get no door open. To get inside.

To get away. Sometimes I even try to crawl into a locker. I can't get my hands on no clothes, and everybody else is dressed."

After sluicing down quantities of vodka, after smoking too much marijuana and producing some luminous prose, it is Crews who stands naked. In the final essay, "Climbing the Tower," he contemplates the relationship between futility, violence and creativity. "I know what it means to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure," he admits. "Inevitably, it is out of a base of failure that we try to rise again to do another thing."

Blood and Grits may give the author a feeling of defeat. It gives the reader a sense of triumph.

-- Nelson Canton

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