Florida snubs literary lion with sharp teeth

By DIANE ROBERTS
Published November 16, 2007

Florida's literary heritage? Ernest Hemingway, who drank at Sloppy Joe's in Key West. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of that sad book about the deer and the poor Cracker kid. Oh, and Carl Hiaasen.

For most of us, that's about it. We don't much rate the excellent writers who have lived - and still live - in Florida. We don't even know about them. This is partly because we would rather watch reruns of CSI Miami than read a book. It's also because Florida does a lousy job of recognizing and honoring its writers.

At the recommendation of the Florida Arts Council, the secretary of state recently named filmmaker Victor Nunez and sculptor Augusta Savage to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Nunez has made humane and luminous movies such as Gal Young 'Un and Yulee's Gold. Augusta Savage of Green Cove Springs spent the 1920s sculpting Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the 1930s fighting for the inclusion of African-American artists in WPA projects.

Nunez and Savage richly deserve this accolade. But, for some reason, Harry Crews, the great University of Florida novelist, memoirist, teacher and hellraiser, author of The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes and also nominated for the Hall of Fame, got turned down flat.

Full disclosure: I was among the people who wrote letters supporting Harry Crews' nomination. It's a no-brainer. He's the heir of William Faulkner and the godfather of Cormac McCarthy. He's Maileresque (if Mailer had been born on a tenant farm). He's the poet of the low-down, the back roads, the broken heart of old Florida. His milieu is the green-shadowed swamps and tar-paper shacks tourists never see, and the hamlets promising not tropical paradise but deer processing, cheap beer and salvation at the Full Gospel Church.

So why was Crews not acceptable? It's not as if the Hall of Fame pays out big money: the only material reward is your name on a wall in the Capitol. And it's not overcrowded. The statute (265.2865, if you'd like to look it up) says the secretary of state can pick up to four people per year, as long as they have made "significant contributions to the arts in this state." Singer Jimmy Buffet's in; actor Burt Reynolds is in; and dancer Edward Villella. I like margaritas and cheeseburgers as much as the next person, but for 30 years Crews' fiction has been telling us of the invisible, the poor, the outcast: people who try to survive in the face of deprivation.

I understand not wanting to get close, even in prose, to mules and madness and drunken rages and families so dysfunctional they make the Borgias look like the Waltons. I understand the state wanting to include in the Hall of Fame people who are amiable, school visit-friendly and generally sober. Dead people are good: there's only so much they can do to embarrass us. Maybe Harry Crews is too scary; he's not known for decorum and delicacy. Maybe a member of the Arts Council once had the bracing experience of encountering him in a Gainesville bar.

But being a nice guy should not be one of the state's criteria for recognizing its literary treasures. Was Shakespeare a nice guy? Who knows? William Faulkner, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, was not a nice guy. He'd get liquored up, say outrageous (occasionally racist) things and hit on teenaged girls. Does it matter? These are artists, not Scout troop leaders or candidates for pastor of the First Baptist Church.

What's certain is that Florida, as usual, lags behind other Southern states. Georgia makes a fuss over Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Alice Walker, Margaret Mitchell and Joel Chandler Harris. Alabama aggressively promotes sites associated with Truman Capote, Zelda Fitzgerald and Harper Lee. Mississippi sponsors commemoration days, book fairs and grants reminding everyone that the state produced not just William Faulkner but Eudora Welty, Margaret Walker, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams and Richard Ford.

If we weren't so busy destroying wetlands and holding special legislative sessions, we might take some notice of our glittering literary history. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bob Shacochis, Peter Matthiessen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Connie May Fowler, William Bartram, Stetson Kennedy, Wallace Stevens and recent National Book Award finalist David Kirby have all found inspiration in Florida. How about we honor Harry Crews before he ups and dies on us? And see if we can't catch up with the likes of Mississippi in celebrating our writers.

Diane Roberts is author of Dream State, a book about Florida.

[Last modified November 15, 2007, 21:43:56]