Reissues breathe new life into works of Harry Crews
There is no easy way to assess the work of Harry Crews. A beloved and longtime writing teacher at the University of Florida, Crews was the author of several novels and a biography of his homelife before his death in 2012.
His fiction, particularly the early novels, tell stories pockmarked by racism and misogyny. That Crews’s characters lead complicated and troubled lives is what makes the stories compelling. But the world has turned differently since Crews’ came to prominence, and while his characters travel roads rutted with historical realities, his work had fallen out of favor.
Penguin Classics has reanimated Crews, however, with the reissue of two of his most notable books: “A Childhood: The Biography of A Place,” and “The Gospel Singer,” his first novel from 1968.
Born in a rough time and a rougher place, Crews grew up poor in Bacon County, Georgia before enlisting in the Marine Corp. After military service and university he honed his storytelling and recalled his childhood in nine novels and countless works of nonfiction.
“The Gospel Singer,” opens in the main character’s hometown of Enigma, Georgia, a place we learn in the opening sentence “was a dead end,” from which the Gospel Singer has been trying to escape his entire life. He wants to escape the town’s stagnancy, as well as his family’s limits. His golden voice is both his ticket out and his curse.
Back home to mourn his sweetheart MaryBell Carter, murdered and possibly raped by a black neighbor, he also confronts the sins of his undoing, realizing there is little enough insulation in success.
Willalee Bookatee Hull, a mountainous Black man and a boyhood friend, murdered MaryBell, and probably raped her as well, and now waits his punishment in the Enigma jail. He, like everyone else in town, also awaits the return of the Gospel Singer too. “An unabated hunger raged in the whole town for the sight and the sound and–-God willing–the touch of the Gospel Singer, who had single-handedly focused the attention of the world on Enigma, Georgia.”
But it’s not going to be easy, as an undercurrent of judgment is always threatening to derail whatever success he might find, “Because to the Gospel Singer’s mind, God was a kind of enormous Black Cat that was continually threatening to cross the path just ahead.”
Crews’ novel is more clearly understood with a reading of “A Childhood,” from 1978, where he details the course of his life up to his early teens. Raised by a determined mother, he opens with a first memory “of a time ten years before I was born, and takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.”
His father’s early death was a touchstone, but so too are a good many other calamitous moments, such as when Crews is flung into a pit of nearly boiling water at a family hog slaughtering day. “I remember everything about it as clearly as I remember anything that ever happened to me, except the screaming,” Crews writes. He was six years old.
There were neighbors too, such as Auntie, his friend Bookatee’s grandmother. “Somehow all of us knew that Auntie behaved as she did because she had got way beyond just being grown-up. She had grown up and up and up until she got to the very top, as high as you could go,” he remembers.
Harry Crews might be unfamiliar to many, but thanks to these two new reissues, his work is once again earning some deserved attention.
Good reading.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Reissues breathe new life into works of Harry Crews
