Crews, Harry 1935–: Critical Essay by Walter Sullivan

The Gospel Singer, by Harry Crews, and Do, Lord, Remember Me, by George Garrett, develop the same general material, if not the same theme: both are concerned with modern manifestations of the old-time religion, with the crassness and grotesqueness of man's nature, and with sex. Crews's book has all the hallmarks of a first novel: it is energetic but uneven, competent but clumsy, not finally satisfactory but memorable nonetheless. The narrative is framed by the Gospel Singer's return to his home town of Enigma, Georgia, whence he departed not very long ago on his way to great fame and greater fortune. (p. 159)

First novelists are the Quixotes of the writing trade. Young and as yet unbloodied by the struggle with the word, they will try anything, and the result is often admirable fiction deeply flawed. Crews is a little too bold for my taste. He takes the old convention of employing a physical defect to indicate spiritual debility—Lawrence's Clifford Chatterley, Hemingway's Jake Barnes, Warren's Sugarboy—and asks it to carry more symbolic weight than it can comfortably hold. A master freak, known only as Foot, scavenges in the wake of the Gospel Singer, catching the overflow from the Singer's crowds, sharing in the profits. Foot and the inmates of his show are meant to signify not only the depravity of man, but the larger spectrum of human nature; and as symbols their physical distortions are at once too limited and too blunt. The death of the Gospel Singer partakes of the same kind of operatic oversimplification. The people of Enigma kill the god whom they have created because he is frail and because his frailty is token of their own. Here again the big image has no subtlety and no underpinning, no thickness of world or variety of smaller figures to sustain it, and so the book finally fails. But the failure is on a grand scale and the risks Crews takes are big ones—which in the case of a writer with his talent, is the way it ought to be. For in its lesser aspects The Gospel Singer is almost entirely successful: Crews has a good eye, an excellent ear for voices, and a fine dramatic sense. He will be sharper his next time out and he ought to do admirably. (pp. 159-60)

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