Sunday Morning! “The Gospel Singer” by Harry Crews

[Note: I don’t generally give “spoiler alerts,” but it’s hard to talk about the novel in question without talking about its ending. So, if that sort of thing bothers you…]

Just as there are eight million stories in the Naked City, there are eight million clichés about the South. Its denizens have no real education or innate intelligence, and only enough teeth in their mouths to mutter racist slurs, spit tobacco juice on the floor, or whisper sweet nothing in the grubby ear of their first cousin. Or, that’s completely wrong and they’re salt of the earth jus folks who love their God, their family, and their land with a purity unimagined in our metropolitan Gomorrahs, and a rich culinary, musical, and literary heritage to express that love, y’all. Id or angel: there’s not a lot of middle room there.

For such a hard milieu to write decent stories about, there is still a surprisingly rich vein of Southern American literature. William Faulkner is arguably the greatest novelist the country has produced, even though his knotty stories are steeped in Southern lore and pathology. American humor might not really begin with Samuel Clemens, but it sure feels that way. But, then, you also have plenty of MFA graduates to this day writing dreary flat stories in lit journals about worn down Southern women looking to flee that abusive man (who may or may not be a second cousin) with only their waitressing tips.

Which is all a way of saying that, gol durnit, the novels of Harry Crews shouldn’t work. His version of the Deep South is full of grotesque, spiritually and physically malformed, unrestrained and violent men full of lust and bigotry and fear only of God. Writers aren’t supposed to write this way without it turning into pulpy schlock or forgettable schmaltz. And yet, as my musician friends like to say, it’s all in your tone. Crews’s tone sits right in that register where the Grand Guignol meets the Grand Ole’ Opry.

Much of the grotesquery likely comes from Crews’s own life, which rivals that of Hubert Selby Jr. for abject suffering. He was born in Depression era Georgia to poor tenant farmers, unaware that his father died when Crews was an infant and he called his Uncle father. He suffered polio that caused his legs to fold backwards for a year, followed by a a fall into a vat of nearly boiling water, which burned most of his body. Nearly everyone he knew growing up, he would recall, ” had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple…”

Nearly all of the characters living in “Enigma, Georgia” in Crews’s first novel, The Gospel Singer (recently reissued in a Penguin Classics edition), are in some way scarred or infirm, with the exception of the title character (given no other name in the story) whose beauty, and soul, rivals that of Dorian Gray, and whose singing voice has carried him out of the dirty little town all the way to Carnegie Hall. Now, he has returned to his hometown for a show, to find that the great love of his youth has been murdered by his former best friend, a Black man locked in the town jail- no points for guessing how he’s referred to by the locals throughout the novel.

The Gospel Singer would rather be anywhere else. His mother is desperate to keep him at home, his brother with the horrible skin condition, has decided to join a sideshow in order to follow him; the sideshow is led by Foot, a man with one giant foot, naturally. His new manager (who secretly killed the old manager) is trying to get him to give up his rapacious sexual proclivities; his singing brings young women to orgiastic heights of ecstasy, all in the name of God, of course; the Gospel Singer can’t help but give unto God what is God’s, and keep a little for himself. Worst of all, in some sense, he knows he was, in some way, responsible for the murder for which his old friend will be lynched.

Harry Crews. All author photos once looked like this.

So, the tone is somewhere between a horror novel and a satire without any obvious laugh lines. Reading it, I realized a pretty good rule of thumb for satire is: Your characters can’t know they’re in a satire. The Gospel Singer is haunted by his past and the wretched condition of his soul. He’s not a pious hypocrite- well, he is a pious hypocrite, but he knows it and the fact torments him. The manager wants to save the Gospel Singer and sees him as a vehicle to save so many others, even if he had to kill for the driver’s seat. Even the murderer was driven by some sort of obsessive love for this man and his God. The question becomes: can an evil act lead a person to good? Can the worst sin lead to salvation?

Crews is drawing on something distinctly American here. All nations commit all sins, but Americans seem to excel at idolatry. The characters all see the Gospel Singer as the one who will save them; they become convinced his touch can heal. Like Brian of Judea, he is repulsed by their slavish devotion, but likes the perks that come with it. He knows he must tell the crowd that he’s a fraud in order to save his friend, but as W.C. Fields once said, if you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh, or they’ll try to kill you.

The ending is as inevitable as it was shocking. I genuinely believed this was all leading to a Paul Schrader redemptive ending, but naturally, once the Gospel Singer has spurned the mob, they tear him to bits along with his friend. Is he a martyr? Did he give his life to serve God? Or to save his friend? Or, is this just how human affairs end? Is this satire or tragedy? How are we supposed to take all this?

I couldn’t tell you. The book is like a fever dream that you wake up from and have to puzzle your way through. Like the state of your own soul, it’s something you have to deal with on your own.

So, what are YOU reading, writing, pondering, playing, watching, creating, or saving on this Easter Sunday?