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\auteurcourant={ANNE FOATA}
\titrecourant={HARRY CREWS'S RITUALS OF EXORCISM}

\raggedbottom
{\eightpoint
\noindent
From: {\sl Mythes, Croyances et Religions}, vol. 18, 2000, p. 89-97.

}
\vglue 3.5cm
\parindent=12pt
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\centerline{\bf A Childhood, The Gospel Singer, and Writing:}
\smallskip
\centerline{\bf Harry
            Crews's Rituals of Exorcism}

\bigskip
\centerline{Anne FOATA}
\smallskip
\centerline{Universit\'e Marc-Bloch, Strasbourg}
\bigskip 
                  
``It has always seemed to me that I was not so much born into this
life as I awakened to it.  I remember very distinctly the awakening
and the morning it happened.  It was my first glimpse of myself," Harry
Crews writes in his autobiography {\it A Childhood} (47).

 Crews was not quite five on that momentous morning when he
awoke to his self. Within one year, however, his particular ``postage
stamp" of Southern Georgia, the family and kin he came from, the events
that befell him and the mishaps he had to endure, were to mark,
indeed to scar, him forever. They were to shape the man he has become and
the kind of fiction he has written so far.

Nothing, not even the success and recognition that has come
to the writer and the teacher of fiction at the University of Florida over
the past thirty years, has been able to shake off the terrible burden
laid upon the five-year-old boy by his uncongenial environment. Nothing, it
seems, has allowed him to escape from himself and to be set free from the
curse of violence and disaster branded on his flesh and spirit.

To read Crews's 1978 ``biography of a place" (the subtitle of {\it A
Childhood}) from the vantage point of the turning century is
thus to be handed the key to his entire work so far, fiction and
nonfiction alike; and this holds not only for the first batch of novels
that marked his entrance in the world of letters and culminated with the
actual ``biography," but also for the second group that started appearing
in the late eighties after Crews's interlude of writing for the magazines
and for Hollywood, when he was already well established as a novelist.

What Harry Crews was to retain from  his devastated childhood in rural
Georgia is best expressed by a character in his first novel, {\it The Gospel
Singer}, who ruefully remarks that ``there is nothing so predictable as the
ritual of catastrophe and tragedy" ({\it Gospel} 198), a statement in
which both terms are of equal importance, ``the ritual" no less portentous
than ``the catastrophe and tragedy."

Crews's kith, kin and neighbors in Bacon County were the impoverished
tenant farmers of the Depression years, riddled  with the diseases and
deformities that come with malnutrition and lack of medical care, crippled
by the various accidents that are the poor farmer's lot.  They were also
uneducated and subject to all kinds of superstitions, their women
long-suffering and abused by the hard work on the farms, the large
families, and their husbands' and fathers' heavy drinking. Asked in a 1972
interview if he would rather identify himself with the South of Caldwell
than with the South of the Agrarians, of Faulkner or Welty, Crews
assented, but he reminded his interviewer that Caldwell's father was a
minister and his family had enough to eat ({\it Getting Naked} 29); he
added that things had not changed that much: his world was still, in
1972,``the southern landscape of Georgia, full of hookworms and poverty"
({\it ibid.} 32).

Crews's was a world where one had to survive by any means and at any cost,
where, for instance, the friend of a deceased man would steal all the meat
stored in the widow's smokehouse the night after the burial.  Crews, who
lost his father in 1937, when he was not yet two years old, writes that his
mother knew who the thief was and that he was not only a friend but a close
friend. But ``[i]t was a hard time in that land, and a lot of men did
things for which they were ashamed and suffered for the rest of their
lives.  [T]hey did them because of hunger and sickness and because they
could not bear the sorry spectacle of their children dying from lack of a
doctor and their wives growing old before they were thirty" ({\it
Childhood} 42--43).

It was also a world, Crews writes, that left people no margin for error or
bad luck, where disasters compounded each other in a fatal escalation.
``[W]hen something went wrong, it amost always brought something else down
with it" ({\it ibid.} 40). This Crews illustrates by a  mishap that
occurred to him when he was a mere toddler and his mother was scrubbing
the floor with homemade lye. Spotting the two yearling cows that they had
ever owned about to drink from the barrel of lead poisoning with which her
husband was spraying the tobacco nearby, she abandoned brush and lye and ran
toward the field. Halfway there she heard Harry's scream and knew what had
happened.  When the family returned from the doctor's office in the
nearby town (they had no car then, only a wagon and a mule), they also
knew what was awaiting them: the spectacle of the two yearling cows
lying dead and ``already stiff" by the lead poisoning barrel ({\it ibid.} 39).
Thinking about the episode as it was later recounted to him by his
mother (as he had not yet awakened to his self), Crews muses how typical it
was, and how tragic, of the world he grew up in, ``a world in which survival
depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained
by a lack of alternatives" ({\it ibid.} 40).

Nor was the young Crews spared this kind of mishap as he grew up, and here
we come again to that momentous fifth year of his age which marked the
beginning of his conscious life and initiated the pattern of adversity and
estrangement that was to be Crews's crucial experience in life.

On the night of August 7, 1940, which, Crews writes, was exactly three
months after his fifth birthday, he was taken by a high fever while his
legs slowly bent at the knees with his heels getting closer and closer ``to
the cheeks of [his] buttocks" ({\it ibid.} 77). The pain was excruciating.
And so he remained a couple of weeks in deep anguish and terror, with no one
even knowledgeable enough to put a name on his affliction or to ease his
pain: the two country doctors who quickly abandoned the case, a
faith healer who spouted verses from Ezekiel, passing gypsies who
sold his father ten dollars' worth of herbs and stole a brood sow, and a
tongue-speaking uncle who fell on him in a trance. The little boy's only
comfort as it were came from Auntie, the old black woman who lived on the
Crews farm and had been born a slave, who managed to persuade him that ``in
this world there was much more to worry about than merely being crippled"
({\it ibid.} 83), a bitter truth that laid the groundwork of the future
writer's extensive and highly emblematic use of freaks.

Stared at by an uninterrupted string of gawking relatives and strangers who
came from as far as the neighboring counties, Crews writes: ``I felt
how lonely and savage it was to be a freak" ({\it ibid.} 79), and a few
pages further: ``Right there, as a child, I got to the bottom of what it
means to be lost, what it means to be rejected by everybody\dots\ and
everything you ever thought would save you" ({\it ibid.} 83), knowing too
by some kind of inbred knowledge that this was the condition of the world,
the sheer mystery and terror of living.

Crews eventually recovered, but he was still not six years old when
he had to endure yet another catastrophe which strengthened the
sense of alienation he already so keenly felt. This is recounted in chapter
9 of {\it A Childhood}. It was at hog-slaughtering time the following
winter, with all the neighbors assembled in the Crewses' farm to lend a
hand. The young Harry was playing ``pop-the-whip" with the other children,
a game in which everyone holds hands in a line and runs fast until the
leader  turns sharply, literally popping loose the last child on the line
and sending him flying from his playmates.  And, of course, being the last
child on the line, the young Crews (who should have known better than play
this crazy game on his newly-recovered legs), popped loose and went sailing
into the steaming vat of boiling water in which the hogs were scalded.

Somebody fished him out and set him on his feet.  He did not fall down,
but looking at the horrified faces around him, he ``saw" in them that he
was dead.  

\medskip
{\narrower\narrower
\eightpoint
\noindent
``In memory I stand there alone with the knowledge of death upon
me. [...] I reached over and touched my right hand with my left, and the
whole thing came off like a wet glove. I mean, the skin of the top of
the wrist and the back of my hand, along with the fingernails, all just
turned loose and slid on down to the ground. I could see my fingernails
lying in the little puddle my flesh made on the ground in front of me"
({\it ibid.} 113). 

}
\medskip

The skin of his back came off with his shirt, what was left on
his ``cooked" body with his overalls.  He still had not fallen; he stood
there  ``participating in [his] own butchering". His pain meanwhile had
``turned into something words cannot touch" ({\it ibid.}). The {\it coup de
gr\^ace} was dealt to him when out of ignorance and panic, they wrapped him
in a blanket to drive him the sixteen miles to the nearby town of Alma.

This, Crews writes, was his ``second major hurt back to back" in the same
year, and it was not to be his last, as his years with the Marines and his
wild motorcycling tour around the continent would provide their own share,
but our concern here is with Crews's {\it annus horribilis} when, aged
five, according to his own admission, he came to the full consciousness of
his being and of the world around him, of its unfathomable mystery and
terror.

To assuage the terror, to find some defense against it and to make some
sense of his life, the young Crews, still in the fifth year of his age,
started to make up stories, to ``fabricate," as he says, ``to spin a web
of fantasy" ({\it ibid.} 54) around the world he experienced  every day. 
Choosing random characters from the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue,
Harry and his black playmate, the son of the tenant farmers who lived on
the farm, set to creating stories about them, inventing relationships
between them, mostly violent ones, of those that included family feuds and
ended in blood. For, at five, and already well in the know of all the
couplings around him, animal and human, Crews also knew that if the
smooth, well-dressed young man they spotted on one page of the catalogue
was ``fooling" with the pretty girl they found on another, ``the man in
his middle years, dressed in a hunting jacket and wading boots" ({\it
ibid.} 55), whom they spotted on still another page and  made out to be
the girl's father, would stop all that ``messing around" with the guns and
knives that were on display in a further section of the catalogue.  They
sometimes embroidered on the story by having the whole male kin lending a
hand to the father and laying traps for the young man, and even refined it
by having the girl's complicity in the whole bloody affair. ``Before it
was over," Crews writes, ``the entire Wish Book (as the catalogue was
called in the country) was filled with feuds of every kind and violence,
maimings, and all the other vicious happenings of the world" ({\it ibid.}
57).

 Another noteworthy thing about the catalogue, in the light of
all the deformed characters that were to take up the space of his
fiction, is that it showed people who were not only smiling and beautiful
but whole, that is, unscarred, unmaimed, in a word, perfect. And as young as
he was, Crews knew it was a lie, ``that under those fancy clothes there had
to be scars ... swellings and boils of one kind or another because there
was no other way to live in the world" ({\it ibid.} 54). 

Of those ``vicious happenings of the world" that the boy devised for
his first fantasies, the Crews family, meanwhile, was getting more than
their normal share, and an increasingly uncontrollable one, on account of
the stepfather's drinking and the ensuing violence.  It was during the
winter of Harry's fifth birthday that the sitation finally got out of hand.
Life was becoming a nightmare, and the young Crews was well acquainted with
nightmares and their unspeakable terror. ``[I]t occurred to me for the first
time  that being alive was like being awake in a nightmare. I remember
saying aloud to myself: 'Scary as a nightmare. Jest like being awake in a
nightmare'"({\it ibid.} 108).

Again, in the middle of the tension and terror of his daily life, of the
mishaps of all kinds that were his daily bread, the young Crews was well
aware that these were nothing compared to the torments of eternal damnation
that God would eventually wreak upon them.  He was familiar with them;
they were preached to him during every Sunday service. And so it came to
pass that to ease the tension of his mother and brother while they were
waiting for their father, Crews, one night when he was five, improvised his
own sermon and preached ``about hell and God and heaven and damnation and the
sorry state of the human condition" ({\it ibid.} 65).  The adult Crews comments:

\medskip
{\narrower\narrower
\eightpoint
\noindent
     In all the churches, you smelled the brimstone and the sulfur
     and you felt the fire and you were made to know that because of
     what you had done in your life, you were doomed for ever. Unless
     somehow, somewhere, you were touched by the action of mercy and 
     the Grace of God. {\it But you could not, you must not, count on the 
     Grace of God.  It probably would not come to you because you
     were too sorry} ({\it ibid.} 65-66; {\it emphasis added\/}).

}
\medskip
      
The certainty embedded in those last two sentences may well 
encapsulate Crews's whole ``philosophy" of life (although Crews would
certainly object to the word); they also foretell most of the contents of
his novels and nonfictional stories; they explain most of his characters,
their innate sorriness, their ever renewed hope in love, salvation\dots\ 
God, and their no less ever renewed disillusionment. Crews, at five,
together with the gift of self-awareness, was given this poisoned glimpse
into the human condition.

All of Crews's characters do indeed hanker after something that might or
might not be the Grace of God, but they also know that they are too sorry
to ever be worthy of it. They inhabit a doomed world replete with all
kinds of wretchedness that they are powerless to understand and control.
Feeling abandoned by God and men, they are all of them grotesques of some
sort, their freakishness but the existential sign of their alienation. 
Unable to change their condition, terrified most of the time by what they
cannot comprehend, they lash out against it in periodic bouts of violence
that are as many rituals of exorcism. After which, broken but somewhat
restored, they embark upon another round of mishaps and frustrations that
eventually ends up in the same way.

One may not be too far from the mark in stating that all of Crews's novels
so far have been rituals of exorcism, enacting one aspect or another of
what Ren� Girard has called ``generative violence." This is a fact of
life that the more civilized world does not willingly acknowledge; it
was bedrock reality, nevertheless, albeit unperceived as such, in Crews's
world. To Crews, however, between the age of five and six, it asserted
itself as an inescapable fact of life, and very consciously so.  

\medskip
{\narrower\narrower
\eightpoint
\noindent
     I had already learned -without knowing I'd learned it- that every
     single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power.
     And it was only by right ways of doing things -ritual ways- that
     kept any of us safe.  Making stories about them was not so that
     we could understand them but so that we could live with them.
     [...] [F]antasy meant survival" ({\it the end of chapter}~6, 90). 

}
\medskip

Crews's very act of novel writing is a ritual of exorcism; and each of his
novels re-enact a form of it. Perhaps this is why they give such an
impression of sameness, despite the abundance and variety of
characters and situations. To open a Crews novel is to expect it, to
expect freakish characters of some sort involved in violent action of
some kind. There are bodybuilders, beauty queens, and karatekas preparing
single-mindedly for their competitions; there is a young man eating his
car, pound after pound a day; an oversexed Gospel singer given to
compulsive fornication; a twentieth century nostalgic of the mediaeval rites
of falconry bent on taming a hawk; there is a town of rednecks getting ready
to celebrate its annual roundup of rattle snakes. Then there are the
freaks, the authentic freaks of the various freak shows, the giants,
midgets, fat men and fat ladies, whose deformities are emblematic of the
alienated state of mankind.

Unlike as they may appear, they still share the same outlandish
extravagance, the same compulsive hankering after something they can't
even name - acceptance, love, happiness , God ... whatever.  All of Crews's
characters appear obsessed by something, which may be carnal love, physical
perfection, ambition, salvation and penance; and this obsession inevitably
involves them in bouts of violence that are as many rituals of exorcism.

Both themes are intricately linked in Crews's first published novel,
{\it The Gospel Singer}, in 1968.  Condensed, film scenario fashion (in
the manner of the scripts Crews himself wrote during his spell with
Hollywood), its story might read:  Gospel singer's obsession with female
flesh combined with manager's obsession with penance leads to violent
undoing by frenzied mob.

Nor is the spareness of this formulation of the novel's contents quite
alien to the nature of the story. There is no importunate dalliance with
irrelevant episodes, no unwarranted sensationalism (as may appear, it must
be said, in some of Crews's lesser novels),  no flamboyance for
flamboyance sake.  The action unfolds in one place and in one day and not
so much drifts as it is recklessly and relentlessly driven to its
cathartic d�nouement. Of all Crews's novels, {\it The Gospel Singer} may be
regarded as possessing in the most stringent way the very lineaments of
Tragedy: the tension and ineluctability, the hero's tragic weakness and its
implacable retribution, the strict husbanding of means toward end.  It also
has the crispness of Crews's best prose, which is not to be found in every
one of his novels, but is the prose of {\it A Childhood} and of the
sequel he is currently writing (judging from the opening chapters that
appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of {\it The Southern Quarterly} and were
reprinted since then in a book of Crews's interviews, {\it Getting
Naked with Harry Crews}.)

A surface reading of {\it The Gospel Singer} makes it appear for what
Crews intended it to be, that is, a Christian tragedy set in our Western
world deprived of the old certainties of Christianity, where Gospel
singing and religion have turned into a lucrative business. This is
heralded by the epigraph Crews added to it: ``Men to whom God is dead
worship one another," and further implemented by his specific use of
freaks as emblems of man's estrangement from God.  In this respect, Crews
shares his fellow Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor's belief in the
essential depravity of men, which both of them make perceptible to their
readers through the very visible bodily distortion of the grotesques that
people their novels.  ``If there are freaks in my novels," Crews admitted
in his 1972 interview, ``it is only that these people have conditions
which are more apparent and more immediate than the people around them.
But I am convinced that you and I, all of us, are caught in the same kind
of inexplicable, almost blind terror, except that ours is not so apparent"
({\it Getting Naked} 30-31).  Both Southern writers, however different
their faith, have drawn their characters from the same deprived rural
neighborhood and, by distorting them into freaks, have made them into
``figure[s] of our essential displacement" ({\it Mystery} 45).

 O'Connor, however, held a staunch belief in the workings, devious
as their ways may appear, of God's Grace, whereas Crews, already as a small
boy, has had serious doubts about it. There certainly is no Redeeming God
in {\it The Gospel Singer}, only bleak humanity engaged in rites and
rituals that hark back to a much darker age, when the orgiastic killing of
vegetation gods had not yet given rise to its apotropa\"\i c representation
on the tragic stage.  To the point here, undoubtedly, must be the setting
of the novel, the small town named Enigma, and the presence of the
eunuch-like, self-flagellating Corybant figure of the Gospel singer's
manager-priest Didymus, among many other references. 

Didymus, the nickname of the apostle Thomas, as the Bible-ridden Southern
audience may well have known, is also the name of one of the earlier
oracles of the god Apollo in Asia Minor before he won his fight against
Python and  moved to Delphi. Had indeed the Gospel singer kept clear of
Enigma and its man-eating Sphinx, Apollo to the end he would have remained,
sunny, golden-haired and fair, his Gospel singing progression around the
country no less triumphant than Apollo's progresss around Greece amid his
retinue of Muses.

No such glory, however, was to be the novel's protagonist's.  Enigma erases
the radiant image of Apollo as the Gospel singer stumbles into the dark
revelries of the god who shared Apollo's shrine at Delphi, Dionysus.  The
old Dionysian rites, indeed, loom large over the destructive frenzy of the
Enigma mob, while the Gospel singer eventually turns into the sacrificed
victim of yet another avatar of the god, i.e. the Dionysus-Zagreus of the
Orphic myths.

If the Gospel singer may eventually appear, in the enveloping Christian
symbolism of the novel, as a Christ figure in his sacrificial death, he
certainly is no innocent victim intended to put an end to the old
scapegoating rituals of mankind, as Ren� Girard interprets Christ's ``non
sacrifice" on the Cross in his ``non sacrificial" reading of the Gospels
(in {\it Things hidden since the Foundation of the World}).  No
innocent Savior, the Gospel singer is put to death because of the
black sheep he is, lustful and sinful to all excess, and also
because the people of Enigma refuse to acknowledge the blackness
of their own hearts and transfer it upon him.

All the cogs and wheels of the old scapegoating machinery are set in motion
by the end of the novel.  Once an adulated member of the community, the
Gospel singer is turned into the ``inside marginal" (another Girard term)
because of the excess of his wealth, fame, and good looks. Magically
endowed with exceptional powers by the adoring crowd, the power to heal
the lame and the halt, to forestall death, even to bring rain to the
parched land, he is made a god, all too human alas! and then murdered for
being human and the worst of sinners to boot.  In accordance with the
motives laid bare in Girard's book {\it The Scapegoat}, he is made to pay
for the worst abomination, here his transgression of the strictest taboos
of Southern society:  Pure Southern Womanhood, with its corollary of
racial purity.

Not only does he confess to having perverted the Southern girl who was to
be his bride and turned her into an unashamed whore, but he also tells the
truth about  her killing at the hands of the black preacher who was his
childhood pal: not because he has raped her and murdered her to hide the
deed, but because, in the words of the Gospel singer, ``he wouldn't screw"
her, when she begged for it ({\it Gospel} 193).

A seducer, a sinner, and above all a scandalmonger and liar about the
sacred tenets of the community, he's strung with the preacher from the
same oak tree by the infuriated crowd, made to atone for Enigma's own
acknowledged suspicion of the black man, its unallowable lust for the
beautiful MaryBell, its envy for the preacher who, it is thought, had
``had" her, its ``mimetic desire" (to use Girard's seminal expression)
for the all-too-successful Gospel singer, and, last of all, for its
self-loathing, its despair at its failures and poverty.

Catharsis has been achieved.  Law and order are restored to Enigma, but as
Roberto Calasso writes in {\it The Ruin of Kasch}, which is a reflection on
order and disorder, all sacrificial murder is a self-murder, since violence
has been allayed for a limited time only, and any member of the same
community is liable to become a victim for the next
outburst.\footnote{$1$}{Calasso writes: ``in offering the sacrifice, we
accept--even behind the stratagem of substitution, which temporarily keeps
us alive--the fact that we ourselves will one day be devoured, if not by
men, then by those gods who are invisible guests at the banquet: 'killing
always means killing oneself'" ({\it Ruin} 160).}

The ritual killing of the {\it pharmacos}, in restoring order, also
breaches the dis-ruption within the community, re-unites what has been put
asunder.  In the deadly love-hate embrace which closes {\it The Gospel
Singer}, Calasso would also recognize the {\it coniunctio} which, on the
strength of his reading of Vedic texts, he assumes to be the essence of the
act of sacrfice, ``the ritual foundation of the interweaving of Eros and
Thanatos" ({\it Ruin} 151).

\bigskip\bigskip\bigskip

``I fear my world view is a terribly black, awful one," Crews admitted in
the 1972 interview. ``I have only one thing to say to people. As soon as
something pleasant and cheerful and confectionery occurs to me, I'll write
about it; but I can only write about whatever comes.  And what has come so
far has been a kind of blackness" ({\it Getting Naked} 31).

Something ``confectionery" must undoubtedly have come Crews's way in the
thirty-odd years of his novelwriting: money, recognition, fame,
gratification from a work well done. Yet all his novels, to the latest,
evince the same bleakness disguised under the trappings of violent farce
and baroque action.  Reading {\it A Chilhood}, however, one can
understand why.  At five, Crews's outlook on life was already deeply stamped
upon the man he was to become, and rooted into his personality
in an ineradicable way. And inescapable too has appeared in his adult life
the repetition of the selfsame patterns that have darkened his childhood,
as if bred into the bone by family and environment: the violence,
outrageous behavior, bodily accidents, hard drinking, losses.  

Harry Crews, at sixty-five, seems to have found some peace.  Retired from
teaching, and from the bottle that has caused so much havoc among
writers,\footnote{$^2$}{{\it cf}. James Dickey's son Christopher's memoir
on his father, {\it Summer of Deliverance}. New York: Simon \& Schuster,
1998.} he is currently writing a sequel to {\it A Childhood}, starting at
the time of his mother's death.

In one of his latest interviews, Crews has expressed his wonder at being
published in France ({\it Getting Naked} 340 \& 349).\footnote{$3$}{``In
my life, I finally found an audience. France. The French love me"
(340")\dots\ Telling the interviewer that he wished he had {\it The
Mulching of America} back in order to burn it, he says that ``the French
just bought it, God bless them\dots" adding: ``The French are curious
people" (349).} To what measure of response and success, however, lacking
Gallimard's record of sales, is hard to assess. A first venture in 1974
with the translation of {\it Car} ({\it Superbagnole}) by Albin Michel had
come to nothing.  It seems Gallimard has bought the translation rights in
the 1990s, reissuing {\it Car} under its American title, and a few others
of Crews's novels: {\it La Foire aux Serpents} ({\it A Feast of Snakes}),
{\it La Mal�diction du Gitan} ({\it The Gypsy's Curse}), {\it Body} (same
title), {\it Le Chanteur de Gospel} ({\it The Gospel Singer}), and
fortunately, albeit belatedly (in 1997), {\it Des Mules et des Hommes},
the French felicitous title for {\it A Childhood}, possibly borrowed from,
or inspired by, Zora Neale Hurston's 1935 collection of tales, {\it Mules
and Men}.

It so happened that the French version of Crews's ``biography of a place"
appeared about the same time as the translation of Frank McCourt's own
memoir of his childhood in Ireland, {\it Angela's Ashes}.  For those French
readers who have read both books, the debate remains open as to whose
childhood was the more appalling, whose environment the more unredeemed. 
In both cases, whether McCourt's Roman Catholic Ireland or Crews's Baptist
South, combined underpriviledge and ignorance was responsible for their
experiencing early in life what a French writer has so adequately called
``la maudissure de la vie, " the everyday sorriness and wretchedness that
is like a blight on one's life. McCourt, however, has not produced any
novels so far.

The curse, apparently, has never lifted from Crews's writing life. He,
however, has exorcized it in the act of writing, in creating the flamboyant
situations and characters of his novels, their farce and drama, and in the
better cases, as in {\it The Gospel Singer} and {\it A Childhood}, the
chastening pity and terror of Tragedy.

\vfill\eject
\vglue 25pt
\centerline{\bf Bibliography}
 \bigskip
{\parskip=0pt\parindent=0pt
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1
Erik Bledsoe.  ``An Interview with Harry Crews," {\it Southern Quarterly},
37 (Fall 1998); 97-117; reprinted in {\it Getting Naked with Harry Crews},
ed. Erik Bledsoe.  University Press of Florida, 1999; 331-62.
  
\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1           
Roberto Calasso.  {\it The Ruin of Kasch}, trans. William Weaver \& Stephen
Sartarelli. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Harry Crews.  {\it The Gospel Singer}.  New York: William Morrow, 1968; the
quotations are from the 1969 Dell paperback edition. (Trad. {\it Le
chanteur de Gospel}. Paris: Gallimard, 1995).


\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
----------- . {\it A Childhood. The Biography of a Place}. New York: Harper
\& Row, 1978. (Trad. {\it Des mules et des hommes}. Paris: Gallimard,
1997).

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
----------- . ``Assault of Memory," {\it Southern Quarterly}, 37 (Fall
1998); 124-138.

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Anne Foata. ``Interview with Harry Crews," {\eightit RANAM}, 5, 1972;
207-25; reprinted in {\it Getting Naked with Harry Crews}, ed. Erik
Bledsoe. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999; 26-48.

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Ren� Girard. {\it Violence and the Sacred}, trans. Patrick Gregory. 
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.


\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
------------ . {\it The Scapegoat}, trans. Yvonne Freccero.  Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.


\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
------------ . {\it Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World}, trans.
Stephen Bann \& Michael Metteer. Stanford University Press, 1987.


\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Flannery O'Connor. ``Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern
Fiction," in {\it Mystery and Manners}, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New
York: Farrar, Straus \& Giroux, 1969.


}

%\vskip 2cm
%\rightline{\vbox{\halign{\hfil#\hfil\cr
%Anne FOATA\cr
%{\it Universit\'e Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France}\cr}}}

\vfill\eject
\nopagenumbers\pagetitretrue

\centerline{{\it A Childhood, The Gospel Singer}, and Writing:}
\smallskip
\centerline{Harry Crews's Rituals of Exorcism}
\bigskip

\centerline{Anne FOATA}
\bigskip

L'�criture, pour Harry Crews, cet auteur sudiste n� en 1935, est un
rite d'exorcisme pour �chapper � l'implacable violence et pauvret� qui a
marqu� son enfance dans un comt� du sud de la G�orgie pendant la
D�pression.  Son autobiographie, {\it A Childhood}, qui date de 1978,  mais
n'a paru en France qu'en 1997 ({\it Des Mules et des Hommes\/}), raconte
pourquoi et comment, d�s l'�ge de cinq ans, il s'est mis � ``fabriquer" des
histoires � partir du catalogue de ventes par correspondance Sears \&
Roebuck, une habitude qui devait mener � son premier roman, {\it The Gospel
Singer}, en 1968.

\bye
    Harry Crews's 1978 autobiography, {\it A Childhood}, provides a clue for
reading the work of this Southern writer born during the Depression in the
poorest county in Southern Georgia. Crews writes that he was five when he
``awakened" to himself and to the world around him, where ``survival
depended on raw courage...born out of desperation and sustained by a lack
of alternatives." To be able to live with the mystery and terror of his
everyday life, Crews, at five, started to invent stories for the figures
he found in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, a habit which led to his first
published novel, {\it The Gospel Singer}, in 1968.



