The Uses of Adversity

126 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW works, Pig Earth and About Looking, may well find they want something from them which John Berger is not able to supply us with now: a sense of our own political and cultural vitality and possibility. But it is precisely this something which, in 1980, we must rediscover and extend, for Berger's sake and the sake of his work, and for the sake of our lives. Fred Pfeil THE USES OF ADVERSITY Harry Crews, A Childhood: the Biography ofa Place. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. $8.95. Blood and Grits. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. $10.95. Many reviewers of Harry Crews's eight novels might argue that a better description of his work should be "the uses of perversity," for his work is such strong stuff as to provoke limitless outrage and red-hot bile from most genteel and workaday reviewers. He is, nonetheless, an important chronicler of the dark underside of Southern rural life, and his essays and memoirs are as significant as his accomplished fiction. Crews's novels (all published between 1968 and 1976) are patently unfair to reviewers and readers with button-down minds who seek only to retrace formulas and conventions of popular fiction and then go back to watching TV. What can a poor grub-street reviewer make of a novel that squirms deep inside a guilt-obsessed backwoods preacher (Gospel Singer), or one about a man who vows to eat a new Ford Mustang (Car), or one about a renegade karate samurai (Karate Is a Thing ofthe Spirit), or one about a fanatical falconer in deep suburbia (The Hawk Is Dying)! Crews's work has usually been as welcome in a review column as a leper in a message parlor. These two books of personal reflection demonstrate to me that Harry Crews is one of the most persuasive and able masters of narrative in America. He has chosen the out-back and down-under of the nation as his playing field, and he knows the deep South and its disfranchised proletariat (those he calls "Grits") better than any other observer. These books show us how he came to his wisdom. His novels are marked by an outrageous, bizarre humor generated by insanity, physical violence, deformity, suffering and perverse obsessions, all narrated in faultless cracker colloquial. Crews's ear for both the bouyant rhythms and the sheet-iron flatness of content of country polite conversation is impeccable, and these books are as dazzling in verbal music as his fictions. Seamless fabrics of anecdote and casual observation, the books ought to delight and hypnotize anyone remotely interested in people, places or things. Crews's superb autobiographical fragment, A Childhood, deals with a place (Bacon County, Georgia) and a time (the 1930s) as reflected through a child's mind in a way that makes the middle-class masters of Southern fiction (Agee, O'Connor, Faulkner, Warren, McCullers) seem remote and chilled. Crews focuses with an obsessive's microscopic vision and eidetic memory on the day-to-day absurdities, cruelties and outrages of subpoverty existence. Yet there is a curious joy—acknowledgment of the sheer strength of living itself —giving the mordant comedy an edge beyond despair or fashionable "black humor" nihilism. 127 REVIEWS One horrific anecdote among many describes a man who enters the butcher shop where young Crews works and drives a knife into his chest before a crowd of onlookers: He turned his eyes toward me. "Come over here, boy." I stood where I was. "Come on over here." I stepped closer. He leaned just perceptibly. "You don't have to worry about this. I don't want you to worry about this." I didn't say anything. "You know why it ain't no reason for you nor anything else to worry about this?" "Why?" I said. "The knife feels good." "Godamighty," I said. "It feels good." (Childhood, p. 141) He learns this in another form when a hired hand must bleed a bloated mule, in what seems an unendurably cruel procedure: "It was a awful thing to have to do to'm." Mr. Willis thought about it for a little and said: "No, it weren...