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Agrarian Nightmare: Harry Crews' Dark Vision in Naked in Garden Hills

In the novels of Harry Crews, the symbols of an industrial society--cars and junkyards, highways and wreckage, factories and their offal--have come to dominate formerly pastoral southern landscapes. Crews portrays twentieth-century industrialism and the materialism that springs from it as the root causes of spiritual and cultural decline in the modern world. (1) In his second novel, Naked in Garden Hills (1969), Crews develops a withering critique of the transformations of the South in the twentieth century that invokes the Agrarian arguments of the 1930s: his grotesques here emerge out of an industrial New South that has abandoned farming for the factory, the rural for the urban, the sacred for the secular. Yet while Crews portrays a society broken by the very forces that so concerned the Agrarians, he parodies their call for a return to subsistence farming as elitist fantasy and ultimately sees no way past the depravities of modern culture. The situation of Crews' characters is exactly that of the idealized farmers of the rural South described by Andrew Lytle--Crews' writing mentor at the University of Florida in the early 1950s--in "The Hind Tit" his contribution to the centerpiece of Agrarian thinking, I'll Take My Stand (1930). In a highly stylized narrative section of Lytle's essay, farmers fall from arcadian bliss to modern anomie, emphasizing what he and the Agrarians firmly believed: that modern progress is merely a dupe's game leading inevitably to the loss of individual and communal values. For Lyre, the transformation to a capitalist economy "presents an awful spectacle: men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects." (202-203). Lytle's words read as a postulate for Naked in Garden Hills, and, in this essay, I consider the novel's connection to an Agrarian tradition that Crews himself has regarded with great ambivalence. As Harry Crews demonstrates evocatively in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), he knows well the people of whom Lytle and the Agrarians write, and the characters in his fiction are the sort of souls that the Agrarians--and particularly Lytle, in his contrast between pre- and post-lapsarian poor whites--lamented over in their famous tract. Written nearly forty years after the publication of I'll Take My Stand, Naked in Garden Hills closely echoes the earlier critique of the new economy of the South. Having left the farm behind and abandoned rural life, Crews' characters immerse themselves in the industrial machine that transformed the South of his childhood. His narrative suggests he would agree with Lytle's description of the onset of modernism as "a war to the death between technology and the ordinary human functions of living" (202). Lytle went further in his essay, auguring not merely the loss of human functions but the loss of human life itself, as the movement to new technologies becomes "to follow the matter to its conclusion, a moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction" (202-203). It is a state of being that anticipates the grotesques found in much southern fiction, especially that of Caldwell, O'Connor, and Crews. In reading Naked in Garden Hills alongside I'll Take My Stand, and especially Lytle's essay, we find that the dark vision of the modern South in the novel emerges from the essential conservatism of the Vanderbilt writers. Just as Lytle suggests that the damning mantra of the modernist society will be "keep the machines turning!" (205), the future residents of Garden Hills, Florida, repeat the news to themselves over and over again when, years before the present time of the narrative, they learn that industry is coming: "They gone dig" (Crews, Naked 11), they say. And dig they do, building the town of Garden Hills at the very bottom of that first hole: "Everything was growing, children, possessions, and mounds of earth. Particularly the mounds of earth. Every day it seemed that Garden Hills sank a little further from sight. …