Barry Hannah's Long Shadow

The author with a "sculpture" at his home in Mississippi. credit: Erika Larsen

One afternoon in July, the author Barry Hannah took to the small roads south of Oxford, Mississippi, where he lives, to visit the grave of friend and fellow writer Larry Brown. Hannah hadn’t been out this way in some months. He missed an important turn at a place called the Yocona River Inn and had to stop at a country store to ask directions.

“Excuse me,” Hannah said to the woman behind the counter. “Can you tell me which way is the Yocona Inn? We’re trying to find our friend Larry Brown’s place.”

The woman returned a vacant look.

“Larry Brown—he was a very fine writer,” Hannah pressed on. “He lived right around here. Do you read his books?”

The clerk did a weird abased shrug but didn’t answer. Hannah paid for his Coke and cigarettes and departed, vexed.

“It’s just unbelievable to me, the lack of pride and curiosity,” he said, pulling his Jeep Cherokee onto the blacktop. “If the people out here should be reading anybody, it ought to be Larry Brown. This is what he wrote about—these people, life out on these roads, and in these little stores. I guess they’re busy with their televisions. Man, it just nauseates me. It’s sick and dumb.”

Southern letters suffered a cruel deprivation when a heart attack took Larry Brown in November 2004. Brown, a former captain at the Oxford Fire Department, wrote straight, bold books about lives gone wrong in north Mississippi. That the clerk did not recognize Hannah himself, arguably the Deep South’s best living writer you have perhaps never read, bothered him not at all, but to a highly partial observer, the oversight seemed about like Hemingway strolling unrecognized through the streets of Key West.

Barry Hannah’s fame is of a peculiar kind. Ask people about him, and either they’ll say they’ve never heard the name (despite his nominations for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) or they’ll get a feverish, ecstatic look before they seize you by the lapels and start reeling off cherished passages of his work. Echoes of familiar Southern tropes appear in Hannah’s novels and short stories: outlandish violence, catfish, desperate souls driven half mad by lust and drink. But in Hannah’s fiction the South becomes an alien place, narrated in a dark comic poetry you’ve never heard before, peopled with characters that outflank and outwit the flyspecked conventions of Southern lit. A Civil War scribe whose limbs—save his writing arm—are shot off. A serial killer who looks like Conway Twitty and makes his victim suck a football (“moan around on it some”) before beheading him. A Wild West widow who lashes a personal ad to a buzzard in hopes of finding a man. In Hannah’s panoramas, you’ll find hints of William Faulkner, rumbles of Charles Bukowski, and the tongue-in-cheek grotesquerie of David Lynch. But the fierce inventiveness of Hannah’s prose makes him something sui generis entirely, a writer who renders the project of comparison a farce.

“We stand in awe of him,” says the novelist Richard Ford. “There’s an electricity that galvanizes his sentences and connects one word to the next that basically creates a whole new syntax….He just completely rejiggered everything that the term South calls to mind. Whatever affected all the writers who are the sons and daughters of William Faulkner, Barry somehow eluded.”

His departure from Dixie’s literary main is not accidental, Hannah said, but grows from a violent allergy to the antebellum banalities that can plague the Southern mode.

“The canned dream of the South is something I’ve resisted my entire career; it disgusts me,” Hannah said. “And being Southern isn’t always a graceful adjective; it’ll kill you sometimes. Often, it’s shorthand for ‘Don’t bother reading this because it’s just gonna be a lot of porches and banjos.’”

Hannah may bridle at being herded into regional corrals, yet you’d be hard-pressed to turn up a belle-lettrist below the Mason-Dixon Line who doesn’t applaud him for jumping the proprieties of traditional Southern lit.

“Pound for pound, Hannah possesses more talent in the little finger of his right fist than certain humid Southern states do,” says Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, and other books. “His prose is always not just writing, it is prose. Never a careless ordinary syllable, not a mark that hasn’t first been sung aloud at three a.m. beside some river at a hunting camp.”

Hannah is not a writer to be read idly, with half a head or heart. His work thrives in his sentences, the best of which require a couple of readings to fully wring their satisfactions. The syntactic rigor and strange music of his fiction occasionally get him classified as a difficult or, less appropriately, a postmodern writer, and are probably why Oprah Winfrey hasn’t called him yet.

And though master of fine arts programs nationwide teem with young writers who tend private shrines to Barry Hannah, his broader impact on American letters, as Richard Ford sees it, may be a subtle one.

“There are certainly people who come tripping down to Oxford who sit at his feet, but he didn’t exactly spawn whole generations of imitators like Ray Carver did,” says Ford. “It was more that Barry made us aware of wonderful possibilities of language that we did not know were there before.”

Hannah is the author of thirteen novels and short story collections; his most recent book, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, came out in 2001, though a close scrape with lymphoma nearly kept him from finishing the book. The cancer returned a few years back, but these days Hannah’s health is holding. He’s making headway on a new project and still finding time to tour greater Oxford’s back roads by Jeep or motorcycle on afternoons when the weather is fine. A man of frailer emotional stuff might find it a lonely condition to be one of Southern literature’s last men standing, laboring among the specters of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and more lately departed friends, but Hannah is philosophical. “I’ve grown used to having ghosts around,” he said.

SACRED GROUND

With a bit of huffing effort, Hannah, who is sixty-six, clambered over a cattle gate and stepped onto the meadow where Larry Brown is buried. “We’re on sacred ground now,” he said as he made his way down to the grave.

Hannah stood over the modest marker, which reads, “William Larry Brown, CPL US Marine Corps, Jul 9 1951–Nov 24 2004. The Road Goes on Forever.” He took a breath and spoke. “Old sport, I really miss you,” he said. “There’s just a vacuum in town, a hole, still. You did more with little than anybody I’ve ever met. You were a great, positive, helping friend.”

Hannah drew a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket and lit it. “You know, Larry never had anything bad to say about other writers,” he said. “He never had time to get any of that spiteful literary stuff going. He turned me on to Cormac McCarthy. Such a smart guy. Larry succeeded at whatever he touched. He did inherit that drinking gene, though, like I did, from his father.”

Then Hannah turned and walked a few dozen yards to the edge of the pond where he and Brown used to fish. He stood on the dock, peering at the smooth khaki surface of the water, which buckled now and again with the sheeny muscle of catfish and Florida bass. Talk turned from funereal to sporting matters. “I still fish when I can, but I throw them back now. I’ve been catch-and-release for so long.” Hannah, a gentle, courtly man who doesn’t much resemble the rough people in his books, also owns a good number of firearms, but he doesn’t care for hunting, or the killing of small things. “I’m an animal fan,” he said. “In my teens, I’d kill songbirds and woodpeckers, things I’d hate to hurt now. You’re just bloody-minded when you’re young. There was just no reason to shoot those beautiful things, and yet we did. But with fishing, there’s still that magic, that pull when you hook a fish. You never know what you’re gonna pull up.”

The afternoon sun was baleful, and the air wet and thick, yet Hannah seemed in no hurry to leave the pond, which, knowing his fiction, made a kind of sense. You can’t read twenty pages of Hannah’s work without stepping into a pond, a sea, or a creek. I asked him why that was. Hannah gazed out over the water’s dark, placid lid. “The mystery of it,” he said. “The savage nature underneath us. So calm on the surface, but down there, everything’s just eating the hell out of everything else.”

A WILD PAST

Barry Hannah Hails from Clinton, Mississippi,
North of Jackson. At Mississippi College, Hannah was premed but switched to literature. He went on to earn an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the University of Arkansas in 1966. Not long after, he found an admirer in Esquire magazine’s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, the slash-and-burn literary tastemaker who helped cultivate both Richard Ford and Raymond Carver. It was Lish who, to Carver’s ultimate anguish, dismantled and rewrote much of Carver’s early work, and generally gets credit for the brave, spare prose on which Carver built his name. Hannah, however, did not suffer Lish’s editorial wrecking balls as compliantly as Carver did.

“He’d mark things up, but if I didn’t agree with it, I wouldn’t take it,” Hannah said. “But he did teach me a lot about writing short stories. The use of open space. The music of the empty white. Not to write so damn fucking much. Stop, sir! You’re through!”

Hannah’s first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), a feat of comic firesetting to the coming-of-age genre, established him as a new sort of Southern writer, one whose work was of the South, but whose voice issued from its own extremist nation of the id.

His next major outing, Airships (1978), a collection of short stories, and his fourth book, Ray (1980), inspired a fervent multitude of Hannah cultists, among them Robert Altman, who brought Hannah out to Hollywood to write a script for him. (“It didn’t work,” Hannah said. “I was just flat bad at it.”) Hannah found an awed reader in Truman Capote, who once described Hannah as “the maddest writer in the U.S.A.” Hunter S. Thompson’s assessment went a few steps further. “Hannah should not be in front of young people,” ran a blurb of Thompson’s Hannah quoted to me with pride. “And perhaps he should be in a cage.”

Hannah’s transgressions didn’t stop at feats with language. As his literary repute spread, so did his fame as one of Southern lit’s notorious bad men. He drank a good deal. He shot holes in walls and automobiles. At the University of Alabama, where he had a tenured teaching post, he brought a revolver to his writing workshop and twirled the empty chambers before the class by way of explaining his theory of a short story’s six movements. The deed got him fired.

“The trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work,” Hannah said. “The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.”

In 1983, Hannah accepted a position as writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, where he nourished the careers of young writers from Donna Tartt (The Secret History) to Jonathan Miles (Dear American Airlines). Hannah’s life took a calmer turn in Oxford. He married his fourth wife, Susan, with whom he lives today. In 1990, he quit drinking. He’s been sober ever since and does not reflect with much nostalgia on his infamous years. “The wild stuff is also overrated,” he said. “There’s not a great deal of romance in it, mostly just a lot of wasted time and misery and things I wish I hadn’t said to other people. But you see, all my heroes were alcoholics—Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. How many more do you want? Alcohol had had that code of mystery about it as a writer’s drug, which I’m glad has been debunked.”

BACK TO WORK

These days, Hannah lives in a 1950s-era brick ranch in a wooded Oxford neighborhood that more evokes suburban Orlando than Yoknapatawpha. A typhoon of dogs greeted us at the door—six of them, including two determined yowlers that Susan was powerless to calm. Hannah fetched me a cold Budweiser from a stash he keeps on hand for thirsty visitors. He took a Coke for himself and led me to his office, a tidy chamber of knotty pine.

Not far from his desk stood a group of musical instruments—flügelhorn, bass, two guitars. (Hannah has an informal band with a few of his musical graduate students at Ole Miss.) Books shared the shelves with a healthy arsenal of rifles and shotguns, which these days Hannah wields only against cans.

“Terry Gross put the question to me on Fresh Air a while ago: ‘Why do you like guns?’” said Hannah. “I don’t really know. It’s just an old admiration. It’s almost genetic to Southerners. You can put every argument about gun control to them and they don’t have an answer. They just tear up. They just start shivering. It’s like you’re pulling a goddamned heart out of somebody.”

Hannah eased himself into the chair behind his writing desk, which supports the electric typewriter he uses (he abhors computers). The work on his latest book, initially conceived around a string of church arsons, was going well, Hannah said. After a frustrating period of halting progress, he’d decided to dismantle the novel structure he’d been working with and reassemble the book as a collection of short fiction. “For years I was miswriting the thing,” he said. “It had been an embarrassment, and just two weeks ago, I said, ‘To hell with this. I’m going back to short stories.’ They don’t sell as well, but so what? When I was getting started, short stories were the breath of life.”

Outside, dusk was taking hold. Hannah leaned back in his chair, and, reflecting on his career, spoke with some sorrow about the readers he felt he hadn’t reached. “I’d always imagined this hip, intelligent crowd I was writing for, but as it turns out, they’re not out there waiting,” he said. “Really, I was brokenhearted to hear people call me difficult. I always intended to be light and open, but I suppose I misjudged the American audience.”

But Hannah’s claims of obscurity were belied by the wall behind him, which bears a trove of awards and commendations to humble a Nobel laureate. A letter from John Cheever conferring the literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A resolution from the governor of Mississippi praising Hannah’s work. Multiple medals from assorted literary arbiters hanging from tricolor ribbons. “Susan did all this, and really, it embarrasses me,” he said. “There are far too many pictures of me in here and not enough of her.” Hannah glanced at the wall and hazarded a minor grin. “I’m not an egomaniac. But those prizes do keep you going. They mean a lot to us scribes who work in the dark.”

HANNAH'S SHORT STORY
"Water Liars," from Airships

When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.

I’m glad it’s not my name.

This poor dignified man has had to explain his nobility to the semiliterate of half of America before he could even begin a decent conversation with them. On the other hand, Farte, Jr., is a great liar himself. He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tells big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghosts took out of Farte Cove in years past.

Last year I turned thirty-three years old and, raised a Baptist, I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three. It had all seemed especially important, what you do in this year, and holy with meaning.

On the morning after my birthday party, during which I and my wife almost drowned in vodka cocktails, we both woke up to the making of a truth session about the lovers we’d had before we met each other. I had a mildly exciting and usual history, and she had about the same, which surprised me. For ten years she’d sworn I was the first. I could not believe her history was exactly equal with mine. It hurt me to think that in the era when there were supposed to be virgins she had allowed anyone but me, and so on.

I was dazed and exhilarated by this information for several weeks. Finally, it drove me crazy, and I came out to Farte Cove to rest, under the pretense of a fishing week with my chum Wyatt.

I’m still figuring out why I couldn’t handle it.

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. The movement of every limb in every passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.

You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.

I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.

My vacation at Farte Cove wasn’t like that easy little bit you get as a rich New Yorker. My finances weren’t in great shape; to be true, they were about in ruin, and I left the house knowing my wife would have to answer the phone to hold off, for instance, the phone company itself. Everybody wanted money and I didn’t have any.

I was going to take the next week in the house while she went away, watch our three kids and all the rest. When you both teach part-time in the high schools, the income can be slow in summer.

No poor-mouthing here. I don’t want anybody’s pity. I just want to explain. I’ve got good hopes of a job over at Alabama next year. Then I’ll get myself among higher-paid liars, that’s all.

Sidney Farte was out there prevaricating away at the end of the pier when Wyatt and I got there Friday evening. The old faces I recognized; a few new harkening idlers I didn’t.

“Now, Doctor Mooney, he not only saw the ghost of Lily, he says he had intercourse with her. Said it was involuntary. Before he knew what he was doing, he was on her making cadence and all their clothes blown away off in the trees around the shore. She turned into a wax candle right under him.”

“Intercourse,” said an old-timer, breathing heavy. He sat up on the rail. It was a word of high danger to his old mind. He said it with a long disgust, glad, I guess, he was not involved.

“MacIntire, a Presbyterian preacher, I seen him come out here with his son-and-law, anchor near the bridge, and pull up fifty or more white perch big as small pumpkins. You know what they was using for bait?”

“What?” asked another geezer.

“Nuthin. Caught on the bare hook. It was Gawd made them fish bite,” said Sidney Farte, going at it good.

“Naw. There be a season they bite a bare hook. Gawd didn’t have to’ve done that,” said another old guy, with a fringe of red hair and a racy Florida shirt.

“Nother night,” said Sidney Farte, “I saw the ghost of Yazoo hisself with my pa, who’s dead. A Indian king with four deer around him.”

The old boys seemed to be used to this one. Nobody said anything. They ignored Sidney.

“Tell you what,” said a well-built small old boy. “That was somethin when we come down here and had to chase that whole high-school party off the end of this pier, them drunken children. They was smokin dope and two-thirds a them nekid swimmin in the water. Good hunnerd of em. From your so-called good high school. What you think’s happnin at the bad ones?”

I dropped my beer and grew suddenly sick. Wyatt asked me what was wrong. I could see my wife in 1960 in the group of high-schoolers she must have had. My jealousy went out into the stars of the night above me. I could not bear the roving carelessness of teen-agers, their judgeless tangling of wanting and bodies. But I was the worst back then. In the mad days back then, I dragged the panties off girls I hated and talked badly about them once the sun came up.

“Worst time in my life,” said a new, younger man, maybe sixty but with the face of a man who had surrendered, “me and Woody was fishing. Had a lantern. It was about eleven. We was catching a few fish but rowed on into that little cove over there near town. We heard all these sounds, like they was ghosts. We was scared. We thought it might be the Yazoo hisself. We known of some fellows the Yazoo had killed to death just from fright. It was the over the sounds of what was normal human sighin and amoanin. It was big unhuman sounds. We just stood still in the boat. Ain’t nuthin else us to do. For thirty minutes.”

“An what was it?” said the old geezer, letting himself off the rail.

“We had a big flashlight. There came up this rustlin in the brush and I beamed it over there. The two of em making the sounds get up with half they clothes on. It was my own daughter Charlotte and an older guy I didn’t even know with a mustache. My own daughter, and them sounds over the water scarin us like ghosts.”

“My Gawd, that’s awful,” said the old geezer by the rail. “Is that the truth? I wouldn’t’ve told that. That’s terrible.”

Sidney Farte was really upset.

“This ain’t the place!” he said. “Tell your kind of story somewhere else.”

The old man who’d told his story was calm and fixed to his place. He’d told the truth. The crowd on the pier was outraged and discomfited. He wasn’t one of them. But he stood his place. He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about.

I told Wyatt to bring the old man back to the cabin. He was out here away from his wife the same as me and Wyatt. Just an older guy with a big hurting bosom. He wore a suit and the only way you’d know he was on vacation was he’d removed his tie. He didn’t know where the bait house was. He didn’t know what to do on vacation at all. But he got drunk with us and I can tell you he and I went out the next morning with our poles, Wyatt driving the motorboat, fishing for white perch in the cove near the town. And we were kindred.

We were both crucified by the truth.

Airships © 1978 by Barry Hannah, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press.