Barry Hannah, 1942-2010
Word quickly spread this afternoon that Barry Hannah died today of "natural causes" at the age of 67 in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was the chair of the writing department at Ole Miss and where the 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book, already dedicated to him this year, is to begin on Thursday. Hannah was a titan many have not heard about, undeniably tied to the South and to what people who really like writing call "the sentence." Like Grace Paley, or some of his Southern peers like Padgett Powell or Harry Crews, he wrote with a voice that was so full of life and invention that, reading it, you are filled with the desire to write yourself and at the same time daunted by the idea that you ever could.
There are many Hannah maniacs out there. My sister turned me on to Airships a long time ago and I've always had it nearby to leaf through with awe and pleasure but I think I was too knocked out by it to just sit down and swallow it whole. I expected at some point I would become a maniac myself, and these things going the way they do, that time is probably now, i.e., a few hours too late. In the spirit of letting people describe themselves, here is a section from a story in Airships called "That's True," about a man who sets himself up as a phony psychiatrist so he can listen to people talk, that I imagine carries some autobiography (with apologies for the raw language, from which Hannah did not shy):
Old Lardner, I never knew what his real voice was, he had so many, though I knew he came from Louisiana like me. He loved Northerners--Jew, Navajo and nigger alike. He was a broad soul with no spleen in his back pocket for anybody. Except whiners who knew better. You ought to hear some of the tapes he brought back. He never taped anybody without their knowledge of it.
All of them liked to be taped, Lardner said.
It was their creativity.
Last week I posted about a whole lot of rules for writing fiction; according to a post from his student Michael Bible on HTMLGIANT, Hannah was no fan of rules, but under hounding from an "odd and earnest" student in her 60s who "often reeked of gin," he relented with a handwritten list of six. Here's one:
6. In grad workshops your can make QUANTUM LEAPS in your art as you cannot with a piano or saxophone. (Perhaps you can in painting or photography e.g. my own [illegible] where I am never going to be better than an adequate cartoonist or late modern [illegible]. But you cannot WANT to learn, not want to listen to the advice of professional writers. You can just cool your jets and be mediocre the rest of your writing life. RETREAT is what I see happening too much. The adventure is left out. You are afraid of reading into the ACTS of others, you are stuck in mere conciseness. So DO something more and leave complacency—give your men and women something to do, to say, to move, to explode or implode.
The best thing about Hannah I've found online so far is a profile Wells Tower (a suitable acolyte) wrote of him for Garden & Gun (a suitable venue) in 2008, from which I borrowed the lovely photograph above, by Erika Larsen. Hannah takes Tower outside Oxford to find the grave of a friend and fellow writer, Larry Brown, who died at an even younger age than Hannah would.
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.”
It's (past) time this evening for me to turn to the book reviews for Old Media Monday, but I expect I'll be turning back to Airships for much of the night to post sentences on Twitter. Here's a list of Hannah's books to date:
Novels:
- Geronimo Rex (1972) (National Book Award finalist)
- Nightwatchmen (1973)
- Ray (1980)
- The Tennis Handsome (1983)
- Hey Jack! (1987)
- Boomerang (1989)
- Never Die (1991) (Boomerang and Never Die are available now in a single edition)
- Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)
Story collections:
- Airships (1978)
- Captain Maximus (1985)
- Bats Out of Hell (1993)
- High Lonesome (1996) (Pulitzer finalist)
Elinor on March 02, 2010 at 12:03 AM
She had a certain smile that would have bought her the world had the avenue of regard been wide enough for her. They loved it at the Bargain Barn. But the town was one where beauty walked the walks as a matter of course, and her smile was soon forgotten by clerk and hurried lecher on the oily parking lot. She never had any talent for gay chatter. She could only talk in brief phrases close on the truth. How much is this? Is it washable? This won't do, it's ugly.