Spotlight on … Barry Hannah Ray (1980)

 

‘A few years ago I received a letter from Barry Hannah, written in a shaky hand, on University of Mississippi stationery. I was working at the Paris Review, and he was writing to submit a short story by one of his students. It was a generous gesture, and a rare one, too—you’d be surprised how infrequently authors submit their favorite students’ work. (The students might be even more surprised.) But the most striking thing about the letter was the way Hannah introduced himself. “I’m not accustomed to this kind of thing, but I’m the author of Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray, High Lonesome . . . ” An introduction was unnecessary—after all, he had been the subject of a major interview in the magazine just a few years earlier. It’s hard to imagine, say, Larry McMurtry beginning a letter, “I’m the author of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment . . . ” And Hannah was, as McMurtry himself has said, “the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor.” It’s possible Hannah was being excessively modest, but I suspect it’s more likely that he figured whatever kid opened his letter might not, in fact, know who he was.

‘The sad thing was that Hannah had good reason to think this. Although he was one of the few hugely innovative writers of our time—he suffered a fatal heart attack on March 1—he never had the readership or popularity of many of his peers, despite winning their adulation. Truman Capote called him “the maddest writer in the U.S.A.” His books are accompanied by unrestrained praise from John Grisham, Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, and Philip Roth (who in a single sentence compares Hannah to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and O’Connor). These encomiums were a mixed blessing. Hannah couldn’t shake such lukewarm, even backhanded euphemisms as “southern writer” and “writer’s writer.” As Harrison said after Hannah’s death, “I always thought he would become a massively famous novelist, which didn’t quite happen, except in the minds of other writers.”

‘There’s not really any mystery to this. His prose is unlike any you’ve ever come across. One of the ways he manages this is by breaking rules—of syntax, narrative, logic. Sometimes he breaks them all at once. Take, for instance, the first paragraph of “Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony,” from his first collection, Airships (1978):

In the alleys there were sighs and derisions and the slide of dice in the brick dust. His vision was impaired. One of his eyes had been destroyed in the field near Atlanta as he stood there with his binoculars.

‘A stingy grammarian might strike the repetition of the preposition that brackets the first sentence: “In the alleys . . . in the brick dust.” Our grammarian might also have a problem in the second sentence with the use of “his” instead of the character’s name, which we learn several lines later is False Corn (only on the next page, following this backward logic, does Hannah finally give us the man’s full name: Isaacs False Corn). We can piece it together, but Hannah doesn’t make it easy. This kind of thing can discombobulate casual readers. And without them you can’t sell a massive number of books. …

‘Hannah never lost his high exuberance. Even during his final years, in stories about church arsonists and Dexedrine-hopped fighter pilots, he was writing sentences like “The fire caught up in all points of the compass, running, almost speaking in snaps of twigs mad orange all suddenly” and “I was a child in an illuminated storybook, way off in a foreign brilliant home. The whale pulled on me and Persia was singing to me from across the water.” Hannah as narrator is wild-eyed and shifty—his writing bursts with digressions, anecdotes, stories within stories—but reading Long, Last, Happy, the stories themselves tend to blur. Three of them involve fishermen catching the biggest fish of their lives, the Confederate cavalry general Jeb Stuart makes an appearance in four, and vengeance-seeking women are everywhere. There is an interchangeability to Hannah’s work; in even his greatest stories there are paragraphs that could be swapped with paragraphs from other stories without disruption. The lasting impression is instead of the tunefulness of Hannah’s prose. “Music is essential,” he said in his 2004 Paris Review interview. “Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn’t think you ever had.”’ — Nathaniel Rich, Bookforum

 

____
Further

Barry Hannah, The Art of Fiction No. 184
Writers Remember Barry Hannah
Barry Hannah’s Top Ten List
Years After Barry Hannah’s Death, He Haunts Us Still
PULL BACK AND RELOAD: BARRY HANNAH IN HOLLYWOOD
Barry Hannah’s “Lost” Novel
A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah
Language and Humor: Barry Hannah is a Dangerous Teacher
Barry Hannah by Fiona Maazel
Every Line Matters: In Memory of Barry Hannah (1942-2010)
Telling Tales of Barry
There Are Dry Tiny Horses Running in My Veins: Mourning Barry Hannah
Goodbye Epiphany, Hello Ecstasy
Why I write, by Barry Hannah
Barry Hannah: Macho Swaggering and Masterful Control
BARELY DISCERNIBLE NOTES ON BARRY HANNAH
Barry Hannah Left a Charge in the Air
Thrill Me: Barry Hannah in Memoriam

 

____
Extras

Barry Hannah Interview and reading, Feb 1986

Bookmark with Don Noble: Barry Hannah (2008)

Barry Hannah in Tuscaloosa

 

______
Interview
from The Believer

 

WELLS TOWER: Do you still read much Faulkner?

BARRY HANNAH: Yeah, there are only about five books I re-read. I reread As I Lay Dying. With the insanity and tragedy, it’s the best dysfunctional family ever written. There’s not a speck of love lost there. I taught at Middlebury, and since I was Southern, I had to teach Faulkner. I’m glad I discovered Faulkner late, it would have messed with my style. I’d have felt inadequate. I like Hemingway much better. It gave me life. I wanted to go to Paris so bad after reading The Sun Also Rises, just to have a Pernod or a coffee or something.

[We drive past a banner advertising the upcoming McCain-Obama debate.]

Hey, did you know we’re having the presidential debate here? We’re gonna be on the map some. We’re having McCain and Obama, there’s gonna be three thousand journalists here in two months.

WT: Why Oxford, I wonder.

BH: The country’s just running out of places that are decent, and Oxford’s very decent. A handsome town, very literary.

WT: How do you feel about the election?

BH: Waiting, still waiting. I like Obama. There’s the Grisham house. My publisher Sam Lawrence loved Oxford so much that he lived there, and when he died, Grisham bought it. Grisham’s generosity has totally changed my teaching; the MFA program’s almost totally John. It’s highly ranked and everything. I don’t care. I really want to be below the radar, but hell, all this money from John—I didn’t wanna let him down. Two Grisham fellowships. We’re not ever going to be Iowa, but we’ll be good in a small way. Georgia State was a drag. On the third floor there were these gypsies selling fake silver shit. It was crazy.

[At Rowan Oak. We walk over to the house to peer in the window of Faulkner’s office.]

Faulkner bought this place for twenty-five thousand dollars after he had a hit with Sanctuary in 1929. The curtains are parted. No, they’re not, goddammit, how rude. I’ve got a handkerchief for the dew…. It all has to be air-conditioned to the right temperature to preserve it.

It was not in this good of shape when he was here. Then he went up to Charlottesville. He said he liked Charlottesville because everybody was a snob, like him—they left you alone—and he rode horses. His death was brought on by a combination of alcohol and horses—he fell off one. He’d ruptured a disk. He was drinking for pain (as well as for his alcoholism) at the end. The dry-out clinic is up the road, below Memphis, about an hour from here—Byhalia. His back was killing him. He died in Byhalia. It was just his time.

There’s a deer. Look at the deer. Sweet little yearling. I don’t know how people shoot ’em.

WT: I feel like shooting them. They eat everything I plant.

BH: They’re just incredibly beautiful. I think they’re wonderful. He’s not trained to survive. I could walk right up to him. Do you see any spikes?

WT: No, I think it’s a doe.

BH: The males know you wanna kill ’em. Every now and then one comes by with a rack. They’re just so glorious. They beat each other to death to get to mate.

Here’s the marker for his Nobel Prize. Around here, no one even knew what the hell that was. Some Swedes give him a prize. Shit, why’s that important? I’m not kidding.

When I first came here, I just heard Faulkner Faulkner Faulkner. His kinfolk and all of it—I was just bored by it. But then I grew to like to have these ghosts around. I find it amenable. He was a little man who did a hell of a lot. Underdog story.

I spent about six or seven years outside of the South. Two years in Vermont at Middlebury, a few in Montana, California. I didn’t think I’d come back here at all. I grew up during the civil rights era and I’d had it with these horrible goddamn cowards killing blacks and all the rest. It was a shame. But there are certain worthy things about the Mississippi. It’s one of the most integrated states in the Union. Oxford, at least on the surface, is very gorgeous. It wasn’t Faulkner or any of that that brought me back. It was the people.

WT: So you don’t feel an urge to flee the company of other writers, or their ghosts?

BH: The good ones are so few. But fiction writers are good people, usually. There’s a lot of pretenders, but I haven’t met a lot of sons of bitches.

WT: Well, if you stick with it, it beats you into a certain humility.

BH: Right, humility.

WT: Are you mostly working on the typewriter these days?

BH: Always. That’s all I use. Pencil, pen, and typewriter. I put a tin roof out here just for the rain.

WT: It’s a great sound. I wish you could get it on a white-noise machine.

BH: We got a pool out back, so it’s a better house than an Eisenhower house. We put the decks around it, added a pool. I’ve got very musical students so we play some over here. I play bass and flugelhorn but I always envied the guitar, the way you handle it. When I got very ill and almost died Susan built this library, all the shelves. I came back and Susan wants to give me an environment to write in. It’s not necessary, I told her. I write in motels. I write at the kitchen table, but she’s from Southern California money and you’re supposed to look like a writer. I don’t get off on being imperial. I was just flat bad when I tried to write for Robert Altman [Power and Light]. At his house, I was in a wooden tower with Plexiglas windows and gulls were all round you and the Pacific Ocean came under the house and I said, Shit, this is heaven, I don’t have a subject, it’s just too good.

WT: He optioned Ray?

BH: No, he didn’t. He liked Ray, but I went out there. I thought there was gonna be a future in it but there wasn’t.

There’s too much crap in here. I always thought I’d live among books, you realize when you move, you’re moving stuff you’ll never read again. I’m just giving away a lot of stuff now. It’s my time in life to give it away to someone who’s gonna read it. Most of these books are history, all of Cormac McCarthy, Bukowski, Larry Brown, Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Faulkner.

I’m just like an elder modernist. Postmodern is a very flat, meaningless term to me. I’m nothing like John Barth or Robert Coover. I don’t like games about writing.

WT: I recently came across an interview with someone who couldn’t stop calling you a “difficult writer.” It seemed to piss you off.

BH: I’m disheartened by others who’ve said that. I never thought I was that difficult. I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book. They’ll use it on television or something—so I was kind of brokenhearted that I was called difficult. I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience. On the other hand, I’ve had students at Iowa who’ve sold a lot of books, there just aren’t huge numbers of writers who are doing well. It’s not impossible. I guess it’s the plot element that I don’t care enough about. I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

 

____
Book

Barry Hannah Ray
Grove Atlantic

‘The hard-drinking, womanising, smart and witty Southerner, with weird friends, a chequered history and a few odd habits, including recreational drug use, is a staple of US fiction and this novel fits squarely into this genre. Though it is very short, Hannah packs a fair amount into the story of Ray Forrester, known to everyone (including himself – he frequently uses the third person instead of the first) as Ray or Dr. Ray. Ray is a former Vietnam War pilot and is currently a doctor in Tuscaloosa. He is divorced (at the beginning of the book), though later marries Westy. Because the book is short and moves at such a fast pace, you will be never be bored with Ray’s sexual and medical adventures.

‘Of course, in accordance with the tradition of this genre, Ray is not exactly faithful, even when he is married. In particular, he loves Sister. Sister is a member of the obligatory weirdo family, the Hooches. Their house is completely run down and bits keep falling down. There are seven children, two sets of twins at either end, and three others, one of whom is Sister. (Her real name is Betty but everyone calls her Sister.) Ray used to date her and goes back to her early in the book. He had paid for her to go to college but she dropped out and made some money dealing marijuana. She manages to get a good career as a singer but is shot and killed by a minister shortly after having sex with Ray. The Hooch parents are, of course, eccentric. They nearly kill one another with propane and, at the end, Mr. Hooch is about to have his collected poetry published. During the course of the book, they remain a focal point for the obligatory eccentricity.

‘Of course, there are other strange people, such as Charlie de Soto (yes, he is apparently related), who has a passionate affair with Eileen in the office, tries to kill a neighbour for no other reason than he dislikes his regular habits and inadvertently succeeds, marries Eileen, who then loses interest in him and becomes a lesbian. Ray himself has strange adventures in the emergency room, mainly with drunks and knife-wielding thugs, flashes back to his Vietnam experiences and imagines himself as one of Jeb Stuart‘s cavalrymen slaughtering Yankees. In short, it is fast-moving, full of humour and never boring.’ — The Modern Novel

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** T. J., Hi. I’ve always found Jr. almost thoroughly annoying. I’m high on those three films too. Big up. ** David Ehrenstein, Peter Schjeldahl’s daughter Ada Calhoun just published a book about her attempt to finish Peter’s failed attempt to write a Frank O’Hara biography back in the 1980s, and I think it could be very interesting. She’s a good writer. Everyone, Although my prior attempts to urge those of you who can to contribute to Mr. Ehrenstein’s gofundme have largely failed, I try again because things are very, very tough for him, and his husband, the fine writer Bill Reed, is bedridden, so please do consider helping him if you possibly can. Thank you very much. Go here. Bill’s bedridden? What happened? Jesus. I’m sorry, David. ** Tosh Berman, Wow, that’s a great story. That film blew my mind way back when. Crazy. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, J. Oh, that’s an idea: to do a RDSr film in our thingeroony. Stories is really the happening place, I guess. Can’t wait to get there and investigate its current hotness. xo. ** Misanthrope, I don’t think very many people who are much younger than me know RDSr’s films, but the early ones were quite the buzz in their day. So much for having buzz as a goal. Anything to do with requiring lots of money is really hard, or so I imagine. Mm, I think there are better and more exciting and lucrative things you can do with your valuable time. Hope your mom’s okay today. Is she? ** _Black_Acrylic, He is due some kind of revival. Jr. could surely make that happen, but I guess he’s too busy maintaining his fame. Oh, right, about the dexterity impact. Needless to say, what you’ve had to go through is the very epitome of unfairness. Bodies suck, and not in the good way. But between you and me, writing is better any way. And you’re already amazing at it. So way onwards and upwards. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I don’t think James ever shows his face in ‘Donnie Darko’. I think there must’ve have been a plan originally that he did. Otherwise why cast him in the role and not just some anybody who was hanging around on the set? The funding search is very stressful and worrisome, but I have to believe it will work out okay because there’s no other choice. I’ve been sneezing a lot lately ‘cos the pollen has been weirdly dense, and turning into a red ball every time sounds like so much fun not to mention giving my sneezes a larger purpose (to blow others’ minds). We just found out that the one song we want to have in our new film is far, far too expensive to get the rights to, so love forming a band and recording a cover version of that song that sounds exactly like it, G. ** RYAN (he’s back baybee), There you are. No big. I know busy, it’s just I have to be here whether I’m busy or not. Sweet, clue me in to the single and poster and so on when the time turns ripe. Exciting! Oh, uh, Interview Magazine asked me to interview Keanu for some reason. I can’t remember what the movie was that the interview was tied to. He was about to go film ‘Idaho’. It was at this restaurant that was his favorite. It was on Melrose, it doesn’t exist anymore. He was extremely nice and sweet and open and really innocent seeming. maybe almost too much because I asked him if he was gay, and he said no, but you never know, and he was just being funny and sweet, but that answer led to years of rumors that he was gay, which he wasn’t/isn’t. Just the loveliest guy. He talks about ‘Wolfboy’ in the interview. I interviewed a bunch of famous people at one point for magazines, and Keanu was definitely the nicest person I ever interviewed. So there you go. Love back. Great luck getting everything ready! ** Steve Erickson, I think by ‘Up the Academy’ he was just a gun for hire and his auteur stuff was long gone. I would say the drop off came after ‘Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight’. Okay, I’ll check out the utterly odious sounding Tom McDonald. Everyone, Via Steve Erickson: ‘My review of the excellent NEPTUNE FROST came out in Gay City News yesterday.’ While the fundraising is somewhat desperate right now, don’t think my integrity, such as it is, would let me join the NFT racket. Hopefully I won’t eat those words. ** Right. When I did my favorite novels post recently, a number of people responding put this Barry Hannah novel on their favorite novels list, so I thought I’d give it a berth. See you tomorrow.