8.Barry Hannah and Larry Brown’s Fishing Spot
I finished my journey by winding my way from Louisiana back up through Mississippi to return to Oxford, that town where Faulkner made his mark. Since his time there, Oxford has ushered in a new generation of fiction writers, some drawn there by the University of Mississippi’s MFA writing program, some by Faulkner’s legacy.
THE OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI, of today is a place that William Faulkner would have had a hard time imagining. When I arrived, on a bleak February day, the courthouse square was in a semi-bustling state. A steady stream of college students filled the sidewalks, ambling between brunch and some leisurely studying. Stores selling bow ties and flip-flops, beer cozies and hair ribbons in red and navy, the college colors, lined the blocks downtown. A group of tourists snapped cell-phone photos with the bronze statue of Faulkner; someone had managed to lodge the last of a melting snowball in his hat. Floating above the square, beacon-like, was the town water tower, painted robin’s-egg blue.
Bars with generously sized television screens for watching football games have replaced the tucked-away juke joints, SUVs long ago replaced the mules and buggies, and blues music leaks out onto the pavement on weekend nights. On the way toward the square, I had stopped for coffee, biscuits, and gravy at Big Bad Breakfast, a restaurant with a twin vision of including pig products in every meal and naming dishes after Oxford writers. (Menu items include: Burgsalom, Burgsalom!, The Pel“egg”can Brief, The Secret History Omelet, and The High Lonesome—a tribute to Barry Hannah in steak and eggs.) The name of the place itself is a play on another Oxford luminary, Larry Brown, who wrote a collection titled Big, Bad Love. Oxford is now more hip college town than quaint backwater. In the past forty years, Faulkner’s postage stamp has expanded into a cultural destination.
It was a slow and deliberate change from the Oxford of the 1960s into the place I arrived at. In the early 1970s, the University of Mississippi was mostly known for the anti-integration riots after James Meredith became the first black student admitted to the school. Reclaiming Faulkner became a way to reimagine the town and its community. In 1973, just a decade after Faulkner’s death, a group of academics founded the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, which expanded into an annual program of lectures and presentations on his work. After Faulkner’s widow, Estelle, died in 1977, the University of Mississippi purchased Rowan Oak, restored the estate, and opened the home to visitors. Ole Miss rolled out a Southern Studies program, founded the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and started beefing up its Creative Writing Department.
The first place I set off for in the square is the first stop I take on every visit: Square Books, a shop yearly in contention for the best independent bookstore in the South, if not the country. Longtime Oxford resident Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, established Square Books in 1979, and have worked to make it a literary hub—a well-curated, friendly place where out-of-towners flock on their way through town. Literary heavyweights began to read there, and it became a hangout for the bookish parties of the town. It became popular enough that the Howorths opened two more stores on the square: Square Books, Jr., dedicated to children’s literature, and Off Square Books, for used and remaindered copies. Richard Howorth even served as mayor of Oxford from 2001 to 2009. And he was also a close friend and booster of many of the writers who lived or pass through Oxford. One of them was a minor literary celebrity who joined University of Mississippi as the writer-in-residence in 1983, a man who would spend many afternoons with a dog-eared copy of a novel on the balcony of Square Books: Barry Hannah.
HANNAH WAS A native Mississippian. He was born in Meridian and grew up in the tiny town of Clinton, a dozen miles northwest of Jackson, in 1942. Clinton is now part of the Jackson metropolitan area, but at the time Hannah was growing up, it was a peaceful, conservative hamlet. Hannah’s father was a banker turned insurance salesman. His mother, a devout Baptist, brought Hannah to services, where he soaked up the rhythm of scripture and learned the chatter of the congregants by heart. “I see them pass still, the little old tiny-headed women of Clinton, Mississippi, in the ’50s, in their giant cars on the brick street,” Hannah wrote in an essay for the Oxford American. “They established the tone of my world.”
His first foray into creative writing was thanks to a third-grade teacher who allowed Hannah to turn in little written stories in lieu of his actual assignments. “The fact is I wanted to write long before I had anything to say,” Hannah later wrote. He enrolled at Mississippi College, also in Clinton, as a pre-med major, but switched to literature after discovering the work of Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller. An MFA in fiction at the University of Arkansas soon followed, and his time out of his home state had the effect of solidifying his fondness for Mississippi. “I’ll only say that I became more committed to people who could never tell their own stories,” Hannah wrote. “And that I was no longer ashamed of being from the most derided state in the Union.”
By the time he moved back to Oxford as a writer-in-residence, Hannah was already well established as master of darkly comic, gripping fiction. His twisted coming-of-age novel Geronimo Rex was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973, and established Hannah as part of a new wave of Southern writers whose work had absorbed the rich literary traditions of the area but had gone for something wilder. In it you can sense the quiet intensity of Flannery O’Connor and the razzle-dazzle descriptive power of Truman Capote, but only as you might recognize ancestral features on a newborn’s face. Hannah’s work was all his own, infused with Southern wit and weirdness.
His writing in Rex fairly crackles with electricity. Hannah has a knack for making his sentences veer suddenly into unexpected territory, sometimes teetering on the brink of jumbled incoherence. His writing is a high-wire act: There’s a daredevil quality to his prose, always a sense of risk involved. At its worst, Rex seems oversaturated, unwieldy and reckless, too many fireworks crammed into one display. But at its best, it’s just plain thrilling, explosive and impassioned and spellbinding stuff. As when the protagonist Harry Monroe describes his first encounter with the Dream of Pines marching band: “This band was the best music I’d ever heard, bar none. They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere.” Or Monroe’s unsentimental assessment of his drive home from college on Christmas break: “I passed the fields like dead palomino horses—winterset in Mississippi—the sun a cold bulb; and later, over the Vicksburg bridge, saw the river: a snake in throes, its belly up.” His assessment of one of his conquests: “Her voice was as thin as an ill-poached egg thrown against the treble strings of a harp.” Hannah knew how to mix Southern vernacular into his language in a way that seems exact rather than hokey. In the pages of Rex, men slosh into rooms, people put on their shoes “contrariwise,” and barrels get “tumped” over. Hannah revels in the sheer possibility of those words, their sounds, but he makes the slang essential rather than decorative.
Inside the entrance of Square Books, just next to the stairs, is a wall of books by local authors, Hannah featured prominently. It’s easy to understand why he liked the place; anyone who has an itch for the written word would. Copies of classics mingled with recent bestsellers, and posters advertised the authors who would be shortly passing through. The Faulkner-dedicated section is upstairs, by the café. The wall next to the stairs is cluttered with signed pictures of authors, including a large photo of Hannah, posing in sunglasses in front of the courthouse, grinning. Behind the counter, bumper stickers for sale proclaimed, I’D RATHER BE READING AIRSHIPS.
Hannah had followed Rex with the positively reviewed novel Nightwatchmen, but his status as a cult writer was cemented with the 1978 short-story collection Airships. The collection introduced themes that would run throughout his writing: airplanes, women, motorcycles, old Confederates spinning tall tales, fishing trips, and sudden outbursts of violence. Short stories provided range for Hannah’s voice, good containers for its elegance and intensity. His literary pyrotechnics are grouped into short, entrancing bursts, but the stories are more than just stylistic hot-dogging. There are undertones of melancholy and menace; sentences inside the stories serve as perfectly encapsulated stories themselves. Like this one, from “Love Too Long”:
She and the architect were having fancy drinks together at a beach lounge when his ex-wife from New Hampshire showed up naked with a single-shotgun gun that was used in the Franco-Prussian War—it was a quaint piece hanging on the wall in their house when he was at Dartmouth—and screaming.
Like Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews, Hannah favored titles that were also microstories, like “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” a phrase Hannah’s pal Jimmy Buffett later lifted for a song of his, or the later “Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?”
With Airships and his novel Ray Hannah became a writer whom other writers admired. Reviewers hailed him as a Southern version of Charles Bukowski. Robert Altman recruited Hannah to be a writer in Hollywood, an ultimately ill-fated experiment. “Turns out, I’m not a good screenwriter,” Hannah noted wryly. Truman Capote became a fervent fan of his, labeling Hannah “the maddest writer in the U.S.A.” Hunter S. Thompson, in a blurb, gave a gonzo compliment that Hannah often repeated: “Hannah should not be in front of young people. And perhaps he should be in a cage.”
If these phrases sound like Hannah’s own version of the famous description of Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” it’s because his reputation was not solely based on his feats of literary prowess. During stints as a writing teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Middlebury, Texas State University, and the University of Montana at Missoula, Hannah had become notorious for his bad behavior, often fueled by booze. His fondness for alcohol and guns contributed to an image of Hannah as an off-kilter loon with a taste for explosive situations.
One story has Hannah firing a rifle into the floor of his car in order to drain accumulated rainwater. When he needed to make a hole in his wall to run stereo wires through it, he blasted away with a shotgun. At the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Hannah landed a tenured teaching position, but the five years he was there coincided with a particularly chaotic time in his personal life. He drank heavily, and he and his second wife divorced. “It was probably the saddest time in my life,” he noted later. He was fired after bringing a revolver into one of his classrooms, using the six chambers as a way to illustrate structuring a short story into six movements, and then waving the gun into the air when students tried to walk out on him. “A lot of that stuff was not a good idea, but it gets turned around by middle-class minds into a cowboy thing,’ ” Hannah told the New York Times. “It wasn’t. It was just a need to find something real, to do something that was real.”
When he landed in Oxford, a town that he later described as “a United Nations with catfish on its breath,” Hannah swiftly became part of the town’s lore. He had a fondness for motorcycles and flashy outfits; the sight of him whipping through the square on his chopper soon became a familiar part of the landscape. Even in his later days, when his health had deteriorated, Hannah would pull up to Square Books on his motorcycle, his oxygen tank in tow. The writer Darcey Steinke recalled Hannah’s proclivity for spending Saturdays reclining on a lawn chair while wearing just a Speedo, drinking martinis and throwing the emptied glasses against the trash can.
“You know, all my heroes were alcoholics: Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. How many more do you want?” Hannah said in an interview with Wells Tower for The Believer. “The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work. 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.”
SHORTLY AFTER BARRY Hannah settled into town, he met Larry Brown. An ex-Marine from Yocona, a small community just south of Oxford, Brown started developing literary ambitions in his late twenties. He favored a uniform of work jeans and cowboy boots. His accent, a patient hill-country drawl, was so thick that Hannah later had to translate it for a French publisher who was perfectly fluent in English. He joined the Oxford Fire Department at twenty-two after leaving the armed forces, working odd jobs between shifts to help support his family. (His time in the firehouse would later inspire a memoir, On Fire.) “When I was twenty-nine, I stopped and looked at my life and wondered if I was ever going to do anything with it,” Brown recounted in an essay. “I guess what I thought for most of my life was that I’d just let one day take care of the next. I’d made it that way okay for a long time, had some good times, some beautiful babies. But those babies were going to grow up. They were going to want things, and I wanted things to be better for them than they had been for me.”
When Brown first approached Hannah with some of his unpublished stories, Hannah was outwardly encouraging but privately skeptical of Brown’s writing career. “He showed me stories that were so bad, I’d duck out the back of the bar when I saw him coming down the walk with his inevitable manila envelope,” Hannah wrote. “I couldn’t stand hurting his feelings. I loved his sincerity. I didn’t give him a cold prayer in hell as to a future in literature.”
But it was the beginning of a long friendship, cemented, for Brown, by Hannah’s relationship with Harry Crews. In an essay about his friendship with Hannah, Brown remembers Hannah leading him over to a wall in his house where a picture of Crews was hanging, an author who Brown wrote was “my own personal candidate for Great Writer of the Century.” As part of his new writing career, Brown had upped his already voracious reading appetite, and found Crews’s work and tenacity especially encouraging. “I knew that back in those days when he was unpublished, he must have wanted success as badly as I did then,” Brown wrote in a tribute to Crews. “It meant that I was not the only person who had ever gone through what I was enduring, that it was probably a universal experience, this apprenticeship period, this time when you wrote things that were not good only to throw them away or have them rejected in order to write enough to eventually learn how.”
Thanks to a steady diet of books and pure trial and error, Brown’s apprenticeship paid off. He had begun hanging out at Square Books and gave Richard Howorth some of his recent work, which impressed Howorth enough that he began to help Brown place his stories with magazines and publishers. The difference was a shift from experimenting with thrillers and horror stories—one of Brown’s earliest attempts was about a man-eating bear at Yellowstone—to something closer to home, the rhythms and social worlds of Northern Mississippi. “I wasted a lot of time writing about things I didn’t know anything about,” Brown wrote. “You don’t know when you start out that there’s plenty of life around you, no matter where you live.”
Brown had his first book reading at Square Books in 1988, around the same time that another Oxford native, John Grisham, was also celebrating his debut novel at the store. Grisham wrote a note to Brown in 1989, saying, “I hope you sell a million copies. And if you do, and if I sell a million copies of A Time to Kill, then maybe we can retire to the balcony at Square Books and spend our time drinking cold beer, watching co-eds, and talking about future books.” As I combed through the shelves of Square Books, I noticed a photo of Brown hung right beside one of Hannah. He was holding a beer and grinning shyly, as if in sly triumph.
From Square Books, I walked over to City Grocery, just two doors down from the bookstore, through a crowd of hungover-looking students clad in fleece jackets and khaki shorts. The restaurant was beginning to fill up with lunch customers eagerly awaiting their weekend catfish creole or some of the superlative house shrimp and grits. The upstairs portion of the place is a bar, all polished wood and high-backed stools, where Brown would spend most of his evenings, and Hannah would sometimes entertain students or visitors. (An apocryphal Hannah story has him bringing his fishing pole to the balcony of City Grocery in an attempt to hook the hats of passersby.) Like most bars, the inside of City Grocery was less impressive than the stories that came out of it. Hannah would relax on the balcony and people watch, throwing out zingers to his companion. Brown would go to sop up the conversation and drink peach schnapps chased with Budweiser or Crown Royal, his favorite combination. “It’s just like, a natural thing to set a story in the bar because that’s where I spend so much of my life, at a bar. That’s where I hang out with my friends,” Brown said in an interview.
Like Hannah, Brown struggled with drinking. “I write by binges and I drink by binges,” he told a reporter from USA Today. “But it’s not good to try to write and drink at the same time.” The drinking and the time shut away from his family put a strain on his marriage. At City Grocery, his wife, Mary Annie, whom Brown called M.A., would try to lure Brown away from the bar as he pleaded for “just one more,” a phrase that Mary Annie joked would be the title of her own book. “I’ll just put it this way,” Mary Annie told Gary Hawkins, the director of The Rough South of Larry Brown, “I thought he wasted a lot of hours. Now, he might not have thought so, but he did. And he wasted a lot of mine.” Or, as Hannah put it in his remembrance, Brown “was not a saint and we should remember that to their wives all men are garbage men trying to make a comeback.”
FROM THE SQUARE, I aimed my car south, toward the tiny farming town of Yocona and the adjacent community of Tula, where Brown had spent most of his life. The places along the highway have names derived from the Chickasaw tribe that first lived there; “Yocona” roughly translates to “the places of the earth.” In Tula, Brown had bought a patch of land around a pond that he used to fish in as a boy. On the eight acres of land, he had built a boat dock, cleaned out the pond, and restocked it with catfish, crappie, and bass. It became a place of respite for Brown and his family, a getaway spot where friends would come to camp and fish and hang out in warmer weather. Hannah was one of the frequent visitors to Brown’s pond, where the two would kick back and fish. After Brown’s death of a heart attack in 2004, Hannah would sometimes bring friends and interviewers along with him to the pond at Tula, to pay his respects.
In Tula, Brown’s grand project had been to build a little writing cabin just on the shore of the pond, a place away from the main building where he could sit and go on a long writing binge amidst the scenery he loved. I had asked Mary Annie for permission to go see Brown’s writing cabin, and she had sent me directions to navigate the winding roads to get there. “Enjoy our peaceful place,” she told me. Shane, Brown’s younger son, had recently moved onto the property. His eldest, Billy Ray, operates a dairy farm down the road, the inspiration for Brown’s book of essays Billy Ray’s Farm. You can buy the farm’s milk at the market in town. I passed the sign for the farm on the way, and caught a glimpse of cows roaming in the adjacent field, huddled together. The bright February sky was streaked with graying clouds, reminding me of a passage that Brown wrote in his memoir On Fire:
I live out in the county, out here in the land of the Big Sky country. I live at the edge of a river bottom and the clouds can go all mushroomy and marshmallowy late in the afternoon and loom up big and white in the sky so that they can capture your attention.
After several turns, I came to an iron gate that had A PLACE CALLED TULA forged onto the top. I opened the gate and drove through, down the truck tracks that served as a driveway, and parked near the main cabin, a sea-foam green building with a generous back porch. Two Adirondack chairs in disrepair populated a boat dock; beside them sat a Cool Whip container filled with fishing lures. An iron bottle tree bedecked with faded red, yellow, and blue empties stood nearby. Brown’s headstone was on the far side of the pond. He’s buried next to his daughter, Delinah, who died shortly after birth.
The pond itself was a dark, sludgy green, partly iced over from the recent freeze. The sweet gums lining the pond were skeletons; their leaves formed a thick, mottled brown carpet around the water, contrasting with the bright needles of the pine trees interspersed throughout the woods. I walked around the pond slowly toward the tiny writing shack on the other side, listening to the rustle of squirrels, the occasional echoing birdcall. Caught fishing line flashed in the trees; the leaves hissed and crackled beneath my boots. Even in the cold, it wasn’t hard to imagine a warmer day not too many years ago when Hannah and Brown would have cast their lines into the water together and swapped tales.
In every collection, Hannah included a fishing story. The rhythms of baiting a hook, waiting for a bite, and reeling in a catch appealed to Hannah, made a kind of parallel to his writing process. Unlike Crews and Brown, Hannah didn’t write by committing himself to sitting in front of a typewriter for a certain number of hours every day. When stories struck, they struck, and Hannah would write them as quickly as he could. In his collection Captain Maximus, Hannah started the story “Getting Ready” with the line: “He was forty-eight, a fisherman, and he had never caught a significant fish.” The protagonist, Roger Laird, ends up selling his equipment at a loss, building a pair of stilts, and wading out into the lake to scream obscenities at the people passing in sailboats. In Hannah’s most famous fishing story, “Water Liars,” from Airships, men grapple with the sexual drives of women over their rods and reels. “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 each other,” Hannah begins. Out in Tula, Brown and Hannah were part of the snapping and wheezing crowd.
A little wooden walkway spans a short ravine leading up to the cabin, with a sign in purple and white letters that reads, simply, THE SHACK. The cabin had a small porch with a rusting chair on it, providing a vantage point to overlook the pond. Inside, the walls were painted bright red, an African mask glared from its hook on the wall, and a chandelier of candle holders hung from the ceiling.
Like his writing career, the little shack was the fruit of Larry Brown’s sheer doggedness, a willingness to work hard and face rejection and work out the problems in the process over and over. His love for the place where he lived informed his work, his legacy, and his construction projects. “Loggers and housewives and children and drunks and farmers and mailmen and lawyers and widowed old ladies and mechanics and cowboys and bums and preachers, every one of them has a story, and I know now that the little place I live in is full of stories,” Brown wrote. “I don’t think I’ll ever tire of writing about them. There’s too much beauty in the world that I know, about ten miles out of Oxford, Mississippi.”
If that sounds like Faulkner’s “postage stamp,” it’s not a coincidence. Brown had grown up with Faulkner as a local muse; he had started reading Faulkner’s writing as a teenager, and became familiar with the grounds of Rowan Oak thanks to the fire department. The fire-alarm system there, he wrote in On Fire, “is sensitive enough that a bug can walk inside it and set it off, but still the trucks have to roll.” Brown began rereading Faulkner’s novels with purpose, sometimes strolling the grounds of Rowan Oak just to marvel at the place, and walk around the trees. Brown kept two pieces of cloth from Faulkner’s favorite chair, one hung above his typewriter, and one in his pocket.
Unlike Brown, Hannah’s relationship with Faulkner was an uneasy one. Even if Hannah’s work hadn’t previously drawn comparisons to Faulkner before he moved to Oxford—and, as a Mississippian, it inevitably had—it became inescapable. “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,” he told the Believer. “I find it amenable.”
But I don’t know that I believe Hannah; the relationship was more complicated than that. In the Oxford Hannah knew, Faulkner had become as much a brand as a scribe, a name slapped on events and items to sell them as highbrow and literary. Faulkner inherited the burden of the South’s past, and then became part of the burden, at least for writers trying to craft original work in his shadow. Faulkner, the persona and not the writing, became part of the prevailing tropes applied to someone living in the South with literary ambitions—the “canned dream of the South,” as Hannah put it. The high-octane metaphors in works like Airships read like efforts to gain enough power to bust out of Faulkner’s orbit, to redefine the idea of a Southern writer.
Faulkner’s writing also seemed to weigh heavily on Hannah’s ambitions. “I think of those moments in Faulkner, Beckett, and Holy Scripture, when the words seem absolutely final, bodiless, unattached, as out of a cloud of huge necessity,” Hannah wrote. “My desire is to come even close to that team—to be that lucky, to be touched by such grace.” Hannah often spoke about how his prose fell short of his intentions, was something that he felt a sense of disappointment about. In one interview, he confessed that he could barely stand to read his books over again. “You’ve got that dream, that gemlike flame you want to apply to something you’ve seen or something that’s been in your heart a long time, and the first sentence murders it,” Hannah told the Oxford American. “It breaks your heart a little. I understand that Muslims would put a deliberate imperfection into the pictures they created because only God was perfect. Well, I don’t have that trouble.”
I think of that often when I read Hannah, that gemlike flame and the idea of the written word constantly failing him. To me, Hannah is one of those writers whose grasp on language makes you doubt that you have the same common pool of vocabulary. His sentences are so deft and unpredictable, his characters rich and bizarre and precise. His failure to have written the Bible or The Sound and the Fury reads as something like The Rolling Stones’ failure to be Muddy Waters: Hannah could not help but write as himself, and the world is richer for it. The opening of Hannah’s novel Ray always felt to me like a rebuke of the scene between Quentin Compson and his roommate in Absalom, Absalom!, the one where he keeps asking what it is about the South that haunts Quentin so. In Ray, a professor responds forcefully to a poem by his student: “They always say Southerners can write. So I slugged this skinny lad. I laid him down the steps . . . his family is saying they’ll sue.”
After he died of a heart attack in 2010, Hannah was even buried in the same cemetery as Faulkner, his own marble tombstone is just a hundred feet away down the hill from Faulkner’s. Instead of bottles of Four Roses, Hannah’s admirers leave toy guns and highlighters on the grave. Inscribed in the stone is a quote from his story “Escape to Newark,” one of the gems in Airships: “It was a short ride, like all the best ones.”