In November 2004 Larry Brown sent the manuscupt of his all but completed sixth novel, A Miracle of Catfish, to his agent, Liz Darhansoff, of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman, in New York. He had made notes for the two or three chapters to end the novel and would start work on them after the Thanksgiving holiday. To the shock and sorrow of his immediate family and the wider family of his readers, Larry Brown died of a massive heart attack on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, at home in Lafayette County, Mississippi. He was fifty-three years old.
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, publisher of all but one of Larry Brown’s nine previous books, is proud to be the publisher of the novel he was writing when he died. And I am personally honored by the request of his wife, Mary Annie Brown, and her advisers, Tom Rankin and Jonny Miles, that I edit the unfinished manuscript A Miracle of Catfish for publication.
Once Larry Brown had mastered his laconic style, the first-draft manuscripts of his books were nearly always so polished stylistically that my job as editor mostly involved showing him the places I felt the novels would benefit from trimming. He was, as a novelist, likely to write more than he needed. Having honed his skills on the short-story form, he reveled in the wide spaces that novels offer. I rarely found reason to suggest expansion. But I did find places I thought would gain by careful snipping and shaving.
Ever the professional, he almost never argued, though many years after the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he liked to remind me that I had asked him to cut the first two hundred pages of the first-draft manuscript — and, he was always careful to add, that he’d done it without any dispute. This was only slight exaggeration on both counts.
Never having edited a manuscript for posthumous publication, I consulted other novelists and critics about the kind of editing I might do and should do under such circumstances. Our conversations led to a consensus that making any changes — substantive or minor — to the plot, the structure, the characterizations, would be inappropriate. No word changes, no syntax changes, and certainly no effort at “ending” the novel should be made. (The author’s notes of his plans for the final chapters, typed in at the end of a rough table of contents, were found among his papers. They follow the last page of the novel as written.)
But what about cuts? The towering 710-page manuscript on my desk reminded me of the first draft manuscripts of two of Larry Brown’s earlier books, Joe and Fay, and I felt strongly that some cutting — to streamline the narrative and lighten some sections that went on past the point — was in order. But I also felt that cuts to the manuscript would be permissible only if the printed book were designed so that the reader would know where these had been made; by the same token, scholars could easily compare the book with the original archived manuscript.
So the unfinished novel you have in your hands is Larry Brown’s first-draft manuscript with editorial cuts (including drafted chapter titles I believe he meant to revise if not omit) that I hope improve the flow and that I believe he would have accepted pretty readily. A Miracle of Catfish is still a very long novel, albeit an unfinished one. If you do have the opportunity to compare it with the manuscript now available to students of Brown’s work in the Department of Archives and Special Collections of the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and you take issue with the cuts, I am certainly willing to share my reasons for them. I would, in fact, be happy to explain myself, as I would have had to explain myself to Larry Brown had he lived to finish the work.
The experience of working with Larry Brown over the course of his all too short writing career was a high point of my own career in publishing. He was a writer who started from scratch and taught himself not only how to write about what he knew but how to write literature in the process. As he expressed it so clearly in a speech delivered to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, a year after publication of his first book:
It took a long time for me to understand what literature was, and why it was so hard to write, and what it could do to you once you understood it. For me, very simply it meant that I could meet people on the page who were as real as the people I met in my own life . . . Even though they were only words on paper, they were as real to me as my wife and my children. And when I saw that, it was like a curtain fell away from my eyes. I saw that the greatest rewards that could be had from the printed page came from literature and that to be able to write it was the highest form of the art of writing . . . I don’t think it was meant to be easy. I think that from the first it was meant to be hard for the few people who came along and wanted to write it, because the standards are so high and the rewards so great.*
Larry Brown’s determination, his relentless hard work, his unswerving respect for his art, and his honesty in exposing the depth of human emotion paid off. His characters — those real people — live on, just as he intended.
For me, and I hope for you, it doesn’t really matter that A Miracle of Catfish wasn’t quite completed. What he meant it to say is as clear as can be.
Shannon Ravenel
January 2007
* “A Late Start,” a talk given at the Fifth Biennial Conference on Southern Literature, April 8, 1989, Chattanooga, Tennessee.