NEVERMORE THE METAPHOR: THE FLAMING ARTIST AND ME
By John Griffin Jones
Cover Photo by: Maude Schuyler Clay


Barry Hannah made my father-in-law like me. It wasn’t easy. I never took any of it for granted. Father-in-law was a country doctor who spent his off-hours chasing dogs across fields all over Jeff Davis and Lawrence Counties, occasionally shooting some of the last of the Mississippi quail. In summer he fished. I was a city boy whose parents spent their off-hours in the arts: music, theater, the big books, absolutely unbalanced in their love for if not planning their next trip to New York City. So the first time I went hunting with Father-in-law and his sons, he handed me a 40-inch piece of broomstick instead of a shotgun, “so you can get some practice before you blow somebody’s head off.” I refused. Later I refused to yield in tennis, golf, chess, Trivial Pursuit and all the forms of useless knowledge, and then I refused to rest easy under his labeling. Four years of marginally friendly competition, halfway through which I married his daughter, and we were no closer than when we first met at a dingy steak joint just off Highway 49 in Hattiesburg.

It’s probably been answered since I last thought of it, but who are the rightful heirs to Mississippi’s rich literary heritage? Think about it. Is there anybody in Mr. Faulkner’s league, Miss Welty’s, Richard Wright’s, Walker Percy’s, Shelby Foote’s, Margaret Walker Alexander’s? Who in the generation that came of age in the eight years between the first appearances of Elvis and the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and 1964, respectively, has carried it on? With Mississippi finally joining the Union around 1970, are there any rich veins of guilt, desire, miscegenation, zealotry, etc., left to mine? And who would want to even if they could? Richard Ford? His defining novels take place in New Jersey, which is Sopranoland, USA, and a long way from the Magnolia State. Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, dear old Willie Morris? No. The unwanted prize and all that comes with it belongs to Barry Hannah. By acclamation, though he never agreed to run, let alone serve. On the merits, however, Hannah has accumulated the most points in the competition for the funniest observations, the closest study of the mind of the Mississippi redneck at work and play, the most brutally frank depictions of every self-defeating and backward-dragging quality in this or any of the three surrounding states, the best sentences produced by any writer alive today, and the most consistently fine writing, fiction and non-, of any Mississippian who knew the dates of Elvis’ and the Beatles’ first appearances on Ed Sullivan.
The criteria for judging excellence are ultimately more important than the award anyway. Hannah has plenty of awards. Since his 1972 debut novel, Geronimo Rex, through his last published novel in 2001, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, I count a couple of National Book Award contenders, every major prize given out for short-story writing in the country beginning with Hannah’s breakout collection Airships (1978), the coveted Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Literature Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, one nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the short stories in High Lonesome (1996), and many, many more the significance of which escapes me. Education? Usually a disqualifier for a Mississippi writer, but for the subject generation Hannah probably has the most extensive to be found: B.A., Mississippi College, M.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing, University of Arkansas, all over the time it would have taken him to become a Mississippi lawyer or doctor. The man is trained. Teaching? Though always looking for the Hollywood slickster who can turn his prose into something cinematic, Hannah has taught since 1967 with only a few years off. For the last 24 consecutive years he has been writer-in-residence at Ole Miss. That’s a record for both institution and writer. And critical response? No one can come close to the praise lavished on the work.
“The best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor.” Larry McMurtray (for the uninitiated or merely uninterested, the author of The Last Picture Show, Hud, Lonesome Dove, and screenwriter for the latest lazy cowboy saga, Brokeback Mountain).
“An original, and one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation.” William Styron (author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, among other major works).
“The maddest writer in the U.S.A.!” Truman Capote .
More recent reviews are almost breathless with praise, calling Hannah “the godfather of soul of contemporary southern writing,” and the creator of “the most consistently interesting sentences of any writer in America today.” And it’s all true. To top it off, Hannah and his wife Susan have chosen to live with their herd of dogs (between six and forty-six; their numbers defy easy computation) in the leafy hills north of Oxford, Mississippi – yes, right in Yoknapatawpha County, near the Square where a statue of Mr. F. gazes directly at University Sporting Goods 24/7, and where, on fall nights, Willie Morris swore he saw the “ghosts of Mr. Bill, Conerly and Manning.” Despite his rowdy past, the quaint little town has taken in the writer and his family for a generation now. Not many can compete with those credentials.
It’s just that none of it matters. “Everything now is ‘Awards Day,’” Hannah notes. “Television with all that reality crap, elections, even poor grunts killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The thing is the spectacle created around awards, like that football player [Pat Tillman] who was killed by friendly fire but they withheld that little factoid from his family till they could have George W. fly in for awards day at the football stadium. Guys like Bush love handing out awards that somebody else had to fight and die for.”
I tell him that this award competition is among “Mississippi Writers,” and he gets up to leave. “But,” I cry, explaining that I thought writers wanted rankings, highly intellectual irony, pithy use of humor early to facilitate our communication, sharing the new jokes floating around the English Department, but he looked at me like I was trying something new on him. “Yeah, well,” he says, annoyed. “I pretty much hate everything new. Most of what I see and hear these days makes me want to sit in the [Oxford] Square with the other old geezers and curse everything that moves.” I am struck speechless. I then try to lead him with a few southern literary allusions, but he won’t play. “Haven’t we about done the whole southern lit thing to death?” he pleads. I demur. “Give me some good eastern-European influence. Give me any Brooklyn lit. I’ll take that stuff any day over the normal wading pool level of what is called the ‘southern writer.’” Again, speechless. When I gather myself I tell him that the competition was my idea and I didn’t need his permission to throw his hat in the ring. “Anyway,” I tell him, “this is about you, not for you.”
In truth, there is less literary pretense in Hannah than exists in even the smallest graduate seminar, maybe the smallest graduate student. He has drawn his cues for nearly 50 years from the Beats: Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, his friend Allen Ginsberg. “I followed what they said as a life protest mainly, and the attitude. All that was huge for my friends and me at Mississippi College, boy, in 1963.” Though on last reading he decided that Kerouac’s epochal On the Road was a “young man’s book” (much like Thomas Wolfe who, in Look Homeward Angel and other novels Hannah can no longer name, became the oracle for “three or four years maybe”), he recalls in a recent magazine piece that in his youth he set his sights on achieving “fame like Kerouac’s, my picture in Life, heralded as the new Southern beatnik taking charge of the movement. Perhaps somewhere a wild coffeehouse named after me?” He still is more beatnik than hippie, and in the end who would you rather have over? Allen Ginsberg with drugs, or David Crosby talking about them? It is strange and a bit unsettling after this long time gone (sorry, but we’d still rather hear Crosby sing) that the15-odd guys and gals who really understood the spontaneous, first-thought-best-thought creative process and the levels and depths of the Darma have outlasted the millions upon millions of us who tried to be good hippies. Hannah wins that competition, too. He deserves the No Lonesome Rex Snerd’s Coffeehouse somewhere near Clinton, or, better yet, Oxford: poets reading original verse; breadbaskets gathering coins for starving artists; bad guitar playing and worse singing; finger-snapping instead of applause; cheap wine and heavy smoke; and no heat or AC. If Barry went, so would I.
And the unequaled praise? It can ring hollow, not because it is false but because it cheapens the real thing. Maybe Hannah has to author the praise to remove all doubt about its legitimacy. No writer today pays more meaningful homage to his forebears and contemporaries than Hannah. He has written beautifully, movingly and with unique insight about Mr. F., Miss W., Willie Morris, and his homeboy, the late Larry Brown. These pieces are stunningly good, and may outlast everything else. His understanding is so clear, his analysis so evocative, that you have to go get the original work and read it by the light of Hannah’s non-fiction piece, two-fisted. Hannah has that rarest of abilities to use his own unique understanding to illuminate rather than to dissemble or deflate the other artist’s work. In all his years teaching creative writing, I have never heard him criticize, belittle or even joke about another writer, even student writers. He talks about the invaluable nature of rough experience, to be sure, but “even Faulkner needed that.” There is a disconnect between the voice of his fiction and the remarkably generous spirit he brings to his literary criticism, essays and articles. That’s okay and exactly how it should be; the disconnect sort of authenticates both. His generosity gives context to the work of others who have sold a lot more books than Hannah but use their non-fiction deceitfully to make some vicious attack on another writer or gain some cheap competitive advantage. For instance, look just below the epidermis layer of Mr. Hemingway’s self-regard and you find him gouging out the eyes of his first friend and best supporter, F. Scot Fitzgerald. If you doubt it, try A Movable Feast sometime. In Hannah terms, it is unmanly.
Still, the coolest part of coming of age as Clinton, Mississippi’s only flaming beatnik artist? Contemporaries. Hannah was born within 18 months of John Lennon and Bobby Z. Dylan, two months before Paul McCartney and within a year or two of most of those responsible for the best of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s. He admits that Dylan’s influence equaled that of any writer, “but not just for the words.” A musician himself all his life, Hannah first heard what all of the above-named heard: the beat. Like Brian Epstein said when asked what struck him about four over-haired boys playing at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England 1962: “The first thing I noticed was their sound, their beat.” The beat is in every sentence Hannah has ever published, giving punch and drive and rhythm to the otherworldly word choice. The image of the noble troubadour leading the protest march is decidedly not what stuck.
“It ain’t poetry when it has to rhyme,” Hannah notes about Dylan’s heralded early work (including the cryptic verse “Yonder stands your orphan” from “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”). “It’s not really all that great when you take away the guitars,” he winces, “but that’s the point. It’s how the words can sound, how they play on and off the page, how they support the music and the music highlights the best lines. Now that was a real discovery.” He says he didn’t really get Dylan until the thin man picked up that black Stratocaster and “went electric” at Newport, July 1965. Initially a folk-music slayer - “My boys and I were into Stan Kenton, Cannonball Adderly, who weren’t blowin’ in the wind; they were just blowin’!” - Hannah yielded to the popular force of wooden music, but not much else that wasn’t built from the bottom - the bass drum/bass syncopation - up. “I don’t mind yielding,” he notes, “it’s just that it takes so long.” These days he warmly observes that Dylan, like Neil Young, provides comfort to the aged and the lonesome, “and they just keep changing, improving.” Like the man said, “He not busy bein’ born is busy dyin’.”

April 1983. In Oxford. Father-in-law and whole bunch drive up for my wife’s induction into Ole Miss scholastic honorary, a poor Mississippi second cousin to Phi Beta Kappa. Induction successful, we’re back at our poor-student house after dinner and many drinks. I’m in law school with first mock-trial exercise next morning at 8:00, so I’m easing off to bed. A knock on door. Barry with five dice in right hand, come to “get you to do some gambling.” He’s wearing his Confederate kepi, always trouble in a Man Mortimer (anti-hero of Yonder) sort of twisted way. I beg off, but Barry is assaulted with praise and unadulterated flirting from three beautiful women. He stays. Drinks all around. Gambling is serious business, and after a tense hour with too much noise and not enough focus on the tumbling dice, Barry begs off. As an afterthought, really just a good-manners throwaway of the kind he learned from good southern rearing and which he practices to this very day, he asks, “Well, does anybody else want to do some gambling?”
Father-in-law stands straight up and shouts, “I want to go with the genius. I missed Faulkner when I was up here in school. I’m not gonna miss another chance to drink with a genius!” Barry appraises him balefully, then smiles and says, “Well come on, Paw-in-law.” I guide them to the car, Barry’s 1972 black-on-black Olds 442, and before the doors close the tires are blue-smoked and screeching on the new asphalt, and they’re OFF. Family is horrified.
I’m getting undressed for bed when wife and Mother-in-law find me and say in unison, “Get your clothes back on!” looking at me as if I were the crazy one. “You have to go get him and bring him home!” I shrug, protest free will, but my heart isn’t in it. It’s true; he won’t get back home otherwise – at least for a few days. That’s how, at midnight, I’m in my pickup truck driving east on Fillmore Avenue approaching the intersection with South Lamar. A southbound black bullet – in the dark a dead ringer for the Batmobile - is passing 70 mph in the left lane. My dim headlights broadside Batman and Robin in a regrettable flash. The image I’ve never been able to shake is Father-in-law’s round, Charlie Brown head pile-driven into his Jack Kramer tennis jacket (bone-white with red and blue stripes at collar and cuff – impossible to imagine attire more anti-beatnik), utterly motionless and trying for all he is worth to act … cool. As the image scalds itself into my brain, genius suddenly fishtails to a dead stop on the edge of oblivion in the black night. No going back now. The 442 is perpendicular across South Lamar facing east, loose muffler purring loudly, riders crouched and coiled, Batmobile aimed like an M-16 rifle dead up Johnson Avenue. Almost home. Chassis rises and back end pivots slowly, tires again blue-smoked, then genius releases brakes and they’re catapulted toward oblivion’s next edge before I even shift into second gear.

Some writers can only communicate with readers at or near their own age, or with similar cultural memories and references, or who share with the writer some immediate obsession, and so on. Very good writers can cross generations; the best transcend time. So far, in my house, it is only Oxford, Mississippi’s best living writer and flaming artist who bridges the critical generational divide. We’ll consider transcendence later. My two sons and I compete to find the best Hannah paragraphs, sentences or images. When we find one too good to keep to ourselves, we read or e-mail it to each other with great glee. Losing all ability to stifle laughter while talking with your children is one of life’s rarest pleasures. When we find a Barryism that makes us laugh, and then shake our heads for a full minute while staring at the floor in total silence, we all remember it verbatim. I’ve asked my sons – Hewitt, 22, a senior English major at Millsaps College in Jackson, and Morgan, 20, vocals/guitar/lyrics for rock group King Elementary, presently of West Hollywood, CA – to tell me why we have thus far been unable to connect on All the King’s Men or The Hamlet/Town/Mansion or The Golden Apples or The Moviegoer, to name but a representative few, and they say it is because Hannah is in a league alone.
I offer Hannah’s own analysis: “The Neverneverlands of the imagination don’t interest me that much. I’m interested in that thing that puts you in a special place you can’t get to except on the page. Like the Joyceian voice coming out of all those concepts of ART, that Scotch-Irish voice of the South was always too abundant, too reverential, endlessly lyrical yes but endlessly illusive too. I think that’s what’s wrong with art. I mean, have you read Finnegans Wake lately, or ever tried to? Nevermore the metaphor, I say. Forget all the literary allusions. I want a voice to offer desperate individual existence, again without the veil of let’s pretend. I want to transcend artiness. I want to be the ‘Flaming Artist!’ I want to look at reality like Beckett, and if I can’t hack it, just flame out. But if I can get there, I want my stories to read like prayers.”

In Barry’s house. Father-in-law and genius flatfoot a fifth of Southern Comfort, open another. Barry cries – no, sobs talking about Janis Joplin, then Jimi Hendrix (the only “art” in the house is a framed, black-light poster of Hendrix), and then the sainted Vietnam dead, all of whom sucked Southern Comfort right out of the neck. Father-in-law, an Air Force flight surgeon and bird colonel in the Mississippi Guard, starts talking about war as fun, war as games with great toys, war as missed opportunity. Barry clarifies the sentiment put forth for discussion. Father-in-law offers history of left-leaning politics, yellow-dog Democrat, commitment to the poor, etc., and asks me to vouch for him. I try, but both are past deaf. Both are taking a measure of the scene for provocation. I cannot leave, so I nervously grab an acoustic guitar and play along with bad-period Eric Clapton record blaring on genius’ overgrown system. Barry grabs handy trumpet and blows. It is awful, but there is enough thudding bass to keep time, and the players sway to it. Father-in-law observes briefly, says, “Hey, I can do that too,” and starts hunching his shoulders up and down to no beat at all in what becomes a series of spastic shrugs. We laugh in spite of, maybe because of, the mortifying embarrassment, and I struggle to keep it lighter than light. Genius can pass from light to total darkness in less than an instant. I’ve seen it, and the last man on the face of the planet to have around that tension, and talking LOUD, is Father-in-law.
Barry has his throwing knives lined up on his side of the dining room table. Styrofoam picnic plates covered with crazy little drawings are shot up all over the house. Indoor target practice with the .22 pistols. A few fist-sized holes scar every wall in the house, evidence that the .45 came out, roared through what it had in the clip, and ended another night on the town with genius way too early. It has been that kind of week.
Barry senses my embarrassment, wants to ease my tension. My rock-solid friend, with whom I had searched for much light, grinned at me, and turned to Father-in-law. “You know,” he drawled, “you’re lucky to have him as your son-in-law. I’m just not sure you deserve him. You should listen to him every once in a while.” I leap to the chair beside Father-in-law, directly across the table from genius. And I quake with terror contemplating the response. Father-in-law lifts his head to assess me.

“No one ever expected me. I never expect me,” says the good doctor in Ray, one of Hannah’s more personal studies and without question one of the best. In all the work, the whole catalog of pain and suffering, mutilation and death, inveterate alcoholism and drug addiction, divorce and betrayal, plain evil or pedestrian faithlessness that populate Hannah’s fiction, there are no two lines more forlorn, more distressing, more bereft of hope and light. At least to me. He’s an orphan! Those nine words do not age well or retreat in meaning to droll cynicism or self-pity. I’ve thought about them for 27 years now; I don’t know how long they have haunted the author.
Hannah is 65 now. Aging has not warped his appearance out of all recognition, like those guys who grow or cultivate another body, trapping the guy you knew inside. He looks like a young man grown old. What he has called his “Asian face” – actually, it is a Native American face, like a better-looking Geronimo, with fine features and good teeth, and the lithe, rattlesnake body of an old warrior – doesn’t encourage normal expectations. His looks have always been a bit unexpected. If you’ve ever actually read the fiction, expectations are further confounded if you discover that he comes from one of the “best” families that the state has produced. Straight-up Scotch/Irish from the potato fields of the old country, which is the last ancestry one would pick for Hannah. It’s like somebody made him up.
His father was an extremely successful insurance broker in central Mississippi, present at the creation of whatever stability the Mississippi economy has enjoyed since the Depression, and president emeritus of every community leadership club that existed in central Mississippi during his long life. His mother had a bad health scare when Barry was born and devoted herself thereafter to the Lord’s work, meaning that she undertook every task available for lay women at the Clinton Baptist Church. Brother Bob is an extremely successful developer, sister Dot a legendary English teacher, writer, all-around lady of letters and mentor to generations of the brightest kids to come out of north Jackson. Barry was born 12 years after Dot, so he was raised in a family which had already weathered the storms of financial insecurity and the awful tendency of young couples to rip each other apart, by a mom and dad who, like all older parents, recognized the late arrival for the gift he was and adored him. His rapid academic progression and early literary success (he was 28 when John Updike said Geronimo Rex offered a “fresh angle on the great American subject of growing up”) were unparalleled for their time and place, which is to say they were unexpected. Yet the guy who practically invented the southern creep, porn junkie gun nut and hateful old geezer is probably the most famous graduate of Mississippi College and Clinton’s most honored son.
He drank, of course, to great excess and over 20 rocky years. He caused much pain and harm, battled not only the label but the debilitating physical effects of alcoholism for more than half his life, went through marriages and lost close touch with children, all while producing almost every piece of the literature that has defined him except Yonder and recent non-fiction work. Maybe. The facts are more than hazy on which works were bottle-driven. The truly impressive thing about his body of work is that you can’t tell by reading it. The stories of drunk Barry are legion and largely apocryphal, but what of it? A mere glimpse into the private lives of Hannah’s contemporaries shows that his disease was relatively controlled. The best gift he gave his beautiful bride Susan, and she him, was 17 years of continued sobriety. A gift that keeps on giving. And besides, if he has any “disease,” it is not the alcohol but going to the very limits of every extreme. He lives life plus, roving way beyond the borders. That is what’s important and lasting; that is what produced the bottle problem, sure, but also the brilliance of the prose; that is what makes him defy all expectations; that is why we never expect him, either. When we’re with Hannah – or Huck Finn and Jim, Sal Paradise and driver, Jack Burden, Binx Bolling, Harry Monroe and Dr. Ray and Man Mortimer, Bob Dylan and Gerry Mulligan and Charlie Parker and Neil Young, and a few more - we’re always in new territory. We can only count on never traveling the middle of the road, sometimes losing the road altogether, and never looking back.

The music was still booming, so Father-in-law had to shout louder. “Well,” he yelled through his sphenoid sinuses, “you’re in MY family now, and in MY family we marry once. You married my daughter and that’s it.” Barry is putting on another record. I’m nodding and shaking my head all at once in fast motion, like I’m having a seizure, but I can’t shut him up. “We’re not like these famous geniuses like Barry who can run through four or five wives and still chase everything in town.”
Genius heard that. I saw the darkness start in his brow, and then just spread. Turning toward Father-in-law he hissed “You old …” And then he saw his throwing knives. In the next moment I was standing up and frantically waving my arms, but there was no distracting him. When he picked up the big knife, the one with the eight-inch silver blade, I tried to say something, I needed to say something, but all I could get out was “Wwwhhhhaaaaaaaaa!” From seven feet, genius reared back like Nolan Ryan, and for an instant I thought he might relent. It was a good way to get someone’s attention; may be the only way to get a drunk’s. But Hannah the teacher was at work. He brought his right arm down hard, and with all the force he had, THREW THE KNIFE DIRECTLY AT FATHER-IN-LAW’S FOREHEAD. The whirling blade passed about six inches above and to the left of its target, and STUCK in the wall – booiinnnggg, like Jim Bowie or Dan’l Boone or Bill the Butcher from Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, like a steely-eyed knife killer had set upon Father-in-law. I remember thinking it was like life in a movie, like life on TV. Genius’ eyes flashed with sudden recognition of the danger and pride in the throw, and for the first time in all the years I’ve known him, he was speechless. I think I fainted.
Father-in-law was … cool. The cool of a man who’d been in harm’s way before and knew to stay still until the immediate danger passed. No pretense. To his everlasting credit, Father-in-law just smiled at genius for at least five seconds, then slowly turned his head and shoulders to the left while taking a deep drag of his Vantage. For three perfect beats, he absorbed what had just happened and the large knife sticking a good four inches into the wall. He then turned back to me, not genius, and still smiling said, “Yeah, he can throw it.”
We all laughed so hard that we fell out of our chairs. You would avoid genius’ floor if you could, but we splayed out on it. Tension released. The climactic battle was over and we’d all lived through it. Unmanly Mr. Hemingway’s test of grace under pressure was passed by both, with plenty of room to spare. For the rest of the evening Father-in-law and genius strode arm-in-arm parading through the house and out into the yard, each praising the cool of the other, toasting the hard life fated to the warrior class to which they belonged, swearing undying fidelity and allegiance. Genius was looking around for something to give Father-in-law, and then his eyes flashed again – this time with possibility, maybe even hope. “Hey, I’ll teach you how to dance!” There was an attempt, of sorts, until I asked that all the knives in the house be stuck in me if they continued. It’s 3:30 a.m. before they stop. I saw Father-in-law’s face as he sat back down and immediately walked him outside, whereupon he threw up on Barry’s motorcycle. Three times, and he did NOT miss. Genius is missing, so I pile Father-in-law in pickup and we’re back at my house, where we both know we belong, in five minutes. As Mother-in-law disgustedly undressed him for bed, I could still hear his nasal whine two rooms away. “People up here like him. They really do.” Over and over until he finally passed out.

Hannah’s reality has changed enormously in the past several years. Besides giving up on imagination as the wellspring of all great or even good fiction, he survived an extremely close battle with cancer. On one of the worst nights in the hospital, when he was alone fighting not to win but to survive till morning, dozing in fugue state, he had a vision in a dream: Jesus Christ was with him. He refers to this dream visitation now as his “religious experience,” meaning he discovered faith. He speaks of it without guile, uses no slogans or hyperbole, and presents his experience merely as the basis on which he changed his mind about a critical issue. That’s enough. “But of all the people in trouble that night, Barry, the fact that Jesus picked you shows remarkable judgment,” I offer. “”Doesn’t it though?” he deadpans. “I’m going to try to be worthy of it the next time.” “Well, as surprised as you and all of us were by what happened, imagine how the worshipped feels counting His flock and seeing you there!” We laugh until we can’t anymore.
Another lasting effect of his illness is his full frontal embrace of the non-fiction form. “Part of it is purely physical,” Hannah explains. “I just can’t write fast, just reel it off like Kerouac, you know, taking dictation. I used to write just like that. Now, I don’t know if it’s the drugs I have to take still, or maybe it is a complete change in what I am thinking about, but whatever it is I just can’t write that way now. What comes out is this non-fiction or more plotted stuff.” I compliment – no, I gush over his recent stuff. “I don’t know,” he says, scratching his head, “maybe I’ve lost it completely.”
The flaming artist’s recent obsession is the noir genre; specifically, the novels of masters like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, with their hard-bitten and usually woefully alcoholic detective heroes lost in the cities of mid-century America. Hannah teaches a class on noir at Ole Miss. If you don’t know the archetypes, read Hannah’s great overview of the genre in “Dark Harvest,” a recent piece in The Oxford American (Issue 55, Fall 2006). There has been a happy confluence of Hannah’s adventures in noir and his “nevermore the metaphor” rejection of “let’s pretend” artiness. “My good Christ, give me talent please, no more art. I loved Ruthie,” says Max Raymond in his long soliloquy in Yonder Stands Your Orphan. Getting close to reality is not only a rejection of redundant forms and an abandonment of sole reliance on imagination for the detective heroes of noir; it is their job. Thus, Hannah’s next novel will feature church burnings in Mississippi, skills of close detection, the forever nights of the blessed and cursed characters of noir, plenty of alcohol and drugs and self-abuse, anti-hero and Rita Hayworth/Eula Varner stand-in, worlds of creeps and psychopaths, and a plot.
“Yes, a plot,” Hannah shrugs. “It’s not like I’ve never had plots; I just sort of got into that Charles Bukowski view. You know, this creature slithering through the day was story enough. He rejected plot as superficial, and there is a lot to be said for that. Our lives aren’t plotted, are they?” No. “So plot seemed not only superficial but false – a false reflection of reality.”
No more. Faith, especially Christian faith, presumes plot. Once we know or achieve faith in the ending of any story, the journey getting there is nothing but plot. And? “I don’t know if faith creates order,” Hannah says, “but it sure helps you make sense out of events that otherwise just seem crazy and random. So whether faith is based on something real, you know, or is just an expression of hope doesn’t matter. It is how it affects the faithful, or maybe the faithless, that I’m interested in,” he says, feeling a bit uncomfortable. “But I have accepted that there is something divine at work. I believe it!” The point is that faith improves your life, sure, but it puts you on to something too. Something huge. We have enough sense to stop there. With words. Because if you’ve known Hannah at any point in his adult life, you can look at him and tell that something has changed his life and the way he appreciates life. You’re scared that talking about it, trying to name it, will chase it away. He’ll tell us, his readers, when he is ready.
It’s not all about such mammoth matters. Step into Hannah’s study these days and it’s easy to see the transformation at hand. There is any easel standing before his desk, with a pack of different colored markers dangling on a string. “For storyboards, yeah,” he says. “I’ve never done one in my life. Never even seen one except Robert Altman’s when I was working in Hollywood with him.” What’s it for? “Well,” he says, fidgeting, “story. I plotted out about half or more of the new novel on that thing. Then I got frustrated with it and just wrote. But it’s my one concession to … what? Modernity?” Looks more like plot. “That’s right,” he nods, “plot.”
Also, if you look behind the shotguns and other junk on the bookshelves adorning every wall in the room, you see biography, history, military history - non-fiction overwhelmingly. The only fiction I can find are Bukowski’s complete works. “Me being a man aging, as I am,” Hannah says, “give me something concrete, baby, hard facts.” The detective novel he is writing is based upon research, not imagination, “because what really happened just seems closer to reality, closer to the bone. More Beckett, you know,” and we do. It is easy to find a plot in history. History, or the study of it, is plot. Like faith, the starting point is the reality of the ending, and the job of the historians and biographers Hannah is reading almost exclusively is to trace the plot, to explain through scholarship how we got to that ending. That’s pretty easy to understand.
It is not easy, however, to find a 65-year-old man willing to give anything “new” a chance, to undertake a personal transformation in his sixties. It is particularly difficult to find such willingness in one whose work to that point has been as heralded as Hannah’s. The flaming artist explains his personal transformation as the result of the gradual, accidental processes described above. Well, okay. “All I can say is that it is all true, it did happen,” he offers. And isn’t that the point? “I am still trying to figure that one out,” he says. “I guess we’ll just have to wait for the novel.” The signs are all good. Plots away!
In the last analysis, the most underrated Hannah quality is his courage, his willingness not only to fight but to go to the mat, to the final extremity, to flaming death, if he believes in the cause. Like many of his fictional characters, he’s not scared to resort to physical violence, to guns, to bigger guns, to whatever it takes to do the right thing or just make his point. Courage of Hannah’s stripe also makes one (reader should guess here; give up?) unexpected and unpredictable, even to himself. It sounds corny, but courage is as true and important as anything hip that can be said about Hannah. It has probably kept him out of AARP meetings and still looking for that wild coffeehouse in the hinterlands of north Mississippi. His search, his courage to follow it wherever it leads, and the violence in his fiction and elsewhere has concerned and scared some of us who count on him. It was not until he cured the problem between Father-in-law and me that I finally understood.

Father-in-law and I never had another cross word in the 24 years following the night of the knife. Eventually we grew to rely on each other to the exclusion of others, especially when dealing with his family. He taught my boys and girls the country ways: how to bait a hook and free the fish from it; shoot a gun properly and safely; tend a garden, grow your own food, how to get away from the games and the TV and still have a good time. Eventually I ceded to him everything he wanted, including the use of all tools, lawn mowers, blowers, saws, rakes and brooms. When I just had to fix something in the house, he would look at it curiously as if he were evaluating a sick patient, and then just shake his head at me. “Who let you loose with tools?”
He also became Barry’s biggest fan in Jeff Davis County and at Camp Shelby during what he called his summer “vacation” at National Guard camp, sending to Johnson Avenue, Oxford, vests and prized military gear for years and years. He read everything. To this day, a TIME review of Ray from Christmas, 1980, featuring a small head shot of his buddy the genius, is crudely taped to his dresser mirror. “You know Barry Hannah, the writer?” he would ask anybody anywhere who looked like they had ever read a book. “Personal friend of mine,” he would puff up his chest and proclaim. “Best writer in the history of the world.” Not cool, but I ceased caring about that. When I told the story of our night with the genius over the years, he would wheeze and gag himself purple with breathless, uncontrollable laughter. He had a stroke four years ago. It cost him his right side and the power of speech but left his critical functions and judgment intact. He has lived with us since. When I told him I was doing this Hannah reprise, he opened his eyes wide and nodded and grunted with excited approval. We anticipate Barry’s detective novel like it is good news coming. I’ll read it to Father-in-law, cover to cover, twice. He won’t let anybody else.

To pay anything like close attention to Hannah’s work is to become his pupil. He is a natural teacher. He knows things, critically important things, and how to convey them so they won’t be forgotten. His most significant personal fear is redundancy. He has no problem with avoiding the expected thing, because it is when he is unmoored and cast out there alone that he finds the lessons worth teaching the rest of us. It is what makes his subjects worthy of his non-fiction, and vice versa. He believes in, will sacrifice for, and permanently support his students. Every single one of them. Same for friends. For him it’s not only a question of commitment or loyalty, self-sacrifice or Christ’s love of the servant; it is belief in the future. He tells us to fling ourselves forward into the future unshackled by needless past, and then come and report well and truly to your people, to the rest of us. What can come from that cycle, performed honestly and completely as Hannah does, with courage and without limits, is the promise of everlasting life. According to the flaming artist, that promise is in our children.
“Wanna know why I’m not in despair over the war and the wretched state of our politics? Young people. Even at Ole Miss, listening to or reading the students’ analysis of current problems makes me hugely optimistic about the future. They get it, you know? They are paying attention. Today’s students are just like we were in the sixties, only don’t tell them. They have a healthy suspicion of the old labels; telling them they’re like hippies or beatniks or anything else, especially parents, bores them. They don’t trust that stuff. Rightly so. But they have the same response we had to their parents’ hand-wringing over the state of the world and the culture and art and music and all that. And if the stale old worn-out political-party system in this country won’t yield the real power, these kids will take it! Soon!” Yes, and soon.
Little wonder that Hannah is the link between my sons and me. There are more: the guitar, baseball, the sprung sound of Dylan’s backup group, The Band, politics (I think). But we go deeper when we discuss Hannah’s work. The connection he fosters lets me know that my boys see the world from somewhere near my perspective. Yet the oddest link, and the one which has something to do with the inexpressible sense the boys talked about, is between Father-in-law and me.
Barry saw and immediately understood the difficulties in my relationship with Father-in-law all those years ago. We were stuck, rutted in tension and committed only to competing with one another for everything, anything, world without end. I had resigned myself to just fighting it out with him. The reality we had worked out for ourselves wasn’t working, never had worked and never would. Barry, even in his Confederate kepi, sensed all that, knew it root and branch, and he knew how to cure it. He knew that when we find ourselves in a bad or dead relationship and we’ve forgotten everything about the other except winning our private competitions, the only way out is by explosion, not only tempting but calling down calamitous fate, by throwing a knife though the whirlwind of pride and misunderstanding. If you live through the blow-up, the past is over. You must immediately figure out a way to go forward together, or neither of you will survive. And if you do make it out alive, you never go back. For the first time in a life reading Barry seriously since 1974, I understood his characters and their use of physical violence as a last resort to end an unhappy or diseased relationship, to end the redundant expectations, to change their own lives.
The histories and biographies that now fill Hannah’s shelves teach the same lesson. If there is any clear and consistent message in all of American history, it is that the price of ending the past is determined by and proportionate to the extent of sin that went into creating the intolerable present. The Civil War is the most obvious example; specifically, Frederick Douglas’ observation that every drop of blood drawn by the lash would be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword. In Hannah’s time, the tragic Bobby Kennedy, in a speech shortly before his assassination: “This much is clear: Violence breeds violence. Oppression breeds retaliation. And only by a cleansing of our whole society can we remove this sickness from our souls.” Hannah was the first person that brought that lesson, that rule of proportionality, to personal relationships, at least in my experience. I thought he was showing me the violence, the gun, the fuse, for kicks – his kicks. But the rule of proportionality we find in our history makes even more sense when applied to individual relationships. The individual must, however, have the courage to change, to go as far as is necessary and then farther, to climb into the black 442 and ride to the edge of oblivion, again and again, to kill a bad past and earn a new future.
Father-in-law and I learned that together, and remembered it forever. What happened that night in Oxford was the foundation of our relationship thereafter, but it was only while reading him Yonder Stands Your Orphan to him fairly recently that I got it. I finally understood why Barry put us through that ordeal. Something had to give, and it did. As I explained it to him, Father-in-law nodded up and down, grunting the affirmative and opening his eyes as wide as they could go. He got it, too, finally. We learned it all a generation ago, from our friend Barry Hannah. .
“Remember,” the artist said, “it’s always better to flame out. Always.”
And it is.