Barry Hannah (1942–2010)

In honor of Barry Hannah, whose writing appeared in the first issue of The Oxford American and in many subsequent issues, we reprint this interview conducted with him just after the publication of his novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan in 2001. Editor Marc Smirnoff remembers Hannah here. We will miss him.

Photograph by Maude Schuyler Clay, 2001.

An Interview with Barry Hannah

"I'm not trying to put on a freak parade—I'm trying to get to the bottom of our last, basic, desperate questions."

(from The Oxford American, Issue 41, fall 2001)

AFTER BATTLING LYMPHOMA FOR the past two years, Barry Hannah, who teaches writing at the University of Mississippi, is back with his twelfth book, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Atlantic Monthly Press). The new novel, his first in ten years, is rife with what we've come to expect from Mr. Hannah: needy, desperate characters on strange quests (for redemption and other things); black humor and slapstick humor; violence; defiant honesty; potent social commentary; and poetic language that moves with jazz-like rhythm. Here is just one paragraph from Yonder:

Ulrich had been quiet, painting on deck varnish. Now he spoke. "We don't love each other as much as we used to. You can see the uncertain looks, the calculations, the dismissals. People are not even in the present moment. Everybody's been futurized. You look in those eyes and see they're not home, they're some hours ahead at least. I hate to go into Vicksburg any more. Anywhere, really. It's all like meeting people who have just departed. Old men and women don't look wise any more. They are just aged children. And who gets the highest pay? Actors. Paid to mimic life because there is no life. You look at everybody and maybe they're a little sad, some of 'em. They're all homesick for when they were real." Ulrich began painting again as the others tried to guess what could have prompted this.

Here is another Hannah quote from the July 13 issue of the local college newspaper, the Daily Mississippian:

Reading and writing train our people for logic, grace and precision of thought, and begin a lifelong study of the exceptional in human existence. I think literature is the history of the soul. Writing should be a journey into worthy perception.

Prior to Yonder Stands Your Orphan, two Hannah story collections were released: Bats Out of Hell (1994) and High Lonesome (1997). Both are fullblooded, full-fledged masterpieces. At his peak, Mr. Hannah could be the most consequential fiction writer in America.

—Marc Smirnoff

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: Was there one book that sparked your interest in literature?

BARRY HANNAH: I didn't have a bookish home, except for the Bible. I wasn't that literary until, I think, The Sun Also Rises, which I first read in college, and Huckleberry Finn—but I didn't read Huck in a sophisticated way; I didn't realize it was a great book. I think Dylan Thomas was my first influence. And certainly The Catcher in the Rye was something I had never heard before. So Dylan Thomas and The Catcher in the Rye would be the big instigators. The Catcher in the Rye sort of gave the wise guy credentials, and I loved that.

THE OA: Is there a Faulkner influence in your prose?

BH: My style has never been a damn thing like Faulkner's. Every time I think of Faulkner, I do a parody of him, as Old Bill. I love him, but I don't think you can find any sentence in Hannah, if I can be so bold, that is nearly what Faulkner was writing. He wrote like an organ going on all the time, except in "A Rose for Emily" and a few stories. He liked really long sentences. I like to examine the staccatos—the telegraphed, quick, hard images.

THE OA: What was the first story you published?

BH: A story of mine was placed in a national anthology of the best college writing when I was at the University of Arkansas. And then I wrote my first truly good story, "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt," which was a piece of my then-forthcoming book, Geronimo Rex. I was about twenty-three. It really lit up for me, I thought. I don't really care what folks think of it now, but "Mother Rooney" was a springboard to the rest of my creative life.

Somebody in New York saw one of those stories and asked to see the novel. I never had any grief or delay in publishing. I think that helped, because someone approved almost instantly. Geronimo Rex is, I've been told, a bildungsroman. It was what had happened to me, just about, until my late twenties: the progress from Mississippi to Arkansas, flunking med school, becoming a writer, stuff like that. I remember being warned by my teacher at Arkansas, Bill Harrison, that autobiographical novels were dangerous because you'd use things up that you should reserve for third-person treatments, and that often people who wrote autobiographical novels would be done for. But I have not read Geronimo Rex in a long time, and I don't know quite what to think of it now. I had great joy writing that book, typing at night with four classes, or maybe even five, at Clemson, where I was teaching. I loved the life, the secret life, of the typewriter when the house was quiet.

THE OA: What pleased you most about Geronimo Rex?

BH: Well, I had no idea that it would be accepted as happily around the establishment as it was. It didn't sell that many copies, by the way. I never thought I would be a millionaire, but I had always thought novels made you comfortable. That's not true. I was stunned by its being nominated and making the shortlist for the National Book Award when I never had any audience but about five guys and one girl. I was a little disappointed, but not depressed at all, by the small audience. The joy was having a book between covers.

THE OA: I would think that you'd have fond memories of creating the character of Fleece in Geronimo Rex, because he seems so abundantly alive.

BH: Yeah, and the guy I based it on is still alive down in Jackson, Mississippi. He was my roommate at Mississippi College. He was so easy because he was such a large character. He had a mind for science and for aesthetics and psychology way beyond mine. It was wonderful just to hear him, even though he always whined about having physical ailments, as I recall. It was quite nice, actually, to be cordoned off at Mississippi College, and be thought of as detestable Bohemians and rebels by the Christians—we called them "Christers": beyond Christian. It was so easy to be a rebel at Mississippi College. You know: smoke a Marlboro, play Ray Charles's "What'd I Say," play Take Five late at night, and that made you a rebel.

THE OA: How meaningful is criticism to you?

BH: Criticisms never made a difference in my work. They hurt other writers, apparently. I just skim the bad ones. This last one, in the New York Times, the fellow, a British guy, a film critic, thought that Yonder Stands Your Orphan—which I think is my best book, and I don't think that will change for a while, until I write my next one—was just a parade of eccentrics and gargoyles and that it was repetitive. These folks may also be eccentric, but it seems to me that privately we are all monsters, if we'd only look at our obsessions. I'm not, in other words, trying to put on a freak parade. I am trying to get to the bottom of our last, basic, desperate questions and the loves, desires, and terrible needs that sometimes may come off as freakish to others. And I certainly wouldn't want to be repetitive, but I read that, and it doesn't hurt me. I know that you need a good New York review to sell more books, but I'm changing nothing, and I'm not belligerent about that—I'm just going to do what I can in the next book. I've been in a room with authors who are physically challenged by reviewers. I mean, they want to attack them with their fists. I don't know that I've ever faced but about two critics who wanted to destroy my career. Those are curious people. But they're out there.

THE OA: What kind of criticism have you gotten for Yonder Stands Your Orphan?

BH: Largely good. Yonder has been attacked for little plot. For my work, it is very plotted. Who's Man Mortimer, the main character, going to cut next and why? And who owes him? What trouble is there going to be? What are people going to do about it? I'm very interested in these people who go free after doing multiple injuries to other folks. I've known them in my life. The law just doesn't touch them, is not interested in them, or is afraid. These people are absorbed as if they were mere eccentrics. "Oh yeah, he cut old Hank the other day."

THE OA: Some writers claim that they map out all their writing—and that the actual writing provides few surprises. How do you see it?

BH: Writing is like exploring. I have a large outline in my head, but there are so many gaps in it. I'm exploring every day what this gal should be, what she needs, what kind of language is appropriate. And the voice of a book, the tune that it takes, takes over all for me. It's like the progression is going to be as much a voice as it is a story.

THE OA: When you are in the head of a guy like the narrator in your story "The Spy of Loog Root," who is strange in a number of ways, does he take the story places that you didn't expect or even want to go?

BH: He's a voyeur and a philosopher, as I recall now, but one who is lacking a great deal, obviously, to be this avid and thorough in following a pretty boy around the hills. And as I recall, the poor voyeur himself needs to be watched at the end. Here he is in nowhere, no one's paying attention to his philosophy, he thinks he's important personally, and he wants that young man to be watching him. But I could not have told you these things as I was writing it. I was exploring what I thought a voyeur was. I have never actually held a pair of binoculars in my hands and watched a woman undress, though I'd like to. I've been an accidental voyeur about four or five times in my life. It's not straight-on eroticism, but it's pleasant; it's more like Columbus looking at something he just accidentally saw. It's got a delicious quality, remote and delicious. You can't do any harm, and it's just like found art. So, I was getting into it from my own accidental glances.

THE OA: How does a piece of fiction get started for you? Does the plot first come to mind, or is it a phrase or a character?

BH: A phrase. And some characters will follow if there's a good phrase. Listening, of course, is essential, but you are the director, and listening is only going to become important in a form you give it. You can't get around that. Even if a writer proclaims absolute objectivity and that he's just a fly on the wall, he's going to have to give the shape to it, finally. You can't really get much out of bar talk. If you've been there forty minutes, you've about got it. On the other hand, you shouldn't be so selfish that you're trying to make everything yours. I like the people who are foreign to me. We were talking about my Japanese friend Masaru in class yesterday. He had spent a night with Willie Morris drinking bourbon, and Willie was reading him something out of his Yazoo City past. Somebody asked Masaru, "What was Willie reading, saying?" "The young Willie plays basketball, and he very sad." I love that. That's broken English, but actually he's getting right to what's going on.

THE OA: Could you give an example of a phrase that evolved into a story or a novel?

BH: This is going to be hard because a phrase sometimes only appears on page two hundred, and you've almost forgotten it. More than likely there will be two or three people in a room, and somebody says something that may be very banal but that seems to echo in your head. And the moment it was said is as important as what was said. That's why I don't have any remembrance. It's not like some epigraph. It would be more like somebody saying, "She's short, but she's tall"—a comment that some guy on four beers said. Half banal, half interesting.

THE OA: I won't push this line too far, but what do you do with a phrase like that? Does it resurface in a scene?

BH: Well, I think a phrase like that might describe a whole year or a whole life. And it just ignites this beautiful, creative flow: where they've been, how they got here, why it had to be said, why it meant anything to you when it wouldn't mean anything to anyone else. That's the creative flow you want. The ignition. The best stuff, I find—maybe other writers don't see it this way—comes when I'm writing rapidly. And the signs that it's not going well are when I start slowing down and start thinking. So I want that ignition, that flow. I have written decent stuff slowly, but it seems like my best writing comes as if I can barely keep up with it, like a court reporter. Then later I go back to refine with one typing, then I send it off.

THE OA: I wouldn't be surprised if you equated that process with some of the zones you get into as a tennis player, when you're not thinking.

BH: I've been watching the U.S. Open this week, and you can tell those who get in the zone, like a great player like Agassi, and the opponent has to just wait him out. The guy is just hitting shots out of mind, and all you can do is change courts and hope it'll be over soon. Yes, it's almost athletic itself, those zones where you're just playing a hell of a game of Ping-Pong or whatever. And then you stop, and you drink a Coke, and you're back to...old Barry. Struggling.

THE OA: But I bet also that those people who get into these zones more than others have to earn them a little bit, right?

BH: Sure. They have to have had the shots. So they practice for ages to get into these zones. The zones probably represent a hundred thousand games or something. That's the best I can say for just hard work. To make yourself lucky you've got to put in a lot of hours. But I have lost too many hours staring at white paper when I didn't have anything. They used to say, "Go in a room with the typewriter, and don't let yourself out, just stay there for three hours every day." I think that's silly. Absolutely silly. By the time you get on that typewriter, you should have been almost tasting the typewriter for five blocks. You just had to come in there. You knew how you were going to start with four or five sentences, at least.

THE OA: Was it hard writing Yonder Stands Your Orphan while you were ill?

BH: I don't think I could have written Yonder had I not been lifted up by the steroids I was taking with chemotherapy, which are a kind of speed. You wouldn't ever advocate the way this book was written. You wouldn't tell a young writer, "Take some steroids and be a writer," but if you are ill like I was, they counteract the chemicals in you and bring you back to human, and they do kind of rush you, but it's an artificial feeling.

THE OA: What are some of the things you learned from being sick?

BH: I told my class a couple of weeks ago that I know what all the weak American men do. They watch videos. When I was ill I got into the habit, and it's a beautiful, beautiful feeling when you put in a video or three and sit in that chair and just start sinking into it. Quality sometimes doesn't even matter—I'm a horror buff. But I also think that watching videos was a big symptom of my illness. I wasn't creating. The videos did nothing for my head or my gut as far as being an artist.

THE OA: How do you keep challenging yourself artistically?

BH: Well, I want to try writing a quiet book with very few literary devices. I've never done a totally quiet book, a book without metaphors. I tend to be very metaphoric. I want to see what's there if I saw things just clear, straight, and quiet without the use of literary terms. Just tell a story. That's a large risk for me. My natural voice is usually grabbing a metaphor. I have to watch that because metaphors can be so false.

THE OA: What is the hardest thing for you to do as a writer?

BH: Starting is the toughest, so I would advocate blasting through, just blasting through. Deadlines are wonderful. They get you to just start doing blasting work, and just finish it. People are getting too easy on me. "Oh, Hannah, we'd always like to have something from you...." That's the way The New Yorker and Esquire are right now. I really need a deadline so I can start the blasting process and see if I can come up with some half-bright sentences.

THE OA: Does your writing do what you want it to do?

BH: Every book I've written I can't bear to read. I open the pages, and they just seem like they're about fifteen degrees below what I intended. You've just got to get over the fact that what you write is going to be imperfect. You've got that dream, that gem-like 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. It's not going to be quite what you wanted. 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.

THE OA: Has the disturbing subject matter of some of your stories and novels ever riled your family?

BH: I only heard by secondhand that my sister said that my mother was very disturbed by my first novel. But on the other hand, she went and gave a book report about that novel to her study club, bless her heart. Mother was a Baptist, and she would have found the illuminating and life-affirming things in the book. But Mother was a prude, like the women of her generation were.

Those people who used to be upset by my writing would find me fairly mild now, I think. The world has caught up with me and passed me. I might have been a little ahead of my time, but not for long. It's just not a big thing anymore. The movies are just so raw and nasty and stupid that my work is almost Victorian in comparison.

THE OA: Your early work includes rather liberal usage of the infamous N-word. Did you ever get in trouble for this?

BH: No. I think some blacks left a reading of mine because I used the word once, and then another time a woman wanted to discuss that term with me. However, I would only use it now if it were in dialogue; I have no political correctness about dialogue. But I'm less likely to throw it around casually as we did in the '60s and '70s. There's a lot I wouldn't write now.

THE OA: You've appeared in the annual New Stories from the South collection only once. Do you have any idea why some literary people don't respond to your work?

BH: I've read brilliant stories in the New South collection as well as rather flat ones. So it works both ways. I've taught New Stories from the South, and my class has often wondered why some of the stories are in there, and I have wondered, too. I don't have any real answer. My stories have been celebrated, as you know, by prizes in the '70s, the Esquire award. I don't know why they've been excluded from the other anthologies. I just don't know.

THE OA: I guess some people think your stories can be very violent. I wonder if that played a part.

BH: Maybe it does. I don't know why. This is the most violent era I've ever lived in. Mothers killing babies—I've never even touched that subject. I've never really gotten to the grizzly, hideous things that you read in the newspaper.

THE OA: What fascinates you about violence?

BH: I've only been in a few fistfights in my whole life, and when I was young I had .22s for shooting rats at the dump. But I have no interest in maiming or shooting anyone. Personally, tennis is as violent as I've ever gotten. I'm more just a student of the myths, the true myths. World War Two is practically my god. The Civil War and World War Two were as cataclysmic as anything in science fiction. They were science fiction. But violence is not a constant stream in my work, I don't think. Since I don't read myself much, I might be shocked. I've used it different ways. Sometimes it's a parody of violence. Sometimes it's a comedy of the hideous that you'd find in slapstick. Sometimes it's grim and real, as in a Flannery O'Connor story. I'm interested in what people do in the face of it. I probably got that from adolescence, that manly yearning to know how we'd behave in a war. Would we be chicken? Would we be rational? A war might have done me good. I might've been less violent had I been in a war.

THE OA: There's a strong religious element in most of your work, even if it's a little hard to see. Nevertheless, you surprised a lot of people by recently declaring yourself a Christian. Can you talk about that a little bit?

BH: I've been Christ-conscious a long time, but a confused and doubting Christ-conscious fellow. Especially in my relation to God, about whom I'm still confused. But I had an experience at the hospital a week after I almost died of pneumonia here in Oxford. And it was quite the realist's dream. It was not an outer vision but a physical presence of Christ, who said nothing, who was very assuring and very hard-edged. He was about six feet, the body of a working man, dark, and although He didn't say anything, I was shocked that He appeared at all. Shocked that He was conscious of me, it seemed. And I actually spoke in the dream. I said, "You know, I haven't paid you enough attention." And Christ, in the dream, didn't answer. But I was given to understand that that was all right, He had been there. So I have been much more conscious of Christ. I'm a believer that He is immortal in some fashion, and I hope that His code has directed me. I am conscious more of kindness and helping and service, and I hope I do it. But I think the Baptists put that in you early, it's just their version you reject. I don't think I've ever been an ugly person except when I was drunk, and I didn't really mean it. Kindness always struck me as very smart, anyway. It keeps you out of a lot of fights. And you avoid the needless, petty hassles of intellectuals and big cities. I think I was ready. But it has not brought me a sense a superiority or such otherness to where I understand everybody. I don't go around forgiving. I'm not Christ. But I find Him very solid and real inside myself, and I'm more attuned to Him in my work.

THE OA: Could you talk about your drinking and how it affected your writing?

BH: A little. Not much. I'm not my own critic. I'm not hovering above me. But I do have more powers of concentration, more patience since stopping. That's all I know. I think everybody who gets sober from the kind of life I had is radicalized in some way from the person he was.

A lot of the earlier work went for shock and electric jolts—which I still believe in—out of the kind of despair of logic that may have been brought on by alcohol. I'm still bored by logic. I think that art can speak of many things without ordinary logic. It's what we all know already.

THE OA: What is your strategy for teaching writing to college students?

BH: It can't be an academic workshop where we're going to sit around soothing each other with sensitivity. I've read stories in writers conferences lately where the whole thing was about if somebody got tenure or not, for God's sake. Students mistake college for the world. I try not to be scolding or unkind, but readers don't need you, they can always get on their motorcycles. You've got to make them sit there and turn pages. A very simple, old-fashioned idea: beginning, middle, end. That's all a writer can have on his wall. He'll work all his life for that. You needn't be much more complex than that. And you can't have this insincerity and irony forever. Insincerity and irony reigned for too goddamn long in writing. Everything is insincere or ironic or a parody. In writing, you've got to commit.

THE OA: You said recently, "I know less and less about how to write a book." What did you mean by that?

BH: You create the novel every time you sit down to write it. Maybe others don't, but I feel that it is an amorphous shape waiting on you. As you work you will feel your way through it. Perhaps by throwing away a lot of pages, cutting a great deal. But the subject you take on is going to make you work differently, and no rules are going to certify that it's any good at all. So it's scary. I'm not being disingenuous—I've written twelve books, I know a little about writing books—but I don't know what the shape's going to be. I can still make an ass or a public fool out of myself.

THE OA: Have you ever gotten deep into writing a novel that you could not complete?

BH: Yes, I have quit them because they were just making me sick instead of lifting me up. If a certain clarity and joy are not with you, I think you should give up. But if there's joy happening, you're on the right track.

THE OA: You have stated a preference for short stories. Is there a reason that the form attracts you?

BH: There's a chance to be explosive, as in a poem, to be so pithy and in right rhythm that the short story reminds you of the highest art. It stays with you lots longer than books—some books. So I still love the possibility of the short story. I intend to write some more. Also, I now love the short novel more.

THE OA: Do you enjoy writing nonfiction, or is it in some ways a distraction from your fiction writing?

BH: Frankly, it is not as rewarding to me as fictional work. I don't like to bother folks. I don't like to talk about what they don't want to talk about, so I'm not a good investigative journalist. I like to meet people you never would have met in other circumstances, but I don't look to it for high art. People have told me my essays are better than my fiction and that they'd rather read them, and that certainly follows the national trend. So here I am. I might be a better journalist than fiction writer.

THE OA: Do you regret anything that you've written?

BH: No. It had to be done. I've always given it my best shot. I've never tried to write in a minor genre. And I've never attacked individuals or betrayed their privacies. I've only been vengeful about two or three times in my whole writing career—where I thought this guy was a jackass who really deserved it. And even so, the literature hid it so that it wasn't like something you'd find in the local newspaper. I would have regretted being unkind, I think. I can't even resent having written Night Watchmen, my second novel. I know it's not that good. But I was doing what I could at the time, working as hard as I could.

THE OA: In what way is literature limited as an art form?

BH: All the art forms are limited, probably, except music. I try to concentrate on what literature can do, because I know it shouldn't compete with a camera. Bad writers compete with the camera. Bad writers compete with the movies. Even worse writers compete with television and videos. There is something between the eye and the mind that words can do that nothing else can do. I try to stay in that range. But, hell yes, I know that it's just black on white, and I'm always thinking, For God's sake, isn't there just one other dimension I could push this into? But what literature can do at its best is be its own thing and appeal to everything that a movie can't touch: the inner movements of a person that only music can come close to. I'm still in love with writing and even its limitations because it's still in such a beautiful zone. It's untouchable by the camera, by painting, even. When it is very good, it hammers home as deeply as music.

Please click here to read "The Spy of Loog Root," a short story by Barry Hannah that appeared in the first issue of The Oxford American.

Please click here to read "Among Mutinous Helium Bursts Around Saturn: Barry Hannah's Dangerous Syntax" by Jamie Quatro, which appeared in our September 2009 Southern Lit issue.