A WILD PAST

Barry Hannah hails from Clinton, Mississippi, North of Jackson. At Mississippi College, Hannah was premed but switched to literature. He went on to earn an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the University of Arkansas in 1966. Not long after, he found an admirer in Esquire magazine’s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, the slash-and-burn literary tastemaker who helped cultivate both Richard Ford and Raymond Carver. It was Lish who, to Carver’s ultimate anguish, dismantled and rewrote much of Carver’s early work, and generally gets credit for the brave, spare prose on which Carver built his name. Hannah, however, did not suffer Lish’s editorial wrecking balls as compliantly as Carver did.

“He’d mark things up, but if I didn’t agree with it, I wouldn’t take it,” Hannah said. “But he did teach me a lot about writing short stories. The use of open space. The music of the empty white. Not to write so damn fucking much. Stop, sir! You’re through!”

Hannah’s first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), a feat of comic firesetting to the coming-of-age genre, established him as a new sort of Southern writer, one whose work was of the South, but whose voice issued from its own extremist nation of the id.

His next major outing, Airships (1978), a collection of short stories, and his fourth book, Ray (1980), inspired a fervent multitude of Hannah cultists, among them Robert Altman, who brought Hannah out to Hollywood to write a script for him. (“It didn’t work,” Hannah said. “I was just flat bad at it.”) Hannah found an awed reader in Truman Capote, who once described Hannah as “the maddest writer in the U.S.A.” Hunter S. Thompson’s assessment went a few steps further. “Hannah should not be in front of young people,” ran a blurb of Thompson’s Hannah quoted to me with pride. “And perhaps he should be in a cage.”

Hannah’s transgressions didn’t stop at feats with language. As his literary repute spread, so did his fame as one of Southern lit’s notorious bad men. He drank a good deal. He shot holes in walls and automobiles. At the University of Alabama, where he had a tenured teaching post, he brought a revolver to his writing workshop and twirled the empty chambers before the class by way of explaining his theory of a short story’s six movements. The deed got him fired.

“The trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work,” Hannah said. “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.”

In 1983, Hannah accepted a position as writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, where he nourished the careers of young writers from Donna Tartt (The Secret History) to Jonathan Miles (Dear American Airlines). Hannah’s life took a calmer turn in Oxford. He married his fourth wife, Susan, with whom he lives today. In 1990, he quit drinking. He’s been sober ever since and does not reflect with much nostalgia on his infamous years. “The wild stuff is also overrated,” he said. “There’s not a great deal of romance in it, mostly just a lot of wasted time and misery and things I wish I hadn’t said to other people. But you see, all my heroes were alcoholics—Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. How many more do you want? Alcohol had had that code of mystery about it as a writer’s drug, which I’m glad has been debunked.”

BACK TO WORK

These days, Hannah lives in a 1950s-era brick ranch in a wooded Oxford neighborhood that more evokes suburban Orlando than Yoknapatawpha. A typhoon of dogs greeted us at the door—six of them, including two determined yowlers that Susan was powerless to calm. Hannah fetched me a cold Budweiser from a stash he keeps on hand for thirsty visitors. He took a Coke for himself and led me to his office, a tidy chamber of knotty pine.

Not far from his desk stood a group of musical instruments—flügelhorn, bass, two guitars. (Hannah has an informal band with a few of his musical graduate students at Ole Miss.) Books shared the shelves with a healthy arsenal of rifles and shotguns, which these days Hannah wields only against cans.

“Terry Gross put the question to me on Fresh Air a while ago: ‘Why do you like guns?’” said Hannah. “I don’t really know. It’s just an old admiration. It’s almost genetic to Southerners. You can put every argument about gun control to them and they don’t have an answer. They just tear up. They just start shivering. It’s like you’re pulling a goddamned heart out of somebody.”

Hannah eased himself into the chair behind his writing desk, which supports the electric typewriter he uses (he abhors computers). The work on his latest book, initially conceived around a string of church arsons, was going well, Hannah said. After a frustrating period of halting progress, he’d decided to dismantle the novel structure he’d been working with and reassemble the book as a collection of short fiction. “For years I was miswriting the thing,” he said. “It had been an embarrassment, and just two weeks ago, I said, ‘To hell with this. I’m going back to short stories.’ They don’t sell as well, but so what? When I was getting started, short stories were the breath of life.”

Outside, dusk was taking hold. Hannah leaned back in his chair, and, reflecting on his career, spoke with some sorrow about the readers he felt he hadn’t reached. “I’d always imagined this hip, intelligent crowd I was writing for, but as it turns out, they’re not out there waiting,” he said. “Really, I was brokenhearted to hear people call me difficult. I always intended to be light and open, but I suppose I misjudged the American audience.”

But Hannah’s claims of obscurity were belied by the wall behind him, which bears a trove of awards and commendations to humble a Nobel laureate. A letter from John Cheever conferring the literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A resolution from the governor of Mississippi praising Hannah’s work. Multiple medals from assorted literary arbiters hanging from tricolor ribbons. “Susan did all this, and really, it embarrasses me,” he said. “There are far too many pictures of me in here and not enough of her.” Hannah glanced at the wall and hazarded a minor grin. “I’m not an egomaniac. But those prizes do keep you going. They mean a lot to us scribes who work in the dark.”