By Wells Tower | Nov 08 | Southern Masters

Barry Hannah's Long Shadow

How a wild man from Mississippi changed the course of Southern fiction

“Pound for pound, Hannah possesses more talent in the little finger of his right fist than certain humid Southern states do,” says Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, and other books. “His prose is always not just writing, it is prose. Never a careless ordinary syllable, not a mark that hasn’t first been sung aloud at three a.m. beside some river at a hunting camp.”

Hannah is not a writer to be read idly, with half a head or heart. His work thrives in his sentences, the best of which require a couple of readings to fully wring their satisfactions. The syntactic rigor and strange music of his fiction occasionally get him classified as a difficult or, less appropriately, a postmodern writer, and are probably why Oprah Winfrey hasn’t called him yet.

And though master of fine arts programs nationwide teem with young writers who tend private shrines to Barry Hannah, his broader impact on American letters, as Richard Ford sees it, may be a subtle one.

“There are certainly people who come tripping down to Oxford who sit at his feet, but he didn’t exactly spawn whole generations of imitators like Ray Carver did,” says Ford. “It was more that Barry made us aware of wonderful possibilities of language that we did not know were there before.”

Hannah is the author of thirteen novels and short story collections; his most recent book, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, came out in 2001, though a close scrape with lymphoma nearly kept him from finishing the book. The cancer returned a few years back, but these days Hannah’s health is holding. He’s making headway on a new project and still finding time to tour greater Oxford’s back roads by Jeep or motorcycle on afternoons when the weather is fine. A man of frailer emotional stuff might find it a lonely condition to be one of Southern literature’s last men standing, laboring among the specters of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and more lately departed friends, but Hannah is philosophical. “I’ve grown used to having ghosts around,” he said.

SACRED GROUND

With a bit of huffing effort, Hannah, who is sixty-six, clambered over a cattle gate and stepped onto the meadow where Larry Brown is buried. “We’re on sacred ground now,” he said as he made his way down to the grave.

Hannah stood over the modest marker, which reads, “William Larry Brown, CPL US Marine Corps, Jul 9 1951–Nov 24 2004. The Road Goes on Forever.” He took a breath and spoke. “Old sport, I really miss you,” he said. “There’s just a vacuum in town, a hole, still. You did more with little than anybody I’ve ever met. You were a great, positive, helping friend.”

Hannah drew a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket and lit it. “You know, Larry never had anything bad to say about other writers,” he said. “He never had time to get any of that spiteful literary stuff going. He turned me on to Cormac McCarthy. Such a smart guy. Larry succeeded at whatever he touched. He did inherit that drinking gene, though, like I did, from his father.”

Then Hannah turned and walked a few dozen yards to the edge of the pond where he and Brown used to fish. He stood on the dock, peering at the smooth khaki surface of the water, which buckled now and again with the sheeny muscle of catfish and Florida bass. Talk turned from funereal to sporting matters. “I still fish when I can, but I throw them back now. I’ve been catch-and-release for so long.” Hannah, a gentle, courtly man who doesn’t much resemble the rough people in his books, also owns a good number of firearms, but he doesn’t care for hunting, or the killing of small things. “I’m an animal fan,” he said. “In my teens, I’d kill songbirds and woodpeckers, things I’d hate to hurt now. You’re just bloody-minded when you’re young. There was just no reason to shoot those beautiful things, and yet we did. But with fishing, there’s still that magic, that pull when you hook a fish. You never know what you’re gonna pull up.”

The afternoon sun was baleful, and the air wet and thick, yet Hannah seemed in no hurry to leave the pond, which, knowing his fiction, made a kind of sense. You can’t read twenty pages of Hannah’s work without stepping into a pond, a sea, or a creek. I asked him why that was. Hannah gazed out over the water’s dark, placid lid. “The mystery of it,” he said. “The savage nature underneath us. So calm on the surface, but down there, everything’s just eating the hell out of everything else.”