barry hannah an interview with

Cover of High Lonesome

james d. lilley and brian oberkirch 
an interview with
barry hannah 

This interview took place on October 23, 1996 on the balcony of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
Interviewer: Many of the narrators in your latest collection of stories, High Lonesome, seem to reflect on—perhaps even obsess over—things past. What role does memory play in your fiction?
Hannah: It plays an enormous role. Looking back, the obsession usually comes from guilt or incompleteness, and I think that is what haunts my memory—the incompleteness of everything. You wish it had been a story, you wish it had had meaning; sometimes you don’t see any meaning until ten—sometimes even twenty or thirty—years have passed.
But I don’t think that people change severely from when they are eighteen; the obsessions they are carrying around with them now were there before, so that when they look back they are looking at another version of the same thing. But I think that we all want to put things right, put things better. That’s maybe why we write. It should have been this way, it should have had a little more edge, we should have given a little bit more.
Sometimes you don’t want to arrange your memory. I love the pure chaos of it and just the reverie of it for its own sake. I think that is what a writer has: a better memory than most people, or at least a more sensual memory. Language and memory are what it is all about.

 

Interviewer: Perhaps not only a better memory, but a clearer vision as well? Robert Olen Butler said recently that what an artist is supposed to do is not avert his eyes.
Hannah: That’s true. Those that don’t avert their eyes are the real artists. It is concentration, that’s what Dostoevsky said. Concentration is what the artist is about: he can look, and look, and look, and look. He carries no brief. He will tell you everything he sees. This sensibility will overcome every tendency to capsulize or moralize or philosophize; it is why, despite the themes and philosophy announced in behalf of an author by others, the actual art experience is much more whole. Flannery O’Connor can never be accounted for by her Catholicism. There is something rich and deep and strange in her that just doesn’t get on a theorist’s page—that just does not explain itself by outlines. It’s a special feeling.
I know some writers who really are just above making change, but they can tell a story. It has nothing to do with what will show up on an IQ test. They are just gifted in a certain way—even sometimes as an idiot savant. Writers maybe just stare, like a cow—just staring. Most people don’t stare. A writer is unembarrassed to just keep looking.
Interviewer: A kind of wholeness of vision—not being partisan, not trying to reduce art to a statement. You can see that in a lot of your work: embracing both victory and defeat.
Hannah: Absolutely. In fact, I am sort of like the criminal writer Jean Genet who even embraced his prison. It was his paradise. I embrace even the bad colleges I have been to, the wretched, depressive experiences. The wrong towns, the wrong woman: all of this is part of you, and I like it now. I didn’t like it then—I’m not a masochist—but it’s life and you just take it, that’s what you are. You announce it.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t have philosophy or thoughts, but the thing is people in theory begin behaving like puppets. If you pick a theory of life it can sabotage you as an artist. I don’t think that Americans have had much theory. For instance, we have never had a significant Southern philosopher. Maybe Walker Percy—a high Catholic philosopher. But that is so rare in the South; it is a much more pragmatic, experiential place. I think you’ll find prejudice and religion in abundance in the South, but not a hell of a lot of philosophy. It’s just not a subject down here. Never has been. Southerners are more interested in music, in painting, in the expression of being alive.
Interviewer: The narrator of High Lonesome’s "Through Sunset Into the Raccoon Night" makes a comment that "Places do make people." Do you still see contemporary places shaping fiction?
Hannah: Yes. This guy has seen a number of significant creeps issue from St. Louis, and it bothers him because it makes him think he is a creep himself, probably, and that he is about to marry another creep from St. Louis. Sometimes even cities within the same state—Montgomery, Alabama and Mobile for instance—have a completely different character. And that is, what, 150 miles or so? I like the confidence bred in many people from New Orleans. They don’t even read that many books down there: they just live culture. The same thing is true of Mobile. There is a joie de vivre and an appreciation of the day—of eating, surf, wind—that is instantly recognizable if you just stand around and watch a little bit. There are many different American characters: Western, Southern, Northeastern . . . I teach at Bennington sometimes in the summer, and in my first trip up there I noticed in the Administration Hall that the pictures hung up there were of people dying from AIDS. You would not find here in the South pictures of AIDS victims. As many as have died of it, it is still not a reverenced disease. There is a huge difference in attitude. So when people from these two places go to France—they could both be ugly Americans—their experiences are going to be very different, very distinct. Yes, I think towns shape people.
Interviewer: There are some experiences shared by the land that just can’t help but shape you.
Hannah: Right. It’s only the elements that get to Americans. Like my mother’s big experience, she never stopped talking about the ’27 flood. My uncle, who was in World War II, but he had light duties, was in Hurricane Camille. Every time I visited him, he said "Son, that water was up to here . . .," and he died, this as the central experience of his life. It’s amazing, horrible, but also beautiful to him. Mobile lives with that. So, that’s what we have.
I’m still an addict of enormous weather. I just adore it. I would have died in a hurricane, as I have said in some story, "Just, come on. Show me what ya got."
Interviewer: Out on the balcony?
Hannah: On the balcony. "Come on, Baby." And I would have been drunk enough to die. The people who were drunk died in Hurricane Camille.
Interviewer: You mention France. How is your work—and perhaps contemporary Southern fiction in general—being received in Europe?
Hannah: Things black, things cowboy, things Southern seem to be very special in France now. I have no idea how to market myself, but if I were a real cynic I would probably get on a Lash Larue outfit, be a cowboy writer, and make a lot of jack. My French reception seems solid. I’ve had good reviews. I’ve only had one book, my last collection, Bats Out of Hell, translated—which took three years. The French translator gave up on about three stories. He thought that they were so Southern that there was no way to idiomize them—which shocked me because I thought I wrote pure American, but I still must be really Southern. I was on the French "Tonight Show," and my publisher is Gallimard, so I’ve got all the outlines of looking good in France. I hope I do. I’m just waiting. I think the French are going to buy three more books within the week, so I’m excited about France. I’ve always thought of it as sort of my spiritual home. I think of Henry Miller and France in the thirties—Ernest Hemingway. That era was why I became I writer. It excited me. I wanted to get on a plane and leave for Paris when I put down The Sun Also Rises. It was hard to be at home.
Interviewer: Do you have any sense why it is the regional writers who are particularly hot right now in France? Is there anything about France that lends itself to this kind of fiction?
Hannah: Well, it may be an unfortunate Americanizing of everything. But they have always loved noir theater, noir movies, even more than Americans. They love the down and out, the outcast, the gritty, the black, the pariah. I think they have an impression of America as a gargantuan, materialistic country, which it is, and they like the people who are left behind and who are on the outside—even to the extent of worshiping heroin addiction, or sickness even, as a virtue. The removed artist is a special character after Marcel Proust—he was allergic to everything and didn’t even come out of his room. This kind of thing is adored just in and of itself. Jim Harrison’s books are worshipped in France because of the savage grace in them—the untamed, the Montana, the Midwestern Indians, the alcoholic liable to violence. Deep adventures. Actually, they are worshiping what kids over here used to worship. I used to read for these very reasons. The world itself is becoming a colony of very bad American movies now, and I like anything literary almost—that’s vital, vivacious.
Interviewer: You’ve talked about place, but let’s talk a little about communities. Your characters seem to be interested in forming communities, however unlikely they might be. How important is community to you as a writer and to some of your characters in your books?
Hannah: Probably that became more important to me when I finally found a town—Oxford. I really think pals are heaven, as I say in my dedication to the Howorths [from High Lonesome]. There is something bracing about it. I have lost my folks. You gather pals and girl and boy friends and that’s your civilization. It is a small marriage: you have your own language, your own values. I like the different points of view in a community. I like the little fights—the fights over trees, over grass. It is something I personally need. Everybody wants respect—you go where there is respect—and you want life. It’s somehow more fun to have it with others. I remember I discovered California alone, and I was always wishing for someone to be with me. You know, "This is too good to have alone." I wanted my son, a girlfriend—I was a bachelor, divorced. I felt kind of greedy. It’s more fun to have things together.
Interviewer: Is it important for you to feel networked into a community of writers?
Hannah: No. But, I think it’s lovely that Larry Brown is here and that the students write supremely well. What I like is the high mark that is expected after Faulkner. You don’t have to love Faulkner, but there is a high mark that folks shoot for. It’s very strange in the poorest, probably the most illiterate, state in the union to have a town where this kind of excellence is expected. I think the onus is on the younger writers in this town to come up to the very highest of standards. They can’t buffalo people. They read books here. Quality is heralded. Even the bad book that makes a lot of money hasn’t buffaloed anybody on the streets of Oxford. They are glad for the author, but they are not sold on the prose. And this is electricians, tailors, doctors. I kind of like that. It’s not snobbish at all, but just that you expect good work—whether it’s painting, music, or writing.
Interviewer: You mention the influence of Faulkner. Who are some of the writers around at the moment who you admire and who influence you?
Hannah: Cormac McCarthy. It’s not just the language, although I can’t imagine loving his books without the special language. He’s one of the few writers who has a vision. Relentless. It’s very rough—almost fascistic, as nature is. Darwinian. But he gives such reverence to nature itself. I think that is why he seems atavistic; he likes the fact that there was a time when boulders, trees, mosses with lichens—all their individual names—participated right next to man. And even though there are horrible things that happen in his books, he’s quite sure that we have disconnected ourselves from the good stuff. He can make a gorgeous, almost epic, page out of a man riding a horse through a half decent meadow somewhere in Mexico. Actually, it kind of makes me excited in a positive way—does not depress me as it does others—because it makes me a participant in the universe. You are no longer just a dead man, floating. You’re right there with the stars, smoke, the peace, and the beauty—as well as the violence. It makes you a player.
I don’t think there is a better stylist in America than Tom McGuane. He writes with a sort of mod Shakespearean elegance. That’s very rare—you lose readers if you write that well nowadays, by the way. I never thought that I would be sitting on the porch, apologizing for my antiquarianess, but respect for the word in and of itself has become rare. Language has turned bland—democratic in a bad way. And very disposable, very disposable. The novels are more disposable because they are closer to information than they are to art. I think it is dreadful. It is up to you to make a difference, to see the world and raise the language. It doesn’t mean prettify, but exactify. It is up to the writer to be a scientist of the word. What else is he doing?
Interviewer: Given your recent comments in The New York Times Magazine, it seems that you think that the short story is a better way to do that—to revivify the language—than the novel.
Hannah: Yes. A guy is always in favor of what he is doing. Coming out in favor of the short story: I’ll put my gnat-like shoulder to the wheel. It doesn’t have an enormous audience. It is closer to poetry. There are more fireworks, there is more emotional depth possible, because of its concentration. Poe said a story should be read in one sitting, and I think he was right. Even a superb novel—getting up, going to work, putting it down, reading it in the bathroom, reading it at the beach—gives you a disconnected flow. My ideal novel is something like Camus’ The Stranger. I could not leave my chair; I thought I had a hold of something like heavy water—it was so distinct and rare. I had never read anything like it. To read that at twenty, and to never have had a hint that people could carry on like this. I think I finished it at four in the morning. I couldn’t get up. I remember that power.
I’m not a big playgoer because here in the South we just don’t have that many theaters, but I think that from the handful of successful plays I have seen it must be similar. You get something, in one night, from Shakespeare, or Beckett, Stoppard, or Pinter. All whole, sitting there. You are an active participant—in the room with the people. That’s what I want out of the short story. And the conventions of the novel almost have to be artificial.
Interviewer: Yammer and chat?
Hannah: Yammer and chat. And also plot line. Enormous coincidence is false to me. Like manipulation. I can feel it coming on in a book. I say, "Oh no, oh no." Here go the dollar signs. You can just hear the [sound of a cash register] "Cha-ching." Here comes the depraved uncle—you know. "Cha-ching." If you can write a novel without that falseness it is a tremendous achievement. I think the novel is still very vital; but you don’t have time to be phony in a short story. A reader can tell instantly if he is being manipulated, and I like that. It’s closer to real life art—living tissue. I don’t always get it, and no short story writer always gets it; in a collection there are going to be three or four duds. Like shooting out a big magazine: you think you’ve got it, you just keep trying. Usually it comes out by extreme honesty, where the language is inevitable, and people just believe it totally. And you believe it. Those are usually the successes.
And the other thing about the story is that it’s a huge compression. In my better stories I sometimes have a novel-length experience. I’ve got seven stories to tell, and I’ve just got to get one out of that material. So it’s reducing things to the very best, pulling slightly dissimilar experiences in time together, to make the power that your memory gives you. Your memory chugs along, and your consciousness chugs along, but there is power there you can never explain. You don’t know what it is, but you just try to come close to it when you write. So I am with Beckett when he says, "Fail again. Fail better." Fail better. And you will fail—you’re not going to get it all the time. But I’d rather read an ambitious failure that is not foolish than a well made American novel.
Interviewer: You mention your admiration of McCarthy. Who are some of the short story writers who are audacious and willing to take risks?
Hannah: Tim O’Brien has taken adventures in The Things They Carried. There are particular pieces in there, he told me, that are truthful but imagined. He made a daughter. I said, "Tim, I didn’t know about your daughter." He doesn’t have any children. And also those experiences walking the jungle that are sufficient unto themselves—because they are beginning, middle, and end nightmares. You just can’t imagine yourself at nineteen strolling through this jungle, with this around you, and this crew. And it just stops. You’re on another plane, as you are in McCarthy. You’re in this fierce, unforgiving, hideous condition like the most ghastly but wonderful painting you have ever seen.
Nobody’s going to complain if Tim O’Brien still tells Vietnam stories when he’s eighty. They might get better. Deeper. They can be even more accurate. I wouldn’t complain. He might bore himself, but that’s the central event of his life. When I was drinking, we were on this porch once and he said, "Hannah, you are the wildest guy in American letters." I said, "You fool! You volunteered for Vietnam." I mean, this country boy didn’t want anything to do with Vietnam. I thought it was rotten. He had a fancy education and still went over. There’s a wildness in Tim. I think that it’s very beautiful to live long enough so that your past and your friends become meaningful to you as good history.
Interviewer: There is a story in The Things They Carried—"How to Tell a True War Story"—where O’Brien talks about the need to make some things up in order to get at the truth. I know that you have been reading a lot of nonfiction, especially histories and biographies . . .
Hannah: Yes. I’ve been reading histories and biographies for about four or five years now.
Interviewer: I was wondering how nonfiction and fiction interact in your work. It is made very explicit with a couple of the nonfiction stories from your latest collection, but it seems to have always been a part of your work. Boomerang, for example.
Hannah: Yes, in Boomerang I tried something similar. I began seeing that much of our best writing was in history and biography—I think because reality has caught up with imagination, as Phillip Roth suggested in the sixties. The novel no longer stuns us. You’re never shocked. I saw on CBS news the other day the first thing I’ve actually been shocked by recently. Men driving stakes through their stomachs on videotape. I couldn’t sleep.
But I haven’t been disturbed by anything in ages, and I’m a horror movie buff. I keep going back like a sad child—I’m trying not to be jaded. I love the biography because there’s not the veil of "let’s pretend." That’s the thing that is wrong with art. You’ve got to have not only a willing suspension of disbelief, but I also wanted to know that what I was reading was real. I don’t like to be carried into purely fanciful circumstances. The fancifulness is just not for me. I have never been drawn to fantasy writing, for instance. The never never lands of the imagination have not interested me that much.
The thing that puts you there, but puts you in a special space that you cannot get anywhere else but the page—that’s what I’m interested in. I know we’re not historians, but I love great history because you are just flabbergasted that it actually happened. You cannot quite believe it. There is plenty in life that is this way. Time gives it to you. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s not a day dream—you only see it was a story by living past it.
I expect to go on and do things very much like High Lonesome. I do like interesting facts now more. I don’t like dead information; I hate it more than ever. I love the living tissue of facts.
Interviewer: So perhaps another reason why you admire McCarthy stems from the way in which he uses—rewrites even—history.
Hannah: Right. And I’m a big Western buff, so my favorite is Blood Meridian. I’m not a big horse man—he makes me love horses, although I don’t like them that much. I love to see them run the Derby. But it’s the cowboys and Indians, on a much fiercer level, that make you admit things to yourself. The book opens up with a skull—three thousand years old—that had been scalped. This kind of grotesque need to maim that you don’t acknowledge as a part of yourself. You may deny it, and you don’t do it of course, but it helps to notice that’s a part of you so that you are not shocked and can deal with it better. None of the polls account for how human beings really are. These things are not accounted for. This is what the artist does: CNN will never get it right about who human beings are. Who would have thought that in 1996 there are people shooting themselves in the stomach, or ramming wooden stakes through themselves—relinquishing everything for Saddam. "I do this for you." They were driving stakes into a guy’s head. This is a part of the freaks’ circus we thought had been abandoned. It’s right in there. You get Saddam watching "Little House on the Prairie" and shedding tears while cruise missiles are coming. This is a mission. You know he was an orphan. And so he’s watching American TV—his tears are coming down for his own pain. He never had a house. I mean, this is it. This is the millennium.
Interviewer: So you are a truth teller?
Hannah: Yes. That kind of truth needs to be told. It helps you get along better in life when you realize that everyone’s human. I had a kind of bad review on High Lonesome yesterday. Some dude who sent me down a novel I ignored wrote it. I understand he is a guy, and there are resentments, there are personalities. Maybe that’s why reviews don’t hurt me as much. They just devastate other writers I know. A particular day, a guy. He is sore, his life is not going on that well—nobody’s taking his books. It takes down that curtain when you know that folks are folks. The artist does that as a matter of habit.
Interviewer: What gets you to writing? What are your writing habits, particularly with these last two books, the massive collection Bats Out of Hell and this latest collection?
Hannah: Maybe I can contrast it to the hugely successful writer of the town, John Grisham. I can’t imagine writing entertainments, even on a classical level, on a schedule. Even if he were like le Carré, I can’t imagine entertaining with a formula. I don’t have it. I’m not good at it. In fact, I think I would have picked up thousands of more readers had I been better at plotting. Plot has never interested me. I think I’m a dash man. I see explosive circumstances with interesting people. They just come to me any time of the day, sometimes in my dreams. And the best art, I think, is very close to dreams anyway. So, my inspiration is constant, but I can go for a month without having a story. It bothers me, but I just don’t have anything to say. I work like a banker, however, when I’m hot. I mean, I get up at four and write till three, and then call James for tennis. I’ve got to get out of the house, be with a pal or go out on the Square. Because it’s possession, it’s obsessive. That’s why books, novels, wring me out. Physically, they’re terrible on me. I’m trying to write one now, but, it’s faithful to life and art, for me, to work on two heavy scenes. Two or three heavy scenes with folks.
And maybe I still have some anger. Littleness, bullies, commercialism—the standard enemies of the bohemian are still mine. I don’t like to see my country consumed by big money in everything. I’m tired of watching magazine after magazine coming out with Madonna or another semi-talented millionaire face. The face or the image, I much resist. So there’s a lot of anger. It’s very unreal. The phony smile. Why am I interested in a person who owns dollars? Why is the person more interesting? I’ve never got it. So, it’s anger.
And I think a love of women. The mystery of women through the times. I’ve been a student, like Freud. But, they’re very different creatures, and people who try to forget that, try to mold us together, are idiots. I was raised by strong women. Women controlled the money, the home. Little biddy women dictating. They do in the South. So, I don’t know what feminism was all about. So what do you want? You want in the market place, now. To have the letterhead. Of course, women have been disgraced by low salaries and so on, but I’ve always known about their power. You know? I didn’t think they were lacking power.
Interviewer: You mentioned that you are working on a novel at the moment.
Hannah: Yeah, but like a stutterer, until I reach the good stuff. Something I’ll be passionate about for months.
Interviewer: Bats Out of Hell is such a voluminous, immense book in many ways, and I’m wondering how the writing process for that compares to High Lonesome.
Hannah: It was a book unlike any other I’ve written. My Dad had died, I knew he wouldn’t see it. He was 87; he had a full life, and we were very close. He was a dear man to me. I had quit drinking about six months before Dad’s death, and I had been depressed from lack of chemicals, I guess. Couldn’t write, couldn’t think. Then my father died. About two weeks later, just absolute liberation. I couldn’t stop writing for a year and half. He died during Desert Storm, and I started writing the book on the back porch. I started in with that Desert Storm story, maybe the last one in the book. It’s been so long now, it seems like ancient history. I just started doing a take on those missile folks over there. "That Was Close, Ma." So I just started. Other stories built up. "Rat-faced Auntie." And they were forty-five page stories. They were unpublishable lengths. The Chicago Review wanted to do "Rat-faced Auntie" in sections, by issue, and I thought that was a bad idea. I don’t think it was ever published. "Rat-faced Auntie" was done in Italian in one big chapbook. Another long one, ["Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?"] the father whose son is a poet going nuts and getting into trouble—he’s from Mobile, he lives on the Eastern Shore—that’s a forty page one. The Santa Monica Review did it. See, the big slicks, they have too many Cole Hahn shoes, too much Chivas Regal and overcoats to wedge you in there. In fact, my newest story in Esquire, "Two Gone Over," I was delighted they ran it straight.
But it didn’t matter. I knew that these were not commercially viable, but I just couldn’t stop. My mother and I spent some fine time together; she was also beginning to die. We got honest with each other, more than ever. I was on the back porch; I think I felt liberated being at home, back in my old circumstances, that things were at an end, that maybe I had to be more of a champion now. Maybe my Dad’s spirit sort of entered me; I started believing more in hard work. But they just came, I couldn’t wait to get up at three, four. Even on vacation. I was on fire with the book, and, actually, I don’t think all of it is the very best I’ve done, but certain stories may be as good as I’ve got. I don’t think that really violent thing with Pusalina ["Ride Westerly for Pusalina"], which caused me a few attacks for misogyny, I don’t think it’s a great story. I just had some fun with my love of the West, thought I’d put a vampire nun in the West. It’s one of those ideas that comes down the pike and you just do it.
Interviewer: What were some of the prime movers for this new collection?
Hannah: They were much more deliberate stories. With about three exceptions, from the past almost literally. Literally from events, formed only by my separation from them in time. My friend’s suicide in "Drummer Down," it did take me three years to write. I didn’t want to write it; I didn’t want to disgrace his memory. It’s so hard to get it right when a close pal goes down. Finally, I got the strength and some vision to do it. The "Carriba" story I was actually working for Esquire, and I got about halfway through it, with this young son who killed the father who had shot the policeman on the square. And it got to me, it was so sordid and awful, I just told Esquire, "Thanks. I can’t do it." Murder is just so horrible on the families. I just felt poisonous trying to make it interesting to a public. There’s something ugly about journalism. Because finally, it’s going to make me money, they get nothing. The media is really not a very nice institution on that level.
Interviewer: So the guy in your story tries to be more than just a "hag and a parasite."
Hannah: He does something about it, which I wanted to. I said "Come on up to Oxford," and I was in line to help the boys, both of them, go to college, but they hardly ever elect to that class. I only knew them for a couple of weeks, and they’d rather live with the familiar. It’s what they knew. But the kid did look like a movie star, and he was just in horrible circumstances.
Interviewer: Talking about beautiful youths, your first story in this collection, "Get Some Young," is a sharp contrast to what we’re used to in your other recent short story collections, which begin in the elderly community of Farte Cove. We’ve got a completely different community of young people here.
Hannah: That’s also from my youth. The beautiful guy is imaginary, but I have seen beautiful people and life surrounds them in a different way. People are good to them, but also they have fathers who messed with them. There’s also some noteworthy ugliness to their coming up. So, it was invented out of experience, although Swanly is fictional. You enjoy having a beautiful pal along. It’s not homosexual, it’s pride of association. I see some of these beautiful frat guys, and it’s just like society surrounds them when they walk out of class. The girls come up, almost like a rock star. And it’s phenomenal.
Interviewer: Is there something, again, about having a distance from which to look back at it, too? There are these two people, kind of elderly, looking back at youth.
Hannah: I’ve also seen the way people feed off of young lives in this town. There are some older and middle-aged people who are rather pathetic. They live off of college events. They get to drooling when the talk is about nineteen-year olds playing football, and they’re fifty. I’m a fan, but not on that level. This worship. They have no real lives; their lives apparently stopped when they were twenty two. And that’s not uncommon in America. It may be American, in fact. That we about all stop when Huck Finn lights out for the territory. It’s also James Matthew Barrie, the Peter Pan guy: certain quotes from him are astounding. "Nothing that happens after we’re twelve matters very much." I think I see that in middle-aged people here. They have no lives; they only talk about their children. Older people attending to the young that way always amazed me.
Interviewer: "Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night" begins "You get on, and one day it occurs to you that you might be doing something rather important for the last time."
Hannah: He’s getting married. He’s going to start something or stop something. Different and odd things in marriage come up that are untoward or sometimes rather poisonous. Like he and his fiancé seem to be privy to a number of car wrecks, and their reaction is not unusual: violence increases horniness. It’s horrible, but it’s true; there’s a condition in us that loves to watch violence from afar. In the same way that when you go to a funeral you feel twice as alive, because you’re not the dead one. These things should be said. It’s a little bit ugly, but it’s human. Also, marriage astounds people with how ordinary they are. You thought that you were a wild bohemian, and yet, when two people get together you go around buying stuff. Or talking about your grape arbor. I’ve seen this happen to hippies. Hippies who suddenly become landowners. A friend of mine, who’s kind of a hippie musician, she and her husband bought land and started having to put up "No Trespassing" signs. You could tell it was killing them, but all these old guys who fished there for fifty years kept driving up at all hours. They just couldn’t have it. So, here they’ve become landowners.
Marriage makes you ordinary, and you resent it somewhat. You become a denominator that you didn’t expect. Just to have the little civilization, the compromise is enormous. Now, [in the story] I’m on her side, because he’s too old to be having his mainly negative principles. It’s not all good, it ain’t ever going to be all good. I think it’s wrong to believe in heaven itself. A lot of us believed in a kind of purity of existence for too long. I did. I was always expecting too much from folks in situations, and it made me distanced and a snob. Maybe that’s why I also drank a great deal. Nothing was ever quite up to par. I had that cynical liberal arts attitude. Looking for a miracle. And it cuts you off, spiritually, from life. You don’t experience a good game, because it’s a little beneath you. You end up sitting on your couch, despising where you are. And that’s what he would face: further pessimism and bleakness about people. At least he’s got a spark with the woman, even though they can’t talk. Their occasional moments are probably worth having, and healthy. People say I’m mellowing or maturing; maybe so. But part of it is just recognizing the inevitable. It’s like fighting with your parents for the rest of your life over things that will never be solved. It’s just stupid. You’ve got to come to some accord or just be miserable. You’re not going to convert everybody. You go around the world trying to correct everyone’s tennis swing, and you’re an asshole. People do enjoy their errors; they enjoy their bad cars, their bad towns.
Interviewer: Donald Kartigainer commented that he saw Bats Out of Hell as a love story.
Hannah: Much of it is. I think Don’s right. I’m always fascinated by who gets married and why. Just on kind of a beauty shop level, I love great gossip. Great gossip is akin to great art for me. It’s the secrets no one will tell. I understand it on, I hope, a deep, curious level. Gossip of the other variety is always to elevate yourself. You know, "I’m so glad I’m not a cokehead like him," or "My wife doesn’t run up a $200,000 bill at Village Tailor I can’t pay." This vicious sniping I don’t care for at all. I like to know the secrets though. There are more freaks on campus. This is where you meet the world. This old thing about not being in the real world in college is baloney. I mean we have suicide, we’ve got drugs, we’ve got violence, we’ve got sexism, we’ve got rape. And you’ve got engineers, psychiatrists. It is the world. Also, it’s like Roy Blount said. They told him when he was in college, "Son, this ain’t the real world, just wait." And he said, "And you know, they were right. When I got out in the world I found out it wasn’t college, it was high school." You go back to the vicious powers in high school. You go back down. After thinking that ideas move the world, that theories, that people are sensible, that you use your education, and then you go right back down to who’s class president. Who’s popular. Keeping your attitude in shape.
Interviewer: Ned Maxy could be the latest avatar of Ned Maximus. Will he ride again? What was the fate of Maximum Ned, your Hendrix book?
Hannah: The Hendrix book never got written. I was also interested at one time in the cavalry general Jeb Stuart. I thought I was interested in him book-length. But I wasn’t. It was the people who were around him, his effect on others. After all my massive reading in the Civil War, I was more interested in his effect as the last cavalier, on his troops. Three stories, I think.
Hendrix is similar. Hendrix is to be enjoyed like a Romantic poet—in bursts. The book on Hendrix has been written by others. I wasn’t as interested in his biography as I thought. I find him an amazing man; I love the American side to the story. That he was in the paratroopers, that helicopters probably inspired the huge volume. That he thought of turning the volume up to ten and starting there—it sounds so simple now, like something a sophomore with two beers could come up with—but nobody had ever done it. He turns it up to ten, and if he breathes on a string, he can use that. He was a genius. I still think there’s nobody like that on guitar, I mean for the inroads he made.
Interviewer: So the stories in Captain Maximus he makes his way into you think are the right vehicle for that?
Hannah: Right. There is no review for a truly wonderful musician. A good review is impossible. It’s beyond words. To prove my point, try reading Spin or Rolling Stone. As they say, often written by people who can’t write for those who can’t read. And all they can do is say "It’s sort of like this other guy, sort of like this band," and it’s so conditional that the review winds up as total incoherence. Just referential. Berserk in a pedantic way; it leaves out being there. Being there is it. God Bless you lads if you want to write about Cormac McCarthy, I couldn’t. I don’t really have the English. And I hope I will write books like that someday. That there is just not quite the language yet to describe it. I would aspire to the condition of music.
Interviewer: Music and painting and other art forms, do they work their way into your style?
Hannah: Absolutely. Although I have no talent in painting, never had a course. I’ve seen the Impressionists in Paris, as thousands have. They’re the biggest thing in Paris. I think it’s the only experimental art that made itself into the mainstream in such a huge commercial way in my time. There’s no parallel in fiction. Ulysses has never been mainstream, never will be.
Music, certainly. Nothing gets to you better than the tune, sometimes the words. It’s ineffable. It is the highest thing you can reach for. It is beyond good and evil; that’s why I don’t like to attach morality or philosophy to the deepest things I feel. They’re just beyond it. And it is benign. It makes you know that, goddamn, it is worth being a human being. It is really worth it. If these people were here and felt this much, then, Christ, it’s a hell of a planet.
Interviewer: It gives hope?
Hannah: Right, it gives hope. That’s why I love to hear the stories about people in down and out circumstances, like Tom Waites, who really had a kind of ugly voice to give, but who is just wonderful. And Dylan can’t sing, but he had the desperation of not being able to sing which is better than, say, Glen Campbell, who can sing. Some of the writers I like are not born writers. The struggle you can feel. There’s Larry Brown in that. He is a born writer, but sometimes the biggest experience I have in Brown is where the characters are reaching out for a little larger word, a bigger, more whole experience beyond the six pack. The gestures are important.
We writers know, all of us who have an ear, that we cannot touch music. The people who try to duplicate it on the page—idiocy. Even Edgar Allan Poe, his worst experiments. To try to be bells. Although he was the most musical—the French adore him because he was pure music. You aspire to that condition. A good story, a good poem, a novel, will just simply take you into another zone. There’s no explanation; there are no elders around telling you what to feel, or telling you the philosophy of this. It just is.
Blake knew that. The question was "Who the hell made you? Why are you here, tiger? How can you be this beautiful?" You know, it’s just "Wow." That’s why the hippies liked it. In fact, I wrote my Master’s thesis on Blake, ‘cause I was a kind of hippie. "Wow. How can this be?" And LSD—there’s no literature; Ken Kesey, a few scenes. But, you know, "Whoa." It’s that gleam I get from a fine story.
Interviewer: You’ve talked before about how you’re not necessarily interested in plot, but in story and voice. What is the importance of voice for your fiction?
Hannah: For me, it’s everything. And it’s not that I get it right in every story. That’s why I don’t believe in such a thing as a perfect story. I was taught in graduate school that this story by Updike is perfect, this story by Joyce is perfect. This hard, gem-like flame. It’s not perfect for everybody. Joyce and Updike bore very intelligent people sometimes. There are a number of ways a story can be told, and if you’re lucky you get the voice that tells it the best. Then a lot of your problems of form, structure, are solved. It’s just a natural voice. Pause. I’ve said enough about this. Just as if I were trying to entertain you, I would know when to quit. I’d say "That’s enough, I’m boring him. This is too personal. This is not relevant." I think form and real experiment in fiction comes from voice. How long could this go on? How good is it? And then you pause. The physicality of the body has a lot to do with form. And more people are familiar with the natural way a story should be told, even when it’s unconventional. I think the brain is ready for it.
Interviewer: So maybe one of the reasons Ray looks the way it does is because of the voice?
Hannah: Yeah. It’s very asthmatic, frantic, depressed. But a manic depressive, he jumps and jumps and jumps. That book brought me a much bigger national audience that I ever expected. I thought it would be a very small, eccentric book, and it probably got me more attention as a novelist than any of my books. Geronimo Rex got a lot of attention, but it’s much more conventional. It’s picaresque: this happened, then this happened, as I grew up I did this.
This is what Beckett is all about: he decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs, with its formulas. And yet, he wanted art. But he wanted it right from life. He didn’t like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive. He went into French to cut down. And he bores the hell out of a lot of people because he wants to talk about desperate individual existence. But he made a kind of joy out of depression. I find him a joyous writer; his stories read like prayers. You don’t have to think about literary allusions, but your dead-on experience itself. That’s what I want from the voice. I want it to transcend artiness. I want the veil of "Let’s Pretend" out. I want the voice to draw you in. But you can turn phony; you can start writing like somebody else. A number of bad things can happen. If you’re young, you may tend to imitate Ray Carver or whoever you may have been reading. To be honest and interesting is the challenge. And not to be phony. There’s a lot of bogus experimentation where somebody adopts hip or alien attitudes, and you can almost always tell by about the third page. "I don’t believe it; I don’t believe it." If you’ve got an ear, and a heart, "Uh Uh. This is concocted." Because a man will reveal himself quickly, as if a witness at a trial. Intonations. You can tell when someone is being deliberately eccentric or weird if you listen. Talking you can tell it, and you can tell in a story too.
They say that the most natural writer born in America was Mark Twain. He just seems to have begun talking. I think that’s what I’m after. I don’t know how natural, I have some gifts. But just to be as natural as Twain and to be as witty. Without effort. To be hilarious and unconscious of yourself as a comic. I love that stuff.

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