Posted: 06 Mar 2010 05:48 AM PST A Short Story by Barry Hannah
Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay
"Water Liars," from Airships
By Barry Hannah
When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.
I’m glad it’s not my name.
This poor dignified man has had to explain his nobility to the semiliterate of half of America before he could even begin a decent conversation with them. On the other hand, Farte, Jr., is a great liar himself. He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tells big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghosts took out of Farte Cove in years past.
Last year I turned thirty-three years old and, raised a Baptist, I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three. It had all seemed especially important, what you do in this year, and holy with meaning.
On the morning after my birthday party, during which I and my wife almost drowned in vodka cocktails, we both woke up to the making of a truth session about the lovers we’d had before we met each other. I had a mildly exciting and usual history, and she had about the same, which surprised me. For ten years she’d sworn I was the first. I could not believe her history was exactly equal with mine. It hurt me to think that in the era when there were supposed to be virgins she had allowed anyone but me, and so on.
I was dazed and exhilarated by this information for several weeks. Finally, it drove me crazy, and I came out to Farte Cove to rest, under the pretense of a fishing week with my chum Wyatt.
I’m still figuring out why I couldn’t handle it.
My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. The movement of every limb in every passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.
You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.
I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.
My vacation at Farte Cove wasn’t like that easy little bit you get as a rich New Yorker. My finances weren’t in great shape; to be true, they were about in ruin, and I left the house knowing my wife would have to answer the phone to hold off, for instance, the phone company itself. Everybody wanted money and I didn’t have any.
I was going to take the next week in the house while she went away, watch our three kids and all the rest. When you both teach part-time in the high schools, the income can be slow in summer.
No poor-mouthing here. I don’t want anybody’s pity. I just want to explain. I’ve got good hopes of a job over at Alabama next year. Then I’ll get myself among higher-paid liars, that’s all.
Sidney Farte was out there prevaricating away at the end of the pier when Wyatt and I got there Friday evening. The old faces I recognized; a few new harkening idlers I didn’t.
“Now, Doctor Mooney, he not only saw the ghost of Lily, he says he had intercourse with her. Said it was involuntary. Before he knew what he was doing, he was on her making cadence and all their clothes blown away off in the trees around the shore. She turned into a wax candle right under him.”
“Intercourse,” said an old-timer, breathing heavy. He sat up on the rail. It was a word of high danger to his old mind. He said it with a long disgust, glad, I guess, he was not involved.
“MacIntire, a Presbyterian preacher, I seen him come out here with his son-and-law, anchor near the bridge, and pull up fifty or more white perch big as small pumpkins. You know what they was using for bait?”
“What?” asked another geezer.
“Nuthin. Caught on the bare hook. It was Gawd made them fish bite,” said Sidney Farte, going at it good.
“Naw. There be a season they bite a bare hook. Gawd didn’t have to’ve done that,” said another old guy, with a fringe of red hair and a racy Florida shirt.
“Nother night,” said Sidney Farte, “I saw the ghost of Yazoo hisself with my pa, who’s dead. A Indian king with four deer around him.”
The old boys seemed to be used to this one. Nobody said anything. They ignored Sidney.
“Tell you what,” said a well-built small old boy. “That was somethin when we come down here and had to chase that whole high-school party off the end of this pier, them drunken children. They was smokin dope and two-thirds a them nekid swimmin in the water. Good hunnerd of em. From your so-called good high school. What you think’s happnin at the bad ones?”
I dropped my beer and grew suddenly sick. Wyatt asked me what was wrong. I could see my wife in 1960 in the group of high-schoolers she must have had. My jealousy went out into the stars of the night above me. I could not bear the roving carelessness of teen-agers, their judgeless tangling of wanting and bodies. But I was the worst back then. In the mad days back then, I dragged the panties off girls I hated and talked badly about them once the sun came up.
“Worst time in my life,” said a new, younger man, maybe sixty but with the face of a man who had surrendered, “me and Woody was fishing. Had a lantern. It was about eleven. We was catching a few fish but rowed on into that little cove over there near town. We heard all these sounds, like they was ghosts. We was scared. We thought it might be the Yazoo hisself. We known of some fellows the Yazoo had killed to death just from fright. It was the over the sounds of what was normal human sighin and amoanin. It was big unhuman sounds. We just stood still in the boat. Ain’t nuthin else us to do. For thirty minutes.”
“An what was it?” said the old geezer, letting himself off the rail.
“We had a big flashlight. There came up this rustlin in the brush and I beamed it over there. The two of em making the sounds get up with half they clothes on. It was my own daughter Charlotte and an older guy I didn’t even know with a mustache. My own daughter, and them sounds over the water scarin us like ghosts.”
“My Gawd, that’s awful,” said the old geezer by the rail. “Is that the truth? I wouldn’t’ve told that. That’s terrible.”
Sidney Farte was really upset.
“This ain’t the place!” he said. “Tell your kind of story somewhere else.”
The old man who’d told his story was calm and fixed to his place. He’d told the truth. The crowd on the pier was outraged and discomfited. He wasn’t one of them. But he stood his place. He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about.
I told Wyatt to bring the old man back to the cabin. He was out here away from his wife the same as me and Wyatt. Just an older guy with a big hurting bosom. He wore a suit and the only way you’d know he was on vacation was he’d removed his tie. He didn’t know where the bait house was. He didn’t know what to do on vacation at all. But he got drunk with us and I can tell you he and I went out the next morning with our poles, Wyatt driving the motorboat, fishing for white perch in the cove near the town. And we were kindred.
We were both crucified by the truth.
Airships © 1978 by Barry Hannah, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press.  |
Posted: 06 Mar 2010 03:18 AM PST
Barry Hannah directed the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford. APBarry Hannah directed the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford. Award-winning author Barry Hannah died of a heart attack in his home on March 1, leaving behind an impressive body of work that includes nine novels and four collections of short stories.
Hannah's favorite setting was the American South. Born in Mississippi, the author imbued his novels with a fresh, Southern flare. His talent was compared with such giants of Southern literature as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.
Hannah broke onto the literary scene in 1972 with his debut novel, Geronimo Rex, a coming of age story that won the William Faulkner prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. He followed that with the short story collection Airstrips, another award-winning literary work which explored the Vietnam and Civil Wars and the modern South. His final work, a collection of stories called Sick Soldiers at Your Door, is set to be published later this year.
Hannah's style was described as intensely personal, frenetic and comedic. In remembrance, we listen back on an interview with the novelist and short story writer who Truman Capote once called "the maddest writer in the U.S.A."
This interview was originally broadcast on July 31, 2001.
via npr.org
March 4, 2010 - TERRY GROSS, host:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=124275611
The novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah died of a heart attack Monday. He was 67. We're going to listen back to excerpt of the interview I recorded with him. Larry McMurtry called Hannah the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Conner. William Styron described Hannah as an original, one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation.
Hannah wrote about the American South. He grew up in Mississippi and taught for many years at the University Mississippi. He won the William Faulkner prize and was a National Book Award finalist.
When I spoke with him in July 2001, his book "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" had just been published. The title borrowed a line from the Dylan song, "It's All Over Now Baby Blue." There are orphans and guns in the novel and plenty of evil as a killer changes the lives of everyone around him. Hannah wrote the book while getting chemotherapy treatments for lymphoma.
MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP
Here's Hannah introducing a short reading from the book.
Mr. BARRY HANNAH (Author): This is Man Mortimer, who is the evil that lurks in this book and he likes to cut people. He comes from Missouri, and this little piece about him.
At this juncture he had no plans to hurt people around the lake. He did not like bodies of water much, had never seen the ocean. He was indifferent to trees. Soil was hateful to him, as was the odor of fish. But like many another man, forty-five years in age, he wanted his youth back.
He wanted to have pals, sports, high school girls. This need had rushed on him lately. He lived in three houses, but he had no home. He did not like the hearth, smells from the kitchen, an old friend for a wife, small talk. It all seemed a vicious closet to him. He moved, he took, he was admired. But he had developed a taste for young and younger flesh. This was thrilling and meant high money. Men and women in this nation were changing, and he intended to charge them for it.
Religion had neither formed nor harmed him. Neither had his parents in southern Missouri. But he despised the weakness of the church, and of his parents, whom he had gulled. He was a pretty boy born of hawk-nosed people. It was a curse to have these looks and no talent. Long and lank. Hooded eyes, sensual lips that sang no tune. Still, he quit the football team because of what it did to his hair, claiming a back ailment that had exempted him from manual labor since age 14. There are thousands of men of this condition, most of them sorry and shiftless, defeated at the start. Many are compulsive and snarling fools, emeritus at 20.
GROSS: Is this character of Man Mortimer based on anyone?
Mr. HANNAH: No he's not. He's a compound and I've gotten just by looking around and believing that I perceived evil in front of me. So it is imaginative but a collected history of my impressions, I believe.
GROSS: You describe him as a quiet man, a gambler, a liaison for stolen cars and a runner of whores, including three Vicksburg housewives. Describe his kind of crime.
Mr. HANNAH: His kind of crime is the kind of crime that begins out of laziness and being admired by women. He finds he can make a living at it, and he continues since he ran away from home in high school. He's not been particularly violent but he has induced violence and suicides in others. He is a thief. He has a stolen car ring, especially expensive SUV's. He's a man who doesnt like to work and he doesnt like much of what's offered by nature. So I've seen him as an alien without real pals and only a commercial connection to women.
He wants to join in society now but he only knows how to hurt, and that's the basis of the book - evil when it reaches out to you and when it befriends you. And in Mortimer's case, he likes to use a knife. He's dangerous and he has made quite a deal of money off the casino life around Vicksburg.
GROSS: Has evil like Man Mortimer's kind of evil ever come into your life?
Mr. HANNAH: I've been around it. Usually evil is something you can't face. It simply has to wear out. Sometimes you work for evil unwittingly. And I can't think of a particular person right now, but I think I've felt the closeness of evil in casinos and it brings out the old Baptist in me. I find the wretched excess and the sort of zombified folks that attend and participate in casinos pathetic and also dangerous in many cases.
GROSS: Now what about violence? There's some violence in this book. Has violence come into your life? Have you witnessed it? Have you ever had a violent streak yourself?
Mr. HANNAH: I liked to throw knives back in my drinking days. But no, I've never been personally violent. I can't be an honest man though, and tell you -but that I am occupied by violence. It seems to be out of my nightmares. And my wife wishes I wouldnt write about violence, but as soon as the pen starts going I become interested in it all over again and as if it's almost dictated to me. I've been writing for 35 years and it's attended a good deal of my work. At this point, I dont think I can do anything but confess that I am a student - and of violence, because of what it does - because of how it quickens the character of those around it.
GROSS: Youve also collected guns, right?
Mr. HANNAH: I've collected guns. Yes.
GROSS: And have you used them? What kind of things do you use them for?
Mr. HANNAH: I have not used a gun in 10 years.
GROSS: Mm-hmm.
Mr. HANNAH: If I used them right now I'd shoot beer cans at the city dump. It's a 22 rifle. Now, I dont have any real personal urge to shoot anymore. It just past, and I've never shot at a human being, never threatened a human being, if that's covering the subject.
GROSS: So what did you use the guns for?
Mr. HANNAH: You know, this is a difficult thing to explain to others about how a gun is a piece of art. Guns are history. I like to look at the mechanism. I like to feel the heft. And they are a kind of history. So that's about all I can say. I dont collect guns anymore but I'm not sorry for the ones I have. They just feel like a decent hunk of the past hanging on the wall.
GROSS: Describe where you grew up.
Mr. HANNAH: I grew up in Clinton, Mississippi, which is right outside the state capital in Jackson. But it was a distinct village; about 2,000 people with a little college - a little Baptist college. So that we had professors and for neighbors. And the culture of the Baptist church, the high school band, and the football team. That was it. That was civilization as I knew it. Also there was no crime. We disappeared sometimes in the summer at eight o'clock in the morning, didnt come back until seven at night. There was no fear because we -the whole village took care of us.
GROSS: Did you go to the Baptist church?
Mr. HANNAH: Oh yes, I did. Yeah.
GROSS: What was the oratory like in the church and do you think that that influenced your sense of storytelling or the way you write?
Mr. HANNAH: The preachers did not, but the Bible itself has. I just, the rhythms of the Old and New Testament, the King James version, are just as solidly set in a person of my era who went to church as a moral foundation. I make sentences, I'm sure, from Biblical rhythms. I've been called post-Modernist but I doubt it. I think I just write in more fragmented ways and narration. But the base of my sentences, although they are sometimes Baroque, is I think from the Scriptures as far as I can feel it myself.
We read a lot of the Bible. We knew Scriptures by heart, especially Psalms and a great bit of the Book of John, the Sermon on the Mount, and - from Matthew and certain things like that were memorized. And I had them memorized until I was 15-16 years old.
GROSS: Can you think of a line or a passage from the Bible that has the kind of rhythms that youre speaking of, and how they influenced you?
Mr. HANNAH: Yeah, it's something like the 23 Psalm. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow and so on. But this had just a such wonderful basic human poetry in it. And I never was sophisticated enough to consider the Bible as literature until I was - I never even heard the term the Bible as literature until I was way into graduate school. So I - in fact, I'd stopped going to church. But the church is - the Scriptures are very much with me and more and more now I'm reading Mark and John in the Bible. Not all the time but I just love the clarity and the mystery at the same time.
GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
Mr. HANNAH: You bet.
GROSS: Barry Hannah recorded in July 2001. He died Monday of a heart attack at the age of 67. His work is the focus of this year's Annual Oxford Conference of the Book, which began today. The conference is dedicated to him. Coming up, David Edelstein reviews Tim Burton's new film "Alice in Wonderland."
This is FRESH AIR.
Comment: (only thing that's made me laugh all night)
Bobby Peru (bobby_peru) wrote:
The book of stories is called Airships, not Airstrips. Its phenomenal, by the way.
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=104639982898687
"Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself."
Richard Ford
Barry Hannah Search Results from my Emails:
Dear Mel, You'll never guess where in wr ng this letter from?:. O house of alcohol.
I m raised and confused because both alcohol and because I've been on the set of "Unchain My Heart" - the story of Ray Charles, played by Jaime Fox, where I have a role that draws extrema not frolicking all day today and I found a fridge full of beer from the airport I started drinking when he throat became clear we were not going to get tonight.
So effectually they gave us a call time of 6>00 am tomorrow to do the same stuff mothering.
But I saw my ex ex girlfriend by chance, who now lives in Los Angeles and holds an MA in costume design and worked on the film - very soporific her to talk to me after what I put the poor thro0uhg child when she lived w me on Royal, I am a walker airport as a supplement and I look funky like a son of a b h like is supposed to be 1964 and the scene is wearying Ray is set in a toilet at the airport while the State Trio [people try to dodge.
These fodder like me.
You see I was right about the evanescence of Oxford.
Do not tell if your man met my husband, Barry Hannah?
Tomorrow I'll shine like Jack Kerouac in my halo Dexedrine I walk past the camera in the coolest place you've ever seen.
Yours, \ nicely.
Publications
Novels
* Geronimo Rex (1972)
* Nightwatchmen (1973)
* Ray (1980)
* The Tennis Handsome (1983)
* Hey Jack! (1987)
* Boomerang (1989)
* Never Die (1991)
* Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)
Story collections
* Airships (1978)
* Captain Maximus (1985)
* Bats out of Hell (1993)
* High Lonesome (1996)
* Sick Soldier at Your Door (2010)
Essays
* "Memories of Tennessee Williams," Mississippi Review, Vol. 48, 1995.
* "Introduction" The Book of Mark, Pocket Canon, Grove-Atlantic, 1999.
Awards and Honors
* The William Faulkner Prize
* The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction
* The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award
* The Award for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
* The PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction
External Links/Webliography
Interviews
* Oxford American interview 2001
* Bomb interview, 2001
* An interview with Barry Hannah at Mississppi Review Online; interview conducted by James D. Lilley and Brian Oberkirch, October 23, 1996 on the balcony of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
* Wired For Books Audio Interview with Barry Hannah
* Mississippi Review Vol. 25, No. 3, Barry Hannah Special (Spring, 1997)
* Paris Review interview with Barry Hannah, 2004
* R. Vanarsdall, "The Spirits Will Win Through: An Interview with Barry Hannah," Southern Review 19:22, 317-341, 1983.
Reviews and perspectives
* Writers Remember Barry Hannah by Claire Howorth
* Barry Hannah's Long Shadow by Wells Tower
* Kim Herzinger, "On the New Fiction" Mississippi Review, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 7-22.
* Perspectives on Barry Hannah Edited by Martyn Bone
Exhibits, sites, and homepages
* Barry Hannah at the Mississippi Writers Page
* "Southern Destroyer" in Austin Chronicle
Selected online publications
* Water Liars the full text of a short story from Hannah's 1978 collection Airships
* "Testimony of Pilot" by Barry Hannah
* Barry Hannah on Tennessee Williams, Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 48, 1995.
* "Evening of the Yarp: A Report From Roonswent Dover," by Barry Hannah Mississippi Review Vol. 25, No. 3, Barry Hannah Special (Spring, 1997), pp. 89-105.
Obituaries
* GuardianUK obituary, March 2, 2010
* Hannah, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 67 obituary by William Grimes in The New York Times
* Barry Hannah 1942 — 2010 This "cyber-tombeau" at Silliman's Blog by poet Ron Silliman includes comments, tributes, and links
* Barry Hannah, Author, Dies at 67 in Mississippi Filed by The Associated Press; Published: March 2, 2010
References 1. ^ a b c Mississippi Review Online: An interview with Barry Hannah
2. ^ Obituary New York Times, March 3, 2010; page A27.
3. ^ a b c Author Barry Hannah dies at 67 in Mississippi by Emily Wagster Pettus (AP)
4. ^ a b c Oxford Conference for the Book
5. ^ Barry Hannah 1942-2010 from the website of Oxford American: The Southern Magazine of Good Writing
6. ^ Barry Hannah, R.I.P. tribute and obituary at the Wilmington (NC) Star News website
7. ^ "Barry Hannah: A Southern Literary Force Dies At 67". National Public Radio. March 4, 2010. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124275611. Retrieved March 4, 2010.
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