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Novelist Barry Hannah talks inspiration and finds home right where he left it

by Paige M. Travis

Here in Knoxville we talk a lot about Knoxville. We talk about the city’s past, present and future, how the town denies our satisfaction or fulfills our expectations. And sometimes these circuitous conversations come around to the South and how we, as Knoxvillians or transplants, either fit in or don’t fit into the region’s geographical and cultural boundaries.

When I’ve read Southern literature—as a college student and on my own initiative—I’ve imagined that Southern writers must also talk a lot about what it means to be Southern, how their own hometowns fit within the South and fulfill or deny their internal notions of Southerness.

But I’m wrong about Southern writers. They don’t sit around and wax lyrical about Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and their connections to these writers and their literary legacy. Southern writers are just Southern, by birth or association. That Southern quality pervades (or invades) them without permission. It’s readers and critics who analyze these figurative maps, wheedling nuances of dialect for authenticity or sifting through allusions for the bones of long-dead progenitors of the genre.

But the reader and critic in me abandons debates of Southern identity when confronted by the work of Barry Hannah. The South is woven into Hannah’s writing like the dirt of Oxford, Miss., lodges in the soles of his shoes. That he was born in the town of Clinton, Miss. and teaches at Ole Miss places him geographically; his stories of people with complicated thoughts and motivations make his work universal, made regional and recognizable by a Southern accent.

After two well-received novels, Geronimo Rex (1972) and Nightwatchmen (1973), Hannah made a serious impression with his first collection of short stories, Airships, several selections in which had already been published in Esquire magazine beginning in 1970.

“That’s a group of stories I wrote surrounding Jeb Stuart,” Hannah said in a recent interview. He mentions that the book came out in 1978 and quickly does the math. Twenty-five years ago Hannah’s mind was chewing on the Civil War and its storied Southern general, the more immediate war in Vietnam, plus the themes of death, love, marriage and drinking. How does he relate to that book now?

“I don’t relate to it at all,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It was another young man that wrote that. And I’m glad for it. I’m proud of it. I don’t ever go back and try to change it. But I don’t reread myself much. It hampers going forward. You don’t want to get into self-congratulations.”

There are plenty of others doing the praising. Hannah’s book jackets are covered with quotes, perpetuated by articles like this one, hailing Hannah as carrying on the Southern gothic tradition established by O’Connor and Faulkner. That Hannah is so admired by his contemporaries in modern literature is a sign of his value, but his style and subject matter isn’t for the faint of heart. His narrators and their cohorts are frequently crude and brash, offensive like redneck neighbors whose yelling seeps into your quiet yard. The men of Airships—soldiers, doctors, musicians—are a rough bunch whose voices you want to shut out but for the times their words gather into short bursts of brilliance. These stories may be 25 to 30 years old, but to a new reader’s ear, they ring and bark with a frightful and compelling mortality.

In “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb,” a Rebel soldier threatens an old Yankee with his pistol and a demand for answers. He says to the quivering old man: “You’re thrice as old as I. You should give me the examples. For instance: Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.”

These six sentences capture Hannah’s ability, through this ignoble character, to find the right questions, if not any philosophically satisfying answers. His tone is somehow anachronistic—old, yet modern. His sentences demand your complete attention; long sentences can meander toward the point, while short phrases hit like a sucker punch.

Hannah’s creative writing students at University of Mississippi have been assigned a reading of “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb.”

“I told them to let me have it if they didn’t like it,” he says. “It won’t hurt me.” As writer-in-residence at Ole Miss for 21 years, Hannah has inspired students and been affected by them as well.

“Teaching is beautiful because I don’t do much of it. My students keep me alert, and I get a chance to dig into their culture,” he says. “I’ve never in my life written down an idea or a concept directly from a student, but I’m certain I was influenced by something a student said or a line.”

Ideas come from a variety of places for the author, and he’s not one to question them. Music has been a huge factor, particularly the work of Bob Dylan.

“[Music] goes directly to the heart quicker than any art I know of,” he says, quoting British essayist Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” The statement speaks to Hannah’s personal connection with music of all types—jazz, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan (whom he’s written an essay about for an upcoming Norton Anthology). Pretty much everything except bluegrass, he says, apologetically.

“That’s the beautiful thing about a tune as we all know. It can evoke a month, very clearly in your life, or an afternoon or a deeply hurtful lost love. And it would just bring it back instantly. It’s a beautiful condition, music.”

And even as he envies the short time in which a song can be written and performed compared to his medium, Hannah takes the trade-off in the form of inspiration.

“[Songs] actually give me language sometimes, even when it is a wordless tune. As if I were tuning up out of the orchestra, or the environment of music. In the car, against a certain environment, will create a sentence.”

Hannah says he takes about three years of “thought and life” to finish a new book; he’s currently in year two of a novel. He’s attached to the physical elements of writing—writing by hand in notebooks and typing on the series of electric Smith Corona typewriters that have conducted his words to paper since the late ’60s when they were “state of the art.

“I’m superstitious a little about what’s been good to me before. I keep buying Smith Coronas because I’m afraid they’re going to quit selling them,” he says.

Artists and writers are fascinating—even to each other—because the process of creation lies somewhere between deep mystery and simple fact. Hannah has been writing influential Southern literature for more than 30 years, and an interviewer would be foolish to ask how he does it—or expect an answer. A hint at his methods comes in the form of affectionate praise, a sort of love poem.

“I love the South. For one thing, you can actually stare a thousand yards without seeing too much. That kind of stare, where if you look long enough, something will gather. So I like looking out at the trees and seeing the seasons. That’s about all I need: music and a stare.”

In addition to expanses of trees, Oxford is home to its share of writers, including Larry Brown, who share society with Hannah. But they don’t sit around talking about Faulkner, whose spirit haunts the small town. Except for the occasional sharing of book titles they’ve read or recommend, “We never talk literature,” Hannah says. “[It’s] like other people’s talk. Never heavily literary, and thank God. I mean, I don’t want to get in a group of folks and talk literary. I do it, and that’s enough.”

In his career, Hannah has lived and taught across the country, in California, Montana, Iowa, Alabama, Vermont. But he ended up back in his home state of Mississippi. As he writes his 13th book, the follow-up to Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), he’ll continue to let his thoughts gather, and perhaps wander to his place in Oxford, and Oxford’s place in the South.

“I found my town. It just happened to be in my own state,” he says. “I didn’t know I’d come back to my own state. A lot of people never find their town. I feel fortunate.”

VARDATE © 2004 Metro Pulse