A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah by Louis Bourgeois, Adam Young and J.W. Young
Telling Tales of Barry
Barry Hannah hunched over the stack of short stories. “OK, here’s one,” he said, pulling out a couple of pages, squinting through the swirling smoke of a cigarette.
A dozen scruffy undergrads squirmed in their chairs. We never knew what to expect when Barry raised his head to read. He’d either have the comforting countenance of a benevolent uncle, or the unsettling expression of a grinning jack-o-lantern. It all depended on how he felt that morning, how much he’d been drinking the night before—and whether the story was worth a damn.
It was the winter of 1976, and as a junior at the University of Alabama I was taking Barry’s creative writing class. Every other week a group of novice novelists gathered around a long wooden table in chilly Woods Hall, trying to catch, or avoid, the author’s wandering, watery eyes. His critiques often cut to the bone, slicing off fatty sentences and overused symbols—honest praise mixed with pointed asides (“not even going to waste your time reading this”). A good class meant Barry liked what he saw; a better class meant he liked it so much we moved the session to a local bar.
The Mississippi native had come to Tuscaloosa after teaching for six years at Clemson University in South Carolina and freezing for 12 months at Middlebury College in Vermont. When Barry returned to Dixie, he was riding high. His first novel, Geronimo Rex, won the William Faulkner Prize in 1973, while his second, Nightwatchmen, came out to good reviews a year later. He published one story after another in Esquire.
But success seemed to rub the rough-edged writer the wrong way. After two divorces and one more book—the well-received short story collection Airships—Barry left Tuscaloosa (or was asked to leave, the stories differ) in 1980. He headed to Hollywood to write scripts for Robert Altman and then bounced around the country, serving as the writer-in-residence at universities in Iowa, Mississippi and Montana. He eventually returned to the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he died in 2010.
Along the way, he turned out several more novels and short story collections including Ray (1980); The Tennis Handsome (1983); Captain Maximus (1985); Hey Jack! (1987); Boomerang (1989); Never Die (1991); Bats Out of Hell (1993); High Lonesome (1996), and Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001). His gothic-gonzo tales of gay Confederates, African-American band directors, crazy aunts and ex-biker preachers mingled lust, longing, violence and humor. Reading Barry’s novels and stories, you felt like a grateful hitchhiker climbing into the warm passenger side of a waiting pickup truck and then noticing the driver’s crazy eyes and the gleaming .45 by his side. Even a simple scene, such as one in Geronimo Rex where narrator Harry Monroe sneaks in to watch an African-American high school band practice, takes an unexpected turn off the highway. “The fact probably was, by what I saw and heard that afternoon hiding under the bleachers at the colored football field, Dream of Pines was the best high school band in at least the world. . .They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere.”
Throughout his writing career Barry continued to teach. Some of his students, such as fellow Mississippians Larry Brown and Donna Tartt, and my University of Alabama classmate Mark Childress, became novelists. Others turned to poetry or journalism. But even those who ended up as bartenders, bikers or bookies learned to love great writing, and endure the sweat-drenching work it takes… because of Barry Hannah.
Last year, Louis Bourgeois, founder of the Oxford, Miss.-based Vox Press, asked 35 of Barry’s former students and sidekicks to put down their memories of the teacher, friend and sometimes asshole they had known. The collection of their essays, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah paints an eclectic portrait of a talented, occasionally tormented man who loved attractive women, semi-automatic pistols, Jack-and-Coke and Kawasaki motorcycles.
Many contributors talk about his rough but reasonable teaching techniques.
“If you were willing and able to get into and stay in the ring with the man, if you realized it actually was a kind of fight (a fair fight, but a fight) and not a beauty or popularity contest. . .you were okay,” says Brad Watson, a professor at the University of Wyoming, on Barry’s classes at Alabama.
Poet Anna Baker quit her job as a security guard in Montana and moved to Mississippi to take his class. “Barry always said that flaws made good writing—it’s your flaws that are going to save you.” Oxford writer and frequent tennis partner Neil White recalls the seemingly simple (but hard to achieve) advice his teacher gave him about writing short stories. “A story has a beginning, middle and end. And thrill me.”