“Lying is one thing,” Barry Hannah always said. “Telling the truth, though, will crucify you.” Whether it helped or hurt him, he never stopped doing both.
His characters followed suit. Their yearning was explosive: “My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs.” Jealousy wracked them: “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.”
They hated — “I was praying for an artery to snap in his face and vowed direct revenge if it didn’t. The man must be stomped and dragged off in a net” — and lied with abandon: “…a chronic prevaricator whose lies were so gaudy and wrapped around that they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened.”
They had quit drinking but longed to start again: “He missed making the nut of drink every day. He missed the raddled adventures. There was always the focus: securing the next high, defending the hoard of liquor money, but with chivalry; getting through the day without murder…”
They knew great joy, but emotional distress was their default button: “All we are is obsession and pain. That is all humans are.”
A native of Mississippi, Hannah won the William Faulkner prize for his first novel, “Geronimo Rex” (1972), also nominated for the National Book Award. But it was his debut short-story collection, “Airships” (1978), that marked a super nova in the literary sky: a bad boy who refused to follow any rules, yet wrote like an angel.
A twisted, demented, dark angel, but an angel nonetheless.
Despite accolades from other writers and critics alike, Hannah, who went on to pen eight novels and three more story collections, remained a cult writer with a limited audience. Like one of his characters, many of whom were an achingly familiar version of Hannah himself, his books were “hailed by major critics and bought by a few hundred people.”
Before his untimely death last year at the age of 67, Hannah had been at work for almost a decade on a new novel that he eventually scrapped for a series of linked short stories. Four of these are included in a new posthumous collection that invites readers to discover the South as seen through the eyes of one of the most brilliant, daredevil writers our generation has known.
For readers unfamiliar with his work, “Long, Last, Happy” is the perfect introduction. To the newer material, it adds stories from “Airships,” “Captain Maximus” (1985), “Bats Out of Hell” (1993) and “High Lonesome” (1996). Throughout those years, Hannah’s style remained as elegantly lunatic as ever, but the stories gradually evolved, growing longer and more personal and sometimes more difficult to read. But no less remarkable.
The selections here should bring at least another hundred followers into the Hannah fold, wowed by his high-strung, inflammatory prose, a mind-boggling blend of old-fashioned and newly minted words, of high and low language—a combination he called “truth and high rhetoric.” Hannah was the first to admit, “I was always florid.” His overwrought stories are not for those who object to being cornered by the drunk in the bar with his urge to offer up “great lore, buzzing insights.” This is the corner of sacred and sacrilegious, where vulgar meets Southern aristocrat.
“Allow me my phrases,” begs one of his characters. “There is a strange and deep thing coming…”
That strange, deep thing generally takes the form of torment, hilariously tangled up in themes of alcoholism (Hannah quit drinking in 2003, but its effects haunt his fiction), marriage, divorce, writing, nostalgia, purity and innocence, homosexuality, war, aging and the pressures of academia. In short, his own demons, but transferred to a territory where he could usually—but not always—keep them at bay.
Taken altogether, these 30 stories suggest an explanation for why Hannah never enjoyed the wide readership he deserved. The many tales of Civil War soldiers, fighter pilots, the Vietnam War, fishing and motorcycles earned him a reputation as “a guy’s writer,” for one. Two, his habit of plunging to the heart of his characters’ bigotry, prejudice and sexual bitterness—his narrators are often wretched husbands who aren’t sure whether to worship or murder their wives—might be what once earned Hannah the damning labels “misogynist” and “racist.”
Finally, add in his tendency to flout tradition, as in “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” where instead of the typically glorious battle scenes, Hannah writes of an openly gay lieutenant who pines for the dashing (but smelly) Civil War general, Jeb Stuart.
For Hannah fans, “Long, Last, Happy” offers a chance to rediscover his crazy trove of “honest unbearable humanity.” For new readers, a caveat: In the same way you could listen to “The Best of Bob Dylan” and never hear, say, “Visions of Johanna,” the greatest Hannah hits found here don’t give the full picture of just how many of the nice writing rules that bad boy really broke.
Fortunately, the originals are still out there. I think I'll start with "Bats Out of Hell."
FICTION
"Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories"
Barry Hannah
Grove Press, $27.50, 464 pages
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