Barry Hannah

Compared to some of Barry Hannah’s other talents, his genius for titles might not seem worth mentioning. But I’ve been reading the tributes and eulogies and remembrances that have followed his death on Monday and I’m a little surprised that no one has even nodded in the direction of his titles. So let me say here and now that the The Tennis Handsome is a wonderful title for a novel and that Captain Maximus--his 1985 story collection-- may the best title of anything, ever.

I went to see Barry Hannah read in, well, 1988, it must have been. I drove out from the city to a massive exurban community college campus with a friend from work--and there he was reading his story “Idaho.” It was already a story I liked and had gotten busy trying to imitate, but hearing him read it that night only made me goonier about it. After the reading, I joined the line of people wanting to get their books signed or talk with the author. I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to ask Hannah. I just wanted to meet him. When I got to the head of the line, all I could think to say was, “honest sentiment,’ which is a phrase Hannah uses in the story to describe the poetry of Richard Hugo. Hannah, looked at me, blinked and said back, “honest sentiment, yeah.” And that was about it. It occurs to me now that my words might have been interpreted as a challenge or a mockery. I hope it didn’t come across that way. Anyway, Hannah did tell me that I had to read Hugo. Of course, I did as I was told, and, of course, I became a Hugo fan, too.

What I remember is that when I got up close to Hannah, he looked a little tired. Like maybe he had a little eye-strain headache. This was a surprise. So much of my idea of him as a writer was tied up in the wildness of his prose and his boozy, swaggering, motorcyclish motifs that, in my callowness, I was a little surprised to catch that small glimpse of ordinary vulnerability.

I’ll also remember how he said back to me, with a certain patience: “Honest sentiment.”

Here’s the opening of his novel Boomerang:

We were such tiny people in the Quisenberrys’ pecan orchard.

We were so tiny but we were sincere. The Quisenberrys’ house looked like a showboat on the Mississippi River, and when we were tiny we fought and we had secret intrigues. The kids would roam out and find pecans and horse apples and a stick of dynamite.

There were Reds and Nazis out there. . .

In my back yard Tommy Poates was in an Admiral television box moving slowly ahead, attacking the rest of us with an automatic rubber gun. Rod Flagler had brought in the idea of the automatic rubber gun from Culver City, California. The television box was as large as a refrigerator. Every time we ran up close, we got stung. We all dressed in short pants and nothing else. Fairly soon we learned not to get stung. Edward Ratliff set the box on fire with lighter fluid. It was quite amazing to see Tommy get out of the flaming box. Darn it, I'd never thought of that.

The Pastor's Remix

My mini-profile of Otis Moss III, the pastor of Chicago’s Trinity UCC—you might remember it as “Obama’s church” from the 2008 campaign—is online here. Moss likes to quote Mos Def and Common, and one of my favorite exchanges came when I asked him about calling the apostle Peter “a thug” in one of his sermons. He said: “He cut off someone’s ear! That’s acting like a thug!”

Blogging The Moviegoer: Ash Wednesday

It has always bothered me a little that The Moviegoer ends on what is not only Ash Wednesday, but Binx’s 30th birthday, too. The day is practically doubled over with the weight of meaning. The timing, I suppose, raises all sorts of questions about Binx and his search and his faith or lack of it, but I’m more interested in a simpler—and yes, dopier—question: What happens to Binx and Kate? They’re supposed to marry, and Binx is supposed to go to medical school and the plan is for them to “walk abroad on a summer night. . . and see a show and eat some oysters down on Magazine.” But, really?

I got a kind of answer when, a few years into my annual Moviegoer routine, I read another very good New Orleans novel, John Gregory Brown’s Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, from 1994. I was almost at the end of that novel when I came to something that just about knocked me out of my chair. A stockbroker-turned-doctor named Jack makes a brief appearance. Some things about Jack seem awfully familiar. Jack drives a tiny red sports car. Jack likes to go to the movies. Jack’s a Korean war veteran who once lived on Gentilly Boulevard. There's not much mystery about it. It’s Binx, of course. But there’s one more thing about Jack, and it’s the detail that made me sure of his identity. Brown says that he “had been married, but his wife had killed herself some years before.” I'm not sure I've ever been quite as stunned by a single sentence in a novel as I was by that one.

Odd as it was to come across Binx rendered older and sadder, and odd as it was to find Kate killed off, I had to give Brown credit. He was a Percyist, it was obvious, and he'd pulled off the best possible Moviegoer homage: to borrow Binx for his own novel. And better still--and sadder still--I think Brown gets him, and Kate, right.

Blogging The Moviegoer: Tuesday

For all the buildup to Mardi Gras that runs through The Moviegoer, it’s almost inevitable that Binx and Kate are nowhere near New Orleans when Fat Tuesday finally comes. I had a crazy writing teacher who liked to refer to this sort of thing as “the swerve.” It reminds me a little of one of my favorite Barry Hannah stories. It’s called “Idaho,” and it’s about a year he spends teaching at the University of Montana, riding his BMW motorcycle up into the Lolo Pass almost—but never quite—to Idaho.

Binx and Kate spend most of Mardi Gras on a Scenicruiser bus “plunging along the Illinois bank of the Mississippi through a region of sooty glens” on their way back to New Orleans from Chicago. It’s an oddly decorous choice for a novelist--to skip the wild color of the carnival and the crewes and the party and to give us instead the gray routine of the Scenicruiser rolling through Evansville. It’s almost like one of those scenes in old movies that primly cut away just as the lovers fall to the couch.

By the time Binx and Kate get back to New Orleans, all we can see is the exhausted mess, the street cleaners pushing “confetti and finery into soggy heaps in the gutters.”

Blogging The Moviegoer: Monday

After three months sunk in the gray of Chicago winter, it’s almost perversely fun to come to Binx’s take on Chicago. It’s so bleak and despairing—and dead-on--that I have to laugh:

The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and the cold stony fronts of the building. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and sharpening and silencing—everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and the skyey space to the out-of-doors. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America.

This makes me want to stay under covers until maybe June.

When I was going to school at Loyola in the '80s, I found out that Walker Percy had come to campus for a reading a year or two before I started there. I was so mad that I’d missed him that I asked around the English Department to find out if anyone had recorded his appearance. They hadn’t. But one professor told me that Percy had read something about visiting Chicago as a boy to see the World’s Fair. That sounds a lot like Binx’s memory of his first boyhood encounter with the fearful “genie-soul” of the city. I wonder if Percy was about as enthused about traveling to Chicago as Binx is: “Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. . .”

I can’t really argue with him.

Blogging The Moviegoer: Sunday

I went to Catholic schools in the '70s, which put me among one of the first waves of Catholic kids who never knew a Latin Mass. Our parish had a guitar Mass and a youth group and a cool, young, sideburned priest. All of it—even the sideburns—seemed part of the new spirit of progressive, post-conciliar reform. We were taught to feel fortunate that the Ancient and Eternal church was now New and Improved. The old ways—Latin, and Communion rails, and priests facing the altar—seemed dark and mysterious and were rarely mentioned.

So I have to sit up and take notice when Binx and Sharon get dragged to Sunday Mass in Biloxi with the Smiths. The whole scene seems like a time capsule from that fabled era just before the Church, finally, entered modernity. The first thing that seems odd is that Binx tell us that the place is packed:

A woman comes up the aisle, leans over and looks down our pew. She gives me an especially hard look. I do not budge. It is like the subway. Roy Smith, who got home just in time to change into a clean perforated shirt, gives up his seat to a little girl and kneels in the aisle with several other men, kneels on one knee like a tackle, elbow propped on his upright knee, hands clasped sideways. His face is dark with blood, his breath whistles in his nose as he studies the chips in the terrazzo floor.

I’ve seen men give up their seats and kneel florid-faced in church aisles, too, but only at midnight on Christmas Eve. Finally, Binx gives us the scene through Sharon’s eyes, with her “sweet catholic wonder peculiar to a certain kind of Protestant girl:”

She thinks: how odd they all are, and him too—all that commotion about getting here and now that they are here, it is as if it were over before it began—each has lapased into his own blank-eyed vacancy and the priest has turned his back.

Blogging The Moviegoer: Saturday

One of the things I’d only noticed after I’d read The Moviegoer a few times is how little sleep Binx gets. He must be one of the great insomniacs in American fiction. He has another restless night at the Smith’s fishing camp on Saturday, after he spirits his secretary Sharon away from the office for a trip to the beach: “Three o’clock and suddenly awake amid the smell of dreams and of the years come back and peopled and blown away again like smoke.” That’s a little too elegiac for me, but before long Binx gets back, literally, to earth. “I roll over and fall in a heap on the floor and lie shivering on the boards, worse off than the miserablest muskrat in the swamp.” I like that not-quite-eloquent “miserablest.”

In fact, I like all the earthiness of Binx’s Saturday: the way he turns his car accident to good use in his seduction of Sharon; the beer and crabs under a naked light bulb at the Smith’s; their pine-country screening of Fort Dobbs at the Moonlite Drive-In. It’s all a welcome relief from the Garden District lunches and the musing talks about life and the universe, and Aunt Emily's stoicism. As much as I love Binx’s search and his private Kierkegaardian vocabulary (repetitions and rotations and everydayness), his basic greed and concupiscence is crucial, too. One side of his character earns the other. “I think of Sharon and American Motors,” he tells us. “It closed yesterday at 30 1/4.”