Interview with Barry Hannah: February 6, 2001.

Williams, Daniel E.

WILLIAMS: Barry, I'd like to start by asking you a couple of questions about your new novel that is about to be published. By my count, this is your thirteenth book?

HANNAH: Yeah, I think either twelfth or thirteenth. I can't remember.

WILLIAMS: How would you describe the distance between Yonder Stands Your Orphan and Geronimo Rex?

HANNAH: Well, I just re-read Yonder Stands Your Orphan, and I was shocked by its darkness. I wrote it under dark circumstances, but I thought there was more joy in the book, and as a reader I was rather stunned. There is an unrelenting vision of evil in the person of a man called Man Mortimer, and the novel's about his effect on a lake community. I haven't forgotten how to laugh, but I think the laughter of this book is more wry and sardonic, whereas there was more youthful jubilation in Geronimo, which was a series of episodes about a boy growing up in the South. This is about older people, and they're sharing calamities like cancer and broken hearts, and some of them are trying to have significance of some sort of the other toward the end of their lives and this fellow, Man Mortimer, who is involved with the casinos and with running prostitutes, is affecting all of them. And so I think I told you once that you would enjoy this book, Dan, that it was kind of frolicsome. But when I re-read it, I was shocked at the lack of frolicsome material. I hope it's not too grim and depressing a book, but it's sure not all that happy. It's just what I could do at the time.

WILLIAMS: Did you change it much as you read through the proofs?

HANNAH: I scratched out a great deal I thought was unnecessary to it and trimmed it down. So it's going to be in a much trimmer version than it was.

WILLIAMS: Yonder comes after two highly successful collections of short stories. What made you switch back to novel?

HANNAH: I had more people, and the people at the Cove have been occupying me since the 70s. I wanted to see them live their lives out a little bit more. They just needed more distance and more time than the short story allows, and the novel just pushes on into a little further in time and space. That's just about it.

WILLIAMS: Who are the people at the Cove?

HANNAH: Well, Melanie Wooten is a nice-looking woman of seventy-one. Dr. Harvard, who builds a pontoon leisure barge for them all to have a good time on out in the lake, and there's Sidney Farte, who is a vicious old man, who loves the discomfort of others and doubts that he and his old man, Pepper, who runs the bait store, were born with a heart. He doesn't think they have hearts, and he's amused by this, although not really that concerned. Then there are others like Dr. Max Raymond, who, after a scandal in which he advised one of his patients to commit suicide, was busted from the medical profession. He plays saxophone in a Latin band, and his wife, Mimi Suarez, sings in it, and they perform at the casino. There's Colonel Wren and a few others around. The difference in this novel is that it doesn't have a real hero. It's got multiple points of view, and it has people who react to evil, but it doesn't have a single hero. You only get to see different visions of life around the lake. All are concerned about an orphanage that starts across the lake, and it brings in a kind of wild breed of children who help bring on disaster with Mortimer, who tries to exploit them for sin. Some of the younger orphans are girls. So when my wife read it, she said, "Gee, this is really dark. There is nobody I really cheer for here." And she was right. The only people to cheer for are those in a small church a man named Egan has started. And they're where the community can come around and have its devotions and its meditations. The only salvation in the novel. So a small church run by an ex-biker is a very open meeting house for Christians or just anyone to solve their problems through the ministries of Pastor Egan. The only real hero is the church itself.

WILLIAMS: Barry, I know you wrote this book under a lot of difficulties and illness yourself.

HANNAH: Yeah, and it really shows. In fact, after getting it revised this week and sending it in, again I was staggered by much of the darkness. If the book is successful, I hope it will just assure the reader that we can stand a lot and that we do go on. We are not heroes, but we endure. I'm not patterning anything after Faulkner, but it just seems to me that simply to endure is not a surprising piece of philosophy, but the people of the Cove just simply take it. They do take it, and it's a miracle that they do take it. It takes support often like a little church. It takes reaching out of hands, and these people have not completed reaching out to each other even as the book ends. It's also about the fact that evil really cannot be put in prison. The people just really absorb this man who cuts people's faces. And the sheriff becomes afraid of his own perp, the man who is suspected, but the sheriff is hesitant to get close to this family of evil around him. So it's not where the white hats win. But I think it's truthful and, yeah, this year has been one I would have passed to another. Yet this book has a lot of trial, a lot of failure, and I hope that it brings satisfaction to the reader. For one reason, he doesn't live here; he doesn't have to go through this. But he sees that people do survive, despite rumors, despite bad names, despite treachery, despite even physical deformation. They just keep creeping on, keep fishing, keep having their pleasure barges. And I am struck by that.

WILLIAMS: Great. Some of my favorite scenes in your stories involve the old men on the pier. Are there some scenes similar to these in Yonder?.

HANNAH: Yes, but this time, they are industrious under the leadership of the new oldster. New to the books anyway, Dr. Harvard, who's been unheroic in one of my stories. He's a wealthy retired surgeon whose own wife is dying of cancer, and he should be Melanie's boyfriend, but as things work out the thirty-five-year-old sheriff falls in love with Melanie. That's a scandal that stays all the way through the novel until she really gets fired of him. And there is more direction to the people on the pier now. They're animated, having this barge; they're looking more straight ahead at evil or more up close at it in the presence of casinos and this strange orphanage that has been started across the river by an insane couple. Yeah. So I would say the oldsters are meeting life straight on more than they used to. I mean it's come to them. Life has been built out to them in the suburbs, and in the casinos that are pressing about them, and the pawn shop culture that stays right around them in Vicksburg. They are taking more of a direct look at it all rather than being retirees.

WILLIAMS: Great. How do you think your writing has evolved over the years since Geronimo Rex? You say this book is darker. I see your writing, especially in the last two short story collections, as going in the opposite direction.

HANNAH: It might be. It might just be this year that I've had. I wrote the novel two years ago, and the re-write and the revision followed when I was ill. But it also might just simply be true that this novel is a darker piece of work. I wrote Bats out of Hell almost without a pause. I mean it was almost a huge gift. I couldn't stop writing stories for about two years. And then the next series of stories, High Lonesome, were stories that did have much more light, much more--I think--equanimity about existence. It was less of grotesque, less of the tragic. People are, I think, clearer folks with the capacity for joy in the last two collections. I just can't help these things as they come along. I don't even know. I am not even seriously sure that one's writing gets all that much better as you age. You simply just go through different things, and the events call for a different style. Or a certain voice, and you're a slave of that voice. So it just depends much on where you are when you write.

WILLIAMS: And are you writing stories now?

HANNAH: Well, not as we speak. I created about two stories that are at the Halfway House, and I haven't finished them. This book Yonder took a great deal out of me, and I am planning to write much more slowly now, and much more deliberately. And I am waiting to fill up. I think you will find a lot of writers like to have fill time. I am trying to get my work at the school clear. I feel like I've been behind a year. The creation sometimes just leaves you for a while, and I have not been that creative since I edited the novel. But it has always heretofore come back to me.

WILLIAMS: You have also recently done a little non-fiction work, haven't you?

HANNAH: I have done a good deal of non-fiction work, and it is not my favorite, but some people claim they had rather read my essays than fiction. I think that is characteristic of a general, let us say, changing in the people who read. People are simply reading more non-fiction nowadays than they are fiction. It's a fact; it's a sad fact that many of us have to recognize, although we love the genre of prose fiction. I like to go adventurous places and write articles. It's a fine way to make a living, but I'm also stymied by the world of fact and fact checking. It always seems that half of your effort is involved in fact checking about things that don't matter. So, I do it but it is not my favorite thing to do. I'm a pretty good bet, though, if you send me out there with a good contract; I'd come back with a decent story for you.

WILLIAMS: I know that you read a lot of history, which is filled with facts. Why are you drawn to history and less to contemporary fiction?

HANNAH: I read history, especially military history. Actual doings. It's a way of knowing the world because, curiously, we know the world by wars. Nobody really, except a few scientists, knows the state of anywhere unless it's been occupied, or so it seems to me. How interesting would the South be had there been no defeat, no Civil War, no shrines to glory, none of the dead underground? It would be a strange mall if we didn't have that depth of being. When I think of traveling in Tennessee or in Georgia, I think of armies moving through, as silly and as mean, as absurd as it is. People were ever happily moving through territory that was thick and hostile, full of briars and bugs and coming to face each other in battle. I'm just fascinated, although repulsed like every sane man. I think the cure for people like me is to be in battle; then I wouldn't be so deeply interested in it. Robert E. Lee thought it was a curse. He said his military education was his curse. But you do learn about countries when you read about the soldiers that were involved in either protecting it or overrunning other people. It's a way of knowing the world.

WILLIAMS: You recently lent me a book on the French and Indian War, Fred Anderson's Crucible of War, that was about 800 pages. You might be the only body in north Mississippi to have read that book.

HANNAH: Well, I don't know. I thought it was deeply interesting. I don't ever know how hostility starts, or who's to blame. As they always say, history is written by victors. I think we're getting a good lot of literature now where there've been adjustments made to give the defeated some voice. And we're seeing some very fine history written because of this revision. Not of the truth, but of the understanding of the other sides, of the Indian for instance. The Indians, like all white men, have been variously cruel and enormously generous and kind. And it's good to read the things, like, why were the French more attractive to the Indians. Why were there massacres, and who really started the massacres? So these are questions that have always been interesting to me and that book was very uplifting. For one thing it was a vacant area of mine. I had never known what really happened in the French and Indian War.

WILLIAMS: Let's talk about your teaching a little. Over the past few years how do you think your teaching has changed, particularly the way you conduct a creative writing seminar?

HANNAH: Well, it's gotten simpler and simpler and simpler. And it's always been a simple craft as far as its geometric description. Write a beginning, middle, and end, and thrill them. It's actually enormously hard to do, but I've been working off that axis, almost like a marine drill, for about ten years, and it's gotten better results than more abstract theory. I allow everything from science fiction to domestic drama. I never tell the kids and the older people in the class what to write. I think you write about the most important things in your life. I urge them to do that. Don't spend your time being clever. Just go ahead and get into being real. Just get out your pencil and start being real. A beginning, middle, end, and thrill me and thrill the rest of the class. You know, it's like tennis. There are not many rules in tennis; it's just very difficult to play well. All good things in life are like that pretty much. And so through the workshop experience they get to see what their peers are doing. I keep it short the first time, four to seven pages. I don't think they should go up in volume until they know a good bit more about how to tell a story. So it's as simple as that sounds, like a blocking coach at some university, but that's the way it is. You can teach writing if you keep it simple.

WILLIAMS: You also assign a lot of readings in your writing class.

HANNAH: Yes I do. I think that the writer should be aware of different modes, different ways of developing points of view. Sometimes young writers are lucky enough to find their story. But most aren't. Most dream about the one they wish they had written, the one that speaks to them as The Catcher in the Rye spoke to us. I think a lot of people became English majors because of The Catcher in the Rye.

WILLIAMS: That's probably true.

HANNAH: You know, that book turned around my life somewhat. And there are other works of literature that have had the same impact, sometimes even a short story. You are just not the same anymore after you have read that book. You feel there is an allied universe with you. You haven't been doing it all alone. And it is quite beautiful to see a kid find his own story, his own writer. I'm not so interested in the kids being comprehensive as I am in their intensity about whom they like. I think they should read most of the person they really like rather than just a scattering. And I've used different texts to go along with the writing. I don't want them to forget how good writing can be, and I like the anthologies that have bad stories in them. You learn a lot from a story that doesn't make it. And we will never understand why that editor put it in the anthology because we all agree it bored us and that it told us nothing about being human. It was unexciting and unneeded, and so you learn from that, because what you're writing should always be extraordinary in one way or another, either that or else you should just be quiet. But the form is simple; it's just the doing on the machine that's difficult. Young people often have a big hard time making up stuff to write about. What do I write about--it's not an uncommon problem. Their lives don't seem to have given them any stories, but when I start talking to them about the people around them, we find out that there's a story. Why don't you just add a little more meanness to this guy and make it a story. Don't just accept facts as they are. See that there is a beginning, middle, and end and something that entertains and delights, or something that might instruct us. I have a good time when I'm in my stride teaching. It's one of the best things I know, and I always learn from it.

WILLIAMS: You still love it then?

HANNAH: I still love it, yeah, yeah.

WILLIAMS: Now that you mentioned Catcher in the Rye, I am curious about other books that might have touched you deeply. What other books have been important to you?

HANNAH: Oh, I think the revolutionary way of looking at the world in Tropic of Cancer, that underground classic of college, probably touched me in sweet ways, not nasty ways. It's a pretty nasty book but in sweet ways. I saw the liberation of a man, and how to live, and how to get through the day. Good food, something to drink, women, and all of the absurdity and joy you have in human commerce. It was just a raw down-to-earth beauty, and I think Miller liberated me. It was my book for a while. You know, I really didn't quite understand Naked Lunch, but I pretended it was deep and wise. At the same time I was taking girlfriends to Fellini films and not really getting it, but understanding that you didn't really need to get it. It was being there, you know, being cool and hip, that was what was so very important. The ultimate hip books remain forever like Catcher in the Rye and Tropic of Cancer. They are just as good today. That's what I was attracted to after I dropped out of pre-med, which I was dismal at anyway. They also made me want to write. I wanted to respond to these voices. I had two or three wonderful teachers early on too, who helped me get close to literature. I will always be thankful for them, yeah.

WILLIAMS: Was that in high school?

HANNAH: Both. In high school, Mrs. Blackwell. In college, Annibel Jenkins and a poet named Joe Simmons, a very passionate, devoted poet nominated for the National Book Award. From our little college, Mississippi College. He was just a singular man who brought a whole new universe into the classroom where words, language, really mattered.

WILLIAMS: Well, Barry, thanks for bringing so many new universes into our world.

DANIEL E. WILLIAMS
University of Mississippi