Barry Hannah's Funny Business

Airships, "Return to Return," and a light defense of being "full of shit"

I pulled my copy of Airships off the shelf this morning. It’d gone top of mind again but I haven’t read a Barry Hannah story in maybe a few years. There was a time when I was so taken with his voice that it was very dangerous for me as a writer. In my early twenties, I’d gone full blown imitator, and imitating Barry Hannah is not an easy thing to do.

It was just another discovery in the possibilities of language — an astonishment, a new revelation, the gift that keeps on giving for the fiction writer: you can do a lot of shit with this medium.

It’s the same thing when you first read Jesus’ Son or Suttree or countless others, by which you’re delighted to discover prose taking on new forms. However, it’s best to take bits of this stuff and slide them in your toolbox. Variety and moderation is key, and you really will spoil your own potential if you get too drunk off one brand.

When I’d gone to grad school, I studied under a couple of writers whose work I very much admire, but they really did not care for Barry Hannah, and the conceit was something like this: this guy is full of shit. In fact, David Gates once told me, “You’re much less full of shit than your boy Barry.” Which I guess made me feel pretty good.

The full-of-shit thing: that’s fair. I’ve half-expected to age into the same sort of writer, repulsed, to a degree, by what I’d just call a kind of “prose funny business.” A lack of sincerity, a decorative approach to composition that’s often — if done wrong — a lazy cop-out masquerading as lyricism; and then there’s the risk of not taking your characters seriously.

I’ve slipped into my own voice long since I went through my big Barry phase, but as much as I admire extreme polish and some measure of austerity in American literary fiction, it seems like I’ll probably never grow out of my own funny business. But that’s been a happy discovery amid the undulant, forever-identity crises writers suffer. At some point, you’ve gotta accept who you are. And I think maybe I absorbed enough Barry that he’s become a part my Writers’ DNA. As another mentor once told me, “When you’re a fiction writer, you get to pick your grandparents.”

When I took up Airships this morning, I opened it to a random page, to a random paragraph, which I’ll commonly do with books I treasure, have read and re-read and re-read. Page 76, the story: “Return to Return.”

This one was just as good as any paragraph I could’ve come across. I wasn’t disappointed. I haven’t grown cynical-skeptical, evidently. Almost every sentence here is wildly original, and easy on the ears. I might as well have been listening to one of my favorite bands.

I’ve heard personal anecdotes from people who knew Barry, and there’s a consensus that, just as a person, outside his fiction, Barry was a colossally funny human being. And for that I believe Barry wrote in his own voice. He wasn’t phony. And his talent radiated from humor as its epicenter.

“He dragged himself from one peak of cowardice to the next and began wearing sunglasses … Levaster’s body left him and was gathered into the body of French.”

This is not something you can teach in a writing program, and it’s probably not something you can learn as an autodidact. This is delightful to the ear, complex or at least warped (he started wearing sunglasses because of his cowardice?), and entirely idiosyncratic — “was gathered into the body” — and, as often is the case in Hannah’s fiction, almost mysteriously hilarious (yes, he did start wearing sunglasses because of his cowardice).

A bit of trivia: the story “Return to Return” was gathered into — along with a few others from Airships — his cobbled-together 1983 novel The Tennis Handsome, a sort of tragic follow-up to the divine and vulgar genius poem-novella Ray (1980). This was when Hannah started to lose some of his mojo to alcoholism in the ‘80s, before roaring back in the ‘90s with Bats Out of Hell and High Lonesome. There are flights of brilliance in The Tennis Handsome, most of which appear in the sections salvaged from Airships. But the cover of my copy is very alluring, and it’s a good read for the Hannah completist:

Anyway, it’s good to not fully grow out of funny business. And by “prose funny business” . . . I guess you could define it more broadly as anything that comes off as inauthentic. I have a sort of goofball schtick in my personal life, and therefore I have a sort of goofball schtick in my own fiction, sometimes, but I have good, talented friends who will call me out on my bullshit if need be. But if they said they laughed out loud at a line, or even a little in their head, then I’ll let the funny business do its work. The problem, always, is that it has to be good. And Barry Hannah just happened to be very good at being good.

Nothing like an authentic load of bullshit. One to cleanse the palate after, say, Kent Haruf or Raymond Carver (who could be very funny, read “Feathers”). Come to think of it, a lot of our best writers are fucking funny. Denis Johnson. Funny. Flannery O’Connor. Very funny. Good fiction’s much like stand-up comedy, in which a good line ought to land with a wallop, and it’s the incisive commentary on characters, on human beings, that renders much of Hannah’s work — and Flannery’s, et al — so humorous, and that’s because people are strange as hell. And mostly full of shit.