Conversations with Barry Hannah

James G. Thomas, James G. Thomas

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781496804365
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Between 1972 and 2001, Barry Hannah (1942–2010) published eight novels and four collections of short stories. A master of short fiction, Hannah is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of modern American literature. His writing is often praised more for its unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters than for plot. "I am doomed to be a lengthy fragmentist, " he once claimed. "In my thoughts, I don't ever come on to plot in a straightforward way." Conversations with Barry Hannah collects interviews published between 1980 and 2010. Within them Hannah engages interviewers in discussions on war and violence, masculinity, religious faith, abandoned and unfinished writing projects, the modern South and his time spent away from it, the South's obsession with defeat, the value of teaching writing, and post-Faulknerian literature. Despite his rejection of the label "southern writer, " Hannah's work has often been compared to that of fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, particularly for each author's use of dark humor and the Southern Gothic tradition in their work. Notwithstanding these comparisons, Hannah's voice is distinctly and undeniably his own, a linguistic tour de force.

Barry Hannah

John Griffin Jones / 1980

Originally published in Mississippi Writers Talking, ed. John Griffin Jones, University Press of Mississippi, 1982. Interview recorded on December 26, 1980. Used by permission, courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

I got the news on Christmas Eve that Barry Hannah was in town and had agreed to an interview. When I arrived at his parents’ home in Clinton at dusk on the day after Christmas, I found him watching his sons throw the football in the front yard. He is a thin man with a great smile, and on the day of our interview wore white cowboy boots, jeans and a blue, hooded sweatshirt bearing a “Ray” silk-screen design on the breast to advertise his latest novel. He is also a very funny man, adept at a variety of accents. I meant to disparage no one when I gave these idioms the designations that I did in transcribing the tape. We sat in the living room and talked for a couple of hours while smells of the supper his mother was cooking penetrated the cigarette smoke from time to time. Later I stood around the table with eight members of the Hannah family and held hands as Barry’s father blessed the fried oysters and ham.

Hannah: Is this like Nixon’s? Every time I tell a lie it turns on? That was good, you know, it gave us that much history.

Jones: Right. Let me say this. This is John Jones with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, about to interview Mr. Barry Hannah. It’s the day after Christmas 1980, and we’re at Barry Hannah’s parents’ home in Clinton, Mississippi. With us is the lovely and charming Miss Maribeth Kitchings, Mr. Hannah’s niece. Is this house where you grew up, in this home?

Hannah: A good bit of it. There is an erased house on Main Street uptown in the old village part that I lived in until I was around fifteen.

Jones: Were you born here in Clinton?

Hannah: No.

Jones: Tell me something about your early life.

Hannah: Well, there’s not much to it. I was born in Meridian in a hospital, but our home really was in Forest, out from Forest in Scott County. Then my folks lived on the Coast a while, lived in Pascagoula. Then, because of my Mama’s asthmatic condition, we had to move upstate and my father brought us here to Clinton.

Jones: What did your father do, or does he do?

Hannah: Dad was for twenty-five or more years an insurance agent for New York Life, a very fine salesman. But he’s had car dealerships and some real estate, he’s been in banking. You know, it’s been all business pretty much.

Jones: Yes. You graduated from Clinton High and went straight to M.C.? (Mississippi College)

Hannah: Yes.

Jones: Four years at M.C.?

Hannah: Four wonderful years at M.C., yes.

Jones: Tell me, was there someone here in Clinton who was an early intellectual mentor for you, maybe someone who instilled in you an early love for the language?

Hannah: Yes. There must have been something at home. We were rich in Bible, for one thing. But mentors outside that really encouraged me came about in third grade. Mrs. Bunyard was a woman of large experience and appreciation, and she used to let me get by with short stories when others were doing serious work. That was nice. I also remember a woman who is still actively mentoring others over at Millsaps: Mrs. Lois Blackwell taught me what poetry was and introduced me to drama and music and French and maybe the world; an amazingly marvelously learned lady who was very generous to brats like me in the tenth grade. At Mississippi College I was fortunate enough to have some instruction in appreciation, especially from a man who’s dead, very regrettably: Joe Edgar Simmons, a poet of note, a fine poet. I took his classes. Certainly there were others. Louis Dollarhide was very encouraging, always on my side. There was, when I was at Mississippi College, a real literary interest, and for some reason or another, good English instruction. I profited from the Lipseys there, Mr. Pete Lipsey in history. He introduced me to history. I don’t want to leave out also a really influential man named Dick Prenshaw, who was my high school band director. When I went to high school, you either played football or, I don’t know, maybe you were queer.

Jones: Same thing when I went.

Hannah: Yes, we had a marvelous band that won all the awards and went places. It made you proud of yourself if you were not being brutalized on the field. I mean you could hold your head up! As a matter of fact, the jocks envied us, which was quite a note. So I want to include Mr. Prenshaw, who’s at Mississippi Southern now.

Jones: Peggy Prenshaw’s husband?

Hannah: Her husband, yes.

Jones: Did you play the trumpet?

Hannah: Sure did, yes. All that goes along with being a musician, John, was very valuable. And travel. I want to include my parents too. My Dad always took me along on these trips that he won by being a marvelous salesman, you know, Top Club and President’s Club. They’d take me out of school, you know. It was all right. It was kind of loose back then. So I was well travelled when I was twelve years old, you know: Miami, Canada. That’s pretty good for a Mississippi boy. And out West. You pick up as much travelling as you do in the classroom, you know that. The same with our band. Our band was cosmopolitan! We read Downbeat, you know, and kept up with the world at large. The paper curtain didn’t really cocoon us like it did others. We knew there was something outside, and sought it.

Jones: Yes. That Dream of Pines Marching Band in Geronimo Rex was fashioned after some of the things you saw touring around with the Clinton High Band?

Hannah: Yes. I saw some good black bands in Mississippi. I don’t think anybody’s missed them. They take it seriously, a lot of them.

Jones: Yes.

Hannah: I mean real men in those things. I mean they trot, man, they’re fast! They will blow you away, you know, if you’re interested. I saw in Enid, Oklahoma, on one of these band trips with Clinton High, and I saw that there were bands, and then there was this other band. It was us and them, I mean. It was like somebody had dropped out from Mars. The categories were just discarded! They were beyond. They were quick, you know: d—d—d, d—d—d, d—d—d, d—d, d—d, d—d—d, d—d—d, and smoke was coming off the field! It was kind of scary! And this was Bossier City, baby, and they were good. You know, a lot of jaws dropped. You know, triple ones in everything. Superior, you know, wow! So maybe a little of them, and the whole mystique, and the absurdity, really, of having that kind of show out of what should be low-rent creeps at some high school—you know, pros at sixteen! You just know somebody’s behind it. You just wonder.

Jones: Yes. After you finished M.C., did you go straight on into graduate school?

Hannah: Yes, right into the University of Arkansas.

Jones: Yes. I interviewed Jim Whitehead last month.

Hannah: Yes, I saw him last year.

Jones: Was he an influence on you?

Hannah: Yes. Although Jim didn’t teach me in the classroom, he taught me a lot outside, especially in the snooker parlor. That’s the good thing about graduate school: it loosens up your education, it goes outside the classroom so much. You got something you want to do, and you pick up on things. It’s like you’re a lint instrument or something. You just hang around and you get an education if you don’t watch it. Jim was very good. He took poetry so seriously I said, “My God, it must be worth something.” To see some man like that take art seriously will change you. Again, it made me say, “Well, this is worthwhile. This man is passionate about what he does.” I kind of was a dabbler, you know the kind on college campuses: they write and the sensitive girls like it. You keep dropping these stories, you know, and they are probably dreadful. But it was on that level that I was writing.

Jones: For the ladies here at M.C.

Hannah: Yes, you know, I had a reputation for stories that nobody could figure out. I never told them I couldn’t either. I was a mysterious young man and all that, with a strange crowd. I enjoyed it, enjoyed the hell out of it. What were we talking about?

Jones: Jim Whitehead and graduate school.

Hannah: Yes, he’s a good man. I stayed with him, as a matter of fact, in Fayetteville. He’s got seven children. They are beautiful and polite. You can tell they’re from Mississippi. Their mama is a gorgeous Delta lady.

Jones: Gen, yes.

Hannah: Yes. It was just a glorious reunion.

Jones: What about the academic training for a writer? Do you believe in the role of academics in the creative process?

Hannah: Yes, finally. I don’t teach anymore. I’m glad. I might do a little teaching out at Occidental this spring, but that’s just to pay the rent. But after all is said and done, and experiencing a lot of people—you know, I’ve seen students drop out and say, “This ain’t it, school,” and it doesn’t have to be. There are not many of them who make it, “IT,” out on their own, you know?

Jones: Yes.

Hannah: I believe in the theory of dropping out and writing, but I don’t see it coming through too much. Some kind of discipline, if it’s a good school or a half-ass school, is good. There’s something about putting yourself down in school that’s instructive, if you let it. One teacher out of twenty is fine, you know?

Jones: Yes.

Hannah: So, yes. And it doesn’t hurt to read books, and it doesn’t damage you to know history and all you can. Eventually it is going to come forth in your sentences. Even if it’s not on that subject, it’s going to shine some-way. Somebody’s going to say, “That man knows what he’s talking about,” or, “This man is faking it.”

Jones: Fabricating his information.

Hannah: Yes.

Jones: Yes. It’s been interesting talking to some of the Mississippi writers to see that the ones who teach in college usually say education is important if not vital, and then one like Shelby Foote, you know, who quit undergraduate school, says that really nothing worth anything is coming off college campuses these days, that most every poet you know is stuck off away from life somewhere on a college campus doing nothing besides laying the coeds.

Hannah: I’m with Shelby on that point. But then I’ve been antipoetry for years; not the art but the sham, and the lack of product from the campus. I have met a number of suicidal, sensitive people who might write three poems a season that nobody in their right mind would publish but get published and are bragged on, by whom? Each other! It’s a very incestuous profession, and very unmanly in most cases. Ideally it should be very brave because you get nothing for it, and that’s true. There’s something about a mute and inglorious Milton, you know, like Gray said. That’s a wonderful idea, but the ones I know are not mute and inglorious, and they deserve to be inglori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Barry Hannah
• Barry Hannah
• The Spirits Will Win Through: An Interview with Barry Hannah
• An Interview with Barry Hannah
• Barry Hannah Interview
• An Interview with Barry Hannah
• A Conversation with Barry Hannah
• The Art of Being Interesting: An Interview with Barry Hannah
• Interview with Barry Hannah
• Interview with Barry Hannah: February 6, 2001
• Interview with Barry Hannah, Athens, Ohio
• An Interview with Barry Hannah
• Southern Destroyer
• Interview with Barry Hannah: October 13, 2005
• Crying Like a Fire in the Sun: A Conversation with Barry Hannah
• Bat Out of Hell: An Interview with Barry Hannah
• Barry Hannah: Interview, with Handgun
• Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower
• Index