This is one of my favorite short stories. It is only one page long. After it appeared in the issue of the The New Yorker below, I cut it out and framed it and maybe once a week would re-read it. As I would stand before it, I felt as if I were at an altar. This story about an altered life altered mine. Sometimes it takes a reimagining of what an altar-ed life can be to arrive at a reimagined, altered one.
I will post a photo of the page itself below. But because a big part of this altered life of mine is about service - and I do feel as if I am in grateful service to my subscribers here at SES/SUMS IT UP - I have transcribed the text of the story if it is easier for you to read in this column’s script than to read it from the photo of the page from The New Yorker that contained the whole short story.
But first a bit about the story’s author Barry Hannah. Here is some of his obit by Williams Grimes from The New York Times’s March 3, 2010 edition:
“Barry Hannah, a writer who found wide acclaim with wild, darkly comic short stories and novels set in a phantasmagoric South moving at warp speed, died on Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67.
“The cause was a heart attack, his son Barry Jr. said.
“Mr. Hannah staked his claim to the Gothic territory mapped out by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor in his first novel, ‘Geronimo Rex’ (1972), a high-octane coming-of-age tale set in the fictional town of Dream of Pines, La.
“‘That book was like a bolt of lightning,’ Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said in an interview Tuesday. ‘It was gonzo Southern fiction that opened you to a whole new way of writing. It was fresh, original and dangerous, in a way.’
“Reviewing the book for The New York Times, the novelist Jim Harrison called Mr. Hannah ‘one of those young writers who is brilliantly drunk with words and could at gunpoint write the life story of a telephone pole.’
“The short story collection ‘Airships,’ published in 1978, confirmed Mr. Hannah’s budding reputation as a daring stylist and a loose-limbed adventurer in an absurdist South of his own imagining: a passionate and violent land teeming with loud drunks, confused war veterans and ardent, uneasy good ol’ boys. Most of the stories were first published by Gordon Lish in Esquire.
“‘He played an important role in introducing Southern literature to postmodernism at a time when Southern writing was trying to live up to and move beyond the great achievements of the modernist Southern Renaissance authors, especially William Faulkner,’ Martyn Bone, the editor of ‘Perspectives on Barry Hannah’ (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), wrote in an e-mail message on Tuesday.
“‘Many of his stories or novels feature scenes in which Faulkner’s style, characters, or subject matter are satirized or parodied,’ Mr. Bone added. ‘He was able to play fast and loose with Southern literary tradition and its subject matter in a way that some other writers were not.’
“Howard Barry Hannah was born on April 23, 1942, in Meridian, Miss., and grew up in Clinton, a small town near Jackson. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Mississippi College in 1964, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas, where he received a master’s degree in 1966 and the university’s first M.F.A. degree in fiction in 1967.
“While writing, he taught literature and creative writing at several colleges, including Clemson University and the University of Alabama, and was at various times a writer in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, the University of Iowa and the University of Montana at Missoula.
“In 1982 he became a writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, and later was the director of its M.F.A. and creative writing program. His many students over the years included the writers Bob Shacochis, Donna Tartt, Cynthia Shearer and Wells Tower.
“Mr. Hannah’s exuberant, high-energy narratives tended toward the picaresque and, as often as not, crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. ‘Nightwatchmen’ (1973), a horror-mystery tale in an almost hysterically comic vein, exhibited the author’s alarming tendency to wander, wobble and then fall apart in what John Updike, in a review of ‘Geronimo Rex,’ called ‘accelerating incoherence.’ Over the years, such performances recurred, in novels jammed with incident and infatuated with language, like ‘The Tennis Handsome’ (1983) and ‘Hey Jack!’ (1987).
“Mr. Hannah himself admitted to being a short story writer first, with an imagination calibrated to the short burst. ‘The old man off 40 years of morphine was fascinated by guns,’ begins the short story ‘Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other.’ ‘He was also a foe of dogs everywhere. They were too servile, too slavering, too helplessly pack-bent, when not treacherous. The cat was the thing. Coots cut at the evening with his cane and wanted to “see a death” in the big city.’
“Plot and character mattered less to him than the ripe bit of regional speech, the fraught incident, the startling metaphor, the ingeniously shaped sentence. ‘I am doomed to be a more lengthy fragmentist,’ he said in a 2001 interview with Bomb. ‘In my thoughts, I don’t ever come on to plot in a straightforward way.’”
(Above: Barry Hannah photographed by Erika Larse)
You can read more about him here in a lovely appreciation and remembrance written by an ex-student of his, Michael Bible. And here is the beginning of his The Art of Fiction (No. 184) interview from the Winter 2004 edition of The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
I’ve read that you didn’t grow up in a house full of books.
BARRY HANNAH
No, only the Bible. My dad read history, about a book a day, but only after he retired as a successful bank and insurance man. Before that, he read Faulkner. He went to school with Faulkner, tried to read him. But I guess Dad wasn’t literary. He loved everybody, but even he thought Faulkner was a snoot.
INTERVIEWER
Count No’ Count.
HANNAH
Count No’ Count. Dad was from low circumstances—farm people—and art snobs were not in his universe. He knew Faulkner only as an aloof, bohemian figure. He’d say to me, “Son, he was hard to know.” And his report was not unlike others. They didn’t know what to do with Faulkner; they weren’t unkind, they just didn’t have a category for him.
I put off reading Faulkner because I was afraid of him. As a young writer you automatically want to ignore what’s in your backyard because you feel if it’s from here, it ain’t good. It just can’t be that damn good. It’s overrated. But I peered into Faulkner long enough when I was about eighteen to know that he was such a consummate genius with a comprehensive mind for history—he scared me. I didn’t want to be anything like him and I was also afraid that he might be too much of a genius, that he might just blow me away. I wanted to be a writer in my own right, and I felt just on reading a few pages that he would be very contagious, oppressively influential.
INTERVIEWER
Are there other writers who shut you down? Were there writers who were helpful when you were starting out?
HANNAH
My immediate idol was Hemingway, who wrote in a deep boy style, with much white left on the page. He was approachable, yet demanded a good piece of your head. Nabokov said Hemingway wrote books for boys, but that’s just a pompous disreading of genius. “Aesthetic bliss,” so identified with Nabokov, is a frequent blessing in Hemingway, too. I love both authors, by the way, and found my own way between them. Lolita released me into truth and beauty. It did not paralyze me. Nobody paralyzes me anymore. I needed age, wisdom.
INTERVIEWER
Did your father discourage you from being a writer?
HANNAH
He would rather I’d been an M.D. or a Ph.D. Said he wanted a doctor to cut his lawn.
THE WRETCHED SEVENTIES
by Barry Hannah
Many, too many days, Ned Maxy had stared out a window weeping, fasting, and praying in his way. In character of both the drunkard and the penitent, he had watched life across the street. Now, in a healthier time, arising to his work at early hours, he labored at his front window table, peering out on occasion at a world that spoke back at him. Not loudly, and not a lot, but some.
Over the white board fence he’d just painted, and through the leaping wide leaves of his muscadine arbor, he spied shyly like a stranger in town. The satisfaction of this almost frightened him.
The woman in a uniform who left every morning at a quarter to eight was a paramedic. In the awful seventies Maxy had sworn to hundreds in saloons that he wanted most of all to be a paramedic. This was a bogus piety to support his drinking. But here was the real thing. Maxy did not know the paramedic woman but he watched her through a pair of opera glasses he had bought at a Hot Springs pawn shop from a man who had also been broken in the seventies and who now sat with his crutches beside him and lit up unfiltered Luckies that made him retch.
In his late forties the lifetime monster of lust had released him, first time since he was eleven, just as the monster of drink had released him four years ago. He still did not know what precisely accounted for it, but it was a deep lucky thing, now that he was able to see the woman paramedic leaving for work and comprehend that she could be happy without him. He looked on in high admiration, good will, and no panic. She was engaged to a wide man with a crewcut who came out with her to the doorway on his big white legs, in Bermuda shorts, and embraced her, seeing his love off in the cool of the morning. Maxy applauded their love. He had been in love this way twice in his life. He recalled the stupid rapture and had no advice for them at all.
He had spoken to the woman only once, told her she looked good in her uniform - all ready to fly away in a helicopter in her high-top black leather sneakers. She had the voice of a country girl, the kind of girl who had soothed his old man dying in the hospital at the age of eighty-seven. The old fellow had got rich in the city but loved the country much better, and the nurse was a sweet comfort at the last. Maxy liked that this country girl had the moxie to fly in a machine that would have terrified many hillbillies, and he told her so. Even from a hundred yards he could see her go shy, having an unexpected compliment sail out to her from a man who didn’t need anything, here in the late cool of a summer morning, her head of blond hair lowered to look at her own eminent bosom of which he was no longer required to dream in impossible lechery.
She answered some way he couldn’t make out, in a whisper, a country whisper of thanks, good beyond form. This whole exchange would not have been possible even three months ago, when in his mind he would have been teaching her the needs of his famished world, her body a naked whirlwind of willing orifices, as he smiled at her all the while like the prince of liars.
The whisper had fetched back for him his old mighty friend Drum, lately a suicide. Drum was a practicing Christian, one of maybe four selfless men Ned Maxy had known in life, brought low by pain and anxiety after a heart attack. He was cut off from good work and high spirits and could not go on, they said. Drum was the only whispering drunkard Maxy knew. Through all the thundering seventies he had never raised his voice.
He killed himself in the bathroom of a double-wide mobile home he rented from a preacher who lamented to the police: Now poor Drum can’t ever go to Heaven. But he had been tidy there in the bathtub with the large-calibre pistol, much appreciated.
His drinking buddy Drum’s whispers of encouragement, his pleading to Maxy that he was a man who must respect himself, that he must work hard, that he must not waste the precious days or the gifts poured on him by nature - Ned Maxy would take that whisper with him until his own heart stopped, too, and he knew this.
The whisper of the paramedic country girl was there for him now. He did not want to make too much of it. Thousands must have been given this gift. He didn’t want to be only another kind of fool, a sort of Peeping Tom of charity.
But he was a new fool. Some big quiet thing had fallen down and locked into place, like a whisper of some weight. Ned Maxy had been granted contact with paradise, and he could hardly believe the lack of noise. His awful seventies decade had gone past twenty years. Finally it was over.
The next day, Maxy, in a daze, got his rushed suit out of the cleaners and attended the wedding of the woman paramedic at a country church down between Water Valley and Coffeeville. He shook hands with the bride and groom, then stood out of the pounding heat under the shade of a tall brothering sycamore.
Nobody ever figured out quite who he was. Their faces were full of baffled felicity, as if each one was whispering, Well, howdy, stranger, I guess.