by Barry Hannah
BARRY HANNAH’S
AIRSHIPS
“Exhilarating! Hannah is afraid of nothing in experience. He runs to meet life and to transform it.”
—DENIS DONOGHUE
“Barry Hannah’s writing is raw and exhilarating, tortured, radiant, vicious, aggressive, funny and streaked with rage, pain and bright, poetic truth.”
—THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
“Hannah’s stories are powerful, and powerfully original.”
—JOHN GARDNER
“Barry Hannah is an original, vital talent.”
—THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
“The best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor.”
—LARRY MCMURTRY
AIRSHIPS
Barry Hannah
Copyright © 1970, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978 by Barry Hannah Appreciation © 2004 by Richard Ford
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
“Water Liars,” “Love Too Long,” “Testimony of Pilot,” “Coming Close to Donna,” “Return to Return,” “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” “Our Secret Home,” “Eating Wife and Friends,” and “Pete Resists the Man of His Old Room” first appeared in Esquire; “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed” in Black Warrior Review; “Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt” in The Carolina Quarterly; and “All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail” in Fiction. Text and title have in certain cases been altered since the original publication.
Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1978
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hannah, Barry.
Airships/Barry Hannah.
Previously published : New York: Knopf, 1978.
ISBN 0-8021-3388-6
I. Title.
PS3558.A476A75 1994 813′.54—dc20 93-42713
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
04 05 06 07 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
This book is for Patricia B.,
Blue-eyed Nebraska lady
This book honors the memory of Arnold Gingrich.
Its publication was in part provided for by the
men and women who were his colleagues at Esquire,
the magazine he founded and edited with distinction.
Contents
An Appreciation
BY RICHARD FORD
Water Liars
Love Too Long
Testimony of Pilot
Coming Close to Donna
Dragged Fighting from His Tomb
Quo Vadis, Smut?
Return to Return
Green Gets It
Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet
Our Secret Home
Eating Wife and Friends
All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail
Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed
That’s True
Escape to Newark
Pete Resists the Man of His Old Room
Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony
Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa
Deaf and Dumb
Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt
An Appreciation
All of us who are writers take heart from the confident expectation that truly wonderful, provocative, pleasure-giving writing will eventually get its due. In thirty-three years of writing stories and novels, Barry Hannah has made a signal and inimitable contribution to the life of the short story and to the vivacity of American imaginative writing. I’m positive that nobody writing stories in America today doesn’t know Barry Hannah’s work, and that everybody writing has been affected by it in one way or another.
This does not mean that Hannah’s due is to be that most unloveable of things, a writer’s writer—which means that you’re always broke and that only other writers read you, when they get your books for free. Barry Hannah’s work has stayed in print and widely read since the celebrated publication of his first, unforgettable book—a novel—Geronimo Rex, in 1972, a critical affirmation corroborated by readers and permanently forged by his first collection of short stories, this very book, in 1978, the likes of which the American reading and reviewing public had simply never seen before.
Richard Blackmur wrote once—about poetry—that real poetry is distinguishable from mere verse by the animating presence of a “fresh idiom: language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter at hand but adds to the stock of available reality.”
Poetry, of course, has it a little easier than prose would have it in satisfying Blackmur’s stipulation, since modern poetry, anyway, is less likely to be as strenuously asked to “express the matter at hand.” Whereas prose is the dray horse of ordinary, at hand communication, and as such is somewhat resistant to truly “fresh idiom.” Generations of American prose writers—Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Patchen, Anaïs Nin, Donald Barthelme—have banged themselves and their sentences against conventional and intransigent American prose syntax, grammar, and diction, with often unsustained results—failing most often to express the matter at hand, while doing much better at the “twisted and posed” parts.
Maybe you just can’t try to do both at once. Either you naturally do them, like Faulkner, like Alice Munro, like Ray Carver, or you don’t. After which realization you can choose to step back into the “realistic tradition.”
In the course of four collections of short stories, Barry Hannah’s idiom has stayed incomparably fresh, if occasionally a little twisted. And his sense of what’s-real-at-ground-level—what is the matter at hand—bedazzles our own sense of what’s actual like a glittering reproof. Places, characters’ names, emotions, impulses, consequences that seem utterly familiar to us taunt, provoke, and shock us in Hannah’s stories. His view of humanity is skeptical, not always favorable, frequently hilarious. His work is a lifelong revel in our own blunt human fecklessness and unpredictability. Barry most often approaches the very serious by way of the blatantly unserious, and challenges us to determine what seriousness—ours, the world’s—actually comes to.
You can’t quite imagine what it was like to be a young writer from the South, as I was thirty years ago, steeped in the preoccupations and the sounds of Faulkner and his imitators, and also steeped in Eudora Welty and Walker Percy and Richard Wright—these Mississippians—and then to find Barry Hannah recasting the world in the way obviously great writing does. And my own age, too. And from Clinton, Mississippi, no less—right across town from me. It was both daunting and thrilling. His very conception of what a story could be was one I’d never thought of. His sentences had, among their teeming effects and emotions, a perilous feel; words running almost sedately at precipice-edge between sense and hysteria; verbal connectives that didn’t respect regular bounds and might in fact say anything. If voice is the music of a writer’s intelligence, Barry’s voice was the one many of us hear when we speak candidly to ourselves—subversive, inventive, unpredictable, funnier than we can be in public and certainly on the page. This was and is a true voice, though also truly literary—which is to say, heightened, felicitous, privileged speech you converse with intimately in your mind. And b
ecause it was clearly so good, and because I knew no one else could do it the way he did, it was best for me, his reader, those years ago, not to think it was daunting and thrilling, but that it was thrilling. Which is what I think to this minute.
For better or for worse, in his writing life, Barry has spent time as a teacher of young writers. I’ve always thought it was cruel that impressionable young novice writers, having gotten their first sniff of Barry’s work, should come—as they do—to sit at his feet and try to learn to do even some little bit of what he does. You can’t do what he does. It’s hopeless for them. It’s a law-of-the-jungle measure of excellence, I suppose, that this kind of rare talent isn’t impartable.
I have no wish to heap on more cloying praise or painful, hyperbolic exegesis, though Barry would perhaps like me to. But when I was called on to award Barry Hannah the PEN-Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, it was simply to give him his due, as it has been his due since the publication of the volume you hold in your hands. This is a rare writer and a rare and wonderful book—still thrilling after all these years.
—Richard Ford
AIRSHIPS
Water Liars
When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.
I’m glad it’s not my name.
This poor dignified man has had to explain his nobility to the semiliterate of half of America before he could even begin a decent conversation with them. On the other hand, Farte, Jr., is a great liar himself. He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tells big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghosts took out of Farte Cove in years past.
Last year I turned thirty-three years old and, raised a Baptist, I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three. It had all seemed especially important, what you do in this year, and holy with meaning.
On the morning after my birthday party, during which I and my wife almost drowned in vodka cocktails, we both woke up to the making of a truth session about the lovers we’d had before we met each other. I had a mildly exciting and usual history, and she had about the same, which surprised me. For ten years she’d sworn I was the first. I could not believe her history was exactly equal with mine. It hurt me to think that in the era when there were supposed to be virgins she had allowed anyone but me, and so on.
I was dazed and exhilarated by this information for several weeks. Finally, it drove me crazy, and I came out to Farte Cove to rest, under the pretense of a fishing week with my chum Wyatt.
I’m still figuring out why I couldn’t handle it.
My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow. The movement of every limb in every passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.
You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.
I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.
My vacation at Farte Cove wasn’t like that easy little bit you get as a rich New Yorker. My finances weren’t in great shape; to be true, they were about in ruin, and I left the house knowing my wife would have to answer the phone to hold off, for instance, the phone company itself. Everybody wanted money and I didn’t have any.
I was going to take the next week in the house while she went away, watch our three kids and all the rest. When you both teach part-time in the high schools, the income can be slow in summer.
No poor-mouthing here. I don’t want anybody’s pity. I just want to explain. I’ve got good hopes of a job over at Alabama next year. Then I’ll get myself among higher-paid liars, that’s all.
Sidney Farte was out there prevaricating away at the end of the pier when Wyatt and I got there Friday evening. The old faces I recognized; a few new harkening idlers I didn’t.
“Now, Doctor Mooney, he not only saw the ghost of Lily, he says he had intercourse with her. Said it was involuntary. Before he knew what he was doing, he was on her making cadence and all their clothes blown away off in the trees around the shore. She turned into a wax candle right under him.”
“Intercourse,” said an old-timer, breathing heavy. He sat up on the rail. It was a word of high danger to his old mind. He said it with a long disgust, glad, I guess, he was not involved.
“Maclntire, a Presbyterian preacher, I seen him come out here with his son-and-law, anchor near the bridge, and pull up fifty or more white perch big as small pumpkins. You know what they was using for bait?”
“What?” asked another geezer.
“Nutbin. Caught on the bare hook. It was Gawd made them fish bite,” said Sidney Farte, going at it good.
“Naw. There be a season they bite a bare hook. Gawd didn’t have to’ve done that,” said another old guy, with a fringe of red hair and a racy Florida shirt.
“Nother night,” said Sidney Farte, “I saw the ghost of Yazoo hisself with my pa, who’s dead. A Indian king with four deer around him.”
The old boys seemed to be used to this one. Nobody said anything. They ignored Sidney.
“Tell you what,” said a well-built small old boy. “That was somethin when we come down here and had to chase that whole high-school party off the end of this pier, them drunken children. They was smokin dope and two-thirds a them nekid swimmin in the water. Good hunnerd of em. From your so-called good high school. What you think’s happnin at the bad ones?”
I dropped my beer and grew suddenly sick. Wyatt asked me what was wrong. I could see my wife in 1960 in the group of high-schoolers she must have had. My jealousy went out into the stars of the night above me. I could not bear the roving carelessness of teen-agers, their judgeless tangling of wanting and bodies. But I was the worst back then. In the mad days back then, I dragged the panties off girls I hated and talked badly about them once the sun came up.
“Worst time in my life,” said a new, younger man, maybe sixty but with the face of a man who had surrendered, “me and Woody was fishing. Had a lantern. It was about eleven. We was catching a few fish but rowed on into that little cove over there near town. We heard all these sounds, like they was ghosts. We was scared. We thought it might be the Yazoo hisself. We known of some fellows the Yazoo had killed to death just from fright. It was the over the sounds of what was normal human sighin and amoanin. It was big unhuman sounds. We just stood still in the boat. Ain’t nuthin else us to do. For thirty minutes.”
“An what was it?” said the old geezer, letting himself off the rail.
“We had a big flashlight. There came up this rustlin in the brush and I beamed it over there. The two of em makin the sounds get up with half they clothes on. It was my own daughter Charlotte and an older guy I didn’t even know with a mustache. My own daughter, and them sounds over the water scarin us like ghosts.”
“My Gawd, that’s awful,” said the old geezer by the rail. “Is that the truth? I wouldn’t’ve told that. That’s terrible.”
Sidney Farte was really upset.
“This ain’t the place!” he said. “Tell your kind of story somewhere else.”
The old man who’d told his story
was calm and fixed to his place. He’d told the truth. The crowd on the pier was outraged and discomfited. He wasn’t one of them. But he stood his place. He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about.
I told Wyatt to bring the old man back to the cabin. He was out here away from his wife the same as me and Wyatt. Just an older guy with a big hurting bosom. He wore a suit and the only way you’d know he was on vacation was he’d removed his tie. He didn’t know where the bait house was. He didn’t know what to do on vacation at all. But he got drunk with us and I can tell you he and I went out the next morning with our poles, Wyatt driving the motorboat, fishing for white perch in the cove near the town. And we were kindred.
We were both crucified by the truth.
Love Too Long
My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can’t read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can’t find work. My wife’s got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I’m afraid she’ll screw up and crash.
I got to get back to work and get dulled out again. I got to be a man again. You can’t walk around the house drinking coffee and beer all day, thinking about her taking her brassiere off. We been married and divorced twice. Sometimes I wish I had a sport. I bought a croquet set on credit at Penney’s. First day I got so tired of it I knocked the balls off in the weeds and they’re out there rotting, mildew all over them, I bet, but I don’t want to see.
Some afternoons she’ll come right over the roof of the house and turn the plane upside down. Or maybe it’s her teacher. I don’t know how far she’s got along. I’m afraid to ask, on the every third night or so she comes in the house. I want to rip her arm off. I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out. Some nights she lets me lick her ears and knees. I can’t talk about it. It’s driving me into a sorry person. Maybe Hobe Lewis would let me pump gas and sell bait at his service station. My mind’s around to where I’d do nigger work now.