Joy
A couple of months ago I expressed interest in Barry Hannah to a friend, wondering where to start (the consensus seems to be Airships), and he said, “I like him because he’s got a real fuck-you tone, as opposed to the abundant, tender, pinched-sphincter tone most writers these days have.” Exactly.
Hannah’s death has sent me scouring the internet for interviews and eulogies, for advice and memorable lines. Here are some of my favorites (please add to the list in the comments):
A recorded conversation between Larry Brown & Barry Hannah
A profile written by Wells Tower from a couple of years ago (the fourth page has the entirety of “Water Liars,” the first story from Airships)
The Mississippi Review interviewed Hannah in 1996.
Alec Niedenthal’s collection of remembrances (which includes a syllabus from one of Hannah’s classes)
Tin House’s interview from last year:
TF: How has your teaching changed over the years?
BH: It’s gotten a lot simpler. The things that I do well in my own work, I didn’t ever think about, because I’d been trained on good storytelling and helped by a few good teachers. But outside of beginning, middle, and end and “thrill us,” what else is there to teach? There’s no theory, there’s nothing that guarantees publication. I’ve never been interested in intellectual experiments. I prefer to thrill people in their guts rather than in their heads. With some of the MFA writing I read now, I wonder, “My God, didn’t anybody get it across that you’ve got to entertain?” You’re fortunate if what entertains you entertains the crowd also.
It may be just my time of life, but I’ve been teaching better, I hope. My essays have gotten a lot better. But what I want is what I had in Airships and High Lonesome and Bats Out of Hell and Captain Maximus: joy. Joy, just joy, just jump in there because you’re onto it. You’ve gotta write it. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach.
I was surprised by this response, not just because of some of the conversations we’ve had here & here & here (“Entertain!? Damnit, Hannah!”), but how the word joy struck me: I was hungry for it.
Deadlines looming, the last thing on my mind at the desk lately has been joy. Usually I’m calculating in my head how I’m going to get through the day’s to-do list. His response reminded me of a David Foster Wallace essay I’ve been returning to lately. Wallace outlines an evolution of the experience of writing, from for fun, just for yourself, to a vain, stifling concern with being considered a good writer, to a new kind of fun. To “the discovery that disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun…Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.”
Obviously I know little about to what degree Hannah’s heartbroken, drunken, horny characters correlate to their creator, but his fiction is outrageously funny and full of humanity. It makes me crave the process Foster Wallace describes. This week I’m taping the word Joy above my desk, for Barry and for myself. I want to jump in.
Tags: Barry Hannah, David Foster Wallace
great post. I love Hannah, and have taken another look at some of the stories in Airships in the past couple of days. They’re so energetic and strange, and they make all these unfamiliar moves, in language and “plot.” I like the idea of joy as a driving force, the life force of the stories.
I love the audio conversation between Hannah and Larry Brown, linked above. That’s from 1994, and is just excellent. Great post, TJ. There’s something so exciting about Hannah’s language, his sentences, the weird shapes his stories take. Love what he says about joy, too.
The audio conversation is great. I love hearing them talk about what keeps them from writing.