Airships

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

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
.

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

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 because 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

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 Far
tay
, 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.