Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday January 5, 2011
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LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories
Barry Hannah
Grove
ISBN 978-0802119681
456 pages
$27.50
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Boy, did I not see this coming. While I knew that Barry Hannah, who died earlier this year at the age of 67, was a revered Southern writer, a teacher at the University of Mississippi, and a mentor to the novelists Donna Tartt and Larry Brown (among others), I had somehow never actually read any of his work. Yet his first collection of stories, "Airships," has long been regarded as a modern classic, and "Captain Maximus," "Bats Out of Hell" and "High Lonesome" hardly less so. I did have the impression that the stories themselves were pretty much about good old boys who liked their liquor, women, guns and motorcycles, and probably tended to abuse the first two. But that's about all. Hannah himself, I figured, probably hadn't been much different in his youth.
Then I heard that he'd gotten sick with cancer, seen Jesus in a dream and recovered, and that his subsequent work grew a bit softer, less frenetic. In Oxford, Miss., however, he remained a fixture, a regular visitor at the famous Square Books, a guy people liked and were glad to have carrying on the local traditions of Faulkner and Welty.
But I knew all this secondhand, never having read a word by the man himself. Which is why I was eager to review "Long, Last, Happy." Before going any further, let me say straight out that I was a fool to have waited so long to discover Hannah.
Agatha Christie mysteries we read for their plots, Sherlock Holmes stories we return to for their gaslight and hansom-cab coziness, but the very best writers we love for the sound of their sentences, the shiver of pleasure delivered by unexpected words and astonishing turns of phrase, by the way their language makes us feel glad to be alive. You don't pick up James Joyce's "Ulysses" because you want to learn about the events in Dublin on June 16, 1904; you don't read Hunter S. Thompson because you want to find out about the nightlife in Las Vegas. What Joyce and Thompson offer is simply the glorious experience of the English language knocking your socks off.
Barry Hannah belongs in this noble company. And then some. As a boy, Hannah was drawn to Dylan Thomas' surreal poetry; as a young man, he wrote a thesis on William Blake's apocalyptic visions. These are his forebears as much as the masters of the American grotesque: Edgar Allan Poe ("Hop-Frog"), Nathanael West ("Miss Lonelyhearts"), William Faulkner (almost anything) and Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find"). Yet like all these writers, Hannah produced work full of macabre humor and wistfulness and wild regret. "'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." That's from "Water Liars," which starts with a lovely sentence (reminiscent of one from the start of "Moby-Dick"):
"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."
While that's certainly beautiful, it's also basically realistic. Not so this description of a man's passion for his wife: "I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out" ("Love Too Long").
Sometimes Hannah can be Woody Allen funny: "Roger had a fascinated aversion to this Mintner and believed that he should be hauled away and made to eat with accountants" ("Getting Ready"). At other times, the surreal grows into absurdist drama. A Confederate soldier unhorses a Yankee:
"'Say wise things to me or die, patriot,' I said.
"'But but but but but but,' he said.
"'Shhh!' I said. 'Let nobody else hear. Only me. Tell the most exquisite truths you know'" ("Dragged Fighting from His Tomb").
In "Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed," a gay Confederate soldier pines for Gen. Jeb Stuart. Still another Civil War tale, "Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony," might have been written by Ambrose Bierce at his most bitter and pitiless, as a Yankee spy finds himself unexpectedly betrayed. While Hannah's sentences are never anything but pure pleasure, his stories often finish enigmatically, as in the sudden violence at the end of "Coming Close to Donna." But then this is a story that opens with two rivals fighting to the death over Donna while she begs for sex from her gay friend Vince, who simply likes "to wear smart clothes and walk up and down Sunset Strip."
In one of Hannah's longest pieces, "Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other," a writer closely modeled on William Burroughs discovers that a distinguished doctor suffers from "Grofft." In an attempt at sexual reinvigoration, the 89-year-old surgeon has had a transfusion of what turns out to be the tainted blood of a South American Indian. Symptoms of Grofft include "lupine facial features and doglike barking and whining; quadriped posture; hebephrenia; extremely nervous devotion to a search, general agitation, constant disappointment, lethargy, then renewal." During a severe attack of the virus, the doctor suddenly barrels through New York City on all fours and finally buries his head in the dug-up grave of his first wife.
The surreal is often close to the spooky, and every Southern writer worth his moonshine knows at least one or two tales of "your witches and your haints." In "Evening of the Yarp: A Report by Roonswent Dover," a backwoods boy unsuspectingly gives a lift to a vampiric creature called the Yarp. Now, a Yarp generally "denominates in black garments" but will suddenly "lift his coat and you can see all his digestion, everything he's eaten all chewed and gravyed-up in them tubes and holds and glands, and it makes you sicker. Thered be a baby's foot or one woman saw his stomach and there were a human brain." The Yarp is definitely what poor Dover calls one of "your active supernaturals," like the hag who can stare at people "till theyr hearts break."
While the four new stories in "Happy, Long, Last" don't quite pack the power of the earlier ones, they're still more than worth reading. In "Sick Soldier at Your Door," God is imagined as a lanky fellow -- "Old Dad" -- with "iron gray hair parted and combed straight back" who is always "busting his ribs with glee over the misreadings of rabbis, monks, and the television preachers from the Academy for Significant Hair."
Gentle Reader, learn from my own awful example. Put aside that meretricious best-seller and go immerse yourself in the heartbreakingly funny, word-drunk world of Barry Hannah.
Michael Dirda reviews books every Thursday for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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KAY THOMPSON: From Funny Face to Eloise
Sam Irvin
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1439176535
416 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday
I don't know how much they'd have to pay me to read the first 200 pages of this book again, but somewhere in the second 200 pages, I began to pity the author. Sam Irvin is obviously in thrall to his material, lost in the murky swamp of place names and song titles and record dates and nightclub performances, but nobody told him the difference between what's interesting and what's not.
The book is a biography of Kay Thompson, whom many people don't remember anymore. But she had an interesting life. She was born in St. Louis, on Nov. 9, 1909, as Kitty Fink. The author wants you to know that Kitty's mother was born in Eureka, Kan., and was "raised 140 miles northwest in Abilene, home of future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, two years her junior." Kitty grew up in St. Louis, and "while tinkling the ivories at the dance studio, she came down with a serious case of dance fever." Although she was "loath to admit it, Kitty continued as the pianist for the St. Louis Symphony for three full years." She loved to sing, and so she "groaned, growled, and grunted guttural sounds that could wake the dead."
She went to high school and was a camp counselor. She kept her sisters as singing partners and friends, and eventually, she left home to seek her fortune, spending time in various cities including Hollywood, where she got her actual start as a choral arranger and singer on different 15-minute radio shows, singing with Bing Crosby, sometimes on the "Lucky Strike Hit Parade" and programs with names like "The Royal Gelatin Hour." We hear about it like this: "For his NBC show, The Royal Gelatin Hour, Rudy Vallee wanted to feature selections from Hooray for What!" -- a Broadway musical from which Thompson had just been fired -- "performed by the musical's cast. However, the radio program went on the air at the same time the play was being performed at the Winter Garden. Someone proposed the unthinkable: Would Kay consider salting her wounds for one more night? If it meant millions of people would hear her proudly sing her own arrangements of 'Down with Love' and 'Moanin' in the Mornin',' rather than Vivian Vance, then hell yeah."
Now, I don't want to sound like a grump, but way too many people have never heard of Kay Thompson, except as the author of the "Eloise" children's books. They may remember Vivian Vance as Lucille Ball's frumpy television sidekick, but not as the scheming femme fatale she's portrayed as here. And though a hefty wedge of senior citizens may remember the spate of 15-minute singing radio shows, why, exactly, would they want to be reminded of those goofy little distractions now?
Irvin just can't leave anything out. He doesn't care if it's essential or trivial. If he has the fact in hand, he has to write it down. By his own account, he spent 10 years on this book, and I believe it. He prefers an old-time wacky Hollywood style: "After she'd had her fill, Kay left Merry Old England for Old Blue Eyes in the Big Apple." It goes on and on. Relentlessly.
The second 200 pages turn out to be more interesting. After successful stints as a choral arranger for MGM and successful nightclub tours with the Williams Brothers -- Andy Williams was a member of the group, and apparently her longtime lover -- Thompson, already friends with a great many Hollywood celebrities, made a movie with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn called "Funny Face," where she repeatedly "stole" the picture. And after years of amusing herself by talking in the affected voice of an imaginary 6-year-old girl named Eloise, she enlisted the collaboration of an amiable and talented illustrator, Hilary Knight, and the "Eloise" series of children's books was born. Since Eloise lived at the Plaza Hotel, management dedicated a room to her, and the venerable hotel became a tourist stop for little girls from across America. But Kay shortchanged her illustrator; she wanted Eloise to be her own and no one else's.
The more you read about this woman, the more awful she sounds. She did make sure that Howard Duff played the radio Sam Spade, and she inspired true saintliness in Liza Minnelli, who sheltered her in her final years. But the life that's portrayed in excruciating detail by Irvin turns out to be a mean one.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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