In the early 1990s I went to a writers conference at Bennington College in Vermont. My chief motivation was to meet Barry Hannah, “a writers’ writer” I idolized. It was time and money well spent. The following previously-published story memorializes that event.
At Bennington, John Irving, introduced as a “true literary lion” by Bob Shacochis, turned neatly-stacked manuscript pages of his latest work with neatly-trimmed, New York-looking hands, marking the end of the ’93 writing seminars. A memorable, kind man, who flew in for the reading and flew out shortly thereafter, was Irving. And Shacochis, so gregarious, so funny . . . and his Indian-sounding last name—sha-cochis. But Barry Hannah was king for his two weeks in Vermont that July. Unquestionably. Shacochis knew. We all knew. I suspect Irving knew. I’d give a year of my life to be back there again with Bob, and Liam Rector and Bret Lott and Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon and Jill McCorkle and Margot Livesy, every one, all so kind . . . Barry Hannah could be kind but didn’t seem to consider it a necessity like the others had. He was, as they say, brutally honest. I was surprised when he read High Water Railers and pronounced cocksuckers “corkshuckers.” That’s the closest thing to a lie I remember hearing him say.
He was not “epicene,”—as I’ve lately heard reported in Oxford Magazine by an acquaintance of his, fourteen months after Barry’s death—not then, not to me. Save me from “friends” like that. Scribbling assassins. I know that when we die we don’t know what people say and write about us, but shit, what about the family? Barry looked crisp in his khakis and striped button-down shirt and light-brown shades. He was coolness and crust, had a smooth desert sand voice, seemed a planet unto himself.
I remember when I first became aware of him. It was at a bookstore, and I saw a spine announcing Bats out of Hell in yellow block caps. Off the shelf and in my hands, the front jacket sleeve rocked—black, fanged, bat/cat-devil face, red rockets screaming Rebellion. Blood eyes. The black-and-white author photo on the back seemed a paradox—a damaged-but-thoughtful-looking Uto-Aztecan chief, perhaps a wayward Shoshone, far from his Wind River home.
Not Buddha in rouge and lipstick, as the assassin described him—Barry was Geronimo Rex.
At the time, I was going for my MFA in the writing program at The American University in Washington, D.C. I read everything of Barry Hannah’s I could get my hands on.
I’d heard the rumors of guns and booze and lunacy, sobriety. And recently, in ill health, the great gulf looming just ahead, the turn to Jesus. Who can blame him? There are no gods, though. Only old men and women struggling through those flat days, young ones too; dogs, cats, Screaming Rebels, guns, booze, Democrats and Republicans, ferocity, shame, lassitude, embarrassment, joy, and creeping, inevitable death.
At Bennington, he smoked Winston Lights, which seemed like a concession. Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?
I gathered from some of his writings that he didn’t like people from Ohio. My home was in Akron, but I was born in Wyoming, a half-Shoshone Indian from the Wind River reservation, considered myself a Westerner and still do. He called me “Ricky.” He seemed like, well, a dad. Mine, a white guy who’d wanted to adopt me but for reasons too complicated to go into did not, had died years before, at forty-two. He’d be two years Barry’s senior if they were alive.
Barry was reading what looked like a coffee-table book with BECKETT on the cover when I arrived for our appointment in the small office he was using at Bennington. You could tell he felt like a prisoner. Another student. Gawd!
On one of my manuscripts he’d written, “Good, dutiful prose, but where is this going?”
Yet I knew that he’d told his cabin-mate, Bret Lott, that my stuff “came off the page,” which gave me hope; I also knew my master couldn’t impart his magic to me.
But his characters were me, and I told him so.
“Oh gawd,” he said. “I hope not.”
We talked a little about writers we admired. I told him he was my favorite, which he was, that he was the reason I’d come to Bennington. He thanked me and in return generously said I was “a locomotion” and a “fine writer.” He signed my copy of Bats out of Hell with an expensive-looking fountain pen—in purple ink, which I took for an inside, writerly-type joke.
“To our good times together on Bennington Hill,” was the inscription.