Observatio

Barry Hannah died not very long ago. He was one of those writers I was glad to have discovered, even if most of the time I didn’t quite grasp what he was trying to say through his madcap, absurdist, even bizarre tales. Often I laughed as I read him, but when I finished something like The Tennis Handsome, I’d shake my head and say to myself, That was interesting. It never occurred to me to emulate him, just as I’d never try to emulate Tom Robbins or Salman Rushdie, or Nabakov, or Twain. You can’t emulate the utterly unique.

But last night I read a short piece in Harper’s: “Why I Write,” by Barry Hannah. It was a speech at Bennington College in 2002, and it touched on what I think are the two most important drives any serious novelist must possess and cultivate. One is the drive to own the past in a comprehensive, personal way, and the other is the drive to venerate language. In the past lay the details and resonating emotional spikes that get deep into what it is to be human, the triumphs and humiliations we can’t forget, the seemingly inconsequential moments that somehow manage to form us though we may shrug them off at the time. Like Hannah, I can remember things my father said to me forty years ago, which, when he said them, had no context but the moment in which he said them. All these years later, they are draped with significance and large meaning, they deepen my sense of human contradiction and self-preservation, and they help to define him in a way he couldn’t have meant to project at the time. The past is where all your material comes from, even if you write about the here and now.

Language, Hannah says in the speech, “still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores. At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, it can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”

You might have in your junk box the picture fragments of the time you found a young rabbit at the bottom of the basement stairs, its pink bowels protruding from a belly no thicker than the skin of a balloon. The cat did it, failed to finish the job out of boredom. You can’t let the thing die there like that, in a slow way, not with its dark, soap-washed eye looking up at you in something between fear and pleading. You will have to kill it, but how? And how do you tell the story of killing it, retaining every detail so that someone else can know what it was like?

Only language, with precision and surprise, is up to the task. Mr. Hannah knew it. All true writers do. And that is why there will always be a need for the writer who is first an artist (as distinguished from those who are first entertainers): so that we will know what we have been through and what it meant, and means.