In and around Oxford, Miss., about three decades ago, it wasn’t uncommon to drive along a rural route and pass a car with a bumper sticker that said, “I’d rather be reading Airships.” The people in those cars tended to have their windows rolled down, and they looked awfully happy. These were the kind of free and literate souls, with their muddy boots and eyeglasses, that a bar-stool sociologist might call liberal rednecks. Someone slapped a copy of that bumper sticker on William Faulkner’s grave in Oxford. No one thought it vandalism.
Do you remember “Airships”? Published in 1978, it’s a collection of 20 short stories by Barry Hannah that slowly became a classic of a then-new style of Southern literature. Hannah was from Mississippi. His writing was anarchic and wonderfully funny. He sounded like what you’d get if you stirred three heaping teaspoons of Thomas Pynchon and Terry Southern into a jar of Eudora Welty.
I was 13 when “Airships” came out; it took me two decades to catch up with it. When I did, yikes, I was troubled by the rebarbative flecks of its racial content. “Airships” was the wrong book to hang a movement on. But let’s hold that thought for a moment. Because in retrospect “Airships” was a small, misshapen and early part of an era that would come to mean a lot to me and to many other readers I know, an era that should not be left to pass without comment.
This was a movement for which I’m tempted to use a shorthand drawn from three of its best writers: Harry, Barry and Larry. I am talking about Harry Crews (1935-2012), Barry Hannah (1942-2010) and Larry Brown (1951-2004). They were at the vanguard of a genre sometimes referred to as Grit Lit, or Rough South.
The “sensitive guy at the dogfight” — that’s what Tom Franklin, a Rough South novelist himself, said these writers sounded like. The genre’s heyday was during the 1980s and ’90s. It wasn’t entirely a boys’ club: Bobbie Ann Mason and Dorothy Allison were paid-up members, and Jayne Anne Phillips was a brilliant and moody adjunct from West Virginia, where I spent the first eight years of my life.
I’ve never loved the phrase “Rough South.” It’s too coarse. (The term “Americana,” for the more literate variety of country music, has an artsy-craftsy Dolley Madison vibe that’s even worse.) The Harry, Barry and Larry crowd and their progeny have mostly dwindled away, perhaps for good reason. But I sometimes stare at their age-speckled paperbacks on my shelves, and I wonder: What was that all about?
They were very different writers. Crews’s stuff is intensely masculine and often violent. Like Flannery O’Connor, he has an affinity for grotesques, and for shame in its umpteen varieties. Herman Mack, the protagonist of his pulverizing novel “Car,” commences to eat an entire Ford Maverick on a stage. Crews had a commanding hold on what Philip Roth called the “American berserk.” His memoir, “A Childhood,” about his impoverished upbringing near Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, is as powerful an American story as I know.
We’ve talked about Hannah. Digression piles on digression in his stories and his novels, which include “Geronimo Rex,” “Ray” and “Yonder Stands Your Orphan.” Hannah snorted the chalky line between seriousness and playfulness. A typical sweet and funky declaration of love in his work is, “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.”
Finally, there’s Brown. His prose has a more placid surface, but he has a deep feeling for blue-collar life and the gentle humor in his work rises to the surface like a trout after a fly. His novel “Joe” was made into a Nicolas Cage movie, but his work lives most fully in his come-as-you-are short stories, collected in a book called “Tiny Love,” and a near-perfect memoir, “On Fire,” about working for the Oxford Fire Department.
I owe an enormous debt to the irreverent and well-read English teachers in my public high school in Florida. They noticed how happy the frazzled humor in Welty’s work made me, and they turned me onto these younger Southern writers. They sent me home with Randy Newman, John Prine and Lucinda Williams records, too. They guessed, correctly, that I’d take to these like a pup going for a walk.
My teachers’ blended recommendations for books and music, in retrospect, make sense. No literary genre has been so closely tied to a musical one as has Rough South to Americana. (Williams’s father was the poet Miller Williams, and she grew up chasing the peacocks in Flannery O’Connor’s yard.) If you spent time around Oxford in the 1990s, it was possible to envision an alternative America in which Rosanne Cash was president, Chuck Berry was secretary of transportation, Newman ran the Navy and Bobby Bland oversaw keeping the lights down low in nightclubs.
If Partisan Review was the house organ of the New York Intellectuals, the keeper of the Rough South’s flame was The Oxford American, a quarterly that debuted in 1992. The movement’s high church, clubhouse and psychiatric headquarters was a bookstore: Square Books, in downtown Oxford, not far from Faulkner’s home. It remains one of the best bookstores in the English-speaking world.
Over time, my sets of Harry’s, Barry’s and Larry’s oeuvres became dusty. I grew out of their work, or I told myself that I did. Crews and Hannah began to resemble literary character actors; their talents were sharp but narrow. Often, they strained for effect. Brown never strained for anything. But he, too, has his limitations, especially a certain tonal repetitiveness. Once I’d discovered Iris Murdoch, Ralph Ellison, Mary Gaitskill, Martin Amis and John Updike, to name but a few titanic sensibilities, my attention drifted from the Rough South in the way that your attention will drift, for years or even decades, from bands that mattered to you. Not that I didn’t return for visits.
Some of their work has aged poorly. If the Rough South crowd was not exclusively a boys’ club, it was a white one. I wish a few of these writers had done certain things differently. For the most part they skittered around the subject of race and around what the critic Louis Rubin called the “impossible load of the past.” But Hannah throws the N-word around too freely in “Airships,” usually but not always in the voice of an addled narrator steeped in the prejudices of an earlier time.
To his credit, Hannah grew out of this predilection, and his best stories — collected in a euphoric career retrospective titled “Long, Last, Happy” — are not marred by it. The sexism in some of Crews’s work is ripe, but it generally bleeds over into obvious parody. (Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch and Sadie Mae once formed a thrash supergroup called Harry Crews.) If Norman Mailer had handled snakes and was into muddy, open-wheeled auto sports, he might have sounded a bit like Crews.
Here’s the thing I came to say, though. I feel lucky to have found Harry, Barry and Larry when I did. They provided me, in a way more highbrow writers might not have, with core literary values. Among them: Dry is better than wet. Funny beats somber. Liberal (in the small “l” sense) is better than conservative. Writing about ordinary lives is, nine times out of 10, more valuable and more interesting than reading about cosseted or artistic ones.
There is more. Like the filmmaker Mike Leigh, Harry, Barry and Larry refused to condescend to working-class people. (One character in “Airships” announces, to no one in particular, that he went to junior college, “which is to say, I can read and feel fine things and count.”) Crews and Brown knew what it was to chop cotton; Brown worked factory jobs. They were in absolute sync with the world’s misfits, dissidents and jokers. All three had a mistrust of authority. Few writers have better lived up to Charlotte Brontë’s epic declaration in “Jane Eyre”: “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
These writers barely existed in publications such as The New York Review of Books. (No Crews book was reviewed there. One of Brown’s was, in a group review. Three of Hannah’s were, also in group notices, the steerage of arts criticism.) I sensed early that if I took too many cues from that austere publication, my reading life would be as cold and stunted as a pebble in a middling Bergman movie.
It’s best to enter the literate world like a cat burglar, I’ve long suspected — through a window, that is, rather than through the front door. Kids, you must find these windows on your own. Then you drift down the stairs and kick open the main entrance.
Were the Rough South’s books aimed solely at readers of the honky persuasion? I don’t think so. The most fun I’ve had in literary conversation in the past few years was driving around rural Virginia with the crime writer S.A. Cosby, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Crews’s, Hannah’s and Brown’s work. We geeked out together. (Cosby wrote the introduction to a new edition of Crews’s 1988 novel “The Knockout Artist.”)
I’ve been grateful that Harry, Barry and Larry gave me the eyes to see Black novelists such as Charles Wright, Fran Ross and Paul Beatty, the ones who blend the pain with the funny, the ones who do battle with tedium in every paragraph. It’s a pleasure to note that the powerful and earthy Mississippi writer Jesmyn Ward was a writer in residence at Ole Miss — a title Hannah held for more than 25 years. If the new Southern literature has an avatar, it’s surely Ward.
Larry Brown used to hand out a business card that had the words “Human Being” under his name. I’m lucky to have one of them. His work, like Crews’s and Hannah’s, had a humane and deep-souled quality that declared, at bottom: You can decide to believe in yourself.
There is a perfect moment in Ted Geltner’s 2017 biography of Crews, “Blood, Bone and Marrow,” in which Crews informs his mother that he’s sold his first novel. She is incredulous. “You mean, you made it all up, and they taken it and give you real money for it?” she asks.
“Yes, Ma,” he replies. “Yes, they have.”
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