Barry Hannah (1943-2010)

Barry Hannah, a famously hard-living writer who wrote darkly eloquent and funny stories about hard-living people in the South, has died at his home in Oxford, Mississippi. According to an Associated Press wire story, pending notification of his wife, authorities would say nothing about what killed him except that it was natural causes, although they did add the odd additional note that “the death is not under investigation.”

Hannah’s work won wide acclaim from early on, with his first novel, Geronimo Rex in 1972, winning the William Faulkner Prize. In 1996 his story collection High Lonesome was nominated for a Pulitzer. “Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word,” says Richard Ford, whom the AP story relies on soley for an assessment of Hannah’s work.

But within the writing community, at least, Hannah was also known for his no-holds-barred lifestyle. For example, there’s this story about him from a 1998 New York Times profile:

In an incident recounted in Esquire magazine in 1988, he pulled out an unloaded pistol in a classroom at the University of Alabama when students tried to walk out on his impromptu soulful trumpet solo. According to the article, he waved the gun, told the students, ”Now this is some bad soul — you guys had better learn the difference,” and began to play again.

In those days, Mr. Hannah says, when he needed to make holes in the walls of an apartment for stereo wires, he would use a shotgun. When his car once filled with water during a rainstorm, he riddled the floorboard with bullets to drain it. ”A lot of that stuff was not a good idea, but it gets turned around by middle-class minds into a cowboy thing,” he says. ”It wasn’t. It was just a need to find something real, to do something that was real.”

Hmmm. On the other hand, it could have been a cowboy thing. You decide. Barry Hannah was 67.