Sabres, Gentlemen, Sabres

RAY HAS LOOKED at the world and found it too much with him.

Ray--who has flown B-52 support missions in his Phantom Interceptor off the carrier Bonhomme Richard; Ray--who is a doctor, a healer who sometimes cuts off the life support; Ray--who has seen too much useless death and too much useless life; Ray--who in his third decade is divorced and remarried to a woman who is perfect, except he hates her, except he loves another woman named Sister, except she is murdered on the verge of rock'n'roll stardom in a shack in Tuscaloosa; Ray--who steals a Learjet and crashes it into the Toronto woods; Ray, the unfaithful, who needs to make love twice a day, who fantasizes about naked women in high-heeled shoes, who delivers papers on the effects of Valium but can think of little but the erotic blue veins of his nurse's feet. Ray--whose friends are becoming lesbians, whose parents had him by holy accident, who wants to fly, fuck and read poetry; Ray--who drinks too much wine and falls back in love with his wife. Ray--who dreams of Saigon and the Civil War, of phosphorous guns and all those glittering raised sabres. Ray! This hopelessly crazy fuck...

Whenever they start talking about Barry Hannah in the periodicals, they always bring up the Southern Writer thing. Southern Writers. The phrase rolls blissfully off the tongue as if it actually mertied those majuscules. It rolls off the tongue like a fait accompli, like some sort of advertising slogan. Southern Writers. Northern Lights. Westward Ho.

The thing about these Southern Writers, of course, is their fabulous underdog literature--a result, popular psychology goes--of the pain and trauma of the Civil War--a regional bad childhood which now, over one hundred years later, still finds expression in the airless vaults of literature. There's Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and that huge shadow which is Faulkner. Southern Writers are supposed to be totems of our national pain, and to question their existence as a group becomes something of a sacriligious act. We need this "South" for reasons which are deeply buried. We need the South with its chivalry and shitkickers, because it is the only region which still seems to have a sense of place. Texas is a joke. The South, we hope, is not. It is the place of exaggeration--the vegetation is lusher, the corruption is more colorful, the women are more beautiful, the gentlemen more chivalrous. In the South, the story goes, there's that Southern hospitality. The Blacks are more Black, the racists more obvious, it's the best of low comedy mixed with lofty aspirations--that part of the nation which always has its formal fly unzipped. Some things, we would like to believe, never change.

And furthermore, the South is the home of the Great Oral Literary Tradition--another myth from days gone by many would like to believe in, a myth from the days when people told tales on the front porch while the cicadas sang and the Spanish moss languished dolefully on the eucalyptus trees.

As Sidney Bechet used to say: "I had it-- but it's all gone now."

The regional stereotype which is the South persists but the land that spawned it is as long gone as the mule trouble which plagued Yoknapatawpha County. The pre-poured Sun Belt South has about as much a genuine sense of place as, say, Fall River. The old South exists solely in the mind and its juxtaposition with present-day Birmingham jars as awkwardly as the idea of putting a city with the Hellenic name of Athens in the middle of Georgia. The Asheville of Thomas Wolfe is a tourist trap of unremitting neon. Faulkner cruised the strip of Hollywood. The capital of the New South is Atlanta--a crypto-futuristic city where you can rise 72 stories in an outdoor glass elevator and drink martinis in a revolving bar and look down on people as they smash their automobiles headlong into one another in front of the largest Coca Cola plant on the face of the planet. Robert E. Lee and the rest of the "noble" ones are gone. It is nothing like that.

But the legend lives on--a self-conscious parody of itself. Confederate flags grace the rear windows of countless Le Sabres (of the Buick variety), and the endless parade of hypesters, from Ted Turner to the late Colonel Sanders, parade themselves in front of a beguiled public as something unique--something Southern. Of course, one would be hard pressed, once one looked beneath the drawl, to find anything unique at all. The South is as distressingly prime-time American as any other section of the country, perhaps even more so. We would like the South to be different; to be a hopeless anachronism. But we're not going to get it.

The voices coming out of that region of the country are as myriad and American as any other. There is none of the hyper-moralism (complete with burning tractors and side-show stigmas) that was supposed to be such a feature of Southern Writing. There is none of the harking back to the rural past--for the South has grown, and the oral tradition has given way to a howling one. It is the sound, not of yarns spinning off into the night air, but of men who have chucked the mint julip at their wives and are skyrocketing down the interstate with the top down, their voices drowned out by the rush of the slipstream. It is the voice of the self-conscious who have adopted customs for no good reasons, in a nation which needs that sort of thing. It is the voice of men like Ray.

Ray! He is kicking and screaming. He hates this place but he's crazy in love with America.

And so, it seems, is Barry Hannah. There are few writers today who can match Hannah for sheer sustain--for the ability to keep extraordinary excess under control. He resists the usual literary tricks, the epiphanies and the neat endings, the sly references and displays of prodigious learning. Instead he revels in our perversity. He points to the airports, the pimps and the pinups and remains dazzled, amazed, repulsed and fascinated. He distills it all and produces the literary equivalent of grain Alcohol--a genuine Purple Jesus.

Hannah has been writing this dazed and dazzling fiction from the depths of Alabama for over a decade now. His first book, Geronimo Rex, won the Faulkner Prize and immediately set Hannah up as a hot Southern Writer. This was followed by Nightwatchmen and then by the prizewinning collection of short stories, Airships. During this time, Hannah published a record number of stories in Esquire, where the native Mississippian confused the hell out of a lot of people with stories like "Dragged Fighting From His Tomb," the story of a homosexual Confederate Soldier who butchers his way into Pennsylvania, only to turn traitor to Jeb Stuart. Or "Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet," a story about Vietnam, pro golf, incest and infantry tactics.

Hannah's characters were always at the very end of a very frayed rope. But still, they were refusing to go down with any sort of literary decorum. They wanted to tug on your coat for a minute. They wanted to explain things, to explain how it was to be so much in love that it was "driving you into a sorry person." They were yahoos and warriors, gigglers and killers, they were pilots and brain-damaged tennis pros. If they were funny--and they usually were--they were also noble as the last minutes of desperation dragged on and on. They were hopeless and deranged, but somehow against all the odds they retained this ridiculous faith. And though capable of extraordinary cruelty, they remained in Hannah's eyes, worthy of extraordinary compassion. They were the exaggerated voices of the minds which richochet at alarming velocities when simply going out to get a paper.

Those whom the Gods have doomed to a life of literary criticism often look askance at Hannah and his black humor. They criticized him for his absurdity. They were convinced that the world in general, and literature in particular, was a fundamentally sane enterprise. Those who applaud Hannah, with nothing better to say, fell back on complimenting his irony. But irony is not what Hannah is up to. Irony is simply juxtapositioning opposites--a false stance adopted by too many poor writers. It is a higher form of advertising; one flashes on garbage and someone says, "Nice day for a picnic, dear." It is the last bastion of the ineloquent and the terminally stupid. Only Hannah can get away with a line in a love story like "I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out."

But Hannah isn't ironic because he doesn't look for dualities, but instead goes for the whole damn show. Hannah has some sort of compound eye with an ear to match, and the result is a manic cacophony of life in These United States. His characters comprise the fifth column perpetually looking for salvation in a parking lot

It takes perhaps a familiarity with Hannah before one can appreciate not how much he has left out of this tiny Ray (a book of some 60 chapters in only 113 pages) but how much he manages to recreate. Doctor Ray alternates between the first and third persons, his thoughts follow each other in a seemingly random order, and yet he emerges with the clarity of night neon. He wants to resist becoming another victim of "the American confusion"--he wants the carbon monoxide and the cancers to go away--he wants the persiflage to magically transform itself into poetry. He wants...and that's all that matters. As long as that impulse is still there Ray can live to tell the tale, Ray's life--a trip to the zoo.

With Ray, Hannah continues to amaze. He's beyond Southern. He's brilliant