A Miracle of Catfish

LARRY BROWN

A novel in progress

A Shannon Ravenel Book
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

For Lauren of New York:
You my shining pride, girl

Larry Brown: Passion to Brilliance
by Barry Hannah

Editor's Note

Acknowledgment

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Larry Brown's Notes for the Final Chapters of
A Miracle of Catfish

Special Preview of Larry Brown's
Joe

BY BARRY HANNAH

When death comes for
him
it should be
ashamed

—Charles Bukowski

— We both loved Bukowski, the everlasting redundant universal grouch. Fail again, fail better.

— I can't remember him ever out of cowboy boots.

— When he got famous and went on tour we discussed his wardrobe. He'd just shopped and bought some Dockers.

— In Seattle together at a book thing we sat and ate a plate of small, sweet to larger oysters similar to our Gulf ones. He'd found this restaurant. Tucked his bib in, face lit up like a baby's, happy as a clam.

— I think we were both drunk at the Wells' house. In front of my publisher Sam Lawrence, Brown hooted and hunched my leg like a dog. The next day Lawrence offered him a large book contract. There is no story line here. Algonquin, home of Shannon Ravenel, who had helped shape Brown hugely, upped the ante and he stayed. I suppose there is a story line here.

— I never heard him give a negative blast to another writer. I did hear him repeat a truly wretched sentence from a writer, and giggle. Very wryly. Happy in the eyes like a child. Maybe somebody had actually scored somewhere beneath Brown's early badness.

— When
Father and Son
came out I got an ecstatic call from Kaye Gibbons, the beautiful Carolina writer, telling me what an act of genius it was. I agreed. I was flat out envious. But he had worked so hard and wrought so much from his beginnings it was impossible not to be happy for Larry, always.

— He visited my class and told them of a negative review he'd received from another writer. He was amazed, again like an incredulous boy, very hurt over what was, he felt, a personal betrayal by a fellow worker. I paid little attention to reviews, and I was refreshed, really, by his direct honest humanity.

— He told me and the class that he was disheartened by teaching at the colleges and summer workshops he was invited to (including our own Ole Miss). He loved talking about stories well enough, but he could not stand working with those who were not given over totally to writing, as he was.

— More happy face of a boy: He told me he had introduced bigger, faster-growing Florida bass minnows into the pond where he let me fish. I fished like God's expert in the following years and caught exactly one Florida bass one happy afternoon alone. (Rubber bream minnow with spinner.) For that fish I at last say thanks to my gone pal. He is buried beside his infant daughter at this pond on family land. You can imagine the bittersweet emotion from your feet up when I visit this pond and steal from his hospitality again. (White Rooster Tail, yellow or green beetle spin.) Twilight on the writing cabin, solar powered, he never quite finished.

— Not once did a bad word pass between us. There was no time for that. You always felt this with Larry, who considered himself a late bloomer, a late guest at the table.

— You understand the beauty of the town and county libraries and the exponential reach of a fine bookstore where, as far as I know, almost all of Brown's literary education came from. Lucky creatures here in Oxford. Josephine Haxton (the most excellent broad, nom de plumed Ellen Douglas) gave him multitudes in the single college course he had. Richard Howorth was a kind hand early on. Larry found Conrad, Faulkner, O'Connor, Hemingway, and Carver. Brown knew the biographies of writers much better than anyone I know. The marines, the firehouse, and life gave him the rest. He was an early, avid reader, encouraged by his mother, I believe.

— He was not a saint and we should remember that to their wives all men are garbagemen trying to make a comeback. True also is that in eulogies the worst people try to stand on the shoulders of the dead in order to levitate their own dear egos. God knows, I'm trying not to do this.

— I haven't been the same since he and my good publisher, Sam Lawrence, passed away. I don't write as well and I write more slowly. Such is his absence, but Brown would want us to crawl past this mood. He did, hundreds of times. No excuses. Ask his pals Tom Rankin and Jonny Miles, fierce artists themselves. Ask Mark Richard, likewise.

— His Mississippi hill country brogue was so thick I had to translate Brown to our French publisher at Gallimard who spoke perfect English. The man shed tears of exasperation over Brown's refusal to travel to France, where Brown's books were big. He begged me to intercede, but it was rough because I wasn't his mother. I still miss the trip to Paris he and I might have made together.

— In the early eighties he showed me stories that were so bad, I'd duck out the back of the bar when I saw him coming down the walk with the inevitable manila envelope. I couldn't stand hurting his feelings. I loved his sincerity. I didn't give him a cold prayer in hell as to a future in literature. When he published in Harley Davidson's
Easy Rider
, a story about a galoot, a sheriff, and a marijuana patch, as I recall, I cheered but secretly believed he'd then peaked out.

— Brown was an example of an
élan vital
, the creative life force about which the philosopher Bergson wrote. Animals get better because they want to, not just to survive. Passion begat brilliance in Larry Brown. I love it. My throat is raw from teaching the life of Brown to students. Work, work. The pleasure deeper than fun. It gets good when you turn pro.

— In Texas last year when Larry Wells called about Larry's passing, I was having a physical spell and could not fly to his funeral. I've never forgiven myself although my wife, Susan, represented us. His absence in Oxford is intolerable to me still. His wife, Mary Annie, actually took time to write me back during the first stunned period of mourning. Her letter and she are dear to me, even though I see her rarely.

— Two nights after his death a great band in San Marcos dedicated the night's performance to him. Such was the reaction of musicians, an untold amount of whom were his fans.

— At his house I found out his record collection about matched mine. Crazed love going on here.

— He never asked me for a blurb. A small mountain of creeps have never known this courtesy which came naturally to him. The publisher or the agent asks, always with the intro that the author is an almost rabid fan of mine. That is correct form, this is what God says.

— Once, when he was judging NEA fellowship fiction with George Plimpton, he came across a strangely familiar piece. Some arrant dufus had plagiarized a Larry Brown story. Where is this fool? Where is the hooting jail for this pissant? No doubt a rabid fan of Larry's, but please. Brown enjoyed it. Grinning like a kid.

In November 2004 Larry Brown sent the manuscupt of his all but completed sixth novel,
A Miracle of Catfish
, to his agent, Liz Darhansoff, of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman, in New York. He had made notes for the two or three chapters to end the novel and would start work on them after the Thanksgiving holiday. To the shock and sorrow of his immediate family and the wider family of his readers, Larry Brown died of a massive heart attack on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, at home in Lafayette County, Mississippi. He was fifty-three years old.

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, publisher of all but one of Larry Brown's nine previous books, is proud to be the publisher of the novel he was writing when he died. And I am personally honored by the request of his wife, Mary Annie Brown, and her advisers, Tom Rankin and Jonny Miles, that I edit the unfinished manuscript
A Miracle of Catfish
for publication.

Once Larry Brown had mastered his laconic style, the first-draft manuscripts of his books were nearly always so polished stylistically that my job as editor mostly involved showing him the places I felt the novels would benefit from trimming. He was, as a novelist, likely to write more than he needed. Having honed his skills on the short-story form, he reveled in the wide spaces that novels offer. I rarely found reason to suggest expansion. But I did find places I thought would gain by careful snipping and shaving.

Ever the professional, he almost never argued, though many years after the publication of his first novel,
Dirty Work
, he liked to remind me that I had asked him to cut the first two hundred pages of the first-draft manuscript — and, he was always careful to add, that he'd done it without any dispute. This was only slight exaggeration on both counts.

Never having edited a manuscript for posthumous publication, I consulted other novelists and critics about the kind of editing I might do and should do under such circumstances. Our conversations led to a
consensus that making
any
changes — substantive or minor — to the plot, the structure, the characterizations, would be inappropriate. No word changes, no syntax changes, and certainly no effort at “ending” the novel should be made. (The author's notes of his plans for the final chapters, typed in at the end of a rough table of contents, were found among his papers. They follow the last page of the novel as written.)

But what about cuts? The towering 710-page manuscript on my desk reminded me of the first draft manuscripts of two of Larry Brown's earlier books,
Joe
and
Fay
, and I felt strongly that some cutting — to streamline the narrative and lighten some sections that went on past the point — was in order. But I also felt that cuts to the manuscript would be permissible only if the printed book were designed so that the reader would know where these had been made; by the same token, scholars could easily compare the book with the original archived manuscript.

So the unfinished novel you have in your hands is Larry Brown's first-draft manuscript with editorial cuts (including drafted chapter titles I believe he meant to revise if not omit) that I hope improve the flow and that I believe he would have accepted pretty readily.
A Miracle of Catfish
is still a very long novel, albeit an unfinished one. If you do have the opportunity to compare it with the manuscript now available to students of Brown's work in the Department of Archives and Special Collections of the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and you take issue with the cuts, I am certainly willing to share my reasons for them. I would, in fact, be happy to explain myself, as I would have had to explain myself to Larry Brown had he lived to finish the work.