Raunch alert! The easily offended should skip this entry.
We received a charming call from a concerned John Pritchard, who phoned after reading from his own profanity-laced novel The Yazoo Blues. It was the first public reading he'd given from the book, written in diatribe-style from the foul mouth of an ornery Delta lawman whose colorful recollections form a unique and entertaining pastiche of life in the strange New South. The gentlemanly Mr. Pritchard hoped he hadn't crossed the line of good taste with his off-color selections, which had most of the audience rolling and crying with laughter and only a few red-faced and leering at the exit. Nevertheless, we assured him that we'd not received any angry requests for refunds and in fact believed that audacity and irreverence had its place in public, especially when performed so artfully.
It got us talking about some of our favorite literary bad boys. In general, we found there to be too few of these barb-tongued poets, who do not so much endeavor to make us squirm in our seats as make us think about the power of words and their remarkable effect on us. We honor and cherish it here at Turnrow. In fact, we were proud that the first set of readings at our grand opening two years ago featured literary bad boys Dennis Lehane — whose reading referred to an act of oral sex, which elicited a gasp from one audience member, though we could not discern if it was a gasp of horror or excitement — and Tom Franklin, who read from his novel Smonk, certainly one of our favorite vulgar books of all time.
Another favorite bad boy is Jim Harrison, who has bitten at least one of us. (No lie.) We just finished reading his new novel, The English Major, and reveled in its quintessential Harrisonian raunch. Those of us who love Jim Harrison — and we meet them all the time — will read anything he writes. Even the lesser novels are a joy to read, and while some have suggested The English Major is just that, it's a lot of fun regardless. In a career filled with sagas like Legends of the Fall and Dalva, he deserves to take a horny comic road trip every now and then.
The novel is told by a retired English professor who is set adrift after an ugly divorce. While sifting through his belongings, he comes upon a puzzle of the U.S.A. from his youth, then gets it in his head that he must visit every state, rename them and reassign their state birds. It's a kind of autopilot midlife crisis, but mainly just a ploy to get things moving. In essence, we're treated to a novel-length road trip with Harrison as he delivers colorful observations on food, sex, nature (both physical and human) while dropping nuggets of wisdom along the way. Here's an example, from a brief stop at a cafe in New Mexico in which we can see all the Harrisonian elements at play. (By the way, the experience of reading Harrison is further enhanced if you imagine his voice, which can be heard in this great short profile from the New York Times site):
I stopped in Tombstone, the scene of gunfighter mayhem, for breakfast. Given the right tools men will always murder each other. There was a young, alternative life style couple seated at the table next to me sniping at each other as they finished their cereal. The young man wore a blue-fringed leather shirt and had a gold ring in his nose. The girl was a little mousey in her shorts and a t-shirt that chastely read, "Fuck Republicans."
"When I woke up this morning I began to think of myself as a Zen-Indian," he said.
"That's a pretty big mouthful to chew, Danny boy."
"Hey, fuck you," he said, and walked out. She winked at me and paid the bill. To be frank, she had a perfect fanny which that fungoid nitwit didn't deserve.
And that's just breakfast. Whether or not that excerpt illustrates it, Harrison is cut from the same cloth as Hemingway, and we get a similar thrill from reading him. That he lives up to his bad boy reputation in person is all the more rare and wonderful.
Chief among the literary bad boys, at least among many of us Mississippians, is our own Barry Hannah, whose storied life lives up to his outrageous fiction. Hannah stories are the stuff of legend in Oxford, where he lives and teaches. And while he has no doubt mellowed with age, as was kindly illustrated in a recent profile of Hannah in the interesting new magazine Garden & Gun, his fiction is read, studied and mimicked by a new generation of writers. Literary critic Sven Birkerts nailed it: "Barry Hannah writes the most consistently interesting sentences of any writer in America today ... with moods and interior storms that cannot be found anywhere else in fiction." He is, in many ways, like Faulkner before him: storied, misunderstood, woefully underappreciated and a genius writer.
