Who is he?

A railroad track toward hell?

  —Anne Sexton, "Despair"

In the story "Rat-Faced Auntie," one of the twenty-three new Barry Hannah tales in Bats Out of Hell, someone gives a character named Edgar "books by Kerouac, Bukowski, Brautigan, Hemingway and Burroughs; also the poetry of Anne Sexton." Edgar is a horn player in a motley band and he was "coming on strongly to the bassplaying woman, Snooky, and barely knew that he was capturing her with his new vocabulary stolen from Ms. Sexton."

Now, this points to a widely known but little discussed bonus in reading authors of a different stripe than your own. Hannah himself—through his six novels, three volumes of stories and one semiautobiography—goes out of his way to lead us to believe he is a hard-writing, hard-drinking, hard-balling man. His male friends (he never mentions female friends) are all hard-living Southern coots and snards, most of whom played football in their younger days, loved a good prank and loved nooky, especially if both could be purchased through someone else's pain. My own experience is that writers do not run in packs (despite what glossy magazines suggest), but often writers swim in a common current until they need to break for shore, or until one of them drowns. For Hannah, this swim team includes Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison and Willie Morris, about whom he writes with great affection in his novel-stroke-autobiography Boomerang. What is particular about the sort of friendship that Hannah has with these other writers is not that it is male but that it is so active—these guys are always fishing and drinking, or grilling meat and drinking, or cutting horses, shooting clay things out of the sky, hopping on Harleys, cruising through our big two-hearted playground in giant cars, Caddies, Bonnevilles, LeBarons with the top down and their testosterone up. Now the point I want to make is this: Not all male fiction writers act this way (and not every female poet ends in suicide). French male novelists do not hurl themselves in clusters with abandon into risky ventures, no. And the English—christ, the English: Some of them are known to test the laws of nature periodically in a frenzied game of snooker. Perhaps it is the product of their public schooling, but the English (not the Scottish, not the Irish, not the Welsh), the English males love to show off in front of one another in a form of recitation—not a debate, actually, more a game of talk, like poker, that includes the function of an ante to be upped, a kitty to be won. And when they're really having fun with one another, the English boys will do all this in rippingly hilarious (to them) Fa-rench accents. So give me a home where the buffalo roam.

There are a thousand discoveries at hand in any book by Barry Hannah, not the least of which are the noble and amazing tricks he can perform with language. He has snatched himself many times, he tells us, from the hairy jaws of self-destruction; but the truth is, even in sobriety and the bosom of a third marriage, Hannah's writing consistently displays the edginess of one who risks his peace of mind, day in, day out. I (delicate creature of the opposite stripe) approach each new work of his with a degree of horror and trust—horror at the unrelenting violence; and trust in him to push through it, somehow, in a way that is clear, exhilarating, funny. There are people in this country, Hannah's message is, who are big and strong or small and nasty, strung out, fucked up and enraged. Hannah's worst cases are usually male, but hey. Like his character Edgar reading Ms. Sexton so he can court the other sex, one of the reasons I read Barry Hannah is to try to learn how to live with those other creatures from Eden, the snakes and the men.

Hannah's first novel, Geronimo Rex, was published in 1972 and is, gratefully, still in print. It won the William Faulkner Prize, which, for a Southern writer, means they put your face on local minted money. I am only a half-breed Southerner myself, but the heroic significance of worthless currency is still imprinted on my genes. Geronimo Rex prefigures many of Hannah's recurring themes (sex, Elvis, war, liquor, drugs), but in the succeeding years Hannah has greatly pared down his style, leaving this first novel, perhaps not so surprisingly, his densest and longest work. A second novel, Nightwatchman, appeared (and disappeared) before Hannah jolted everybody awake with the publication in 1979 of Airships, very simply one of the best short-story collections around written by anyone. Ever. Male or otherwise. Even those French guys, who perfected the form.

Between and among Airships and Captain Maximus, his second collection of stories, and the new one, Bats Out of Hell, there is a lot of phantom imaging going on, a lot of shadow hiding, or what the moon people call "coherent backscatter." Characters and places from the stories in Airships reapper in Captain Maximus and Bats Out of Hell, and one of the loveliest threads in current literature runs from "Water Liars" in Airships to "High-Water Railers" in the new collection. Both are fishing tales of profound sweetness and despair, featuring a crew of ancients fishing off a rail on a pier in Farte (pronounced "Far-tay") Cove, off the Yazoo River.

"Water Liars" is the first story in Airships, and "High-Water Railers" is the opening tale in Bats Out of Hell; and for any fan of the former, it's a tender reunion to open this new volume and on the first page find old joy reflected. (Clever, too, is Hannah's reflected use of the words "liar" and "rail" in each story: One word is the other spelled backward.)

On the rail in "High-Water Railers" are four old men, "hovered together into one set of eyes three hundred and twenty-three years old." Wren, "a chronic prevaricator whose lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened"; Ulrich, who "was in the process of 'studying' blue herons, loons and accipiters in flight and for some nagging reason was interested in the precise weight of everybody he met"; Lewis; and Sidney Farte:

Sidney had endured lately a sorry, sorry thing, and all of them knew it. A male grandchild of his had won a scholarship to a mighty eastern university, Yale, and was the object of a four-year gloat by Sidney, who had no college. The young man upon graduation had come over to visit his grandfather for a week, at the end of which he pronounced Sidney "a poisonous, evil old man who ought to be ashamed of yourself." This statement simply whacked Sidney flat to the ground.

But Hannah lifts these men off their individual points of desperation through (of all things) the intercession of a woman, and the promise of that other one of man's best friends, a dog.

In fact, as many dogs run through this new collection as run through old Disney movies. In "Two Things, Dimly, Were Going At Each Other," the unfortunate Harry Latouche suffers from "the grofft," a disease that turns a man into a canine. And in "Upstairs, Mona Bayed for Dong" (yes, folks, we could sit here all day and talk about Barry Hannah's titles, like the one on this review—he even claims Jimmy Buffett paid him $7,500 for a title for a song, but "Mona" is credited to Tom McGuane) a man who practices snapping cigarettes from the lips of his pregnant wife with a bullwhip ruminates upon the attractions of women by stating, "I know what most men want is the quality of Old Shep, waiting at a Montana train station twelve years for his master who's been taken off dead in a coffin to the East, but there are other qualitites of marriage, rather strangely enjoyed."

As Hannah writes in Boomerang, the love between a man and a woman is not especially his strong point. Men and fishing, yes. Men and F-14s. Men and dogs. Men and sons (a new and pregnant lode). But men and women? "My life," he writes, "is bountiful. It is like the Garden of Eden with a woman who is so goodlooking I took a Polaroid picture of her lying in a bed in Biloxi with her breasts showing and showed it to my close friends. Sharing her beauty, although I hate her often. She challenges the thing: the thing. The thing itself."

Possibly the closest he has come to writing about the love thing is in the comic novel Ray—second in its sidesplitting delights only to Airships. But who needs love, anyway, in a nation of what he calls "compulsive videoers"? "Best a man like me can hope for from now on is just to blur out and have a few good days," a phantom cowboy tells a lad whose mother he has just killed in "Ride Westerly for Pusalina." "We'll just do some long blurring out together."

Long blurring out is not a new perspective in men's writing, but try though he has, Hannah can't quite manage it. There are several wildly surrealist apocalyptic and postapocalyptic tales in Bats Out of Hell, and again and again, through all his work, he addresses the horrors of war, all wars—Civil, Nam and Desert Storm—in language that makes it clear that he's opposed to them. "That Was Close, Ma" in this new collection is one of the first antiwar stories to come to print since Bush drew his vanishing line in the sand.

Hannah distrusts everything he sees—except, possibly, death—but he refuses to make a hackneyed tragedy out of it by blinding both his eyes (although he writes a lot about men who are blind in one or both eyes). Nope—behind those aviator shades of his he channels all the vicious goop that is this great society into the language of intelligible madness. Much of the crazed certainty that was the hallmark of the stories in Airships, though, is gone from these new stories. Each story in Airships ended on a note of resolution—in fact, we could string together a sort of manifesto from the last lines of these stories, lines like "Changes like that never bothered my heart" and "We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful."

Uncertainty—or, well, the wisdom of age that nothing is ever for sure carved-in-stone certain—inhabits the stories in Bats Out of Hell. Everything, everything, Hannah seems to suggest, has its double, its doubt, its own mirror image. A son (who is a poet) tells his father (who is a biographer) in "Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?" that in the South, "the men who change the world mostly go fishing…. They want out of this goddamned place."

But of course they stay, these guys, they hang around, waiting to berth out on some modern Pequod of their own. "That's it, lads," the father in "Hey, Have You Got a Cig …?" addresses a bunch of punks he has just shot to hell with an air rifle. "Start asking some big questions like me, you little nits. You haven't even started yet." These new stories announce the prospect of a long afternoon for Hannah, fishing, staring into that bright soup, raging, pulling up bones at the end of his lines in search of a new definition, a white whale, perhaps, a lasting name:

      Is your name by any chance Rumpelstiltskin?
      He cried: The devil told you that!
      He stamped his right foot into the ground
      and sank in up to his waist.
      Then he tore himself in two.
      Somewhat like a split broiler,
      He laid his two sides down on the floor,
      one part soft as a woman,
      one part a barbed hook,
      one part papa,
 
      one part Doppelgänger.

Anne Sexton wrote that. And she hadn't even laid her eyes on Barry Hannah.