A Miracle of Catfish Read online

  LARRY BROWN

  A MIRACLE OF CATFISH

  A novel in progress

  A Shannon Ravenel Book

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  For Lauren of New York:

  You my shining pride, girl

  CONTENTS

  Larry Brown: Passion to Brilliance

  by Barry Hannah

  Editor's Note

  Acknowledgment

  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64

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

  Special Preview of Larry Brown's Joe

  LARRY BROWN: PASSION TO BRILLIANCE

  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.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  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.

  The experience of working with Larry Brown over the course of his all too short writing career was a high point of my own career in publishing. He was a writer who started from scratch and taught himself not only how to write about what he knew but how to write literature in the process. As he expressed it so clearly in a speech delivered to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, a year after publication of his first book:

  It took a long time for me to understand what literature was, and why it was so hard to write, and what it could do to you once you understood it. For me, very simply it meant that I could meet people on the page who were as real as the people I met in my own life . . . Even though they were only words on paper, they were as real to me as my wife and my children. And when I saw that, it was like a curtain fell away from my eyes. I saw that the greatest rewards that could be had from the printed page came from literature and that to be able to write it was the highest form of the art of writing . . . I don’t think it was meant to be easy. I think that from the first it was meant to be hard for the few people who came along and wanted to write it, because the standards are so high and the rewards so great.*

  Larry Brown’s determination, his relentless hard work, his unswerving respect for his art, and his honesty in exposing the depth of human emotion paid off. His characters — those real people — live on, just as he intended.

  For me, and I hope for you, it doesn’t really matter that A Miracle of Catfish wasn’t quite completed. What he meant it to say is as clear as can be.

  Shannon Ravenel

  January 2007

  * “A Late Start,” a talk given at the Fifth Biennial Conference on Southern Literature, April 8, 1989, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

  The author was especially grateful to Paula Klepzig Brown for sharing her knowledge of the specifics of Tourettes syndrome.

  A MIRACLE OF CATFISH

  THE NOVEL’S SETTING, HAND DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR.

  1

  The blessed shade lived on the ridge. The white oaks stood with their green tops hanging thick under the sun, and a big old man in faded blue overalls walked in the June heat beneath them. He crunched lightly, ankles deep in dry brown leaves, feet wary for copperheads the same color. He was mopping at the sweat on his brow with his forearm, and he was holding his hand out to bash at the webs of spiders that hung in his path. There was a glade carpeted with lush beds of poison ivy, quiet gardens, no place for a nap. A fox squirrel went up a tree and flowed his tail like water over a limb and then lay down on top of it, his legs hanging, his head low to the limb. An unseen little buddy. An old white-faced boar squirrel with a nut sac that laid out behind him like two pecans in a bag. A breeze lifted and blew a cool wind that for a moment stirred his eyelashes. He twitched his parti-colored nose. He probably appreciated the breeze in some squirrel way.

  The old man looked around. There were two sloping walls of trees, a natural place to build a pond. Cortez Sharp could see it plain as day. He’d been seeing it for a while. He wondered if Lucinda would want to take that retard fishing after he got the pond built. And some catfish in it. Course it’d take a while to get them up to eating size. Not a year probably. He didn’t think it took them that long to get them up to eating size at the catfish farms down in the Delta. He’d go buy some catfish feed at the Co-op. He’d seen it before, in the stifling heat of the tin-roofed warehouse, stacked in fifty-pound bags on pallets beside fertilizer and seed. Each bag had a picture of a catfish on it. He saw one of those boys who worked in the Co-op’s warehouse kill a big woodchuck in there with a shovel one day and then he stretched it out bloody on a pallet with its stained yellow buck teeth showing and Cortez didn’t think woodchucks even lived in Mississippi. Was a woodchuck a groundhog? What was that thing about if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Probably came in on a load of feed from somewhere up north. Maybe late in the evenings when it was cooling off he could do it. Throw it out there on the water like raindrops. He’d have a special bucket just for that. Or maybe a steel garbage can. Have a lid for it. Keep the fire ants out of it. He wondered if that retard of hers even knew how to fish. He wondered how big the fish would get if he just kept on feeding them instead of catching and eating them. He could catch and eat a few of them. Just not all of them. Leave a few in there to see how big they’d get. What if they got to weighing ten pounds? If he kept feeding them and they kept growing they would. What if they got to weighing twenty? What if they got up to thirty? What would that feel like on a rod and reel? He might have to go get a new one. They might break his old one. Shitfire. They might break a new one. Wouldn’t that be something? What if they got so big they were uncatchable? How fun would that be?

  Standing there in the baking woods he looked around again. Why did she want him? What good was he? Cortez just didn’t understand it. He knew they slept together. Hell, lived together. He was tired of worrying over it. There w
asn’t anything he could do about it anyway. She evidently saw something in him. He guessed he could show the dumb son of a bitch how to catch a fish. Maybe that wouldn’t be too complicated for him. But that retard sure had him a dirty mouth.

  He stood there for a while, […]* and then the old man turned and went away […]. The squirrel lay on his limb and listened to him go, then jumped to another tree, and another, and another, and soon he was just a faint trembling high in the leafy treetops as he gamboled his way into the woods to be unseen again for a while. Maybe. There were hawks in the woods, and when their shadows came sailing by he sought the undersides of branches where perhaps he wouldn’t be taloned to death, then fed in bloody pieces to thinly feathered hawklets with hooked beaks that lived in high nests made from big sticks in trees like these. Meat-eaters that grew and finally flew. On gloomy and rainy winter days they gripped with their talons their high and swaying limbs, as the wind riffled the tiny spotted feathers on the backs of their necks, as they coldly surveyed the naked gray oaks of their range and then spread their wings to cruise the pine-covered ridges that lay before them to the ends of the world.

  * Throughout, “[…]” indicates that a passage has been cut by the editor.

  2

  Soon a yellow D9 Cat, wrenched and welded together by beer-drinking, polka-dancing union members up north, arrived, and then there was no more silence in the simple woods. This American juggernaut crawled with steel treads churning over a hill jetting black smoke, and its progress could be gauged by the shaking treetops with their rafts of dark green leaves waving and then bending before it, like masts in a wild sea, and then slamming to the ground. In this way, tearing and shoving, the machine made its way into the glade of poison ivy and began to push down white oaks and bulldoze them into a pile. The soft earth that had lain hidden beneath rotted leaf mold for millenniums was torn up and printed with dozer tracks and shown to the unflinching sun, where it lay curled and cracked and began to dry and flake and be clambered upon by red fire ants. The sun was hot and the day went on. Things formerly in the shade now got some light. A box turtle moved away dryly rustling, scaly clawed reptilian feet digging for purchase in the dead leaves, bright fingers of yellow stippling its round brown shell. A clan of local crows flew in and lit and walked around on some limbs and started saying in their crow language, What the hell’s up? Anything to eat?