Larry Brown's Big Bad Love

I've just finished reading a book of short stories by a really good Southern writer, William "Larry" Brown, from Oxford, Mississippi ( also home to William Faulkner and John Grisham), who died in 2004 unexpectedly of a heart attack. I didn't like all of BIG BAD LOVE but there are a few gems that made me laugh out loud - "Falling Out of Love," "The Apprentice," "Waiting for the Ladies," and "Big Bad Love." (That one was made into a movie in 2001). His characters are from the blue collar life of hard living, plenty of drinking, sex and relationships gone sour. He has been compared to William Faulkner, Raymond Carver and Earnest Hemingway, and his prose has been described as simple and direct. I loved most his ability to make me laugh out loud!

His life story should give hope to any aspiring writer. His father was a sharecropper and his mother was the postmaster and owned a bookstore. He flunked senior high school English and had to attend summer school after which he enlisted in the Marines. When he was discharged after serving 2 years, he worked odd jobs that show up in his writing - especially house painter - but also hay hauler, fence builder, lumberjack. Finally in 1973 he joined the Oxford Fire Department and worked there for 16 years, serving as captain. It was during those years he taught himself how to write and read Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and Faulkner. In "The Apprentice" his male character is married to "Judy," who wants to be a writer. Through a hilarious account of her struggle to write about "The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati," which he said was boring as hell, he made fun of his own early efforts to write all those stories that were rejected, especially one about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone Park. When he described her, he was really describing himself:

"She wrote a novel first. Blasted straight through, seven months, night and day. I'd be in there on the couch watching old Hopalong Cassidy or somebody and hear that typewriter going like an M-60 machine gun in the bedroom.... She'd be sitting at her typewriter when I left, and most of the time she'd still be sitting there when I came back in. ... I never saw anybody so obsessed. Her appearance went to shit, and she'd dress in the first thing that came to hand. Sometimes she wouldn't even get dressed, just sit there and work in her nightgown.

"And then she started getting published. One story here, another one there. The first acceptance was a great event, and we were happy for a few weeks, and she wanted to throw a big party and invite all our friends. But some of them didn't show up, I guess because so many of them felt that they had been left by the wayside. I understood it. I told Judy that you couldn't keep friends like a can of worms and just open the can whenever you needed them. I said that to her after everybody had left, while we were standing in the kitchen after cleaning up the mess.... Success for her isn't a matter of if any more. It's just a matter of when. Once in a while, just for fun, I pull out 'The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati' and read it. It's got to be the worse damn thing I've ever read. But I'm sort of beginning to like the dog." The hunchback had a son who was a cripple and a "damn dog you didn't even know about until the last page, and the dog had some rare disease that only this vet in Cincinnati could cure.... I damn near puked when I got through reading it." p. 18
"The Apprentice," BIG BAD LOVE, p. 18, 28-29.

Finally, he got one published in 1982 in a biker's magazine, Easyriders. It was 5 years later before he published anything else - this time in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal - a short story titled "Facing the Music." An editor from Algonquin Books read it and that's how he got his big break. He was married for 30 years to the same woman who survives him along with their 3 children.

Larry Brown...I wish you were still around. One thing he was quoted as saying is, "There's no such thing as a born writer. It's a skill you've got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter."

One reviewer wrote of Brown's short story collections that they are all "dedicated to the proposition that folks born south of the Mason-Dixon line are biochemically altered by this accident of geography. It predisposes them to overheated lives of hunting, boozing and hopeless love... [Brown] enrolls [his] male chroniclers in Hemingway's 3-F club of fishing, fighting and fornicating.... Southerners since the 1800's have always promoted the notion that they are a tribe apart."

His novel FAY, a "Southern-fried Odyssey," chronicles the haphazard wanderings of his heroine, a beautiful teenage girl, who hitchhikes from Oxford toward Biloxi and meets mostly jerks. I'm reading that one next since I've met a few myself--that is, after I read DIRTY WORK, his first novel, which is based on stories he heard from Vietnam veterans. My cousin Dexter Bentley, who was my same age, was a Vietnam Vet who died alone in his house in North Carolina, his wife having long since deserted him, taking their two sons. Most folks thought he was crazy because he was strange. He used to visit me sometime--drive all the way from Roanoke to Richmond by himself. His father (my father's brother) worked on the railroad. His mother was deep Southern Baptist religious, and I guess she was the first one that messed him up. He talked incessantly about Jesus. He was never "right" after he got out of the service. We were kissing cousins in our teens. One of the 2 main characters in DIRTY WORK got his face blown off in the war. I'm not sure I'll be able to read the whole thing.