The Misfit Wisdom of Harry, Barry and Larry

In and around Oxford, Miss., about three decades ago, it wasn’t uncommon to drive along a rural route and pass a car with a bumper sticker that said, “I’d rather be reading Airships.” The people in those cars tended to have their windows rolled down, and they looked awfully happy. These were the kind of free and literate souls, with their muddy boots and eyeglasses, that a bar-stool sociologist might call liberal rednecks. Someone slapped a copy of that bumper sticker on William Faulkner’s grave in Oxford. No one thought it vandalism.

Do you remember “Airships”? Published in 1978, it’s a collection of 20 short stories by Barry Hannah that slowly became a classic of a then-new style of Southern literature. Hannah was from Mississippi. His writing was anarchic and wonderfully funny. He sounded like what you’d get if you stirred three heaping teaspoons of Thomas Pynchon and Terry Southern into a jar of Eudora Welty.

I was 13 when “Airships” came out; it took me two decades to catch up with it. When I did, yikes, I was troubled by the rebarbative flecks of its racial content. “Airships” was the wrong book to hang a movement on. But let’s hold that thought for a moment. Because in retrospect “Airships” was a small, misshapen and early part of an era that would come to mean a lot to me and to many other readers I know, an era that should not be left to pass without comment.

This was a movement for which I’m tempted to use a shorthand drawn from three of its best writers: Harry, Barry and Larry. I am talking about Harry Crews (1935-2012), Barry Hannah (1942-2010) and Larry Brown (1951-2004). They were at the vanguard of a genre sometimes referred to as Grit Lit, or Rough South.

The “sensitive guy at the dogfight” — that’s what Tom Franklin, a Rough South novelist himself, said these writers sounded like. The genre’s heyday was during the 1980s and ’90s. It wasn’t entirely a boys’ club: Bobbie Ann Mason and Dorothy Allison were paid-up members, and Jayne Anne Phillips was a brilliant and moody adjunct from West Virginia, where I spent the first eight years of my life.

I’ve never loved the phrase “Rough South.” It’s too coarse. (The term “Americana,” for the more literate variety of country music, has an artsy-craftsy Betsy Ross vibe that’s even worse.) The Harry, Barry and Larry crowd and their progeny have mostly dwindled away, perhaps for good reason. But I sometimes stare at their age-speckled paperbacks on my shelves, and I wonder: What was that all about?