Barry Hannah, Willa Cather

I told myself, last night, that I would write even if the result is only self-indulgence and absurdity, empty poetic language and redundant melancholy longing. I have been stuck museless and mute for the last month, except for the occasional bout of satire, reading Barry Hannah and Willa Cather and wishing for more inspiration and certainly more talent. Hannah is loud, explosive, transgressive, pitiless, and often brilliant in an entirely original and unreplicable way. Cather’s prose is lyric and graceful and precise, weighted with the authority that retrospection can bring, and her narrators face what time has made of memory—what was important and beautiful, what we cannot have back.

Both I admire an awful lot, but I find myself finally more taken with Cather than with Hannah—I am never bored in reading Hannah, but I am only moved in his occasional quiet work that has a feel of looking back through time (“Testimony of Pilot,” for example, and his fishing story about a boy dragged into the surf by what took for a moment his line, and how he held onto that story and that time in his youth). I look to Hannah and his talent with awe; I aspire to the clarity and size of Cather’s work at her best, which has—resonance? Heart? – a sort of purity of gaze, as if what she wrote and kept was only what was at the bottom of something she cared deeply about. Hannah is punch-drunk with language and the intensity and acceleration of what mad and absurd collision he has imagined and realized, and so I am endlessly entertained. Cather is singing quietly to herself in the dark with the voice she has, which she doesn’t herself think of as beautiful but which is better still for that lack of self-regard, and hearing her, I want to write.