For years, Larry Brown was just another one of the guys over at Oxford Fire Station No. 2, a little brick building at the edge of the University of Mississippi campus. Every now and then he`d charge out to a car wreck or a burning house or another phony frat-house alarm.
A real blaze in Oxford is about as uncommon as a traffic jam, so Brown spent a lot of days stretched out shoeless on his firehouse bunk, sipping sweetened iced tea and reading while his buddies played spades or watched HBO. At first, he read Harold Robbins, Stephen King, whatever sleaze and tease he could find at the library or on the supermarket paperback rack.
”I didn`t know the difference between a grocery store bodice-ripper and something Mr. Faulkner wrote,” he said.
Brown spent his 20s that way, drifting through days at the firehouse, just an ordinary, small-town fellow who had squeaked through high school, coon hunting when he was supposed to be diagramming sentences.
”All I wanted when I was younger,” he said, ”was for school to be over with and to be out where I could get me a job and buy me a car and get me a way to go.”
But at age 29, Larry Brown peered down the old highway of life and saw a scary sight: middle age, hurtling toward him like an 18-wheeler with the brakes gone bad. He started thinking.
Maybe it was time to make a little money, a better life for his kids, a mark in the world. Maybe he would become a writer. Writers make money, don`t they? And writing couldn`t be that much more complicated than other jobs he`d done, like laying bricks or hauling hay or fighting fires, could it?
He wrote a novel. It was about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone National Park. ”Just imagine,” he said, ”it was 327 single-spaced pages of sex and man-eating.”
He got his first rejection slip.
Nine years later, Brown has achieved the kind of literary success that thousands of better-lettered writers would trade their Ph.D.s for.
In fall 1988, after Brown had received 30 rejection slips, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, in North Carolina, published his first collection of short stories, ”Facing the Music.” The critics raved. There were no man-eating bears here, and not a lot of sex.
”I decided sex wasn`t the main thing to be writing about,” Brown said,
”that other things were more important to the readers than that.”
These were small, spare tales about people trapped by loneliness and love and drink, people who spent their lives in Days Inn motels and convenience stores and seedy bars, people who often behaved badly but had the decency to regret it, who in a violent world struggled to refrain from violence. The collection`s title story was about a man`s reaction to his wife`s mastectomy. ”Larry frightens people,” said Shannon Ravenel, the senior fiction editor at Algonquin. ”His stuff is so daring and stares so unblinkingly at subjects that people aren`t sure everybody wants to read about.
That`s one reason he had trouble getting published.”
Last August, Algonquin published Brown`s novel ”Dirty Work,” a chronicle of the conversations of two hospitalized Vietnam veterans, one black, the other white. Critics praised it as the most unflinching depiction of war and its scars since ”Johnny Got His Gun.”
Suddenly, Larry Brown was no longer just a literary fluke; he was a phenomenon. Suddenly, on the likes of the ”Today” show and CNN, his life was reduced to a tidy wad of marketable contradiction, the stuff of headlines, sound bites and book jackets. Larry Brown: firefighter, ex-Marine, the sharecropper`s son who flunked high school English, the next William Faulkner. Brown comes close to blushing apologetically about the frequent, highblown Faulkner comparison. ”About the only thing Mr. Faulkner and I have in common is being from Oxford.”
Brown`s stories are apt to convince readers that he is a tormented man who has staggered to hell and back in a blur of beer and bourbon. In reality, his life looks as placid and ordinary as a 1950s sitcom.
He lives with his wife and three children in a comfortable but plain house he built himself on several acres of green farmland 10 miles out of Oxford, a small college town in northern Mississippi`s red clay hills. He seems wounded and puzzled that some critics berate him for excessive violence and a bleak vision.
”I think a lot of people lead bleak lives, but I don`t think life is bleak,” he said. He was sitting in his living room, wearing camouflage pants and a T-shirt, smoking Marlboros and occasionally sipping a Budweiser tucked in a foam-rubber coolie.
He called to his wife, Mary Annie, who was in the kitchen.
”You think I got a bleak outlook on life, Hon?”
They have known each other since they were teenagers. She thought for a minute, then shook her head. No. ”He`s got a bad temper,” she added, ”but he doesn`t use it.”
It may be hard to fathom how a man who lives a calm, common life, who has seen little of the world beyond Memphis, an hour`s drive north, could write so powerfully about life`s dark side.
”I got an early education in trouble,” he said. He talked for a while about his childhood and his late father, then asked that none of it be printed. He worries about hurting his relatives.
Brown is a small, wiry man, at once sweet and shrewd, naive and wise and much too shy for small talk. He is obsessed with writing and remarkably prolific. At Ravenel`s urging, he even threw away the first 600 pages of
”Dirty Work.”
A man of letters
Ellen Douglas, the author and a professor at the University of Mississippi, recalls the day six years ago that he dropped by her office to see if she would accept him in her creative writing class, even though he had never been to college.
”He`s very laid back, and he`s also very Southern,” said Douglas, recounting the conversation. ”So when I asked him if he`d done much writing, he said, `Yes, Ma`am,` he had. I asked him what he was working on. He said, `I reckon I got about 100 short stories and drafts of three novels.` ” She told him he could take the class.
It was about that time that he started hanging out at Square Books, an airy, well-stocked, wood-floored bookstore on the same town square that Faulkner mythologized in fiction. Richard Howorth, the owner, guided him through the unfamiliar titles, suggesting a book here, a book there that might be better than Harold Robbins and Stephen King.
Now he points proudly to his small home library, stocked with such writers as Pete Dexter, Richard Ford, Rick Bass, Clyde Edgerton, Raymond Carver and Harry Crews. He said he needs to build some bookshelves to accommodate them all.
Brown usually writes, on a typewriter, in a tiny room he built not long ago next to his carport. On the walls are his children`s drawings, a photograph of himself with Eudora Welty, and a variety of reviews. All but a few are glowing.
”Here`s one that says `Dirty Work`s` relentlessly talky,” he said.
”Here`s one that says it stretches credibility.” He shrugged.
Above his desk he has tacked a list of names he calls the All-Bush Saints Review. ”Bush” is the nickname his firehouse buddies gave him when his hair was long. The saints are the people who helped him with his writing. In addition to Howorth, Douglas and other locals, the list includes an editor at Outdoor Life magazine (”the first person who ever wrote me anything good about my work”) and an editor at Twilight Zone magazine (”he sent a steady stream of encouraging rejection letters”).
Success, of course, has its hazards.
He has become so well known that he had to change his phone number. Too many weirdos were calling. One was a woman who claimed to be a Jewish Choctaw Indian daughter of a slavemaster; she wanted him to write her life story.
When The New York Times asked him not long ago to review another author`s book, he agreed, only to discover that he was uneasy passing himself off as a critic. ”It never crossed my mind that the book might be bad, which it was,” he said. ”I didn`t want to be seen slamming another novelist in The New York Times. So I told the woman, `I can`t give this novel a good review.` But she just said, `We wouldn`t have given it to you if we didn`t think you were qualified to review it.` ”
The reluctant promoter
Brown balks at doing promotional tours. He said it`s because he hates to fly and doesn`t like visiting cold cities. Some of his friends say he worries about making a fool of himself in front of interviewers and literati slinging around fancy literary terms.
He initially refused to appear on the ”Today” show last fall, despite his publisher`s assurances that it would mean a million dollars in free publicity. Finally he relented, under pressure from his wife, who doesn`t read much of his work but encourages him to promote it.
”I slept alone too many nights while Larry was sitting in front of the typewriter with the overhead light on for him not to succeed now,” Mary Annie said.
Brown now earns more money writing than he ever did as a firefighter, though he won`t feel truly accomplished until one of his stories appears in Esquire, which has turned him down several times. ”Someday,” he vowed,
”someday.”
Early this year, he quit the Fire Department, hoping to devote himself full time to more short stories, another novel and a screenplay of ”Dirty Work” for ”American Playhouse” on PBS. The city threw him a going-away party, at which the mayor and aldermen presented him a gift, his firefighter`s collar brass and captain`s badge, mounted and framed.
At a Southern literature conference in Chattanooga, Tenn., last spring, Brown gave a talk about his writing. It was called ”A Late Start.”
”I`ve seen that distant dream come true,” he said, ”a book with my name on it. It hasn`t been easy, and I doubt if it ever will be. I don`t think it was meant to be easy.”
The audience stood and cheered.
LARRY BROWN`S UNFLINCHING LOOKS AT ORDINARY LIVES
Here are excerpts from some of Larry Brown`s stories:
From `Dirty Work`
(Braiden, the black soldier who has lost both legs and arms, is in his hospital bed when Walter, the white soldier, is rolled in.)
He didn`t look like much when they brought him in. . . . Had him strapped down on a stretcher. Had him knocked out. Hair was all down in his eyes. Even with that I could see his face. Most of it had been blowed off and they`d tried to put him another one together. . . . Didn`t know if that was all that was wrong with him. Other than his face they wasn`t nothing else. Had all his fingers and toes. Thought maybe they`s just holding him for the padded room. They took the straps off him, though. Took him off the stretcher and put him on a bed. Didn`t have nothing hooked to him. Just to look at him you`d think he was dead. They had trouble moving him cause he was so big. He must`ve weighed about two fifty.
Old boys that brought him said, ”Brought you some company, Braiden.”
I said, ”Misery loves it.”
From `Kubuku Rides`
(A woman tries to hide her drinking from her husband.)
”It`s just wine,” she say.
”Well, woman, how many you done had?”
”This just my first one,” she say, but she lying. She done had five and ain`t even took nothing out the deep freeze. Wind up having a turkey pot pie or something. Something don`t nobody want. She can`t cook while she trying to figure out what to do. Don`t know what to do. Ain`t gonna drink nothing at all when she get up. Worries all day about drinking, then in the evening she done worried so much over not drinking she starts in drinking.
From `Facing the Music`
(A man tries to avoid his wife`s sexual overtures shortly after she has had a mastectomy.)
Sometimes I have trouble resting at night, so I watch the movies until I get sleepy. They show them-all-night movies-on these stations from Memphis and Tupelo. There are probably a lot of people like me, unable to sleep, lying around watching them with me. I`ve got remote control so I can turn it on or off and change channels. She`s stirring around the bedroom, doing things, doing something-I don`t know what. She has to stay busy. Our children moved away and we don`t have any pets. We used to have a dog, a little brown one, but I accidentally killed it. Backed over its head with the station wagon one morning. She used to feed it in the kitchen, right after she came home from the hospital. But I told her, no more. It hurts too much to lose one.
From `The End of Romance`
(A drunken couple argues outside a fast-food place.)
So she whipped it into one of those little quick-joints that are so popular around here, one of those chicken-scarfing places, whipped it up in front of the door and stopped. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. Nothing worse than a drunken woman. Empty beer cans were all piled up around our feet. The end of romance is never easy.
”What matter?” I said.
”Nuttin matter. Everything just hunkin funkin dunky.”
”You mean hunky dory?”
She had some bloodshot eyes and a ninety-yard stare. I`d known it would come down to this. The beginning of romance is wonderful. I don`t know why I do it over and over.
