The Try-Works

Larry Brown’s recipe for squirrels, biscuits, and gravy.

The late Larry Brown, the author of Joe, Billy Ray’s Farm, and seven other classics of Southern literature, had a saying. When things were difficult, complicated, aggravating, or vexing in one way or another, he’d say, “They ain’t squirrels, baby.” Squirrels, for Larry, were the antithesis of all that: They were a joy to hunt, a joy to cook, and a joy to eat. Hunting and eating them was one of life’s simple pleasures-along with bream fishing, slow back-roads driving, drinking with pals, and cradling his grandchildren. On numerous mornings he greeted me with a plate of squirrel, biscuits, and gravy, his signature dish, usually made with grays his sons had killed. Nothing ever tasted better, or will again.

2 squirrels (about 1 pound each), dressed and quartered
2/3 cup flour for dredging, plus roughly 1/4 cup for gravy
5 slices bacon
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Biscuits
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup vegetable shortening, chilled
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons butter, melted

The rest.

These are the words engraved on Larry Brown’s tombstone. They come from a Robert Earl Keen song, which some of you savvier readers might also know was covered by the Highwaymen, a country music group made up of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

This is a fan video.

Larry Brown, as I’m learning, was a country music fan, befriending many of my favorite artists in the so-called alternative country scene.  Following is a New York Times article, running down the Oxford Conference for the Book’s celebration of Larry Brown, which turned into a concert.

I’m tearing through Joe.  It’s fucking fantastic.  I’ll give a full review when done.

The minimarts in this town are not allowed to sell cold beer, and anyone familiar with Larry Brown or his fiction might reasonably think that he is the reason. Mr. Brown, who grew up in this area, wrote stories with many a compulsive drinker, many a winding road and nary a designated driver.

Like his characters Mr. Brown, a firefighter and largely self-taught writer, loved to drive around the county chain-smoking and drinking beer. On his car stereo he played Southern singer-songwriters like Robert Earl Keen, Alejandro Escovedo and Vic Chesnutt. As his fame grew, his passion was reciprocated. He became a patron saint and friend to alt-country, anthem-folk, hillbilly, banjo-picking, Southern soliloquizing, bourbon-poisoned, frat-boy-followed and/or cop-chased musicians. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote a song, “Long Way Home,” inspired by Mr. Brown’s stories, and the country star Tim McGraw optioned some for movies.

On Thursday Mr. Keen, Mr. Escovedo, Mr. Chesnutt and others gathered here to celebrate Mr. Brown, play music in his honor and, as they say down here, tell stories on him. The occasion was the Oxford Conference for the Book, which focuses each year on a Southern writer, usually a long-dead one like Tennessee Williams or Walker Percy. Mr. Brown died in 2004, at 53, after a heart attack, and with so many friends, and his wife, Mary Annie, in the back row, the conference seemed less like a scholarly endeavor than an Irish wake.

Mr. Brown was a lion of the literary movement known as Rough South. His novels, funny and tender and violent, include “Joe,” about a family of squatters and their depraved alcoholic father; “Dirty Work,” about two disfigured veterans, one black and one white, in a hospital room; and “Father and Son,” about a man’s return home after doing time for manslaughter. An unfinished novel, “The Miracle of Catfish,” has just been published by Algonquin Books.

The panel discussions included students of Mr. Brown like Steven Rinella, author of “Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine”; young people he had literally taken in when they were down on their luck, like Ben Weaver, a singer-songwriter who now lives in Minneapolis; and friends who had known him all his life, like the Oxford fire chief, Jerry Johnson. Debra Winger and Arliss Howard, who made a movie based on Mr. Brown’s short stories, were there, as was Gary Hawkins, who made the documentary “The Rough South of Larry Brown.”

The panels were rounded out by a concert at Proud Larry’s, a local music club, and the release of a tribute album.

Into microphones or over whiskey, people recounted Mr. Brown’s long letters, his meticulous list of rejections from editors and the tours of nearby Lafayette County he would give to friends, pointing out where one of his characters had found warm beer in a ditch or where a real, live family member had run off the road; how Mr. Brown once, seeing some people he believed had wronged him, climbed on their restaurant table and danced, slowly and calmly, on their food; how he plunked a bong down on the kitchen table to announce to his family that he would not longer conceal his pot-smoking habit; how he loved to play the guitar but refused to learn more than three chords.

Larry Brown was a native son in this town where William Faulkner scrawled the outline of a novel on his study wall and John Grisham frequents a bookstore owned by the mayor, Richard Howorth. The son of a sharecropper, Mr. Brown joined the Marines after high school; he returned in 1972, married and joined the Oxford Fire Department. The Browns lived in a trailer outside town.

At 29 he began to teach himself to write, reading obsessively and turning out dozens of short stories and several novels on his wife’s typewriter and sending them off to magazines. One was finally published in 1982, in Easyriders, a biker magazine. In the late 1980s Shannon Ravenel, an editor at Algonquin Books in North Carolina, stumbled across one in a journal and called him, beginning a long and sometimes contentious relationship. She returned one manuscript with a note that said, “Start the novel on page 134”; he called her, she said, “a prissy old lady.” Usually, though, he took her suggestions, as he did once when she wanted him to cut a particularly raunchy scene. ‘The cow thing can go,” he wrote her. “I don’t know when I’m offending people unless you tell me.”

At the concert, in a good-size room off the town square, the contours of Mr. Brown’s musical taste emerged. The show had been sold out for weeks. In the first set four Mississippians with guitars — Duff Dorrough, Cary Hudson, Tim Lee and Clint Jordan — traded off, mixing their own songs about catfish and hush puppies with Hank Williams covers. Next was the less traditional, younger set: Mr. Weaver, Mr. Chesnutt and Brent Best, of a defunct band from Denton, Tex., called Slobberbone. Last were the headliners, Mr. Escovedo and Mr. Keen, who played with his bassist, Bill Whitbeck.

At one point Lisa Howorth, the mayor’s wife, was asked if she would open her home to a postconcert gathering. “I don’t have any bourbon,” she protested. The party went elsewhere.

On Friday morning a group of remarkably unhungover people made a pilgrimage to Mr. Brown’s grave.

The polished black tombstone is on the bank of a pond on a piece of land he owned in Tula, Miss. Beyond the trees was a little writing shack he spent years building with no power tools. It took so long his friends suspected he did not actually want to finish it.

“He would write you letters about it, and he would know exactly how many buckets of dirt he had carried,” said Jonathan Miles, a friend and magazine writer who organized the tribute concert. “And he would have a story for every bucket of dirt.”

During the 20-minute trip to Tula Mr. Keen, Mr. Whitbeck and Mr. Chesnutt jokingly critiqued their friend’s guitar playing but seriously discussed his prose. Mr. Whitbeck said he preferred Mr. Brown’s work to that of a kindred writer, Harry Crews. “There’s more soul to it or something,” he said. “And less pretension, in a way.”

Mr. Chesnutt, who lives in Athens, Ga., compared Mr. Brown with another of his favorites, Cormac McCarthy: “Larry’s the opposite of Cormac. You’ll never need a dictionary with Larry.”

Mr. Keen, who is from Texas, sprawled in the back seat of the van and grinned. The title of one of his songs, “The Road Goes on Forever,” is engraved on Mr. Brown’s tombstone. The song itself is about Sherry, a waitress with a reputation, a dollar in her tip jar and a pot-dealing, Navy-reject boyfriend.

It could easily have been one of Mr. Brown’s stories, except in the song, the six-pack she buys is cold.

I just picked up the first book in my promised Larry Brown binge from the local branch of my library. It’s Joe. I couldn’t help but read a few pages in the car, and what I read was fucking spectacular.

There’s a paucity of information on the web about Mr. Brown. The best I could do for a biography was this bit from this New York Times obituary.

William Larry Brown was born on July 9, 1951, in Oxford, a town with a literary tradition stretching from William Faulkner to John Grisham. But for much of his life Mr. Brown, the son of a restless sharecropper father and a mother who was a store owner and postmaster, seemed to be anything but the bookish type.

Before graduating from high school in 1969, he failed senior English and had to attend summer school, he told an interviewer in 2000. Soon after, he enlisted in the Marines, serving for two years in noncombat positions.

After his discharge Mr. Brown returned to Mississippi, where he worked a variety of odd jobs - over the years they included lumberjack, house painter, hay hauler and fence builder - before joining the Oxford Fire Department in 1973.

He remained a firefighter for 16 years, during which he began to teach himself how to write, reading obsessively the work of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and, of course, Faulkner. For years afterward he would be referred to as “the fireman-writer,” enough so that he tired of that designation and discouraged its use.

Though he took one writing course at the University of Mississippi, he honed his craft by writing scores of stories, many of which were rejected before he got one published in 1982 in, of all places, Easyriders, a bikers’ magazine.

Five years later another story, “Facing the Music,” published in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal, caught the attention of Shannon Ravenel, a founder of Algonquin Books. “I called him and asked if he had other stories,” Ms. Ravenel recalled. “He said he had a lot.”

Algonquin published nine of them in a 1988 collection, also titled “Facing the Music.” A novel came a year later: “Dirty Work,” about two Vietnam veterans from Mississippi - one white, the other black; one with his face blown off, the other missing all four limbs - who find themselves in adjacent hospital beds.

“Right from the beginning he was willing to look very straight into the depths of human pain without blinking,” Ms. Ravenel said. “If you didn’t blink and were willing to stand there and look with him, you could learn some remarkable things.”

Mr. Brown’s characters had dark, brutal lives, often overtaken by drinking and sex and ruinous relationships. But Mr. Brown, though as spare in conversation as in his writing, was neither brooding nor a wanderer. He is survived by his mother, Leona Brown, of Tula, Miss., near Oxford; his wife of 30 years, Mary Annie Coleman Brown; his children Billy Ray, Shane and LeAnne, all of the Oxford area; and two grandchildren.

Being from Oxford, Mr. Brown was frequently compared to Faulkner. But his prose was direct and simple - perhaps better compared to Carver or Hemingway - as in the opening of “Fay,” based on a character that first appears in “Joe.”

“She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince,” he wrote. “Alone for the first time in the world and full dark coming quickly. House lights winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse from her hand. She could hear cars passing down the asphalt but she was still a long way from that. More than once she stopped and looked back up into the ridges that stood behind her, thinking things over, but each time she shook her head and went on.”

The rest.

He’s my favorite kind of writer: dedicated to playing it his own way, win or lose. As he said, “I think it is necessary to sit down and work for years and years to get it right. I think that’s the main thing, that’s what the emphasis has got to be on: individual work.” He means it, too. He decided to be a writer at the age 29, and spent the next ten years banging out five novels and a few hundred short stories before publishing a word.

More to come.