Joy Williams on the Wild, Lyrical Stories of Brad Watson
A “Soulful Half-Comic Songbook” of Fiction
Brad was Brad Watson’s middle name. The name he was supposed to go by was Wilton. Wilton Watson. What a mouthful. What could such a name portend for a white Mississippian born in the summer of 1955? Well, anything could happen and some things even did.
He didn’t dream of becoming a writer, certainly. A presence on stage or screen perhaps. He was good-looking, a bit roguish. He had charm, that Southern charm. He fathered a child and got married when he was but a junior in high school. It seemed he was always getting married and fathering a son and getting divorced, but that happened only twice.
Then suddenly he was forty and had written a wonderful book, Last Days of the Dog-Men, a collection of stories. Each one excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild. And within each, its blazing core, its irreducible essence, was a dog—a memorable, tragic, honorable, thoroughly realized dog. “A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned,” Watson states quite correctly. “He is who he is and his only task is to assert this.”
Watson’s dogs are close to divine, his people—strange, piteous, futile, and fickle things—hardly. In the title story, a wife euthanizes her faithless husband’s dog Spike, just to be mean of course, but compounds the evil by confessing that after the fatal injection she begged the dog not to die, to come back to her, to them, the marriage.
Only occasionally does a human rise to the level of redemption, achieve that state of faithful abide, that is a dog’s natural condition. “Bill” may be the saddest, dearest story of the lot when an old woman and her aged “trembling” poodle Bill share a last dream howl, a pure wordless language of grief and goodbye.
Last Days of the Dog-Men, with its iconic sepia-colored cover photograph of two madly confident dogs in flight, won some prizes and was allowed to nudge against the cold cruel gates of establishment success. His next books were permitted to do the same; a boisterously engaging novel The Heaven of Mercury, another collection, and a second novel, the quiet and riskier Miss Jane.
The novels were more deeply lyrical than the stories, wide-focused on a lifetime in a single, long-past place. They were roomy, like a big old Lincoln, generous with meanderings and asides:
A mockingbird sat somewhere nearby…belting a repertoire…ohmygodhelpme!, ohmygodhelpme!, dearme dearme dearme, lookahere!, lookahere!, boogedieboogedieboogedie, therewego therewego therewego, who, me? who, me? stick close! stick close! stick close! stick close!, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
But it was, I believe, the short story in which he delighted and at which he excelled, that American treasure that American readers are so wary of, resisting its surprises, attentiveness, and demands. The good short story tells us something very alarming about ourselves and our puzzling sojourn on this earth, our situation, as it were.
It is the perfect vehicle for delivering us to ourselves, an experience we instinctively wish very much to avoid. A good story gives us a glimpse—and the glimpse is so surprising, so varied yet unequivocal, so ruthlessly complete, that it does awaken us in some manner, if not protect or prepare us.
This glimpse is the short story’s gravest gift and Watson is a maven at slamming our souls with it. In “Visitation,” an unhappy father awkwardly attempting to engage with his estranged and fearful son doesn’t recognize his child or himself after his palm is read by a woman in a sleazy motel. In “Terrible Argument,” a couple seasoned in marital discord find there are limits to choreographed rage. In “Uncle Willem,” a prank involving a much-delayed sunrise drives a simple man literally out of his wits.
In “Agnes of Bob,” a woman quietly drowning in a public swimming pool has a vision of her long-dead husband cleaning bream and throwing the heads still gasping for air to their old bulldog, “tossing fish heads around the yard like balls.” She feels “on the brink of a wonderful vision, as if in a moment she would know what Pops had seen as he passed through his own heart and…into the next world.”
The next world(s) are always near in these stories, so unlike the visible here-and-now one where people just get “scattered carelessly into this life or that,” and Watson enters them with unguarded joy. He dips into the consciousness of boys (“Eykelboom”) and dogs (“Seeing Eye”), and ex-cons (“Dying for Dolly”) but more arcane ways of being pose no challenge, either.
Two of my perversely favorite stories here are pure grotesque. One explores an awareness of the “mighty defecation” of a leopard escaped from a zoo “steaming in the wet, glinting, close-clipped grass” of freedom. The leopard has brought down and consumed a zookeeper (for whom he had long cultivated a hatred). Now digested and transformed into fresh scat, the man, or rather his remaining consciousness, finds a measure of relief “at the sensation of (relative) light and air.”
In the other, “There Is Happiness” a gruesomely embellished wig stand provides comfort to none other than a homicidal lunatic before ultimately speaking to her of life’s grim verities and death’s dominion. Yes, the wig stand speaks. Its skin is shrunken and hardened and its eyes are black as if burned in a fire of deep understanding. Its name is Elizabeth Bob.
Such freakish flair is not uncommon in these stories, but neither is straightforward melancholy realism like the powerful “Crazy Horse” or antic forays into male meltdown like “Are You Mr. Lonelee?” The mix, the shifts in intent and tone, makes for a heady experience, a soulful half-comic songbook of cries and fears and play: “Ohmygodhelpme dearme dearme stick close I dont know I don’t know….”
William Gass has noted that every real book is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness. The reader reading “dreams the dream of the deserving page.”
In the accomplished “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” the story that lent its name to Watson’s second collection, a young couple, totally unprepared for their impoverished and inevitable future, rent a sweltering attic apartment a block away from a mental institution.
After a visit from a cheerful twosome in rumpled pajamas who claim to be from another planet, certainly not the nearby facility, they cycle through a number of pleasant scenarios—some quite immediate (a lovely breeze enters their awful home, a wide bowl of cold fried chicken and a Tupperware of potato salad appear in the previously empty Frigidaire)—while others unfold in a serene and fulsome future complete with a well-tended farm, a perfect child, and a fine church-singing voice.
All that happens is more than a dream, but it’s still necessary to awake from it. So does life require. Or, as one figure from a blurry past informs our unnamed hero: “You have to go back to where you came from.”
Wilton Brad Watson died in the summer of 2020, suddenly, of cardiac arrest in his home in Wyoming, two weeks shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. Here is a generous portion of the work of a swiftly passing lifetime. Bountiful is the deserving page.
The mix, the shifts in intent and tone, makes for a heady experience, a soulful half-comic songbook of cries and fears and play.And the dream, both imagined and remembered (the difference being not great), is the peculiar one of life and its conversions. The moment it ends seems hardly stranger than all that has transpired before. Brad was ever striving to glimpse a vision appropriate to his characters’ essence—perplexed, anxious, done with it, or hopeful, as that glimpse might be.
On his death notice are the last lines of The Heaven of Mercury. It is one of the most striking, unabashedly lovely endings of any novel I know.
He wandered toward a spot of color in the distance and when he got close he saw that it was a bush filled with preening monarch butterflies…resting and soaking up the sunlight….They seemed to shiver under his rapt attention. He felt such an outpouring of love for them, he thought he would weep. They seemed hardly able to contain their delight that he was gazing upon their beautiful wings.
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There Is Happiness by Brad Watson and with a foreword by Joy Williams is available via Norton.
