We Won't See Brad Watson Again

In Remembrance of a Great Friend and a Great Writer

Brad Watson passed away last Tuesday at the age of 64. He was a good friend to my entire family and a fiction writer I looked up to. I’m still processing his unexpected departure. One thing I can say for sure is that Brad left behind a body of work that will not soon be forgotten, and one to which I’ll keep returning, knowing that I’ll learn something new each time I re-encounter his writing.

What I’ve kept coming back to, over this past week of grieving and reflection, is that I’ve never known a writer who gave as much of a damn as Brad did. I was raised by a novelist, Alyson Hagy, who was a colleague of Brad’s and who very much gives a damn. Through her and my own wanderings, I’ve gotten to know many people who write fiction seriously, quite a few of them successfully. None of them have Brad’s brooding intensity about the work.

I had the good fortune to have a lot of long talks with Brad while he was with us. It’s a compliment to him that almost all of these conversations circled back to writing fiction. Partly this was because it was what I wanted to talk about, partly it was because Brad seemed to spend as much time thinking about The Struggle as any writer I’ve known, and partly it was because quite a few of our encounters happened at Christmastime gatherings during which gallons of wine were decanted. Though it must be said, even on those candlelit snowy nights, Brad always favored bourbon.

To our mutual friends, over our own glasses of whiskey, I’ve been saying Brad was a Mournful Southern Writer. That is to say, a true Southern writer, perhaps the only one I’ve known who could sit on an unbearably humid porch with Flannery O’Connor and have a conversation that seemed to be about the chickens scratching in the yard but was really about death. He was from Meridian, Mississippi, a fact you couldn’t miss if you knew his fiction and of which he would remind you if any doubt arose. Wyoming suited him well as an adopted home, perhaps because it was just far enough away from Mississippi to let him survey the whole landscape.

Even away from the humidity, Brad sweated for his fiction unlike anyone I’ve known or ever expect to know. I’ll let his longtime editor, Alane Mason, do the honors:

Everything the guy published was prize-worthy. He wrote like a composer, every note held for just the right amount of time to make music.

He was the most self-critical author I knew. I could never tell whether I was being encouraging by asking after a next book, or adding to his self-torment.

Make sure you read the whole remembrance, because she said it all better than I could. I want to drive home that first point: I doubt I’ll ever know another writer about whom it could be said “Everything the guy published was prize-worthy.” That sounds like the kind of unverifiable flattery you could heap on any accomplished writer after their death, but it was the actual truth about Brad. You’ll have to read Brad for yourself to decide whether I’m right, but I’ll try to give a little Watsonian heft to the claim.

Every time Brad and I talked at length, we spent a great deal of our time on what Mason rightly calls his “torment.” Brad always fretted that he wasn’t working fast enough, or well enough, or on the right thing. He once said to me, “You end up throwing most of it out,” by which he meant, you throw away most of your words if you’re serious about fiction. I didn’t understand how right he was until years later, after I’d thrown away literally half a million words of my own.

Perhaps because of his savagery towards his own drafts, when Brad’s work finally came out, it was somehow an impossible alloy of sparkle and gloom. I’ve spent my entire fiction writing life puzzling over the opening to the short story “Vacuum” and why it works so well. Here’s a passage near the start of a story called “Eykelboom,” in which the narrator moves us from description of the boy Eykelboom’s dislikable father into the heart of the matter about the boy himself:

He was tall, with a big rectangular head, a flattop haircut that wedged to a point over his small, square forehead, and droopy, arrogant eyes. Long loose limbs that looked apelike and strong, huge hands and feet, but thin and wiry legs as if he’d descended from a jackrabbit or some fleet herbivore. As he pushed the lawnmower back and forth across the grass, he sucked in his gut like a movie actor. You could always tell that it was sucked in because it wasn’t muscled, just smoothly concaved by the sucking. Eykelboom walked around doing the same thing, sucking in his belly, sticking out his chest, atop which stood the same long neck, slack face, flattop haircut. He was slighter and softer than his old man, gangly. He ran with his head thrown back, legs flailing, chest thrust forward as if to break the wire.

Eykelboom’s old man didn’t like Eykelboom much, either, which was a pretty awful thing, even to the boys.

The father is grotesque but eminently believable, just another guy in the neighborhood trying to seem tough and commanding and mostly failing. The boy is trying to be like his dad, and also mostly failing. And then the intimation that the father, so despised himself, doesn’t even like the son. This breaks the rules to which “the boys”—whose point of view the narrator is both honoring and critiquing—in this neighborhood are accustomed. We come to realize that while we were reading this seemingly innocuous and quiet description, we were learning of a man’s inadequacy as a man, a son’s inadequacy as a son, and the codes of the cloistered, inevitably humid realm in which these standards are being set. And then we’re ready to do some good old suffering alongside Eykelboom.

A steady recital of only subtly adorned facts, told from a vantage that belies its own complexity by hewing deceptively close to what you could verify for yourself if you were there with The Boys in Mississippi in the Sixties. It feels simple until you take the time to unspool its densely woven threads. That’s probably a good working definition for what fiction should be at its best.

From a random page in Miss Jane, Brad’s most recent novel, which practices a different kind of alchemy:

As her father rose to go be by himself, and Grace and her mother began to clean the table and wash the dishes, she sat looking at her own, with its two beautifully symmetrical, cleaned fish skeletons lying there in a thin film of congealed grease. It occurred to her what a very strange creature a fish was, a thing that lived in the water, underwater. And somehow breathed water, which would kill a body fool enough to try it, though she’d once wondered if she could sift it carefully through her lips and make that work, and when she’d mentioned it to her father, he’d blanched and said, “Don’t ever try that.”

Now in this moment she wished she had paid more attention when her mother was cleaning the fish, scraping out their insides, their small and delicate organs, had gazed on the mystery of them. And she wished she had asked her mother for one of the heads, so that she could peer closely at those gills, what they had instead of lungs, her father said, with their strange, blood-filled filaments that were apparently the secret to their magical abilities to live as they did.

She wondered what happened to a fish that was born without them. If it just floated the surface of the water and died.

It took me a while to transcribe that passage, because I was trying not to fiddle too much with my mom’s copy of the book.

A middle-aged man in Wyoming in the 2010s casting himself back into the consciousness of a young girl in early-twentieth-century Mississippi. A lot of writers try this kind of thing, and if they find any success, it’s usually superficial in the most literal sense—all about surfaces. What Brad does in the above passage is transport us back inside the melancholy curiosity of childhood with a gossamer viscerality. I’m not sure I can unpack those paragraphs any more than I can tease out each tiny bone from a dead fish. The way the inseparable wonder and fear of childhood collide when she remembers her father saying “Don’t ever try that”—I can’t really do it justice. I just want you to read it and understand that every page of Miss Jane shows that kind of poignant generosity. I can’t read any part of that book now without tearing up.

When I say that we won’t see a writer like Brad Watson again, I mean that I don’t know if it’s any longer possible to dedicate yourself to writing fiction in the way Brad did. There will always be serious fiction writers, but I don’t know where you’d even go to learn to be like Brad, where you’d see that kind of patient-yet-painful fight playing out in all its dusty tussling. For him, the craft of writing was exactly that—work that took something from you in the way that only backbreaking labor, done until you drop, over and over again, can take. A brutal process that makes you mourn even when you succeed.

I do know that Brad’s fiction will stay beautiful forever. I’ll never live up to his example, but his writing will always be there, glimmering on the horizon, showing me where to go. I will always miss Brad Watson, and I will always return to his work.

Other things:

I’m keeping my powder dry on Calvin and Hobbes this week—they’ll be back next week, I promise.

I encourage you to read the links to Brad’s work and the Alane Mason remembrance above.

— Here’s another worthy obituary

— And another fantastic story

— A GoFundMe to support Nell Hanley, a friend of mine and Brad’s wife

A poem:

The Watson Poems from a good friend of Brad’s