You Should Be Taking Notes
A posthumous collection of stories from Mississippi’s Brad Watson, who left a legacy of beautiful fiction, is just out. Alabama novelist Caleb Johnson, a student of Watson’s, has this remembrance.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This week, W.W. Norton published There Is Happiness, a posthumous collection of new and selected short stories by the Mississippi writer Brad Watson, who died on July 8, 2020, just two weeks shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. Pulitzer-Prize finalist Joy Williams, who wrote the book’s introduction, calls it “…a generous portion of the work of a swiftly passing lifetime. Bountiful is the deserving page. 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.”
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Watson’s family and friends waited more than a year after his death to gather in person and remember him. They held a memorial for Watson inside an old railroad depot turned museum in Laramie, Wyoming, where he lived and taught creative writing for many years at the University of Wyoming. The Alabama writer Caleb Johnson was one of Watson’s graduate students. During the memorial service, Johnson spoke about what Watson’s mentorship meant to him. Published here for the first time is that eulogy, edited for clarity.
The day Watson died a tremendous rain fell in the valley where my wife, Irina, and I lived in western North Carolina. The meadows around our house flooded. Mountains beyond them breathed fog. After the rain stopped, we walked our old dog Hugo to a nearby river where trout shimmered like coins in the murky water.
It felt as though Watson was everywhere.
During the grief-filled aftermath of his death, it was difficult for me not to see Watson in the natural world. A deer’s hoof printed in mud, wind that shivered a sycamore’s branches, a brookie let go of my hand. Watson possessed a sharp eye for nature and a honed gift at translating what he observed into fiction. This skill was one reason I came to admire his work and, ultimately, left Alabama at twenty-five years old to study with him in Laramie.
I’d never lived outside my home state or traveled beyond the eastern side of the Mississippi River. I arrived in Laramie with a pitiful excuse for a winter coat, a vague idea for a novel I wanted to write, and little else besides a car ill-suited for driving in snow. For now, it was summer though. Watson had set me up to do some work for another University of Wyoming professor. Painting, landscaping, minor home repairs. This was the only way I could afford to come out before the fall semester began and scrape by until I received my teaching stipend. The first of many acts of kindness Watson showed me.
I fell hard for Wyoming. While living there I learned patience, how to shoot at pheasants and at ducks, the art of revision, how to snowboard, which is no small feat for an Alabamian, some things about love, and, yes, how to dress properly for cold weather. I could have learned none of this without Watson. Because of him I met my wife. We now have a son whose middle name honors the man to whom we owe so much.
Watson and I stayed in touch after I graduated and moved away from Laramie. We didn’t see each other often. When we did, things picked up right where they left off. Once, at a conference for writers held in Washington D.C., we shared a heroic number of drinks. I was struggling to finish what became my debut novel, Treeborne. Before parting ways, Watson said to me, “You know, I don’t worry about you, Caleb. I know you’ll keep working.” He sort of had a trademark on melancholy when it came to himself and his work. But with us, his students, Watson was encouraging in exactly the right ways, at exactly the right moments.
In the last few years of Watson’s life, I made a habit of calling in the evening when I suspected he’d be sitting down with a drink. Whiskey on ice, gin and tonic. Among other things we talked about were the animals we saw on walks with our dogs. Mine in the Blue Ridge, his on the high plains. One of my favorite stories was the time he and his dogs, Maji and Hank, watched a coyote crest a hill, pause, take a shit while staring right at them, then trot on down the other side as though its point had been firmly made.
Watson was a tremendous storyteller, pulling from a reserve dating back to his childhood in Meridian, Mississippi. I treated him a bit like a jukebox, requesting favorites I’d heard time and again. Watson always grinned telling them. He was charismatic, handsome, boyish, just goddamn cool. I mean, whenever I put on a pair of boots, or the one cowboy hat I own, I hope I look half as badass as Watson did in such a getup. Rarely did it occur to me he was old enough to be my father. I thought of him as someone I’d gone to college with, who happened to have a little more gray in his beard.
I realized something meaningful was happening and thought: Pay attention, remember this. The part of my brain that doesn’t want to reckon with mortality responded: Don’t worry, you’ll do it again.
Friends are the greatest thing a life in writing has provided me. The best ones last longer than any book review or advance. As evidenced by the tremendous outpouring after his death, Watson had many, many friends. It amazes me how giving he was with all of us, how there was anything leftover for himself. At times, I know, there wasn’t.
I always made a point of expressing gratitude for his friendship. I suspect my earnestness made him uncomfortable, a little squirrelly. I worried I needed Watson more than he needed me. Then one evening, as we were getting off the phone, he said, “Hey, I appreciate you keeping in touch. It means a lot.” I hurried to hang up before my voice cracked.
After his death, I went back and read an essay Watson wrote about Barry Hannah, under whom he studied at the University of Alabama. Watson had told me the best you could hope for in Barry’s workshop was to go unnoticed. An experience that no doubt shaped the workshop leader he became—thoughtful, humorous, inquisitive.
In this essay Watson writes about the workshop leader’s dilemma: “People want you to make them a star, or at least make them better, but you can hardly ever do that. You can show them what they need to do, where or how they’re not doing it. You can encourage them when they’re working hard and taking risks and doing well. You can be tough and tell them they’re not delivering and will never do anything if they don’t give a lot more to it. Or you can go easy and find ways to suggest they discover this for themselves.” Watson did the latter for us, his students, who make up so many branches of a magnificent writing tree. I see it as our task to keep leafing out, keep dropping seeds, keep growing as writers in the surprising ways Watson taught us good fiction necessitates.
I have searched for a photo of Watson and me, and found none. This was upsetting until I reasoned why. Watson possessed an ability to make you feel present in a moment that few others I’ve met do. It’s the thing you hear people say about certain movie stars. When we spent time together, it never occurred to me I should intrude with a camera.
Looking back, there are things I wish I had pictures of though. About a year before Watson died, we took a road trip through Alabama and Mississippi. Something we’d talked about doing since we first met. Our loose agenda included Oxford and Jackson, Tuscaloosa, then Montgomery, where one of Watson’s oldest friends lived.
My wife, Irina, had given us two rules to abide by during the trip—no drinking and driving, and no moping. These were hopeless requests. We broke the first somewhere around Okolona, cracking open a couple beers hidden in the console between our seats.
In Oxford, we gathered with several other Mississippi writers on the balcony at City Grocery, a popular restaurant and bar on the town square. It thrilled me to be surrounded by people whose work I admired, to be introduced by my mentor as a writer, to feel included in an artistic tradition I revered. Watson seemed happy, too, though I recall leading up to the visit he questioned whether he was imposing by showing up with no reason other than passing through.
We stayed up late that night, eating watermelon and drinking bourbon with the owners of the local bookstore, Square Books. The next morning we set out for Jackson. The plan was to tour the Eudora Welty House, which neither of us had done.
Cruising down I-55 ahead of a rainstorm, Watson began talking about his life. I’d told him Irina and I were considering having a kid. He spoke of becoming a father, his sojourn in Hollywood, returning home and enrolling in community college, moving to Starkville, where he studied English, a failed attempt at becoming a good Baptist, he called it, divorce, another marriage, another child, absconding to the Gulf Coast, taking an appointment at Harvard, where he lived on Cape Cod and met his wife Nell and, eventually, finished his first novel, The Heaven of Mercury.
My wife, Irina, had given us two rules to abide by during the trip—no drinking and driving, and no moping. ... We seemed in danger of breaking Irina’s second rule until Watson glanced over and said, “You should be taking notes. Maybe you’ll get a piece out of this one day, if nothing else.”
We seemed in danger of breaking Irina’s second rule until Watson glanced over and said, “You should be taking notes. Maybe you’ll get a piece out of this one day, if nothing else.”
This allowed us to laugh away the sadness. But I realized something meaningful was happening and thought: Pay attention, remember this. The part of my brain that doesn’t want to reckon with mortality responded: Don’t worry, you’ll do it again.
In Tuscaloosa we visited with a critic and a poet, a married couple Watson had known for decades. They cooked pork chops and served us wine. Watson and the critic gave a ribald oral history of Tuscaloosa literary life gone by, including the story of a Richard Yates manuscript stolen out of a freezer, and the greatest hits of Barry Hannah’s oft-chronicled antics.
The following day we drove to Montgomery. “Welcome to McLemoreland,” Watson said as we eased into a gravel driveway that did feel like the entrance to another country. I looked out and saw Harold, the McLemore in question, Watson’s close friend going back to their days editing Black Warrior Review together during the late ’70s and early ’80s. Harold was striding across the overgrown yard. He wore a sweatshirt and shorts, walking poles gripped in either large hand.
We started drinking. Beer, I don’t know. An enormous St. Bernard sprawled on the floor. Later that evening Harold boiled several pounds of Gulf shrimp and heated pre-baked loaves of French-style bread in the oven. There was so much butter I could feel the food slipping through my body as I swallowed each bite.
After dinner, still at the table, Watson and Harold decided to take turns reading aloud the work of the poet James Wright, who they both admired going back to their time as graduate students in Tuscaloosa. Watson chose “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” I’ve sat through many readings. None moved me the way Watson did when he spoke—
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
The sense of enlightenment in that last line can be difficult to confront unless we note it comes only after moments of careful noticing, a kind of presence that borders on the spiritual. It’s no wonder Watson loved this one.
The next morning I woke early to catch a Greyhound. Watson stayed on in McLemoreland and, maybe, wrote a little before returning west.
When I got home, I did write down my memories from the trip and used them to put together parts of this eulogy. In doing so, I also returned to Watson’s essay on Barry Hannah, where he describes an attempt to bring Barry, who was very sick in his last years, to Laramie.
“I really wanted to see Barry,” Watson writes, “to take him trout fishing the way he’d often said he wanted to come out and do, to see him marvel at the beauty of the mountains and clear little rivers here, the wildlife, the vistas. It felt to me as if it would be a culmination of some sort, that it would bring our friendship full circle…”
“I really wanted to see Barry [Hannah],” Watson writes, “to take him trout fishing the way he’d often said he wanted to come out and do, to see him marvel at the beauty of the mountains and clear little rivers here, the wildlife, the vistas.”
The tragedy is he—now, we—cannot. Watson left us without the warnings others give. Suddenly, in the night. But I think it isn’t quite necessary, this desire for closure, I mean, because if you spent time with Watson, then each and every moment, joke, story, grin, drink shared was in fact a tiny circle closing. Those moments accumulated and accumulated. We carry them with us yet. Some we’ll inevitably drop, lose, let roll away into the wake of time. Others we’ll keep, fitting perfectly in the palm of our hands, where we can hold them up to light sometimes and look as closely as we like.
Buy the Works of Brad Watson
There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories [2024]
Miss Jane: A Novel [2016]
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives [2010]
The Heaven of Mercury: A Novel [2002]
Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories [1996]
About the author
Caleb Johnson is the author of the novel Treeborne, which received an honorable mention for the Southern Book Prize. His nonfiction has been cited in Best American Essays, and appears in Garden & Gun, Southern Living, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He teaches at the University of South Alabama.
- Caleb Johnsonhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/caleb-johnson/
