Brad Watson, 64, dies; His southern upbringing animated his books

The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, March 28, 2024


Brad Watson, 64, dies; His southern upbringing animated his books
For “Miss Jane” (2016), his second novel, Watson reimagined a family mystery.

by Richard Sandomir



NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Brad Watson, whose short stories and novels — including one book inspired by a great-aunt’s anatomical anomaly — came to life largely on the Southern Gulf Coast of his birth, died on July 8 at his home in Laramie, Wyoming. He was 64.

His wife, Nell Hanley, said the cause was cardiac failure.

Watson’s two novels and two short-story collections did not make him a major literary star. But his fiction was often praised for its surreal, bizarre, funny, wild and tender stories about characters who inevitably must transcend difficult moments in their lives. His first novel, “The Heaven of Mercury” (2002), was a National Book Award finalist.

“Brad Watson, white, male and already wise beyond his years when the near-perfect story collection ‘Last Days of the Dog-Men’ was published in 1996,” Amy Grace Loyd wrote in The New York Times in 2016, “has long explored how the peculiarities of our physical selves can be a benediction and a curse (in turns or all at once), how insistently they express nature’s beauty and brutality.”

For “Miss Jane” (2016), his second novel, Watson reimagined a family mystery: His great-aunt Mary Ellis Clay, known as Jane, was born in the late 19th century with a rare birth defect that apparently had a profound effect on her sexual organs and left her incontinent. Relatives had few stories to tell him, and there were no extant medical records to describe her condition. A surviving photo of her showed an attractive teenager who, Watson’s mother said, was popular and enjoyed dances.

“Had she known love, or some version of it?” Watson asked in an interview on the website of his publisher, W.W. Norton. “What, then, happened to that? And everyone said Aunt Jane was a ‘cheerful’ person. Was that true, or a front to cover a long-ago, unavoidable sadness?”

It would take Watson 13 years — time aplenty for medical research and many false starts — to complete “Miss Jane,” which follows Jane Chisolm from her birth on a large Mississippi farm in 1915 through a life of relative isolation — although she does have an almost erotic connection to nature and a lasting friendship with the doctor who delivered her.

“You would not think someone so afflicted would or could be cheerful, not prone to melancholy or the miseries,” Watson wrote. “Early on, she acquired ways of dealing with her life, of life in general. And as she grew older it became evident that she feared almost nothing — perhaps only horses and something she couldn’t quite name, a strange presence of danger, not quite or not really part of the world.”

Reviewing “Miss Jane” in The Washington Post, Aditi Sriram said it “plays on the tongue like an oyster — first salty, then cold — before slipping away to be consumed and digested.”

Wilton Brad Watson was born on July 14, 1955, in Meridian, Mississippi. His father, Robert Earl Watson, ran a shoe store and owned a bar; his mother, Bonnie (Clay) Watson, was an office worker.

As a youngster, Watson did not have writing ambitions. His poor handwriting generated mockery from a teacher, and he did not know how to type.

“Dim child — dreamy but dim,” he once said of himself.

While in high school, he acted in plays at a local theater, which led him to try for a Hollywood career. He headed west with a wife he had married between his junior and senior years and their baby, Jason. But instead of finding acting jobs during a writers’ strike, he collected garbage.




Back home, he enrolled at Meridian Junior College (now Meridian Community College), where he wrote his first short story.

He studied fiction writing at Mississippi State University (he and his wife had split up by then) and wrote a pile of short stories that he himself said were bad. In the spring before he graduated in 1978, he attended a symposium at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where he hoped to meet the darkly comic writer Barry Hannah, who was teaching there. Watson was headed to the school that fall to start work on a master’s in creative writing.

The two met and spent the day bar hopping. At one point, Hannah said, “as if to himself, ‘You wouldn’t believe how beautiful my wife is naked,’” Watson recalled in “A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah,” a book of essays published two years after Hannah’s death in 2010.

“That was uttered not so much as a statement of wonder,” Watson wrote, “but in the way of words that might lead to physical combat.” When Watson said, “I wouldn’t know,” Hannah “looked at me, steady. ‘You’d better not.’ He didn’t smile. He seemed to mean it.”

That baffling encounter did not deter Hannah from counseling Watson on his work or becoming his friend. And those odd words from Hannah about his wife? It was a line, lifted with some changes, from one of his short stories.

After completing his master’s degree, Watson gave up fiction for a while, unhappy with the quality of his stories. He worked as a reporter and editor at The Montgomery Advertiser, moved on to an advertising agency and then returned to the Tuscaloosa campus to teach.

His “Last Days of the Dog-Men,” a book of short stories, was published in 1996 and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Like all his books, it was published by Norton and edited by Alane Mason.

In a tribute on the website Literary Hub, Mason noted some of the quirkiest moments in Watson’s work, including a description of a dog watching a streetlight change; the “most noble account of an old man on the toilet”; a marital argument that a man shoots himself in the foot to end; and a necrophiliac scene in “The Heaven of Mercury.”

“Heaven” spans 80 years in the life of Finus Bates, a newspaper editor, broadcaster and obituary writer, and of the small Mississippi town of Mercury.

“The language is racy and colloquial, delivered in a Southern telegraphese in which sentences tend to lose their subjects and verbs, rolling and swinging like the Mississippi accent,” Mary Flanagan wrote in a review in The Independent. “Shamelessly gorgeous prose becomes suddenly hymnlike, and there are modernist passages of fractured beauty.”

Watson taught at several schools, including Harvard and, most recently, the University of Wyoming, Laramie, where he was director of the creative writing program.

His second collection of stories, “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives” (2010) — some of which he wrote while struggling with “Miss Jane” — was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2011, and his son Jason, Watson is survived by another son, Owen; his brother, Craig, and a granddaughter, Maggie, who suggested to her “Pappy” that he give the title character of “Miss Jane” a peacock.

And he did.










Today's News

July 25, 2020

Illuminated manuscripts and bejewelled works of art go on display in Edinburgh

Christie's sale celebrates the visual synergy between centuries

Columbus statues removed from Chicago parks

Four extraordinary chairs, ordered by the Comte d'Artois in 1778, more than triple their estimate

London's Tate Modern gallery gears up for Monday reopening

Bruce Silverstein Gallery now represents Adger Cowans

Christie's first-ever Asian Art Week Online achieves $8.95 million

1968 Mexico City Olympic torch sold for $41,786 at auction

Michael Jackson's signature sparkling glove set to shine at Heritage Auctions

Walter Ioss sports photography highlights Gamechanger sale series at Christie's

Broadway is dark. Liberty Island is empty. Will the tourists come back?

London's West End comes out of lockdown. For an afternoon.

France's love affair with cinema tested by the virus

Exhibition presents a cross-section of the main exhibits at the BIO26 │ Biennial of Design in Ljubljana

Ripley Auctions to offer collection of dazzling costume jewelry pieces

The NYUAD Art Gallery launches fifth digital archive as part of "TRACE: Archives and Reunions"

Two new hires join the California African American Museum

Brad Watson, 64, dies; His southern upbringing animated his books

OLANA announces new Director of Education & Public Programs and Family Tours

Curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz awarded Warhol Foundation Grant

Sao Paulo postpones carnival over coronavirus

Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis concert poster headed to Auction

Bob Dylan gave his best friend the best seat in the house, and now it can be yours

What is an alarm duress code? All that you need to know about




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

sa gaming free credit
Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful