Monthly Archives: February 2022

JPH, R.I.P.

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What follows are two texts written for my father, an obituary and a eulogy.

1.
James Pollan Hathcock died Sunday, February 20 of complications from lung cancer. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, February 24, 2022, at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church with visitation beginning at noon.

He was 71 years old. Born in Cleveland, Mississippi, on June 19, 1950, he was the second son of Charles Tillman and Clara Pollan Hathcock. He graduated from Cleveland High School in 1968 and Delta State College (now Delta State University) in 1972, where he majored in accounting. After graduation, he moved to Jackson with his wife Patricia Holmes Hathcock to play music professionally. A lifelong drummer and singer, he played music full time for most of the 1970s, most notably with the group Lock, Stock & Barrel. He became a Certified Public Accountant in 1980 and earned his Master’s in Business Administration from Mississippi College in 1982. After working several years in the accounting, insurance, and software industries, he and business partner Jim Meadows founded Compensation Insurance Services, an endeavor that braided together these areas of expertise and which still operates today.

Known as “Jim” by his professional peers, “Jimbo” by his friends and family, and “Bobo” by his two grandchildren, he was predeceased by his parents and brother Charles Tillman Hathcock, Jr. He is survived by his wife of 52 years; his son Barrett; daughter-in-law Katie; and two grandchildren, Stella and Carter. In lieu of flowers, memorials can be made to Stewpot Community Services and Habitat for Humanity’s Broadmoor Initiative.

2.
Good afternoon. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Barrett Hathcock. I am Jim’s son. When he asked me to give his eulogy about a week before he died, I initially demurred. Dad, that seems . . . difficult. 

“Oh, you can do it. You’re much more stoical than me. If I were up there, I’d be blubbering like a 7th-grade cheerleader.” 

As you might know, my father could be very persuasive. 

So here I am, endeavoring to give you an idea of what he was like without blubbering. I will now do my best to read from my prepared text without making eye contact with any of you. 

For the first several years of my life I was convinced my father was the tallest man that had ever lived. The years since haven’t totally corrected that impression. He was seemingly always the tallest man in the room, especially if you measure height by the power of a person’s voice, by the force of his personality, by the quality and proliferation of his jokes, his monologues, his sayings, his stories. He was a monument of conversation. He was a mountain of pithy, colorful expressions, most of which I cannot repeat in a house of worship. 

Example: If I had a head a hair like that, I’d be President of the United States. 

It didn’t really occur to me until I was much older and saw him in a professional context that my father was a character — larger than life, and not just to me but in general, like Paul Bunyan, except instead of Babe the Blue Ox, he was often accompanied by a drumset.

This character was known by many names. James, Jim, Jimbo, Bobo. Each name signified a different context, a slightly different neighborhood of peers. He was James P. Hathcock officially — on the checks, on the diplomas. 

Professionally he was mostly known as “Jim.” Perhaps you know that I moved back to Jackson eight years ago to take over the business he started in the early 90s with his partner, Jim Meadows. Working with him brought me a whole new arena of father knowledge. When I began, my learning curve was essentially vertical. It struck me a couple of months into my apprenticeship that my father had fashioned the perfect job for himself. First, he was the boss. Second, and more important, it was essentially an insurance bookkeeping job, a distinct kind of professional animal with its own claws and stripes, which tended to scare away the uninitiated. But the other half of the job, the softer skill, was the need to explain the job, how this particular breed of insurance accounting behaved. And at this he was exceptional. Whenever I describe the intricacies of my job at a dinner party (back when we had dinner parties), I can always sense my conversational partner looking just over my shoulder, scanning for the closest available wine. But my father made residual market pool administration riveting. He made it vital. And he could do it at a moment’s notice. He was like a fine German automobile but instead of going 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, he could go from essentially asleep to full explanatory aria in 4 seconds, and you were entertained. He told the history of the Mississippi Workers Compensation Assigned Risk Pool to more people than I’m likely to ever meet in my life, and they remembered what he said, laughed at his jokes, and were generally grateful for the experience. 

My father had a particular method of stapling paper. It had to do with whether the document was meant to be understood in portrait or landscape, and he stapled the papers so that the staples lined up. He would show you how to do this, and when you didn’t listen and kept stapling in your chaotic, Devil-may-care, English-major way, he would correct you and show you again and illustrate the superiority of his staple-aligning method, and he would keep doing this until you would awake in the early morning hours, sleep disturbed by staple-addled dreams of workpapers left askew, and you would get to work early so that you could make sure it was all just a dream.

When an accountant reviews these stapled workpapers, that person signifies their approval by initialing the upper right corner. So my father’s initials — JPH — were everywhere. But it didn’t mean that he had just “looked” at a spreadsheet. It meant that he had “tied it down.” Without getting too inside baseball on you, you can think of accounting like docking a boat. Every number has to be tied down; a number on one document has to be verified by another document. They must agree. So, much like a boat you don’t want to float off into the reservoir, you have to tie that sucker down, and my father could tie down a workpaper like none other, so that no matter what kind of afternoon storm came along, that boat was not going anywhere. It was verified, it had been thoroughly examined, and he had staked his honor on it, exemplified by his initials. My metaphor breaks down a bit here, because my father generally loathed boats, but you hopefully get my point. He once quipped that he could tell you the journey of every penny that had ever entered the MS Assigned Risk Pool, and he was right. I can show you the workpapers. They are filed neatly in a drawer under his desk, initialed each in the right hand corner. Perhaps his true business name was not “Jim” but JPH, because that was how he communicated I WAS HERE. It was the signal that he had blessed that piece of paper with his fantastically meticulous attention.  

He was Jimbo on the bandstand and to his friends and family. There are so many songs that are inextricable from my father’s voice, songs I know logically, now in my adulthood, were first sung by other performers, but still in my primordial memory they are my father’s songs, first sung by him, only really ever sung by him. 

He played his first gig when he was 15 and kept performing until just this past summer. Though he didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, he might as well have, so complete and instinctive was his talent. He was asked by a bandmate later in life how he knew what to play, how he knew where to put the emphasis. “Where else would you put it?” was his answer. Like an athlete, he wasn’t particularly good at describing what he was doing, but when the game started, he knew what to do. He loved to perform. He loved to be on stage, so much that he never really left the stage. He was always performing to some degree. He loved having an audience, and they loved him in return. And he loved surfing the wave of that mutual affection that somehow manifests on certain nights halfway through the second set. He would say if you want to be a gigging musician you had to learn to love the feeling of being shot out of a cannon and not knowing where you were going to land. This got abbreviated in later years to the phrase “learn to love the feeling,” uttered when the prospect for onstage chaos reached a boiling point, and he did love that feeling, no longer a discomfort but a sense of ease within chaos — a resilience and flexibility in the face of life’s unknowability. 

The one musical sin that my father could not abide was musical ambivalence, an unwillingness to commit on the part of a performer, any kind of laziness or lack of sweat, a performer just going through the motions. He wanted all performers to exhibit a James Brown-level of devotion, whatever the genre or instrument. He abhorred tentativeness in all matters but especially behind a drumset. 

The highest achievement, as a musician, was to be known as a player among players, to be recognized as a peer by other musicians, even ones who you didn’t regularly play with — especially those. This was the ultimate validation, more permanent than an audience’s fleeting enthusiasm. 

“Who’s on the gig?”

“Don’t worry. He’s a player.” 

I was 13 years old when my father got sober, and he participated in Alcoholics Anonymous for the rest of his life. He talked to me a lot about getting sober and how it had affected him, but congruent with the “anonymous” part, I know little of his AA community. I don’t know what name he went by in AA, whether it be Jim or Jimbo or something entirely different. And that’s as it should be. But I do remember two details. 

When he first got sober he would attend AA meetings on Saturday mornings, this in addition to the daily meetings. All I knew was that he went to AA meetings all the time, which was in itself odd because my father was a committed non-joiner. Anything larger than a quartet was a sport or group that he was uninterested in. But he miraculously became an enthusiastic participant in his sobriety and in AA. And I remember those early Saturday mornings when he would come home singing — joyously strutting through the backdoor, singing for all the life he had left to live, 10:30 on a Saturday morning. I’m still gnawing on breakfast and watching cartoons, and here he is reborn in middle age, unambiguously happy. 

The other AA memory I have is going out somewhere with him, out to eat, running an errand, anywhere, and how he suddenly knew everyone on the planet. He was always sociable, but this was another level. He would cock his head and nod at someone passing by or quickly shake someone’s hand, no conversation, just a mutual recognition. “Who was that?” I’d say. 

“Oh, just someone I know.” 

He was suddenly but forever baptized into a quiet brotherhood spread across the city, a network of sobriety monks who had heard every crazy ass story one could tell, and had told a few themselves, and who had somehow developed biblical levels of patience. I don’t recommend that everyone here become an alcoholic, but I do recommend everyone find a group of recovered drunks that love you as pitilessly and relentlessly as that group loved my father and as he loved them in return. 

To my two children he was known as “Bobo.” It was one of those accidental toddler renamings, courtesy of my daughter Stella. Despite being a talker and having many names, my father didn’t have nicknames. He was not one to be mocked. Only a granddaughter could get away with renaming him Bobo. My father also wasn’t ever goofy, and yet he became so with his grandchildren. Who is this strange person, who used to be my father, now going by a silly nickname, and playing on the floor, and singing to a baby? This is simply how fathers turn into grandfathers. 

No doubt this is an incomplete portrait. I only have a son’s view of the monument. I haven’t told enough stories or I haven’t told the right stories. But trying to describe him to you without taking the next three weeks of your time is like trying to paint the Grand Canyon on a postage stamp, destined to be mostly incomplete. I know you have your own Jimbo stories. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. So I ask that you go forth and tell those stories. It’s what he would have wanted, and through telling those stories about that unique character also known as my father may he continue to live. 

Thank you for coming. 

Yet Another John

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When I was in my twenties, I bought the Everyman’s Library edition of the Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike, and I resolved to read one of the novels each year. I got through the first two before becoming distracted by life, but this winter, for some unknown reason, I pulled the thick book down and finally read novel number three: Rabbit is Rich. 

I found it astounding. Perhaps it had simply been too long since I had read an unashamed American realist novel, but it seemed like Updike at his best. Yes, I am aware of the myriad criticisms of Updike: relentlessly prolific, old fashioned in his political and sexual views, his protagonists entirely oversexed, etc. All of those criticisms could still be lobbied at Rabbit is Rich, but as a chunk of fiction, as an installment in the broader panorama of Harry Angstrom’s life, it’s exemplary. Like the other Rabbit novels, the third volume functions as an almost-instant retrospective look at the American decade just passed, and that decade’s excesses, inhibitions, and sins become embodied in the characters. 

All of which is great, but what I was impressed with was how effortlessly he seemed to pull off the regular old novelisms: the set pieces, the implacable situational conflict, the behavior of characters that’s simultaneously evocative of time/place/personality and also plausible — significant but not screamingly so. The novel feels both richly descriptive of a lived American reality and also richly imagined as a fictional landscape, and this ratio of observation and invention is controlled throughout. I realize these are merely characteristics of a well-done, old-fashioned realistic novel, but as someone who has intermittently attempted to do that very same activity, to see it pulled off with this level of apparent effortlessness is astonishing. It’s like watching an Olympic athlete flip and twist across a padded floor, their hummingbird breathing at the end nearly hidden by their beaming smile. I understand enough about novel writing to know how hard it is to do what he’s doing without it seeming hard. Perhaps I’m just a bad novelist. It’s possible! But still: I’d kill to be able to write like this. 

For Christmas, I received a newer novel: Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I was in my 30s when I broke down and finally started reading Franzen’s novels. I had read his essays, a less intimidating backdoor into his oeuvre, but The Corrections received so much praise when I was in grad school that I studiously avoided it. As if I were picking sides in the Twilight saga, I was devoutly team DFW. But finally I broke down and read Freedom and then the floodgates opened: The Corrections, then Purity, and now Crossroads. In the meantime, Franzen has become a metonymy for the sins of postwar American male literary success. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. Something about his public persona and his success annoys a certain kind of online literary young person, and the result is that every time he makes any kind of public utterance, or every time he publishes a new book, there is an endless amount of commentary about how wrong Franzen is. And I partially sympathize: he can be insufferable, humorless, at his worst a kind of deliberate troll regarding environmental issues. He’s the kind of person who thinks he’s got an excellent sense of humor. Is this the kind of person he really is, or is this just how he comes across in the pinhole understanding we have of him via his nonfiction writing and his interviews? 

My answer is another question: who cares? Having a strong opinion on Franzen’s latest media utterance as a replacement for actually being well-read is unhealthy. Sorry. It would be easier to be a literate person if they removed the blurbs, the fetching author photographs, and the online interviews, the noise pollution of publicity. Until that day, we have to be more rigorous in our attention. The author is not dead, but it’s sometimes easier to pretend he is. 

What I care about is the fiction, where all of his faults and excesses coalesce and reverse into a greater rhetorical artifact. It must be said: Franzen is an exceptional novelist. Is he essentially an old-fashioned realistic novelist according to generally acceptable terms? Yes. Are there a conspicuous number of tried-and-true novelistic plot conventions in this latest novel? Namely, accidental pregnancy, psychological breakdown, drug use as character revelation and plot instigator, similar use of crisis of faith? Yes. One thing is sure: he’s not writing fragmentary autofiction that questions its own status as a work of linguistic artifice. What he’s doing instead is much simpler and much more pleasurable: a double-decker sodbuster of a family saga. This is obviously Franzen’s forte. And sections of Crossroads succeed as powerfully as any other novel of his that I’ve read. The novel-length first section, “Advent,” is remarkable. The novel concerns a pastor experiencing a midlife crisis, his four children, and his wife. Everyone except the youngest child (10) is barrelling toward a reckoning, and it all collides two nights before Christmas in a suburb of Chicago in 1971. Updike’s brand of routine excellence also manifests here. Franzen’s ability to juggle multiple plot strands and make it interesting and relevant and pull you along, so that it feels less like you’re reading and more like you are succumbing to some tidal undertow of events, is overwhelming. I would kill to be able to write like this. He doesn’t have the same level of prose as Updike, whose mission it seemed was to describe everything on the planet in his eloquent high-def style. At times, that style is perfect for what is being described, and at times it’s awful, insufferable, tasteless. Though I understand this criticism of Updike, I am sympathetic because it seems essentially instinctive. He’s got this Paul McCartney–like helplessness before the staggering plenitude of his own talent. The dog will always roll in the stink; it’s how he proves he’s alive. Franzen’s prose is different and has changed since The Corrections. It’s less fussily aware of itself as language. It’s clearer. It doesn’t dance as hard as it used to. It’s not particularly voice-driven, either in terms of its author’s own constant God-like baritone, or in terms of a more Faulkner-like deep-character ventriloquism. It’s more of the transparent window pane rather than the swirling disco ball. There are nice phrases, to be sure, but one rarely slows up attentionally to ponder them. But at the same time it’s not cliched. It’s not sloppy, it’s not breezy, and it’s not filmic. He’s not a benign prose stylist in this novel. And that middle ground is itself incredibly difficult. Though I don’t agree with Martin Amis, that a good novel is exemplified by a long marginal line of excitement drawn down the page cheering on each innovative utterance (moderation in all things, Marty), I do enjoy the shock of new language. But this goal of sentence-level innovation is often antithetical to moving a novel along, to submerging oneself in the novelistic dream of the characters. In Crossroads, the dream is everything. 

Does it get a little rickety, plot-wise toward the end of the first section? Yes. Does it feel a little too much like a P.T. Anderson movie where everyone’s storm of pain happens to rain on the same exact evening in a way that seems a little too conveniently dramatic? Yes. Does the novel ultimately hinge on a couple of characters’ deeply held beliefs that remain unpersuasive to this reader? Yes. Are the primary members of the Hildebrandt family all weirdly destructive moral absolutists, none of whom have a restraining thread of common sense? Yes. Pastor Russ’s break from his family’s Mennonite faith, his love of Navajo culture, his difficulties with his own faith all seem slightly less than convincing. He has an orientalist fascination with “authentic” blues records, an affectation which is lightly ironized at one point in the novel. But his larger infatuation toward the Navajo people, which seems like a deeper version of the same search for a more authentic culture distinct from his own, doesn’t have any irony attached to it. Perhaps I am just misreading. Likewise, the novel-binding affection between Clem, his oldest son, and Becky, lone sister, seems rather baffling. At the end of the first section, which essentially occurs over one long day, there are so many confrontations and crises that they lose emphasis. Like a group of streakers at a football game, it becomes difficult to distinguish which revelation sprinting across your field of vision is important. In its attempt to braid together so much narrative information, one loses a sense of proportion. But then, who said novels were about proportion? That sounds like the griping of an envious short story writer. 

Aside from the complementary excellence between Updike and Franzen, there is an interesting plot device parallel in both novels: they both are primarily concerned with a middle-aged patriarch’s adulterous fantasies. In each there is a focal point for this fantasy. For Rabbit, it’s Cindy Murkett, the youngest wife in his country club golf set. For pastor Russ Hidlebrant, it’s Frances Cottrell, the foxy, young, widowed parishioner. Though of course there are many other elements, the wished-for consummation of this desire forms the spine of the plot, and the night of reckoning coincides with (and metaphorically seems to bring about) a crisis with their sons. In the case of Rabbit, his hoped-for rendezvous with Cindy doesn’t happen. The climactic wife-swapping-in-the-islands gambit lands him instead with Thelma Harrison, who it turns out is as obsessed with him as Rabbit is with Cindy. He awakens the next day post-coitus (yes, exhaustively described) to find out that his son Nelson has abandoned his own just-married and very pregnant wife back in the States. For Russ, he manages to bed his infatuation (in the the most depraved and pitiful and ick-worthy of circumstances), which coincides with his son having a cocaine-abetted psychological breakdown (plus some fire). Of course the sons’ crises refract the patriarch’s self-absorption and excesses. Though both novels hail from more liberal, more gently Protestant neighborhoods, this essentially simultaneous retribution strikes me as remarkably Southern Baptist, as plot devices go.

To further complicate matters, the novels also share marriages that endure in spite of the wayward husbands and wives. In each, both spouses are conflicted, adulterous, or at least adultery-adjacent. Neither split but are somehow stronger despite being each other’s rusty foil for most of the novel. There is a strange resilience to their antagonisms, as if the antagonism between husband and wife strengthens their bond. These chronicles of wayward females and libidinally distracted men somehow transmogrify into odes for marriage. It echoes an observation from the real world: That many long-term successful marriages are opaque, unknowable accomplishments, like obelisks appearing in the desert. At the right angle and distance the marriages almost seem like cults of two. The most surprising part of each novel in the end are the portraits of these conjugal cults — cults that exist at the center of the family island, beating the drum of civilization. 

Despite Franzen’s role as despised Literary Man, the novelist he currently reminds me of is yet another John — John Irving. He also wrote plot-stuffed, continent-spanning, energetically goofy novels that are essentially unputdownable if one submits to them. (Thank God Franzen avoids bears and wrestling.) I’m not saying it’s the highest aesthetic achievement in the bookstore (though all ranking is bunk), but it ain’t nothing either.