The fourth, “A Birthday Party,” appeared in the Southern Review in 1992. It’s my least favorite of his stories, I’ll confess—partly because I catch a whiff of secondhand smoke in it, drifting over from Charles Bukowski’s ashtray, but mostly because there’s a sourness to it that, to my ear, Larry didn’t fully calibrate. He had his own misgivings about the story, which he originally wrote to give to the friends who’d attended his fortieth birthday party, worrying that it was “too maudlin and nasty.” Maybe. It goes without saying that one shouldn’t ever infer alignments between a fiction writer’s work and his life, even when the writer appears to yoke them (as Larry occasionally did), so I’m not going to inventory the myriad ways in which Leon Barlow (our narrator here, and also in the more fully realized “92 Days”) was unlike Larry Brown.

Except one: Larry, unlike the crotchety Barlow of “A Birthday Party,” was unfailingly generous to would-be writers (I know because I was one of them), even the hopeless ones (because he understood that’s what he’d been considered, once upon a time). Permit me two anecdotes about that. Once, when Larry and I were fishing at his pond, he got to grousing—uncharacteristically—about a novel he was reading, a seven-hundred-page cinder block of some of the worst writing he’d ever encountered. What’s worse, he told me, was that he was still three hundred pages shy of finishing. I asked the name of the book, but it wasn’t a book; it was a manuscript some guy had mailed him from Idaho. (He got a lot of those in the mailbox, too, in addition to the albums.) When I noted that he wasn’t under any obligation to, y’know, finish it, Larry flashed me an appalled and shaming look. “He sent it to me,” he said, “all the way from Idaho.” A deal was a deal, apparently, even when, y’know, it wasn’t really a deal. I have no doubt Larry sent the guy a frank but gentle letter about his novel. I’m sure he told him he had more and harder work to do. But I guarantee you he told him he could do it, and believed it. “If you want to hurt bad enough for something,” goes the best line in “A Birthday Party,” “you can have it.”