Time and Again Breece Pancake Time and Again Breece Pancake Trailer
A Ghost Is Born
The Collected Breece D'J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters By Breece D'J Pancake. New York: Library of America. 384 pages. $25.
IN 1975, BREECE D 'J PANCAKE was a twenty-iii-year-onetime English language teacher at Staunton Military Academy in the Shenandoah Valley. He was one-half a day's drive from Milton, Westward Virginia, where he'd grown upwardly. He hated the barbarous, stultifying culture of the schoolhouse, but the job was plenty to support himself as long as he lived cheaply, which was of import considering his father had multiple sclerosis and could no longer work. His parents, Helen and C. R., said they were getting past, just he worried about their long-term fiscal security. Pancake was a loner, a dreamer, a contrarian, a depressive—in short, a writer. The other good thing well-nigh Staunton was that information technology left him plenty of time to write. Nobody could take known this at the time, but he was at the height of his productivity. Between 1974 and 1976 he either started or finished nine of the twelve stories that constitute his life'southward piece of work, a small bright star in the firmament of twentieth-century American short fiction, at present in a new edition from the Library of America.
Simply permit'south linger a while longer in 1975. Pancake had introduced himself to John Casey, who chaired the artistic-writing program at the University of Virginia in nearby Charlottesville. Casey was so impressed by Pancake'due south piece of work that he invited the immature writer to sit in on his fall workshop. Just equally the term was starting, Pancake'due south male parent died from complications of his illness. Less than three weeks after, Pancake'south practiced friend Matthew Heard died in a automobile blow. The double loss was burdensome. In his mother'due south words: "That liked to impale that boy." He started going to a local Presbyterian church. "Don't fall over," he wrote to her about information technology. "I just idea it would vanquish sitting in my room all forenoon."
Pancake practical to the graduate programs at UVA and Iowa. He was accustomed to both, but Iowa couldn't promise funding. The money was important, only perhaps not as important as the opportunity to stay near his widowed mother and to written report with John Casey, in whom he now sought a surrogate male parent. Pancake started graduate school at UVA in the fall of 1976, where he too worked with James Alan McPherson and Peter Taylor. He had a stint every bit an assistant to the novelist Mary Lee Settle. He listened to a lot of his favorite singer, Phil Ochs, who had committed suicide in April. He studied the style and structure of his favorite novel, Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer, which is defended "to Jolene, who turned off the gas." A relentless cocky-mythologizer, Pancake exaggerated both his poverty and his drawl. He struggled to keep a handle on his drinking. He became an initiate of the Catholic church, taking the proper name John at his confirmation.
Breece Dexter John Pancake. D. J. became D'J due to a typo on the proof pages of his short story "Trilobites," which McPherson and Casey had helped him sell to The Atlantic. He idea the fault was funny and somehow fitting, and so he let it stand up and claimed information technology as his ain. "Trilobites" was published in Dec of 1977. It was a huge achievement and people at UVA were shocked and impressed, though non as shocked and impressed equally Pancake had hoped they would be. He was paid $750 for the story. He donated all the money to his church building.
In 1978 The Atlantic bought "In the Dry," a grim story whose title comes from a grim passage in the Gospel of Luke. At that place were inquiries from publishing houses. The New Yorker nibbled just didn't seize with teeth. He applied to the Millay Colony and the Fine Arts Piece of work Center. He proposed to his girlfriend but her father nixed the appointment. His drinking worsened. Things started to spiral. He outlined some novel ideas, drafted chapter openings, revised old manuscripts, only was slowing down. He read submissions for the Virginia Quarterly Review. He was a prolific giver of gifts: fossils he plant, fish he caught, wild game he shot with ane of the many guns he owned. He in one case gave a gun to McPherson, who didn't want it. He somewhen gave away every gun in his possession salvage for the double-barreled shotgun with which he shot himself on Palm Sunday, 1979. He was 20-half-dozen years old.
THE STORIES OF BREECE D 'J PANCAKE was published in 1983, with a foreword past McPherson and an afterword by Casey, who was—and yet is—Pancake's literary executor. The volume contained the 6 stories Pancake had published during his lifetime: "Trilobites," "In the Dry," "The Mark," "Hollow," "The Way It Has to Exist," and "Time and Again." These were supplemented past another six that Casey admitted were probably not up to Pancake'due south own exacting standards merely existed every bit complete drafts and had seen at to the lowest degree some substantial revision. These were "Play a trick on Hunters," "The Scrapper," "The Honored Dead," "A Room Forever," "The Conservancy of Me," and "Beginning 24-hour interval of Wintertime." Across that, nothing existed but a few dozen pages' worth of fragments and juvenilia.
In the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates compared Pancake'due south debut to Hemingway'south In Our Time: "the writing, lean, taut, pared back, nearly-flawless in its uninflected cadences, is perfectly suited to its content." She noted that the drove was "necessarily an uneven gathering" only that "the most powerful of the stories . . . are as compactly and tightly written as prose poems and should exist read (and reread) with farthermost care."
Pancake's depictions of the culture and geography of Appalachia and the Trans-Allegheny were all but unprecedented. The hills and hollows of W Virginia were largely neglected in American literature, even the intensely regionalist literatures of the Due south, possibly because Due west Virginia had fought with the Union during the Ceremonious War, and so had piddling to contribute to the revisionist horseshit of Lost Cause sentimentality. Pancake seems to know everything well-nigh this place, from its hilltops to its coal mines to its barrooms, and he has an eye for the minor, sharp details that bring information technology to life. In "Hollow," when Buddy wakes upwardly on the flooring of his trailer after a night of drinking and brawling, at that place is "a niggling ball of rayon batting against his nostril as he breathed." Bo, in "Fox Hunters," "stepped onto the pavement feeling tired and moved a few paces until headlights flooded his path, showing upwardly the highway steam and making the road requite nascence to little ghosts beneath his anxiety." At the same fourth dimension, Pancake is always attentive to the natural world. He finds a kind of holiness in the history-dwarfing scale of geologic time. Hither'south a justly famous passage from "Trilobites":
I lean back, try to forget these fields and flanking hills. A long fourth dimension before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can virtually feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites brand when they crawl. All the h2o from the old mountains flowed west. Only the state lifted. I have only the bottoms and stone animals I collect. I blink and exhale. My father is a khaki deject in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge.
"Trilobites," like many of Pancake'southward stories, is set in the town of Rock Camp, his fictionalized version of Milton. Colly, the narrator, has lost his begetter and there'due south pressure to sell the failing family farm. Ginny, his onetime sweetheart, has moved to Florida without him. He's hardly out of loftier school and already feels futureless. When Ginny comes back to town to visit her parents, she takes Colly out for a nostalgic drive and they stop up having sex among the rubble of an abandoned railroad train depot, though Ginny's nostalgia starts to curdle after she cuts her arm on a slice of glass, and Colly becomes acutely aware that he is being used. "She isn't making love, she's getting laid. All correct, I call up, all correct. Get laid. I pull her pants around her ankles, rut her." Colly retreats into a fantasy nigh a friend's underage sister just that image quickly dissolves into a traumatic childhood retentivity of his father whipping him; the physical terror he felt as a male child somehow rhymes with the inchoate emotional pain he's enduring now. Information technology's one of the loneliest sex scenes I've ever read. (Some other contender for that thorny crown is in this same book, in the story "A Room Forever.") Subsequently, Ginny drives off, leaving Colly to walk home from the depot. He seems markedly less lonely as soon as he is actually alone, and the story closes on a moment of hard-earned, breath-communicable poetry. I don't recall that quoting it quite does information technology justice, but read "Trilobites" yourself and meet if you don't agree that its ending is up there with Cheever's "Good day, My Brother," Baldwin'due south "Sonny'due south Blues," or Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried."
"Hollow," "The Honored Dead," and "In the Dry out" all rank easily amidst Pancake'south strongest work. They're brilliant by any standard, and when you terminate to call back that they were written by a guy less than halfway through grad schoolhouse or his twenties—holy shit. But so you lot've got stories like "Play tricks Hunters" and "A Room Forever," which are powerfully conceived but clumsily executed, while a few others are, to put information technology plainly, not very skillful. "Fourth dimension and Again," for example, is about a snowplow-driving serial killer who keeps hogs at habitation to swallow his victims' remains. "The Way It Has to Be" is about a guy who wants to impale some other guy but his woman thinks he shouldn't, so he has to kill her, besides. They're both silly noir exercises self-closeted to their own status as camp. I sympathize why Casey included them, and at this tardily date they're hardly worth criticizing, but I have to believe that if Pancake had lived he would exist embarrassed by them today.
In his foreword, McPherson reminisces well-nigh how he and Pancake bonded every bit outsiders in snooty, genteel Charlottesville. (Pancake was poor; McPherson was Black.) But McPherson also admits that "there was a mystery virtually Breece Pancake that I volition not claim to take penetrated. This mystery is not racial; information technology had to practice with that small room into which his imagination retreated from time to fourth dimension. I e'er idea that the gifts he gave were a fashion of keeping people away from this very personal area, of focusing their attending on the persona he had created out of the raw materials of his best traits." McPherson mentored Pancake but would not allow himself to exist drawn into the chaos of his educatee's life. Pancake sensed and resented that a purlieus had been drawn, occasionally complaining in his letters of McPherson'southward detachment.
John Casey, for his office, drew no such boundary. "He was almost to turn twenty-seven when he died," Casey writes in his afterword. "I was forty. Just half the time he treated me (and I treated him) equally if I were his kid brother." When Pancake converted to Catholicism, he asked Casey to exist his godfather. "This godfather arrangement soon turned upside downward. Breece started getting after me about going to mass, going to confession, instructing my daughters. It wasn't so much out of righteousness equally out of gratitude and affection, but he could be blistering. And and then penitent."
McPherson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his second story collection, Elbow Room, then never published another book of fiction. He left UVA for Iowa and taught there until he died in 2016. John Casey won the National Book Honor in 1989 for a novel I had never heard of before I read his Wikipedia page to write this review. He retired from UVA in 2018 amidst a storm of sexual-harassment allegations. I mention these things only to make the point that we're far past the day when Pancake requires their literary bona fides to vouch for his. The educatee is far more than widely read than either of his sometime teachers are, or probably e'er were. The indelible value of the foreword and afterword then are as primary-source documents, eyewitness accounts. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake has been in print for virtually xl years and every edition that I'yard aware of contains both McPherson'south and Casey's essays. At this betoken, they feel as much a office of the book as the stories themselves. For meliorate or worse, their intimacy and reverence establish the collection as a reliquary: they are the gilded box and velvet pillow that hold the sacred basic.
So here they are again in the Library of America's Collected Breece D'J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters, along with a new introduction past Jayne Anne Phillips. She is a boyfriend West Virginian, built-in the same yr as Pancake, and though their lives never intersected, she gamely recounts the missed connections. His first, abortive effort at college was at W Virginia Wesleyan in the town of Buckhannon, where she was a senior in high school at the fourth dimension. If he had gone to Iowa instead of UVA he would have been in her cohort. If he hadn't killed himself, and if he had chosen the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship over the Millay fellowship (he was accepted to both) they would accept met in Provincetown in the autumn of '79. This trivia is charming in its style, but I'd take been more than charmed by it if she hadn't gotten the date of his death wrong by ii months, or led with the fatuous exclamation that "Breece Pancake's stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners."
There'southward no shortage of things to admire in Pancake's work, but it is (as Oates observed) uneven, and in some cases (equally Casey admitted) conspicuously unfinished. Phillips is absolutely right that "his stories build their own rhythm and throb, shift past to far past to present in ghostly dissolves, sculpt their solitary, ineffable power." Just she's wrong to say that he was "never, truly, anyone's apprentice." In fact he was desperate to be held in the mastering easily of artful and moral say-so—Casey'south, McPherson'southward, Ochs'southward, Kromer's, Christ's—and office of the value of these stories is their well-preserved fossil record of those several overlapping and sometimes contradictory apprenticeships. Pancake's stories offer a rare glimpse of genius in late gestation, fighting to be born. The crude edges, loose ends, false steps, and psychic cocky-exposure are all part of that hard birth, and it inappreciably diminishes the writer or the piece of work to say so. One does the stories no favors by belongings them to a standard of individual excellence and collective effect that they cannot perchance come across.
What would be accurate to say, however, is that Pancake himself—and the general tenor of Pancake worship—strongly resembles the portrayal of Michael Furey in "The Dead," the final story in Dubliners. Like Furey, Pancake was a beloved male child lost at the height of his promise. Any serious attempt at assessing the work is shadowed, if not overshadowed, by this romantic grief. John Casey once said, of Pancake's splattered blood and brain thing, "If I could have eaten some of it off the wall that night, I would have."
I don't doubt for a moment that he meant it, but Jesus fucking Christ.
I 'M GLAD TO Run into Breece D'J Pancake in the Library of America, where he surely belongs, but I wish that more care had been put into this book. I mentioned earlier that Phillips got the date of Pancake's death incorrect. Anyone tin can accidentally blazon "June" when they hateful "April," but she specifies that he died "twenty-ane days before his twenty-seventh birthday," which tells me that she actually idea this was right, and likewise that her introduction wasn't fact-checked, since the right date is given in McPherson's foreword a few pages afterwards. April 8, 1979, is of import not simply because it is accurate, and because it was Palm Sunday, but too considering Phil Ochs committed suicide on April 9, 1976. Anyone who has studied Pancake knows how significant that date would accept been to him, and anyone who has had a suicidal depressive in their lives knows how easily a fraught ceremony can become a trigger. To exist clear: this isn't Phillips'south fault; she wrote the introduction, only she is not the editor. In fact, no editor is credited on the volume, which likely explains why it also lacks a chronology, bibliography, or biographical essay. The absence of a guiding curatorial intelligence is palpable and much lamented.
It is certainly nice to have the selected letters in the same spine as the stories, but who—other than a Pancake super fan—is going to read them? The letters contain flashes of insight into Pancake's writing procedure and inner life, simply few are objects of literary merit in their own correct and those that are take been widely circulated and quoted from for as long as his stories have been in impress. I'm thinking in particular of Pancake's final letter to his female parent, from March, 1979. He writes that he has dreamed of a "happy hunting ground," a kind of cross between Eden and Ezekiel's valley of dry out bones, where "y'all could shoot without gun, never kill, but the rabbits would exercise a little dance, all equally if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then Winter came with heavy pulverization-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes—all white—snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed inside the dream." This is gorgeous on its ain terms, and in low-cal of his suicide, it is heartrending. But it likewise strikes me every bit deeply naive: a fantasy of actions without consequences, which is a kid's—or an alcoholic's—idea of freedom.
(For a better choice of Pancake'southward letters, and a proper biography, one must expect to Thomas E. Douglass'south A Room Forever: The Life, Piece of work, and Messages of Breece D'J Pancake. I also recommend two splendid essays: "Breece D'J Pancake" by Cynthia Kadohata, which appeared in Mississippi Review in 1989, and "The Surreptitious Handshake" by Samantha Hunt, which appeared in The Believer in 2005. Both are available for costless online.)
Because Pancake'due south productive period was and so concentrated, it'southward no surprise that the stories are largely of a piece in their concerns and approach or that they tend to the same set of psychic wounds. Fully one-half the stories feature characters who have lost one or both parents. There are several in which the narrative slips away from the protagonist's point of view into that of a nearby animal (bobcat, possum, flim-flam) that is observing him. Hills and fields are full of arrowheads, fossils, and Indigenous burying mounds. He loves the discussion "ghost," which is e'er used figuratively, and the word "whore," which unfortunately never is. Poverty is pandemic. Bourbon is breakfast. Sex is repulsive withal overpowering—something you cannot help just want and cannot help only detest yourself for wanting, then inevitably you lot also finish upwards hating whoever gives it to you. Everyone is staggering through what Samantha Hunt rightly calls "a landscape strewn with derailed promise."
On this reread I found myself well-nigh drawn to "The Mark" and "The Salvation of Me," two lesser-sung stories that stand up out in part considering they're the to the lowest degree similar to the other ten, or to each other. "The Marking" is lurid and flawed nonetheless information technology leaves me awestruck every time I read it. Reva is married to a man she doesn't love and haunted by memories of teenage incest with her quondam blood brother. Every paragraph pulses with Southern-gothic melodrama. Reva loses a pregnancy, watches monkeys have a threesome at a traveling carnival, tortures herself with fantasies of her brother sleeping with prostitutes, and finally sets fire to the family barn. The story ends with her sitting on the front end porch steps watching the befouled fire. Jackie, a farmhand, is trying to get her on her anxiety. She'due south looking up at him. "His huge caput hid the moon, and, when she cried against him, the fire." There's one more line afterwards this i, and if I were the editor I'd accept cut information technology, but allow's go ahead and phone call this a perfect ending anyway.
"The Salvation of Me," which Pancake began writing in late 1975, is notable less for the story it tells than the way it tells it. He experiments with an associative, voice-driven style that feels more like Saul Bellow or Barry Hannah than Ernest Hemingway or Andre Dubus. It is such a stark departure from his standard mode that one suspects he was trying to imitate something he'd read, quite possibly one of the two men same, though it could have been some dark horse like Grace Paley or Thomas McGuane. Only listen to this:
All I know for certain is that Chester made it big, and came back to testify it off, and that I never hated him more in the years he was gone than I did in the 2 hours he was habitation. The fact that without Chester I had twice as many cars to fix, half as much gas to pump, and nobody to route-race or play chicken with on weekends made up for itself in giving me all my own cigarettes, since Chester was the only bum in the station.
I'm frankly shocked at how well Pancake takes to the rhythms of wisecracking and the kinetic energy of improvisation. An ex-drinker is described as "stoned sober out of his mind." The narrator marries and divorces within the span of a single antic paragraph.
When I call back of the lost potential of Breece D'J Pancake, I think of "The Mark" and "The Salvation of Me." I'm non interested in the final polish he would have put on his crude gems, or how the fragments might have blossomed into drafts. I have never once tried to imagine the fully fleshed-out plots of the two novels he outlined. The only Pancake that I'm interested in imagining is the i who surely shocked himself when he looked down and saw he'd written that penultimate line of "The Mark," or that first draft of "The Salvation of Me." I imagine him reading over his pages and thinking, Hell, I didn't know I could do that. Then venturing a second thought: I wonder what else I don't even know I tin can do. This version of Pancake grows and changes over years and decades. He continuously renews his vocation, is ever willing to take a chance and go out himself susceptible to self-surprise. Would nosotros have gotten that body of work if he had lived? Impossible to say, pointless to speculate. Simply isn't information technology pretty to think so.
Justin Taylor is the author of Riding with the Ghost (Random Firm, 2020).
Source: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2704/revisiting-the-short-promising-career-of-breece-d-j-pancake-24270
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