{"id":148616,"date":"2020-10-28T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2020-10-28T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=148616"},"modified":"2020-10-28T10:20:54","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T14:20:54","slug":"all-of-time-is-a-grave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/10\/28\/all-of-time-is-a-grave\/","title":{"rendered":"All of Time Is a Grave"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo of Breece D\u2019J Pancake, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.<\/p><\/div>\n

Breece D\u2019J Pancake\u2019s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time. Forty years of the author\u2019s absence cast no shadow. The shadings, the broad arcs of interior, antediluvian time, are inside the sentences. The ancient hills and valleys of southern West Virginia remain Breece Pancake\u2019s home place; the specificity and nuance of his words embody the vanished farms, the dams and filled valleys, the strip-mined or exploded mountains. His stories are startling and immediate: these lives informed by loss and wrenching cruelty retain the luminous dignity that marks the endurance of all that is most human.<\/p>\n

Breece Pancake\u2019s stories are the only stories written in just this way, from inside the minds of protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world closed to others. I\u2019ve said, in a quote for an earlier edition of his work, \u201cBreece Pancake\u2019s stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners<\/em>.\u201d I meant not that the author\u2019s style is similar to Joyce\u2019s, but that the stories are a map of their physical locality, above and below ground, just as Joyce\u2019s stories are a map of Dublin\u2019s streets in Joyce\u2019s youth. And that the links between the stories are as finely calibrated, and as naturally present in the material itself, as those in Joyce\u2019s Dubliners<\/em>. Colly\u2019s mourned father in \u201cTrilobites\u201d is a literary relation to Bo\u2019s dead father in \u201cFox Hunters\u201d and foster son Ottie\u2019s never-known father of \u201cIn the Dry\u201d; the stories share a generational, nearly biblical sense of time. There is the long-ago time in which men and women brought forth their issue in the isolated, virginal hills they owned and farmed and hunted; there is the loss of the land, of living from it; there is industrialization, exploitation, ruin. <\/p>\n

\u201cTrilobites,\u201d the first in The Stories of Breece D\u2019J Pancake<\/em>, is a portal to other stories as tone-perfect and wholly accomplished: \u201cFox Hunters,\u201d \u201cHollow,\u201d \u201cIn the Dry,\u201d \u201cA Room Forever,\u201d \u201cThe Scrapper,\u201d \u201cThe Honored Dead\u201d\u2014readers will have their favorites\u2014but \u201cTrilobites\u201d comes first, as though clearing the way and claiming haunted ground with exhilarating precision. Colly, the story\u2019s protagonist, was born in this country and \u201cnever very much wanted to leave,\u201d but his father, who paid his dues in combat on the Elbe, died alone in a West Virginia field, \u201ca khaki cloud in the canebrakes.\u201d Colly is no good at farming the beautiful hilly land, with its dust devils and wind-furled rows of cedars, its brief rainstorms and willow-wisps, the patchy fog that curls little ghosts into the branches and gullies. All of time is a grave. \u201cI look again at the spot of ground where Pop fell. He had lain spread-eagled in the thick grass after a sliver of metal from his old wound passed to his brain. I remember thinking how beaten his face looked with prints in it from the grass.\u201d The loansman stands by with a contract to buy the farm, build a housing project, fill the bottoms with dirt and raise the flood line. The Permian certainty of geologic time, eons of graves, striations of rock and shifting landmass, flows through the stories, and the prehistoric Teays River, gargantuan and mighty, vanished underground, seems to pulse with absence in the prose. Colly gaffs for a turkle in a drying creek, as though wrestling a fellow survivor from its shrinking dominion; equipped with the author\u2019s vision, he looks at the land and sees the past. \u201cI look down the valley to where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breece\u2019s suicide on June 8, 1979, twenty-one days before his twenty-seventh birthday, left others to champion the survival of his work. His widowed mother, Helen Pancake, dedicated herself to seeing his book published. James Alan McPherson\u2019s foreword, and John Casey\u2019s afterword, were written for the stories\u2019 first publication as a collection in 1983. Both writers were his teachers; they tell us what they can of who he was, how they learned of his death, and the ways in which he approached them later in dreams and memory. They weren\u2019t his mother or his sisters, or Emily Miller, the girl who begged John Casey to \u201cgo see\u201d because she couldn\u2019t. But they were his mentors and continued to support his work after his death. Like everyone intimate with a suicide, \u201cthey will take his death to their graves\u201d: the phrase creates a burden so gravid that it defies clich\u00e9. His death, for those who knew him and are still alive, is a long time ago now, but it never goes away. That\u2019s why suicide is a moral crime. As surely as homicide, matricide, or fratricide, it ends a lived life and opens a wound. We attend to the story of his death, a limited, fractured story, to move beyond it, past limitations and personal history. His fiction is the world he lived in, the world he made. \u201cA long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl.\u201d<\/p>\n

I never knew Breece D\u2019J Pancake except through his work, but his life brushed past mine three times. Born the same year, twenty-one days apart, we were raised in different versions of West Virginia. He was from the small town of Milton (population 2,500) in the southwest part of the state, and attended, in his freshman year, West Virginia Wesleyan, a Methodist college in Buckhannon, my hometown. Buckhannon (population 6,000) is in north central West Virginia, part of the Tristate Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia region then linked by straight-ticket Democratic sympathies and strong unions. I was a senior in high school in 1969\u201370; Buckhannon-Upshur High School won their third AAA football championship and I was in passionate \u201cfirst love\u201d with the tight end, a brilliant boy whose musician brother died in Vietnam that November. It\u2019s odd to think of Breece living in Buckhannon. He joined the drama club but left Wesleyan (\u201cStill nothing to do in Buckhannon?\u201d he wrote to a former classmate) to attend Marshall University in Huntington, near his parents. After graduation, he went south, to teach at military academies in Fork Union and Staunton, Virginia. I went west, to San Francisco, then Boulder, waitressing. I\u2019d published a few poems and wrote my first story, \u201cEl Paso,\u201d for application to M.F.A. programs. He taught cadets, sent his work to John Casey at the University of Virginia, and began driving the forty minutes from Staunton to Charlottesville to sit in on Casey\u2019s weekly workshops. Casey \u201ctried to send him off to Iowa for a year to get him some more time to write,\u201d and Vance Bourjaily accepted him into the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, class of \u201976\u2013\u201978 (my class), but apparently didn\u2019t offer him financial aid\u2014or perhaps financial aid decisions were already made by the time Bourjaily read Breece\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Iowa\u2019s M.F.A. program was famous, but I went there because they offered the best financial support\u2014in-state tuition and a small stipend. Workshop students at Iowa, pitted against each other for second-year funding, were viciously competitive, but there were no Southern codes of honor as at UVA, and class-conscious noblesse oblige did not enter into things. It would not have mattered that Breece wore jeans, flannel shirts, and boots\u2014most of us did. And Breece\u2019s work, in any case, would have distinguished him at Iowa, where the work itself finally defined one\u2019s status. He would have encountered a larger, more broadly ranging group in a Midwestern landscape that promised a remove from the past.<\/p>\n

But Breece was accepted full-time at UVA, and saw himself as John Casey\u2019s apprentice. He went south to the antebellum-by-nature UVA campus for grad school, was eventually awarded a Hoynes Fellowship, and moved to One Blue Ridge Lane, near the university. His 12 x 12 apartment, in the east wing of a building that had been servants\u2019 quarters for the manor house on the property, shared a circular drive with a few other cottages. His landlady, Mrs. Virginia Meade, gave occasional English department parties and \u201chad the gall,\u201d Breece wrote his mother, to ask Breece to tend bar: \u201cSaid if I didn\u2019t, she\u2019d have to hire a colored, and they don\u2019t mix a good drink.\u201d The Georgia expat James Alan McPherson, who won the Pulitzer for Elbow Room<\/em> while Breece was his student, called UVA \u201ca finishing school for the sons of the southern upper class,\u201d and the English department, \u201cthe interior of a goldfish bowl \u2026 an environment reeking of condescension.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breece felt excluded, looked down upon, even as he achieved success. He wrote to his sister Donetta, \u201cMade it! Atlantic<\/em> bought \u2018Trilobites\u2019 for $750 \u2026 This has really set fire to Wilson Hall and the (Cross yourself) English Department. Poor second rate citizen Pancake who can\u2019t speak the King\u2019s English \u2026 that turkey made it.\u201d According to his teachers and fellow students, he played up his \u201cotherness,\u201d exaggerated his accent, spread tales of eating roadkill and fighting in bars. The surname Pancake is an Anglicized version of the German name Pfannkuchen; he was Scottish (Frazier) on his mother\u2019s side and took his middle initials from a printer\u2019s error in The Atlantic<\/em> galley of \u201cTrilobites\u201d: D. J. for Dexter John translated to the aristocratic D\u2019J with the grace of an apostrophe. He was courtly toward women, if defensive concerning \u201cWomen\u2019s Lib\u201d; James Alan McPherson remembered that Breece \u201cspoke contemptuously of upper-class women with whom he had slept on a first date, but was full of praise for a woman who had allowed him to kiss her on the cheek only after several dates.\u201d His sympathies were for the dispossessed, the underdog, the working poor. \u201cI am sick to my stomach of people who drive fine cars, live alone in big apts., never worked a day in their lives,\u201d he wrote to his mother of Albemarle County, Virginia, soon after moving to Charlottesville. \u201cThis county is second in the country for millionaires\u2014LA county being first. It do get hard to swallow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milton, in southern West Virginia, did not breed millionaires. The novelist Mary Lee Settle, a West Virginia native who taught at UVA, addressed West Virginia\/Virginia cultural dissonance in her novel Clamshell<\/em>: \u201cPhysically, [VA] is only a barrier of mountains away, across the Allegheny Divide, but to us Virginia is our Europe, hated and loved, before which we are shy, as Americans are shy in Europe.\u201d Northern West Virginia towns were more like small towns in Pennsylvania or Ohio; Virginians didn\u2019t matter at all to us. My family\u2019s Ohio relatives hosted my brothers when they worked summer jobs in Youngstown\u2019s steel mills; we would have seen antebellum pretensions as laughable. But southern West Virginians, even those descended from aristocratic Lost Cause Virginians, can still find themselves particularly disparaged by Virginians.<\/p>\n

This was news to me until a somewhat famous Virginia writer delighted in informing me that he and his wife had grown up deriding West Virginians across the Tug Fork River: \u201cWe could actually see them on the opposite bank at high school parties, and we\u2019d throw beer cans and cat-call them.\u201d He seemed to think that real or imagined disparities of wealth and \u201cprestige\u201d on two sides of a river had to do with the inbred superiority of Virginians, rather than the economic advantage of slave-state evil that plantation Virginia practiced so enthusiastically. Most Americans, even now, are unaware that West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1863 to stand with the Union, that West Virginia\u2019s state motto, \u201cMountaineers are always free,\u201d is a reference to Virginia\u2019s slavery economy and unjust taxation of its \u201cwestern frontier.\u201d West Virginia, the only Appalachian state entirely located within the Allegheny, Blue Ridge, and Appalachian mountain ranges, was and remains geographically and culturally isolated. Virginia considered the land\u2014so towering, pristine, majestic, navigable only by river\u2014worthless, until Big Timber and Big Coal colonized the state anew.<\/p>\n

Breece was insulted by what he considered superficial representation of his home place, as in Harry Caudill\u2019s influential Night Comes to the Cumberlands<\/em>, and the \u201cselling short\u201d of his frugal, morally upright people. He connected, through his idolized father\u2019s experience, to Depression-era, World War II standards of masculinity. The wrinkly old boundary post in \u201cTrilobites\u201d is a monument: \u201cPop set it when the hobo and soldier days were over. It is a locust-tree post and will be there a long time.\u201d Like many writers, Breece didn\u2019t belong in the place where he was born, but knew its history in myriad detail, swearing eternal allegiance in his writing and being. He didn\u2019t play sports, which so define boys in rural small towns; he wasn\u2019t meant for mine or factory work (his father once warned him, \u201cSon, you\u2019d better get an education because those hands will never fit a shovel\u201d), but loved the land down to the strata and composition of the mountains themselves. A good student, he wrote about working-class characters whose families did not possess the measure of security his own had managed to attain. A farmer in \u201cThe Honored Dead\u201d angrily refuses his son an education: \u201cEverybody\u2019s going to school to be something better \u2026 I don\u2019t care if they end up shitting gold nuggets. Somebody\u2019s got to dig in the damn ground.\u201d The farmer isn\u2019t wrong. Every word and phrase and punctuation mark in a Pancake story is perfectly chosen; each story engages our complex empathy and presents unresolvable dilemmas. Breece did meticulous research on doghole mining, long-distance trucking, Holiness congregations, serpent handling, and more; typically, he wrote fifteen drafts of each story, but his unerring sense of the culture and sound of his characters was bred-in-the-bone.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A large rectangular slab marks Breece\u2019s grave in Milton Cemetery. Its border, the letters of his name, his dates, a small, centered cross, are raised in brass. His parents\u2019 graves are just beside. His stone, flat to the ground, seems to deepen into the earth like a pillar. Two weeks before he died, Breece wrote to his mother about a dream he\u2019d had: \u201cI came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, as if it were all a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes\u2014all white\u2014snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

The miraculous, exhilarating truth is that Breece D\u2019J Pancake fought his way out of any dream, no matter how pervasive or foretold, with the sheer power of his dedication and intent, his genius and his passion, in language that is his alone. Truly great work delivers worlds that are known rather than merely understood or apprehended. His stories will be read as long as American stories survive, passed on, head to heart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jayne Anne Phillips, a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, was born and raised in West Virginia. She is the author of two short story collections, <\/em>Black Tickets and <\/em>Fast Lanes, and five novels: <\/em>Machine Dreams, <\/em>Shelter, <\/em>MotherKind, <\/em>Lark & Termite, and <\/em>Quiet Dell.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>The Collected Breece D\u2019J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters<\/a>. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2020 by Jayne Anne Phillips. Published by Library of America. Used with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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