He went back to the house, and in the living room stretched out on the couch. Pulling the folded quilt to his chest, he held it there like a pillow against himself. He heard the cattle lowing to be fed, heard the soft rasp of his father’s crying breath, heard his mother’s broken humming of a hymn. He lay that way in the graying light and slept.
The sun was blackened with snow, and the valley closed in quietly with humming, quietly as an hour of prayer.
So much of Pancake’s art lies in what he does not tell us, that the rifle is loaded and somewhere in the house, that young Hollis can’t take much more and probably won’t. Instead, the author trusts the innate power of the details themselves: the father’s crying breath, the mother’s broken humming of a hymn, the blackened sun, and, finally, the valley closing in “quietly as an hour of prayer.” A time for holy reflection or unholy capitulation—take your pick, Pancake seems to say—all of this in the “graying light” Hollis sleeps in.
But that night, nearly twenty years ago, standing in the Rocky Mountain cold, I was not beginning to analyze any of the work that had just passed through me; I was still in its spell, was still moved by all these people and their tough lives that were not so different from people I had known growing up, were not so different from the inmates I spent most of my time with in the halfway house up on the hill. William Carlos Williams said, “Write what’s under your nose.” I had no idea how Breece Pancake had achieved his art, but I felt more inspired than ever to try and make some, too.
A razor wind blew in from the plains to the east. I wished for a hat and gloves and started back for home. And I knew at least this: that Breece D’J Pancake had brought more to the writing table than simply a way with words and a strong work ethic; what he shows us is a certain fearlessness on the page, an inherent willingness to go as deeply as the story and the characters require. This takes great generosity and courage, faith and perseverance. But there’s more going on here as well; with some of the other writers I’d been reading at the time, I could feel a slightly judgmental quality in the prose, as if the characters in the stories were not so much real people as they were props being used to make wise, sardonic points about the human condition. With Pancake, there is none of this. On the contrary, there is the opposite feeling; his stories’ characters are not mere inventions but flesh-and-blood human beings whom he suffers along with, believes in, and ultimately loves, no matter how far they might fall. This cannot be achieved without a deep artistic sincerity, a word a Nadine Gordimer character defines as “never having an idea of oneself”; Breece D’J Pancake was too focused on the task at hand—with trying to find that essential physical detail, that perfectly resonant line of dialogue, that truest image—to be concerned with what far too many young writers seem to be concerned with today: How does this story I wrote reflect back on me? How does it make me look?
This is an almost desperate response to the world and one’s perceived place in it, and at twenty-three, drifting and afraid, I was not above doing this either; the morning after reading The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, I sat at my desk and re-read everything I’d been working on. I saw clearly, for the first time, how my notebooks were filled with sentences written only to convince myself and others that maybe I did have a real ability at this and was not wasting my time even trying. Still in the grip of Pancake’s art, I saw how the language was overwrought and was being used not to serve my characters and their particular truths, but instead, to show off my college vocabulary. I saw, too, how the images I’d thought I had worked so hard to paint were actually trite and rang falsely and that even my punctuation and sentence rhythms seemed to reflect more my particular mood when I wrote them rather than the overall work they were there to serve.
I threw away every page and started over.
Breece D’J Pancake woke me up in my own struggles with fiction, with helping to guide me to what I’m still trying to find, and over the years I’ve met many writers of my generation who say similar things about his work. I am grateful to him for this, but my gratitude goes far deeper; I am convinced that the experience art gives us makes us larger, more authentic human beings, that simple human truths—hunger, weakness, honor, lust, courage, to name a few—lie waiting to be captured so that we may see clearly who we are before we’re gone. And it would be a mistake to consider these stories merely regional, for they go far too deeply for that: by giving us the hollows of West Virginia, its farms and coal mines, barrooms and motels, fighting grounds and hunting grounds and burial grounds, but, most significantly, by giving us its people in all of their tangled humanity, Pancake has achieved the truly universal.
Yes, this is Breece D’J Pancake’s first and last book, but the twelve stories in this collection will surely endure, will continue to illuminate that deeper, darker part of us all—our insistent need to love and be loved, our flesh-and-blood fallibility, our eternal yearning for grace.
2002
About the Author
BREECE D’J PANCAKE was born in West Virginia in 1952. He attended Marshall University, taught English at Virginia military schools, and then entered the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he died in 1979. During his lifetime, his short fiction was published primarily in The Atlantic.
Extraordinary praise for
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
“Strong, utterly distinctive fiction…. Pancake’s knowledge of his domain resembles in its totality Faulkner’s exhaustive knowledge of Yoknapatawpha County…. There is about all of these stories a raw, edgy, atonal feel which is impressive and moving…. The bleak poignant outer and inner landscapes of these stories are both a requiem for Pancake and a grace to the reader.”
—Harold Jaffe, Newsday
“Powerful, elegiac…. Mr. Pancake has a sharp, writerly eye for detail, and he uses those details to build a picture, layer by layer, of life in the barren hills and hollows of his native West Virginia.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Achingly felt and honestly rendered…. A dozen crackling stories about that bleak landscape by a young man who obviously knew the territory…. I shudderingly urge on you the experience.”
—James R. Frakes, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Simply first-rate…. The collection has a cumulative power rare in books of unlinked fiction…. These words are Pancake’s last—read them with care.”
—David Bosworth, Boston Globe
“A story like ‘Trilobites,’ which contains so much knowledge, which explores its subject so well on so many levels, must have aged Pancake as a writer, must have made him feel that he had used up all he knew…. It is impossible not to admire, indeed to envy, the writer at work in these stories.”
—Robert Wilson, Washington Post Book World
“Pancake’s style is terse, laconic, tough, moving, and, in its own unique way, incandescent.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A territory never quite penetrated and laid bare in American literature as skillfully, honestly, and hopelessly as it has been in The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake…. What lifts Breece Pancake’s best stories into solid, moving literary experiences is his attention to atmosphere [and] a powerful sense of place that is rare in contemporary fiction…. These stories have the polished, purged, hard-won qualities that will insure that they last far longer than the flesh that once inhabited them.”
—Bolton Davis, San Francisco Review of Books
“What is apparent on every page is Pancake’s ability to re-create, in sharp and memorable detail, the West Virginia landscape of ancient, weathered hills and hollows, of half-abandoned mining villages, rusting trailers, tank cars, sad cafés, and impoverished farms—a landscape that serves as a metaphorical equivalent for the lives of his characters, most of them trapped, crippled, or obsolete.”
—Robert Towers, New York Review of Books
“In the stories of Breece D’J Pancake, we can sense the sort of geogra
phical despair that could drive a person to self-extinction…. So much emotion is expended… that we can almost understand the inward intensity of feeling Pancake himself understood and, tragically, never seemed to outlive.”
—Gregory Morris, Prairie Schooner
“Pancake was blessed or cursed with the true creative gift…. Readers will return to [these pages] for their sureness and variety of character, their clarity of life imagined and made known…. Pancake’s vision was as generous as it was dangerous; his book testifies that it was not wasted.”
—Raymond Nelson, Virginia Quarterly Review
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Contents
Welcome
Foreword by James Alan McPherson
Trilobites
Hollow
A Room Forever
Fox Hunters
Time and Again
The Mark
The Scrapper
The Honored Dead
The Way It Has to Be
The Salvation of Me
In the Dry
First Day of Winter
Afterword by John Casey
Afterword by Andre Dubus III
About the Author
Extraordinary praise for The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Helen Pancake
Foreword copyright © 1983 by James Alan McPherson
John Casey afterword copyright © 1983 by John Casey
Andre Dubus III afterword copyright © 2002 by Andre Dubus III
Cover design by Carol Hayes; cover photograph © Loren Hammer/Tony Stone
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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First e-book edition: February 2013
Some of these stories have been previously published in Antaeus, The Atlantic, and Nightwork.
“When I’m Gone”: Lyrics and Music by Phil Ochs, © 1966 Barricade Music, Inc. (ASCAP), All Rights Administered by Almo Music Corp., All Rights Reserved, International Copyright Secured; “The War Is Over”: Lyrics and Music by Phil Ochs, © 1968 Barricade Music, Inc. (ASCAP), All Rights Administered by Almo Music Corp., All Rights Reserved, International Copyright Secured; “Jim Dean of Indiana”: Lyrics and Music by Phil Ochs, © 1971 Barricade Music, Inc. (ASCAP), All Rights Administered by Almo Music Corp., All Rights Reserved, International Copyright Secured.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-316-25232-4
Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Page 17
