Time and Again Breece Pancake Exposition in Time and Again Breece Pancake
1.
…I desire to know my country. I desire to bear upon, taste, smell and hear too every bit see this land. If it stinks of manure on the fields I want to know it. If the water on any given mount is sweet I want to know just how sweetness. I want to hear the wind in the grass as well equally see it push the trees around. Just almost of all I want to experience all of these things. I desire to know firsthand. I don't want the Greyhound Visitor or whatever other pumping stale reconditioned air into my lungs or pre-recorded sound into my ears. If I take to exist an American (and I do) I don't want to be sold short on my own land.
Those words were not written by Jack Kerouac or Woody Guthrie. If you lot paste them into Google the results you get refer mostly to Walt Whitman poems. "Vocal of Myself." "Leaves of Grass." "Song of the Open Route." The truth is a nineteen-year-erstwhile kid named Breece Pancake from Milton, West Virginia wrote those lines in a letter to his mother in 1972.
Breece D'J Pancake would have turned 60-5 this month. Pancake may take been the best American writer of his generation, but many people all the same don't know who the hell he was. He put a shotgun in his mouth on Palm Lord's day in 1979 when he was only twenty-six. He left twelve posthumously-published short stories, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Pancake has become a semi-mythical figure of American literature, a hillbilly Hemingway for those few — heavy on writers and academicians — who exercise know of him. Parts of the myth he created for himself through the way he lived his life and the foggy circumstances surrounding his expiry. The remainder of the myth we've created ourselves around the legacy of his extraordinary writing.
Kurt Vonnegut, writing in a letter to John Casey, Pancake's teacher and close friend, wrote of Pancake: "I give you my word of honour that he is merely the all-time writer, the about sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it injure besides much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know." Joyce Carol Oates has compared him to Hemingway and Jayne Anne Phillips called his story collection "no less than an American Dubliners." Marker Knopfler's vocal "River Boondocks" was inspired by one of Pancake'southward stories. "He (Pancake) could really take been the future." Even the singer Lorde is a fan, demonstrating that Pancake's writing has the ability to resonate with a younger generation thirty-eight years subsequently his expiry.
2.
I open the truck's door, stride onto the brick side street. I look at Company Loma again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy, and stood like an island in the Teays River. Information technology took over a one thousand thousand years to make that smooth little hill, and I've looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been in that location and ever will be, least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summer. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was built-in in this country and I have never very much wanted to exit. I remember Popular's dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café.
-from "Trilobites"
Breece Pancake was from Appalachia. The town of Milton lays hard by Interstate 64, halfway betwixt Charleston and Huntington forth old Route lx. The landscape is flatter here, more than Midwest than mountain. I take the exit and bulldoze dorsum and forth looking for the minor white house with the gabled front end I'd seen in the picture show. The public library where his mother worked is still here. So is the small cluster of Primary Street buildings, one of which used to firm the West Virginian restaurant, the model for the café in "Trilobites." It's a Mexican restaurant now and the brick streets have been paved over. I take it all in. Kids riding bikes. The former Methodist church. The funeral home. I get lost in a neighborhood of pocket-sized houses and plough downwardly a narrow extension and there is the cemetery, worn cedar trees lining the hill. He's up in that location somewhere. I realize he could probably see this loma from backside his house. I continue on. Just the old house is gone. The barn too. There's a Become-Mart and a Beige World restaurant where it in one case stood. It looks just similar the rest of America now. At that place is nada to see here.
"Trilobites" is Pancake'southward near well-known story, the first to be published by The Atlantic, and the 1 that introduced him to America. Pancake's stories all share that strong sense of identify — his native West Virginia — and reverberate his particular Appalachian feel. His distant cousin, the acclaimed author Ann Pancake, never met Breece. In her wonderful essay, "Brush Billow," she admonishes the critics who sometimes accuse him of capitalizing on narrow cultural stereotypes or of class appropriation:
What Breece does is dishonored by the word "correspond." His art does not evoke. Information technology invokes. Out of the immateriality of language Breece generates the rumple of W Virginia land, the texture of its copse, the smell of its weather, the taste of clay and air, and most remarkable of all, he wraps information technology all in that complex caul of love and hate, longing and grief, beauty and repulsion, that shrouds the West Virginian center when it contemplates its place. For me, the stories' subject affair is secondary…
Simply his writing should non exist valued solely for its descriptive power of identify either, argues Andre Dubus III:
Information technology would be a error to consider these stories just regional, for they go far also securely 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, past giving united states of america its people in all of their tangled humanity, Pancake has achieved the truly universal.
3.
"This story is about learning how to fight fate."
-Pancake'due south handwritten note on his story, "A Room Forever"
Breece Pancake could see the future of America and it must accept scared the hell out of him. Born in 1952 and coming of age in the late 'lx's and early lxx's, he was part of the first generation of Appalachian writers to experience and do good from the mail service-Globe War II industrial boom and its associated rise in standards of living, as well as to meet the beginnings of its collapse. Just as many "Southern" writers of the preceding generation were shaped past their own particular Deep South rural surround, Jim Crow, and the Keen Depression, Pancake's writing was informed by his own place and time: the northern Appalachians, more than Rust Chugalug than Dixie, afterwards electrification and interstate highways, the Neat Society and television receiver had come up to the mountains. He had travelled to the American southwest and California and United mexican states. He'd spent time in Washington, DC. Pancake was no rube come down from the hills in buckskins, every bit is sometimes portrayed.
While many of his themes, characters and settings appear in "traditional" forms that could have just equally easily been penned past earlier Southern authors, his writing is nothing like theirs. Embedded subtly inside both his stories and personal messages are references and commentaries on a litany of more modern concerns reflective of America's cultural issues of his time: the Vietnam State of war; the '73 Oil Crunch; labor's decline; women's liberation; racial equality; drug corruption; economic stagnation; environmentalism; and the growing urban/rural cultural divide. In some ways, it's every bit if Pancake was a canary somewhere deep in the American coal mine, warning us of the methane building up, and of the explosion that would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, the canary is e'er the showtime to die.
Pancake, caught up in a fast-changing America, all the same preferred to write on his old 1920's Underwood typewriter. He longed for literary success like Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway, two of his literary idols. His middle-class youth was spent similar to many in Milton, hunting, fishing, and hiking the woods along the aboriginal Teays River Valley looking for fossils. He wrote brusk articles for the local paper, went to summer camp sponsored by Union-Carbide, his father's employer. He loved the folk singers Phil Ochs and Gordon Lightfoot nonetheless he scrawled the lyrics of Led Zeppelin'south "Stairway to Heaven" on the cover of his sketch pad.
His childhood friend, Rick Blenko, remembers spending days with Breece as two kids "not quite fitting in," cruising effectually Milton in Pancake'southward Volkswagen Fastback and going to Clint Eastwood movies. "Breece would sometimes mimic the dress of Eastwood, wearing Johdpur boots, a Mexican coating slung over his shoulder and smoking cigarillos." They were enthralled past the BBC television show The Prisoner, a sci-fi, cold state of war, psycho/spy-thriller that developed a cult-like following. "I really liked the "Prisoner" logo he had custom-fabricated and glued on the left side of the dash," says Blenko, who also recalls belatedly-night drag races and spins through neighbor'south lawns. "My thoughts of Breece? As you lot go through life, it's astonishing what you lot can do if you have ideas, drive, appetite sometimes driven by keen malaise. Breece superseded anything he could have imagined. Had he lived, I recall he would have been writing novels and a earth class storyteller. When y'all die, you are stock-still in that age yous died, and so Breece for me is e'er in his xx's."
4.
Pancake began writing in earnest during the aftermath of Watergate. The country was mired in the angst of Ford and Carter. His stories, reflecting both the political/economic times and elements of his own personality, are ofttimes described as "dark" or "depressing" and his characters every bit feeling trapped by their ain circumstances, caught between two pulling worlds. Afterwards graduating from Marshall University in 1974, he was teaching at armed services academies in Fork Union and Staunton, Virginia, beginning to refine and develop his own writing voice, when he met John Casey in the Spring of 1975. Casey, who deservedly gets credit for "discovering" Pancake and bringing him to the Academy of Virginia a year later, writes in the Afterword to Stories, "Breece didn't know how good he was; he didn't know how much he knew; he didn't know that he was a swan instead of an ugly duckling."
At UVA, Pancake quickly came to despise the genteel grade-snobbery he felt in Charlottesville, a town that has perfected it to an art grade. One of Pancake's teachers, the British poet Richard Jones, in one case wrote to him of his time living in Charlottesville, "There's a peculiar unreality in our Virginian lives. Nosotros float on a ocean flavoured with apricot brandy and never seem to become our feet downwardly to earth." Like many West Virginians of the great diaspora, however, Pancake's feet were still planted firmly in the dark clay and rock scree of his native Country. Despite his modest but center-class upbringing in Milton, he always felt himself an outsider in the much-tonier Charlottesville.
One friendship he did form was with the writer James Alan McPherson, who had only moved from Baltimore to teach at UVA. McPherson, who would get the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, shared the social pressures of being viewed as an outsider in Charlottesville. "Breece Pancake was a W Virginian, that peculiar kind of mountain-bred southerner, or function-southerner, who was but every bit alienated equally I was in the hushful gentility of Wilson Hall," he wrote.
5.
"I stop in forepart of the motorbus station, expect in on the waiting people, and recollect almost all the places they are going. But I know they tin't run away from it or drink their way out of it or dice to get rid of information technology. It's always at that place, you lot only await at somebody and they give you a look like the Wrath of God."
– from "A Room Forever"
The sky is a perfect blueish. The rolling hills overlap their shades. Brilliant dapples of the pink and creamy white of redbud and dogwood blossoms pock the textures of green. It is springtime in Virginia. Driving into Charlottesville's Farmington State Club I cantankerous over the railroad tracks then bulldoze upward a narrow entry route flanked by sentries of old cedars. It takes me past the golf course and swimming puddle lined past whitewashed horse stables, past the tennis courts and the white-columned clubhouse originally designed past Thomas Jefferson in 1803 equally a plantation home. Workers are cut the grass low, manicuring the tees and greens, making things perfect. A little farther on the road dips and curves into a modest forest and becomes Blue Ridge Lane. A cluster of houses constrict themselves behind circular driveways, tall boxwood hedges and blooming azaleas, hidden from the road the way multi-million dollar houses often are. The houses front the sloping fairway and I tin glimpse through the quondam copse the domed clubhouse looming at the top of the hill and, farther to the west, the fifty-fifty taller mountains in the altitude. It is a pastoral scene. A polo-shirted human driving a golf cart waves and smiles. It is hard to imagine that anything could always get incorrect on Bluish Ridge Lane.
When Pancake was accepted into the graduate writing program at UVA and moved here, Farmington Country Club all the same had a whites-only membership policy and had been embroiled in controversy for a number of years. It even counted equally one of its members then-UVA President Frank Hereford. This is where Pancake lived and wrote and worked while he was in Charlottesville, in a rented room in the home of Virginia and Everett Meade on the club grounds. To supplement his meager teaching stipend, he worked in the kitchen of the clubhouse grill, serving up sandwiches to the golfers and the swim moms. He abhorred the course and racial divisions he soon establish. In a letter to his mother he wrote of a stinging conversation with his new landlady:
Mrs. Meade is throwing a party for the Eng. dept. and had the gall to ask me to tend bar. Said if I didn't, she'd have to hire a colored, and they don't mix a skilful potable. That tells me where I stand every bit a Hillbilly — one notch above the colored — only because I tin mix a proficient drink. If Mrs. Meade forgets herself and invites me, I'll decline on the basis of not having any shoes, and having to tend my nonetheless and welfare cheque.
I don't bother looking for the address to the former Meade business firm at One Blue Ridge Lane — the house numbers accept all been changed. There are discreetly-mounted cameras and security signs. The Meades had a gardener dig upward and remove the blood-stained dirt under the apple years ago. It looks just similar a postcard. There is nothing to see here anymore.
half dozen.
"If only one thing is true to existence a writer, it is to remain at once the most moral man and most repentant sinner God could want."
– Breece Pancake, scribbled note
Pancake had a moralistic streak that may take been a reflection of his traditional upbringing or a counter-reaction to the loosening mores of the '60'south and 'lxx's and his own internal struggles. Despite frequent inclusions of sexual practice and violence within his own stories, he was non a fan of Allen Ginsberg. "Ginsberg thought he had something new when he incorporated perversion into poetry, only Sophocles wrote nigh a son who killed his father and married his mother. This was written nigh 4 thou years ago and it'southward much finer poesy than 'Howl,'" he wrote in a alphabetic character to his parents.
But Pancake as well seemed to be trying to notice a centre, more progressive ground, as he wrote in the same letter: "I guess I discover fundamentalists — difficult-shells, foot-washers — even Methodists a fleck hard to have at times. Super-dedicated people bore me. They have no humor, no reception to unlike ideas, nothing — only their cause, and that makes them singly difficult-headed, and generally sickening."
This inner struggle to define for himself what is moral tin can be found throughout the characters in Pancake's stories and in his messages. Information technology likewise played out in his life through his growing religiosity. Having been raised a temperate Methodist he was an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism in Charlottesville, even joining the Knights of Columbus chapter of St. Thomas Aquinas parish. Despite his continual money worries, he donated all of the $750 he earned from selling "Trilobites" to the church. John Casey, who Breece had asked to sponsor him and human activity as his religious godfather, wrote, "As with his other noesis and art, he took in his organized religion with intensity, almost as if he had a different, deeper measure out of time. He was presently an older Catholic than I was. I began to feel that not only did he learn things fast, absorb them fast, but he anile them fast."
Barbara Dignon was a immature organizer of church social events. "Breece seemed to always be nearby, not in the group, merely almost plenty to hear conversations…I can't remember him ever joining in. I recollect he was looking for a family unit to belong to. But he didn't have the social skills needed to practise that. He bankrupt my heart."
Pancake, despite his social anxieties, did manage to develop several friendships with women while in Charlottesville. The almost serious was with Emily Miller, a fellow UVA student. Miller's parents actively discouraged her human relationship with Pancake, and she would become the second woman to reject an offering of marriage from Pancake, following a cleaved engagement while he was still at Marshall. He believed it was because Miller's parents, beingness "a good Southern Virginia family" from Richmond, felt he was non a worthy suitor and the rejection appears to have greatly affected him. In his concluding letter to John Casey, he discussed his dearest for her and wrote "I'm non skilful plenty to piece of work or ally, but I'yard skillful enough to write."
Pancake was conspicuously a torn man at the time of his death, heartsick, worried about money and jobs, drinking, and suffering from the loneliness he felt in Charlottesville. He had been shaken by the deaths of his begetter from Multiple Sclerosis and one of his best friends in a motorcar accident several years earlier. His letters begin to speak cryptically of premonitions of his own decease. In the end, it's a common story.
seven.
I reach into the concluding acid-complimentary archival box of the Breece Pancake collection housed in Due west Virginia University's Wise Library. Unlike the other ten boxes filled with his letters and story drafts (Pancake was a tireless self-editor, often rewriting his stories xx times,) this box holds only ii items: a heavily tabbed and annotated King James Bible and a minor, simple cross made from palm fronds. I lift the cross out and hold information technology in my hand and my mind begins to run. I'd known about Pancake for some years having grown up and attended college in West Virginia before — just every bit he had — being accepted to graduate schoolhouse at UVA. But I hadn't fallen down the Pancake rabbit hole until I read Thomas Eastward. Douglass'southward A Room Forever, a comprehensive (and the only) biography of Pancake.
I stare at the twined palm, twirl it in my fingers. It was stuck inside his bible, the one he had tabbed and highlighted in brightly-colored markers with passages that reference "poetic forest" — lyrical verses filled with words of figs and apple trees, mountains and flora. There is no way to know for sure when the small cross was placed there.
In a letter to his female parent several weeks before he shot himself, Pancake describes a dream he had. Like his writing, it is filled with both cute and trigger-happy imagery.
Last nighttime I dreamed of the "happy hunting basis." I passed through a place of bones that looked homo, just weren't—the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a identify where the days were the best of every flavour, the sweetest air and water in Spring, then the dry out heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of autumn with proficient leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never impale, only the rabbits would do a niggling trip the light fantastic toe, all equally if it were a game, and they were playing information technology too. Then Winter came with heavy pulverization-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffeloes [sic] — all white — snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, fabricated my bed in the snow, and then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed past bandits, and she took me dorsum to the place, and under a huge rock where no calorie-free should accept shown, a cavern almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of crimson those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them man-looking. And so I went back to the other side of both dreams.
eight.
"I retrieve he threw himself into the faces of the gods…I retrieve that Breece wanted love, the certainty of love, more than annihilation else in the world."
-James McPherson in a letter to Breece's Female parent
In his volume, Myth and Reality, the philosopher Mircea Eliade speaks of the earth equally equanimous of two parts, the "sacred" and the "profane," and of a "nostalgia for the primordial." "Exile is among the profoundest metaphors for all man life," he wrote.
Breece Pancake wrote a notation on a grade describing what "Trilobites" was about: "For me at least, we are suckers for the roots that concur u.s.." He could never escape his memories of the land, the culture, the people that had formed him, just as the ancient Teays had carved out and scoured the valley he knew and so well. He was a man trapped and overwhelmed by his own uniquely American nostalgia, a nostalgia for things that once were and no longer are.
In her essay "On Nostalgia," Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes, "The danger with nostalgia is that it does not liberate the mind; information technology traps it. Let'due south use a cornball metaphor and compare it to amber. The mind, under nostalgia, becomes a fossil, entombed in honey-hued resin."
A fossil. Like a trilobite. What was one time alive is at present merely rock. It's all that is left for u.s.a. to build our myths upon. Sometimes information technology is enough.
Source: https://themillions.com/2017/06/american-myth-short-beautiful-life-breece-dj-pancake.html
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