A Khaki Cloud in the Canebrakes: On "The Collected Breece D'J Pancake"
Breece D’J Pancake; introduction by Jayne Anne Phillips | The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters | Library of America | 2020 | 384 Pages
Every few years, the United States remembers it has a white underclass. Typically, a handful of books attend to this reawakening: after John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign in West Virginia, such titles as Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Yesterday’s People, and The Other America sought to make sense of the continued existence of these poor whites and their peculiar culture. About a year after Donald J. Trump rode down the golden escalator, the blockbuster memoir-cum-explainer Hillbilly Elegy, penned by the Yale Law graduate and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, was published. Countless politicians and media types alike glommed onto it, alongside the piquant diner reportage that promised to take the temperature of the “real America,” as the veritable bible explaining the phenomenon of Trump’s appeal.
Five years on from the publication of Vance’s curiously un-elegiac Elegy, debates about the nature of the white working class have been sublimated into other concerns. Vance himself, who writes in his memoir, “My primary aim is to tell a true story about what [the] problem [of downward mobility] feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck,” has moved from a Trump-skeptic to espousing the polite blood-and-soil nationalism typified by Senator Josh Hawley. Flirting with a Senate run in Ohio, Vance muses on Twitter about declining birthrates and national identity. Upon my initial reading of Hillbilly Elegy, I took Vance’s references to the hearty Scotch-Irish who settled Appalachia after the forced removal of the Cherokee and other indigenous peoples as little more than the hackneyed and timeworn appropriation of white ethnicity familiar to anyone who has spent time in the region. In retrospect, they echo ominously.
Much water has passed under the bridge in the intervening years, not the least of which was the concurrence of a global pandemic and a renewed Movement for Black Lives in the summer of 2020. Perhaps for this reason, the publication of The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters by The Library of America last October did not result in the renewed interest that longtime Pancake readers like me had hoped to see. Pancake, an Appalachian writer firmly of his time and place, frequently reaches into the timeless. Colly, the narrator of his most famous and well-executed story, “Trilobites,” thinks geologically:
I open the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill 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. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I’ve looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters.
These, the opening sentences of the opening story in his 1983 collection The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, are typically the first sentences of his that readers encounter. They immediately establish his voice: conversational, haunted by time and circumstance, drawn painfully inward even while looking outward. Pancake never let go of the mountains: during an unhappy stint teaching at the Fork Union Military Academy in 1974, he writes in a letter to his parents, “I’m going to come back to W.Va. when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply rooted in my soul. I like to think that I’ve left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never be able to leave for good until I find it – and I don’t want to look for it because I might find it and have to leave.”
Pancake was born in Milton, West Virginia on June 29, 1952 and took his life in Charlottesville by shotgun under an apple tree on Palm Sunday in 1979, a few weeks shy of graduating from the University of Virginia’s creative writing program. His letters reveal a complex figure who loved his home and family, was dedicated to his craft, and was restlessly uncomfortable when not writing, revising, hunting, or fishing. Pancake was alienated by the southern blue bloods that populated UVA’s campus, as was his teacher James Alan McPherson. As McPherson writes in the memoir essay included in both the 1983 collection and the new volume, “Friendships grounded in mutual alienation and self-consciously geared to the perceptions of others are seldom truly tested.” However unlikely, the black professor and the white student forged a friendship born from shared alienation during their time together on that campus where “the constitutional nonconformists like Breece Pancake became extremely isolated and sought out the company of other outsiders.”
Pancake was driven by a need to master himself. In many ways a traditionalist, particularly in his relationships with women, at the same time he resisted bourgeois conformity. Like many Appalachians, he mistrusted politics but was concerned about the political. His favorite musician was the radical folksinger Phil Ochs, and his stories and letters reveal a concern for the outcasts and marginalized. (“When and if I ever get into politics,” he wrote to his parents in 1974, “I’d like to work on the quality of public education and public health.” To be fair, his later letters also reveal abundant concern with the day-to-day scraping by of the poorly remunerated graduate student.) Drawn to other people, a famously generous giver of gifts, he could also be solitary and moody, perhaps inadvertently creating an aura of mystery in the process.
Pancake’s stories are written with exacting precision, endlessly drafted, full of terse but specific language designed to achieve an effect of representing the mountains and people of West Virginia as he experienced and understood them. They are populated with lonely hearts, outsiders, solitary types, and losers. Colly, in “Trilobites,” is haunted both by his dead father, “a khaki cloud in the canebrakes,” and his inability to successfully cultivate his father’s farm. The nameless narrator of “Time and Again” runs a snowplow while murdering young male hitchhikers in a ghastly recreation of his own son’s similar disappearance. Women in Pancake’s fiction come off poorly: Colly’s ex-girlfriend has moved to Florida without him and taken on airs; the story ends after the two of them have lovelessly rutted on the glass-strewn floor of an abandoned railroad depot. The nameless underaged prostitute in “A Room Forever” attempts suicide after being abused by yet another john. Reva, the frustrated childless protagonist of “The Mark,” suffers from an unfeeling husband and an incestual desire for her brother. Without excusing this inherent sexism, it feels inextricably bound to the same desire for exactitude that otherwise marks his work. Pancake was unable to turn away from ugliness.
For this reason, he has sometimes been understood as a part of the southern “grit lit” movement that includes such writers as Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown. That Pancake emerged contemporaneous to these southern writers’ extension of the grotesqueries of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor into more explicit material suggests an affinity, but his work is hewn from different stuff. Many of his protagonists, like Colly or the teenaged Bo in “The Fox Hunters,” plan like Huck Finn to light out for the territory as soon as they’re able, as though preternaturally aware of the foreclosure of a meaningful future in the mountains.
The urgency and sustained value of Pancake’s work resides in his characters’ restlessness, which not only mirrors his own, but reckons forthrightly with the dwindling opportunities on offer in 1970s West Virginia. His sole story about coal miners, “Hollow,” accurately portrays the increasingly small-stakes mining operations that followed in the wake of extensive strip mining. He intuited what was coming: in our own time, the industry continues to occupy an outsize position in our political imagination despite its effective demise after decades of mountaintop removal mining.
For all Pancake’s concern with capturing the fine-grained reality of West Virginian life, his work neither attempts nor purports to capture the authentic Appalachia. Although he told McPherson that one of his purposes for writing was to correct the distortions of such volumes as Night Comes to the Cumberlands, he evokes West Virginia through his characters’ experiences, not through narrative declaration. Pancake’s stories are a testament to the notion that the real Appalachia is a fiction born from a need to make sense of a region that, having been depopulated of indigenous people, was then repopulated by settlers who were in turn used as pawns in a mighty extractive industry that left the region scarred, barren, a perpetual social problem to be raised when politically convenient but never solved.
When Breece D’J Pancake died by his own hand, only three of his stories had been accepted for publication; a further three came out in magazines prior to their arrival in 1983 in The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. This slim volume was padded out by McPherson’s and John Casey’s memoir essays. These supplemental materials, along with the praise of such writers as Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, created the legend of Pancake as a singular, haunted, and tragic literary figure. The fact of the matter is that Pancake would be horrified by the publication of stories that had not yet been developed to his standards. He had great plans for future projects – story collections, novels building upon stories already written, journalistic pieces – but they would never be realized. The 1983 volume, reprinted in full in the LOA collection alongside story fragments and letters previously collected in Thomas E. Douglass’ out-of-print A Room Forever: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Breece D’J Pancake, represents a legacy worth salvaging, one that here achieves the closest to completion possible.
The Collected Breece D’J Pancake offers a valediction for what could have been while symbiotically representing the throttled potential of his region. In “Trilobites,” Colly says, “A 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.” Pancake always knew the true dimensions of the mountains: they precede the meddling of humans and they’ll remain in spite of our destructive ways.