{"id":232653,"date":"2021-04-25T07:49:41","date_gmt":"2021-04-25T07:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=232653"},"modified":"2021-05-08T17:31:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-08T17:31:39","slug":"breece-dj-pancakes-quiet-magnificence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=232653","title":{"rendered":"Breece D\u2019J Pancake\u2019s Quiet Magnificence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh \u2013 The Unz Review Apr 24, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

In the visual arts, there\u2019s Egon Schiele who died at 28, Seurat at 31, and the photographer Francesca Woodman, who leapt from a window of a Lower East Side building at just 22 years of age.<\/h4>\n

In literature, there\u2019s Hart Crane. Chugging from Mexico to NYC on a steamship, the 32-year-old poet couldn\u2019t help but hit on some handsome sailors, so got thrashed. Totally trashed days later, Crane keeled overboard. \u201cGoodbye, everybody!\u201d<\/h4>\n

Sylvia Plath was just 30 when she gassed herself. Her fatal despair also fueled her enduring collection, Ariel, with its fantastically deranged yet much celebrated poem, \u201cDaddy.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The German-born Otto Plath was a biologist who published Bumblebees and Their Ways<\/em> in 1934. When Otto died in 1940, Sylvia was just 8-years-old. Although there\u2019s no indication he had any Fascist sympathies, Otto transformed into an uber Nazi in Sylvia\u2019s imagination.<\/h4>\n

This isn\u2019t just fine but necessary, according to the Jewish critic Marjorie Perloff, \u201cThe Age Demanded a universal theme\u2014the rejection not only of the \u2018real\u2019 father but also of the Nazi Father Of Us All [\u2026]\u201d<\/h4>\n

Lauding \u201cDaddy\u201d as \u201cthe \u2018Guernica\u2019 of modern poetry,\u201d the equally chosen George Steiner comments, \u201cSylvia Plath is only one of a number of young contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights, themselves in no way implicates in the actual holocaust, who have done most to counter the general inclination to forget the death camps.\u201d<\/h4>\n

(Far from being forgotten, George, it\u2019s a permanent indictment of the entire West, a colossal hoax that can\u2019t be challenged. Distorting and extorting society, the Holocaust is an insatiable Moloch.)<\/h4>\n

American letters\u2019 biggest loss to an early death, though, is Breece D\u2019J Pancake. While still a student at the University of Virginia, Pancake shot himself in the head, at age 26. His entire oeuvre consists of just 12 stories, but you\u2019d hard pressed to find a finer batch.<\/h4>\n

Pancake\u2019s story collection was published posthumously. Though he had joked to his mother that it should be called, \u201cBullshit Artist,\u201d there\u2019s no false note here. Pancake\u2019s prose is always true and often startlingly fresh, and that\u2019s because he observed and listened very attentively to his native West Virginia.<\/h4>\n

Stories matter because, at their best, they capture the texture of a place, and give us its inner life also. Beyond their plot or wisdom, they show us how people from a distant place and time really felt, thought and spoke.<\/h4>\n

Quotidian language is already creative, if not charming and amusing, but the fiction writer is not just a transcriber, of course. He must distill. Consider this exchange between two men, one much older, from Pancake\u2019s \u201cTrilobites\u201d:<\/h4>\n

The girl brings Jim\u2019s coffee in his cup, and we watch her pump back to the kitchen. Good hips.<\/h4>\n

\u201cYou see that?\u201d He jerks his head toward her.<\/h4>\n

I say, \u201cMoundsville Molasses.\u201d I can spot jailbait by a mile.<\/h4>\n

\u201cHell, girl\u2019s age never stopped your dad and me in Michigan.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cTell the truth.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cSure. You got to time it so you nail the first freight out when your pants are up.\u201d<\/h4>\n

I look at the windowsill. It is speckled with the crisp skeletons of flies. \u201cWhy\u2019d you and Pop leave Michigan?\u201d<\/h4>\n

The crinkles around Jim\u2019s eyes go slack. He says, \u201cThe war,\u201d and sips his coffee.<\/h4>\n

\u201cPump,\u201d \u201cnail\u201d and \u201cskeleton of flies\u201d are so deft and suggestive. Pancake delivers.<\/h4>\n

\u201cGood hips\u201d instead of \u201cnice ass\u201d is also a nice alteration, and the old man\u2019s \u201cYou see that?\u201d is comically authentic.<\/h4>\n

Of course, stemmed humyns are perked up by good hips, not cloaked up, and youth, as life, ever more life, always seduces, whatever the law. It\u2019s only natural.<\/h4>\n

If not for this \u201csexism,\u201d we\u2019d have a society of dour dykes, seething incels and ghastly drag queens, like, well, right now, but I better not say that. It\u2019s not correct.<\/h4>\n

In \u201cTrilobites,\u201d the narrator, Colly, is briefly visited by his old girlfriend, Ginny. Having moved from West Virginia to Florida, Ginny admits to having a new guy who\u2019s \u201cdoing plankton research.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Still, for old times\u2019 sake, they have sex, and not very prettily, \u201cI slide her to the floor. Her scent rises to me, and I shove crates aside to make room. I don\u2019t wait. She isn\u2019t making love, she\u2019s getting laid. All right, I think, all right. Get laid. I pull her pants around her ankles, rut her.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Again, the stark, nearly brutal language, but Pancake never allows us to laugh at any of his characters, unlike, say, with Flannery O\u2019Connor<\/a><\/span>. Pancake merges into each one, and through his artistry, we too suffer their desperation, shame and sorrows.<\/h4>\n

Unlike Ginny, Colly hasn\u2019t been anywhere, \u201cWhen I was a young punk, I tried to run away from home. I was walking through this meadow on the other side of the Hill, and this shadow passed over me. I honest to god thought it was a pterodactyl. It was a damned airplane. I was so damn mad, I came home.\u201d That\u2019s as close as he\u2019s ever gotten to an airplane.<\/h4>\n

The dinette\u2019s jailbait is also described as having \u201cHips and legs that climb steps into airplanes.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Pancake\u2019s implicit and suggestive style is indebted to Hemingway and his iceberg theory, of course, and his terse prose also betrays influence, but Pancake\u2019s atmosphere, his climate, if you will, is clearly different. It is more grounded, often more trapped, and aches much more.<\/h4>\n

Further, Pancake\u2019s characters speak with a surer poetry. The younger writer had the better ear, simply put.<\/h4>\n

Pancake is also more in-tune with the day-to-day grind of ordinary survival. In \u201cA Room Forever,\u201d what a beautiful title, a barge hand describes all the other lonely hearts on a New Year\u2019s Eve, \u201cI look around. All these people have come down from their flops because there are no parties for them to go to. They are strangers who play a little pool or pinball, drink a little booze. All year they grit their teeth\u2014they pump gas and wait tables and screw chippies and bait queers, and they don\u2019t like any of it, but they know they are lucky to get it.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Get what? Anything, if you\u2019re lucky.<\/h4>\n

Not knowing what to do with himself, the narrator wanders the superficially festive streets. Feeling mean and low, he enjoys the sight of a drunk bum trying to spread newspapers for his bed, in some cold alley, then he\u2019s softened by the sight of an underaged whore, standing in a doorway, marking him.<\/h4>\n

They end up in his room, \u201cThe darkness is the best thing. There is no face, no talk, just warm skin, something close and kind, something to be lost in. But when I take her, I know what I\u2019ve got\u2014a little girl\u2019s body that won\u2019t move from wear or pleasure, a kid playing whore, and I feel ugly with her, because of her. I force myself on her like the rest. I know I am hurting her, but she will never get any breaks. She whimpers and my body arches in spasms, then after, she curls in a ball away from me, and I touch her. She is numb.\u201d<\/h4>\n

When he suggests she could stay in this room for the month, get a job at Sears or Penny\u2019s, then pay him back later, she tells him to \u201cjust shut-the-fuck-up.\u201d Though he\u2019s slated to ship out the next day, she doesn\u2019t know that, so probably thinks he just wants free sex, but that\u2019s for us to deduce. Pancake doesn\u2019t spell everything out.<\/h4>\n

Leaving her john, the girl ends up getting plastered in a bar, before slitting her wrists, though without success. She\u2019ll have plenty left to endure.<\/h4>\n

In Pancake\u2019s story collection, there\u2019s an introduction by James Alan McPherson, and two afterwords, by John Casey and Andre Dubus III. McPherson and Casey were Pancake\u2019s professors at Virginia. Pancake didn\u2019t live long enough to have many literary friends.<\/h4>\n

McPherson\u2019s recollection is particularly vivid. At their very first meeting, \u201cHe asked if I drank beer, if I played pinball, if I owned a gun, if I hunted or fished.\u201d<\/h4>\n

As outsiders at this still uptight and complexly stratified university, they became fast friends. They drank and even went to movies together. McPherson, a black man, wasn\u2019t just Pancake\u2019s mentor but also a father figure.<\/h4>\n

McPherson recalls that Pancake was a compulsive gift giver. After McPherson had helped Pancake place a story in the Atlantic, his very first publication, the young man invited his professor to a fine seafood dinner, then gave him a 12-gauge shotgun. Pancake had a closet full of guns.<\/h4>\n

Tired of Virginia, McPherson left for Yale in 1978, thus ending their two-year friendship. A professor can only do so much. When Pancake sent McPherson a package, he didn\u2019t open it, because \u201crenewing my connection with Breece would take my memories back to Charlottesville, and I wanted to be completely free of the place.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Less than a year later, Pancake would be dead, but it\u2019s nearly impossible to trace the causes of many, if not most, suicides, for they often have byzantine, far-reaching roots no one can untangle.<\/h4>\n

Pancake\u2019s father had died of alcoholism, and Pancake drank more than his share, even competitively, to the point of getting into bar fights, with the scars to proudly boast about afterwards.<\/h4>\n

On one postcard sent to a friend, Pancake wrote as the return address, \u201cOne Blow Out Your Brain.\u201d To another friend, he confessed, \u201cIf I weren\u2019t a good Catholic, I\u2019d consider getting a divorce from life.\u201d<\/h4>\n

In Pancake\u2019s stories, there are these ghosts, \u201cHe saw his ghost in the window against the outside\u2019s grayness and felt his gut rumble with the flux.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cHollis sat by his window all night, staring at his ghost in glass, looking for some way out of the tomb Jake had built for him.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cAnd Ottie sees them together a last time: a dying dog and two useless children, forever ghosts, they can neither scream nor play; even dead, they fight over bones.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cBo looked out on the broom-sedge slopes. He could swear his daddy\u2019s ghost answered, \u2018Yech.\u2019\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cIn the window I see our ghosts against the black gloss of glass.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cThe remnants of the night lay strewn about the leaf-floor like a torpid ghost.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cHe loaded his gun and watched a low trail in the brush, a trail he saw through outlines of snow in the ghost light.\u201d<\/h4>\n

There are even more Pancake ghosts, but you get the idea.<\/h4>\n

Most strikingly, John Casey, his other professor, claims to have been visited by Pancake\u2019s ghost.<\/h4>\n

At first, it was only a disturbance of the senses. As Casey was walking across a campus lawn, \u201cI smelled something. I tasted metal in my mouth. I didn\u2019t recognize the smell for an instant. It was a smell I\u2019d known well years before. Gun bluing. But inside this sense of taste and smell was a compelling sympathy, beyond the sympathy of that\u2019s<\/em> what it smelled like to have the muzzle in his mouth.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Then, \u201cA month after the experience on the lawn, I was lying in the bathtub trying to think of nothing. I heard a short laugh. Then Breece\u2019s voice, an unmistakable clear twang: \u2018That\u2019s one way to get the last word.\u2019\u201d That year, Casey heard Pancake several more times.<\/h4>\n

After Breece\u2019s death, James Alan McPherson visited Pancake\u2019s native region, a landscape of hills and hollows, \u201cHorizontal vision, in that area, is rare. The sky there is circumscribed by insistent hillsides thrusting upward. It is an environment crafted by nature for the dreamer and for the resigned.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Of such dreaming, Pancake intones it so gorgeously, \u201cI\u2019ve got eyes to shut in Michigan\u2014maybe even Germany or China, I don\u2019t know yet. I walk, but I\u2019m not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Beyond restless yearning and defeatist resignation, there must be other options, though, such as a deepening love for one\u2019s persistently circumscribed hollow, with its too many ghosts one can\u2019t escape from. (As a global tramp, I should be the last to preach this.) There\u2019s always another side to each corpse, no matter how many times you turn him over.<\/h4>\n

The brightest prospect of America\u2019s quickening disintegration is the reemergence of the local. No longer poisoned by so much centralized filth, we will finally see and hear our neighbors more clearly, as if for the first time, even, thus clearing the way for the emergence of many more Breece P\u2019J Pancakes.<\/h4>\n

As for the original, may Breece haunt us as long as English survives.<\/h4>\n

Linh Dinh\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> latest book is Postcards from the End of America<\/span><\/a>. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The brightest prospect of America\u2019s quickening disintegration is the reemergence of the local. No longer poisoned by so much centralized filth, we will finally see and hear our neighbors more clearly, as if for the first time, even<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":232655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=232653"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232657,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232653\/revisions\/232657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/232655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=232653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=232653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=232653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}