Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (2 page)

Ironically, the people who seemed most isolated and insecure were the sons and daughters of the southern lower and middle classes. They had come to the place their ancestors must have dreamed about—Charlottesville is to the South what Cambridge is to the rest of the nation—and for various reasons found themselves spiritually far from home. Some of them expressed their frustrations by attacking the traditional scapegoats—black teachers and students. Others began to parody themselves, accentuating and then assuming the stereotyped persona of the hillbilly, in an attempt to achieve a comfortable identity. Still others, the constitutional nonconformists like Breece Pancake, became extremely isolated and sought out the company of other outsiders.

A writer, no matter what the context, is made an outsider by the demands of his vocation, and there was never any doubt in my mind that Breece Pancake was a writer. His style derived in large part from Hemingway, his themes from people and places he had known in West Virginia. His craftsmanship was exact, direct, unsentimental. His favorite comment was “Bull
shit!
” He wasted no words and rewrote ceaselessly for the precise effect he intended to convey. But constitutionally, Breece Pancake was a lonely and melancholy man. And his position at the university—as a Hoyns Fellow, as a teaching assistant, and as a man from a small town in the hills of West Virginia—contributed some to the cynicism and bitterness that was already in him. While his vocation as a writer made him part of a very small group, his middle-class West Virginia origins tended to isolate him from the much more sophisticated and worldly middle-class students from the suburbs of Washington and the Northeast, as well as from the upper-class students of southern background. From him I learned something of the contempt that many upper-class southerners have for the lower- and middle-class southerners, and from him I learned something about the abiding need these people have to be held in the high esteem of their upper-class co-regionalists. While I was offered the opportunity to be invited into certain homes as an affirmation of a certain tradition of noblesse oblige, this option was rarely available to Breece (an upper-class southerner once told me: “I like the blacks. They’re a lot like European peasants, and they’re
cleaner
than the poor whites”). Yet he was always trying to make friends, on any level available to him. He was in the habit of giving gifts, and once he complained to me that he had been reprimanded by a family for not bringing to them as many fish as he had promised to catch. To make up this deficiency, he purchased with his own money additional fish, but not enough to meet the quota he had promised. When he was teased about this, he commented to me, “They acted as if they wanted me to tug at my forelock.”

Breece Pancake seemed driven to improve himself. His ambition was not primarily literary: he was struggling to define for himself an entire way of life, an all-embracing code of values that would allow him to live outside his home valley in Milton, West Virginia. The kind of books he gave me may suggest the scope of his search: a biography of Jack London, Eugene O’Neill’s plays about the sea—works that concern the perceptions of men who looked at nature in the raw. In his mid-twenties Breece joined the Catholic church and became active in church affairs. But I did not understand the focus of his life until I had driven through his home state, along those winding mountain roads, where at every turn one looks down at houses nestled in hollows. In those hollows, near those houses, there are abandoned cars and stoves and refrigerators. Nothing is thrown away by people in that region; some use is found for even the smallest evidence of affluence. And eyes, in that region, are trained to look either up or down: from the hollows up toward the sky or from the encircling hills down into the hollows. Horizontal 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.

Breece once told me about his relationship with radio when he was growing up, about the range of stations available to him. Driving through those mountains, I could imagine the many directions in which his imagination was pulled. Like many West Virginians, he had been lured to Detroit by the nighttime radio stations. But he was also conscious of the many other parts of the country, especially those states that touched the borders of his own region. Once, I asked him how many people there were in the entire state of West Virginia. He estimated about two or three million, with about a hundred thousand people in Huntington, then the state’s largest city. It was a casual question, one with no real purpose behind it. But several days later I received in my mailbox a note from him: “Jim, I was wrong, but proportionally correct (Huntington, W. VR. has 46,000 people). To the West, Ohio has approximately 9 million. To the East, Virginia has approx. 4 million. To the South, Kentucky has approximately 3 million. To the North, Pa. has approx. 11 million. West Virginia—1,800,000—a million more than Rhode Island. P.S. See you at lunch tomorrow?” It need not be emphasized that he was very self-conscious about the poverty of his state, and about its image in certain books. He told me he did not think much of Harry Caudill’s
Night Comes to the Cumberlands.
He thought it presented an inaccurate image of his native ground, and his ambition, as a writer, was to improve on it.

This determination to improve himself dictated that Breece should be a wanderer and an adventurer. He had attended several small colleges in West Virginia, had traveled around the country. He had lived for a while on an Indian reservation in the West. He had taught himself German. He taught for a while at a military academy in Staunton, Virginia, the same one attended by his hero, Phil Ochs. He had great admiration for this songwriter, and encouraged me to listen closely to the lyrics of what he considered Ochs’s best song, “Jim Dean of Indiana.” Breece took his own writing just as seriously, placing all his hopes on its success. He seemed to be under self-imposed pressures to “make it” as a writer. He told me once: “All I have to sell is my experience. If things get really bad, they’ll put you and me in the same ditch. They’ll pay
me
a little more, but I’ll still be in the ditch.” He liked to impress people with tall tales he had made up, and he liked to impress them in self-destructive ways. He would get into fights in lower-class bars on the outskirts of Charlottesville, then return to the city to show off his scars. “These are stories,” he would say.

He liked people who exhibited class. He spoke 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. “She’s a lady,” he bragged to me. I think that redefining himself in terms of his
idea
of Charlottesville society was very important to Breece, even if that idea had no basis in the reality of the place. Yet there was also an antagonistic strain in him, a contempt for the conformity imposed on people there. We once attended a movie together, and during the intermission, when people crowded together in the small lobby, he felt closed in and shouted, “Move away! Make room! Let people through!” The crowd, mostly students, immediately scattered. Then Breece turned to me and laughed. “They’re clones!” he said. “They’re
clones!
”

He loved the outdoors—hunting and fishing and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Several times he took me hiking with him. During these outings he gave me good advice: if ever I felt closed in by the insularity of Charlottesville, I should drive up to the Blue Ridge and walk around, and that would clear my head. He viewed this communion with nature as an absolute necessity, and during those trips into the mountains he seemed to be at peace.

He also loved to play pinball and pool and to drink beer. He was very competitive in these recreations. He almost always outdrank me, and when he was drunk he would be strangely silent. He sat stiff and erect during these times, his eyes focused on my face, his mind and imagination elsewhere. Sometimes he talked about old girlfriends in Milton who had hurt him. He related once his sorrow over the obligation imposed upon him—by a librarian in Milton—to burn and bury hundreds of old books. He liked old things. He talked about hunting in a relative’s attic for certain items that once belonged to his father. He recollected letters his father had written, to his mother and to him, in the years before his death.

Breece Pancake drank a great deal, and when he drank his imagination always returned to this same place. Within that private room, I think now, were stored all his old hurts and all his fantasies. When his imagination entered there, he became a melancholy man in great need of contact with other people. But because he was usually silent during these periods, his presence tended often to make other people nervous. “Breece always hangs around,” a mutual friend once said to me. He almost never asked for anything, and at the slightest show of someone else’s discomfort, Breece would excuse himself and compensate—within a few hours or the next day—with a gift. I don’t think there was anyone, in Charlottesville at least, who knew just what, if anything, Breece expected in return. This had the effect of making people feel inadequate and guilty.

In the winter of 1977 I went to Boston and mentioned the work of several of my students, Breece included, to Phoebe-Lou Adams of
The Atlantic
. She asked to be sent some of his stories. I encouraged Breece to correspond with her, and very soon afterward several of his stories were purchased by the magazine. The day the letter of acceptance and check arrived, Breece came to my office and invited me to dinner. We went to Tiffany’s, our favorite seafood restaurant. Far from being pleased by his success, he seemed morose and nervous. He said he had wired flowers to his mother that day but had not yet heard from her. He drank a great deal. After dinner he said that he had a gift for me and that I would have to go home with him in order to claim it.

He lived in a small room on an estate just on the outskirts of Charlottesville. It was more a workroom than a house, and his work in progress was neatly laid out along a square of plywood that served as his desk. He went immediately to a closet and opened it. Inside were guns—rifles, shotguns, handguns—of every possible kind. He selected a twelve-gauge shotgun from one of the racks and gave it to me. He also gave me the bill of sale for it—purchased in West Virginia—and two shells. He then invited me to go squirrel hunting with him. I promised that I would. But since I had never owned a gun or wanted one, I asked a friend who lived on a farm to hold on to it for me.

Several months later, I found another gift from Breece in my campus mailbox. It was a trilobite, a fossil once highly valued by the Indians of Breece’s region. One of the stories he had sold
The Atlantic
had “Trilobites” as its title.

There was a mystery about Breece Pancake that I will not claim to have penetrated. This mystery is not racial; it had to do with that small room into which his imagination retreated from time to time. I always thought that the gifts he gave were a way of keeping people away from this very personal area, of focusing their attention on the persona he had created out of the raw materials of his best traits. I have very little evidence, beyond one small incident, to support this conclusion, but that one incident has caused me to believe it all the more.

The incident occurred one night during the summer of 1977. We had been seeing the films of Lina Wertmüller, and that evening
Seven Beauties
was being shown at a local theater. I telephoned Breece to see if he wanted to go. There was no answer. When I called later I let the telephone ring a number of times. Finally, a man answered and asked what I wanted. I asked for Breece. He said I had the wrong number, that Breece did not live there anymore. There was in the tone of his voice the abrupt authority of a policeman. He then held the line for a moment, and in the background I could hear quick and muffled conversation between Breece and several other people. Then the man came on the line again and asked my name and number. He said that Breece would call me back. But then Breece himself took the telephone and asked what it was I wanted. I mentioned the movie. He said he could not see it because he was going to West Virginia that same evening, but that he would get in touch with me when he returned. I left town myself soon after that, and did not see Breece again until early September. That was when he gave me the trilobite, and shortly afterward he made me promise that I would never tell anyone about the night I called him the summer before.