Take a look at a map of West Virginia. It's part of the South but not really southern. It's below the Mason-Dixon line, but only the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line separates its northern panhandle from Lake Erie and the Canadian border. It was called Kanawha before it was called West Virginia. It is officially known as the Mountain State, unofficially the Cog State, and affectionately Almost Heaven (thanks to John Denver). Politically and geographically it's a mixed-up place.
Look at its shape on the map. It looks like a water jug tipped backwards - withholding something. It also looks like a fowl or a game bird dressed for the pot.
West Virginia's finest writer was a mixed-up guy. So much so that he blew his head to pieces at the age of 27 in 1979 with only a dozen publishable short stories to his name.
I'm not saying that Breece D'J Pancake killed himself because the place of his birth was shaped like a headless chicken, or even that there was some tangible link between this deracinated would-be southerner and the shaky, ambiguous nature of his state's history. But to understand him we have to understand, or at least acknowledge the importance of, the place. It was the only place he wrote about: every one of his stories is set there, in the farm-dotted valleys and the mining towns. Ohio is like a distant land; Chicago is mentioned as if it were a fabled realm, or somewhere existing only in a dream.
The rural rhythms in Pancake's stories take the place of any sense of resolution. There is no finality. Things get a little better, or more often a little worse, but never end. People get ill and don't improve, but neither do they die. And when the do, they 'become soil.' The stories are full of euphemisms that don't soften anything. They do the reverse, in fact. They align the reader with the edges and the jolts that the protagonists live with daily.
In England there is writing about the countryside, about farming and rural industries. But this English writing is anchored in the past, in the social history of the land, in tradition. This gives it the tweeness of something kept in a padded box, or a show put on for outsiders. Think H.E. Bates. Why is it shit? Because it's packaged. A shit in a box, with a bow on it.
No-one wants a shit in a box. So more recent English writers have gone the other way, taken the shit out of the box and thrown it a the big intellectual, avant-garde fan. Adam Thorpe did this with his rural-modernist epic novel Ulverton. It was a noble effort, immunised against triviality by its all-encompassing range and ballsy arrangement, but it felt a little forced.
The Americans - Hemingway, Faulkner, Carver, Pancake - relied on their ear, and nose, for the nuances and current specificities of their respective landscapes. The word 'current' is important here. When these guys were writing they were still treating their land as a new land. Theirs was a pioneer language. They saw people fucking and fighting and they made new words for it, words that came out of the land, out of the mines and fields. And the stories feel fresh as a result. Like good manure.
Breece Pancake's favourite word was 'bullshit', or rather 'bull-shit' with that emphasis only certain Americans can give the second syllable. According to his mother he wanted to entitle his collection of short stories 'Bullshit Artist'. They are instead published as The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake and they contain less bullshit than practically any stories ever written. They are also among the very best.
