Anti-Melodrama in “Trilobites” from The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
by Willie Watt
He was a little over six feet, sported a slight beer gut. He wore checkered flannels, faded blue jeans, and his favorite drink was beer. He had brown eyes. Breece D’J Pancake wrote twelve stories, each about the same things: rural West Virginia, disappointment, lost souls. “I walk, but I’m not scared,” he once wrote. “I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.” He is one of the greats in a long line of criminally undervalued writers: Alice Munro, Percival Everett, Breece Pancake.
His life was active, oversized. The youngest of his siblings, he completed a bachelor’s degree in English Education at Marshall University in 1974, then studied under John Casey and James Alan McPherson at the University of Virginia creative writing program. He got drunk and hunted and fished, made an institution of competitive, hard-knuckled, no-nonsense academics simultaneously fear and admire him. He published six stories in his lifetime, converted to Catholicism in his twenties, worshipped devoutly the folk singer Phil Ochs, taught English at two Virginian military academies, was heralded by Kurt Vonnegut as “merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read,” and, on Palm Sunday 1979, at age twenty-six, shot himself in the head.
His motives remain unclear. What he left behind—twelve stories as airtight as they are generous, as polished as they are raw—tower above the postmodern, ironic work of his contemporaries. Originally collected and published as The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake in 1983 (Little, Brown & Company), these stories are somehow both deeply spiritual and dirt-under-nail real. They are gritty as well as lovely. Dreamlike as well as carnal. They look heavenwards with two feet always firmly planted on the West Virginian soil. They are the overlooked, underappreciated, best-written, least-read stories in the canon.
The elements that comprise Pancake’s bruisingly honest style are evident in the collection’s first story, “Trilobites.” It’s simple on its face. The narrator, Colly, lives in the rural West Virginian foothills with his mother on the family farm. His father, a war veteran, is long dead “after a sliver of metal from his old wound passed to his brain.” The crops are dying of blight and Colly’s mother is considering selling to the town loansman. She plans to move to Ohio. Colly, deeply conflicted, meets up with an old girlfriend named Ginny who is back for a few days. They drive out of town, make love in an old depot, and she leaves Colly once again.
In the world of “Trilobites” there are no unexpected complications, no twists or revelations. Colly, by the end, is fundamentally unchanged. The sentences are short and declarative. There’s a touch of Hemingway (whom Pancake admired) in the way events are relayed without flashy descriptions, metaphors; in the way absences are allowed to dominate the foreground, suggesting the depths beneath. “I feel better in a way I’ve never known,” Pancake writes, and it is representative of the pared-back and affectless style he utilizes throughout the collection to express the emotions of his characters. Landscape, for Pancake, is the descriptive sorcery illuminating undercurrents of meaning. “The fog curls little ghosts into the branches and gullies,” he writes. Colly’s psychic landscape, too, is spectral. In a way, he becomes a parallel personality with the West Virginian foothills. Both are witnesses to a rapidly modernizing world changing without them. “I look down the valley where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind.” Things once ancient and awe-inspiring are in the process of being rendered modern, industrial. Like the landscape, Colly is getting left behind. Powerless to do anything about it, bitterness and disappointment take root. His plans for the future have all been frustrated: “I wonder if she remembers the plans we made for the farm. And we wanted kids.” Indeed, powerlessness recurs throughout the story, extending even to Colly’s interpersonal relationships. “The house is quiet,” he notes, his mother crying on the porch, “and I can hear her out there sniffling. But what to hell can I do about it?” Like the foothills, Colly is rooted in place, paralyzed by the changing world.
The story’s primary image is Colly’s hunt for trilobites. His search, always fruitless, acts as a symbol without being overtly symbolic. They function as a tether to the pre-industrial world—a physical token signifying an ancient way of life that can still be rediscovered. But by failing to find any trilobites, a failure to maintain the tether bubbles up:
I look across the railroad to a field sown in timothy. There are wells there, pumps to suck the ancient gases. The gas burns blue, and I wonder if the ancient sun was blue. The tracks run on till they’re a dot in the brown haze. They give off clicks from their switches. Some tankers wait on the spur. Their wheels are rusting to the tracks. I wonder what to hell I ever wanted with trilobites.
In this passage, words are transformed into images, which are then transformed into deep feelings. The principle emotions at work in “Trilobites”—longing, nostalgia, paralysis—are related to the reader in an anti-melodramatic way. The pictures are handed over without analysis, allowed to speak for themselves. It is perhaps ironic, then, when only a page later Colly laments, “I want to talk, but the picture won’t become words.” In writing “Trilobites” Pancake accomplishes what Colly can’t: he takes words, makes them into pictures, which in turn, unexplained, are transfigured into deep emotions. Colly is unable to find a trilobite, and this suggests his failures. But Pancake succeeds where his character falls short. He finds his trilobite by writing this story.
Reading “Trilobites” for the first time was a revelatory experience. I devoured it. Then reread it. Then read it again. I had a realization, powerful in its simplicity, that stories don’t need to be grand-mythic, dramatic, or even special to be worth telling. Narratives about normal people, I suddenly understood, are worthwhile even when the tenor of their lives fails to reach the heightened vibrations we’ve come to expect from fiction. It is enough to simply be honest. Authentic and real, even when it is ordinary—perhaps even when it is uninteresting.
The criticisms occasionally levied against Pancake involve a caricatured portrait of his work that views him as a writer capitalizing on the narrow cultural worldview of lower-class West Virginia, and in so doing, fails to capture the universality expected of great literature. But according to Mike Murphy, in “American Myth: The Short, Beautiful Life of Breece D’J Pancake,” this argument is dismantled by the essay “Brush Breaker.” Written by Pancake’s distant cousin, the author Ann Pancake (whom he never met), the essay contends that the use of hyper-specificity is justified. “What Breece does,” she writes, “is dishonored by the word ‘represent.’ His art does not evoke. It invokes.” What “Trilobites” accomplishes is not simply to impersonate the lifestyle and landscape of West Virginia, its people. Rather, regional particularities and idiosyncrasies are utilized in order to achieve what Jon Michaud in the New Yorker calls “a broader portrait of the personal and societal wreckage left behind by mass industrialization.”
Or, as novelist Andre Dubus III puts it:
It would be a mistake to consider these stories merely regional, for they go far too deeply 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, by giving us its people in all their tangled humanity, Pancake has achieved the truly universal.
He's right, of course. What could be more universal than the “tangled humanity” of life? The messiness of existence is worth invoking in fiction. It applies across borders: class, race, gender, time. Towards the end of “Trilobites” Ginny asks, “What is it Colly? Why can’t we have any fun?” The dialog is quintessential Pancake: plain, unvarnished, double-barreled. Ginny’s question conveys without projection something profound to the reader. We are elegantly made aware of the ways in which the spark of youth eventually evaporates—a kind of draining of life from life itself. After sex, Ginny suddenly seems like a stranger to Colly: “I look a long time at the hollow shadows hiding her eyes. She is somebody I met a long time ago. I can’t remember her name for a minute, then it comes back to me.” We are made to recall the people in our lives who have drifted away—fading like an old photograph, like memory. Colly, picturing his father returning from war, thinks to himself, “Of a sudden, I know his mistake was coming back here to set that locust-tree post on the knob.” A different writer would milk this image for paragraphs. For Pancake it is a single sentence, come and gone, reminding us of the power our homes hold over us—romantic and dangerous at the same time. These moments are universal because they are profound without being obvious, insightful without being loud. They are epiphanies without melodrama. They suggest quietly the ways in which our humanity is bound up in a crippling nostalgia, married to it. Even if we didn’t grow up in rural West Virginia. Even if we aren’t poor or white. Even if we are not paralyzed by the past. “Trilobites” is a universal story because it explores how people embody the legacies of their predecessors, either by following in their footsteps or rebelling, how they desire a version of the world where things turned out differently, how they love or hate or have mixed-feelings about their past, their homes, and how they act out and embody those feelings in ways even they don’t understand. Like Colly, all of humanity is struggling to turn the pictures in their heads into words.
“Vintage Pancake” is how Tim Heffernan described “Trilobites” in the Atlantic. “It is not a story driven by plot,” he writes. “It is, instead, the transcript of a troubled mind’s attempts to come to peace with itself . . . the crisis is resolved by the main character’s breaking away from the past that seems to govern him.” Plot, and the resolution of plot, are rarely at the forefront of “Trilobites.” But things happen, of course. The mother decides to sell the farm. Colly tries, and fails, to find a trilobite. He and Ginny have mechanistic sex in an abandoned depot, and this seems to signify the coldness—the diminishment of true feeling—in the broader world (“She isn’t making love, she’s getting laid. All right, I think, all right. Get laid. I pull her pants around her ankles, rut her.”). Ginny goes away again, and Colly is left paralyzed and alone in the aftermath. Despite the bleakness, there is a bittersweet and tempered optimism to the character arc—an open-endedness. Colly’s “past that seems to govern him” doesn’t exactly “resolve” in the sense Heffernan suggests. But the possibility that maybe he’ll eventually get out animates the melancholy ending with a rare, haunting elegance.
All of Pancake’s understated epiphanies possess the qualities of prayer. On the final page, Ginny gone, Colly contemplates the possibility of leaving as well: “I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don’t know yet.” There is a ruthlessness to “Trilobites” as a whole, but this is not a ruthless ending. That clause—that “I don’t know yet”—provides a sliver of hope. The paresis of Colly’s life will perhaps always draw him back like an object in a whirlpool. Wanting to get out, eternally failing. But the possibility of reaching exit velocity, suggested without explanation, gives the final pages of “Trilobites” a distinctive resonance—the sense that if change ever comes it won’t arrive in a flurry of banners, music. Though only sixteen pages long, “Trilobites” captures the yawning meridian of an entire life. It demonstrates how the little shifting moments—the ordinary days composed of ordinary hours and minutes—are insignificant in isolation but all-encompassing when compounded. The ending, bleak as it is, suggests that the dramatic moments of life are special precisely because they are unspectacular, important because they are so painfully, utterly ordinary.
After Pancake’s suicide, Kurt Vonnegut penned a letter to the former’s teacher and friend, John Casey. “I give you my word of honor,” he wrote, “that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I’ve ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know.”
The hours surrounding Pancake’s death remain murky. A common version of events goes something along these lines: he had been drinking; for some reason he went into the home of a family that lived nearby; when they returned he made a noise of some kind; they became frightened, thought he was a burglar; Breece ran from the house to his own place; there, he took one of his shotguns, placed the barrel in his mouth, and blew his head off. But according to James Alan McPherson, another teacher and friend, this fails to adequately paint the picture. “I have never believed this story,” he writes in the foreword to The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. McPherson typifies Pancake as a “Provider”—the kind of person who, in trying to be a rock for others, was “inarticulate about his own feelings . . . frightened he would be rejected.” It must have been difficult, the foreword suggests, for someone like Pancake who had lived “a life of indiscriminate giving” to ask for help from others. Skeptical of the official story, McPherson furnishes an alternate theory:
I believe that Breece had had a few drinks and found himself locked inside [a] secret room he carried around with him. I believe that he had scattered so many gifts around . . . had given signals to so many people, that he felt it would be all right to ask someone to help him during what must have been a very hard night . . . I believe he panicked when the couple came home. Whatever the cause of his desperation, he could not express it from within the persona he had created. How does one say he expects things from people after having cultivated the persona of the Provider? How does one reconcile a lifetime of indiscriminate giving with the need for a gesture as simple as a kind word, an instant of basic human understanding? And what if the need is so bathed in bitterness and disappointment that the attempt itself, at a very critical time, seems hopeless except through the written word? In such a situation, a man might look at his typewriter, and then at the rest of the world, and just give up the struggle.
Is it possible that Pancake, like one of his transfixed characters, was driven by a need to break away from the past? Was he too left bitter by life, disappointed? Or does something else entirely explain the violence, the seeming randomness, of his death? There is often in Pancake’s work a strange conflation of the physical and the liminal. Space and time get mixed-up, confused, inextricable one from the other. “I look beyond the hills and time,” he writes in “Trilobites.” It is hard not to wonder, when he “looked at his typewriter, then at the rest of the world” if he, like Colly, saw a paralyzing future, time beating ceaselessly on, the old world changing, disappearing, with only him left behind to mourn its passing.
We are only now beginning to properly mourn his passing. The twelve stories Breece D’J Pancake left behind are exquisite, brilliantly crafted. They will live on, even though he didn’t. Masterclasses in understatement, they demonstrate the ways in which drama can be most effective when it is least, well, dramatic. “Trilobites” is his magnum opus, arguably one of the five or six greatest short stories ever written in English. Unlike the farms and fields and foothills of West Virginia, that will not disappear or change. Cradled in the afterglow of his genius, one hopes that he understood this to be true—felt it in his bones. One hopes that, like Colly, he simply no longer had the ability to turn pictures into words and couldn’t see another way out. “I walk, but I’m not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.” Ultimately, Breece D’J Pancake couldn’t walk anymore. We can’t know if he was scared when he pulled the trigger. But his stories, if we are lucky, will remain with us through time as it changes, as it moves away in rings for a million years, and a million years after that.