I think you should come over (drive or train, I’ll pay your expenses and ‘put you up’) because if you do the preface I feel you should be more familiar with this valley and [my son] Breece’s surroundings as well as what you knew of him in Charlottesville.
– Letter from Mrs Helen Pancake,
February 10, 1981
He never seemed to find a place
With the flatlands and the farmers
So he had to leave one day
He said, To be an Actor.
He played a boy without a home
Torn, with no tomorrow
Reaching out to touch someone
A stranger in the shadows.
Then Marcus heard on the radio
That a movie star was dying.
He turned the treble way down low
So Hortense could go on sleeping.
– ‘Jim Dean of Indiana,’
Phil Ochs
In late September of 1976, in the autumn of the Bicentennial year, I began my career as a teacher at the University of Virginia. I had been invited to join the writing program there by John Casey, who was then on leave. I had been lent the book-lined office of David Levin, a historian of Colonial American literature, who was also on leave that year. I had been assigned the status of associate professor of English, untenured, at my own request. I had come to Virginia from a Negro college in Baltimore. I had accepted Virginia’s offer for professional and personal reasons: I wanted to teach better-motivated students and, on a spiritual level, I wanted to go home.
If I recall correctly, 1976 was a year of extraordinary hope in American politics. James Earl Carter, a southerner, was running for presidency, and people in all parts of the country, black and white, were looking to that region with a certain optimism. Carter had inspired in a great many people the belief that this New South was the long-promised one. And there were many of us who had followed the ancestral imperative, seeking a better life in the North and in the West, who silently hoped that the promises made during the Reconstruction were finally going to be kept. While in the ‘white’ American community Jimmy Carter’s candidacy provoked an interest in the nuances of southern speech and in the ingredients of southern cooking, in the ‘black’ American community the visibility of Carter – his speaking in a black Baptist church, his walking the streets of Harlem and Detroit – seemed to symbolise the emergence of a southern culture, of which they had long been a part, into the broader American imagination. The emergence of Carter suggested a kind of reconciliation between two peoples shaped by this common culture. His appearance was a signal to refugees from the South – settled somewhat comfortably in other regions – that we were now being encouraged to reoccupy native ground. There were many of us who turned our imaginations towards the ancestral home.
I had left the South at twenty-one, a product of its segregated schools and humanly degrading institutions, and had managed to make a career for myself in the North. Growing up in the South, during those twenty-one years, I had never had a white friend. And although, in later years, I had known many white southerners in the North and in the West, these relationships had been compromised by the subtle fact that a southerner, outside the South, is often viewed as outside his proper context, and is sometimes as much of an outsider as a black American.
Friendships grounded in mutual alienation and self-consciously geared to the perceptions of others are seldom truly tested. They lack an organic relationship to a common landscape, a common or ‘normal’ basis for the evolution of trust and mutual interest. Mutual self-interest – the need of the white southerners to appear ‘right’ in the eyes of sometimes condescending northerners (the South being the traditional scapegoat on all matters racial) and the need of the black southerner for access to somewhat commonly held memories of the South and of southern culture – is the basis for political alliances rather than friendships. To achieve this true friendship, it is necessary for the two southerners to meet on southern soil. And if growing up in the South never presented this opportunity, and if one is still interested in ‘understanding’ that part of oneself that the ‘other’ possesses, it becomes necessary to return to the South. Ironically, while the candidacy of Jimmy Carter represented a political alliance between white and black southerners, the real meaning of the alliance, in 1976 at least, resided in the quality of the personal relationships between these two separate but same peoples on their home ground, in the homeplace. Perhaps this is what I was looking for in the fall of 1976, at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia.
I remember two incidents from those first days at Virginia, while I sat in David Levin’s book-lined office. An overrefined and affected young man from Texas came in to inquire about my courses, and as I rose from my chair to greet him, he raised his hand in a gesture that affirmed the Old South tradition of noblesse oblige. He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no! You don’t have to get up.’
The second incident was the sound of a voice, and came several days later. It was in the hall outside my office door and it was saying, ‘I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President.’ The pitch and rhythms of the voice conveyed the necessary messages: the rhythm and intonation were southern, lower-middle-class or lower-class southern, the kind that instantly calls to mind the word cracker. Its loudness, in the genteel buzz and hum of Wilson Hall, suggested either extreme arrogance or a certain insecurity. Why the voice repeated Carter’s campaign slogan was obvious to anyone: the expectations of the South, especially of the lower-class and middle-class South, were with Carter. He was one of them. His campaign promised to redefine the image of those people whom William Faulkner had found distasteful, those who were replacing a decadent and impotent aristocracy. These were the people whose moral code, beyond a periodically expressed contempt for black Americans, had remained largely undefined in the years since Faulkner.
The bearer of this voice, when he appeared in my doorway, conformed to the herald that had preceded him. He was wiry and tall, just a little over six feet, with very direct, deep-seeing brown eyes. His straw-blond hair lacked softness. In his face was that kind of half-smile/half-grimace that says, ‘I’ve seen it all and I still say, “So what?”’ He wore a checkered flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, and a round brass U.S. Army-issue belt buckle over a slight beer belly. I think he also wore boots. He stood in the doorway, looking into the handsomely appointed office, and said, ‘Buddy, I want to work with you.’
His name, after I asked it again, was still Breece Pancake.
There was something stiff and military in his bearing. I immediately stereotyped him as of German ancestry (in the South, during its many periods of intolerance, German names have been known to metamorphose into metaphorical Anglo-Saxon ones, Gaspennys and perhaps Pancakes included). He had read some of my work, he said, and wanted to show me some of his. His directness made me wary of him. While I sat at a desk (in academia, a symbol of power), he seemed determined to know me, the person, apart from the desk. In an environment reeking with condescension, he was inviting me to abandon my very small area of protection.
He asked if I drank beer, if I played pinball, if I owned a gun, if I hunted or fished. When these important cultural points had been settled, he asked, almost as an afterthought, if he could sign up to do independent study with me. When we had reached agreement, he strolled back out into the hall and resumed shouting, ‘I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President! I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President!’ I recall now that there was also in his voice a certain boastful tone. It matched and complemented that half-smile of his that said, ‘So what?’ Breece Pancake was a West Virginian, that peculiar kind of mountain-bred southerner, or part-southerner, who was just as alienated as I was in the hushed gentility of Wilson Hall.
The University of Virginia, during that time at least, was as fragmented as the nation. There were subtle currents that moved people in certain directions, toward certain constituency groups, and I soon learned that it was predictable that Breece Pancake should come to my office seeking something more than academic instruction. The university, always a state-supported school, had until very recently functioned as a kind of finishing school for the sons of the southern upper class. About a generation before, it had opened its doors to the sons of the middle class. And during the 1960s it had opened them farther to admit women and black students. In an attempt to make the institution a nationally recognised university, an effort was made to attract more students from the affluent suburbs of Washington and from the Northeast. More than this, an extraordinarily ambitious effort was made to upgrade all the departments within the university. Scholars had been recruited from Harvard and Princeton and Stanford and Berkeley and Yale. The institution claimed intellectuals from all parts of the world. The faculty was and remains among the best in the nation.
But these rapid changes, far from modifying the basic identity of the institution, caused a kind of cultural dislocation, a period of stasis in the attempted redefinition of the basic institutional identity. In many respects, it was like a redecoration of the interior of a goldfish bowl. Many of the sons of the southern gentry, seeking the more traditional identity, began attending Vanderbilt, Tulane, Chapel Hill, and Washington and Lee. And while the basic identity of the school remained southern, very few southerners were visible. One result was the erosion of the values that had once given the institution an identity. Another was stratification by class and color considerations. Preppies banded together. So did women. So did the few black students. So did, in their fraternities and clubs, the remnants of the old gentry.
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 ‘Bullshit!’ 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.’
You may keep the books or anything Breece gave you – he loved to give but never learned to receive. He never felt worthy of a gift – being tough on himself. His code of living was taught to him by his parents – be it Greek, Roman or whatever, it’s just plain old honesty. God called him home because he saw too much dishonesty and evil in this world and he couldn’t cope.
– Letter from Mrs Helen Pancake,
February 5, 1981
And I won’t be running from the rain, when I’m gone
And I can’t even suffer from the pain, when I’m gone
There’s nothing I can lose or I can gain, when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.
And I won’t be laughing at the lies, when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why, when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die, when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.
– ‘When I’m Gone,’
Phil Ochs
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 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 emphasised 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 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.
Jim, ‘Bullshit’ was one of B’s choice sayings – in fact he used to say he wanted his short stories entitled ‘Bullshit Artist.’ Love his heart!
– Letter from Mrs Helen Pancake,
February 5, 1981
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free,
And what’s this got to do with me?
I declare the war is over. It’s over. It’s over.
– ‘The War Is Over,’
Phil Ochs
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 Wertmuller, 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.
In the early summer of 1978 I left Charlottesville for New Haven, Connecticut. Carter was still President, but my ideas about the South had changed dramatically. I hoped that, with luck, I would never have to return to Charlottesville. I began making plans to resume my old life-style as a refugee from the South. But if life has any definition at all, it is the things that happen to us while we are making plans. In the early fall of that year I found out that I would be a father before spring arrived. Around that same time, a package from Breece, mailed from Charlottesville, arrived at my apartment in New Haven. I did not open it. I knew there would be a gift inside, but I also knew that renewing my connection with Breece would take my memories back to Charlottesville, and I wanted to be completely free of the place. The package from Breece remained unopened until the late evening of April 9, 1979.
On the evening of April 8 I had a dream that included Breece. I was trapped in a room by some menacing and sinister people and they were forcing me to eat things I did not want to eat. Breece was there, but I cannot remember the part he played in the drama. I woke up before dawn to find that my wife’s contractions had begun. The rest of the day was spent in the delivery room of the Yale-New Haven Hospital. In the late afternoon I went to the Yale campus and taught a class, which earned me one hundred dollars. Then I walked home, happy with the new direction my life had taken as the hardworking father of Rachel Alice McPherson. At my apartment, however, there was a telegram from John Casey, sent from Charlottesville. It informed me that on the previous night Breece Pancake had killed himself.
I called Charlottesville immediately and was told certain facts by Jane Casey, John’s wife: Breece had been drinking. He had, for some reason, gone into the home of a family near his little house and had sat there, in the dark, until they returned. When he made a noise, either by getting up or by saying something, they became frightened and thought he was a burglar. Breece ran from the house to his own place. There, for some reason, he took one of his shotguns, put the barrel in his mouth, and blew his head off.
I have never believed this story.
I speculate that Breece had his own reasons for hiding in a neighbor’s house. They may have had to do with personal problems, or they may have had to do with emotional needs. Whatever their source, I am sure his reasons were extraordinary ones. As a writer, if I am to believe anything about Breece’s ‘suicide,’ extract any lesson from it, that lesson has to do with the kind of life he led. I believe that Breece had had a few drinks and found himself locked inside that secret room he carried around with him. I believe that he had scattered so many gifts around Charlottesville, 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 that he was so inarticulate about his own feelings, so frightened that he would be rejected, that 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 explain the contents of a secret room to people who, though physically close, still remain strangers? 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 this 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. Phil Ochs hanged himself. Breece Pancake shot himself. The rest of us, if we are lucky enough to be incapable of imagining such extreme acts of defiance, manage to endure.
Very late in the evening of the day I got the news, I opened the package that Breece had sent me the previous fall. It contained some old photographs of railroad workers, some poetry, and a letter. The first line of the letter told the entire story: ‘You are under no obligation to answer this.’ But he had hoped anyway that I would. The pictures were from his family collection, given to him in trust by his Aunt Julia, who was soon to die. He wanted to give them away rather than sell them. The poetry represented an extension of this same impulse. ‘Also enclosed are some poems you might find interesting – again, I’m not asking for response, just sharing news. I went to Staunton Correctional Institution (the pen) and stumbled onto this guy [an inmate]. Not knowing anything about poetry, I gave [his poems] to [the poet] Greg Orr … He liked them and is doing what he can to help find the proper market thru CODA. Anyway, what was that Latin phrase about the Obligations of Nobility? If it’s what I think it means – helping folks – it isn’t bad as a duty or a calling. We’d both better get back to work.’
Looked at in purely sociological terms Breece Pancake’s work was helping people, giving to people. I think that part of him, the part of West Virginia that borders on Virginia, wanted to affirm those old, aristocratic, eighteenth-century values that no longer had a context, especially in Charlottesville. He was working toward becoming an aristocrat in blue jeans. But he was from the southern lower-middle class, his accent had certain associations, he could find no conventional way to express his own needs, and while he was alive there were many of us who could not understand who or what he was.
Several weeks later, I sent the fossil he had given me, the trilobite, to the girl who had allowed him to kiss her cheek after several dates. She had left Charlottesville, and was then working in New York.
JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON