Breece D'J Pancake

Back at UVa., a bit of a legend in the halls of the English department was the brief tenure of one Breece D'J Pancake, who came from the hollows of West Virginia to the more refined academic circles of neighboring Virginia and made quite a splash in his few short years.

He got some stories published in The Atlantic, made a deep impression on those he met and, apparently, like any good artist, took his drinking very seriously. Joyce Carol Oates compared him (favorably) to Hemingway. Others compared him to Faulkner. At age 27 he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off.

I recall a professor or two mentioning him reverently. (He was there just a few years before I was.) Being an underly curious ungrad -- especially as it pertained to things not actually assigned to me -- I never explored his work at the time. And over the years as he (or the notion of him) would occasionally pop into my head, I'd wonder whether I'd misheard or even imagined the whole thing. Indeed, the name "Pancake," which was all I recalled of his name, didn't exactly inspire confidence that he was anything more than a phantom from some hungover portion of my brain.

Then along came the Internet, and I recently googled him. The first fact I found was that Breece Pancake was his actual given name. (He was from West Virginia, after all.) The unusual "D'J" was the result of a printer's error on one of his galleys. He liked the apostrophe so much he adopted it.

In any case, I found a little volume of his short stories at my neighborhood Borders and started reading. He really was something. I suppose he's Hemingway-esque in the tough, muscular nature of his stories. But they're harder, grittier and more modern. And he had a bit of a poetic flare, especially in evoking the countryside where he grew up -- again, much like Hemingway could do:

"Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street's yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on."

He's also reminiscent of Faulkner in laying out the dysfunction and the culture of his homeland -- lots of fights and filth and whores and incest. And again, like Hemingway, lots of hunting and fishing and drinking.

Anyway, it's been a bit of a joy discovering his works -- the few that exist, at least. It's reminded me that I have a bit of a love/hate thing with short stories. I like that you can pick up a collection like this and start anywhere and get a full story if you have just a limited time. On the other hand, every chapter starts a whole new investment of time and energy in figuring out who these characters are and what's going on.

There are, sadly, so few pictures of him, but the one up there is the most common one you'll see. I love it. For better or for worse, it captures that sadly romantic image of the brooding, tortured artist. Which works just fine for the people who aren't the friends and loved ones constantly hurt by that person's illness.

Breece D'J Pancake -- check him out.