Remembering a great West Virginia writer

 It's no secret that my favorite West Virginia writer is Breece Pancake from my hometown of Milton. If you know anything about him, you probably know that he took his own life in Charlottesville, Virginia on Palm Sunday in  1979.

By the time of his death, he had published some stories in The Atlantic and literary magazines. His book of short stories, appropriately titled The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake was put together posthumously and published in 1983 after massive efforts by his mother Helen Pancake, my friend and co-worker at the time, and author/teacher John Casey.

Although the last few decades hardly qualify as the Golden Age of short stories, Breece's book has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages. I was pleasantly surprised when a friend sent me this link to a recent post about him from The Paris Review by fellow West Virginia writer, by way of Buckhannon, Jayne Ann Phillips.

Here's a sample, but there's way more:

Breece D’J Pancake’s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time. Forty years of the author’s absence cast no shadow. The shadings, the broad arcs of interior, antediluvian time, are inside the sentences. The ancient hills and valleys of southern West Virginia remain Breece Pancake’s home place; the specificity and nuance of his words embody the vanished farms, the dams and filled valleys, the strip-mined or exploded mountains. His stories are startling and immediate: these lives informed by loss and wrenching cruelty retain the luminous dignity that marks the endurance of all that is most human.

THE JINGLE-MAN

Welcome to Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

In some ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the Rodney Dangerfield of American literature--he don't get no respect.

T.S. Eliot said some snarky things about him, for example, once stating that Poe "had the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary eminence of the early and mid 1800s, famously referred to him in a letter as "the jingle-man." To be fair, if you do read or hear more than the proper measure of his poetry, the jingles are very audible.

But here's the deal, Ralphie and Tommy Boy: more people know The Telltale Heart and The Raven than Self Reliance or The Waste Land.

(Note: I'm not implying that this is necessarily good thing.)

John Allan, his foster father, had a pretty sharp take on Poe's genius: "His talents are of an order that can never prove a comfort to their possessor."

Here's James Russell Lowell's take in verse:

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."

The snooty Henry James--who was nowhere near as cool as his brother William--wrote that

With all due respect to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Walt Whitman was more charitable:

Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.

(If it's any consolation, they loved him in France. But then they liked Jerry Lewis and Derrida over there too.)

But here's the deal: it doesn't really matter what the critics think. Poe has won the verdict of popularity. He was the father of the modern detective story and horror tale and a major early influence on science fiction. Those are three of the most popular literary genres (i.e. they are things people read voluntarily).

The accursed heart still beats...

AN ANNIVERSARY TO REMEMBER. Seventy five years ago this month, FDR--peace be unto him--was elected to the presidency.

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY is the subject of this article from Time.

SPEAKING OF MORALITY AND SCIENCE, here's a good slam on economic libertarianism with a science slant.

FOR A 425 MILLION YEAR OLD PETRIFIED VELVET WORM UPDATE click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED