Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

book review

“The Collected Breece D’J Pancake”

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Up to a point, the similarities between John Kennedy Toole and Breece D’J Pancake are uncanny.

Toole (1937-1969) wrote two novels. The first was The Neon Bible, which was published a decade after the second novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Both received repeated rejections from publishers. Toole would eventually commit suicide in 1969. His mother, Thelma, was determined to see A Confederacy of Dunces published, and she pestered publishers and writers for years, finally wearing down Walker Percy who read it and was blown away. It took Percy three years to find a publisher, and it was LSU Press. A Confederacy of Dunces was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

Pancake (an unusual but real last name) wrote 12 short stories and a few fragments of others. Born in 1952 in West Virginia, he managed to graduate from Marshall University. and taught at two military academies. He enrolled in the creative program at the University of Virginia, where he sensed a “class” consciousness between those who held only a B.A. degree and those who had more advanced degrees. But Pancake was the one selling stories to The Atlantic, which made a typographic error when they printed his stories, changing his middle initials “D.J.” to D’J; he kept it. 

He killed himself in 1974 at age 26. His 12 stories represented his entire literary output, but his mother Helen was determined to see them published in book form, which they were in 1983. In 2020, the Library of America republished the 12 stories, along with fragments of other stories and his letters as The Collected Breece D’J Pancake. The introduction is by novelist and short story writer Jayne Anne Phillips, who would go on to win the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Night Watch. The collection also includes the 1983 introduction by James Alan McPherson, who was a director of the creative writing program at Virginia. 

The stories are absolute gems, and even the fragments are excellent. For all of the stories, Pancake drew upon his knowledge of and upbringing in West Virginia. These are the stories of the people left behind America’s growth and prosperity. A farmer trying to keep a dying farm alive. A coal miner who somehow still has work, drinks, and shoots pool. A man who encounters an underage girl working as a prostitute. The death of two teenagers that’s meant to look accidental. A snowplow driver who gives a lift to a hitchhiker. Men who fight for money while onlookers bet. A man on parole out for revenge. And more.

Breece D’J Pancake

The stories aren’t minimalist, which was a quite popular writing movement in the 1970s and early 1980s), but they are written sparingly, with no word superfluous or wasted. Pancake had an ear for authentic conversation; you know you are reading words that sounded exactly like people of the time and place spoke. 

Both Toole and Pancake died way too young. Both left an impressive if limited literary estate. Both were so good one has to wonder what else they might have written had they lived. But both left us with something important and valuable. And both are well worth reading.

Related:

“Time and Again” – short story by Breece D’J Pancake at The Short Story Project.

Top photograph: New River Gorge National Park, West Virginia, by Ryan Arnst via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Southern Tradition at Bay” by Richard Weaver

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It’s something of an obvious truism to say that “winners write history.” That’s my starting point for considering The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought by Richard Weaver.

First published in 1968, the work was republished in 1989, and then again in the past year. It is a thoughtful examination, or re-examination, of the mind of the South after the Civil War and how Southerners interpreted their defeat. Weaver isn’t about defending the “Lost Cause” as much as is he focused on what was in the mind of the South before the war, what was driving those thoughts, how it developed during the war and after.

If you read the vast majority of histories and commentaries on the Civil War and its causes (and I read more than my fair share during the research for my novel Brookhaven), the vast majority will tell you that the cause, THE cause, was slavery. That determination, however, ignores considerable evidence. Even most northerners believed that the war was about preserving the Union, not to eradicate slavery. Slavery certainly moved more into the driver’s seat with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Henry Grady, who coined “The New South”

Weaver takes a different approach. He spent considerable time and effort examining memoirs, letters, journals, and other “first-hand” materials and concluded that what drove secession and war for the South, and in reverse for the North, was the clash of what was essentially a feudal society motivated by a romantic idealism and the egalitarian, more mechanized ideas born during the French Revolution and eventually finding their way into industrialization. Notions of chivalry were no match for the industrial juggernaut the Northern states were becoming. 

These ideas are not merely historical; they still are playing themselves out in culture, politics, and even religion. Consider the writings of Wendell Berry about localism, community, and agriculture, and the research writer Paul Kingsnorth has been doing on what he calls “the machine.” We’re still grappling with many of the same ideas that Weaver saw as bringing on the Civil War and what followed. After the war, Southerners, he says, were outraged at being called traitors; they saw the North as having betrayed the constitution and its principles. This belief seasoned their defenses, eventually leading to the “Lost Cause” idea. 

He considers the background or heritage of the war, what the apologists said, what both Southern and Northern soldiers themselves said in letters and memoirs, the fiction that came from the war, what notable figures like Henry Grady (the Atlanta publisher who coined the phrase “the New South”) said and defended, and the writings of the critics of the Southern feudal tradition. 

Rochard Weaver

His conclusion: “The South possesses an inheritance which it has imperfectly understood and little used. It is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness. I am conscious that this reverses the common judgment; but it may yet appear that the North, by its ready embrace of science and rationalism, impoverished itself, and that the South by clinging more or less unashamedly to the primitive way of life prepared itself for the longer run.”

Weaver (1910-1963) taught English at the University of Chicago, yet he was mostly known for his work on intellectual history, rhetoric, and politics. A native of North Carolina, he received his A.B. degree in English from the University of Kentucky and his M.A. degree from Vanderbilt University.  Before the University of Chicago, he taught at Auburn and Texas A&M universities and then returned to school to earn a Ph.D. degree from Louisiana State University. He was influenced by the so-called Agrarians, which included Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom. 

His thesis was titled “The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture.” It would eventually be published as this book, The Southern Tradition at Bay. Throughout his life, he was strongly associated with political and social conservatives. Having reading the work, it seems that Weaver thoughtfully, quietly, and comprehensively made his case.

The Biography of a Civil War Regiment

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In my historical novel Brookhaven, the elderly Sam McClure recalls his experience with the Iron Brigade in the Civil War. It was of short duration, only about three weeks, but he attached himself to the brigade’s soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg. He was following his orders; he was all of 13 years old, but he was working as a spy for a Confederate group called Colby’s Rangers.

Sam admits he never really learned anything of importance; what he did was to run errands and keep the soldiers entertained with recitations of poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The brigade suffered a high casualty rate during the war; it was known for its fearlessness. Sam meets up with a bare handful of survivors at the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913, but he never reveals his identity. He listens as the veterans eventually discuss “the boy who recited Mr. Longfellow’s poems.” 

He tells his listeners that he’s always felt bad for misleading the men; the reporter Elizabeth Putnam gives him another insight, that he provided a respite to the men from the horrors of war. Her words move Sam to such an extent that he spends time alone in the woods.

Historian James Marten has written a somewhat unusual history of a key part of the Iron Brigade. The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment is not an history of all of the battles the regiment fought in. The battles are included, of course, because they played such an important role in the lives of regiment’s men. But Marten uses the word “biography” very deliberately; he’s not telling the story of the regiment’s history so much as he’s telling the story of men who comprised the regiment. As he writes, the book is a story of “how men made war and what the war made of those men.”

Marten’s subject: the 2,000 men who served in the regiment at one point or another. The men wore distinctive black hats; in fact, they because known as the “Black Hat Brigade” as well as the “Iron Brigade” for their seemingly utter fearlessness. And the regiment was changing fairly constantly; the often horrendous losses suffered required a constant infusion of recruits. And his study goes well beyond the war years of 1861-1865, because while the fighting may have stopped, the impact went on for decades. One could argue that we still feel the impact of the American Civil War.

He addresses four areas: the men’s military history as well as their lives as veterans; what they survived as veterans; how the generation of Civil War men “invented the very idea of war,” and the kind of “constructed community” that the Sixth Wisconsin became. It’s a fascinating way to tell a well-known story.

James Marten

Marten in a professor emeritus of history at Marquette University. His academic work has focused in two areas: the Civil War and the histories of children and youth. His more than 20 books includes The Children’s Civil War, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace, and Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. He is a past president f the Society of Civil War Historians and the Society for the History of Children and Youth. 

The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War is an extraordinarily well-research account of a famous Civil War regiment, not only through the war years but in the long decades that followed. And it explains why war isn’t only what happens on the battlefield.

Top photograph: Men of the Sixth Wisconsin in their famous black hats.

“Defending Dixie’s Land” by Isaac Bishop

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I grew up with relatives who were still fighting the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, as my grandmother described it). I knew about the Lost Cause, usually referred to simply as “The Cause.” I had watched Gone with the Wind countless times with my mother, and I knew it not as a movie based on a novel but as history. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that my American history teaching challenged our class to explore received history and find out what really happened in the Civil War.

It was an eye-opening exercise. And yet I knew that while my relatives and my received wisdom were largely and mostly wrong, my understanding wasn’t entirely wrong. For example, the abolition movement in America was empowered by a powerful propaganda war, which often exaggerated reality to score points in public opinion (as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, himself a part of that propaganda war, would come to realize and regret). Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin without having set foot on a slave-owning plantation, yet Northern readers accepted it as fact. And the idea of secession by individual states were first advanced and popularized, not by the southern states, but by the New England states, which wanted high tariffs to protect their own manufacturing interests and were willing to entertain leaving the Union to achieve their goals. 

Still, it was something of a surprise to read Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About the South and the Civil War (2023) by Isaac Bishop, a pen name for writer Jeb Smith. He’s born and raised in Vermont, no less (a Yankee!). 

Bishop’s journey into the Civil War, began with his studies on the American Revolution and the country’s founders. He realized that most of what he was learning was about the founders from the Northern colonies, with very little being said about the founders from the South and what they believed. From there he studied what he terms “the most terrible sin in our history” – slavery. His previous understanding began to unravel. And the more he looked, the more unraveled it became.

Wherever possible, he looked at original source documents – writings of the protagonists, accounts by former slaves, and the people on both sides who were living through a tumultuous political conflict that became a devastating military conflict.

In Defending Dixie’s Land, Bishop lays out his defense of the South by examining several broad areas: slavery, secession of the cotton states, secession of the Upper South, the Union as created by the founders (all of them), African-American support for the South during the Civil War, America’s agricultural past, treatment of minorities by both North and South, slavery around the world, and finally the fundamental antagonism between North and South. The North, he argues, accepted modernity and the radical beliefs of the French Revolution, while South is “perhaps best understood as a Protestant version of medieval Europe.” 

Isaac Bishop / Jeb Smith

Yes, my mouth hung open in surprise as I read the book, especially when he writes about the individual he views as the chief villain in the play – Abraham Lincoln. Even if I might disagree with him on many things, I was still left with a sense of Bishop may not be entirely right, and he may not be even largely right, but it’s difficult to ignore or discount many of the arguments he makes.

Bishop, a penname for author Jeb Smith, has published two other books: Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, and Liberty; and The Road Goes Ever On and On: A New Perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-earth. He’s written more than 100 articles for such publications as History is Now, The Postal Magazine, the Libertarian Institute, History Medieval, Rutland Herald, Vermont Daily Chronicle, Medieval Magazine, Medieval Archives, the Libertarian Christian Institute, and Fellowship & Fairydust Magazine. He lives in Vermont.

Top illustration: an 1852 publicity poster for Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

From a Review of “Brookhaven”

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From a review of “Brookhaven” by Jody Collins on Substack:

“As you know, Miss Putnam, every story has a before, a during, and an after. I think it’s how we make sense of the stories we hear, to organize them that way. Novels are like that, generally.” Sam McClure (the elder) in “Brookhaven” by @Glynn Young. Historical fiction is my new favorite genre and Glynn Young’s story, Brookhaven is the main reason why. I was a poor student of the Civil War when I was in school, so I learned a lot about particulars of a number of battles, as well as the effects of the war on the South. Young manages to weave a love story into a mystery surrounding a stealth-footed youth whose undercover intelligence (supposedly) aided Robert E. Lee and his army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. This poet also enjoyed Young’s addition of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem at the head of each chapter, making Brookhaven both a time capsule of literature and a captivating, history book-worthy tale. (from my Amazon review). If you’re a historical fiction/love story fan, I highly recommend “Brookhaven.” 

“Grace Is Where I Live” by John Leax

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From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books. 

In 1993, Leax published Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation. It describes how he became a writer, starting with believing he would be a novelist. Early on came the discouragement of teachers and mentors, who didn’t think he was cut out to be a novelist. He turned to essays and poetry, it was there he found early acceptance and success.

While Grace Is Where I Live is not a how-to guide, it is filled with a kind of humble wisdom – wisdom learned the hard way. Leax discusses holiness and craft, stewardship and witness, and story and place – all vital considerations for a writer who is also a Christian. He includes his notes from a sabbatical journal, and then distills what he’s learned about his writing, his calling, and himself in the final four chapters.

John Leax

Of all the books on writing I’ve read, this one comes closest to my own experience. “I have a sense,” he writes, “that calling is not to be confused with being a writer – one punching out the books and making a name, being read and admired. The calling has to do with sitting here and accepting silence if necessary. The silence of not writing. The silence of keeping back my poems until I have tested them in time. The silence of having the poems rejected.” 

The last silence is the worst, he says. If you consider your work a calling, rejection can mean God is not ready for you to be heard, striking “at both my best and my worst. And I cannot separate them.”

He tells a beautiful story in these essays – a story of finding his way to what he was called to do. 

Grace Is Where I Live is long out of print; even in one or two newer editions. If you can get your hands on a copy, it is well worth the time and effort.

Top photograph by Christin Hume via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Related: 

Nightwatch by John Leax.