Volume 30, Number 5 · March 31, 1983
Violent Places
By Robert Towers
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
foreword by James Alan McPherson, afterword by John Casey
Little, Brown, 178 pp., $13.50
Ironweed
by William Kennedy
Viking, 227 pp., $14.75
The 'packaging' of The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake seems expressly designed to corrupt judgment. The first sentence of the jacket flap informs us that the writer killed himself before his twenty-seventh birthday. Before reaching the stories themselves, the reader is waylaid by a foreword by James Alan McPherson—an edgy, somewhat defensive, and moving account of the friendship between the established black writer and the truculent, hard-drinking young white man from the West Virginia hills as it developed in the not always friendly environment of Mr. Jefferson's university. Then, when the stories have been read, one comes (if one hasn't already succumbed to the temptation to jump ahead) to an afterword—less defensive, equally moving—by John Casey, the director of creative writing at the University of Virginia, who became not only Breece Pancake's friend but also his godfather at the time of Pancake's evidently troubled conversion to Catholicism. An anguished and difficult friend, a barroom fighter, an impulsive giver of gifts, a Catholic suicide—the Breece Pancake of these short memoirs conforms almost too patly to the image of the doomed young writer so cherished by a romantic and vulturine public.
Review, 2550 words
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