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Annie Proulx's bad geography
Mitchell Fair, a New York architect, and his kitchen-designer wife, Eugenie, make the move to Wyoming. They aren’t young. She has kept secrets from him, and Wyoming will be quick to take advantage of that. Seeing for the first time “the high prairie and the luminous yellow distance”, Mitchell feels he has stumbled into a landscape never before seen on the earth; Eugenie thinks that, out here, everything ends in blood. They soon adopt a routine: he drives around in an old truck in the dark and the snow, while she stares out of the picture window at “the wind-damaged sky” and tries to make conversation in the local store. He falls in love with a species of antelope – “evolved on the high plains over 20 million years along with wolves and bison” – because its coloration reminds him of a pair of golf shoes he once owned; she plans to write two books, The Real Urban Kitchen – Takeout and Deli; and Global Kitchen. But neither Annie Proulx nor Wyoming is having any of this. The story draws tight around them, its flat title, “Man Crawling Out Of Trees”, generating a shiver before a single page is turned. Proulx’s first collection of Wyoming stories, Close Range (1999),
was prefaced with a quotation she attributed to a rancher: “Reality’s
never been of much use out here”. There was a debilitating wryness
to this joke; and, when you read the magnificent “Brokeback Mountain”,
a lot less humour than first appeared. In Proulx’s mythology, Wyoming
is what you make it; and that will always mean a conflict with what Wyoming
makes you. Bad Dirt takes a second tour along the interface between these
two states, where anxiety opens up the landscape like an old map, along
the worn folds and creases and unmade backroads of which we find not just
the geography we expect – the rural towns, population fifty, which
at dusk stain the mountain darkness with “a globe of light like an
incandescent jellyfish” – but also what Proulx calls the “real
Wyoming”, the trailer parks full of “poor, hard-working transients,
tough as nails and restless, going where the dollars grew”. Fresh
from Brooklyn Heights, Mitchell and Eugenie Fair quickly decide that Wyoming
is peripheral to the real world; but there are real worlds everywhere
here, their considerable masses often less peripheral to one another than
in a kind of grazing collision – old against new, Back East against
Old West, the vanishing ranch life against the “real Wyoming”
of methane-gas One of the consequences of this encounter is a flip of the magnetic poles,
from the cowboy to the cosmetic. “The Wamsutter Wolf” turns
over the trailor trash of a methane boom town, “a hairline off I-80”,
to reveal a much older predator among the rubbish. In “The Indian
Wars Refought”, six cans of ancient movie film are brought to light
in a soon-to-be-demolished ironfront building. The contents turn out to
be Buffalo Bill Cody’s cynical 1913 revision of the Indian massacres,
and family history collides with the real thing. “What Kind of Life is a mess of layers, personal, social and – primarily for Proulx – temporal. Archives, personal and official, dominate these stories. People turn over the goods of the newly dead, in rooms stuffed with junk. Research has always been Proulx’s forte. She is contemptuous of character the way other people write it, drawn instead to history as the “minute examination of the lives of ordinary people through account books, wills, marriages and death records”. Despite that, and given her equal tendency to court the burlesque, it was easy enough to read “Brokeback Mountain” or “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” and believe in her Wyoming people, with their grim lives built from will, dullness and resentment. Everything she noticed, everything she brought to the reader’s attention, seemed to spring from the plains themselves like some kind of vegetation, thin and, to all intents and purposes, useless, yet impossible to shift. You felt that human life in Wyoming had established itself like that. By extension, you felt, at least for the duration of the stories, that human life generally was probably quite like that too. It was an experience similar to reading Ethan Frome at sixteen, though funnier. But here in Bad Dirt it is hard not to feel as if much – although by no means all – springs not from inside people, or landscapes, or even the interpreted paper trails of people and their landscapes, but directly and without much modification from the archives of the McKracken Research Library or somewhere similar. This is a mixed blessing. For nearly a quarter of its length, “The Indian Wars Refought” seems less fiction than family history. In “Dump Junk”, the Stifles of Firecracker, Fremont County, interrogate the possessions of their deceased parents: among many other things they find a “handwritten grocery slip for a hundred pounds each of flour and sugar, dated 1924”, and an OE43 Willys jeep in good condition, still in possession of its “rotating headlights and the side straps”. Elsewhere, we learn about the price of hay, and the cost of transporting it. We learn that, “in the years following statehood”, every Wyoming town had to have at least one imposing building, and that few of these edifices have held on to their original purpose, but are reduced to housing cellphone enterprises or, in one case, a brewery. We learn that in 1946, Real Western Stories magazine ran an advertisement for “a device that when cranked sent mild charges of electricity through the body and was, the ad claimed, a no-fail encouragement to hair”. Proulx’s frame of reference, fluid and geologically layered at the same time, enables us to look in on the lives of bad inventions, the careers of towns, industries, businesses and institutions. Lawyers, ranch barons and barkeeps flash by, in and out of focus in the length of a sentence. "In 1919 Mr Frasket, the old dry-goods merchant, died and his corpse
was shipped back east. An ice cream parlour rented the premises and became
a popular gathering place. Seven months later Gay G Brawls himself, on
his way back up to his office after a lemon phosphate, dropped some business
folders on the stairs, stumbled and slipped on them, cracked his head,
and after a week in a coma, died at age fifty-three." Squatting in Bad Dirt is a second, or shadow, collection. All the stories in it are set in Elk Tooth, Wyoming, “where rodeo procedure is the rule of law”. They are tall tales, with overtly fantastic values, and a tone of evident burlesque. Despite a population of eighty, Elk Tooth has little going for it except Donald’s Rawhide Cowboy Junkyard. Its bars – Muddy’s Hole, the Silvertip and Lewis McCusky’s Pee Wee – carry a traffic of game wardens, truckers and ranch workers, who have outlandish names like Creel Zmundzinski, Jumbo Nottage, Wiregrass Cokendall and Fiesta Punch. They don’t read much, or watch television. In fact, Elk Toothers rarely leave the state, and those who do are regarded with some suspicion, even though they hurry back, tail between legs, singing nouveau-Country music along with Jim White on the radio. It is “a point of pride in Elk Tooth to quit whenever and whatever needs quitting”. As a result, Elk Toothers inhabit an unfinished, idiosyncratic, scrapyard zone, across which sweep, like dancing fevers of the Middle Ages, strange obsessions. They embrace fads and fancies; they are overtaken by their wildest dreams. In “The Contest”, the Pee Wee bar regulars – the male ones anyway – grow their beards for a winter; it is less a competition than something to do. Tired of booking poachers from out of state – all of them apparently foul-mouthed, ruby-complexioned lawyers perilously close to being city folk – Creel Zmundzinski discovers an alternative to paperwork in “The Hellhole”. There is a “Summer of Hot Tubs”; and in the facetious “Florida Rental”, Amanda Gribb, who grows vegetables when she isn’t behind the bar at the Pee Wee, turns range war into biological war and gets the edge on her cowboy neighbours. The Elk Tooth tales are a kind of populist commentary on Proulx’s
Ur-narrative (in which someone always gets the edge on someone else).
They present all the indicators of the Proulx Experience, but lack the
high finish and intensity of delivery we associate with it. We are encouraged
to laugh at the Elk Toothers, but not to wince simultaneously at a life
lived with one leg in the animal trap of history. Overt comedy lets us
off the hook. It softens the raw landscape, muffles the bitterness, diffuses
the tragedy. This may be intentional. If so, it is quite a risk. The underlying
tensions of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming, the anxieties of fit which never
allow a character to settle, are both user and driver of her vision, rendering
it applicable in situations far away from ranching, cattle and people
who say “a” when they mean “of”. When the anxiety
is diffused, general applic- Copyright TLS 2005. |