The Books: “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” – ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (Annie Proulx)

51SF97BJN3L.jpgDaily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – excerpt from the story ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

First published in The New Yorker in 1997, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ of course went on to be her most famous short story ever, due to the movie and the brou-haha around the movie (which I loved). I was nervous to see the movie, because I had originally read the story in The New Yorker (any time I see Annie Proulx’s name ANYwhere, I’ll read it … I’d read her grocery list) and it made me cry. On the subway. A lot of her stories have that sucker-punch feel to them, but this one even more so. Annie Proulx often creates characters who are not all that likable, but you end up loving them in spite of yourself. But in ‘Brokeback Mountain’, you just love these two men. You love them. So I had apprehensions about the film, although the fact that Ang Lee was directing soothed me somewhat. Jake Gyllenhall is not at ALL the “Jack” in the story – and both actors have better teeth than either of these guys ever would – but I understand how Hollywood works. And I was astonished when I saw the film. First of all, the adaptation was amazing. Word for word it’s the story. Very little is added. Which is amazing because the story is only 30 pages long. Annie Proulx has said that ‘Brokeback Mountain’ took her as long to write as a novel. It feels like a novel (most of her short stories do). So the movie didn’t need to “flesh out” the story, they filmed what was on the page. As I watched the film, I felt that odd feeling of proprietary pride and joy … because the story meant so much to me … within 10 minutes of the film, I realized: “Yup. They’re doing it.” Annie Proulx was interviewed by The Advocate and she said, in regards to the two actors playing Ennis and Jack::

I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist…wasn’t the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal’s sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he’s in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I’m concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.

I agree. I loved her comment on why the story took her so long to write. She almost talks like an actress here:

I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.

That’s one of Annie Proulx’s greatest gifts: her ability to imagine herself into other people’s lives and psyches. I’ve read reviews written by men who say, to paraphrase, “She totally understands men.” She writes about men with respect, love, and understanding. They’re not always good, they’re not heroic, they’re not even all that nice … but she is able to slip inside the skin … and be them for a while. You forget it’s a woman writing it. I wish more male writers could do the same thing when they write female characters. I suppose it’s a rare trait in a writer anyway.

‘Brokeback Mountain’ tells the story of two down-and-out cowboys – Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. They are job to job kind of guys. Both of them weren’t really brought up – their childhoods were chaotic, quick, and violent. Jack dreams of being a rodeo cowboy. Ennis … well, who knows what Ennis dreams of. Ennis Del Mar made an indelible impression on me years ago when I first read the story. He is why I cried on the subway. We will never know who Ennis is, and the pain Ennis has experienced … he can barely be with it himself. The story ends with him in his windy trailer, staring at the postcard of Brokeback Mountain, holding Jack Twist’s shirt and saying, with tears in his eyes, “Jack, I swear —”

You swear what? What were you going to say? He doesn’t finish the thought. He can’t. Ennis Del Mar is a man of vague and deep yearnings, but with the grit to bear up under a life that wants none of that from him. Jack Twist is more of the restless dreamer, the one who wants to talk about things … and I suppose that Ennis Del Mar speaks more with Jack Twist than he speaks with anyone else in his life. (Let me just say that Heath Ledger is extraordinary in the part. I loved Jake too – but that movie is Ledger’s movie, rest in peace).

The two men get a job watching over a herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain. They’ll be up there for the whole summer – one minding the camp, the other watching over the sheep. One cold night, they share the tent, and Jack pushes the envelope. He’s the one. Later in the story, we learn that Jack has been going down to Mexico on the weekends … a place notorious (to Ennis) for the fact that men can have sex with men, in alleys, wherever. That’s where you go to have a little anonymous sex. So Jack is more tormented, in the end, by this “thing” (that’s what they call it) in him. He gets married, he has kids, so does Ennis. But Ennis is like an animal. Meaning – an animal suffers in mute silence. An animal bears up. Like D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Self-Pity”:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Jack Twist feels sorry for himself. That’s where the rage comes from at the end. He and Ennis, after their first summer, go years without seeing each other. Until they finally get into a groove, and go on hunting and fishing trips about once a year – in isolated places – so that they can make love and do their thing and not be bothered. Ennis looks forward to these trips. It is the only escape he has in his miserable trapped life. But to Jack, they are everything. When Ennis can’t make it, because of work or obligations, Jack flips out. It’s unbearable.

Whatever it is in Ennis that makes him bear the unbearable, it makes him one of the most memorable characters in fiction I’ve ever encountered.

It’s kind of like the old saying from acting teachers – If you cry, the audience will not. If you try not to cry, you’ll be wiping the audience up off the floor.

Ennis does not express his sadness. And so we, the reader, the audience, ache. I can feel Jack’s desperation, and I ache for him, too … He is a reckless man, willing to take enormous risks to satisfy this “thing” in him … Ennis just bites the bullet, and trudges through the days, knowing and accepting that he will only truly come to life once a year.

The story is magnificent, and I just re-read it now and am blown away all over again by how much she gets in in 30 pages. These guys live. The story spans 25 years of life. I don’t know how she does it – but the story puts you through the wringer. Every time.

The following excerpt is my favorite part of the story. And (again, with me being all proprietary, etc.) I was so glad to see that they included it in the film … and it’s just as I imagined it. It’s a quiet moment, a snagged glimpse … And so often in life, isn’t it the smallest things we remember from our love affairs? Not the big moments, or the “firsts”, but small moments. Jack and Ennis have a hunger for one another, for sex with one another … but this is a moment of love. Again, it’s the kind of story where the word “love” is never used, never would be used … but maybe it doesn’t need to be used. At some point, it becomes redundant.


EXCERPT FROM Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – excerpt from the story ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleepin on your feet like a horse,” and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words “see you tomorrow,” and the horse’s shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.

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4 Responses to The Books: “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” – ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (Annie Proulx)

  1. Jon says:

    “dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died…” and “Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted…and the horse’s shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.” What an astonishing setting of clauses, phrases and sentences against one another, the sounds and meanings here verging on the poetic. And yet they still very much ground (or is it grind?) us in the depths of these guys’ very real feelings. Rust, stone, snort, hoof, spur: what incredible mileage she gets from these terms, evoking character, object and action as if they were all one and the same thing. Which, in a sense, they are. Rust certainly makes sense when you think of Ennis. Rust and, of course, the “unusable” pipeline it coats, leading to his deeply buried (and unpracticed) heart. By the way, last week’s NY’er has a new piece by her. Haven’t read it yet, but I certainly will now. Thanks for the, um, spur.

  2. red says:

    The “shuddering snort” and “grind of hoof on stone” are my favorite phrases in this section (love that you pulled them out too) – maybe in the whole story. I don’t know how it happens or why it works so well – but I feel the cold, the chilly dawn, the bruises on their faces and bodies from fucking, the cold tin cups … and then suddenly the quiet tenderness of a moment … I don’t know … both of those phrases are just so evocative of all of that.

    And yes – I love how say “unpracticed”. It is like there was only room for one in there. He was just that type of guy.

  3. The Books: “Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2” – ‘The Trickle-Down Effect’ (Annie Proulx)

    Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf: Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2by Annie Proulx Anything coming after Close Range was going to be a disappointment – especially since Proulx explicitly connected them by calling this short story collection “Wyoming S…

  4. The Books: “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” – ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (Annie Proulx)

    Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – excerpt from the story ‘Brokeback Mountain’. First published in The New Yorker in 1997, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ of course went on to be her most famous…

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