Life does not offer many opportunities to "drop-out country boys with no prospects" like Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, the central characters in Annie Proulx's magnificent new story, Brokeback Mountain (4th Estate, £3.99 in UK). They first meet as young men, and "neither of them was twenty" when they end up working together. It is a lonely, slightly dodgy job - minding sheep grazing illegally on a stark Wyoming mountainside. The plan is for one of the youths to keep camp and fetch supplies, while the other stays out with the flock, keeping the coyotes at bay while also avoiding the Forest Service rangers. "Sleep with the sheep, hundred percent," orders their employer, "no fire, don't leave no sign."
Ennis had wanted to be a college sophomore; for him "the word carried a kind of distinction". High school proves an impossibility when his truck breaks down, "pitching him directly into ranch work". Big, strong, capable of violence, Ennis - his name carrying an echo of innocence - is also surprisingly diffident. His romantic nature invariably bows to the more prosaic side of his personality. His response to a crisis is predictably passive: "If you can't fix it you got a stand it." Jack Twist - "Jack Nasty" as Alma, Ennis wife's, later suggests - is different, restless and hungry. There is a nervous, terrifying need in him which both drives and destroys him: ". . . he was crazy to be somewhere, anywhere else than Lightning Flat."
Proulx's characterisation here is impeccable, as is the cryptic dialogue with its rawly authentic use of jagged, vernacular speech. The story balances brilliantly between taut observations - "stout and careful in her movements as though recovering from an operation" - and the edgy exchanges of characters as intense as they are aimless. Author of three novels - Postcards (1991), The Shipping News (1993), which won the Pulitizer Prize and the National Book Award as well as the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the disappointing epic Accordian Crimes (1996) - Proulx is a superb short-story writer. It is her natural form. The dark, defiant stories in the Heart Songs collection, which was published in the US in 1987 but not in Britain until 1994 when she was already famous, represents the best of her work. To this must now be added Brokeback Mountain, her finest achievement to date. It is easy to justify the solo publication of this short story in advance of a new collection.
Brokeback Mountain is a worthy addition to the already formidable canon of the American short story. Proulx is a tough, relentless, even harsh visionary. Stern and ironic, she is philosophical and unsentimental yet not without compassion. Not only is this story an outstanding portrayal of a strange and hopeless passionate relationship, it is also remarkable for the quality of the prose and for the wry tone she sustains. The detachment adds to the emotional power of a work as bleak as it is unexpectedly beautiful.
Language fascinates Annie Proulx; she can be as linguistically inelegant as she is eloquent. Her rugged, masculine stories serve it, rather than the other way round. Proulx's fiction always creates the impression of having been forced out as an aside while she dissects words: horses "nickered in the darkness", the frost is "glimmering", "the startled bear galloped into the trees with the lumpish gait that made it seem it was falling apart"; Confronted with his refusal to act decisively, Ennis is "heart-shot". Proulx has always pushed language in a clipped, daring, physical way. Testing, straining, almost taunting the words, she frequently attempts the impossible; in the past sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. However, there is not a false move in this latest work, a flawless performance.
The story begins in the 1960s, but it could be anytime. Ennis and Jack are as out of time as they are out of place, loveless misfits with no true function. Just as Ennis had entertained his notions about schooling until his truck broke down, Jack aspires to being a rodeo rider. "Jack said his father had been a pretty well-known bull rider years back but kept his secrets to himself, never gave Jack a word of advice, never came once to see Jack ride . . ." He is the more experienced of the two. Jack has already been up on Brokeback and tells Ennis "about a lightning storm on the mountain the year before that killed forty-two sheep, the peculiar stink of them and the way they bloated . . ."
Ennis is an orphan, both his parents having been killed when driving off "the only curve on Dead Horse Road". Jack may as well be an orphan, such is his relationship to his brutal father, a man Ennis later recognises as "a not uncommon type with the hard need to be the stud duck in the pond".
While not obviously setting out to mythologise the cowboy, Proulx does achieve a subtle variation of this theme when describing Ennis: "riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he'd never had such a good time", he "felt he could paw the white out of the moon". The boys are aware their solitude has given them an unexpected stature of sorts. "There were only the two of them on the mountain, flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk's back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours."
Their solitude, however, is not private. Their boss has been observing their activities. By the end of the job the two have become close and are mutually dependent. They part awkwardly, "shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder; then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions". Four years pass before they meet again and by then Ennis is married and has two daughters. The reunion is witnessed by Ennis's wife. "She had seen what she had seen. Behind her in the room, lightning lit the window like a white sheet waving . . ."
Time passes and the men arrange various meetings. There are bogus fishing trips. No fish are ever caught. Meanwhile their lives continue to change independently of each other. Alma leaves Ennis; Jack marries a wealthy woman. Jack hopes and dreams, makes plans and pleads. Suddenly "they were no longer young men with all of it before them". Jack's pent-up frustration is finally expressed in one of several haunting scenes of despair and desperation and angry vulnerability. "Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable - admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears - rose around them."
Few writers have explored the nature of desire, loss and regret as well as the discomfort and ease of memory as masterfully as Proulx has in this profound, heartbreaking love story.
