When John Diamond, an angry, young, apiring bronco-buster in The Mud Below - one of eleven, powerful stories in this Western collection - watches another rider, aged 36, coming out of the shower he thinks of him as "ancient." To the watching youth, he is "an old man for bull riding but still doing it. His shallow cheeked face was a map of surgical repair and he carried enough body scars to open a store. A few months earlier Diamond had seen him, broken nose draining dark blood, take two yellow pencils and push one into each nostril, manoeuvering them until the smashed cartilage and nasal bones were forced back into position."
Elsewhere, a rancher turned emu farmer dies when one of the birds turns on him: "He tried to fight it off with his cane but it laid him open from belly to breakfast." A weary mother no longer able to deal with her irritable baby stands up as her wagon crosses the Little Laramie River and "hurled the crying infant into the water. The child's white dress filled with air and it floated a few yards in the swift current, then disappeared beneath a bower of willows at the bend." She fails to save her. "Gone and gone," writes Proulx, concluding the episode. That same jinxed mother later loses a grown son who, having been hideously disfigured in an accident, is deranged and has now taken to stalking women. His sexual antics are curtailed when a little surgery, ranch-style, is administered by a family of ruthless farm boys.
No one has ever been able to accuse Proulx of being a sentimentalist. She is a tough, relentless, bone-hard visionary. Her tone has always been stern and ironic, even more so now that she has moved her fictional world from Vermont to that of Wyoming, the geological heart of America and the most sparsely populated state in the Union, save for Alaska. The plains country evoked throughout these stories is uncompromising, a place where "cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country. . . provokes a spiritual shudder. . . the tragedies of people count for nothing." Her characters are sad misfits with names like Rollo, Elk, Tick, Old Red ("ninety-six years young") and Ottaline. Josanna is a waitress, of whom we are told, if she "was still around at two in the a.m. she looked like what she was, a woman coming into middle age, lipstick gnawed off, plain face and thickening flesh, yawning, departing into the fresh night alone and sorry." The latest beau is found in a newspaper ad. "To me," the sole first-person narrator in this collection observes, "he looked like he'd tried every dirty thing three times." Then there's Inez Muddyman, "scrawny and redheaded, a little savage with an early change of life." On being propositioned by a neighbour whose ranch is run by a 70 year old female foreman, Inez complains `'I got a hard enough life I don't need a put up with a sex maniac neighbour comin at me," to a husband who doesn't hear her.
Proulx's humour is black, manifesting itself in sharp jabs. A character notes the extensive acne covering another's face, and can't help wondering "how he shaved without bleeding to death." Still mourning the small aircraft he had loved as if it were a horse, a rancher "suspected the Mormons."
In these stories, as in any of Proulx's work, language is her central concern. Her rugged, masculine fictions serve it, never the other way round. She challenges words. Her approach is physical, laconic; she has always tested, teased, indeed taunted words and situations and continues to do so. All the stories are a prelude to the magnificent Brokeback Mountain, which was published last October as a 10,000-word book. What seemed an odd decision was immediately justified. This story is her finest achievement to date. Set in the 1960s, although it could be anytime, the narrative follows two young drifters who meet when tending sheep grazed illegally on a stark Wyoming mountainside. Big, strong, diffident, capable, Ennis is a romantic, albeit a prosaic one. Jack Twist is different: restless and hungry, he has a terrifying need.
Life leads them in different directions. They part awkwardly, "shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder; then there was forty feet of distance between them." But after four years they are briefly re-united and the pattern continues. Suddenly, "they were no longer young men with all of it before them." It is a profound, heartbreaking love story - "Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved" - and quite simply, a great American story. Aside from the sensitivity which she confers on a narrative drawing its genius from her depiction of characters engaged in edgy, intense exchanges, at its heart lies the simple truth of powerlessness and the de-mythologising of the cowboy. The dialogue is cryptic, its eloquence residing in its jagged, vernacular quality.
In her acknowledgements Proulx, who now lives in Wyoming, stresses that "short stories are very difficult for me." Yet this book reiterates what was already evident in the dark, defiant Heart Songs collection, which was first published in the US in 1987 (but not in Britain until 1994, when she was already famous as the author of Postcards (1991) and The Shipping News - that the short story is her natural terrority. The real and the surreal, the logical and the offbeat attract her equally. In 55 Miles to the Gas Pump an assortment of corpses is explained thus: "when you live a long way out you make your own fun." There is often an almost anthropological aspect to her characterisation. In explaining the psychology of Wyoming, she observes "Wyos are touchers. . . maybe it's because they spend so much time handling livestock, patting, smoothing, caressing, enfolding. This instinct extends to anger, the lightning backhand slap, the hipshot. . . then the serious stuff that's meant to kill and sometimes does." Never a creator of heroes or myths, Proulx - even at her most brutally realistic - is a compassionate and original observer of lives gone wrong.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist
