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Chicago Tribune
(KRT)
Lodged in the labyrinth of the novel "Machine Dreams" is the answer.
The question is, "Who lives here?" - here being the small, impoverished town of Tallmansville in central West Virginia - and it's a completely understandable inquiry, because a dozen coal miners died in the Sago mine after a Monday explosion. Television cameras showed a place of narrow dirt roads and dented pickups and hemmed-in lives. Reporters described the desperate daily exchange of safety for dollars.
But the quick and cursory accounts made you long to hear from somebody who really knows Upshur County. Somebody who scuffed along those streets as a kid and then, as a teenager, drove fast down them, car windows wide open, radio turned all the way up and to hell with the what the neighbors say. Somebody who has tried to convey the special fever of being young and gifted in West Virginia.
Somebody who hailed from there, who loves the place the way you can only love it when you know you have to leave it to do the work you need to do.
It made you want to find somebody such as Jayne Anne Phillips.
Phillips, 53, a renowned novelist, was born and raised in Buckhannon, just up the road from the ill-fated mine. While she moved away decades ago and now divides her time between Boston and New York, her stories - including the radiant, acclaimed novel "Machine Dreams" (1984) - always seem to return to West Virginia. If you want insights about this part of the world, you can pry them loose from Phillips' gritty, lyrical books.
Reached at her home when no one knew if the miners were alive or dead, a shaken Phillips said she had been "completely shocked" at hearing news of the explosion at the Sago mine. "Tallmansville is about 5 miles from Buckhannon. Sago is where we used to go swimming."
Later, when news came that all but one miner had died, Phillips sent a follow-up e-mail Wednesday: "I'm amazed and saddened at the turn of events. When I went to bed last night I believed the `miracle' so touted by officials. ... To let those families hope for those hours was a disastrous mistake."
Phillips, who has taught at Harvard and Brandeis Universities and now is an English professor at Rutgers University, said Tuesday, "It's so sad and so typical of our culture that the only time you see a reference to West Virginia in the media is for sports or tragedy. The ongoing political reality of people's lives does not make news."
Indeed, on the same day the 13 miners initially were trapped some 260 feet below ground, the West Virginia University football team polished off the University of Georgia Bulldogs in the Nokia Sugar Bowl.
Phillips' novels are suffused with the sad-eyed beauty of West Virginia, with its soaring, epic landscapes brought crashing back down to earth again and again by chronic poverty and isolation. Her fiction doesn't celebrate West Virginia in an oblivious, rah-rah sort of way - that would be dishonest and ultimately demeaning - but nor does it stereotype the state as a backward place of nothing but urgent need and ruined dreams.
Her West Virginia is a region of real people, people with ambitions and visions, people for whom the ideals of land and family run deep and true. Phillips' West Virginia is a place where people make difficult choices every day about what they need to do for themselves and their families to survive-psychologically as well as physically-and for many, that choice is coal mining. "These mines offer the only decent employment in a lot of cities," she said Tuesday. "It's a tragedy and an ongoing problem. It's amazing to me that we haven't invested in alternative energy that wouldn't cause people to have to put their lives in mortal danger every day.
"Mining was a part of my life indirectly," Phillips added. "I had family two generations back who worked in the mines. Mining pays good money in the short term, but these disasters happen every few years in West Virginia and Kentucky and Pennsylvania."
In "Machine Dreams," Phillips writes about a Buckhannon family from the 1940s through the 1970s; the story reaches its shattering climax during the Vietnam War. While Phillips changes some of the town names, the connection with Buckhannon is clear; Danner Hampson, a Phillips-like young woman with a rebellious streak and a powerful wanderlust, works summers at the "local Methodist college" that is obviously West Virginia Wesleyan College, located in Buckhannon.
On weekends, Danner drives into town, and this is what she sees: "Saturdays, miners cashed their checks in their hard hats and rumpled clothes; country families stood in line at the welfare office before shopping at Woolworth's. ... Their children were numerous and pale, dressed in ill-fitting clothes. They wore muddy shoes with no socks, or they were barefoot. ... The women were very thin or very fat, their faces middle-aged and set as though frozen. Their hair was never styled but hung past their shoulders, occasionally restrained with a child's cheap barrette too small to have much effect." This, Phillips' books show, is what poverty does to people.
But West Virginia does something else to them, too, she said: It creates people who have a "primal connection to the land itself," a relationship she explores in her novel "Shelter" (1994), set in a West Virginia girls' camp in 1963.
"I felt," Phillips recalled Tuesday, "a kind of pressurized silence that comes from living with dignity in the midst of difficult conditions. It's something I admired about my father and other men."
Her parents are both deceased, but she still goes back to West Virginia every few years, Phillips said. She has lectured and taught at several West Virginia colleges, including WVU, her alma mater.
"The whole area has changed. Like a lot of small towns, the local businesses have been undercut by the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and chain restaurants. The house where my mother grew up was torn down and they built a McDonald's there."
Could she have stayed in Buckhannon? "I suppose, if my life had gone differently," Phillips said after a pause. "I needed to go to graduate school at a university where I could use my skills and that wasn't available there then. It is now - now, there are a lot of people working to let teenagers in West Virginia know that there are writers from West Virginia." She cited the Appalachian Education Initiative and the West Virginia Library Commission's recordings of Mountain State writers.
A character in "Machine Dreams" has this to say to Danner: "Everything that passed through you showed." West Virginia still shows in Phillips and her work.
That work, a critic once noted, displays a "crooked beauty." It's a gorgeous oxymoron, fully worthy of Phillips and of the complicated place, benighted and beautiful, that created her.
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
