Inspiring Older Readers
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
The other day when I was browsing in a charity shop I came across a US first edition of Annie Proulx’s collection of Wyoming short stories, Close Range. It’s a really attractive edition with a tremendous and evocative jacket and unusual fine art illustrations throughout.
I haven’t read all of the stories in the book but I did go straight to the last one – Brokeback Mountain. I have seen the movie but I’ve never read the story before and so I thought it would make a good read for a short train journey. I’m always nervous about reading any prose after having first seen it being dramatised or turned into a movie – the power of the visual images can prevent you from painting your own imaginative portraits and landscapes and I quite resent that.
I understand the author herself has become quite grumpy about the success of the movie and has said she wishes she had never got involved in the film project. It would seem that in the age of social media, Proulx has been inundated with people who feel that she should have ended the story differently – happily, they mean – and it seems they can become quite insistent and even abusive in expressing this. This seems to be a case of the author losing control of her own creation. So I approached the story with some preconceptions and just about all of these turned out to be misplaced. This is a scintillating piece of writing – an example of the very best in the art of short story writing.
The story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar is a powerful one – two young(ish) cowboys who develop a close emotional and physical relationship that is both consummated and frustrated – but one which could easily be misinterpreted as being about the nature of gay love. That, I think, would be a mistake because for me this is essentially a story about the fundamentally homophobic nature of society. Jack and Ennis share common dreams and aspirations, they long for each other’s company and feel incomplete when they are apart – but the idea that they might build a life together is simply impossible for them. The demands of ‘ordinary’ lives – marriage, public opinion, social status and, more controversially, money (or the lack of it) – will never allow men like this to find fulfilment.
The ultimate act of rejection, the final condemnation of the ‘other’, is the anonymous act of violence which is signalled and prefigured earlier in the story. Nameless and faceless men kill in the name of decent society – and this, I think, is Proulx’s point. This isn’t a story that promotes some wonderful notion of diversity or paints a picture of two brave men heroically shunning societies myopic norms – it’s a tale of just how brutally closed our society actually is. It’s a bleak tale beautifully realised and I can now readily share the authors irritation over those idiots who think this should have a happy ending.
Go and read it for yourself and marvel at an author at the top of her game. I still think the movie does a decent job without really capturing the bitterness of the story’s harsh central message but it’s an infinitely better effort than many other adaptations I’ve been unfortunate enough to witness. The truth is, however, that the film can’t hold a candle to the short story.
Terry Potter
December 2015