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Martin Sorrell on the photographs of Winston O. Link
Martin Sorrell on the photographs of Winston O. Link

Vanishing Point

Think of an Edward Hopper picture, Main Street, Anywheresville, USA, a warm summer’s evening. Geometric buildings, neat and desolate. Give them names: Northfork Drug; The Hub Men’s Clothing; First Clark National Bank; Dr J. P. Wade, Physician, Walk In. Remove Hopper’s colours, see it in black-and-white. In an open window a table-lamp illumines a man’s face. He’s the only human visible. The scene is empty, and you might be hearing utter silence if it weren’t for a huge steam locomotive dragging a freight train down the track that runs along the middle of the street. The locomotive’s as tall as a house, its headlight and its white smoke piercing the dark. No engineer, no fireman visible. A ghost train driving itself.

Another scene. A young American called Colly crouches on a station platform at night, hoping the train about to blast through will be slow enough for him to jump it, so he can join the hobos heading west. Colly’s just been dumped – again – by Ginny, who’s driven off, this time for real.

I hear the train coming. She is highballing all right. No stiffs in that blind baggage . . . My skin is heavy with her noise. Her light cuts a wide slice in the fog. She’s hell-bent for election . . . I watch her beat by. A worn-out tie belches mud with her weight. She’s just too fast to jump. Plain and simple. I get up. I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan – maybe even Germany or China. I don’t know yet.

The black-and-white Anywheresville is in fact the real town of Northfork, West Virginia, and it’s the subject of one of the eeriest photographs of the last steam trains on the Norfolk & Western Railroad, part of a series taken in the late 1950s by the New York photographer O. Winston Link. And it’s my favourite of the two thousand plus that Link took with old-fashioned equipment, great square cameras, thick electrical cables, flash b

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Think of an Edward Hopper picture, Main Street, Anywheresville, USA, a warm summer’s evening. Geometric buildings, neat and desolate. Give them names: Northfork Drug; The Hub Men’s Clothing; First Clark National Bank; Dr J. P. Wade, Physician, Walk In. Remove Hopper’s colours, see it in black-and-white. In an open window a table-lamp illumines a man’s face. He’s the only human visible. The scene is empty, and you might be hearing utter silence if it weren’t for a huge steam locomotive dragging a freight train down the track that runs along the middle of the street. The locomotive’s as tall as a house, its headlight and its white smoke piercing the dark. No engineer, no fireman visible. A ghost train driving itself.

Another scene. A young American called Colly crouches on a station platform at night, hoping the train about to blast through will be slow enough for him to jump it, so he can join the hobos heading west. Colly’s just been dumped – again – by Ginny, who’s driven off, this time for real.

I hear the train coming. She is highballing all right. No stiffs in that blind baggage . . . My skin is heavy with her noise. Her light cuts a wide slice in the fog. She’s hell-bent for election . . . I watch her beat by. A worn-out tie belches mud with her weight. She’s just too fast to jump. Plain and simple. I get up. I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan – maybe even Germany or China. I don’t know yet.

The black-and-white Anywheresville is in fact the real town of Northfork, West Virginia, and it’s the subject of one of the eeriest photographs of the last steam trains on the Norfolk & Western Railroad, part of a series taken in the late 1950s by the New York photographer O. Winston Link. And it’s my favourite of the two thousand plus that Link took with old-fashioned equipment, great square cameras, thick electrical cables, flash bulbs, reflector disks like something used at Jodrell Bank, all needing hours, sometimes days to set up. These photographs made Link’s name – and the small fortune that he subsequently lost to a rapacious second wife. They are works of consummate artistry. They are social commentaries too, for they speak of more than a dying form of transport. They hymn an Appalachian way of life close to its vanishing point. The N&W existed primarily to bring coal down from West Virginia’s mountains to the Atlantic seaboard at Norfolk. It also conveyed passengers in elegant streamliners with mostly forgotten names such as The Pocahontas, The Pelican, The Vestibule. A fine railroad at the heart of the community it served. The poignancy of an era lost for good is made more acute by the knowledge that the N&W runs through the heartland of the old South and the Confederacy’s nerve centre. Close by the railway’s Shenandoah Valley route are some of the Civil War’s most iconic sites, and the place where the impossible secessionist dream had to die. Appomattox is not that many miles from the N&W’s headquarters at Roanoke. In the second tableau, Colly and Ginny are characters in a short story set in hillbilly country not far from Northfork. The words I’ve quoted are Colly’s, right at the end of the story called ‘Trilobites’, written by a young man with the improbable name of Breece D’J. Pancake. But the name and the man were no joke. At the time Link was taking his photographs, Breece (I can’t write Pancake with a straight face) was a small boy learning to hunt, shoot and fish in the Milton valley, deep among West Virginia’s farms and coalfields. He went to university, like Ginny, only in his case it was just down the road in Huntington. The roots Breece could never tear out were planted in those conservative, cautious, simple, stoic, dark and defensive parts. Unlike Colly, Breece left. He taught English here and there, and got a number of his short stories published, principally in the Atlantic. He became a Hoyns teaching Fellow at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. But then, almost out of the blue, in 1979, aged 26, he killed himself with a hunting rifle. A huge shock to everyone he knew. His mother, trying two years later to make some sense of it, wrote in a letter to Breece’s friend James McPherson that ‘God called him home because he saw too much dishonesty and evil in this world and he couldn’t cope.’ I like to kid myself that I bumped into Breece, literally, in some coffee queue when, in 1976, I visited Charlottesville on an excursion from Williamsburg, where I was teaching. At that point I’d not heard of him, or indeed of Winston Link. The N&W, not many miles from Williamsburg, had long since switched to diesel engines. In the summer of 1976, I travelled for a month on Amtrak, and came across not a single steam train. I also went to West Virginia on a different occasion. The country looked beautifully forlorn to me, tough and silent as oak. It was also a land of joblessness (is it still?). I thought I sensed melancholy, spiritual drift. But maybe I’m projecting something of my own on the past; a romanticism suggested by Link, a realism learned from Breece. If Link’s work is lyrical and affirmative – great 10,000-ton coal-trains headed by steam giants crewed by rugged West Virginians out of the pioneer age; or smooth expresses to Cincinnati, Chicago and beyond, on board which B-movie actresses sip cocktails and cross and uncross lovely legs – then Breece’s is a newer world, rocky, undermined. In his world, people yearn for love, community, which marriage, the church, work and land should bring in plenty. But in Breece’s dozen stories, they don’t. Too many people such as Ginny need to get the hell out. Some manage it, but often at the expense of those who for whatever reason can’t make the break themselves. Yet those who leave tend to come back, sooner or later. A sense of fatalism has them by the throat. Colly’s father gets to see a bit of the world, but only for the short time he’s in the Army, and it’s much the same for another father in another story, ‘The Honoured Dead’. In that story, however, one person, a generation down, succeeds in staying out for good. Eddie is killed in Vietnam. Though Breece himself got out, perhaps he never exorcised his West Virginia demons, whatever they were. People who knew him found him rather sad, rather lonely. He can’t have had nostalgic thoughts of West Virginia; no land of rural retreats (Rural Retreat is the name of a stop on one of the N&W main lines, and is the subject of one of Winston Link’s most striking night-time photographs). Not for Breece, one suspects, the romance of the lonesome train whistle – of which Link made a couple of haunting audio recordings. For Breece Pancake and the characters in his stories, that whistle is a portent of disaster. In 1983, a major exhibition of Winston Link’s N&W photographs came to London. It was shown first at the Photographers’ Gallery, which is where I saw it, and where I acquired the slim, captivating catalogue, entitled Night Trick and including twenty terrific large-format stills. In the same year, Breece D’J. Pancake’s collected work, twelve stories, was published for the first time. The edition I have is the 2002 paperback from Back Bay Books, an imprint of Little, Brown. My enlightened local bookshop took the risk of ordering a few copies, which is where I stumbled across it. I find it moving just to hold this little volume, with its beautiful fox’s face illustrating the plain white cover. Moving, because this is all there is and ever will be of its doomed and compelling writer. He might or might not have gone on to bigger things. It doesn’t matter. His book is his book, it is what it is. The stories may be uneven, youthful, but the work is done. In a strict sense, it is perfect. Winston Link might have taken photographs of other railroads that served more glamorous parts of the USA than did the N&W. He might have given a more comprehensive account of great lines, legendary trains. But he didn’t, and won’t. He died in 2001. His glorious achievement was to capture and preserve the particularity of the people of Appalachia – and their universality. In one photograph, old folk and young sit around a stove at Green Cove station. They’re waiting for a train known as The Creeper. You look at them and you fancy that the old ones are the parents of Breece Pancake’s characters; and the young ones, Colly and Ginny.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Martin Sorrell 2011


About the contributor

Martin Sorrell teaches postgraduates, translates, writes for radio and listens to trains in the night.

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