"Pork Pie Hat" (1994) by Peter Straub

Readers unfamiliar with "Porkpie Hat" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

A disturbance in the texture of reality: "Pork Pie Hat" (1994) by Peter Straub

....we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds.

....To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash.

– Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010)

*   *   *

The truth is hard to live with. Straub was concerned with men and women trying to figure out a puzzle, a mystery, a tragedy of some kind, even if some of them would not be able to reconcile it with their waking life. 

Straub took delight in partial views, skewed perspectives, unreliable recollections. His witnesses fought for equipoise within a tangle of partial information, groping to understand what they may have witnessed.

[....]Hat had lived forty-nine years as a black man in America, and I'd spent all of my twenty-one years in white suburbs. He was an immensely talented musician, a man who virtually thought in music, and I can't even hum in tune. That I expected to understand anything at all about him staggers me now. Back then, I didn't know anything about grief, and Hat wore grief about him daily, like a cloak. Now that I am the age he was then, I see that most of what is called information is interpretation, and interpretation is always partial.

*   *   *

"Porkpie Hat" (1994) is one of the most accomplished pieces of short fiction produced by a US horror writer in the 1990s. It approaches both historical and family trauma (and failed recovery therefrom) with bold and challenging choices of point of view.

Straub was always accomplished at defamiliarization: estranging protagonists (and readers). His fictions usually have knotty crimes at their core, and many traps to thwart his investigators. 

Solving "the case" can become discoraging in a story of typical Straubian length, say 600 to 700 pages. Happily, this is not the case with "Porkpie Hat," a modest novella of under 100 pages.

Jazz saxophonist Hat, interviewed by the unnamed narrator, has a profound self-interest in telling his story wrong: to keep shielding himself from its full implications after half a century. He spends his days drinking and sleepwalking through the last chapter of his life, cocooned in an almost cosmic sorrow. He only comes alive when performing.  

Ultimately, we will learn Hat found out about adult realities much too soon: as an eleven year old in depression-era Jim Crow Mississippi.

*   *   *

What appeared to be a long slide from joyous Mastery to outright exhaustion can be seen in another way altogether.

[....] Hat had lived forty-nine years as a black man in America, and I'd spent all of my twenty-one years in white suburbs. He was an immensely talented musician, a man who virtually thought in music, and I can't even hum in tune. That I expected to understand anything at all about him staggers me now. Back then, I didn't know anything about grief, and Hat wore grief about him daily, like a cloak. Now that I am the age he was then, I see that most of what is called information is interpretation, and interpretation is always partial.

"Porkpie Hat" is a story about why a grown man stays home every Halloween night as neighborhood kids run wild. Hat's antipathy to the date stems from a horrific night he and a childhood friend spent in The Backs.

[....] "No matter where you live, there are places you're not supposed to go," he said, still gazing up. "And sooner or later, you're gonna wind up there." He smiled at me again. "Where we lived, the place you weren't supposed to go was called The Backs. Out of town, stuck in the woods off one little path. In Darktown, we had all kinds from preachers on down. We had washerwomen and blacksmiths and carpenters, and we had some no-good thieving trash, too, like Eddie Grimes, that man who came back from being dead. In The Backs, they started with trash like Eddie Grimes, and went down from there. Sometimes, our people went out there to buy a jug, and sometimes they went there to get a woman, but they never talked about it. The Backs was rough. What they had was rough. " He rolled his eyes at me and said, "That witch-lady I told you about, she lived in The Backs." He snickered. "Man, they were a mean bunch of people. They'd cut you, you looked at 'em bad. But one thing funny about the place, white and colored lived there just the same—it was integrated. Backs people were so evil, color didn't make no difference to them. They hated everybody anyhow, on principle." Hat pointed his glass at me, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. "At least, that was what everybody said. So this particular Halloween, Dee Sparks says to me after we finish with Darktown, we ought to head out to The Backs and see what the place is really like. Maybe we can have some fun.

The Backs on Halloween night turns out for Dee and Hat to be a hellish borderland. Reanimated thug Eddie Grimes will be the least insidious threat they face. Facts and implications flowing from that Halloween, the truth about what happened (as opposed to the story Hat will tell the narrator about what happened) will take our narrator years to unravel.

*   *   *

A deep irreversible sadness

"Porkpie Hat" is ripe with peripeteias for Hat and the narrator. 

In fact, Hat seems to have infected the narrator with some of his own affectless ennui. The young man who moved from Illinois to NYC to attend Columbia when "Porkpie Hat" began was on the road to an academic career. He apparently ends up married with children and working as a Chicagoland corporate drone who feels the pinch of paying $35 for a hardcover biography of Grant Kilbert. He also reveals he rarely listens anymore to jazz.

*   *   *

The narrator's ultimate success in assembling the real story of that Halloween night, and what it revealed about Hat's life and career, leaves the careful reader with a story of stunning emotional power. Art, whether jazz or literature, may ultimately be nothing more significant than an attempt to use  "trifling or momentous trash" to distract us from "a world of horror."

Jay

18 September 2022