Michael Cunningham on Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”

When I first read “Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx’s seminal short story about gay cowboys in love, I wondered how I might carry it with me forever, literally, in the form of a tattoo. I’d loved countless stories before then but had never before felt the urge to actually wear one.

I did not tattoo even a single phrase anywhere on my body, although I can still feel the urge as powerfully, and mysteriously, as I did in 1997, the year that “Brokeback Mountain” was published. The urge is all the more mysterious for the fact that although I’m a gay man, I am now in my early seventies and have never ridden a horse, and am unlikely to become a cowboy. I don’t expect ever to fully understand my desire to hold on to those two doomed cowboys in the most literal way possible.

The boys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, not yet twenty years old, have taken summer jobs guarding sheep from coyotes in the Wyoming wilderness. Ennis and Jack come from practically nothing—little money, little education, little luck—and are doing whatever they need to do to survive until the nothing from which they emerged sucks them back in again. It’s only the two of them up there on the mountain, with the sheep and the constant, watchful hunger of coyotes, waiting for Jack and Ennis to drop their guard for the several minutes it’d take to snatch a lamb and slice it open, as quick as unzipping a sleeping bag.

As far as we can tell, any attraction Ennis or Jack may have felt to another man has been repressed right out of existence. What they’ve both known of love is punishment for imaginary crimes, and a local religion that offers Jesus’ tears of forgiveness in place of affection. And yet, alone together with only the sheep and the mountain, they soon fall almost violently in love.

Things aren’t going to go well for them. They don’t know that yet, and neither do we. But, about halfway into the story, Proulx abandons her customary prose style, which is as coiled as a rattlesnake and about as sentimental, in order to cut loose and give the boys their first moment of physical tenderness. Ennis comes up behind Jack and holds him:

Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight, and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still usable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleepin on your feet like a horse,” and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness.

Ennis has just repeated to Jack a few lines from his long-dead mother, to whom shows of affection did not come particularly naturally but whose spirit arises, nevertheless, to deliver a benediction that the living woman would have meant as mere domestic ritual. I wonder sometimes if most great love stories aren’t also ghost stories, all the more so as we, temporarily still alive, speak unknowingly to our loved ones about the ways in which we’ll come to haunt them: the off-kilter joke; the snatch of song; the imprecation to go to bed, for God’s sake.

Life is generally all as ordinary as the rooms we rent, as the last bottle of beer when we forgot to buy more on our way home from work. It may, however, momentarily shed its ordinariness if, say, we pick up a magazine, take a swig of that last beer, start reading, and, before too much time has passed, ask ourselves, Is there any way I could render this story and myself inseparable, for the rest of my life?

Reading can, every once in a while, have an effect like that. You may pick up the right story on the right night and submit to a playful little shove from the boyfriend you’d almost stopped waiting for, in a place so remote that everything’s possible. You may get yourself the slap of love from a dead woman—an invented dead woman, at that—who, as the ghost of a ghost, may convince you that you’ll be back again in the morning, even as you head out into the darkness. ♦

Brokeback Mountain

“They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight.”