I knew who Pitts was long before I found out who he was.
Let me explain.
Once upon a rainy time in Oxford, Missisippi, early 90's, I was walking across the town square to get to Square Books, and I saw a young man about two blocks down, gaunt of cheekbones and serious of mien, lost in his thoughts, hands sunk into a retro thrift-store chic black coat of the sort deemed appropriate for young college men about thirty years prior. It was an overcoat that could have been a relic from the Eisenhower era, but he wore it like it was an accidental thing available. I saluted this young guy in my mind, not only for the sheer unselfconscious effrontery of that old coat, but for the expression on his face, quiet anguish, the sort we wear when we feel invisible. I knew immediately what he was doing in Oxford; he was one of those hardy perennials, a young literary man. He was in Oxford for the same reason many others were. He had some story sleeping within; Oxford was a place to utter things other villages would burn you at the stake for saying.
"That Pitts," Barry Hannah said one time, shaking his head and smiling. "He takes more abuse from Gordon Lish than I ever did." Pitts would mail pieces of his work to Lish, then editor of The Quarterly, and Lish would mail them back, with perhaps two sentences surviving the Lishly axe. By that time I'd had an early piece published in The Quarterly, but only after the Procrustean revision of the sort where Lish hacked off the limbs and tampered with its heart's rhythm until it was as harmless as a bicycle seat in a Dada exhibition. Can't remember if Pitts was in Hannah's classes with me, or if we just struck up a conversation, but he was deeply aggrieved because Lish hadn't taken anything of his. I didn't understand his grief or his persistence. I would have gladly given him the space devoted to my piece; it meant more to him than to me. Years passed. He finally got something in The Quarterly I think, some ghostly Lishified revenant of himself that I hope somewhat resembled Pitts' original intent. I hope it still mattered to him by then.
But in the meantime, other currents swept him along into the river of his life.
He began to paint, like a cooler Howard Finster without the vindictiveness. After his first gallery show, Cynthia Gerlach hung a painting of his in Bottletree Bakery: a lone male overlooking a blue village, his geeky separateness adorning him like a crown of thorny light. It was like a self-portrait of early Pitts, like that kid I saw walking down the sidewalk, already understanding something the rest of us did not.
Adopted as a child, Pitts discovered he had grown up not too far from his natural sister, who contacted him: hello. I am your sister you never met before. He told me about this in an awed, hushed tone, at the counter in Bottletree Bakery, beneath that figure in that thorny light. You have to write about this, I said. You have to.
He fell in love and married in a quiet, spectacular way. He was loved, not only by his wife, but by us all in that little blue village of literary Oxford. His new brother-in-law was a real live zen master. His new mother-in-law thought enough of him to donate a kidney to him when he needed it very badly, and it saved his life. The separateness Pitts wore like a thorny crown when he was a sad young literary man gave way to something larger, like a mantle of light that showed where all connection was possible. He positioned himself in a way that he intersected all the Venn diagrams of art in North Missisippi: fiction, poetry, painting, music. He understood new things the rest of us never would. He knew what he knew about the way the human world spins, and he was still glad to be here.
And so it's hard, sitting here writing these words, to agree to the news that he has died. I'm going to adhere to my tradition of not saying goodbye to the literary men of Oxford, Mississippi; I am going to decline to do so. But I can tell you that I do not, do not like this, the undertow of Time with a capital "T" taking people away from us, Larry Brown, Jim Higgins, Barry Hannah, and now Pitts.
When I can trust myself to talk to my students about him without weeping, I will. We'll start with that image of him, walking in the rain in his black coat, feeling alone. I'll show them the photo of the man with the thorny crown, looking at the village. "Lookit how this guy is yearning for connection," I'll say. "Guess what? He doesn't know it yet, but somewhere down there is the sister he hasn't met yet, who is going to phone him someday. Somewhere down there is the wife he hasn't met yet, whose mother is going to give him a kidney. And then there's the village. I know from personal observation that this fellow is going to be very, very loved by that village."
photo credit: Square Books?
