"In the Riffles with Richard: A Profile of Richard Brautigan"
Keith Abbott
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006, pp. 38-55.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

"The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out."
— from Trout Fishing in America

When I first met Richard Brautigan in 1965, he was living in rear flat of a spooky San Francisco Victorian which was a few minor aftershocks away from being a ruin. Surplus parachutes were strung along the long narrow hallway to keep chunks of ceiling plaster from hitting people on the head. His home decoration consisted almost solely of funky folk art and/or funky fish art.

The walls and bookshelves and floors and kitchen tables and window sills held icons of trout or trout fishing. Books on fishing, a quilted fish, book shelves with trout stream pebbles, childish line drawings of fish, and a giant butcher paper poster announcing a Richard Brautigan reading of Trout Fishing in America, which was unknown to me, as the novel was still unpublished. In the useless marble hole of a former fireplace squatted a rusty old pot-bellied camp stove with a thick layer of candle wax blanketing its shoulders. Perched on top of this waxy mound was a U.S. Army manual on Trout Fishing.

That grey manual intrigued me, never imagining that the Army went in for such instruction. I fantasized boot camp: "Awright, grunt, let's see you rollcast twelve of fifteen of these here Pale Morning Duns inside that old Jeep tire."

My first thought was, "Either this guy will read anything or he's a total nut about fish." That turned out to be right on both counts: Richard was a voracious, though eclectic, reader, and he doted on trout.

Talking to Richard for five minutes confirmed that the Army had never trained his mind in the secrets of the U.S. Government Trout Fishing regulations.

When he was a boy in the Northwest, trout fishing had given his days a purpose and had stoked his imagination. He had lived for the moment when a trout took a lure "like an ambulance coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air raid siren."

That shared pleasure provided a jump-start for our friendship. It turned out that we had many things in common. Richard had been born in Tacoma, Washington, and so had I. Richard had been obsessed with trout fishing as a teenager in the Northwest, and so had I. He was now a penniless poet and struggling novelist in California, and so was I. And although he had published one novel, and I hadn't even written one, we had a mutual friendship with that novel's hero, Price Dunn, who had driven me up from Monterey that day to meet Richard.

After viewing Richard's eccentric collection of trout memorabilia, Price, Richard and I went out on what was to become the first of a long series of adventures in San Francisco. It was fitting that this first afternoon's high point involved the romance and art of fishing.

Richard had cast Price as his hero Lee Mellon in the novel, A Confederate General From Big Sur, and while he retold his adventures with Price, such as silencing a pond full of frogs with two well-placed alligators, my first reaction upon reading the novel was "This is hilarious, but this Richard guy only told a fourth, at best, of the loony tune life of Price."

Here was a guy who ran a moving service called Blue Whale Movers, a guy whose constant need for new phone service (born from a firm belief that utility companies had more than enough money and didn't need his cash) caused his new phones to be listed under William Bonney, Delmer Dibble, Rufus Flywheel, Jesse James, and Commander Ralph G. Gore, and a guy whose first act upon renting a new house was to chainsaw all the interior walls, "because a man needs space to breathe."

An Alabama hedonist who loved good meals, good books and good classical music, Price could also play the role of macho hero with his barroom brawls and amazing seductions. There were unexpected moments when he revealed a startlingly vivid gift for verbal invention and runaway fantasies.

What Richard and I shared the most was an admiration for Price's imagination, which far outstripped both of ours simply by the fact that Price acted on his fantasies. Price not only acted on his, he sometimes inflicted them on the unsuspecting world. Some of his landlords, for example, who had uses for those interior walls.

Of course, Richard's appearance matched his notion of home decorating. In those prehippie days, Richard was already dressing like one: he wore a felt Injun Joe hat, granny glasses, a chambray shirt under a vest decorated with Hells Angels buttons, homemade beads, and faded jeans. On his feet were some gunboat-size black Beatle boots. With unruly blonde hair, a drooping blond mustache, and a stooped, high-hipped, long-legged six-foot-four frame, Richard looked like a cross between Mark Twain and a heron.

That afternoon, when we entered the Steinhardt Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, we were not mistaken for tourists by anyone. We were happily yakking to each other and cruising the fish tanks when Price turned the corner ahead of Richard and me, stopped in amazement, and yelled "Gars! Why we used to land them just as big as that down South!"

All heads turned toward us as Price advanced on the tank. We were surrounded by herds of tour-bus tourists, and Price's shout got their attention. Price pointed at the gigantic, improbable looking gars, with the bodies of monstrous carp and the snouts of alligators.

"Alligator gars!" Price yelled again. "Why, I haven't seen one of them in years. You know how we used to fish for gars down South?"

Behind the gathered assembly, the walls seemed to have exuded schools of Japanese tourists and they were all watching and listening to us. They looked puzzled and interested about this new tour guide.

"Well, first you got to get corn cob, and then a good long bamboo pole. Then you get a nylon line, high-test, because you can see how big those babies are, and then you put a hook on the end and put a corn cob on the hook."

More people were arriving in the space, but no one was moving out because they were all staying for Price's story.

"Then you throw the line out in the river," Price imitated the act with such vigor that he reeled back, pushing the crowd together even closer, "and let that corn cob drift down, and when that old gar comes up for the corn cob, you can see him real clear," Price's voice lowered as he dug deep into his boyhood memories. "Hell, they're as big as a house, anyway."

The crowd involuntarily leaned forward to hear better.

"So, when that old gar's comes up for your corn cob," Price lowered his voice further, crouching to show how the pole was held, his eyes on the huge six foot gars torpidly circling the tank, "and you can see those old gars real clear," Price shouted, "why you drop the pole, pick up your rifle and you shoot it!"

There was a stunned silence and then the crowd jerked back and fled, sure that Price and his two weird henchmen were about to relive those childhood memories by yanking out their Winchesters and blasting the tanks of gar fish in a Sam Peckinpah slow motion, glass-shattering, water-flooding slaughter.

Richard and I looked at each other. We were both Northwest fishermen, raised with a code for catching trout, an almost chivalric set of rules where craft and guile were the only skills allowable. This was most bizarre way to fish that we had ever heard.

You don't shoot fish, you catch them on hand-tied flies with little hooks!

And that was the moment when Richard and I really bonded. That day started our practice of Price as a subject of comic routines between us. From then on, whenever Price would retell one of his adventures, we would check each other out to determine who owned the literary rights to the story.

"Have you got that one?"

"Naw, that's too weird for my work, you take it."

Strangely enough, in the nineteen odd years I knew Richard, I never went fishing with him. I only witnessed Richard preparing to fish, much later on, in Montana in the mid-1970s. He bought a house near Livingston and used to spend his mornings on Pine Creek and other streams nearby.

All the time I was around his decaying flat on Geary Street in the 1960s and early '70s, I never even saw a pole or any fishing gear, certainly never a stuffed and mounted trout. The only representations of trout Richard allowed in his digs were ones that had passed through someone else's imagination.

Money had something to do with it. In his dirt poor days up until 1969, lack of it prohibited him from any fishing trips in California. And after he hit it rich with his writing, the fact that he didn't drive inhibited his travels and opportunities to fish, as did the sleigh ride of pleasure he enjoyed while servicing his growing fame with regular readings and book tours. The harvesting of the young lovelies who flung themselves at him also reduced his stream time.

As I learned more about his childhood in Washington and Oregon, however, I understood why trout fishing occupied such a large chunk of his imagination and functioned the way that it did in his books.

In his impoverished childhood, he lacked money, love, security and most of the normal pleasures of growing up. Novelist Tom McGuane once aptly characterized Richard as being the goofy kid "whose only toy was his brain." And this was true. "Poverty" is a word that doesn't do justice to his experience as a boy.

In Trout Fishing in America, Richard described the equipment for his first fishing trip: "I bent a pin and tied it onto a piece of white string." While written for a work of fiction, this was also probably no exaggeration.

But one of the pleasures of nature was the thrill and satisfaction of good fishing that was available during the '40s and '50s to practically every rural kid who could borrow a pole. For a boy dealing with abusive stepfathers, a wayward mother, daily drunkenness, welfare-motel life and, at times, abandonment, a trout stream's promise of adventure, thrills, and victory was one of the few things capable of sustaining a note of delight.

In Trout Fishing in America Richard wrote: "As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine. . . . The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal."

Richard never lost that idea, that vision. Although he was one of the funniest and most companionable friends I have ever known, he never was a happy man. He was subject to insomnia, melancholia and depression. The solitude and peace fishing provided was a godsend to his childhood, and his reverence for it never diminished. He loved trout fishing because it saved his young life and his sanity, many times, when his days and nights were truly awful.

The peace that trout fishing can bring was well known to me. My father and I fished every weekend he could, from opening day to closing, and together we caught, killed and ate hundreds of trout all over western Washington. On summer vacations we fished in Vancouver B.C. and all around National Parks in the western states.

For my father, fishing a new lake or trout stream was as calming and reviving as prayer might be for others. Saturday or Sunday afternoons as we drove back from a morning of fishing, he felt grateful. He had usually revisited his sense of wonder and his sense of humor at our luck or lack of it.

For Richard, fishing renewed his lyricism, fueled his off-the-wall humor and restored his pleasure in the unexpected bonuses of travel and life. In Trout Fishing in America he describes the end of a productive day: "traveling along the good names—from Stanley to Capehorn to Seafoam to the Rapid River, up Float Creek, past the Greyhound Mine and then to Lake Josephus."

Hear his delight in those names and their histories becomes an infectious catalogue of found poetry shining in the list.

After catching his limit at Hell-diver, he describes his daughter's antics on their return to the shore of Lake Josephus: "She was soon running around with a big cutthroat trout in her hands, carrying it like a harp on her way to a concert—ten minutes late with no bus and no taxi either."

Richard was not a practical man. He learned what he had to learn to get by, but basically he felt he belonged to some other era. This feeling surfaces in his early fiction.

In A Confederate General From Big Sur, the two heroes, Lee Mellon (Price) and Jesse (Richard), are stone broke in outback Big Sur when they catch two teenagers trying to siphon their gas. Lee throws down a rifle on them which, unbeknownst to the kids, is completely out of bullets.

"'Howdy, Jesse,' Lee Mellon said. 'Look what I got here. A couple of smart fuckers, trying to siphon our gas. Guess what, Jesse.'

"'What's up, Lee,' I said.

"Do you see how perfect our names were, how the names lent themselves to this kind of business? Our names were made for us in another century."

His sense that he was out of place also surfaced in his daily habits. Richard always relied heavily on his pals for the right information, whether it was about pots and pans, freezers, or flags. He would detail the friend's pedigree as an expert before reciting the preferred makes and models, as if to reassure himself doubly that he was doing the right thing.

Richard often enlisted my aid before trips, especially for any equipment purchases, not only because I owned a truck, but also because he relied on second opinions to counter his sometimes screwy, over-amped takes on reality. And sometimes that "sometimes" was fairly lengthy. It didn't take much for Richard's imagination to conduct him to La-La Land.

One of our buying trips was to R.L. Winston rod and tackle store in San Francisco to outfit him in new fishing gear. Richard was making his first visit to Montana, going up to visit his new friends, the novelists William Hjortsberg and Tom McGuane, and actors Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. He wanted to outfit himself for the trout streams there, and Tom McGuane had recommended R.L. Winston.

This was around 1974 or so, during the heady period when Richard's books were selling in the hundreds of thousands. Every new release of his was widely reviewed, optioned for movies, and usually the translation rights sold in up to seventeen languages. Richard did not lack for money, and he wanted the best for himself.

So, with this visit to the R.L. Winston store, not only was he buying something he needed, Richard was validating his new savvy friends and, by extension, his new fascinating life as a celebrity. This habit irritated some of his old friends, who thought it mere name-dropping, but I thought he was entitled.

Richard was the quintessential outsider. He was well aware that his grungy early life had largely taken place on the underside of the bottom rungs of society and he recognized that this had damaged him, deprived him of social graces and practical knowledge. Anything that relieved his perpetual insecurities was okay by me.

He prepared me for the store by repeating what McGuane had told him about the excellence of supplies there and detailing what honors Tom had recently reaped as a fisherman. He also assured me that, although Winston's shop was in the grotty wino-strewn part of San Francisco, this was the best.

The milieu was not misrepresented. Broken glass, desolate parking lots, and junked cars surrounded the place. The drunks were largely of the sitting stripe and when they did move, they moved slowly. Most had a sooty fashion look from coatings of asphalt dust and diesel fumes. This patina came from sleeping in the old delivery cellars tucked behind buildings. Very few panhandled, probably because it disturbed their concentration on alcohol.

Third Street was rasty. Richard's imaginary legless wino, Trout Fishing in America Shorty, would have swam with this school of bottom feeders.

The windows of Winston were high, small and barred, set in cement block walls. The sign gave no indication that this was anything more than another faceless supply depot that populated the area.

Richard was bursting with enthusiasm, hot to turn the itemized list in his pocket into reality that day. He also had a wallet full of hundred dollar bills. He never trusted that any shop would accept his checks, largely because he still dressed in chambray shirts, jeans and black Beatle boots. So he came prepared for his purchases with crisp Franklins.

Once inside, we saw that it was indeed a fisherman's paradise. In the workshop in the rear the shopkeeper raised his head when we entered, to check that we weren't winos and then, let Richard and I ricochet around the store. He took his time before he ventured out into the front.

The shopkeeper was completely unimpressed when Richard dropped McGuane's name. His eyes got a faraway look, as if he were mildly put out by any effort to conjure a face to fit that name.

Richard was too impatient about his upcoming buying spree to even notice the guy's reaction—beyond registering that he had failed to nail down Tom's importance.

And Richard pushed the point one step further, saying something about how McGuane had landed a state record for a brook trout recently in Montana, then waiting for a response.

At that point the shopkeeper turned Western.

He looked up at the ceiling, working his lower lip, turned and looked back in the corner where there were stacks of huge bamboo trunks leaning, took that short snorting inhale through his nose that sometimes signifies someone's about to say something—but might not—and then he cocked his head and, well, he ah-hummed.

It wasn't a short ah-hum.

It was long and deep and wide.

Richard felt his momentum falling into that vacuous ah-hum. Richard added that McGuane had sent him.

And the shopkeeper might have added this piece of info to his silent considerations, too, and then again, he might not have.

Richard started to tell something about McGuane's landing something fantastically difficult in Florida, a huge bonefish or a permit, on ridiculously small tackle, and then Richard faltered when he recognized that this story was having no effect at all.

At that point I wanted to take Richard by the arm, lead him outside, and enter all over again. Richard was way up the wrong trail with this guy.

There was a long silence.

Then the shopkeeper regarded the top of the wall behind us, examining it closely but still possibly thinking about that record brookie or whatever up in Montana, and finally, slowly, he nodded.

With that response, Richard almost jumped in with something else, but caught himself.

The shopkeeper's eyes ran the length of the entire wall to the corner and then back again.

"Yeah, Tom's come . . . ," the shopkeeper paused for just the right words, "come a long ways," and then paused for several beats, "in a short time."

His "in a short time" was Western code for "Don't tell me about anyone's fishing skills until they've done it for seven hundred years, and in the snow."

By the time we had bought two very expensive rods and a mountain of related equipment, the shopkeeper was tired of Richard, completely unimpressed by his Franklins, and impatient to get back to whatever it was he was doing in his workshop.

Richard did a final check of his list again and discovered he forgotten waders.

"I never needed or owned them before," Richard said. "When I was kid, my waders were tennis shoes. It rained so much in the Northwest, I was wet all the time anyway, so stepping into a river meant nothing to me."

Once he got to looking at the different types of waders, too many decisions about too many purchases had depleted his common sense. Richard turned instead to his abundant, fertile, and uncontrollable imagination, that other, much larger riot zone of his mind, where the simplest things became complex.

Suddenly he fretted that the waders weren't high enough for Montana trout streams. After all, he was going to be there in the spring.

Torrents of snowmelt deluged his imagination. Glacial runoffs foamed behind his eyes. Richard swept off his rubbery feet to a watery doom.

The shopkeeper looked up at Richard's six-foot-four-inch frame and then at the extra long waders in his hand and an amused interest entered his eyes. The pair of waders Richard was holding would have come up to his armpits, if not over his neck.

Richard's mind shifted to contemplation of a further possibility for disaster. "What happens if these fill with water?" he asked, holding them up and letting them pooch out so he could check the potential in gallons. "I could drown."

"Son, to fill those waders with water," the shopkeeper advised him gently, "you'd have to climb up on a rock and dive headfirst into a stream."

At the end of the 1970s, Richard's life went sour. Alcoholism, a failed marriage, declining sales of his books and his increasing alienation from his friends and admirers all contributed to his suicide in 1984.

During this time he alternated living between houses in Montana and Bolinas, with long visits to Japan. There his work was enjoying fame and success that almost matched his popularity in America ten years earlier. But even this return to the spotlight could no longer sustain him.

His friend, the photographer Erik Weber, said that during this time Richard "went down the list of his friends, knocking them off one by one."

While I never was one of those, I stopped making any effort to see Richard sometime around 1982. He was too angry, too drunk. He would call occasionally, but he was always sodden with booze, monomanically detailing grievances and complaints against other old friends.

His Montana retreats apparently ceased to involve fishing. Actor Rip Torn stopped by his ranch house in Montana to do some fishing, but Richard claimed he was working and refused.

One of the last things Richard did before leaving Livingston was to give his Winston rods to McGuane to store. He had made up his mind to commit suicide by then. He told his Montana friends he was in Bolinas, and he told his Bolinas friends he was in Montana. His body lay undiscovered for several weeks in his house. After his death McGuane opened the package and found his rods wrapped in dried flowers, along with a Japanese funeral urn.

"Richard Brautigan and the Final Chapters in A Confederate General from Big Sur"
Keith Abbott, Amy Arneson, Veronica Stapleton, Mark Bernheim, and Joan Harvey
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 26-34.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Introduction
Keith Abbott
Part One

Our Brautigan symposium centered on narrative techniques in the final chapters of Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur. Briefly, to reprise, earlier in the novel Lee Mellon insisted that his great grandfather's family was a Confederate general, Augustus Mellon. However, when Jesse and Lee tried to find his relative in Civil War histories, they failed. This defeat did not stop Jesse from vowing to believe in Lee's Confederate general forefather forever. This vow of faith forms a bond that unites the two protagonists.

Toward the novel's end in the chapter "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku," Brautigan divides some chapters into two paralleled sections; the first section involves the ongoing adventures of Lee Mellon and Jesse in Big Sur, while the second, italicized section jump-cuts into scenes of Civil War battlefield action. Sometimes these scenes include Private Augustus Mellon, performing amidst increasingly desperate and chaotic battlefield situations. For some readers this device seemed a split-screen technique; for others the Civil War segments a television crawl paradoxically updating for us the past.

Our opening questions for the panelists were basic:
What happens to a reader when two stories have to be tracked at once?
What relationships are formed between the regular narrative and the Civil War narrative?
How do the two narratives comment on each other, or do they function in some other way?
Does this device destabilize the novel's narratives, or does the device perform some other narrative services?
How does Brautigan's final metaphor of 186,000 endings per second (the speed of light) function within this novel's ending?
Each symposium participant addressed these questions or concerns of their own when they presented their papers in our first section.

In Part Two the panelists moved on to respond and discus topics via email. After some exchanges Mark Bernheim wrote a summation. The essays are followed by the participant's exchanges and a summation. The essays are as follows:

1. Amy Arenson: Perceptual Rhythms: Realities and Truths in A Confederate General from Big Sur

2. Veronica Stapleton: Characters and Cycles in A Confederate General from Big Sur

3. Mark Bernheim: The Union Sergeant of Santa Cruz

4. Joan Harvey: "Ah, fuck it. Where are the alligators?"

Amy Arenson
Perceptual Rhythms: Realities and Truths in A Confederate General from Big Sur

The first time the reader encounters Lee Mellon he rants about his great grandfather, "He was a general. A Confederate general and a damn good one, too. I was raised on stories of General Augustus Mellon, CSA" (Confederate 26). Mellon is obviously excited by his family history and is clearly attached to a thread of greatness he sees in the past. It is as if there was once a celebrated Mellon, so there will inevitably be another. The tone of the novel is one of impending illustriousness—as if toothless Mellon will somehow rise to the status of hero because he is related to the Confederate general.

The reader is immediately clued into the truth when Jesse takes Mellon to the library to research the general. They look at the book and find a list of generals. The list works like an annotated bibliography, giving the name of each general and the facts of his life. The detail of the list shows that serious research was conducted, and it becomes apparent that if Mellon's great grandfather were a general he would have been included. But, there is something about Mellon. He is convincing and charming in a toothless, drunkard way. He needs the Confederate general in his past, he needs familial greatness; on top of his personal needs, he requires that people believe in his family history. He begs Jesse, "'Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That Goddamn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!'" to which Jesse replies as if it were natural, "'I promise,' I said it and it was a promise that I kept" (Confederate 31). Once Jesse suspends his disbelief the reader has an invisible handshake with the book. The reader continues, knowing subconsciously that Mellon lives a life based on illusion. Subconsciously because the reader chooses to continue, chooses to invest in Mellon, thereby accepting and playing into his fantasy and allowing the imagination to reign free.

Beginning with "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku," A Confederate General from Big Sur begins to deteriorate, and once again Mellon's absurd beliefs take center stage. Up to this point the reader has agreed to accept Mellon's version of reality; the chapters prior to "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku" follow Mellon's reality and work to build it to the point that it becomes Jesse's reality, which in turn makes it the reader's reality. So, the reader is dealing with a many-layered world adrift in illogicality. The chapter brings the reader to a crossroads—the reader is forced to come to grips with the immensity of imaginary events in the novel or to abandon it all together. Once it becomes clear that Mellon's Confederate general was really "Private Augustus Mellon thirty-seven-year-old former slave trader in residence at a famous Southern university ran for his life among the casual but chess-like deaths in the Wilderness. Fear gripped every stitch of his clothing and would have gripped his boots if he'd had a pair," the reader is obligated to confront Mellon's version of his family and the world.

The great grandfather's story brings the reader back to a technically factual realm. According to the novel, the Civil War story is truth that juxtaposes Mellon's fiction. It is not that Mellon's story is false in and of itself—the events he experiences are real, or true to him—but his history, beliefs, and morals are based on a bed of falsehoods. The story is, in essence, a juxtaposition of personal truths and historical facts.

Brautigan compels the reader to deal with the issue of perception. In the end, truth, illusion, and reality are all based on one's point of view, one's imagination. In addition to the split screen technique, the 186,000 endings per second represent the infinite possibilities of interpretation. Each reader's experience with the novel will be different, just as Mellon's sense of history is unique. It doesn't matter that he and Jesse live a life based on imaginary principles; the events are real to them, the experiences are tangible and important. They live an alternative lifestyle, stealing electricity and living in the woods in Big Sur. The split screen and 186,000 endings per second are methods of illustrating that everyone lives an alternate lifestyle according to someone else's interpretation. The novel plays with the reader's perception to show the reader that the possibilities for living a life are infinite.

Veronica Stapleton
Characters and Cycles in A Confederate General from Big Sur

The novel's unifying storyline begins with Brautigan's description of the Civil War Battle of the Wilderness (in Virginia), at the moment at which Hood's old Texas Brigade is assaulting the Union forces. This moment remains suspended while Brautigan uses the ensuing twenty chapters to build a storyline set 100 years later in Big Sur, California, revolving around a descendant of one of the battle's participants. He intertwines direct and indirect references to the Civil War in general, and Lee Mellon's great-grandfather in particular, throughout the book. In the chapter "Augustus Mellon, CSA", Lee and the narrator Jesse search for the ancestor in a book about the Civil War. Several other chapter titles contain military and civil war lingo as well: "Headquarters," "A Daring Cavalry Attack on PG&E," "Campaigning with Lee Mellon at Big Sur (Part Two Title)," "To Gettysburg! To Gettysburg!" "A Short History of America After the War Between the States," and "Awaken to the Drums!" Some of these references imply that Lee Mellon, not Augustus, is the Confederate general in question. The first chapter concludes with the lines "Lee Mellon who is the battle flags and drums of this book. Lee Mellon: a Confederate general in ruins." The link between General Lee (who appears in the first chapter) and Lee Mellon's first name is not coincidental. Furthermore, it turns out that Augustus is not a general at all, but a private (in "He Usually Stays Over by the Garden"), leaving Lee as the only likely candidate for the title.

The escalating crisis in the primary storyline parodies (as well as parallels) the Civil War narrative. Lee's opportunism echoes that of his great-grandfather, and although Augustus is in a more arguably desperate situation, both utilize events in ways that better their chances of preserving their way of life (although Lee botches as many opportunities as he takes advantage of). Augustus has been a slave trader. Lee chains Roy Earl to a log, drinks his whiskey, and has in the past tried to take advantage of the man's insanity to acquire a truck he owns. Augustus steals boots from a dead lieutenant. Lee illegally taps into a PG&E gas line, picks up discarded cigarette butts for tobacco, eats mackerel left for the cats, and terrifies two teenage boys into giving him their money. Augustus plays dead when the union soldiers show up. Lee ignores the plight of a woman he has gotten pregnant.

That the primary narrative takes place 100 years after the Battle of the Wilderness is irrelevant; it's all one story, and Lee and Augustus are—for the book's purposes—the same character. During the first twenty-one chapters, the reader has a semi-conscious awareness of this parallel. In "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku" chapter (number 22), Brautigan separates the two Mellon characters by using distinct narratives of different weights. The Big Sur storyline is deliberately given more space and emphasis, making the Civil War narrative—told in brief, italicized vignettes—act like a television set running in the background. This effectively brings Augustus Mellon into Big Sur. Brautigan has already brought Big Sur to Virginia in the form of the Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters (first chapter). Thus by splitting the screen, Brautigan brings the reader's attention to the twofold nature of the story more directly, and further meshes the storylines while appearing to separate them.

The arrivals of Augustus and Roy Earl in the story are fairly close together. Roy Earl is the Union Army: the element of surprise, destruction, and chaos. The private does what he can to survive the battle. The general (Lee) takes charge of keeping the destructive element at bay.

By the time Augustus Mellon appears in the flesh (in "The Campfires of Big Sur"), the reader has spent twenty-six chapters anticipating him, and in three of those, the question "Where's Augustus Mellon?" has been asked directly. It is significant that he catches up with the reader rather than the reverse. In fact, the reader traverses the landscape before him: Augustus runs past the spring, the horse, the crow, and the two dead soldiers we have already visited in previous episodes. This is the right moment for Augustus to appear because the story is circular. Augustus is present at the moment Brautigan invokes (and then suspends) in the first chapter. He cannot move forward again until the narrative, which drops back (although it appears to jump forward) has brought the storyline up to that moment again. Furthermore, when the narrative finally does come full circle, it has nowhere else to go; the destruction necessary to the story has been accomplished and it's time to conclude.

When the story ends, neither the Battle of the Wilderness nor the war itself is over. The term "186,000 endings per second" invokes a vision of something in rapid motion taking on its own momentum. "Endings per second" echoes "revolutions per minute," which suggests that the motion is cyclical. Brautigan is underscoring the circular nature of the story; now that it has completed one cycle, it will take on its own momentum and continue in an infinity of possible variations.

Mark Bernheim
The Union Sergeant of Santa Cruz

The inclusion of the Civil War narrative within the text of Richard Brautigan's larger story, A Confederate General from Big Sur, creates a commentary in the space between them that questions our presumption of the story's reality. This commentary is a declaration of uncertainty that eventually reaches fruition in the "186,000 endings per second" technique Brautigan uses to end the narrative. Both techniques destruct our certainty as to the legitimacy of the story and construct an awareness of the whisper-down-the-lane inaccuracy of any story told after the fact. We are left with the question of what percentage of what we have been told happened and what proportion is the fancy of the narrator's telling.

The book starts with tables that present statistical information on the Confederate generals of the Civil War and moves into a narrative about the first time General Robert E. Lee meets the volunteer army reporting for the Confederacy from Big Sur. They are the "8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters," a troop composed of Indians who "didn't wear any clothes . . . didn't have any fire or shelter or culture . . . didn't grow anything . . . didn't bury their dead or give birth to their children . . . lived on roots and limpets and sat pleasantly out in the rain" (Confederate 16-17). We are presented this narrative of their first encounter under the guise that the narrator "can imagine the expression on General Robert E. Lee's face when this gang showed up." (Confederate 16). The story then jumps out of the narrator's imagination with seeming authority and no declared factuality.

Approximately two-thirds through the novel's episodic chapters, "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku" chapter begins a split narrative about this Civil War battle imagined at the beginning of the book. The Civil War narrative functions, we are to assume, as the true story of the character Lee Mellon's ancestor. He is far from a general or a hero, both of which descriptions Lee Mellon had provided in the family folk tale of earlier chapters in the novel (Confederate 26). Instead, we see him as quite the failed soldier. He has lost his boots and his fellow men, and he plays dead when confronted with fthe enemy, quite in contrast with the hero of the Battle of the Wilderness. This Civil War narrative, presented to us in the split-screen chapters of most of the last third of the novel, confirms the earlier suggestion of the library records that there was no General Mellon (Confederate 30). Instead, we readers are left with the impression that this story has taken on a life of its own and reflects instead the desires of the storytellers, Lee Mellon earlier in the book and our narrator after we have reached "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku."

This impression of stories' subjectivity, the storyteller's influence on the story, is affirmed by the 186,000 endings per second. We readers are presented with multiple endings and informed that there are many more (Confederate 157-159). The story has accelerated to as many endings per second as miles per second in the speed of light, and its integrity naturally breaks down. The beginning and ending of the story have broken into the imaginative fragments that fiction really is. This almost allows us to choose our ending, nearly allows us to choose the story from amongst the pieces of this narrative's many flights of fancy, and that is just what the Mellon family has done with their Confederate ancestor, what our narrator has done with his stories of Big Sur.

Through all this, Brautigan allows his readers the option of choosing what they believe and what they dismiss in A Confederate General from Big Sur as much as his characters seem to choose what parts of their reality they believe. We will never know if there is money in Roy Earle's briefcase, where the pot came from, if there really are alligators, or if anyone lives, dies, or falls in love in this story, but we will be able to tell ourselves the story after the fact however we choose to imagine it. This could be Brautigan's point and even his expectation.

Joan Harvey
"Ah, fuck it. Where are the alligators?"

The title of Brautigan's novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, contains the unlikely yoking of two very different spaces, both chronologically and geographically. This joining is the starting point of a somewhat troubled relationship which begins to show itself most clearly when the text splits in two in "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku" chapter. In this splitting we move out of the illusion of a "Union" (which as we know claimed victory over the Confederacy) and are instead presented with a couple—half consisting of the present time story in Big Sur, while the other half presents an imaginative past of the Civil War. And, as in every couple, there are issues of relationship, kinship, connection. On the one hand we have history pretending to represent the real, the one truth, while in the process camouflaging the fact that it too is made up of pre-selected and arbitrary elements. On the other side we have fiction, unstable, metaphoric, saying one thing in order to tell us something else. With Brautigan's juxtaposition of history with fiction, each text disturbs the illusionary unity of the other. We cannot live in a completely arbitrary present of our own imagining, because there is some kind of history that goes on outside our heads. However, this history is not as solid and stable as it pretends to be. Perhaps, though, this disjunction permits connection. Eros requires an encounter with the Other, so this splitting allows the possibility of play, of relationship across different forms of discourse and time.

One would expect the addition of a text about the Civil War to give A Confederate General from Big Sur more gravity, but Brautigan's method seems instead to unweight the heaviness of history. The war sequence in the novel moves from a list of dead generals to the life of a runaway private; from the "generalized" public of history to the "private" lives of individuals. The split screen technique puts Big Sur into history and history into Big Sur, and both sides of the screen show how the way we describe things creates them. In this story the Confederacy is a romance, a failed gesture, against the more powerful Union (I confess I find it disturbing that nothing in the novel alludes to the fact that the war was fought about slave holding). We are used to reading history in a certain way but here history is undermined, causing us to ask: What is the relation of fiction to history? What is history? What are our histories?

The two halves of "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku" chapter are linked by a metaphor, "the wind roared like the Confederate army through the hole in the kitchen wall" (Confederate 112). A fictional technique moves us into history, while in the second paragraph of the chapter we are reminded in several ways that history is a construction: "Collapsing sideways into memory," . . . "As he lay there sublime in history," . . . "another bullet struck his body, causing it to jerk like a shadow in a motion picture. Perhaps Birth of a Nation" (Confederate 112, author's italics). The Civil War narrative is told in such a way that it casts doubt on all historical telling. And yet because the war was a brutal and defining event in the shaping of our nation, something we cannot help but take seriously, Brautigan's imaginative narrative here regains the weight it has lost through parody and pastiche. The war scenes in the novel are described in unusual detail and particularity which makes us realize that the names in books were not just empty ciphers, now reduced to rows of black type, but rather were people with ants crawling across their hands while they tried to play dead. Ironically, fiction makes history more "real."

The Civil War references also reflect on Jesse and Lee's move outside of history and the law, but Lee's war is against the gas company, and it clearly is not a matter of life and death. For all their poverty these are characters with wealthy connections and with some education; they are not the abject poor. There is the system to fight, but the system is a vague presence that doles them out gifts; nifty shacks on the coast and yummy girlfriends. The gravity of the Civil War causes us to look at their weightlessness in a different light. Perhaps they have moved too far from the law of society, so far out of the real that the ability to play off difference, to find the tension in opposites, is lost. This is shown in the way ultimately Jesse ends up impotent, unable to couple, looking for a lost pomegranate, an ancient symbol of fertility.

The Civil War ended, but America did not; experience in America fragmented and multiplied; people lived all sorts of possible lives. Lee Mellon exemplifies one imaginative possibility. The fragmentation of endings in A Confederate General from Big Sur also indicates a certain fear of stability, as stability equals death. The book begins with death, with many deaths, and Brautigan's evasion of settling on any one ending may have been a way to evade the certain ending we all face. There is no closure; what we are left with is not a "Union," and cannot, like our heavy history textbooks, pretend to one truth. In the myriad endings are multiple possibilities; this story could have been told 186,000 ways.

Part Two
After the initial essays the four participants engaged in some Email roundtables on Brautigan's novel and the individual essays. The need for faith or suspension of disbelief came up. Veronica Stapleton responded to Amy Arenson's analysis with the following selected interlinear notes (in Bold).

[Lee Mellon] needs the Confederate general in his past, he needs familial greatness; on top of his personal needs, he requires that people believe in his family history. [This is a good insight. Why does he need familial greatness?] He begs Jesse, "'Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!'" to which Jesse replies as if it were natural, "'I promise,' I said it and it was a promise that I kept" (Confederate 31). Once Jesse suspends his disbelief the reader has an invisible handshake with the book. The reader continues, knowing subconsciously that Mellon lives a life based on illusion. [This pair of sentences is precisely expressed and seems like the core of your interpretation.] Subconsciously, because the reader chooses to continue, chooses to invest in Mellon, thereby accepting and playing into his fantasy and allowing the imagination to reign free.

Then Stapleton finds that during Arenson's discussion of the split-screen introduction of Brautigan's soi-disant factual Civil War scenes her essay ". . . takes us on a tour from first perceptions to the breakdown of Lee's credibility and the reader's tacit agreement to suspend disbelief to the reintroduction of reality via Augustus' story."

This need for belief Stapleton also finds at the start of Mark Bernheim's essay, only this need functions in a different critical dynamic: what readers require for participating in a work of fiction. Bernheim asserts that in a fictional setting the Civil War commentary functions as a "commentary [that] is a declaration of uncertainty." Bernheim states: "We are left with the question of what percentage of what we have been told happened and what proportion is the fancy of the narrator's telling."

Stapleton remarks that she "likes the ideas you're articulating in this thesis—especially the point about the natural, and possibly desirable (?), inaccuracy in storytelling."

Bernheim's insights on Brautigan's historical and fictional techniques continue, "The story then jumps out of the narrator's imagination with seeming authority and no declared factuality." From that juncture in Bernheim's essay Stapleton then cuts to another point, how fiction may assume the force that histories often assumed, from myths to today's data-driven chronicles: their notion of historical destiny as a player: "It is as if the story were the intelligent being and the players its tools."

Bernheim takes his notion another step further when he comments: Approximately two-thirds through the novel's episodic chapters, "The Wilderness Alligator Haiku" chapter begins a split narrative about this Civil War battle imagined at the beginning of the book. The Civil War narrative functions, we are to assume, as the true story of the character Lee Mellon's ancestor. . .. He is far from a general or a hero, . . . provided in the family folk tale of earlier chapters in the novel Instead, we see him as quite the failed soldier. . . . we readers are left with the impression that this story has taken on a life of its own and reflects instead [of the historical record] the desires of the storytellers.

In Joan Harvey's essay, Stapleton singled out Harvey's distinctions between history and fiction and what their powers create in Brautigan's novel:

On the other side we have fiction, unstable, metaphoric, saying one thing in order to tell us something else. With Brautigan's juxtaposition of history with fiction, each text disturbs the illusionary unity of the other.

These ongoing disruptions via juxtapositions alter the reader's needs for judgment and participation:

And yet because the war was a brutal and defining event in the shaping of our nation, something we can't help but take seriously, Brautigan's imaginative narrative here regains the weight it has lost through parody and pastiche. The war scenes in the novel are described in unusual detail and particularity which makes us realize that the names in books were not just empty ciphers, now reduced to rows of black type, but rather they were people with ants crawling across their hands while they tried to play dead. Ironically fiction makes history more "real."

Part Three

Our writers' essays and further observations on each other's work were capped off by Mark Bernheim's closing remarks on their different issues.

There is much agreement in our views on narrative instability within A Confederate General from Big Sur, and I would like to bring an element Amy asked me about from my essay to table regarding this. Particularly, I would like to focus on the tacit agreement between reader and writer and what it means in terms of fiction.

Both Joan and Amy used the image of interpersonal relationship to describe something that happens within the narrative.

Amy describes the relationship between the story and the reader and parallels it with the narrator's decision to accept a lie as history. She said, "Once Jesse suspends his disbelief the reader has an invisible handshake with the book. The reader continues, knowing subconsciously that Mellon lives a life based on illusion. Subconsciously, because the reader chooses to continue, chooses to invest in Mellon, thereby accepting and playing into his fantasy and allowing the imagination to reign free." Here, the unattributed imagination of her last sentence, I think, is poignant. The narrative is now at the mercy of both Lee Mellon's, the narrator's, and the reader's imaginations, and that is not even mentioning Brautigan's.

Joan likened the union of the two narratives, the Civil War and the Lee Mellon stories, to that of a couple. She says, "In this splitting we move out of the illusion of a "Union" (which as we know claimed victory over the Confederacy) and are instead presented with a couple—half consisting of the present time story in Big Sur, while the other half presents an imaginative past of the Civil War. And, as in every couple, there are issues of relationship, kinship, connection." This made me think immediately of every occurrence in which I have heard couples tell the same story two ways, each remembering it from their own point of view and with different events being significant enough to compose their shared history's retelling. I think she touches on this again with the line, "With Brautigan's juxtaposition of history with fiction, each text disturbs the illusionary unity of the other." This is the subjective nature of memory, for certain, but also narrative. Every writer simply picks the important events to bring together into the story they want to tell.

Further, I think we can see this in Veronica's reading of Lee Mellon's delusion, both regarding himself and his family history. She says, "The escalating crisis in the primary storyline parodies (as well as parallels) the Civil War narrative. Lee's opportunism echoes that of his great-grandfather, and although Augustus is in a more arguably desperate situation, both utilize events in ways that better their chances of preserving their way of life (although Lee botches as many opportunities as he takes advantage of)." We know that neither Mellon is heroic in the least, really, Lee being the bastard-birthing type and his ancestor a coward, but their stories are both told heroically by someone else, and they are remembered later by the stories that are told about them and the listener-reader's memory of the events both "true" and fictional that are selected in their retelling. This becomes their story, is arguably the stuff of story, and as we have pointed out is as inherently false as any account of the past.

What we have arising in all our responses to this unstable narrative and its variably episodic structure is a sense of subjectivity. This is what I sought to tap into in my original essay. I cannot help but feel this was a declaration on Brautigan's part of the readers' generally false trust in a story's reality and desire to immerse themselves in it, whether that story is intentional fiction, history, or family yarn. It is always told with subjectivity and the problem of point of view. Yet, readers want to connect it, believe it, and lose themselves in it as much as Lee Mellon desires to in his family's false history.

To return to Joan's focus on history, the expression "history of the victor" occurs to me when she says "The split screen technique puts Big Sur into history and history into Big Sur, and both sides of the screen show how the way we describe things creates them." The story we take as real, as Joan indicated, is always under the false presumption that the source has authority. Thus putting history into an absurd fiction and vice versa takes from the authority of both and it becomes difficult for us to submit to the authority of the narrative.

This was the "space" that I described between the two narratives, a [Bertolt] Brecht-like insistence that readers be willing to acknowledge that they are engaging with artful non-reality and to think about their reality relative to it. It was that sense of forcible reflection and avoided immersion that was most interesting to me and is most interesting to me regarding writing itself. I think it was only successful due to both the use of circular narrative Veronica points out and the expansive nature of the relationship between narratives and between those narratives and the reader that we all pointed out. In this sense, Brautigan forced me to reflect on my story and myself as I read his story. He thus succeeded at putting me through the sort of conscious experience that I think was the goal of Brecht's dramatic theory and, I would suggest, Brautigan's intention.

"A Drop of Pouilly-Fuissé into The Pacific Ocean"
Pierre Autin-Grenier
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life.. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 98-101.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

It is this rather odd story Richard relates in a book published in 1981 in which, at the end, he leaves the Pacific Ocean just under a candy bar wrapper on the platform in a railway station, that had been worrying me so much for months and that I had promised myself to visit again on my own account one day, in my own way of writing of course, because I feel concerned by the atmosphere coming out of it, as it is precisely mine, and so I take my seat at my desk before daybreak and here I am, pen in hand, on the watch for a particular ambiance. I think this story is only about fifteen lines long it is the one I prefer in the whole book; I should even say it is the one I prefer in everything Richard has written up to now, novels, poems, short stories, but I am not fool enough to venture to assert this.

And then the hours clear out, in the berbéris bushes around the house I can already hear a blackbird whistling, the silence of the night crumbles second after second, soon the day breaks and I am trampling and wandering round and round without managing to catch the very first word of my narration. It is no use my reading again and again that famous passage where Richard says how the Pacific is engulfing and devouring itself, getting smaller and smaller until concentrating into a single drop weighing trillions of tons, all the words' alchemy has vanished and I stay thousands of miles away from that peculiar climate I was so well prepared for and so familiar with. I say to myself that I am spending a worse moment than if I were questioned for an exam in nuclear physics or recoating the Empire State Building with an aquarellist's brush and really this is the kind of dead-end situation that makes you suddenly aware about how writing can be a failure.

At the beginning, my aim was not transcribing Richard's adventures like a copyist and finding myself, just like him, on a railway platform waiting for a train with already upsetting ocean uproars in my head; I was not going to use up my time making picture transfers, please understand me. No, my care was rather making again exactly the same thing, but at the same time performing a slight shift from the initial story, a kind of rupture that, in my opinion, would have dropped the narration texture into my own bag while maintaining the same atmosphere in both texts. Altogether I wanted to put my steps into Richard's, because we were finally walking with the same boots through that business and so we should have found ourselves more or less like brothers beyond the Pacific Ocean, at least during a few lines, should we not? And I was pleased with this idea.

But, hang it! Impossible to unearth the word that, as a key, would have unlocked a sentence and, on its way, unwedged my brains for my dashing on Richard's tracks and odd story! Time was stagnating as to strangle angels; imperceptibly some anguish had settled down inside myself and was now upsetting all my senses. I was smelling something like a deep scent of tide taking the place over, from the open window huge ground-swells came in and furiously crashed in foam rolls on my white sheet and, in the heart of this impossible deluge, I could see drunk trains going at top speed through barbed-wired stations where colonies of infuriated women were yelling! When suddenly the trillions and trillions of tons of the Pacific Ocean, amassed in a single drop of water, rise up from under the candy bar wrapper and, threatening, prepare to engulf me! That is when the postman arrived, because it was mail time and, I say it that way, it was not too early.

I have uncorked a bottle of pouilly-fuissé; without trying to understand, the postman has agreed to clink glasses at the Pacific, at a certain Richard, at my fiasco, too. Then he has got back on his bicycle and gone.

"She's Gone. It's Done"
John Barber
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 80-87
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan had a peculiar relationship with telephones. He burned them in his fireplace. He shot them to pieces with guns. But he would call friends around the world and talk for hours. When they answered he started talking. No introductions. No pleasant inquires about their health. He got right to the point.

One hot afternoon in July 1982 he called me.

"She's gone. It's done. Why don't you come over. Bring a bottle of whiskey. My friend just died."

No introduction. No closing. A quick telephone call. A clear request, one friend to another, something that could not be refused.

The sound of the telephone bell still buzzed like a housefly against a screen door, anxious for release. I held the receiver, stunned by the afternoon heat and the news.

Richard talked about his friend all spring. She was dying of cancer. He was waiting for the telephone call telling of her death. His wait was over.

I arrived an hour later with a bottle of George Dickel Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey purchased at The Mint Bar in Livingston, Montana. Richard's ranch, he called it "Rancho Brautigan," was a few miles south, in Paradise Valley. The ranch was about 42 acres sloping down from the old valley road to The Yellowstone River. The main house, the barn, and a small cabin were close to the road. Woods followed a creek down to the river.

Richard was in the small cabin, off to one side of the main house. He was in good spirits and with a sweep of his hand showed me the one room building. "This used to be a smokehouse," he said, "and one time, when I had some money, I hired a master carpenter to do the remodeling work you see here. Some day I want to put in a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a hot tub with a roof that slides back exposing the sky. Think what it would be like to soak in a hot tub during a rain storm, or while it is snowing!"

The remodeling already done included a redwood floor, redwood trim around the room, and a triangular, free-standing closet in one corner. A wood stove sat next to one wall, uncoupled from the chimney, now unused, in the center of the room. The bottom of the unused chimney was boxed with wood painted a rich shade of raspberry. Above the stove hung a Russell Chatham painting of the Aspen tree once seen out the window filled in during the remodeling.

A swayback brass bed occupied most of the cabin's sleeping area. Behind the bed, a large plate glass window framed a view of the overgrown yard and decaying chicken coops. A roll-down plastic shade hung in the window. It had a silvery, reflective facing that acted as a one-way mirror. Richard was proud of the shade. "You can lie here in bed with people all around in the backyard and have sex," he said. "No one can see in, no one knows what you're doing."

A funereal mound of sheets and blankets lay on the bed. I thought of his friend. Who was she? I guessed they were lovers from the way Richard spoke of her. Had she shared this cabin with him?

He often talked of her that spring. Never said her name, however. Never talked about his relationship with her. She was always just "my friend." Nothing more. Except that she was dying of cancer.

Richard wrote a novel about his wait for her death that summer. He told me the title, An Unfortunate Woman, but nothing more. I didn't learn anything about his friend until publication of his novel over a decade after his own death in 1984. She died of a heart attack on July 8, 1982, in San Francisco after struggling against cancer. She was Nikki Arai.

In July 1982, in the small cabin at Rancho Brautigan, we sat still and silent like the hot afternoon, not even opening the bottle of whiskey.

At sunset, we left the smokehouse, moving to the back porch of the main house. I sat at a weathered green table in a spindly wooden lawn chair. Richard sat on the porch railing, leaning against a pillar, his long legs stretched out along the railing. Still silent, lost in our own thoughts, we watched the pods on the cottonwood trees explode and release their feathery seeds to snow down and gather on the porch floor where gentle puffs of air swirled them into the corners.

We watched thunderheads trailing veils of virga rain boil up over the mountains. As twilight lengthened deer jumped the fences of the old corral and stood like brown ghosts in the tall grass on the side of the hill by the barn.

Richard broke the silence. "She's gone. It's done."

It was the first time he had mentioned the death of his friend since his telephone call hours earlier. Wanting to make some response, I said, "She's gone, but not forgotten," and immediately felt stupid for having said it.

"I have no pictures of her, none of her letters, nothing. She's gone. It's done."

"But you have memories and you can write them down and preserve them," I chirped hopefully.

"I don't write for therapy, or to eulogize," he retorted. "But, then again . . ."

He stood, stretched, walked across the porch, and into the house. The cottonwood seed fluffs swirled in his wake. He returned with a poem written on a scrap of paper. He read the poem to me, and the deer in the old corral, and the rain storms over the mountains, and his friend, wherever she was.

Rendezvous

Where you are now
I will join you.

"Come inside," Richard said. "Hunger has visited us. Let's eat." He left the poem on the green table, fluttering in the puffs of cottonwood air.

We prepared noodles with smoked oysters, green peas, and chopped fresh onion shoots gathered from the backyard. Richard taught me how to eat the noodles with chopsticks and how to slurp the noodles into my mouth. He said that slurping the noodles helped to cool them and made them taste better. He said that in Japan, it was quite acceptable to make a slurping sound while eating noodles. He taught me to make the correct sound.

"Someday, if we are still friends, I will have Japanese friends over for dinner. I will make noodles, and invite you to join us. They will compliment you on your sound."

Richard's house was sparsely furnished, in Japanese fashion. The walls were bare, as were the bookshelves, save for a few editions of his novels reprinted in European and Asian languages. We ate at the big, dark wood table in the dining room, filling his empty house with the sounds of noodles properly eaten.

After dinner we opened the bottle of whiskey and talked. I kept thinking he would talk about his friend but Richard never mentioned her. He talked of his neighbors, other experiences, but he never mentioned his dead friend. The night grew older and the whiskey died a lingering death. We decided to make the twenty-mile trip into Livingston for another bottle.

We took the new road down the valley. Rather than following the contours of the foothills like the old valley road, the new road followed the Yellowstone River down Paradise Valley. The road was wide open and empty. We could drive at highway speeds even while staring out the windows. The moon was rising and we watched its light play across the river water. Neither of us talked. It wasn't that there was nothing to say. There was, plenty, but neither of us could think of a way to talk about what we were thinking. It was a quiet, thoughtful trip for a bottle of whiskey.

Back at the house, fresh bottle of whiskey half consumed during the return trip, Richard broke the silence. "My friend was Japanese. She was a Buddhist. The Buddhists believe that you can send things to the dead by burning them. I have two books she liked and the poem. I will burn them and you can help if you don't think it's too heavy."

I agreed to help. We gathered the books, the poem, some matches, and lighter fluid. Passing through the kitchen Richard paused in front of a shelf of glassware and said, "She loved to drink white wine from a glass like this." He took a delicate wine glass shaped like a tulip from the shelf. He went to the refrigerator and filled the glass with white wine. "We will burn this also," he said, holding up the glass of wine and walking toward the back door.

We waded through the waist-high grass in the backyard guided by brief flares of matches. We placed the books, the poem, and the tulip glass of white wine on an alter-shaped pile of rocks. Richard picked a handful of white and yellow columbine and placed them on top of the books and the poem.

Richard soaked everything with lighter fluid and lit a match. As the flames erupted he said with a laugh, "She always had great style."

The books, the poem, and wildflowers burned to ashes. The wine glass broke where the delicate stem joined the tulip-shaped bowl.

"She's gone," he said, "It's done."

"The Secrets of Fiction: Where Have You Gone Richard Brautigan?"
Kevin Berger
San Francisco Magazine, Sept. 1999, p. 50.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Three years before my father died in 1994, he discovered Richard Brautigan. He was looking for family photographs in the attic and came across a box of worn paperbacks; Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America was lying on top. He started reading it because he thought it was about, well, trout fishing in America.

But Dad quickly discovered that the book was not about spinning rods and jigging lures. It was a picaresque novel about an oddly serene narrator drifting through San Francisco's bohemian bars and hotels in the early '60s, recalling his lonely Northwestern childhood, failed fishing trips around the country, and random encounters with an ageless sage named Trout Fishing in America.

Dad was so enchanted by the comic 1967 novel that he spent a week reading the rest of Brautigan's slim, wistful books, including In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion. He wasn't sure what drew him to the novels; he guessed they were about the commercialization of America. The "bastards and their malls" was how he put it. But above all, he said, they were "surreal, really weird. Like poems." Had I read them? Were they well known?

Yes, I had read them; yes, they were very well known. Initially released with little promotion, Brautigan's novels soared in popularity on a street buzz that American literature had seldom seen. In the late '60s and '70s, they were required reading not in classrooms but in the Haight, Greenwich Village, and every other epicenter of cultural electricity.

Often called the "last of the beats," Brautigan at his best transcended the self-righteousness of his forebears and penned scenes that were tender, funny, and sad at the same time. Dad's idea of great book was The World Rushed In, an epistolary history of the California gold rush, so I cherish the image of him in his den, reading about the poor kid in Trout Fishing who couldn't work on his family's farm because he was "ruptured," and so "stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino."

But Dad's Brautigan encounter was also a sad reminder that contemporary novels no longer seem like personal treasures, secrets that bind us to our friends and times. Regardless of how Brautigan's novels weather posterity—and some critics file them alongside albums by the Strawberry Alarm Clock—they represent the end of the line for certain ebullience in American fiction, days when it thrived at the heart of our culture. The past two decades have brought us countless novels that illuminate this century's waning days with exceptional grace and force. Yet they exist at the margins of culture, barely subsisting on a shrinking supply of avid readers. Even Thomas Pynchon's brilliant Mason & Dixon, released in 1997, raised little more than a cultural murmur—a far cry from the '70s, when the author of Gravity's Rainbow was widely revered as a titan of American letters.

The problem begins with today's sheer number of good writers. With so many fictional voices, literary culture has become what contemporary novelist Richard Powers calls "a bathtub with the faucet open. Eventually the tub has to overflow. And eventually the sense that literature is a centripetal force that holds culture together is going to be replaced by the notion that it's a force pulling culture into a diversity it will not survive."

Yet that force is fueled by more than a surfeit of writers. Fiction that requires time and thought is trampled in the Information Age, a multimedia marketplace of books, movies, and music designed to entertain us as quickly as wisecracks. Because a few cultural barons now own everything, they demand instant profits to keep their stock prices rising. They cram the shelves of popular culture with titillating products, taunting us to keep up with the output. And the scariest thing of all is that we are: Lord of the Rings, Six Feet Under, Outkast, The Da Vinci Code, Diane Arbus museum exhibits, Barry Bonds home-run displays—we consume them all without pause or discrimination. Nothing is special anymore.

Which only increases the need for novels to arrive on the words of our friends. Outside the entertainment machine, we can settle into the spaces of consciousness, the only place to make sense of the chaotic world. Brautigan, who committed suicide in 1984, seemed to reach out to my father from a different era. He granted Dad a week of solitary pleasure, a respite from the inescapable news that he had cancer. When Dad told me about Trout Fishing in America, how it had puzzled and pleased him, I knew I would always save a piece of this maddening life for the quiet, unending stream of fiction.

"Just Like a Poem: Richard Brautigan and Mad River"
David Biasotti
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 92-116.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Though they recorded two albums for Capitol Records, Mad River remains one of the least-documented and enigmatic Bay Area bands of the late Sixties. That so much of their music is strange—emotional, edgy, meticulously orchestrated and quite unlike anything their peers were doing at the time—adds to the air of mystery that has long surrounded them. Their demanding music ensured that Mad River would never rise beyond cult status, but they did have their admirers, some of them well-known and influential. "Big Daddy" Tom Donahue at radio station KMPX championed the band; music critic Ralph J. Gleason liked them as well. Another fan was Richard Brautigan, who, though neither particularly well-known nor influential when Mad River first met him, would soon become both, when Trout Fishing in America hit it big. Brautigan not only befriended the young band, he helped feed them and introduce them to the local scene. As a gesture of thanks, Mad River dedicated their first album to him, and Brautigan would appear on their second album, performing his poem "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend." While providing an interesting glimpse of Brautigan's life in those days, the story of his friendship with Mad River also offers, in its way, a reminder of how, in that unique period on the West Coast, poets, musicians, political activists, bikers and freaks all swam together in the same countercultural soup.

Mad River, or the Mad River Blues Band as they first called themselves, came together around the spring of 1966 at the famously progressive Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Says Tom Manning, who played bass, then rhythm guitar for the group, "What Antioch did was to have three months on campus to study. The college would get you a job with a company or an organization, and you'd work for three months off campus, come back, and write papers about it. So you were in school all the time, but you were six months on a job during the year, and six months on campus during the year. It was amazing." Guitarists Dave Robinson and Tom Manning, folkies both, were the first to start playing together. Folkies everywhere were succumbing to the allure of electric music, and Robinson and Manning soon decided to start a band of their own. They brought in Greg Druian on guitar and Lawrence Hammond, who, though classically trained and proficient on a number of instruments, initially played blues harp with the band. When a drummer was found, a younger local kid named Greg Dewey, the first lineup was in place.

It was during their off-campus work stint in Washington, D.C. that the band began to truly jell. (Manning had gone west to do his work-study at the University of Washington's Department of Oceanography, so Hammond moved over to bass.) Sharing a flat, they worked at their various day jobs, while non-Antiochian Greg Dewey kicked around town, visiting museums and killing time. In the evenings they would either rehearse or play any club gigs they could scrape up. By the time they returned to Antioch, they had become a very tight band. More than that, they had become serious.

At first, their play list had consisted mostly of blues and R&B covers, though they would occasionally work in an original or two. (One of their first originals was William Blake's "The Fly," for which Lawrence Hammond composed a musical setting.) Increasingly, though, Hammond was coming up with songs, many of them quite dark, and all of them musically demanding. Says Greg Dewey, "Some of the intros took four weeks to figure out. Just the intros! We literally had to memorize every measure. When I think back on it, it was intense, intense work. We would get into enormous arguments and have huge fights."

The Bay Area was where it was happening, and that is where Mad River decided to go. "Putting the move together was an act of faith," says Dave Robinson, "a leap of desperation and a process that bonded us together. Essentially, we all said, 'Hey, we're out of here, and we'll meet in two weeks. Here's the address and the phone number. We're going to go where the action is.'" Tom Manning had rejoined them on rhythm guitar. As Greg Druian had opted out to continue work towards his degree, guitarist and fellow Antiochian Rick Bockner was asked to join the band on this venture, which he happily did. Says Bockner, "Because I'd been out there once and seen the sort of embryonic beginnings of the scene there, I was interested to go back and see it. And we were getting credit for doing it—it was part of our college education, to go to the Bay Area and be a rock band!" And so, in the spring of 1967 they made their various ways to the West Coast and rendezvoused in Berkeley, first at the flat of Greg Dewey's sister. Soon, they got their own place and started finding their way around.

There was an undeniably bucolic side to the Bay Area scene of 1967, but it is sometimes forgotten that it was a dark and scary time as well. The music of Mad River certainly reflected that darker side of things. Says Dave Robinson, "We kind of fled to sunny California and San Francisco, and that beautiful blue sky and that wonderful air and the sunshine, and eight months later there were tanks rolling down the street and people shooting at us. And why? Because we were speaking up against something that we knew to be wrong. People are not aware of the intensity of feeling and the storm clouds that were there. That terrible angst that you lived with from day to day. And, you know, it was more than the war. It was the oppression, the non-acceptance of who we were and the lifestyle we had chosen. It was the Blue Meanies, it was the drug busts, it was being roughed up and told to move along, the traffic stops, the harassment. I've mellowed out a lot, but I used to be a punk, a real wiseass. I don't regret that. There was a community there that you were either true to or not true to."

While no one in the band can recall with exactitude when Richard Brautigan entered their lives, it was sometime in the late summer of that year. Lawrence Hammond remembers this: "There was a guy who lived in our house when we lived in Berkeley. His name was Hal. He'd been with us at Antioch and he always wound up sleeping in the closet with his feet sticking out. Sleeping space was at a premium; there were about thirteen people who crashed there on and off. Hal found himself working at the Free Store, and I think that he ran into Brautigan and brought him home. I'm pretty sure that's the way it happened."

The Diggers were the initial connection. As Rick Bockner remembers it, "We got on to Richard or him on to us through the Diggers, Emmett Grogan and the Diggers. The Free Store in Haight-Ashbury was the first free store I'd ever seen. He was hanging around there." Says Dave Robinson, "Our getting together may have been totally serendipitous. Richard was one of a group of poets and performers that kind of floated around the Diggers. The Diggers and the Hells Angels were very much from the same mold: up the Establishment, and to a large extent, from my experience, very straightforward, practical people. Straight shooters, kind of 'Get it done' attitude, both allied against the Establishment. Meeting Richard could have been as simple as him driving a car down to one of these gigs that we played at. It may have been something as simple as travel arrangements that led to the introduction."

Tom Manning and Greg Dewey are fairly certain that Brautigan had first seen them play at an event in Berkeley's Provo Park. (Though officially named Constitution Park at the time, local counterculturalists had rechristened the tribal gathering spot in honor of Amsterdam's "playful anarchist" Provo movement. It is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Park.) Says Dewey, "He wanted to meet us. He always was a shy guy; the fact that he even ever approached us and talked to us at all was pretty bizarre, actually."

Whatever the circumstances that led to the initial meeting, it is generally acknowledged that, when Brautigan first visited their place, he suggested Mad River play at a free concert that was happening the following day in San Francisco's Panhandle neighborhood. "I think Quicksilver Messenger Service played," says Hammond, "and the Airplane played after them. There may have been three or four groups. I remember we played and Richard standing up on stage. I remember candles being handed around in the crowd and candles all over this flatbed truck. It was a kind of cold and misty night. I remember getting little twinges of shock, 'coz nothing was probably grounded very well!" Dewey adds, "We were getting shocked and it was really cold. That's the coldest I think I've ever tried to play. I remember Lawrence saying, 'Wear gloves!'"

Despite the fact Brautigan was more than ten years older and vastly more experienced in worldly matters than anyone in the band, he and Mad River seemed to click immediately. "He was older," says Dave Robinson. "We were kids. We clung to each other out of necessity. That's how we got fed, that's how we made music, that's how we lived. And here was this very independent older guy, who kind of had it together and knew the San Francisco scene and was connected and knew how to get things done. We were hippies, he was a Digger. He was part Beatnik; we didn't have any Beatnik blood. He was very much into that North Beach intellectual thing. He used to hang a lot at that place where you could sit outside, Enrico's. He would hang there with the literati and the glitterati and hold forth and see and be seen."

Brautigan was fond of all the guys in Mad River, but became especially friendly with Lawrence Hammond. That Hammond was the group's chief lyricist, and one who took his craft seriously, no doubt had something to do with the attraction. "He loved talking to Lawrence," Greg Dewey remembers, "and he was fascinated with Lawrence's writing. Here's this kid writing these wacky songs. Richard's writing from experience, and here's this 20-year-old kid writing these songs that were like heavy stuff." While Brautigan and Hammond dug talking to each other, apparently their conversations were not centered on writing, particularly. Says Hammond, "We didn't talk about art too much, he and I. I don't think he liked to talk about it. If you talked about what you were working on before it was finished, it became very difficult to finish it, for some reason. I seem to remember him commenting on that. I never asked him what he was working on at a particular time."

After the six-month lease on their place in Berkeley expired, the band shifted its base of operations to a flat on Oak Street in the Haight, across the street from the Panhandle. "Once we got to the City," says Greg Dewey, "Richard became a regular visitor, almost daily. He really took care of Mad River. Actually, the Diggers in general, probably because of him, took a liking to Mad River and sheltered us. We were very young and we didn't know what the hell we were doing, and they were guys who were out there and had been around. They were very kind to us, and took care of us. It was a major gift to us, that we had them in our corner, so to speak. Without a doubt, it was Brautigan who put us in that corner."

As Lawrence Hammond remembers, "Brautigan started appearing in our flat there on the Panhandle with Emmett Grogan and Bill Fritsch and Lenore Kandel, who were biker poets, and all involved with the Diggers. Brautigan would come and sort of regale us. When he was really wound up, he would pace back and forth with that funny floppy hat, and his hands behind his back, and just deliver all these lines." Adds Rick Bockner: "He had posture like a question mark, you know. Just this big, curvy, long guy. His head down and his hand on his chin, and his shoulders kind of curled." Hammond continues: "I always thought he'd sit down down and write in the morning, and then he'd try out what he'd written in conversational riffs on whoever happened to be in his line of fire. Anyway, he would do this and we'd all be laughing and wander off into some other room. When we'd come back and open the refrigerator, there'd be all this food in it, and we were starving. That was the Diggers' thing, free food. Well, years later it came out they were hijacking Safeway trucks. We all thought that they'd conned these people into giving away free food!"

Often as not, Brautigan would show up at the Oak Street flat toting a gallon of white wine, Gallo chablis or the like. "It was always a delight when Richard came," says Greg Dewey. "It was like the circus came. Everybody would show up, 'coz we'd get some wine and everybody would sit around and have fun all night, talking and joking around and drinking." Tom Manning: "Richard was a great guy. He was a spacey guy, in the sense that he was the kind of guy who you think is there and he's looking at you and he's seeing you, but he's seeing through you and behind you and above you at the same time. He was always like that. He was the neatest guy, one of the sweetest guys I've ever met in my life."

Brautigan would sometimes come by with poet Bill Fritsch, or "Sweet William" as he was known to some. Rick Bockner: "Fritsch was in the Hells Angels. He was head of the San Francisco chapter at one time. He was real Kerouac material. He had a heart, he had an interesting soul. The Hells Angels kind of went downhill from him, far as I'm concerned." As Lawrence Hammond remembers, "Bill had black hair. Kind of a handsome guy, and he rode with the Angels. I can remember coming home once and walking into the living room, and there were two Hells Angels there. I was kind of intimidated, and Richard and Bill were just sitting there grinning. And these Angels were just riffing about guns and shooting themselves in the feet. I was watching Richard during this whole thing, and I had a feeling that he was taking it all in and getting ready to write it down. I think he liked to do that, put people together and then sit back and watch."

Mad River released their first recording, a three-song EP for the local independent label Wee Records. Lonnie Hewitt, an East Bay jazz musician and aspiring record producer, had heard them in rehearsal, liked them, and booked the session. For one side of the EP they recorded a truncated version of their signature instrumental, the Eastern-flavored "Wind Chimes." Though in performance the piece could go on for thirteen minutes or more, one side of an EP could only accommodate a little over seven minutes in those days, so they were forced to edit it down. Also recorded were two Lawrence Hammond songs, "Amphetamine Gazelle" (titled "A Gazelle" on the EP) and the strange and lovely "Orange Fire," which evokes a napalm attack from a Vietnamese child's point of view. A thousand copies of the record were produced, and in the do-it-yourself spirit of the thing, the band actually glued the album jackets together themselves. Some recall Brautigan pitching in, as well. Rick Bockner: "That was a fun project. Five guys, a chunk of hashish, and some mucilage, gluing the covers together. We glued our own covers, and, to my knowledge, I haven't seen one that's still in one piece!"

The release of the Mad River EP signaled a change in the band's fortunes. Tom Donahue at KMPX, San Francisco's underground FM radio station, dug it, and Mad River's music began circulating on the local airwaves. This led first to some better gigs, and eventually to their recording contract with Capitol Records. Greg Dewey: "The Capitol thing was spurred on by the EP. The EP brought on the record thing, and that was Tom Donahue's influence. The radio play from the EP was what brought on the record companies. Just all of them came." Exactly how much money the band received as an advance from Capitol is something no one seems to recall with certainty, but what money they did see was mostly spent on a new van, better guitars, and better amplifiers.

While some members of Mad River do not recall one way or the other, others remember that a bit of their little financial windfall from Capitol was used to help finance the publication of Brautigan's Please Plant This Book. Rick Bockner thinks Mad River kicked in five hundred dollars or so. "I wouldn't be able to tell you the figure," says Greg Dewey. "I thought we financed it, period." Please Plant This Book was a folder containing eight seed packets—four of flowers, four of vegetables. On the front of each packet was a poem; planting instructions appeared on the back. Some of the members of Mad River helped assemble the folders. Dave Robinson: "Brautigan helped us glue together our EP jacket, and in return we helped him glue together the folder for Please Plant This Book. We would sit there and lick these things, and the glue tasted horrible! Those were two jugs of wine, pot of spaghetti kitchen projects." For his part, Greg Dewey does not remember the folder-gluing project at all, but, as he says, "Anything involved with Brautigan included booze, so I could have been blotto!" Once the books were assembled, Mad River helped distribute them. "We stood around on the corner in Sausalito," Rick Bockner recalls, "passing out these books to people to plant them." Lawrence Hammond: "I remember being given four or five copies to distribute. I think I have several copies. I think I still have the seeds, so I disobeyed the title! I think everybody thought that this was going to be a souvenir, something to have down the line. We did help to glue them together, and I don't think the glue held up!"

During the time Mad River knew Brautigan, whatever was going on in his romantic life seems to have been something of a mystery to them. Says Tom Manning, "I don't remember ever seeing him with a woman." Rick Bockner: "I don't know if he kept them away from us on purpose! I suspect that he wasn't an entirely happy man. I didn't think about that at the time, you know? I could see that there were probably those little quirks in his personality that might make him possessive or guarded in some departments, for sure." Says Dave Robinson, "We were all attracted to the ladies. In that time and in that consciousness and in that spirit, everybody was on the make. That's the reality of it. I always think that he wound up at our place 'coz we generally had these beautiful women around! God bless him, Richard would go after anything that wasn't nailed down, right now! I think that was part of his deal, that was part of his psyche, and very important to him. His love life was central to his consciousness—and I cringe to call it 'love life.' No, I won't do that, it's not at all what it was about. It was something more than that, and it was important to him. It was important to all of us. We didn't see much of the women he was with; he was kind of guarded. He was guarding his and eager to meet ours!"

Occasionally, some of the Mad River guys would visit Brautigan in his flat. "It was right at the corner of Geary and Masonic," says Lawrence Hammond, "and it was this old house that sat all alone. He had the first floor. It was Spartan in the extreme." Rick Bockner: "Not a lot there, but it was really a welcoming space, a very nice space to be in." As Dave Robinson remembers, "It was a hippie flat, one of those wonderful old flats where you walk up the stoop and there's a parlor. You walk up the hall a little bit and on the left there's a water closet. Then off to the right there's a living room and a dining room, then a bedroom, another bedroom, then a kitchen in the back, all down off this long hallway. With those big San Francisco bay windows. Very spacious, full of light."

"At this time," says Hammond, "Trout Fishing in America was just way up the Best Seller list and there was all this money, but Richard just couldn't fathom that, and so he was just living as he'd always lived. I remember going over there and he decided he would scramble us some eggs. He actually at times liked to cook and liked good food, but only one burner on his stove worked. I said, 'Richard, how long has it been like that?' and he said, 'Ever since I've been here. I've become good at one-burner cooking.' There was nothing in his bedroom. He always wore the same clothes. I suppose he went out to a laundromat somewhere." The simplicity of Brautigan's lifestyle extended to transportation, as Greg Dewey recalls. "I remember once when I was walking with him and I said, 'So, Richard, how come you don't have a car?' and he says, 'Well, I don't have a driver's license.' I was astonished he didn't have a driver's license and I said, 'What do you mean, you don't have a driver's license?' He says, 'I don't need a car.' I went, 'What?' He says, 'Well, who needs a car?' I said, 'You've got to have a car to get around' and he said, 'No, I don't. I just put my thumb out, or I could walk, or I could get on a bus.'"

Considering Brautigan's eventual sad end, it is hard to avoid a sense of ominous foreshadowing in the fact he kept guns around his flat. He liked to talk about them at times. "It is kind of creepy in retrospect," says Lawrence Hammond. "I just kind of let him talk about it, because he was such an unviolent guy." One of Brautigan's memorable disquisitions involved a World War II vintage machine gun he had in his place. "I can remember him expounding on why the Japanese lost the war," says Dave Robinson. "He wasn't a gun freak, but he had guns around. He had this Japanese light machine gun. A heavy thing with a tripod, so you can steady the barrel. There's a handle that comes out of the side of the barrel. In the Japanese machine guns, that handle is welded to the barrel, so that the barrel itself, if you take the gun apart, is a 25" tubular affair with a handle sticking out the side of it. That's the main weapon that's used in jungle warfare, a light machine gun. Those go bad very quickly. If you fire a hundred rounds through that, it's ruined. It just gets plugged up with lead, it warps, it gets too hot. So, the logistics of jungle warfare is to get food and medicine and machine gun barrels to your guys. And because of that handle welded onto the side of the barrel, they could only pack I think like six of those guys in a box one man could carry. Which is a very inefficient way of doing it. The guns that were used by the Americans and most of the Australians had a screw on the handle, and you get twenty of those barrels in a crate. So, the geometry of that [Japanese] barrel limited the number of machine guns that could be operable. That was Richard's theory. It takes many a good reefer with this!

"He was a great one for implications. A lot of his wisdom was jumping to the ultimate conclusion. Being able to travel great distances through logic and intuition to the end point of an argument or question, often with great humor."

Brautigan and Mad River often performed at the same events, for it was the nature of the times that poets and musicians shared the same stage. "Remember, this was not only music," says Dave Robinson. "There are bands, there are musical hangers-on, there are poets, there are ranting idiots who take the microphone from time to time, there are political rabble rousers. Those shows were a chance to get to a microphone, so that people whose art flowed through a microphone were attracted to that. There were standup comedians, too. So, anybody that could hold their own for more than a minute or two would show up at these things. I think that's part of it."

As Rick Bockner recalls, "Our neatest gig—I think the most interesting historical gig—we played a gig for poets against the war in Vietnam. It was at the University of Santa Barbara, in '68. It was Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Bly, Lenore Kandel, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders. It was like the cream of the cream of the crop of that Beat up to Hip era. It was just a real powerful night. That was a neat literary moment, and we were the music for it. Richard was there; it was probably him that made the connection with that group for us. To me, that was some kind of a cultural moment that I didn't truly appreciate at the time. But when I look back at the poster from that, it's just an amazing lineup of the best poets of the Sixties."

Also memorable was a beach party in Santa Barbara which was organized—if that is the word for it—by the Diggers. Says Bockner, "This is one of those California beach parties that are only talked about in legend and song. It was a mixture of Hells Angels and poets and musicians and surfers—it was just a mix. Brautigan was there. I remember cops running around going 'Who's in charge here?!?'—which is the wrong thing to ask at a Digger event! Everybody said, 'You are! What do you want to do? What do you want to see happen? OK, take it away! If you can do it, then you can get it!' It was absolute chaos, and we were playing on the beach there." Dave Robinson: "We actually wound up sleeping right on the beach. Terrible sand fleas."

For their first LP, Mad River were assigned veteran L.A. producer Nik Venet. Venet had worked with countless acts, including the Beach Boys and Bobby Darin, and had recently scored a hit with "Different Drum" by the Stone Poneys, but he had never produced anything remotely like Mad River. Says Tom Manning, "He comes up from L.A. in his Jaguar XKE, trying to figure out what the fuck these longhairs from the Haight-Ashbury are trying to do—it just blew him out of the shop!" Greg Dewey: "I remember us doing mixes where all five of us had hands on the slide pots, and Venet's back there going 'Give me another pill!'" There was also, according to Isaac "Harry" Sobol, Mad River's manager, a bit of romantic intrigue during the sessions. "David Robinson started having an affair with Nik Venet's girlfriend, or secretary, or something like that. How that affected Venet's take on things, I don't know!" As Rick Bockner recalls, "There were a lot of arguments with Nik. We were really prickly, you know. I hate to say it, but we didn't trust anybody. We really took that 'Don't trust anybody over 30' business way too seriously at the time, and we were pretty sure we were gonna get screwed somehow. And we were! It was a self-fulfilling prophesy."

Any joy they experienced the day the carton containing 20 copies of the freshly pressed and packaged Mad River LP arrived was extremely short-lived. It was bad enough that the band members' names did not match up with their pictures, and Rick Bockner's last name was misspelled as "Bochner." The real horror came when they opened one up and put it on the turntable: in post production, Capitol had actually sped up the tracks. "It wasn't a mistake," says Tom Manning. "It was considered at the time that 18 minutes per side was the best high fidelity, and they just sped it up to fit into that." The resulting product did the music, which was often speedy enough already, no favors, and was especially unflattering to Lawrence Hammond's vocals. Greg Dewey: "It was one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life, to have our dream come out and just about everything about it was wrong. Then we get slammed in Rolling Stone of all places, and by someone that we know. [Reviewer Ed Ward was a fellow Antiochian.] That was just about as bad as it could get."

Due in part to the critical shellacking it had received in Rolling Stone, Mad River did not sell, and Capitol did not renew the recording contract. Mad River was, however, able to record a second album, Paradise Bar and Grill. Produced this time by an old friend, Jerry Corbitt of the Youngbloods, the second album, recorded in Berkeley, boasted a much more varied sonic palette, blending acoustic and electric textures in a way the first album had not. The album was this time dedicated to departed bandmates Greg Druian and Tom Manning. (Manning, feeling increasingly outclassed by the formidable musicianship of the other guys, had decided to leave the band.)

Paradise Bar and Grill also featured the recording debut of Richard Brautigan, "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend." This performance was actually recorded during the sessions for the first album, but was held over for the second. Says Greg Dewey, "My personal feeling was that we didn't have a concept where that fit. We just wanted to get it on tape." This was, in retrospect, a wise choice, as it sits very nicely indeed on the first side of Paradise Bar and Grill. Recorded live, Brautigan reads his poem to an acoustic guitar duet put together by Robinson and Hammond. Says Rick Bockner, "I thought that was such a great contribution to that album; it made it very special for me. A great moment."

As to how the session came to be, Tom Manning says, "I think Lawrence asked him to read a poem and said we'd put a piece of guitar work behind it." "I think it was sort of a band idea," says Greg Dewey. "I think it was one of those drunk night ideas. Richard was there, and the idea was, 'How about if you read a poem to a guitar?' and he thought, 'Okay, yeah!' But he had really never done anything like that; he had no idea what we really meant. The guys came up with the piece. We got back together at the studio—we didn't practice it. Richard had absolutely no concept of how to read it; he read the whole poem before they even got done with the first verse of the music! He had trouble with the verse concept, waiting around to read his poem. We basically had to direct him. It was rough. The music didn't actually work the way we intended it to, so we cut it in half. We got Richard to slow down and we cut the music in half." Manning adds, "It took a while and probably more than one joint to figure out what the hell was going on, to make it work." Dewey continues: "He was used to just reading his poem the way he felt like it, and in this case he had to wait for the guitars to get done. I think he had considered that songs are a lot like poems, but he had never considered how you have to perform the poem within a song. So, suddenly he was trying to do it and it was harder than he thought. We didn't want him to try and sing it; we just wanted him to be Brautigan."

Asked about his take on the poem, Dewey replies, "It was kind of a startling poem. I don't think I was prepared for it to be that poem. It struck me as, wow, a heavy poem—he's lighter than that, usually. I think that he's talking about a friend that fell in love with him, and that was difficult for him. He probably had a buddy, a fuck friendship with this person, and I think he had a number of those, but suddenly it was turned into a love affair, and it was more complicated than he needed it to be. I think that's what that was about, but I'm guessing, 'coz I didn't talk to him about it."

An unqualified artistic success, Paradise Bar and Grill also fared a bit better commercially than had the first album, and actually managed to chart, albeit at #192. Though there never was a break up—indeed, the members of Mad River remain good friends to this day—things just wound down. For one thing, the draft, a worry that had long dogged most of them, finally caught up with Rick Bockner, who split to British Columbia. And when Greg Dewey was asked to drum for Country Joe and the Fish, then at the height of their success, it was hardly an offer he could turn down.

"After Mad River broke up," Dewey recalls, "Brautigan came over once. He was getting famous. So was I. I was with Country Joe and the Fish. He was busily drinking me under the table, as usual, and he said to me, 'So, what are you planning on doing? Are you going to get rich, or famous, or both?' It didn't occur to me that I had to think about that. I just thought if you got to be famous, you got both, so I said, 'Well, you know, famous.' He said, "You better plan on getting rich.' He was right about that."

Lawrence Hammond and Greg Dewey kept in touch with Brautigan, though over the years they saw increasingly less and less of him. "I'd go over to the Bolinas bar," says Dewey, "and I'd see Richard there, and then I'd go over to Richard's house and we got reacquainted. But I stayed acquainted with him. The way I did was by running into him at Enrico's. I made a point of dropping into Enrico's, 'coz he made a point of being there. If I was going through the City I went there, and if he was there, I stopped. That's just the way it went."

Of the sad trajectory Brautigan's life took in the following years, Rick Bockner says, "It was hard for me when he ended up just kind of sinking into wine and killing himself. It was really a harsh way to go for a guy like that. He was kind of a prince at the time we knew him, you know."

"To tell you the truth," says Lawrence Hammond, "I didn't foresee what happened to him was going to happen. I was apprehensive for him, but at the time the book [Trout Fishing in America] came out, I imagined that this guy was just going to go on and become a literary giant. It didn't work out that way. I just think that the literary world moved on, and he ended up as a novelty, a sort of artifact of the hippie deal. He went on doing what he'd been doing, and suddenly there were a million people doing it and doing it more elaborately, or even better. When he started hanging out with [Tom] McGuane and those guys, I think that—either because of his drinking or other things—they just outpaced him. Tom Robbins, that whole set.

"Like Hemingway, he became an imitation of his own art—continued to try to imitate what had worked before, and wasn't really able to forge ahead. I think that when he was hanging out in Montana with Thomas Berger and those guys, I think that was probably really bad for him—a bunch of flamboyant personalities who were also fairly disciplined artists and fairly disciplined about their drinking. Richard, being an alcoholic, couldn't be disciplined. I'm quite sure he was probably bi-polar, and I think he was bi-polar long before he became an alcoholic.

"That thing with guns. I didn't think too much about it for years, and then I heard that when he was out at Bolinas he would drink and go out and shoot cans for hours. In terms of literary style, he might have denied it, but he borrowed so much stuff from Hemingway's tricks, in terms of brevity. What was supposed to be left unsaid, he'd write it down and then leave it out, which Hemingway did in a lot of his stories. As the years went on I kind of thought of Hemingway's drinking more, prone to depression and carrying the pistol his father had shot himself with around with him. It all just seems kind of creepy to me. It seems as time ran on that Hemingway and Brautigan wound up being afflicted by the same addictive disease, and they became imitations of themselves and had invented a public persona. The inside didn't match the outside. It caused them to suffer a lot. I don't know, maybe I'm dragging the parallels too far, but they both seem kind of bi-polar."

Greg Dewey was in Mill Valley, not far from Bolinas, when Brautigan ended his life, in the fall of 1984. "I started becoming aware that there were these rumors going around about what a jerk Brautigan was, and that he'd been 86'd from the bar in Bolinas. At this time I was trying to confront my own alcoholism problems; I was in trouble myself. I knew Richard wasn't a bad person, I knew that this was one of the kindest people I'd ever met in my entire life. I knew that this guy had the same disease I had, and I wanted to help him personally. At the time I was, oddly enough, what's called 'twelve-stepping' people. I was very effective sending people to AA, and I wanted to talk to Richard."

Though Dewey wanted to contact Brautigan, he was, for whatever reasons, brushed off by the people he spoke to. "He had people around him that were basically groupies," he says. "I was trying to find Richard. I thought he was in Bolinas, but they said he was in Japan. I was in Mill Valley, I was only eight miles away from Richard, and I wanted to talk to him, 'coz I knew that he was just a drunk." When asked why he thinks his attempts to communicate were rebuffed, Dewey says of the people he talked to, "Their basic trip is that it's more important for them to be his friend than to have me be his friend—they wanted to deny my friendship to him. Marty Balin and I called them EV's, which stands for 'energy vampires.' They can get severe. People get between you and them. They think they're protecting him from people. They didn't believe me that I knew him, or they didn't want to let him know that I was there, or whatever—I don't know what the fuck. But, at any rate, they prevented me from finding him and he shot himself. Not that I could have made a difference—I just wish I could have found him. We could have shot each other, or gotten into a fight, or we could have gone to the bar and got drunk together one last time. I don't care what would have happened, I just wanted the opportunity to try. I wanted to find him and tell him that he was a beautiful person, and that he had the same disease I had."

Thinking back on his old friend, Lawrence Hammond says, "A lot of painful memories there, but good ones, too." "He had a lot of complicated things in his head," adds Tom Manning, "but to the people who knew him and loved him, he seemed to be one of the most uncomplicated guys there was."

Greg Dewey recalls a passing moment he shared with Brautigan one afternoon in San Francisco, long ago. "One time he said, 'You know that little breeze, Dewey?' It was in the summer, it was very hot. 'That little breeze was just like a poem.'"

"The Gentle on the Mind Number"
Robert Creeley
Rolling Stock, no. 9, 1985, p. 4.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The caveat that death makes adamant is significantly ignored by all who keep on breathing. In this case, it is no different nor would Brautigan presumably have wanted it to be if he was at that point in any sense concerned. Despite the meager industrial interests already at work on the bleak legend, i.e., those who will tell us the true story, of what deadened circumstances, etc., the fact is still that Richard took responsibility as ever, and killed himself as factually as he'd do anything, like turn out a light or write a novel. He was not sentimental in that respect, albeit he could cry like a baby if drunk enough and with sufficient drama in the occasion. But he could stop it on a dime, and I can't believe, drunk or sober, that he ever finally looked on the world with other than a cold eye not hostilely but specifically.

What's often forgotten is that he was a remarkably articulate writer, a determined one in its resources. His particular teacher was Jack Spicer and there is no one who more called for, literally demanded, that writing be intelligent, perceptive, conscious recognition and employment of words and the complex system of their event. Brautigan's writing seems so simple, "the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol."

"The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section. It is the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food."

It's like an ultimate dominoes, ultimate attachments, endless directions and digressions, but all a surface or a skin of unvarying attention, a wild, patient humor, an absolute case in point.

Trout Fishing in America is dedicated to Jack Spicer and Ron Loewinsohn. There's a great picture of Loewinsohn and Richard they used for the cover of a magazine they edited together in the sixties, Change. Brautigan was in his middle thirties before the big time hit him. He said once his average annual income had been about $950 up till then. His childhood was classically awful, dirt poor, mother, step-father to whom he's given when the two separate and his mother takes his sister. He told a story once of cooling himself in his sister's hair, locked in fever, in some bleak motel they were living in. He hauled himself up from nothing to be the most influential writer of his specific generation, prose or poetry, you name it. You could hear him and you didn't forget it. It was like, think of this, this trout, like this. He was a great pro.

He was a loner and that didn't seem to be easy except for the situation of writing. He loved his daughter very much and tried to be and was a careful, resourceful father. He was very proud of her.

This attempt to say something is a weird and lonely exercise. I hate it that no one was there to say goodbye, or hello—that he could be dead that length of time, almost a month, with no one's coming by. They thought he'd gone to Montana. The people there must have thought he was in Bolinas. I know that he didn't make it easy to get next to him, like they say. Still, that's a distance no one needs.

One time we were leaving some chaos of persons together, in the 60s it must have been, and just as we were at the door, Richard, looking back in at it all, smiles and says, let's leave them with the gentle on the mind number...

"Help Yourself
Sir Richard Comma
three dots for a dime

"drummed into my head
abstract pavement

"as opposed to dirt
no move from the end

"to the middle. Style's
a hug, a friend's

"true pleasure.
To be home

"is to have a friend.
Van Gogh in Amsterdam—

"streets an easy size,
the canal in harvest moon

"moonlight, walking with
David Gascoyne, with

"Michael Hamburger.
Richard's friendship—

"dear Richard met me,
you know what talk's like?
1/8/84"

Now he's dead. You figure it out, i.e., you got something to do you better do it now, friend. Onward.

"Sketches of Richard Brautigan"
Kenn Davis
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 122-131.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I met Brautigan in late 1956 or March, April, or May of 1957. I had transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute from San Francisco City College. I had had possibly two one-man shows by that time. I was living in North Beach. One day an artist friend by the name of Mike Nathan called and said, "Hey, I have a new studio." It was a storefront of Green Street, in North Beach. I got there about ten in the morning. Mike was there talking to a man and a woman. The man was tall, lanky, blond, and acted very aloof. The woman was his girlfriend. Mike introduced us. The man was Richard Brautigan. He recognized my name from a painting of mine he had seen somewhere. We started talking about painters and writers and realized we had a lot in common. We spent the rest of the day together, drinking wine and talking, and agreed to meet again the next.

We became good friends and shared many adventures. Somewhere in 1958—although my memory is faulty about this date—I rented a rundown cottage on a hill and decided I wanted a bigger window overlooking the city of San Francisco. A mile or so away was the Cleveland Wrecking Company yard, where all kinds of house salvage was stored. I called Dick [Richard Brautigan] and told him I was going there and [asked] did he want to come along—so we did; he found the place fascinating, and lo and behold he wrote about it in Trout Fishing in America. Poets can find inspiration anywhere. As it was, I bought a large window and we drove it to my shack, where I installed it to my satisfaction.

As for fishing stories, the first time Dick and I went trout fishing, in the Sierras, we caught our limit early in the morning, ate the fish, buried the bones deep, then caught our limit again, which we ate for dinner. We did this for several days, often having to eat trout when we didn't particularly feel hungry. I was never the fisherman that Dick was; he was one of the best I ever saw or met.

Brautigan asked me to do the cover art for The Galilee Hitch-Hiker and Lay the Marble Tea, which I was glad to do. I also helped Dick design the interior of Lay the Marble Tea.

Dick called and said "Ron Loewinsohn wants to put out a chapbook of my poetry" and asked me to work on the cover. That was The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. Dick wanted something funky. I suggested a photograph but he said no. So I read the contents and some of the poems sparked an interest with their mention of a Ferris wheel and a carnival. I drew a quick sketch of a carnival and Ferris wheel. Dick liked it. So did Ron. I wanted to clean it up, make it better but they both said no, they liked the rough look.

White Rabbit Press had no binding capabilities, so the printed contents of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker were delivered to Brautigan. "Dick and Virginia Alder, Brautigan's first wife, and I sat around and needle and threaded the copies together, drinking wine and yakking." Next was the problem of distribution. "City Lights would take a few, but we needed to find other ways to sell the book. One day Dick, Ginny, and I wanted to see the movie Room at the Top with Lawrence Harvey which was playing at the Larkin Theater. Together we had maybe a buck. So I took a handful of the books and started hawking them to tourists on the streets of North Beach. 'Right here,' I'd say, 'this is the genuine thing. Real Beat poetry. Get it right here.' It worked. I sold eight to ten copies including one to a traffic cop who, I think, just wanted to get me off the street. We had enough money for the movie but not transportation. We walked from North Beach, through the North Beach Tunnel, over to Larkin Street and then to the movie theatre. We enjoyed the movie. I mentioned some kind of odd connection between White Rabbit and Harvey the imaginary rabbit of stage and film name; Dick and Ginny liked the surreal idea.

After that Dick preferred to use photography for his covers, starting with The Octopus Frontier. At that time I admit I was a bit disappointed, not to say hurt, but it was his choice. We often discussed the cost of doing covers in color, with me painting an original, but the expense in those days always stopped us.

That whole North Beach scene was more of a literary movement, rather than an artist's movement, but there were many truly gifted artists around. Like me, many, or most of them, never became famous or infamous. Which was fine by me because I could develop without any heavy scrutiny. Richard felt the same way, and often mentioned that life changed once he was published and known.

In many ways I knew then that I was in the midst of many talents, whether they were considered part of the so-called Beat Generation or not.

I drew many pencil drawings of Richard Brautigan, as well as other people I knew in North Beach. However, I sensed at that time that Richard's talent was unique, and I was fortunate in meeting him and being a friend.

Why I drew these sketches is easy to explain: I decided early on that Brautigan was unique, and deserved some pen-and-ink and pencil respect, because I was certain the Richard would stand out from the many poets and prose writers that were around and in North Beach in those Beat Generation years.

I realize that the history behind these sketches is also about me, but my friendship with Richard and Virginia Brautigan was so intertwined for almost 20 years—especially the years 1957 to about 1975—that it is practically impossible to write about them as exclusively of Richard.

"Richard Brautigan: Shooting Up the Countryside"
Helen Donlon
Beat Scene, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 1-9.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington on the 30th January 1935. The American post-war years he grew up in were pervaded by a cultural and environmental regeneration where for many like himself, the future seemed somewhat empty of promise, although the new youth were growing up with a renewed optimism. The Great Outdoors flourished as the sons and daughters of the land of Hemingway and Thoreau exploited the fishing and hunting idyll, scouting forest and seeking freshwater stream. Richard Brautigan, raised only by his mother (his father allegedly left her when she was pregnant) was no exception to this rule. What he lacked in academic discipline, he more than made up for in his outdoor pursuits and adventures, early experiences which remained stamped upon the personality of his writing and lifestyle for the rest of his life. An outsider at school, he channeled his energies into the simple pleasures immediately surrounding him, later developing a special penchant for fishing and shooting.

In later years "when fame put its feathery crowbar under his rock", he was always reticent when it came to talking about his deprived childhood, but he retained an unceasing love towards and childhood nostalgia for nature, following closely in the footsteps of Papa Hemingway, not least of all in the way he decided to end his life.

In 1954, Brautigan left his home, his mother and younger sister, Barbara, and headed for the city—arriving in San Francisco. During the late fifties, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had opened the City Lights bookstore at Broadway and Columbus, and Allen Ginsberg was a baggage handler at the Greyhound bus station, although he had already read Howl in public. The poet Ron Loewinsohn recalled meeting Richard at the time, and remembered how Richard had walked up to him and handed him a handwritten poem which was called "A Correction" and it went "Cats walk on little cat feet and fogs walk on little fog feet, Carl". Brautigan was delighted when Loewinsohn found the poem funny and they immediately became friends.

Also around this time Brautigan met Virginia Adler, who became his first wife, and with whom he had a daughter, Ianthe, born in 1960. Within a year he was writing the book that brought him immediate recognition as a cult figure and made him spokesman for a new generation, caused an underground movement named after the book to be formed, brought Life magazine to his doorstep, and even had a college named after it. Trout Fishing in America was translated into 15 languages. It was first published in 1967, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, of nationwide demonstrations across the USA against the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky and Robert Lowell marched to the Pentagon to 'exorcise' it of the evil within. It was the year that the Haight-Ashbury was the centre of the universe, of love, peace and LSD.

Although Brautigan was in many ways the archetypal hippie, he never took drugs, preferring alcohol, mostly in wild binges. He was involved for a while with the San Francisco Diggers, a self-supporting group without obvious "leaders"... one of whom was Emmett Grogan, author of the cult autobiographical novel Ringolevio. The Diggers organised free events and "happenings", preparing free meals which they would dole out on the street to anyone in need. Peter Berg, one of the founding members of the Diggers remembered Brautigan, "Before he was rich, Richard hung out with The Diggers. But if you asked him about the class system he would reply 'there are no classes in a lake' his point being that nature is grander than classes."

Grove Press had published A Confederate General from Big Sur in 1964, and at the time it had only sold a meagre 743 copies. As a result of this they dropped Trout Fishing in America. Donald Allen first published Trout Fishing In America at the Four Seasons Press and sold 29,000 copies of it before it was bought by Delacorte. Eventually it sold way over 2,000,000 copies, and it was an almost immediate success overseas. That was the year Brautigan got rich. The irony was that he was in the middle of San Francisco, home of the Beat generation, yet suddenly he was more popular and a hell of a lot richer than his more literary peers. This surprised many of the Beat writers as Richard's style of writing had always been considered very naüve and simplistic by the Beats. Ferlinghetti had said that "as a writer I was always waiting for Richard to grow up". The peak moment must have been the day Life magazine did a six-page spread on Brautigan, on the day that students of the Trout Fishing in America college were parading down the streets carrying huge cardboard trout.

Fairly soon, Richard was immersed in writing, churning out novel after novel. During the 1966-67 semester he had been Poet In Residence at California Institute of Technology. In 1968 he was awarded the National Endowment For The Arts. He was living in Bolinas, an old area in Marin County, alongside other contemporary writers and poets, writing In Watermelon Sugar, a novel about a small community of peers living in a utopian landscape, existing day to day on small pleasures, but threatened by a gang of distopians from the neighbouring community of The Forgotten Works. Many have thought that the Watermelon Sugar community, called iDEATH was built on an idealised version of Bolinas—a recent trip to Bolinas made me see why—and The Forgotten Works represented the downtown San Francisco across the bay, which was fast becoming a refuge for disenchanted people who had come to the city with flowers in their hair looking for Scott McKenzie's idyll. The writer Keith Abbott remembered visiting Richard at the house in Bolinas on an evening when Joanne Kyger, Don Allen, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and her husband Robert Creeley had been invited up to dinner. "Just before dinner was served, Richard made a big show of putting on a Grateful Dead record. He said that he had been saving the record as a surprise for Creeley. Bob nodded his thanks. When the first cut started Creeley brought his head up abruptly "This is my favourite cut on that record" he announced. Richard beamed happily. As Creeley listened to the song Richard told a story of all the obstacles that he had encountered during the day in his attempt to find this particular record for Bob. Content that he had made Creeley happy, Richard went back to the kitchen to attend to dinner. When the song was over, Creeley got up, went over to the stereo and, trying to play the cut again, raked the needle across the record, ruining it. "Uh-oh" he said. Then he went back to the couch and resumed his discussion. At the sound of the record's being ruined, Richard came rushing out of the kitchen and stood there, watching the whole "uh-oh" performance by Creeley. Going over to the stereo he brought out a second copy of the album from the stack alongside it. In his own funny, precise way, Richard congratulated himself. "I'm, ready for Bob this time" he boasted. Then he went on to relate how Creeley had wrecked the very same album on a previous visit.

The same year, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster a small book of poems, was published; followed shortly by Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt. Many people will remember this as the year that Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died. It was also the year that the American National Guard killed four Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University. In this year Richard told his friend Margot Patterson Doss, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist that he had never had a birthday party, and she said he should throw one at her place. The whole place was decorated with shoals of fish, Kentucky Fried Chicken did the catering and at the time of blowing out the candles on his cake, Richard said "this is the Age of Aquarius. The candles will blow themselves out." It was his thirty-fifth birthday and he was in the presence of many of the prominent artists and poets of the moments including Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan. Richard's literary career was soaring as well. Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill Versus The Springhill Mining Disaster were published in one volume in 1970. The writer Tom McGuane said "He seems crazy with optimism. Like some widely gifted Rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

In 1971, The Abortion and The Revenge of the Lawn, a book of short stories were published. The latter was a mosaic of snapshot reminiscences, and included two chapters which had apparently been "lost' from Trout Fishing in America. It was around this time that Brautigan made his first trip to the McGuane ranch, later to be immortalised in McGuane's book and movie, Rancho Deluxe, Richard's drinking was becoming increasingly heavy and he would get desperate to be out of San Francisco when he felt he had had enough. He loved Montana, and he had great respect for McGuane with whom he regularly went shooting. McGuane's ranch was in Paradise Valley, and soon the ranch became a hive of social activity, as people were always visiting, often with the result that they would grow so enamoured of the place they would never leave, instead opting to buy land themselves in the area. Richard was one of these people. McGuane says "Although he wasn't the type to handle the practicalities of rugged ranch living, he saw himself as very much of a Westerner. He was always full of himself, mostly in a nice way, and his personal mythography of himself included a sense that west of the Mississippi was his terrain to raid for language and imagery. He had a quirky antiquarian air. He was, in some strange way, hell-bent on the image of himself as a sort of Mark Twain, funky-looking old-timer."

During this time Richard had ceased to deliver lectures or grant interviews, and his drinking got heavier. He had virtually stopped writing too, although he always told friends he was working on something which was nearly finished. The most remarkable book of those years was The Hawkline Monster, a gothic western which cameoed the contrastive adventures of Greer and Cameron as wild cowboys in a standard western setting and then in a Frankenstein-type, almost opium-glazed wilderness at the home of professor Hawkline where the predominant force is that of the "chemicals", a half-finished scientific experiment which comes to life and takes over the minds and perceptions of the characters, rendering them insensible. The next novel, Willard and His Bowling Trophies contained an odd erotic narrative. Like many of his later works, Willard is almost totally devoid of dramatic action, in contrast to his earlier work. There are many instances in the book where the characters suffer moments of iconic arrest and seem to be constantly flitting between being alive and dead. The irony and black humour phase in his writing career had truly arrived, seen even more vividly in Sombrero Fallout, a novel about internal conflict and dissension. The story supposedly takes place in an hour.

Sombrero Fallout and Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, a return to the poetic spirit of his early work, were written in the year that Richard was first making it big in Japan. During his stay there he was sinking into heavy depression, and alienating all his friends at home by telephoning them long distance during the early hours of the morning. It was during this time that he met a Japanese girl called Aki, who soon became his second wife. He was a great success in Tokyo as the Japanese literati was fascinated with his beautiful and innocent haiku poems. He loved Tokyo and its neon lights of which he said "They remind me of my childhood, when neon meant magic, excitement, romance. The neon lights of Tokyo give me back the eyes of a child."

Although in Japan he was read by intellectuals, avant-garde people who were priding themselves on this new discovery in American literature, at home his popularity as a writer was quickly fading. In 1978 he wrote The Tokyo-Montana Express and June 30th-June 30th. It seemed as though he was in some sort of personal and literary dilemma between the new found joys of the bright lights big city Tokyo scene, and his outdoor life in Livingstone, Montana. Subsequent trips home found him more and more miserable and devoid of friends. He was deserted by many of those close to him because of his drinking, and more, he was becoming financially unstable. His marriage to Aki had turned into a failure. Around the time of Sombrero Fallout, Helen Brann, his agent felt he should put the book aside and told him so. "The next day I received a letter saying "Goodbye". A two-line letter as if her were writing to the bank.

Sometime in October 1985, Richard put the barrel of a .44 magnum in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Later when friends called, worried that he hadn't been seen for some time, they got an answering machine with a message left by Richard, only eventually the batteries wore down and all they got was a warbled voice and the same message. That's when the panic set in.

Peter Fonda recalls "The boys had gotten together to go shooting. Everyone missed him and we began calling San Francisco. As it turned out, those freaks in Bolinas never went in to check what was happening. If it hadn't been for Becky, my wife, I think Richard would still be there. Checks had been returned and even his agent hadn't been able to get hold of him."

Richard is remembered for his sensitivity, generosity and joie de vivre, as well as his wit and surreal visions of life both in and out of his texts. He has been compared to Vonnegut and Pynchon for the way in which he hilariously characterises society and its misfits. And yet the torture of loneliness and desperation in Sombrero Fallout and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away are just as typical of his style.

"The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again, they wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads." (Trout Fishing In America)

Richard Brautigan was a veritable sixties figure and perhaps the definitive hippie writer. I think that was a matter of circumstance. Richard will always be an anachronistic figure to me, a writer who moved in Beat circles, yet wrote nothing like they did, did not believe in any of the real Beat ethics and never took drugs. He was as lost in the city sometimes as he was lonely and sad in the country. In his time he received far more criticism than praise, and was only truly accepted by the mass when he was rich, and giving it all away. There are still people out there who will love and remember him for the rest of their days.

"Food Stamps for the Stars"
Brad Donovan
Firestarter, June 1996, pp. 4-5.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Brautigan took his parties seriously. They were planned like a military campaign, anticipating heavy casualties. But I had yet to "come under fire" on that innocent fall day when Richard called to invite me and the little keeper to a barbecue.

It was the last reel of the Seventies and we had moved here [Bozeman, Montana] because Richard invited us to go fishing. Then I forgot I had a career and joined a group of misfits who drank too much, raised lying to an art form but were good-hearted about it.

It was a fun scene and we were proud to do our bit, like extras in an Eskimo beach movie. So when Richard called back to ask me to bring some food, I agreed. A quick tour of the supermarket brought back a mound of burger and an armload of condiments. Sloppy Joes, the secret recipe kind. Then Richard called back to say that so-and-so was coming to the party, could we get more food. Hearing the famous name made my little helper search for something sexy to wear, and me to search for something interesting to say. She had more luck than I, but that is the reason for our story, to reveal how, at one of Brautigan's parties, we joined the stars in a conspiracy against the Department of Agriculture.

At the IGA we decided we could not feed these special guests mere Sloppy Joes, but needed something sophisticated, continental, like spaghetti. I spent all our cash on Dago Red, then crossed that line when I nonchalantly tossed down the last of our food stamps to pay for a shopping cart load of Ragu.

"We're Mormons. Italian Mormons," I explained.

Now government regulations forbid feeding other poor people with food stamps, let alone the rich and famous, who must eat a lot to satisfy our appetites. But it was a day that felt like a happening, the smoky air thick with meaning.

Richard's house in Pine Creek was western Gothic. A hacienda sort of house with a graceful arched front porch and a wrap-around back porch, and a kitchen that was the center of activity. The place was all trimmed in redwood. It had its own unreal aspect because of the huge weird trees. The grand red barn, the Montana trash garden of old cars, the shooting range in the backyard: all these were normal, and the house was fine and normal. But the place, like its owner, added up to Normal Plus.

For instance, as I began to prepare my secret sauce, Marinara In A Drum, Richard brought up pesto sauce. I did not know that recipe. So he recited the history of pesto, variations on the sauce, which stores in two counties had canned pesto and which aisles of those stores it was in, and the substance of olive oil. There was a narrative counter-melody too. The novels of Don Carpenter, writing a song for his friend Janis Joplin (who called it "Sweet. But not my style."), Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . . . no kidding.

Then Richard left for the phone, shoving Dennis into the kitchen to help. I did not trust the guy. He was a recovering English teacher, writing a book, poor bastard. And at the July Fourth rodeo, he had worn an Arab burnoose. Worse yet, during the intermission show, when Buffalo Sam pretends to sleep as his pet buffalo comforts him, the ancient bond between man and beast symbolized by this buffalo bending over Sam in felonious manner, Dennis shatters the sacramental silence by demanding, "Make it good for the buffalo too!" For a moment, human sacrifice was a real option. But he stashed the burnoose, and the crowd wallowed around a bit then settled down to wait for the bull-riding.

Not the sort of guy you'd expect to be handy in the kitchen, but typical of Richard's friends: fun-loving, witty, tactful.

I was chopping onions when Dennis pulled a bookmark from some paperback and said, "Look what I found."

"It's a bookmark. An edible bookmark. Try it." He tore the paper in half and ate one piece. There was a purple dragon on my slip of paper, some sort of Eastern spice, he said. I ate the dragon-spice bookmark but did not taste anything. Richard had published Plant This Book, a collection of poems that included packets of vegetable seeds. I figured the bookmark was another of those medium-is-the-message trips.

I cannot remember when I have had so much fun cooking. Smashing the tomatoes was jolly, chopping onions had me in tears, the sight of Dennis frying burger was a real howler. I stirred in anything that looked like food, emptied Tabasco on it.

"Are you guys alright"? Richard inquired. "Come out here and meet a few people."

Why not? We were done in the kitchen. It looked like a produce truck had crashed into a cattle hauler.

My first star sighting was Clark Gable. I learned fact number one about them: they look like you expect them to look. It is disorienting to see a person for the first time and feel the sense of familiarity, of recognition, we reserve for our friends. Young Clark was gracious, casual, but not as big in person as on the screen where he is a celluloid shadow twelve feet tall.

We were passing the time by blowing holes in stuff with large caliber firearms. A TV set, a Pachinko game no one could figure out, dishes from a teflon party that had been snowed in and driven to cannibalism. Young Clark shouldered a rifle, sighted in on a Tab can, and I saw it meant more if he shot or missed the can, than how I shot because no one would remember my results. A clutch shot and he blew it away along with our tension when he joked, "Did I hit it?" like a guy who frankly did not give a damn.

Then Doris Day walked up to me and we talked recipes. She was that rarity, a beautiful woman who does not make you nervous. She appeared fascinated by what I was saying, or maybe she was curious about what language I was speaking. Anyhow, she made us feel welcome and we still think of her with fondness. Her dancing partner, Fred Astaire, was classy and eloquent, well informed, opinionated. And I realized that I had been judging these strangers as if they were required to measure up to our illusions, which is rule number two: Stars better do it right.

The cooking alarms where chiming that dinner was ready, so I flew into the kitchen. The man sampling the sauce was . . . are you ready . . . Humphrey Bogart!

"What the hell are you looking at, kid?"

"But you're dead," I suggested.

"I know I haven't worked in years. I've signed with a new agency, which doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this world."

Thus I came to rule number three: Stars must be tolerant because we ask them to explain the obvious.

We ate dinner. Most of it found my face. The noodles stopped their twitching but the spicy squid, the smoked whitefish from Japan and the salad from hell made a unique dining experience.

Back in the living room, I met Nixon, or the actor who played him on TV. He removed the false teeth that changed him from a real person into Nixon. Nixon's teeth took on a life of their own, enjoying a free lunch, on the dole. Torn loose from its moorings, the conversation grew like a swarm of fireflies. The actor, and Richard, when younger, had rented a station wagon to go trout fishing in the Sierra Nevada. They blew four tires, sideswiped a tree, modified some big rocks. "How to return the car to the rental agency?" they wondered. The actor put on a Dr. Caligari disguise, along with an émigré accent and raved at the rental clerk about vandals, crime in the streets and that the car was in the ghetto. Is that a problem?

They did not go to jail, which shows one of the uses of the imagination. The rest of the evening was filled with similar stories, a string of ephemeral moments wired together by Brautigan's willpower. All of his books, and all of his days, were marked by the capacity for surprise and the knowledge that life is fleeting. He told the story about Baron von Richtofen, how the Red Baron, after dueling in the skies, would go into the forest at night and hunt wild boar with a knife, to unwind after a tough day of being an ace. He acted it out, and I saw him as some prehistoric hunter wielding an intellect that was not nice.

After another story about Richard's friend Ken Kesey, Dennis rambled on and on about who was hip, who on "on the bus" . . . a topic for nostalgia buffs now perhaps, but this was before the Internet.

Dennis announced that he was on the bus. He had a ticket to go where no culture had gone before. We considered whether this was so. Then Richard drew himself up, acquired a solemn look and explained why the hippies had failed: "A bus ticket is not a license to kill."

We were stunned. We were speechless. Dennis drank a fifth of Calvados brandy and I drank the other one. It was almost dawn and we were still stunned but unfortunately not speechless.

Dennis greeted the fresh day from the roof of the chicken coop shrieking, "I'm a morning person." After that, the fresh day is a bit vague.

The memory is a trip of its own and maybe everything did not happen exactly as is related above. I remember the sunrise was awful loud. While puking in the front yard, there appeared to me a ring of mushrooms, and underneath them, a busload of leprechauns partying down. Recycled spaghetti and a river of booze rained down on their parade. The little people were not surprised by this treatment from a big star like me.

Richard peeked around the corner of the house. He looked like Mark Twain, and in a flash I accepted reincarnation. Like I said, it was a weird yard.

I got over my guilt about misusing my gifts from the Department of Agriculture. I had used official food to propitiate the gods, which is like feeding the homeless.

There would be other parties, equally magical and difficult to recall. Then Richard booked his trip on the choo-choo to nowhere.

What remains of the most original prose writer of his generation is in the books. As for the man, all we should feel is sympathy . . . not for him, but for the party-goers in his next life.

"Brautigan and The Eagles"
Brad Donovan
Rolling Stock, no. 9, 1985, pp. 4, 6.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

He liked Bozeman, so returning from Japan in the spring of '83 he taught a writing class at the agriversity and drank at the Eagle's Club bar on Main Street. He was the only non-member allowed to run a tab, thanks to his friendship with the manager, an expert on guns. "The best bar in Montana" (but he was free with praise), the bar area is narrow, high-ceilinged with a false ceiling over the horseshoe bar proper where sit a stunning variety of drunks. The room is wider towards the alley, accommodates long wooden tables, folding chairs, cheap burgers on Friday nights, and a small frantic dance floor presided over by a band that can wring, bar-rag fashion, four songs from one tune. He drank with precision and enormous capacity, and was usually polite to the gaggle of students, reporters, rednecks, would-be bohemians and curious regulars. Drinks were purchased by the round until midnight or so, when they all stumbled out feeling flash burnt by a goofy UFO.

One evening, a college student came in wearing a baseball cap that sported a plastic Toucan's bill protruding over the visor.

"You're Richard Brautigan, aren't you?" the kid said and gave Richard the hat. A while later, Richard is in the can at the trough. In walks crew cut Lou, one of the regulars, boozily blinking in the fluorescent glare.

"I don't know about this place anymore," Lou says to me, meaning, Who let the college kids in?

Then Lou sidles up to the trough, looks up at the big guy next to him, dressed all in denim, with stringy blonde hair and a damned yellow and range beak growing out of his head. Lou is unshaken. "I don't believe you either."

Critical disbelief, and some jealousy, characterized Brautigan's reception over the past ten years. He once said, "San Francisco will forgive a writer anything, except success. You can screw the mayor's wife on the courthouse steps and nobody cares. But if you're successful, they get mad."

Placed in a hippified niche, then, he turned in his work to an investigation of genres, trying to recombine old forms into new ones. The Hawkline Monster combines gothic and western novels. Willard and His Bowling Trophies, a Sadean diary, depicts Violence overwhelming Love in our time. Dreaming of Babylon is a study in film noir. Sombrero Fallout, The Tokyo-Montana Express and his last, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, reflect his long interest in the Japanese "I novel" where the author's mind is admitted as a character in the text. The mind that was Trout Fishing in America grew wiser, more amused, and often sad. On the surface, the books became more clear, until in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away—his best, he said—narrative Time and Space blend with cinematic ease and sixty-word sentences are easy to read. The French, those dogged America-watchers, are treating his later work with critical respect. Last November, Richard went to Paris where Editions Chretiens was bringing out three novels and a "postmodern structuralist" accounting. Then to a poetry festival in Amsterdam, a radio drama and concurrent release of two books in Munich, back to Amsterdam until February when he flew east to Japan. Once again the promoters had given this "simple guy" a free ride around the world.

Signing books after a lecture in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard was approached by a young woman with a copy of the latest novel, and asked him to dedicate it to a friend.

"Sure. What's your friend's name?"

"Beef. It's his nickname."

"Let's hope so."

As the book-signing wore on, seven different people brought books belonging to Beef.

"Where's this Beef person?"

"He had to work."

A few months pass and a fan letter from Beef arrives at Richard's Pine Creek, Montana, home. Beef thanks Richard profusely for the autographed books, includes a phone number. It's a slow night on TV. Fantasy Island is over, so Richard calls. Turns out, literary folks in Lincoln are having a party at Beef's apartment. Beef thinks it's a practical joke but is finally convinced that Richard's voice is the genuine article, and asks Richard to talk to others at the party, which he does for an hour on his own dime, portraying Beef as an old friend, Genius, and all round Great Guy.

On another occasion, after the Livingston bars closed, Richard got a ride the fifteen miles back to his house from the local cabbie, who looks like a wino Santa Claus. It's three in the morning, so Richard fixes the old man breakfast.

"Whadya do for a living?"

"I write books," and Richard gives the driver a copy of Tokyo-Montana.

Next time they meet, the driver says, "Ya know, I showed that book to the fellas down at the shop. Ya gotta dozen more of em maybe? I think we can make some money."

The gunplay and whiskey served as recreation, after the work, the writing. One afternoon at the Livingston Bar and Grill following an intense session inventing dumb jokes for our screenplay, Trailer, the feeling was of giddy enthusiasm, like in a Tin Pan Alley movie. Richard was surrounded by eight people he'd just met, treating the table to drinks and stewed mussels. The tab came, written in imaginary numbers. One of us signed the check. The bartender was laughing too hard when he said, "Drive carefully."

Richard sipped from a "go cup" (carryout booze by the drink has a mysterious legal status here). I drove, puking over the door. Back at the ranch, Richard handed me a porcelain bowl the size of a football helmet, and I went to the upstairs bedroom and commenced filling it up. Meanwhile, Richard was on the back porch firing his 30-30 Winchester into the darkness and hoary trees. The bowl was nearly full when Richard ran out of bullets. Through a cold air return, a grill in the floor, I could look downstairs and see him pacing back and forth, like Godzilla reading the National Enquirer.

"In Memoriam: Richard Brautigan"
Edward Dorn
The Denver Post, Empire Magazine, May 19, 1985, pp. 22-23, 25, 27.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The sensationalism surrounding the death of Richard Brautigan has been odd. It has met all the qualifications of National Enquirer—calculation, decay, disease, drek sexuality, and a fate conveniently beyond explanation. Richard would have enjoyed that part of it because he was drawn to such style of coverage, and, in fact, might have had it in mind, since he arranged for his body to rot for several weeks before the likelihood of discovery.

The first thing to understand about Richard's mind was that he idealized the common intelligence. That's why he was abruptly popular, and why, in the end, he was systematically forgotten: The people who were surprised by him never abandoned their hatred of him, and the ones who loved him, never a large number, never abandoned him. Even toward the end you could meet people who thought So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away was the truest account of growing up ever written. The only trouble with his admiration of the National Enquirer audience was that they never heard of him. He was condemned, and he knew it, to be one of us.

Last fall, when the news of his suicide came through the wire, there was a blizzard of speculation. A lot of the turbulent guesswork was simply the confusion of the strange man's friends. They felt the triumph of an adversary's death. And, in fact, it was a strong coup. Literary personalities overwhelmingly die in the presence of at least one other person. To die as he did, with calculation, with everything working—ights, radio, telephone machine on in a house with a Do Not Disturb sign—was a disturbing afterthought to a public not yet accustomed to free-market euthanasia.

The comparisons with Hemingway are quite erroneous: Brautigan was not a shotgun man. The pronouncements that women drove him to it are equally off the mark. He mostly got along with women better than men: He was more confidential with them and more friendly toward them. The fact that he was disappointed in marriage had to do with his alienation from humanity in general on a constant basis. He looked to men for the kind of respect that the exclusiveness of marriage denied. The aesthetic which led him to prefer Japanese women was at the heart of his essential lack of interest in domestic routines. His views on these matters are very eloquently expressed and recorded in Sombrero Fallout, a deeply lyrical presentation of the contrast of American and Japanese traits.

He was a roamer, always looking for the odd sign and the direct encounter, and he was naturally dubious of explanation and analysis, because he felt the phenomenon itself was complete. And so did his readers, during the early years of his success. He didn't write fiction so much as observation, honed and elevated so as to catch the light emanating from the most presumably insignificant of details. The only respect in which he was a Christian was the interest he shared with Christ in professional women.

He was a true macho in that his challenges were thrown at men. He loved sharp arguments the nastier the better. He craved for verbal contest to reach a point where he was compelled to say "Watch it! You're going too far." Those who knew him well, and who played that game with him, took it as a compliment if that theater of combat was reached. Although his writing is not violent, there was no end to his search for the bounds of violence. To Richard Brautigan, the idea of fate itself was comic. That attitude has always made as many enemies as friends.

He has no history of morbidity. All his writing—the lonely, wry, preoccupied, lapidary miniatures he published as poetry, or the spare boldness of his micro-prose—was devoted to coaxing life to live up to its obvious possibilities. Death was a fact to him, not just another attraction. Richard could be vicious, but he was not sour. He had too much pride for that.

Brautigan saw himself and often referred to himself as a humorist. That's a designation not much used about anyone anymore, since everybody in the whole nation has become a comic. But it has been a rare thing when an artist has identified with any tradition in this century. There is a distant similarity between Brautigan and Twain. It consists almost solely in a natural innocence in regarding the evil disposition of mankind. But whereas Twain's treatment of the condition is streaked with acid intelligence, Brautigan's is amazingly tolerant, if not gleeful, and resembles an anthropologist's understanding more than that of a literary man.

Contrary to what is often claimed, Richard spoke easily of his childhood and its tribulations. He was without recrimination, so his stories were saucy versions of the School of Hard Knocks. His work appealed to those who had decided not to mock their chains but to pick them up and carry them out of the hippie slums of the West Coast back to the Rocky Mountains, much as the disappointed seekers of '49 gradually made their way following silver rather than gold to the East again.

One night in August 1980, Richard delivered a little talk and read from his work at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder (Colorado). There were about a thousand old-timey people from the hills to hear him. He was very impressed that forerunners like Billy Sunday and William Jennings Bryan had spoken there. He liked those old echoes. The audience of freckled, ginghamed women and their freckled, ginghamed children and their homespun fathers obviously loved him, and he openly returned their regard. It was a touching reunion filled with gentle, reflective laughter.

That summer in Boulder was special in a number of ways for Brautigan, and he was fascinated with the town itself. It represented many elements of the new life, the untested but already discernible motion of the '8Os at the brink. He was impressed with the liberal sprinkling of beautiful women in the crowds. He stayed at the Boulderado for about a month and felt at home in the ornate, turn-of-the-century ambience. In 1980 the hotel was still a little rough-edged, although some of the present amenities were in place then. The heyday of the hotel in Richard's terms would have been slightly earlier, in the '7Os, when the clientele was a loose traffic of waywardly successful odd-balls with specific intentions if they could ever "get it together."

It was while he was staying at the hotel that he met Masako one evening at a party in his honor given by Ginger Perry. Perry had apparently managed to find the one Japanese girl in Boulder that summer. Masako was very young and very Japanese. She called him Lichad.

Boulder became even more absurdly intriguing in his estimation. He glowed with possibilities and talked about new writing projects. Fishermen came and went. There was a fair amount of talk about fishing the in-town course of Boulder Creek. And then, eventually, he took Masako off to Montana. They didn't live happily ever after, but they were very happy for a while.

His second wife, Akiko, has related how she saw him inadvertently in North Beach very shortly before his suicide. The sight of him was so affecting she followed him along the street and into Vanessi's, an old and still classy Italian restaurant on Broadway, near the crossroads with Columbus Avenue of San Francisco's bohemian quarter, and haunt of sailors and internationalists, and except for the Spanish Mission and Presidio, the oldest inhabited part of the city.

She stood there by the door, she said, until Richard saw her. He closed his eyes. In this sign she thinks he saw her as a ghost. But as everyone knows, if you're lucky enough to see a ghost, you open your eyes. What Richard actually saw, from the testimony of his own record, was yet another instance of the distortion of the dream he had had. It was the final judgment of the truly poor that everything be perfect.

"The Perfect American"
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn
The Denver Post, Empire Magazine, May 19, 1985, pp. 23, 31.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The first time we spent any considerable time with Richard Brautigan was in 1969. The occasion was the writers' conference at a private college in San Diego. It was about two weeks following the birth of our son, Kidd, on the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos, New Mexico.

A strange and provocative little gathering typical of those heady days, the company included Richard Brautigan and Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley and his wife (the writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins), the prominent San Francisco renaissance poet Michael McClure, and Jim Morrison.

A few years and many miles later, we lived across the street from Richard in San Francisco—first out on Geary Boulevard and then in North Beach. In the summer of 1976, he invited us up to his small ranch on the Yellowstone River, outside Livingston, Montana.

He was a generous host and an enthusiastic cook. We went trout fishing. We went to Chico Hot Springs, a scruffy, but marvelous local spa. Richard was such a keen student of life that he even turned the pathetic, worn-out cowboy nightlife of Livingston into a tour de force.

The night before we left, we stayed up drinking Dickel with him and arguing about Patty Hearst and Symbionese Liberation Army. Richard did not like the idea of revolutionaries running around killing people. In fact, as a reasonably well-off landowner, he was not about to support a revolution of any kind.

It was when he moved in across the street from us on Kearny in San Francisco that we met Akiko, his quite beautiful second wife. They appeared to be very happy, and Richard was more that ever bowing and tiptoeing around, using quaint Japanese mannerisms. He had Akiko read us Japanese poetry and serve us tea.

Despite his tendency to inspire an almost competitive urge to drink up the night hours, it was a pleasure to see Richard. When he came to stay in Boulder for six weeks in 1980, we saw him almost every day. However obnoxious his behavior might have been the previous evening, it was easy to forgive him. However deep his troubles—and he was going through complicated and painful divorce proceedings at the time—his mischievous or drunken behavior was more like that of a naughty boy than that of a disturbed adult. It was like he hadn't grown up.

He once told us that he grew six inches in his 13th year, all the growth occurring in the area around his knees. The doctors attributed it to a gland, which they proceeded to remove, using a local anesthetic. Watching his gland come out Richard described as one of the "memorable moments" of his life. The four additional inches he grew to become 6-feet-4 were "normal," but he had become a freak of sorts, and he seemed to carry that sense of himself in the slope and stoop of his narrow shoulders, in the strange, giraffe gait to his walk, and above all, in his vivid, almost child-like imagination.

It was as though something of that 12-year-old had always remained with him. In this respect, his last book, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, is particularly revealing. It provides biographical detail about Richard's boyhood—the drab, welfare household of females from which he escapes every day to explore the big world and to search for characters who might have been his father. When I asked Richard whether the incident in which the boy narrator kills his best friend was fiction, he laughed and said yes.

When we went to Montana in July 1982, we were thinking of Richard, but we were out of touch. We had driven to Bozeman, to the trailer home of a former student of Ed's, Brad Donovan, who was now living on the bank of the Gallatin River. Although we knew that Brad and his wife, Georgia, saw quite a lot of Richard, we were surprised and delighted to see him sitting on the trailer steps when we pulled up in our station wagon. We were touched that he was there to greet us, to be our host again in Montana.

It was early in the afternoon, and Kidd, just a few days away from his 13th birthday, was anxious to go fishing. Richard had already started on a quart bottle of Dickel. Brad, an experienced Michigan fisherman, invited Kidd to go fishing in the Gallatin. It wasn't long before our daughter, Maya, came running back to tell us Kidd had a line of something big.

As we all stood watching Kidd with his line bowed across the flood water, angling his first fish, Richard looked on like Uncle Trout Fishing in America himself. The moment was caught, along with the trout, in Georgia's snapshot. It was the kind of coincidence Richard considered perfect—where real life mimics fiction.

He was careful, on bringing out his firearms the next day, to make certain the children understood they should never point guns in the direction of people. He then took them down to his target range and set them up for the afternoon shooting beer cans with an air rifle.

He rejoined us on the back porch then, laughing with that high-pitched sequence of hoots and howls of his over some monstrous joke he'd told the kids. Life was a very simple progression for Richard: He was pure American for who Japan was the final frontier, the ultimate Out West.

"A Last Letter to Richard Brautigan"
Gerald Haslam
Western American Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, May 1986, pp. 48-50
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Dear Richard;
They found your final message over on Bolinas Mesa the other day, a soft bag of bones that reviled the coroner's boys. Little lank was left, and that stolen mustache was beyond recognition. Maybe you and George Dickel and your swift lead friend planned it this way; we'll never know, but we should have heard the shot.

All I heard was the talk that followed; not your voice, of course, but all those others—some pained, some baffled, some just grateful for having known you. Seymour Lawrence said: "I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American loneliness."

Your loneliness was personal, not national; Lawrence's easy hyperbole would not have survived one of your second drafts. The mother who had on occasion denied you; the three stepfathers who used you for a punching bag; the father who came forward to acknowledge you only after your death; the two marriages that didn't endure: that's not American loneliness, that's personal tragedy.

Tom McGuane explained with real insight, that you were "very much a person who was self-enclosed, hard to break through. Everyone says if he had only reached out to someone. That's sort of the last thing Richard would do. . . . He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." You were certainly all those things, and you created a special literary would that was magical, that was humorous, that was telling.

Despite the stereotype your publishers seemed to encourage, you were something other than a hippie, too. Unique, yeah; unconventional, oh yeah; original, a yeah again. I mean, what do you call a guy who never had a driver's license, who shot up his kitchen and framed the bullet holes, and who wrote many a memorable line on cocktail napkins at a bar? "Richard was one of the truly eccentric individuals I have ever met," William Hjortsberg admitted. "He was a genuine Bohemian." That's more like it, don't you think? No flower in your hair, but you damn sure were an original.

But oddness and eccentricity don't develop automatically in each individual, any more than talent such as yours emerges reflexively from a rolled joint, as many of your doper friends speculated. The nagging question is how much the unhappy past that rendered you so vulnerable also contributed to your unique sensitivity, how much pain was part of your bargain? Few in our generation have produced more original pictures of inner America, but at what price? That muffled shot on Bolinas Mesa seems an answer.

In any case, Ron Loewinsohn was mighty close when he observed: "On the surface, Brautigan's America is all Ben Franklin; underneath, it's all Kafka." Don Carpenter said—and I'm sure you'd agree—that he didn't think your work had ever been adequately appreciated: "His ability to compress emotion into such a small space was second to none. He was a great artist." Loewinsohn and Carpenter were your friends, but it wasn't mere friendship talking because you when you were at your best—many of the stories in The Revenge of the Lawn, some of those crazy poems, and Trout Fishing in America—you ere without peer.

Even in those weaker later works flashes of the old magic broke through. That some of those less-than-successful works were the product of your willingness to try new ideas and techniques was to your credit. "Brautigan's integrity as a novelist is clear," Loewinsohn points out, "from his refusal to repeat a successful formula." No doubt you could have sold many rewrites of "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard."

Once Trout Fishing propelled you into the surreal world of American publishing, your hunger for approval converted you into an armless boxer. You didn't understand all the rules. "One minute you're the darling of the fleet," said Becky Fonda, "the next minute they go right over you. Richard was really undone by it."

Even your counter-cultural audience, the one that adopted you after the "hippie" photo appeared on Trout Fishing's cover and liked to pretend your wondrous vision was its own, began to drift away, so Europe and Japan became a focus for your need for approval. Curt Gentry told about walking with a stork like you in Tokyo: "Richard looked particularly strange, out of place. . . . The Japanese would turn and stare at him and kind of laugh as he went by. Richard would say, 'Everyone knows me in Japan. Can't you see that?'"

McGuane blamed the critics for your diminished popularity at home: "Richard became and internationally famous writer without any help from the American literary establishment. When the crest broke, I think they were eager to injure him. I think they tried all the time." While the particulars differ, the pattern is familiar; ask other western mavericks: Jack London, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck. But it's also true that even admiring critics considered much of your later work poor, and I suspect another reason has to be considered.

Once your books were selling well and your publisher was willing to allow you to publish anything, it seems that you did. Without realizing it, you were caught by the bookkeeper mentality of contemporary American publishing, that one that values dead cat books and racks of fake best-sellers in supermarkets rather than literary quality. You became a victim of the very popularity you so deeply needed. Face it, for a time your laundry list would have sold, and your publisher would certainly have marketed it—with a cute photo on the cover. Sometimes it seemed as though he was doing just that.

Ken Kelley has suggested another factor: your venture into the pseudo-macho celebrity set at Paradise Valley. Again, you weren't able to deal with it. "It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard. The books he wrote up there, like The Hawkline Monster, were full of violence—nothing like the earlier hippie novels.

"He would really get whacko up there."

But you were always a writer, a real one. Booze and babes and random beefs aside, you labored at your craft. Remember what you told that audience of freaks at San Francisco State back in the sixties when one kid asked if you just smoked dope and left it flow? "Are you crazy man? Writing's work!" Amen.

So it was and so it is, and for awhile the St. Vitus dance of your prose livened our own strolling lines by extending the possible. When the final assessment of our period is written, your name will not be blown away by the wind because you gave us a special and candid version of ourselves. Once you said, "I have no fear of it [death] at all. I'm interested in life. People wouldn't take life seriously if they didn't know it would it would turn dark on them." You took it seriously and helped us to accept its seriousness with your flashing, your unexpected words.

"I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails," you wrote in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. "They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore's edge, which I belong to with my imagination." I just glanced out the window, and the blackbirds have gone from my small pond, the cattails withered to the color of your scraggly mustache. You reached us, pard', more than you knew, and that is our burden. To the west it's darker, a Pacific storm blowing in toward Sonoma Mountain; the big willow genuflects again and again. There are troughs between gusts—foamy silences—and I am listening for a shot. We all are.

All the best,
Gerry

"Glimpses of Richard Brautigan in the Haight-Ashbury"
Claude Hayward
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 176-189.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Because I printed some of Richard's work and got to know him slightly during the year I lived in San Francisco, John Barber asked me to remember what I could about Richard in that context. The following is as disjointed and out of synch as were the times described. I do not remember as much as I thought I did and in it are only glimpses of Richard Brautigan.

I was just a typical American boy: immigrant mother, broken home, bad relationship with a step-father, alienated teenager. I was born in that unique moment in 1945 after the surrender of the Fascists in Europe but before the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I escaped my family in 1963, I also escaped a whole future that could have gone down an academic pathway or perhaps some future in the emerging new technologies; one of my high school classmates, I heard, forty years later, learned some computer stuff in the Navy and then hooked up with a guy named Cray who had some project going. Now he and his wife have separate Learjets. My own brief experience in the corporate world had been as an apprentice at the National Cash Register Company, where I was thoroughly schooled in the intricacies of mechanical cash registers, a trade that was obsolete within a few years, as moving electrons replaced moving chunks of metal as compilers of information.

I followed I am not sure quite what, perhaps a quest for some self-view of authenticity. I had read the Beat poets and novelists, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village as a child. My path led to Venice West and the tattered remnants of the Beats still there after the police pogroms drove the core of the Beat scene to San Francisco's North Beach. The Venice West Café was still there, and it became my door into the Underground. The path led through KPFK, the pioneer Pacifica radio station founded by WW2 conscientious objectors, where I was a newsroom volunteer under the tutelage of Vaughn Marlowe, the news director at the time. That led to the LA Free Press in its first two years, when its office (and editor and publisher Art Kunkin's secret crash pad) was located in the basement of Al Mitchell's underage coffeehouse that was called the Fifth Estate, on Sunset across the street from the notorious Chateau Marmont. I was editor's devil and chief dogsbody, rising to "advertising manager" by the time I left to go to San Francisco in late 1966.

Arriving in San Francisco essentially penniless, with a pregnant partner and no job, I found a flea-infested flat on a soon-to-be "Urban Renewed" block near Third and Mission that we could stay in iexchange for fixing it up, a hopeless task if ever there was one, and probably a polite fiction to cover the owner's generosity. I happened across the first issue of the Sunday Ramparts, a rich man's folly perpetrated by Warren Hinkle III, editor of Ramparts magazine, and presented myself at his office, where I managed to talk myself into a job as "advertising manager" of the Sunday Ramparts, that having been my previous experience in the emerging "Underground Press" and cachet enough. I was given an office to share with an up and coming young rock music reviewer named Jann Wenner, a protégé of the mighty Ralph Gleason, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Jann was designated "rock-n-roll editor" for the paper.

Ramparts occupied a heady place in the journalistic world in 1967, a slick magazine blowing the lid off of one scandal after another and helping to push opposition to the Vietnam War into the mainstream of American consciousness. Hinkle III, raised in the old-school Catholic social activist world, acquired a whole stable of counter-culture types on his staff, including Eldridge Cleaver as house Black radical, Wenner as house rock maven, Robert Scheer as house student radical, David Horowitz as house left intellectual, later to become a darling of the Right, Gene Marine as archetypal noir crime and sleaze reporter and many other noteworthy journalists whose names now escape me. I was house hippie, uniquely placed to lead the search for the elusive and enigmatic Diggers and other so called community leaders of the Hippie scene over in the Haight-Ashbury, when Hinkle decided the burgeoning scene over the hill warranted Ramparts magazine's scrutiny.

As "advertising manager" of the Sunday Ramparts, I was essentially worthless, not really having, at age 21, much of a clue as to how to operate in the business world. I did let myself get talked into hiring the San Francisco Mime Troupe for a PR stunt by Harvey Kornspan, their business manager. Harvey's scheme was to dress up a few Troupers in gaudy costumes and go up to the offices of the major ad agencies to sing Christmas carols and pass out promotional literature for the Sunday Ramparts, to attract advertising revenue. Needless to say, it produced little revenue, but some marvelous scenes of gorillas and Santas emerging from high-rise elevators and singing to the bemused office staff while I handed out ad rate cards and promo stuff. Harvey later found a newly-arrived kid from Chicago named Steve Miller and got him to open for Big Brother and the Holding Company at a benefit for the Communication Company on March 5, 1967. Then he got Steve his first gig at the Matrix club over the hill near the Marina District. As Steve's manager, Harvey corralled us into going down and listening to his wunderkind do his stuff. Miller just filled the tiny Matrix with his raw energy and blew down the doors; afterwards he would shyly invite us to his place to smoke some reefer and unwind after the show. We were the only people he knew in that first month or so, but we lost touch in the bubbling ferment of the Haight.

The Mime Troupe was a hotbed of activity and some of its members had secret lives as political and social activists. From this group emerged the Diggers, who challenged the prevailing vision of thousands of young people descending on San Francisco's Haight scene in innocent droves seeking the liberation of peace, love and good vibes. Terminally pragmatic, the Diggers asked such questions as "Where will they sleep?" and "How will they eat?", not to mention where would they shit. The Diggers led by example, anonymously providing cooked meals for any takers in the Panhandle Park that bordered the Haight, organizing food runs to farmers' and produce markets and establishing gleaning rights with various growers and opening a succession of "Free Stores" where clothes and gear were made available. Key to the digger energy was its anonymity and lack of hierarchy. Nobody was the leader and anybody was the leader. People were encouraged to "make it happen", to actualize their own reality.

Around Christmas time, 1966, once I had been working for a while, we escaped the fleabag apartment and rented a flat on Duboce Street. at the south end of Fillmore, ten blocks or so southeast of the Haight-Ashbury epicenter.

Somewhere, in the midst of all that, I encountered Chester Anderson, newly arrived on the scene with a minor literary reputation and some money he had been paid for a paperback novel. My partner at the time, H'lane Resnikoff, recalls that Chester and I connected at Ramparts, and he joined up with us in the flat at Duboce Street. At some point, inspired, I believe, by the hard-hitting broadsides being handed out in the Haight by the Diggers, Chester proposed that we pool resources and acquire some advanced mimeograph equipment and start a street press to serve the community. He led me down to the showrooms of the Gestetner Corporation, a German based firm that was at the leading edge of refined mimeographic copying technology. The heart of the system was the Gestefax, a stencil cutting machine that would reproduce a layout as a stencil for the mimeograph machine. Its pre-digital technology involved a beam of light reading the original as it spun on a revolving drum while burning through the thin rubber paper-backed stencil, rotating simultaneously next to the original, with a spark modulated by the scanning light. It was advanced for its time, and it allowed us to reproduce anything from text to halftones faithfully and rapidly. We were sold. Chester had a few hundred bucks for the down payment, and I had the steady, verifiable job to sign the payment agreement. The Communication Company, ComCo, was born.

The first ComCo sheet laid out our vision: "love is communication," and our noble objectives: provide printing, function as the communication arm of the Diggers, be a more immediate and responsive medium than the hip weeklies, to raise Hell and, last and least, to make our payments on the machinery. We spelled out what we could do and invited participation. No prices, no address, our names and a phone number, which I remember to this very day.

I continued with my job at Ramparts, while Chester and H'lane manned the machinery with the aid of successive young men that wandered in and out. I set up a workroom for the press in the small room over the stairwell, handy to intercept incoming traffic. The machinery was straightforward and fairly foolproof and I quickly trained everybody in the basics. The actual process using the Gestefax involved positioning the camera-ready copy or the original side by side with a fresh stencil on a cylindrical drum and clamping them into place. The drum was set to spinning and the simultaneous scan and burn took from six to eighteen minutes, depending on the sensitivity selected. What emerged was a thin film of rubber on a paper backing, perforated by the spark that, when peeled from the paper and installed on the silk-screen drum of the mimeo, placed ink in a duplication of the original. The actual printing took less time than the preparation and 500 copies could be out the door in less than half an hour.

Sunday Ramparts only lasted a couple of months before Hinkle pulled the plug. Owing to Hinkle's insistence on producing the paper with antique technology, actual Linotype, huge matts and cast lead plates for rotary web presses, the Sunday Ramparts never really made it off the ground, financially. Hinkle's fascination with the minutiae of assembling the pages as actual blocks of type was clear on the several occasions I helped him put the "paper to bed" in the aging pressrooms of one of the City's dailies. He also insisted on the large sheet format, reminiscent of the London Times. The final touch to the ritual was screwdrivers and egg sandwiches at the nearby newsman's bar around the corner as dawn was breaking.

I became full-time operator as ComCo "business" or, more properly, "activity", increased. As the archive shows, a steady stream of broadsides went out, and a steady stream of San Francisco literary figures augmented what came in off the street.

It was not long after ComCo started doing its thing that people started to check us out. Richard Brautigan showed up and started spending time at the Duboce Street location. Sophisticated observers like Richard were quick to pick up on the action. I am not sure if he found us on his own or if he was pointed at us by the Diggers. The Diggers were constantly funneling their various manifestoes through the Gestetner.

Richard was an imposing figure, tall in stature with long, straw-blond hair and a walrus mustache, and always dressed in that heavy range coat, and worn boots that had seen the prairies. He had recently published (I think it was) Trout Fishing in America with the aid of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Margot Patterson Doss, and was a presence in the literary scene. I had seen him at various poetry functions and around in the street. He was friendly and cordial and clearly cut from different cloth than the average hippie. But Richard was an observer, an acute, bemused one with a keen eye for the absurd and surreal. I do not know how long he had already been in the Haight when I got to know him. By that time his book had received critical acclaim in the San Francisco literary world and he was an acknowledged lion on the scene. But he got right out into the streets and felt the full effect, without being swept away by it. I knew he was storing it all away, grist for his fine-grinding poetic mill. Richard was both sardonic observer and willing participant. His poem about taking a leak and gazing down at his penis, knowing it had been inside his lover twice that day, and how that made him feel good always seemed to me to be the perfect metaphor for the innocent romanticism of the free-love hippies.

Richard became a part of the community stream that passed through our door. I know he enjoyed our company, although he sat mostly with H'lane in the kitchen, where she, enormously pregnant with Clane, our first child, held court and kept the coffee going. He and H'lane had many a long caffe-klatsch while the fervor of the ComCo office swirled through the apartment. I would be deviling about, running the press, and Chester might be there or ensconced in his room churning out his latest meth-inspired screed, or prowling the streets in search of good company, news and speed. Richard would never smoke reefer with me, graciously declining, and I do not think he ever did any of the rampant psychedelics that were endemic to the scene, but he was ever-ready for a nip of whiskey if that was about. I never saw him drunk or incapacitated; he was always his seemingly mellow self, usually reeking of patchouli and always wearing the pea coat and the battered, yellow, ten-gallon stetson that was his trademark appearance. He could always be spotted in a crowd, the hat towering above all and his all-seeing gaze not far behind.

His first project for us was the single sheet edition of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," of which I printed perhaps 500 copies, which he quickly distributed. He returned shortly for another run, with a slightly different background, which had more copies.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," the poem, caught me with its magical references to benign machines keeping order. The potential of the cybernetic revolution was beginning to dawn on some of the heavy digger thinkers, and I had been hearing a lot of raps explaining how the machines were going to free humankind from the awful soul-killing drudgery of machine-like labor and there would be a great explosion of creative energy as people were freed to realize broader potentials than standing in front of a machine pulling a lever. Silly dreamers; we should have realized that of course the machines would be enslaved by the owners to create wealth rather than liberate workers. Richard's poem, though, at the time fit right in with our optimism over the promise of the computer.

The third-floor flat on Duboce Street at the corner of Fillmore was just far enough from the Haight action that we did not get casual drop-ins off the street, and yet close enough to be there with a brisk walk. The free street communication that we provided amounted to almost a blog of the scene, of sorts, in that it had the stream-of-consciousness spontaneity of a Web log and access to it was free. Moreover, in a scene in which the hot media were increasingly tuned out by the inwardly looking participants, a medium as cold as a piece of paper put in your hand in the street by someone who looked like you (was another hippie) instantly grabbed the attention and involvement of the reader, who most likely showed it to someone else, and they would see it posted around the neighborhood. Remember that this was going on in early 1967, as the scene began to emerge into national consciousness and the Haight became more and more crowded. We gained massive street credibility by being as unrefined and unfiltered and unstructured as we were, which stood in sharp contrast to the conventional media.

Our open-door policy meant that we would put out anything that came in. In those pre-fax, pre-digital days, it all walked in the door and they had to find us, as we did not advertise. So if a disheveled young man walked in with a poem he had written, inspired by a free meal in the Panhandle, I printed it and he published it by walking out the door with one hundred free copies and handed them out. I have no doubt that there were little handouts like that that never made it into anybody's archive. Even Steve Shneck, who claimed to have an archive in his name at Boston University, to whom I often gave copies of the latest runs on my visits with him on my way home from the Ramparts office, did not get them all.

Brautigan became inspired by the simplicity of our process, which contrasted sharply with the methodical and time-consuming processes which went into straight world publishing. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (the yellow book) happened within a few days of his bringing it in. His text was already typescript so it passed rapidly through the Gestefax. The photo on the cover took a few hours' tinkering to get the right degree of graininess against the bright yellow. I do not remember where the paper and ink came from. Richard provided it, of course, but I do not remember if he brought it to us himself or came with me to buy it from the supplier. There would have had to have been a vehicle involved, because 1,500 copies was four cases of paper. We laid out the book in a format of four pages to a single legal size sheet. I did the printing in an overnight burst of energy. By that point in our operation we had acquired a folder and a stapler, and in a massive collaboration we collated the pages and folded and stapled it all up in a day-long run, Richard helping us with the tedious dance of walk-around-the-table-collating technology, and then he spirited them all away and I began to see the familiar yellow book at bookstores everywhere I went, always priced free. Nowadays, mint examples of that book bring $500 from collectors.

I have been told, although I have no personal knowledge of it, that a later edition of this book, similar in appearance, was rumored to have been printed by someone that commandeered the strike-idled presses at the San Francisco Chronicle. I have never seen an example of this edition, if it exists, although I have handled a mint specimen of the book I printed as recently as June of 2004, and there is no question as to the origin of this original edition. Nancy, the widow of Robert Levy, who worked at City Lights Books for decades, saved it from the original stock that Brautigan delivered to City Lights.

Later, Richard brought us another project, Please Plant This Book, which involved printing on little envelopes to be filled with flower seeds. This was a project I could not do for him, for technical reasons; as best I remember there was a problem with getting the little envelopes through the machine and keeping good registration for the multi-color he wanted. I also had to turn away Robert Crumb, who came to me with his art for the first Zap Comix, which was too large a format for our machine. It had to be standard comic-book size, and besides, Crumb was trying to make some money (rightfully so, considering his talent) and by then we were a digger free service so there would have been an ideological self-conflict. He did later do a poster for our fund-raising concert.

I really caught that free thing bad; four years later I could not sell some Digger land that I had "liberated" with a generous donation from Bill Buck (William Benson Buck III, whose heirs, I believe, founded the Buck Foundation that does so much for Marin County) and I had to find a steward to pass it on to for free who would take on its care. That land is still "liberated", removed from commerce by virtue of legal legerdemain and blessed with an extended family of stewards to this day.

Out of all this ferment in Haight-Ashbury-era San Francisco arose the grand scheme that I know Richard played a part in promoting with his literary reputation. The Invisible Circus grabbed the attention of the literary underground and brought that together with "happening" (as we called it then) artists, performance artists experimenting with the immediacy of now. Richard brought us into it with his vision of the "John Dillinger Computer", an in-your-face gangster of communication, robbing the rich to feed the poor. I, of course, saw very little of it, as I spent most of the weekend in the basement, running the press. A constant flow of paper came in, was duplicated, and left in a rush; a constant on-going commentary on the upstairs scene, with immediate art criticism of the events and random poets flinging poems out to the revelers. Free Wheelin' Frank, the Hells Angel poet, sat in the corner and painstakingly wrote a poem in the midst of the chaos. Somebody went into the bar across the street and sat overhearing a conversation, rushed down to the press room and wrote breathless reportage of the conversation, we printed it up, and then he ran back to the bar to hand the commentary to the still-gabbing drunks. Richard was coming in three times an hour with a poem or another announcement we had to get out.

I doubt that anybody has the complete picture of all that went on during that event, but many descriptions of it, like the blind men in the room with the elephant, have captured the essence of an event that, like the ill-fated Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, has become mythic in its remembrance. Enough has been written of this that I will defer to those who were upstairs to describe, as best they can, just what it was that happened. As concerned Glide Memorial Church deacons surveyed with dismay the wreckage, I myself staggered out of the Glide Church in a pre-dawn Sunday haze, in search of the Gully Jimson Memorial Opera House, but I never found it.

I did find New Mexico, finally, after a few more years in northern California that saw the end of my publishing career and have been here, in sight of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, since 1971.

"Dreaming of Brautigan: An Appreciation"
Steve Heilig
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 190-195.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The classroom fell silent before I noticed it and then it was too late; the teacher was standing over me and all the other kids were staring. Some smirking.

"Give me that little book you're reading," she demanded, holding out her craggy hand. My face flushing, I removed it from behind our boring textbook and handed it to her.

"Hmm," she grumbled, looking at it. "Trout Fishing in America." Her disdain was withering. "We do not read about fishing in English class, Steve."

Busted again. She even took the book away. But what could I do? I was addicted to Richard Brautigan's writing.

Growing up in sunny, suburban Southern California in the 1970s was not particularly conducive to much beyond the beach, at least not for many of us. There is no denying we were lucky—what better place to be a teenager than the beach? But when not surfing or exploring various rites of passage to adulthood on the sand, day or night, there were hours to occupy, and I often did so by reading. Even though some of my friends made fun of me for doing so, it likely saved my life, as many of my peers went down hard when their drug or drink or other habits got the better of them. I pursued via books what I thought, and still think, were broader horizons. I read science and politics and travel books and more, sometimes even books assigned by teachers, but mostly I read fiction. You could buy fine paperback novels for 95 cents and they were one of the things I spent my meager allowance on. And Brautigan was one of my touchstones, as he, along with J. R. R. Tolkien and a few others, was among the first writers I discovered on my own after moving on from children's books.

Brautigan's early books, especially A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar, The Abortion (I was not sure I understood that one yet), Trout Fishing in America, and the short stories in Revenge of the Lawn, were not only magical in themselves but also opened up new vistas to places and other authors. I went to Big Sur as soon as I was old enough to drive and buy a $400 VW bug. I read Kerouac, Vonnegut, and even Hemingway and Faulkner when I learned that Brautigan loved and was himself influenced by them. I even wrote some horrible stories and poems in bad imitation of him, and maybe he even influenced my taste in cheap wine, for all I recall. I owe him a lot.

And then I became one of the guilty ones. I stopped reading Brautigan in the mid-1970s, around the time of his novel The Hawkline Monster. I kept reading, but not him. But I was not the only one to move on from Brautigan in those years. About the same time, Brautigan's readership began declining with each new book. He went from being a folk hero, mobbed on the streets of San Francisco and featured in LIFE magazine—the biggest thing going then—to gradual obscurity, to the point that by the beginning of the 1980s he even had trouble selling a new book idea to a publisher. Half a dozen more books came out during those years and some of them were good ones. But by late 1984 Brautigan, sunk into alcoholism and bitterness, was dead by his own hand.

I did not know Brautigan; I only met him once, and then just barely. On one of my first visits to Bolinas, where he lived part-time, I happened to be invited to a party and there he was, sunk deep into a couch, clutching a drink. "I wouldn't try to talk to him if I were you", advised a knowing local, and I took that advice. Sometime in the evening we had a brief chat about some trivial news of the day, I think. Within two years it was too late to ever talk with him again.

I do remember when his end came—it was worldwide news. I had been wandering in the Himalayas that autumn and when I returned to Kathmandu, where the outside world penetrated, this sad news was shared on par with other disasters such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Reagan's re-election. How could it have happened that a writer who for many symbolized the best, most carefree and even innocent and adventurous spirit of the "sixties" had sunk so low?

There are lots of theories about that, of course. There are probably elements of truth in many of them. Falling from fame to obscurity is hard for anyone; alcohol is a deceptive depressant; divorce is usually a big emotional wallop; and so on. Pop psychology has nominated a "midlife crisis" as a hurdle for everyone, but especially high-achieving men. Brautigan's shadowy childhood seemed, from what little others knew, dark and pain-filled. A legacy of mental illness or suicide in his family tree is another burden Brautigan may have carried (like Hemingway, among many other writers). Some people posited that the entire fading of the counterculture ethos weighed heavily on Brautigan's mythic shoulders, whether he acknowledged it or not. But who really knows? His only daughter, Ianthe, although she has deeply reckoned both privately and publicly (in her own poignant book You Can't Catch Death) with her father's decline and fall, refuses to buy into the tragic view of him and his legacy. She is understandably protective of him, and she is certainly correct that his accomplishment in words lives on in a most positive manner, to be discovered and rediscovered by new and old readers.

But will they? Most of Brautigan's books remain in print in various forms, and a few "new" ones have been published in recent years, after a long lapse. A definitive biography is forthcoming one of these years. But a while back I tried a little experiment. In every bookstore I visited, I asked the clerk if they had any books by Richard Brautigan. All too often, if the clerk was young, the response was, "How do you spell that?" Older booksellers of course knew his name and work, but in chain bookstores, with their cafes and CD listening stations, he too often drew a blank. Shocking or dismaying, maybe, but again, how many young people read or listen to authors or musicians who died—or at least became obscure—before they were born? Supposedly Brautigan is still more appreciated overseas, and online there are Web sites and electric mailing lists devoted to him. Some of the participants on these are evidence that new, young readers do in fact discover and appreciate Brautigan. Whether there will be any kind of Brautigan resurgence, and what his literary legacy will be, is still uncertain.

As another experiment, try writing like him. His work is so deceptively simple, even childlike, but behind it lurks a lot of life and hard work. Some who knew him say he labored and rewrote his work endlessly; others say he worked it all out in his head and then spilled it onto paper in almost-finished form. In any event, his imitators tend to be justly forgotten, if published at all.

Nowadays I often wander past Brautigan's final home, and walk some of the same paths he did for many years. Maybe I feel his presence; I am not so sure. People I know who were his friends and neighbors until he alienated almost everyone seem to hold on to the positive memories of him as a funny, creative creature, however eccentric or difficult. An old pal of mine, who used to summer in Bolinas with her divorced dad when she was a child, tells of going down to the town's one bar at dinnertime to retrieve her famous lawyer father, who was buying drinks for Brautigan and other regulars. Another pal has an IOU from Brautigan stating that he owes about four dollars. Yet another feels that, contrary to some accusations that the townspeople neglected him, Brautigan was fiercely protected against the outside world, and even against local intrusion. Brautigan's house has been remodeled and his ghost, and maybe others, exorcised by light and birth and time. We try to memorialize him in some way in the local paper each year, on his birthday at a minimum. It is a token way of thanking him for all his writing and what it meant to so many.

By the way, I got my little Trout Fishing paperback back at the end of the school year. In fact, I got a whole pile of books from the teacher's box of confiscated items—Tolkien, Kesey, Hemingway, Hesse, Salinger, and a bunch of Brautigans. I guess she was trying to protect me from bad influences. Little did she know. Thanks, Mr. Brautigan.

"Lit Crit, Over Easy, and R. I. P.: Three Vignettes"
William Hjortsberg
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 196-206.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Lit Crit

In a lifetime of fishing trips similar details blur, a typical day's catch long forgotten while the big one that got away remains forever framed in memory like a snapshot of eternity. Hardship and bad weather also seem more memorable than perfect halcyon days; sprightly conversation making even disasters endure as cherished good times in the mental scrapbook. Such a trip occurred in the summer of 1972, when Richard Brautigan, Jimmy Buffett, photographer Erik Weber and I set off for Sixteenmile Creek, a legendary Montana fishing spot.

Our directions veered somewhat askew. After finding Sixteenmile on a map, flowing out of the Shields Valley (named for Sgt. Shields, who passed through with Lewis and Clark,) we assumed driving north on US 89 was the best way to go, unaware the fishery was located mainly on the huge CA Ranch across the Meagher County line eighteen miles southwest and that the correct approach was from the Gallatin Valley, via Maudlow. Instead, we found ourselves in Ringling, a ghost town named for the circus family whose huge surrounding ranches once grew all the hay to feed their traveling menageries and the brigades of drafts horses hauling gilded show wagons down Main Street America.

At this point in his career, Buffett had released a failed album and was mainly singing in bars. The songs he wrote over the summer were soon to make him famous. Today's trip resulted in "Ringling, Ringling," a melancholy ditty later gracing Buffett's Living and Dying in 3/4 Time album. Ringling was indeed "a dying little town." All that remained of the bank was the fireproof vault, stark amid the surrounding debris. Only the bar survived more or less intact, a squat log building crouching beneath a towering aluminum Matterhorn of discarded beer cans glittering brighter than neon in the late morning sun. Stopping to ask about access to fish Sixteenmile, the four anglers got the bad news and stayed on for most of the afternoon, adding considerably to the alpine empties pile.

Erik Weber remembered Brautigan sitting alone and aloof at the end of the bar, while the rest of the gang played pinball and horsed around. "He was talking to the person running the place, this older woman. But he wouldn't relax. He wouldn't have any fun."

Later, hoping to rescue what was left of the day, the misinformed quartet headed up through White Sulphur Springs to the Musselshell, a slow-moving river the color of coffee and about as fishable as an irrigation ditch. Before and after encountering the final sad truth of a fruitless fishing trip, conversation in the car volleyed amiably from front seat to back. When Richard grouched about bad reviews from the east-coast literary establishment, I replied that the harshest criticism I had ever received came from Ben Stein, a former state senator who had edited the remarkable journals of Montana pioneer, Andrew Garcia. A Tough Trip Through Paradise was a book I much admired, and when I bumped into Stein and his wife outside Sax & Fryer in Livingston the previous winter, I told him so.

Stein replied that he had recently read my first novel, Alp. The senator further observed that it was the most depraved and disgusting book he had ever encountered, so foul he felt compelled to carry it out back behind the barn and bury it in a manure pile.

"I said I hoped a beautiful rose grew in that spot," I told Richard, who grinned behind a lattice-mask of steepled fingers. "He said the only other books that ever causing such a violent reaction were, '...that Trout Fishing abomination! and Tom McGuane's The Sporting Club,'" both volumes hurled by Stein into his fireplace for burning.

"Hmmmm," Richard pondered, covering his sly grin. "I wonder if he ever thought of drawing and quartering a book?"

Over Easy

One evening in the fall of 1973, Richard Brautigan came into Livingston for a night of serious drinking. He headed straight for the Wrangler, at that time the bar of choice for the Montana Gang. Starting in the nineties, the much-beloved watering hole was replaced by a succession of up-scale restaurants in the on-going yuppification of the West, but back then Livingston was still a true railroad town and boasted twenty-four bars and an equal number of churches. A fellow could tie one on every Saturday night and pray off his hangover each Sunday without ever hitting the same joint twice for six straight months. There was also a brothel operating on the outskirts of town ("Sally's: Where the Customer Always Comes First," read their souvenir ballpoint pens,) the final surviving remnant of a prosperous turn-of-the-century pleasure population once occupying more than fifty houses along B Street.

Two rival drinking establishments stood on Park Street, diagonally across from the Northern Pacific depot. The Wrangler featured rock 'n roll bands and catered to a scruffier long-haired crowd, although in those days these were most likely blue-collar guys, carpenters and auto mechanics, not flower-power hippie weirdos. Next door was the Longbranch, (now sadly transformed into a Chinese restaurant,) a shit-kicker cowboy bar with country music and a frieze of the local ranch brands running around the walls. Most nights, the customers would wander back and forth between the two long narrow rooms. Eventually, an interior door was cut through the dividing wall. Music came mainly on the weekends. The rest of the time, folks shot pool, played the Pong machine, and got slowly and religiously drunk.

Richard spent a lot of time at the Wrangler. Cindy Murphy, a local gal who tended bar for proprietor Bob Burns, remembered him often arriving alone. Brautigan sat by himself drinking all night without saying a word to anyone. Even when acting aloof, Cindy recalled that Richard always tipped well. Once, standing at the bar, he was accosted by a weary salesman in a rumpled plaid polyester suit, wide necktie undone. After a difficult and frustrating day, the fellow radiated truculence and glared red-faced up at Richard. "You hippies certainly have it made," he said, his voice acid with disapproval.

Whisky glass in hand, Richard peered down imperiously though his bifocals at the angry little man. "I am not a hippie, sir," he declared, enunciating each word precisely. "I work for my living."

On another occasion one fall in the early seventies, Richard came into the Wrangler with Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison after a day of grouse hunting. Dick Murphy, Cindy's brother, remembered that it was "a pretty crazy night in there." While McGuane and Harrison elbowed to the bar, shouting out drink orders, Richard had something else on his mind. "Brautigan's got this paper sack," Dick recalled, "like a big grocery bag, and he's got it kind of necked down, funneled down from the top, and I'm watching him and he's got people sticking their hands in there and people would scream. 'Stick your hand in there,' he'd say, 'so you can tell what it is.' The girls especially would all come out screaming."

Murphy himself gave it a try. The bag contained dead grouse, as many as seven or eight recently killed birds. "There were so many in there that they were all still warm, of course, and so all you felt was this kind of plump feathered bodies. It was pretty funny. He was getting a big kick out of it."

Richard was again in an affable mood on the evening in question, never taking off his goofy hat and knocking back round after round of Black Jack and water, no ice, a drink known locally as a "ditch." After the Wrangler closed at 2:00 am, a group of patrons straggled across the street to Martin's, an all-night cafe slinging hash in an Italianate brick building which once served as a dining room (known as "The Beanery") for the N.P. passenger depot. Designed to resemble a Renaissance villa by the St. Paul firm of Reed and Stem, who later took part in the creation of New York's Grand Central Station, the imposing structures went up between 1901 and 1902. Martin's exterior matched that of the baggage room flanking the depot to the west, all three buildings linked together by a curving colonnade along the track platform. Inside, the place was pure 1950s moderne, Formica-topped tables and a color scheme running to pumpkin and aqua. Long-standing Livingston barfly tradition dictated heading to Martin's for a greasy breakfast after closing time.

The crowd from the Wrangler numbered about ten, including Cindy and Richard, an artist named Donna Bone, and a couple of guys who recently moved to Montana from New Jersey. They sat at a long table in the middle of the large, high-ceilinged room. Orders were taken: eggs prepared various ways, hash browns, omelets, short stacks, biscuits and gravy. At some point, Richard, who had not been saying much, got up and walked silently away from the table. No one really paid attention. Richard was quite drunk, yet moved with a certain lurching dignity. Cindy Murphy remembered only a gradual awareness of the displeasure building behind her, a barely perceptible murmuring, an uncomfortable mirthless laughter; the uneasy sound of people wondering if the joke was on them.

As if on cue, the folks at the long central table spun around to see what was going on. They beheld Richard, passing from group to group, deliberately sticking his finger in everyone's food, one plate at a time. He did so with casual indifference, like a royal taster working the house at the king's request. The stunned reaction behind him was not exactly that of a lynch mob, but people were plainly puzzled and patently pissed. The bunch from the Wrangler looked on in helpless bewilderment, having no ready explanation for their companion's peculiar behavior and expecting a massacre at any moment.

Richard wove between the tables, serene as a drunken angel, dipping his finger dispassionately into the cheese omelets and sunny-side-ups on his way to oblivion. There were perhaps thirty people in all, railroad workers and ranch hands, the usual late-night crowd, and nothing like this had ever happened to any of them before. Not looking back, Richard made his way to the cash register by the door. Deadpan, he picked up the tab for everyone in the place. Three dozen free breakfasts anointed by the touch of the poet. Richard Brautigan stepped out into the windy Livingston night where a cab stood waiting to drive him back to his rented cabin in Pine Creek.

R.I.P.

The Old Saloon in Emigrant, Montana, has not changed much since it first opened in 1902. A long narrow single-story brick shoebox of a building, it once stood hard by the railroad depot on the Park Branch of the Northern Pacific. Back then, a train ran down from Livingston to the north entrance to Yellowstone Park at Gardiner. The depot is long-gone and so are the tracks, torn up when the line was abandoned in 1972. After Prohibition, the Old Saloon survived for a time as soda parlor but the management finally threw in the towel and locked the doors in the early 1920s. Forty years later, in 1962 when the new Highway 89 opened to traffic, the owners simply swept the board floors clean and started pouring whisky once again.

Aside from replacing the carbide lights with electricity and the ice chests with refrigeration there were few concessions to modern times. Gold pans from the miners in Emigrant Gulch hung on the walls. A big cast-iron wood stove offered heat, with indoor sport provided by a pool table in the rear. An ancient, goose-necked electric cigar lighter adorned one end of the bar next to the old Superior Quality cigar cutter. The brass cash register dated to 1904. Only a color television set hanging above the entrance to the tiny grill kitchen provided a tenuous concession to the present day.

The poet and songwriter, Greg Keeler remembered an afternoon in the early 'eighties, when he, Marian Hjortsberg and Richard Brautigan paid a visit to the Old Saloon after attending a barbeque party at the Paradise Valley home of former Montana governor, Tom Judge. Richard's sour mood on this occasion stemmed from his dislike of "yuppies," many of whom had been in attendance at the governor's place. As Greg recalled in his exquisite memoir, Waltzing With the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan, "the three of us went in, and there was one of the wealthiest, most egotistical people we had seen at the party. He sat at our table, pretty obviously flaunting his acquaintance with Richard. Several cosmic cowboys were at the bar behind us when Richard decided to change the tone of things, took out his Buck pocket knife, opened it, and started stabbing away at our table. He then dropped the knife in Mr. Upwardly Mobile's whisky. The whole bar took a deep breath, and I wished I was back in Richard's kitchen eating beany weenies. But Marian saved the day. She daintily plucked the knife from the whisky glass, licked the blade, folded it up and put the knife down. The general breath was exhaled, unheard applause went around the bar, and things calmed down."

On another afternoon not long afterwards, Lynne Huffman, an aspiring writer whose career as a railroad brakeman had recently been cut short by severe back injury (the result of being dragged sixty yards by a slow-moving train,) sat at the Old Saloon bar with a couple of cowboy pals, sipping drinks and watching a noisy football game on tv when Brautigan came in with Marian and Becky Fonda. They were all three-sheets to the wind and navigated erratically to a small table in the rear. Almost immediately, Richard scowled with displeasure at the loudness attending professional sports events.

Marian did nothing to stop him this second time around when Brautigan got up and approached the bar, disgusted with the raucous tv. "Would you mind turning it down?" he mumbled. "We'd like to play the jukebox." It was difficult to understand what Richard was saying and Lynne Huffman had to translate for the cowboys.

All eyes remained fixed on the screen. A wind-weathered wrangler said, "We're watching the game." Richard returned to his table. Several moments later, he was back. This time, he proposed to buy everyone a round if they would lower the volume. Again, nobody bothered to turn his way. "We've already got drinks," another cowpoke laconically observed.

Richard slumped away without a word. The loud cheering continued with every play. Dropping quarters in the jukebox would have been a waste of money. Brautigan's agitation grew. Finally, he could take it no longer and walked up to the bar once again. Always penny-wise and pound-foolish, he said, "I'll pay you a hundred dollars if you'll just turn it down a bit."

The cowboys swiveled on their bar stools, regarding Brautigan through narrowed eyelids. He towered stork-like above them with his drooping General Custer mustache, long blond hair straggling out from under an absurd Elmer Fudd cap topped by a little woolen fluff-ball. "We're not interested in your damn money." The monotone reply sounded final. Richard nodded, getting the message at last, and rejoined Marian and Becky at their table.

"Who is that guy?" one of the cowboys asked Lynne Huffman. Lynne explained that he was Richard Brautigan, a writer and a poet who lived nearby.

"Well," the ranch hand drawled, his words coming as smooth and easy as a knife blade drawn across an oiled whetstone, "you better tell your friend not to come back to the bar one more time, or he'll be Richard 'Rest-In-Peace' Brautigan."

"Dreaming Richard Brautigan"
Greg Keeler
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 207-214.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Many of my memories involving Richard fit easily into narratives, but some are just fragmentary images and unresolved vignettes which, for some reason, have been more likely to show up and resolve themselves in my dreams. While alive, Richard provided the glue for these dream fragments by insinuating subtle, half-joking possibilities for guilt, shame and failure into his letters and conversations. More than once I have awakened from a dream about Richard, first rejoicing that he is still alive, then anxious because I know I have let him down again, then both saddened and relieved when I realize it was just a dream and he is long gone. Even now, when I read a letter like the following, I recall things that I might have done to accommodate him and perhaps even postpone his death a little longer.

Tokyo,
June 7, 1983
Dear,
I hope this letter reaches you before you reach England. Maybe I wrote to you... maybe I didn't about giving my address to Scoop and Brad. Please do. And, also about that money you owe me . . . just kidding.

There's nothing like a good hearty laugh
HO!
HO!
HO!

Love, Richard

The laugh was, of course, that Richard owed ME money, but the guilt comes when I realize that Richard made so many little requests, like the addresses, that I did not respond to most of them. Over the years, those favors and requests have been like tiny vacuum cleaners in my dreams, sucking up the loose imagery into stories that drop me smack dab back in the middle of my old anxieties.

In some of these dreams, I will be looking for Richard, driving up and down the East River Road near his house in Paradise Valley, Montana. Sometimes he will be at home and sometimes he will be at a party or a friend's house, but he will usually be depending on me for a ride, whiskey, money, news from friends, etc. Sometimes our conversations will go as follows:

Greg: I thought you were dead.
Richard: I was, but I got better. Did you bring the whiskey?
Greg: No, I didn't know you were alive.
Richard: I suppose you've hidden the gun?
Greg: No, do you want me to get it?
Richard: Are you kidding? Do you want me to shoot myself again?

The settings and events of the dreams will frequently combine the random yet vivid imagery of actual experiences into wild contexts. Richard used to take pride in showing me his barn, how it still retained equipment from the time it was a working dairy. He even turned on the milking machine once so that the milkers shook and hummed. These showed up in a disturbing dream where Richard and some of his celebrity friends had vanished from a party at his house. I asked a beautiful Asian woman where they were, and she pointed out to the barn. When I opened the door to the milking room, Richard and his friends were all hooked up to the machines by their penises. Richard said, "You're late as usual. Look what you've done," and he pointed to a milk receptacle that was filling with blood.

Another dream incorporates a party my wife, Judy, and I once attended near Richard's house. I dressed up a little too much for it and felt like a clown as I tried to make small talk with Jeff Bridges. I remember falling into some pat conversation about how I admired his work in a short film, "The Girls of Summer," while Richard, dressed in the usual jeans and jean jacket, smirked at my attire and my feeble schmoozing efforts. Judy and I felt so out of place that when Ted Turner and Jane Fonda arrived and were being introduced out front, we made a furtive escape.

In the dream rendition, I am wearing a jean jacket and Richard is wearing a clown suit. Judy tells me that had she known, she would have ironed my clown pants. When Bridges points out that I have forgotten to wear any pants at all, Richard tells him that I am from Oklahoma where pants are optional. I think that one ends up with Judy and Richard as my parents driving off without me while I chase them down the road without any pants.

In describing most of these dreams, I have to work backwards through some of the disparate events which inspired them since the dreams are the only things which relate them. Take for example the following disparate images, events and characters.

Richard told me on several occasions of his fondness and sympathy for Vietnam vets. He said that once during a poetry reading, a vet interrupted him, telling the audience that nobody could possibly relate to what he had been through. Instead of getting mad, Richard went down into the audience, took the man's hand and said that he had a deep respect for his suffering then went back to the stage and continued reading with the vet's rapt attention. In another incident, Richard and I were at a poetry reading with a friend who had a withered arm from childhood polio. The friend did not like to talk about the arm, but before the reading, Richard said "Let's see the ol' paw there," and took his hand and told him he should not be ashamed of it.

In a completely unrelated incident, Richard and I were visiting friends out on the Gallatin River when, on the other bank, we saw a man sending his young boy out into the dangerous current to retrieve a fishing lure he had snagged on a downed tree. Richard leapt to his feet and started screaming at the man, "What kind of father are you! It's just a fucking lure, and you're risking your kid's life."

Subsequently, the man called his child back and they left.

In another episode, Richard, Judy and I were having dinner with our friends Vern and Joann Troxel. Joann taught at the high school here in Bozeman and Vern was a logger who had taught me how to ice fish. Before and during the meal, Vern, who is a WWII vet, talked with Richard about his war experience, and Richard, with his penchant for dark imagery, encouraged Vern to get more and more graphic in his descriptions. By the end of the meal we had pretty much lost our appetites, except for Richard and Vern who seemed to relish the food along with the stories.

Yet another unrelated character named Beef Torey sometimes enters my dreams. When Richard was alive, Beef would occasionally call and help Richard claim payment for work that appeared in foreign magazines. He was a fan and never asked for anything in return, so Richard became quite fond of Beef, though he only knew him from phone conversations. Richard liked to say the word beef just like he enjoyed saying such words as beer, bowling, and burger. After Richard died, I finally met Beef who seemed archetypal and ubiquitous, both in his muscular red-faced rotundity and in his habit of showing up in odd places when least expected.

When I recall the dream, or maybe dreams, which result from these characters and vignettes, I am not sure of the sequence or even of the characters but the following captures the mood.

Vern, Richard and I are fishing on a river, and we see a man gutting a fish on the opposite bank, but when we look closer, the man is actually gutting his son. Then Richard swims or walks across the river and tells the man to let go of his son, which he does, but the boy is a fish again, and it drifts half-gutted away in the swift current. Then Richard takes the man's bloody hand and tells him not to be ashamed of it, and Vern yells across the river that the man should read Richard's poem, "Yes, the Fish Music." At the end of the sequence, I am the man and I am mad at both of them for making me throw the fish away. But Richard calms me by explaining that Beef has made everything all right. Beef will make sure that I get paid for "Yes the Fish Music." Beef will get my fish back.

Probably the saddest of my Richard dreams is the one where he has just slightly gotten better from being dead and wanders around Judy's and my small house, totally ignored and cut off from the living. I sometimes ask him why he is still here, but he avoids the question and wanders into another room.

When he was alive, I sometimes felt that Richard's and my relationship was like that. In spite of his fame and his travels, I think Richard deeply envied domestic situations because he never knew a stable one in his own life. He wanted to live with me and Judy in our house, but Judy did not get along with him at all and our house is tiny, so he lived by himself. During holidays like Thanksgiving and Easter when he was in Montana, he would tell me that such occasions meant nothing to him, that they were just another day, so Judy and I would celebrate with friends and relatives and not include him. But later I would get hints about the pathetic meals he would eat by himself while everyone else was celebrating and rejoicing.

So that is probably why he wanders our house in my dreams. He is looking for the family that never included him.

"Richard's Miraculous Mistakes"
Greg Keeler
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 215-218.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I sometimes think that Richard's use of similes and metaphors in his poetry, prose and conversation was less of a literary device than an expression of his longing for the miraculous in everyday experience. In the early pages of Trout Fishing in America when the young protagonist sees a beautiful white waterfall on a hill in the distance and when, on closer observation, he realizes it is not a waterfall at all but a flight of white wooden stairs, a combination of joy, confusion and disappointment comes across in the image. As in many traditional haiku the kicker comes not so much from an intentional comparison but more from a mistaken identity. The stairs were not like a waterfall; he actually thought the stairs were a waterfall.

Later in "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard" chapter, the water and wood, instead of becoming an extended metaphor, become a mistake that extends itself into fact. Streams and waterfalls are sold by the foot like lumber. Instead of the stairs looking like a trout stream, the boundaries disappear and longing has transformed water into a measurable and stackable substance—like wood.

In our conversations, I noticed a similar longing that welded the miraculous to the mundane. Maybe because I knew Richard when he was in an extended period of depression, there was more disappointment than joy in his fusions, but the result was usually a wonderfully dark humor. For example, Richard's mailbox always seemed magic to me. Even before I knew him, I would sometimes drive by his house and wonder why it was painted blue, though I guessed it had something to do with a chunk of water stuck on top of a post. It was not until I had known him for a couple of years that I started hearing him refer to it as the "tsunami." I might have just passed the term off as a whimsical comparison had I not come to know the huge changes that box could bring to his life, whether positive, like royalty checks or letters from friends, or negative, like a turd squashed in one of his books or papers involving lawyers, taxes, and divorce. Richard was not comparing his mailbox to a tidal wave. To him, his mailbox was a tidal wave. I can remember him on several occasions staring out his window, eyes glazed, mumbling "tsunami" as the mailman drove up.

Maybe longing is the wrong word to describe the catalyst behind Richard's verbal fusions. Maybe it is more that he was so stunned and amazed at what life could deal him, he could not accept ordinary explanations, and disconnection in and of itself became the reaction. His poem "Crab Cigar" is one of my favorites in this vein. Richard writes about watching "a lot of crabs", hundreds, eating in the tide pools of the Pacific Ocean. "They eat like cigars," he writes.

The fact of so many crabs in one place would seem to be the focus of this poem—and maybe it is, or at least the shock of the perception. But the explosion at the end, "They eat like cigars," disconnects itself from the preceding logic as if to say, if you want to know how many crabs there were, go figure how they eat like cigars. Damn, that is a lot of crabs!

Once in the middle of a sub-zero Montana winter, Richard told me that a friend had been driving him home when he looked out in a field and saw a bunch of magpies eating a tire. "Can you fucking believe it?" he said. "It was so cold they were eating a fucking tractor tire." He could have said, I was so cold, it looked to me as if they were eating a tire. But he did not. Though the magpies eating the tractor tire had about as much to do with the cold as crabs eating like cigars had to do with their incredible numbers, I just thought, Damn, it must have been cold!

Or maybe Richard just flat out did not like the way poets had spent centuries searching for the perfect word for the perfect comparison. Maybe, he just enjoyed throwing the occasional pie in the face of convention. Where metaphysical poets in the vein of Donne and Marvell like to jar their readers into new perceptions with extreme but accurate comparisons, maybe Richard liked to poke fun at poets by plugging absurdities into the sacred end of a metaphor. In this way, a glass of lemonade is like the eye of a Cyclops, 500 children get stuffed like hornets into a mud nest, and an insane asylum rubs up against Baudelaire's leg like a cat.

One of the similes that Richard used on me still sticks in my mind because it simultaneously parodied my monogamous marriage and my background as a poet and creative writing teacher. Quite simply, he said, "Big Guy, if you ever get divorced, you'll be like an uzi in a balloon factory." I laughed and blushed at the time, thinking it was as much a compliment as anything else. But looking back at this wacky combination of sound and imagery, it seems more like he was saying, "Hey Mr. Literary Family Guy, look this up in your Funk and Wagnals."

Whatever Richard's reasons were for making similes and metaphors into little exploding miracles, they have established a lasting effect on his readers, particularly the younger ones who, every generation, have been told that good writing is an esoteric act which only works through the hands of established professionals. If their sense of wonder has not yet been slapped into line, they'll be willing co-conspirators in Richard's little plots to fill the language with the miraculous possibilities of its own failure.

"I Remember Richard Brautigan"
Joanne Kyger
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 219-226.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I remember meeting Richard Brautigan. It is the spring of 1957. I meet Richard and Ron Lowenshon at a gallery opening. They tell me they are poets. They are very young, like 19 or 20. Ron likes Keats and I make fun of him. Keats is so old fashioned! I give Richard my address and he comes by the next night so we can go to dinner, only he does not have much money so it means I take him. He shows me this basement in Chinatown on Washington Street where the dishes cost 49 cents each. We have a modest dinner and then go back to Grant Avenue where we run into Mike Nathan, a very young artist who has painted a picture in City Lights Bookstore's front window of a policeman and a priest standing side by side and looking very similar. Mike wants to show me North Beach, but Richard is not happy with this and spends the rest of the evening lurking up and down upper Grant Avenue a half a block behind us. He maintains this somewhat moody distance during the next two years when I see him from a distance in North Beach. He marries Ginny [Virginia Alder, 1957] (later Ginny Aste) and after a time I recall her sitting with Jack Spicer in The Place and saying, "The hardest thing I had to do was give Richard back my wedding ring." The relationship was over [they separated in 1962; divorced in 1970] but they had a daughter, Ianthe [Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan; born 1960].

I remember, in the winter of 1964, coming back from Japan, where I had lived for four years, and realizing Richard was almost a different person. He and Ron Loewinsohn had started a magazine, Change, in 1963 and I had sent them some poems to publish. Despite its title it was a very modest typing-paper size stapled publication with a photo on the cover of Richard and Ron looking very solemn. Only one issue came out. Richard meanwhile had a section of Trout Fishing in America published in Evergreen Review, which I thought was hilarious. His writing had really matured beyond the short, surrealist, dada poems he had been writing before. I wrote him and congratulated him and when I arrived in North Beach, February 1964, we started to visit each other in the shifting scenes of North Beach. I saw him every day for a while. He was happy to have approval and acceptance which he had gained from, among others, the poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, who had read his first two novels while they were being written and had given advice and encouragement.

I remember good times, and good fun, with Richard. Like a long dramatic recreation of a samurai movie in someone's pantry with lots of arm movement and sword slashing, and lots of Pecan Punches at Gino and Carlo's Bar in North Beach. We became tremendous Beatles fans, writing them a letter [to Ringo Starr] in March 1964, at Vesuvios Bar, with Jack Spicer: "Bring personal effects, the rest will be provided—ironing boards, axes, canning equipment, one vacuum cleaner, hot running water." At a long party at Bill McNeill's over on Lyon Street, Richard strummed the guitar and made up very long and winding, aimless songs, and Helen Adams said, "Oh, that one was lovely, can you play that one about grasses on the lawn again?" But it was forever gone in the after moment.

I remember March 28, 1964, when Donald Allen rented a car and took Richard and me to the Wine Country. He was Richard's editor and Grove Press editor. I wrote this poem right after Don died in September 2004.

Don Allen

Once he took Richard Brautigan and I north out into the wine country
circa 1964 when it was really empty and spring blossoms were on the
trees

He'd point and Richard and I would run out from the car
and hack away at all the branches we could find and finally
the car was filled up

When he dropped us off in the city
he took just one very shapely branch
and left us on the sidewalk

with this huge mound
of drooping blossoms and greenery
and drove off into the night.

September 14, 2004

I remember dreaming about Richard—"You should keep on writing like 2 billion buddahs"—and writing that down on a little piece of paper and giving it to him. We were not romantic but loved playing off each other.

I remember a publication party for A Confederate General from Big Sur hosted by the publisher, Grove Press (Don Allen arranged it all), on January 22, Friday. It was 1965 and I lived with Jack Boyce over on 2921 Pine Street in San Francisco. The party featured a reading at the California Club, 1750 Clay Street and reception afterwards with an open bar from 10 to 12 PM at the Tape Music Center at 321 Divisidero Street. Tommy Sales, Ariel Parkinson, Dr. John and Margot Doss, Gary Snyder and his girlfriend of the time, Sally Hoyem, etc. were there. A Confederate General from Big Sur was Richard's second book, but was published before Trout Fishing in America. Tom Parkinson of the University of California-Berkeley English department reviewed it for the San Francisco Chronicle. He said the prose had qualities of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson: "fact and fraud and wild whimsy are all reported with an air of detachment . . . an author with the potentiality of [William] Saroyan, its own tone of bewilderment and amusement that brings American humor a new and disturbing voice." Detached. Disturbed.

I remember the February 1965 issue of McCall's magazine ran a picture and piece on a page called "sight and sound"—"not since Jack Kerouac hit the famous road has there been an eloquent spokesman for the Beat Generation. In fact we thought they had all grown up. But here comes Richard Brautigan, 29, with A Confederate General from Big Sur, a wildly original fictional fantasy . . . somehow telling all about what makes the Beats tick; their bravado, pathos, and especially their laughter. PS: If liberal use of four letter words offends you in a novel, Mr. Brautigan is definitely NOT for your bookshelf."

I remember that Richard stayed out in Bolinas some times on the very empty Mesa, in a house Robert Callegy Jones was building for Mel Wax. Richard camped out in it from time to time and wrote parts of In Watermelon Sugar there. Jack and I took the Greyhound Bus out and spent a few days with him, very eerie and quiet. Smiley's, the only bar in town, was too territorial to enter.

I remember when Four Seasons Foundation brought out Trout Fishing in America (1967) one of Richard's books was nominated for a big important prize. There was a feeling, at least on Richard's part, that he would be catapulted into fame and everything would change for him. Just like what happened to Jack Kerouac, thrown to the media, becoming an instant celebrity. After Richard became famous we would not have the "waiting around" telephone conversations, and there would be no more eying each other over the marked down meat at the local Safeway. Richard lived a few blocks away on 2830 California Street with his new girlfriend Janice but he did not get the prize and after an embarrassed few weeks, we drifted back into the telephone.

I remember that in groups, when Richard was quiet, you could tell he was thinking up his next "mind game," all by himself. He was a loner in this way, kind of parading his thoughts and acts in front of you—not a conversation or collaboration. It was "his" territory. One "played" or listened to him. Riffs on things. I did not know his thoughts about Viet Nam but I did not think of him as political.

I remember Richard reading his newly finished manuscript of In Watermelon Sugar in two parts over at Buzz Gallery on Buchanan Street, Saturday, July 3, and July 10. Tom Parkinson laughed in all the wrong places. The novel was dedicated to Don Allen, Michael McClure, and me. This was during the famous Berkeley Poetry Conference, July 12-24, 1965. It was a great fermenting stew of poets arriving. Richard was not a part of that.

I remember Richard's response when Jack Spicer, our totem North Beach poet guru, died rather suddenly on August 17, 1965. There was a reception and memorial at Robin Blaser's with Jack's mother there—but no one specifically invited Richard. Don Allen called me and I called Richard. He said he had been thinking about life and death and went down in his back yard and picked a perfect rose and asked whether if he brought it over in an envelope would I give it to Mrs. Spicer? I said I could not. "If you want to do this, you have to do it yourself."

I remember Richard and Janice [Meisnner] having a party at their apartment on California Street—a Halloween costume party, with invitations written out in Richard's hand on orange computer cards. There was a lot of grumbling about the horrible color of puke-colored paint Richard had bought, because it was so cheap to paint their apartment. It was a Saturday night and Janice went out into the back yard with one of the Fugs, who were in town performing their crazy music, and almost never came back. Elvin Jones beat Michael McClure's tambourine until he broke it. Nemi Frost lost her pocket book. Allen Ginsberg came as Allen Ginsberg and Don Allen returned from his trip to New Mexico with a book from Robert Creeley for me.

I remember watching television with Richard. Our favorite was Batman, a kind of pop rendition for television. It was a funny big deal. Richard and Janice and Jack and I got together to watch religiously at our place because Richard did not have a television set.

I remember Richard taking me to a Digger event, a mock funeral procession called "The Death of the Hippie" in the Haight Ashbury. That was 1967, when the Summer of Love was all over. Jack Boyce and I married in February 1966. We had the reception at Margot and John Doss's grand house. Janice danced and danced at the wedding—her dress got soaked and so she went downstairs and took it off and put it in the dryer and ironed it and came upstairs and danced some more. Then Jack and I left for Europe. When we came back in 1967 the Summer of Love was all over. I missed the whole Richard Brautigan Hippie Fame Thing in San Francisco.

Still, I remember Richard Brautigan . . .

"The Brautigan Library: A Noble Experiment"
Todd Lockwood
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 227-229.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The Brautigan Library was founded in Burlington, Vermont, in 1990 by Todd Lockwood and a group of visionaries from Burlington's arts community. The idea for this library was inspired by a fictional library described by Richard Brautigan in his 1970 novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. What made Brautigan's fictional library unusual was the fact that only unpublished books were allowed on its shelves.

From 1990 through 1995 The Brautigan Library lived in a small building on lower College Street. The library accepted unpublished manuscripts from all over North America, and from other parts of the world as well. People from all walks of life sent their novels, poetry and stories to the Brautigan. While some hoped a publisher might see their work at the library, most were happy simply to have a public shelf for the one copy of their work.

True to this spirit, the Brautigan never judged the works it received. Any manuscript that met the physical requirements was accepted. This ideology sometimes put the library at odds with the traditional literary and publishing world. But to unpublished writers, it made perfect sense.

The Brautigan Library supported itself with donations from supporters across America and with fees paid by writers to have their work catalogued and bound. Everyone who worked for The Brautigan worked for free, donating their time and services to the library. Nearly 100 volunteers in the Burlington area served as librarians or board members.

By 1995, time had taken its toll on The Brautigan. Increased expenses and career changes by some key volunteers made it more difficult to keep the library open. In The Abortion, Brautigan's fictional library was secretly supported by a millionaire admirer, but in reality no such person ever materialized.

In late 1995, the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington agreed to take over the Brautigan's collection of 325 books, designating a special area for this purpose. The Fletcher's exhibit serves as testament to the power of an idea and the spirit of volunteerism in Burlington.

While the Fletcher will not be accepting new additions to the Brautigan collection, The Brautigan Library is planning to have a presence on the Internet where readers and writers can exchange ideas and inspiration.

"The Brautigan Library Founder's Message"
Todd Lockwood
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 230-243.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Vol. 1, No. 1 December 1990

The Brautigan Library got started, in spirit, about twenty years ago when Richard Brautigan wrote his fourth novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. Among other things, this book helped redefine romance for the sixties counterculture—breaking away from simplistic gender roles, and offering up the possibility of relationships founded on mutual respect and communication, not just passion alone. It was a book that tended to have a profound effect on those who read it, evidenced by the "this book will change your life" inscriptions one often finds scrawled in old copies of the novel.

And, of course, Brautigan's book described a library—a weird little library where unknown, unpublished writing could find a home. As Brautigan put it, "This library came into being because of an overwhelming need and desire for such a place. There just simply had to be a library like this." When I first read those words in the mid-seventies, I could not have agreed more. Such a library seemed like a splendid idea. It seemed perfectly plausible to me that someone, somewhere would one day open such a library, using Brautigan's story as a model.

Well, life nearly began imitating art shortly after the novel was released: Brautigan had given his readers an actual library street address in The Abortion, right down to the zip code. As it turned out, the address was indeed the address of a library—the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. They were subsequently flooded with inquiries from all across America, wondering if they indeed accepted unpublished manuscripts. Sadly, the answer was "no."

Years ticked by as I pursued a career in photo-portraiture, and in 1980 started a music recording studio in Vermont. The Abortion continued to own a space on my bookshelf, and it got a rereading every year or so. With every reading, I would be reminded of the library idea. By the mid-eighties, I really began thinking of the library as "something I was going to do." It was simply a matter of when.

Brautigan's suicide in 1984 was a terrific blow to thousands of readers whose ideals survived the cynical seventies with the help of Brautigan's insights and humor. Coming to grips with the reality of his troubled life—a life perceived as fun-loving and well-founded—has not been easy. His death made the library idea seem a bit trivial, so it stayed on the back burner for another five years.

In August 1989, I happened to go to the film Field of Dreams with my wife. I had no idea what the movie was about, but before long it became clear that, for me, the movie was about building The Brautigan Library. Somehow, I knew the time had come to get things rolling. The very next day I called Brautigan's literary agent, and off we went.

The Brautigan Library idea has not been greeted with universal praise. A number of published authors have declined invitations to be advisory trustees to the library. In fact, one poet had her lawyer send us a cease and desist letter, to insure that her name would not be associated with the library. The fact is, even when Brautigan was at the peak of his career, his own work was not held in high esteem by the literary community. He was an outsider. Academics thought his writing was trivial, yet his popularity was undeniable. He was writing for readers not for writers.

Perhaps it was Brautigan's unpretentious approach to writing that made him such an inspiration to new writers. Probably no other American author since the sixties has inspired so many people to write down their story for the first time. Brautigan shows us that ideas need not be wrapped in layers of grammar and vocabulary to be relevant; that vision is the seed that makes for a moving piece of writing.

A few months ago, we received a two-page manuscript from a woman who drives a school bus. It was filled with spelling errors and incomplete sentences. While trying to decide whether or not to send it back for corrections, I finally just read it, as it was written. The short story tells of sunlight beaming through a snowstorm "like a diamond patch." So beautiful was this moment that she pulled the school bus off the side of the road so her passengers could enjoy it. I learned something in reading her story: Ideas with vision will usually survive a less-than-perfect presentation. But the most elaborate presentation in the world is no substitute for vision. In an era when technique is the most discernible asset one finds in most art and literature, this is indeed a concept worth pondering.

We already have all kinds of writing in The Brautigan Library, but the vast majority is writing which shares a personal vision. Many of our books are written in first person, which is, to me, a signal that we are already building an archive that will distinguish us from other libraries; that will be of use to historians; that will offer a unique, grass-roots view of America.

Vol. 1, No. 2 March 1991

When considering a library like the Brautigan, most people are inclined to categorize it along with grass-rootsy ventures that harken back to the sixties in one way or another. Yes, it is true that we have mayonnaise jar bookends and deliberately mismatched furniture in our library. We have even been known to serve cider and donuts, and read poetry aloud. But we do not do these things for want of a return to the past—we do them because they work.

Somewhere along the line our culture has gotten a bit confused about such things. We seem bent on making symbols of everything. If the sixties were not so far behind us, I fear that many people would have written off the Brautigan Library as a "hippie" thing—just another symbol of an era gone by.

But one look at The Brautigan Library catalog and you can see that we are anything but a symbol of the past. The library has caught the imagination of thousands of people of all ages, many of whom do not have any recollection of Richard Brautigan, or any other fond memories of the sixties for that matter. For many, the library is just a good idea.

In Brautigan's fictional library in The Abortion, things were done with a casualness appropriate to the times. New books were registered in a massive log book, known as the "Library Contents Ledger." The entries were done by hand, and the writing of these entries was more a symbolic gesture than serving any practical purpose.

At The Brautigan Library—behind the scenes, that is—we operate on a level more appropriate to the nineties. Along with sophisticated machinery for the binding of manuscripts, we utilize a powerful Apple Macintosh II computer to keep track of things [, to organize virtually everything, to print title pages as well as this newsletter, and to create our catalog list]. The intent of this automation is not to remove human interaction, but instead to amplify it.

I think there could be some truth to the notion that The Brautigan Library might not have been able to exist in the sixties—at least not in a practical sense. As an all-volunteer organization with limited resources, we are indeed indebted to nineties technology for making it physically possible to do what we do, and to do it elegantly. The application of technology need not stand in the way of creativity if it is used thoughtfully. The key is in knowing what your mission is before applying it.

Vol. 1. No. 3 June 1991

If one were to plan a commercial venture with the kind of national recognition that the Brautigan Library now enjoys, it would take millions of dollars of advertising to achieve this end—and still, you would have to spend even more to keep it fresh in people's minds. It seems that just about every new idea these days, from politics to religion, has got to have a pile of cash behind it if it is going to become common knowledge.

How is it then, that the humble Brautigan Library has managed to reach twenty-five million Americans in twelve months without spending a dime to promote itself? The answer to this question is so simple, it could elude even the brightest of public relations people.

Over the past year, I have been interviewed by dozens of journalists from places as far away as London. Almost without fail, the interviewer eventually gets around to making the comment. "This makes a great story!" It is as if, in the quest of some rare beast, The Brautigan Library popped out of the woods ready to be stuffed and mounted. The "story" becomes the object of interest, and the library just the means of describing it. In the world of journalism the Brautigan is a classic catch, up there with the best of them, a story of stories.

Perhaps it is our fast-paced lifestyle, the effects of television, or the electric light switch that has reduced our attention to the level of the superficial. Significant issues of the day are presented in neat, bite-sized chunks that more resemble entertainment than information. The Brautigan Library story gets into print because of its entertainment value, but what is this library really about?

Certainly for many people, The Brautigan is but a chirp of whimsy, enjoyed for the moment, then forgotten. But for many others the library is a symbol of hope. I am not talking about the hope of being published. This is a different kind of hope.

We are offering people the realization of the impossible, the notion that good things are still possible in the world we live in, and that one's ideas, no matter how humble, will always find a home on our shelves.

Yes, to a degree, the humor and whimsy of The Brautigan has fueled interest in our library, and to a degree, we are indebted to journalists all over the world for bringing that story to the masses. But if The Brautigan Library did not have more to offer than a few minutes of entertainment, we certainly would not be long for this world. Ours is a song that rings true to the bone, and that is what makes us more than just a great story.

Vol. 1. No. 4 September 1991

I have often wondered if there was a way to make The Brautigan Library simply exist in people's minds, without the encumbrances of a physical plant to bog things down. In a way, I suppose that is what Richard Brautigan did when he wrote The Abortion. His story presented the believable notion that this library really could exist, and he even took into account some of the practical problems that might arise.

The Brautigan Library has thrown some new bridges across the reality gap with the introduction of a fantasy place that actually functions in reality. We really do accept unpublished writings from all over America, and there are readers who visit our library and enjoy its offerings. Indeed, The Brautigan is a very real place. But at the same time, we are no more than a whim of a writer's pen, a fantasy. We are walking a fine line, dancing in the twilight zone.

The key to our library's longevity will be our ability to stay anchored in the real world. (The fantasy side, if treated with respect, will probably last forever.) Our survival is dependent upon two very real ingredients: volunteers and supporting members. Currently, there are over thirty volunteers working to keep the Brautigan's doors open. Supporting members from all over North America have come forward to show their support. It is a sign that we are doing something that people feel is right.

Vol. 2, No. 1 December 1991

It is hard to believe that almost two years have passed since the original Brautigan Library Board of Trustees got together to hammer out the principles of our library. It was on a snowy evening on January 30, 1990 that the ten of us ventured into the unknown. It was a different kind of board. Unlike the typical library board, we were more visionary than literary.

These people, each in their own way, have helped define The Brautigan Library. Though the most exciting part of the job is done, many of these fine people continue to be involved in the Brautigan on a daily basis. Thank you one and all for your heroic efforts.

Vol. 2, No. 4 September 1992

The Brautigan Library continues to sail the high seas of goodwill. At every turn we have found surprises waiting for us: from the invitation to fly the library to Seattle last year, to a front-page in The Wall Street Journal, to the photocopy of Richard Brautigan's birth certificate that arrived the other day. There is just something about the Brautigan that inspires people to step out of the ordinary.

A few years ago, when the library was just a twinkle in the eye of our Board of Trustees, it was hard for us to know just what would happen when we unleashed this dream. Would we see 10,000 manuscripts arriving every month? Or would only 10 arrive in the first year?

As it turned out, our volume of submissions has hovered around two to five books per week. Since our opening in April 1990, we have mailed Brautigan Library information packs to several thousand writers across North America. About 275 of them have responded by sending us their unpublished gems. Many more, perhaps, just enjoyed finding out about the library, and left it at that.

In recent months, we have found that the flow of incoming manuscripts has slowed somewhat, making us wonder if the well is running dry. Surely, there must be tens of thousands of manuscripts hiding in closets and attics that deserve a home here. But how do we get them?

Early on, we experimented with targeted mailings to writer's groups, in hopes that we could get a better rate of response. To our surprise, the response was even less than before. What we learned is that Brautigan Library writers are a special kind of writer, less likely to be part of a group of people who call themselves writers. Our writers just write.

So what if the flow of books runs out? Then what? [H]ow do we maintain and feed [the library]? Who will continue to vacuum the floors and answer the mail, not to mention pay the rent if the well runs dry?

Our membership continues to be our lifeline. We are supported by by people who just like the way we do things, who believe in us. Many of these people have never even been inside our library, though you would probably think they had if you met them. To our members, the Brautigan is a symbol of what is possible in a world where little seems possible.

As long as our members support us, we will continue to keep the fires burning at the Brautigan. The national media continues to show interest in us, and as long as they do, we will be inspiring writers to come out into the light with their ideas.

Vol. 3, No. 2 March 1993

Celebrating Richard Brautigan's birthday [January 30] with the writing of a public book really seems to have struck a chord. I do not think any single event at the library to date has generated such warm enthusiasm and memories for Richard Brautigan.

It is clear that Brautigan's flame has not gone out yet. Many people shared with us personal encounters they had had with Mr. Brautigan. One that sticks out in my mind is the letter we received from a woman who had visited Brautigan's San Francisco apartment with her mother in the late sixties. She was eight years old at the time.

Brautigan excused himself and disappeared into a bedroom in the apartment. After a few minutes he reappeared with an autographed copy of Trout Fishing in America with a trout fly attached to the front cover. That is the kind of impression he left on people.

But the most striking thing about the public writing project was the attitude of the writing we received. People instantly understood what this book was about: that it was not about publishing or careers. Instead, it was about telling one's story, sharing a moment. Writers of all varieties got into the spirit of it. January 30 was a day of giving, not getting. [The writings were collected and bound as The Brautigan Birthday Book.]

The Brautigan Library continues to attract people from around the world who believe in the symbolic importance of what we are doing. If you spend too much time trying to find the practical in the Brautigan, you will miss the real purpose of it. We are fulfilling a need that cannot be explained with numbers.

If you plan to visit New England this summer, I hope you will stop by and see us. There is nothing quite like a summer afternoon in The Brautigan.

Vol. 4, No. 2 Spring 1994

In spite of a particularly long Vermont winter, The [Brautigan] Library has enjoyed a number of exciting events in recent months.

In December, the BBC aired a half-hour special on The Brautigan Library. The program is a collage of observations on the life of the unpublished author.

On January 30th, the library celebrated it National Unpublished Writers Day (and Richard Brautigan's birthday) with an open house and an invitation to writers everywhere to write something for the 1994 Brautigan Birthday Book. Several dozen pieces of work were received from across America, and the 1994 Brautigan Birthday Book is now available for reading in the library.

In April we had an unexpected visit from Mr. Trout Fishing in America himself [formally Peter Eastman, Jr. of Carpinteria, California]. Trout was in the area interviewing at Marlboro College.

Vol. 5, No. 1-2 Winter/Spring 1995

With The Brautigan Library approaching its fifth birthday this spring, those of us who have served on its board can now take a moment to look back on our extraordinary journey. Since 1990, we have watched a glimmer of an idea become transformed into a dream of international proportions.

Literally hundreds of newspapers, magazines and broadcasters have helped plant the Brautigan seed in the minds of millions of individuals around the globe. It is amazing to think that if you walk up to someone on a busy street almost anywhere in North America there is one chance in 10 that they have heard of The Brautigan Library—a humble little place with about 300 volumes and seating for six.

Richard Brautigan must have sensed this potential when he wrote, "There just simply had to be a library like this." Indeed, there does have to be a library like this. The last five years have made that quite clear. The next five years will determine whether the library can live up to the dream.

1995 will mark a new chapter at the Brautigan. [I] will retire from the board as of the first of January. My retirement from the Brautigan has been a gradual, though difficult, step for me. I have always been involved in the board's decision making, and not being involved in that way will take some getting used to.

While my direct involvement in the library will be somewhat limited in years to come, I will not be far away. You can count on me at various Brautigan functions and perhaps even a spot at the librarian's desk now and again. Thank you to everyone who has helped make this an unforgettable five years.

"Richard Brautigan: A Millennium Paper Airplane"
Eric Lorberer
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 244-257.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

It has been nearly two decades since Richard Brautigan died. When I heard the news I immediately recalled his statement that "You cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of words somebody is dead." It appears in a short story called "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane," in which the narrator, trying to tell his wife that her father has died and thinking about "what his death means to all of us," makes a list of 33 thoughts. I think that is a good idea:

1. Richard Brautigan was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington, and drifted to San Francisco in the mid-'50s on the winds kicked up by the Beat generation. Legend has it that upon meeting the poet Ron Loewinsohn on a street in North Beach, Brautigan handed him this poem ["A Correction," addressed to Carl Sandburg, saying cats, not fog, walked on cat feet].

The poem adumbrates Brautigan's minimalist attack, quirky humor, concern for detail, and obsession with American letters and values, which even in 1956 he knew needed correcting.

2. Little is known about Brautigan's childhood—he refused to talk about it, though allusions to the poverty he endured are strewn throughout his work—but a glimpse of Brautigan's youth can be gleaned from his recently published juvenalia, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Mariner Books). That Brautigan gave everything he wrote to Webster (the mother of a girlfriend) before moving to California, scrawling a note that "they are now her property, and she may do what she wishes with them," is itself a lovely Brautiganesque stroke. Though some of the writing here is typically adolescent, a few of the pieces shed some light on Brautigan's experience in an insane asylum (a stay he earned by throwing rocks at a police station so they would arrest him). One can also see him experimenting, developing his voice. "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye" tells the story of his incarceration in one-line "chapters"; there are "Three Experimental Dramas"; imitations of his literary heroes from Hemingway to Kenneth Patchen appear frequently; and poems [asking whether it is against the law to eat ice cream in hell] show his peculiar humor and playful sense of form in the crucible.

3. After nearly a decade of handing out poems and publishing a novel that would not make waves until later, Brautigan found an audience with Trout Fishing in America. A book with no identifiable plot, it became one of the era's biggest bestsellers, making Brautigan a counter-culture icon. This immense popularity, however, made serious critical approaches to his work increasingly scarce, and when the '60s ended—around 1973—Brautigan's heroic status ended with them. It probably did not surprise him; like many of his modernist role models, he had prophesied the ephemerality of the national consciousness, telling actor Dennis Hopper, "America would only be remembered for maybe another hundred years and then the idea would be a dream, a word people would repeat like a fantasy, as if it all had been an idealized moment in the past."

4. Trout Fishing in America is a quintessential postmodern text. It rejects linear narrative, providing instead a picaresque of pastoral themes and signifiers that change their referents constantly. The flagrant polysemy of "Trout Fishing in America"—the phrase refers to sport, book, main character, criminal, wino, hotel, and more—encourages the reader to reflect on how "America" is "often only a place in the mind."

5. Neil Schmitz calls the Brautigan of Trout Fishing "an ironist critically examining the myths and language of the pastoral sensibility that reappeared in the sixties." Brooke Horvath calls the book "a witty, dispassionate jeremiad to criticize his country's passionless capitulation to death." John Ciardi wrote that "Brautigan manages effects the English novel has never produced before." As far as I can tell, they are all right.

6. "There are thousands of stories with original beginnings," Brautigan begins a story; "This is not one of them." His disclaimer turns that opening line into what philosophers call a transcendental statement, one that paradoxically corrects itself. This is a typical Brautigan strategy—to use a lie, question, or naive pretense in order to tease some truth from the fiction.

7. Transforming "Trout Fishing in America" into a pen nib, Brautigan writes the novel's conclusion with a defiant gesture of non-closure. In the penultimate chapter, "Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter," Brautigan follows heady quotations from athropological texts with this coda: "Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise"—but "The Mayonnaise Chapter" ends "Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise." This willful misspelling may frustrate the "human need" for linguistic stability, but it also reaffirms what Roland Barthes has called "the pleasure of the text."

8. In Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, the protagonist Lee Mellon ("a Lee-of-another-color") gets rid of his southern accent by reading the German philosophers as he searches for his mythical military ancestor Augustus, whose story creeps into the text dragging the imagery of death with it: "He ran barefoot through a spring with a shattered branch lying in it, and he saw a horse smoldering in the brush, and a crow covered with spider webs, and his dead soldiers lying next to each other, and he could almost hear his own name, Augustus Mellon, searching for himself." Brautigan's view of military discourse and conventional narrative is so disparaging that the reader of A Confederate General from Big Sur is forced to play a game that admits the futility and circularity of the current text: "Where"s Augustus Mellon? . . . Turn to page 17 for Robert E. Lee. Turn to page 100 for an interesting story about alligators." The structure of the novel emphasizes structure as a narrative principal, as the narrator's reading of Ecclesiastes confirms; counting the punctuation marks as "a kind of study in engineering," he reasons: "Certainly before they build a ship they know how many rivets it takes to hold the ship together, and the various sizes of the rivets. I was curious about the number of rivets and the sizes of those rivets in Ecclesiastes, a dark and beautiful ship sailing on our waters."

9. As with Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan concludes A Confederate General from Big Sur with a powerful gesture of non-closure; the book ends with several different endings, then "more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second." Opposing narrative's conventional imperative for one "correct" ending, the book offers a plurality of endings whose only limit is set by physics.

10. Trout Fishing in America remains in print in an omnibus edition, along with the poetry volume The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar, an extraordinary fantasy in which Brautigan describes a surreal utopia. In 1970 Guy Davenport wrote, "These works show Mr. Brautigan is one of the most gifted innovators in our literature." Right again!

11. A word must be said about Brautigan's book covers, which often featured posed photographs that interacted with the text to great and sometimes crucial effect. (Walter Abish has used the same device; at a reading, I heard him acknowledge the debt to Brautigan.) Sometimes a Brautigan cover provides ironic counterpoint to the subject matter of the text; Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt, for instance, depicts a woman playing in a sandbox, an image that should be measured against Rommel"s desert exploits. The cover of Revenge of the Lawn, with a grinning woman sitting before a chocolate cake, more specifically plays into the fiction, for Brautigan effectively offers here the picture of a metaphor: in the volume's title story, he describes his delusional grandfather's imaginary chocolate cake, thus inviting the reader to contrast it with his cover photograph of an actual cake that is only fictional within the fiction. And the cover of Trout Fishing in America is so fully exploited by Brautigan's metafictional techniques that it would take me pages to explain—so I will move on.

12. According to an article in a fashionable literary magazine, "Minimalists are the slaves of Derrida," a statement which puzzles me, since minimalism has been around a lot longer than the French philosopher. Even if one amended the comment to include only recent minimalists, it would still ring false; although Brautigan's writings are as postmodern as they come, he was simply not an intellectual.

13. Though Italo Calvino was an intellectual, he had, as Gore Vidal points out, a way of writing that made both schoolchildren and theoreticians flock to his funeral. The same should have been true for Brautigan. Like Calvino's justly loved If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, Brautigan's novel Sombrero Fallout (which predates Calvino's book) contains two separate tracks. As the novel opens, a writer is writing a novel, gets discouraged, and throws the opening lines in the trash. While one track of the novel chronicles the next hour in the writer's life, the other follows the discarded lines, which "decided to go on without him." The two stories run concurrently and, as in Calvino's novel, are linked only by themes.

14. Brautigan's late masterpiece So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is also erected on the unstable ground of time's relationship to the act of narration. The opening sentence, reminiscent of the famous beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, encapsulates this idea: "I didn't know that afternoon that the ground was waiting to become another grave in just a few short days." In a complicated weave, Brautigan skips through time to piece together his tale, including scenes from 1979, 1947, memories of events before 1947, and what could be called "no-time"—i.e., fictional events within the fiction. The portal into these different time zones is the novel's title; during the course of the narrative the book shifts chronology by means of the interpolation, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust . . . American . . . Dust"

The repetition of the title reaffirms as well as reorients the narrative act, and the structure of temporal dislocation allows Brautigan to surround his narrator—not so much a character as the embodiment of death anxiety—with an environment of stories, subtexts which illuminate and eventually resolve the narrator's traumatic memory of a shooting death.

15. Richard Brautigan died in 1984 at his home in California; like Hemingway and Kurt Cobain, he took his life in one of the most violent ways possible.

16. In a sense there are two Richard Brautigans: the one critics adored, who between 1964 and 1971 published works of "comic genius" (Gilbert Sorrentino), "structurally innovative books" (Jerome Klinkowitz) like The Abortion, a work that while "making fun of the conventional novel" (Clarence Major) is also "a testimony to the enduring truth of literary forms" (Charles Hackenberry); and the one critics despised, who between 1974 and 1982, published, if you believe them, mindless drivel—though this period includes the genre-benders Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster (the latter a "gothic western" which fuses the two into a grotesque hybrid), and the anecdotal meditation The Toyko-Montana Express. The problem may have been that pop culture was out (and would not be in again until after Brautigan's suicide). Barry Yourgrau's comment about Brautigan in a 1980 New York Times Book Review, "He is now a longhair in his mid-40's," seems indicative of how subject to the tides of fashion criticism can be.

17. In one of my favorite blurbs of all time, Robert Creeley wrote that the poems in Brautigan's Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork are "weirdly delicious bullets of ineffable wisdom" and instructed readers to "pop a few!"

18. Brautigan is a minimalist in his poetry as well as his prose. Some poems are exceedingly brief; the title "1891-1914" is followed by a blank page, which is somewhat akin to Buddy Glass's idea of a gift letter: "A blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of explanation." But while Salinger was uttering Zen precepts (as any critic will tell you), Brautigan made them into art. "1891-1914" encourages the reader's contemplation of historical events occurring within that time period; in the context of the rest of the collection Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, the dates are also invested with military significance; and surely, for a writer obsessed with the death and denial of American values, his authorial silence about these decades carries a blatantly recognizable "message."

19. The longer [poem] "Critical Can Opener" is equally open to play, [asking readers whether they can find what is wrong with the poem].

20. Poets are not spared criticism, as in "Haiku Ambulance" [where Brautigan asks the significance of a single piece of green pepper falling from a salad bowl].

21. Brautigan always tries to make short extracts do large work—the very essence of minimalism—and fragments are often employed to this end. Unclosed parentheses recur in his novels and poems; unfinished sentences appear as titles; mistakes are left standing and then corrected in the text. The novel Willard and His Bowling Trophies is even thematically constructed around fragments of the Greek Anthology, a volume beloved by Brautigan. Nearly everything that "occurs" in this "perverse mystery" generates thematic rather than narrative activity; for example, the ghost of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady takes a picture of the title figures "because it is very important for Willard and his bowling trophies to be a part of everything that has ever happened to this land of America." As in Sombrero Fallout and Trout Fishing, static objects such as statues are precursors to violence, a dominant theme of the novel. Plot questions remain unresolved in this paean to fragments, as reaffirmed by the epilogue: "Q: What about the Logan sisters? A: Forget them."

22. Brautigan's June 30th, June 30th is a volume of poetry with an autobiographical essay; together they form "a kind of diary" detailing the author's love for Japan. Brautigan writes that as a young man he "read Basho and Issa. I liked the way they used language concentrating emotion, detail and image until they arrived at a form of dew-like steel."

23. Roland Barthes has spoken of an art form in which "codes of expression are detached from one another, pulled free from the sticky organicism in which they are held by Western [culture]."

24. Richard Brautigan is read by intellectuals in Japan. Perhaps they are confusing him with Roland Barthes?

25. What most critics seem to hate about Brautigan is his whimsy. As Tony Tanner put it: "A light touch cannot always hope to avoid coyness, false naivety, and sentimentality." True enough, although I want to point out that a light touch does not always give rise to those artistic blunders either. I think of Nietzsche's observation: "A man's maturity consists of having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play."

26. Apparently Brautigan is also read by intellectuals in France: critic Marc Chénetier postulates, quite correctly I think, that all Brautigan's books "are motivated by one central concern and activated by one central dialectic: they are driven by an obsessive interrogation of the fossilization and fixture of language, and by a counter-desire to free it from stultification and paralysis."

27. There have been excellent reminiscences of Brautigan by those who knew him (including Ed Dorn, Michael McClure, and Keith Abbott), and a full-length biography by William Hjortsberg is in the works, but his daughter has recently published what should be the most intimate of the lot. Ianthe Brautigan's You Can't Catch Death (St. Martin's Press) is a memoir which, like her father's work, wanders imagistically in short passages; occasionally this structure leads her to take on his voice, as when she notes, "Instead of going to an office and working, he went for long walks inside himself using his body as a map." Yet the book is as much about Ianthe's experience as a suicide survivor (her conjectures, self-blame, and attempts to communicate the rocky history to her own daughter) as about her father. Though some readers might wish for more details about Brautigan, her approach also yields beneficial insights, such as "My father had money problems, family problems, and drinking problems, but his biggest problem was that he didn't want to live."

28. Ianthe Brautigan was estranged from her father at the time of his suicide, because he disapproved of her marriage. This topic is aired at some length in An Unfortunate Woman (St. Martin's Press), a work the author completed in notebook form before his suicide and that has now been published. "I don't know what's going to happen between my daughter and me," he writes. "I've searched through the possibilities like an archeologist. These ruins puzzle and haunt me. But I haven't the slightest idea how to catalog them and what museum they will end up in." In typical Brautigan fashion, the unfortunate woman of the title is not necessarily a single character but a theme repeated in the figures of a friend dead from cancer, another from hanging, the sad image of "a brand new woman's shoe lying in the middle of a quiet Honolulu intersection," or—most tellingly concerning the strained father-daughter relations—the book's references to Euripides' Iphigenia.

29. Though billed as a novel, An Unfortunate Women is more journal-like than any of Brautigan's other fiction, and as with any posthumously published book, it's hard to know whether the author considered it ready or not. Where once Brautigan could command prose at 186,000 endings per second, the writing here is slowed to a glacial pace. There are, to be sure, brilliant passages that are vintage Brautigan—"I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them"—and suites of fantasia appear throughout, as when birthday ruminations lead to him imagining the headline "TRAIN HELD HOSTAGE BY MAN CELEBRATING BIRTHDAY." Brautigan's endless fascination with time in narrative is also present; "one of the doomed purposes of this book," he writes, "is an attempt to keep the past and the present functioning simultaneously." Yet An Unfortunate Woman is accurately described by Brautigan himself, late in the book and with a hint of some disappointment, as "an unfinished labyrinth of half-asked questions fastened to partial answers."

30. Brautigan's work continues to inspire young poets around the world. The latest example of this is Canadian Rob McLennan's The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talon Books), a book of verse and prose poems that pays homage to Brautigan through its metapoetic flourishes, contemporary cultural engagement, humor-filled observation, and a warm first-person speaker. This is street-poetry with flair, probably better heard than read, but a clear indication that Brautigan is gone but not forgotten.

31. Though Brautigan is perennially ignored by the literati, there are occasionally signs that the tide might turn. The latest is Brautigan's presence in the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction, which includes him in the list of the first wave of innovators we can credit with "breaking the frame" of narrative form. He is grouped in the book with Pynchon, Burroughs, and Barthelme.

32. I have been trying to show that Richard Brautigan was a postmodernist of incredible invention, deploying sophisticated rhetorical tropes with innate mastery. Like his "Kool-Aid Wino," who "created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it," Brautigan created unique worlds in his deceptively simple writings.

33. "Richard Brautigan died." I made this millennium paper airplane and am tossing it into the air, hoping when it lands it will find someone to unfold it.

"Ninety-one Things about Richard Brautigan"
Michael McClure
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 258-303.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Vanity Fair asked me to write an article about Richard Brautigan and his recent suicide in 1985. These are notes written at typing speed as I reread all of Richard's writings. The article appeared in Vanity Fair and these notes, none of which appear in the magazine, are published for the first time.

Ninety-One Things about Richard Brautigan

1. For a long period I was probably Richard's closest friend and he was probably mine. He was here visiting two or three nights a week. We talked and drank Gallo white port, sitting on the floor. This was when we did not have any furniture. We were still poor. The first sip of white port hits the mid-chest and brings on sudden intense warmth. The second swallow begins warming the shoulders. After that you slip into a sweet yellow-warm glow and become great storytellers and listeners. Richard had an open face and mobile eyes behind his round glasses—the movements of his mustache emphasized his jokes and stories. As I remember, a pint of port was thirty-seven cents. We bought it at Benedetti's Liquors on Haight Street, where we bought most of our bottles back in the mid-sixties.

2. Richard was a disciple to some extent, or more aptly a pupil, of Jack Spicer. He must have met poet Jo Anne [sic] Kyger through Spicer, and maybe Joe Dunn that way too. (Dunn published Richard's first book in his White Rabbit Press series.) Richard was an aficionado of Gino and Carlo's Bar, Spicer's hangout. When I first met Richard, there was something skittish about his literary background—probably Gino and Carlo's and Jack Spicer. I liked Richard because of his angelic schitzy wit and warmth.

3. I arranged a poetry reading for Richard at CCAC [California College of Arts and Crafts] and I made a poster for it. It was like a boxing poster of the time. I drew it by hand, Richard face-forward with his glasses, hat, and mustache. Across from that I drew his profile, then wrote DIGGER under one and POET under the other. Richard kept that poster up on the wall forever, along with other posters, and good notices. He loved it. Everything got very old on his walls. He would hang new things but he would never take anything away or down. The things about him comforted him and got cobwebby. It was like an old museum of himself.

4. Richard always dressed the same. It was his style and he wanted to change it as little as possible. (I was like that myself at the time. We were all trying to get the exact style of ourselves.) Richard's style was shabby—loose threads at the cuff, black pants faded to gray, an old mismatched vest, a navy pea-jacket, and later something like love beads around the neck. As he began to be successful he was even more fearful of change. When the three-book-in-one edition of Trout Fishing In America, The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar was published, it faithfully reproduced the earlier avant-garde editions of his work—including cover photos, critical comments, and pagination. It was a magic formula and Richard did not want to jiggle it.

5. The planning of each book was a huge strategy and Richard was a Confederate general scheming a campaign. He was the same way about placing a story of his. He could not simply do it and be done with it. He had to go over everything endlessly. He wold phone me half a dozen times each day to talk to me about a cover photograph he was thinking up. How to do it? Who should do it? He probably phoned novelist Don Carpenter that many times a day too. He became even more obsessive about contract details with his Delacorte Press publisher and with Grove Press. It was maddening and painful and dull to go over it all with him. He would laugh about it—but it was obsessive. He would sweat over whether to take an advance of $60,000 or whether to hold out for $65,000; he would torture out details regarding advertising his book. It was endless, and painful for his artist friends who were supporting him emotionally but were in near terminal poverty. You wanted to help, he needed it, but he also needed to hurt with his success. It was awful for everyone.

In his book Marble Tea there is a poem—a prose poem reminiscent of Blake's "Memorable Fancies"—in which Richard describes cutting a worm in half on an April morning. Part of the worm crawled toward the infinite and part towards infinitesimal. Richard's success—to my eyes—cut him in half. Part of him was crawling on to creation and another part was crawling towards destruction of friends and self through booze and the birth of envy. As his writing became more divine, Richard became more sexist and more alcoholic.

6. Richard convinced his agent Helen Brann to represent my short plays Gargoyle Cartoons and my novel The Adept. Richard believed in my work the way I believed in his. His poem "For Michael" is beautiful, and his dedication to me and Don Allen and Jo Anne Kyger in In Watermelon Sugar is lovely. Especially so since it is his most perfect book.

7. The first thing about Richard and guns that I remember is when he was beginning to get goofy with drinking and success and he gave Gary Snyder a broken, vintage Japanese machine gun for his son Kai. "So he won't lose his Japanese heritage," said Richard.

8. As Richard became a kind of monster, his public appearances became sweeter and more like his creative, imaginative, and beautiful person of before. He was a wonderful reader—his voice was smooth as honey and warm and personal, almost sweetly drunken to the ear. And his eyes sparkled with a cross between happiness and the resignation to the ineffability of everything. It was real. He felt it. It is all there in the work and in his earlier person. At a reading he literally loved everyone and they literally loved him back. They were wowed by the beauty of his poems.

9. When my wife of the time bought a Russian wolfhound puppy we named him Brautigan. He was skinny and angular, long-faced and long-nosed, and he looked like he had loose threads on his elbows.

10. Richard and I were always showing up in the newspapers, usually the Chronicle. My play The Beard was a topic of conversation and the play's censorship was still going on, I was writing Hells Angel Freewheelin Frank's autobiography with him, I was doing a video documentary on the Haight Ashbury. Richard had stories and reviews appearing everywhere, and columnist Herb Caen loved to mention us. When either of us had our name in the paper we declared ourselves to be a "Ten Day Baron of Cafe Society." We proclaimed that we were famous for ten days and we rushed off to drink at the sidewalk tables of Enrico's Cafe where we could be admired by mortals. We drank Enrico's stemmed glasses of cold white wine in the afternoon and watched record scouts digging in for the new rock 'n' roll of Frisco, or literary agents, or visiting L.A. stars come to ogle the City of Love. After a couple of glasses Richard began to get owlish and silent with bursts of slightly tipsy talk and I began to get winishly ennobled in my own ways. I contended that nobody—not even Frank Sinatra—could be famous for more than ten days in Frisco. Often Richard and I were simultaneously Ten Day Barons of Cafe Society and sometimes we would get on a roll and manage to keep a Barony for a month at a time with overlapping newspaper references. One rule, though, was that you could not accrue Baronhoods. A Baronhood only lasted ten days after the mention or article. A second rule was that it could not come from your name being in an advertisement. Richard would phone me or I would phone him. "Hey, I'm a Baron. Let's go to Enrico's."

11. One of the things I liked most about Richard was that he was the real poet of the Diggers. He was often on Haight Street passing out papers from the Digger Communications Company. I liked that activism. Richard was doing it because he believed in it. I got so I would go down there and do it too. And I was a lot more self-conscious on the street than he was. Richard would pass out papers from the Digger Communication Company urging all the "Seeker" youngsters at the Summer of Love to go immediately to the VD Clinic at the first sign. Richard has a poem about clap in [The] Pill [versus The Springhill Mine Disaster]. It might have been a Communications Company broadside. It was his example that got me involved with the Communications Company, and I wrote a poem—"War Is Decor"—and helped pass it out, then read it later on Walter Cronkite's national television report on the Haight Ashbury.

12. Richard was crazy about beautiful women, smoothly glabrous ones with long hair and big eyes. Blonde or brunette did not matter. He would been considered real homely all his life (I am sure), but like a Russian wolfhound puppy he knew better. When his sex appeal bloomed with his fame he loved it. He loved all the lovely sex around him. Real sensuality—clear and lucid like you read in poetry of the Greek Anthology—began to come out in his poetry . . . But that worm got split about the same time and the secret sexism began to become obnoxious.

13. Rereading Trout Fishing I began to fear that it would be an apolitical and purely esthetic document and there would be no comment against the monster war in Vietnam. Then there it was, near the end: the Trout Fishing Peace March. It must have touched millions.

14. It was Richard buying the house that David and Tina [Meltzer] lived in right out from under them and their two children that was the straw that broke my camel's back. I thought he should have bought it and let them live in it for nothing. Or even have given it to them.

Suddenly Richard was wealthy and not only real tight but afraid that people would find out he was wealthy. It was a shock to him and he had broad anal streak anyway. It was too much for him to handle. I felt that he was not only after me with his success but also after David because David was like Richard's anti-type. David poured creativity, and in vast spontaneous amounts. I think Richard just had to get at David. So he bought the house and left it standing empty.

Later, Richard shot and killed himself in that house.

15. When I reread Trout Fishing, In Watermelon Sugar, and the early poems, I had a flash of intuition. It is wrong to look at Richard as a novelist. What he is doing seems more akin to Lautreamont, to his Chants of Maldoror. Lautreamont was a young South American intellectual named Isidore Ducasse. Ducasse was inspired by Rimbaud and wrote a book length prose poem. This began a chain of thought: Richard should rightfully be compared to Rimbaud, Lautreamont . . . Baudelaire. He should be compared to the dark school of French writers, to the maudites. His suicide closes his life. Compare him to Alfred Jarry who also changed personality and became gross and fat and took ether and alcohol. Richard reminds me of the mystic poet Gerard de Nerval also. Further, Richard could be compared to the German visionary Novalis. Novalis was full of aphorisms—his works were studded with them. Richard lacked that in his writing, but it is a world of the imagination and of nature melted into the imagination, as is Novalis.

16. The tigers in In Watermelon Sugar are surely Blake's tygers from "The Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction." They have beautiful voices and The Nameless Hero asks them for aid in his math problems. The black world of Death is the interwound topology of the primal (unformed and still forming) material, and the unconscious, and the universe of anti-matter.

Richard lived across the street and down a few yards from the big Sears Roebuck department store on Geary Street. Sears is the Forgotten Works in the novel.

In Watermelon Sugar might have been written by an American Lorca, it has the darkness of one of Lorca's late poems: "Nobody understood the perfume of the dark magnolia of your womb. . . ."

On the other hand, In Watermelon Sugar on the whole is simple-minded, which Richard was not. What the prose lacks, as does Trout Fishing, is conflict. In both books Richard almost abolished interpersonal conflict to create a "gentle" (the word is used over and over) world of the imagination and sensory perception and memory melted into a pool that Richard took us swimming in, a stream that he fished in. Those two books are his great struggle to cancel conflict and confrontation. There is never confrontation because each chapter is in a new place or new situation.

One cannot create a long dramatic work without conflict.

17. Richard can be seen as a phenomenon of the Haight and the sixties. Or as an American artist. I think one might say Artist rather than either poet or novelist. I think of myself as an artist, with a capital A. Artist. West Coast writers of the period tend to see themselves as Artists, not so different from the painters or musicians they admire. Artists are free from the specter of the possibility of monetary success or national acclaim which in those days they knew they would never get. In the fifties Gary Snyder used to tell young poets to learn a trade, meaning there was no way to support themselves through their art; learn to be a merchant seaman or a carpenter.

18. Richard can be seen as a West Coast writer—not that his success was not national or that he is not a national artist. The West Coast looks to the mountains and the forests and the deserts and Big Sur and Mendocino and Puget Sound around it. When strangers visited I would sometimes take them across the bridge to Mount Tamalpais—or into Muir Redwood Forest. San Francisco is part of the United States but it is also part of the Pacific Basin and as part of the Pacific Basin we were connected to the Orient, to Japan and China. New York looked to Paris and London. San Francisco looks there too. In 1955, Frisco looked like Cow Town, USA. No tall buildings. There were Asian people all around. They had a different cuisine. Buddhism was something real to them and lots of them practiced it in churches.

Kenneth Rexroth was the ideologue. He showed us that we could define our own personal anarchism, that we were free to invent our own mysticisms or follow old ones—agnosia by way of the Areopagite, or Kundalini Yoga via Arthur Avalon, or practice Zen Buddhism. Everyone was free to invent or reinvent their own intellective structures of understanding time and space, music and painting. The West Coast was full of deep readers who were also involved in soul-building by means of travel and mountain and forest experience. We were different.

Kenneth Rexroth did something else, too. He showed that we could look to the Orient for poetry and cuisine but that also we could look back in time—we could look to 1000 A.D. to Sung Dynasty China, or back to Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tsu in Chou Dynasty China. Most of us did some Oriental time-travelling by way of art and poetry.

19. Editor Donald M. Allen "discovered" Richard—he put his faith in Richard, publishing Trout Fishing, then In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill [versus The Springhill Mine Disaster]. It was Don who brought together the San Francisco Issue of Evergreen Review in 1957, linking up [Allen] Ginsberg, [Jack] Kerouac, [Robert] Duncan, [Jack] Spicer, [James] Broughton, [William] Everson, [Philip] Lamantia, and me for the literary public eye. And it was Don who edited the major and poetry-world shaker, The New American Poetry, in 1960. Richard was not in that anthology as he had not made any impact as yet. Don was the first business world literary gentleman to recognize Olson, Duncan, me, and many others.

20. Regarding information on Richard and the "Orient": Shig Murao (who was the man busted for selling Howl at City Lights in 1957) tells me that I should contact Albert Saijo about Richard because it was Albert who got Richard the job testing meat samples that he had in the early sixties. I'm told incorrectly that a Japanese restauranteur loaned Richard his final gun. Richard had a Japanese wife. Richard had—if I understand correctly—as big a vogue in Japan as he had here.

21. On the phone I asked Shig Murao if Richard was not part of the Jack Spicer—Gino and Carlo's Bar crowd. Shig said that Richard came here when he was seventeen or eighteen and hung around North Beach "in the early days." Shig said Richard liked to hang out at The Place, which was mostly a painters' and poets' bar in the mid and late fifties. Shig said Richard liked to recite a poem about pissing in the men's room sink. I do not know of that poem. Jay DeFeo had a show of painting in The Place, and Allen Ginsberg had a show of his poems hung with the flower paintings of Robert LaVigne there. The Place was the corner bar for me in 1954, the Deux Magot of Frisco; it put the X into San Francisco Existentialism. The Place was where I could get high on the beauty of Jay DeFeo's gouaches hung on the walls.

22. Poems of Richard's in The Pill intrigue me lot. Often the word surrealism is used inaccurately. "Horse Child Breakfast" might be called a "surreal" poem by someone, though actually it is quite lucid. Some young woman looks like a horse to Richard—probably she has a long palomino mane and sleek legs. Also, she looks like a child to Richard. I imagine she looks like a horse-child to him also, a filly. She is there the whole night and they have breakfast together, which she probably fixes, as it is hard to imagine Richard fixing breakfast. She becomes Horse Child Breakfast and Richard addresses her as such. That is not surrealism. Actually, it is a love poem owing more to Richard's imagination of Sappho's poems—to their lucid sensual and sensory address of another person than to a surreal impulse.

In fact, the use of three words—Horse and Child and Breakfast—probably owes much to Oriental poetry as we understand it. Richard was aware of [Ernest] Fenollosa's text on the origin of the Chinese ideogram and how elements combined to make a calligraphic character, as well as the "concrete" use of three words, not normally syntactically connected to create a verbal construct.

It is quite a delicate poem. It may be naively combining the Greek and the Chinese—but it is canny and memorable. It is gorgeous!

23. A big figure on the West Coast in the fifties was philosopher Alan Watts. He was speaking visionary Buddhism and new hipness and mystical Taoism on his radio program. The poet Kenneth Rexroth also had a great and eccentric book review radio program in which he reviewed, in the most intellectual and learned terms, everything from the Kabalistic aspects of the Shekina to the geography of Han Dynasty China and texts on Byzantine Greek theology. There were carpenters and printers and news-reporters around who were members or ex-members of anarchist-pacifist discussion groups. San Francisco was a rich network of streams to "trout about" in. Richard must have loved it all as much as I did. Vibrancy of thought was in the air. Consciousness of California landscape and Oriental thought were in the air we breathed, and it was made dark and moist by the Pacific beating on the coast of Monterey. Steinbeck country was nearby, Henry Miller lived down on Partington Ridge, Robinson Jeffers was in his tower in Carmel. Kenneth Patchen was in town. William Carlos Williams came to read for the Poetry Center. Robert Duncan had a class in poetics at S.F. State. A Jack Spicer disciple group met at Joe Dunn's house to read and discuss poetry. Brother Antoninus was in a nearby monastery after his previous career of being poet William Everson. Philip Lamantia was around—he had been acclaimed a major surrealist poet at age fourteen by André Breton. Kerouac came to town. [Robert] Creeley visited and ran off with Rexroth's wife. The buckeye on the mountainsides was in flower—everything smelled like redwood and bay. One could see the first reappearance of sea otters down the coast. I met Ginsberg at a party for W.H. Auden. I can not remember when I first met Richard.

24. An intriguing passage of Richard's in The Pill is "Our Beautiful West Coast Thing." It begins with an epigraph by Jack Spicer: "We are a coast people. There is nothing but ocean behind us." Richard says he is dreaming long thoughts of California on a November day near the ocean. He says he is listening to The Mamas and The Papas. Naively he says in caps, "THEY'RE GREAT." They are singing a song about breaking somebody's heart and "digging it!" He gets up and dances around the room.

San Franciscans were inhabiting their bodies by learning to dance communal dances with Billy the Kids and Mae Wests and Florence Nightingales and Beatles' Sergeant Majors in the Fillmore Auditorium and in the Avalon Ballroom. Everyone was putting their booties down to the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The dances were free-form—you could make any beautiful step or wave of arm that you wanted with anyone around you on the floor. Tribal stomp! But a lovely stomp, even "gentle," as Richard would say, amid the gross amplification and the strobe lights and large moving patterns of colors on the walls.

25. It is easy to read free-form from chapter to chapter in Trout Fishing after dancing free-form at the Fillmore or Avalon Ballroom. You danced with the partner who was behind you when you turned around. She had on a dreamy costume and had lovely bare arms. Maybe you had had a hit of windowbox grass and she was high on acid. She was a goddess. You were some god. Goethe said, "Experience is only half of experience." The details could shift a lot but it was all holy. When Brautigan speaks about dancing in the poem he is making reference to W. C. Williams dancing solo in his home being the happy genius of his household, but the dancing that Richard saw and did in the Fillmore helps explain the chapter structure of Trout Fishing. It was what people were doing.

26. Richard was five years younger than me. He was from the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle. As a kid, the newspaper comic strips that I read were probably the same ones he read. I remember "Smokey Stover," where the goofy firechief with the blank eyes and big smile tooled around in his three wheeler car from panel to panel with almost no connection and a host of weird characters. There were little signs on sticks that said "Nov Shmoz Kapop" and "Notary Sojac." I also read "Toonerville Trolley," which was often just one big panel with dozens of strange countrified and shaggy, shabby, angular whiskerandos and old ladies and terrible children clinging to the country trolley. In "Smokey Stover" there was little need for continuity—just a good old-fashioned sense of humor and appetite for the strange and amusing—and a basically good-natured view of the world and its tiny tribulations and ambitions. A chapter of Trout Fishing had as many things clinging to it, and riding on it, as did the "Toonerville Trolley" on a crowded outing to Blueberry America.

I wonder if Richard read my other favorite newspaper cartoon strip, "The Nutt Brothers: Ches & Wal"? It was so far out that it made "Smokey Stover" read like Ecclesiastes or the Odes of Horace. Ches and Wal Nutt changed not only costumes from panel to panel but even bodies. Each strip was based on some far-reaching pun. It was a wonder to look at—it had whales in it and bathtubs and fezzes.

Trout Fishing reiterates the American comic strip of the period Richard grew up in, the late 1930s and early 1940s. He read all those panels and they must have delighted him. So he wrote Trout Fishing in panels.

I would guess he got desperate about reaching out in [A] Confederate [General from Big Sur]—trying to write an On The Road—and afterwards he went back to what he knew, loved, and could do. Part of what he did was to make far-out comic strips, but with an enormous, liberated imagination, using only words, and childhood, and everything he ever felt, or saw, or thought that fit in. Thus, In Watermelon Sugar was his second big comic strip. I cannot think of any comic strips like it, save maybe an imaginary one: "The Adventures of Federico Garcia Lorca in Samuel Palmer Land." Samuel Palmer was a disciple of William Blake who etched dark nightscapes of sheep and kine and shepherds walking past black kirks in the Lake Country. The funny thing is that there might be a grain of truth there—Richard certainly knew Lorca and no doubt he knew some of Palmer's works.

27. Novalis wrote, "Man is a sun; and the senses are planets." Richard would have liked that.

28. I think of Bruce Conner as an Artist. He is known now as a filmmaker but he is a master sculptor in assemblage and in wax, and there is no better painter or draftsman around than Conner. Bruce wrote terrific rock lyrics and learned to play electric piano; he is considered by some to be a fairly fine mouth harpist. Richard thought of Bruce Conner as an Artist and he would have thought of himself as an Artist. I cannot imagine that Richard thought of himself as a "novelist," except, that is, for public consumption. I do not mean that he looked down on it at all—he admired novelists. But he was an Artist.

29. Richard's mutation interests me. By "mutation" I mean metamorphosis. I love to see metamorphosis in an artist. I love Mark Rothko's change, over a period of five years in the forties, from his spirit-figure paintings to his color fields. I love Rimbaud's teenage change to explorer. I even love Dali's change from Salvador Dali to the person renamed (in anagram) Avida Dollars—the money-hungry genius satirized by André Breton. Oddly, I couldn't stand the big change Richard made in front of me from Richard to Dark Richard. Only now can I begin to appreciate it.

I have spoken about the transitions from Confederate to Trout to Watermelon—equally intriguing like the graceful hops of the katydid are the leaps between his first books of poetry. Only a visionary literary critic would ecstasize over Galilee Hitchhiker. It is a small collection of whimsical, poignant, intense to some extent, momentarily witty poems with the central thread being the changing presence of Baudelaire as an occupant of the poems. Sometimes he is a monkey, sometimes he is driving a car, sometimes he is a flowerburger chef. (This again reminds me of Smokey Stover and the Nutt Brothers. Persons change their bodies and their occupations with no rational linear reason except the pleasure of fantasy and expression.) Galilee is mimeographed and not prepossessing, except to the au courant literati who recognized that it was published by a ring of intense young poets surrounding the ideologue older poet Jack Spicer. That was in 1958.

Next, in 1959, appeared an equally unprepossessing book of twenty-four small poems, titled with a quote from Emily Dickinson: "Lay the Marble Tea." But the poet's skill has expanded! The obsessive crispy Baudelaire persona has gone and the poems are inexplicable artifacts and penetrating insights into childhood. They are both soft and terse and they lack the compression of statement that a [Ezra] Poundian poet would have written. These are literary poems with reference to [William] Shakespeare, [Herman] Melville, [Franz] Kafka, and Dickinson. Though the references are whimsical, they are inherent to the poems and not decoration. Richard is clearly quite literary.

In the front of this book is the first sight of Richard's trademark—his teardrop-shaped trout drawing. The book is published by Carp Press. One of Richard's fish drawings is there and next to it are the words: The Carp.

The next katydid hop is to his 1960 book The Octopus Frontier. It has Richard's first photographic cover, looking as deliberate and planned as the cover of Trout Fishing. The photo is by North Beach photographer of the fifties (and daughter of folklorist Jaime de Angulo) Gui de Angulo—she used to photograph all of us. It is a bleed photo cover showing what is apparently Richard's foot on the suckered tentacle of a large octopus. It is striking and just misses being sinister. It is startling and not funny. It is a non sequitur . . . and a memorable one.

The poems of Octopus Frontier are filled with large simple images of vegetables and pumpkins floating on the tide, a poem about Ophelia, and poems about childhood. At this point there is a recognizable Brautigan style, though it would still be hard to recognize the gleam of gold in the poetry. Now there are three stepping-stone books of poems, and Richard has been lucid and readable in every one of them, but there is no indication that this work is greatly above the level of much North Beach poetry. There is not any reason for even a keen reader like Donald M. Allen to note any of this for his important anthology.

Keats said, "Life is a Vale of Soul-making." Richard was Soul-making—carefully, cautiously, tersely, but still with some sweetness and even courtingly. The three little poem book "hops," in all their sharp-edged softness, add up to a stepping stone big enough to move him into poetry of true richness. That rich poetry shows up in the Pill. But the Pill is a "selected" poems. Richard carefully seeds and manures it with selections from these three early books. He puts them all together in the Pill into what he finds to be a courtingly enchanting—and otherwise inexplicable—order.

Later in Please Plant This Book he not only passes out the free poems by way of the Diggers, but real packets of seeds along with the writings. Richard's metamorphosis is made of little mutations, skin-sheddings like those of the instar of a katydid.

30. I like the little "Dandelion Poem" that Richard dedicated to me. He also reviewed my Beast Language poems, Ghost Tantras, in a mimeo magazine of the day called (if memory has it right) Wild Dog Review. It was one of the few reviews that book ever had. I said earlier that Watermelon is dedicated to Don Allen, Jo Anne Kyger, and me. Richard really knocked himself out to please people the liked or loved. He wrote a lot of poems for women he loved and men friends that he was close to, and he dedicated all his books in the most generous and heartfelt way.

31. Except for Don Carpenter—who never broke off with Richard—I was the last of his old close friends to cut away. It tears me up to think how close we were and how wonderful he was in many ways. Could I have stuck by him longer? Then I realize—yes, I could have. . . What? For a month more? A year more? But to old friends he was like a cat on its back clawing the stomach out of a hand.

32. Writer Ron Loewinsohn first met Richard in 1957. He says that Richard's natural form was the short story. Ron and I are probably the only two around to whom Richard had expressed his admiration of Henri Michaux's prose. Michaux's Miserable Miracle, about mescaline, was the take-off point for me to write my essays titled "Drug Notes." I felt I could be more truthful, more American in my description of peyote.

33. Trout is dedicated to Ron Loewinsohn and Jack Spicer. Ron confirms that Richard wrote Trout before Confederate, and that Spicer was responsible for much editorial contribution. So young poet Brautigan was helped with his first novel by Jack Spicer.

34. I told Ron that the beginning of The Abortion reminds me of Franz Kafka. Ron pointed out that in the prologue to Trout, Richard notes that Kafka learned about America from reading Benjamin Franklin. Then there is that poem, "Kafka's Hat." Then there is Richard's ever-present hat.

The situation in the beginning of The Abortion reminds me of Kafka's novel Amerika. The Abortion's a real book about an imaginary America.

There is a real library in a real place in San Francisco, but in the novel it is open twenty-four hours a day and the librarian lives there and cannot leave. It is as if he were involved in a "gentle" and voluntary Trial.

35. Today most students at California College of Arts and Crafts do not know who Richard is. One student asked me if Eleanor Dickinson was famous—she teaches at CCAC. I said, yes, for her drawings and television documentaries. The student thought he had her seen picture on a stamp. He was thinking of Emily Dickinson. Television has collapsed time and history for these students. Trout collapses Time and History and Memory and the topological separations of Places. Trout changes channels every few hundred words.

36. Poet and critic Bill Berkson says when he went up to a radicalized Yale [University] (late sixties) to teach, he asked who the students were reading. They were only reading Richard.

37. Ron Loewinsohn thinks that all of Richard's later (post-Abortion) works are based on a two-screen principle—shift from one location to another, then back to number one, then back to the other. This would be a desperate attempt to eliminate conflict or confrontation. It is also literary, a device. It is also romantic, turning from partner to partner and never looking at one long enough to see the flaws.

38. People sometimes mixed up James Broughton and Richard Brautigan. Before Richard was famous—on his way up—film-maker and poet James Broughton was making a film called "The Bed." It featured celebrities on a bed. Broughton filmed Brautigan for the film. Richard was thrilled about it. He was genuinely excited to be recognized as an art-celebrity by a world-known film-maker like Broughton. When the film came out, Richard was not in it. For a long time Richard went around with damp eyes, lashing his tail.

39. There is a "grandmotherliness" in Richard's Abortion. In addition to the smarminess of the dialogue, metaphors like "Vida and I were so relaxed that we both could have been rented out as fields of daisies" begin to become underwhelming. The dialogue is almost mincing. Not only is Richard skipping the confrontation and conflict, he is also using filler, and it is hard to put filler in such a small book. There are small dialogues about nothing at all in simple-minded phrases.

40. The American painter of the 1920s and 1930s, Arthur Dove, had a naive simplicity in his work—a simplification of landscapes or mood-scapes derived from vistas in broad, sweet, looming colors. Dove also did grandmotherly sentimental and exquisite collages using materials that might have come from grandmother's trunk or her life . . . pieces of lace, a spice label, and an elegant piece of veneer, or a page from an old letter in lovely elder handwriting of a previous generation. In doing those collages, Dove was not only American-Grandmotherly—he was French. There is something French about American-Grandmotherliness. It is perfectionistic. Sweetly anal. Exquisite. Even more than the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell.

41. To go back a step, Trout was written before the Fillmore dances, but I think for readers it mirrored their tribal dances in the switching of partners and chapter-channels. To paraphrase Samuel Butler, life is like a violin solo that one is playing in public but one is learning the violin as one plays. That is what Richard was doing—learning to write novels in public as they were being read. That is entrancing for a reading public but perhaps dangerous for Richard. He was always on the brink. He was always risking himself like a cautious acrobat and he was firmly trying to keep his shabby, personal, angular, wire-rimmed image unaltered. But he was also trying to become a male sex image and a wealthy artist.

42. Richard's description of the airport in The Abortion sounds like the world as seen by a schizophrenic—the nets of travel hanging in the air and catching people is a most real idea—most real and schizophrenic. Seeing the people as generalized robots seems schizophrenic. Seeing airplanes and airports as medieval castles of speed and so forth seems not only accurate but over the edge. This is a highly perceptive and accurate book but I am afraid it is no longer fiction—it sounds like a "gentle" case history being written. The writer seems alienated, childlike and incapable. It seems like an accurate set of descriptions about a real fantasy about incapability.

It occurs to me that the latent madness or hysteria is being salved by constant grandmotherliness. The hysteria a nanosecond beneath the surface is being calmed by cliches, figures of speech that are reassuring, and a willingness to be satisfied with images like "blank as snow" as capable acts of writing.

Richard, like the protagonist of The Abortion, did not know how to drive.

43. Richard keeps referring to the coffee spot on the wing of the plane through his protagonist. When the protagonist looks out of the cab and sees there is no coffee spot out there on the wing of the cab which is not there—then, I begin to worry about Richard. This seems to be Richard flat-out describing schizophrenia. It is the raw stuff of mental cases.

By the time Richard wrote The Abortion we were both clearly "controlled" alcoholics. I wonder how much he had progressed later into uncontrolled alcoholism which may have acted as a balm of drunkenness—as per the balm of grandmotherliness in the novels. Alcohol is a numbing, godly, poisonous, liberating high.

44. The Abortion may be as mad and daring an act as Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings. Both books are lovable for their vulnerability. I mean that both Richard and Norman dare to make themselves vulnerable. Are these voluntary acts of literature or are they uncontrollable obsessions? Great literature surely must be obsessional, and surely both of these books are obsessional.

45. Because it is so self-referential and so highly literary, Richard's oeuvre seems almost decadent, as if it were a part of a long tradition of intra-referential, self-referring works. Richard's works seem like Wen Fus written about other Wen Fus in a tradition of Wen Fu writers (the Wen Fu being an old Chinese form of highly literary prose poem). Clearly Kafka is there, and Michaux, and [Kurt] Vonnegut, and Spicer as mentor, and, I suppose, Hemingway into extremis. The writing is so au courant that Richard's oeuvre writes itself out and seems mindless and spontaneous and unliterary, or anti-literary. But it is just the opposite. Richard is a highly-honed esthete writing esthetic documents and works of art of great, great refinement.

Like Baudelaire, Richard is a refined Dandy. His dress was the dandyism of Beatles style as well as Haight Ashbury style. The impoverished Dandy dresses in the most carefully chosen stylish rags of no-style. He makes an elegant sculpture of himself while he works obsessively in his garret. And as he interwinds the topology of his works, picturing himself on the cover of the work, his schizophrenia becomes its subject

46. As I finish reading The Abortion, it seems inept. Richard had few adventures in his life when I knew him. He had apparently had an abortion with some woman, he had had a number of trips to Big Sur, and he had had a dream that became In Watermelon Sugar. In the fifties none of us had had many adventures—we were poor and broke and young. Some of us shipped out to Asia and some of us had sexual adventures; some had been in the forest service; a few were criminals and drug addicts, or dope dealers, or had been through the post-midnight romance of bop at Black nightclubs and in sleazy hotels. Richard must have missed most of the few opportunities there were for adventures—he just wasn't adventurous, he was cautious. And with good reason, judging from the mental state of the narrator of The Abortion.

47. Our biggest adventure in the fifties (and it was huge and without proportion, on the scale of our nervous systems and the Universe) was literature, and trips of the mind through literature, and the literary wars for dominance in North Beach and elsewhere in San Francisco. Our study of poetry and each other's poetry was marvelously, miraculously intense. Richard was on the edges of that in the fifties, but he must have feasted on it mentally and in the bar life, as a whale feasts on the bloom of krill in the Antarctic Sea.

48. The opening of The Hawkline Monster reminds me of Richard's enjoyment of movies. It is a carefully-studied movie opening for a slightly far-out cowboy movie. To open with cowboys on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii in 1902 reminds me of movies like Chinatown: the subject is popular, specific, and a little off-beat, but realistically satisfying and intriguing.

I remember Richard's pleasure in retelling scenes in movies. There is Richard in my mind's eye retelling a favorite scene (from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) He tells the scene over in a precise and pleasurable way—juicy in the telling (from the warmth of a glass of wine in his shabby flat across from Sears)—but it is deliciously precise also.

49. Hawkline has a strong opening in the third person as compared to the mentally inept and grandmotherly sweet Kafkaesque opening of Abortion. (Was not Hawkline the next novel after The Abortion? Answer: No, I remember Richard telling me about Willard and His Bowling Trophies, though I had not seen the manuscript.) There is an enormous jump between The Abortion and the opening of Hawkline. It is not just the shift of person in the narrative—Hawkline is deliberately macho. Cameron and Greer are right out of macho cowboy movies. Maybe they are a split person. They are Sun and Dance, or Butch and Cassidy.

50. Richard really wanted to be MACHO—he wanted to be one of the Big Boys. It was childlike, or maybe childish. After I quit speaking to Richard I wrote an angry poem about him:

NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

SO, AT LAST YOUR PERSONALITY
HAS BECOME A COPROLITE!
((Fossilized shit!))
HOW
painful it was
to grow up in the fifties!
WE LEARNED:
materialism
macho-competition,
greed.
BUT STILL I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE
that you sit there telling me
about the women you fuck,
how much money you make,
and of your fame.
As if
the last twenty years
never happened.
You seem pathetically
foolish. But there is a viciousness
in
our generation.
YOU
ARE
REALLY
SET
(like a robot)
ON OVERKILL.
And you believe
in social appearances.
You want to be like
The Big Boys.
Whoever they are!

I put the poem in September Blackberries and I did not edit it out when I edited scores of pages from the manuscript. It meant something to me—it was a point I had reached. It was a node. I saw the degree of my own materialism, sexism, and macho in Richard's actions and yet I was slightly aghast at Richard.

September Blackberries was the first book I published after the break with Richard. I hoped he would never see the poem, and I believed that he would accept our break so abruptly that he would not read the book.

51. Last year Richard upset producer Benn Possett and his co-organizers at the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam. Apparently, Richard came on stage too drunk to read and he either read a bit or not at all, and maybe delivered an insult or several. Then he drunkenly howled and yelled and demanded for a woman who would fuck him. That must have been October of last year, and Benn was still talking about it in March when I saw him in Amsterdam. A couple of other people also mentioned Richard's scene. He was outrageous enough to anger the Dutch literary bohemians. It must have been something!

52. [Percy Bysshe] Shelley and [Lord] Byron used to practice with pistols together regularly. They were both so highstrung that there was apprehension of a duel arising in a moment of anger. Shelley was the better shot.

53. Years ago in The Summer of Love days I asked composer George Montana why so many of the rock musicians were so terrible, and why they were listened to, and why they did not learn their instruments. George said that was the way it is supposed to be. George's idea was that anybody could learn to make sandals, and anybody might make them and be a sandal-maker. The same with music. He believed anybody could be a musician—it was just wanting to do it that was the necessity.

I wonder if many young sixties people felt that Richard was just their casual sandal-maker novelist, and that they could themselves write just such novels as Richard did if they sat down (by candlelight on acid) to do so. Probably no one realized he had been rewritten some passages sixteen times with labor and fastidious obsession.

54. A few nights ago I had a dream with Richard in it. There was a vast auditorium as big as the Fillmore Ballroom, but it was clean and shiny, with waxed floors, and the air was clean, and people were dressed in respectable suits. A band was playing (a regular band, not a rock band) and there was an enormous circle of people and gray plastic folding chairs. It was a game of musical chairs. Richard was directly in front of me in the line and the band started playing. He just stood there owlishly, holding up the whole line. He did not know he was supposed to move.

55. June Thirtieth is a terrifically good book. It does things that a book—and poetry—should do. It is a book of travel poems, poems about place. There is a tradition for this "genre" of book. It is the tradition of haibun; that is, a collection of haiku gathered into a story line. I think especially of Basho's haibun Narrow Road to the North.

56. June Thirtieth reminds me, in an odd way, of what I love about Kerouac—Jack giving me his perceptions with the lucidity and athleticism of his sensorium. I love to read Kerouac for the clarity with which he sees the same things I see. We see differently, and thus Jack gives the lucid gift of his perceptions. With Norman Mailer it is a different case—I see things almost the same way as Mailer does, as if we are twins. But Kerouac is a little odd and quite understandable to me.

In June, Richard is giving the gift of a rare and delicious combination of his perceptions (sensory) and his imagination (uniquely personal). His perceptions are quite unlike mine—they would not interest me except for the potent charge of his interest. Richard can be potent and spontaneous in this little book. It is quite daring. Being in Japan is a big adventure for Richard. He is safe (God, is Japan safe), so he is less cautious. He is playing: going to Japanese bars, courting and loving women of different appearance, discovering television all over again. He is seeing flies and elevators differently. This book is fabulous stuff. And it is the right length in the sense that one does not feel that things are being squeezed off early.

The "quality" of the poems is uneven—as Richard notes in his introduction—but so what? It is a glorious whole and Richard is letting himself go, finding new stops in his flute. There is divinity in this book.

Thank you for these poems, Richard.

57. If someone knew nothing about Absurdism or Samuel Beckett and went to see Waiting for Godot, that person might think Beckett was a literary Naive. There are two things typical of Absurdist theater that are usually not commented on. Each Absurdist play takes place in a different universe with its own rules—such as people turning into rhinoceroses, vaudeville bums standing in empty fields speaking existentialist thoughts, and etc. Beckett has a different universe for each play. Endgame is similar to Godot, but only similar. It is a different universe. Second, though Absurdist theater is quite literary, it is heavily influenced by the popular media, using films and comic strips as sources.

Each of Richard's "novels" is a different universe. Each one (except for Trout and Watermelon) reminds me strongly of Absurdist theater. (Trout is complex to a degree that is unsustainable in theater, and the "decor" of Watermelon is too lovely to be Absurdist theater.)

58. Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork reads as dry and trashy, with an occasional smart aphorism. The "poems" are flat and Richard is trying to pretend that he—and the reader—are hearing something special in the flat prosy lines. Once in a while I am almost convinced.

59. What is interesting about Mercury is that it is Artful. It is almost all on the same level of flatness and dryness; it all inhabits the same vibration of possibilities that Richard has chosen to write in. As ever, Richard has edited it into artful bundles. The nature morte of "Group Portrait Without Lions" almost works—but, of course, there are no lions. There are no lions growling, nor any gazelle blood, in any of the poems. It is a strain to read it, and I can imagine some self-horror in this book.

60. The poem "Ben" in Mercury is about a phone call to Ben Wright in Oklahoma. Ben is not in his house trailer to answer Richard's call. Ben is a brilliant and intense man moving from one terrible affair to another after his wealthy Oklahoman father's death. When Richard and I first met Ben he was at U.C. Berkeley working on a paper about Mark Twain. He said the Twain archives were being ransacked and everything interesting was being stolen out of them. Ben lived in San Diego, and Richard and I saw a lot of him. Ben was tormented and hyper. He always said, "I've got the whips and jingles."

61. I finished The Hawkline Monster easily, but Richard's novel Dreaming of Babylon is awful, pathetic. I am more than a third of the way through and I feel stuck. It is hard to look at the page. This little universe was hardly worth creating and barely has enough energy in it to sustain the fact of the ink upon the page.

The novel is a double removal. It is removed in time and space to 1942. Then the private eye protagonist removes himself like Walter Mitty to his imaginary Babylon. The Private eye character is barely there as a persona (another post Beatles loser), and to have him go off into a personal removal to his fantasy world leaves only words on the page—there is barely any coherence of "story." It is a book constructed of props: private eye, peg-legged mortician, a blonde, a gun, absence of bullets, a lovely corpse, reminiscences of the Spanish Civil War. But the props do not come together to make a story.

62. Kenneth Anger titled his book Hollywood Babylon, a deliberate use of the pun "babble-on."

63. The Hawkline Monster owes less to [Edgar Allan] Poe than it does to Disney movies that Richard and I grew up watching. Hawkline uses the same color palette as Disney's Fantasia, and to a certain extent the same sleek glabrous non-threatening biomorphic monster shapes and shadows of monster shapes. The monster is ultimately cute and plays his role on the steep steps to the basement, or on the surface of the gravy bowl, or mingled with the pearls on the lady's bosom as a pattern of light. Finally, the monster becomes diamonds.

64. Poe used some of the following, but Richard used them all over and over in tandem and in rotation, one on top of another, in a musical series like a tone-row composer: doubles; revenants; periods of forgetfulness; confusion of self; childlike view of self; confusion of places and proper names of persons; interruptions; ruptures of transition; pointless dialogue. These seem, when they show up in abundance, to be like symptoms, and they are the solid stuff, the structural stuff, of Hawkline.

65. Some chapters of Hawkline seem like symptoms.

66. A description of Freud's Unconscious in Hawkline: "But they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by the mutated light in The Chemicals, a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind." All things are possible to the monster—as to the Unconscious of Freud—and the monster is just beginning to learn to use its powers.

67. In Hawkline the monster dies when whiskey is poured on The Chemicals. Richard poured a lot of alcohol on his monster.

68. Dreaming of Babylon ends with the beautiful whore corpse tucked in the protagonist's refrigerator. To my earlier list of Poe/Brautigan symptoms I will add: inability to accept the body.

69. A few years ago I looked up and saw Jack Nicholson standing by the stairs in Cafe Sport Restaurant. Jack was facing the dining venue and he had on his HUGE Jack Nicholson smile. He was standing so everyone could see him would see him—would notice him—would have their "minds blown" that they were looking at Jack Nicholson. Jack loved it. I liked him for his flagrant egoism. It was heroic. Irish.

Richard got so he liked to sit at Enrico's outdoor tables to drink (it was the most visible place in North Beach), and to be seen. He wanted to be seen, to be admired, and perhaps to be envied. He seemed to like being there by himself. He managed a look that was at once wistful, self intent, and intriguing. He looked like the great man of himself sitting there. This was not the boyish show-off macho of running to Enrico's to be Ten Day Barons of Cafe Society. This was serious.

70. Someone describes Richard at Enrico's after he separated from his Japanese wife. She was suing him for alimony, I suppose. The friend tells me about how Richard told him the whole dismal financial story, and no doubt with juicy precision mixed with intense and slightly wet-eyed anguish. Richard told how he was being ruined, how the woman wanted to strip him financially, how she was doing it, what he was doing, and so on. Painfully detailed, yet probably Richard was not telling any personal secrets and was keeping much under the table. Then Richard told the next person who came into the bar, apparently the same story with slightly different wording. Then Richard found someone else and told the story yet again. And the next . . .

71. Bruce Conner knew Richard's wife Aki and liked her. When she wanted to get a divorce from Richard she phoned Bruce and asked him how to get hold of a lawyer. She had been, Bruce says, some kind of an executive at Sony in Japan. Here in San Francisco, when Richard went off on trips to Japan to "do his writing," she stayed at home.

In Japan the home is the province of the woman, Bruce explains. Richard got a Pacific Heights apartment for himself and his wife. I imagine it to be large with high-ceilinged rooms and a view of the Bay. Bruce describes Richard bringing home his drinking buddies, being quarrelsome (dish-throwing), and also bringing home girlfriends. Bruce is sympathetic to Aki, though he is a firm friend of Richard.

72. Bruce reports that Aki's family was hostile to Richard when he was in Japan. Bruce stayed in Tokyo for a month to write a film script with Richard, but Richard did not show Bruce around Japan and stayed in his hotel room much of the time. The script aborted because they could not agree on a working style to compose it. Bruce pictured Magritte-like and Troutfishing-like ideas for the film. One idea was to show Dennis Hopper disappearing into quicksand. Bruce wanted to do sixty or so takes—he imagined Dennis would do it differently each time.

73. The writing of the script bothered Bruce because Richard would only have people on screen telling what they were doing. He would not, or could not, have them actually do actions on the screen.

I commented that none of the "novels" had been made into films. Bruce said that Hawkline was optioned for a film. I replied that only Disney could have done it, meaning as an animated cartoon. Later, I imagined it might make one of those strange combinations of animation and film. A real lady, with real pearls, but an animated Hawkline monster slithering around on her pearls.

74. Bruce asked me if I had any idea why Richard killed himself. Then he proposed several reasons: a. To get people to read his works; b. To emulate what Richard postulated was Hemingway's reason, i.e., Hemingway intended to kill himself when his faculties dwindled; c. Serious depression. Earlier in our conversation Bruce led me to believe that in Japan Richard might have learned from the Japanese culture that suicide is an acceptable way of dealing with problems.

75. In the late sixties, Richard phoned Don Carpenter one day and told him he had had dinner at a Japanese restaurant with Rip Torn, and he recounted some of what he had said, and what Rip had said, and so forth. This kind of ego-building and one-upping mysteriousness was typical of Richard. Don was excited to meet Rip, who was his favorite actor. Finally, he demanded that Richard tell him where he had met Rip. Richard said chez McClure, then Don came by and, as he puts it, just leaned on the door and smiled. Then Don and Rip became friends and Don wrote and produced the film Payday for himself and for Rip. How often, how endlessly, Richard would phone with some great coup of his and tell you about someone you would like to meet, but then nor let on where it happened or who his connection was. He was trying envy and its discontent on his friends. It was unpleasant and highschoolish, but it was a fundament for what he was to do to friends later.

76. Driving back from Mill Valley after having lunch with Don I had an idea: Why did Richard kill himself? Possible answer: Because he had made his point. Clearly in the process of making his point he had used himself up, "fried his brains with alcohol" as someone unkindly put it. That would not take into account what Richard's liver and insides looked like. I am making a subtle "take" on human spirit. Perhaps Richard killed himself because he had made his point and used himself up like a butterfly uses itself up in the process. If Richard's point was the fulfillment of blind groping hungers of the Freudian Unconscious, he had satisfied a lot of them that must have looked unsatisfiable during his early life: he had become a male sex figure to some great extent; wealthy and propertied; a successful artist; admired by those he despised in the colleges; had some adventures; tasted glory. And he had triumphed over his enemies and most of his friends. It may have taken all of the physical and spiritual substance—and the fuel of alcohol—that Richard could manage to make such a triumph.

There are ways of looking at death. One might say that Richard killed himself in an extreme depression, or that he killed himself because his faculties were going (as per Hemingway fears). Those could be the series of impressions in Richard's consciousness preceding his death.

In a different stance I can observe Richard's whole life and say what a grand triumph—he won on all scores. He got the things he seemed to want so intensely. He went from threadbare recluse born too late, unwanted child, and has-been, all the way to the stars.

Richard had made an immense number of points against his friends and enemies. It took everything he had to make the points and he ended the game. This is not to infer that this was a rational process of the conscious mind. He did not sit there with a gun and think, "O.K., I'll do it now. I made my point." Of course, he was drunk and in agony, or drunk and numb, and uncrystallizing himself.

But Richard's life doesn't look like a failure to me. It looks like a win in the overall. Even if Richard thought he was losing, his whole life says something else.

77. One mutual friend says he bedded several of Richard's women friends—they went to him after they left Richard. He says that Richard worshipped one woman who appeared on the cover of a novel, that he went down on his knees in front of her and worshipped her. Like worshipping a goddess or a Mary or a mother, I suppose, and I imagine with maddest religious-sexual and religious-fervor bound together. She must have been Richard's first real bravissima, glorious, non-bohemian, long-legged sleek beauty with perfume and clean expensive sheets. Why not!

78. An old friend's reactions to some stories about Richard being "into bondage" is that, yes, it is likely Richard was involved in leather or whatever. He treats it casually and as a minor foible—not implying that Richard would have been very deeply involved. He believes that Richard might have become involved because it is a "national pastime" in Japan. It would be ordinary enough to be a bit intrigued after a number of sexual adventures in Japan, he says.

79. Don Carpenter disagrees with me when I say that Richard was well-read. He asserts that Richard was only well-read about [Adolf] Hitler and the Civil War. I reply to Don that Richard could talk about Blaise Cendrars or Michaux. Don's reply is that Richard only "read the odd stuff."

This is certainly to be taken con grana salis to my over-assertion of Richard's literary breadth. Richard probably could not talk for long about [Edmond] Spenser. He had not been to college—his reading in literature may have been delvings into the "odd" plus, however, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, [Herman] Melville, [Ernest] Hemingway, and etc. Richard's reading was quirky, thorough, broad in the directions he chose. Probably he had not read the usual literary traditions of Beowulf, Chaucer, Spenser. He did not know the college English Lit canon, but none of us cared about that much anymore because we were the New Mutations.

80. The below-zero, cold, black sombrero in Sombrero Fallout reminds me of the ice caves in other books. The crowd going mad and running out of control reminds me of the "body"—I mean the sexually huge out-of-control body of Vida in The Abortion.

81. Actress Mie Hunt is on the cover of the Japanese publication of Sombrero Fallout. There was a simultaneous Japanese and American publication of Sombrero. It reminds me of Richard's other tinkerings with topology and making novels into real and unreal events. The simultaneous printings make me think of a set of intentions similar to those behind making the cover of Trout a real place with the real author on it—and referred to in the interior of the novel.

I like those topologizings and meltings. They are poetic in intent, as well as egoistic. They are embedding Richard in the work as the artist of the work. Richard is using the possibilities (some new ones) of the media. Many of us were doing similar things, or wanted to.

82. Please Plant This Book, poems printed on seed packets, is not only a coup in gaining an audience through a startling book and object, but it also creates a new image of the book and is a true poetic act. [Stéphane] Mallarmé said the book is a spiritual instrument. Richard made one that would spread carrots, lettuce, parsley, squash.

The free book is taken in concept from Wallace Berman—it is an extension on Berman's give-away packet magazine, Semina. The tomb screened cover photo and the triplication of it is also sheer Berman.

83. The screens of Sombrero Fallout: To use Ron Loewinsohn's image, there are not two but three screens. The screen that contains the sombrero that has fallen to the street is the first. The screen with the humorist writer protagonist is the second. Screen three is the screen of Yukiko, the lost lover of the protagonist. The first screen which is the continuation of the story begun on the torn scraps of paper in the wastebasket interests me almost not at all. Richard barely tried to make the expanding story of pillage, mayhem, and civil war interesting or even amusing. I imagine that it was his strategy to not even try. It gains a little interest because there is no effort to make it believable or funny. It is odd. But I tend to sight-read those sections—I turn the pages and the words on them are obvious and repetitious.

The second screen: The screen of the protagonist/author interests me more because Richard is presenting a highly and carefully doctored self-portrait. I wonder when he is presenting himself and when he is deliberately not doing so. I wonder when he is presenting himself and thinks he is not—and vice versa.

Yukiko sleeping is the third screen. It is a worshipful portrait of the beauty of a sleeping, long-haired Japanese woman. Much of it is exquisite prose poetry. Just now I thought of Pierre Louys, though it is not like that. Still, perhaps Richard shares some things with Pierre Louys.

The Yukiko screen gives birth to another screen. Her cat has a screen all to herself and is an entity splitting from Yukiko. It is one of those rare and delicious animal portraits, and its wholly anthropocentric nature contains a wonderful believable cameo of a cat expressed in human terms. It feels like a cat. The cat chewing the soft but crunchy diamonds of the catfood. The cat lapping a drink of water but forgetting the five or six bites of food and then returning for the dainty nibbles. The self-involvement of the cat, its inherent bored indifference. As in the accurate descriptions of schizophrenic observations of the airport in Abortion, I am moved. Of course, a cat does not imagine the cat food as soft diamonds—but what an analogy!

84. The descriptions of Yukiko's dream life are interesting perceptions of dream life, and relationships of dreams to the exterior events—like the cats purring or stirring—are most psychologically credible.

85. Pierre Louys wrote a book titled The Daughters of Bilitis. My mother had a copy of it on her little shelf of books where she kept Kristin Lavransdatter and Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads and the Book of Stag Verse. After almost forty-five years I remember Daughters of Bilitis as being an erotic but not explicit book of prose poems describing, in sensual and delicate terms, acts of female romantic homosexuality.

86. Here is an aspect of Sombrero Fallout that intrigues me: the description of the cat purring and the relationship of the purring to dreams, the description of the cat itself; the renderings of the dreams themselves remind me of poetry. Richard's decadent poetry is written as prose. Further, this decadent poetry written as prose is basically a comedy.

I am not using decadent perjoratively. I mean by decadent a style that is overly aware and lush. It is playing with the edges of our acceptance by means of its delicacy and accuracy regarding a human fringe of feelings. In Sombrero there is a lushness at times and it is achieved with sparseness. This reminds me of certain Oriental works and is certainly not part of the English/American tradition of literature. It is contrasted to the cartoonishness of the Civil War that is started by the hat in the street.

87. On the phone Dennis Hopper tells me about sitting up late at night with Richard arguing politics. They shout, presumably extremely drunk. Richard's wife Akiko comes into the room and asks them to stop shouting at each other, but Dennis tells me that he and Richard were shouting into a corner of the room and not at each other. They had made that decision. Dennis comments on how right wing Richard's politics had become.

In large part, Richard's "politics" had much to do with my ceasing to speak to him. His feelings about women, other artists, and the growing lack of sympathy for the Digger ideals he had help build were clearly growing into right wingism. It was awful to hear, especially when he acted sweeter and more sugary and sincere on stage or in public utterances of kindness, love, and social concern.

88. Robert Duncan in conversation is negative about Richard. He remembers Richard for writing a wonderful book called Trout Fishing in America, and he remembers he and Spicer going to Richard's public reading of the book. Robert declares that Richard did not write anything else of worth. Robert dislikes—maybe despises—Richard's poetry. He sees Richard as a talented stand-up entertainer, recollecting that people would stay to the end of long multiple poetry readings just to hear him. That is a fact.

Clearly there were a number of people who read Trout and were disappointed by all the books afterwards. There were others who bought Richard's "package" of Trout, Pill, Watermelon and then read no more. I can imagine that The Abortion stopped many or turned them around in their interest in Richard.

89. Like Abortion, Richard's last novel So The Wind deals with a Kafkaesque American landscape, another example of visionary schizophrenia. So The Wind seems at one moment exactly right in its depictions of Northwest small town post-Depression boyhood; at another moment I realize the "landscape" of small town America is as unlike how it really was (I grew up in the Northwest also) as the protagonist is dissimilar to Richard. This double intention on the part of the artist gives me a sense of great skill.

90. So The Wind is ominously depressing. I feel terrible while I read it and I still have four or five pages to read. It is depressing to read a novella of more than a hundred pages when one knows from the very beginning that the protagonist is trying to call back a bullet that has killed someone. The landscape is relentlessly depressing, from children's funerals to rundown motels to hooverville huts where old sawmill guards live out pointless, impoverished, neat lives.

91. In So The Wind, the protagonist's killing of his "classy" junior high school friend makes me think of Richard's own "murderings" of his friends in the late sixties, early seventies. Killing a special friend seems to be a primal event in Richard's consciousness. He did it often enough in real life and then it returns (no, it emerges) as a subject in a novel shortly before he kills himself. Just as the protagonist is not to blame—not responsible for the bad luck of having shot his friend—so I feel, in a similar way, Richard is not to be blamed for killing off his friends.

Richard's alienation and attacks on the capacities of his friends seem mindless. He was not able to control the impulses he acted out and I cannot imagine that he had any insight into what he was doing. I always felt that what Richard was doing was somehow programmed. I felt that Richard was acting out directive impulses that he had no awareness of, that he had little or no conscious contact with them. We are like that much of the time. When it is in such a crucial area as friendship and when one needed friends as Richard did, then it is tragic.

The child, the twelve-year old boy, in So The Wind is as mindless as Richard often seemed. The boy is a mirroring reflection of what catches his senses, and he follows the most simple animal directives—to get some bottles to sell so he can buy a hamburger or some bullets. To blow apples apart with his gun. To try to imagine what an enemy boy might have gotten with the returnable bottles that he did not get.

Bruce Conner said he saw Richard as a tragic child. And he was. And he is.

"Paper Flowers: Richard Brautigan's Poetry"
Steven Moore
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 304-335.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

He was born in poverty and died a suicide, suffered from depression, alcoholism, and insomnia, yet Richard Brautigan produced some of the most delightful and inventive poems in American literature. With their quirky humor, bizarre metaphors, and playful forms, these poems charmed readers in the Sixties and Seventies and continue to attract new readers—that is, those lucky enough to find them. For with the exception of The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, which is sandwiched between two novels in a Houghton Mifflin omnibus, his poetry has been out of print for decades. Although Brautigan will always be better known for his dozen books of fiction, his poetry played a major role in establishing his reputation and remains a significant part of his enduring appeal.

Like the adorable woman seated in a sandbox on the cover of his Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt, Brautigan regarded poetry as a sandbox to play in. His poems take a vaudevillian variety of forms: hobbled haikus, sabotaged sonnets, prose poems, newspaper headlines, Zen koans, public service announcements, penseés, surreal weather reports, mash notes, Beat goofing, fragments of autobiography, psalms, obituaries, insults (some play is serious), broadsides, found poems, poems "published" on seed packets, poems with titles but no text, poems with titles longer than their texts, poems about the failure to write poems, Shakespearean adaptations, Carrollian whimsy, Joycean epiphanies, Marxist gags (Groucho, not Karl), fractured fairy tales, instructions for the use of a "Karma Repair Kit," lists, journal entries—and throughout, some of the most astonishing, mindbending metaphors in verse. Only Brautigan would be reminded by a potted plant on a windowsill of a vampire entering by the window. Who else would think of a contraceptive pill in terms of a mining disaster, or describe Shakespeare's Ophelia floating "like an April church"? He was blessed with the gift of metaphor, one of the truest signs of a born poet.

And he knew it. From an early age Brautigan knew he had a vocation to be a writer, and pursued it with the fierce dedication of a true believer. He was born (as he tells us in the poem "Tokyo/June 24, 1976") on January 30, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington. He had a bleak childhood; born in the pit of the Depression to a single mother often on welfare, he suffered from malnutrition, neglect, and abuse at the hands of his mother's string of boyfriends. (Brautigan saw his real father only twice during his childhood.) He and his sister were boarded out to another family once, abandoned a few times, and other times left with one of his abusive stepfathers for weeks. Only after his mother remarried a decent man when Brautigan was thirteen did his life improve, though those earlier experiences marked him for life, and he rarely spoke of that time thereafter.

"Richard was real smart," his mother told his daughter Ianthe years later, "read all the time. Always had a paperback in his pocket."1 He also developed a poet's eye early on; he would often take his sister Barbara with him on fishing trips, and she later told Ianthe: "'We would make peanut butter sandwiches and quart jars of Kool-Aid and walk for miles fishing along the way. He saw beauty in everything,' she said. 'We were just kids, but he would point out a special tree or the way the flowers were bending in the wind. Nobody talked about that sort of thing in our family or even in the town we lived.'" The mention of Kool-Aid recalls one of the more memorable characters in Trout Fishing in America: the Kool-Aid wino. He too is poverty-stricken, but rises above it by the power of imagination: "He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it." For Brautigan, it was not Kool-Aid but the discovery of poetry that allowed him to create his own reality.

In the contributor's note to one of his earliest magazine appearances, Brautigan stated: "I have been writing poetry since I was seventeen. Olivant will publish my first book of poems, Tiger in a Telephone Booth. Making paper flowers out of love and death is a disease, but how beautiful it is."2 He discovered poetry in high school, and was especially drawn to Emily Dickinson; like telegrams from a parallel universe, her short, gnomic verse provided a model for the poetry he began writing then, and her personal example of the poet as an eccentric outsider must have appealed to his own sense of estrangement. In a fine essay on Dickinson, poet Alice Fulton noted, "It's hard to think of any criticism that places a man poet within a primarily Dickinsonian orbit,"3 but Brautigan certainly gravitated toward her, even though he may never have attained her level. But he paid tribute to her by using a line from one of her poems as the title of his second book of poetry, Lay the Marble Tea, and by including therein one of his own titled "Feel Free to Marry Emily Dickinson."

William Carlos Williams is another poet Brautigan discovered in high school who exerted a lasting influence on the budding poet's aesthetics. Reacting against the complex, multilingual, allusive poetry of Pound and Eliot, Williams insisted on using the American vernacular, on junking obsolete poetic forms, and on writing poems that made an immediate impact on the reader (as opposed to poems that were to be puzzled over in the classroom). Williams believed a good poem was the result not of working up preconceived ideas but of recording fresh observations of ordinary things; his credo "No ideas but in things" became Brautigan's credo as well. Williams's iconic poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" and the two-sentence refrigerator note "This Is Just to Say" could both be mistaken for Brautigan poems.

The other important poetic discovery Brautigan made in high school was the Japanese haiku, especially as practiced by such masters as Basho and Issa. "I like the way they used language concentrating emotion, detail and image until they arrived at a form of dew-like steel," he later wrote in his introduction to June 30th, June 30th. While he rarely followed the strict syllabic form of the classic haiku, Brautigan aimed for the same effect in his short poems. The haiku of Basho and Issa were often lighthearted or humorous, qualities Brautigan emulated, only to have his verse criticized consequently for its lack of seriousness.

From 1952 to 1955 he wrote a great deal of poetry, some of it collected in the posthumously published The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. Many of these "paper flowers" are what you would expect from a high school student, but others already display the distinctive voice and aesthetic strategies of his later poems. Before he published even one of them, however, he got his first negative review: as Keith Abbott tells it in his introduction to The Edna Webster Collection, "Richard showed his poems to a girlfriend, and when she criticized them, he was so distraught that he went to a police station and asked the police to arrest him. They said they couldn't; he hadn't done anything illegal. Brautigan then threw a rock through a glass partition in the station."4 They not only put him in jail for a week, but sent him to the Oregon State Mental Hospital in Salem—the setting for the film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest—where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and given electric shock treatments.

After his release, Brautigan made a concerted effort to become a published poet. He submitted three small collections of his poetry to three different publishers in 1956—The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World to New Directions, Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown to Random House, and Little Children Should Not Wear Beards to Scribner's—all of whom rejected them.5 Deciding it was time to move on, Brautigan gave his collected writings to his girlfriend's mother and in the summer of 1956 left Portland to go on the road: first to Reno, Nevada—where he stayed long enough to publish a few poems in the local newspaper in nearby Fallon—and then to San Francisco.

San Francisco was experiencing a literary renaissance in the 1950s, partly as the West Coast wing of the Beat movement but mainly as the flowering of a homegrown tradition of poetry that had been underway ever since Kenneth Rexroth moved to San Francisco in 1927. Brautigan came, he later told Bruce Cook, "just to come to San Francisco." He had no ambitions to be a Beat writer or anything. "No ambitions at all," he said. "Just got to know some of the people around town after a while, that was all. But my involvement with that was only on the very edge and only after the Beat thing had died down." Supporting himself with dead-end jobs, he continued writing poetry and began placing his poems in various small magazines. In 1957 a small publisher in San Francisco called Inferno Press brought out Brautigan's first separate publication, a broadside poem titled "The Return of the Rivers," tipped into black construction paper wrappers. (Needless to say, this is the Holy Grail for Brautigan collectors; only 100 copies, all signed in Brautigan's cramped hand, were printed.) This impressive poem, later reprinted in The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, serves as Brautigan's aesthetic calling card, announcing the direction his poetry would take. Like a brief history of modern poetry, it begins with a stanza of nineteenth century verse, reminiscent of Swinburne's "The Garden of Proserpine," then wipes the slate clean with the affectless observation "It is raining today / in the mountains." The third stanza evokes the early modernists, especially the synesthesia in "a warm green rain," the fourth stanza mimics Beat bebop ("Birds happen music / like clocks ticking heavens"), and with the fifth and final stanza, we have the true Brautigan voice: a bizarre but charming juxtaposition of images that still make a kind of narrative sense, rewriting the first stanza in Brautigan's own style: Swinburne on acid, or Dickinson on weed.

In May 1958, Brautigan produced his first "book" of poems (actually, a 16-page pamphlet): The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, published by Joe Dunn's White Rabbit Press in San Francisco. (Only 200 copies were printed; a second edition of 700 copies followed in 1966, published by Cranium Press.) The book consists of a suite of nine poems featuring a time-traveling hipster named Baudelaire. It is appropriate that for his first substantial contribution to modern poetry Brautigan would evoke the father of modern poetry, Charles Baudelaire, whose major work The Flowers of Evil had been published almost exactly a hundred years earlier (1857). Baudelaire was an iconic figure for the Beats; in the 1940s Lucian Carr had introduced the French poet to Kerouac and Ginsberg, who were seduced as much by Baudelaire's unconventional lifestyle as by his decadent poetry. Ginsberg modeled his poem "The Last Voyage" on Baudelaire's famous "Invitation to the Voyage," and when Kerouac had a brief affair in 1953 with a black woman (novelized in The Subterraneans) he was consciously following in the footsteps of Baudelaire, whose principle mistress was a mulatto named Jeanne Duval (mentioned in part 6 of Brautigan's book). Every well-read bohemian owned a copy of The Flowers of Evil or its prose counterpart, Paris Spleen (from which Brautigan quotes).

In The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, Baudelaire is the young Brautigan's role model and alter ego ("mon semblable—mon frère!"). Baudelaire is reckless where Jesus is cautious (Part 1); he loves to drink on Skid Row (Part 2); he encouraged the imagination of the four-year-old Brautigan in the slums of Tacoma (Part 3) and said prayers for the boy's dead insects (Part 9); he plays dada games in San Francisco (Parts 4 and 5); he is a daydreamer who creates great art with a wave of his spoon (Part 6); he smokes opium at a Yankees-Tigers game and transforms a high fly ball into a suicidal angel (Part 7); and, like the 20-year-old Brautigan, Baudelaire enters an insane asylum only to emerge all the stronger from it (Part 8).6

Introducing himself to the literary world, Brautigan tosses off a psychological autobiography with admirable élan, aligning himself with the daring French poet to assert his own freedom from convention and his commitment to the imagination. Even though it reads more like prose chopped into lines than poetry, The Galilee Hitch-Hiker is a jaunty, assured work; Brautigan still liked it enough ten years after to place the sequence in the center of The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and editor Alan Kaufman liked it enough thirty years later to include the entire cycle in his anthology The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999).

Brautigan's next book, Lay the Marble Tea—published by Carp Press in an edition of 500 copies in "that terrible year of 1959" (as it is called in the "Sea, Sea Rider" chapter of Trout Fishing in America)—is another 16-page pamphlet, but consists of two dozen poems and displays the full range of Brautigan's poetic abilities at that time. The first thing that strikes the reader is the large cast of characters; most of Brautigan's later poetry would be written in the first person, but here he speaks through and about a variety of characters from history and literature: Billy the Kid, Hansel and Gretel, Harpo Marx, Baudelaire again, Ulysses and the cyclops, Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, Kafka, Hamlet and Ophelia, Emily Dickinson, and John Donne all make appearances. Only a few poems are in the first person, as though the young poet is not yet confident enough to trust his own experiences and observations (as Williams urged).

But the poems of Lay the Marble Tea are bursting with poetic confidence: Brautigan flaunts his gift for incongruous imagery throughout, thumbs his nose at old forms (his "Sonnet" has only thirteen lines), and experiments with different meters. Still under the influence of the prose poems in Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, he blurs the distinction between poetry and prose. A daring use of synesthesia in "Yes, the Fish Music" contains the guppy that would become Trout Fishing in America, and the book ends in postmodern fashion with a self-referential gesture, returning the reader to the first poem in the book. It is a dazzling performance, but attracted little notice beyond San Francisco.

The Octopus Frontier followed in 1960, likewise published by Carp Press. (The fisherman in Brautigan must have liked that name.) A few literary couples from Lay the Marble Tea reappear (Moby Dick and Ahab, Hamlet and Ophelia), but there is a greater reliance here on Brautigan's own powers of observation and transformation via metaphor. Like a magician confident enough to reveal how he performs his tricks, Brautigan shows in three poems how he changes the most mundane things into poetic concepts ("Horse Race," "The Postman," "Private Eye Lettuce"). The seeds of In Watermelon Sugar are sown in one poem ("The Last Music Is Not Heard"; cf. p. 51 of the novel), and in the incantatory "1942" he refers to an uncle whose story he would eventually tell in the introduction to June 30th, June 30th. In the fanciful title poem, Brautigan sounds a note of regret, a note that would be silenced by the tumultuous Sixties but heard with increasing volume in the poems Brautigan would write in the Seventies. Brautigan liked The Octopus Frontier well enough to include all but five of its poems in his "Selected Poems" of 1968, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.

In one of his short stories, "The Literary Life in California/1964," Brautigan tells of a friend who once tore up two of Brautigan's early poetry books in a fit of jealous rage. Those pamphlets now go for as much as $2,000 on the rare-book market. But his first three books of poetry were sold only on consignment at the City Lights bookstore, and consequently made little impact elsewhere. They were barely noticed even in San Francisco, where Brautigan was considered merely a fringe poet. "Allen Ginsberg had hung the nickname of Bunthorne on him," Keith Abbott tells us in his memoir.

A Gilbert and Sullivan character, Bunthorne is a synonym for a precious and winsome poet who indulges in 'idle chatter of a transcendental kind.'7 This was apt, given that Brautigan's early poems were perfect Bunthorne productions, concocted of brief whimsical thoughts of a metaphorical and ephemeral nature. His public Bunthorne persona as a poet often exposed Brautigan to ridicule—of which Ginsberg's was perhaps the kindest among his North Beach mentors. Since he continued to publish mainly his poems, people could not reconcile those sometimes simple-minded lyrics with what seemed to be Brautigan's inflated self-regard (36-37).

Brautigan's next book of poetry would not appear until seven years later. Though he continued to write poems, he turned most of his attention to writing fiction, resulting in four of the most remarkable novels of the Sixties: Trout Fishing in America was written in 1961-62 (and rejected by Viking Press, among others), followed by A Confederate General from Big Sur in 1963. (They would be published in reverse order, the General in 1964 but Trout Fishing not until the fall of 1967.) The enigmatic In Watermelon Sugar was written between May 13 and July 19, 1964—inspired, thinks Abbott, by Brautigan's separation from his wife at the end of 1963—and The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 was finished at the beginning of 1966. (Grove Press bought the first two novels and optioned the second two, but published only the most conventional one; In Watermelon Sugar was published by a small press in 1968, and The Abortion not published until 1971.)

This abandonment of poetry was not a sudden decision, nor an attempt to cash in on the more commercial viability of fiction. (No one interested in making money writes a book like Trout Fishing in America—though, ironically enough, that book went on to sell millions of copies.) It was part of his master plan, as he explained in an essay titled "Old Lady," published in David Meltzer's The San Francisco Poets (1971) in lieu of an interview. It is brief and interesting enough to be quoted in full:
"I love writing poetry but it's taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other. I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady.

"One day when I was twenty-five years old, I looked down and realized that I could write a sentence. Let's try one of those classic good-bye lines, "I don't think we should see so much of each other any more because I think we're getting a little too serious," which really meant that I wrote my first novel Trout Fishing in America and followed it with three other novels.

"I pretty much stopped seeing poetry for the next six years until I was thirty-one or the autumn of 1966. Then I started going out with poetry again, but this time I knew how to write a sentence, so everything was different and poetry became my old lady. God, what a beautiful feeling that was! I tried to write poetry that would get at some of the hard things in my life that needed talking about but those things that you can only tell your old lady."

Brautigan's return to poetry in 1966 was partly inspired by his real-life "old lady," a lovely Canadian woman named Marcia Pacaud. (She is pictured on the cover of The Pill and is the subject of many of the poems written in 1966-67.) But in truth, he did not so much abandon poetry as apply his poetic strategies to writing fiction. His novels and poems share the same kind of imagery and extended metaphors, and reading his early novels is the best preparation for reading his poetry because he often explicates those strategies. In fact, the poet Jack Spicer, to whom Brautigan apprenticed himself in the late 1950s, called Trout Fishing "a great poem." As Ellingham and Killian write in their exhaustive biography of Spicer, Poet Be Like God, "He brought it to Spicer page by page, and the two men revised it as though it were a long serial poem" (223). In what originally was probably the first chapter of Trout Fishing (the published first chapter describes the novel's cover photo, which was taken years later), Brautigan gives a step-by-step explanation of how he arrives at one of his characteristic images:
"First is the process of describing the trout as if they were "precious and intelligent metal."
Second is the process of looking for just the right adjective, not silver, maybe steel, steel made from trout.
Third "imagine Pittsburgh."
Fourth steel made from trout is used to make buildings, trains, and tunnels.
Finally, this leads us to the image of Andrew Carnegie, whose wealth and prominence now becomes associated with trout" (3).

A Brautigan poem eliminates the process and presents only the image, leaving the reader to work out the steps by which the image was achieved. A Confederate General from Big Sur provides further examples. If a Brautigan poem compared a cup of coffee to an albino polar bear, it would be dismissed by an unsympathetic critic as incoherent, but the image would work like this: "My cup of coffee changed into an albino polar bear: I mean, cold and black" (126). In a poem, Brautigan might compare a woman to "an infinite swan" and leave it at that; in his novel, he spells it out: "Elizabeth acted like an infinite swan. I mean, that quality advanced beyond the limits of her body and hovered there in the room" (138). Consequently, when one comes across a baffling image in a Brautigan poem, it should be taken on faith (if not diligently worked out) that a careful if zany process of association is behind the image.

The book that marked Brautigan's return to poetry was All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. This 36-page chapbook was produced by the Communication Company, the publishing arm of a collective of hippie anarchists called the Diggers (named after a 17th century British radical group of agrarian reformers). This book can also be said to mark the transition of Brautigan from "the last of the Beats" (as he has been called) to the first of the hippie writers.

It is worth a brief digression to wonder if there is such a thing as hippie literature. The counterculture did not produce any major poets; or rather, those who would have been poets a generation earlier became lyricists instead. Bob Dylan, Donovan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, and the Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson set their poems to music rather than send them off to poetry magazines, though later they all published their lyrics in book form. John Lennon published two books of punny prose and poetry in the Sixties; his bandmate Paul McCartney eventually published his collected lyrics in the year 2001. Record companies began printing lyrics on album covers, and there was a conscious effort on the part of many songwriters to move beyond simple love songs to something resembling serious poetry. Some bands had an in-house poet to provide lyrics, such as Procol Harum's Keith Reid, Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter, and King Crimson's Peter Sinfield. (I cannot be the only teenager whose interest in "real" poetry was sparked by these rock poets.) In 1969 Richard Goldstein published an anthology entitled The Poetry of Rock that tried to make the case that some of these lyrics approached the status of poetry.

As regards fiction, most counterculture novels were actually late Beat efforts, like Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966), Irving Rosenthal's Sheeper (1967), Ed Sanders' Tales of Beatnik Glory (set in the Sixties but not published until 1975), and the novels of Beat poets Philip Whalen and Michael McClure. The first free novel published by the Diggers' Communication Company, Happiness Bastard, was written by another San Francisco Beat poet, Kirby Doyle. However, one could argue that two of our most flamboyant contemporary novelists, Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins, began as hippie writers. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), though set in the last days of World War II, is implicitly about the Sixties; his later Vineland (1990) is explicitly so, and the best evocation I know of that revolutionary era. Robbins, beginning with Another Roadside Attraction (1973), has kept his freak flag flying through a half-dozen iconoclastic novels filled with outlandish, Brautiganic metaphors. James Leo Herlihy, best known as the author of Midnight Cowboy, wrote a mainstream novel about hippies entitled Season of the Witch (after the caustic Donovan song), but most of the other books that might qualify as hippie fiction are, appropriately enough, literary oddities: Richard Horn's alphabetic Encyclopedia (1969), Rudolph Wurlitzer's hallucinatory Nog (1968), Willard S. Bain's sci-fi novel Informed Sources (first published by the Communication Company, then picked up by Doubleday in 1969), another hippie sci-fi novel called The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson (1967), Andy Warhol's tape-recorded "novel" a (1968), Ed Sanders' obstreperous Shards of God (1970), Raymond Mungo's commune fantasy Total Loss Farm (1970), Chandler Brossard's kaleidoscopic freakshow Wake Up. We're Almost There (1971), Thomas McGuane's magniloquent Bushwhacked Piano (1971), Samuel R. Delany's post-apocalyptic Dhalgren (1975, but written 1969-73), and whatever you want to call Bob Dylan's Tarantula (1971). Of Brautigan's novels, only The Abortion has the setting and sensibility of a hippie novel, and only the work he did between 1966 and 1971—from The Abortion through Revenge of the Lawn—would qualify as hippie literature. Before that, Brautigan could loosely be called a Beat writer, and after 1971, simply a West Coast writer.

At any rate, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was definitely a hippie production. Fifteen hundred copies were mimeographed in 1967 and distributed free by the Diggers to the flower children who had blown to Haight-Ashbury that "Summer of Love." Some copies were misbound, resulting in duplicate poems, missing poems, and upside-down pages, but the pamphlet did introduce Brautigan to a new audience. And the kids dug it: the poems were funny, sexy, silly, and now. Some of the poems mentioned bands that could be heard on the radio (the Lovin' Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and the Papas). Others were distributed as single-sheet broadsides with illustrations. These are not Brautigan's greatest poems—he described them to Digger founder Emmett Grogan as "tidbits"—but they are among his most appealing ones, and the new audience they attracted helped make him a best-selling author over the next few years.

His next "book" of poetry was another typical hippie product of the times. Please Plant This Book was made of card stock folded to create pockets, with eight seed packets laid in with poems printed on the sides. The "poems" are actually prose pieces, their line breaks merely the result of the size of the seed packets, not metrical requirements. This book of lilting pronouncements on utopian and environmental themes was also distributed free.

In the fall of 1967, Donald Allen's Four Seasons Foundation Press published Trout Fishing in America, and the well-deserved success of that slim masterpiece apparently led Allen to invite Brautigan to compile a volume of his selected poetry. For The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Brautigan's best-known book of verse, Brautigan reached back to his earliest publications: he included his first separate publication, "The Return of the Rivers," the complete Galilee Hitch-Hiker, less than half of Lay the Marble Tea, most of The Octopus Frontier, and all of Machines of Loving Grace, along with three dozen newer poems. The book was published by the Four Seasons Foundation in 1968, then reprinted the following year by the Dell Publishing Company of New York, where it went through numerous printings.

Because of its chronological span, The Pill is something of a mixed bag, but the range of poetic forms and Summer of Love "vibe" make it his most representative and attractive book of poetry. It opens with his most frequently reprinted poem, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," foretelling the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and capturing the giddy sense of new possibilities that was in the air back then. The book is filled with sweet love poems to Marcia Pacaud, recounting "the legend / of her beauty" in the language of street people, but other poems contained enough "heavy" thoughts to give the book some weight. There are some harsh notes here and there: a poem protesting the war entitled "'Star-Spangled' Nails," a swipe at the then-current fad for writing haikus called "Haiku Ambulance," an apocalyptic account of "The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead," and, concluding the book, a poem of farewell (presumably to Marcia) entitled "Boo, Forever." But overall, The Pill was easy to swallow, lighter in tone than Beat rantings, and certainly more enjoyable than the turgid (if more sophisticated) academic verse being published at the time.

Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, the first of his poetry books to be brought out by a major New York publisher (Delacorte, 1970), has its playful moments, but is a little darker than The Pill. The success of Trout Fishing in America transformed Brautigan from a struggling hippie who had to hustle for rent money into a rich celebrity who was lionized everywhere he went, but the initial euphoria quickly wore off. He sneers at reviewers who belittled his work ("Critical Can Opener"), dismisses a would-be biographer who had been stalking him ("Cannibal Carpenter"), spits out insults ("Negative Clank"), and writes less of love and more of jealousy and loss. The Summer of Love had turned into a winter of discontent as flower children wilted into hustlers and junkies ("Diet"), and local calamities like busting the Dead paled in comparison to larger events like the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy ("Yeah, There Was Always Going to Be a June 5, 1968").

The superficial simplicity of many of the poems is misleading. One poem—which reads in its entirety "Do you think of me / as often as I think / of you?"—was singled out for criticism by book reviewer Jonathan Yardley for sounding like a bad Hallmark greeting card, which would be a fair assessment had the poem been entitled "Friendship" or "First Love." But it's entitled "Please," which turns the mawkish sentiment into a despairing plea, spoken by someone afraid he's losing the one he loves. (This is reinforced by the poem's placement immediately following "30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love," about a person who has been left by his lover.) I don't think Hallmark makes a card for that sinking feeling. Even a sympathetic critic like Terence Malley, who wrote the first book-length study of Brautigan but quotes Yardley with approval, dismisses a poem like "April 7, 1969" as unpoetic, without noticing the careful metrical pattern Brautigan deploys: a perfect line of iambic trimeter is followed by another (after first intentionally stumbling with an extra syllable), then the poem collapses in the third line with a well-placed caesura, leaving the poem to limp to its conclusion, effectively dramatizing the poet's frustration with his failure of imagination on that particular day.

In fact Rommel shows a sharpening of Brautigan's poetic skills throughout. There are many striking, compressed images ("Vampire," "Cellular Coyote," "A Closet Freezes"), and poems that extend a metaphor with Brautigan's wonderful sense of poetic logic ("Shellfish,""33-1/3 Sized Lions"). Four poems consist only of titles; like John Cage's notorious music composition 4'33"—whose score instructs a performer to sit in front of a piano without playing it for that amount of time—the reader is invited to fill in the blank text: "1891-1944" is a riddle whose answer is elsewhere in the book, and "A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego" perhaps commemorates a criminal so quiet he does not make a sound in the poem; "8 Millimeter (mm)" may be an exposed (blank) roll of film, and "'88' Poems" evokes the 88 keys of a piano, perhaps Brautigan's sly homage to Cage. There is a tighter control of meter in most of the poems, more effective use of enjambment, a more restrained vocabulary. And it has got that terrific cover photo, though perhaps the sight of a grown woman playing in a sandbox is meant to be sad rather than adorable.

Envious of the royalties songwriters earn, he took one of the poems from Rommel, "She Sleeps This Very Evening in Greenbrook Castle," and an older poem called "The Horse That Had a Flat Tire" to his friend Janis Joplin for consideration. Needless to say, she passed on both. Brautigan had better luck with another poem from Rommel titled "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend." A Bay Area band called Mad River invited him to recite it on their second album, Paradise Bar & Grill (1969), to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars.7 In 1970 Brautigan released his own album, Listening to Richard Brautigan, on Capitol Records' hip Harvest label (Pink Floyd, Roy Harper, Kevin Ayers, et al.), featuring selections from his prose and poetry. Unlike many professional poets, Brautigan appreciated some rock lyrics, especially those of the Beatles: he had Beatles lyrics posted on the walls of his San Francisco apartment and later wrote a brief foreword to The Beatles Lyrics Illustrated (Dell, 1975).

When the 1970s arrived, Brautigan once again put poetry on the back burner in order to concentrate on writing fiction. He signed a lucrative deal with Simon and Schuster, who would publish his next six books and financed his purchase of a ranch in Montana. He first dusted off the five-year-old manuscript of The Abortion for publication in 1971, then gathered his wonderful short stories for publication later that same year, naming the collection Revenge of the Lawn after one of its funniest stories. He then began writing the first of the increasingly experimental novels that would occupy him until the end of his life. Determined not to coast on his previous accomplishments—as he said at the time, he did not want to write "Son of Trout Fishing in America" or "Grandson of Trout Fishing in America"—he experimented with different temporal structures and juxtaposing disparate genres. The seven novels he wrote in the ten years between 1972 to 1982—from The Hawkline Monster (1973) to An Unfortunate Woman (written in 1982, published first in French in 1994 and then in its original form in 2000)—were not as popular as his first four, even though a case can be made—as Marc Chènetier does in his brilliant monograph on Brautigan—that these novels show a maturation of his aesthetics.

The Hawkline Monster, a historical novel yoking together two previously disparate genres (the Gothic and the Western), appeared in 1974, and was followed in 1975 by Willard and His Bowling Trophies, which similarly tied mystery and s-and-m erotica together. Among Willard's seedy charms is the presence of the Greek Anthology, from which the "amateur sadist" Bob reads aloud throughout the novel until it reduces him to despair.8 This large collection of Greek epigrams, poems, songs, and fragments was originally gathered together in the first century B.C. by Meleager, and then expanded in the ninth century by Constantinus Cephalus with similar collections, and finally revised in the tenth century into sixteen thematic sections. Brautigan owned a set and enjoyed reading it aloud to visitors, recommending the poems to Abbott and other fellow writers as "models of brevity and emotional concision"—the same qualities he found in the haiku and aimed for in his own poetry. Many of the entries in the Greek Anthology consist of single lines—all that remain of the original poems—and in some of his poems Brautigan deliberately wrote fragments, hoping they would have the same evocative power as the Greek fragments that move Bob to speculate on lost poems and lost lives.

In 1976 Brautigan brought out his next collection of poetry, Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork. It is unique among his poetry books for being organized into titled sections, and for having a dominant figure throughout: the crow. This noisy scavenger appears in a half-dozen poems—evoking both Poe's ominous raven and perhaps the Crow tribe of Native Americans that once occupied the land just east of Brautigan's ranch in Montana—and it is a suitable totem animal for these downbeat poems. There are a few examples of the whimsical Brautigan of the Sixties, but most of the poems express the sour feelings of a man becoming increasingly disappointed with himself and those around him. The book's title describes an act of futility, and the mood throughout is grim, regretful.

There is certainly no falling off of technical ability, and the care with which Brautigan organized these poems (mostly written in the early Seventies) into titled sections indicates he was still devoted to his craft. The trademark Brautigan similes are as surprising as ever, and he can still turn on the old charm ("I'll Affect You Slowly") and make you laugh ("Attila at the Gates of the Telephone Company"). But most of the poems are from a man who admits: "I collect darkness within myself like the shadow / of a blind lighthouse."

Ghosts, cemeteries, graves, funeral parlors, and tombstones are recurring images. In several poems Brautigan broods on the night sky—stars, distant constellations—as though, like Pascal, the eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies him. The hell-raising Baudelaire of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker stands in vivid contrast to the catatonic nautical drifter Captain Martin in a similar poem cycle ("Good Luck, Captain Martin"). The latter is one of two poem cycles in the book; the other, "Group Portrait without the Lions," consists of fourteen miniature character studies, a sad gallery of poetic snapshots. Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork is a mature, reflective collection, and those who consider Brautigan a hippy-dippy poet will find little evidence of that here.

Just as Loading Mercury was arriving in bookstores, Brautigan took off for his first trip to Japan. He had a longstanding interest in Japanese literature—both the haiku and the fiction of twentieth century writers like Yasunari Kawabata,9 Junichiro Tanizaki, and Kenzaburo Oe—and was flattered by the serious interest Japanese critics took in his work. He kept a poetry journal during his six-week visit, wrote an introduction for it a month later, and published the results in 1978 as June 30th, June 30th (the title taken from that moment on his return when he crosses the international date line).

Given the circumstances of its composition, June 30th would be Brautigan's most unified book of poetry. After an introduction providing "a map that led me to Japan and the writing of this book," Brautigan records his impressions of Japan in about eighty dated poems. He states in the introduction that they "are different from other poems that I have written," and there are indeed fewer striking metaphors and self-consciously "poetic" thoughts than in his earlier poems. At first the tone is lighter, less despairing than Loading Mercury; the change of scenery briefly restored Brautigan to his old self, allowing him to take delight in what he sees on his first trip to Japan. Winning silly prizes at a pachinko parlor, he goes so far as to say,"I feel wonderful, exhilarated, child-like, / perfect." But soon the drinking and depression set in, and the ominous crows from Loading Mercury return. "The American Fool" he calls himself, making cultural blunders, ranting drunkenly at his Japanese friends, and generally embarrassing himself. "Lazarus on the Bullet Train" is an especially candid admission by Brautigan of how impossible he could be. A few poems deal with an affair he had with a woman named Shiina Takako, who owned a lively bar in Tokyo patronized by writers and artists. (She is pictured on the back dust-jacket cover of The Tokyo-Montana Express.) But despite his obvious love for Japan, to which he would often return in the years following, the poems indicate it was not enough to halt the downward spiral his life was taking.

The book was largely ignored by the American book-review media, but Brautigan's Montana neighbor and fellow novelist Jim Harrison provided an acute assessment on the back cover of the book that deserves to be preserved. Addressing his friend directly, he wrote:
"What can I say? It is your work that has touched me the most deeply, the least mannered and the most exact in its insistent nakedness. It is not a succession of lyrics but finally ONE BOOK. A long poem that offers us its bounty in fragments. It is saturated with the "otherness" we know to be our most honest state and the true state of poetry. It offers itself in perhaps the unconscious but ancient fabled form of the voyage. It is about the stately courage and loneliness of this voyage into a strange land which is both Japan and the true self of the poet, where there are no barriers to admitting and singing all. It is about love and exhaustion and permanent transition, so fatal that it is beyond the poet's comprehension. I love the book because it is a true song, owning no auspices other than its own; owning the purity we think we aim at on this bloody journey."

June 30th, June 30th was the last collection of poetry Brautigan published. He continued to write poetry in the years following: a half-dozen were published in magazines before his death, a few more have appeared posthumously, and dozens more are among his papers at the Bancroft Library (University of California at Berkeley). They continue to record his despair, but also include meditations on karma and reincarnation. Richard Brautigan committed suicide in October 1984, three months short of his fiftieth birthday.

"I'm a minor poet. I don't pretend to be anything else," Brautigan told Keith Abbott modestly in 1970, surprised at the virulence of a negative review of his work. But a minor poet is not necessarily an inconsequential one, or a forgettable one, and this particular minor poet who set out to make "paper flowers out of love and death" deserves to be remembered. "Don't ever ever forget the flowers that were rejected, made fools of," Brautigan writes in his poem "Japanese Pop Music Concert."

Notes
1. Quoted in Ianthe Brautigan's You Can't Catch Death. Her memoir and Keith Abbott's Downstream from "Trout Fishing in America" provide most of the biographical details in this essay; both are filled with horror stories of Brautigan's childhood.

2. Epos 8.2 (Winter 1956). Plans for that first book fell through.

3. Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), 126.

4. Brautigan told his daughter that he asked the police to put him in jail because he was hungry; after graduating from high school Brautigan could find only menial labor, such as working in a pickle factory.

5. Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown was posthumously published in The Edna Webster Collection, but the other two remain unpublished.

6. A tenth poem featuring Baudelaire, titled "The Whorehouse at the Top of Mount Rainier," appeared a year later in the first issue of Beatitude (9 May 1959).

7. The liner notes to the CD reissue state: "Mad River, mindful of Brautigan's kindness when they were starving, had used some of their Capitol advance to pay for the printing of Brautigan's novel [sic], Please Plant This Book."

8. Brautigan may have first learned of this book from Kenneth Rexroth's Poems from the Greek Anthology (1962). Bob is said to have "all three volumes" of the "1928 Putnam edition," but that edition (reprinted from the Loeb edition of a decade earlier) consisted of five volumes and appeared in 1927.

9. Like Brautigan, Kawabata had a miserable childhood, excelled at very short stories, used startling imagery in his death-haunted fiction, and eventually committed suicide.

"The West Coast Dreamer: The Lonely Death of Richard Brautign"
Kevin Ring
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 336-347.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Deep clouding mystery still surrounds the death of the California West Coast writer Richard Brautigan in October 1984. That he had certainly shot himself seems apparent. Richard Brautigan was 49.

There are many reasons forwarded as to why he committed this tragic final act. His literary star had rapidly dimmed and the once darling of the counterculture had suffered relative flops with recent books. Trout Fishing in America [published in 1967] had sold more than two million copies but a more recent title, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away [published in 1982] had sold an abysmally low fifteen thousand copies. He was a writer on the slide both publicly and privately.

Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma [Washington] on America's high North West coast on January 30th 1935. His early life was erratic, his father Barnard left the family home before he [Richard Brautigan] was born and he suffered a series of abusive stepfathers. Brautigan was evasive about his adolescence and gave out conflicting versions to whoever was listening. Sometimes it seems he and his young sister survived alone and grew up without the help of any adults. His mother left, returned or was never there. It fluctuated.

In the mid-1950s he arrived as a hopeful writer in San Francisco, at a point when the San Francisco literary renaissance was really flowering. [Jack] Kerouac, [Allen] Ginsberg and the Beat Generation were just beginning to get into their stride, as far as the public was concerned. Brautigan soon became friendly with people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, with whom he shared a home for a time. Allen Ginsberg gave him the name "Bunthorne," after a poet in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera ["Patience"] and the name stuck. It was not entirely complimentary. There was always a distance between the so called "Beat Generation" and Brautigan. If ever there was an outsider, Brautigan was one.

In the small press underground explosion of the period, Brautigan found it easy to get into print. The Galilee Hitch-Hiker was his first published work.1 Published in 1958 by White Rabbit Press, the book was not [,however,] the great breakthough for Brautigan.

Brautigan met Virginia Alder in the unlikely setting of a laundromat. Fellow poet Ron Loewinsohn was with him; both were penniless writers. [Brautigan and Alder married in 1957.] In 1959 Richard and Ginny had a daughter, Ianthe.2 The marriage [however,] only lasted until 1963, despite Ginny's heroic effort at making a go of it in the face of Brautigan's drinking, womanizing and obsession with writing.3

Despite the hype about A Confederate General from Big Sur, the book, when it was finally published by Grove Press [in 1964], sold only seven hundred and forty three copies initially. It was a disaster. Grove Press dropped their options on Trout Fishing in America [and In Watermelon Sugar]. Don Allen and the independent Four Seasons Press finally decided to publish Trout Fishing in America and in 1967 the book, with minimal promotion, sold 30,000 copies. It was the breakthrough that Brautigan had been hoping for. The book seemed to coincide with the new spirit of the era. It is said there was an underground newspaper named after the book and even a school and a commune. Brautigan's themes captured the imagination of a new wave of young people looking for something different. He instantly became a hippie icon. Rolling Stone magazine picked up on him and Brautigan became a regular contributor, spreading his fame nationwide.4

But there were those with reservations. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had published early sections of Trout Fishing in America in his City Lights Journal but he said, "As an editor, I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. I could never stand cute writing. He could never be an important writer like [Ernest] Hemingway—with that childish voice of his. Essentially he had a naïf style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a nonliterate age."

Faint press indeed and this might paint a picture of Brautigan as a standard bearer for the hippies when, in fact, he was ambivalent about them. And of course, at that time, he hated drugs. So it is not correct to perceive Brautigan as a major figure of the Summer of Love and nothing else.

His friends have ventured a bewildering list of obsessions Brautigan had at this time. Southern women writers, talking on the telephone (he even included a section doing this on his one and only album [Listening to Richard Brautigan]), the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the American Civil War, basketball (he was six foot four himself—so a good height to play), and chicken fried steak. Plus others too numerous to mention. But one abiding passion was walking, though it is said he hated any form of exercise.

[After] the spilt with his wife, Ginny, Brautigan moved into a gloomy place on San Francisco's Geary Street, one of the darkest parts of the city. He could have afforded much more but he was obstinately careful with his cash. The décor of the place reflected his austere ways. Posters from his own readings covered the walls; an old Japanese machine gun was mounted on a tripod. It was archetypal hippie chaos.

Then Helen Brann entered Brautigan's life and became his literary agent, selling In Watermelon Sugar, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and Trout Fishing in America to the Delacorte Press. The books took off and Brautigan became an underground hero, a hero of the college-based counterculture. He was as hip as the rock music of the era, the big sounds emanating from the centre of the universe, San Francisco. Rock music, writing and the West Coast became the focus of the world.

Later works like The Abortion, written in 1971, and The Hawkline Monster, [written] in 1974, demonstrated the shift in his state of mind and already decline was noted in his popularity as a writer. It seems as if his star really did dip with the end of the so called "flower power" ear and his involvement with the rock bands and the legendary Diggers. One of his rarest titles, Please Plant this Book [published in 1968], was financed by the Bay Area band Mad River in return for help Brautigan had given them in organizing the release of a record. It seems that while there was this tremendous sense of community on the West Coast, with writers, musicians, poets, artists and others working in unity, Brautigan was relatively happy and secure in his role as literary idol. Once the dream was over he slipped in the nation's consciousness and he never regained the higher ground.

Novels such as the 1980 The Tokyo-Montana Express and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away from 1982 were darker works and reflected Brautigan's inner turmoil. It certainly was not love and peace anymore.

While America began to ignore Brautigan his popularity rose in Europe. He had always been well received in Japan and now countries such as France and England took him in. Just prior to his death there were two studies of Brautigan's writing: Marc Chénetier's Richard Brautigan and Edward Halsey Foster's Richard Brautigan [both published in 1983]. Both suggested that Brautigan was a link between the Beat Generation and later schools of literature. That notion has stuck. Generally though it looks as if Brautigan is a writer considered to have published all his best work early and whose later writing simply does not match up.

There were [also] contrasting impressions about Brautigan amongst the people who knew him. A friend and fellow novelist, Don Carpenter, remembers Brautigan thus, "For three or four years, he was like George Harrison walking down Haight Street."

Brautigan was odd about money and while it is said he was generous, there are others who said he tried to pay them back with "tout money"—paper with his little famous fish sketch on it! He also had a habit of spending Christmas in movie theatres. He was feted heavily for a time and was invited to read at universities, however there was the edge of the country boy about him; he was not that well read, though he loved [Henry David] Thoreau and [Ernest] Hemingway.

Always Brautigan felt a greater affinity with women and is quoted as saying, "I feel closer to women. Often I can ask them questions it would be harder for me to ask a man. Women are more likely to humour my strange ideas."

Marcia Clay says, "I was born with cerebral palsy and Richard was very sympathetic to that. He saw this hand [the left hand] was cramped. I never wanted to call attention to it; I kept all my watches and rings on my right hand. One day he took both my hands very ceremoniously and said, 'This right hand is very beautiful; it doesn't need any jewelry. Put your jewelry on your other hand; it needs all the help it can get.'"

Writer Tom McGuane was living in Bolinas in 1968. At that time, Bolinas as not yet the artists and writers colony it subsequently became. McGuane was "knocked out" by Trout Fishing in America and that proved to be the start of a friendship with Brautigan, although Brautigan came to call Bolinas a "hippie Brigadoon" later. Richard rented a house in Bolinas and was writing about the community he called "iDEATH." It was not the rural idyll of myth in this Brautigan story and the notion of a heavenly community was somewhat shattered when Brautigan actually bought property in Bolinas [in 1970] and in the process moved David and Tina Meltzer out of their home.

Tom McGuane never liked this house, saying it was always dark and gloomy.

In 1973 Tom McGuane invited Brautigan to visit his place in Montana and Richard rented a cabin in Livingston where he wrote The Hawkline Monster.5 He liked McGuane and he liked Montana so he bought a 40 acre ranch in Pine Creek [in 1974], quite close to where Ernest Hemingway had fished and written.6

Quite an artistic community established itself around Brautigan and McGuane. Sam Peckinpah the film director came there; actors Warren Oates, Jeff Bridges and Jim Harrison too.8 McGuane's wife Becky says, "Everybody was hitting at the same time." She says that at one point there were twenty seven people living at the McGuane's ranch, including musician Jimmy Buffet. The McGuane's eventually split up and Tom McGuane eventually married actress Margot Kidder. Jimmy Buffet's sister married actor Peter Fonda (famous for Easy Rider, of course).

At this point Brautigan was well into the fact of having guns around and it is said he would shoot at anything and often took aim at his telephones, television, and once even, his kitchen clock.

Amidst all the community drinking and sense of togetherness amongst artists, Brautigan's books were beginning to be slated as the Sixties mood gradually evaporated and the times that had been home for him vanished. There was a new mood abroad.

[This new mood was more positive in Japan] and on one of his trips there Brautigan found a new wife, Akiko, and he brought her back to Montana. The marriage was [eventually] a failure. Opinion has it that Richard expected Akiko to cater to his every whim. Instead he got a newly independent woman who was set on being an individual. It was not what he expected, though he did love her in his own curious way.

Brautigan never recovered from the trauma of divorce from Akiko and he often tested the patience of his friends with his endless talk of it. Writer Tom McGuane said that his egocentricity was unacceptable and manic, both in Montana and in San Francisco. Brautigan, despite his short lived but massive success, was paranoid and a very mixed up man.

Japan, [and his notoriety as an author there], helped Brautigan through the last years of his life. He said, "The neon lights of Tokyo gave me back the eyes of a child."

[In the final years of his life Brautigan] had alienated most of his friends as he tested their loyalty to him. [He also] became noticeably morbid and preoccupied with death. In his gloomy retreat in Bolinas a hummingbird broke its neck when flying into the house. Richard carefully buried it. Bobbie Louise Hawkins, novelist, says of him, "He didn't have any place for the eccentricity to go. I don't think he had the resources to be normal, especially when he got famous."

One thing which probably triggered the deeper depression in Brautigan, that finally culminated in his last tragic act, was meeting his ex Japanese wife Akiko in San Francisco, quite by chance. They had not met in four years. It was September 14, 1984. Akiko has said, "I stood there five or ten seconds. Then he found me, and he closed his eyes as if he saw a ghost. I never saw that kind of expression on a human being's face."

Marcia Clay was one who stuck with him to the very bitter end. She also bumped into him on September 14 and she called him the next day on the telephone and spoke with him. Brautigan asked Marcia Clay if she liked his mind. She replied, "Yes, Richard, I like your mind. You have the ability to jump in and out of spaces. It's not linear thinking; it's exciting, catalytic, random thinking."

Clay tried to phone him shortly after, possibly because Richard sounded downbeat. All she got was his answering machine. A few friends phoned and left messages on the machine but Brautigan never responded.

His death perhaps was no surprise to those closest who witnessed his decline. Perhaps within the so called "Summer of Love" of 1967 lay the beginning of the end for Richard Brautigan. Maybe as that year slipped away his ticket to a happier life went with it.

Whatever his merits, the guy in the odd cowboy hat, dark clothes and wire rimmed glasses with the big mustache and a Mark Twain fascination has won his place in the lore of the era. He represented something almost intangible but very desirable, that myth of the literary west coast, when the hype machine would have you believe that all you needed was love and peace. Perhaps because that ideal evaporated so rapidly as 1970 dawned, Brautigan was doomed to his untimely end.

Editor's Notes

1 The Return of the Rivers (San Francisco: Inferno Press, May 1957) is generally considered to be Brautigan's first published "book." Although this limited edition publication (only 100 copies were printed) was only a single poem printed as a broadside, it was folded and contained in black construction paper wrappers. Each book included a paper label on the front signed by Brautigan. For these reasons, rare book collectors and dealers consider this Brautigan's first book since it was published in wrappers by an established press. The poem was published by Leslie Woolf Hedley, owner of Inferno Press, as a favor to Brautigan, who along with wife Ginny (Virgina Alder) and friend Ron Loewinsohn folded the poem into the black construction paper wrappers and pasted the signed labels on the front cover.

2 Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan was actually born March 25, 1960, in San Francisco, California.

3 Brautigan and Virginia separated on Christmas Eve 1962. Each pursued separate lives; they divorced in 1970. Although Ginny's frustration with Brautigan's lack of attention is justified, it is generally acknowledge that Ginny, tired of being left by behind, started an affair with one of Brautigan's friends, Tony Aste, and then moved with him to Salt Lake City, Utah.

4 Brautigan's publications in Rolling Stone began in December 1968 and continued through July 1970.

5 Actually, Brautigan rented a cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge, in Pine Creek, Montana, in 1973. It was here that he wrote The Hawkline Monster, and held court with other writers and artists visiting or living in that section of Paradise Valley. This writer and artist community referred to itself as "The Montana Gang." The Pine Creek Lodge was just down the road from the ranch Brautigan bought in 1974.

6 Hemingway is noted for fishing and writing in Idaho, not Montana.

7 Jim Harrison, although he appeared in a film with Brautigan called Tarpon, is more noted as a writer. It should also be noted that "The Montana Gang" was already in place when Brautigan first visited in 1973.

"The Historical Present: Notions of History, Time and Cultural Lineage in the Writing of Richard Brautigan"
Neil Schiller
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 348-370.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

To those familiar with Brautigan, it will come as no surprise that he is an author who is typically assessed not on the merits of his own work, but rather on his engagement with the social context of the period in which he was writing. The purpose of this essay, and indeed the eventual thesis that it represents, is to re-examine the assumptions made about the writer's place in the canon of American literature and to focus on a recurrent intellectual premise in his work which, it will be argued, serves to sever the link between him and the Beat writers and aligns him much more closely with the postmodernist movement. This is because, although his poetry and his narratives are thematically spread across a wide area, there is a primary engagement in each and every one of them with the mechanisms that deliver the author's premise to the reader: the language; the grammar; the ink on the page. And most important of all, the fixed moment of representation and what that consists of in terms of historical content and historical implication. How does meaning transpire? What significance can a single moment hold unless that significance stems from and flows out into an infinite continuum of moments and interdependent relevances a strand, almost, of some vast chronological DNA? And how do these elements of the whole interrelate: are they synchronous; is the model linear; cyclical; dimensional? Of course, it is no coincidence that this central theme is one which quite closely mirrors aesthetic concerns of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, John O'Hara, John Weiners, and any number of other loosely categorised writers. But rather than a mere extension of some pseudo-Beat ethic, the concept of historical omnipresence manifests itself in Brautigan's work in a distinctive, interrogatory, even ironic fashion. It is the nature and the function of this omnipresence that interests him. It is the interrogation of its meaning which distinguishes him from the Beats, and it is the method of his engagement with this meaning via genre and pop culture and the absurd that marks him out as a postmodernist.

According to Mark Currie, in his book Postmodern Narrative Theory, "there can be no such thing as a moment"; to promote such a conceit is, he insists, to "impose arbitrary boundaries which mark off the present from past and future."1 Brautigan's engagement with the notion of moment is a much more complicated one, but in terms of his relationship with the Beats, Currie's perspective would seem to have some relevance, because Brautigan's writing is not entirely removed from the work of this previous generation—it shares some of the same preoccupations, but develops them in line with the evolving counter-culture of the sixties and seventies. For example, his novel A Confederate General from Big Sur begins with a rather typical Beat premise: a pair of friends grow tired of bumming around San Francisco and decide to make the trip up to "the Grand Hotel of Big Sur."2 They inhabit the same space as characters of Kerouac, they seem born of the same concerns. Just as the narrator of Lonesome Traveller remarks upon "feel[ing] the warp of wood of old America beneath [him]", so too is Brautigan's narrator, Jesse, inherently aware of this historical weight which binds the present to a stylised American past.3 He cannot suppress the thought that his friend Lee Mellon has a name "made for [him] in another century,"4 or that he is no more than "the end product of American spirit, pride and the old know-how."5 Between the two writers there is very much a shared sense of lineage, of a complex but distinctly American past with which their characters, and indeed the authors themselves, engage as they attempt to define their own existence and their own place within this cultural landscape.

It is perhaps with Ginsberg, however, that Brautigan shares more common ground. In his poem "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", for instance, Ginsberg asserts that the most important feature of all of reality and all of human experience is a set of racks, of "wooden shelves and stanchions" which are "God's only way of building the rickety structure of Time."6 It is the realisation that intellectual experience, knowledge and understanding, is a secondary experience, is something only made possible by the solid foundation the physical world provides. And it is an awareness that maybe this physical dimension to our lives is not merely a support strut for the glorious discovery of higher meanings. Maybe this physical reality contains its own meaning and its own relevance which is all the relevance there is. In the story "Homage to the San Francisco YMCA" from Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan tackles this same concept, albeit more directly. The main character in this instance removes all of his plumbing and replaces it with poetry. For instance, Shakespeare replaces his bathtub, Emily Dickinson replaces his kitchen sink. Like most of Brautigan's allegories, the resolution of the story is somewhat ambivalent, but essentially, the plumbing fails because it is no longer practical, no longer "real" in the same sense that his former plumbing was.7 And when he attempts to broach this problem with the pipes and the joints, the debate gets tangled up in the finer points of ethics and he is ultimately thrown out of his own house by the poetry that has decided he is no longer fit to live there. Obviously, this can be interpreted as a humorous anecdote on the perils of taking intellectualism too seriously, but it also has a more pertinent undertone which is echoed elsewhere in Brautigan's work: the reality of human experience is not twofold. There is no distinction between the tangible elements of the physical world and the ideas and discoveries of the imagination. The two exist inextricably. And the world of academia and, in this case, the work of several identified writers, with their tendency to emphasise the grand idea over the primary impulse, is something pretentious and exclusive and ultimately preposterous. It could be argued that this stance is essentially another Beat characteristic—a distancing of the author from the existing canon of literature, a deliberate positioning of his work as reactionary to this canon, an impulse to return to basics and write with a much more direct inference to and from his subject material. Just as the "YMCA in San Francisco" is preferable to living with pretension for his character, so too are the pastimes of fishing and the American outdoors preferable to Brautigan over the pursuit of abstract themes in his writing.8

And just as Ginsberg identifies the details of the physical world, the very atoms of the furniture and artefacts he sees around him, as the building blocks of a much vaster universe, so too does Brautigan identify as the baseline of existence the simplest of facts and lists of random data. In An Unfortunate Woman, he frequently stops the narrative to give a progress report on how much he has now written in his notebook: "the first page has 119 words, the second 193."9 Seemingly everything is a potential statistic for Brautigan, and often his logic regarding these simple facts leads onto a new perspective on the nature of the world around him, on the nuances of existence.

"I divided my cash output, $40.00, into my total viewing time on the set, 6 minutes, and came up with a per-minute cost of $6.66. If I had watched that set for an hour before it died, I could have bought a brand-new set with the money it would have cost."10

In this example the narrator of An Unfortunate Woman attempts to rationalise the money he has spent on a defective TV set. The set breaks down after he has watched it for only six minutes so he divides the amount of money it cost him by the number of minutes it worked to derive a unit costing. So far this is simple logic and a relatively meaningless calculation. Except that the narrator then makes a mental leap, inverting the statistic he has arrived at to identify that this unit cost, if prolonged from six minutes to sixty minutes, would exceed the price of a brand new TV set, therefore rendering him stupid for buying a second-hand one. Of course, if the set had worked for sixty minutes it would not have cost the narrator any more than it did when it worked for six the effect of a longer life span for the TV would simply have been a lower unit costing. But what Brautigan is doing here, by pushing the narrative outside of the laws of mathematics and physics and logic, is illustrating how the imaginative side of the human experience takes the factual as its stimulus and creates, sees, understands at a much more esoteric level, but always from this starting point. The author, he seems to be saying, cannot exist outside of his environment. He is a product of his time and place and can only create out of this context, using this context and defined by this context.

But what exactly constitutes Brautigan's time and place is a matter of some contention. Precisely because he is so readily identified with the American Sixties: contemporary magazine features branded him a "gentle poet of the young"11; Ferlinghetti damned him with faint praise as "all the novelist the hippies needed" in their "nonliterate age."12 He engages with history and with the physical present in a manner which seems to align him with the Beats, and yet he somehow takes it much further than this, constructing in his texts a state of narrative that transcends time and gathers into its domain a whole host of signifiers that relate unilaterally across the expanse of cultural history. For example, a compliment on Lee Mellon's building skills in A Confederate General from Big Sur transforms him into "Frank Lloyd Mellon"13; the narrator of Dreaming of Babylon inhabits a world where baseball and Nebuchadnezzar and "shadow robots" all coexist in a fantasy of his own masculinity14; and in Sombrero Fallout, Norman Mailer shows up in the beleaguered town as an icon of war correspondence and journalistic celebrity. This is almost a maelstrom of imagery, a chaos of contemporary culture and historic and literary reference. Linda Hutcheon calls it a "rummaging through the image reserves of the past", which is precisely what Brautigan is doing here—defining the moments of his narratives via recognisable cultural archetypes.15 And the construction of these archetypes is self-referential and playful, which immediately puts some distance between Brautigan and his Beat counterparts, because their engagement with their subject matter is far from ironic: "the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future," muses Kerouac, "a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it."16 He is not concerned with petty observations regarding a man in a deli who would look "just like Rudolph Valentino if Rudolph Valentino had been an old Italian making sandwiches and complaining about people having too much mustard on their sandwiches."17 He is concerned with the infinity of a universe and the continuity of meaning and the elevation of one's life to the limits of its significance. Which, it could be argued, so is Brautigan. But rather than approach this concept from the perspective of an enthusiastic dialogue with the brute energy of nature, he does so instead from an immersion of his characters into a flux of unfiltered influences, and in this manner conveys an alternative concept of timelessness within the human condition.

Linda Hutcheon also claims that "postmodernism reveals a desire to understand present culture as the product of previous representations."18 What is interesting about this claim is that if applied to A Confederate General from Big Sur it seems to suggest that Brautigan's method in fact skirts along the boundaries of postmodernism. As has already been discussed, this novel revolves very much around the link between the contemporary scene of the Sixties and the American Civil War, using imagery and token facts from the former period to add credence and weight to definitions of the main characters, and to place them as the end result of a century of social evolution (and impending cultural revolution). The postmodernist element of the novel, however, lies more in what happens to these images and signifiers as the narrative progresses—how they evolve from metaphors into conceptual truths. At the beginning of the book, Lee Mellon uses what he believes to be a genuine ancestor, a Confederate general, as a method of defining his own identity against a backdrop of American heritage. It is not long before Brautigan dismisses the factual truth of this matter: Mellon cannot find the statue that is supposed to exist of his forefather and then cannot find any reference to him in any of the historical documents relating to the period. But this hardly seems to matter in the context of the narrative, because the more conclusive the evidence that there never was a Confederate General Mellon, the more concrete this definition of Lee Mellon's character becomes and everything he does begins subsequently to be represented in these terms of reference. He "lay[s] siege to Oakland" and slips further and further into the persona of an Americana outlaw.19 Perhaps even more significantly, a parallel narrative begins in the book which depicts the alternative history of "private Augustus Mellon thirty-seven-year-old slave trader" and his exploits with the Digger Indians during the final days of the war.20 Not only has Brautigan debunked the notion of Lee Mellon's heritage, he is engaging the reader in a parody of the very same thing, knocking the rank of the fictional forefather down as far as it will go and mocking him with an incident where he pretends to be dead to avoid a column of Union soldiers who are in fact themselves merely "looking for a Confederate to surrender to."21 What the author is doing here is not an attempt to correct an error of history, but to elevate this error, to revel in it and celebrate it and make of it an untruth so absolute that it challenges the very notion of what truth is. As Mark Currie states, history is nothing more than a subjective discourse with the diverse elements of the past; historians "construct rather than reflect, invent rather than discover."22 Annals of the past are essentially no more than a series of narratives, forged via the promotion of certain facts and the repression of others to create an illusion of coherency. The logical conclusion of such an argument is that history is nothing more than fiction. And if this is the case, then all fictions have an equal claim to authenticity when representing this history. There are no absolutes: none of the versions we are presented with are any more or less reliable than any of the others. So who is to contradict that Lee Mellon has a Confederate general for a grandfather? Who is to contradict that it was instead a cowardly private squatting in the mud of Big Sur?

It is a theme that runs throughout all of Brautigan's work: the challenge to perceived notions of authority. Historians have no authority; narrators have no authority; and most importantly of all, the author has no authority. His narratives can spiral out of control, can accelerate towards "186,000 Endings per Second."23 It is a perspective that links Brautigan with the counterculture of the Sixties, in particular the Diggers and their program of social reform.

". . . this country is our country, and if we don't like it, then we should try to change it, and if we can't change it, then we should destroy it."24

Diggers like Emmett Grogan and Peter Coyote were very much engaged throughout the Sixties in a war upon capitalism and consistently attacked "the foundations of the edifice" through their free-food and free-store initiatives.25 Coupled with impromptu theatre performances in public places that involved unsuspecting audiences as participants, they attempted to broaden people's perspectives on the roles they had unwittingly assumed in the dominant social hierarchy. A sign in the free-store, for instance, read "If Someone Asks to See the Manager / Tell Him He's the Manager" and all decisions would be turned over to this random individual who would then contemplate what it was that dictated his suppositions on the role of customer and manager.26 And although Brautigan was only marginally associated with this movement rather than appearing regularly on the front lines, the same preoccupations can be found in his writing. For instance, an eponymous poem that begins "the net wt of winter is 6.75 ozs."27 Here, because the taste of toothpaste reminds the poet of winter, it follows that the tube of toothpaste is a physical manifestation of the concept of winter, and the weight of that toothpaste is therefore the weight of the concept. Of course, this assertion is arbitrary and the line of reasoning is deliberately labored, is absurdist in nature. Because Brautigan does not want the reader to take his theory seriously—toothpaste is quite obviously not the same as winter, and nor is 6.75 ounces the weight of four months of the year. But what he is doing is again challenging the dominant cultural ideology that states that winter is a season and toothpaste is a cleaning product and the two concepts do not, cannot, exist as signifiers of each other. Brautigan the poet, as individual, has made some connection which makes it a valid connection to him, which makes it a valid connection for readers as well. Who is to say that it is not? Who is in a position to contradict? Or in another poem, "Nine Crows: Two out of Sequence":

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6, 8, 9" (28)

It is ridiculous to think that crows should follow a particularly defined sequence, and equally absurd to determine how two of them could be out of sequence. But then this is precisely what Brautigan is implying. Definitions of basic logic, in effect collective social criteria, are all to some extent arbitrary. They are initiated and refined by a process of cultural osmosis that has perpetuated itself over such an extended period of time that even the notion that they may be wrong, or inadequate, or inapplicable lies back in the mists of evolution. Ferlinghetti may have called the Sixties, and by implication Brautigan, "non-literary"; in actual fact he was referring to possibly the most overtly postmodernist trend in Western society to date.29

In his memoir of Brautigan, Downstream from "Trout Fishing in America," Keith Abbott also identifies the link between the writer and the "hippie craze."30 For Abbott, his friend's attitude upon the nature of time itself seems indicative of that of "the psychedelic generation: the insistence on the present, the here and now."31 What he is identifying in the author's work is a focus upon the metaphysical moment, the transitory instant of now through which all of his other themes do indeed seem to be distilled. From socks that can make a narrator "feel very sad"32 to the sound of "a silver early-in-the-morning drum that would lead to the various events that would comprise July 13, 1902,"33 Brautigan's narratives seem to begin and end with specific segments of time, flashes of comprehension and understanding that reach out to subsequent events. But then Abbott insists that the moment is all Brautigan ever concerns himself with, that his method turns its back on everything else, that "time becomes ahistorical" in the texts.34 And this seems a critical miscomprehension of Brautigan's technique. His engagement with the notion of time may indeed begin and end within the moment, but this engagement is never ahistorical. In fact, it is quite the opposite, almost meta-historical, with an awareness of the totality of history clearly visible in each of the moments he navigates through. For instance, in Willard and His Bowling Trophies, the eponymous papier-mâché bird of the title is revealed to "look . . . like Abraham Lincoln", "the bowling trophies look like his generals during the Civil War."35 Even a whimsical description cannot be freed from a legacy of cultural influence that spans back over a century.

"I walked very carefully over to the baby buggy. I didn't want to stumble over the past and break my present-tense leg that might leave me crippled in the future.

"I took the handle of the baby buggy and pulled it away from the 1900s and into the year 1947."36

Brautigan's present is always about the past, and very often about the future too. The moment is for him a microcosm of the totality of experience, is a window on the constant flux of history that spills off the page in all directions. Indeed, this division on the author's perspective on time is in fact an exact parallel to the division in postmodern theory on the nature of historical reference. A common charge leveled at the postmodernist movement is that it fails to engage with representations of the past in a meaningful or insightful manner. Frederic Jameson terms it the "pastiche", the "bravura imitation"37 of postmodernism, a reduction of authentic images and ideals of a period to a "mass cultural allusion", a set of stylised signifiers which start to replace the truth of the matter.38 The example he cites is David Lynch's Blue Velvet which, he believes, displaces "the 1950s" with "the 'fifties,'"39 a string of "stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities" rather than those facts and realities themselves.40 And to a certain extent, yes, this argument has some validity. But this is not strictly a fault just of postmodernism: every period in social history has attempted to define those periods preceding it in order to define itself, either in favourable terms or reactionary ones. The 1950s do not mean anything in and of themselves; they are merely a collection of years, of months, of revolutions of the earth around the sun. The attachment of significance to them is a reductionist process, a revision of facts into a narrative, which leads back to questions of whose narratives have greater authority—those of the historian or those of the postmodernist? Mark Currie takes the opposite view to Jameson, viewing "the present, or presence itself, [as] a crossed structure of 'protensions' and 'retensions', bearing within it the spectre of its own past and future."41 This theory is much more closely aligned with Brautigan's narrative technique, where the actions of a character in any given instance bear the mark of a lifetime of cultural influences and sow seeds of future consequences. One character has his future mapped out by Brautigan's narrator, who knows intuitively that he will end up "doing three years in the pen for stealing a car and then [have] a marriage with a spiteful woman ten years older than him."42 Of course, his narrator has the benefit of hindsight in these observations, but then this is what is interesting about the author's perspective on time, because it does not exist in his narratives as a linear concept. It is not merely a sequential force which drives the story forward, but rather a dimensional structure which inter-relates in a complex manner with all other points of time that have ever existed and ever will exist. In So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, the narrator almost navigates himself across a landscape of his own personal history. He places himself specifically in the sphere of one moment and then makes overt reference to moments that are future to that present, moments that he knows are going to happen consequently. So the ground he walks on at one point is "waiting to become another grave in just a few short days,"43 or he is suddenly "catapulted into the future where . . . the February-17th apple-orchard event is history."44

There is a malleable quality to Brautigan's time, a sense of subjectivity and authorial control. It can stop and start at will; the narrator can step outside of his moment and describe another one while waiting for that to come to an end. "While I'm a quarter of a mile away, walking back to the pond . . . I'll talk about something else that is more interesting."45 Because after all, what is time but a primary experience of passing moments as interpreted at the focal point of individual perception? If history is a chaos of facts reconstructed into a narrative, then so too is time a maelstrom of impressions that are reconstructed into a chronology. It is not linear in and of itself, which is just one model of narrative. Another model would be cyclical; another perhaps modular. Brautigan's is dimensional; molecular; conceptually geographical, with moments placed like co-ordinates across some huge "calendar map."46 The implications of this type of time are numerous. In the first instance, there is an element of stoicism implicit in a system where past and future cease to have any real meaning. Brautigan's characters do not look back along a narrow timeline when they reminisce; they look at segments of the molecular model. And obviously they do not look forward either, because there is no forward. They are instead located in the middle of a physical landscape, a timescape almost. The directions they can look in are all relative pinpoints in the totality of their perception. What this means in real terms is that a detachment exists between the characters and the immediacy of their emotional experiences. The narrator of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away describes his memory as "a gigantic motion picture studio in [his] mind" through which he has "been working on the same movie for 31 years."47 Mark Currie goes further than this, claiming that the deconstruction of linear time is the road to madness. "To be normal, as opposed to schizophrenic, it is necessary to have a linear concept of time," he claims; "it is the basis of guilt and moral action."48 It is not clear, however, why precisely a linear model of time promotes guilt and morality when any other structure does not. The basis of Currie's argument seems to be rooted in cause and effect, the enactment and the gauging of reactions to that enactment that help develop a moral sensibility. But Brautigan's model does not preclude this at all. Rather than consequence existing almost as an electrical charge between actions in a sequence, it becomes instead a juxtaposition between two points in space. The regret of the narrator in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is a very tangible element of the narrative: he spends over a year believing that "only a complete knowledge of hamburgers can save [his] soul", obsessing over the one item he feels he should have bought instead of the bullets as a way of avoiding the issue of his friend's accidental death.49 This is cause and effect at its most extreme, morality at the edges of despair. Yes, the molecular model of time introduces emotional distance into engagements with the past, but this distance is often the symptom of ethical trauma rather than evidence of the death of morality.

When discussing the concept of the historical moment in Brautigan's work, it is essentially the engagement that exists between each instance of modular time within his narratives and the expanse of historical and cultural reference points that are contained within these moments. Of course, these signifiers are defined stylistically, a practice that is bound up irrevocably with processes of reduction: the construction of meaning is the deconstruction of the chaos that is the authentic state of the past or the present. But it is this microcosmic approach to the concept of moment that defines Brautigan as a postmodernist whilst simultaneously distancing him from the Beat categorisation that he is customarily given. It also aligns him much more closely with the counter-culture of the Sixties than that of the previous decade that was the contemporary era of the Beats, because it marks him out as a sometime challenger to perceived notions of authority. He attacks the canon; he attacks logic; he attacks the concepts that constitute the bedrock of Western knowledge—history and time. As Alan Watts puts it, "all sorts of things that we believe to be real—time, past and future, for instance—exist only conventionally."50 Brautigan is, ideologically at least, a part of the movement for unconvention, or misconvention. History is a narrative—all narratives are fiction—all fictions are equally unreliable and equally authentic. Time is not linear—time is a subjective notion that is interpreted at the focal point of human consciousness. There are no absolutes in Brautigan's work just as there are no absolutes in a postmodernist perception of reality, merely "a crossed structure of 'protensions' and 'retensions,'" a framework of signifiers which define each other contextually.51

There is moment, there is history (although what precisely this means is a matter of debate), and there is a legacy of American culture. Above and beyond this there is no more than the method of determining how these three create a universe.

Notes
1. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, (Palgrave, 1998) p. 81.
2. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur, (Rebel Inc., 1999) p. 75.
3. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller, (Grove Press, 1989) p. 38.
4. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur, p. 65.
5. Ibid, p. 81.
6. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, (City Lights, 1992) p. 46.
7. Richard Brautigan, "Homage to the San Francisco YMCA," Revenge of the Lawn, (Rebel Inc., 1997) p. 49.
8. Ibid, p. 49.
9. Richard Brautigan, An Unfortunate Woman, (Rebel Inc., 2000) p. 76.
10. Ibid, p. 97.
11. John Stickney, "Gentle Poet of the Young," (LIFE Magazine, August 14, 1970) p. 49.
12. Lawrence Wright, "The Life and Death of Richard Brautigan," (Rolling Stone, April 11, 1985) p. 36.
13. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur, p. 85.
14. Richard Brautigan, Dreaming of Babylon, (Hughton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1995) p. 63.
15. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, (Routledge, 2002) p. 89.
16. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller, p. 36.
17. Richard Brautigan, Dreaming of Babylon, p. 25.
18. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 55.
19. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur, p. 33.
20. Ibid, p. 117.
21. Ibid, p. 121.
22. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p. 88.
23. Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General from Big Sur, p. 142.
24. Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, (Counterpoint, 1999) p. 59.
25. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, (Faber and Faber, 1970) p. 55.
26. Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio, (Rebel Inc., 1999) p. 374.
27. Richard Brautigan, "The Net Weight of Winter is 6.75 ozs," Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt, (Dell Publishing Co., 1970) p. 12.
28. Richard Brautigan, "Nine Crows: Two out of Sequence," Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, (Simon & Schuster, 1976) p. 117.
29. Lawrence Wright, "The Life and Death of Richard Brautigan," p. 36.
30. Keith Abbott, Downstream from "Trout Fishing in America," (Capra Press, 1989) p. 39.
31. Ibid, p. 43.
32. Richard Brautigan, "The Irrevocable Sadness of her Thank You," The Tokyo-Montana Express, (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1980) p. 36.
33. Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster, (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1995) p. 55.
34. Keith Abbott, Downstream from "Trout Fishing in America," p. 172.
35. Richard Brautigan, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, (Amereon House, 1995) p. 109.
36. Richard Brautigan, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1995) p. 11.
37. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, (Verson, 1991) p. 133.
38. Ibid, p. 134.
39. Ibid, p. 281.
40. Ibid, p. 279.
41. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p. 78.
42. Richard Brautigan, So the Wind Won't Blow it all Away, p. 77.
43. Ibid, p. 1.
44. Ibid, p. 81.
45. Ibid, p. 25.
46. Richard Brautigan, An Unfortunate Woman, (Rebel Inc., 2000), p. 2.
47. Richard Brautigan, So the Wind won't Blow It All Away, p. 74.
48. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p. 103.
49. Richard Brautigan, So the Wind Won't Blow it all Away, p. 81.
50. Alan Watts, Zen and the Beat Way, (Eden Grove Editions, 1997) p. 8.
51. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p. 78.

"Brer Brautigan: Trickster Dead and Well in Montana"
Michael Sexson
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 371-373.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

My most vivid memory of Richard comes from a car trip that he, Greg Keeler and I took from Bozeman to Paradise Valley. We turned off the interstate into Livingston and stopped at the Albertson's Food Market to pick up some snacks. Some local event of some importance (what, we knew not) must have been going on since all the clerks at the store were decked out in clown costumes, replete with polka-dot gowns, red noses, and red wigs. On our way down the highway headed toward Yellowstone Park one of us happened to wonder what it was that inspired the clown suits. Was it National Clown Day in the country? A takeover of the country by the hitherto unsuspected Clown Liberation Front? Were clowns the way everyone was and we had just realized it? For the next few hours, we riffed on the clown motif until we were helpless with laughter.

I have often thought why this should be my most vivid memory of Richard when so many other anecdotes of his antics were richer candidates for remembrance. I suspect it is because that in the years since Richard died, I have come more and more to see him as doomed to play the role of the clown, or, as I now think, the trickster. This came clear to me recently when I chaired a session on Richard at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula. A standing-room audience listened ruefully to recollections at once hilarious and horrifying from Greg Keeler and William Hjortsberg. As members of the audience asked questions, I realized that they were deeply saddened to hear about the dark side of this man whom they had thought to be the living (and now dead) embodiment of their fantasies of the 1960s. Where they had thought to hear about a gracious and generous man, they heard instead of a mean-spirited and narcissistic drunkard; where they had thought to hear of charming and lovable prankster, they heard instead of a cruel and malicious demon.

As tempting as it may have been for Hjortsberg and Keeler to support the popular Brautigan myth, they chose, wisely, I think, not to demythologize but to unearth a deeper and more complicated myth—to which Brautigan was fatally attached—that of the trickster. Anyone who has studied the subject knows that the popular incarnation of the trickster—the Br'er Rabbit and mischievous Coyote and the jovial Sir John Falstaff and the Bacchus Keats so charmingly describes as the "god of breathless cups and chirping mirth" are all just displacements of something so dark as to be malevolent, so deep as to be unfathomable. Bugs Bunny turns easily into the vicious killer rabbit of Monty Python; the coyote we read about in many Native American tales is as disgusting and stupid as he is wily; Sir John is in fact a pitiable drunkard who, in Prince Hal's words, is so fat he "lards the lean earth as he walks along" ; and the cheery Roman Bacchus deeply imagined is the Greek Dionysos who presides over the agonizing dismantling of the personality, even of the body; he is the merciless god of sparagmos, the tearing of warm, living flesh. These are the primordial deconstructors who seek to disassemble the easy, the familiar, the popular, the desperate need in us all to find them charming and sweet and loveable. They are not. Nor should they be.

If we demythologize, it is in order to find a deeper myth, and in this myth, we discover that it is not absurd at all to think that a figure such as Richard Brautigan becomes, like the coyote in so many stories, a sacrificial victim. His sacrifice is made in the service of our greater and sadder understanding. However lamented, he is not to be pitied. To sacrifice, strictly speaking, is to make sacred, and poetic tricksters know that the sacred makes us scared by lightly juggling a single letter, and by adding a single letter, we are forever scarred.

A tribute then to a real trickster, bona fide clown, authentic charlatan, genuine fraud, mon semblable, mon frere, Br'er Brautigan.

"Notes from a Brautigan Collector"
Craig Showalter
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 374-380.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

While at the International Book Fair held in Chicago, Illinois, in 1983, I was talking with Peter Howard of Serendipity Books about collecting modern first editions. I had been a collector of W. Somerset Maugham for many years, but our conversation was focused on a writer whom I had come to admire during the 1970s—Richard Brautigan. "I have his rarest book!" Peter said as he reached into his glass-front book counter. He brought out a sheet of black construction paper, folded in half and with a tiny Inferno Press label on the front. The label was signed with Brautigan's distinctive signature. I opened this slender booklet to find a folded sheet of paper attached to its construction paper cover by a drop of glue. This opened to a single poem, "The Return of the Rivers." I bought it and became a Brautigan collector.

Inspired by my purchase of his first and most rare book, I quickly decided to collect the rest of Brautigan's books as well. Thus began a challenging and enjoyable twenty-year search. His early books such as The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (San Francisco: White Rabbit Press, 1958), Lay the Marble Tea (San Francisco: Carp Press, 1959), and The Octopus Frontier (San Francisco: Carp Press, 1960) were fragile and printed in small editions. First appearances of his poetry and short prose pieces were often handed out free in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, California, in the 1960s, and many appeared in obscure underground magazines that were ephemeral and thrown away after a quick reading. Some of these were never reprinted and thus were not only first appearances, but also only appearances. In order to put together a complete collection of Brautigan's work these ephemeral broadsides and magazines would have to be included. Some had been forgotten and were rediscovered only by scanning stacks of little magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, many of these without a table of contents.

For example, Brautigan's first literary appearance in a nationally circulated magazine was a poem, "Someplace in the World a Man is Screaming in Pain," printed on the inside of the back cover of Flame, a small literary magazine published in Alpine, Texas, in the autumn of 1955. It was published before Brautigan left his home in Eugene, Oregon, for San Francisco, and it has never been reprinted. I know of only two copies of this little magazine that have turned up since I started my collection. What makes collecting Richard Brautigan so interesting is that there may well be an even earlier appearance in such a little magazine waiting to be found by someone willing to leaf through its pages.

Brautigan arrived in San Francisco in 1956 and quickly became acquainted with the Beat poets and other creative forces at work in this productive literary era. He soon began publishing poetry in little counterculture magazines such as J (edited by Jack Spicer), Hearse, and Beatitude. He also wrote novels that would not find publishers for many years. His writing, and Brautigan himself, six feet four inches tall, lanky, and eccentric, became increasingly recognized. In 1967, with the publication of his novel, Trout Fishing in America, he became famous, much to the amazement of those who knew him. Later, with his poetry frequently published in Rolling Stone magazine, accompanied by his photograph—long blond hair, floppy ten-gallon hat and wire-rimmed glasses—he became a celebrity in the San Francisco scene of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Brautigan never aspired to be a spokesman for the Hippies or any other group. Although Trout Fishing in America brought him fame during that era, it was actually written in 1961, six years before it was published. But his readers saw a symbol of the Haight-Ashbury "happening" in his public persona as well as in his writing, and the stage was set for his success. His name was often seen on posters and handbills announcing events such as the "Rockdance-Environment Happening Benefit," the Bedrock One Concert, and a "poetry diddey-wah" throughout the San Francisco area.

When I began collecting the work of this unique and engaging writer in the early 1980s I was surprised to find a lack of interest in him among many booksellers. Some did not carry Brautigan in their bookshops and said there was no longer interest in him. His readers knew better and fortunately so did several booksellers. In addition to Peter Howard there was James Musser of Skyline Books and Burton Weiss, Bookseller, who turned up some of the most arcane examples of Brautigan's literary efforts as well as copies of his rare early books. These booksellers and others were noted in the introduction to the catalog of my collection, Collecting Richard Brautigan (Pine Island, Minnesota: Kumquat Pressworks, 2001). Musser and Weiss were themselves responsible for the publication of three books of Brautigan's earliest poetry found after his death. These posthumously published books are collector's items and add much to the understanding of Brautigan's creative development.

Collecting Richard Brautigan has brought me into contact with many others who share a love of this writer: Christian Nelson, editor and publisher of Kumquat Meringue, a poetry magazine dedicated to the memory of Brautigan; authors and friends such as Keith Abbott, Greg Keeler, and Beef Torrey; bibliographer John Barber; and biographer William "Gatz" Hjortsberg. Todd Lockwood founded The Brautigan Library, modeled after the library in Brautigan's novel The Abortion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), and Ted Latty assembled what must be the largest collection of Brautigan material anywhere. All of these people have contributed to the pleasure of reading and collecting Brautigan.

After many years of enjoyable and sometimes obsessive pursuit I did succeed in getting first editions of all of Brautigan's books—ten novels, ten books of poetry, and a collection of short stories—as well as examples of all of his broadsides. Some are inscribed to his fellow poets, some to his publisher and to his friends, and at least one belonged to Brautigan himself. Although there were only twenty-one books published by Brautigan, there are nearly three hundred items in my collection. What came to interest me as much as the books were the ephemeral items that complement his literary output—the broadsides, the little magazines, the posters, and handbills that put his life and work into the context of the San Francisco literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Within this context, reading Brautigan becomes more rewarding, and surrounded by these posters and handbills announcing his appearances and readings I can feel the ambience of that time.

It was one of the broadsides that turned out to the most elusive of Brautigan's works—"Star-Spangled Nails." Little is known about this broadside: who printed it, where or when it was published. Gary Lepper, in A Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-Five Modern American Authors (Berkeley: Serendipity Books, 1976) states that it was probably published in Berkeley in 1970. "Star-Spangled Nails" is a strong antiwar statement and thus is unusual in Brautigan's writing. There are only five copies of this broadside known to have survived and three of these are in university collections. One is the rare book collection at Northwestern University, and since it seemed so unlikely that I would ever own a copy I went to see it. The seven-line poem is stencil-printed in black on a long, narrow sheet of turquoise construction paper. Three red stars are printed above the poem and Brautigan's name is printed in lower case letters below the text. The librarian allowed me to make a copy of it and this had to do until many years later when I was fortunate to get a copy from a collection in California that was being broken up. At that time it was the only copy known outside of a university collection and it was not until recently that a fifth copy turned up. Because of what this brief poem reveals about Brautigan, its strong presentation and its rarity, "Star-Spangled Nails" is what I value most in my collection. I realize that I was fortunate at the beginning of my collecting as well to get a copy of "The Return of the Rivers," as only about twenty copies can be located and only three or four have turned up in the past twenty years.

Author collections, the bringing together of the complete literary output of a writer, has become less attractive to collectors in recent years. It was a popular approach to collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but has given way to acquiring major works and not being concerned with minor or unsuccessful efforts. I like the search for the unknown and obscure and much can be learned about a writer and his intent by looking at the entirety of his work. This seems especially true of Brautigan, many of whose works appeared as broadsides handed out free to anyone who might read them or as contributions to underground magazines with small printings. Through these ephemeral productions one can see important work in its original context.

At some point the collector must plan for the disposition of what he has brought together and preserved. One choice is to keep the collection together in an institutional setting so that it can be seen and studied in its totality. On the other hand, there are other collectors waiting for collections to disperse so they can get copies of rarities such as "The Return of the Rivers" and "Star-Spangled Nails." I like to see the unique copies such as inscribed and association copies stay in the hands of private collectors. Recently I began to sell some of these unique copies from my collection to make way for other collecting interests. I have kept the broadsides, posters, little magazines, letters, and other ephemera as well as unsigned copies of most of Brautigan's works.

There will continue to be new generations of Brautigan collectors as well as readers. Collectors serve an important function in finding and preserving material that might otherwise be lost. I still look for a little magazine that might contain a forgotten poem by Brautigan or a handbill that puts him at a place and time in his career. Collecting Richard Brautigan has made reading his work even more enjoyable and I continue to be a collector as well as a reader.

"Richard Brautigan, Flânerie, and Japan: Some International Perspectives on his Work"
Barnard Turner
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 381-459.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Joseph Mills noted, with some justification, that Brautigan's "reputation may be higher abroad than in his native country" (8). Among the author's early, positive and still insightful critics were several from Europe, including Marc Chénetier, who established a new style in American Studies while at the Université d'Orléans in France, and, from England, Sir Malcolm Bradbury, who ushered in similar innovations at the University of East Anglia, and Tony Tanner of Cambridge University. In the conclusion to his City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (1971), one of the earliest academic assessments, Tanner relates Brautigan to Melville, places him in a context of American society, and praises both his innovations with genre and the lack of polemic in his work. In The Modern American Novel (1983), Bradbury gives an overview of the work, from the "insistence on intruding his own presence and tone into his storytelling" (169) in the earlier work to "the dissolution of classic identity" in The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980). For obvious reasons of chronology, Brautigan appears at the end of these respective volumes, rounds them off as both summary of a point reached and an intimation for the future. This essay extrapolates from this point, and considers Brautigan's outreach in several related directions: his significance in the two decades or so after Bradbury's book; his reception outside America, particularly in Western Europe and (to a much more limited extent) in Japan; and the reception of Japan in his own work, especially in the two Japan books, June 30th, June 30th (1978) and The Tokyo-Montana Express. At a time of the increasing perception that the field of American studies can only develop if it takes on an international dimension, Brautigan's work in this context contributes to such momentum, not least by giving added definition to Mills's rather vague polarities, the generic "abroad" and the nebulous "native country" which does not discriminate between constituent regionalisms.

While such a transoceanic bifurcation may at first seem untenable and distracting, it does reveal a latitude in Brautigan criticism by widening styles of reading still current and normative. In his 1969 story "A Complete Movie of Germany and Japan" (originally in Rolling Stone 33, and which appears in Revenge as "A Complete History ..."), Brautigan refers to World War II as "a few years ago" and implies a ghostly haunting by the trauma of staying next to a slaughterhouse in wartime, getting used to the squealing of the doomed pigs. Such a connection is hard to shake, and the "Introduction" to June 30th expresses a solemn farewell to the mentality, thus hopefully also to animosity and fear. This sublimation of originary mind-sets is possible, in Brautigan's main texts, by its incorporation of new settings, genres and themes, and, in the criticism, by reference to a wider context, parallel to the new geographical settings, in which the texts are read. Brautigan's metropolitan, trans-Pacific records can then be considered updatings of the perceptions of the city by two seminal European writers: Charles Baudelaire, with whose work Brautigan shows his familiarity, and Walter Benjamin, who threads Baudelaire's insights into his own work in a way comparable I hope to that of my own reading of Brautigan through these two earlier writers. By so providing a theoretical, international dimension, this essay attempts to stir up some new ground in Brautigan criticism, and thus to plant his books in new critical contexts.

Placing Brautigan, chronologically and topographical, was an early concern of the criticism and has remained a central issue. In 1972, Terence Malley published his ground-stirring work on the writer, still one of the most influential studies. As the title of the series (which included assessments of Vonnegut, Hesse and Tolkien) made clear, Brautigan was a Writer for the '70s, that is, for the immediate future: "I believe that Brautigan is a writer of both talent and substance—an artist—and that he'll be around for a while, for quite a while" (183). Later criticism has sometimes defined Brautigan ironically in the light of this series title: in such a view he is, thirty years on, a writer of the 70's, that is somewhat dated literally and metaphorically. When Malley's book appeared, Brautigan was in his late thirties, had already written an impressive body of work characterized—I think we can now begin to see it—by "glocalisation," paying lip-service to Modernism and modernity but leading them in his own direction, that is, the Pacific Northwest. A quarter-century after Malley's book (1997), the encyclopedic Western Literature Association volume Updating the Literary West gave room for Brautigan, as might be expected, in both the Oregon and the California chapters, but twice as much in the former than the latter; it would be both unfair and ignorant to suggest that this was the result of greater competition for the space provided for the discussion of the more southern state. (There was, I note in passing, no specific Montana chapter, but Brautigan might have fit here also.) While Michael Powell situates several of Brautigan's novels in Oregon, Gerald Haslam makes but a paltry, simplistic reference to "Richard Brautigan and the Hippies" in his paragraphs on San Francisco and the North Coast (299). Yet with such a plethora of northwest place-names swimming immediately into the ken—Tacoma, Eugene, Livingston—San Francisco seems like but one place in and on the way.

Speaking at the onset of the 1980s, Wallace Stegner viewed Brautigan as a "Westerner trying to be something else" (Conversations 138), measuring him perhaps by some abstract, deductive notion of the West, and therefore which would represent a static force against a place whose definition is ever-evolving. While such a distraction and mythopoeia—making something other and new—are inherent in any definition of the West, and characteristic of a central Blakean impulse in the best work of Brautigan's generation, Stegner here summons this very cardinal principle, essential to the construction of the West, in his effort to underline his movement of exclusion. Of course, there has been resistance to Stegner's view, yet his concern that a place be lost, its culture and rhetorical tropes forgotten before it has truly been found, albeit now a commonplace, is an urgent and compelling one. A self-critique could even be established through Stegner's texts themselves. Some two decades earlier, Stegner had called a "western writer" one who "has spent his formative years in the West" (Sound 170), a looser but more productive definition into which of course Brautigan would fit. Given the Paradise Valley, Montana, community informed by the writer, Stegner's view—following Walter Prescott Webb—that the West is "an oasis civilization" which has "infinitely more various" if interlacing myths and realities (Conversations 149) than those seen in Westerns, for example, could well be extended metaphorically to Brautigan also, who would then partake of what for Stegner is a typical feature of the West. Stegner foregrounds Brautigan's historicity, asserting rather proleptically that "his vogue is past" (139), and therefore cannot foresee more than one reception for his texts (that, presumably, of the students who "followed him around like little dogs"). Notwithstanding Stegner's authoritative stance against Brautigan as "Westerner," Malley ranks highly Brautigan's provenance in the Pacific Northwest (19). It is not easy to disengage the Western "spirit of place" throughout Brautigan's work, and even to accord it a more specific regionalism, in which the Pacific Slope merges into but is offset against both, on the one hand, what the slope inclines into (the vast Pacific) and, on the other, what it is demarcated against, the inland Northwest (here Montana, and thus skipping—consciously perhaps, as often in Brautigan—the Hemingway associations with the intervening Idaho). In these connections, already still in the continental United States, the West itself becomes something else; even more so is this apparent when the region is placed in its wider geographical context, as in the Japan books.

A characteristic claim such as "That meant something in Oregon" ("A Short History of Oregon," Revenge 105) self-confidently asserts an intimacy between place, lifestyle and the recognition of their significance; such a claim, however, glimpses a relation but does not define by means of it. This tendency runs through Brautigan's best work, which may well be in the short stories and the poetry in which the style explicates the essence of an economy with an economy of expression. One of the most moving passages I think in any Brautigan text—and it is one about Oregon—is that of Uncle Jarv in "The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon," a "locally famous" athlete, womanizer and "honky-tonker" in his youth, but now with only chewing tobacco for company (Revenge 91). In two short paragraphs, a life, rooted and meaningful, resonant with the promise and mutability of a residual small-town frontier life, is conveyed. Laconicity is a trait here both of the style and of the people so described; the latter might be a stereotype, but at a time of pontification and self-promotion, it is useful to be reminded of this cardinal Western (if mainly literary) trait.

The local in Brautigan was always crosshatched with the literary allusive, even if—and mostly—as an act of appropriation and emptying-out or kenosis. Throughout is implicit the Modernist trajectory of making new, of updating American genres from the pastoral (in Trout Fishing) to the pioneer epistolary (in Confederate General) to the romance (In Watermelon Sugar), updating the strategic concision of Hemingway and combining this with the equally Modernist stylistic emphasis (from James and Woolf) of detaching from adjectives their corroborative, explicatory or epithetic function (as in much Realism) and invigorating them with their own sense and purposes. In poems like "Clad in Garments Like a Silver Disease," "Chosen by Beauty to Be a Handmaiden of the Stars" (from Rommel) and "Death Is a Beautiful Car Parked Only" (from Pill), Brautigan combines a cadence reminiscent of Dylan Thomas with the pictorial incongruities of the Surrealists; in "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker" sequence, of course, Brautigan pays homage to their mutual ancestor, Charles Baudelaire. With such influences, echoes and allusions, Brautigan could be considered not only "in the American grain" (as Malley contends [186]) but also in the "European." More generally, throughout his work, Brautigan shows his sense of structure and his knowledge of the traditions in which he is writing, and this gives the work an openness to a range of responses. Allusiveness then opens up the works to new interpretations and contexts, and surrounds a familiar reading, apparently rooted in a recognized time and place, with other uncanny literary references.

While Realism projects words as direct interventions in the social, Modernism and its critical permutations overarch the empirical in the futural, even utopian parataxis of language and experience. Few of Brautigan's novels have consensual, hypotactical chapter relations, and even where such connections appear more stable, the sequencing is quickly aborted or granted a sublime speed and insolidity, as at the end(s) of Confederate General. "Forgiven" in Revenge talks about "a novel called Trout Fishing in America" (165) but the persona writing this story talks of "Richard Brautigan" in a distanced, objective way, "a close friend or perhaps even a lover"; it is not therefore that Brautigan himself need share the narrator's classification of the text's genre. As John Clayton remarked in a 1971 New American Review article, Trout Fishing is "not an anti-novel; it is an un-novel" which dispenses with all notions of the bourgeois novel; since however according both to that classic student text of Brautigan's generation, Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957) and to other luminaries like [Georg] Lukács, the novel and the bourgeoisie are coeval, Clayton's argument might well self-destruct when he goes on to note that Trout Fishing is not "rebellious" (64).

In the Revenge story called "The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America: 'Rembrandt Creek' and 'Carthage Sink,'" the authorial references are however autobiographical, as here Brautigan talks about himself, and his work, from a first-person subjective viewpoint. Yet placing two chapters from one book into another destabilizes not only the integrity of the text but reminds readers that the term "novel"—to be faithful to its own meaning—needs to be constantly updated, and that experiment with the genre is the norm, from Lucian to Sterne to Joyce to Brautigan. It is therefore difficult to assert—as Malley does—that Brautigan is "consistently anti-literary throughout his books" (183), since in one sense at least being "anti-literary" in the criticism of what already has been produced in the name of literature is integral to the "literary" endeavor of whatever age. While nobody reads in In Watermelon Suga, and readers are not expected at the library in The Abortion, Brautigan's texts seem acutely conscious of their status as material objects; this is of course fundamental to the stacks and ranges of Brautigan's then-imaginary (and since real) library. Trout Fishing includes a reference to the covers as part of the text, and thus highlights the book as thing in the world. Both Terence Malley (152) and John Clayton (68) note the significance of this reference, the latter saying that the couple there depicted "reflect the nostalgia which permeates the book: for a simpler, more human, pre-industrial America." The book as a thing however is not so affected by this nostalgia, as the reference might cause a reader to reflect on contemporary marketing strategies, and their relation to that discrepancy highlighted in the old adage of judging a book by its cover.

Such nostalgia—for a time which, needless perhaps to point out, never existed except in the later imagination—leads (so Clayton) to a disengagement with the present, as it coalesces "a pastoral locked in the past, a pastoral which cannot be a viable social future." Here Clayton's critique itself can be related to wider theoretical aspects of reading Brautigan's texts. The material aesthetics of the book as object might well extend the argument of Walter Benjamin's 1931 speech about book-collecting, "Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus" ("Unpacking my library"). Here Benjamin addresses several topics that seem implicit in the acquisition of the Abortion library: for the collector, "not only books but copies of books ["Exemplare"] have their fates" ("Ich packe" 170; "Unpacking" 63); the best way of acquiring books is to write them oneself; reading a book is not essential to its acquisition (172; 63-64); and a collector cherishes a book bought solely because it appeared on the market "surrendered, ravished and abandoned" (["preisgegeben und verlassen"]; "dog-eared" or "thrown to the dogs" perhaps would together give the right nuance for the first German adjective in an appropriate, and here relevant, Anglophonic context [174; 65-66]). That one can cherish a book for the ephemeral accidental features which coalesce around it during its existence, and see these as part of its "aura" as an object (to conceive of their uncanny magical properties in Walter Benjamin's well-used term) are grounds for optimism which quite displace the haunting presence of "Richard Brautigan" as he delivers his Moose book to the library (Abortion 28).

Thus the pastoralism, as Clayton discusses it, need not be merely passé and nostalgic if it makes demands on the present reader to pick up and over the traces of a peremptorily abandoned trajectory, and thus to envisage a productive future, held in the promise of the book finding a reader. Such is also implicit in Walter Benjamin's philosophy, but more so perhaps in his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse. One could easily apply the first sentence of the first full chapter of the latter's One-Dimensional Man to the notion of reading which Brautigan's texts resist: reading as the product of apparent free choice is "comfortable, smooth, reasonable, [and] democratic," yet an "unfreedom" as the god of the machine, the realist author, is in command of the flow of action, even or particularly in more advanced forms which allow the reading public to set the norms and structure. The book market is a market like any other, its authors producers; such are now commonplaces in the cultural criticism of advanced industrial civilization masking itself as inevitable, sustainable and innovative technical progress.

Decades before the term "reception aesthetics" was raised to an integral part of literary studies, Walter Benjamin criticized such attempts. "Nowhere," he writes at the beginning of "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" ("The Task of the Translator") of 1923, does a "reflection on the receiver prove fruitful for [an artwork's] analysis" (cp. Illuminations 70). Brautigan's work has so often been defined by its readership that it has been taken as integrally related to it; once the counter-culture moves on, the work then will be mausoleumized, but only of course if new ways of reading the work do not arise. Readership—or the lack of it—is theme and motif in several of his books: through the library in The Abortion (1971) he cheerfully lambasts both profit and prophet motives underlying what is available for our reading; even more so now, with the Internet giving a seemingly infinite window of opportunity, readers can indulge in the creation of their own literary value, which while being both subjective and self-willed is yet informed by critical judgment, itself to be regarded as equally idiosyncratic. Similarly, Brautigan's prose follows its own course; it highlights the unusual, elusive and fleeting, and in its evocation of the ephemeral but significant fulfills the existentialist dictum of living in the moment. Such a style enables the detachment of Hemingway to accede to the verbal range and intrigue of Baudelaire: insouciant, ingénu, but not naïf. In this it is held in a generally Blakean orbit, although such a connection is often overlooked: as [William] Blake remarks in The Four Zoas (page 93), "Innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with Ignorance" (Blake 838). A reading can then be fresh and vital, expecially when it is informed by a knowledge of the strategic traditions behind the text.

A consideration of the manner in which Brautigan's texts are perceived in other traditions, Benjamin notwithstanding, permits a reflection on the writer's present importance and an intimation of his possible future place in American literature. In considering Brautigan's texts as they work through and are received by the elsewhere, the variety of reception, essential for his future significance, is noticeable. Given the above context which includes a leading French poet, a German writer whose main work is about Paris, and an English poet who both has been well-served by French translators (including André Gide) and has given his name to one of the most influential French small publishers (of [Yves] Bonnefoy and [Jacques] Derrida, for example), the consideration of such significance might well begin with France, in which there is no sign of a decline in this reputation. In October 2004, the popular series 10/18 reisssued several works in the translations by Marc Chénetier, whose 1983 monograph apparently won Brautigan's approval ("the Frog's got it right" [Keeler 150]) and who worked through a reception aesthetics of the writer in his subsequent Critical angles: European views of contemporary American literature (1986). Thierry Séchan's 1995 biography of Brautigan was reissued in 2003, evidence of an abiding fascination with the writer, even if its cover reported that Brautigan shot himself at his Montana ranch, rather than in Bolinas, California. Marie-Christine Agosto published in 1999 a short introduction to the writer, Richard Brautigan: Les Fleurs de néant, the title of which interlaces Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) with the quasi-existentialist "flowers of nothingness" which is granted an extra-Francophone dimension because the passage from which we can now see this borrowed (from the posthumous An Unfortunate Woman [91]) had first appeared in French (in 1994), that is more than a lustrum before its American publication in 2000. The characteristic brevity of Agosto's volume, however, does not permit much discussion of Brautigan's admired precursor from a specifically French perspective.

Brautigan has been in the past two decades one of the most widely published American authors in German translation. While the first translations, up to the mid-'eighties or so, appeared only sporadically, after the author's death the Eichborn Verlag, a quality paperback firm in Frankfurt am Main, published a near-complete uniform edition (the poems were proposed in an omnibus selected edition) in the translations of Günter Ohnemus (of whom more in another context later). In the 1990s, the cheaper dtv and then the more popular rororo publishers took up the books, the latter adorning the cover of a selection of the poems with a stylized comic-book rendering of [Felix] Nadar's photograph of Baudelaire and publishing in 1996 a slim edition of some of the Revenge stories as part of its 50th anniversary series. While June 30th has not been reprinted in English, it was republished in 1995 in Germany with the title Japan bis zum 30. Juni (Japan to June 30th), and in 1993 in France in the 10/18 series (the equivalent of dtv) with the title, reminiscent of the Japanese translation, Journal japonais: 13 mai-30 juin 1976; indeed, both the Japanese and the French translations had originally appeared in 1992. In October 2004, Express appeared in the same publishers; again, this is a work which has not been republished in the Anglophone world. In 2004 there were perhaps more of his books available in "old Europe" and in cheaper editions designed for a new market of perhaps younger readers, while at the same time publishers in the United States seem to prefer the more expensive omnibus format.

Generally, academic criticism in Anglophonic countries has emphasized the relation of Brautigan to Beats and Hippies, with a minor current associating him with Californian orientalist forces (themselves of course related to these groupings); such attempts both rather overplay the homogeneity of such inclinations, and act as heuristic limitations within which the texts are to be positioned. European criticism in contrast has played up the works' specific qualities themselves, and particularly their readerly effects, while following the Anglo-American lead in pinpointing Brautigan's sources (Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, and Hemingway for example); links to Raymond Carver and Paul Bowles are made, and at times to Charles Bukowski also, while the wider Western American tradition of humor is underplayed. Inventiveness, nimble-mindedness and humor are foregrounded instead of counter-cultural elements, which would thirty years on in any case rather date the works. Thus while the announcements in the 1991 rororo edition of Express point out that Brautigan was "the cult-author of American campus-youths," this is mentioned in a context which establishes first more universal features of the prose. The 2003 Italian translation of The Abortion (less controversially entitled La casa dei libri [The House of Books]) typically says that the work "places him among the classics of the 20th century."

Generally, then, Europeans project Brautigan as an author for the contemporary. Making the texts available for a new generation, there is little attempt to evoke nostalgically an époque of which these readers have no personal memories. While Brautigan's poems—even in that respect, that some readers do not find them poems at all—have certain affinities with Imagist texts, or more specifically (in manner if not in articulation) with Lawrence's unrhyming poems, they also find a contemporary resonance in a collection like Grass's Fundsachen fur Nichtleser (Found Objects for Non-Readers, 1997), a collection of oddments, detritus, and close observations in laconic, witty free verses with full-page watercolor illustrations, including one about readers who send him run-over frogs (34; Grass has written a novel called Unkenrufe, translated as The Call of the Toad) and another about the smell of humans' "Scheiée" (153) which might recall Brautigan's "December 30" (Pill 32). Chatman, Kent (UK) local hero-poet, artist and punk-rocker Billy Childish has many similar Brautigan resonances in his Calling Things by Their Proper Names (2003; the title is modified from Confucius), where the poems are accompanied by woodcuts, and in which one finds a matching tonality:
Let me be known as
The hero of hunger
Who turned down a
Three
Thousand quid [£]
Poem
[Calling 27]

Nobel Prize-winners and punk-artist-poets are not of course "influenced" by Brautigan, but stand in a comparable relation to his work as that which Canadian poet Al Purdy once remarked of D.H. Lawrence: "when a poet . . . is influenced enough by Lawrence, he escapes all influence, including Lawrence" (147).

The publication of The Edna Webster Collection in 1999 began again the task of contextualizing Brautigan, even if this led on the rare occasion to a regionalist move of exoticizing him, as in the 2001 short piece by one aptly styling himself "Brooklyn" (Levi Asher) who calls the writer a "native of the deep Pacific Northwest" (Tacoma?!) with a "'white trash'" upbringing in Eugene. Far from confirming such a view of Brautigan as the Natty Bumppo of the dockyards, sawmills and canning factories, the Collection, which appeared in 2003 in France and just over a year later in Germany, is likely to extend contexts for reading in these countries. One notes for example the rootedness of Brautigan's interest in Hemingway (not of course in itself remarkable), as in the poem "argument" (121), and the short piece "Somebody from Hemingway Land" (62). In both are evident the ludic approach to genre divisions and the dialogic qualities in the search for a discourse partner or a reader who would get the subtleties. Among some clever strong readings of recent poets (cummings, Williams, Thomas), and of Baudelaire, there are echoes of Lawrence's Pansies poems in this volume, particularly in the "Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown, part 2" section. Brautigan has "a few ideas of his own," including perhaps—an idea to be taken up in The Abortion but of course fundamental to European Modernism from Cocteau to the (London) International Times—that an unknown poet is still a poet, even perhaps better if impervious to fama. Brautigan calls his thoughts ideas "More/or/less" (7), but they set a tone for his later work. While Abbott contends in his introduction that at 21, Brautigan was to enter "the education of San Francisco life" (xvii), what is remarkable about the collection is how far he had already gone in outlining his own visionary company before he left Eugene. (I often think that had he not lived there in his youth, he might have settled there later; Kesey, Sturgeon and Brautigan would have been a highly productive mix with the wrestlers and the track stars.)

While the increasingly international and trans-generational contexts of reading in some ways extend those already positioned, the "aura" of Brautigan's particular texts is never itself lost since one viable, undeniable literary context for his work is that of magic realism, and particularly the poetry—if not the architectonics—of Jorge Luis Borges offer specific fruitful comparisons. Indeed, it is this alien quality which, like every import, maintains a growing international market for such books, particularly granted their ambivalence to temporal setting; they are of an age and of all time. Implanting such texts into new cultures modifies the host environment, which in turn makes demands on the import to be productive and to resonate; given that so much of the readerly experience of a Brautigan text—like many other texts of magic realism&$8212;is singular to the individual, the context is unique to each reading, and the topographical references, which mean so much to those familiar with the Pacific Slope, are open to many interpretations. Like magic realism itself, Brautigan's texts propose no explicit commentaries, but instead announce a world-vision—in this case, an Americana—which is at once both already passé and to come. For a contemporary readership, the term "counter-culture" is misleading, as the cultural context to which the texts run counter and by which they are defined, negatively, has been lost to sight—readers can designate new ones. Brautigan's West Coast, like Dickens's London or Hemingway's Paris, is both a product of temporal or chronological placement and its transcendence. While readers are then guided by their own cultural placement and the inclination this may imply to the texts, this guidance is never restrictive, since open source in library and bookshop ranges, and the increasing access to bibliographic materials on the Internet, make the serendipitous and random hallmarks of individual reading choice. With the assumption of equitability in economic and cultural level, an increasingly transnational literary market, and the continuing emplacement of English as adjunct language, the particular reception without America of an American text is more mainstream than supplement. To follow Jay Boyer's provocative but rather understated argument (40), Brautigan's texts are suitable for such a development because they rarely pontificate or make claims, but leave gaps—Wolfgang Iser's "Leerstellen" or "empty spaces"—which need to be brought to fulfillment by the reader (40).

If the text as a commodity can be refashioned, the idea of commodification itself is questioned, since the textual object is offered to various receptive, imaginative and transformative readings which might, in Harold Bloom's terms, be misreadings, might be idiosyncratic if illuminating moments in a café, but which bring the otherness which is the text into the orbit of that other which is the mind reading it. In such multiple contexts of reading, the consideration of details is paramount, but inevitable erroneous impressions have their part in the experience, as this detaches itself from a root meaning in one culture. Some years ago, reading the German translation of Revenge, I noticed that a paragraph had, in my version at least, been displaced from "A Study of California Flowers" to "Memory of a Girl." I corresponded with Ohnemus, who at first had trouble explaining the discrepancy; it finally appeared that the error had in fact been made when the Pocket Books edition was produced from the Simon and Schuster text. There may indeed be more such discrepancies, which seem to multiply with the increasing adoption of new printing technology. Again, the availability of the text in a proliferation of editions and translations (including three in German) makes inevitable the question both of the commodification of the work as a material object (a theme paramount of course in Benjamin, especially his 1934 Paris lecture on "The Author as Producer"), and of the necessity for a critical edition which would establish a definite text. Lew Welch's oft-quoted contention from his December 15th, 1968, San Francisco Chronicle review of In Watermelon Sugar that "when we are very old," people will write a new genre "invented" by Brautigan and named in his honor would imply the need for such editions (22). The work demands a popular reception by the reader who—like Ohnemus in his self-description as flâneur in his letter to me—spends months mostly wandering around a summer city gazing at the people eating chocolate cake in outdoor cafés and occasionally reading a page from Revenge which he carries in his pocket. Yet the work also calls for a more contextual, literary-historical or theoretical approach which would ground the affective speculation or wishful thinking which has surrounded the texts with a determined coordinated assurance.

Such determination of Brautigan's status can already be calculated through a consideration of the extent and nature of his influence, the manner in which later writers envelop his linguistic modalities into their own work. Zeit reviewer Andreas Nentwich has called Brautigan's translator Günter Ohnemus "der amerikanische Romantiker" of German literature. His 1998 novel Der Tiger auf deiner Schulter (The Tiger on Your Shoulder) has often been compared to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, a connection drawn as part of the publicity blurb for the 2004 French translation. German authors from Goethe to Plenzdorf also provide precursors, especially in the Werther figure (as for all Bildungsromane). Yet for all the clear affinities, the contrasts are equally apparent, and of equal significance are the allusions to Richard Brautigan, not surprising of course given the attention Ohnemus has given to Brautigan's work. Clearly there are moments of allusive gestures to Salinger in Brautigan's own work, as between the opening of the "My Name" chapter of In Watermelon Sugar and the first lines of Salinger's 1951 novel, but Holden himself cites David Copperfield as an influence, even if a negative one, and the circle of other possible literary ancestors is wide and popular. Tiger ends with two epilogues (thus going partway along the trajectory of the ending of A Confederate General) and the final lines are Ohnemus's translation of Brautigan's "Abalone Curry" from Rommel. Ohnemus however acknowledges the debt only so far as to say that the poem is by someone "whose voice" he had once been.

Like Grass and Childish mentioned above, Ohnemus has also included Brautigan's recognizable techniques in his Reise in die Angst (2002; English translation as The Russian Passenger [2004]). In a novel which reprints a chapter from Confederate General, it is not surprising that the main character Harry has named his daughter "Jessie," not for Jessica but "Jessie for Jessie" (Reise 39; Passenger 25), or that later sections are set in San Francisco, people arrange to eat at Enrico's (Reise 247; Passenger 212), at least in its Jackson Square incarnation an established landmark on the Brautigan circuit. Ohnemus establishes another possible Brautigan connection when Harry starts his narrative by stating that he is fifty years old, and referring to that threshold age as that at which a "good Buddhist" must leave behind possessions and embark on the next stage of life, that of disburdening. "There's no escaping people who write stupid things about you," claims Ohnemus's narrator Harry (Reise 73; Passenger 57), a phrase which echoes, rather self-consciously, Brautigan's in his February 1984 Japan poem about "all the shit" that would be written about him after his death. Later in the novel, a character writes to Harry: "I'm writing, because I want to talk with you and because you aren't here" (Reise 258; Passenger 222), which one might suspect is another conscious rephrasing from Brautigan, the second half of the first sentence of In Watermelon Sugar. In a page-length section which might fit well into Brautigan's novel, Harry searches for something to say to Susannah: "it isn't important what we say, because voices are music" and comes up with: "Gee, you're so beautiful that it's starting to rain," a title of a poem of course from Pill. Again not revealing his precise source, but allowing readers of Brautigan to understand the critical glance involved, Harry merely says that this is from "some hippy poem" (Reise 257; Passenger 220—neither German or English texts acknowledge this source). There are two epigraphs to Ohnemus's novel, the first from [Leo] Tolstoy, the second, supposedly from "an old hippy poster in San Francisco," the three lines of "A Closet Freezes" from Rommel (56), which is later described—in another muted critical assessment—as being by "some crazy hippy poet" (Reise 248; Passenger 212).

"Sonja heiét sie" says Andreas Nentwich in his Die Zeit review: "her name is Sonja." Yes, but not altogether so; the full name of the character from Ohnemus's novel is Sonja Kowalewskaja. Why does a Russian Mafia-wife, "the Russian passenger" of the title in English translation, have the name of a famous mathematician (1850-91), the first female member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1889) and the author of both The Nihilist Woman and the prize-winning Question of the Rotation of a Hard Body around an Unmovable Point (Sur le problème de la rotation d'un corps solide autour d'un point fixe [1888])? Ohnemus has presumably read her Memories of Childhood (1890), which appeared in a 1963 Kiepenheuer (Weimar) edition and then in a series edited by Peter Härtling from Fischer in Frankfurt am Main (1968). Since the Sonja of Reise is the daughter of a general, and the mathematician of an artillery officer, and since both the Memories and Reise include a summary of [Edward George] Bulwer-Lytton's Harold (1848), the connections are beyond a coincidence, even though few readers would be able to establish the connection, which—like certain passages in Brautigan—has the appearance of a private or "in" joke. Kovalevskaya—to Anglicize her name and to make the distinction clearer from Ohnemus's character—wrote her Memories in what the Kiepenheuer editors describe as a "prose reminiscent of [Ivan] Turgenev," and indeed the text includes in its 10 chapters many characterizations which could have come from Fathers and Sons (1862) and other literary works, including David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, The Moonstone and Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky indeed makes an appearance towards the end, as a suitor for Sonya's elder sister, who will later marry Victor Jaclard and take a memorable role in the Paris Commune of 1870-71.

What, however, does Kovalevskaya have to do with Brautigan? There are perhaps more specific connections to which Ohnemus might point interested readers. Kovalevskaya's eighth chapter is set in the heady days of the 1860s, a period reminiscent of the 1960s: there was, she says, only one problem then, that of the conflict between the old and young generations. Many daughters of good families sought out communes in the capital, even if nobody was quite sure where they were or why the police allowed them to exist (Erinnerungen 114); in a later section which casts interesting light on Dostoyevsky in his mid-forties, Sonya eavesdrops on his rejected proposal to Anna. While Reise is set in the recent past (1999-2000) or so, the spirit of the earlier decade permeates the novel, especially when Harry talks of attending school in the US as a teenager and later teams up with an old friend from that period. More important, however, is that light touch with literary sources, which binds together Kovalevskaya, Brautigan and Ohnemus. As Tony Tanner notes, literary allusions in Brautigan are "typically quiet and unobtrusive" (414); as I have claimed above, readers' imaginations, more perhaps than their literary knowledge, are required to make the connections, as in the case of that between the "Russian passenger" and the mathematician in Ohnemus's novel. The interpenetration of the historical and the aesthetic, so that one is an unacknowledged prosthetic of the other, but without the former assuming ascendancy over the latter, is a technique of collage that could well come from one of Brautigan's texts.

Since three very different writers in very different circumstances adopt such a technique, and Brautigan's texts play a key role in aligning their resonances, his interfusing of the historical and the literary partakes of a wide tradition; it is no discredit to Ohnemus to claim that the incorporation of such supernumerary allusions is a strategy that could well have been discerned in the American's work. "In the American grain" (again, Malley's contention [186]), each plank in his work—like Margaret's board in In Watermelon Sugar—has its own resonance and pitch, and is composed of materials from long "years ago" which cannot now be distinguished (3). Thus the exorbitant or extra-vagant is nailed or riveted into the main text, as most clearly perhaps in Trout Fishing, which includes a pastiche of other books, imaginings and genres, and it is in this "grain" that a novel like Ohnemus's Reise can well be positioned. Sometimes the connections are so far-fetched that mentioning them seems absurd, but this is part of the materialist aesthetics at play in Brautigan, his skirting the limits of the plausible in order to let us glimpse the ideal, or—to quote the subtitle of a play written by Kovalevskaya and her friend Anna-Charlotte Leffler—to reflect on "how it was and how it could have been." Brautigan similarly reverses the trajectory of [Ernst] Bloch's utopian, teasing out other pathways and associations than those delineated by history (as in the opening of Confederate General and of course the "history" lessons in Revenge), but in order to highlight a possible, but overlooked, productive line of development into the future.

James Maguire has noted that "reading works by Brautigan and Stegner, the reader is constantly reminded that the West, for all its isolation, is part of the world" (26), and Ohnemus's text shows a productive engagement with the Western, if specifically San Franciscan, in Brautigan. Brautigan himself provides a wider geographical vision in his sojourns in Japan, in 1976 and later, which offer equivalent reflections on a lateral geographical outreach for a source of literary particulars. Brautigan's works continue to do well in Japan, of which he wrote so well, and where his fame preceded him. Greg Keeler notes that Trout Fishing (known, apparently, in Japan as a "dark" book) was once used to sell a brand of sunglasses (33); throughout Keeler's narrative, Japanese press and business people appear in Montana to interview Brautigan or, on one fateful occasion, to use his house for a Jim Beam commercial (34; 143). The Abortion and In Watermelon Sugar, both of which had appeared in Japanese translation in the 1970s, reappeared in 2002 and 2003 respectively. In 1999, the 1992 translation of June 30th, June 30th (1978) as Tõkyõ nikki (Tokyo Diary) was reissued, translated by Fukuma Kenji, the choice of title picking up the reference to the "diary" in Brautigan's introduction (11), even if that cultural reflection and mirroring implicit in the original title are not retained. Tõkyõ nikki is, for a Japanese text of translated poetry, reasonably priced if not exactly cheap (some USD 15; the novels are even now half that price), and there is a clear market for the book, hard to find in the United States. The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) was translated in 1982, but is now unavailable, although second-hand copies are offered on the Amazon Japan site.

What appears as the qualitative new can mask an ersatz iterative; what can appear passé may not have found its time; and a writer can be given a renewed significance after being discovered elsewhere and brought back into an originary context. Blake was reassessed after Yeats's edition, and Lukács made Scott interesting again for readers of Brautigan's generation. Ernst Bloch contended, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle [of] Hope [written 1938-1947 in the USA, and first published in 1959]), that a moment of apparent novelty can be illusory, a mere point of contrast with the habitual and repetitive (231; 201). Surrounded by "novelty" today, we are now conditioned to its transformation from important, integral and essential to mere beautification and of course advertising (169; 148-9). In Brautigan's case, the recognition of novelty elsewhere is productive in its comparison with familiar social, cultural and economic features of modernity, so that the American moment is seen as just one aspect of the modern and that which is but mere innovation can be set against that which is a true productive discovery. The movement into the new and unknown, the "strange land" as which Jim Harrison describes Japan in his assessment positioned in the back-cover blurb to June 30th, is always partial, never leaves the past behind entirely, and always carries with it the premonition of eventual disappointment or distraction; in this, Bloch, Lawrence and Baudelaire (of "Le Voyage") join with Brautigan.

Harrison's view offers again an old model of the country, one predicated on mystical-religious rather than cultural, economic or social factors. In contrast, a most pervasive, timely feature of Brautigan's experiences of Japan is their very contemporaneity, their inclusiveness of all aspects of Japanese modernity. Brautigan presents the changing economic position of the nation at a time when its GNP was fast approaching that of the US (and it might be timely also to note that the US dollar is now worth about half of what is was at the time of Brautigan's final visit to the country). There are of course rock gardens, geishas and kimonos in the two Japan volumes, but these are most likely combined with visits to "American bars," working women on the subway, or—as in the first poem of June—a television interview with traditionally dressed women and a Kitty Hawk biplane. Such an opposition between the traditional and the modern or between Oriental and Western is blurred, leading to an amalgam of various cultural tropes of ethnicity. Given the (at times hostile) awareness of the Asian population in the Northwest in Brautigan's early years, an acquaintance with such an ethnic range was presumably granted him through his first seven years or so in Tacoma, particularly in the light of the city's role as a port and its attraction for northeastern Asian immigrants who might find the topography hauntingly familiar. (This uncanny double take might indeed occur to readers familiar with the Northwest on looking at the back cover photograph of Express, which shows Brautigan and Shiina [Takako], with a background of misty hillsides reminiscent of Puget Sound.) Some thirty years after his journey, Japan is no longer "strange" (and the degree of such estrangement is often exaggerated anyway) as its popular culture—manga, anime for example—is increasingly known abroad. From our contemporary vantage point, however, it is perhaps easy to underestimate Brautigan's achievement here at clearing away the clichés that had beset Euro-American visions of Japan.

Among many such commentators, Kathryn Hume has presented Brautigan as an "aesthetician" and "conscious artist who used Zen principles"; he thus "invites an unusual sort of reader response modeled upon Zen observation" (76). In his "Introduction" to June (8), Brautigan does reveal his fascination, while still in high school in Eugene, with the "form of dew-like steel" in the works of Bashõ and Issa, but his remarks are about aesthetics rather than spirituality; he could perhaps have found the same by looking through a collection of Imagist poetry. While plotting of such undercurrents extends critical discourse, as when Chénetier skirts the implications of such an interest in specific passages (87-88), Hume's essay, which gives an overview of the writer rather than a detailed reading of any particular texts to tease out implications of her main claim, neither proves "conscious" Zen use, nor explains how such a "model" can be tested by readers unconscious of Zen. She has, surprisingly perhaps, little to say about Express (just over a page [85-87]), and nothing about June 30th, in the "Introduction" to which Brautigan claims—rather disingenuously perhaps—to have "picked up Buddhism through osmosis by watching the way my friends lived" (9). He is listed as a participant in a 1979 MLA panel on Zen and American Literature, but again this does not in itself strengthen claims about his own literary texts. Zen has become, perhaps by osmosis indeed, one of those commonplaces about Japan that are often associated with writers of Brautigan's generation, and is considered sufficiently abstruse for a variety of opinions and impressions to be entertained about it. Such claims offer few interpretative possibilities for the presentation of the diurnal and the workaday foregrounded in Brautigan's own texts about Japan. While it is tempting to see a short passage like "The Pacific Ocean" (Express 50) as a koan on the "incalculable" "Buddha-lands" (Flower Ornament [Hwa Yen/Kegonkyo/Avatamsaka Sutra] Scripture 891-892), such connections are rather summarily made if seen through the prism of a Zen "model."

Claudia Grossmann approaches Brautigan through Zen also, and has comparable problems of applying "the Budddhist teaching of transience of the material world," especially as she combines this with a quasi-Heideggerean view of the "elasticity [Nichtfestigkeit] of phenomena because of their dynamic potential" (110). [Martin] Heidegger does not help her subsequent consideration of Brautigan's use of metaphor, as the approach seems rather too abstract to define specific qualities within the work, and emphasizes context over original talent. Such a presentation of Buddhist teachings becomes a little difficult for Grossmann to reconcile with another of her points, itself common in the German criticism, that his poetry shows a "droll ["skurriler"] disposition" (110). She quotes all of "Taking No Chances" (June 83), then claims that "Zen-Buddhism doesn't recognize this kind of skepticism" (100) presented in the final lines.

Both Grossmann and Hume find little place for humor in their conception of Zen—Hume in fact repeating such terms as "dispassionate observation" (77) and "Zen detachment and passivity" (81)—while a look through Stryk and Ikemoto's 1977 collection of Zen Poetry would encourage a consideration of skepticism and humor (114). One might particularly note the poems written in response to Bashõ's "Frog" haiku (47; especially [Koshi no] Sengai's 36): Furu ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto. Brautigan, indeed, shares this jocular disposition towards frogs. Not entirely coincidentally, perhaps, the sound of the frogs' plopping in the water disturbs Jessie and Lee at Big Sur (Confederate General 102). It is, moreover, the "Preparing for Ecclesiastes" chapter, which talks of their irritation at length, which Ohnemus quotes (without however betraying his source) in Reise in die Angst (45-48), and which here makes the joke further reverberate from Sengai and Brautigan. One suspects the June persona of more than an in-joke for readers of his when he writes in a poem "Japan Minus Frogs" that he cannot find the word for frog in his Japanese-English dictionary (45). The question of course, might well be why Brautigan was looking the word up, and whether literary references have anything to do with it (maybe he just wanted to order frog, or saw something that reminded him of frogs' legs, etc.). Sengai's poem, and the last poem in the Zen Poetry anthology, by Shinkichi Takahashi, have all the qualities of a quizzical, sometime self-defacing engagement with the everyday which is at once very far from and intimately bound with the encounter of the mystical in the everyday. One wonders then, whether the Zen side should be supplemented or supplanted by a more sardonic, even droll figure like that of Chuang Tzu, if any East Asian philosophy is to be granted the status of a metalanguage to Brautigan's.

Grossmann's comments and Hume's article therefore take as assumed what is to be more rigorously proven, if this is indeed possible. They have certain affinities with the self-confidence which gives the title 102 racconti zen (102 Zen Tales; that is, one more than the Paul Reps anthology) to a 1999 Italian selection of stories from Revenge and Tokyo. Apart from a few rather general remarks—"Zen applied to the simple things of life" for example—on the back-cover blurb, Daniele Brolli in his afterword, otherwise comprehensive with references ranging from Henry David Thoreau to Kenzaburo Õe, cannot define the precisely Zen qualities of the stories. Not entirely accidentally perhaps, the collection starts off with "Coffee" from Revenge, and the translation itself fits well into a stereotypical Italian context: "A volte la vita è solo una questione di caffè, e del grado del intimità che pu concedere una tazza di caffè" (4).

Few commentators then discuss in much detail the role of Zen as an aesthetic practice, as its relation to actual Japanese social concepts is treated in a summary fashion at best. Such concepts foreground, as often commented, reconciliation, but this as a process rather than a state, and even less a state of abandonment as it is often presented outside Asia: docility and obedience are therefore choices, made in context, rather than preconditions, particularly in the contemporary period. Mystical, civic teaching and jocularity combine in these perspectives. Central to such thinking is the view that one can therefore produce the absence of something, and both that absence and the effort to make it are of importance here. While then Zen—as zazen, as wu-wei—is taken as synonymous with "no action," consideration of both the context within which such a practice takes place, and of the mind's negotiation with it, is integral. As writers as diverse as the Chinese sages and Derrida have noted, silence—a blank space, tabula rasa or interstitiality—is essential for the production of any meaning at all, including that of the production of no-meaning, and the moment between, even if held in stasis or abeyance, imbricated in the strategic involvement, no matter how disciplined or minimal, before and after the moment of hiatus.

The growing reception of one culture by another, and of Brautigan's texts in international contexts, provides the background for what Maguire calls "an increasingly sophisticated readership" (27) which would recognize the different traditions—represented by writers as varied as Benjamin and Õe—which serve as contexts for the contemporary readings of Brautigan. In such cosmopolitan texts, as in Brautigan's descriptions of Japan, it is the everyday, the singular but not the exotic, which fascinates. Both in his texts about and in his private visits to Japan, Brautigan concentrates on the ordinary, which takes on a special aura for him; since writerly and personal are in this respect at least comparable, criticism has sometimes confused them, in order to overemphasize the latter, even if this is not so easily denied. Visiting her father during his second stay there in 1977, for example, Ianthe describes "the Brautigan tour: the plastic food in the windows of the noodle shops, pachinko machines, cherry blossoms at midnight, the bullet train, Kyoto" (118).

As a timely corrective to a more mystical vision of Japan which has latterly characterized Western American approaches to the nation, Brautigan foregrounds what might largely be called secular aesthetics, everyday working life, over the religious and the token traditional. Edward Halsey Foster makes a valuable, often overlooked but undeveloped point about Express, that while it might be seen to make "explicit" the previously "implicit" "profound effect" of "Japanese culture in general and Zen Buddhism in particular," the actual circumstances in which Brautigan stays in Japan, and what he found there—contrary perhaps to the "osmosis" with which he claims to have picked up Zen in San Francisco from his friends (June 9)—are much more interpenetrating, humdrum and secular: "He finds the values of the East thriving in Montana, and the values of the West doing a rich business in Japan" (118). There is something optimistic about this side of globalization, perhaps, as a productive intermingling of viewpoints, a gradual cultural osmosis, far from the conviction of pre-Meiji isolationist Japan and its contemporary variants.

The recognition of such multiplicity inherent in both the reception and the construction of the textual serves then to position within contemporary cross-cultural relations the self-presentation of the persona or narrator in Brautigan's two Japan books. Brautigan here is granted the status of privileged outsider, well respected as a famous writer but like all foreigners something of a ghostly presence among the Japanese. Allowances can be made for such a one. He cannot be expected to get the codes right, and any assumption on the outsider's part of an easy familiarity would be arrogant and premature. Brautigan has little familiarity with the land, and cannot even take on the guise of anthropologist, since he does not know the questions to which he might obtain preprogrammed and therefore misleading answers. The best he can do is to report minute features, much like that populist kind of British sociology in the mid-twentieth century, known as "mass observation," which sent out teams of watchers to report back the essential trivia of everyday life. We are all, perhaps, as the title of one poem has it, in "a small boat on the voyage of archaeology" (48), and cannot foresee what future archaeologists will find of consequence in understanding the present.

For all the explication of the private and the subjective in Japan texts, Brautigan's persona fits that of an established literary guise. He updates the 19th century Parisian flâneur, the fashionable urban idler through the city, easily distracted by but purposive in his attention to its idiosyncrasies, fashions and nuances, whose own individual response is sublimated by the generic posture he adopts as a distinct urban type. The flâneur is in search of something indefinite, the ultimate essence of the city, and is characterized by a seemingly erratic wandering through it (the word, originally from Norman French, has etymological associations with Greek planasthai, to wander, as of course in the word planet). In the most comprehensive presentation of the phenomenon, Walter Benjamin, in a vast compendium (more than 1,000 pages) of clippings and jottings, published posthumously in the spirit of a textual flâneur his Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project). This both enacted literally and amassed materials about 19th century Paris, as this work has come to symbolize a productive definition of the flâneur, in its unfinished nature suggesting ironically that no definitive overview of the phenomenon can be granted. Contemporary Tokyo is one such site in which the cultural type finds a contemporary resonance, one that both fits with Brautigan's early interest in Baudelaire (who along with Balzac, did much to identify the characteristics upon which Benjamin draws), and contextualizes his behavior through a paradigm accessible to many European readers. It therefore draws together various strands—the tricontinental outreach—which I am attempting to lace through this essay. Just as 19th century Paris enabled Benjamin to understand better contemporary Berlin, the reality of Japan serves to illuminate Brautigan's coastal and inland Northwest, not least in this respect the appropriation of the country in his contemporaries' imagination.

Tokyo itself and, indeed, Japanese traditional architecture also are remarkable in the ease with which the boundary between a building's interior and exterior can be breached, a feature which recreates that essential context for the flâneur in Benjamin's terms: making the "boulevard into an intérieur" (Opitz 526; Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 37). Tokyo is interlaced with arcades, many with extensive series of basements; shopping centers serve as above-ground locators of subway stations, and many department stores have their own dedicated, marked subway exits. The main underground exit of Shinjuku station, one of the busiest in Japan and often mentioned in Brautigan's work, has been a vast campground for the homeless, who construct their cardboard dwellings in plain view of the insouciant commuters. While in Tokyo, Brautigan stayed at the Keio Plaza hotel (incidentally misspelled in several commentaries), and might have spent many hours just wandering around the city-within-a-city, a vast labyrinth of arcades connecting, through passages and walkways, over several city blocks, and extending to Shinjuku. Indeed, in one poem, he describes such flânerie, including tips about "Things to Do on a Boring Night in a Hotel" (June 52). With everything new and thus in a literal way remarkable, but with no compelling reason except notional literary value to find any one article of greater significance than another (that is, with little knowledge of the language or culture itself), Brautigan can take simple delight in repeated trips on the elevator, dadaist pranks and so on, all of which bring out in him that which Charles Baudelaire notes—in a section of his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life"—is the child within the flâneur. Indeed, in one forthright but essentially dialogically ambiguous poem, the persona notes that he never really stopped "being a child / playing games" (June 93).

Even if one able commentator on Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, claims that the traffic put an end to the flâneur (103), this view is counterbalanced by his own note that flânerie is possible even on public transportation. He remarks that an elderly Victor Hugo reflects on riding on the newly intergrated democratic "omnibuses": "er gern auf den impériales der Omnibusse in Paris spazieren fuhr" (["he liked to travel-for-a-walk on the 'imperial decks'—the upper decks—of the omnibuses"] Passagen-Wer 554-55; my emphasis). Part of the crowd, and yet in a way both literally and socially distinguished from it, Hugo here fulfills the condition of the flâneur even if in motion. This is comparable with Brautigan's own early impression of Tokyo, as when he uses as a context for his stories the Tokyo Yamanote-sen (Yamanote Japan Rail line, in some ways comparable to Chicago's Loop line), which enacts an uncanny symbiosis with the city's buildings, shaping itself to their contours and almost behaving as a mobile annex to them. From such a vantage point, the city becomes a moving arcade from which the persona—Agosto's "sélectif" (11)—can glean observations carefully but seemingly at will. Such is also the case with the bullet-trains (shinkansen), and other forms of high-speed transport, as in "Traveling toward Osaka on the Freeway from Tokyo" (June 53), or in "Imaginary Beginning to Japan" (Express 236) in which he imagines flying into Japan with millions of people waving chopsticks in welcome.

Benjamin gives a productive reading of accelerated sense-activity which is part of urban disorientation when he quotes Georg Simmel's view that one of the most disorienting effects of public transport is to see without appearing to listen, and thus to enact a kind of uncanny relationship with one's fellow travelers (Opitz 527; Benjamin, Baudelaire 38). Brautigan's works are full of such speculation, of seeing but not being able—for both linguistic and social reasons—to communicate, as he laments throughout June 30th, for example in a poem whose title refers to—a very conservative estimate of—the population of Tokyo at the time, "The 12,000,000" (30). Alone and incommunicado, Brautigan is no more so than many another subway passenger; in this, he is akin to an acknowledged literary precursor, Charles Baudelaire himself, of whom Benjamin writes that he "loved solitude, but he wanted it in the crowd" (539; 50). Baudelaire writes in the 1863 "Painter of Modern Life" essay: "For the consummate flâneur, for the impassioned observer, it is an immense pleasure to take up residence in the mass. . . . To see the world, to be at its centre and to remain hidden from it, these are some of the small pleasures of these independent, passionate and impartial spirits which the language can only clumsily ['maladroitement'] define." Benjamin emphasizes this point (529), calling it a "dialectic," and this is also the condition to which Brautigan aspires in his private musing in public spaces.

For someone who—as he notes in the introduction to June 30th (10)—dislikes traveling (10), Brautigan foregrounds it throughout June and Express. The titles of both texts are of course, one rather more implicitly than the other, references to the effects of intercontinental transport (the doubling of the date as, in both titles, one moves west across the international date line; in this respect at least America is behind East Asia). Claudia Grossmann generalizes about the entangled "coming together" and "opposition" of cultures which form a precondition for Brautigan's work and its international reception (218), and this—a typical state of international relations today, from the political to the touristic level—informs that unstable position, an interstitiality which is best expressed in this context in the hyphen between "Tokyo" and "Montana," which keeps the Japan books relevant two decades or more after their publication. While there are moments in June 30th when the persona seems to wish to cancel out the Japan by which he is surrounded and live instead in a dreamland of Montana, or the North American continent in general, the former country takes on a half-life of its own, an after-image, in those poems in which such a move is attempted. In the poem "Tokyo/June 13, 1976" (that is, about a month from the beginning of the "diary"), the persona imagines watching the Livingston Roundup on Independence Day, "Japan gone" (73). This is a curious kind of recusatio which would predict the end of something which has yet to come to fruition, proleptically leap over the remaining weeks in Tokyo and assert that this period will in that future moment be annulled. The mere anticipation of the Fourth of July shows a detachment, neither regret nor anticipation, but as a statement it is a counter-factual, not only because it is an imaginative projection but also because the very act of recording impressions of Japan gives them a permanence, a flight through the printed medium. The final poem "Land of the Rising Sun" intersects the geophysical and the geopolitical, applying the epithet of Japan to the reality of flying eastwards across the Pacific, and greeting the day—but, of course, as implicit throughout the volume from the title on, it is yesterday—which rises to meet one. America is therefore both the future and the already known, and that impression of newness which the persona carries back with him is less easy to disburden. In "The Past Cannot be Returned" (June 87), the titular thesis is undermined by the textual note, that some words were added to this Tokyo poem in Montana; at least, as literature, one can summon the past as a text.

Brautigan's persona lives in the moment: "we knew this moment / we were here" he says in "Future" (June 38), an outreach to the great Blochian "not yet" which is "an element of progressions" through death to the consciousness that even this does not detract from the carpe-diem chance of the ephemeral (Prinzip 61; Principle 56). In using the past tense ("knew") for a present continuous reality, Brautigan implies what Bloch himself asserts, that "no person is really yet there [da]," and that any full assessment of what there is in the day to be seized is hardly ever appreciated (Prinzip 341; Principle 293). On the other hand, Brautigan falls short of this insight by confusing his "seizure" with what Bloch calls the "mere impressible" ("das bloße Impressible"), its surface of passion and pain: the vitalistic or even the banal hedonistic (342; 293). Like the dandy-flâneur in Baudelaire's Paris, the persona highlights the unusual or even grotesque in the everyday, as in "Portrait of a Marriage" (Express 193) and "The Convention" (173). In this, he plays up what Baudelaire, in "The Salon of 1846," calls the "heroism of modern life," in which the marvelous confronts and nourishes everywhere ["abreuve"], "but we do not see it," or are fully equal to its challenges. Often, of course, a seizure of such intensity is but mock heroism. In "The Hillary Express" (June 19), Brautigan's persona describes his elation at the freedom of being able to order for himself in a Tokyo restaurant; we would share his joy, were it not that the Japanese for the dish he ordered—"curry and rice"—is, as might be expected, transliterated as kariraisu! Still, it is of such moments that the entry into the new culture is made. Elsewhere, the persona indulges in situationist activities which are not by their very nature provocative but which the narrator assures us are taken as such, as for example "ranting" on the shinkansen (56), sneaking into the Meiji shrine (68), or walking around with a clock (rather than perhaps Gérard de Nerval's lobster, but with comparable effects). Even that consummate writerly pose of writing in public settings can inspire the persona to think he is "weird," self-conscious or exposed to a chance interaction, as noted in "Writing Poetry in Public Places, Cafes, Bars, Etc." (June 30th 65). Lorna Sage, in her 1981 Observer review of Express, says that Brautigan is "an expert in the art of sitting still" (Barber 156), and one "voice" of the station-narrator in Express claims that Japan is "a good place" for watching people (230).

A characteristic self-effacement, in which reportage overcomes psychological projection, runs through the Japan texts, and the assertive or generalist authoritarian tone is limited, permitting in turn a readerly contribution in assessing the significance of an episode. "The Eyes of Japan" (Express 131) does not rail against women's willing acceptance of domesticity, nor does "Toothbrush Ghost Story" (86) probe into the "sensitivity of Japanese women"; indeed, it allows this to be inferred through the Japanese woman's actions—subdued, calm and resigned. There is no sense here of either the much-touted "inscrutability" of the Japanese or an intrusive assertion of discerning cultural particularities. Both women understand the situation, are clear in their own minds about it, and discussion would be endless and both ultimately and initially futile. While it would be tempting to ascribe the narrator's stance here to the recognition of cultural relativism, the recording of the observation, minus its implications, is enough. Like Nanci Griffith's persona who incorporates a taxi ride along the Falls Road into one of the most compelling songs of the 'eighties, Brautigan, who frequently describes taking taxis across Tokyo, realizes he should be content to "say from the back, '[he doesn't] know,'" and regrets his inquisitiveness about the taxi driver whose English is so good (June 62). Perhaps here, then, as in the vignette "In Pursuit of the Impossible Dream," one should simply keep in mind that there is "more here than meets the eye" (Tokyo 174), as one does not have enough cultural knowledge to make meaningful judgments. To perceive is of course also to be perceived, as the narrator here notes in closing. Integration with the observed, a basic principle of phenomenology, is an acclaimed attribute of the flâneur-poet, part of that which Baudelaire in his prose-poem "Crowds" ["Les foules"] calls the "holy prostitution of the soul" ["cette sainte prostitution de l'âme"] which makes itself available to any passing impulse (95).

Baudelaire's legacy for Brautigan, as routed through Benjamin, extends from the depiction of urban change and consequent alienation to the lapidary episodicity through which the flâneur-poet's vision encountering the city as material is presented. Such staccato, disjunctive interpolations of paragraph-length observations form a common trait in Baudelaire's prose-poems and Benjamin's Passagen of course, but also in the latter's Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street) and Brautigan's Express. Confronted on all sides with a plethora of information which cannot be shaped into a coherent, extended vision, Baudelaire's persona records his "spleen." Such a sentiment appears in Brautigan's story "The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You," in which the narrator, who has just left a train at a crowded station, reflects on a young woman he has noticed in the compartment and who appears to be as "young and sad" as the corresponding figure in Baudelaire's poem "À une passante" ("To a Woman Passing By"). In two notebooks in the Berkeley Bancroft collections (numbers 19 and 39, one of which at least is a notebook bought in Japan in 1976), there are notes for a story called "The Complete Absence of Twilight" which implies the geophysical impossibility of Baudelaire's crepuscular, interstitial wandering but ends with thoughts similar to those of "Sadness" / "Passante", a description of urban estrangement in the sentiment of a contact possibly offered but forever denied or brought only to partial fulfillment. Yet the denial by the woman is cause for creativity, a "journey in Tokyo called the complete absence"; for the flâneur, a further opportunity or distraction is soon revealed. Alienation gives rise to truncated social relations which can then be shaped into a literary expression appropriate to a moment of modernity and which project possible continuations through supplementary, if belated, fantasy.

Brautigan's narrator presents himself on occasion under those guises which Benjamin notes as familiar personae of the flâneur: the hunter or detective. In "A Mystery Story or Dashiell Hammett à la mode" (June 28), the persona takes on the suitable attributes, as he is careful not to leave his hotel room without those tools essential for his investigations, including notebook, writing materials, and of course his dictionary, but "the rest of life is a total mystery." In "Passing to Where?," the persona talks of taking out his passport to look at the photograph "just to see if [he] exist[s]" (72). Here, as in several other poems and some stories in Express, the persona takes on the guise of a mountain (or Montana) man lost in the urban wilderness, seeking out the remarkable and to him valuable, the urban hunter-type (Benjamin, Passagen 969-70).

At times Brautigan can even transform his persona into other sub-categories of the flâneur. He sees himself as a criminal, as in trespassing at the Meiji shrine ("Meiji Comedians," June 68). Since this criminality takes on resonances of the counter-cultural, the consciously anti-social, it needs to be, even if paradoxically, shown in public. Given a characteristic Western attire—the dust-jacket for Express shows Brautigan in jeans and cowboy hat—this aspect, which intersects with the flâneur as dandy, is culturally and temporally defined. Sometimes—as in his encounter with the Caucasian in a Keio Plaza elevator (June 46)—Brautigan presents himself offset, in the specifics of his style, habit and thought, to other fellow visitors, a counter-cultural nuance meaningless in Japan but resonant in the Pacific Northwest. In self-consciously dressing down, Brautigan takes on qualities of the flâneur's counterpart, the chiffonnier ("rag-collector," or—to use Benjamin's translation—"Lumpensammler"). While social superiority and importance are here encoded through dress, and while the fellow-traveler in the elevator clearly has paid a high price for his attire, the persona is however implicit in asserting his own superiority, both as he has a room on a higher (and thus no doubt more expensive) floor (the 30th [June 79]) and as he can take the wider, literally long-term view of human mortality and the meaning of an individual life (June 46). The "high life" is implicit in many pieces, even the unpublished ones, from the first Japan period, for example the schemes for stories on "American Airports and Tokyo Escalators" and "The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo" (from notebook 19 in the Bancroft collection). Brautigan made exceptional use of the hotel stationery, with a dozen of so sheets used as drafts of various pieces, all of which are crossed out. If Brautigan needed his passport to confirm his identity (as in "Passing to Where?"), the stationery gave him a sense, literal and material, of place.

Throughout the extracts—or chiffons—Benjamin collects in his section on the flâneur in Das Passagen-Werk the recognition of the magic of the city has repeated importance. "Things [are] represented to allow the observer to dream them," says Gustave Geffroy of the Parisian prints of Baudelaire's contemporary Charles Meryon (546), and Ernst Robert Curtius notes that the urban in Balzac is a rendering magical of nature, the "Arcanum" of "matter" ["Materie"] (547). Yet without a context or conduit in and through which this dream- or magic-work can be expressed, that is in contemporary cross-cultural contexts, it is thrust back on the perceiver, who performs the act of playing observer but cannot initiate an audience into its mysteries. Irving Wohlfarth has noted that both Benjamin and Baudelaire are chiffonniers or "rag-pickers" who collect observations as such people would rags. Brautigan too lives through a similar, and similarly unique, existential and textual collage, as he composes a fabric of relationships around his oblique, superfluous position to the society he observes but by which he is not socially or legally interpellated or to which he is obliged to account for himself. Lorna Sage calls Express "a parody travel-book" (Barber 156), but it is also the limit of all such books, as experiences can be described but not structured into a narrative which would explain causal relations, would permit aftercomers to share insights or profit from them, or would fashion an overview or map of the territory.

In the place of such a narrative we have a premonition of that television-clone and epigon, the Internet, a sign that communications can be accelerated or beautified (Bloch, Prinzip 169; Principle 148-9) but not given a new human purpose as a true social cohesive, in that Modernist techne already includes its updatings, trappings and trimmings which supposedly date the so-called postmodernist period. Brautigan's view, in the 1982 So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, that television has "crippled the imagination of America" (130) is (literally) off-set in "Tokyo Snow Story" (Express 146-147) in which the narrator is able to keep his dreams by imagining that the screen static after the broadcast day is like the sound of "hundreds of Japanese people talking quietly a few feet away like the sea from my bed until they turn to snow" (147). Far from constructing a story around a sharable observation, the essence of that conveyed here is a highly idiosyncratic vision founded on the absence of a signal, even if static and white noise might well be considered essential to the production of all signs. Given that an increasingly personalized infotech complements its ubiquitous social penetration, Brautigan's work can now be taken as part of this ubiquitous dreamwork in its collage of rapid images, its episodicity and jump-cuts and its brevity. With no core meaning to which a proliferation of images can refer, hybridity rather than integrity defines the result of a conglobing of highly personal contiguities, particularly in cross- or multi-cultural technological contexts.

A hybrid, bicultural experience is of necessity partial, and explicating its various components is a hallmark of contemporary multicultural criticism. Often, rather erroneously, perceived as a homogenous nation ethnically, linguistically and culturally, Japan presents more specifically an amalgam of historical shifts and cultural layerings, where—as Brautigan puts it in one title—"Pachinko" and "samurai" coexist (June 23). In the section of Express called "Sky Blue Pants," the narrator portrays a woman of "about eighteen" at a subway station, who moves along almost oblivious to the significance of the moment; this brief vision jump-cuts to a description of the "six centuries old" Moss Garden in Kyoto (249). In "The Eyes of Japan," Brautigan describes a vision of long historical tradition he detects in the eyes of a very modern woman who is confident of her own position in society and hybridity, who has Western furniture in her place and who drinks "sake on the rocks" (Express 132). Given such amalgams, no one trait can be said to dominate the outsider's perspective, and—piecemeal though it necessarily might be—the juxtaposition both denotes and expresses such hybridity. This one can relish, find confusing or alarming, or one can take pleasure in the disorientation.

Brautigan's poem "Taking No Chances" (June 30th 83) reflects on the indefinite but ineluctable lacunae in any extrapolation from individual to group identity or from microscosm to macrocosm; integration as one of a multiplicity of foci within interpersonal and object relations forbids that very allegoricisation which would make of the individual a type, at the very time as such lacunae make possible or even necessary the allegoricizing tendency. This, in my admittedly rather cryptic articulation, is Brautigan's recognition of a transpacific cultural dialectic which would be more a sequence of cultural and historical contiguities (although some now displaced or forgotten) than a simple bipolarization of forces. Trans-Bering over the Aleutians for example, one moves along an apparently (on a map) connected yet geographically isolated series of landfalls which were once traversed by some of the earliest settlers to North America, and it is the recognition of such a national genesis which Brautigan figures as his own biographical transformation on several occasions described in the Japan books. It is this that in turn lessens the charge of sentimentality and even self-pity that might otherwise become excessively maudlin. While "A Study in Roads" (June 32) lists many of the places in which Brautigan had lived (omitting, incidentally, Eugene) or which he had visited and implies that such roads taken lead to the despondency of the lonely drinker in a Tokyo bar, such a pattern of naming leads to the drawing of connections between them, and thus extrapolations which would place one in an uneasy relation to the others, rather than enacting a mere negation. Historicist reflection gives a sense of connections, even if these must—as all conjurings of the past—remain but illusory and virtual.

While however Benjamin's work and Euro-American Modernist thought in general serve to place Brautigan's narrator, there are also precursors for him in Japanese Modernism. Even if the depth of his understanding of Japan has probably been somewhat overestimated, his reading of Japanese texts (as for example in Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel [1976] which is dedicated to Tanizaki and which predates the Japan visits) gave him an insight into a Japanese aesthetic tradition of episodic textual structures, in which—as Masao Miyoshi notes—"dispersal" of the material is more common than resolution and "order" ("Against the Native Grain" 153-54). As reported by Steve Chappel in a February 11th 1980 San Francisco Examiner review (and quoted on John Barber's Brautigan Bibliography and Archive web site), Brautigan discovered that the Japanese, unlike the Americans, do not find his books "fragmented and pointless" and are more appreciative of the "structure of [his] novels." The antipathy to the fragmentary is of course a legacy of the Anglo-American new criticism, as a reaction perhaps to Eliot's Waste Land (a poet whom, according to Keeler, Brautigan admired [38]), and other aesthetic traditions—the German, from Romanticism on, for example—have also taken a more positive view.

Other Japanese aesthetic beliefs are also insightful here. A repeated observation about Brautigan's work is the prevalence of death and an associated melancholia. While these can well be discussed through biography and culture (war, hunting, etc.), they have a particular resonance in the Japanese aesthetic principle of yugen, the evocation, as in [Motokiyo] Zeami's plays, of the faint, mysterious, dimly or obliquely perceived, with its later (seventeenth century or so) offshoots of sabi and wabi, a quiet resignation to or muted pleasure in the transitory nature of life, as in "The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You" and "Sky Blue Pants" in Express. Typically associated with a contemplation of a wintry seashore, these concepts are given a contemporary nuance in such stories as "Tokyo Snow Story" (which integrates a cardinal sabi image, seen throughout Matsuo Bashõ's Narrow Road for example, into the title of [Yasujiro] Ozu's classic movie) where the image of "the sea at descending tide" is a ghostly, literally after-image of modernity (television programming).

Global communications have rendered ironic the value of the Modernist new, where if everything is novel nothing is new, as novelty itself is an old trick. If however, as Agosto claims, a feature of Brautigan's style is the use of "the materiality of language and its power to generate forms through which ephemeral images can arise" (113; my translation), and this quality can be linked to such Japanese aesthetic principles as sabi, the presentation of the ephemeral is a major contribution to a cross-cultural dialogue, and not, as John Berry claims in a Washington Post Book World review of Express, a flaw (Barber, Bibliography 152). Indeed, in this reading and contra Berry, that the "descriptions wilt after a while" is the very point he should be applauding. Reflection on objects and their relations to modern life is facilitated by technology, itself fleeting as subject to obsolescence, which grants the expressions of private meanings which are both reflective and spontaneous, since I can of course change my email or SMS message before I allow it to be sent, but do so with the understanding that I need not send a finished product. The narrative techniques of Brautigan's two Japan books keep pace with or even announce such social changes, as they similarly record the experience of the everyday.

The story "Sky Blue Pants" (Express 247) presents various historical and aesthetic contexts on the ephemeral. The narrative perspective abrogates to itself a vision of the future which it cannot communicate to the young woman who would be most interested in hearing it. Given however that it is plain that she has already imbibed the message, this is a message she does not need to hear. She has her serenity, her self-satisfaction, and a consciousness of change and decay would be but another passing shadow in a mind-set which is already attuned to the ephemeral. The narrator can take a momentary satisfaction in addressing his futural vision to the readers, and thus one transitory moment—the young woman's consciousness of male adoration as she walks along the platform—is of equal status to that of the narrator, whose moment will include not only his own admiration but also the epiphany regarding mutability. Through such an insight, in this short extract, is expressed the essence of sabi in a contemporary context.

Reading June or Express as celebration and collection of ephemera does not then diminish its worth but relates it, through the recognition of its literary affinities, to a flânerie of reading comparable to that of Benjamin or other observers of the modern city. While one reader might find in a passage from Express a mere self-indulgence or cast-off (Dreck perhaps), another might find it essential, and both responses are necessary in offering a complete picture of the city, where both gems and Dreck are of cultural value. Every little thing can take on its own value for contemplation, and following the Japanese folk-arts movement of Yanagi, the humbler the artifact, particularly if anonymous, the greater its offering for such reflection. Like the narrator, the reader is both chiffonnier and flâneur; Benjamin notes aphoristically that for the true collector [Sammler] every object—and here he includes the mass-produced—has an irrational value (Passagen 271), with its own place in a system of the collector's own creation, a new world characterized—as is that of the flâneur—by the "Quodlibet," the free play of choice (277). The "Pachinko Samurai" (June 23), exchanges some coins for some pachinko balls, and then, lucky in the falling of balls through the contraption, exchanges the balls won for some crab meat and a toy locomotive; he does not say whether he took these objects around the corner for monetary exchange.

Each object, once received, fits into a greater pattern of cultural appropriation, even if it is only to be later discarded. Such is the case for words and new cultural expressions also; such is also consistent with the view of sabi, and here, from very different starting-points, European and Japanese aesthetics meet in a Brautigan text. As Benjamin, in kabbalistic terms, writes in "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" ("The Task of the Translator") (Opitz, 54; Benjamin, Illuminations 79), each item added into a host culture, even if a fragment, becomes a piece of that vast compendium, the formation anew of a universal language. Yet this can be asserted only or mainly when the fragment can retain its neologic or uncanny potential, in pushing the host language in the direction of the new. In an important passage a few pages later, Benjamin quotes a few sentences from Rudolf Pannwitz's Crisis of European Culture (1921) in which he claims that translation has a transformative power over the host language: one should not attempt to turn the foreign language into the host language ("verdeutschen") but add a nuance of the source language into the host, for example to "verenglischen"—"make English"—when translating from that language ("Aufgabe," Lesebuch 56; Illuminations 81). While Pannwitz and Benjamin are concerned here with individual texts, something similar might be said for the incorporation of the cultural other into the host culture, as with Brautigan's Japanese works. An easy assimilation and an adamant unaffectedness are two strategies here discarded, in favor of what might be called a diplomatic shuttling of individual facets or perspectives, the equivalents in this context of Benjamin's contention that in order to bring the other as new into language the translation must focus on the word rather than the sentence level: it should give attention to literariness, as in an interlinear translation, as an arrangement of words comparable to the aspects of the "arcade," so that in this sense also the translator or cultural observer becomes a flâneur (54; 79). Here then, Brautigan's leaving many of his insights in an unfinished, fragmentary state, is again seen as a virtue. Chiffons, private meanings and connotations which give words their aura, have a secret value which is not transferable to another observer, as the system into which they are placed gives them their own variant, unique reading. They are thus both immune to exchange value and of its very essence in an economy, both something and nothing, as the basis for the distinction is only that something is an excess or coalescence of attributes, in themselves nothings, and nothing a ceasing to be or not-yet formation of a something.

Being and nothingness as opposites and corollaries are significant subsidiary themes in Brautigan's Japanese books. As with that of many philosophers, from Chuang Tzu, Parmenides and Aristotle to Derrida, Brautigan's intuition—it can be no more than that—is that superfluity and excess make of nothing a something, and therefore a negative emotion can have a positive side (as in the aesthetics of sabi). "A Short Study in Gone" (June 29) questions the comparative state of reality assumed for dream and waking respectively, and in their interfusion is a summary perhaps of Chuang Tzu's "butterfly-dreamer" passage (end of section two) intercut with basic premises, from Plato, Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, that dreams sustain reality. In "Umbrellas" (Express 25), the inanimate becomes conscious, as suddenly umbrellas appear, in spite of a forecast for clear weather, and then it does indeed start to rain. The narrator, dumb-founded but wise to the intimations of animism, ends the passage with the question: "Who are these umbrellas?" "The Pacific Ocean" compacts the fluidity of the great ocean into a phantasmagoric super-heavy droplet, which the narrator drops behind him under "a candy wrapper bar" (Express 50). In "The Beautiful Oranges of Osaka" (Express 121), Japan's second city, a vibrant, proudly working-class metropolis but not, as the narrator's note says, "known for oranges," is transformed in a waking dream into the "Orange Capital of the Orient."

While this dream state—this "airy nothing"—is characterized by Brautigan's habitual playfulness with Realism, its articulation provides more than that mere "beautifying" surrealism for which it has been often mistaken. It encourages readers elsewhere (Brautigan's primary audience) to indulge in a cross-cultural conceptualization of the city even if the narrator shows a distance and estrangement from such visions. If, as Benjamin claims of Baudelaire the flâneur, the visionary is forced into the role of allegorist by ostracism and alienation ("Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts," Passagen-Werk 54; cp. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 170), Brautigan similarly views the city through his own wandering gaze, irreconcilable with those of the people he describes. Unable to shape meaning for the locals, Brautigan counteracts his loneliness (sabi) and constructs systems of representation designed for a belated, indefinite, even unrealizable audience: "I am here and you are distant" (In Watermelon Sugar 1). Being "distant," we cannot but help transform the new into that which is known, thus to see it allegorically, but at the same time the text warns against such a whimsical appropriation or translation of that which is so clearly, self-consciously but not exclusively also the product of whimsy.

The problems of translation are entertainingly highlighted in "Strawberry haiku" (June 27), almost a parody of the later-day japonisme among Brautigan's generation. While both Ohnemus (29) and Fukuma (50) valiantly attempt to translate the lines as a haiku, it is that which does not in itself require translation—the dots which represent the berries (five for the first line, seven for the second)—which prove the most problematic. What is the sound of a strawberry in its representation as a dot or a period? While German "Punkt" or Japanese "ten" can stand for "dot" without violating the laws of haiku syllabification, this would imply that a monosyllable is represented by each period in the first few lines, and that the punctuation mark ("dot") represents the sound of the berries, or their small seed-like protrusions). Yet perhaps instead of a dot we should read a blank space, words not yet positioned to complete the haiku. Indeed, notebook 22 in the Bancroft collection includes a draft for the poem, with "the twelve berries" as the final line; this is crossed out, awaiting perhaps the inspiration that would provide the final missing syllable. Since haiku-composition circles are common in Japan, such a reading would be consistent with the acknowledgment of bourgeois cultural practices. And yet, like so many of Brautigan's Japanese experiences, the poem remains untranslatable. Fukuma needs to take advantage of a latitude in haiku-composition and brackets out the four syllables which together make up the number "twelve" and its required measure word, as "red berries" takes up five syllables (a-ka-i-mi-da). Ohnemus keeps to the five syllables, but gives the indefinite "twelve red berries" ("zwlf rote Beeren") and therefore alters the sense. Logical positivism and the precision of haiku here might contest that definite and indefinite forms are inviolable constituents of language which cannot be so altered without great changes also to the sense. Whether such a change really matters—and it does of course, if only for the legitimacy of the translation—is dependent on how the ellipsis in the two preceding lines is filled in. This is then a fragment, a silent sound poem, and a typographical concrete poem (if the dots are taken as pictorial representations of the berries).

"Strawberry haiku," then, permits the reader to reflect on shared and singular aspects of cultural contact, and unsettles what is perhaps thought basic (punctuation) so that the iterated (the twelve dots) can be read as part of a unique vision; as the berries represented themselves cannot be identical, so neither can the individual's encounter with the new experience or culture. Cultural translation is possible only at the interstices between communities, as it is here that the gestural code, entrenched in one culture, opens to its relation to the other and therefore can be said to be a gesture at all, since it calls attention to the promise of the new. A cross-cultural presentation is necessarily partial, both incomplete and subject to definition by relation to the known, given culture, and cannot therefore be pure; in this partiality, indeed, lies the interest of a text, and Derrida's work of self-destructing texts is perhaps but a theoretical approach to that which is already apparent to the hybrid gaze.

By asking its readers to reflect on the metaphysics of a point, the transformation of a marker into a sweet, living thing, "Strawberry haiku" takes on then some of the fragmentary, kaleidoscopic qualities of the flâneur's vision of city life as it is taken into the literature in the methods of its exposition and analysis, as for example in Benjamin's Einbahnstraße (8; One-Way Street 45). Here Benjamin talks of the essential contribution of colportage and occasional literary forms like the feuilleton in reproducing an adequate sense of the moment. Convictions, he notes, were unfruitful; precisely observed and delineated facts gave much more for the "construction of life" (7; 45). While perhaps not as extreme and metonymic as those in "Strawberry haiku," precise points of detail abound in June: dates, times, room numbers, locations all give a sense of the ephemeral and thus the real. "What Makes Reality Real" is the precise recognition of time, and its incorporation into a poem, even if an occasional one—as this—written while waiting (85). Such a sense is not entirely unpredictable or random, as contextual factors such a class, health and attitude impinge upon it, but once the moment is past these factors alone cannot guide us to recapture it. The patchwork assemblage of the ephemeral which characterizes many of Brautigan's works, and even more the cartons of Financial and Travel Records, 1965-1978 (Series 3 in the Bancroft collection), are of that Modernism which would construct out of the particular details of one life a much more revealing generic pastiche of a typical, if unknown and cross-cultural citizen. Indeed, a contemporary antiquary is a suitable implied reader of the texts, as such a person would make precise distinctions between genres, but would not, in the consideration of their relative interest, foreground the published works over other paper records of the minute particulars, gewgaws and facts of a life.

If opinions yield to facts, this does not necessarily acknowledge an unexpected turn to Gradgrindism, as the factual is placed in contexts in which the observer takes on a theatrical persona which is easily seen through, as the reader—as so often in Brautigan—needs to enter into a hypothetical discourse situation in order to enter the text's improbable world, however realistic this might seem. Benjamin opens his chapter of the "Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" devoted to the flâneur with a consideration of the "physiologies," a mixture of caricature, satire and close observation, presented in thin paperback editions and which were much in vogue in the 1840s (Opitz 524; Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 35). Seemingly objective and succinct, these miniatures—as extended to caricatures of cities or even nations—are essential, if little known, precursors to the lapidary, fragmentary sections not only of Benjamin's own work (including Einbahnstraße and Das Passagen-Werk) but also of course of Brautigan's June and Express. In the June collection, "Fragment #3" appears to take up again, but not to cancel, "Fragment #1." The first fragment is an enactment of that which it simply states: "speaking is speaking" (the line repeated in #3). A banal statement, perhaps, hardly "poetic," yet an essential fragment in this cross-cultural context where to speak is to be noticed, to offer communication or at least amusement for the native speakers. The risk of an attempt to communicate is to be "unintelligible" (June 55) as in "Talking" (39) but if one does not attempt there is a void, as occurs in "The Silence of Language" (78), the equivalent of which being the "white page" by which Stéphane Mallarmé said he was "haunted." Here Brautigan is both author and editor, and in the latter function preserves a lacuna much as an editor of Greek papyri might do. Unlike Roland Barthes or other Euro-American writers, who have raised an almost complete ignorance of the Japanese language to a principle of their own commentary on it, Brautigan's stance is that of the engaged, if supernumerary and theatricalized, observer, who pieces together impressions, sometimes with faltering gaze and results, but at others with insights verging on the epiphanic ("Japanese Children," "Future," "It's Time to Wake Up").

In a hauntingly perceptive passage of Einbahnstraße, Benjamin prophesied the end of both the thick tome and the autonomy of the printed book, subject to the hyperbole of product positioning and the demands on content imposed by an increasingly homogenous cultural market. In the vanguard of capitalist cultural change were marquees with their lurid, spectacular, mobile letters, and newspapers whose typestyles decondition attention from handwriting and the traditional fonts of printed books (41-2; One-Way Street 62). Under these conditions, the new could not be addressed by mere silent contemplation and its accompanying fantasy projection, as these arise from a belief that solipsism gives integrity and therefore plausibility. From such a perspective, Sombrero Fallout, part of Brautigan's pre-Japan imaginary, seems much like a dream fantasy, and one of the main characters is dreaming, of Kyoto, throughout much of the book. It therefore appears much more personal, if read in light of biographical information, than the two books written out of his actual experiences of Japan which open a breach to connect the fantasy with a given reality. While the publisher's blurb says that June 30th is "the most intimate book Richard Brautigan has ever written," the generic persona—rich American in Japan—underlying the poems serves itself as a distancing device. Even when the persona describes his "melancholy," he knows that he is "not alone. / Others must feel the way" he does (June 30). Raymond Carver called Express "uneven," but even if he wished that Brautigan had been served by a better editor (a criticism Brautigan predicts in the "Fragment" poems), he also asked that there were more to choose from. From Benjamin's perspective, Carver's projected editing would instead be a serious limitation to authenticity, while that excess, considered a weakness, is instead a strength. One's experiences in a foreign culture, and one's ability to contextualize them for ourselves and others, are subject to renegotiation, cannot be of one piece. A holistic, coherent vision of the foreign is only possible when we are confident of our status and detachment, and Brautigan is much different from those commentators who would present a short acquaintance with another culture as sufficient to pontificate about it in print or other media.

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that an "ordinary mind on an ordinary day" amasses impressions haphazardly, inattentively, and keeps a latent but later accessible stock of urban encounters from which arises a sense of self which is then the product of its conditioning by this random accumulation. Such is the essence of the cross-cultural cosmopolitan in Brautigan's work also. A dominant mood is difficult to detect in the eclecticism of observations in the Japan books, and while one can find in the Bancroft materials two much later drafts of poems ("Reflection" and "Death Growth") from Brautigan's final visit to Tokyo in early 1984 which seem to share a sinister, even tragic vision, these poems are enlivened by the positive references to spring in the draft for a text to be called "Shinjuku Porno," of about the same time. Even the two poems have their whimsy and a strong textual allusiveness that would not be lost on many readers. "Reflection," in its proleptic criticism of critics, has affinities with Pound's "Go, dumb-born book" or Larkin's "Posterity," and "Death Growth" merges Romantic visions of Apocalypse with the scenario of a 'fifties science fiction movie. Both poems are on Keio Plaza Hotel stationery, which serves as an immediate context, such that one might suspect that Brautigan's objective was to underline his contention that there was at best an ironic connection between fame and happiness.

There is an equivalent sense of the random, misdirected and haphazard which underlines a social construction of a persona in one of the objects among the Bancroft collection, a March 12th, 1971, United Airlines ticket from San Francisco to Monterey, on which Brautigan's name is misspelled. We are here provided with a reflection not only on his questionable fame at the time, even in that place with which he has been most connected, but also on easier policies prevailing then in the airline industry. In the December 21st, 1968, issue of Rolling Stone—alongside the news that Graham Nash was to leave the Hollies "to come to the US" to "record with friends" (4) and that "the [sic] Led Zeppelin, a British band [!], led by ex-Yardbird Jimmy Paige [sic]"(6) had signed to Atlantic Records—appeared the story "Fame in California," which ironizes not only such news reports but also, proleptically, the self-conception of the famous writer who appears in a friend's novel only to open a door. A dialectic between literary fame and personal incognito informs his work; it is an issue which, in the poem "Ego Orgy on a Rainy Night in Tokyo with Nobody to Make Love to" (June 50) with a laconicity worthy of the Greek Anthology (and it is by no accident that Brautigan uses an epigraph from Sappho), Brautigan takes up in what might appear a rather self-possessed way. The "ego orgy" of course is in the title itself, in the view that fame itself increases personal relations, the expectation that one should not—and this in a foreign city—be both a famous writer and sleep alone. This perception on a theatricalized narrator comments also on a facet of fame in an implicit context of relationships between super-powers and rising nations.

This comment is particularly important, of course, with those texts, like Brautigan's two Japan books, which both integrate otherness thematically, and which in turn allow the integration of a theoretical discourse which itself foregrounds otherness into their creative engagement. Such a discursiveness has but the most tangential relation to the semiotic appropriation of the other, as in the work of Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva on East Asia, but has more to do with a willingness not to resist the consciousness that one is an other outside normative interpellation. Here again, East Asian philosophical, aesthetic or cultural practices are nearer Brautigan's strategies than those considered, outside Asia, religious (although the distinctions are of course blurred). Overcoming the personal in the embrace of a strategic will imposed on the world is fundamental to Kuo Hsiang's neo-Taoist reading of Chuang Tzu (328), and the Japanese have traditionally placed much cultural importance on reconciling desire with cultural order, hierarchy and pre-established levels of respect. This juxtaposition informs Express also of course: "The 'I'" of the book, as the prefatory note claims, "is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express." While some reviewers have seen this as more allegorical whimsy (Jack Trevor story in Punch [Barber 157]), or an opportunity for jokes about Brautigan's imagination becoming "derailed" (Andrew Sinclair in The Times or Joseph Skorupa in Best Sellers [Barber 156-57]), the identification with a place of stasis, a communal structure rather than personality (at turns perhaps, self-assertive, anticipatory, bemused, sentimental or melancholy) is consistent with the Japanese aesthetic principle of unspoken communication and interdependence. In contrast, much of even contemporary Anglo-American literary criticism is still imbued with variations on the cult of personality.

At that historical point where a cultural formation is stable enough for an individual to describe it, but new and unique enough for its description for others to be significant, a new connotation is given to the meaning of home, and this whether or not the observer counts as an insider with a local habitation in the culture described. Brautigan's observations reposition the concept of home with reference both to a center of interest and affinity (but not, I think, a spiritual center) in Japan, and to a center of activity and historical awareness in the Pacific Northwest, be it northern California through to southern British Columbia, or the Inland Northwest of Montana. In his self-reflexive but not self-assertive notes, in his provisionality and idiosyncrasy, he partakes of that modernity which, in some ways prophetically, Virginia Woolf described in her lead article for the London Times Literary Supplement of April 5, 1923, "How It Strikes a Contemporary": "the writer of the present day" "must be content to be a taker of notes" (221-222). Culturalist assumptions which define the right to speak for a group only to members of that group are logically invalid in the proposition of an irreconcilable heterogeneity and discursivity inherent in and constitutive of each group. Thus, as Woolf also claims, life cannot be presented credibly if the capacity to generalize or to rationalize is subordinated to mere, subjective impressions. Brautigan similarly does not rationalize, but in his cross-cultural setting is our contemporary in highlighting the circumstances in which such an endeavor to decipher unknown codes for us would be folly at best and a lack of cultural sensitivity at worst. Along the line which unites Woolf and Brautigan, one could also draw [Theodor] Adorno, Derrida, [Edward] Said and Baudrillard, who have come to comparable, but of course widely divergent conclusions.

While ecology and spirituality remain fundamental to post-millennial survival, the real existing social and economic conditions pertaining between nations and cultures, and the factors underpinning reciprocal experiences and understanding, are transmuted through media virtuality and mass travel. Brautigan's Japan texts therefore contribute to that ongoing cultural troping of the American West which takes on a new resonance when this region is seen to be as much east of something as west, but when this distant western shore (of Asia) refracts the American West and reflects its own economic and cultural obsessions with an uncanny, local color. To appreciate these resonances, of course, one must listen to its voice, and not impose borrowed patterns which might preordain, abstractly and authoritatively, the significance of the encounter with the new. While Brautigan claims in a later (February 1984) note on Japan that when he "turned to Japan," he "turned to [him]self" (Bancroft Richard Brautigan Papers, Notebook No. 47; n.p.), this is not a sign of self-absorption, as the new as supplement opens this implosion of identity in the recognition of the hybridity of all experience. Given an insight into such multiplicity—now in cultural terms, as throughout his work in its dissolution and pastiche of genres—the self is fissured and extended, and becomes part of the cosmopolitan main. Like Whitman at the point of the many departures in his work (266-67), Eliot bidding "fare forward" to the train passengers in the Four Quartets (188) and many a theorist of the postcolonial hybrid, Brautigan attends to that internationalism which negotiates its spirit of place in a context of the other and the unknown.

The two Japan books are integral to transoceanic reception because they conjoin the magic real, the surreal and a self-reflective commentary on international interdependence. Brautigan's utopian impulse, common to most of his texts, is here combined with a pressing political outreach of mutual, respectful and engaged intercultural exchange, and thus presents a hope for multinational understanding at a time of its pressing need.

Works Cited
Agosto, Marie-Christine. Richard Brautigan: Les fleurs de néant. Paris: Belin, 1999.

Barber, John F. Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990 [and his website The Brautigan Bibliography and Archive, from which I have also drawn material as noted in the text].

Baudelaire, Charles. La Fanfarlo. Le Spleen de Paris (Petits Poèmes en prose). Paris: Flammarion-GF, 1987.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973.

---. Einbahnstraße. 1928. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997 [One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. 1979. London: Verso, 1997.]

---. "Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Eine Rede über das Sammeln." 1931. Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften 2. 1966. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988. 169-178 ["Unpacking My Library. A Talk about Book Collecting." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. London: Fontana, 1992. 61-69].

---. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1970. London: Fontana, 1992.

---. Das Passagen-Werk. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 1983. New series. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000.

---. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. 211-244 ("Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [2. Fassung]." Walter Benjamin: Ein Lesebuch. 313-47).

---. "Über den Begriff der Geschichte." Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 251-261.

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. 1965. Newly rev. ed. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1988.

Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 1959. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1985 [The Principle of Hope. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986].

Boyer, Jay. Richard Brautigan. Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 79. Boise: Boise S U P, 1987.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. 1983. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Brautigan, Ianthe. You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir. 2000. New York: St Martin's P, 2001.

Brautigan, Richard. The Abortion. 1971. Revenge of the Lawn; The Abortion; So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (Three books in the manner of their original editions). Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1995.

---. 102 racconti zen [selections from Revenge of the Lawn and The Tokyo-Montana Express]. Trans. Alessandra di Luzio. "Postfazione" ["Afterword"] by Daniele Brolli. Turin: Einaudi, 1999.

---. A Confederate General from Big Sur. Secaucus, N.J.: Castle, 1964.

---. The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. Introduction by Keith Abbott. Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

---. Japan bis zum 30. Juni. Trans. Günter Ohnemus. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995. German trans. of June 30th, June 30th.

---. June 30th, June 30th. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978. Rpt. New York: Dell, 1978.

---. The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. 1968. Trout Fishing in America; The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; and In Watermelon Sugar. (Three books in the manner of their original editions). Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1989.

---. Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.

---. Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt. 1970. New York: Delta, 1970.

---. The Richard Brautigan Papers, 1958-1984. University of California, Berkeley. The Bancroft Library.

---. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1982.

---. The Tokyo-Montana Express. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1980.

---. Tõkyõ Nikki; Tokyo Diary. Japanese version of June 30th, June 30th. Trans. Fukuma Kenji. 1992. Rpt. Tokyo: Shichõsha, 1999.

---. An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

Brooklyn [Levi Asher]. "Richard Brautigan." Online. Literary Kicks. http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=RichardBrautigan&who=brooklyn. September 2001. Accessed December 21st 2004.

Buck-Morss, Susan. "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering." New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986): 99-140.

Carver, Raymond. "Brautigan Serves Werewolf Berries and Cat Cantaloupe." No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. Ed. William L. Stull. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Chénetier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. London: Methuen, 1983.

Childish, Billy. calling things by their proper names: poems 1996-2002. Chatman, Kent: Hangman, 2003.

Clayton, John. "Richard Brautigan: The Politics of Woodstock." New American Review 11 (1971): 56-68. Online. Accessed December 29th, 2004. http://www.eoiweb.com/brautigan/articles/clayton71.htm.

Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.

Flower Ornament Scripture, The, A Translation of The Avatamsaka Sutra. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambala, 1993.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Richard Brautigan. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

Griffith, Nanci. "It's A Hard Life Wherever You Go." Storms. MCA, 1989.

Grossmann, Claudia. Richard Brautigan: Pounding at the Gates of American Literature. Untersuchungen zu seiner Lyrik und Prosa. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1986.

Hume, Kathryn. "Brautigan's Psychomachia." Mosaic 34.1 (March 2001): 75-92.

Keeler, Greg. Waltzing with the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan. Boise, Idaho: Limberlost, 2004.

Kowalewsky, Sonja [Sonya Kovalevskaya]. Erinnerungen an meine Kindheit [Memories of My Childhood]. 1890. Trans. Louise Flachs-Fokschaneanu. Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1963 [according to the Library of Congress catalogue, there are two translations into English, one in 1895 and the other in 1978].

Kuo Hsiang. "Commentary on the Chuang Tzu." Ed. and trans. Chan Wing-Tsit. A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1963. 326-35.

Maguire, James H. "Stegner vs. Brautigan: Recapitulation or Deconstruction?" The Pacific Northwest Forum 1st ser. XI. 2 (Spring 1987): 23-28.

Malley, Terence. Richard Brautigan. New York: Warner, 1972.

Meltzer, David, ed. The San Francisco Poets. New York: Ballantine, 1971.

Mills, Joseph. Reading Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Boise, Idaho: Boise S U Western Writers Series Number 135, 1998.

Miyoshi Masao. "Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the 'Postmodern' West." PostModernism and Japan. Eds. Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1989. 143-68.

Nentwich, Andreas. "Lebe lieber ungewöhnlich." Review of Günter Ohnemus' Reise in die Angst. Die Zeit 2002.18. http://zeus.zeit.de/text/archiv/2002/18/200218_l-ohnemus.xml

Ohnemus, Günter. Reise in die Angst. 2002. Munich: Droemer-Knaur, 2003 [The Russian Passenger. Trans. John Brownjohn. London: Bitter Lemon, 2004].

Opitz, Michael, ed. Walter Benjamin: Ein Lesebuch. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996.

Purdy, Al. Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996. Madeira Park, B.C.: Harbour Publishing, 1996.

Stegner, Wallace. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. 1983. Rev. ed. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1990.

---. The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West. 1969. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Stryk, Lucien, and Takashi Ikemoto, eds. and trans. Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter. 1977. New York: Grove, 1995.

"Talking with Richard Brautigan"
Fred Wright
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2006, pp. 463-471.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan was well known in San Francisco during the mid 1960s and early 1970s and I ran into him several times there during that time, usually in the North Beach district but not always. We passed each other on the streets, or visited the same bookstores, City Lights or Discovery, at the same time.

Brautigan was easy to spot because of his height. That and the floppy cowboy hat he often wore. I would say hello to him and he would usually mumble something unintelligible in response. It was not a rude response. More like he wished I had not noticed him.

So, out of respect I never pressed for any further conversation.

I was a writer/painter with few publications and showings while Brautigan was beginning to be recognized as a major force on the local literary scene and would soon become well known and respected worldwide.

I eventually ended up in the Los Angeles area, spending most of my time in Hermosa Beach. While living there I finally had a novel, The Whorehouse, published after several years of moderate success on the small press scene and selling a few paintings out of a local shop called the Squashed Blossom.

Having that first novel published should have been a high point in my life. Instead, I felt empty. I had no one with whom to share the moment. My girlfriend, to whom I had dedicated the book, left me just days before its release and I had no really close friends in Hermosa Beach with whom to celebrate.

In fact, I had no close friends anywhere. Ever since returning from Vietnam and going through a divorce I had moved around a lot. That is probably one of the reasons my girlfriend left me, like all the others before her. I shunned closeness.

I do not know the reason for my aversion to closeness since I like people. Perhaps it was because the Vietnam War was very unpopular and I did not want anyone to know I was a veteran. Not that I was ashamed of that fact, but it was just was not a good conversation piece at the time for a lot of people. "Oh, you are a Vietnam vet? Well, see you later, baby killer."

So there I was, the night of my first big publishing success, sitting alone on the living room floor. For company I lined up shots of tequila, chasing each one with Schlitz beer, which I no longer drink. I drink Budweiser now.

I was listening to Brautigan's record album, Listening to Richard Brautigan. I talk to myself a lot and I was leery, that night, of answering back. I wanted to hear the voices of other people.

One of those voices was that of Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who read Brautigan's "Love Poem." Hearing Caen read this poem reminded me that he had mentioned in one of his columns how Brautigan included his telephone number on the jacket of his record album. Caen found it strange, he wrote, that someone as shy and reclusive as Brautigan would publish his telephone number this way, right out there for the whole world to see, and supposedly call.

If anyone could call Richard Brautigan why could not I? But for what reason? If I never spoke to him on the street in San Francisco, why could I just suddenly telephone him from Hermosa Beach?

After some more shots of tequila and Schlitz chasers I came up with a reason. Brautigan's novel Dreaming of Babylon had been published only a few months before my novel. We both had had novels published at about the same time. We shared that in common. We had a connection. I had a reason to call Richard Brautigan.

I dialed the number: 567-3389. "Mr. Brautigan?" I asked when a man answered the telephone.

"Yes," he replied.

"Richard Brautigan?"

"As far as I know," he responded. His voice was pleasant. "And may I ask who this is?" he asked.

"My name is F. N. Wright. Forgive me for calling but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your writing. Your last book was great! Actually," I continued, "my first novel was just published and I wanted to talk to someone."

"Why me?" he asked with complete candor.

"I don't know, really, . . . I . . . I," I stammered.

"Well, I'm not a writer," he said, "I'm a businessman."

Although I was nervous about speaking with Richard Brautigan, famous author, I was well fortified with alcohol and so I laughed and asked him about his business. "What do you sell, pantyhose?"

"No," he chuckled, "Bras."

"Business must be booming," I replied, "With so many women burning their bras."

"Are they still doing that?" He chuckled softly and I wondered if he might be under the influence too.

"So," I said, the conversational ice now broken, "do you really expect me to believe there are TWO Richard Brautigans living in San Francisco?"

"As strange as it sounds," he said, still chuckling, "There does appear to be two of us in the city."

"Say what you want," I retorted, "but I think you're lying, and I think your last novel was great!"

"What novel?" he asked, still playing the innocent.

"Dreaming of Babylon, asshole!" I laughed, taking a healthy swig from the tequila bottle.

"Dreaming of Babylon Asshole is an interesting title," he said. "And what's the title of your book?"

"The Whorehouse," I replied. I was very relaxed.

"That's an interesting title too," he said, "Maybe I should read both of these books."

"And why would you want to read your own book?"

"I don't write."

"Bullshit. You are a damn good writer and poet!" I persisted.

"What do you like about this writer, the other Richard Brautigan, his books?" he asked.

"If you aren't the author why would you be interested?"

"Who knows?" he responded. "I could possibly run into this other Richard Brautigan one day. Strange things do happen."

"We both know that's doubtful," I laughed. "And if you did run into him how would you know it was him?"

"Someone might introduce us."

"And?"

"I could tell him about this strange phone call I received and tell him what you had to say about his writing."

"I do like just about everything you have written."

"Him."

"Right!" I laughed again, "The other Richard Brautigan!"

"Yes. He might like that."

I do not remember the details of the rest of our conversation. I admit I was drunk that night and it was a long time ago. But I do remember that talking with Richard Brautigan on the telephone was one of most enjoyable conversations I have ever had with anyone. Richard Brautigan wanted to hear my thoughts on his writing and he was gracious enough to ask me about my own efforts.

He seemed genuinely interested when I told him I indulged in what I called "whimsical paintings."

And as strange as it may sound, I also feel like I can say I got drunk with Brautigan that night. I am positive that he, like me, was drinking something in his apartment at the other end of the telephone line. At one point in our conversation he needed to take a break to go to the bathroom. I offered to hang up but he wanted to talk more so I went to the bathroom as well.

When we resumed our conversation he asked what I liked most about "This Brautigan's writing."

"The simplicity he brings to complexity," I answered. "The quality of his writing, his diversity, and what seems like his innocence even though cynicism is never far below the surface."

Finally, I said, "I know you're fucking with me." And as we both chuckled, riding the warm wave of alcohol, I said, " Otherwise you wouldn't be asking me all these questions about YOUR writing! And we both know writers like to have their egos stroked on occasion. No matter how good they are."

"Yes, I've heard that writing is a lonely occupation," he replied.

Richard Brautigan ended our conversation by asking me to telephone him again, if I ever cared to do so. "I enjoyed our conversation," he said.

Regretfully, I never did talk with Richard Brautigan again.

"Knowledge and Reality: Language Reflection and Language Experiment in the Novels of Richard Brautigan."
Kurt Albert Mayer
Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 277, no. 2, 1990, pp. 423-424.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan, all but ignored by German Americanists before his death in 1984, suddenly enjoys a certain vogue in those quarters. Of three doctoral dissertations grown to book-length studies of his writings and published in the last five years, Ms. Horatschek's Erkenntnis and Realitit. Sprachreflexion and Sprachexperiment in den Romanen von Richard Brautigan is the most penetrating and ambitious. Regarding the author as influenced by postmodernism and French poststructuralism, it allocates a chapter each to ten of Brautigan's books and proposes to elucidate their epistemological dimension as well as the concept and use of language underlying his prose. The interpretations are intrinsic, yet in a pragmatic rather than a dogmatically formalist way, and profess to shed light on the vast array of intertextual references imported by Brautigan. When it is warranted by textual clues, the readings resort to ideas drawn from the depth psychology of Freud and Jung, to semiological and psychologic-philosophical postulates of poststructuralism (derived from Barthes and Lacan), to popular culture, essays on postmodernist critical theory like Susan Sontag's, or findings in the early history of Babylon, Egyptian mythology, Zen Buddhism, and Japanese literary history.

The explications offered are on the whole persuasive, although some contradictions inherent in Brautigan's career and writings are not resolved satisfactorily. It must be taken into consideration that there is an a-rational element in his art that defies articulation. His habit of self-advertisement, of having his portrait appear on the covers of his books, apparently was more enticing than his repeated endeavors at dissociating himself from his fictions; all too often, the study mistakes characters of his works for their author. Similarly, the sweeping inclusion of heterogeneous worlds of thought in the frame of reference invites a number of inconsistencies. As Braurigan refused to categorize his works according to traditional headings, calling them writings instead of poems or novels, the restriction imposed on the selection of primary texts is problematic, for his prose frequently exhibits lyrical rather than narrative qualities, and many of his poems can he classified as such only because of their formal appearance. Also, with respect to his anachronistic bent it may be well that postmodernist theories of the late 60's and early 70's are introduced in order to point our how firmly he is integrated in the prevalent literary currents of his time, but neglect of chronology tends to eclipse Brasasigan's role as a forerunner in the advancement of the new writing emerging at the time—Trout Fishing in America, for instance, was published prior to the essays it is said to comply with.

If generally true to fact, the readings suffer from occasional longeurs. As the 'great novels' of the 60's (Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General From Big Sur, and In Watermelon Sugar) are allotted no more space than the later, lesser novels, the discussions do not rise above surveys of the research devoted to the books; at best, glimpses are afforded which hardly explain the complex interplay of random, seemingly self-generating episodes and lighthanded verbal variegations turning off into unexpected meaning. In contrast, the books written in the 1970's (and commonly lumped together as genre parodies) receive more than a fair share of attention. Seeking to exonerate them, the drawn-out presentations of The Abortion, The Hawkline Monster, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Sombrero Fallout, and Dreaming of Babylon inadvertently confirm allegations that these texts are labored fictional constructs lacking the wit and playfulness which accounted for the success of his earlier writings.

Erkenntnis und Realität is first of all a close analysis of Richard Brautigan's minor novels. An admirably perceptive study, it suffers the limitations of the works it sets out to examine, for it, too, is unable to bridge the dichotomies at the bottom of Brautigan's failure. That it is carelessly proofread and edited is another matter—some fifty slips and errors in the first half make one lose count—but that need not be held too strongly against the book.

"David Meltzer on Richard Brautigan"
an interview with John Barber
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

How did you meet and come to know Richard Brautigan?

The first time I met Richard was in the North Beach scene of the late '50s. I got to know his work in Sunday informal workshops at Joe Dunn's pad in the Polk Street ozone. Joe was the editor/publisher of White Rabbit Books. He worked for Greyhound Bus Line and on the weekends we'd "liberate" their mimeograph machines to run off booklets by Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and others under his imprint.

A weird and wonderful range of younger poets would gather at Joe's apartment to present their poems of the week; people like Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Harold Dull, George Stanley, and others. The two maestros/hierophants were Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan—they were mentors and gate-keepers—check out my interview in SF BEAT. Richard identified with Spicer's compact and hard-boiled mystic poetry and more than anything, I suspect, wanted Jack's blessing which never really happened. I have always thought that that refusal (happily or not) made Richard decide to go into prose/fiction. I don't want to get too easygoing about lost fathers but Jack was an ideal father figure, but, like Richard, equally narcissistic and self-loathing. They were too close to each other to help each other. They drank themselves to death. They were both isolated and in deep withdrawn despair.

What was your relationship with Brautigan?

We were peers, pretty much the same age, on different paths but still curious about each other and often talked writing, poetry, and novels at Vesuvio's and The Place, or on the streets in between those two watering holes in late '50s. As contemporaries on that particular scene, I think we were inspired by the immediate middle aged elder poets like Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. I remember Richard talking about his admiration of Ernest Hemingway and about Sherwood Anderson's economy and complex simplicity. I tried pitching James Jones to him which he dodged, despite my eloquence.

Why did you decide to include Brautigan in your book, The San Francisco Poets?

I wanted to include Richard because we knew each other as young poets on the transitory scene and talked a lot of barroom blather about poetry and writing. I felt his interactive dialogue would've been helpful to others in the struggle.

Richard was included in the first gathering because we were friends and he was suddenly very visible and like all anthologists, I was stacking the deck. At the last minute, Brautigan decided to forego the interview process and instead invent his own, which, in the spirit, seemed fine. Obviously, Brautigan was voicing the zeitgeist not so much of his generation but of that younger one his readers and girl friends inhabited. Remember, Brautigan wasn't in any sense a documenter or creative realist like Kerouac but was, instead, a fabulist, beyond the moment.

Your book, The San Francisco Poets, included background information about each of the included poets: Brautigan, William Everson (Brother Antoninus) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lew Welch drawn from interviews you conducted. But Brautigan's information was included in the form of a "self-interview." Why did you decide to introduce Brautigan, and his work, in this manner?

At the last minute, Richard said he didn't want to be interviewed and would instead submit a "self interview" which I said, under the circumstances and deadline, was okay. He was riding the first wave of literary and financial success and was acting accordingly.

Did Brautigan make any impression upon the evolving literary scene in San Francisco at that time?

One way or another, participants in any literary scene that surfaces into the mainstream has impact. Richard had already locked-down a certain style and attitude towards what writing was for him. His Emily Dickinson chapbook, Lay the Marble Tea, with its cover drawn by his artist friend Kenn Davis, expressed not only a sense of style but how writing could be packaged.

Brautigan is often referred to as the author who best expressed the culture and lifestyle of the 1960s, especially that in San Francisco during the so-called "Summer of Love." How was Brautigan, and his writing, influenced by the events of that time?

During the heyday of the '60s, with the Diggers breaking through the barricades, Richard was a comfortable outlaw, non-threatening in his demands, whimsical and latently nasty. For someone as frugal as Richard, the anti-capitalist, anti-materialist gesture had less to do with the confrontational theatrics of the Diggers then to his own deeply tangled abjection of childhood poverty and its humiliations. I remember a sociological book of that era called The Hidden Injuries of Class by Richard Sennett and while Richard never brought "class" into his work I suspect it was a deep subtext that his work wrote out of.

What do you think was the cause for Brautigan's fall from grace with both critics and readers?

The fickle finger(s) of fate. Like Jack Kerouac, Brautigan was elevated onto an impossible plateau which he managed as he could but, like Jack, couldn't handle the crushing embrace of success. Also other word heroes embraced by fame like Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, were on the road to self erasure. (I read where Sherwood Anderson died due to a pimentoed-olive speared by a toothpick which peirced his intestine on a cruise ship martini.) Like Brautigan, Kerouac was immensely sensitive and introverted and really just wanted to write or hang out with his mates. They used booze to get out there, to be socially acceptable or outrageous. But in Richard's case, he'd zone into sourness and mean-spirited behaviour, which I can identify with my own class-consciousness and its permanent imprint on social relationships.

Yet Brautigan, and his work, still remains popular, for both scholars and readers who discover him for the first time each day. Why is this?

Richard will continue to sell books, at least those that are in print, and will, in the advent of fast-forward nostalgia, have the possibility of contacting an audience of Sorrows of Werther and Kurt Cobain's Hemingway style brain blast. But Richard was middle-aged when he suicided [sic] himself. The mystery of young death seems more haunting and inexplicable.

Scratch that.

Suicide, unless in extreme health situations will always have an aura of the inexplicable around it. Everyone tries to "figure out" the why of it. If you know someone you don't have to collect them, unless of course you're compulsive and lost in the mythos of loss.

What about Brautigan's writing stays with us? And why?

Was it the moment, its sizzle and razzle-dazzle? Nostalgia? Michael McClure reads Richard as a fabulist, a bent fairytale author, just as he described my 10 agit-smut novels (written in 1969). Richard was a serious writer who sometimes drifted off into a Digger-Hippie-McKuenesque (not McCluhanesque) fey naivete deeply insinuated with dark weaves of rage. I don't want to presume anything, but I'll guess Richard's class consciousness underpins his work; and like his heroes Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was devoured in that same life-suck embrace of fame and success.

With the 1960s now fertile ground for academic research, will Richard Brautigan come up on more and more radar screens? Will such investigation into the social and cultural (r)evolution of that era support the contention at the time that Brautigan was the writer/voice who best captured the zeitgeist of the time?

(R)evolution was not what Richard or the Diggers were about, in retrospect. The Black Panthers (also betrayed by charisma) were more proactive and active in communities of social and economic alienation. Mostly, Diggers were boys who dug the romance of it. Peter Coyote (nee Cohen), for example. Emmett Grogan, on the other hand, was the real deal proletariat. But if you've been doing your research you know that the boys' club got into the high life of bad boy celebrity with its perks of speed and guns and leather jackets and male posturing.

"Zeitgeist," yes, but for whose zeit?

So many of the burn-outs became "geists," ghosts of their former selves

What can you, someone who knew Brautigan then, before and just after he was visited by fame and glory, say about him now, twenty years gone in the grave? What about the mystery that surrounds much of his life? Is it hype, or not? Was his work notable then? Now? What legacy should we take from his writing?

You express the difficulty of evaluating his work as writing is undetachable from a time, a moment, a frisson. Richard was first and foremost a writer, even though he continually lost track of it in the haze and blaze of a kind of lethal public embrace. Kenneth Rexroth insisted that the true works are those that can't be assimilated.

Let's continue this . . .

"Gentle Poet of the Young: A Cult Grows around Richard Brautigan"
John Stickney
Life, vol. 69, no. 7, 14 Aug. 1970, pp. 49-52, 54.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan and some friends were without the wherewithal to go to a new movie. This was a while ago in San Francisco, before Brautigan was very well known even as an underground writer, and there was this money problem. What to do? "We gathered up some of my old poetry books which were lying around moldering away," Brautigan recalls, "and we hawked them on the streets of San Francisco. Poetry for sale! Finally we bummed $7.50, enough to get everybody into the flick." Long pause for a sigh. "The movie was terrible, as it turned out."

Brautigan's unmistakable turn-of-the-century face has since appeared on the covers of three of his books and he would be instantly recognized on almost any college campus from Berkeley to Old Town to Cambridge, and at a good many high schools too. Among the young, a kind of cult exists about his writing, his preoccupation with nature and with gentle things in life. At the time of the panhandling, for instance, he was handing out poetry broadsides gratis to Haight-Ashbury passersby and publishing little folios, free for the taking in community shops. One such work, which he calls "true underground poetry," was Please Plant This Book, a collection of eight packets of real seeds, each printed with a poem and planting instructions. His first published novel provoked critical acclaim, but bombed on bookstore shelves. "My income from 1965 to 1968 was less than $7,000," Brautigan says. "I write because I like to write." Then, three years ago, a small San Francisco press published a second novel, this one called Trout Fishing in America.

What happened to Brautigan since Trout Fishing appeared has happened to other writers who at some stage of their careers have been mightily nourished by younger readers: The Catcher in the Rye was at the core of a J.D. Salinger cult; J.R.R. Tolkien had his hobbits in The Lord of the Rings trilogy; William Golding had Lord of the Flies. As heir to them and beneficiary of this particular collegiate grapevine, Brautigan's quiet philosophy is exactly in tune with everybody's concern about man and his environment: he believes it is possible for the two to get along amicably. In strident times, Brautigan might seem an odd pocket companion for the campus barricades, but his readers find no inconsistency.

Three of his soft-cover books, which Delacorte Press has gathered together in a special hard-cover edition, have each sold close to 100,000 copies, and a new volume of poetry was just released. Negotiations for a spoken-word album are under way, movie companies are sniffing around the novels, and invitations for readings are coming in from all over the country. Besides all this, a commune, a free school and an underground newspaper all take their name from Trout Fishing in America. (But misunderstandings can arise here. Trout Fishing in America is also the name of a character in the book. And, until they learned better, sporting goods stores ordered, stocked and cheerfully sold copies of Trout Fishing.)

An odd thing about the existence of the Brautigan cult is that Brautigan, at 35, is hardly the Messiah type, like an Allen Ginsberg, and nothing at all of a self-promoter, like Rod McKuen. It is hard to imagine him on a television talk show, for instance, and he is reluctant to see interviewers or journalists. His message, such as it is, is mild and unprogrammatic, and unfashionably optimistic about human beings—life-affirming rather than life-denying—and involved completely with the everyday American experience. And yet in his imagination a free-flowing trout stream can perfectly easily be cut up and stacked in sections for sale in a wrecking yard, like pieces of an old house no one can find any use for.

Brautigan's sign just happens to be Aquarius, and his books are a gentle carnival to which young people relate easily, a show of laughter, romance, sensation and innocence—an intense identification with nature and all living things. Thoughtful hedonism, it might be called: celebrate the pleasures of life and love on the midway, he advises, because tragedy lurks just outside the gates. And most who admire him are glad to leave despair behind—so many others have told them all about that—if only for a little while. Reading Brautigan, someone has said, is "like a natural high."

Here is the end of a chapter from Trout Fishing
"The woman who travels with me discovered the best way to catch the minnows. She used a large pan that had in its bottom the dregs of a distant vanilla pudding. She put the pan in the shallow water along the shore and instantly hundreds of minnows gathered around. Then, mesmerized by the vanilla pudding, they swam like a children's crusade into the pan. She caught 20 fish with one dip. She put the pan full of fish on the shore and the baby played with the fish for an hour.

"We watched the baby to make sure she was just leaning on them a little. We didn't want her to kill any of them because she was too young.

"Instead of making her furry sound, she adapted rapidly to the difference between animals and fish, and was soon making a silver sound.

"She caught one of the fish with her hand and looked at it for a while. We took the fish out of her hand and put it back into the pan. After a while she was putting the fish back by herself.

"Then she grew tired of this. She tipped the pan over and a dozen fish flopped out onto the shore. The children's game and the banker's game, she picked up those silver things, one at a time, and put them back in the pan. There was still a little water in it. The fish liked this. You could tell.

"When she got tired of the fish, we put them back in the lake, and they were all quite alive, but nervous. I doubt if they will ever want vanilla pudding again."

Has success spoiled the author? "It's really something to have fame put its feathery crowbar under your rock," he writes at the beginning of one of his innumerable short stories, many of which were first published in the music newspaper Rolling Stone, "and then upward to the light release you, along with seven grubs and a sow bug." Recently two young ladies in San Francisco's North Beach—whose winding up-and-down streets and late-night cafes Brautigan has haunted since he came down to the city from his birthplace in Tacoma, Washington 16 years ago—fondled a copy of Trout Fishing in a bookstore. The writer hovered about behind, undetected and unrecognized. "I'd like to get this," said one girl, "but I don't have the money." Brautigan leaned over. "Steal it!" he whispered. "Go ahead!"

When he is not encouraging petty larceny, Brautigan hides away and works in a small, elegantly cluttered apartment in an out-of-the-way San Francisco neighborhood—"a Richard Brautigan museum," as a friend calls it. The visitor must negotiate his way through a dark, narrow hall, past the room where Brautigan writes in a corner cleared of his jungle foliage of fading periodicals and manuscripts, into a sunlit living room. A battered collection of fishing tackle rests beside a fireplace that long ago ceased to function, and a number of odd plants climb the walls toward the windows as if they were trying to get out. A bottle of good whiskey sits in the kitchen. Someone painted a couple of smiling trout on the scarred wooden floor. Tacked to the wall is a letter from Hubert Humphrey, thanking Brautigan for a copy of Please Plant This Book.

It is a quiet place, and the hall is good for pacing up and down during a stalemate at the typewriter. There is a sense that things have not changed much in the museum, success or no success. The clutter is distinctly his own, the sheets of manuscript are the maps to his existence; he would be lost without them. When he is writing, Brautigan tries to isolate himself. When he is not, he loves to go visiting, rapping with friends at their houses, riding buses around the city (he does not drive, and he never seems to be in a hurry to get from one place to another), or hitchhiking up to the country to see his 10-year-old daughter Ianthe, who lives with his former wife.

In Trout Fishing, carried along on the flowing stream of his surreal consciousness and the deep pool of his gentle humor, Brautigan meanders from creek to creek, guzzles wine, chats with friends, makes love, drops in on a city or two, writes letters, creates recipes, even hooks a few trout—managing, in the deliberately cock-eyed process, to give the science of ecology a whole new dimension. "Once water bugs were my field," he says at one point. "I remember that childhood spring when I studied the winter-long mud puddles of the Pacific Northwest. I had a fellowship. My books were a pair of Sears Roebuck boots, ones with green rubber pages. Most of my classrooms were close to the shore. That's where the important things were happening and that's where the good things were happening."

He visited the shores of Walden pond not long ago, and was appalled, as everybody else is, at the rubbish he found. "Where the hell are the trash bins?" he muttered. "What would Henry David Thoreau think if he could see this place now?" He peered into the water. "Look there!" he said. "Right below the surface. A glass-backed trout is sleeping." Brautigan's friends followed his pointing finger—right to an abandoned beer bottle sitting forlornly on the muddy bottom.

"I cannot believe that man has come this far only to kill himself with his own pollution," he will say, optimistically. Then, less certainly, "I wonder whether what we are publishing now is worth cutting down trees to make paper for the stuff."

Brautigan is pleased that his first novel and the two others—A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar—are popular. But, he says, "I'm not interested in imitating a style or structure I've used before. I'll never write another book like Trout Fishing in America. I dismantled that old machine when I finished with it and left the pieces lying around in the backyard to rust in the rain."

Anyone who hangs out with Brautigan for a while risks getting the strange sensation that he has fallen by chance into one of Brautigan's books. An overcast winter day in the mountains outside San Francisco finds the author and his friend Valerie perched atop a rock close to a rain-swollen stream. Both stare intently into the turbulent water until Valerie exclaims that she has just seen a piece of celery swirl by in the current. Brautigan leaps off the rock and squints far upstream through his thick glasses.

"A piece of celery! Listen," he says, his voice rising, "that could be the first hors-d'oeuvre! Suppose there were more, an entire table full of them, canapés and all? Then a bar, with drinks and setups for everybody! And finally an entire cocktail party, man, floating down this crazy stream!" It has something to do with his mind, and the things he sees in streams.

Harvard got the same sensation, full strength, when Brautigan showed up there later for a poetry reading. The author—who never attended college, although he has been poet-in-residence at a university—cautiously ascended the podium and surveyed the hirsute, sueded, fadded and fringed crowd of neo-surrealistic young people draped around the neo-classic lecture hall. A group of his friends plopped down near the podium and began swigging on a gallon of Chablis, occasionally passing it up to the author, who has never been known to refuse a drink, even at a reading. Sufficiently fortified, Brautigan leaned forward with a poem clutched in his outstretched hands, as if he were about to cast lines of his poetry, breaking up into laughter and a little dance when he felt a strike in the crowd's response.

But Brautigan dislikes the stiff formality of a reading—he has read everywhere—at high school graduations and at San Quentin prison—and he prefers some form of give-and-take with his audience. After a half hour or so with the Harvard crowd, he jumped down off the podium to confused applause and shouts for more, and refused to return. Instead, he called for people to come up and read his poetry, or whatever they wished. Soon Brautigan aficionados clutching his books filled the aisles and began reading their favorite poems to the politely attentive audience.

Then a girl decided to recite two of her own poems, and a boy presented a short radical manifesto. Several people read Brautigan's "Love Poem" over and over, testing the changes of sound and inflections in the different voices. Someone read an absurd newspaper item which was greeted with howls of laughter, and Brautigan clapped his hands with glee. Finally a young man reached the microphone and whipped out his harmonica and began ha-wonking out a Luther Johnson blues tune. Couples got out of their seats and began to dance. Brautigan paced back and forth to the music. The happiness of the crowd was cracking him up. and he pronounced his benign total judgment of the occasion in a wide, beaming smile. "I love chaos," he said and had some more Chablis.

[See also Jeffrey S. Golden's review of this reading by Brautigan at Harvard University, "Richard Brautigan On Saturday Night."]

Rob McLennan
rob mclennan's blog 5 December 2006.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

After years in the works, comes John F. Barber's promised collection of essays on the works of Richard Brautigan, the late lamented last of the American beat writers, Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life (Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), most famous for his novel Trout Fishing In America (1967) and/or his selected poems, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). Collecting new and years worth of previously published pieces on Richard Brautigan, Barber, who also administers the definitive online Brautigan resource, Brautigan Bibliography and Archive, this new book includes work by Keith Abbott, Kevin Berger, Robert Creeley, Brad Donovan, Greg Keeler, Michael McClure, Steven Moore, Michael Sexton, Barnard Turner and Erik Weber, as well as some drawings and photographs of Richard Brautigan as a younger man. Considering the amount of work Brautigan did, and the kinds of attention his work got during the 1960s and 1970s, there is both a surprising lack of critical work on his writing, and a surprising amount of hostility from critics over the years. As Barber writes in his preface:
"Although he knew the Beats, and they him, Brautigan always insisted he was not a part of their literary movement. Contemporary literary opinion supports this contention, seeing Brautigan, when his writing catapulted him to international fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the writer best representative of the emerging counterculture.

"At the time of his death, however, in 1984, Brautigan was largely ignored or, worse, negated by critics and pundits who then trivialized his contribution to American literature" (p. 1-2).

Barber's collection works very hard to correct that, collecting numerous pieces from numerous years, including some of the tributes written on Brautigan in the weeks and months following his suicide in 1984, including pieces by the now-themselves-deceased poets Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn, and Dorn's wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, and make this, possibly, the only book on the work of Richard Brautigan but for Marc Chénetier's small book from Methuen's Contemporary Writers series, Richard Brautigan (1983).

"Brautigan saw himself and often referred to himself as a humorist. That is a designation not much used about anyone anymore, since everybody in the whole nation has become a comic. But it has been a rare thing when an artist has identified with any tradition in this century. There is a distant similarity between Brautigan and Twain. It consists almost solely in a natural innocence in regarding the evil disposition of mankind. But whereas Twain's treatment of the condition is streaked with acid intelligence, Brautigan's is amazingly tolerant, if not gleeful, and resembles an anthropologist's understanding more than that of a literary man" (Edward Dorn, pp. 103-104).

Moving from the critical to the personal and back very easily (sometimes within the same piece), the collection includes pieces such as "I Remember Richard Brautigan," where poet Joanne Kyger writes a series of reminiscences, starting:
"I remember meeting Richard Brautigan. It is the spring of 1957. I meet Richard and Ron Loewinsohn at a gallery opening. They tell me they are poets. They are very young, like 19 or 20. Ron likes Keats and I make fun of him. Keats is so old fashioned! I give Richard my address and he comes by the next night so we can go to dinner, only he does not have much money so it means I take him. He shows me this basement in Chinatown on Washington Street where the dishes cost 49 cents each. We have a modest dinner and then go back to Grant Avenue where we run into Mike Nathan, a very young artist who has painted a picture in City Lights Bookstore's front window of a policeman and a priest standing side by side and looking very similar. Mike wants to show me North Beach, but Richard is not happy with this and spends the rest of the evening lurking up and down upper Grant Avenue a half block behind us. He maintains this somewhat moody distance during the next two years when I see him from a distance in North Beach. He marries Ginny [Virginia Alder, 1957] (later Ginny Aste) and after a time I recall her sitting with Jack Spicer in The Place and saying, 'The hardest thing I had to do was give Richard back my wedding ring.' The relationship was over [they separated in 1962; divorced in 1970] but they had a daughter, Ianthe [Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan; born 1960]."

What this collection accomplishes is a larger portrait of the late American writer, moving from reminiscences of his early life and writings, to explorations and longer, critical essays on various aspects of his writings, as well as a piece by the founder and former curator of The Brautigan Library (a reference from the novel The Abortion). The book even includes pieces that show frustration and even anger at what Brautigan let himself turn into in later years, the "dark Brautigan" that one author refers to, the one who ended up telling his friends around both his residences that he was going to be in the other, before he turned a gun on himself in 1984, to be found in his kitchen weeks later. There aren't that many books on Richard Brautigan out there in the world, and even Keith Abbott's memoir of his experiences with Brautigan, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America has been out of print for so long that it's become a rare collectable; will someone ever think to reprint it? One of the funniest pieces has to be Abbott's own, in his "In the Riffles with Richard: A Profile of Richard Brautigan" (originally published in California Fly Fisher) writing
"After viewing Richard's eccentric collection of trout memorabilia, Price, Richard and I went out on what was to become the first of a long series of adventures in San Francisco. It was fitting that this first afternoon's high point involved the romance and art of fishing.

"Richard had cast Price as his hero Lee Mellon in the novel, A Confederate General From Big Sur, and while he retold his adventures with Price, such as silencing a pond full of frogs with two well-placed alligators, my first reaction upon reading the novel was "This is hilarious, but this Richard guy only told a fourth, at best, of the loony tune life of Price."

"Here was a guy who ran a moving service called Blue Whale Movers, a guy whose constant need for new phone service (born from a firm belief that utility companies had more than enough money and didn't need his cash) caused his new phones to be listed under William Bonney, Delmer Dibble, Rufus Flywheel, Jesse James, and Commander Ralph G. Gore, and a guy whose first act upon renting a new house was to chainsaw all the interior walls, 'because a man needs space to breathe'" (p 17).

After years of nothing new, save the fact that his books, at least, were being kept in print through a series of omnibus collections, 1999 also saw the publication of a collection of Brautigan's writing from his 20s, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, and a year later, a reissue of his last novel, An Unfortunate Woman, as well as a moving tribute by his daughter Ianthe, the memoir You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir, writing about being the only child of a famous writer who killed himself, and discovering not only her place in his life, but finding and meeting his own parents he had cut himself off from so very many years before. With a writer such as Brautigan, it gets far too easily to focus on the man himself, moving further into his own suicide, that it often overlooks not only the earlier versions of who he was, but overshadows the writing; what makes this volume particularly interesting is that it focuses on all of the above, creating a larger overview for future readers and even future critics to move out from. Will there be a selected letters? Will there be a selection of Brautigan's non-fiction pieces? Have the omnibus' run their course? But I'll let Brautigan himself get the last word, from his collection Loading Mercury With A Pitchfork (1976)
"CAROL THE WAITRESS
REMEMBERS STILL
Part 6

"Yes, that's the table where Captain Martin
sat. Yes, that one. By the window.
He would sit there alone for hours at
a time, staring out at the sea. He always
had one plain doughnut and a cup of coffee.
I don't know what he was looking at."

"Barber Brings Back Brautigan"
Sean Reynolds
Entertainment Today, 22-28 Sep. 2006, p. 6.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

John F. Barber teaches digital technology and culture at Washington State University-Vancouver. He has assembled a collection of essays entitled Richard Brautigan Essays on the Writings and Life. Many of the thirty-two articles are from people who knew the late author personally or professionally. Scheduled for release in the fall, it will also include previously unpublished photographs and artwork.

The last novel of Richard Brautigan, An Unfortunate Woman, was published posthumously by his daughter, Ianthe. It is a sublimely humorous, melancholy bramble of short chapters that the narrator describes as"one person's journey, a sort of freefall calendar map." It is a calling card; a self appraisal of the author's life while communicating his tilted visions of traveling across the US in the early eighties, unwinding at his home in Montana and ruminating over an apartment in Berkley where an unfortunate woman had hanged herself. Endemic in Brautigan's extraordinary style of unique fabrication and extreme metaphor, the book is as genuine and honest as his other writings with all the components of his best work. We are approaching the anniversary of Brautigan's own unfortunate late-summer suicide. Americans have appreciated his poems and novels for more than forty years. Every day there are new readers discovering the bold, dark humorist for the first time and many want to be in touch with the Brautigan conversation. One person has made an earnest goal of continuing the discussion of the artist's work.

John Barber was a former student and personal friend of the late novelist. His previous book Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography is an extensive journal of chronology and criticisms. His website, Brautigan Bibliography and Archive, (www.brautigan.net) is the definitive online resource for the author's work. He says,"The website allowed me to experiment with a new type of scholarship. Instead of going to dusty libraries and slaving among the boxes of unknown material then hoarding what you have discovered until you can publish it years later, I wanted to experiment with the idea of making my research immediately available for scholarship or interested readers and the world-wide-web seemed to offer that ability. So, I shifted my focus and decided to become a developer, a creator, and a curator of an online entity and that's how the archive site began. We get an average of 400 hits daily from around the world."

Barber was a creative writing student when Brautigan was finishing his last novel."He was writing An Unfortunate Woman and I spent quite a bit of time with him during that period in Montana. It was the summer of 1982 and he died in September of 1984. Richard was writing about one of the predominant themes in his life—and that is death. I think we can trace that theme all the way back to his high school days in Eugene, Oregon; to his fascination with Emily Dickinson."

Barber is the perfect choice as the mediator of the Brautigan discussion. He cares for the author's work with the magnifying glass of academia and the shot glass of an old friend. Reminiscing he says,"Richard thought the Eagles Nest was the best bar in Montana especially because he was the only guest they would allow to run a tab. It was what he called the 'Great American good time.' That would often include closing down every bar in the Bozeman area and then traveling to another town to have breakfast."

Barber is looking ahead to the next conversation.

"He always said he was one man observing the twentieth century. He witnessed one great literary movement follow after another; the Beats to the literature of the sixties, all from San Francisco; ground zero for the counter culture. I think it would be interesting to have a movie of Brautigan's life. Personally I'd like to see that happen and I would like to be involved in it someway. It would be an exciting adventure."

"Brautigan, Richard"
Jay Acton, Alan le Mond, and Parker Hedges, eds.
Mugshots: Who's Who in The New Earth. World Publishing, 1972, p. 26.
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Born January 30, 1935, Tacoma, Washington. Moved to San Francisco, 1954. No college. Poet-in-residence, California Institute of Technology. Poet and novelist. Books: Please Plant This Book, Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, The Galilee Hitch Hiker, Lay the Marble Tea, The Octopus Frontier, The Abortion: An Historical Romance, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, Revenge of the Lawn.

Richard Brautigan is—at first glance—an unlikely cult hero for the young. He is not a self-promoter, nor is he a revolutionary in the sense that Abbie Hoffman is. Perhaps the difference is best shown by two books written by Hoffman and Brautigan. Abbie's book is titled Steal this Book; Brautigan's is titled Plant This Book. Abbie's book generally instructs on how to rip off the establishment; Brautigan's contains eight packets of real seeds, each printed with a poem and planting instructions.

Brautigan is constructive. He is optimistic and life-affirming. And in that sense, it is easy to see and understand his prominence in the youth culture.

That is not to say that he does not agree with the Hoffman principle. John Stickney in Life magazine reported that two girls in a San Francisco bookstore were looking longingly at a copy of Trout Fishing in America while Brautigan was standing nearby. One girl told her companion that she wished to own the book, but that she didn't have the money.

"Steal it!" Brautigan whispered to her. "Go ahead!"

Brautigan says he writes because he likes to write, and he has handed out copies of his poetry free to Haight-Ashbury passersby and he has published little folios that were free for the taking in community bookshops.

Brautigan writes with soft, blurred images, intermingling fantasy with reality so deftly that the reader moves from dimension to dimension as easily as one moves from the present to remembrance of the past. In Watermelon Sugar, Brautigan uses lines like: "After making love we talked about the tigers." And: "Pauline's shack is made entirely of watermelon sugar . . . a lot of windows are made of sugar. It's hard to tell the difference between sugar and glass, the way sugar is made by Carl the windowmaker."

His is in tune with his environment and the return-to-nature mood of the times. He urges his readers to appreciate and use the beauty that surrounds them, to distinguish between good and evil, and to simplify their lives. He advocates that which St.-Exupéry proposed in The Little Prince: "That which is essential is invisible to the eye."

Three honors have been bestowed upon Brauigan of which he can well be proud—a commune, a free school, and an underground newspaper have all taken their names from Trout Fishing in America.

"Brautigan, Richard (Gary) 1935-1984"
Anonymous
Major 20th-Century Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Vol. 1. Edited by Bryan Ryan. Gale Research, 1991, pp. 371-374.
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Terence Malley observes in his Richard Brautigan: Writers for the Seventies, "In general, people who write or talk about Brautigan tend to be either snidely patronizing or vacously adoring." Certainly Brautigan's work, perhaps due in part to his association with West Coast youth movements, has generated a multitude of critical comment. Robert Novak notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Brautigan is commonly seen as the bridge between the Beat Movement of the 1950s and the youth revolution of the 1960s." A so-called guru of the sixties counterculture, Brautigan wrote of nature, life, and emotion; his unique imagination provided the unusual settings for his themes. Critics frequently compare his work to that of such writers as Thoreau, Hemingway, Barthelme, and Twain. Considered one of the primary writers of the "New Fiction," Brautigan at first experienced difficulty finding a publisher. Thus, his early work appeared in small presses during the sixties. College audiences of that decade clamored for his "new visions"; Trout Fishing in America achieved such popularity that several communes across the country adopted it as their name. In 1969, writer Kurt Vonnegut noticed Brautigan's West Coast success and introduced his work to Delacorte Press, who then reprinted Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. Delacorte's handling of Brautigan's early work helped expose his writing to readers on a national scale. Considered by most critics to be his best novel, Trout Fishing in America (written in 1961 but not published until 1967) established Brautigan as a major force in the mainstream literary scene.

About the body of Brautigan's work, Guy Davenport comments in the Hudson Review: "Mr. Brautigan locates his writing on the barricade which the sane mind maintains against spiel and bilge, and here he cavorts with a divine idiocy, thumbing his nose. But he makes clear that at his immediate disposal is a fund of common sense he does not hesitate to bring into play. He is a kind of Thoreau who cannot keep a straight face." Robert Kern presents a more traditional analysis in the Chicago Review, asserting, "Brautigan's work in both poetry and prose . . . provides a post-modernist instance of primative poetics in as pure a form as one could wish and also helps clarify some of the differences between modernism and post-modernism in general." His books mourn the apparent loss of the American Dream, and his characters spend lifetimes searching for an American utopia. Thoreau Journal Quarterly's Brad Hayden explains: "The narrator of Brautigan's novel seeks a pastoral life in nature but does not succeed; his search ends in frustration and disillusionment. En route he comments upon social and personal values in America with an equal sense of despair." Brautigan often linked life and nature in his writing and thus believed one cannot find personal joy within a contaminated environment; he deplored the encroaching pollution of the earth. Critics seem divided as to whether Brautigan's works present a melancholy vision of America, or whether they transcend worldly hardships to offer an ultimately optimistic view of existence. Hayden notes: "Brautigan's final commentary on life in contemporary America is pessimistic to say the least; it's certainly not like Thoreau's commentary in the final stages of Walden, which ends optimistically. . . . Yet all is not hopeless in Brautigan's world. Mention is made periodically throughout the book of 'Trout Fishing in America Terrorists'; persons who oppose society and, like Thoreau, live according to the dictates of the conscience rather than those of social law." Malley agrees with Hayden's observation, stating, "Although Brautigan is often a very funny writer, he is not finally an optimistic one." In contrast, John Stickney, in a Life article, perceives Brautigan's work as generally hopeful: "His message, such as it is, is mild and unprogrammatic, and unfashionably optimistic about human beings—life-affirming rather than life-denying—and involved completely with everyday American experience." Reviewers generally agree that the author's earlier writings present his themes more concisely than his later work; some feel his later work lacks cohesion as well as the perspicacity and precision characteristic of this first efforts. In addition, most critics sharply delineate his prose from his poetry, finding distinct variations in style and quality. Brautigan partially explained the difference in his work, telling Stickney: "I'm not interested in imitating a style or structure I've used before. I'll never write another book like Trout Fishing in America. I dismantled that old machine when I finished with it and left the pieces lying around in the backyard to rust in the rain."

Brautigan's prose style inspires numerous comments from critics. Describing him as a "visionary and enthusiast," Stephen Schneck of Ramparts claims: "[Brautigan] writes clearly, enunciating each phrase. He is not sloppy, he is not sentimental, he is close to the ground and without intellectual pretensions. He is never profound, but he is often a poet. A literary man of the people: which is to say, he's a gifted hick." Robert Christgau writing in the New York Times Book Review, notes Brautigan's stylistic contributions and echoes Schneck's remarks: "He is a serious writer, certainly, but the mark of his seriousness is in his craft, especially as a stylist; he is without pretensions." An innovative use of language permeated Brautigan's work as he experimented with a variety of highly individual literary techniques. Observes Tony Tanner in his City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970: "He retains the illusion of orthodox syntax and grammar, but the sentences are continually turning off into unexpectedness in ways which pleasantly dissolve our habitual semantic expectations. At the same time, Brautigan is constantly, cunningly, deviating into sense; there is enough linguistic coherence left for us to experience the book as communication, and enough linguistic sport for Brautigan to demonstrate his own freedom from control." Contemporary novelist Tom McGuane also comments on several Brautigan characteristics in the New York Times Book Review: "What is important is that Brautigan's outlandish gift is based in traditional narrative virtues. His dialogue is supernaturally exact; his descriptive conclusions is the perfect carrier for his extraordinary comic perceptions. Moreover, the books possess a springtime moral emptiness; essentially works of language, they offer no bromides for living."

Despite Brautigan's off-beat and fantastic prose, Malley asserts that he "is very much in the American grain." Similarly, Dictionary of Literary Biography's Novak notes of Trout Fishing in America: "It has a traditional theme of American novels: the influence of the American frontier and wilderness on the American imagination, its lifestyle, its economics, its ethics, its therapies, its religion, its politics." Kenneth Seib, writing in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, also observes an attachement to a typically American literary genre: "For all its surface peculiarity, . . . [Trout Fishing in America] is centrally located within a major tradition of the American novel—the romance—and is conditioned by Brautigan's concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past. Its seemingly loose and episodic narrative, its penchant for the marvelous and unusual, its pastoral nostalgia—all of these things give it that sense of 'disconnected and uncontrolled experience' which Richard Chase finds essential to the romance novel." Agreeing with Seib's remarks, David Lo Vanderwerken comments, also in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, "In choosing to write the kind of fiction that he does—symbolic, parabolic, fantastic—Brautigan clearly aligns himself with the tradition of American romancers, as opposed to that of the realists."

A concern with nature coupled with often surreal and whimsical plots typifies Brautigan's novels, which combine pastoral imagery with an examination of social disintegration within the contemporary human condition. John Clayton claims in the New American Review: "Brautigan's value is in giving us a pastoral vision which can water our spirits as we struggle—the happy knowledge that there is another place to breathe in; his danger, and the danger of the style of youth culture generally, is that we will forget the struggle." Brautigan presents paradoxes within his messages: his characters long for an American Utopia free from pollution and technological innovation, yet they use these very elements to achieve their goals. Conversely, his novels trace the apparent decline of American civilization by using traditional American symbolism and values. In each instance, Brautigan's anti-traditional style emphasizes the importance of the characters' search for, in Novak's words, a "mythical Eden."

Brautigan's characters frequently display similar reactions to similar events. They feel more comfortable in uncomplicated environments, places where "trout fishing" means "fishing for trout." But, as Josephine Hendin remarks in the New York Times Book Review, "All Brautigan's characters are fishing . . ., freezing away every psychic ache, or looking for that cold, hard alloy Brautigan calls 'trout steel.'" The simple becomes obtuse, the familiar complex. Pastoral pleasures such as trout fishing emerge as metaphors for social change, for the mutability inherent in technological advancement. Hendin explains, "Brautigan is the prophet of cities built out of ice rather than fire, of an America whose emblem would be no war-god eagle, but an elusive cold fish."

For the more savvy of his characters, however, Brautigan offers a different message, in which survival becomes the key element. Success or failure fade into indistinction as his characters struggle to triumph over a mostly hostile world. As their images of Eden crumble, Brautigan's characters realize that staying alive means readjusting attitudes and priorities. Deep emotion and meaningful relationships serve only to hinder survival; therefore, surface feelings and superficial encounters permeate character interaction. Comments Hendin: "Brautigan's dream world is constituted from watermelon sugar and trout steel, from that mixture of sweetness and detachment that permits you to be kind but never loving, disappointed but never enraged . . . Brautigan makes cutting out your heart the only way to endure, the most beautiful way to protest the fact that life can be an endless down."

Brautigan looked to nature as the one constant of recent times, despite its increasing contamination. In Trout Fishing in America, the trout stream, symbolic of the natural beauty and wildness inherent in America, becomes a reference point for "trout steel," and incomparably tough metal. Perhaps trout steel serves as a metaphor for the durability of nature, yet Brautigan indicates that even nature cannot remain impervious to progress: finally, pieces of a used trout stream are for sale in a junkyard at $6.50 per foot—evidence of nature's ultimate frailty. With the belief that nature should remain untouched, Brautigan exhibits concern at pollution and man-made destruction of natural environments. Life's Stickney notes that Brautigan "was appalled" at the condition: "'Where the hell are the trash bins?' [Brautigan] muttered. 'What would Henry David Thoreau think if he could see this place now?'"

Unlike his prose, Brautigan's poetry frequently draws comments of inconsistency from critics. Malley identifies part of this complaint in his Richard Brautigan: "In my view, Brautigan's sense of the transforming power of art (of the imagination or the heightened perception) is at the root of one of his chief strengths and as writer—and is also responsible for the unevenness of his work, especially of his poetry." Similar to analyses of his novels, many reviewers find his later poems less brilliant than his earlier attempts. Timothy Daum of Library Journal compares Brautigan's first verse efforts to the more recent Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, claiming, "Brautigan's poetic style, previously centered around eclectic insights into how everyday events are tranformed into art, is here reduced to quick simulacra of bitter thoughts and cynical visions." In describing June 30th, June 30th, Dennis Petticoffer comments, also in Library Journal, on the book's irregular balance: "Taken individually, many of these poems do not hold up well. Brautigan himself concedes that the collection is 'uneven.'" Petticoffer concludes that the book "may prove less enticing than Brautigan's earlier works." The Tokyo-Montana Express inspired Raymond Carver to write in the Chicago Tribune Book World that some of the poems resemble "little astonishments going off in your hands," while others are "so-so, take them or leave them," while still others, "I think too many—are just filling up space." Agreeing with Carver's observation about the book, Barry Yourgrau asserts in the New York Times Book Review: "A number of these items strike me as just doodlings falsely promoted from the author's notebooks. Their only function seems to be to make the book fatter on the shelf."

Despite negaive comments about his verse, however, many critics admire Brautigan's poetry. At his best, he receives praise for his linguistic precision and imaginative originality. Notes Malley, "Some of Brautigan's best poems, in my opinion, have a quality of fresh, precise observation." The Georgia Review's John Ditsky compares Brautigan's prose and poetry and perceives many similarites: "Richard Brautigan's fiction shares many of the qualities of his poetry—charm, brevity, whimsy, and in many cases a total inability to leave a residue in the consciousness." Michael Rogers claims in the New York Times Book Review that "Brautigan's most durable work, in fact, has been his short fiction and verse—shorter pieces containing wit, innovative imagery and unexpected turns of phrase that will almost certainly retain a lasting audience." Chicago Review's Kern identifies qualities of Brautigan's poetic style and categorizes him in a distinct literary genre: "More than anything else, it is probably the flatness and the apparent artlessness of his poetry that are boring and even offensive to some of Brautigan's readers. But it is precisely these elements that constitute what is meant by a primitive poetics (though Brautigan, admittedly, takes them to a blatant extreme)." About The Tokyo-Montana Express, John D. Berry observes in the Washington Post Book World that "it is [Brautigan's] unusual descriptions that catch our attention." Michael Mason of the Times Literary Supplement sees this book as a culmination of th author's earlier verse attempts and, unlike other critics, praises its consistency: "It may sound odd to say that an author has arrived at a vision which is harmonious with his way of writing after a sequence of no less than eight novels, but it is a claim which can be pressed surprisingly far for Brautigan and The Tokyo-Montana Express. . . . The book amounts . . . to a coherent meditation or investigation: united by a vision of things which is melancholy and alienated and which is seeking an assuagement of these feelings."

Dictionary of Literary Biography's Novak describes Brautigan as "a controversial writer because he seems to encourage the self-adoring anti-intellectualism of the young." Few critics would argue that the bulk of Brautigan's work inspires disagreement and controversy. But, according to John Yohalem in the New York Times Book Review, Brautigan's work seems to meet with general approval from readers: "Richard Brautigan is a popular writer. He is clever and brief; he touches themes and myths close to the current fantasy without being too difficult or too long to complete and understand at a single sitting. He is witty, likable, even literate—a rare virtue nowadays." Rolling Stone's Gurney Norman concurs with Yohalem's assessment of Brautigan's overall impact: "As a California writer, [Brautigan] stands as a kind of gift from the West Coast to the rest of the nation which, judging from the enormous circulation of his books, is a gift the country willingly accepts."

"Richard Brautigan"
Caroline J. Bokinsky
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 5: American Poets Since World War II. Edited by Donald J. Greiner. Gale Research Company, 1980, pp. 96-99.
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Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the son of Bernard F. and Lula Mary Keho Braurigan. He married Virginia Dionne Adler, from whom he is now divorced, on 8 June 1957, and he has a daughter, Ianthe. He moved to San Francisco in 1958 and there befriended such poets as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Phillip Whalen, and Michael McClure. He is often categorized as one of the San Francisco Poets. Brautigan was poet-in-residence at California Institute of Technology in 1967 and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968-1969. He maintains no single place of residence, claiming San Francisco, Montana, and Tokyo as homes. He lives a secluded life, despite his wide-spread popularity, often retreating to his home in Montana.

He began his writing career as a poet, gained most of his acclaim from his novels, and became a cult hero with Trout Fishing in America (1967). One of his few published comments on writing is recorded in David Meltzer's The San Francisco Poets (1971): "I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady." By experimenting with poetry, he developed his skills with language. Many readers consider him a master of the simile and metaphor because he is able to link seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts.

In precise, lucid words, Brautigan encourages the reader neither to pry deeply nor to overinterpret. As Robert Kern notes, Brautigan's style is like that of William Carlos Williams, with a "Poetics of Primitivism" that "does not look like literature and is not meant to." This primitive, pure form of writing is almost "preliterary," according to Kern, because it is based on no historical traditions but instead is invented "out of the daily events and objects of [the poet's] immediate physical locality." Brautigan's primitivism, according to Kern, lies in the intentional naivete of his poems as the poet draws attention to himself in the act of articulating his emotional responses and observations of the world. Tony Tanner, although focusing more on Brautigan's novels than his poetry, finds Brautigan's achievement in his "magically delicate verbal ephemera."

What appears as nonliterary in Brautigan's work is more an attempt to start anew. Deliberately using poetry as a stimulating "lover," he experiments with his sensations, tests his emotions, and observes external reality, with the ulterior motive of grasping language at its most elementary level and recording his gut responses. His creative imagination is constantly at work as he looks at life in terms of analogies; one form of experience, or one particular observation, is like something else. The poet imposes his unique order on the world's chaos as he sees life in a new way, giving meaning to the meaningless. The reader must strip himself of expectations and conventions in order to approach and accept Brautigan's poetry as a refreshing new version of experience. Despite his concern for the new, Brautigan has been influenced by the Imagists, the Japanese, and the French Symbolists. From the Imagists and the Japanese he inherits a concern for the precision of words, while the Symbolist influence is apparent in his references to Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and in his use of synesthesia, in which one type of sensation stimulates a different sense, or a mental stimulus elicits a physical response, or vice versa.

Brautigan's earliest published poem, The Return of the Rivers (1957), is an observation of the external world as a surreal, romanticized setting in which the cycle of life is exemplified in the river, sea, rain, and ocean. He demonstrates the creative power of the poet's imagination to an even greater degree in The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958). The book consists of nine separate poems in which the speaker describes his encounters with Baudelaire, who appears in a different pose in each section. Terence Malley considers the collection "one of Brautigan's finest achievements" and suggests that Baudelaire is a symbol of "the artist who can transform anything into anything else."

With his next book, Lay the Marble Tea (1959), Brautigan's exploration of language extends to similes and metaphors with humorous twists as suggested by such titles as "Feel Free to Marry Emily Dickinson" or "Twenty Eight Cents for My Old Age." His experiments with the simile include strange analogies in which "a dish of ice cream" looks "like Kafka's hat," or in "In a Cafe":

"I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of
bread as if he were folding a birth certificate
or looking at the photograph of a dead lover."

Brautigan's imaginative reconstructions of reality also include such recollections of his youth as "The Chinese Checkers Players" and "A Childhood Spent in Tacoma."

The Octopus Frontier (1960) continues Brautigan's creation of order and meaning from objects in the literal world by using them to construct a fantasy world within his own imagination. In many of the poems the speaker leads the reader through the maze of Brautigan's imagination, as in "Private Eye Lettuce," an attempt to show how man's imagination makes connections, no matter how extraneous, and gives significance to "objects of this world." While "Private Eye Lettuce" makes logical associations, in "The Wheel" the poet assumes a child's view of the world where the analogies are more fanciful. "The Winos on Potrero Hill," however, relies more on realistic detail and precision. The poet acts as a painter, in a meticulous step-by-step process, putting each object in a specific place to create a painting. "The Postman" creates its effect by allusion because although the poet never says what "The smell / of vegetables / on a cold day" elicits, the accumulation of similes causes a synesthetic response. The sensation of smell suggests the taste of fresh summer vegetables. The taste in turn stimulates the feel of a warm summer day. All sensations merge in the imagination, and even those that are illusions appear real for a moment.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967) provides a transition to the collection that was to become his most popular and was to establish his position as a poet, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). Recalling the romanticism of The Return of the Rivers while looking forward to the humor that characterizes The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, the long poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, presents a vision of an ideal world where man and nature exist in harmony, "where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony," and where the perfect world is "all watched over / by machines of loving grace."

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster includes most of the poems that appeared in previous volumes and new poems that confirm his magical power of transforming an image into something else. The title poem, most often mentioned by critics, is a Brautigan classic. A sudden revelation, which flashes into the poet's head as an insignificant moment, becomes an analogy with greater proportions. Robert Kern praises "Haiku Ambulance," a brief poem often casually dismissed as pointless, and links it to William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." In some of the poems Brautigan's extravagant metaphors become farfetched. Such poems as "The Harbor" "The Horse That Had a Flat Tire," or "Death is a Beautiful Parked Car Only" verge on the incomprehensible. Yet in "The Garlic Meat Lady" he is absorbed in the elemental delights of life. He identifies passion with Marcia preparing dinner:

"She takes
each piece of meat like a lover
and rubs it gently with garlic.
I've never seen anything like this
before. Each orifice
of the meat is explored, caressed
relentlessly with garlic."

Brautigan continues his experiments with similes and metaphors in the next volume, Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt (1970), but his poetry also begins to move into social commentary. Some pages are blank, with only titles at the top, as if poems were intended to be there but were never created. Along with the humor, he takes a verbal stab at critics, alludes to Robert Kennedy's death, suggests the economic plight of the country, and depicts the lack of communication between husband and wife. In "Jules Verne Zucchini," he hits hard at the discrepancy between scientific progress—man walking on the moon—and people starving on the earth. "Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt" suggests the futility of war, the cycle of history, and dead heroes forgotten by the passage of time. A momentous occasion, like Rommel's penetration into Egypt, is meaningless to someone seeing the news account (the title of the poem is an old newspaper headline) years after the event.

A new tone emerges in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976). Brautigan's terse messages and witty similes are overshadowed by a blacker humor and a darker, more pensive mood. The poems are more personal; the reader even glimpses the poet in the process of writing. The blacker poems include references to Captain Martin who is lost at sea and to "a freshly-dug grave," "a blind lighthouse," or "a poorly-designed angel." An awareness of growing old is a key subject, as in "The Last Surprise":

"The last surprise is when you come
gradually to realize that nothing
surprises you anymore."

A poet who once saw life in pleasant, whimsical analogies is now filled with foreboding and pessimism. His sensations are no longer so acute. In "Fresh Paint" the speaker expresses perplexity over his associations of the sight of funeral parlors, the smell of fresh paint, and the sensation in his stomach. He retreats to a private wilderness in "Montana/1973" to reexperience life in nature, to rediscover his true essence, and to get back in touch with his own sensations, with the world, and with the cosmos. He concludes the volume with an existential pose, convincing himself that retreating to Montana is an action with some value:

"Nobody knows what the experience is worth
but it's better than sitting on your hands,
I keep telling myself."

In June 30th, June 30th (1978) Brautigan comes to terms with an important moment in his youth: the death of his uncle in 1942, which was indirectly caused by a head wound from bomb fragments during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. He died a year later from a fall that Brautigan felt would have been avoided had he not been injured. In the introduction to the poems, Brautigan states that after going through a period of hatred for the Japanese, "the war slipped back into memory." When he discovered their art and their humanity, he could forgive the Japanese and was eventually drawn to the country, where he confronted his animosity during a visit that lasted from 13 May to 30 June 1976. Leaving Japan on the evening of 30 June, he crossed the international date line in mid-Pacific and landed in the United States at the beginning of a second 30 June, feeling that part of himself was left behind in Japan. The book's title signifies the divided self, while also implying the poet's coming to terms with his other self.

Brautigan calls the poems a diary: critics have referred to them collectively as one poem. June 30th, June 30th is the most unified of Brautigan's volumes not only because the poems pertain to a single experience but because the speaker of all the poems is Brautigan himself examining his reactions to this experience. For the first time, Brautigan is a confessional poet, lost and alone in a strange land, unable to communicate. There is a barrier separating him not only from those who do not speak English, as "The Silence of Language" and "Talking" indicate, but also from those who speak his own language. He effectively conveys to the reader this greater lack of communication in "On the Elevator Going Down." He is just one individual among the millions in Tokyo in "The 12,000,000" and "Japanese Children," and he discovers that Tokyo is no different from any other city. His observations of a sleeping cat, a fly, or dreams could have been made anywhere else in the world. In "A Study in Roads," he comments that with "All the possibilities of life, / all roads led here," expressing the feeling that he has been a sporadic wanderer. Although he is well known, "Ego Orgy on a Rainy Night in Tokyo with Nobody to Make Love to" ends with a despairing tone: "I will sleep alone tonight in Tokyo."

As Brautigan told Meltzer in 1971, "I love writing poetry but it's taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other." June 30th, June 30th is the transition from a lifelong courtship of poetry into a commitment whereby he gives himself to poetry, making her his "old lady."

"Postmoderns and Others: The 1960s and 1970s"
Malcolm Bradbury
The Modern American Novel, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 169-171.
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The effort to use experimental fictional forms to reach towards and recover a spirit of American innocence can also be seen in the work of Richard Brautigan, another author very insistent on intruding his own presence and tone into his storytelling. A younger writer whose roots lie in the California hippie scene and in Sixties radicalism, Brautigan has been too readily cast as a writer of naive fictions, and as a celebrator of that California beach and hippie life-style that followed on from the worlds of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. Brautigan certainly exploits that connection; his first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), plays solid images from the American past, above all those arising from the Civil War, against the latter-day skirmishings of his contemporary 'confederate general', Lee Mellon, as he battles with hippie irony against ideology and system. But Brautigan's effort is also to create a modern text, dissolving old national narrative. He writes about the ironizing of the world, the waning of pastoral myths of innocence and of escape from social constriction into nature; he shows the power of old images and then of the endeavours of the imagination to dissolve them, both through the struggles of his fictional outsiders, and of the poetic imagination itself. If the world wanes, the writer's exuberant comic imagination thrives; form in its collapse promises recovery, the fixities of time, space, and ideology dissolve, and A Confederate General ends both in a characteristic sadness and in hyperactivity of the creative imagination, as it generates 'more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second'.

The same notion of dissolving the solidity of the world through the freedoms of imagination dominates Brautigan's next book, or "writing", Trout Fishing in America (1967), 47 brief chapter-essays cast in the mode of the angler's notebook, an old pastoralizing form that permits Brautigan to celebrate his West Coast world. But on that world a mechanical age has imposed itself, generating mechanical images; from their juxtaposition come strange mergings and contrasts, a new discourse. Old linguistic sets generate new fantasy and invention: thus the title phrase itself, 'Trout Fishing in America', keeps transforming, becoming place, person ('Trout Fishing in America Shorty'), and an essential principle of imaginative independence. Mind and metaphor can recover the animate from the inanimate—as when. in a marvellous passage, the narrator visits the Cleveland Wrecking Yard and there buys a used trout stream. Signs thus detach from their systems, grow indeterminate, generate invention; phrase becomes dreck, redundancy, and reforms as a new basis for textual creation.

Brautigan's effort to recover an animate from the inanimated world is yet more evident in his next book In Watermelon Sugar (1968), a surreal fantasy set in a peaceable community called iDEATH, where, amid the remnants of a technological America, the inhabitants make a gentle world of watermelon sugar, much like a fiction itself. With its apparent restitution of an innocent pastoral world, the book is open to sentimental reading; but it is also about the decentreing of the subject, the death of the self (iDEATH), about consciousness fading and changing, objects displacing into pure phenomenal existence, then being recovered as random icons. As in other postmodern texts, words lose their fixity and attachment to things, becoming fluid, just like watermelon sugar. Brautigan is parodying fixed writing and solid forms, and his next books mock the generic fixities of fiction itself The Abortion (1971), sub-titled 'An Historical Romance', attempts to collapse the library of literature itself, which now includes Brautigan's own past books; The Hawkline Monster (1974), sub-titled 'A Gothic Western', merges two seemingly incompatible forms, the classic adventure Western and the Gothic novel of horrors, displacements, and estrangements; Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1974), sub-titled 'A Perverse Mystery', dissolves all the suspense and expectation of mystery writing to create a text for fictional play. These books are attempts at the dissolution of forms, the breaking of serial orders, the collapse of nominative processes and identities, the substitution of free invention for static mimesis. More recently, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) has emphasized the poetic and conceptual underpinnings of his work—its emphasis on the instant, the sense of severance from the past, the awareness of the dissolution of classic identity, the claims of the fluid moment. It illuminates the serious postmodern "game" of his work, a work that proposes the wasting of old forms and orders, the exhaustion of writing, but the powers of recovery the image offers to the imagination, as intertextuality generates new forms, parts without wholes that invite radical re-connection. Brautigan has proved vastly more than an innocently hippie writer, rather an author of gnomic knowledge and imaginative discovery whose spirit of saddened yet finally optimistic imaginative hope would pass on to a number of literary successors in the Seventies.

"Brautigan, Richard"
Wesley Britton
Identities and Issues in Literature. Vol. 1. Edited by David Peck. Salem Press, 1997, pp. 188-189..
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A spokesman for youthful disillusionment with American society in the 1960's, Brautigan is remembered for his contribution to literary style.

From 1967 to 1971, Richard Brautigan's popularity was based on his association with West Coast youth movements. His books, particularly his short, fanciful novels, were viewed as expressions of a generation disillusioned with the American myth. His gentle, comic books mourned the apparent loss of the American Eden, and his stories often focus on the search for a new American pastoral utopia. Such a search, his works point out, ultimately results in despair and disillusionment. Brautigan's works comment upon social and personal values in America, linking life and nature. An implicit belief in Brautigan's work is that one cannot find personal happiness in a contaminated, polluted environment.

Critical views differ widely on Brautigan's vision, some emphasizing his apocalyptic, melancholy America, others pointing to his gentle, sweet, optimistic imagery that transcends the hard, workaday world. His use of nature is often compared to that of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), especially Trout Fishing in America, regarded as Brautigan's best novel. Like Thoreau, Brautigan is considered to be an advocate of the individual conscience rather than the dictates of social laws, a theme explored in all of his early works, pehaps best demonstrated in his The Abortion: An Historical Romance, in which a couple live in a library of unpublished books and in which the woman has, without much guilt or any medical complications, an abortion.

Critics generally agree that Brautigan's prose is more important than his verse, and that earlier, more stylistically innovative writings present his themes more concisely than his later work. Brautigan's canon is widely discussed for his use of metaphorical, whimsical language rather than for any depth of philosophy or meaning. His use of America's past as being both bankrupt of ideas and a necessity for understanding the present, his concern for the fluidity and stability of nature, and his quirky, surreal examinations of social disintegration remain of interest despite his reputation for merely being a spokesman for the revolutionary attitudes of the 1960's.

While continuing to publish after 1971, Brautigan found both his critical and popular support eroding with each successive book. Brautigan apparently committed suicide in September, 1984, but his body was not discovered until October 25 of that year.

"Richard Brautigan 1935-1984"
Carl Brucker and Farhat M. Iftekharuddin
Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Vol. 1. Edited by Kirk H. Beetz, Ph.D. Beacham Publications, 1996, 2000, pp. 222-227.
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Richard Brautigan was born on January 30, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington, to Bernard and Lulu Brautigan who inflicted him with a turbulent, nomadic childhood. He was abandoned at the age of nine with his four-year-old sister in a hotel room in Great Falls, Montana; only later did his mother reclaim the children and take them to Tacoma. The family moved to Eugene, Oregon where Brautigan was allowed to finish high school. In 1955, embittered by criticism of his writings by a girlfriend, he deliberately threw a rock through the window of an Oregon police station, which resulted in a one-week jail sentence; subsequently, he was sent to the Oregon State Hospital where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1956 he abandoned his family and moved to San Francisco where he found himself in the company of such writers as Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, George Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Ron Loewinshon. He worked delivering telegrams to support himself, and in 1957 married Virginia Alder, with whom he had one daughter. In 1958 he published his first book, a collection of poems called The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, which brought him some notoriety among his more famous peers. In 1961 he traveled to Snake River Country, Idaho, with his family and began working on his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America. In 1977 he married Akiko, a Japanese woman who fell in love with him after reading The Abortion. He commited suicide in 1984 in his home in Bolinas but was not found until October 25, at least four weeks after his death.

After moving to San Francisco in 1954, Richard Brautigan became involved with the Beat literary movement. His works was included in Four New Poets (1957), and he managed to publish several volumes of poetry in the next few years. None of these books sold well and some were simply given away. In 1964, Grove Press published Brautigan's novel Confederate General from Big Sur, but it was not until Don Allen's Four Season Foundation published Trout Fishing in America at the height of the "summer of love" in 1967 that Brautigan became widely read. After four printings, the book, which Brautigan had written in 1961, was purchashed by Seymour Lawrence for his Delacorte imprint. Lawrence's winning bid, which also bought the rights to The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (poems) and In Watermelon Sugar, was made without his having seen the book. The three titles were reprinted in one volume in 1969, and Dell's aggressive marketing of the subsequent separate printing of Trout Fishing in America helped make it a best seller. By the time of Brautigan's death in 1984, Trout Fishing in America had sold over two million copies in twelve languages.

When Trout Fishing in America's popularity attracted critical attention, Brautigan was immediately and somewhat inaccurately linked with the hippie counterculture. This connection with an ephemeral cultural movement was profitable for a time: Confederate General from Big Sur was successfully reissued by Grove Press in 1968; In Watermelon Sugar (1968) sold well; and his collection of stories Revenge of the Lawn (1971) was widely read and discussed. However, being known as the "literary representative of that phenomenon . . . known as The Hippies" limited Brautigan's appeal, and as fashions changed in the 1970s, Brautigan's work steadily lost readership in America. His books continue to sell very well abroad, particularly in Japan and France.

Despite national promotion by Grove Press, the 1964 publication of Confederate General from Big Sur drew little critical notice, and the reviews that were written were generally negative. After the publication of Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan was inextricably tied to the counterculture, and much that was written about it and subsequent publications was colored by the individual reviewer's politics. Conservative academics dismissed Brautigan's iconoclastic writing as literature for kids, and the political left was put off by his lack of militancy. Nevertheless, the overall reaction to Trout Fishing in America was positive, sometimes extravagantly so, and many respected critics such as John Ciardi said in the book Brautigan "manages effects . . . never produced before."

In 1968, Brautigan received a National Endowment for the Arts award. In 1972 he purchased a small ranch in Pine Creek, Montana and refused all lecture invitations and interviews for the next eight years. Although he returned to the lecture circuit in 1980, his literary fortunes continued their decline. Friends say that this diminishing readership depressed Brautigan, and on October 25, 1984, he was discovered in Bolinas, California, killed by an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. His obituaries still referred to him as a "quixotic counterculture writer." In a final ironic note, Bernard Brautigan of Dearborn, Michigan discovered that he was the author's father only after his son's suicide.

"Richard Brautigan 1935-1984: The Court Jester of the Counter-Culture"
Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shepard
Cult Fiction: A Reader's Guide. Contemporary Books, 1999, pp. 30-31.
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Born in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan was influenced by the Beat writers and specifically the San Francisco renaissance poets (Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg). His first publications were poetry volumes including The Galilee Hitchhiker (1958) and The Octopus Frontier (1960).

Brautigan's first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), won critical acclaim. His next, Trout Fishing in America (1967), was a commercial success, selling over 2 million copies worldwide. Detailing the search for the perfect fishing spot, the book took in San Francisco city parks, Oregon woodlands, Idaho campsites and a Filipino laundry. The failure to find the spot symbolised the cultural aridity of mainstream American life. Both books exhibit Brautigan's inimitable style: imaginative fantasy where the normal laws of reality and the traditional logic of fiction are cast aside in favour of brilliant free-thinking bejewelled with a charmingly whimsical poetic innocence. They are the embodiment of hippiedom.

Around the time of Trout Fishing, Brautigan became involved with the San Francisco Mime Troup and the Diggers—radical activists who donated free food to itinerants, scoffed at the meaningless psychedelic rituals enacted in Haight-Ashbury, and distributed leaflets to drug-addled hippies, saying: "How long will you tolerate people transforming your trip into cash?" and "Your style is being sold back to you."

As the summer of love went sour, so Brautigan's books lost their naivety. They retained their quirky style (some chapters were only two sentences long) but each one was darker than its predecessor. The change in Brautigan's mood, from psychedelic optimism to Nixon-era paranoia, is discernible in the contrasting titles of his stories and prose/poems: Please Plant this Book (1968), combining verse and packets of seeds, and Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976), expressing his increasingly pessimistic sense of absurdity.

For some critics, Brautigan's early naivety is now as embarrassing as love beads. Modern ears are more tuned to his darker, later voice, as heard in Sombrero Fallout (1931) [sic] and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980).

His final book, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away, appeared in 1982. Rather than go the way of his old Mime Troup/Digger colleague Peter Cohon, aka Jagged Edge film star Peter Coyote, who also does voiceovers for car adverts, a depressed Brautigan shot himself. It was several weeks before his body was discovered.

"Richard (Gary) Brautigan"
Anonymous
Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 42. Gale Research, 1987, pp. 48-66.
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American novelist, poet, and short story writer.

Often considered a link between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Brautigan is best known for his novels Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). In his novels, Brautigan employs lyrical prose, simple syntax, and whimsical style while exploring such themes as death, sex, violence, betrayal, loss of innocence, and the power of imagination to transform reality. His early novels, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America, and In Watermelon Sugar, are regarded as his most important works. They are generally seen as tragicomic pastorals in which Brautigan discards such traditional features of the novels as plot, characterization, and setting in favor of a more innovative approach utilizing metafictional techniques, imaginative prose, and a carefree style and surface texture that belie the somber nature of his concerns. While some critics contend that the many brief sketches included in Brautigan's novels are slight anecdotal fragments unconnected in either theme or style, others find them to be humorous vignettes that subtly interweave his central concerns and motifs.

While some critics maintain that Brautigan is an unclassifiable writer most closely allied with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., he has also been associated with such American authors as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway. He shares with these authors an interest in the American pastoral myth, a respect for nature and solitude, and a propensity for unadorned language. Brautigan, however, does not share these writers' belief in the authenticity of the pastoral tradition. Acccording to Neil Schmitz, Brautigan "does not write within the pastoral mode as an advocate of its vision" but is instead "an ironist critically examining the myths and language of the pastoral sensibility."

Brautigan began writing poetry in San Francisco in the 1950s. His first collection, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), gathers his poems from 1957 through 1968. Characterized by an inventive use of language, fanciful analogies, and an offhand tone, Brautigan's poetry established his reputation as an imaginative writer. Usually slight in length and theme, Brautigan's poems in this collection are considered among his best. With subsequent volumes, including Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt (1970), Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1978), and June 30th, June 30th (1978), critics found Brautigan's offhandedness annonying and his poetry' slightness ultimately unsatisfying. Brautigan stated that he began writing poetry in order to learn to construct sentences in preparation for writing novels.

Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is an account of the life of Lee Mellon, a comically perverse hero and resident of Big Sur who believes himself to be a general in the confederate army. Told in a series of thinly related episodes by a self-proclaimed student of theology who attempts to analyze the punctuation of the book of Ecclesiastes, the novel is, in one sense, a humorous exploration of rebellion. Although it is the second book Brautigan wrote, A Confederate General from Big Sur has also been seen as an introduction to the themes and motifs he explores with more complexity and depth in Trout Fishing in America.

Widely regarded as the most important of Brautigan's novels, Trout Fishing in America exhibits many thematic and stylistic ties to Beat literature and anticipates the disillusionment experienced years later by the youth counterculture. The novel is a disjointed story of a man, a woman, and their child, who wander across America fishing trout streams while whimsically telling tales, writing letters, and sharing unusual recipies. Yet images of violence, environmental disintegration, and futility continually invade their idyllic adventures. Critics have described Trout Fishing in America as a tragedy in the pastoral mode filled with eulogistic imagery and writen in a whimsical style that is purposefully inappropriate to the seriousness of Brautigan's subject matter. Terrance Malley stated: "Ultimately, Brautigan is not writing a pastoral novel in Trout Fishing in America. Instead, he is writing an analysis of why the old pastoral myth of an America of freedom and tranquilty is no longer viable."

Brautigan's third novel, In Watermelon Sugar, has been called his most serious work of fiction. Recorded by a calm and nameless narrator, the book reflects, without intrusion of meaning or interpretation, the narrator's surreal experience in a successful commune called iDEATH. Except for a band of renegades who have chosen to live a life of violence amid the forbidden ruins of a previouis civilization, the inhabitants of iDEATH are content with their passive and unified existence. The rebels die in a ritual mass suicide, while the commune continues on. This parable-like story, called a "religious tract" by Edward Halsey Foster, has been interpreted as Brautigan's prescription for survival in the twentieth century.

In his novels of the 1970s, including The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966 (1971), The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), and Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942 (1977), Brautigan parodies various genres of popular fiction. Brautigan became more conventional in his use of plot and characterization in these works, and while they generated some serious critical attention, they are generally considered thematically and stylistically less significant than his first three novels. In The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982), Brautigan returns to the themes and style of Trout Fishing in America. In The Tokyo-Montana Express, which comprises short, semi-autobiographical observations on such topics as society, death, and aging, Brautigan attempts to recreate the comically evocative and unusual style of his early novels and extends the alternative vision of life he originally proposed in those works. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is a fictional recollection of a childhood spent wandering from town to town during the 1940s. Filled with eccentric characters, the novel culminates in the narrator's killing of his best friend in a shooting accident that symbolizes America's loss of innocence.

"Richard Brautigan"
John Cusatis
Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry. Edited by Jeffrey Gray, James McCorkle, and Mary McAleer Balkun. Greenwood Press, 2005, pp. 187-188.
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Richard Brautigan wrote poetry for seven years to prepare to write novels. By 1960 he had published four books of verse and established himself as a minor figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. That year he also began work on his first novel, employing the spare style, offset by wildly imaginative figurative language, that he had honed as a poet. Upon publication seven years later, this novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967) became a literary emblem of the flourishing counter-culture movement. Brautigan gained an international audience and returned to writing poetry—this time for its own sake. He would publish six more books of poems, but his readership would decline with the waning of the counter-culture movement.

Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935, shortly after his parents had separated. Accounts of family members indicate that his childhood was marked by loneliness, neglect, and poverty. He began writing as a teenager and was determined to become successful. Poverty added urgency to this goal as he felt writing was his only skill. After graduating from high school in Eugene, Oregon, in 1953, he began publishing his poems in national magazines. In 1958 he settled in San Francisco at the height of the Beat Movement and befriended many of the Beat poets including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. His poetry began appearing in major Beat publications such as the Evergreen Review and City Lights Journal. His first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) sold poorly, but Trout Fishing in America quickly sold two million copies. Brautigan's reclusive life-style and aversion to the drug-culture made him an unlikely hippie icon, but the candor, idealism, and whimsical nature of his work appealed widely to that generation. The author nurtured this association by the free distribution of Please Plant This Book (1968), eight poems printed on seed packets suggesting the reader prolong the life of the poem by transplanting it into the earth. But his popularity dropped dramatically in the mid-1970s, by which time he became relegated to cult status. Brautigan did not adjust well to this decline, and his later years were characterized by alienation and alcoholism. In the summer of 1982, he secluded himself in his Bolinas, California, ranch house to write his final novel, published posthumously as An Unfortunate Woman (2000). His body was discovered on 25 October 1984, several weeks after he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Brautigan's verse is pervaded by a preoccupation with time. Generally, if he is not lamenting the erosive effects of time, he is celebrating and attempting to preserve ordinary moments before they are lost to oblivion. Whether his poems are despairing or ecstatic, their effect tends to rely on irony and innovation. His first book, a broadside titled The Return of the Rivers (1957), introduces this concern with time. The poem alludes to Ecclesiastes, acknowledging the perpetual ebb and flow of the earth's waters but noting the presence of spring, which does not, for the moment, "dream of death." Brautigan's early poems often feature surreal anachronisms. In "To England" from Lay the Marble Tea (1959), the poet imagines mailing a letter back to a time when John Donne's "grave hasn't been dug yet." He imagines Donne greeting the postman, who approaches with a glass cane. The new poems in Brautigan's first major collection, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), which includes nearly all the poems of his earlier books, resemble the concise, conversational poetry of William Carlos Williams ("Widow's Lament") and recall the word play of e.e. cummings ("The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem"). The title poem, one of many that allude to an historic tragedy as an analogue for personal loss, compares "all the people lost" due to a girlfriend's use of birth control to the victims of a mining catastrophe. Brautigan's poems frequently use dates to harness more firmly an ephemeral moment. In "Alas Measured Perfectly," a snapshot of two seemingly happy women, taken on August 25, 1888 becomes a metaphor for the poem itself, which has captured what is "all gone." His next collection, Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt (1970), includes a few poems with only titles, the blank page suggesting something forgotten. "1891-1944," for example, refers to the lifespan of General Rommel, who, as Brautigan notes in the book's title poem, has "joined the quicksand legions / of history." In "The Memoirs of Jesse James," the poet compares his school teachers to the legendary outlaw "for all the time they stole" from him. Often the composition of a poem is itself the subject as in "April 7, 1969," where Brautigan wishes to commemorate how bad he feels with "any poem, this/ poem."

The title poem of his next collection, Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976), conveys the poet's frustration in trying to capture the essence of experience. But in "Seconds" he notes, with "such a short amount of time to live and think" he has spent the proper number of seconds observing a butterfly: "twenty." In the introduction to his final collection, June 30th, June 30th (1978), Brautigan credits the Japanese haiku poets for teaching him to concentrate "emotion, detail, and image" to create "a form of dew-like steel." He also acknowledges the frequent criticism that his work is uneven, stating "the quality of life is uneven." In this book, which chronicles a stay in Japan, Brautigan emphasizes that his art not only preserves poetic moments but also validates his existence. In "Tokyo / June 11, 1976" he remarks that his passport and his poetry "are the same thing." Brautigan's final poem, "The Past Cannot Be Returned" lacks the optimism of "The Return of the Rivers." The "umbilical cord" broken, he notes, life cannot "flow through it again."

The 1990s saw nine of Brautigan's books, including The Pill, reissued in America and many more throughout Europe. The discovery of his earliest poems, published in The Edna Webster Collection (1999), shows that Brautigan's experimental style and concern with the transience of experience colored his work from the start.

"Richard Brautigan"
Edward Cutler
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Twentieth-Century American Western Writers. First Series Vol. 206. Edited by Richard H. Cracroft. Gale Group, 1999, pp. 33-41.
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Richard Brautigan, a San Francisco-based poet and a popular experimental novelist in the 1960s, left an uncertain critical legacy when he died, apparently by his own hand, at the age of forty-nine. Commentators have variously attempted to categorize him as "the last Beat," a Zen Buddhist, a hippie icon, an American humorist, a modern Henry David Thoreau, and a pioneer of postmodern fiction. Although Brautigan enjoyed a generally favorable critical and commercial response to his experimental fiction in the 1960s, reviewers often panned his work as formally simplistic and conceptually light. Following a popular breakthrough with Trout Fishing in America (1967) and other works, Brautigan slipped out of fashion in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many critics dismissed his later fiction and poetry as self-absorbed, empty productions of a flower child whose moment had passed. While some critics found a subtle complexity and artistic purpose in Brautigan's seemingly plotless, monotone narrative fiction and his uniformly self-referential poetry, critical consensus at the time of his death cast Brautigan as a minor writer and a faddish literary icon whose significance had faded along with the counterculture out of which he emerged.

While still perhaps a majority opinion, this view has begun to change.

As a uniquely contemporary Western American literary voice, Brautigan is difficult to overlook; few writers of his generation so thoroughly maneuvered prose fiction away from both formulaic political realism and modernist conventionality. A West Coast writer with avant-garde intuitions and pop playfulness, Brautigan pioneered a narrative and poetic practice that to some extent anticipated postmodern challenges to generic form, referential fixity in language, and the authority of the narrative voice while making use of out-of-the-way fictional landscapes and iconography of the American West. His literary origins in the small presses of a post-Beat San Francisco, moreover, are an indication of the vitality, if not the centrality, of West Coast literary culture in the articulation and extension of some of the major trends not only in Western writing but also more broadly in national fiction and poetry.

Richard Gary Brautigan was born on 30 January 1935 in Tacoma, Washington, to Bernard F. and Mary Lula Brautigan. Brautigan seldom spoke about his upbringing, but all indications are that his childhood was an unhappy one. He apparently never met his biological father. According to Brautigan's younger sister, Barbara, in John F. Barber's Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography (1990), their mother seldom showed affection or concern for her children. Brautigan recalled his mother's having once abandoned him and his younger sister for several days at a hotel in Great Falls, Montana. He began writing stories in his adolescence, which was marked by a tendency toward antisocial behavior. While in high school he was arrested for throwing a rock through the police-station window and, following his arrest, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and committed to the Oregon State Hospital. According to his sister, he was treated there with electroshock therapy, a treatment that she believed led him to "shut down" emotionally.

Shortly after his release from the hospital Brautigan left home for good, moving to San Francisco, where, in 1956, he frequented North Beach coffeehouses and attended Beat poetry readings, befriending such writers as Jack Spicer, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In "Old Lady," a short essay that served as an introduction for six of his poems in The San Francisco Poets (1971), Brautigan asserted that he "wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence" so he could pursue an interest in writing fiction.

He married Virginia Dionne Adler in 1957; their daughter, Ianthe, was born in 1960. His family lived on a meager income while Brautigan published his small-press poetry in the late 1950s and began writing fiction seriously in the early 1960s. After a long separation, the Brautigans divorced in 1970.

Young for the San Francisco Beat writers of the 1950s but older than the 1960s counterculturists who would propel him to icon status in the Haight-Ashbury scene, Brautigan served as something of a link between these two San Francisco artistic communities. His early poetry bears characteristic traces of the Beat milieu, particularly its Zen-inspired tone of indifference, but also shows the outlandish metaphors and dry humor that characterize Brautigan's later prose style.

The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) displays the absurd, iconoclastic humor that made Brautigan famous. Charles Baudelaire, the "hero" of the poems, drives a "Model A across Galilee," where he meets Jesus, "standing among a school of fish, / feeding them / pieces of bread," and offers him a ride to Golgotha.

In the nine short sections of the poem, Baudelaire counsels a wino to be "drunken ceaselessly"; visits the narrator in the "slums of Tacoma"; opens a hamburger stand in San Francisco, serving "flowerburgers" instead of meat; attends a Yankees-Tigers baseball game that is "called on account of fear"; goes to "an insane asylum disguised as a psychiatrist"; and attends an "insect funeral" the narrator remembers holding in his childhood to bury dead bugs. The campy narrative of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, its surreal fusion of history and autobiography, and its blurring the lines between high and pop culture are all features Brautigan carried over into his popular fiction.

Brautigan dedicated himself to writing fiction in the early 1960s, producing in succession manuscript versions for what would become Trout Fishing in America (1967), A Confederate General from Big Sur, (1964), and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). Although actually his second novel written, A Confederate General from Big Sur was first to be published. Set on the Pacific coast of Northern California, the novel charts the exploits of Lee Mellon, a down-and-out drifter who dresses in a patchwork uniform and claims descent from a famous Confederate general as he plots to lay siege to Oakland.

"Richard Brautigan"
David Mike Hamilton
Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Vol. 1. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 2002, pp. 290-295.
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Richard Brautigan began his literary career as a poet. "I wrote poetry for seven years," he noted, "to learn how to write a sentence." Though a poet for many years, Brautigan maintained that his ambition was to write novels: "I figured I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence." Although most of Brautigan's later work was in novel form, he continued to publish poetry and also produced a collection of short stories (Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, 1971).

Achievements
Short-story writer, novelist, and poet, Brautigan created a stream of works which resist simple categories—in fact, defy categorization altogether. Much of his popularity can be attributed to his peculiar style, his unconventional plots, simple language, and marvelous humor, which together provide a melancholy vision of American life and the elusive American Dream.

Richard Brautigan's novels are generally characterized by the appearance of a first-person narrator (sometimes identified in the third person as Brautigan himself) who presents an autobiographical, oftentimes whimsical story. Brautigan's work employs simple, direct, short, and usually repetitive sentences. In his best work, he has an uncanny ability to create vibrant and compelling scenes from apparently banal subject matter. It is the voice of the "I," however, that carries the Brautigan novel, a voice that often unifies virtually plotless and quite heterogeneous materials.

Much of Brautigan's work involves the search for simplicity—an expansion of the Emersonian search for pastoral America. Yet, the complacent rural life is no longer available in Brautigan's world: All the trout streams have been sold to the highest bidder, all the campgrounds are already filled, in fact overflowing; yet, the search must go on for new places where the imagination can still roam free—to a pastoral America where the individual can escape the suffocating din of technocracy.

Brautigan's work evolved into a new, unorthodox version of the American novel. His experimentation with language, structure, characterization, plot, and motif broke new ground. Because of this, many critics have been unable to characterize his work with ease. Unable to pinpoint his exact standing, they have dismissed him as a counterculture phenomenon, a faddish nonentity. Although Brautigan's oeuvre is indeed very uneven, his best work is genuinely original and ensures him a lasting place in American literature.

Biography
Richard Brautigan was born and reared in the Pacific Northwest. The son of Bernard F. Brautigan and Lula Mary Keho Brautigan, he spent his early years in Washington and Oregon. His literary career took hold when, in 1958, he moved to San Francisco and began writing poetry in the company of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure. The company he kept led to his initial identifiction as a Beat poet, but Brautigan's unique and now well-known style defied the classification.

Resisting crass commercialism and the profits linked to corporate America, Brautigan's first books were published primarily from the benefit of his friends and acquaintances. Success finally forced him to allow a New York publication of his work in the 1960's, however, and Grove Press published his A Confederate General from Big Sur. Shortly after his change of allegiance from Four Seasons Foundation in San Francisco to Grove Press in New York, Brautigan was invited to become poet-in-residence at Pasadena's California Institute of Technology. Although he had never attended college, he accepted the invitation and spent the 1967 academic year at the prestigious school.

In 1967 Brautigan married Virginia Diorine [sic] Alder. They had one daughter, Ianthe, and later were divorced. In his later years, Brautigan divided his time among three places: Tokyo, San Francisco, and, when in retreat or fishing, a small town in Montana. He died in 1984, an apparent suicide.

Analysis
Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is perhaps his funniest. A burlesque of American society long after the Civil War, the story is told by Jesse, a gentle, shy, withdrawn narrator (not unlike Brautigan himself) who meets Lee Mellon, a rebel, dropout, and activist living in San Francisco. Lee soon moves to Oakland, California, where he lives, rent-free, at the home of a committed mental patient. As Jesse and Lee figure out how to cope with life and no money, they find a fortune of six dollars and some loose change, get rip-roaring drunk in Monterey, and discover Elaine and a great deal of money. Johnston Wade, a crazed insurance man, arrives on the scene, informing everyone that he is fleeing from his wife and daughter (they want to commit hime to a mental institution). He leaves as abruptly as he arrived, remembering an important business appointment he must keep. The book ends, as it must, without ending.

In A Confederate General from Big Sur, Brautigan is facing the question of how to cope with civilization. The flight from technology toward wilderness holds risks of its own. Brautigan offers no answers. Human life is not unlike that of the bugs sitting on the log Jesse has thrown into the fire. They sit there on the log, staring out as Jessee as the flames leap around them.

The theme of the novel is the ambition to control one's life and destiny. The ownership of the Big Sur log cabin by a mental patient and Johnston Wade's own mental aberrations only serve to illustrate the fleeting control all people have over their lives. Brautigan introduces Wade to burlesque the myth of American destiny. He is parody, a ridiculous image of American business and technology: the self-made man running away from his wife and child who suddenly remembers an important business engagement.

Although not published until 1968, In Watermelon Sugar was written in 1964, during Brautigan's evolution from poet to novelist. The book reflects this evolutionary change, for in many ways it is more poetic than novelistic in its form. The story is that of a young man who lives in a small community after an unspecified cataclysm. In the first of the three parts of the book, the shy and gentle narrator tells the reader about himself and his friends. Their peaceful life was not always so, he explains, and he tells about iDEATH, a central gathering place which is more a state of mind than an actual physical location. In the second part of the novel, the narrator has a terrible dream of carnage and self-mutilation. The third part of the book begins with the narrator's awakening, strangely refreshed after the terrible dream. The gentle, leisurely pace of the first part then restores itself.

In Watermelon Sugar is like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932): a utopian novel of the Garden of Eden, springing forth out of the chaos of today's world. It is his vision of the rustic good life in postindustrial society. From watermelons comes the juice that is made into sugar, the stuff of the lives and dreams of the people of iDEATH. By controlling their own lives, by creating their own order, the people of iDEATH recover society from chaos. The sense of order and recurrence is sent in the very first line of the book, which both begins and ends "in watermelon sugar." That phrase is also used as the title of the first part of the book, as well as the title of the first chapter. Like a refrain, it sets a pattern and order in a world in which people live in harmony with nature and with their own lives.

Like several of Brautigan's books, The Abortion: An Historical Romance spent some time in the library of unpublished books that it describes, where dreams go (and can be found). The world of The Abortion is that of a public library in California: not an ordinary library, but one where losers bring their unpublished books. Again Brautigan's narrator is a shy, introverted recluse—the librarian, unnamed because he is ordinary, like the people who bring their books to the library to have them shelved. Brautigan himself visits the library at one point in the novel to bring in Moose; he is tall and blond, with an anachronistic appearance, looking as if he would be more comfortable in another era. That circumstance is certainly the case with the narrator as well.

There is less action in The Abortion than in most of Brautigan's novels; the book plods along slowly, mimicking its central theme, which is that a series of short, tentative steps can lead one out of a personal or social labyrinth and toward the promise of a new life. Before the reader knows it, however, the librarian is out in the rain with a girl; she gets pregnant; and they journey to Tijuana so she can have an abortion. The girl is called Vida, and she represents life in the twentieth century. The librarian struggles with his inner self, afraid to move from the old ways, afraid to let go of his innocence. Brautigan contrasts him with his partner, Foster, a wild caveman who takes care of the books that have been moved from the library to dead storage in a cave. Foster is loud and outgoing—the opposite of the timid librarian—and he thinks of the library as an asylum.

With Vida, the librarian becomes embroiled in a quest for survival. Vida brings him out of the library into the world of change and conflict. He is frightened by it, but, step by tentative step, he confronts it.

The Abortion is a commentary on American culture. Brautigan draws a loose parallel between the library and American history: The librarian-narrator is the thirty-sixth caretaker of the library; at the time the book was written, there had been thirty-six presidents of the United States. The origins of the mysterious library go back into the American past as well, just as Brautigan himself appears as an anachronism from an earlier, easier time.

While Brautigan laments the times gone by and yearns for the "gold old days" and the leisurely pace of the library, he also holds out hope for a fresh alternative. American culture has nearly been destroyed—the playboy beauty queen named Vida hates herself, and bombs and industrial technocracy threaten lives and deaden spirits. Strangely enough, by destroying life—by the abortion—one can begin anew, start a new life. The narrator and Vida share this hopfulness, which was widespread in the counterculture when The Abortion was published.

With The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, Brautigan began a series of novels which adapt the conventions of genre fiction in a quirky, unpredictable manner. Not strictly parodies, these hybrids sometimes achieve wonderful effects—odd, unsettling, comical—and sometimes fall flat. Combining the gothic novel, the Western, and a dash of romance, The Hawkline Monster is set in eastern Oregon during 1902 and centers on a magical Victorian house occupied by two equally baffling Victorian maidens with curious habits. The unreality of the situation does not affect the two unruffled Western heroes of the book, however, who methodically go about their task of killing the Hawkline Monster. The problem is not only to find the monster but also to discover what it is; the ice caves under the house complete the ureality of the situation. Brautigan moves lyrically from the mundane to the magical in this fusion of the real and the surreal.

Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan's most famous novel and his best, is a short, visionary inscape of the American nightmare. Brautigan has created a tragic symbol of what has happened to America: The trout streams are all gone, the campgrounds are full; escape to the American pastoral is no longer possible. Yet Brautigan assures his readers that all is not lost—there is still a place where they can find freedom. If all the land is being used and one cannot physically escape the city, then one must escape to the pastoral realm of one's imagination. Trout fishing, Brautigan insists, is thus a way of recapturing the simple while remaining aware of the complex.

Trout Fishing in America, like much of Brautigan's work (including his last novel, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away), is autobiographical. The gentle, withdrawn narrator uses trout fishing as a central metaphor. A victim of the technological world, the narrator creates his own watery realm, complete with its own boundaries—a place where he can find solace from the technological stranglehold. His vision implies that all people have a fundamental right to the abundant richness and good life that America can provide but that are denied to many because the bankrupt ideas of the past still hold sway. Aware of the complexities of American life, Brautigan seems to be exhorting his readers to recapture the simple life, to escape the confinement of the city for the freedom of the wilderness. If that wilderness in the actual sense is cut off and no longer accessible; if all the trout streams have been developed, disassembled, and sold; if the horizon is now not new but old and despoiled; if the parks are already overcrowded; if there is no other way, then one must escape through the imagination.

In So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, Brautigan gives readers a glimpse of what post-Trout-Fishing-in-America life has become. Billed as an "American tragedy," So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away focuses on the tragedy that America and American life have become: "dust . . . American . . . dust."

Written, as are most of his novels, in the first person, Brautigan's novel is the memoir of an anonymous boy reared in welfare-state poverty somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Unloved but tolerated by his mother, the boy and his family go from town to town, meeting an odd assortment of minor characters. Although undeveloped, these characters serve to carry the novel's theme and serve as victims of the technocracy America has become. There is an old pensioner who lives in a packing-crate shack; adept at carpentry, the old man built a beautiful dock and boat and knows all the best fishing spots on the pond near his home, but he does not use this knowledge or equipment. A gas-station attendant who cares nothing about selling gas but likes to sell worms to fishermen also appears on the scene. There is a thirty-five-year-old alcoholic who traded ambition for beer; charged with the saftey of the sawmill, the man dresses in finery (although readers are told that his appearances are not true-to-life), cares nothing about his job, and is continually encricled by boys who swoop like vultures to take his empty bottles back to the store for credit. Like America itself, the guard has brittle bones resembling dried-out weeds. Finally, Brautigan introduces a husband and wife who, each night, carry their living-room furniture to the pond, set it up, and fish all night.

Like the end of a late summer afternoon, Brautigan presents America as having come to the end of its greatness, like the end of a summer afternoon. The technological success that spurred the country to greatness has resulted in its downfall. The husband and wife have changed all their electrical lamps to kerosene and await the cool evening with its refreshing possibilities, but as they patiently fish in the wrong spot, America goes on, killing its imagination with the technology of mindless television.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away ends with the horrible climax of the death of a boy, shot by mistake in an orchard that has been left to die. With that end, however, is the beginning of a new life, for, though the orchard has been left alone to die, new fruit will grow. The novel recalls the message of The Abortion: The substitutions of the confinement of the city for the freedom of the wilderness, and of television for imagination, are choices people have. With this novel, Brautigan returned to the successful themes of his earliest novels, warning that to go on will result only in dust.

"Richard Brautigan"
Bill Hoagland
Cyclopedia of World Authors. Third Revised Edition. Vol. 1. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1997, pp. 257-258.
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Richard Gary Brautigan is identified as a link between the Beat generation of the 1950's and the counterculture movement of the 1960's. He was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. His father, Bernard Brautigan, abandoned his mother, Lula Mary Keho Brautigan, while she was pregnant with Richard. Lula Brautigan remarried at least three times, and when Richard was nine years sold, his mother abandoned him and his younger sister Barbara for a short period. Brautigan began writing as a teenager, sometimes staying up all night to work on his poetry. He left home at age eighteen and moved to San Francisco, where he befrieneded writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, and Philip Whalen, with whom he shared an apartment for a while.

In 1957 a selection of Brautigan's poems appreared with poems by three other young writers in Four New Poets, produced by Inferno Press, a small San Francisco publisher. In the following year, White Rabbitt Press published The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. The booklet contains nine poems narrated by a gentle speaker who describes imaginative encounters with the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire.

A swift and prolific writer, Brautigan sometimes wrote as many as ten poems a day during this period. Another small San Francisco publisher, Carp Press, issued Brautigan's next two volumes of poetry, Lay the Marble Tea, in 1959, and The Octopus Frontier, in 1960. These first three books show Brautigan to be a poet of synesthesia and humor. His strength lay in his ability to fuse disperate images through striking similes.

Brautigan's first published novel was actually the second he wrote: A Confederate General from Big Sur. The story, told by Jesse, a naïve student of theology, is about the life of Lee Mellon, a resident of Big Sur who believes he is a general in the Confederate Army. The book is a satire on the hippie lifestyle of the 1960's. Although written before A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America was Brautigan's second published novel. It is widely regarded as the most important of his works. Trout Fishing in America is the fragmented story of a man in search of the perfect trout stream, symbolic of the American frontier dream. What the narrator finds instead are scenes of industrial violence and environment perversion. In one chapter, for example, used trout streams are for sale for six dollars per foot in a place called the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. Yet just as the speaker's imagination has created the negative vision of the wrecking yard, he is capable of magically transcending it: He sees trout in the stacked lengths of stream, and he puts his hand in the water, noting that it is cold and feels good.

Trout Fishing in America established Brautigan as one of the most recognizable voices of the 1960's. College students throughout America identified with the book's style and themes. In the late 1960's Brautigan suddenly rose from anonymity and poverty to fame and fortune.

In Watermelon Sugar, Brautigan's third novel, is narrated by a young man who lives in a commune called "iDEATH," a part of the larger community of Watermelon Sugar, population 375. The story takes place in the distant future; for the residents of Watermelon Sugar, ancient history is represented by the Forgotten Works, a place filled with "high piles" of undecipherable and useless artifacts.

In the 1970's, Brautigan turned to writing parodies of standard popular genres. The Abortion appeared in 1971, followed by both The Hawkline Monster and Willard and His Bowling Trophies in 1974, Sombrero Fallout in 1976, and Dreaming of Babylon in 1977. In his last two novels, The Tokyo-Montana Express and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, Brautigan returned to the comic, anecdotal style and eccentric characters that had garnered him so much interest in Trout Fishing in America. Reviews of these last two novels were mixed, however, with several critics noting that Brautigan's unique style, which had seemed so fresh in the 1960's, had lost its appeal by the 1980's.

At the age of forty-nine, Richard Brautigan shot himself. The suicide probably occurred sometime in late September, 1984, but the actual date of his death cannot be determined, as his body was not discovered until October 25, 1984.

Brautigan's style is light, rapid, and conversational. In Trout Fishing in America and his other early novels, Brautigan might be criticized for being merely sentimental over the loss of the once-pristine American frontier if it were not for the humorous tone of his narrator's portean imagination. Although sometimes tedious, his liberal repetition of key words and phrases emphasizes the ironic innocence of characters surrounded by images of violence, death, betrayal, and emptiness. Shy, lonesome, and impassioned, they are not hardened by the loss of the American pastoral myth. Most often they passively accept their fates.

The enormous, though short-lived, popularity of Brautigan's work during the American counterculture revolution may have worked against his long-term reputation, signaling to some critics that his work was only the product of its time. Yet while American critical interest in Brautigan's work began to lag in the 1970's, European, and especially French, critics discovered textual complexities that Americans did not perceive until the 1980's, when critics Edward Halsey Foster and Marc Chénetier noted, for very different reasons, that Brautigan deserved new study. One of the most unconventional writers of an unconventional era, Brautigan cannot easily be defined.

"Brautigan, Richard"
Paul Kincaid
St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers. Edited by David Pringle. James Press, 1996, pp. 73-74.
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Richard Brautigan's delightful, whimsical tales have much in common (a simple vocabulary, repetitions) with traditional oral storytelling. And like traditional stories, they drift in and out of fantasy without really noticing there is anything different in what they do.

In the 1960s and early 70s, Brautigan combined postmodernist techniques with a hippy ethic. His first books were gentle comedies about contemporary America such as A Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America, but even in these books there is a distinct air of unreality, for instance in the curious hut which is too small to stand up in and which has one wall missing, which the narrator and his companions occupy in A Confederate General from Big Sur. And as the narrator imagines the Civil War adventures of his friend's ancestor, culminating in the arrival of a brigade of Indians from Big Sur to aid Lee at the Battle of the Wilderness, the novel drifts toward fantasy.

Later, Brautigan's technique tended towards putting incompatible styles together. The Hawkline Monster, for instance, is as its subtitle suggests a combination of Gothic novel and Western. As such it has distinct fantastical elements. Greer and Cameron, two gunmen, are lured by an Indian girl, Magic Child, to a remote house in Oregon. Their job is to kill an unspecified monster which lurks in ice caverns beneath the house. But strange things happen. Despite the heat of summer, Hawkline Manor is surrounded by permafrost and freezing cold. Magic Child changes into the exact twin of Miss Hawkline who runs the house. The giant butler dies and is transmogrified into a dwarf. The gunmen learn that the monster is the result of experiments with "The Chemicals" carried out by Professor Hawkline, who has since disappeared. But they manage to identify the villian as an animated and malicious point of light. By destroying the light they resurrect the Professor and the butler.

The Hawkline Monster is the most weird of Brautigan's novels, easily living up to its Gothic tag, but the character of the Western gunmen, the sense that this is the remote West in 1902, is sustained throughout the book. Though his books are playful, often comic, he did tend to maintain a core of reality running through them, the fantasy coming in a drift away from this reality. Dreaming of Babylon, for instance, is a typical private-eye story set in 1942. The narrator has had no client for months, and is so poor that he cannot afford bullets for his gun. When a beautiful woman hires him he thinks his luck has turned, but he finds himself caught in a complex plot involving stealing a body from a morgue while gangsters try to steal the body from him. It is a cleaver pastiche of film noir, but the downfall of the detective, Card, is due to his dreaming of Babylon. The novel is punctuated with Card's fantasies involving baseball teams, villainous scientists, and private detectives in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar.

Brautigan's most overt fantasy, however, is also his weakest book. In Watermelon Sugar is set in a presumably post-holocaust world—there are hints of a lost civilization, and the setting for most of the story is called iDEATH, but nothing definite is said about what has happened. It is a largely plotless book, a series of glimpses of life in this idyllic rural world where practically everyone is nice, friendly and as sickly-sweet as the title. It is an attempt to present the hippy ideal and like that ideal did not long survive its era.

Brautigan's fall from popularity eventually led to his suicide ni 1984. But his better books—The Hawkline Monster, A Confederate General from Big Sur—have a lasting appeal, and their influence can be seen in the work of a new generation of postmodernist writers such as Mark Amerika and William Vollman. But his lasting memorial is perhaps his most attractive fantasy, the library of unpublished books which he contemplated in The Abortion has been turned into reality in the Mayonnaise Library in a small town in New England.

"Richard Brautigan"
Margot Levy, editor
The Annual Obituary 1984. St. James Press, 1985, pp. 462-464.
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Innocence is usually accompanied by malevolence in any portrayal of human life. In Richard Brautigan's novels and poems, there is no such mingling or interaction between the complex elements of human existence. It is not that terrible things do not happen in his novels—women hang themselves, parents are eaten by tigers—but throughout, the central characters remain completely untouched by disaster. Like deliberate victims of amnesia, they search for a pastoral life without acknowledging what goes on around them. Brautigan's message, according to critic Thomas Volger, is that "We can't understand the problem of death and evil; so mourn and suffer, but eat pancakes and be happy."

Surreal and comical in their mixture of the minute details of daily life with fantastic, impossible events, Brautigan's novels Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion made him a cult figure in the 1960's and 1970's. His books, short stories and poems were published in 12 languages, and he was revered especially in the US as a leader of the counter-culture. In later years, his popularity with American readers tapered off, but his earlier works and the later So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away retained a wide following in Japan and France.

Born and raised in the rugged US northwest pacific [sic], Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1958. One of the "San Francisco Poets" who clustered in the bohemian North Beach district, his friends included poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen and Michaell McClure. He published his first volumes of poetry himself, and sold them on the street corners of Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury. But in the mid-1960's, his novel Trout Fishing in America and poems The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster were widely read amongst the literary underground in the US. With the publication of these two books and In Watermelon Sugar in a single volume by Seymour Lawrence in 1970, Brautigan became a bestselling novelist. In 1968, he received a grant from the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts.

The appeal of his work was, first of all, its specifically American, and more particularly its California character. The heroes were gentle, shy, tender, usually shaggy-haired men who roamed California in pursuit of a lost bucolic way of life, a "search for America" in the 1960's manner. The frontier was nature, reflecting Brautigan's own affection for the outdoors but also the American preoccupation with a return to basics. His work was no mere pastoral meandering, however. Some critics compared him to [Mark] Twain and [James] Thurber in his ability to juxtapose the mundane with the fantastic in a hilarious combination. But the overriding appeal was the optimism and naivete of the characters, paralled in his elliptical and simplistic style. Brautigan "seems crazed with optimism" wrote Thomas McGuane in The New York Times Book Review; "like some widely gifted rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

Yet there is something disturbing in all this naive, willful optimism. In Trout Fishing in America, the hero (shy and gentle, of course), stops sleeping with his lover Margaret and takes up with Pauline. Pauline asks him why he thinks Margaret is so unhappy; he replies, "I don't know how she feels." When Margaret hangs herself from (appropriately) an apple tree, the hero is more concerned with the potato salad on his plate than with her death. In The Abortion, the story is less obviously callous, but the central strand of indifference is still there. It is the most coherently structured of Brautigan's novels and the plot is simple: an unnamed librarian meets Vida, dark-haired and glamorous, when she comes into the library in San Francisco where he works. She is uncomfortable with her beautiful body, but he puts her at ease. They live together in homey harmony (she bakes chocolate cookies and he entertains old ladies) until she becomes pregnant, and they then go to Tijuana for the abortion. But neither the trauma of an abortion nor the fact that the librarian loses his job in his absence worries either of them. At the end of the book, Vida tells him that he will be "the hero of Berkeley". Critic Terence Malley, author of the book Richard Brautigan, says that Brautigan is a sharp critic of alienation in America and, influenced by [Ernest] Hemingway, "one of the major chroniclers of the loneliness of American experience". There is loneliness in Brautigan's early works, but the characters, in their optimism, seem not to feel it. The result is that Brautigan's early works, particularly Trout Fishing in America and The Abortion, do a good job of championing those who stay remote from pain and of presenting the prettier side of "alienation". For Brautigan's characters, the world outside is unreal, and the individual (not introspective) world is real. In this way his hero "survives catastrophes without even knowing they are there" (Thomas Volger, Contemporary Novelists). It is always an open question whether Brautigan thinks it is more painful to ignore or to experience the disasters of life—but either way, despite the humour, his books have an element of sharp distress.

What drew the attention of the critics was Brautigan's writing style more than the content of his work. He wrote in a deliberately naive, primitive (one critics said "preliterate") form, in which structure was not made explicit and thoughts were seemingly put down at random. Some chapters in a novel would be five to six lines long; others, six pages. Many critics were uncertain whether to dub him a genius, but the vast majority praised his innovative use of metaphor and simile. For those accustomed to traditional literature, however, Brautigan was anathema. Wrote one reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement: The Abortion is "irreducibly banal, a simpering goo-goo baby-talk drizzle of the kind of thoughts that come into the mind crying out to be imperiosuly dismissed."

Brautigan's poetry (The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster; Rommell Drives On Deep into Egypt; June 30th, June 30th and others) is less well known than his novels but more pointed. In a rare statement on his work, Brautigan said in 1971 that he "wrote poetry for seven years to learn to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence." He called his eleven volumes of poetry his "diary". Like his novels and short stories, his early poetry is light, satirical and metaphorical, turning increasingly to pessimistic images of funeral parlors and death. "The Last Surprise" in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork is almost nihilistic, and certainly gives the opposite impression from the exploratory thrust of his early work: "The last surprise is when you come/gradually to realize that nothing/surprises you any more."

After his fame peaked and then waned in the mid-1970's, Brautigan continued to write prolifically, producing five novels, two short stories, and two books of poetry. Never having learnt to drive (or indeed, as he acknowledged, to excell in anything except writing), he continued to travel between San Francisco and his ranch in Montana until settling in the small northern California town of Bolinas in 1983. What he perceived as the loss of his readership depressed him greatly; it was "breaking his heart" as his agent put it, although he did not care about the critics' reviews. Sometime in September 1984 he shot himself in his Bolinas home; the body was not discovered until October 25 when two worried friends came to visit him.

Richard Brautigan
Michael P. Mullen
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1984. Edited by Jean W. Ross. Gale Research Company, 1985, pp. 166-169.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

On 25 October 1984, the body of Richard Brautigan was discovered, four or five weeks after a single gunshot wound to the head killed him. In an article in People, "Author, Richard Brautigan Apparently Takes His Own Life, but Leaves a Rich Legacy" (12 November 1984), James Seymore emphasized one of the most significant aspects of Brautigan's appeal: his humor. Seymore described Brautigan as a "poet-novelist-humorist" with a vision that was "unique, so humorous." A New York Times reviewer who made reference to Brautigan's "good humor" is quoted, as is Brautigan's twenty-four-year-old daughter, who said, "He was so funny in the morning."

Brautigan was often compared to [Mark] Twain and [Ernest] Hemingway, but these influences are not always immediately recognizable. What is more distinctive is Brautigan's bizarre plots and startling figures of speech. A publisher's note described The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974) this way: "The time is 1902; the setting, Eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a 15-year-old Indian girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right man to kill the monster that lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's cold yellow house." In Trout Fishing in America (1967), Brautigan's most popular novel, the narrator, in looking for the perfect trout stream, discovers that the Clevland Wrecking Yard is selling used trout streams for $6.50 a foot. The main character in A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) says, in a chapter titled "The Pork Chop Alligator": "Your alligator looks like a handbag filled with harmonicas."

The playfulness of Brautigan's work attracted readers; his books could be read for pleasure. At the same time, however, his books had substance, which satisfied his critics. In a 29 December 1969 review in Newsweek, A. H. Norman wrote of Trout Fishing in America: "[Brautigan] combines the surface of finality of Hemingway, the straightforwardness of Sherwood Anderson and the synesthetic guile of Baudelaire." More recently, in the March 1984 issue of American Literature, William L. Stull discussed at length the allusive quality of Brautigan's books.

John Stickney, in "Gentle Poet of the Young," in Life on 14 August 1970, described Brautigan's books as "a gentle carnival to which young people relate easily, a show of laughter, romance, sensation and innocence—an intense identification with nature and all living things. Thoughtful hedonism, it might be called: celebrate the pleasures of life and love on the midway, he advises, because tragedy lurks just outside the gates." In Brautigan's later books, the tragedy tends to prevail. This change in tone is evident in his most recent books, especially The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) and So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away (1982). Both contain his characteristic humor; but more than that they are marked by sadness and death and longing for more peaceful times. Barry Yourgrau, in a review of The Tokyo-Montana Express in the New York Times Book Review, wrote: "He is now a longhair in his mid-40's, and across his habitually wistful good humor there now creeps shadows of ennui and dullness and too easily aroused sadness. The tell-tales of an uneasy middle-aged soul peep darkly among the cute knickknacks of "The Tokyo-Montana Express": dead friends, dead strangers in the papers and on the street, ghosts, regrets over wasted years, regrets over women, bad hangovers, loneliness, phone calls long after midnight."

The narrator of Brautigan's last work, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away (1982), was described by a Publishers Weekly reviewer as a "melancholy 47-year-old man" (Brautigan's age at the time). The novel is a look backward, as the narrator recalls the fateful year, for him, of 1947, when, as a twelve-year-old boy, he one day had to choose between a hamburger and box of .22 shells and accidentally killed a friend of his. The narrator, like Brautigan himself, spent his fatherless, impoverished childhood wandering with his mother from town to town in the Pacific Northwest, which led James Seymore to view So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away as "Brautigan's final return to his beginnings and the central traumas of his life."

The reviews of So the Wind were, as was typical for a Brautigan book, mixed. The Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded by saying that the novel was "a flat, listless narrative, enlivened fleetingly by Brautigan's bizarre imagination, but pretentiously self-important and contrived." Also panning the book was the reviewer from the New Yorker, who called it "a weary little dirge."

Praising the novel was George L. Ives in Library Journal, who said, "Brautigan's latest novel should please both old fans and new readers. His admirers will relish the familiar style—broken chronology and fragmented characterization—which carries the reader on a verbal rollercoaster. But the tighter thematic development in this narrative should widen Brautigan's audience." It didn't; his audience continued to diminish, and this, according to those who knew Brautigan, was one of the things that contributed so much to his unhappiness.

The boom in Brautigan's career came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when his work first received national attention. Three of his books, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), were published in one volume by Seymour Lawrence in 1969 and the success of the collection catapulted Brautigan from a local literary figure to a spokesman for his age.

That the critics were never completly behind Brautigan did not bother him. Helen Brann, the agent who helped engineer the 1970 collection of Brautigan's books with Seymour Lawrence, said that Brautigan didn't care what the critics said about his work: "But what he couldn't bear was losing the readers. He really cared about his audience. The fact that his readership was diminishing was what was breaking his heart." Trout Fishing in America, his breakthrough novel, has sold over two million copies. At the time of his death, sales for So the Wind totaled approximately fifteen thousand copies. He was still popular in Japan, but that was no longer enough to sustain him.

Both Seymour Lawrence and Thomas McGuane remarked, after Brautigan's death, that he had been unhappy and drinking a lot. Before he left San Francisco to go to his house in Bolinas, California, he borrowed a .44 caliber Smith & Wesson from a friend of his, Jimmy Sakata. It was the last anyone heard from him, but not unusual since Brautigan often went into isolation when he was working on a novel, and had told people he was going on a hunting trip.

Headlines of the obituaries that appeared after Brautigan's body was found indicate how closely he was still identified with the era whose spokesman he had become: "Richard Brautigan, Novelist, A Literary Idol of the 1960's" (New York Times); "Richard Brautigan, 49; offbeat novelist of the '60s" (Chicago Tribune); "Brautigan, Literary Guru of the '60s, Dies" (Los Angeles Times); and "Author Richard Brautigan, 49: Figure in '60s Counterculture" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

It wouldn't be fair or necessarily accurate to simply say that, faced by diminishing audience, Brautigan chose suicide. Don Carpenter, a novelist and friend of Brautigan's, said, "It's not a case of 'hot in the '60s, can't get arrested in the '70s, dead in the '80s.'" Finally, as is often the case, perhaps it is best to look to the author's works for answers. The narrator in The Tokyo-Montana Express, a character very similiar to Brautigan, says: "What makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone. . . ." The critical attention Brautigan's books received during his lifetime indicate that he was more than a voice for a generation, forgotten as that generation gave way to the one that followed, and the attention given Brautigan after his death should highlight even more the lasting qualities of his work.

Helen Brann, in her tribute, says, "Richard Brautigan was a writer I was honored to represent as his literary agent from 1968 on. I think Richard was an American genius, a pure artist, an original voice out of the West from which he came. I believe Richard's work will last, not only because of his brillant style so individual, spare, and alternately sharp and gentle, but because in books like Trout Fishing in America, Willard And His Bowling Trophies and The Hawkline Monster he explored the funny, phony, violent, romantic America he loved enough to see with open-eyed vision. His books, so much shorter in page length than his contemporaries' works, had real size. European publishers and Japanese publishers saw these qualities and all his titles are in print in over twelve countries, including the U.S. editions of all his work.

"A personal note about Richard, because he and I became good trusting friends, and that is that he was a consummate professional in his dealings with me and his publishers. I have never had a client so deliberate and knowing about his contracts, so knowledgeable about production problems and design, so fair about what was a reasonable demand and what went over that sometimes fine line. Richard was gentle and kind to me always, funny and acute and great fun to be with whether in New York, San Francisco, or Montana. He spared me his miseries, and now I know how very much he protected me. I loved him very much, and shall miss him always."

Kurt Vonnegut, in his tribute, says, "I never knew Richard Brautigan, except through his writings, which were brought to my attentiion by my students at Harvard, where I was a lecturer in 1971. He was then published by City Lights. I commended him to my own publisher, Seymour Lawrence, who subsequently gained him a much wider audience, thanks to the sales force and mass distribution capabilities of Dell. We never met or corresponded or spoke on the telephone.

"For what it is worth, which is probably nothing: there was publishing gossip that he entered the world of mass marketting with declarations of not being interested in money, but that he later became a shrewd bargainer.

"At this great distance from the man himself, I will guess that he, like so many other good writers, was finally done in by the chemical imbalance we call depression, which does its deadly work regardless of what may really be going on in the sufferer's love life or his adventures, for good or ill, in the heartless marketplace."

"Brautigan, Richard (Gary)"
Robert Novak
Reference Guide to American Literature. Third Edition. Edited by Jim Kamp. St. James Press, 1994, pp. 130-133.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan once stated that he had written poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because he wanted to write novels and thought that he could not write a novel until he could write a sentence: "I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady."

The popularity of his books spread from California in the 1960s to a larger American audience in the wake of the movement often called "The Greening of America." In 1969 Kurt Vonnegut reported to Delacorte Press the West Coast popularity of Brautigan's paperbacks published by a small San Francisco press, Four Seasons Foundation. Delacorte successfully bargained for two novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, and a book of poetry, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and they appeared in 1969. Three hundred thousand copies of this trilogy sold that first year, and 1,390,000 had been sold as of 1977. Soon the Japanese discovered him, and he began living there on and off, using Japan for settings and finally marrying a Japanese woman. His minimalist poetry had always had a haiku quality, and one might argue that his surrealist prose has a Japanese feel for nature.

A controversial writer because he seems to encouarge the self-adoring anti-intellectualism of the young, Brautigan is commonly seen as the bridge between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the youth revolution of the late 1960s. In a full-length study of his work, Terence Malley identifies the common theme of Brautigan's first four novels as "the shy loner trying to find a 'good world' in the inhospitable America of the 1960s." Josephine Hendin has noted that Brautigan's characters are marked by their lack of passionate attachment to anyone and to any place; they never permit themselves to feel. Perhaps an even better case can be made that Brautigan's major theme is borrowed from the Romantic poets—that of the transforming power of the imagination, that both the comedy and beauty of art lie in the power of the artist's imagination.

Trout Fishing in America (written in 1961 but not published until 1968), seems like a collage. Terence Malley, however, has explained its thematic structure and, like John Clayton, calls it an "unnovel." It has a traditional theme of American novels: the influence of the American frontier and wilderness on America's imagination, its lifestyle, its economics, its ethics, its therapies, its religion, its politics. The narrator as a child and later as a husband and a father searches for the mythical Eden of the perfect trout stream that America has promised. He finds that the spirit of such a vision of America has become perverted into a legless man in a chrome-plated wheel chair, a Hollywood hero called Trout Fishing in America Shorty, and that the Cleveland Wrecking Yard has used trout streams stacked and for sale at $6.50 per foot. Trout Fishing in America is Brautigan's Hemingway book, a kind of "Big Two-Hearted River" as seen through the disillusioned eyes of a flower child. Its pervading tone of melancholy arises from the sense that the American child, indoctrinated by our literature, movies, and commerce to believe in the American myth of the Edenic wilderness, has been betrayed. The melancholy is saved from sentimentality by unconventional plots, exaggerated figures of speech that have become Brautigan's trademark, and a style uncomplicated by difficult syntax of logical relationships. Speaking of one trout creek, the narrator says its canyon was sometimes so narrow that the creek poured out "like water from a faucet. You had to be a plumber to fish that trout creek." And the Missouri River at Great Falls, Montana, "looks like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college." The real heroes in the book are probably the sixth-graders who terrorize first-graders by chalking "Trout Fishing in America" on their backs. John Clayton praised the book's imagination but complained of its political stance of disengagement a la Woodstock. Others noted the "latency of violence and death" in the book, along with its "humor and zaniness," its pessimism about the search for the pastoral myth, and the ambivalence in Brautigan's relation to the American myth and symbols.

Based on the proposition that one can combine stories about hippies at Big Sur and San Francisco in the 1960s and a putative General in the Battle of the Wilderness of the Civil War, Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965), humorously portrays the lifestyles of Jesse, the narrator; Lee Mellon, the man who thinks he is a Confederate general; and their hippie women. It is Brautigan's Stephen Crane Civil War book. In it, Brautigan's playful vision of America satirizes the hippie lifestyle.

The twenty-nine-year-old narrator "without a regular name" of In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is an ex-sculptor who has recently taken up writing. He describes three days in his commune at small town oddly called iDEATH, population 375. A flashback describes how the town's hoodlum gang committed mass ritual suicide to restore the town. There is also an accompanying story of how the narrator grows bored with his mistress, who he feels has gone bad by consorting with the hoodlum gang, and how she commits suicide because she is displaced by a new mistress. This tragic love triangle is underplayed, and the death seems merely a sad annonyance to everybody. The real hero is the environment and the multipurpose watermelon sugar. The sun is a different color for each day of the week, there are streams everywhere, even in the living room, and houses, lighting oil, and clothes are made from watermelon sugar.

To Malley, this commune is a group of traumatized survivors of a holocaust trying to cope; they are ritualized and deprogrammed from their egoism and previous ideology. He noted, however, that some people read the book as "an acid allegory of altered consciousness" and "watermelon sugar as a euphemism for LSD or some other hallucinogen." He recognized the "curious lack of emotion" in the town and the condemnation of whiskey drinking, which is treated favorably in other Brautigan books. Such detail has led Patricia Hernlund to argue that Brautigan sees the utopian commune as an unsuccessful counterculture without pity and joy.

Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1971) contains sixty-two vignettes and short stories that are unified by the theme of the stoicism necesssary for healthy survival after one loses the easy life of the child. Many of the sketches seem to detail Brautigan's own childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in the Pacific Northwest as a lonely poor boy addicted to fishing, an enthusiasm for World War II, and writing. The humor of the title story, arising from the story's digressive structure and deadpan tone, is reminiscent of Mark Twain. Hemingway's influence on these stories is also clear in Brautigan's feeling for nature, his subdued tone, and the frequent use of the point of view as an adolescent. Those stories set in California are ambivalent about its kinky inhabitants (the man who rebuilt his house with poetry, the woman who buried her dog in an expensive Chinese rug, the Christians having outdoor services in Yosemite). The title story humorously tells about the narrator's bootlegging grandmoter, her handyman who hated the lawn, and his comic troubles with drunken geese and bees who feed on rotting pears.

Perhaps the prototypal image occurs at the end of this story: the narrator's earliest memory is of a man cutting down a pear tree, soaking it with gasoline, and setting fire to it while the pears are still green on its branches. It combines both the Brautigan surrealistic image (burning the green pears) and the uneasy relationships the Brautigan characters have with nature. Again, Brautigan's theme of the imagination's abilty to reshape reality comes out of these stories in the figures of speech and the imaginative incidents, such as the geese with hangovers, the witch's bedroom filled with flowers, the child who wants to become a deer, and the customer whom the narrator sees in City Lights Bookstore debating himself whether to buy a Brautigan book.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982), Brautigan's last novel and also his best, commemorates a series of people whom the protagonist, who may be autobiographical, knew from the age of five to thirteen "before television crippled the imagination of America." The title, a refrain throughout the book, refers to the writer's attempt to remember these vivid, often eccentric characters: a middle-aged couple who brought their couch, cookstove, and other furniture to set up an outdoor house where they fished; a fifteen-year-old athlete and popular friend whom the narrator accidentally shot to death; two old men who befriended the boy; and one who ran a gas station that sold mostly fishworms and the other who lived in isolation in a one-room shack built of crates. The Northwest seen from a bright, poverty-stricken boy's point of view through the war years and aftermath produces people he does not wish to forget. This book, having sufficient provocative human details, uses few of the usual Brautigan surrealistic figures of speech. It moves the heart instead of the head.

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), ninety-eight poems including the nine parts of "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker," gets its title from its four-line poem about the birth-control pill. Eighteen people read its "Love Poem" on the Listening to Richard Brautigan record, and because of this wonderful performance the poem becomes the book's most memorable piece. The feel of the book is The Greening of America, Consciousness III, which passes no moral judgement ("Winos on Potrero Hill"), celebrates psychedelic or surreal visions ("pomegranates go by in the metallic costumes"), and alludes to such popular music groups as The Grateful Dead and The Mamas and the Papas. The most successful poem is the high school grade card poem "Gee, You're So Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain." The poem "1942" will later be elaborated into the whole book June 30th, June 30th and is Brautigan's finest mastery of tone.

Brautigan's novels area best appreciated by the principles of the New Fiction ("Post-Modern"), spelled out in an article in TriQuarterly by Philip Stevick, especially their deliberately chosen, limited audience and the joy the observer finds in the mere texture of the data of the fiction. Thomas Herron explains how Brautigan's imagination works in his metaphors. Brautigan's theme is usually the power of the imagination to give zest, poetry, and humanness to life as well as to literature. The youth audience was reading him expecting either affirmation (unfulfilled) of the 1960s counterculture or titillation from his style and a literary equivalent of the drug experience. Professionals read him expecting enlightenment on the youth culture. He was aware of several currents of the American tradition, especially that of the new American Eden as created by [Henry David] Thoreau in Walden, by [Mark] Twain in Huckleberry Finn's escape to the Mississippi River, and by the California myth since the Gold Rush days, and Brautigan tends to condem the new America because it has betrayed the promises of the new American Eden.

"Richard Gary Brautigan"
Robert Novak
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 2: American Novelists Since World War II. Edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman. Gale Research Company, 1978, pp. 65-70.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, on 30 January 1935, the oldest child of Bernard F. Brautigan and Lula Mary Keho Brautigan; his father was a "common laborer," his mother a housewife. On 8 June, 1957, he married Virginia Dionne Adler in Reno, Nevada; their daughter, Ianthe, was born on 25 March 1960; the Brautigans were divorced on 28 July 1970 in San Francisco. In 1967 he was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, though he had never gone to college himself. In 1968 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brautigan does not volunteer biographical information, and though his stories often seem to have, along with their fantasy, many autobiographical details, he obviously invents freely. In an interview he states that he wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because he wanted to write novels and figured that he could not write a novel until he could write a sentence: "I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady."

The popularity of his books spread from California in the 1960s to a larger American audience in the wake of the popular movement often called "The Greening of America." In 1969 Kurt Vonnegut reported to Delacorte Press the West Coast popularity of Brautigan's paperbacks published by a small San Francisco press, Four Seasons Foundation (1967-1968). Delacorte successfully bargained for rights to Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (the last, a book of poetry), and they appeared in 1969. Three hundred thousand copies of these three books sold that first year, and 1,390,000 copies have sold as of 1977. His new novels have been appearing yearly and now total eight.

A controversial writer because he seems to encourage the self-adoring anti-intellectualism of the young, Brautigan is commonly seen as the bridge between the Beat Movement of the 1950s and the youth revolution of the late 1960s. In the only full-length study of Brautigan's work, Terence Malley identifies the common theme of Brautigan's first four novels as "the shy loner trying to find a 'good world' in the inhospitable America of the 1960s." Josephine Hendin has noted that Brautigan's characters are marked by their lack of a passionate attachment to anyone and to any place; they never permit themselves to feel. Perhaps an even better case can be made that Brautigan's major theme is borrowed from the Romantic poets—that of the transforming power of the imagination, that both the comedy and beauty of art lie in the power of the artist's imagination.

Trout Fishing in America (written in 1961, but not published until 1967) seems like a collage. Terence Malley, however, has explained its thematic structure and, like John Clayton, calls it an "unnovel." It has a traditional theme of American novels: the influence of the American frontier and wilderness on the American imagination, its lifestyle, its economics, its ethics, its therapies, its religion, its politics. The narrator as a child and, later, as a husband and father searches for the mythical Eden of the perfect trout stream that America has promised. He finds that the spirit of such a vision of America has become perverted into a legless man in a chrome-plated wheel chair, a Hollywood hero called Trout Fishing in America Shorty, and that the Cleveland Wrecking Yard has used trout streams stacked and for sale at $6.50 per foot. Trout Fishing in America is Brautigan's Hemingway book, a kind of "Big Two-Hearted River" as seen through the disillusioned eyes of a flower child. Its pervading tone of melancholy arises from the sense that the American child, indoctrinated by our literature, movies, and commerce to believe in the American myth of the Edenic wilderness, has been betrayed. The melancholy is saved from sentimentality by unconventional plots, exaggerated figures of speech which have become Brautigan's trademark, and a style uncomplicated by difficult syntax or logical relationships. Speaking of one trout creek, the narrator says its canyon was sometimes so narrow that the creek poured out "like water from a faucet. You had to be a plumber to fish that creek." And the Missouri River at Great Falls, Montana, "looks like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college." The real heroes in the book are probably the sixth-graders who terrorize first-graders by chalking "Trout Fishing in America" on their backs. John Clayton praised the book's imagination but complained of its political stance of disengagement a la Woodstock. Others noted the latency of violence and death" in the book, along with its "humor and zaniness," its pessimism about the search for the pastoral myth, and the ambivalence in Brautigan's relation to the American myths and symbols.

Based on the proposition that one can combine at the same time stories about hippies at Big Sur and San Francisco in the 1960s and a putative Confederate general in the Battle of the Wilderness of the Civil War, Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965), humorously portrays the life styles of Jessie, the narrator, Lee Mellon, the man who thinks he is a Confederate general, and their hippie women. It is Brautigan's Stephen Crane Civil War book. In it, Brautigan's playful vision of America satirizes the hippie lifestyle.

The twenty-nine-year-old narrator "without a regular name" of In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is an ex-sculptor who has recently taken up writing. He describes three days in his commune at a small town oddly called iDeath [sic], population 375. A flashback describes how the town's hoodlum gang committed mass ritual suicide to restore the town. There is also an accompanying story of how the narrator grows bored with his mistress, who he feels has gone bad by consorting with the hoodlum gang, and how she commits suicide because she is displaced by a new mistress. This tragic love triangle is underplayed, and the death seems merely a sad annoyance to everybody. The real hero is the environment and the multipurpose watermelon sugar. The sun is a different color for each day of the week; there are streams everywhere, even in the living room; and houses, lighting oil, and clothes, as well as life-style, are made from processed watermelon sugar.

To Malley, this commune is a group of traumatized survivors of a holocaust, trying to cope; they are ritualized and deprogrammed from their egoism and previous ideology. He noted, however, that some people read the book as "an acid allegory of altered consciousness and 'watermelon sugar' as a euphemism for LSD or some other hallucinogen." He recognized the "curious lack of emotion" in the town and the condemnation of whiskey drinking, which is treated favorably in other Brautigan books. Such detail has led Patricia Hernlund to argue that Brautigan sees the utopian commune as an unsuccessful counterculture, without pity and joy.

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) is a "love" story. It begins as if it were to tell the amusing but touching incidents in the life of a thirty-one-year-old librarian of an unusual library but ends with a trip to Tijuana for an abortion for his mistress. The mistress is the beautiful twenty-year-old Vida, who has always disliked her fabulously attractive body until she meets the hippie librarian. She is the archetypal Brautigan woman, who stirs the metaphorical imagination of the hero and is obviously the perfect companion for a gentle flower child. Their relationship liberates both of them: he can go back into the real world again, out of the library for losers; she accepts her body enough to work in a topless bar and go back to college. The library is the most impressive invention of the book, the best artifact of the days of the San Francisco flower children. It takes and stores original manuscripts from anybody, usually the naive and childlike who need to write for private reasons. If the book is about love in 1966, then such love includes the embarrassment of the abortion trip and a relaxed, fulfilling, monogamous, unmarried sexual life. But it also includes a life-style that allows one to feel useful to his society.

Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1971) contains sixty-two vignettes and short stories which are unified by the theme of the stoicism necessary for healthy survival after one loses the easy life of a child. Many of the sketches seem to detail Brautigan's own childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in the Pacific Northwest as a lonely poor boy addicted to fishing, an enthusiasm for World War II, and writing. The humor of the title story, arising from the story's digressive structure and deadpan tone, is reminiscent of Mark Twain. Hemingway's influence on these stories is also clear in Brautigan's feeling for nature, his subdued tone, and the frequent use of the point of view of an adolescent. Those stories set in California are ambivalent about its kinky inhabitants (the man who rebuilt his house with poetry, the woman who buried her dog in an expensive Chinese rug, the Christians having outdoor services in Yosemite). The title story humorously tells about the narrator's bootlegging grandmother, her handyman who hated the lawn, and his comic troubles with drunken geese and bees which feed on rotting pears.

Perhaps the prototypal Brautigan image occurs at the end of this story: the narrator's earliest memory is of a man cutting down a pear tree, soaking it with gasoline, and setting fire to it while the pears are still green on the branches. It combines both the Brautigan surrealistic image (burning the green pears) and the uneasy relationships the Brautigan characters have with nature. Again, Brautigan's theme of the imagination's ability to reshape reality comes out in these stories in the figures of speech and the imaginative incidents, such as the geese with hangovers, the witch's bedroom filled with flowers, the child who wants to become a deer, and the customer whom the narrator sees in City Lights Bookstore debating with himself whether to buy a Brautigan book.

The Hawkline Monster (1974), set mostly in eastern Oregon in 1902, tells how two professional killers are hired to rid an isolated mansion of its monster, accidentally created by a great scientist. The humans are all amoral; only the "shadow" of the monster is moral. The book purports to be the history of an unpopular manmade recreational lake. It has fewer of the Brautigan figures of speech, and gains its power from the parody of gothic trappings and from its comic disdain for the Western life-style of the early 1900s.

Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975) ties together three sets of people: the Logan Brothers, who are out to kill whoever stole their bowling trophies; Pat and John, a junior high school teacher of Spanish and her filmmaker husband, who accidentally found the trophies in an abandoned car in Marin County, California; and, upstairs in the same building as the teacher and filmmaker, a married couple, Bob and Constance, who in sexual desperation practice sado-masochism while they read poetry from the Greek Anthology. The sex is obviously meant to appear unattractive and embarrassing, though obsessive, and perhaps justifies the word "perverse" in the subtitle. Willard is a large papier-m#266;ché bird that sits in Pat and John's living room. They pretend that the bird likes to be surrounded by the trophies, and the wife arouses her tired husband by voicing her sexual fantasies with the artificial bird. Perhaps the book's mystery is how these three sets of characters will finally interact. Brautigan sees it as amusing that the Logan brothers, all-American, ideal boys, become murderers—of the wrong couple—when their bowling trophies are stolen, and he symbolizes American culture with bowling, kinky sex, Greta Garbo, Johnny Carson, and kitsch such as the papier-mache bird—all of this is the decline of the West, as one chapter labels it. The all-American Logan father understands only car transmissions, and the all-American Logan mother can only continuously bake cookies and pies for her sons, who are not even at home any longer. The theme of this novel seems to be less the celebration of the writer's imagination than it is an attack on the confusion and desperation of our culture.

Sombrero Fallout (1976) uses the omniscient point of view as it juxtaposes, chapter by chapter, the story of a ruptured love affair with events which occur when a sombrero with a temperature of minus twenty-four degrees falls out of the sky into the center of a small American town. After the writer tears up the beginning pages of the story and throws them into the wastebasket, the story continues to develop by itself. The sombrero causes strange changes in the town. the citizens break into riot among themselves, and the National Guard has to he called in. Norman Mailer flies in as a reporter, and the President of the United States gives a Gettysburg-like address when the bloodshed is over. The protagonist of the frame story is a famous American comic novelist who personally has no sense of humor. Full of eccentric quirks, he is suffering because he has broken up with his beautiful Japanese-American mistress, a psychiatrist in San Francisco. The details of the writer's ludicrous despair cover exactly one hour of a November evening, but the flashbacks covering his affair with the woman from both his and her point of view, as well as the story of her own life, constitute five stories being told at one time. The book satirizes the media, writer's vanity, political authority, and police power. The obscene epithets in the central character's stream of consciousness and the dialogue of the President of the United States are amusing and appropriate. The heroine's beauty is romanticized by copious figures of speech. The love story has echoes of a Kurt Vonnegut novel in its simple sentence structure and its ironic motto: "There's more to life than meets the eye"; unlike Vonnegut, Brautigan in this novel tends to judge human relationships by sexual hedonism, by how good the lovers are in bed. Some of the charm and humor of the book lies in the figures of speech: the protagonist's worries follow him around "like millions of trained white mice"; two lovers undressing are described: "She took her clothes off like a kite takes gently to a warm April wind. He fumbled his clothes off like a football game being played in November mud." But Brautigan's imagination works best in this book structurally, by tying together the fantasy science fiction plot with the real love affair.

In Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977), dedicated to his literary agent Helen Brann, Brautigan combines a parody of the hard-boiled detective novel having a 1942 San Francisco setting with subplots set in ancient Babylon. The narrator, Private Eye C. Card, twenty-eight years old, broke and in debt, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, usually messes up his job because he begins daydreaming about being a hero in Babylon. On the single day covered by this novel, 2 January 1942, he has been hired by a rich, beautiful young woman to steal from the morgue the corpse of a murdered whore. She secretly hires two other groups also to steal the same body, and C. Card never finds out how the situation all fits together. The New York Times Book Review disliked the book because it seemed to be merely a 1960s cartooning of hard-boiled detective fiction. Kirkus called it a "cart-wheeling fantasy . . . sentimental comic book without the pictures."

The narrator is an amiable loser. Jokes are made about the early days of America's involvement in World War II and about how people relate to a young man who is broke and inept at his job. Brautigan's imagination works on the improbable events in the detective's day and his extravagant fantasies about Babylon. The theme of the San Francisco adventure is that people relate to each other only in terms of money or sex; the theme of the Babylon fantasy is prestige.

C. Card is robbed by pay telephones and hoodlums, and beaten up by bus drivers. His mother disowns him for being a detective and makes him feel guilty for the death of his father. In the Spanish Civil War, he was shot accidentally in the buttocks with his own gun. His legs were broken when a car ran over him (insurance made this his only recent luck). He has been knocked unconscious by a baseball in a practice baseball game, and he has flunked the police academy examination. But he escapes his seedy reality by fantasizing that in ancient Babylon he is a great baseball player, a distinguished detective idolized by his beautiful secretary, Nina-dirat. Or he dreams he is the Babylonian big bandleader Baby, with his own radio station.

Brautigan's novels are best appreciated by the principles of the New Fiction ("Post-Modern"), spelled out in an article in TriQuarterly by Philip Stevick, especially their deliberately chosen, limited audience and the joy the observer finds in the mere texture of the data of the fiction. Thomas Hearron explains how Brautigan's imagination works in his metaphors. Brautigan's theme is usually the power of the imagination to give zest, poetry, and humaneness to life as well as to literature. The youth audience reads him expecting either affirmation (unfulfilled) of the 1960s counterculture or titillation from his style and a literary equivalent of the drug experience. Professionals read him expecting enlightenment on the youth culture. He is aware of several currents of American tradition, especially that of the new American Eden as created by Thoreau in Walden, by Twain in Huckleberry Finn's escape to the Mississippi River, and by the Californian myth since the Gold Rush days; and Brautigan tends to condemn the new America because it has betrayed the promises of the new American Eden.

"Brautigan, Richard"
Peter Parker, editor
A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 102.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.