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by Keith Abbott
This is the second part of a two-part article. Read the first part.
Monterey in 1966 was perfect for me. I did not miss the excitement of the Haight Ashbury then. I collected my unemployment and found a wonderful house in Pacific Grove, overlooking the bay. I began to discover a way to write prose that satisfied me. I got the idea for writing my novel, Gush, and I did sporadic work on it, trying to find a way to get what I wanted.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco the Haight Ashbury had attracted the news media. Scandalous articles appeared in the newspapers, the national media picked it up. Rock concerts were condemned by the press. The government worried that the youth were going to damage themselves before they could be given the chance to fight for their country in Vietnam. There was no representative of this way of life in writing.
The prevailing literature in San Francisco was leftover beats. The writing was outdated and negative and largely self-destructive. Popular writers, such as Ginsberg? and Ferlinghetti, were regarded as forefathers and teachers by my generation. But they were old hat, too.
Someone new was needed to write about what was going on. To my recollection Brautigan's work wasn't considered fitting. Because he had published some work in Ferlinghetti's City Lights Journal and had a novel from Grove Press, he was also old news to the literary people in San Francisco. Again, a local writer. But literary agents and editors were anxious to find someone who would write about these hippies. Once a literary editor told me that what was needed was "the Catch 22 of the hippies." In other words, a Gone with the Wind about hippies, a big mover, a big fat novel. Brautigan's work didn't fit the bill.
Eventually a small press, Donald Allen's Four Seasons, put out Trout Fishing in America. I believe that Allen had to buy the novel back from Grove Press, who still held the rights and refused to publish it.
(It is interesting to note that during Brautigan's rise to literary prominence Grove Press held onto the rights to Confederate General. They never reissued it until his novels were selling in the thousands. And even then they republished it in small editions, which sold out instantly. I remember Richard complaining about this.)
So, as the agents and editors looked for that writer to represent what was essentially a nonverbal phenomenon, Trout Fishing sold out in its first edition. The second edition hit a snag with the printer. I remember Richard very upset with this — the printer wouldn't reprint it as it had dirty words in it — because the time, he knew, was ripe for him. Then a third edition of it came out along with his collection of poetry, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. These sold out instantly.
At the time, I had only read Confederate General and a few chapters of In Watermelon Sugar in manuscript, and I was pleased to see how good his first novel was. The mobile structure of the novel (at that time I did not know of Butor) with its recurring themes as a melodic background for the diverging episodes spurred me on with my own work in prose. The mock narrative ("Seventeen years later I sat down on a rock") and its spare prose with the metaphors that opened little doors to alternative worlds was exactly right to my sense of prose at the time.
It should be noted, though, that until this edition of Trout Fishing was published, it was Richard's poetry that was being published, in mimeo editions that were given away free in the streets.
This was how his audience was created, along with his readings. He seldom reads his prose at readings and it was poetry that amused and instructed his fans. These broadsides and books were distributed by hand. The Diggers did the work, and the Communications Company? published them. This was an instant literature, without contracts or conferences or editorial quibbling.
During this time I was commuting back and forth from Monterey with some other writers, whenever anything exciting was happening in San Francisco. We would load my truck and make the trek up the coast. I remember one evening when I attended a meeting of the Communications Company at Emmet Grogan's apartment. The discussion was on distributing a book of pornographic cartoons. At the time, porn was only available under the counter. The idea was to devalue it by giving it away free. It wasn't until ten years later that I saw the book. The writer Don Carpenter? had his apartment smoke-damaged and I helped him clean up. He had a collection of the Communications Company editions and showed me the book. He said the work was dumped on the street corners in San Francisco and was out of print one day after it appeared. This reinforces my sense of the speed of the events that were happening then, and the ephemeral nature of its products.
Recently I was talking to some Polish editors at a luncheon and I tried to explain how literary popularity on the West Coast largely depends on readings and word-of-mouth. There is no central magazine or press here. There are only the New York publishers for authority figures and not much of their gossip and news makes a dent here. Richard used to say about this geographical problem for West Coast writers: "It never gets past the Rockies." So, in 1967, with the media closing in on the Haight Ashbury, the process was reversed and the news went back there. The media crush was on. And what they found were not published books, at least ones that could be bought in the stores, but writing that was given away free on the streets, if you were there to get it.
Media overloads such as this one create incredible problems. Interviewers, TV and newspaper reporters, they all showed up to extract their five minutes of news and get somewhere else fast. With them came the middle-class kids to get wiped out on dope and free concerts and spread disease and despair and stupidity. By 1968 the only person I knew who was still living in the Haight Ashbury was a printer, Clifford Burke, who eventually moved out.
Fame came to Brautigan's works and to the man himself. He told me once that he knew that he was in for a ride when he walked into his neighborhood Chinese grocery store and the teenage girl at the checkout counter was reading his book. Although he had shopped there for years, there was no way that he could have ever convinced her to read one of his books. He realized it was now out of his hands.
Possibly the last time the media crush was evaded and the community of the Haight Ashbury tried to present itself free of it was when the Invisible Circus? took place at the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Since I had a truck, Richard enlisted me to help with the setting up of what he called THE JOHN DILLINGER COMPUTER COMPLEX.
This was the mimeo machines and typewriters and stencil cutters, etc., of the Communications Company. It was to be an outlaw media center. Anyone who wanted to print something could come in and do it. There were also readings scheduled for that night, and I was invited to read along with others.
There were no advertisements of this event, no tickets, no interviews or notice given. The word went out. And thousands showed up. The sheer volume sent the publishing center into breakdown. Machines ran until they broke.
The church was filled with people doing events. Richard came back from going downstairs to a coffee shop that someone had set up in one room. There were tables and chairs and waitresses, he said, but there was also a large white sheet hung up at one end of the room and a pornographic movie showing on it. Richard said that I shouldn't bother to go down and see it. It was already gone. He said he was talking to a friend when all the waitresses disappeared and the sheet split in two and out came a bunch of belly dancers backed by a three-piece rock band.
Another room had been filled with foam. This was a tactile room until someone turned off the lights and it turned into a group grope. The bridal room off the chapel had been converted into a sensual chamber and for a half hour each, couples could go in and do whatever they wanted to on fur with incense, etc.
All this sounds curiously dated now, but at the time it was not available anywhere else, and certainly not at the speed that it occurred. The saddest memory I have of the night is when Richard abandoned the John Dillinger Computer Complex and read. He had brought a bucket of clams with him. Or someone gave him one. I was behind him when he started to read, and I saw that the audience was completely amok. The noise was deafening. I left. The Invisible Circus was closed down at 4 that morning by the police. In the estimate of many, the entire thing was a mess.
I go into detail about this because it provides a background to what occurred to Brautigan's work. There is one way to become well-known in America as a writer. That is to have your work represent something sociological. Whatever literary values a writer's work might have are of no concern. Kerouac's work was said to represent the media event of the beatniks. Brautigan's work was said to represent that chaos that was out in front of the altar that night in 1968. And it was chaos.
It is hard to imagine calling his writing chaotic. His books didn't hold be-ins or smoke dope or ride in funny buses. His prose style didn't overdose in an alley with a high school band uniform on.
This has to be said. The events of those years had nothing much to do with writing the next book and the book after that, making something original and human out of sentences.
As Robert Creeley? has said in his interview with Michael Andre, Brautigan was well-aware of how fleeting it was going to be and he kept writing and making whatever money he could. Certainly the poetry he wrote was responding to everyday events, but the prose came out of a much longer and precise attention to the world, no matter if the books succeeded or failed. The media event of 1968 still taints the treatment his work receives from the critical press. The situation is similar to the one shown Kerouac. Only Brautigan didn't let it kill him, he continued working. His life changed, certainly, but that is another story.
Review of Contemporary Fiction 3(3)
Fall 1983
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