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by Smiley Anders
If there's any message in these two slim volumes, it's that the tragedy of suicide doesn't end with the death of the person who commits it.
In the first journal, counterculture author Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America and others) is haunted by the death of a woman who hanged herself.
Written in 1982, two years before Brautigan put a gun to his head and died at age 49, the disjointed account of five months of wandering, drinking, visiting cemeteries and musing on death is called a novel by its publisher. But, given the events that followed, it reads more like a farewell statement.
It has, like all Brautigan works, its droll moments.
In Hawaii, he has his picture taken holding a chicken, so he can hang the photo on the wall of his Montana ranch:
"People would visit me there and maybe one of them would ask about the curious photograph ... Perhaps they would sense there was a story behind the photograph ...
"'Is there a reason for that photograph? Is that some kind of special chicken?'
"'No, I just wanted to have a photograph of me and a chicken taken in Hawaii.'
"Where in the hell could they go from there?"
"'Is there a reason for that photograph? Is that some kind of special chicken?'
"'No, I just wanted to have a photograph of me and a chicken taken in Hawaii.'
"Where in the hell could they go from there?"
But most of the book is filled with hopelessness.
In the second journal, his only daughter, Ianthe, tells how a kind, if quirky, father turned into a hopeless alcoholic and, eventually, a suicide.
She found the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman after his death, but says she felt too guilty about his suicide - they were estranged at the time he killed himself - to think of seeking a publisher.
Her journal reads something like his - bits and pieces, and sometimes just shreds, of her life are presented, with little attempt at fashioning a traditional autobiography.
She tells of idyllic visits with her father - he and her mother separated when she was 3 - in San Francisco and at his Montana ranch.
But she also tells of his later bourbon-fueled rages - the time he burned all the telephones in the house; the time she and a girlfriend escaped out a bathroom window and ran to the neighbors as he smashed furniture.
Finally she came to grips with his death, aided by a visit to his mother in Oregon, a grandmother she had never known.
"I started writing about my father because I needed a safe place to explore my feelings about him without having to explain anything to anyone," she writes. "For a long time, I blamed myself for his suicide. I felt that if I had been a better daughter he would have lived."
She says that as she wrote this series of short essays about her father, "slowly I began to realize that each piece was an antidote to a death/suicide that I was convinced on some level was infectious."
It has taken her years to come to grips with his sudden end, to realize it wasn't her fault, and that she didn't "catch death" from her talented but destructive father.
The Advocate
June 11, 2000, Sunday Advocate Magazine: 12, 13
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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