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by Garret Condon?
When Robin Gorman of Hartford was at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1960s, one of his classmates — he doesn't remember her name — was an early hippie and a friend of an obscure Bay Area writer named Richard Brautigan.
"She and her friends were genuine hippies, with the van with the Day-Glo paint and everything. She knew Richard Brautigan. She [a photo of her with Brautigan] ended up on the cover? of a couple of his books."
In the late '60s Brautigan became a celebrity as his novel, "Trout Fishing in America," sold 2 million copies. His popularity waned with the demise of the counter-culture.
"There was a quality of innocence about his work," said Gorman, 38, who works at Huntington's bookstore and says he's never been a big Brautigan fan. "It [Brautigan's work] implied that anything is possible. I think young people don't really feel that way anymore."
Brautigan, 49, was found last week in his Bolinas?, California, home, dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Novelist Thomas McGuane?, a friend of Brautigan's, suggested that Brautigan's success went the way of Day-Glo vans. Gorman, local college teachers and a Hartford lawyer agree that Brautigan's avant-garde work just didn't seem relevant in the 1970s and 1980s.
"He was someone they didn't teach in school, and that was reason enough to read him," recalls lawyer Gerald Sack, 31, who used to imitate Brautigan's poetic style in poems he wrote for The Wyvern, the student arts magazine at Kingswood School in West Hartford.
"I think what I found different about his work was its rhythm. There was a rock 'n' roll rhythm in his poetry," Sack says. But when he started at Yale in 1971, Sack quickly dropped his interest in "Trout Fishing in America."
"He was yesterday's paper," says Sack. "He was leftover from the '60s."
During the late 1960s Brautigan was taken seriously enough to be included in college literature courses. Paula Smith, 59, an English professor at Trinity College, included Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" in a course on experimental fiction.
"His ideas were anti-establishment," Smith says. "He was opposed to the straight, narrative form of fiction. He was simply more a poet. His talent was in brief, beautiful and evocative descriptions of scenes that were not necessarily linked together. You had a series of isolated moments." Although there are those who find "Trout Fishing in America" formless, Smith says Brautigan had a pattern in mind. "It's a pattern of recurring scenes and images that does reach a kind of climax."
Ann Charters?, a biographer of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac and an English professor at the University of Connecticut, says she never taught Brautigan's books at UConn, but admired his work and wanted to meet him. "My favorite book of his was 'Please Plant This Book,'" she says, referring to Brautigan's "book" of eight poems, each poem printed on a separate seed envelope filled with flower seeds. "As an author, he wanted to beautify the world and he thought this would be the most direct way of doing it. It was part of the whole Beat Generation concern with experimental writing."
But if the seeds he "published" grew, his stature as an artist did not, Smith says.
"In some ways, he had a talent that was victimized by the public," Smith says. "It happens to a lot of writers. They do something that is immediately successful, then they turn off and just imitate themselves. I always felt he never surpassed 'Trout Fishing.'"
In addition to "Trout Fishing in America," Brautigan wrote "A Confederate General from Big Sur," "In Watermelon Sugar," "Revenge of the Lawn: Stories," and "The Abortion: An Historical Romance." His best-known book of poems is "The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster." He published 22 books: 11 novels, nine collections of poetry and two works of non-fiction.
His most recent book, the 1982 novel "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," perhaps revealed something of the author's recent state of mind. "For Mr. Brautigan, life seems to be a pointless mess," Eve Ottenberg wrote in her review of the novel in the New York Times Book Review.
But recent Brautigan books have not sold well at Huntington's or anywhere else. Gorman says customers rarely ask for a copy of a Brautigan book.
"His style never changed, essentially," Gorman says. "I suppose his fans grew up and outgrew it."
Hartford Courant?
November 3, 1984: D1,8
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