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by Edward Cutler?
Brigham Young University
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 l960s, 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 coffee-houses 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.
Told from the perspective of Jesse, a passive, Bible-reading narrator who identifies himself as a minister, A Confederate General from Big Sur pits the constraints of history and social interpretation against the imaginative prospects of self-creation. When, for instance, Jesse and Mellon consult a library book listing Confederate generals and fail to find Mellon's grandfather, Mellon asks Jesse to promise he believes there was a Confederate general Mellon. Jesse promises and continues indulging Mellon's whimsical appropriation of history throughout.
In place of a unified conclusion Jesse reports that the novel has "186,000 endings a second." He offers five for the reader's consideration, each a meditation upon the larger tension between imaginative individual autonomy and historical identity. In one ending a wealthy character dumps hundreds of dollars into the Pacific Ocean; in another, Mellon and his friends compare themselves to old photographs. Although no ending offers resolution, the effect is to suggest that a detached, Zen-like perspective is the best response toward postwar America's dwindling connection to its own national history. The narrator's attitude contrasts markedly with Mellon's megalomanic dream of resuscitating a grand American myth in mid-twentieth-century California, a longing that shows the "Confederate General" as a pathetic figure. alienated in both time and place. Transcendence of conflict, judgment, and even desire defines the governing ethos in A Confederate General from Big Sur - an attitude that echoes throughout Brautigan's fiction.
Although Grove Press promoted the novel nationally, A Confederate General from Big Sur garnered lackluster reviews and abysmal initial sales. Reviewers, particularly East Coast reviewers, associated the novel with the fading Beat scene in San Francisco. Writing for the 18 April 1965 New York Review of Books, Philip Rahv? commented that in A Confederate General from Big Sur, "the beatnik tendency to disorganization of form and inconsequence of content reaches a new low."
As a result of the poor initial showing of Brautigan's first novel, Grove Press sold the publication rights of Trout Fishing in America (1967) to the San Francisco-based Four Season's Foundation. Despite release in a regional press with little advance publicity, the book quickly found a local following fueled, perhaps, by the coincidental flourishing of the counterculture in San Francisco. Although Brautigan wrote his novel a few years before flower children, diggers, and hippies arrived en masse upon the scene, his dropout characters, gentle, unassuming narrative voice, and experimental prose style appealed to the youth movement.
Mining Brautigan's sudden regional popularity, Delacorte successfully mass-marketed a paperback edition of Trout Fishing in America in 1968. By the end of the decade the author had passed from regional obscurity to the status of minor pop-culture icon. Not only did he gain a national following for Trout Fishing in America, but Brautigan also achieved a favorable reception among critics, many of whom admired his innovative, eclectic style and gentle humor. The reviewer for the 11 January 1970 issue of the Chicago Tribune, J.D. O'Hara, located Brautigan in the "old tradition of West Coast humor" pioneered by Bret Harte and Mark Twain?. Some reviewers, however, discounted Brautigan on the basis of his popularity with a youthful audience and his status as a regional writer. For the 11 February 1971 issue of London Magazine, Hugo Williams? observed disapprovingly that the book had "become something of a cult on the West Coast" and suspected that Brautigan's innocent, naive narrative voice was merely a cynical, commercial means of delivering "sugary, predigested" vignettes calculated "to touch the dewy and vulgar adolescent heart."
Trout Fishing in America, which reads as a somber elegy for the dwindling natural landscape, is at least partially a zeitgeist novel, infused with the attitudes that generated Americas counterculture and made Northern California its spiritual home. The phrase "Trout Fishing in America" is the never-explained, governing idiom of the novel and appears syntactically as a character, an attitude, an historical condition, a state of mind, and an activity. Short chapters alternate between biographical reminiscences and episodes involving characters, most notably a legless wino named "Trout Fishing in America Shorty." Although creeks and streams encountered on fishing expeditions serve as the backdrop for several chapters, the landscape of the West is not a pristine site of transcendence but rather a surreal intersection between natural beauty and historical trauma. A waterfall in Oregon, on closer inspection, turns out to be a whitewashed staircase. A used trout stream lies stacked in sections against the wall of the Cleveland Wrecking Yard?.
At times surprising historical encounters in the natural landscapes of the Far West suggest something of a leftist commentary on ecological destruction and political oppression. Adolph Hitler appears as a sheep-herder on Carrie Creek. FBI agents stake out a trout stream. Jack the Ripper, who has eluded Scotland Yard to become "Mayor of the Twentieth Century?," is disguised in "the costume of trout fishing in America":
He wore mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt. Deep water flowed through the lilies that were entwined about his shoelaces. A bull frog kept croaking in his watch pocket and the air was filled with the sweet smell of ripe blackberry bushes.
Brautigan's narrator, though, offers little beyond passive observation. Trout Fishing in America is social critique without an overt political agenda.
The most compelling theme in the novel is Brautigan's elegiac intimations of an America of lost promise, as when homeless people are shown congregating around Benjamin Franklin's statue in Washington Square in San Francisco. The novel more than once offers a remembrance of the dead homesteaders and miners who left their traces around the trout streams the narrator fishes. While cleaning trout in the twilight at Graveyard Creek, the narrator has a "vision" of himself crossing over to the overgrown graveyard,
gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over the clouds and then into the evening star.
The image captures the tenor of the novel. Gathering together fragments of America's passing, binding certain of its national symbols - its frontier landscape, its public figures, its neglected citizens, and the traces of its forgotten dead - Brautigan memorializes the whole within his irreducible, nostalgic idiom, "trout fishing in America," much as Walt Whitman had done in "Song of Myself" with his composite "I," an identification at once personal and national. Unlike Whitman's nineteenth-century vision of a robust American future, though, Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America offers only a sense of vanished possibilities.
Brautigan's final novel to be published in the 1960s, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), is uncharacteristic because its setting is not the contemporary American West but a postapocalyptic utopian commune called iDEATH. The wreckage of human history, collectively known as "the forgotten works," lies disregarded outside of the commune. The inhabitants of iDEATH fabricate almost everything they use from watermelon sugar. The narrator, who witnessed his parents eaten by tigers that invaded the commune, lives in a cabin just outside of iDEATH in a seemingly Edenic state of innocence. He reports on circumstances in the commune with the gentle, nonjudgmental tone typical of Brautigan, even when disturbing and violent events occur. When a charismatic leader named inBOIL and his followers mutilate themselves to death, the narrator records the event dispassionately, with more curiosity than revulsion.
The emotionless core of In Watermelon Sugar reveals iDEATH to have been founded on a utopian dream that, as critic Harvey Leavitt argues in "The Regained Paradise of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar," has "no claim on progress, no uplifting of the material condition of man, no holy wars to redistribute the physical wealth, ... and no emotional nirvanas." The price of such a utopia, however, includes the loss of the traditional foundations of human identity, desire, and curiosity - a "death" that is symbolized, Leavitt asserts, in the very name of the commune, iDEATH: I death, id death, idea death. In Watermelon Sugar demonstrates that a utopia that effaces all that has led to the creation of the previous world must simultaneously abandon the most elemental aspects of being, leaving a one-dimensional, empty existence as the necessary alternative to historical knowledge and desire. Of Brautigan's first three novels, In Watermelon Sugar is the most darkly cynical in its outlook - the unsatisfying "gentleness" of the narrative voice appears less a Zen strategy of playful indifference here and more a troubling exploration of the cost for transcending historical experience.
In his remarks in "Old Lady," Brautigan describes his relationship with poetry as "a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage" and recalls that he returned to poetry in autumn 1966 after his stint of writing novels with a renewed appreciation of the form. He characteristically stretches metaphors to the breakingpoint. In the title poem of the collection The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), for example, he compares the accidental deaths of several miners in a Springhill, Nova Scotia, coal mine to all the lives "lost" when a woman takes her birth control pill. His later poetry becomes increasingly prosaic and understated, often playfully so. In "Haiku Ambulance" he undermines the form that was embraced by many post-World War II poets. After presenting a domestic image that parodies the natural imagery of a classic haiku - "A piece of green pepper / fell / off the wooden salad bowl" - he undercuts pretension by asking "so what?" In the poem "Albion Breakfast" Brautigan offers the event of writing as the poem itself. When a "long pretty girl" asks the poet to write a poem about Albion, the poem comments: "I said yes. She's at the store now / getting something for breakfast. I'll surprise her with this poem / when she gets back."
Brautigan's poetry attends to surfaces and encourages the reader not to overinterpret. Critic Robert Kern describes this trait as a strategic "primitivism," a naivete consciously designed to "not look like literature." At times, though, Brautigan's seemingly trivial surfaces suggest conceptually sophisticated ideas. "Xerox Candy Bar," for instance, is a poem in which the speaker addresses a photocopy of a candy bar, declaring "you're just a copy / of all the candy bars / I've ever eaten." An early postmodern sensibility informs this odd declaration. If in fact the candy bars represented by the xerox are somehow more "real" than the mere xerox, they are so only by degree because the candy bars, like Andy Warhol's? "Campbell's Soup" cans, are themselves mass-produced objects, indistinguishable, and hence nearly as insubstantial as the "copy" of the candy bar itself The xerox of the candy bar, raised to the reader's attention by the poem, is more distinctive than the object it supposedly represents.
The late 1960s were the high point of Brautigan's critical influence and productivity, and thereafter his critical reputation as a serious writer steadily declined. As the tumultuous decade drifted into cultural memory, critics tended to categorize him as either a scene writer or a flash in the pan. Fairly or not, many reviewers characterized Brautigan's post-1960s fiction as the lesser work of an aging hippie struggling to recapture the charm and promise of his heyday. So while Brautigan's first three novels and his collected poems had at the outset of the 1970s earned him a substantial readership and some critical recognition, reviews of his subsequent literary productions often drew unfavorable comparisons with the Brautigan of Trout Fishing in America.
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) was the first in a series of parodies of genre novels Brautigan undertook in the 1970s. The "history" around which the narrative builds is a trip to Tijuana for the purpose of getting an abortion for the narrator's girlfriend, a procedure illegal in 1966, the time setting of the novel. The element of "romance" - a genre term Nathaniel Hawthorne used to defend his use of fancy in exploring historical conditions - involves the unnamed narrator's job, in which he, somewhat like Hawthorne in the customhouse, oversees a library of forgotten and unknown books. In this peculiar library, any writer may leave a manuscript, which is filed in a card catalogue that no one ever consults, wherever he or she pleases. (A character named Richard Brautigan makes a brief appearance, donating a manuscript titled Moose.) The narrator's isolation is interrupted by the appearance of Vida Kramer, a beautiful woman who chooses isolated companionship with the emotionless librarian because in the outside world men only pay attention to her body. She soon enough suffers the same fate inside the library, however, and thus begins the journey to Tijuana.
Unlike Brautigan's other passive narrators, the librarian in The Abortion offers readers little if any intimations of Zen peacefulness, elegiac redemption, or conceptual texture. The emptiness here, Edward Halsey Foster argues in Richard Brautigan (1983), appears not to have originated in gentle Zen acceptance but rather in narcissistic sterility. More than one review noted a shift in tone with this novel. "The off-beat, the surreal, the neat observations of Trout Fishing in America have been changed into self-indulgent literary tricks," Thomas Lask wrote in his review in the 30 March 1971 New York Times. In the 22 April issue of New York Review of Books, Robert Adams also found the novel without charm, declaring it symptomatic of "that creeping California disease which amounts to saying, to yourself or to others, 'What the hell, I'm pretty much okay the way I am, right?"'
Brautigan continued his experimentation with genre forms in The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), a book set at the turn of the century in which a monster lives in ice caves beneath a mysterious manor in eastern Oregon. The inhabitants of the manor, the identical Hawkline sisters (each known as Miss Hawkline), solicit Greer and Cameron, two bounty hunters, to kill the monster. A good portion of the narrative is occupied by the empty sexual encounters between the bounty hunters and the Hawkline sisters before all finally set about the task of dispatching the monster, which they manage in short order and with little drama. Reviews of this novel were frequently disparaging. Writing for the 11 April 1975 issue of TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, Valentine Cunningham disliked the "dull, accepting tone" of the novel, but found it somewhat liberating "to find everyday things like four-letter words, the sexual act, and the desire of women for men, making for once an unstrident appearance in fiction." Roger Sale, writing in the winter 1974-1975 issue of The Hudson Review, was less forgiving, declaring The Hawkline Monster "a terrible book, deeply unfunny, in no need of having been written."
The ostensible mystery of Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975) is the theft of some bowling trophies that belong to the Logan brothers, all American boys who turn violent in their quest for the missing trophies. The "perverse" side of the novel likely refers to the sadomasochistic lovemaking practiced by Bob and Constance, the unwitting upstairs neighbors to the actual thieves of the bowling trophies. Uncovering the emotional abjection inherent in Bob's sexual desires, Brautigan's flat, minimal prose conveys the entropy of the couple's relationship. When putting away the ropes with which he had earlier bound Constance, Bob wishes things could be different: "Maybe they would change next week. He certainly hoped so, Day after day, week after week, month after month, he had been hoping so." Constance seldom speaks, feigning interest as Bob regularly reads aloud from an old anthology of Greek poetry.
In the apartment below, "in a typical California room during the decline of the West," their neighbors eat turkey sandwiches in bed, watching Johnny Carson. Eventually, the Logan brothers track the missing trophies to the apartment complex but burst into the wrong apartment and shoot Bob and Constance by mistake. According to Duncan Fallowell in his 29 May 1976 review in Spectator, Brautigan's commentary on the vacuity of American culture and its "small-time perversions" is a well worn theme by the mid 1970s, and his attempted mix of humor and pathos are frequently "stretched beyond endurance," leaving the novel "finally embarrassed by the exaggerated attention brought to bear upon its own whimsy."
Brautigan experimented with genre in two more novels, each of which was poorly received. Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976) is as much a parody of 1950s science-fiction films as it is a "Japanese novel." Like a flying saucer from a B movie, a sombrero suddenly lands on Main Street in an unnamed American town, touching off a public panic. Against this backdrop a second story unfolds, that of the writer of this "sombrero story" as he contemplates a failed relationship. Thomas Edwards in a review in the October 1976 issue of Harper's admired the setup of the novel as a "Barthelme-like exercise in discontinuous modes, lyrical, topical and confessional." He also, however, offers what had become an almost universal lament in reviews of Brautigan's new work: "Remembering Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, I would be glad to like Sombrero Fallout better, but his charm seems to be increasingly calculated." Part of the sense of calculation Edwards and other critics note may be a consequence of Brautigan's ongoing commitment to a sparse and understated prose style, the refreshing novelty of which had set the 1960s novels apart but had come to be read as simplistic and undercrafted by many reviewers of the genre novels in the 1970s.
In Dreaming of Babylon. A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977), a parody of hard-boiled detective fiction, Brautigan employs many stock-in-trade conventions of the genre. C.Card, the detective narrator, dodges crooked cops, works his landlady for another week's rent, greets a beautiful and mysterious customer, and so forth. Card must struggle to fulfill his duties as a private eye because he often loses himself in daydreams about Babylon. Outside of Card's lyrical musings, the plotting is characteristically thin - the detective's attempt to steal a corpse from the morgue, for reasons undisclosed, occupies a good portion of the plotline.
Brautigan's self-conscious appropriation of genre forms had wearied some reviewers from the beginning. Critics complained that he only sporadically worked with the possibilities, humorous or otherwise, of the genres he explored. Expressing the views of many in the 22 April 1978 issue of Spectator, Mary Hope dismissed Dreaming of Babylon as "a spare-time exercise." She contended that there "is not much point in parodying a style unless there is a valid alternative statement to make."
The five genre novels have received far less critical attention than Brautigan's 1960s fiction. A notable exception to this trend is a book-length study, Richard Brautigan (1983), by French critic Marc Chénetier?, the only critic, Brautigan told a friend shortly before he died, who "got it right." Arguing for the conceptual and artistic superiority of Brautigan's 1970s fiction, Chenetier suggests that when Brautigan began to publish books that no longer fitted his received image, critical activity largely responded by discarding him." He asserts that the compelling issue in Brautigan's work is not social theme, plotting, or character development but rather the unique perception of the problems inherent in writing and representation itself. Because linguistic systems and set discourses freeze possibilities for meaning, the task of Brautigan's art is to turn language against itself, to break open a space for genuine "inner-life." Thus, Brautigan carries out a "mocking and subversion of genres" and "seeks the partial deconstruction of the narrative fundamentals - plot, character, structure - through ellipse, discontinuity, redundancy, tromp-l'oeil (and) syntactic disruption." While the analytical categories he deploys have their origin in French post-structuralism, Chenetier stresses that Brautigan's genius is that he intuited and explored what were becoming known as metafictional and postmodern aesthetic concerns but without the air of self-importance that attended much of the "serious," theoretically informed new fiction of the later 1960s and 1970s.
In addition to Brautigan's ongoing genre experiments, he published a collection of short stories and three minor volumes of poetry in the 1970s. Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1971) is comprised of several vignettes and stories, each but a few pages in length. The stories read somewhat like chapters from his early novels, each a small meditation or commentary on a particular theme. In Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt (1970) and Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976), Brautigan mines the "unpretentious poet" vein he explored in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and earlier poems. In a representative poem from Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, "The Amelia Earhart Pancake," he continues to employ the flat, subversive tone that characterizes his poetic voice:
I have been unable to find a poem
for this title. I've spent five years
looking for one and now I'm giving
up.
Brautigan's laying bare the process of composition pushes even further in June 30th, June 30th (1978), a collection filled with his impressions of Japan gathered while on a reading tour there in 1977. Confessing in the preface a childhood hatred of the Japanese because his uncle died as a consequence of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Brautigan examines his reactions to the cultural differences he encounters while in Japan. He also admits in the preface that the quality of the poems, which are arranged chronologically, is "uneven." Certain poems come off as simplistic observations, as in the following two stanzas from the poem titled "Talking":
I am the only American in this bar.
Everybody else is Japanese.
(reasonable / Tokyo)
I speak English.
They speak Japanese.
(of course)
Although unpoetic discursive gestures are part of Brautigan's subversive poetic strategy, the earlier poetry nonetheless aimed at poetic effect through the dismantling of poetic discourse. The self-confessed "uneven" poems in June 30th, June 30th read merely as isolated scraps from a writer's notebook. Taken as a travel journal, June 30th, June 30th expresses Brautigan's sense of cultural isolation and the difficulty of bridging cultural differences.
Although interest in Brautigan's writing had waned considerably in the United States by late 1970s, Brautigan discovered a receptive new audience in Japan. In 1977 he married a young Japanese woman named Akiko, who had sought him out because she felt the worldview of his fiction was uniquely Asian. Their short-lived marriage, which ended in divorce in 1980, served in part as the inspiration for The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980), the first long fictional work to follow Brautigan's five-novel genre experiment.
Returning to the semi-autobiographical form of Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan in The Tokyo-Montana Express offers anecdotes and observations from his travels in Tokyo and his new life in Montana, where in 1976 he had purchased a ranch house near Livingston. While the novel appears as something of a return to the offbeat, autobiographical narrative voice of Brautigan's early work, his friend Keith Abbott in Downstream from Trout Fishing in America (1989) asserts that many of the stories reflect Brautigan's growing "anger against the world for the withdrawal of acclaim." The beginning of the chapter titled "Tire Chain Bridge?," can be read as Brautigan's frustrated rejoinder to those who would label him as a 1960s relic:
The 1960s:
A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls. I remember an Indian woman looking for a tire chain in the snow... It was New Mexico 1969.
Brautigan also explores the themes of declining creativity and resignation. In "A One-Frame Movie about a Man Living in the 1970s," he charts the passing of years in which "nothing happened," an awareness that begins to dawn "like the dawn that occurs in a rejected cartoon, a cartoon that nobody wants to publish in their magazine or newspaper." Personal rejection and feelings of social isolation, either on the ranch or in Japan, mark several of the chapters, making The Tokyo-Montana Express a transitional portrait of Brautigan's growing disillusionment and insecurity.
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982), Brautigan's final novel, tells the story of a forty-seven-year-old man, who, as a twelve-year-old boy, had accidentally shot and killed a childhood friend with a .22 rifle. Brautigan was forty-seven years old when he wrote this novel and like the narrator had himself moved from town to town around the Pacific Northwest with his mother during the 1940s, the time in which the novel is set. The question is still open, however, as to whether the accidental shooting depicted in the novel is an actual event from Brautigan's past. Abbott remembers his having alluded to a tragedy in his past and recalls his having once refused to go shooting .22 rifles because of an unspecified "accident" Brautigan said occurred when he was young. Beyond this, however, nothing more specific regarding this episode has surfaced.
Reviews of Brautigan's last novel were frequently uncomplimentary. The novel, moreover, failed to widen his audience. He faced mounting financial difficulties brought on by his decline in popularity and may have become increasingly despondent about his fading influence as a writer. These pressures and disappointments, perhaps combined with a personal life marked by heavy drinking, two divorces, and many breakups, may have led him to decide to end his life in the autumn of 1984. When Brautigan's decomposing body was discovered on 25 October in his Bolinas, California, home beside a .44 caliber Smith & Wesson he had borrowed weeks earlier from an acquaintance, those familiar with Brautigan's personal struggles were saddened but not entirely surprised to learn of his apparent suicide.
Dictionary of Literary Biography?. Twentieth-Century American Western Writers
Detroit, MI: Gale Group, 1999
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