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Richard F. Dietrich's essay on 'Homage to the San Francisco YMCA' from 'Revenge of the Lawn'
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Brautigan's "Homage to the San Francisco YMCA": A Modern Fairy Tale

by Richard F. Dietrich
University of South Florida

Brautigan's "Homage to the San Francisco YMCA?" is probably best categorized as a fairy tale, containing as it does magical transformations, bewitchment, and a "once upon a time" beginning. But of course it's not the usual fairy tale. For one thing, most fairy tales aren't written for academics. Not that one necessarily needs to be an academic to enjoy this tale, but it helps to know who Michael McClure? and Vladimir Mayakovsky are, not to mention Shakespeare?, Donne, and Dickinson?.

It also helps to know that Wordsworth? declared poetry to be the result of "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and that from Aristotle on the cathartic theory of literature has been popular with critics. For obviously the hare-brained protagonist of this story has heard something of that sort. He's heard not only that poetry serves as the conveyer of flowing emotions, but that it serves the reader as a purger of bad feelings. Why else would it occur to him to replace his plumbing with poetry? Perhaps the idea occurred to him after he'd had an emotionally "draining" experience with poetry. If poetry can drain his spirit of its poisons, why not drain his body as well?

This confusion of levels of reality is not surprising in one who profits in insanity. Our protagonist lives off a pension "that was the result of a 1920's investment that his grandfather had made in a private insane asylum that was operating quite profitably in Southern California." From the Jazz Age of the 20's, so illusorily successful, craziness has so flourished in America that instead of jumping out of windows in the crash of '29 stockbrokers would have done better to invest in it. For the whole country, Brautigan implies, has become so confused about what's real that it has not only lost the ability to distinguish reality from illusion, but it trades on their confusion. The insane asylum, for example, "was one of those places that do not look like an insane asylum." Located so close to Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Disneyland, where illusion triumphs over reality daily, how could it he otherwise?

Unused to reality, ensconced in the never-never land of Pacific Heights, Brautigan's princely patron of poetry naturally misunderstands the uses of poetry. Nothing is more practical than poetry if spiritual cleansing is what you're after, but if as an American you insist that true practicality consists in administering to one's material needs, then you may push poetry too far. In that material realm, as Auden put it, "poetry makes nothing happen." But the protagonist apparently hasn't read Auden, for he forces poetry to undertake a physical task it was never designed for — cleansing of the body. It is no exaggeration to say that "Christopher Columbus' slight venture sailing West was merely the shadow of a dismal event in the comparison."

Unfortunately, the magical transformations — of the minor poets into a toilet, for example — don't work. Our would-be fairy tale sorcerer is a failure, but typically he blames if on the poetry. "'Face up to reality,' the man said to the poetry." But Brautigan means us to notice that it's the would-be sorcerer who's bewitched and who can't face up to reality. Note that "he of course had never met a poet in person. That would have been a little too much." Having a Hollywood mercantile notion of what's useful, the protagonist is unable to deal with poetry's exclusively spiritual usefulness and its insistent spiritual reality, especially in the face of the fact that real human beings are capable of it. That is, physical beings who just like himself need toilets but who are capable of creating the spiritual contradiction that is poetry would be hard to understand for this one-track mind. Man's dual nature is beyond the comprehension of the materialistic monomania.

But perhaps poetry is a little too insistent in its reality. Once you give poetry the notion that it can serve as literal plumbing, it's hard to convince it otherwise. One of the worst features of the materialist's idea of practicality is that it corrupts even that which is opposed to its values. Installed as literal plumbing, the poetry begins to take itself too literally as a drainer of physical poisons, presuming to be real in a sense it can never be. Yeats?, for example, believed so hard in becoming the golden bird of Byzantium that he sometimes lost track of the physical reality he was trying to escape from, the art reality completely replacing for him material reality. In its insistent reality, poetry is always a little presumptuous in this way. Presumptuous or not, the poetry is right in kicking Brautigan's protagonist down the stairs, for his folly is the opposite of Yeats'. His mad insistence is that poetry cannot be "real" unless it is materially useful; that is, that spiritual values count for nothing unless they can be converted into material values.

Madness is the point here. The protagonist virtually lives in the bathroom of the YMCA, talking to himself "with the light out." Living in ignorance and spiritual darkness, the protagonist devotes his life to an obsessive-compulsive act of cleansing that can never be fulfilled because the toilet, however useful otherwise, is not the proper agent for the purging of what really ails him. His malaise is succinctly explained by his retreat to the YMCA. Christianity in general, but especially Americanized Christianity, is a fine example of a spiritual intention that has learned to accommodate the material world, and the ultimate in that accommodation is the YMCA where physical exercise typically takes precedence over spiritual exercise. Whereas the poetry fails to become literal plumbing, religion has made the transformation successfully, in a sense, and is now more plumbing than not. The protagonist may feel more at home there, but he'll never stop muttering to himself, for toilets do not cleanse minds or hearts.

Brautigan is a kind of Christopher Columbus whose every work leads us to the discovery of America. America has been damned by its writers before for its materialism, but seldom has that indictment been put with such charming and amusing simplicity, and with such daring in paradox. For only a fairy tale, that form of literature most held in contempt by our "realistic", "down-to-earth," "practical and no-nonsense" business civilization, could capture the reality of our cultural schizophrenia, which invokes God while worshiping Mammon. As his protagonist pays knightly homage to that institution most aptly symbolic of the selling out of spiritual intentions, Brautigan ironically portrays this American prince as an individual bewitched by false values and self-entombed upon "the throne" of a materialistic obsession.


Notes on Contemporary Literature? 13.4
September 1983: 2-4



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