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by Jennifer Foote?
On tape, Richard Brautigan was talking to some Japanese broadcasters from Tokyo, to whom he had served George Dickel whiskey in the woods, and he was shooting a Winchester .22-caliber rifle at cans from the back porch of his ranch.
He was saying tidy little things in a formal tone between blasts of gunfire and spliced-in swells of Ry Cooder music. His gun, he said, was "mechanical poetry," and be had never used it to kill "and never will."
"My name is Richard Brautigan," he said. "To me, a good sentence is the same as a bullet... moving and hitting a target."
Somewhere around September 15 of last year, about four years after he recorded this tape, Richard Brautigan directed a bullet from a .44 magnum at himself in the dank main room of his home in Bolinas, California. Like the books he had written, his suicide inspired a lot of curiosity about him.
Many of the reporters who wrote about his death treated him as a washed-up "hippie writer" whose simple style — and whose most famous novel, Trout Fishing in America — had been discarded in the '70s as trivial.
Some of the reporters dug up ironies: that he died just before he was about to score two new book contracts. Others found still-bitter acquaintances who recalled the writer as arrogant and miserly. One depicted Brautigan as a violent cowboy fond of bizarre sex who blasted himself dead like a "coward."
In Bozeman, Montana, the stark Big Sky town where Brautigan had a home and friends, and where he drank, taught school and ate Burger King onion rings, that picture is said to be all wrong. Some 30 miles away in Livingston and in the Paradise Valley beyond, where Brautigan had a ranch, there is outrage among his friends about the comments on the writer's death. There is still more anger among Brautigan's acquaintances in Bolinas, San Francisco and New York.
But not one of his friends claims full understanding of Brautigan's suicide. The wretched childhood, the failed marriages, the numbing alcoholism, the harshness of the critics and his dwindling income are dead-end clues to the suicide.
"Richard would want it like that," said his Montana neighbor, Marian Hjortsberg?. "If he ever thought that anyone or everyone could figure him out, that would have been very depressing to him."
Brautigan was born on January 30, 1935. He grew to be a tall, blond man who sported a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He published a book that bombed, A Confederate General in Big Sur, but he bolted from obscurity to national prominence in the late 60s with Trout Fishing in America, which sold 2 million copies. In other slim volumes — In Watermelon Sugar, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, The Abortion — Brautigan demonstrated his humor and wrote about what he saw as the betrayal of the American dream. Each book had a picture of the author or a wholesomely beautiful girlfriend? — or both — on the front. They sold and sold, and Brautigan became a cult hero of the '60s.
He continued to work into the late '7Os, but sales of his books were no longer phenomenal. Critics who had praised the earlier books concluded that Brautigan was a flower-power prodigy whose work didn't hold up under cool literary analysis. For many of his early readers, the news of Brautigan's death was the first they'd heard of him in years.
Mary Lulu Folston never read Brautigan. She hadn't even heard from her son since 1956, when he left her home in Tacoma, Washington, at the age of 21.
"He just left is all," she said. "Didn't say where he was going. He just disappeared, like people do."
His father, Bernard Brautigan, left Folston when she was pregnant with Richard. He didn't know he had a son until the writer died and Folston revealed her story to him.
"This stinks," he told a newspaper reporter, but not much more.
"He was a very good boy, a very quiet boy," Folston said. "Never drank, never smoked, never dated girls."
He was helpful, too, she says; he caught fish and shot birds for the "meat portions" of family meals during World War II. He'd go to bed each night with the Bible.
"I don't think he was very fond of my husband," Folston ventured. "They went hunting once, and there was a rift." Young Brautigan came back from the trip and told his mother that Uncle Larry, her husband's brother, had poured cold water in his ear as he lay in his sleeping bag and then killed a deer and rubbed the blood all over him.
"Richard was shocked," she said. "After that there was cold dead silence."
After Brautigan left home, Folston never wondered what he was up to: "When you know your child is famous, you don't worry, do you?" Still, his suicide gave her nightmares.
"You get to thinking... about how you can lose touch with a person," she said.
Brautigan had tried to leave home and live in San Francisco's North Beach four times before he actually had enough money to stay there. He circulated among the Beats? and wrote constantly.
Sometimes he drank coffee in the Minimum Daily Requirement?, a coffeehouse owned by Kendrick Rand?. Brautigan was a poor, slightly goofy-looking person who could be shy and very private. He couldn't drive and would never learn, but Rand was a glad chauffeur who shuttled Brautigan from poetry readings in Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara to his near-empty San Francisco apartment.
"We used to have breakfast at Mama's? on Washington Square and then walk around it 12 or 15 times, talking as we went," said Brautigan's friend and fellow writer, Don Carpenter?. "He was a surrealist. He might say, 'That guy over there looks like a block of concrete.'"
When he published A Confederate General in Big Sur, Brautigan told Carpenter that he would be paid $1,000 for the book. It was about a third of what he was accustomed to earning in an entire year. But the book came out and "died like a cockroach underfoot," Carpenter recalled. "Richard was thrown in the dumps."
When Trout Fishing in America became a hit, "everyone was stunned," Carpenter said. "But Richard thought it was what he was due."
Brautigan changed little as the royalties rolled in and the groupies began swarming. "He remained in his living habits as simple and uncorrupted as anyone I have ever known," said Helen Brann?, Brautigan's literary agent since 1968. "There were years when the 'Today' show and Johnny Carson and a whole lot of people were after him — they would have put him across as a brilliant eccentric — but he never gave in to that kind of thing."
After spending some time in Bolinas, a coastal town north of San Francisco, where he wrote In Watermelon Sugar and met writers Tom McGuane? and William Hjortsberg?, Brautigan used some of his Trout Fishing earnings to buy a big house there in 1970. By then he was divorced from Virginia Adler?, whom he had married in 1957 and with whom he had a daughter.
Brautigan used the house only on weekends. "He would usually come out with a friend," said poet Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who still lives in the town. "Usually it was a lady friend who could drive and who could cook." They'd prepare big spaghetti dinners, playing host to writer friends from San Francisco. Sometimes he'd work after the guests had gone, perching his typewriter on the porch.
"Richard was getting rich, fat and famous and drinking too much," Carpenter recalled. "Often he would motor-mouth about himself, get obsessed. And he was always looking for two things: always looking for love and trying to improve his work."
"He had that quality of massive, yet somehow inoffensive self absorption," said McGuane. McGuane had written the first rave review? of "Trout Fishing" for The New York Times Book Review and moved to a ranch is Montana's Paradise Valley not long after meeting Brautigan.
One summer, according to McGuane, "Richard sort of showed up here." After several summer visits, Brautigan bought a ranch next door to William and Marian Hjortsberg and went about installing a writing studio in the barn. Montana became one of Brautigan's favorite temporary homes.
Another was Tokyo, where his popularity grew as it declined in America. "Richard became a worldwide literary success without the help of the American critical review establishment." McGuane said.
"The critics got to him more than they would have ever hoped," said Becky Fonda?, who with her husband, Peter, was a neighbor of Brautigan's in Montana. "They devastated him."
In 1978, after many trips to Japan, Brautigan married his second wife, Akiko, and took her to Montana. After two years of marriage, they divorced. "The marriage seemed doomed, and it tore him to pieces," Carpenter said.
Brautigan aggravated his misery with drink. "Through all of the horror show, through everything, he kept writing." Carpenter said. "No matter what else he did, he wrote."
Montana — his ranch and the towns of Livingston and Bozeman — remained Brautigan's refuge. In 1982, he taught at Montana State University in Bozeman and knocked around with the students who took turns driving him from bar to bar.
They would often stay up late drinking until "a horrible time at the end of the night," said Greg Keeler?, a poet and professor in Bozeman. Then Brautigan "would slip into what I thought was a funny Oriental voice and get horrifyingly incisive about things. Be would come up with some really scary stuff about life and about death."
"He hated to be bored, so he made things happen," Keeler said. He loved Americana, like the Eagles bar where Brautigan would indulge in crowd-stopping antics, such as planting a big kiss on Keeler's mouth in a room full of cowboys. He liked to watch "The Love Boat" or "The A-Team" or read the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, the letters of Ernest Hemingway? or the National Enquirer and then talk about them with courtly precision.
But as Brautigan's drinking got worse, his talk turned increasingly to self-centered rambling. "Frankly," said McGuane, "it became harder and harder to be around him."
By the time he left Montana for the last time, after a stay from August to October 1983, Brautigan and a friend, Brad Donovan?, had finished a screenplay called "Trailer," about a mobile-home park, He had also completed a novel, called "The Unfortunate Woman," but his friends, agent and publisher all advised that he should set it aside.
Brautigan was having money problems. His profits were tied up in real estate, and his foreign publishers, who represented a last source of steady income, were slow to pay him. He put his ranch up for sale, announcing that he was disenchanted with Montana, and set off on a tour of Europe and Japan. He told some people he might never come back.
Brautigan was fond of final statements and the drama they might produce, yet there were peculiarities in the last departure from Montana. The day before he left, Brautigan packed up his things to take to McGuane's ranch, as he did every time he left. This time, however, he left behind his typewriter, his guns and his fishing rods, to which he had taped dried flowers.
Brautigan also gave McGuane a wooden box, saying that his friend would get instructions for the object one day in the future. It was a Japanese burial urn.
"My judgment at the time was that it was meant to mildly suggest that I might never see him again," McGuane said.
On the road in Holland, France and Germany, Brautigan wrote his friends playful letters but also made morose, drunken telephone calls in the wee hours. When Brautigan returned to Bolinas in June, he visited Bobbie Hawkins. She gave him dishes and utensils but was pained by his manner. "Suddenly it was like one saw too much of him and seeing more of him made him less tolerable," she said.
Depending on the day, the hour, the person he was seeing and the amount he had drunk, Brautigan was either jolly or morose. When he visited Kendrick Rand, Brautigan was ecstatic, giddily announcing that he just had written for 10 or 12 solid hours.
He told friends in Montana and his publisher and his agent the same thing, that he was hard at work on a novel and a book of poetry. He was ready to get into theater and movies, too, he said.
But Hawkins and writer Bill Brown? saw him at his worst in Bolinas: drunk, bitter and angry. "He'd come here and sit and talk to himself," Brown recalled. "His kind of paranoia was that he was worried about his carcass, someone getting him."
Brautigan had told Hawkins that he was writing about 20 pages a day, but when she visited, she found his typewriter on the porch covered and dusty. Inside, Brautigan had shut off all but the main room and the adjoining kitchen — living and working in a room with a tattered Naugahyde couch, a barren table, a stacked mattress bed and a TV leaning against a cold fireplace.
Hawkins would find him talking in a paranoid haze, sometimes about himself in the third person. "It got to a point where anyone who would say something to him or look at him like they recognized him would just increase his paranoia. He was getting involved with his gun — like if anybody came after him, he would have his gun."
The gun was on loan from Jim Sakata?, who had become a friend during the past five years. Brautigan would visit Sakata's Cho Cho tempura bar in San Francisco and talk to Sakata about everything from Japanese writers to firearms. "Early in the summer, he borrowed the pistol," Sakata said. "He said he was lonesome at Bolinas and wanted some company."
Sakata had discussed death with the writer, but it never occurred to Sakata that his friend would kill himself.
When it happened, nobody knew it. For five weeks, Brautigan's body lay between his bed and his desk, the gun to one side, a couple of empty bottles of bourbon nearby.
It wasn't that no one cared. "He had a lifelong habit of moving quickly and quietly," Bill Brown said. His friends in Bolinas and San Francisco thought he had gone to Montana or Japan.
His agent and publisher mailed letters full of business details, but when the mail was returned unopened, they thought Brautigan had simply fouled up forwarding details.
Friends in Montana expected Brautigan in early October. When he didn't show, Becky Fonda initiated a search, finally enlisting a private investigator to track Brautigan down.
Confronted with the horror of Brautigan's suicide, his friends found hints of it in their last encounters with him. Carpenter recalled that Brautigan had never said good-bye at the end of phone conversations — he usually blurted out a reason to hang up and then did so. But when he called a couple of days before the estimated time of the suicide, Carpenter remembers, "He said, 'I love you,' and then he said goodbye."
Some thought Brautigan had killed himself in the calculated spirit with which he did most things. "It's very simple in a way," said Brad Donovan. "He decided to die and did it. There is no comparing it to why ordinary people do things."
Others thought it was a drunken blunder. Brautigan had seen his ex-wife, Akiko, several days before he was thought to have shot himself. They argued, and some speculate that Brautigan got drunk and aimed the gun.
Some speculate that the writer died because of lack of appreciation. But two of his closest friends point to a more profound disjunction in Brautigan's life.
Marian Hjortsberg remembered Brautigan's tender expectations of himself and his friends: "The cynical world he found himself in was in direct conflict with the innocence that was the wellspring of his artistry."
Tom McGuane said Brautigan rejected sobriety because "his expectations of the world and people around him were so precise it was hard to bear. A guy pulls himself out of a world he fears and hates, makes a world in which he is very happy and for various reasons that world is piece by piece taken away from him, and he can't bear to live in a world that doesn't have the things he created."
The Washington Post?
January 22, 1985: D8-D9
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