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by Andrew Hamlin?
Ianthe Brautigan Swenson still carries the card from a "reknowned expert on suicide" she visited only once, after her father, the celebrated author Richard Brautigan, committed suicide in 1984. This expert stared at her and asked questions between making telephone calls.
"'I think you are not grieving a lost father.'
"'I think you are a mother grieving a lost son.'
This made me cry because it was true.
"'I think you are a mother grieving a lost son.'
This made me cry because it was true.
A mysterious exchange, more poetic than literal, but couched in sturdy, simple, descriptive prose bordering on the sharp, crisp, cleaving of haiku; these tropes marked Richard Brautigan's work even as his imagination charged over skewed terrain, and Brautigan's daughter wraps them around her like a favorite Sunday sweater as she charts the vortexes in her father's life, and the one he created in hers.
As a companion piece, "An Unfortunate Woman," a notebook-sized "journey" found after Richard Brautigan's death but unpublished until now, provides his own take on the slow rustle of despondency. That book might be about its two unfortunate women, fiends of the author, one dead of cancer, one a suicide; but unlike Ianthe, the elder Brautigan will not joust the substance of his melancholy.
The opaque and oblique can carry Ianthe toward insight. Her father's meanings have to be caught refractively. "You cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words someone is dead," runs a passage in Richard Brautigan's short story, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane?." Perhaps thinking of that, "An Unfortunate Woman" flirts with camouflaging, settles finally for walking around it, as with a manhole.
Her father felt comfortable and generally stable, Ianthe writes, at his Geary Street Apartment in San Francisco, where she visited him frequently after her parents' divorce. He had just published four books and released a record album (featuring Ianthe on a chilling poem about lost love), and she "just knew that sometimes he was irritable in a way he had never been before."
After that apartment, she visited him at his Montana ranch, where she once poured bottles of George Dickel down the drain (he drank so much by that point that he never noticed); and his house in Bolinas, California, in which his body was eventually found; and in Japan, where he lived part of each year starting in 1976.
He read to her, encouraged her, with supervision, to experiment with his IBM Selectric, and once, by the side of a Montana road, comforted and protected a young girl who's wrecked her bicycle and bled from her ears. "His terror could ebb away, and I could have my invincible father back," Ianthe says of his sober periods. But by the end of the '70s, his work was out of vogue, and George Dickel became an outspoken houseguest.
For his part, Richard Brautigan retained to the end his spinning of sentence elegance: "The shadows are so close to the light that if the light were to make once slight mistake, the rainy shadows of this winter would take the room away instantly and join it with the rest of the house," runs a description of night in the hanged woman's house. Elsewhere he muses on being sentenced to death for not knowing what day it is, in keeping with his insistence on counting the words in the notebook, the pages until the end. What he thinks of his dead friends comes through occasionally in distilled poetry, more often in musings on, for example, a high and heavy pile of tombstones in a Hawaiian graveyard.
The graves are empty. The bodies are cremated in the "anonymous" shrine next door. If Ianthe learned to mourn her father as a lost son, perhaps her father mourns, through the unfortunate women, the mother he ran away from, the grandmother Ianthe eventually finds. These enigmas, like tombstones, squat, still and sad, in the words of Richard Brautigan's last novel published during his lifetime, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away."
The Seattle Times?
July 23, 2000: L8
online source
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