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Gerald Haslam
Sonoma State University
Dear Richard:
They found your final message over on Bolinas Mesa the other day, a soft bag of bones that reviled the coroner's boys. Little lank was left, and that stolen mustache was beyond recognition. Maybe you and George Dickel and your swift lead friend planned it this way; we'll never know, but we should have heard the shot.
All I heard was the talk that followed; not your voice, of course, but all those others — some pained, some baffled, some just grateful for having known you. Seymour Lawrence? said "I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American loneliness."
Your loneliness was personal, not national; Lawrence's easy hyperbole would not have survived one of your second drafts. The mother who had on occasion denied you; the three stepfathers who used you for a punching bag; the father who came forward to acknowledge you only after your death; the two marriages that didn't endure: that's not American loneliness, that's personal tragedy.
Tom McGuane? explained with real insight, that you were "very much a person who was self-enclosed, hard to break through. Everyone says if he had only reached out to someone. That's sort of the last thing Richard would do... He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." You were certainly all those things, and you created a special literary world that was magical, that was humorous that was telling.
Despite the stereotype your publishers seemed to encourage, you were something other than a hippie, too. Unique, yeah; unconventional, oh yeah; original, a yeah again. I mean what do you call a guy who never had a driver's license, who shot up his kitchen and framed the bullet holes, and who wrote many a memorable line on cocktail napkins at a bar? "Richard was one of the truly eccentric individuals I have ever met," William Hjortsberg? admitted. "He was a genuine Bohemian." That's more like it, don't you think? No flower in your hair, but you damn sure were an original.
But oddness and eccentricity don't develop automatically in each individual, any more than talent such as yours emerges reflexively from a rolled joint, as many of your doper fans speculated. The nagging question is how much the unhappy past that rendered you so vulnerable also contributed to your unique sensitivity, how much pain was part of your bargain? Few in our generation have produced more original pictures of inner America, but at what price? That muffled shot on Bolinas Mesa seems an answer.
In any case, Ron Loewinsohn? was mighty close when he observed: "On the surface, Brautigan's America is all Ben Franklin; underneath, it's all Kafka." Don Carpenter? said — and I'm sure you'd agree — that he didn't think your work had ever been adequately appreciated: "His ability to compress emotion into such a small space was second to none. He was a great artist." Loewinsohn and Carpenter were your friends, but it wasn't mere friendship talking because when you were at your best — many of the stories in The Revenge of the Lawn, some of those crazy poems, and Trout Fishing in America — you were without peer.
Even in those weaker later works flashes of the old magic broke through. That some of those less-than-successful works were the product of your willingness to try new ideas and techniques was to your credit. "Brautigan's integrity as a novelist is clear," Loewinsohn points out, "from his refusal to repeat a successful formula." No doubt you could have sold many rewrites of "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?".
Once Trout Fishing propelled you into the surreal world of American publishing, your hunger for approval converted you into an armless boxer. You didn't understand all the rules. "One minute you're darling of the fleet," said Becky Fonda?, "the next minute they go right over you. Richard was really undone by it."
Even your counter cultural audience, the one that adopted you after the "hippie" photo appeared on Trout Fishing's cover and liked to pretend your wondrous vision was its own, began to drift away, so Europe and Japan became a focus for your need for approval. Curt Gentry told about walking with a stork like you in Tokyo: "Richard looked particularly strange, out of place... The Japanese would turn and stare at him and kind of laugh as he went by. Richard would say, Everyone knows me in Japan. Can't you see that?"
McGuane blamed the critics for your diminished popularity at home: "Richard became an internationally famous writer without any help from the American literary establishment. When the crest broke, I think they were eager to injure him. I think they tried all the time." While the particulars differ the pattern is familiar; ask other western mavericks: Jack London, William Saroyan?, John Steinbeck. But it's also true that even admiring critics considered much of your later work poor, and I suspect another reason has to be considered.
Once your books were selling well and your publisher was willing to allow you to publish anything, it seems that you did. Without realizing it, you were caught by the bookkeeper mentality of contemporary American publishing, the one that values dead cat books and racks of fake best-sellers in supermarkets rather than literary quality. You became a victim of the very popularity you so deeply needed. Face it, for a time your laundry list would have sold, and your publisher would certainly have marketed it — with a cute photo on the cover. Sometimes it seemed as though he was doing just that.
Ken Kelley? has suggested another factor: your venture into the pseudo-macho celebrity set at Paradise Valley. Again, you weren't able to deal with it. "It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard. The books he wrote up there, like The Hawkline Monster were full of violence — nothing like the earlier hippie novels. He would really get whacko up there."
But you were always a writer, a real one. Booze and babes and random beefs aside, you labored at your craft. Remember what von told that audience of freaks at San Francisco State back in the sixties when one kid asked if you just smoked dope and let it flow? "Are you crazy, man? Writing's work!" Amen.
So it was and so it is, and for awhile the St. Vitus dance of your prose livened our own strolling lines by extending the possible. When the final assessment of our period is written, your name will not be blown away by the wind because you gave us a special and candid vision of ourselves. Once you said, "I have no fear of it [death] at all. I'm interested in life. People wouldn't take life seriously if they didn't know it would turn dark on them." You took it seriously and helped us to accept its seriousness with your flashing, your unexpected words.
"I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails," you wrote in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. "They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore's edge, which I belong to with my imagination." I just glanced out the window, and blackbirds are gone from my small pond, the cattail withered to the color of your scraggly mustache. You reached us, pard', more than you knew, and that is our burden. To the west it's darker, a Pacific storm blowing in toward Sonoma Mountain; the big willow genuflects again and again. There are troughs between gusts — foamy silences — and I'm listening for a shot. We all are.
All the best,
Gerry
Western American Literature? 21.1
May 1986: 48-50
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