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by Tom Hillard
University of Nevada, Reno
"When I become rich and famous, Edna, this will be your social security," said a young Richard Brautigan to Edna Webster in 1956, handing her a pile of manuscript pages (ix). Webster was the mother of Brautigan's best friend, and her daughter was his first love. But at age twenty-one, the young poet had decided to leave Eugene, Oregon, for San Francisco, hoping to make it as a writer. As a farewell, Brautigan gave Mrs. Webster all the poems and stories he had written so far. Thankfully for us readers, she kept them. Now, more than forty years later, after Brautigan's international stardom in the 1960s and untimely death in 1984, these manuscripts have finally come to light. "Discovered" by a collector, then arranged and edited, those early poems and stories are now The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.
This slender new volume by the perplexing author of Trout Fishing in America (1967) is indispensable for Brautigan fans. Not only is it the first "new" Brautigan book in well over a decade, but it also covers material from his earliest years, a period which until now has been largely a mystery even to his closest friends. He simply never spoke or wrote about his childhood, save for cryptic and often dark allusions. Though much of this new volume is uneven and is obviously the work of an inexperienced writer, it does reflect the style of Brautigan's later work. For example, we see the brief, often abrupt haiku-like poems that grace his later books. However, many poems are trite and obviously the work of a love-struck adolescent, such as "nothing new," which reads: "There / is / nothing new / under the sun / except / you and me" (16). Nevertheless, the manipulation of words and extended metaphors Brautigan later perfected were all there at this early stage. We also find conscious imitations of his favorite authors, including a short story titled "Somebody from Hemingway Land." Most of these early tidbits glow with his famous humor, both goofy and ironic.
The important themes of Brautigan's later work are also present: cruelty, death, imaginative escape, and, of course, love. Though a hopeless romantic at heart, even at an early age Brautigan clearly felt a strong sense of despair, of futility at the world's cruelty. Most startling are two short pieces that depict his teenage incarceration in a mental institution, the first called "A Love Letter from State Insane Asylum," and the other titled "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye," a haunting narrative that depicts a tormented child sent away "to the madhouse" (56). In "dear old mommie," he writes bitterly of his mother, who abandoned him early on: "God bless / her soul / that / did a perfect /imitation / of a mole" (10).
In the end, The Edna Webster Collection is without a doubt a book for fans. Such nascent writings are most interesting to those curious about Brautigan's early life. Many critics will dismiss this book as merely juvenilia, a mediocre set of stories and poems whose quirky humor is its only redeeming quality. Some Brautigan aficionados may even consider the book a disservice, as it brings Brautigan's weaker writing to the limelight. Nevertheless, the book does bear witness to the blossoming of a young talent, and its poems and stories are also a window into the troubled mind of a 1950s Pacific Northwest youth. Anyone interested in the origins of the literary sensibility of the San Francisco counterculture is likely to appreciate this new addition to our understanding of Richard Brautigan.
Western American Literature? 35.1
Summer 2000: 221-222
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