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by Bill Hoagland?
Richard Gary Brautigan (BROWT-ih-guhn) is identified as a link between the Beat generation of the 1950's and the counterculture movement of the 1960's. He was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. His father, Bernard Brautigan, abandoned his mother, Lula Mary Keho Brautigan, while she was pregnant with Richard. Lula Brautigan remarried at least three times, and when Richard was nine years old, his mother abandoned him and his younger sister Barbara for a short period. Brautigan began writing as a teenager, sometimes staying up all night to work on his poetry. He left home at the age of eighteen and moved to San Francisco, where he befriended writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg?, Michael McClure?, Robert Duncan, and Philip Whalen, with whom he shared an apartment for a while.
In 1957, a selection of Brautigan's poems appeared with those of three other young writers in Four New Poets, produced by Inferno Press, a small San Francisco publisher. In the following year, White Rabbit Press published The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. The booklet contains nine poems narrated by a gentle speaker who describes imaginative encounters with the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire.
A swift and prolific writer, Brautigan sometimes wrote as many as ten poems a day during this period. Another small San Francisco publisher, Carp Press, issued Brautigan's next two volumes of poetry, Lay the Marble Tea in 1959 and The Octopus Frontier in 1960. These first three books show Brautigan to be a poet of synesthesia and humor. His strength lay in his ability to fuse disparate images through striking similes.
Brautigan's first published novel was actually the second that he wrote: A Confederate General from Big Sur The story, told by Jesse, a naive student of theology, is about the life of Lee Mellon, a resident of Big Sur who believes he is a general in the Confederate Army. The book is a satire on the hippie lifestyle of the 1960's.
Although written before A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America was Brautigan's second published novel. It is widely regarded as the most important of his works. Trout Fishing in America is the fragmented story of a man in search of the perfect trout stream, symbolic of the American frontier dream. What the narrator finds instead are scenes of industrial violence and environmental perversion. In one chapter, for example, used trout streams are for sale for six dollars per foot in a place called the Cleveland Wrecking Yard?. Yet just as the speaker's imagination has created the negative vision of the wrecking yard, he is capable of magically transcending it: He sees trout in the stacked lengths of stream, and he puts his hand in the water, noting that it is cold and feels good. Trout Fishing in America established Brautigan as one of the most recognizable voices of the 1960's. College students throughout America identified with the book's style and themes. In the late 1960's Brautigan suddenly rose from anonymity and poverty to fame and fortune.
In Watermelon Sugar, Brautigan's third novel, is narrated by a young man who lives in a commune called "iDEATH," a part of the larger community of Watermelon Sugar, population 375. The story takes place in the distant future; for the residents of Watermelon Sugar, ancient history is represented by the Forgotten Works, a place filled with "high piles" of undecipherable and useless artifacts.
In the 1970's, Brautigan turned to writing parodies of standard popular genres. The Abortion appeared in 1971, followed by The Hawkline Monster in 1974, Willard and His Bowling Trophies in 1974, Sombrero Fallout in 1976, and Dreaming of Babylon in 1977. In The Tokyo-Montana Express and So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away, Brautigan returned to the comic, anecdotal style and eccentric characters that had garnered him so much interest in Trout Fishing in America. Reviews of these last two novels were mixed, however, with several critics noting that Brautigan's unique style, which had seemed so fresh in the 1960's, had lost its appeal by the 1980's.
At the age of forty-nine, Richard Brautigan shot himself The suicide probably occurred sometime in late September, 1984, but the actual date of his death cannot he determined, as his body was not discovered until October 25. A posthumous novel, An Unfortunate Woman, was published in 2000. Brautigan had finished the book in 1983, but his friends, agent, and publisher all discouraged its publication. It appeared in France in 1994 as Cahier d'un retour de troie.
Brautigan's style is light, rapid, and conversational. In Trout Fishing in America and his other early novels, Brautigan might be criticized for being merely sentimental over the loss of the once-pristine American frontier if it were not for the humorous tone of his narrator's protean imagination. Although sometimes tedious, his liberal repetition of key words and phrases emphasizes the ironic innocence of characters surrounded by images of violence, death, betrayal, and emptiness. Shy, lonesome, and impassioned, they are not hardened by the loss of the American pastoral myth. Most often, they passively accept their fates.
The enormous, though short-lived, popularity of Brautigan's work during the American counterculture revolution may have worked against his long-term reputation, signaling to some critics that his work was only the product of its time. Yet while American critical interest in Brautigan's work began to lag in the 1970's, European, and especially French, critics discovered textural complexities that Americans did not perceive until the 1980's, when critics Edward Halsey Foster? and Marc Chénetier? noted, for very different reasons, that Brautigan deserved new study. One of the most unconventional writers of an unconventional era, Brautigan cannot easily be defined.
Cyclopedia of World Authors (4th edition)
Pasadena CA: Salem Press, 2003: 398-399
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