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Introduction to The Alligator Report
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Introduction to The Alligator Report

by W.P. Kinsella

Three days after I signed the contract for this book Richard Brautigan's death was announced. I can't think of another writer who has influenced my life and career as much. If I could own only one book it would be Brautigan's mysterious parable In Watermelon Sugar. I think Dreaming of Babylon is the funniest novel I have ever read.

Many of the short, surreal pieces in this book owe a debt to Richard Brautigan. I publicly call these vignettes Brautigans and many have been published in groups of three or four as such. Brautigan's delicate, visual, whimsical, facetious writing appealed to a whole generation of us who were able to identify with the gentle, loving losers of his stories. He and director Robert Altman are the two famous people I would most like to shake bands with. Richard Brautigan was an extremely private person, one who apparently was unable to take joy from his accomplishments, but concentrated instead upon what he had not done or felt he was no longer able to do. A few years ago a friend and I decided to phone Richard Brautigan, an uncharacteristic gesture, for I too am a very private person. Unfortunately his home near Livingston, Montana had a silent listing.

The letter which follows I wrote to Richard Brautigan in 1980. Though he must have received thousands like it, I'm glad I wrote, I'm glad I let him know how he touched my life. I'm only sorry that it wasn't enough, that I couldn't have done more.



December, 1980

Dear Richard Brautigan:

I am just now reading The Tokyo-Montana Express, reading it slowly, a page or two at a time, like trying to make Christmas candy last until Easter. It is very hard to write a fan letter, for what do you say after you say, "I admire your books very much. They bring me a great deal of pleasure. I wish I could write like you." I don't know. I do write. In fact I am quite a well-known writer in Canada. But I am not very well known in the United States, except in Iowa, where I once brought a dead baseball player back to life. They buy my books there because one of them has 'Iowa' in the title. I think I should have put 'Iowa' in the title of all my books; there are four of them at the moment.

I have just read a story in your book where you talk about driving to Bozeman. I once drove from Edmonton to Bozeman in the dead of winter in a lumbering metallic-blue DeSoto that was old enough to be my father. I drove there to compete in a public speaking contest against people from Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia. Bozeman claimed to be the Convention Capital of Montana. The hotel was dark and poorly heated. Each bar that I visited had a few sodden cowboys in sheepskin-lined mackinaws, but no unattached women, which was what I was looking for.

The judges were all Montana men with square jaws and western suits. I gave a rousing speech, easily the best in my class but because I criticized Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, I did not even place. I learned that Montana men have nothing to do in the wintertime but impregnate their wives and look at the horizon waiting for the Red Tide they know is sweeping toward them across the frozen land.

I also teach writing, whatever that means. Many of my students have published, but I wonder if they would have eventually even if our paths had not crossed.

I have just written a novel about a man who drives from Iowa to New Hampshire, kidnaps J. D. Salinger and takes him to a baseball game at Fenway Park. Somehow it loses something being summarized like that. Perhaps I will write a novel about a man who kidnaps Richard Brautigan and keeps him locked in his rumpus room which has a trout stream and papermache model of Mt. Fujiyama. He makes you write a "Brautigan" every day, like laying a golden egg, and rushes out to his bookie and bets the Brautigan on a very slow horse running in the seventh race at Aqueduct. Then again I may not.

I suppose what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is thank you for writing what you have written. I'll close with a quote from a fan letter I received from an editor in Boston after he read my story about the dead baseball player. But if it is the way he feels about my work, it is also the way I feel about yours:

"You do something in your stories that few writers do well especially today — and that is to make the reader love your characters. They exude a warm glow. They are so real, so vulnerable, so good, that they remind us of that side of human nature which makes living and loving and striving after dreams worth the effort. I, for one, came away with a delicious smile on my face and a soft little tear in my eye and I felt pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day."

Very best regards,

Bill Kinsella


The Alligator Report
Coffee House Press, 1985