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by Michael Lalley?
Waiting for a new book by Richard Brautigan, after the success of his Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, was like waiting for a new album from Dylan?. Each time Brautigan brought out a new book his admirers were more amazed by his talents and potential, and their ranks grew, starting with his first novel A Confederate General from Big Sur. But the old American success story must have struck again: SHAZAM! & you're sold out ...
Rommel Drives Deep into Egypt is a book of poems, many of which are less than ten words. Okay, poetry should not be judged on how many words the poem contains. The Japanese, among others, were masters at poems containing very few words. And it is obvious in some of these poems Brautigan is deliberately or unconsciously attempting to create the kind of experience such Japanese poetry generates.
But the Japanese, like other Eastern cultures, have a world view that has little time for the black and white of life but makes much room for the gray. They see "truth" and "beauty" and all the other traditional Western concepts as goals which can only be approached, but never reached. And they realize that in order to get as close as humanely possible the approach must express reverence for the goal, the object. Brautigan's poetry seems to have little of this kind of reverence for what his poetry might be attempting to reach. Poems like the one called "Melting Ice Cream At The Edge of Your Final Thought" which goes:
Oh
well, call it a
life.
well, call it a
life.
seem to me to be completely self-satisfied, self-contained and self-deluded.
I feel poems like many of the facile ones in this book show a lack of respect for my taste, intelligence, and financial situation. Why should time and money and much effort be put into publishing a book that fills one whole page with banalities like:
It seems to me this poem is some kind of "climb on, cash in, cop out" bullshit that the hip entrepreneurs get into when they rip off our culture and sell it back to us. Only this is worse because it is more subtle. Brautigan is not saying, "this thing I have to say is inexpressible in normal language only the language of metaphor, image, dream, surrealism, or something can communicate it." He's saying, "this thing I have to say is so hip I know you won't want to admit that you don't get it, or won't want to feel left out on a private line between me and that other guru Gary Snyder."
At least poems like "Negative Clank" which goes:
He'd sell a rat's asshole
to a blindman for a wedding
ring.
to a blindman for a wedding
ring.
are fun. This so obviously comes out of a very American, very non-elite, non-upper-class, non-WASP etc. cultural experience that it doesn't come off as pretentious "new gentility" of that basically "New York" tone of the others. There are poems in the book that are amusing, and there are some that are really good, maybe even beautiful. But most of them wouldn't make it in an anthology of Reader's Digest rejects. And that's the hitch. Not that Brautigan wrote some poems some of us would call rotten, he's got a right to do that. And not so much even that he published them, if he hadn't published others first. But it so obviously comes right on the heels of his other successes, including his other Delta book of poems called The Springhill Mine Disaster, that it just looks like a big fast-money hype. Put the Brautigan name on it and it'll sell, you know the hip types, they don't want to be left out of what's happening any more than any other red blooded American consumer.
Unfortunately this kind of deal gets fostered by elitism, where Brautigan is elevated to the pantheon of underground heroes because he wrote some things that expressed where a lot of people were at, at a certain time. But we have to keep reminding each other that we dig artists usually when not many others are saying it at the same time, and usually the reason we can relate to what they are putting down is because they are expressing us, where we are at, or where we would like to be, and that means their art would be nowhere without us.
Brautigan's poems are as much a result of you and me getting loaded last week, or digging ourselves, or each other, or ripping off a bank next week, or whatever, as they are of his own private musings. He's just a brother, that's all. Just like Dylan, just like Abbey, just like Snyder, just like you and me. As for sisters, I figure this rap is already in the dust where they once were after one look at the covers of the Brautigan books, or a few looks into The Abortion and others. You know how to sell a refrigerator: make people think they got to have it and for good measure put a woman next to it and make the men feel that somehow that goes with the extra large freezer.
Sour grapes? I doubt it, because I still love Trout Fishing in America, which I had long before Delta published it, and a lot of other things Brautigan has written. I still pass my copy around and recommend it, just like I still love the music of Dylan or Cash, even if they all did do that old American trick — sell their souls to the devil who in turn sold it to us, at a nice profit.
Great Speckled Bird?
June 28, 1971: 11.
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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