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by Ron Loewinsohn?
Richard Brautigan ended his best-known book, "Trout Fishing in America," with "The Mayonnaise Chapter."
The chapter consists entirely of a letter of condolence that the author actually found in a second-hand bookstore and reproduced verbatim — including the misspelling in the postscript: "P.S. Sorry I forgot the mayonaise."
The letter is so conventional (Mr. Good has "lived a good life," he "has gone to a better place," etc.) that it's anonymous.
In its thoroughly ordinary prose, the momentousness and finality of death coexist with the humdrum everydayness of the overlooked mayonnaise. Death makes a ripple in the stream of human affairs, but the stream continues, pretty much as it did before.
The chapter is vintage Brautigan, who habitually yoked the most dissimilar images and ideas in a tone that remains matter-of-fact.
In much the same way, the book's opening chapter describes San Francisco's Washington Square, which is presided over by a statue of Ben Franklin, as the epitome of American pragmatic optimism. The statue, however, stands on a pedestal that resembles a tomb, and the chapter ends with the observation that Franz Kafka learned about America by reading Franklin's autobiography.
On the surface, Brautigan's America is all Ben Franklin; underneath, it's all Kafka.
Other chapters render in graphically visible terms the ironies we usually discuss as abstract ideas.
America's commercialization of nature is pictured as a "used" trout stream being sold by the linear foot in a wrecking yard, the stream neatly stacked in 10 and 20-foot lengths against a fence. There's even a box of scraps.
At its best, Brautigan's style could discover and illuminate the contradictions of our world that often escape our notice in a manner that was at once startling and compelling.
At less than its best, it could be startling but not convincing, calling attention to its own brilliance without sweeping the reader along with its vision.
At its worst, the understatement failed to gain any resonance at all: an image that must have had some charge for Brautigan was presented without sufficient context, and the reader was left asking: So what?
Brautigan began by writing poems in free verse — brief, sometimes ironic, sometimes lyrical, sometimes flat and observational as Hemingway.
Except for some half-dozen poems scattered throughout his nine collections, most of his poems are drastically weakened by excessive cleverness or sentimentality, or both.
Hearing him read his poems could be like listening to a series of one-liners interspersed with bits of accordion music: entertaining, but not substantial or emotionally engaging.
In the late 1950s, he began writing short stories, and did some of his most impressive work in this form. Like all his prose, his stories (the best of them are collected in "The Revenge of the Lawn") all concern ordinary people, usually poor or working class, often children, almost always "marginal" characters somehow alienated from their communities.
These stories focus, not on plot or character development, but on the ironies of situations, and on the imagery and language that actualize them.
Some of his best stories went into the book that made him a celebrity, "Trout Fishing in America," where they're more or less unified into a novel by the consistency of their themes -— poverty, loss, death, the imagination, frustration -— and also by the metaphor of trout fishing, which becomes a personified character.
The narrator gets letters from Trout Fishing in America and has long conversations with him. The activity of trout fishing here stands for the primal innocence of America, running like a pure stream through a polluted and ravaged landscape.
This theme is central to our literature and links Brautigan with two of his chosen models, Hemingway? and Mark Twain?, and also to Thoreau and Fenimore Cooper.
Short on plot and structure, "Trout Fishing in America" is rich in language, metaphor and a wry humor, by turns sardonic and childlike.
It was so inventive and original it wasn't even recognized as a novel by the first 12 editors who rejected it.
In 1967 it was published by San Francisco editor and publisher Don Allen, with the famous "hippie" photograph of Brautigan on the front cover. The book had nothing to do with Hippies, and the consistent pigeonholing of him as a "Hippie author" is simply another of the ironies surrounding his ironic death, apparently a suicide.
Brautigan's integrity as a novelist is clear from his refusal to repeat a successful formula.
He followed the mosaic of "Trout Fishing in America" with the zany but consecutive "Confederate General from Big Sur," about a couple of cultural drop-outs, and then with a very strange fantasy, "In Watermelon Sugar," set in a land where the sun shines a different color each day of the week.
Even after "Trout Fishing" propelled him into the fast lane (where he paid a high toll), he continued to experiment with genres rather than cater to an audience by giving them what they expected.
The novels that followed — ("The Abortion," "The Hawkline Monster," "Willard," "Sombrero Fallout" and "Dreaming of Babylon" — are all considerably weaker than his first effort, and for varying reasons.
Though each of these novels announces its genre "A Gothic Western," "A Japanese Novel," etc.) none genuinely, rigorously investigates the workings of that form, so they seem merely another Brautigan novel in a new costume. Just play-acting.
In addition, he became predictable by relying too heavily on two devices, the split-screen or double-leveled narration and the startling simile.
Almost all of these novels have brilliant moments, but none, with the possible exception of "The Abortion," sustains a re-reading, as "Trout Fishing in America" does.
The humor and liveliness of his imagination surface from time to time in these later books, recognizable from "Trout Fishing" and his best stories, to which readers will return, the way we return to a pure stream in a ravaged landscape.
San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle?
October 28, 1984
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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