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by Peter Manso? and Michael McClure?
Richard Brautigan was a god of the sixties counterculture, but when he died last fall, he had long been cast out of the temple of Hip. East Coast writer PETER MANSO and West Coast poet MICHAEL McCLURE re-evaluate the fallen idol through the voices of his peers — Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Tom McGuane, and others.
Sometime around the first of October 1984, Richard Brautigan, forty-nine, shot himself in the head with a .44 magnum handgun. The maggot-infested body of the poet célèbre of the sixties lay decomposing on the floor of his two-story wood frame house in Bolinas?, California, for a month or more before anyone went to look for him. A half-pint of Jack Daniel's, two dollars in change, some tranquilizers, and an answering-machine tape with only one message on it — these were the last memento mori of the man whose name had once been synonymous with America's counterculture.
He had arrived on San Francisco's Beat scene in 1956, shy, gangly, and penniless. His experimental poems, collected in mimeographed booklets with titles such as The Galilee Hitch-Hiker and Lay the Marble Tea, were short, haiku-like, and absurdist. He hung out in Bay Area bars, gave occasional readings, and worked odd jobs to raise rent money. In 1965 Grove Press published A Confederate General from Big Sur, and with Trout Fishing in America, which sold more than two million copies, Brautigan became the writer of his generation. For the counterculture his work was an embodiment of the revolution in progress — subversive, surreal, and anti-establishment. Rolling Stone?, Esquire, and Life? put him in the pantheon of protest alongside Bob Dylan?, Allen Ginsberg?, and Timothy Leary?.
With his newfound fame and fortune, Brautigan traveled widely. He bought the house in Bolinas and a forty-two-acre ranch in Montana. But success was not easy for him. Hard drinking, the seduction of fans, and the allure of newly available women began to take their toll. The East Coast critics didn't help matters; they panned or neglected his later books, including Dreaming of Babylon, The Tokyo-Montana Express, and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. The sixties dwindled into the seventies. Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street, Abbie Hoffman fled underground, many of the flower children turned to Yuppiedom, and Brautigan, once hailed as the "gentle poet of the young," sank into decline. His alcoholism, self-absorption, and paranoia deepened. By the end he found himself unpublishable.
The obituaries revealed strange facts about him. Friends reported, for example, that Brautigan had bragged that he never finished high school. Brautigan's father, who had left his wife when she was pregnant, told reporters he had never even known he had a child named Richard Brautigan. Brautigan's mother said she hadn't heard from her son since 1956, when he had left home in Tacoma, Washington, and headed for San Francisco.
To untangle Brautigan's life and death, Peter Manso and Michael McClure canvassed the people close to him and posed some critical questions.
MICHAEL McCLURE: When I think of Richard, I remember the smell of white port wine and the metallic taste it had in the sixties, when one nipped it out of the little green Gallo poor-boy bottle. We'd sit drinking in the middle of my living-room floor and gossip literary stories, and Richard would get companionable and dewy-eyed behind his wire-rimmed glasses. His schizy wit was charming; sometimes the stories didn't gel, but there was a sudden illumination to many of them. Other evenings Richard would be devastated with small, obsessive details of his growing career. Richard seemed happiest when he was on Haight Street with the Diggers, an activist group devoted to cultural revolution, handing out to passersby sheets detailing by means of one of his poems instructions on how — for instance — to find the V.D. clinic. Most of the writers in San Francisco were pleased that Trout Fishing was such a success. For them he was the ugly duckling turned into the swan, or a gawky wolfhound puppy growing a deep chest and getting sleek. Richard dedicated In Watermelon Sugar, his third novel, to his publisher Donald Allen, the poet Joanne Kyger, and me. Richard was high-strung. Parts of his personality began to teeter, and as the money and acclamation grew, be made vaster and more impetuous demands on his friends for help and for tolerance of his growing dark side. Sometime around 1972 I ceased speaking to Richard. My feelings were still deep, but I hoped he'd turn over and be someone like the old Richard again.
After Richard's suicide, I reread him. It's a body of work, and there's nothing resembling it in American writing. It's as West Coast as a Douglas fir, but more broadly it's peculiarly American and Rube Goldbergian. This writing goes beyond eccentricity and into vision at times, and at others it is personal symptomology. It's not just a string of books ranging from witty and sensual to decadent and misbegotten, it's a rippling, flashing river for the critic and reader trout fishers and gold panners of the present and future to explore.
PETER MANSO: Every suicide remains a partial mystery, and that of an artist is especially complex, for one tends to ruminate not just on the individual but on the failure of the world at large. The reaction is instinctive. Yet Brautigan's story seems different — an artist not at odds with his time but too much in step with it; an artist not unappreciated but too much celebrated; a cult victim but also a cult hero. Was his suicide a coda, a tragic re-enactment of what had brought the tumultuous sixties to an end, not with a bang but a whimper? Was the death itself inevitable, the price paid for overnight literary fame in a decade of media hype and narcissistic self-congratulation? Would it have come about had Brautigan torn himself loose from the adulation of San Francisco? Or were the demons completely internal and personal, more clinical than emblematic of a culture gone wild? I consider Brautigan's work to be of very dubious significance, but I find his personal story compelling. To me and to many of the people I know, he was a sad symbol of an energetic but troubled age. His readers were mainly young, unread, and uncritical, more in need of the sanction for a divergent life-style than of literature. To say that San Francisco and the sixties is what killed Richard Brautigan may sound glib, but it's a sure entrée to the dynamics of his career.
RON LOEWINSOHN? (poet): I first met Richard in the winter of '56 or very early in '57. He had recently blown in from the Pacific Northwest. He was very strange, six foot four, very blond, with glasses. He wore a leather jacket — only it was Naugahyde — zipped up to his chin. He almost never spoke, and walked around with his hands in his pockets, like he was hiding from everybody. At some point during that winter I ended up in somebody's kitchen with him, and while we were talking, the lady whose house it was came in, and I said, "Hey, this guy writes good poems." The look on Richard's face was delicious, like somebody had accepted him. At the time, he was delivering telegrams for Western Union and lived in a terrible flophouse, writing ten, twenty poems a day. One day he walked up to me on Grant Street and handed me a little notebook. On one page was a poem in this incredible handwriting, a six-year-old's handwriting, which was called "A Correction," and it went, "Cats walk on little cat feet and fogs walk on little fog feet, Carl." That was the whole poem. I chuckled, handed the notebook back to him, and he just walked away.
This was about the time he got involved with his first wife, Ginny. Virginia Adler was bright and confident, had been going to college and was pretty literate, even politically sophisticated, much more so than Richard. She was crazy about him and took him in at her place, and within six months they were married. She worked secretary-type jobs, effectively supporting him. He did a lot of hanging out, as did Ginny too until the baby, Ianthe, arrived. That was part of the growing friction: she was stuck home with the kid and he'd be out prowling with his buddies.
McCLURE: Richard was like someone who had been orphaned. He always needed a family, whether it was Don Carpenter, who was the "older brother," Ron Loewinsohn, another "brother," or my wife, Joanna, and I, who provided a kind of hearth for him.
RON LOEWINSOHN: There was a circle of people led by Jack Spicer who were literary, college-educated, and gay. Spicer and that crowd were really very suspect to Richard and me, although Richard went to their meetings.
McCLURE: Spicer became the mentor for the peculiar prose poem which became Trout Fishing. There was a small public reading of Trout Fishing attended by the more influential poets, and it was a talked-about event for days. Despite his shyness, Richard had an uncanny gift as a reader. He had a poised sense of timing, not Jack Benny timing but Brautigan timing. It was sweetly profound.
DON CARPENTER? (novelist): Richard would sit in a café — generally Enrico's — and write. And he saved everything. He was untidy in a bachelor way. One time I was sitting in the kitchen of a place where a bunch of poets lived on Beaver Street, and Richard came in. Didn't say anything. Went over to the counter and opened a can of Franco-American spaghetti, dumped it in a cast-iron frying pan, turned the heat on full, stirred it, turned the heat off, ate it right out of the pan. Then he went over to the sink, cleaned out the pan with a paper towel, and left.
RON LOEWINSOHN: His marriage broke up in '63, and it was dramatic. Richard was in the habit of bringing friends home for dinner. They would go on and on, boogying and drinking, and one of these guys eventually got it on with Ginny. Richard was devastated. Ginny, her boyfriend, and the baby left town for Salt Lake City, and Richard started drinking and taking pills.
Afterwards, Richard lived with me for about three months, until we had a fight when we tried to do a magazine together, Change, the Fastest Car on Earth, which lasted only one issue. You couldn't work with Richard; he wasn't reliable or stable. So I'd get pissed, and if you criticized him he would clam up and wouldn't talk to you for six months, which is what happened.
Brautigan and Loewinsohn on the Cover of Change
DON CARPENTER: Richard needed his friends obsessively. He was the loneliest, most terrified little boy. He would often call up to take hours of my time checking commas, paragraphs, and spelling. "What about this word throughout? Is that one word or two words?" I'd tell him, but he'd argue. "Can't it be two words? Richard had the kind of mind... well, it's difficult to relate to if you haven't been there, but if you ever take cocaine for four or five days without eating or sleeping you'll get in a state that was normal to Richard all the time. Telephoning was one of the things that he spent a lot of money on when he finally had it. A couple of grand a month.
RON LOEWINSOHN: Richard's spelling was no better than a grammar-school kid's, which was one of the reasons he wouldn't show people manuscripts. In the last year before he died he said, "I finally figured out I'm dyslexic." He spelled like a person who didn't ever read, which in fact is true; he scarcely read at all — Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Updike, Malamud, none of them. But what he read, he read all the way through, and he became an expert on the Civil War.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (poet and publisher, City Lights Books): As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.
DON CARPENTER: I remember the day he walked up to me and said, "I just sold two books. Two novels." He looked me right in the eye, I who had never sold a thing. "Two novels to Grove Press for a thousand dollars apiece!" Don Allen, the man who invented the Beat generation, had sent the two manuscripts to Barney Rosset in New York. A Confederate General from Big Sur was the second of the two to have been written, but Rosset published it first because it was more like a traditional novel. Then Rosset refused to publish Trout Fishing in America, and Richard was desperate. Don got the manuscript back and published it in '67.
DON ALLEN (editor and publisher): What struck me about Trout Fishing in America was that it seemed original and delightfully amusing, with a poignant undertone. It went through four printings, approximately 30,000 copies, with ads in the underground press. It was a runaway best-seller. Young kids were buying the book, and I think Richard was very happy he'd found an audience. Helen Brann, the New York agent, shortly took Richard on, put together a package, and sold Seymour Lawrence on it — at the time he was advising Delacorte. I still had the rights to the books, as well as to several others. Lawrence wanted to offset an edition, so he called me and we decided that $250 would be fair for each book. At first I resented the abrupt way that Richard had left; four books were taken from me, and he was never sensitive to what I was giving up. He just left, without explaining himself or thanking me.
HELEN BRANN? (literary agent): Another client of mine had sent me Trout Fishing, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. I read them, loved them, called Richard. Sam Lawrence and his wife were staying in my apartment, and Sam said, "Richard Brautigan! Vonnegut just mentioned his name to me the other day. I want in." We got an offer of $20,000, and Sam brought them out in one volume.
The next contract was for two books, The Abortion and a book of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn. We ended up getting $175,000. That's about 1970. Richard was read in the colleges, and his strength in paperback, even more than Vonnegut's, helped change the entire publishing business.
RICHARD HODGE? (confidant and California Superior Court judge): As a lawyer I had been representing a number of Bay Area rock groups, like Country Joe McDonald and Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, and what I became for Richard was his conduit to the outside world, although this is to talk about him as if he were helpless. In fact, Richard read a contract and understood the publishing business very well.
RON LOEWINSOHN: When Trout Fishing hit, I was back in Cambridge and talking to him on the phone. "Jesus, you make an awful lot of money," I said, and he replied, totally serious, "Yeah. Literally more than I know what to do with. I always wanted a big brass bed, so I got myself one. And a friend wanted a coat, so I bought her a coat. Another friend needed a chicken coop, so I bought her a chicken coop. I don't know what to do with the rest."
BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS (poet and performer): The first trip Richard ever made east, he was standing in Harvard Square, and up Mass. Ave. there comes a parade in the very front row of which are four young women. The middle two are carrying a gigantic papier-mâché trout, and the outside two are carrying poles with a banner between them reading, TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. The parade was for some school in Cambridge named for the book, and Richard's reaction was sheer ecstasy and delight. Once Richard was recognized, he joined the parade. I don't think he had any awareness of how damaging celebrity might be.
Brautigan at the Trout Fishing in America communal school in Cambridge, Massachusetts
RON LOEWINSOHN: He read at Harvard, and I introduced him at Quincy House, where he gave a fine, straight reading — poems, stories, chatted a little. Six months, a year later he came back, but by then he was so big, so famous, that there must have been seven hundred people in Lowell Lecture Hall. After reading for about fifteen minutes in a disdainful, contemptuous tone, he just quit. People came up to him for his autograph, and he'd tell them, "Fuck off."
DAVID FECHHEIMER? (private investigator and friend): I don't think he was troubled that his audience was principally kids. There was a time that people have forgotten — it lasted for about six months — when we all believed in the hippie vision of the future. We really believed.
IANTHE BRAUTIGAN (daughter): I never had anything to do with the whole sixties North Beach scene. I was too young, but more importantly, my father kept me away from it. The only thing I remember is that when I was with him people would stop and say, "Oh, you're Richard Brautigan."
DON CARPENTER: Richard became a minor deity, the big buffalo. Scouting parties from East Coast publishers came out here to find more Brautigans.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: He gave up being a San Francisco poet. People would ask him to read at local poetry events and he'd say, "Oh, no, I'm not a San Francisco poet."
MANSO: The irony is that — however private Brautigan's vision — San Francisco in the sixties had cornered the market on the counterculture and media-ized itself beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Would Brautigan have had a readership without San Francisco, or even gotten off the ground? More than any writer in recent times he had the advantage of time and place.
DON CARPENTER: The differences between the West Coast and New York? At a New York cocktail party the colonels cluster with the colonels, the majors with the majors, and the privates with the privates. That doesn't happen here.
When Evergreen Review, Number 2, was published in 1957, it set off an echo all over the English-speaking world, and people said, "Hey! these guys are thinking about the same shit I've been thinking about. I've gotta go to San Francisco!" So they came, and there was a wonderful anthill clusterfuck for about a year or two. Then in came the phonies, the assholes, the drug addicts, the motorcycles, the bums, the fuckers. This happened again in the Haight, only it happened three times as fast.
Richard was never a hit in New York. He used to call me and say he wasn't being treated well, and it infuriated him. His idea of New York big time was being seen at Elaine's. Pretty bush-league. When he came back he would be angry. He saw New York as Moloch.
HELEN BRANN: Richard hated New York. When he visited we'd go to the Palm for dinner and have those huge lobsters, and thousands of drinks later I'd be tottering out the door, and he'd be saying, "Now I've got to go find a girl." He was miserable.
McCLURE: Richard had no capacity for self-analysis. He was one of the most complex men I've known, and also one of the most lacking in the ability to conceive of the personal / historical / factual / childhood / day-before-yesterday causes of the most blatant worldly actions.
PETER BERG (founder, with Emmett Grogan and Peter Coyote, of the Diggers): Before he was rich, Richard hung out with the Diggers. But if you asked him about the class system he would reply, "There are no classes in a lake," his point being that nature is grander than classes.
Brautigan was very polite and meticulous. Emmett Grogan's idea of feeding people would be to go and get the corpse of a whale from the marine-biological station, cut it into steaks, and barbecue it in an open pit. Brautigan's idea was to spend two hours making a spaghetti sauce and making it meticulously. He insisted on things being as beautiful as possible, and was even a little fey or precious about it.
The Diggers were a self-supporting, supportive group of individuals who were behaving in conscious political-outlawry. We weren't Left, we were assuming that a generational cultural change had occurred and that that change would demand a new kind of politics. We all did events in those days, and sometimes huge numbers of people showed up. For example, as a memorial to someone who had died, Richard wanted to have an event called "The Candle Opera." It sounds like candelabra, right? We had to find 10,000 candles; then Richard had everyone light the candles at the same moment. Women were holding up white sheets, everyone was holding candles, Richard was beaming.
He never talked about poverty, the war, racism, or police brutality in his writing. He more or less forfeited political analysis to people like myself.
TOM McGUANE? (novelist): Richard wasn't very political in any kind of coherent or structured way, but you could probably call him a populist. He mentally aligned himself with where he thought he belonged, among the plain-speaking, ordinary Americans.
IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: My father voted for Johnson in '64 because he thought he'd end the war. But when he didn't, he never voted again, because he felt so guilty about Vietnam. Basically he was always conservative, though, like "Right is right, wrong is wrong. You don't lie, fudge on your taxes, or do illegal things." But he believed firmly that children should always have free medical care. Myself, I voted for Reagan. I believe in free enterprise.
DENNIS HOPPER? (actor): One night we were both drinking, and he said he was very much against any kind of social welfare. He felt that if people couldn't help themselves the government shouldn't help them, and he kept saying that America would only be remembered for maybe another hundred years and then the idea would be a dream, a word people would repeat like a fantasy, as if it all had been an idealized moment in the past. He never got into specifics, but he wasn't joking.
McCLURE: Richard wasn't a literary revolutionary. His wasn't a dangerous voice so much as a voice of diversity, potentially liberating in that it showed the possibilities of dreaming, of beauty and the playfulness of the imagination. Look at the Dadaists and how they saw the First World War — they said if Western civilization is war, we reject it and demand Dada. Now, the absence of morals in Brautigan's work I liken philosophically to the position of Dada: if morals bring us to build bombers to drop napalm on Asian fishing villages, let us be through with morals and have what one might call iconoclastic whimsy.
MANSO: Not all moralistic thinking has to be misguided or the voice of the Pentagon, though, and I think that Brautigan and his readers failed to understand that. Trout Fishing is roughly contemporaneous with some of the best of Baldwin and Mailer, Exley, Capote, Didion, Wolfe, Pauline Kael, even Hunter Thompson. Yet on the simplest level it denies what sixties literature is all about — a rendering of experience and crises so as to disturb and stimulate.
McCLURE: At the time, I suggested that people read Shelley and Sartre, but if reading Brautigan's books gave an experience of self to two million young kids, great. It was a TV generation, and in Trout Fishing they found something for their imagination other than television.
MANSO: But Trout Fishing is as close to television as you can get. Neither disrupts so much as it soothes. It is also emblematic of San Francisco — where style and surface and the latest in cults and gurus are paramount.
TOM McGUANE: In '72 or '73, Richard Hodge gave a party for me when Ninety-two in the Shade came out. I brought Robert Altman, the director. Brautigan and Don Carpenter took him aside and gave him a lecture: "You've got to learn something, mister. You're not in L.A. anymore, you re in San Francisco." They ripped into him for about forty minutes. Altman's reasonably tough, but finally he said, "Listen, boys, I've heard as much of your shit as I'm going to listen to," and he read them the riot act. Their whole pitch was San Francisco is the center of the civilized world. Self-righteousness with a little Orientalism laid in.
DON CARPENTER: After he first made it big with the Seymour Lawrence deal, a great wall of secrecy grew around Richard's financial dealings. What he didn't spend on real estate he put into living. I have no way of judging precisely how much Richard made. A minimum of a million and a half, though. Where did the money go? The man spends like five years living in luxury hotels and phones all over the world five times a night. Don't ask where the money goes.
PETER BERG: Richard would talk about how many books he had sold last week, or what a fool he had been not to bring out In Watermelon Sugar before Confederate General, because it would have made more money. "Peter, I've gotta come over and show you this review from the New York Times... Peter, my agent tells me that we're selling in Cleveland." It was constant, to the point where that was his only conversation, and I started calling him Richard Career. That was the end of our relationship. He'd become uninteresting.
DAVID FECHHEIMER: I saw Richard several times in London in the early seventies. In the Ritz hotel, people were coming around just to see him.
IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: I remember one summer when he had all these girlfriends and I called them his harem. But this was just one kind of wild period. I mean, basically, he was a steady person as far as I know, and he always had extremely nifty girlfriends. Really nice, like Siew-Hwa Beh. They lived together in San Francisco, and I think that was like one of the last women who truly loved him to pieces.
SIEW-HWA BEH? (girlfriend): Ironically enough, when we first met, the biggest attraction for him was that I didn't know he was a writer. I didn't know where North Beach was, and when I asked him what he did for a living, he said, "I write. I wrote Trout Fishing." I said, "Well, I really am not into fishing." That turned him on, because he had never met anybody who was educated who'd never heard of him.
MCCLURE: He liked well-dressed, clean-haired women with expensive, sweet-smelling sheets, and that's what he moved into when he became successful. He deliberately set about to make himself a kind of sex figure. Just look at the jacket photo of The Abortion: the upward shot of him sexily posed like Mick Jagger — the cocked pelvis, the granny glasses gone. Richard was set on being the image of a gentle Beatles antihero.
DON CARPENTER: During the mod period in '71 or '72, he was conscious that everyone was dressing mod except him, so he bought himself a new ensemble. He was uncomfortable, though, wore the outfit only four or five days, and that was it.
RICHARD HODGE: He viewed himself as being very attractive to women, and he viewed that attractiveness as coming from the power of his writing.
SIEW-HWA BEH: One of the more complex things about Richard was his mood changes. There was no pattern. It could be hour to hour, it could be days. A lot of that was mediated by drink, but it was very hard to deal with. He could go from being real exuberant to very dark and depressed, or he could get mean and nasty, or nostalgic or sentimental, and sometimes transcendent, philosophical. Richard wouldn't ever talk about what was upsetting him, though. Instead, he'd tell a story or think of something witty.
A lot of people think of him as being sexist and male chauvinist, and he was certainly capable of all that, but to me he was a perfect house-husband. He would cook every day, broil salmon, make his famous spaghetti sauce, or just fill avocado halves with shrimp. It was the first time he ever had a real home.
Neither of us wanted children, but he came home one evening — he was a bit drunk and sort of sad — saying, "I know you'll want children; you're only twenty-eight, twenty-nine." He was afraid of the responsibility.
Richard destroyed the relationship — I'm not uncomfortable saying that. He started initiating a lot of destructive things that would cause rifts, like staying away until all hours of the night. He never brought women back to the apartment, but he would see another woman and come home and say, "Oh, now there are three of us." I'd say, "Richard, you're causing the breakup, and if you cause it, you can stop it." We were together for two years — it seemed like a decade, it was so intense — and finally he called a friend who had a hauling truck, just wanting me out of the place.
It didn't end there. Richard kept trying to resume the relationship, even after [line missing] Malaya.
He was very fond of saying, "Nobody changes, I don't believe in change." That, I think, was the tragic flaw: he could have laser-beam insight, but somehow he was suspicious of analysis. Analysis would somehow take away his craft, his skill, his talent. He'd listen to you, and sometimes things seemed to be O.K.; then all of a sudden the darkness would come over him and he'd say, "No, it's not possible."
DON CARPENTER: Richard drank three fifths a day, two fifths of whiskey and a fifth of brandy. Not on a 365-day-a-year basis — I'm talking binges.
SIEW-HWA BEH: In his writing room he had six cases of Dickel stacked floor to ceiling.
BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: All I can tell you is that every time I saw him he was drunk.
TOM McGUANE: From some fairly early point Richard was a medically severe alcoholic. One time he was quite drunk and said a lot of offensive things to me, personal things, things about my work, destructive, competitive writer talk. I got sore, and a day or two later I told him what he'd said. "I couldn't have said that, that couldn't have happened," he insisted. He was practically sticking his fingers in his ears.
Not long after that, he quit drinking for a while. He never quit for very long, but there would be an instantaneous revolution: he'd look and act different. He must have been able to write when he was drinking. But when he was sober, he had a vast capacity for work, almost around the clock.
With the sober Richard, you'd notice his tremendous bashfulness. He also had a quick sense of humor that was so striking and intricate that it took your breath away. He was very complicated — as free of clean edges as anyone I've ever known.
McCLURE: His self-killing was a culmination of the awkward kid's triumph over both his enemies and his friends. Right out of the nowhere of the Depression-ridden Pacific Northwest he'd surfaced and triumphed and mined himself. What was left?
MANSO: Once the sixties started sliding by, Brautigan dropped San Francisco [line missing] and Warren Oates. His needs were endless.
DAVID FECHHEIMER: The way it happened, roughly, is that Tom McGuane and Bill Hjortsberg? were in the writing program at Stanford in the late sixties and living in Bolinas. McGuane had an early success and bought a ranch in Paradise Valley, and one by one all these people followed him out there. Then a lot of people started flying in from Hollywood. All these very public figures had a great deal of privacy there. Brautigan was there to be with his male friends. It's a cowboy atmosphere; hard-drinking men and supportive women. It's out there with the boys, fishing every evening in the Yellowstone river, drinking in cowboy bars, shooting up the countryside.
TOM McGUANE: I was startled when he first appeared in Montana. I had seen him in Bolinas, I think, and said something like "You ought to come up to the ranch" the sort of thing you say to a hundred people. Then one day he just arrived. I don't remember exactly who was with him — he usually had a kind of entourage in those days — but he kind of settled in.
Although he wasn't the type to handle the practicalities of rugged ranch living, he saw himself as very much of a Westerner. He was always full of himself, mostly in a nice way, and his personal mythography included a sense that west of the Mississippi was his terrain to raid for language and imagery. Since I didn't know him before the late sixties, I can't say why he never learned to drive a car. Perhaps it had to do with his quirky antiquarian air. He was, in some strange way, hell-bent on the image of himself as a sort of Mark Twain?, funky-looking old-timer.
His move had to do with the feeling we all had, that by '72 or '73 Northern California, which had been marvelous, was used up and overrun. San Francisco was getting to be a zoo, and even Bolinas, near frantic with people suddenly moving in, like most of what was then known as the New York School of poetry. So a lot of us moved to Montana. And then as a result of my movie Rancho Deluxe being made here, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sam Peckinpah were around. Peter Fonda came in about '77 or '78.
SIEW-HWA BEH: The more legitimate Richard became, the more he had to be one of the men. Even his fishing — that too turned into a macho act, because all the other guys were doing it.
TOM McGUANE: Richard had a superficial sort of dramatic, literary knowledge of guns. I don't think he could strip and clean a gun. In fact, the only physical thing he did very well was type, which he did fabulously. The first five years or so I was around him, he wasn't all that enthusiastic about guns, and when he got into his gun mania he seemed to see a kind of maniacal humor in guns. He'd tell about blasting a garbage pail full of beer bottles and laugh like a hyena. Or he might fire at Campbell's soup cans — he liked the tremendous splashy effect. I saw it as a little boy smashing all the jam jars.
I still have some of his guns here: a .357 magnum Ruger Security-Six, a .22 Winchester, a .30-30 Winchester, maybe a shotgun. He also had an old standard army automatic. It's got a lot of kick and makes a big hole, but what he liked about it was that he thought it was a completely honest product of American manufacture. He had a fascination with the army Colt because it seemed to sum up gun owning, democratic gun manufacture, and excellence, all in one thing.
PETER FONDA? (actor): He did not have gentleman's guns; he didn't have to. All his friends did.
Richard was often here from before the mayfly hatch until the end of the game season. Then he took to traveling to Europe or Tokyo, but what I think he liked about Montana was the clarity. Really, it's survival day to day. Simple things but nevertheless natural things, like cutting wood for the stove. And Richard did those things if he had to. Mainly he wanted to write, though.
TOM McGUANE: Harry Dean Stanton never bought a place, but he was around a lot, and once, when he was visiting, Richard had a number of hippie carpenters remodeling his place. In the middle of the night Richard went amok and started beating on the walls with a claw hammer. The carpenters were shouting, "You're destroying our work," and one of them came out with a .44 magnum. Harry Dean saw the handwriting on the wall. He rocketed out of the house and hid under a car.
IANTHE BRAUTlGAN: I don't know why he didn't live in Montana year-round, except that he couldn't drive and Livingston was twelve miles away, so he was stuck out on the ranch.
HELEN BRANN: I felt that San Francisco and Montana were increasingly bad influences on him and his work. In Montana, McGuane ran the show. I think Richard genuinely fell in love with the beauty of the place, but it seemed he couldn't ever keep up with those guys. He was completely different and didn't fit in.
TOM McGUANE: Richard was in love with the things he wasn't. For example, although he wrote wonderful, poetic surrealistic and comic prose, he had no interest in poetic surrealistic prose or even comic writing, like Vonnegut. He thought that was silly, and he liked doggedly realistic stuff, like Hemingway or history. Of all my writing, he liked my journalism best. I never saw him envious of my audience, but I think he considered himself a slightly older writer who could help me avoid some pain. When my novel Panama got hammered and I was hurt, he told me, "I could have told you. After your first book made you a golden boy of younger American letters, you were going to get killed, no matter what."
He went in for "writer talk," but he became a monologist about it. There was a kind of naïveté to his egocentricity because it was so unacceptable by normal social standards. He'd be so maniacally egocentric that it was clear he had no sense of how he was affecting his audience. It became progressively crazier and more self-centered, but again I see it attached to his alcoholism.
DENNIS HOPPER: He would talk an awful lot about Paradise Valley and how important it was for him to get away and go there. But he also said he'd be out at the ranch watching the deer, or out on the river fishing, and suddenly he'd say to himself, "God, what am I doing here? I have to get back to the city."
PETER FONDA: The last time Richard was here he wasn't alienating anyone. In fact, he had given up drinking for Tom McGuane's sake. Also, he gave all his guns to Tom because he didn't want to leave them around the house. Someone had busted into his car and be was paranoid.
McCLURE: Montana got him out of San Francisco at a time when he had burned down San Francisco. I'm talking about his alienating a lot of people. I'm also talking about his making a horse's ass out of himself by sitting around Enrico's. There was also Japan. Richard had to have another base, which for him became Tokyo. He wrote one of his best books, June 30th, June 30th, on his first trip there, which ended in June '76. He met his second wife, Akiko, in Japan, and she came to live with him in San Francisco until their divorce.
SIEW-HWA BEH: He was read by intellectuals in Japan, avant-garde people who prided themselves on discovering new frontiers in American literature, and so Japan was a substantiation of himself as a writer. Here in this country he wasn't read by intellectuals, and I think he was conscious of the fact that he never quite finished school, which tied into the belief that he was somehow illegitimate.
RICHARD HODGE: May '83, I was in Japan with Richard for three weeks. We'd go to dinner, then to the Cradle, probably the leading literary bar in Tokyo and owned by Takako Shiina?, the woman on the jacket of The Tokyo-Montana Express. Generally I'd leave about midnight and go back to the hotel. I'd get a phone call about 6 or 6:30 in the morning and it would be Richard, coming in totally wasted.
MARGOT PATTERSON DOSS? (writer and columnist): He once called us from the Tokyo airport and said he was coming in and could John arrange for him to see a physician, because be had got punched out by a drunk karate type and the man had broken his nose.
JOHN DOSS? (doctor and friend): He was totally devastated, and drunk. And the thing he wanted was to get his nose fixed at any cost — for Aki, because Aki had said he had a beautiful nose.
MARGOT PATTERSON DOSS: Once the nose had been attended to and we sent him off to a hotel, he called up at three in the morning: "Margot, please, can I come and stay with you?" I felt sorry for him, so he lived with us for a month. Most mornings I would come down and he'd be blotto on the kitchen table and I'd have to put him to bed. Why did people put up with it? Because we loved him.
MANSO: Montana and Japan, then finally Bolinas, the small coastal town some twenty miles north of San Francisco. However beautiful, the place is an enclave of leftover activists, writers, and ecologists who spaced out in the psychedelic sixties and never came back. It's here that Brautigan fled before the suicide.
BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: When he returned from Tokyo in the spring — I think he came out to Bolinas in June — he didn't want to acknowledge he didn't have any money. Yet I knew he didn't have money, because he didn't have the second half of the $600 he owed someone for tree work.
JOANNE KYGER? (poet): Throughout the summer he was in a paranoid state, and especially hostile to me because I was an older friend. He was arrogant, standoffish, and aggressive, saying things like how he might just take the dedication to me out of In Watermelon Sugar when he reprinted it. I hadn't realized he was so deeply disturbed. The drinking was heavier, no longer fun, and the object of his paranoia was that people were out to get him. "Richard," I said, "I can't understand you anymore," and finally I stopped talking to him as of about August 10.
RICHARD HODGE: He called me saying there was a cabal out to get him. He said the cabal had sent out somebody to cause him harm, a Vietnam veteran who was a little crazy and prone to violence. Several days later he called back and told mc that he'd worked things out.
DAVID FECHHEIMER: No question, Richard was belly-up broke. I know he was broke because he borrowed money from me in May. Also, Richard's lawyer in Montana called Becky Fonda since he was concerned that Richard was seriously overdrawn, and I know he had borrowed against the place in Montana, about a hundred grand or so. Altogether he was in the hole about $150,000.
RICHARD HODGE: The house in Bolinas, though, was unencumbered. He owned it free and clear, and it was [line missing]
HELEN BRANN: At his death, Richard was averaging about $20,000 a year coming through my office, not a lot but not starvation either. Between '68 and '75, however, he'd made nearly half a million dollars, and I talked to him ad nauseam about investing his money.
DON CARPENTER: When you're that poor as a kid, you think that money can solve everything, and of course money solves no problems at all. Every dollar brings a dollar's worth of trouble with it, so the more money Richard had, the more trouble he was in. Yet the less money that was coming in, the more trouble he was in too, so the trouble doubled and trebled, and he couldn't stop the machine. Members of the middle class know how to handle money: they put it in the bank, they deal with it. Richard couldn't.
TOM McGUANE: In day-to-day matters he was unsophisticated, like he didn't know how to put a coat on, and I can't imagine him knowing how to knot a tie. And he was funny about money. He'd get a receipt for a stick of gum. He'd have bursts of virtually giving it away, but that seemed sort of calculated. Fundamentally, he had an almost hysterical fear of poverty. Now that I look back, one of the things he did with his money was haul his ass to whatever parts of the world viewed him as a serious writer, be it Amsterdam, Tokyo, or Berlin, and that was expensive.
IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: The last time I talked to him was at the end of May, when he called from the neighbors' house. He said he didn't have a phone, because he didn't want to call people and didn't want to be bothered. All he wanted was to hole in and work.
HELEN BRANN: In late '83 Richard knew he wasn't going to get his new book published, at least not then. What he said was "Helen, I'm not going to write anything for a year or two. Or I may write, but I'm not going to try to publish in this country. Let the fuckers just sit and wait until the attention I'm getting in Asia and Europe really starts to build; they'll do a revisionist Brautigan thing and I'll be solid again."
I was no longer operating as his agent. He had sent me a new novel. I'd read it and called Jonathan Dolger, who'd been Richard's editor, saying, "I think if I tell Richard what I think of [line missing] called Richard and told him I felt the book should be put to one side. The next day I received a letter saying, "Good-bye." A two-line letter as if he were writing to the bank. The book was extremely autobiographical, all about his disastrous marriage to Aki, very self-pitying and middle-aged.
TOM McGUANE: Sometime that last winter, before he went to Japan, he brought me his fishing rods and his typewriter, as he usually did before he went away. This time he had taped dried flowers to the rods. He also brought me a box and said, "You will receive instructions when this is needed." Even if I'd known it was a funeral urn, my response would've been: "Another one of Richard's crazy jokes."
He was fairly bombed. I took him aside and said, "You've got to do something about this. I had a drinking problem too, so I know it's stoppable." He listened patiently and then said, "I'm not committing suicide."
It's astonishing now. At the time, I thought he meant he wasn't drinking himself to death. I probably saw that and his "You'll receive instructions" as having something to do with his demise, but a demise which could happen thirty years in the future. Because he often spoke of death. Once he said to me, "When I go, it will be by my own hand."
TONY DINGMAN? (friend): I saw him the first of September, and we packed up his office. Some of the stuff he took to Bolinas, but most of it he stored. Then he went out to Bolinas and was back in the city on the thirteenth or fourteenth. That's when he saw Aki on the street and got drunk. The next night I think he decided that he was going to try and commit suicide, so he took pills, which didn't do anything. Sleeping pills. He'd tried it once before, right after he and Aki split up, which must have been '81. The body was found on October 25.
PETER FONDA: The boys had gotten together to go shooting. Everyone missed him, and we began calling San Francisco. As it turned out, those freaks in Bolinas never went in to check out what was happening. If it hadn't been for Becky, my wife, I think Richard would still be there. She called David Fechheimer, and it took Fechheimer to figure out that we were serious. Checks had been returned, telegrams returned, and even his agent hadn't been able to get hold of him.
DAVID FECHHEIMER: When Becky told me that the lawyer had called her and said that Richard hadn't written any checks for a month, I knew immediately he was dead. Becky asked if I'd do something, so I called a friend in Bolinas who climbed up onto the second-level porch of Richard's bedroom, and there he was.
KEN HOLMES (assistant coroner, Marin County): The body was badly decomposed, and the abdomen had ruptured from the distension of gases, so its contents had become available to insects, flies, and maggots, which had eaten away most of the soft tissues, including the fingers and facial features, leaving only remnants of his genitals. At first inspection it was impossible to say whether the body was male or female, white or black, and we had to identify it by dental records. The house was filled with flies, and the odor was overwhelming. He had been at the foot of the bed looking out the window when he shot himself. The shot pretty much blew away the rear portion of his head.
ANTHONY RUSSO (detective sergeant, Marin County Sheriff's Office): There was no question that it was a suicide — the location of the body, the location of the gun, the location of the spent bullet, which we found up in the wall. Apparently the shot didn't throw him across the room. The suicide was done standing up, and he fell backwards on the spot, legs straight out.
BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: People were not that surprised by Richard's death. When I heard he was dead, my assumption was that he'd OD'd on alcohol. Not eating, drinking a lot, and just doing a going-to-bed-and-dying number. But I wasn't surprised.
TOM McGUANE: I don't know when he became what people called paranoid. Nor do I connect it totally to his drinking. The first time he arrived on my doorstep in Montana, whatever he said — it could've been just "I'm here" — seemed so loaded that I always saw him as having his antennae out 10,000 feet. He was always a spiky, darty-eyed, suspicious, thin-skinned individual. From what I hear about the way he was at the very end, it's what anyone would call paranoia.
DAVID FECHHEIMER: I think he'd decided to do it maybe a year ago. He was more at peace during the summer, like he'd passed the hurdle. Also, health-wise he was falling apart. Things were almost coming off his body. Four years ago he had his whole mouth rebuilt, going to the dentist at six every day with a pint of whiskey in his pocket.
DON CARPENTER: Richard also had herpes, which he took as a personal affront. I kept telling him that there are no cures for herpes, but he would say, "No, no, no, there's this guy who's got these monkey glands over in Switzerland, I'm the only one who can get it in the United States, and it only costs $5,000." Women meant a lot to him.
JOHN DOSS: The last conversation I had with him about herpes, he was worried about the boots that either he or his lover was wearing, and he wanted to know how to get them clean. Whether he was being fondled by the woman's boots or whether he was fondling the woman with his own, I have no idea. I said to him, "Richard, that's bizarre. You can't get herpes off of boots." He had herpes from the middle seventies and considered himself a sexual leper, which only made him drink more. Also, he wanted to be a stud, which he wasn't, so he overcompensated.
RON LOEWINSOHN: The breakup with Akiko was much more devastating than he'd let on. Akiko called when she heard about Richard's death and told me she had run into him near Enrico's. He closed his eyes as if he had seen a ghost, turned away, and went into a bar.
DAVID FECHHEIMER: Aki was in San Francisco with a film crew, getting cigarettes at the Dirty Book Store on Broadway next to the Condor Club, when she saw Richard go by, and without giving it any thought she followed him to Vanessi's and tapped him on the back. And he just froze. She backed off and left, because he was horrified. She realized she'd hit all his nerves. He immediately junked his dinner plans, went to Cho-Cho's and got the gun from Jimmy Sakata, the proprietor, then went up to Enrico's and, from what I'm told, got absolutely shit-faced.
IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: The wake was at Enrico's café. It was nice, very quiet. His ashes are here at my in laws' on the [line missing] I don't want them scattered; I want it to be someplace permanent. I feel a real strong need for a place where I know that he is.
TOM McGUANE: In Montana we all talked about it and I wondered, "Why does Richard's suicide make us all so bitterly sad, when before he'd been driving everybody crazy?" I don't know the answer, except that between the alcohol spells a sweet, whole, loving person emerged. We subconsciously believed that was the real Richard, even though the Richard we mostly saw drove us nuts. But it was like a nickelodeon. You run those images, and then another image floats up from behind; the image that was trapped inside this monster was a really good fellow.
McCLURE: Richard cherished beauty. He was not vicious or cruel or mean or petty. I mean, he was all those things, but his overall character was not. He resembled Poe or some nineteenth-century writer. He was like a sweaty, lovely flower. He blossomed and he went with the wind.
MANSO: Indeed. Only in the end it wasn't the wind that blew him away, was it?
NEWSWEEK, December 29, 1969: Brautigan wants to befriend the earth, not shake it. His style and wit transmit so much energy that energy itself becomes the message. "There was a fine thing about that trout," Brautigan writes at one point, "I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy." Brautigan strains to live, he explodes every simile ("His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord"), makes all the senses breathe. Only a hedonist could cram so much life into a single page.
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, August 14, 1970: Trout Fishing in America is playful and serious, hilarious and melancholy, profound and absurd ... To describe it as a book written in a protesting spirit would give no sense of the light-hearted ripple of its pervasive humour; just as to label it some kind of quasi-surrealist comedy would be to miss the quite specific causes of its underlying sadness and anger. Such preliminary remarks perhaps suggest how idiosyncratic, how delightfully unique a prose-writer Richard Brautigan is.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 2, 1980?: For a writer who seems so intimate, he is really quite unrevealing and remote. He is now a longhair in his mid-40's, and across his habitually wistful good humor there now creep shadows of ennui and dullness and too easily aroused sadness. The telltales of an uneasy middle-aged soul peep darkly among the cute knickknacks of The Tokyo-Montana Express: dead friends, dead strangers in the papers and on the street, ghosts, regrets over wasted years, regrets over women, bad hangovers, loneliness, phone calls long after midnight. All these point toward hard, somber themes; but Brautigan's instrument is the penny whistle.
Vanity Fair?
May 1985
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