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Ninety-one Things about Richard Brautigan

by Michael McClure?

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Vanity Fair? asked me to write an article about Richard Brautigan and his recent suicide in 1985. These are notes written at typing speed as I reread all of Richard's writings. The article appeared in Vanity Fair and these notes, none of which appear in the magazine, are published for the first time.

1. For a long period I was probably Richard's closest friend and he was probably mine. He was here visiting two or three nights a week. We talked and drank Gallo white port, sitting on the floor. This was when we did not have any furniture. We were still poor. The first sip of white port hits the mid-chest and brings on sudden intense warmth. The second swallow begins warming the shoulders. After that you slip into a sweet yellow-warm glow and become great storytellers and listeners. Richard had an open face and mobile eyes behind his round glasses—the movements of his mustache emphasized his jokes and stories. As I remember, a pint of port was thirty-seven cents. We bought it at Benedetti's Liquors on Haight Street, where we bought most of our bottles back in the mid-sixties.

2. Richard was a disciple to some extent, or more aptly a pupil, of Jack Spicer?. He must have met poet Joanne Kyger? through Spicer, and maybe Joe Dunn that way too. (Dunn published Richard's first book in his White Rabbit Press series.) Richard was an aficionado of Gino and Carlo's Bar, Spicer's hangout. When I first met Richard, there was something skittish about his literary background—probably Gino and Carlo's and Jack Spicer. I liked Richard because of his angelic schitzy wit and warmth.

3. I arranged a poetry reading for Richard at CCAC [California College of Arts and Crafts] and I made a poster for it. It was like a boxing poster of the time. I drew it by hand, Richard face-forward with his glasses, hat, and mustache. Across from that I drew his profile, then wrote DIGGER under one and POET under the other. Richard kept that poster up on the wall forever, along with other posters, and good notices. He loved it. Everything got very old on his walls. He would hang new things but he would never take anything away or down. The things about him comforted him and got cobwebby. It was like an old museum of himself.

4. Richard always dressed the same. It was his style and he wanted to change it as little as possible. (I was like that myself at the time. We were all trying to get the exact style of ourselves.) Richard's style was shabby—loose threads at the cuff, black pants faded to gray, an old mismatched vest, a navy pea-jacket, and later something like love beads around the neck. As he began to be successful he was even more fearful of change. When the three-book-in-one edition of Trout Fishing In America, The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar was published, it faithfully reproduced the earlier avant-garde editions of his work—including cover photos, critical comments, and pagination. It was a magic formula and Richard did not want to jiggle it.

5. The planning of each book was a huge strategy and Richard was a Confederate general scheming a campaign. He was the same way about placing a story of his. He could not simply do it and be done with it. He had to go over everything endlessly. He wold phone me half a dozen times each day to talk to me about a cover photograph he was thinking up. How to do it? Who should do it? He probably phoned novelist Don Carpenter that many times a day too. He became even more obsessive about contract details with his Delacorte Press publisher and with Grove Press. It was maddening and painful and dull to go over it all with him. He would laugh about it—but it was obsessive. He would sweat over whether to take an advance of $60,000 or whether to hold out for $65,000; he would torture out details regarding advertising his book. It was endless, and painful for his artist friends who were supporting him emotionally but were in near terminal poverty. You wanted to help, he needed it, but he also needed to hurt with his success. It was awful for everyone.

In his book Marble Tea there is a poem—a prose poem reminiscent of Blake's "Memorable Fancies" -— in which Richard describes cutting a worm in half on an April morning. Part of the worm crawled toward the infinite and part towards infinitesimal. Richard's success—to my eyes—cut him in half. Part of him was crawling on to creation and another part was crawling towards destruction of friends and self through booze and the birth of envy. As his writing became more divine, Richard became more sexist and more alcoholic.

6. Richard convinced his agent Helen Brann? to represent my short plays Gargoyle Cartoons and my novel The Adept. Richard believed in my work the way I believed in his. His poem "For Michael" is beautiful, and his dedication to me and Don Allen? and Joanne Kyger in In Watermelon Sugar is lovely. Especially so since it is his most perfect book.

7. The first thing about Richard and guns that I remember is when he was beginning to get goofy with drinking and success and he gave Gary Snyder a broken, vintage Japanese machine gun for his son Kai. "So he won't lose his Japanese heritage," said Richard.

8. As Richard became a kind of monster, his public appearances became sweeter and more like his creative, imaginative, and beautiful person of before. He was a wonderful reader -— his voice was smooth as honey and warm and personal, almost sweetly drunken to the ear. And his eyes sparkled with a cross between happiness and the resignation to the ineffability of everything. It was real. He felt it. It is all there in the work and in his earlier person. At a reading he literally loved everyone and they literally loved him back. They were wowed by the beauty of his poems.

9. When my wife of the time bought a Russian wolfhound puppy we named him Brautigan. He was skinny and angular, long-faced and long-nosed, and he looked like he had loose threads on his elbows.

10. Richard and I were always showing up in the newspapers, usually the Chronicle. My play The Beard was a topic of conversation and the play's censorship was still going on, I was writing Hells Angel Freewheelin Frank's autobiography with him, I was doing a video documentary on the Haight Ashbury. Richard had stories and reviews appearing everywhere, and columnist Herb Caen loved to mention us. When either of us had our name in the paper we declared ourselves to be a "Ten Day Baron of Cafe Society." We proclaimed that we were famous for ten days and we rushed off to drink at the sidewalk tables of Enrico's Cafe where we could be admired by mortals. We drank Enrico's stemmed glasses of cold white wine in the afternoon and watched record scouts digging in for the new rock 'n' roll of Frisco, or literary agents, or visiting L.A. stars come to ogle the City of Love. After a couple of glasses Richard began to get owlish and silent with bursts of slightly tipsy talk and I began to get winishly ennobled in my own ways. I contended that nobody—not even Frank Sinatra -— could be famous for more than ten days in Frisco. Often Richard and I were simultaneously Ten Day Barons of Cafe Society and sometimes we would get on a roll and manage to keep a Barony for a month at a time with overlapping newspaper references. One rule, though, was that you could not accrue Baronhoods. A Baronhood only lasted ten days after the mention or article. A second rule was that it could not come from your name being in an advertisement. Richard would phone me or I would phone him. "Hey, I'm a Baron. Let's go to Enrico's."

11. One of the things I liked most about Richard was that he was the real poet of the Diggers. He was often on Haight Street passing out papers from the Digger Communications Company. I liked that activism. Richard was doing it because he believed in it. I got so I would go down there and do it too. And I was a lot more self-conscious on the street than he was. Richard would pass out papers from the Digger Communication Company urging all the "Seeker" youngsters at the Summer of Love to go immediately to the VD Clinic at the first sign. Richard has a poem about clap in The Pill [versus The Springhill Mine Disaster]. It might have been a Communications Company broadside. It was his example that got me involved with the Communications Company, and I wrote a poem—"War Is Decor"—and helped pass it out, then read it later on Walter Cronkite's national television report on the Haight Ashbury.

12. Richard was crazy about beautiful women, smoothly glabrous ones with long hair and big eyes. Blonde or brunette did not matter. He would been considered real homely all his life (I am sure), but like a Russian wolfhound puppy he knew better. When his sex appeal bloomed with his fame he loved it. He loved all the lovely sex around him. Real sensuality—clear and lucid like you read in poetry of the Greek Anthology—began to come out in his poetry . . . But that worm got split about the same time and the secret sexism began to become obnoxious.

13. Rereading Trout Fishing I began to fear that it would be an apolitical and purely aesthetic document and there would be no comment against the monster war in Vietnam. Then there it was, near the end: the Trout Fishing Peace March. It must have touched millions.

14. It was Richard buying the house that David and Tina [Meltzer] lived in right out from under them and their two children that was the straw that broke my camel's back. I thought he should have bought it and let them live in it for nothing. Or even have given it to them.

Suddenly Richard was wealthy and not only real tight but afraid that people would find out he was wealthy. It was a shock to him and he had broad anal streak anyway. It was too much for him to handle. I felt that he was not only after me with his success but also after David because David was like Richard's anti-type. David poured creativity, and in vast spontaneous amounts. I think Richard just had to get at David. So he bought the house and left it standing empty.

Later, Richard shot and killed himself in that house.

15. When I reread Trout Fishing, In Watermelon Sugar, and the early poems, I had a flash of intuition. It is wrong to look at Richard as a novelist. What he is doing seems more akin to Lautreamont, to his Chants of Maldoror. Lautreamont was a young South American intellectual named Isidore Ducasse. Ducasse was inspired by Rimbaud and wrote a book length prose poem. This began a chain of thought: Richard should rightfully be compared to Rimbaud, Lautreamont . . . Baudelaire. He should be compared to the dark school of French writers, to the maudites. His suicide closes his life. Compare him to Alfred Jarry who also changed personality and became gross and fat and took ether and alcohol. Richard reminds me of the mystic poet Gerard de Nerval also. Further, Richard could be compared to the German visionary Novalis. Novalis was full of aphorisms—his works were studded with them. Richard lacked that in his writing, but it is a world of the imagination and of nature melted into the imagination, as is Novalis.

16. The tigers in In Watermelon Sugar are surely Blake's tygers from "The Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction." They have beautiful voices and The Nameless Hero asks them for aid in his math problems. The black world of Death is the interwound topology of the primal (unformed and still forming) material, and the unconscious, and the universe of anti-matter.

Richard lived across the street and down a few yards from the big Sears Roebuck department store on Geary Street. Sears is the Forgotten Works in the novel.

In Watermelon Sugar might have been written by an American Lorca, it has the darkness of one of Lorca's late poems: "Nobody understood the perfume of the dark magnolia of your womb. . . ."

On the other hand, In Watermelon Sugar on the whole is simple-minded, which Richard was not. What the prose lacks, as does Trout Fishing, is conflict. In both books Richard almost abolished interpersonal conflict to create a "gentle" (the word is used over and over) world of the imagination and sensory perception and memory melted into a pool that Richard took us swimming in, a stream that he fished in. Those two books are his great struggle to cancel conflict and confrontation. There is never confrontation because each chapter is in a new place or new situation.

One cannot create a long dramatic work without conflict.

17. Richard can be seen as a phenomenon of the Haight and the sixties. Or as an American artist. I think one might say Artist rather than either poet or novelist. I think of myself as an artist, with a capital A. Artist. West Coast writers of the period tend to see themselves as Artists, not so different from the painters or musicians they admire. Artists are free from the specter of the possibility of monetary success or national acclaim which in those days they knew they would never get. In the fifties Gary Snyder used to tell young poets to learn a trade, meaning there was no way to support themselves through their art; learn to be a merchant seaman or a carpenter.

18. Richard can be seen as a West Coast writer—not that his success was not national or that he is not a national artist. The West Coast looks to the mountains and the forests and the deserts and Big Sur and Mendocino and Puget Sound around it. When strangers visited I would sometimes take them across the bridge to Mount Tamalpais -— or into Muir Redwood Forest. San Francisco is part of the United States but it is also part of the Pacific Basin and as part of the Pacific Basin we were connected to the Orient, to Japan and China. New York looked to Paris and London. San Francisco looks there too. In 1955, Frisco looked like Cow Town, USA. No tall buildings. There were Asian people all around. They had a different cuisine. Buddhism was something real to them and lots of them practiced it in churches.

Kenneth Rexroth was the ideologue. He showed us that we could define our own personal anarchism, that we were free to invent our own mysticisms or follow old ones—agnosia by way of the Areopagite, or Kundalini Yoga via Arthur Avalon, or practice Zen Buddhism. Everyone was free to invent or reinvent their own intellective structures of understanding time and space, music and painting. The West Coast was full of deep readers who were also involved in soul-building by means of travel and mountain and forest experience. We were different.

Kenneth Rexroth did something else, too. He showed that we could look to the Orient for poetry and cuisine but that also we could look back in time—we could look to 1000 A.D. to Sung Dynasty China, or back to Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tsu in Chou Dynasty China. Most of us did some Oriental time-travelling by way of art and poetry.

19. Editor Donald M. Allen "discovered" Richard -— he put his faith in Richard, publishing Trout Fishing, then In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. It was Don who brought together the San Francisco Issue of Evergreen Review in 1957, linking up Ginsberg?, Kerouac, Duncan, Spicer?, Broughton?, Everson?, Lamantia?, and me for the literary public eye. And it was Don who edited the major and poetry-world shaker, The New American Poetry, in 1960. Richard was not in that anthology as he had not made any impact as yet. Don was the first business world literary gentleman to recognize Olson, Duncan, me, and many others.

20. Regarding information on Richard and the "Orient": Shig Murao (who was the man busted for selling Howl at City Lights in 1957) tells me that I should contact Albert Saijo about Richard because it was Albert who got Richard the job testing meat samples that he had in the early sixties. I'm told incorrectly that a Japanese restauranteur loaned Richard his final gun. Richard had a Japanese wife. Richard had -— if I understand correctly -— as big a vogue in Japan as he had here.

21. On the phone I asked Shig Murao if Richard was not part of the Jack Spicer -— Gino and Carlo's Bar crowd. Shig said that Richard came here when he was seventeen or eighteen and hung around North Beach "in the early days." Shig said Richard liked to hang out at The Place, which was mostly a painters' and poets' bar in the mid and late fifties. Shig said Richard liked to recite a poem about pissing in the men's room sink. I do not know of that poem. Jay DeFeo had a show of painting in The Place, and Allen Ginsberg had a show of his poems hung with the flower paintings of Robert LaVigne there. The Place was the corner bar for me in 1954, the Deux Magot of Frisco; it put the X into San Francisco Existentialism. The Place was where I could get high on the beauty of Jay DeFeo's gouaches hung on the walls.

22. Poems of Richard's in The Pill intrigue me lot. Often the word surrealism is used inaccurately. "Horse Child Breakfast" might be called a "surreal" poem by someone, though actually it is quite lucid. Some young woman looks like a horse to Richard—probably she has a long palomino mane and sleek legs. Also, she looks like a child to Richard. I imagine she looks like a horse-child to him also, a filly. She is there the whole night and they have breakfast together, which she probably fixes, as it is hard to imagine Richard fixing breakfast. She becomes Horse Child Breakfast and Richard addresses her as such. That is not surrealism. Actually, it is a love poem owing more to Richard's imagination of Sappho's poems—to their lucid sensual and sensory address of another person than to a surreal impulse.

In fact, the use of three words—Horse and Child and Breakfast—probably owes much to Oriental poetry as we understand it. Richard was aware of Ernest Fenollosa's text on the origin of the Chinese ideogram and how elements combined to make a calligraphic character, as well as the "concrete" use of three words, not normally syntactically connected to create a verbal construct.

It is quite a delicate poem. It may be naively combining the Greek and the Chinese—but it is canny and memorable. It is gorgeous!

23. A big figure on the West Coast in the fifties was philosopher Alan Watts?. He was speaking visionary Buddhism and new hipness and mystical Taoism on his radio program. The poet Kenneth Rexroth also had a great and eccentric book review radio program in which he reviewed, in the most intellectual and learned terms, everything from the Kabalistic aspects of the Shekina to the geography of Han Dynasty China and texts on Byzantine Greek theology. There were carpenters and printers and news-reporters around who were members or ex-members of anarchist-pacifist discussion groups. San Francisco was a rich network of streams to "trout about" in. Richard must have loved it all as much as I did. Vibrancy of thought was in the air. Consciousness of California landscape and Oriental thought were in the air we breathed, and it was made dark and moist by the Pacific beating on the coast of Monterey. Steinbeck country was nearby, Henry Miller lived down on Partington Ridge, Robinson Jeffers was in his tower in Carmel. Kenneth Patchen was in town. William Carlos Williams came to read for the Poetry Center. Robert Duncan had a class in poetics at S.F. State. A Jack Spicer disciple group met at Joe Dunn's house to read and discuss poetry. Brother Antoninus was in a nearby monastery after his previous career of being poet William Everson. Philip Lamantia was around—he had been acclaimed a major surrealist poet at age fourteen by André Breton?. Kerouac came to town. Robert Creeley visited and ran off with Rexroth's wife. The buckeye on the mountainsides was in flower—everything smelled like redwood and bay. One could see the first reappearance of sea otters down the coast. I met Ginsberg at a party for W.H. Auden. I can not remember when I first met Richard.

24. An intriguing passage of Richard's in The Pill is "Our Beautiful West Coast Thing." It begins with an epigraph by Jack Spicer: "We are a coast people. There is nothing but ocean behind us." Richard says he is dreaming long thoughts of California on a November day near the ocean. He says he is listening to The Mamas and The Papas. Naively he says in caps, "THEY'RE GREAT." They are singing a song about breaking somebody's heart and "digging it!" He gets up and dances around the room.

San Franciscans were inhabiting their bodies by learning to dance communal dances with Billy the Kids and Mae Wests and Florence Nightingales and Beatles' Sergeant Majors in the Fillmore Auditorium and in the Avalon Ballroom. Everyone was putting their booties down to the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The dances were free-form—you could make any beautiful step or wave of arm that you wanted with anyone around you on the floor. Tribal stomp! But a lovely stomp, even "gentle," as Richard would say, amid the gross amplification and the strobe lights and large moving patterns of colors on the walls.

25. It is easy to read free-form from chapter to chapter in Trout Fishing after dancing free-form at the Fillmore or Avalon Ballroom. You danced with the partner who was behind you when you turned around. She had on a dreamy costume and had lovely bare arms. Maybe you had had a hit of windowbox grass and she was high on acid. She was a goddess. You were some god. Goethe said, "Experience is only half of experience." The details could shift a lot but it was all holy. When Brautigan speaks about dancing in the poem he is making reference to W. C. Williams dancing solo in his home being the happy genius of his household, but the dancing that Richard saw and did in the Fillmore helps explain the chapter structure of Trout Fishing. It was what people were doing.

26. Richard was five years younger than me. He was from the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle. As a kid, the newspaper comic strips that I read were probably the same ones he read. I remember "Smokey Stover," where the goofy firechief with the blank eyes and big smile tooled around in his three wheeler car from panel to panel with almost no connection and a host of weird characters. There were little signs on sticks that said "Nov Shmoz Kapop" and "Notary Sojac." I also read "Toonerville Trolley," which was often just one big panel with dozens of strange countrified and shaggy, shabby, angular whiskerandos and old ladies and terrible children clinging to the country trolley. In "Smokey Stover" there was little need for continuity—just a good old-fashioned sense of humor and appetite for the strange and amusing—and a basically good-natured view of the world and its tiny tribulations and ambitions. A chapter of Trout Fishing had as many things clinging to it, and riding on it, as did the "Toonerville Trolley" on a crowded outing to Blueberry America.

I wonder if Richard read my other favorite newspaper cartoon strip, "The Nutt Brothers: Ches & Wal"? It was so far out that it made "Smokey Stover" read like Ecclesiastes or the Odes of Horace. Ches and Wal Nutt changed not only costumes from panel to panel but even bodies. Each strip was based on some far-reaching pun. It was a wonder to look at—it had whales in it and bathtubs and fezzes.

Trout Fishing reiterates the American comic strip of the period Richard grew up in, the late 1930s and early 1940s. He read all those panels and they must have delighted him. So he wrote Trout Fishing in panels.

I would guess he got desperate about reaching out in A Confederate [General from Big Sur]—trying to write an On The Road—and afterwards he went back to what he knew, loved, and could do. Part of what he did was to make far-out comic strips, but with an enormous, liberated imagination, using only words, and childhood, and everything he ever felt, or saw, or thought that fit in. Thus, In Watermelon Sugar was his second big comic strip. I cannot think of any comic strips like it, save maybe an imaginary one: "The Adventures of Federico Garcia Lorca in Samuel Palmer Land." Samuel Palmer was a disciple of William Blake who etched dark nightscapes of sheep and kine and shepherds walking past black kirks in the Lake Country. The funny thing is that there might be a grain of truth there—Richard certainly knew Lorca and no doubt he knew some of Palmer's works.

27. Novalis wrote, "Man is a sun; and the senses are planets." Richard would have liked that.

28. I think of Bruce Conner as an Artist. He is known now as a filmmaker but he is a master sculptor in assemblage and in wax, and there is no better painter or draftsman around than Conner. Bruce wrote terrific rock lyrics and learned to play electric piano; he is considered by some to be a fairly fine mouth harpist. Richard thought of Bruce Conner? as an Artist and he would have thought of himself as an Artist. I cannot imagine that Richard thought of himself as a "novelist," except, that is, for public consumption. I do not mean that he looked down on it at all—he admired novelists. But he was an Artist.

29. Richard's mutation interests me. By "mutation" I mean metamorphosis. I love to see metamorphosis in an artist. I love Mark Rothko's change, over a period of five years in the forties, from his spirit-figure paintings to his color fields. I love Rimbaud's teenage change to explorer. I even love Dali's change from Salvador Dali to the person renamed (in anagram) Avida Dollars—the money-hungry genius satirized by André Breton. Oddly, I couldn't stand the big change Richard made in front of me from Richard to Dark Richard. Only now can I begin to appreciate it.

I have spoken about the transitions from Confederate to Trout to Watermelon—equally intriguing like the graceful hops of the katydid are the leaps between his first books of poetry. Only a visionary literary critic would ecstasize over Galilee Hitchhiker. It is a small collection of whimsical, poignant, intense to some extent, momentarily witty poems with the central thread being the changing presence of Baudelaire as an occupant of the poems. Sometimes he is a monkey, sometimes he is driving a car, sometimes he is a flowerburger chef. (This again reminds me of Smokey Stover and the Nutt Brothers. Persons change their bodies and their occupations with no rational linear reason except the pleasure of fantasy and expression.) Galilee is mimeographed and not prepossessing, except to the au courant literati who recognized that it was published by a ring of intense young poets surrounding the ideologue older poet Jack Spicer. That was in 1958.

Next, in 1959, appeared an equally unprepossessing book of twenty-four small poems, titled with a quote from Emily Dickinson: "Lay the Marble Tea." But the poet's skill has expanded! The obsessive crispy Baudelaire persona has gone and the poems are inexplicable artifacts and penetrating insights into childhood. They are both soft and terse and they lack the compression of statement that a Ezra Poundian poet would have written. These are literary poems with reference to [William] Shakespeare, [Herman] Melville, [Franz] Kafka, and Dickinson. Though the references are whimsical, they are inherent to the poems and not decoration. Richard is clearly quite literary.

In the front of this book is the first sight of Richard's trademark—his teardrop-shaped trout drawing. The book is published by Carp Press. One of Richard's fish drawings is there and next to it are the words: The Carp.

The next katydid hop is to his 1960 book The Octopus Frontier. It has Richard's first photographic cover, looking as deliberate and planned as the cover of Trout Fishing. The photo is by North Beach photographer of the fifties (and daughter of folklorist Jaime de Angulo) Gui de Angulo—she used to photograph all of us. It is a bleed photo cover showing what is apparently Richard's foot on the suckered tentacle of a large octopus. It is striking and just misses being sinister. It is startling and not funny. It is a non sequitur . . . and a memorable one.

The poems of Octopus Frontier are filled with large simple images of vegetables and pumpkins floating on the tide, a poem about Ophelia, and poems about childhood. At this point there is a recognizable Brautigan style, though it would still be hard to recognize the gleam of gold in the poetry. Now there are three stepping-stone books of poems, and Richard has been lucid and readable in every one of them, but there is no indication that this work is greatly above the level of much North Beach poetry. There is not any reason for even a keen reader like Donald M. Allen to note any of this for his important anthology.

Keats said, "Life is a Vale of Soul-making." Richard was Soul-making—carefully, cautiously, tersely, but still with some sweetness and even courtingly. The three little poem book "hops," in all their sharp-edged softness, add up to a stepping stone big enough to move him into poetry of true richness. That rich poetry shows up in the Pill. But the Pill is a "selected" poems. Richard carefully seeds and manures it with selections from these three early books. He puts them all together in the Pill into what he finds to be a courtingly enchanting—and otherwise inexplicable—order.

Later in Please Plant This Book he not only passes out the free poems by way of the Diggers, but real packets of seeds along with the writings. Richard's metamorphosis is made of little mutations, skin-sheddings like those of the instar of a katydid.

30. I like the little "Dandelion Poem" that Richard dedicated to me. He also reviewed my Beast Language poems, Ghost Tantras, in a mimeo magazine of the day called (if memory has it right) Wild Dog Review. It was one of the few reviews that book ever had. I said earlier that Watermelon is dedicated to Don Allen, Jo Anne Kyger, and me. Richard really knocked himself out to please people the liked or loved. He wrote a lot of poems for women he loved and men friends that he was close to, and he dedicated all his books in the most generous and heartfelt way.

31. Except for Don Carpenter? —- who never broke off with Richard—I was the last of his old close friends to cut away. It tears me up to think how close we were and how wonderful he was in many ways. Could I have stuck by him longer? Then I realize—yes, I could have. . . What? For a month more? A year more? But to old friends he was like a cat on its back clawing the stomach out of a hand.

32. Writer Ron Loewinsohn? first met Richard in 1957. He says that Richard's natural form was the short story. Ron and I are probably the only two around to whom Richard had expressed his admiration of Henri Michaux's prose. Michaux's Miserable Miracle, about mescaline, was the take-off point for me to write my essays titled "Drug Notes." I felt I could be more truthful, more American in my description of peyote.

33. Trout is dedicated to Ron Loewinsohn and Jack Spicer. Ron confirms that Richard wrote Trout before Confederate, and that Spicer was responsible for much editorial contribution. So young poet Brautigan was helped with his first novel by Jack Spicer.

34. I told Ron that the beginning of The Abortion reminds me of Franz Kafka. Ron pointed out that in the prologue to Trout, Richard notes that Kafka learned about America from reading Benjamin Franklin. Then there is that poem, "Kafka's Hat." Then there is Richard's ever-present hat.

The situation in the beginning of The Abortion reminds me of Kafka's novel Amerika. The Abortion's a real book about an imaginary America.

There is a real library in a real place in San Francisco, but in the novel it is open twenty-four hours a day and the librarian lives there and cannot leave. It is as if he were involved in a "gentle" and voluntary Trial.

35. Today most students at California College of Arts and Crafts do not know who Richard is. One student asked me if Eleanor Dickinson was famous—she teaches at CCAC. I said, yes, for her drawings and television documentaries. The student thought he had her seen picture on a stamp. He was thinking of Emily Dickinson. Television has collapsed time and history for these students. Trout collapses Time and History and Memory and the topological separations of Places. Trout changes channels every few hundred words.

36. Poet and critic Bill Berkson says when he went up to a radicalized Yale University (late sixties) to teach, he asked who the students were reading. They were only reading Richard.

37. Ron Loewinsohn thinks that all of Richard's later (post-Abortion) works are based on a two-screen principle—shift from one location to another, then back to number one, then back to the other. This would be a desperate attempt to eliminate conflict or confrontation. It is also literary, a device. It is also romantic, turning from partner to partner and never looking at one long enough to see the flaws.

38. People sometimes mixed up James Broughton and Richard Brautigan. Before Richard was famous—on his way up—film-maker and poet James Broughton was making a film called "The Bed." It featured celebrities on a bed. Broughton filmed Brautigan for the film. Richard was thrilled about it. He was genuinely excited to be recognized as an art-celebrity by a world-known film-maker like Broughton. When the film came out, Richard was not in it. For a long time Richard went around with damp eyes, lashing his tail.

39. There is a "grandmotherliness" in Richard's Abortion. In addition to the smarminess of the dialogue, metaphors like "Vida and I were so relaxed that we both could have been rented out as fields of daisies" begin to become underwhelming. The dialogue is almost mincing. Not only is Richard skipping the confrontation and conflict, he is also using filler, and it is hard to put filler in such a small book. There are small dialogues about nothing at all in simple-minded phrases.

40. The American painter of the 1920s and 1930s, Arthur Dove, had a naive simplicity in his work—a simplification of landscapes or mood-scapes derived from vistas in broad, sweet, looming colors. Dove also did grandmotherly sentimental and exquisite collages using materials that might have come from grandmother's trunk or her life . . . pieces of lace, a spice label, and an elegant piece of veneer, or a page from an old letter in lovely elder handwriting of a previous generation. In doing those collages, Dove was not only American-Grandmotherly—he was French. There is something French about American-Grandmotherliness. It is perfectionistic. Sweetly anal. Exquisite. Even more than the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell.

41. To go back a step, Trout was written before the Fillmore dances, but I think for readers it mirrored their tribal dances in the switching of partners and chapter-channels. To paraphrase Samuel Butler, life is like a violin solo that one is playing in public but one is learning the violin as one plays. That is what Richard was doing—learning to write novels in public as they were being read. That is entrancing for a reading public but perhaps dangerous for Richard. He was always on the brink. He was always risking himself like a cautious acrobat and he was firmly trying to keep his shabby, personal, angular, wire-rimmed image unaltered. But he was also trying to become a male sex image and a wealthy artist.

42. Richard's description of the airport in The Abortion sounds like the world as seen by a schizophrenic—the nets of travel hanging in the air and catching people is a most real idea—most real and schizophrenic. Seeing the people as generalized robots seems schizophrenic. Seeing airplanes and airports as medieval castles of speed and so forth seems not only accurate but over the edge. This is a highly perceptive and accurate book but I am afraid it is no longer fiction—it sounds like a "gentle" case history being written. The writer seems alienated, childlike and incapable. It seems like an accurate set of descriptions about a real fantasy about incapability.

It occurs to me that the latent madness or hysteria is being salved by constant grandmotherliness. The hysteria a nanosecond beneath the surface is being calmed by cliches, figures of speech that are reassuring, and a willingness to be satisfied with images like "blank as snow" as capable acts of writing.

Richard, like the protagonist of The Abortion, did not know how to drive.

43. Richard keeps referring to the coffee spot on the wing of the plane through his protagonist. When the protagonist looks out of the cab and sees there is no coffee spot out there on the wing of the cab which is not there—then, I begin to worry about Richard. This seems to be Richard flat-out describing schizophrenia. It is the raw stuff of mental cases.

By the time Richard wrote The Abortion we were both clearly "controlled" alcoholics. I wonder how much he had progressed later into uncontrolled alcoholism which may have acted as a balm of drunkenness—as per the balm of grandmotherliness in the novels. Alcohol is a numbing, godly, poisonous, liberating high.

44. The Abortion may be as mad and daring an act as Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings. Both books are lovable for their vulnerability. I mean that both Richard and Norman dare to make themselves vulnerable. Are these voluntary acts of literature or are they uncontrollable obsessions? Great literature surely must be obsessional, and surely both of these books are obsessional.

45. Because it is so self-referential and so highly literary, Richard's oeuvre seems almost decadent, as if it were a part of a long tradition of intra-referential, self-referring works. Richard's works seem like Wen Fus written about other Wen Fus in a tradition of Wen Fu writers (the Wen Fu being an old Chinese form of highly literary prose poem). Clearly Kafka is there, and Michaux, and Vonnegut?, and Spicer as mentor, and, I suppose, Hemingway into extremis. The writing is so au courant that Richard's oeuvre writes itself out and seems mindless and spontaneous and unliterary, or anti-literary. But it is just the opposite. Richard is a highly-honed aesthete writing aesthetic documents and works of art of great, great refinement.

Like Baudelaire, Richard is a refined Dandy. His dress was the dandyism of Beatles style as well as Haight Ashbury style. The impoverished Dandy dresses in the most carefully chosen stylish rags of no-style. He makes an elegant sculpture of himself while he works obsessively in his garret. And as he interwinds the topology of his works, picturing himself on the cover of the work, his schizophrenia becomes its subject

46. As I finish reading The Abortion, it seems inept. Richard had few adventures in his life when I knew him. He had apparently had an abortion with some woman, he had had a number of trips to Big Sur, and he had had a dream that became In Watermelon Sugar. In the fifties none of us had had many adventures—we were poor and broke and young. Some of us shipped out to Asia and some of us had sexual adventures; some had been in the forest service; a few were criminals and drug addicts, or dope dealers, or had been through the post-midnight romance of bop at Black nightclubs and in sleazy hotels. Richard must have missed most of the few opportunities there were for adventures—he just wasn't adventurous, he was cautious. And with good reason, judging from the mental state of the narrator of The Abortion.

47. Our biggest adventure in the fifties (and it was huge and without proportion, on the scale of our nervous systems and the Universe) was literature, and trips of the mind through literature, and the literary wars for dominance in North Beach and elsewhere in San Francisco. Our study of poetry and each other's poetry was marvelously, miraculously intense. Richard was on the edges of that in the fifties, but he must have feasted on it mentally and in the bar life, as a whale feasts on the bloom of krill in the Antarctic Sea.

48. The opening of The Hawkline Monster reminds me of Richard's enjoyment of movies. It is a carefully-studied movie opening for a slightly far-out cowboy movie. To open with cowboys on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii in 1902 reminds me of movies like Chinatown: the subject is popular, specific, and a little off-beat, but realistically satisfying and intriguing.

I remember Richard's pleasure in retelling scenes in movies. There is Richard in my mind's eye retelling a favorite scene (from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) He tells the scene over in a precise and pleasurable way—juicy in the telling (from the warmth of a glass of wine in his shabby flat across from Sears)—but it is deliciously precise also.

49. Hawkline has a strong opening in the third person as compared to the mentally inept and grandmotherly sweet Kafkaesque opening of Abortion. (Was not Hawkline the next novel after The Abortion? Answer: No, I remember Richard telling me about Willard and His Bowling Trophies, though I had not seen the manuscript.) There is an enormous jump between The Abortion and the opening of Hawkline. It is not just the shift of person in the narrative—Hawkline is deliberately macho. Cameron and Greer are right out of macho cowboy movies. Maybe they are a split person. They are Sun and Dance, or Butch and Cassidy.

50. Richard really wanted to be MACHO—he wanted to be one of the Big Boys. It was childlike, or maybe childish. After I quit speaking to Richard I wrote an angry poem about him:

NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

SO, AT LAST YOUR PERSONALITY
HAS BECOME A COPROLITE!
Fossilized shit!?
HOW
painful it was
to grow up in the fifties!
WE LEARNED:
materialism
macho-competition,
greed.
BUT STILL I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE
that you sit there telling me
about the women you fuck,
how much money you make,
and of your fame.
As if
the last twenty years
never happened.
You seem pathetically
foolish. But there is a viciousness
in
our generation.
YOU
ARE
REALLY
SET
(like a robot)
ON OVERKILL.
And you believe
in social appearances.
You want to be like
The Big Boys.
Whoever they are!

I put the poem in September Blackberries and I did not edit it out when I edited scores of pages from the manuscript. It meant something to me—it was a point I had reached. It was a node. I saw the degree of my own materialism, sexism, and macho in Richard's actions and yet I was slightly aghast at Richard.

September Blackberries was the first book I published after the break with Richard. I hoped he would never see the poem, and I believed that he would accept our break so abruptly that he would not read the book.

51. Last year Richard upset producer Benn Possett and his co-organizers at the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam. Apparently, Richard came on stage too drunk to read and he either read a bit or not at all, and maybe delivered an insult or several. Then he drunkenly howled and yelled and demanded for a woman who would fuck him. That must have been October of last year, and Benn was still talking about it in March when I saw him in Amsterdam. A couple of other people also mentioned Richard's scene. He was outrageous enough to anger the Dutch literary bohemians. It must have been something!

52. Shelley? and [Lord] Byron used to practice with pistols together regularly. They were both so highstrung that there was apprehension of a duel arising in a moment of anger. Shelley was the better shot.

53. Years ago in The Summer of Love days I asked composer George Montana why so many of the rock musicians were so terrible, and why they were listened to, and why they did not learn their instruments. George said that was the way it is supposed to be. George's idea was that anybody could learn to make sandals, and anybody might make them and be a sandal-maker. The same with music. He believed anybody could be a musician—it was just wanting to do it that was the necessity.

I wonder if many young sixties people felt that Richard was just their casual sandal-maker novelist, and that they could themselves write just such novels as Richard did if they sat down (by candlelight on acid) to do so. Probably no one realized he had been rewritten some passages sixteen times with labor and fastidious obsession.

54. A few nights ago I had a dream with Richard in it. There was a vast auditorium as big as the Fillmore Ballroom, but it was clean and shiny, with waxed floors, and the air was clean, and people were dressed in respectable suits. A band was playing (a regular band, not a rock band) and there was an enormous circle of people and gray plastic folding chairs. It was a game of musical chairs. Richard was directly in front of me in the line and the band started playing. He just stood there owlishly, holding up the whole line. He did not know he was supposed to move.

55. June Thirtieth is a terrifically good book. It does things that a book—and poetry—should do. It is a book of travel poems, poems about place. There is a tradition for this "genre" of book. It is the tradition of haibun; that is, a collection of haiku gathered into a story line. I think especially of Basho's haibun Narrow Road to the North.

56. June Thirtieth reminds me, in an odd way, of what I love about Kerouac—Jack giving me his perceptions with the lucidity and athleticism of his sensorium. I love to read Kerouac for the clarity with which he sees the same things I see. We see differently, and thus Jack gives the lucid gift of his perceptions. With Norman Mailer it is a different case—I see things almost the same way as Mailer does, as if we are twins. But Kerouac is a little odd and quite understandable to me.

In June, Richard is giving the gift of a rare and delicious combination of his perceptions (sensory) and his imagination (uniquely personal). His perceptions are quite unlike mine—they would not interest me except for the potent charge of his interest. Richard can be potent and spontaneous in this little book. It is quite daring. Being in Japan is a big adventure for Richard. He is safe (God, is Japan safe), so he is less cautious. He is playing: going to Japanese bars, courting and loving women of different appearance, discovering television all over again. He is seeing flies and elevators differently. This book is fabulous stuff. And it is the right length in the sense that one does not feel that things are being squeezed off early.

The "quality" of the poems is uneven—as Richard notes in his introduction—but so what? It is a glorious whole and Richard is letting himself go, finding new stops in his flute. There is divinity in this book.

Thank you for these poems, Richard.

57. If someone knew nothing about Absurdism or Samuel Beckett and went to see Waiting for Godot, that person might think Beckett was a literary Naive. There are two things typical of Absurdist theater that are usually not commented on. Each Absurdist play takes place in a different universe with its own rules—such as people turning into rhinoceroses, vaudeville bums standing in empty fields speaking existentialist thoughts, and etc. Beckett has a different universe for each play. Endgame is similar to Godot, but only similar. It is a different universe. Second, though Absurdist theater is quite literary, it is heavily influenced by the popular media, using films and comic strips as sources.

Each of Richard's "novels" is a different universe. Each one (except for Trout and Watermelon) reminds me strongly of Absurdist theater. (Trout is complex to a degree that is unsustainable in theater, and the "decor" of Watermelon is too lovely to be Absurdist theater.)

58. Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork reads as dry and trashy, with an occasional smart aphorism. The "poems" are flat and Richard is trying to pretend that he—and the reader—are hearing something special in the flat prosy lines. Once in a while I am almost convinced.

59. What is interesting about Mercury is that it is Artful. It is almost all on the same level of flatness and dryness; it all inhabits the same vibration of possibilities that Richard has chosen to write in. As ever, Richard has edited it into artful bundles. The nature morte of "Group Portrait Without Lions" almost works—but, of course, there are no lions. There are no lions growling, nor any gazelle blood, in any of the poems. It is a strain to read it, and I can imagine some self-horror in this book.

60. The poem "Ben" in Mercury is about a phone call to Ben Wright in Oklahoma. Ben is not in his house trailer to answer Richard's call. Ben is a brilliant and intense man moving from one terrible affair to another after his wealthy Oklahoman father's death. When Richard and I first met Ben he was at U.C. Berkeley working on a paper about Mark Twain. He said the Twain archives were being ransacked and everything interesting was being stolen out of them. Ben lived in San Diego, and Richard and I saw a lot of him. Ben was tormented and hyper. He always said, "I've got the whips and jingles."

61. I finished The Hawkline Monster easily, but Richard's novel Dreaming of Babylon is awful, pathetic. I am more than a third of the way through and I feel stuck. It is hard to look at the page. This little universe was hardly worth creating and barely has enough energy in it to sustain the fact of the ink upon the page.

The novel is a double removal. It is removed in time and space to 1942. Then the private eye protagonist removes himself like Walter Mitty to his imaginary Babylon. The Private eye character is barely there as a persona (another post Beatles loser), and to have him go off into a personal removal to his fantasy world leaves only words on the page—there is barely any coherence of "story." It is a book constructed of props: private eye, peg-legged mortician, a blonde, a gun, absence of bullets, a lovely corpse, reminiscences of the Spanish Civil War. But the props do not come together to make a story.

62. Kenneth Anger titled his book Hollywood Babylon, a deliberate use of the pun "babble-on."

63. The Hawkline Monster owes less to Edgar Allan Poe than it does to Disney movies that Richard and I grew up watching. Hawkline uses the same color palette as Disney's Fantasia, and to a certain extent the same sleek glabrous non-threatening biomorphic monster shapes and shadows of monster shapes. The monster is ultimately cute and plays his role on the steep steps to the basement, or on the surface of the gravy bowl, or mingled with the pearls on the lady's bosom as a pattern of light. Finally, the monster becomes diamonds.

64. Poe used some of the following, but Richard used them all over and over in tandem and in rotation, one on top of another, in a musical series like a tone-row composer: doubles; revenants; periods of forgetfulness; confusion of self; childlike view of self; confusion of places and proper names of persons; interruptions; ruptures of transition; pointless dialogue. These seem, when they show up in abundance, to be like symptoms, and they are the solid stuff, the structural stuff, of Hawkline.

65. Some chapters of Hawkline seem like symptoms.

66. A description of Freud's Unconscious in Hawkline: "But they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by the mutated light in The Chemicals, a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind." All things are possible to the monster—as to the Unconscious of Freud—and the monster is just beginning to learn to use its powers.

67. In Hawkline the monster dies when whiskey is poured on The Chemicals. Richard poured a lot of alcohol on his monster.

68. Dreaming of Babylon ends with the beautiful whore corpse tucked in the protagonist's refrigerator. To my earlier list of Poe/Brautigan symptoms I will add: inability to accept the body.

continue reading?


Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. 36-68.


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