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by Brian Morton?
The American novelist, poet and fictionist Richard Brautigan died at the end of last month aged 49. Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, and like his exact contemporary Ken Kesey did much to reopen the American hinterland to the literary imagination. Brautigan's last-but-one book, The Tokyo-Montana Express consisted of 133 prose miniatures, a kaleidoscopic journey round America in a style and with a philosophy borrowed from the Orient, though nonetheless purely American for that.
Brautigan's "zen" prose did much to endear him, along with Kurt Vonnegut?, Kesey and Ursula LeGuin?, to the hippie generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In more recent years, his reputation (which was always cultic rather than critically "serious") declined rapidly and he suffered increasingly from depression and alcohol dependency.
Brautigan had always been a highly literary author but his interest in genre soon lapsed into a kind of formula writing, books rather archly subtitled "An Historical Romance", "A Gothic Western", "A Japanese Novel", "A Private Eye Novel". He relied more and more on pastiche.
As with many popular writers, his success became a barrier to understanding. Only Tony Tanner in England and Marc Chénetier? in France gave him extended attention. The majority of critics mistook his economy of means and minimal style for slightness, his humour and playfulness for irresponsibility. In reality, his books are particularly sombre, centring on decay, disfigurement and violence; his third novel, the pastoral In Watermelon Sugar takes place in the imaginary space of "iDEATH" one of Brautigan's many dreamlands where the imagination is the only reality and selfhood, society and history irrelevant. While he never directly engaged the large-scale social and moral issues or the wider historical canvas of the conventional novel, he nevertheless managed to explore some of the most profound modern themes by a kind of lyrical and metaphoric compression more readily associated with poetry than prose.
Brautigan's best novel is almost certainly his second, Trout Fishing in America, published in 1967. It was dedicated to the poet and printer Ron Loewinsohn? and echoes Loewinsohn's interest in typography and the visual properties of texts. The words of the title, in a rough typewritten face like the rest of the book, do not appear as normal across the page but in a long, looping curve that mimics the bend of a rod and line.
Brautigan appears on the front cover - as on all his books - with a woman friend, posing before a statue of Benjamin Franklin, father of American pragmatism. Trout Fishing in America poses as a "how-to" book, a manual or guide, but immediately dissolves into an imaginative tour de force that belies any such assumption.
The words "trout fishing in America" become the central character (the novelist William Gass, whom Brautigan admired, had redefined character in fiction not as an echo of actual persons or types but as a "centre of linguistic energy"); "trout fishing in America" is anything Brautigan chooses to make it and he uses a whole range of associations to make ironic points about American society and literature (references to Herman Melville and fishing provide a context for a sideways comment on the burgeoning economic-cum-metaphysical pursuits of Moby Dick).
The book is headed with a puzzling epigraph that gives an ideal insight into Brautigan's method: "There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institution, right next to the 'Spirit of St Louis'." Though interpretation is the most dangerous seduction of all, the short passage provides a clue to Brautigan's themes.
He invokes the aviator Charles Lindbergh as the archetypical American hero, an explorer and pioneer; yet Lindbergh was also a Nazi fellow-traveller (Hitler appears in the novel in the guise of a pastoral shepherd) and Lindbergh's name is also inextricably bound up with another of Brautigan's obsessions, the seduction and betrayal of innocence. The kidnapping and murder of the "Lindbergh baby" was one of the great criminal scandals of the 1930s.
The mix of pastoral and violence and the association of "heroic" adventure with totalitarianism and war underlies Brautigan's distinction between the economic greed and God-bothering he identifies in Moby Dick and the inward journeying he proposes as a saving alternative. Brautigan has no time for museums or institutions (the image of Lindbergh's plane suspended from the Smithsonian ceiling is sufficiently absurd); yet he sought to capture his country and fix it in the imagination in the words of his last book So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away.
Coming as it did on the brink of Ronald Reagan's second term, Brautigan's death comes less as a reminder that the hippies of Haight-Ashbury have grown old or that the celebrated "greening" of America has become a little parched; Vietnam and Watergate soured the vision long ago. What it does neatly symbolize is the dominance of a rigid moral earnestness, nothing to do with right or left, that has swept the west.
In 1922 Scott Fitzgerald ended The Great Gatsby
with an image of the American "capacity for wonder" and the commitment to an "orgiastic future" always out of reach. Brautigan was not impelled by Gatsby's green light; he was prepared to look back with a mind more purely imaginative: I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.The Times Higher Education Supplement?
November 16, 1984
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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