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Gerald Nicosia's review of Greg Keeler's 'Waltzing with the Captain
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Not trout fishing with Brautigan: Memoir recalls adventures with the writer during his Montana years

by Gerald Nicosia

The last time I saw Richard Brautigan was through the window in Vesuvio's? bar in North Beach in about August 1984. As usual, he'd had a lot to drink and staggered away into the heavy mist of a late afternoon, literally fading before my eyes.

I had never spoken to him — I would have been too intimidated — but his huge size, long, wayward hair and hangdog face were unmistakable. Nevertheless, I'd hear tales of him from my friend Ron Kovic, who knew him well, stories about his breaking a pool cue one night at Mike's Pool Hall in a fit of anger at losing a game, about his generosity in ordering steaks for everyone at Enrico's? or about his fascination with guns. Painfully lonely, he was always inviting Ron out to his house in Bolinas?, but Ron had heard stories of Brautigan shooting up his household belongings and was terrified to go. Two months after I last saw him, word spread like wildfire through North Beach that Brautigan's unrecognizable body had been found on the second floor of his Bolinas house. He'd blown out his brains with a .44 Magnum gun.

The tragedy of Brautigan's premature death at 49 was double-edged. Not only did it leave an unfillable void in the life of his 24-year-old daughter, Ianthe, and the many friends who loved him, but it sank a literary reputation that had already been foundering for several years. For too long the myth of Brautigan, like that of Jack Kerouac, has overshadowed what is truly a substantial body of work.

Born in Tacoma, Washington, in the middle of the Depression, the 21-year-old Brautigan landed in North Beach in 1956 and got swept up in the Beat countercultural and literary movements. His poetry, somehow dreamy-eyed and blackly satiric at the same time, was highly respected by his peers, and he might well have ended up another marginal minor Beat writer wasting away in a tiny flat had Don Allen not published the novel Grove Press rejected as too quirky and disconnected. "Trout Fishing in America," which eventually went on to sell 2 million copies in a Dell paperback edition, is still regarded by many as the definitive literary work of the '60s.

When Montana poet, songwriter, performer and teacher Greg Keeler met Brautigan in 1978, Brautigan had already published eight novels, nine books of poetry and a collection of short stories, "Revenge of the Lawn," perhaps his greatest work. But far from mature literary statesman — picture the august presence of a 43-year-old John Updike — Keeler shows us a lonely, insecure, booze-ravaged, rage-filled and at times half-mad aging redneck hippie, whose second marriage, to a Japanese woman named Akiko, is already falling apart.

That may hardly seem the premise for a great memoir, but "Waltzing With the Captain" is one of those rare books that will have you laughing and crying at the same time. By the mid-1970s, Brautigan had alienated most of his former Bay Area friends with his blatantly self-destructive alcoholism, endless pranks, self-absorption and deepening paranoia. As if to make a fresh start, he bought himself a 42-acre spread in the Paradise Valley near Bozeman, Montana Peter Fonda?, Harry Dean Stanton? and novelist Tom McGuane? were among his celebrity neighbors.

For the famous, the Paradise Valley was a place to get away from the starstruck throngs, to get back to nature and a life among what McGuane called "plain-speaking, ordinary Americans." The pastimes were hunting, fishing and long afternoons and evenings of low-key conversation. Brautigan ended up sticking out like a sore thumb. He talked endlessly, obsessively and with frightening intensity about himself; liked to shoot up Campbell's soup cans; and, for all his reputation as a fisherman, usually put away too much George Dickel whiskey to get from his porch to an actual trout stream. Thus the need for someone like Greg Keeler in his life.

"Waltzing With the Captain" opens hilariously with Brautigan summoning the young assistant professor Keeler to his ranch house, with the plan of getting Keeler to offer him a guest-teaching gig at Montana State University. Keeler and two students from the MSU program committee are horrified as Brautigan puts down all their favorite writers — even calling William Stafford a "c — " for commenting that children enjoyed Brautigan's books — and punctuates one of his remarks by throwing his Siamese cat at Keeler's face. Yet at the same time Brautigan manages to charm them with his hospitality and famous home-cooked spaghetti, and before he whisks them out the door, somehow gets them to agree to pay the almost unheard-of sum of $4,000 for a weeklong residency.

Part of the accomplishment of "Waltzing With the Captain" comes from just this sort of deadpan, straight-man's role that Keeler is willing to assign himself. Memoirs of the famous often suffer from the author's trying to prove that he or she was the great one's "best friend." Keeler admits he was often a bumbling and inept wannabe who enjoyed basking in Brautigan's glow, but because of his self-deprecation, we see more clearly the kindness, concern and big heart in Brautigan that was deeply grateful for Keeler's friendship and that sought to help Keeler and other apprentice writers on their own way to success.

More like Chester and Marshal Dillon than Butch and Sundance, we follow Brautigan and Keeler through a host of misadventures, almost all of them fueled by several fifths of George Dickel. There's the night Brautigan gets Keeler to help him avenge a snub from Jim Harrison and Jimmy Buffett? by having Keeler drive his Mazda station wagon into their cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge at 2 in the morning while flashing his lights and honking his horn. There's the night Keeler brings a Scottish artist named Roger Millar to meet the famous American writer, and Brautigan demonstrates his own brand of conceptual criticism by firing a .357 Magnum at a book that has denigrated his work, then sends the Scot home vomiting after coaxing him to drink a half pint of pure grain alcohol.

And perhaps funniest of all, there's the night Brautigan helps Keeler define his sexual identity by leading him up to his small hotel room and, after dinner, drinks and a movie, urging Keeler to sit next to him on the bed, staring into his eyes, and asking, "Welp, big guy?"

What makes this more than just a collection of funny stories, however, is the way Keeler weaves in many of Brautigan's own letters as well as the perspectives of others around him to show where Brautigan's anguish and mad antics are really coming from. Thus he writes of the relation between fact and fiction in Brautigan's life:

"Before I met him, Judy [Keeler's wife] had seen him walking down Bozeman's Main Street with Aki. ... Judy knew immediately that the couple must be the Brautigans because Richard looked like — well — Richard, and Aki looked like she had just stepped out of his novel 'Sombrero Fall-Out.' [sic] .. . When I visited him in Bolinas, a couple of weeks before his death, he said he had seen her in San Francisco, walking down the street. He was obviously torn up about it. "After their divorce, he lived the rest of his life with a huge hole in his chest. He tried to fill the hole with whisky, writing, friends, other women, and frantic trips between Montana, Bolinas, and Tokyo, but it never went away until he put a smaller hole in his head."

Clearly the marks of greatness in Brautigan's writing are there for all to see: the signature sentences; the significant themes, such as poverty, time and loss, mortality, sex and love, and the triumph of the human spirit; the ability to make a story out of anything, even waiting in line at the bank; and a power of description and metaphor that leaves most other writers in the dust, as in "Sombrero Fallout," when he reveals the overwhelming pain of losing a woman's love through the image of a single strand of her black hair left behind in his washbowl.

It remains for the critics and biographers to distill this achievement in a way that will both credit it adequately and make it accessible to future generations. With "Waltzing With the Captain," Greg Keeler has made a noble start.


San Francisco Chronicle?
August 22, 2004
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