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Dick Polman's Brautigan obituary
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A '60s hero's pained soul is finally bared, in death

by Dick Polman?

I had a good-talking candle
Last night in my bedroom
I was very tired but I wanted
Somebody to be with me,
so I lit a candle
and listened to its comfortable
voice of light until I was asleep.
-- Richard Brautigan

Bolinas Calif. — The house has been barren since the body was found. The rain gutters are broken, snapped in two like twigs from a tree. Yellowing newspapers dot the driveway. The pantry is bare, aside from a box of raisin bran and a jar of Yuban.

From a third-floor window, you can look south across Bolinas Bay toward San Francisco gleaming bone-white in the distance. Indeed, there was a time when the owner of this house was the toast of that town, for he was Richard Brautigan, literary guru for millions of college kids who yearned to spurn the rat race and groove with nature. His income, buoyed by whimsical works like Trout Fishing in America, had jumped from $3,000 in 1968 to $100,000 in 1970, and he grew to relish his fame, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Sold Out: Why Didn't I Think of It Sooner?"

But by the fall of 1984, the gravy train had dumped him on the tracks, and when his corpse was found Oct. 25, next to a .44-caliber gun and a bottle of booze, his friends were quick to diagnose his downfall.

"Richard's readers grew up, and Richard didn't," says Curt Gentry, a San Francisco writer, "and he was having trouble with the sales of his books. Like all of us who have ridden the success roller coaster, he thought it was going to keep going forever. And when he discovered that it wasn't, it was a tremendous blow to him. I just don't think he wanted to be poor again."

"The audience just fell away," says Seymour Lawrence?, who published nine Brautigan books at Delacorte Press. "The '60s were a very freewheeling period in American life, but his readers became more attuned to conservative ways in the '70s and Richard was a victim of that change in tastes."

No other '60s literary figure rose so high and fell so far. As Lawrence points out, Kurt Vonnegut? was big at the time, but he can still write a best seller today. Ken Kesey scored with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but its sales didn't rival those of Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Besides, Kesey has been farming in Oregon for 16 years, free from the hunger for attention that always burned in Brautigan's belly.

Yale law professor Charles Reich? wrote The Greening of America, then returned to Yale. Young readers later bought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but author Robert Pirsig? never became a cult figure. Says Lawrence, "Nobody else had that great hold on the imagination of the youth."

At the outset, Brautigan was just one of thousands of kids who flooded San Francisco when the Beat generation? was coming of age. He was 19 when he arrived in 1954 — a solitary, impoverished youth from the Pacific Northwest whose father had vanished before he was born — and poet Joanne Kyger? of Bolinas can remember when she and Brautigan were "just plain people fighting over the markdown pork chops at Safeway."

He earned about $2,000 a year between 1954 and 1967, and sometimes he would hand free poems to riders alighting from the cable cars. Most of his works were suffused with sunny whimsy; one typical entry featured a poet who took over a hamburger stand and began serving flowers instead of food.

His first novel, written in 1961, overflowed with eccentric observations about the environment (a junkyard that sells pieces of a trout stream at $6.50 a foot), meaningless death (a war monument covered by snow in a remote forest), and the allure of taking solitary treks far from the strictures of civilization. But it would not be published for six years.

A small San Francisco publisher took the plunge in 1967, at a fortuitous time when thousands of foot-loose hippies were swarming into town, hungry for new voices. Trout Fishing caught on locally and ultimately sold more than two million copies after Dell Publishing came aboard. Book critics began calling Brautigan "the Love Generation's answer to Charlie Schulz."

His books overflowed with the imagery of nature; a girl's body "was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves." Big sellers like A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion were replete with preening sweetness. "There are high arched windows here in the library above the bookshelves and there are two green trees towering into the windows and they spread their branches like past against the glass. I love those trees."

Brautigan was tagged as a "hippie writer," someone who was urging his readers to get high and happy. Indeed, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet, scoffs that Brautigan "got the hippie audience because his books had just enough simple words and sentences fro a grade-school kid to comprehend."

Yet his artistic friends way that, on the contrary, Richard Brautigan was a gun-loving, drug-hating, hard-drinking loner who stressed the joys of temporal pleasure as a hedge against death and meaningless misery; in the words of poet Gary Snyder, Brautigan was busy cultivating "flowers for the void."

But, misperceptions aside, "Richard wanted all the readers he could get," says an old friend, novelist Don Carpenter?. And he nurtured his cult status by appearing, with boots and beads and granny glasses, on the covers of his books. At his peak, he was mobbed on the street. Girls would send nude snapshots and pledge their fealty. The once impoverished poet earned $100,000 a year in the early '70s, and spent it lavishly — staying in the best hotels, buying homes in Bolinas and Montana. "Richard," sighs Carpenter, "was the only man I know who could go through that much money without ever touching cocaine."

Looking back on what went wrong, poet Joanne Kyger? says: "He really sold himself, sold his image, put himself out there as this public figure. And I don't think there was any back room for him to go to when things went bad. There wasn't any Richard behind the [public] Richard that he could feel comfortable with. There wasn't any way for him to escape from his own image of himself."

Although he loved the limelight that came with being a "hippie writer," he had always hated the label. After all, Trout Fishing was written long before flower power bloomed. But his books became synonymous with a vanishing era, and by the mid-'70s, sales were dwindling.

"Richard always kept up this incredible pretext of success," says Curt Gentry, who co-authored Helter Skelter with Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who prosecuted Charles Manson. "I could pick up Publishers Weekly? and know what a first printing had been on a book of his. And Richard would give me some inflated figure. Instead of 10,000 copies, he'd say it was 100,000. He wanted to keep up that front all the way to the end."

Brautigan loved Japan, where his prose was popular, but he would exaggerate his Far East fame to compensate for his eclipse at home. Gentry recalls, "We'd be walking down a street in Japan, and Richard would be dressing strangely, with his weird mustache and cowboy hat. The Japanese would look at him, too polite to laugh, so they'd cover their mouths, especially the little kids. And Richard would turn to me and say, 'Everybody in Japan knows me, everybody recognizes me from the book jackets.' And he really believed it."

By 1979, his income had dropped to $47,000 and his publisher was doling out smaller advances on his new works. He was writing westerns and mysteries, trying to find new readers. In 1980, he went through a costly divorce from his Japanese wife of two years. According to Gentry, who was privy to the legal maneuvering, Brautigan's lawyer tried to blunt the settlement costs by citing the author's sluggish sales. "But this was so damaging to Richard's ego," Gentry says, "that he later got up and told the judge about how popular he still was. So the judge would up giving Richard's wife more money.·

In 1981, People magazine ran a photo of Brautigan sitting at a San Francisco watering hole, sharing a laugh with Gentry and Carpenter. But as Gentry now recalls, People had hoped for a very different photo: "They wanted all of Richard's friends, people he knew, to get together for a picture. Well, nobody showed up. At the last minute, Carpenter called me and said, 'Richard's really down. He doesn't feel like he's got any friends left.' As soon as I got that call, I ran down there... He usually didn't act insecure, but he wanted praise that he wasn't getting."

Brautigan had always been a solitary soul, loath to reveal his inner pain, and when he returned to Bolinas in June, after a long sojourn in Japan, he seemed "antisocial and paranoid," in Joanne Kyger's words. He drank heavily and was banned from the only bar in town after he hoisted a male patron by the crotch. He went for a walk with Kyger and became obsessed with a dead sea lion that had washed up on the beach. "He spent an hour looking at it," says Kyger. "It was like meditation. He said he was interested in decay."

"He'd tell me he was writing 20 pages a day," says singer Bobbie Louise Hawkins, a friend and neighbor. "But if I came to visit him, his typewriter would still be packed up, with dust on it. And what's interesting is that he claimed he was writing. He was this rotten-poor kid who had invented himself to be this famous writer, and his sense of personal worth was absolutely wrapped up in it. It's the American syndrome of 'What do you do for a living?'"

When he dropped from sight in mid-September, nobody paid attention; he was always prone to wanderlust. But a month later, his friends finally broke into the house and found what was left of Brautigan, who apparently had used the gun found at his side.

"What happened to his sales happened to a lot of authors," says published Seymour Lawrence?. "They hit a peak, and then they lose much of their audience. But Richard must have taken it harder than most."

Kurt Vonnegut? was the one who first told Lawrence about Brautigan back in the late '60s. Ironically, Vonnegut believes he hit his own peak in 1969, with the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, and he's not sure his writing has much direction anymore.

"American literary careers are very short," he says. And about Brautigan, "When you lose your audience, you lose your income. Loneliness really killed him... Depressions comes with the territory, so there you are. That's what drives some people to suicide."

In death, Brautigan made the local TV news for the last time — squeezed between pieces on panda mating habits and the perils of skateboarding. And amid the post-mortems, Don Carpenters recalled an incident with his friend: They had gone home with two women of instant acquaintance, but Brautigan soon emerged, naked from a bedroom, in bitter defeat. The woman, still fully clothed, told Carpenter, "He got undressed without saying a word! Is he nuts or something?"

Today, Carpenter calls this "a surrealitic image of Brautigan's career, for there is something quite sad about an artist who bares himself so willingly for an unresponsive audience. And not even the voice of light from a good-talking candle could quench the loneliness any longer.

Philadelphia Inquirer?
December 3, 1984: E1, E5.



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