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by Margaret Roiter?
On the first Wednesday of spring quarter in 1982, I and 14 other students were sitting in a small classroom in Wilson Hall on the campus of Montana State University. There was not a lot of conversation between us. Those of us who knew each other spoke now and then to one another quietly. The classroom was filled with an air of nervous anticipation as we awaited the appearance of our instructor. The class was a creative writing seminar and the instructor was internationally renowned author Richard Brautigan.
At the appointed time, Dr. Paul Ferlazzo, head of the Department of English at MSU, entered the classroom followed by a tall, barrel-chested, curly-haired, red-blonde man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a blue-denim jacket, blue jeans and Western boots, walking difficultly with a cane. His first words were something like: "Yes, there is something wrong with my leg. It is broken. I tripped over a footstool in my living room in San Francisco last week." He had refused to have a cast applied, so he had gone instead to a specialist in the Bay Area and was treating his leg with daily vitamins, meditation, and I can't remember what all. He lived in pain, but he dealt with it in his own way.
And that, as I came to learn over the next several months of contact with Brautigan, was the approach he used at all times.
For most people who knew him only through his writing, this unconventional approach to life was readily seen in his work. To say that "Trout Fishing in America" or "In Watermelon Sugar" are not your typical works of fiction is an understatement of gigantic proportion, somewhat like saying the Elton John is not just another male vocalist. Richard Brautigan was definitely a one-of-a-kind individual.
When Brautigan was in his heyday during the 1960s, I was a very naive teen-ager who had never even heard of him, much less read him. And when I did encounter Brautigan through his novels, not only "Trout Fishing in America" but also "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966" and "The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western," which I read prior to meeting him in class, I found his work to be wholly outside my spheres of experience or comprehension. He seemed like a totally weird person to me, and I suppose, both by my standards and most other people's, he was.
And yet despite his idiosynchroncies, his rough language and crass mannerisms, there was a softer side to this heavy-drinking, monstrous-sounding man.
My first glimpse of it was during a public reading of his poetry. I had never read his poems before. But hearing him read them, between his sips of something from a styrofoam cup that he had replenished from something hidden in a brown paper bag, gave them such force, such reality, and such life that I began seeing him as something other than a weirdo.1Some of his poems are on the strange and rather funny side, like "The Necessity of Appearing in Your Own Face" (from "Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork," Simon and Schuster, 1971); "There are days when that is the last place/in the world you want to be but you/have to be there, like a movie, because it/features you." Or "Postcard" (from "Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt," Dell Publishing Co., 1970): "I wonder if 84-year-old Colonel Sanders/ever gets tired of traveling all around America/talking about fried chicken?"
His poems are like photographs, each one not seemingly terribly important or impressive on its own, but many together creating a montage of life: things funny and offbeat, things and people that don't make any sense at all, the attempt to connect and form relationships with others, the dislike but acceptance of self, the fear of being alone, and the fear of death.
The Richard Brautigan I got to know both in class and on a couple of occasions at his Pine Creek ranch seemed to me to be a vulnerable man. He seemed to have a lot of friends, but also seemed to be lonely. He seemed to have the feeling of having experienced it all, of having seen everything, of being surprised at nothing. He often talked about the two years he spent in a library as a young man, trying to learn how to write a sentence, but confessed to having to read next to nothing since that time because nothing was new to him any longer. Possibly his life had been riddled with problems, he was empathetic toward others and their problems, but he seemed to be a man incapable of upholding an enduring relationship on a one-to-one basis. He told us he had been married twice but had lived with enough women at various times to consider himself having been married seven times.
He related an incident to us which, he said, proved to be the beginning of the end of his second marriage. His wife came out to his studio while he was writing and asked him if he knew where the Bisquick was. He had been in the middle of another of his existential crises, panicking over the seeming lack of meaning to life, and he blew up at his wife's mundane, idiotic question. He deplored what he sensed as the breakdown in the American family yet was barely on speaking terms with his only daughter, with whom he was angry because she married a man he didn't like. He, in his own words, "boycotted" her wedding and told his daughter he would like her second husband "a helluva" lot better than her first. He told me he disliked children. He was not a happy man, or even a satisfied one. In spite of his fame, he was often alone. He kept looking for meanings in his life, but could find none. He felt like he had seen and done everything.
In class and out he talked about death a great deal. One of assignments was to bring in the obituary column from the Billings Gazette. I think he was afraid of dying, of having his life and his works forgotten, thereby rending them meaningless. His final novel, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," was, I believe, his last attempt to both describe his fear and disprove it.
Throughout much of his work, in many of his poems and particularly in his last novel, Brautigan often used the symbol of wind as an effacing agent, an eraser of people's existences. In his first novel he conscientiously recorded seemingly irrelevant details about unimportant people. It was important for Brautigan to write about an alcoholic night watchman, a financially ruined old man living in a packing crate shack on the edge of a pond where he built a beautiful dock and boat which he never used, and an eccentric older couple who moved their living room furniture every evening to the shores of the pond so that they could do their fishing in comfort. He needed to write about these obscure people so that their lives would not be totally forgotten and therefore rendered meaningless. Life, it seems to me that Brautigan was saying, is perhaps the only precious commodity there is. And we have to recognize each person's value simply because they have lived, "so the wind won't blow it all away."
Brautigan worked very hard on his last novel. He told us it had been in his head for 17 years. When it was published and was not highly acclaimed, I believe he was fatally disappointed. It seems to be a great irony that a man to whom life was the only thing worth having should decide to take his own. Perhaps in the end he felt totally misunderstood and alienated from the human race.
In his last novel he wrote a passage that seems fitting to be among his last:
"If ever I get pneumonia, I wanted whoever was there to tie a very long string to my finger and fasten the other end of the string to their finger and when they left the room if I felt I was dying, I could pull the string and they'd come back.
"I wouldn't die if there was a long piece of string between us."
"I wouldn't die if there was a long piece of string between us."
In the end, there must not have been a string between Brautigan and the world. He died alone, not of pneumonia, but of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
(Bozeman Chronicle))
October 31, 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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