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Jennifer Schuessler's review of The Edna Webster Collection
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A Review of The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

by Jennifer Schuessler?

Before he was the hirsute hippie icon in granny glasses and crusty denims pictured on the cover of such books as "Trout Fishing in America," Richard Brautigan was a working-class outsider in Eugene, Oregon, filling notebooks with tributes to "the Unknown Dreamer" and rudimentary versions of the surreal fables and funny, folksy epigrams that would make his name. In 1956, the year he left for San Francisco, Brautigan, then 21, signed over to a girlfriend's mother, in tidy schoolboy handwriting, the rights to the poems and stories that are published here for the first time. The pieces range from unabashedly moon-eyed love lyrics to streetwise vignettes to a grimly minimalist account of his stay in a state mental hospital. (Brautigan committed suicide in 1984.) The young poet strikes familiar adolescent poses, railing against "conformity and averageism" and declaring that "Pretend / is / a city / bigger / than New York." But among the saccharine metaphors can be found, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jack, the gently ironic titles-in-search-of-a-poem ("Horsemeat for Sale") and disarmingly gimcrack koans ("Question: Is / this poem / as beautiful / as two five dollar bills / rubbing together?") that became his stock in trade. There are also a handful of prose pieces, gestures toward the shaggy, improvised not-quite-stories that critics would later suggest classifying simply as "Brautigans." But this touching first will and testament comes pretty much as billed in a poem titled "Advertisement": "For sale, / cheap, / 206 / slightly sticky / love poems, / written / by / a seventeen-year-old / poet."


The New York Times Book Review
November 7, 1999



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