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Kenneth Seib's essay on Trout Fishing in America
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Trout Fishing in America: Brautigan's Funky Fishing Yarn

by Kenneth Seib?

Richard Brautigan's several novels and books of poems, most of which have been praised by reviewers like Herbert Gold? and John Ciardi?, are now being widely read in the campuses across the United States. Brautigan probably deserves popularity, for he has a lot going for him. He writes a terse, readable prose that often seems the output of an extremely hip computer that has been programmed with the styles of Hemingway?, McGuffey's Reader, and the Berkeley Barb. His postage-stamp chapters allow for fast reading and a lot of skipping around — no mean virtues in the age of McLuhan. His unconventional wisdom distills many disparate things now in the heads of Woodstock generation: Brautigan "gets it all together" and is plugged in to the vibrations of the day.

But whether, as Ciardi claims, "Brautigan manages effects the English novel has never produced before" is another matter. His prose often slips into a primer flatness ("We went and got the body. The farmer had to stay behind. He said that he would have come along but he had to stay and milk his cows,") and his philosophy is sometimes sophomoric and pretentious. In Watermelon Sugar, Brautigan's science fiction projection of the future, is overly "sweet" in most senses of the word, and the realms of iDEATH and inBOIL seem either too vague or too personal to take on genuine parabolic significance. Perhaps the most serious criticism that one can direct against Brautigan is that his novels lack structural design, that they are random observations and experiences strung together with cute chapter titles and little overall unity.

Of his best novel, Trout Fishing in America, this is not the case. A spokesman for the Viking Press admitted that "Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called Trout Fishing in America. I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing." Actually, it was and it wasn't. Brautigan is admittedly no Isaak Walton?, but the title functions in at least three different ways to give the book unified form, viewpoint, and meaning.

First of all, the narrator (presumably Brautigan himself) is Trout Fishing in America. The opening chapter, entitled "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America," not only describes the front photograph, but suggests the author's disguise — his "cover." The most obvious objects in the photograph are Brautigan, looking like an unemployed buffalo hunter, and his lady companion — but nowhere are they mentioned in the description. Their "cover" is obviously successful. There are false identities, disguises, in several places in the novel: the waterfall that turns out to be a staircase, or the Mayor of the Twentieth Century who "wore trout fishing in America as a costume to hide his own appearance from the world..." Moreover, there are letters written to Trout Fishing in America from his friend Pard and from "an Ardent Admirer," plus some replies from Trout Fishing in America to the letters and to some of the early chapters.

Brautigan, then, is identifying himself with the title. But what does it mean? Trout Fishing in America — the phrase suggests open spaces, cascading waterfalls and clear streams, the drama of the rugged individualist pitted against the raw forces of nature. One has visions of the Hemingway? hero fishing the Big Two-Hearted Rivers of the world, finding solace from a lost generation in the crystal waters near Burguete:

As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down.

Trout Fishing in America suggests the myth of America itself, a land of vast open spaces, of unlimited resources and opportunities, and of streams into which one only has to toss a bent pin in order to pull out fish of astonishing sizes. The opening chapter fittingly describes the statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco's Washington Square — Brautigan, like Franklin, is writing an "Autobiography." Brautigan's book is Franklin's "Autobiography" turned upside down. Not about the way to wealth, Trout Fishing in America is an account of the author's rejection of the Puritan ethic and his discovery of the way to Self. As a child, the narrator saw "with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn." The three-cornered hat, traditionally associated with the early American Puritans, reveals these fishermen as Puritan Americans angling for success and riches — and the narrator is taught to fish for the same things. In his disguise as Trout Fishing in America, therefore, Brautigan presents himself as the typical American, a believer in the doctrine of hard work, orientated toward success and money-making, and a staunch defender of the American Dream, the myth of the Great Outdoors.

By the end of the novel, however, the narrator and Trout Fishing in America become two separate personae. Trout Fishing in America is seen for the last time, properly enough, near the Big Wood River, ten miles from Ketchum, Idaho — where, Hemingway killed himself. The chapter is Brautigan's farewell to the Hemingway code of masculine endurance and romantic pantheism. Like the Fisher King, the narrator has been angling over a sterile waste land. In the California bush country, he takes up residence in a "strange cabin above Mill Valley" (TFA, 92), sheds his illusions, discovers his own sexual and creative powers (as he started to in the fantasy sequence with the rich couple in the bookstore), and creates his own world — like the Kool-Aid Wino from his childhood who "created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it" (TFA, 10).

Trout Fishing in America, then, is first of all the autobiography of a societal drop-out, a contemporary hipster's progress from Jack Armstrong? to Jerry Rubin?. Trout fishing as a central metaphor becomes especially poignant in our current age of ecology, an age when America's fish and wildlife are rapidly being obliterated. Like the trout, the narrator is the victim of a technological world that cares little about him and his kind. Again like the trout, whose watery and insubstantial world creates the boundaries of its own reality, the narrator creates his own world in Mill Valley — "It took my whole life to get here" (TFA, 92).

Second, the title Trout Fishing in America implies another dissection — and the subject is perhaps becoming tiresome — of the American Dream. The description of Ben Franklin's statue is comic, for everything — statue, grass, trees, weather — is described in detail except the people in the photograph. The implication is that Franklin's America, the America of today, concerns itself with everything but people. The novel, therefore, becomes a picaresque tale of a somewhat funky narrator, a modern Don Quixote, who is on the road searching for the romantic ideals of his childhood and for the genuinely human. What he discovers is a series of disenchantments. A waterfall turns out to be a wooden staircase. The woods are filled with NO TRESPASSING signs ("4/17 of a Haiku?") or similarly ominous warnings — "IF YOU FISH IN THIS CREEK, WE'LL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD" (TFA, 60). There is Mooresville, Indiana, home of John Dillinger, where there is always "a single feature, a double feature and an eternal feature" (TFA, 13) — violence, boredom, and anxiety. There is the inaccessibility of the "good" fishing places like Grider Creek ("I didn't have a car") and Tom Martin Creek ("You had to be a plumber to fish that creek"), and the crowded camping grounds of places like Big Redfish Lake. There are the sad dead of Graveyard Creek, and the dead fish of Worsewick Hot Springs, "their bodies turned white by death, like frost on iron doors" (TFA, 43). There is the inhuman destruction of the coyotes at Salt Creek that makes the narrator think of the gas chamber at San Quentin, and of Carly Chessman and Alexander Robillard Vistas:

^Then the witnesses and newspapermen and gas chamber flunkies would have to watch a king wearing a coyote crown die there in front of them, the gas rising in the chamber like a rain mist drifting down the mountain from Salt Creek. It had been raining here now for two days, and through the trees, the heart stops beating. (TFA, 54)^
But most of all, there are the winos, the poor, and the disaffiliated. The poor who wait for sandwich time at the church near Washington Square find only a leaf of spinach in their bread; the bums who picked cherries for Rebel Smith wait like vultures for her discarded half-smoked cigarettes; the winos and impoverished artists talk of opening up a flea circus or committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter: "Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss" (TFA, 18).

Nowhere is the distance between trout fishing allurements and human neglect more evident than in Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a legless one-man riot who appears throughout the novel "staggering around in a magnificent chrome-plated steel wheelchair" (TFA, 45). Shorty is in many ways the quintessential American. He is a rugged individualist; he is cheerful and energetic, a kind of the nether-world Rotarian; he is a Whitman-like, boisterous democrat — he is, by God, as good as any man — and he drinks in public view "just like he was Winston Churchill." Moreover, he is a militant patriot, badgering the Italians in North Beach y shouting obscenities at them in fake Italian ("Tra-la-la-la-la-la-Spa-ghet-tii!"). Near the end of the novel, the narrator's daughter carries off one of Shorty's garlic sausages: "Just then the Benjamin Franklin statue turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox at the other end of the park" (TFA, 97). Helpless, Shorty stares after her "as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger." The space between them is the gulf between possibility and failure, the orgiastic future and the impotent present. The child still has the opportunity of achieving success; meaningfully, Franklin's statue gives her the green go-sign, the same "green light" that Nick sees at the end of the Buchanan's dock in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. For Shorty, the traffic light is red. His life has come to a stop, and he spends his days passed out in a wine-stupor in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. "Trout Fishing in America Shorty," the narrator accurately observes, "should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square" (TFA, 47).

Trout Fishing in America, therefore, is a hipster's view of America's square-world ethics, societal goals founded on achievement, wealth, and success — the whole Ben Franklin syndrome. The central metaphor of the novel, trout fishing, implies through its associations the abundance, the richness, the good life that is every American's supposed birthright and the achievement of which is every American's dream. But Brautigan's view is from down under, from that of a societal freak who spends his days at San Francisco's Walden Pond for Winos and finds consolation in fantasy, art, and the pleasure of merely circulating. He has discovered what Alonso Hagen found almost seventy years before. Trout Fishing in America is a fraud, at best a chronicle of loss, frustration, and despair. Hagen's diary is a spiritual accounting of America's resources during the twentieth century: "Alonso Hagen went fishing 160 times and lost 2,231 trout for a seven-year average of 13.9 trout lost every time he went fishing" (TFA, 85).

But the title functions in still a third way as a controlling center of the novel. In many ways, Brautigan remains Trout Fishing in America to the very end. The book promotes the precise agrarian myth that in part the author seeks to nullify. Throughout the novel is a sense of the purity of nature, of the individualism of those isolated few who have inherited America's pioneer spirit, and the untapped priml energies that lie beneath the surface of our eroded landscape. For example, the beautiful energy of the hunchback trout?: "I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy" (TFA, 57), and the lingering spirit of Charles Hayman that still permeates Hayman Creek. Brautigan's descriptions of natural wildlife and surroundings are done with a loving care that denies cynicism, and his use of American placenames suggests a delight in even the sound that Americans attach to their rivers, lakes, and campsites. Nature is fiercely present throughout the book in a way that reveals Brautigan's fondness of her.

On the other hand, urban life presents the most evil appearance in the novel. Room 208 of a cheap hotel in San Francisco harbors potential violence and a prostitute trying to escape from her "spade pimp." The winos and the poor of Washington Square seem, for all of the author's sympathetic portrayal, sad and out of it. New York City is so hot that the narrator sleeps wrapped in a wet sheet ("I felt like a mental patient") and sees the apartment dwellers as "dead people." The alternative is rejection of urban life, of the business ethnic, of technology — and Brautigan trudges in the footsteps of Thoreau to the strange cabin above Mill Valley.

Granting the enthusiasm for flora and fauna, wildlife and isolation, Trout Fishing in America seems a pessimistic book. No joyous hymns to the seasons, no genuine celebration of nature's wonders — only a sense of waste and unnatural death, as in the account of the trout that dies from a drink of port wine. The incidental characters give only negative impressions: the AMA surgeon, for example, who is on the run from socialized medicine, oblivious to the needs of the sick and poor; or Mr. Norris, who cannot remember the names of his own children and who finds (albeit in Brautigan's imagination) that the proximity of a dead body mars the beauty of his campsite. Like the sheep near Wells Summit that have "lulled themselves into senseless sleep, one following another like the banners of a lost army" (TFA, 36), Americans have become in Brautigan's view the embodiment of Woodstock generation slogans. America has become "Amerika" (Brautigan mentions Kafka in the first chapter), a nation of sheep. Watching the sheep at Wells Summit after meeting a shepherd who appropriately looks like "a young Adolf Hitler," the narrator thinks of Stalingrad, that disastrous slaughter of World War II, the culmination of the Nazi sheep-like march to destruction. The Witness for Trout Fishing in America Peace Parade at the end of the novel is further indication of the author's wary view of America's future. "America needs no other proof," he states ironically. "The Red Shadow of the Gandhian nonviolence Trojan horse has fallen across America, and San Francisco is its stable" (TFA, 99). The message is clear enough: America has deteriorated from a nation of rugged trout fishermen to a callous assembly of inhuman surgeons and witless Norrises who are fearful of the young, of genuine protest, of the future. Brautigan's is, of course, the almost platitudinous message of the Age of Aquarius.

The novel ends with chapters on garbage, wreckage, the selling and bartering of land and animals, and a meditation on Leonardo Da Vinci, now working as a designer of fishing lures for the South Bend Tackle Company. In one of the funniest sequences of the novel, at the Cleveland Wrecking Company?, the narrator inquires about a used trout stream (plus all accessories) for sale at bargain prices:

^"We're selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left..."
"We're selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we're also selling extra. The insects we're giving away free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of stream."
"How much are you selling the stream for?" I asked.
"Six dollars and fifty-cents a foot," he said. "That's for the first hundred feet. After that it's five dollars a foot."
"How much are the birds?" I asked.
"Thirty-five cents apiece," he said. "But of course they're used. We can't guarantee anything." (TFA, 104)^
The chapter is a surreal and miniaturized version of the Franklin business ethic and the modern consumer craze carried to a logical extreme — the sale of America itself. Having become another used commodity, landscape is portioned out by friendly, affable hustlers to those with a keen eye for bargains. Waterfalls are appropriately stored in the plumbing department with toilets and urinals, for our streams have become natural water closets. The Cleveland Wrecking Company has few animals for sale because few are left. But the many wild birds, the hundreds of mice, and the millions of insects are the natural inheritors of the future.

During this wasteland vision of apocalypse, Brautigan quotes from three authors — Ashley Montagu, Marston Bates, and Earnest Albert Hooton. The books quoted move in a general historical progression: Man: His First Million Years, Man in Nature, and Twilight of Man. With its insistence on the passing of man in nature, the novel places us in twilight. If we are all going to hell in a Trout Fishing in America canoe, how a writer ends his novel makes little difference — or whether he writes at all, for that matter, which accounts for Brautigan's somewhat careless style. Trout Fishing in America ends with the word mayonnaise — "Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" (TFA, 111).

Trout Fishing in America is a solid achievement in structure, significance, and narrative technique. For all its surface peculiarity, moreover, the book is centrally located within a major tradition of the American novel — the romance — and is conditioned by Brautigan's concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past. Its seemingly loose and episodic narrative, its penchant for the marvelous and unusual, its pastoral nostalgia — all of these things give it that sense of "disconnected and uncontrolled experience" which Richard Chase finds essential to the romance novel. Brautigan's offhand manner and sense of comic disproportion give to the narrative an extravagance and implausibility more suited to the fishing yarn and tall-tale than to realistic fiction. Lying just below the comic exuberance of the book, furthermore, is the myth of the American Adam, the ideal of the New World Eden that haunts American fiction from Cooper to the present. The narrator of Trout Fishing in America is Leatherstocking perishing on the virgin land that once offered unbounded possibility, modern man longing for the restoration of the agrarian simplicity of pioneer America. That a life of frontier innocence is no longer possible adds to the desperate tone and comic absurdity of the narrator's frustrated excursions into the American wilderness.


Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction? 13(2) 1971



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