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John Trevor Story's review of 'The Tokyo-Montana Express'
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Cult Express: A Review of The ))Tokyo-Montana(( Express

by Jack Trevor Story?

Ernest Hemingway? fished gargantuan barracudas in Cuban waters, Richard Brautigan catches a 13-inch trout in his home stream in Montana, recorded in this new book of literary pieces, The Tokyo-Montana Express. Here the similarity between the two writers only begins. Hemingway by my judgement came out of Gertrude Stein?, Brautigan on the basis of reading him now comes from third generation, smaller fish Hemingway. I had not heard of Brautigan but I have now.

"Brautigan is rather a cult figure among American universities." This is my agent talking, Anne; free and instant research. It figures. I was working in films and for Village Voice in New York in the late Sixties and there is a kind of familiar ring here; I think it's an ear-ring. Clues. Printed in America — that means cheapo publishing by Cape. Bad. Single-handed the writer now has to overcome my huffiness. Printed in America (a photo job) means even if they can't get a paperback deal nor even the last ten pounds from the Arts Council, the sales return — with waiting disciples and all — will be not too bad. Also the book bears the seal of American approval. One thing — it's like sitting down to an exciting, fresh, original tinned lobster.

Tokyo-Montana Express is Richard Brautigan's allegorical train journey into his own soul or bowels. I have now read from the beginning of this interesting journey to what I am certain is not yet the end. His adventures appear to be getting less exciting and therefore easier to come by. Well, according to my friend Christopher Challis?, a doctor of literature himself, with his own ear-ring, Brautigan's earlier books, especially Sombrero Fallout and Trout Fishing In America, were very good books. Now this one I would like to like to please Chris. I do already like Richard's enthusiasm for writing which shows through all the time. But (and how I too hate that word), standing on the beach imagining the Pacific Ocean engulfing the whole world makes for shallow waters. Eating in a cafe where you are the only customer; the poor Japanese lady owner goes broke finally and joins mass production with the rest of us. This is perfectly viable subject matter I know; look at Ambrose Bierce with his shot soldier at Owl Creek. But Ambrose vanished in Mexico before Hemingway met Stein in Paris; a meeting that changed the face of western literature.

Ernest Hemingway stole Gertrude Stein, ripped her off as we say today. He was being driven mad with envy of Scott Fitzgerald who kept getting enormous cheques from The Saturday Evening Post. That fury of Hemingway's set a million ear-rings chiming right down through Haight and Ashbury and City Lights book shop. The anger of the sad ephemera, "Boy With John Bull Printing Set On Wet Saturday And Nothing To Print."

There is a tide whose flood began with cryptic Gertie and whose running (down to the last mussel on the last beach) is disconnected from the moon. Do-it-yourself poets arrived. I never get past the first chapter of my big one — Kerouac. Maybe Brautigan got wise to this resistance and so invented the micro-chapter:

All The People That I Didn't Meet,
And The Places That I Didn't Go.

"I have a short lifeline," she says. "Damn it."

We're lying together under the sheet. It's morning. She's looking at her hand. She's twenty-three: dark hair. She's very carefully looking at her hand.

"Damn it!"

Length has got nothing to do with my personal dislike of this author's kind of mannered prose. It does contribute though to a declamatory element which betrays attitudes. A male elitist attitude, an awareness of cosmic utterance and an unnatural or unnaturally emphasised love and obsession with Japan and the Japanese. I expect it's only bomb guilt and therefore okay. What it sounds like is:

"Hear me! Hear me!"

Spotty undergrads are likely to scuttle up as they do around Hobbits and Rabbits and start nodding their heads like car-window doggies. There is a kind of mass hysteria that passes as culture without having to work at it and your young intellectual, tomorrow's Writer, will go for something short and easy to remember:

There Is No Dignity,
Only The Windswept Plains Of Ankona

There is no dignity, only the windswept plains of Ankona, he thought...

But ignoring these natural irritations of an older writer, Richard Brautigan's book holds lots of common-sense (ban umbrellas, encourage rain) some good ideas for stories (which he himself can't be bothered to write), some neat insights and observations. The writing style is truly awful unless — and I give Cape this though I haven't costed it — he does his next book in needle-point. At the Tokyo end of the line the author's world philosophy (he meets a middle-class snob who won't mix with Japanese waiters) comes down to that Englishman who goes to Greece and dances on a table.


Punch?
April 29, 1981: 679-680



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