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by James Sullivan?
At 21, the budding writer Richard Brautigan left his native Pacific Northwest for San Francisco. As a token of his affection, he presented a pile of notebooks to his first love's mother, Edna Webster.
"It'll be your retirement when I become rich and famous," he predicted.
Nearly a half-century later, 84- year-old Edna Webster - still living in the same house in Eugene, Oregon — says she always believed the young poet's promise. "I believe everything people tell me," she says with a laugh.
Webster's faith has been rewarded: Brautigan's earliest poems and short stories have just been published as "The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings" (Mariner, $12). Next Thursday, the Booksmith on Haight Street hosts a Richard Brautigan "celebration" in honor of the late poet and novelist who defined quirky San Francisco to a generation of easy readers.
Brautigan, author of the whimsical classic "Trout Fishing in America,'' died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in Bolinas? in 1984. He was 49.
During the late '60s and into the 1970s, he was a counterculture celebrity, as much a representative of the Bay Area's lifestyle revolt as the psychedelic bands and visual artists whose lives his paralleled.
In his later years, however, an alcoholic Brautigan grew despondent and surly, and his writing, once sweetly absurd, suffered for it. Today he is remembered primarily as a curiosity, not a genuine talent.
That's a shame, says Keith Abbott, Brautigan's longtime friend and author of the 1989 small-press biography "Downstream From 'Trout Fishing in America': A Memoir of Richard Brautigan."
"There's a real problem with revisionism in literary history, which has dropped him and a great many other writers from the list of inventors," says Abbott, who wrote the introduction to the new Edna Webster collection. "You never know who'll survive, and you can't predict it."
Abbott, who teaches Brautigan to his classes at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says his old friend's best writing — "Trout Fishing," "A Confederate General From Big Sur," the story collection "Revenge of the Lawn" — holds up well alongside more enduring, youth-oriented authors such as Stephen Crane and J.D. Salinger.
"Richard goes over very well at Naropa. There's a toleration for eccentrics there," he says. Naropa is the Buddhist institute that serves as a home to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Although Brautigan would have agreed that he belongs at Naropa with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg?, Abbott says, he didn't particularly like being called a "beat" or "hippie" writer.
"He thought of himself in the tradition of the Western writers of American literature — Mark Twain?. He read Hemingway?, and he considered him a Western writer."
"I dreamt/ that I met/ Ernest Hemingway,'' reads a short poem in "The Edna Webster Collection." "We had a terrible argument/ in the dream/ because/ Ernest Hemingway/ thought he was/ a better writer/ than I am."
Despite such youthful bravado, Brautigan seems to have changed his mind about his early verse. There is some indication that he intervened when Webster made a first attempt to publish the material in the mid-'70s, and his daughter Ianthe isn't endorsing the new book.
But Abbott says the manuscripts, the originals of which are now the property of the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library
, are worth a look. "What's most striking is that, like Zeus, he came fully formed," says Abbott. "The writing style is there.""I always thought he'd be famous someday," says Edna's son Peter Webster, 64, Brautigan's best high school buddy and brother of Linda Webster, the girl with whom the aspiring writer was smitten. "I always thought the work was lovely."
Webster, pastor of the Westpark Christian Church in Bremerton, Washington, says Brautigan taught him to fish for trout. "We had a couple of business ventures in our teen years. One was selling night crawlers. We'd go out on the University of Oregon campus at night and find them. We got a penny apiece for them.
"Another time we tried selling Christmas trees,'' he continues. "It was not profitable, but we had some good times."
When they had a falling-out over some petty cash Webster lent his friend, Brautigan threw a tantrum and got arrested.
"They shipped him off to Salem Mental Hospital because they couldn't understand him,'' says Webster. "Which is understandable. He was not a typical person."
It was Edna Webster's kindness and support during that bout of institutionalization, Peter Webster believes, that earned her Brautigan's lifelong indebtedness.
Brautigan's wild imagination was his ticket out of a troubled youth, says Abbott. And the loving detail with which he crafted his apparent trifles makes them unwitting but ideal Buddhist literature.
"It's awareness of the mind — being aware of what's going through your mind, and then tracking it. In meditation you let go of it. Richard wrote it down.
"He certainly had a very cracked imaginary mind."
"The old drunk told me about trout fishing," Brautigan wrote in his most famous book. "When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
"Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
"I'd like to get it right."
San Francisco Chronicle?
October 7, 1999
Online Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/10/07/DD89405.DTL
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