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Interview with Thomas McGuane
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From Conversations With Thomas Mcguane

by Beef Torrey?

Beef: As I'd mentioned earlier during our conversations, the way we actually met was through Richard Brautigan. What are your reflections now of Richard as a writer, as a friend, and has that impacted your life in any way?

Tom: I don't know that it impacted my life except that he wrote some things that I thought were very good. Trout Fishing in America is an original, wonderful book. But frankly, I just couldn't understand some of his other books. The last one, a posthumous book, I thought was also very good but mostly it was all downhill from Trout Fishing in America. Still, everything he wrote had something that you couldn't find anywhere else. He was a unique character, what Melville would call an "isolato". Richard was an anomaly because part of him was a very normal person, just a guy who wanted to fish and hang around, but he was so strange with this high squeaky voice and bizarre costumes and appearance. He always struck me as somebody not entirely comfortable on earth. And then he had a celebrity following for a period of time — the Beatles and so on — that he got addicted to and it was quite misleading because when they left him as they always do, I think he felt sort of bereft. If he had kept his sights on writing, for which he had a gift and commitment, if that had been exclusive, I don't think he would have fallen in despair over not being as popular as he once was. He'd wander around seeking places where he was still well known like Japan, looking for the old buzz. The thing that maybe was a real limitation on my friendship with Richard was that I worried about him a lot, I liked him personally, and I wasn't going to do like the Bozeman gang did, when I thought Richard was drinking himself to death, to call him up and go drinking all the time because they liked the companionship and the excitement of this wacky, famous artist. When he would come to me I would talk to him about some of his problems and where this was going to head, which was in my view, untimely death. I wanted him to stay alive. He didn't necessarily want me to point out how much happier me was the year he attempted moderation. I said, "This is working. This is it! This is what you need to be doing". He was cheerful, productive and fit. But he had terrible demons and was cruelly raised. So I can't judge him.

And then he'd get up in the morning and his hands would be shaking and he'd make a pot of tea and he'd put this much tea in it and that much whiskey on top of the tea. This is at 7:30 in the morning and it would be like that for the day. And I couldn't look on that and say, "This is all part of the myth, let's really do this!" It was years before I forgave the people who lured him down this road. And I knew what I was talking about, having boozed my way through a decade, getting in bar fights, going to jail, and running from guilt. It ain't that pretty at all, and I don't shrink from giving folks the bad news.