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by Thomas Reed Whissen
Richard Brautigan wrote Trout Fishing in America in 1961, but it was not published until 1967, the year of the "summer of love," and by then it was seized upon by an audience that brought to it all the political, cultural, and emotional baggage that we associate with the term "hippie." In fact, to some it is the cult book of the sixties, possibly because it seems to require an "altered state of consciousness" to understand what it is all about. Reading it today gives meaning to the joke, "If you remember the sixties, you weren't there." Trout Fishing in America comes closer to being a literary high than any other book of its time with the possible exception of the novels of William S. Burroughs.
Written as early in the decade as it was, it also has much in common with the novels of the beat generation in its emotional and intellectual detachment, an attitude closer to the existential aloofness of the hipsters than to the idealistic involvement of the hippies. "Hippie" has an inescapably quaint sound to it now, like "dandy" or "flapper," but it meant something specific in the sixties; and it was as a "hippie writer" that Brautigan was received.
When we refer to the sixties, we usually mean the last half of the decade, not the first, for the two halves are as different as day and night. The first five years were the years of beehive hairdos and rhinestone glasses, button-down shirts and narrow ties, Audrey Hepburn movies and Henry Mancini music. Then came the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the start of the Vietnam War, and from 1964 on everything got turned upside down. It is from the latter half of the decade, then, that we get the image of the sixties as an era of long hair and granny glasses, headbands and serapes, bellbottoms and muumuus; of strung-out flower children clustered in communes, strumming dulcimers against a psychedelic backdrop of dope, sex, and hard rock. And it was into this milieu that Richard Brautigan was wildly received.
The secret of the book's success is quite simple. Trout Fishing in America was the literary equivalent of the Grateful Dead — something instantly gratifying when one was high, something requiring no context, no frame of reference other than what one supplied at the moment. Trout Fishing was unlike anything these cult readers had ever seen before, totally unlike the structured, boring novels they had been forced to study and analyze in high school or college. Here was a novel that seemed to be — and for the most part was — totally without plot or narrative or sustained characterization. It was, rather, a series of psychedelic moments — like the succession of frissons so dear to Oscar Wilde? and the decadents — that could only be indulged in fleetingly but that yielded an elusive kind of thrill that depended on nothing but the confluence of language, music, and dope.
Thus, Trout Fishing was blissfully immune to the claptrap of literary criticism. There was no analytical apparatus available to deliver this unique creation into the hands of pompous critics or patronizing professors. The book might seem disorganized and meaningless to them, but to the stoned it was an added high just to be able to open the book to any page and find something "mind blowing," something "far out," something silly you could get a kick out of without getting "heavy" about it. The only other book that even came close to it was William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, about which it was rumored that the chapters had been shuffled like a deck of cards and then published in whatever order resulted. The fact that these two books looked utterly chaotic was quite to the taste of a generation that condemned authority, reason, and order as enemies of all that was good.
But there was a curious contradiction in this high handed condemnation of authority, for it was precisely authority, albeit of a different nature, that the counterculturists worshiped. One has only to think of the pantheon of counterculture gods and gurus, now mostly gone — Janis Joplin?, Jimi Hendrix?, John Lennon?, Abbie Hoffman?, Timothy Leary?, Benjamin Spock?, Daniel Berrigan?, Mark Rudd? — to realize how hungry the hippies were for someone to order them around, to tell them how to dress, what to listen to, what to smoke, when to make love and, of course, what to think. Books like Do It and Steal This Book do not begin to indicate how eager these so-called rebels were to follow some charismatic leader. (The word "charisma" came into common usage in 1960 with John F. Kennedy.) Both Hunter S. Thompson? and Christopher Lasch? have drawn attention to this clear and curious desire for authority that they claim reached into every corner of life and left little room for individual initiative.
Thus, Brautigan's first readers tended to let the immediacy of their reading experience blind them to his essential individualism. Here again one can see how much closer Brautigan was to the hipsters and the beats of the fifties, who cultivated a fierce individuality, than to the hippies, who cultivated communes. And in a commune there is little room for individual conviction when the good of all comes first.
One reason Brautigan went undetected for so long is that he did not assert his personality into this book the way Kerouac did. In Brautigan's prose, American people and things are seen as they are, observed and documented, as it were. Brautigan acts as witness, not judge. And like the "true witnesses" of Robert Heinlein's? Stranger in a Strange Land, he makes neither more nor less of whatever he sees. He uses no conventional techniques to achieve a comic or a dramatic effect. He sees everything with cool, neutral detachment.
Because Brautigan does not intrude upon his story or impose on it any particular slang, the book lacks any sense of the didactic, any intimation that, regardless of how satiric and political it seems, it is supposed to instruct its readers in how to think or behave. Brautigan allows the satire to emerge from his unadorned reporting of America's own internal contradictions rather than from an implied criticism of its ability to measure up to the standards of some arbitrary ideological presumption. With Trout Fishing in America, the reader brings politics to the book. For cult readers, this was no problem. Finding what they wanted to find in the book made reading it all the more enjoyable, in the same way a mystic might find religious reinforcement in working out the numerological references in the Bible to prove some arcane hypothesis.
Brautigan's disengaged, thoroughly nonpolitical narrative voice is the subtle hook by which this book takes hold of its readers, for nothing is more convincing than the report of the disinterested journalist who just happens to uncover something about some governmental cover-up. Another hook, this one much more subtle and much more insidious, is the use of the disinterested voice that indiscriminately accepts evil as well as good. By documenting without judging, Brautigan sends the message that it is pointless to try to change anything, that decisive change is impossible, because the evil inevitably returns.
The acceptance of the immutability of a world divided between good and evil carries with it the tainted thrill of heresy. Emil Sinclair arrives at the same point in Hermann Hesse's Demian, and there is a longing for it that runs through Albert Camus's? The Stranger. It is ultimately a deeply cynical attitude that only adds to the moral confusion in which good and evil are merely interchangeable options, menu items, equal choices. Evil is accepted, even condoned, as being as valuable a part of experience as good, and perhaps even preferable to it. This dispassionate, disembodied, impersonal narrator invites belief precisely because he seems so objective. A man with no score to settle has no reason not to tell the truth. Because Brautigan apparently has nothing to gain by portraying America one way and not another, we trust him implicitly.
Several things contributed to the phenomenal success of this extraordinary book. For one thing. the book is not at all about what it says it is about: trout fishing. Any angler who picked it up would be in for a shock. This kind of zaniness appealed to the age. Another attraction was the apparent absence of a traditional hero. Instead, in his place there is the absurd substitution of "trout fishing in America" used in every conceivable metaphorical sense. So ultimately, it becomes the center of attention, both message and messenger combined, and Brautigan can make the title mean anything or anyone he wants it to mean — or the reader wants it to mean.
Another explanation for the phenomenal popularity of Trout Fishing in America is that it is so unapologetically self-indulgent. By claiming no right to exist, it seems to earn that right. This is an impregnable, unimpeachable, nonassailable book. It seems to belong by itself and to itself, to have nothing to do with anything but itself. And within itself, all is delightful disorganization. It provides a fine escape from a world where everything is perceived as being altogether too regimented and logical.
Brautigan had no ax to grind. No ramparts are breached or causes advanced in this slim volume. Brautigan, like Meursault in The Stranger, is simply too passive to get involved — not because he agrees with the world as he finds it, but because he does not seem to feel that there are social revolutions worth fighting. It is no surprise, then, that this book has been called The Great Gatsby of its time. All wars fought. All Gods dead.
Naturally, the book had its detractors. Those who were mixed up in movements, involved in crusades, concerned about solving the problem instead of being part of the problem, tended to think that books without some obvious agenda were like people who stood on the sidelines and minded their own business: just taking up space. They found the book carelessly gross and its author/narrator preoccupied with a phony detached self, playing the role of this droll, poker-faced, seemingly disinterested third party, detachedly observing something that he never makes quite clear. How can you describe what you are observing, they asked, without having a basic opinion? If you talk about observing the follies or the inanities or even the peculiarities of Americans, aren't you already making a judgment?
What is probably closer to the truth — and closer to the book's central appeal — is the presence of a situation in which the observer is observing himself observing. This interpretation is congruent with the extreme self-consciousness of the age, the passion for keeping one's finger forever on one's own pulse, the obsessive preoccupation with how one was perceived and what image one projected. Brautigan, then, is looking in the mirror, watching himself showing off, pulling his tricks and performing his stunts with a "Who, me?" look on his face. But there was no way that a sixties cult figure could remain neutral, certainly not in the eyes of those who put the spin on what they read, regardless of what the author might have intended. Nobody straddled the fence, least of all Richard Brautigan — certainly not as far as his followers were concerned. And where cult books are concerned, it is the readers who have the last word.
One thing they glimpsed in Brautigan's vision was the bleakly pessimistic view that America, sooner or later, transforms even its finest things into salable commodities. This was the America of mindless restrictions and prohibitions, of broken promises and shattered dreams, the America the beats had rebelled against in the fifties. However true or false this image of America was historically, it fueled the disenchantment, anger, restlessness, and rebellion that found its way into all counterculture writing in the sixties, including Brautigan.
Brautigan's deceptive passivity is pure beat. Unlike the Marxists of the thirties or the New Left of the sixties, the beats did not set out to change the world but to change themselves, to reach beyond the limits and repressions of America and find a heightened personal awareness through whatever means promised fulfillment — mysticism, drugs, sex, "relentless motion." They were continually reaching out for something beyond America's metaphysical boundaries. It mattered little how vocal you were or how dedicated to changing the world, the truth was that the only person you could ultimately reform was yourself.
There is something sweet about such a gentle philosophy, and some of its acceptance had to do with the respect with which the flower children of the sixties welcomed their forerunners, the beats, into their midst. Brautigan came to be known as the "honorary kid" and "the last hippie in America." He was a little older than the rest, and so it was easy to look upon his books as charming but dated, as old-fashioned reminders of the way things were, the way the students of the fifties read F.Scott Fitzgerald, less as literature than as an excuse to wax nostalgic about a time they never knew. It is, in fact, the way today's students read Kurt Vonnegut? and Burroughs and even Brautigan.
Brautigan's picture of America as oppressive and morally weak was commonplace among the beats, but unlike most beats, he displayed neither rage nor horror but almost a kind of contentment, neither smug nor approving, with America as it was. Anger and rational solutions were both irrelevant at this point, for America, as understood by the narrator, was dying. The book is filled with references to death, and the report on Trout Fishing in America's autopsy is not entirely a joke. There was nothing to do now but sit back and watch.
Brautigan's deepest appeal, then, is to an almost Oriental passivity that some consider the ultimate wisdom: the true ability to "let go and let God." It is possible that he was the most deeply spiritual of all the writers of that period, for at the core of Trout Fishing in America is the legendary serenity of the fisherman at rest in the middle of the glassy-surfaced lake, a fine mist rising about him, the frost of his own breath before him, and a palpable peace surrounding and protecting him.
Tom Robbins once said that no matter how fervently a romantic might support a political movement, he must eventually withdraw from active participation in the movement because it means the supremacy of the organization over the individual and is, as such, an affront to intimacy, the principal ingredient with which this life is sweetened. Romantics do not want to limit themselves, to surrender their freedom to anyone or any group.
It is possible that if the generation of the sixties had read this book (the one they claimed to love so much) a lot more carefully, they would have realized that dreams such as theirs never have a chance. Brautigan's real message to them, one that has only later emerged with striking clarity, is that the man who does not go along with the dominant culture must, if he wants to survive, stand alone.
Or it may be that Brautigan is asking the ultimate question of the age, the one Hunter S. Thompson? put this way: "Is there anyone tending the light at the end of the tunnel?"
Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature
New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. 274-279.
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