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by Lonnie L. Willis
Boise State University
In contrast to the respectable critical attention given to his novels of the sixties, In Watermelon Sugar (1967) and Trout Fishing in America (1967), Richard Brautigan's mid-seventies novel, The Hawkline Monster (1974) has received little attention beyond initial reviews. The novel probably merits notice if for no other reason than its resolution of some issues characteristic of Brautigan's earlier work. Unfortunately, the novel's pose as a "Gothic Western" has led some readers to view it as a mere parody of two popularized genres. Although it may be "more of a parody than any of Brautigan's other fictions," The Hawkline Monster continues Brautigan's serious concern with failed American dreams, with what has been defined in another context as his "concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past."
The Hawkline Monster investigates the failure of the American experience to harmonize expectation and reality, and it calls attention to illusions that have distorted the national vision. Professor Hawkline, the transplanted New England alchemist who attempts to create the synthetic resources for a better world in Eastern Oregon laboratory, represents the American national design. When he fails in his idealistic purpose, he nevertheless continues to think "right up to the moment the monster did that terrible thing to him that he would be able to correct the balance of The Chemicals and complete the experiment with humanitarian possibilities for the entire world." The Professor's idealism to the contrary, the novel fails to provide anything but a sense of doom for the American experiment. Customarily Brautigan has been regarded as despondent but not ultimately without hope. While a "sense of failure and loss" pervades Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan is nevertheless "a legatee of an uncompromisingly idealistic strain of American writing that wills to redeem America through formal achievement." The Hawkline Monster, however, provides no more sense of uncompromising idealism than does Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
," a story with which it shares not only a sense of futility but also more than a few similarities in organization and theme. Parallels between Fitzgerald's story and Brautigan's novel provide both a sense of tradition for Brautigan's skepticism and a source for his "monster."Fitzgerald's tale of futility originated in his reading of Twain's? The Mysterious Stranger during the winter just before he wrote his story; that reading evidently directed Fitzgerald to Van Wyck Brook's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, where he found "a cynicism equal in strength to his own." Twain, Brooks, and Fitzgerald had all "succumbed to a sense of futility about American life, with no redeeming sense of latent grandeur." Not only, therefore, was Fitzgerald's attitude sustained at a time of personal cynicism about American life, but he also took the very pivotal idea for his plot, that of a mountain-sized diamond, from this triangulation of Brooks and Twain with himself: "Mark Twain wrote a novel, Fitzgerald learned from Brooks, where the hero finds a mountain full of coal; Fitzgerald thereupon wrote a novella in which a Civil War veteran, prospecting in the West at exactly the same time as Mark Twain's hero, came upon a mountain full of diamonds." Brautigan, of course, can have arrived at his own attitudinal judgments about the failure of American experience without explicitly being influenced by Fitzgerald; however, his terminal skepticism about the national vision is an honest one that places him in a stream of "concern with the bankrupt ideas of the American past" that includes Fitzgerald and has its headwaters in Twain. Given a base for skepticism in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," Brautigan may also have found his monster close at hand.
Such a suggestion makes sense by placing The Hawkline Monster at the end of a line that begins with Twain's The Gilded Age which features a home more or less atop Sy Hawkins' "mountain full of coal" and continues through Fitzgerald's story about Braddock Washington's chateau on a "mountain full of diamonds" since The Hawkline Monster can be summarized as a short novel in which two gunmen travel through the West (at about the time that Fitzgerald's hero takes possession of his father's diamond) and come on a Victorian mansion constructed above ice caves as big as the Ritz. Faint echoes of The Gilded Age also occur in Brautigan's novel: when the Hawkline (Hawkins?) mansion is described as a house that "towered above them like a small wooden mountain covered with yellow snow" (76), beside which rises "a gigantic mound of coal" (68), one hears the echoes of both Twain and Fitzgerald, especially in concert with Brautigan's critical direction.
When Fitzgerald wishes to criticize American illusions about wealth in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," he dispatches his hero, young John T. Unger, on a journey into an isolated Montana valley where "the sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky." Amid such isolation the Washington chateau is discovered:
Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite chateau rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace... The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light... all trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland... Then in a moment the car stopped before wide, high marble steps... At the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.
In like fashion when Brautigan proposes to criticize American illusions about its national design, he first posts his heroes, the cowboys Greer and Cameron, to travel into an isolated Oregon wilderness called the Dead Hills which "looked as if an undertaker had designed them from leftover funeral scraps," and their "road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills," and the Dead Hills "disappeared behind them instantly to reappear again in front of them and everything was the same and everything was very still" (57, 61). In similar Western isolation Greer and Cameron are greeted at the Hawkline mansion:
^There were no fences or outbuildings or anything human or trees near the house. It just stood there alone in the center of the meadow with white stuff piled close in around it and more white stuff on the ground around it...
There was a gigantic mound of coal beside the house which was a classic Victorian with great gables and stained glass across the tops of the windows and turrets and balconies and red brick fireplaces and a huge porch all around the house. There were twenty-one rooms in the house, including ten bedrooms and five parlors... and you knew that it did not belong out there in the Dead Hills surrounded by nothing... so the house looked like a fugitive from a dream.
Heavy black smoke was pouring out three brick chimneys. The temperature was over ninety on the hill top. Greer and Cameron wondered why there were fires burning in the house... As they rode slowly down the hill toward the house the front door opened and a woman stepped outside onto the porch. The woman was Miss Hawkline. She was wearing a heavy long white coat... She was tall and slender and had long black hair. The coat flowed like a waterfall down her body to end at a pair of pointed high-top shoes...
She just stood there on the porch watching them approach. She made no motion toward them. She didn't move. (p. 67-72)^
In spite of expected dissimilarities of style and a tendency on Brautigan's part to fool around with comic interludes, the heroes of both tales find themselves in substantially the same country, the land of fantasy and fable — even myth. The perspective in both passages lies outside the real world's geography and time; where Fitzgerald translates into fable, Brautigan translates into myth, though their comparable properties of the fabulous hint at relatedness.
The fabulous atmosphere of "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" has caused the story to be called a "fable about a fantasy world," and the mythic substance of the "fantasy world" of The Hawkline Monster has also been noted: "All the ingredients of a Good Old Myth are present." Though the term may hint at one reader's wry attitude toward the book, "Good Old Myth" is as common to Brautigan as is his continuing theme about failed America: "Brautigan relates his narratives always in terms of the myths they impart" and is "''par excellence'' the 'reader of myths' whom Roland Barthes describes at length." Such persistent narrative reliance on myth helps to explain the energy of Brautigan's appeal to a deep and underlying sense of the universal mysteries of human experience. Fitzgerald's story, with its modest focus, has less such appeal, for it relies more on elements of fantasy and merely uses some connections with Christian myth in order to effect satiric thrusts at American materialism. Fitzgerald, for example, mocks his countrymen's worship of Mammon by making John into "an Unger — from Hades" and passes him through the village of Fish where "the twelve men of Fish" gather in the fashion of disciples at the depot to confront "the Great Brakeman." Myth, however, endows the narrative structure of The Hawkline Monster with marked power to make the reader question the very meaning of America, and one instructive way of obtaining meaning from Brautigan's structural design is to allude to his use of one common, vital myth in order to effect his own judgments on the failed myth of America. The "monomyth" of the hero and the hero's quest can be seen to dominate the novel's structure: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." Brautigan's novel unfolds in response to the myth until its conclusion; his heroes, unfortunately, prove unable to "bestow boons" on anyone.
The place where Brautigan's heroes, the two hired gunmen Greer and Cameron, find themselves at the beginning of the novel is, if not supernatural, indeed a "region of wonder" — Hawaii in the summer of 1902. Having just completed terrifying voyage by boat from their "world of common day," San Francisco, they are squatting in a pineapple field, intent on bushwhacking a potential victim with their 30:40 Krag and 25:35 Winchester. Nearby and in their gunsights, the intended victim is teaching his young son to ride a horse. The description of the scene emphasizes the "shining" quality of both nature and people: "The man and the boy and the horse were in the front yard of a big white house shaded by coconut trees. It was like a shining island in the pineapple fields. There was piano music coming from the house. It drifted lazily across the warm afternoon" (10). The human paternalism of the scene is as warm as the afternoon, and as the previously efficient Greer and Cameron observe the father-son tableau, a strange thing happens; sentiment subverts their mission. They cannot gun down the father while he is teaching his son to ride.
Greer and Cameron can only continue to watch as "a woman came out onto the front porch. She carried herself like a wife and a mother. She was wearing a long white dress with a high starched collar. 'Dinner's ready!' she yelled. 'Come and get it, you cowboys!'" (10). With their mission now deader than their victim, the two gunmen face a truth that is more formidable than sentiment: "Greer and Cameron were not at home in the pineapple field. They looked out of place in Hawaii. They were both dressed in cowboy clothes, clothes that belonged to Eastern Oregon" (9-10). In this ideal pastoral scene, a composition that relies heavily on both the father-son relationship and the mother-home connection, a scene that is set like a cameo in Hawaii, Brautigan's Oregon cowboys are so out of place as to suggest that in their voyage from their "world of common day" to a "region of wonder" they have turned themselves into anachorisms — into geographical misfits. These cowboys have carried the concept of "Westering" to its extreme; they have boated (an uncommon means of transporting cowboys) off the map of America into the Pacific Ocean.
The occupation of the Far West of America has been called "a highway to the Pacific." At the end of that "highway" lay "The Garden of Plenty," that mythic place in the sun made up of the Pastoral ideal and the Edenic myth. Brautigan's pineapple field, that "shining island" where the loving wife and mother calls her "cowboys" in to a Victorian dinner inside a big white house from which drift strains of piano music, becomes that Eden-like "Garden of Plenty." When Brautigan's cowboys find themselves there, they are clearly not cowboys who have come to dinner. Brautigan wants the reader to see them, rather, as figures from an authentic American West that stands in opposition to the mythic West. Therefore, they are anachronisms in the garden, out of place in time also, and they can only take flight back into the reality of America. Greer speaks for both at the end of the first chapter when he says, "Let's get off this God-damm Hawaii." Like the woman in the white who calls to her cowboys, Brautigan insists, the dream and the myth beckoned Americans into the big white house of illusion; the reality of America is to be revealed back in the Hawkline mansion.
The magic journey to the Hawkline estate really begins on the arrival of Greer and Cameron in San Francisco, where they feel at home and where they promptly function capably in their roles as hired guns. Equally true to their roles as authentic Westerners, they celebrate their return to America by taking contracts to assassinate a citizen of Chinatown in order to earn some travel funds to Portland. Neither Greer nor Cameron realizes that a mysterious agent is designing a heroic mission for them; even as they spend part of their new money in a Portland whorehouse, their own manifest destiny begins to open a road for them into the Dead Hills of Eastern Oregon. The mystical bond between them and their imminent quest is made clear when they are "found" by the girl-spirit, Magic Child, whose purpose is to follow the bidding of Miss Hawkline and conduct them safely on a magic journey across Oregon. Brautigan points out that "Miss Hawkline was thinking about Greer and Cameron, though she had never met them or heard about them, but she waited eternally for them to come as they were always destined to come, for she was part of their gothic future" (16). Thus, when Greer and Cameron leave with Magic Child, they have no clearer sense of their mission than Gawain of Perceval had, all sharing common behavior for heroes, for "the hero sets out on his journey with no clear idea of the task before him."
While one has been accustomed to linking the gothic spirit with the past, Brautigan associates it with the future. Such association is seen to be relevant, however, when the reader follows Greer and Cameron as they are led by Magic Child through an adventure to Eastern Oregon that is like a newsreel of the American past but which takes everyone to the future of America. The holographic young woman who has been dispatched to bring the cowboys to the mansion is called Magic Child for good reason; she seductively leads them, and the reader, through scenes in the novel that are often comic enough but which seriously represent a short, critical history of the American West: conflicts between cowmen and sheepmen, skirmishes with Indians, lynchings by vigilante groups. In concert these short chapters, often give curt and whimsical titles like "Indian," "Gompville," "Binoculars," and "Ma Smith's Cafe," offer a history of the West in terms of its own clichés to which Brautigan gives sly twists. Brautigan's old-West peace officer, for example, the six-foot-tall and equally heavy Jack Williams, resembles a sheriff on any movie lot, but he refuses to wear a "regular gun belt" for fear of it being too close to his maleness; instead of shooting troublemakers he would, says Brautigan, "throw you in the creek" (40). Out of these episodes Magic Child brings Greer and Cameron to the Hawkline mansion where they will encounter the "fabulous forces" of the monster which resides in the basement. Here also Brautigan reveals his theories about America's apocalyptic future, to be wrought by a national inability to distinguish between illusion and reality.
When Fitzgerald poses his protagonist's cheerful but blind idealism about wealth ("I like very rich people") against the dark practices of "the richest man in the world," Braddock Washington, the background is so fantasy-like as to be futuristic. His towers, fairyland, and aeroplanes resemble some kind of Art Nouveau science fiction. By allowing John Unger to watch the insular world of the "richest man" disintegrate during an attack by flying machines, Fitzgerald shows how the impingement of the outside technological world, grown so during Washington's isolation, creates an apocalypse which leaves John aware of his birth of consciousness about "the shabby gift of disillusion." Brautigan's apocalypse, however, takes place in a setting more reminiscent of the past, the Victorian mansion of the Hawkline family. Most of the gothic furniture is there, and in the basement laboratory lurks the monster. The destruction of the mansion, however, is futuristic, though brought about by a collusion between outside and inside forces. In the context of his own dream-like setting amid the Dead Hills of Oregon, Brautigan pits his heroes against the required "fabulous forces" in the form of the treacherous Hawkline monster which makes terrible noises in the basement and which "can change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind" (129). When Greer and Cameron marshal their armaments, which also represent the technological world, "a 30:40 Krag, a sawed-off shotgun, a .38 and an automatic pistol" (118), and launch their attack against the Hawkline monster, the result is again an apocalyptic ending to a kind of insular world where illusions play like ghosts in the daytime. To effect the conclusion of their mission for Miss Hawkline, to destroy the monster that changes reality mischievously, they must also destroy its source, the Hawkline mansion itself; to bring this about they pour whiskey into the mixture of chemicals in which the monster resides. Sparks from the explosion catch the mansion afire, and the monster is turned into diamonds. Greer and Cameron rescue all the people who then stand "for a long time watching the house burn down" (209).
Not until midway through the novel does one learn the identity of Brautigan's celebrated "monster"; it is actually a strange mutation that has taken the form of light and shadow in an experiment of Professor Hawkline's which he calls "The Chemicals" and keeps in a jar in his laboratory. The narrator says that only Professor Hawkline could have joined the disparate chemicals in such a way as to "make them good neighbors" (127). The concept of "good neighbors" is significant, for The Chemicals bring together elements that are clearly suggestive of the elements that comprise the American experiment in democracy with its borrowings from many national cultures and symbolize, then, the complexity of that experiment:
^The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world. Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain. There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C.
There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas.
Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar. Witchcraft and modern science, the newest discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar. There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis. (126-27)^
To this mass of foreign and competing elements the Professor brings the talent and dedication which establish "harmony between past and present in the jar" (127). However, when the mutation is born in the jar and an "epidemic of mischievous pranks" grows into the "horrible sound" (128) that echoes among the ice caves beyond the basement, the heroic mission of Greer and Cameron becomes the only means of quelling the monster. That completed mission, however, does not bring a good; it does not result in boons for the heroes' fellow men, nor does it bring healing waters to a dry land. Brautigan's use of the myth of heroic quest does not include the concluding sense of hope.
Brautigan uses The Chemicals in their original purity as a metaphor for the potential harmony between past and present that he considers necessary for the American experiment in human felicity. When he speaks of "The Chemicals promising a brighter and more beautiful future for all mankind" (127), he intends that future to develop from realistic attitudes toward the national history. But that future reasons without the monster which changes the "nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind." Myth may produce truth; illusions, though, bear failed dreams.
The most striking episode from "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" which Brautigan parallels and which throws light on his own theme regarding failed dreams is the story's concluding impromptu picnic, where John Unger and the girls, Kismine and Jasmine, both just saved from the burning wreckage of the chateau, "spread the tablecloth and put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it." The ironic discovery during this pastoral scene is that the two remaining handfuls of Washington diamonds, which the girls have saved, are mere rhinestones. That revelation leads Kismine to draw a parallel between the "diamonds" and the stars and to say that they make her feel "that it was all a dream, all my youth." Brautigan also explicates his theme most openly during the final episode of The Hawkline Monster, given the form of an impromptu picnic that brings together the protagonists, his two heroes, with the two sisters, Susan and Jane Hawkline. Brautigan's observations on this scene indicate clearly that one is here looking into the gothic future of the American experience: "The way everybody was sitting it looked as if they were at a picnic but the picnic was of course the burning of the house, the death of the Hawkline Monster and the end of a scientific dream. It was barely the Twentieth Century" (210). If what follows in the novel is, then, any indication of what Brautigan expects for America's future, it will be one of wasted expectations. In the next-to-last chapter Cameron dives into the lake created by the melting ice caves and returns with the "handful of blue diamonds" that are the final remains of the monster. His expectations hopeful, Cameron says, "We're rich." However, the final chapter, a summation of the major characters' latter histories resembling the conclusion of a Victorian novel, proves Cameron's hope to be a deception, for not only are the diamonds wasted but so are the lives of their owners. Greer and Jane start a whorehouse in Butte; they are then married and divorced before she is "barely killed" in an automobile accident. Greer ends up as an inmate and a Rosicrucian in the Wyoming State Penitentiary. On their side of the Hawkline family, Susan and Cameron argue until Susan moves to Paris, France, where she marries a Russian count and then dies of a "stray bullet" during the Russian Revolution. Cameron's fate may be even worse: he becomes a movie producer in Hollywood.
As one looks back at the Fitzgerald picnic, one finds John making the following pronouncement on Kismine's suspicion that her youth, like diamonds, has been a dream: "It was a dream," he tells her. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." So, too, was Professor Hawkline's dream a form of "chemical madness," given to him by his creator as though Brautigan had been a visitor at Fitzgerald's picnic. Brautigan's reader, being aware that Professor Hawkline's dream is the dream of America, will perceive how unlikely the prospect is of maintaining the harmony of expectation and reality when the Hawkline monster's shadow falls between them. He will think with Eliot in "The Hollow Men": "Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow." Thus reads Richard Brautigan's final pronouncement on America's failed dream.
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction? 23.2
Winter 1981-82: 37-47.
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