Bozeman Daily Chronicle Obituary
English
by The Bozeman Daily Chronicle Staff and The Associated Press
Richard Brautigan, vagabond poet, off-beat novelist and part-time Paradise Valley dweller who became a literary cult figure in the 1960s, was found dead in his Bolinas?, California home Thursday by friends, an apparent suicide victim.
Sheriff's investigators have yet to positively identify the writer's decomposed body, which had apparently been in the house for about a month. There is evidence the man died of a gunshot wound, an officer said.
However, friends who found the body were sure it was Brautigan, the gangly, bushy-haired and bespectacled 49-year-old author of such popular works as "Trout Fishing in America" and "In Watermelon Sugar."
"I believe it was suicide," said David Fechheimer?, a San Francisco private detective who said he found the body.
"He wasn't away," said another long-time friend, writer Don Carpenter? of Mill Valley, Calif. "He was in the place. The last time we talked he wasn't going to go away."
Carpenter said he had seen Brautigan five weeks ago and he was working on "several projects ... was full of good cheer and optimistic about doing good work. He was in good spirits."
The body, which coroners planned to identify using dental charts, was discovered by friends who became concerned after not hearing from him, according to his publisher, Seymour Lawrence? of Delacorte Press in New York.
A prolific writer born in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan rose from obscurity amidst the "flower children" of San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury district.
With the 1967 publication of "Trout Fishing in America," which sold 2 million copies, Brautigan suddenly found himself famous and in demand as a speaker and spokesman for "new fiction" on college campuses throughout the nation.
In a 1982 interview with The Chronicle, Brautigan said he was pleased by the popularity, but puzzled by the "hippie writer" tag.
"I never thought of myself as a philosopher, either," he said. "My writing is just one man's response to life in the 20th century."
His other novels included "Revenge of the Lawn," "The Abortion: An Historical Romance," "A Confederate General from Big Sur," "The Tokyo-Montana Express" and "The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining sic Disaster."
Paul Ferlazzo?, head of the Montana State University English department, said today he thought Brautigan would be remembered as an imaginative experimentalist who told amazing stories with great symbolic value.
"His poetry was childlike and captured the freshness of experience," he said.
Ferlazzo, who talked the author into teaching a creative writing class at MSU in 1982, said Brautigan was someone he always thought he'd see again.
"I was expecting him to pop up momentarily in Bozeman. He was always turning up," Ferlazzo said. "Or I would get a midnight phone call from Hawaii or Paris. He'd call just to talk."
"The saddest thing is that a man with all the friends and all the contacts he had would end up for month alone in his house before he was found," Ferlazzo said.
With literary fame, however, came problems. Brautigan was known as a heavy drinker. After buying a Paradise Valley ranch in 1973, he became a familiar sight in Livingston and Bozeman-area watering holes, swilling George Dickel whiskey with friends and admirers.
"For his friends he was really both a frustrating and lovable person," said Greg Keeler?, associate professor of English at MSU. "Frustrating because he made a lot of demands of people. Lovable because it was usually worth it. He had a lot of charisma."
Brautigan liked to fish. He also spent a lot of time in the Bozeman Eagle's Club and once praised it as "the best bar in the state of Montana."
He would spend hours talking there with his friends and was very open to others who stopped by. He was very fond of whiskey and often got others to buy drinks for him.
Brautigan did not have a driver's license and relied on friends to get around.
"When the '60s ended, he was a baby thrown out with the bath water," said another long-time friend, author Tom McGuane?, who lives near Brautigan's Paradise Valley ranch.
"He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy," McGuane said. "He once told me that because of a childhood illness he had to grow up in darkness. I guess his mind became his only toy during that time."
A close friend and neighbor who lived adjacent to Brautigan's Pine Creek ranch, Marian Hjortsberg?, said Brautigan had a "gun fetish," and liked to target shoot. He "fooled around with guns in a way that was almost dangerous," she said.
"It took me a long time to get to know him because he had a gruff exterior and drank heavily," she said. But underneath that gruffness he was very kind," she said.
"He used to joke about how his first wife and all his girlfriends, when he gave up drinking, begged him to start again," Hjortsberg said. "He was a very meticulous and exacting person when he he wasn't drinking."
She said she wasn't surprised at the news of Brautigan's death.
"I had a sort of feeling always that he would go in a way sort of like that. He would get real depressed sometimes. He was very lonely deep down."
Although he kept a home in Montana, Brautigan was something of a literary vagabond with a particular affection for Japan, where he also lived and wrote.
Those who knew him, including San Francisco writer Curt Gentry, said Brautigan suffered from loneliness despite a legion of acquaintances.
"Richard was always a heavy boozer," Gentry said. "Obviously, he wasn't happy, but he'd always managed to pull himself out of despair before. Whatever agonies he was suffering from this time, I don't know."
Lawrence, Brautigan's publisher, said the author "was quite alone at the end."
"I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American loneliness," he said.
Married and divorced twice, Brautigan is survived by a daughter, Ianthe.
He was last in Montana a year ago, when he left for a writer's conference in Amsterdam. He traveled both in Europe and Japan in the past year before going back to Bolinas in the late spring, Keeler said. Keeler and his wife, Judy, visited Brautigan in Bolinas in August. Brautigan told them he was happy.
He was working on several different projects at the time, including a couple of screenplays and had several novels "sort of ready to go," Keeler said.
"I know he was really vacillating about where to live and what to do with his life, but he was always doing that," he said.
Brautigan liked Bozeman a lot and was thinking about moving here, Keeler said.
Brautigan was frustrated by the reaction of American critics to his work, friends said.
Eastern literary establishment critics who like complexity and depth, "decided that since (Brautigan's work) was simple it was simple-mindied" or pegged him as a "Mr. '60s flower generation" writer, Keeler said.
"He used to say he didn't care (about the critics) but he used to keep their clippings all the time," said David Schrieber, a Bozeman bartender and MSU student. The Europeans and Japanese appreciated his work much more, he said.
Brautigan actually was a "deceptively simple" writer whose works operate on many different levels, Keeler said.
Brautigan was very happy that French post-modernist critics were taking his work seriously and a book was being written on the many different levels of his work, Keeler said.
Brautigan's latest book, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," was published in 1982.
"I think he put himself totally into that book and was upset that it got such a slack reception," Keeler said.
Brautigan had problems getting publishers to pay him for his work and lived in a sort of self-imposed poverty for much of his life, Keeler said. His house in Bolinas was large but he had sealed off most of it and was living in only a small portion.
"He was a child of the Depression and he never got over that," Keeler said.
Bozeman Daily Chronicle?
October 26, 1984: 1, 2.
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