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Richard Brautigan

by Margot Levy?

Innocence is usually accompanied by malevolence in any portrayal of human life. In Richard Brautigan's novels and poems, there is no such mingling or interaction between the complex elements of human existence. It is not that terrible things do not happen in his novels - women hang themselves, parents are eaten by tigers - but throughout, the central characters remain completely untouched by disaster. Like deliberate victims of amnesia, they search for a pastoral life without acknowledging what goes on around them. Brautigan's message, according to critic Thomas Volger, is that "We can't understand the problem of death and evil; so mourn and suffer, but eat pancakes and be happy."

Surreal and comical in their mixture of the minute details of daily life with fantastic, impossible events, Brautigan's novels Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion made him a cult figure in the 1960's and 1970's. His books, short stories and poems were published in 12 languages, and he was revered especially in the US as a leader of the counter-culture. In later years, his popularity with American readers tapered off, but his earlier works and the later So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away retained a wide following in Japan and France.

Born and raised in the rugged US northwest pacific sic, Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1958. One of the "San Francisco Poets" who clustered in the bohemian North Beach district, his friends included poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen and Michael McClure?. He published his first volumes of poetry himself, and sold them on the street corners of Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury. But in the mid-1960's, his novel Trout Fishing in America and poems The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster were widely read amongst the literary underground in the US. With the publication of these two books and In Watermelon Sugar in a single volume by Seymour Lawrence in 1970, Brautigan became a bestselling novelist. In 1968, he received a grant from the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts.

The appeal of his work was, first of all, its specifically American, and more particularly its California character. The heroes were gentle, shy, tender, usually shaggy-haired men who roamed California in pursuit of a lost bucolic way of life, a "search for America" in the 1960's manner. The frontier was nature, reflecting Brautigan's own affection for the outdoors but also the American preoccupation with a return to basics. His work was no mere pastoral meandering, however. Some critics compared him to [Mark] Twain and [James] Thurber in his ability to juxtapose the mundane with the fantastic in a hilarious combination. But the overriding appeal was the optimism and naivete of the characters, paralled in his elliptical and simplistic style. Brautigan "seems crazed with optimism" wrote Thomas McGuane? in The New York Times Book Review; "like some widely gifted rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

Yet there is something disturbing in all this naive, willful optimism. In Trout Fishing in America, the hero (shy and gentle, of course), stops sleeping with his lover Margaret and takes up with Pauline. Pauline asks him why he thinks Margaret is so unhappy; he replies, "I don't know how she feels." When Margaret hangs herself from (appropriately) an apple tree, the hero is more concerned with the potato salad on his plate than with her death. In The Abortion, the story is less obviously callous, but the central strand of indifference is still there. It is the most coherently structured of Brautigan's novels and the plot is simple: an unnamed librarian meets Vida, dark-haired and glamorous, when she comes into the library in San Francisco where he works. She is uncomfortable with her beautiful body, but he puts her at ease. They live together in homey harmony (she bakes chocolate cookies and he entertains old ladies) until she becomes pregnant, and they then go to Tijuana for the abortion. But neither the trauma of an abortion nor the fact that the librarian loses his job in his absence worries either of them. At the end of the book, Vida tells him that he will be "the hero of Berkeley". Critic Terence Malley, author of the book Richard Brautigan, says that Brautigan is a sharp critic of alienation in America and, influenced by [Ernest] Hemingway, "one of the major chroniclers of the loneliness of American experience". There is loneliness in Brautigan's early works, but the characters, in their optimism, seem not to feel it. The result is that Brautigan's early works, particularly Trout Fishing in America and The Abortion, do a good job of championing those who stay remote from pain and of presenting the prettier side of "alienation". For Brautigan's characters, the world outside is unreal, and the individual (not introspective) world is real. In this way his hero "survives catastrophes without even knowing they are there" (Thomas Volger, Contemporary Novelists). It is always an open question whether Brautigan thinks it is more painful to ignore or to experience the disasters of life — but either way, despite the humour, his books have an element of sharp distress.

What drew the attention of the critics was Brautigan's writing style more than the content of his work. He wrote in a deliberately naive, primitive (one critics said "preliterate") form, in which structure was not made explicit and thoughts were seemingly put down at random. Some chapters in a novel would be five to six lines long; others, six pages. Many critics were uncertain whether to dub him a genius, but the vast majority praised his innovative use of metaphor and simile. For those accustomed to traditional literature, however, Brautigan was anathema. Wrote one reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement: The Abortion is "irreducibly banal, a simpering goo-goo baby-talk drizzle of the kind of thoughts that come into the mind crying out to be imperiosuly dismissed."

Brautigan's poetry (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; Rommell Drives On Deep into Egypt; June 30th, June 30th and others) is less well known than his novels but more pointed. In a rare statement on his work, Brautigan said in 1971 that he "wrote poetry for seven years to learn to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence." He called his eleven volumes of poetry his "diary". Like his novels and short stories, his early poetry is light, satirical and metaphorical, turning increasingly to pessimistic images of funeral parlors and death. "The Last Surprise" in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork is almost nihilistic, and certainly gives the opposite impression from the exploratory thrust of his early work: "The last surprise is when you come/gradually to realize that nothing/surprises you any more."

After his fame peaked and then waned in the mid-1970's, Brautigan continued to write prolifically, producing five novels, two short stories, and two books of poetry. Never having learnt to drive (or indeed, as he acknowledged, to excell in anything except writing), he continued to travel between San Francisco and his ranch in Montana until settling in the small northern California town of Bolinas in 1983. What he perceived as the loss of his readership depressed him greatly; it was "breaking his heart" as his agent put it, although he did not care about the critics' reviews. Sometime in September 1984 he shot himself in his Bolinas home; the body was not discovered until October 25 when two worried friends came to visit him.


The Annual Obituary 1984
Chicago: St. James Press, 1985