Bowman,1999

"Literary Leftovers: Does even the most devoted fan really want to scrape the bottom of Dashiell Hammett's desk drawer?"
David Bowman
Salon.com, 21 October 1999.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I wasn't too interested in the recently published novels by the late Ernest Hemingway ("True at First Light") and Ralph Ellison ("Juneteenth"). I was too busy waiting for another pair of posthumously published works by Richard Brautigan and Dashiell Hammett.

Some criticized the literary executors of Hemingway and Ellison for dredging up substandard works by writers who were no longer around to protect their reputations. Of course, if it weren't for executors willing to defy a dead author's wishes we wouldn't have, for example, more than a handful of Franz Kafka's stories. Posthumously published books include manuscripts left unfinished when the writer kicked ("Juneteenth" and Herman Melville's "Billy Budd"); miscellaneous documents (F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up"); failed work abandoned years before the writer's death ("True at First Light"); juvenilia, like Brautigan's just-published "The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings"; and previously uncollected writings, like the new "Nightmare Town: Stories" by Hammett.

In 1992, eight years after Brautigan pulled a Hemingway and shot himself in the head, the "Edna" poems were discovered in Eugene, Ore. Brautigan wrote them when he was 21 and gave the collection of verse to the mother of his first girlfriend, telling her, "When I am rich and famous, Edna, this will be your Social Security." Brautigan did get rich and famous, but he died a literary has-been. These poems are a windfall only for those readers still interested in Brautigan, or for those who have just discovered his finest work, which includes "Trout Fishing in America" (a novel, not a field guide).

Reading a writer's juvenilia—posthumously or otherwise—appeals most to younger readers. Remember when you discovered Jack Kerouac or Doris Lessing? or whoever first made you realize the power and magic of books, and you devoured everything you could by the magician, good or bad? A devoted reader—and hopeful writer—who absorbs a great author's oeuvre learns that the creation of a masterpiece can be as tricky as shooting an apple off someone else's head (as opposed to shooting your own head, the plan Hemingway and Brautigan eventually opted for). Sometimes you miss. Oops.

I first discovered Brautigan as a kid in the early '70s when his novels and stories were being reprinted in mass-market paperback. I still own my flesh-colored copy of "Trout Fishing in America," with its cover photo of Brautigan in jeans, vest and a 10-gallon hat, standing beside a seated woman with buck teeth and granny glasses. The blue cover of "Watermelon Sugar" shows the writer shirtless and standing behind a pubescent girl. At that time, other male novelists were always photographed wearing suits and trying to look dignified. But Brautigan showed me that a great novelist dressed like a hippie and always had a girl.

Brautigan's pal Keith Abbott wrote in a 1985 article for California magazine, "Once, when we were on Clement Street [in San Francisco, Brautigan] stopped at a record store and pointed at the album cover. 'Another rock star posing on the front of his record—I'm so tired of that.'" Abbott observed that Brautigan was "completely oblivious" to the fact that much the same could have been said of himself, posing for the covers of his own books with "his various girlfriends."

But the implied message of all Brautigan's covers was not "This is a stud who gets chicks," but rather, "This is a writer who 'gets' (as in 'understands') chicks." Brautigan's love stories perfectly suited the unmacho tenor of the 1970s. In the novel "In Watermelon Sugar," Brautigan populates the world with men who do the dishes. Men who cook the meals. Men who then get to make love with lovely women at all hours of the day. And when they are done they talk "about the tigers." Later they talk about "a lamb going for walk." Then they make love again.

Gosh! Life after high school was going to be simple-minded, but full of sex! But then as disco, punk, Quaaludes and "Saturday Night Live" finished off the gentle '70s, Brautigan's literary innocence came to seem, well, icky to readers like me who were still paying attention to his work. And, in 1975's "Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery," Brautigan's la-di-da prose concerned itself with ... venereal warts. The men still did the dishes, but this one's diseased penis is described as resembling a "dead octopus tentacle." Please! Bring back the tigers and lambs ...

Just a few years ago, I found myself reconsidering Brautigan's '60s works, pre-venereal warts. There is something valuable and incredibly vulnerable about true innocence, even to someone whose innocence is long gone. Brautigan was at his best when he was Percival with a typewriter. In his goofy version of Americana, pain and death did exist, but they were as substantial as a cartoon. So when I heard about the publication of "Edna," I was looking forward to it. Yuck. The poems are as terribly precious as the stuff we all wrote in high school English class. An example:
"A door
in Death's heart
will open wide
and I will go
inside
and find
seven rooms
each as big
as God."

But a brief series of poems, "A Love Letter From State Insane Asylum," did deepen my insight into Brautigan. Actually, it wasn't the poems themselves—terse messages like: "I want to write. I want to write and write and write." It was the tale of what inspired them. In the book's forward, Keith Abbott (the same Abbott of the California magazine article) relates that after a girlfriend dissed young Brautigan's poetry, he was so distressed to think that he had failed as a poet that he went to a police station and demanded to be arrested. "What for?" the cops said. "You haven't broken any laws." Brautigan responded by taking a rock and smashing a glass partition. That act earned him a short stay in the bughouse. It's no surprise that a kid so emotionally volatile would end up killing himself before he reached 50.

Dashiell Hammett killed himself with the time-honored method of too much drink and cigarettes, but then Hammett was a generation older than Brautigan. The only other biographical similarity between the two is that they both lived in San Francisco, albeit during different decades. Hammett also lived in New York—the burg I moved to myself in the late 1970s. New York has always been a hard-edged town. In the late 1970s, it was also a punk rock town. But instead of embracing the nihilistic frenzy of the club culture at CBGB's, I chose to devour Hammett's tough-guy prose. It was the writerly equivalent of punk rock—nihilism cracking into art.

Hammett could describe a gunsel getting gutshot with the spare grace of a haiku. There are several tasty, violent set pieces in the new collection of his stories, "Nightmare Town." In the title story, a tough drifter engages in homicidal fisticuffs in the back seat of a speeding convertible:
"The car moved. One of the girl's hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off—tore pieces from him—tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them ... Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced rifle emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert—white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed—was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind."

On first reading, this description seems cinematic, like some Quentin Tarantino shooting script. But a closer look reveals the literary touches. The rifle that fires with a bitter voice. The desert as a "gigantic hospital bed." This type of writing—as tight as a shooting script but just enough literary flourishes to make it breathe on the page—was Hammett's consummate art.

As for Hammett's psyche, in his own way he was as wounded as Brautigan. Hammett only wrote from 1922 to 1934, then abandoned publication to wrestle with the downside of fame, booze, Lillian Hellman and the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s. When the man died in 1961, all his novels ("The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" among others) were in print, but his great pulp shoot'em-up short stories, first published in Black Mark magazine, had been out of print for years.

It wasn't until 1966, five years after his death, that the first hardcover collection of short fiction, "The Big Knockover," was published, followed in 1974 by the splendid if not quite top-notch stories collected in "The Continental Op." And 12 years later, a long, forgotten novelette called "Woman in the Dark" was published as a short novel. When I first read "Woman in the Dark," the prose seemed fresh. Electric. Now, several years later, I have to admit that the work is really second-tier Hammett.

Now we have "Nightmare Town." In the book's introduction, William Nolan claims that this is the "largest collection of [Hammett's] shorter works and by far the most comprehensive." It's big all right. But "comprehensive" of what? Certainly not quality. It really is bargain-basement Hammett. Despite flashes of brilliant writing, almost every story is mired by corny detective-fiction conventions.

"How did you rap to Kelly?" a cop named O'Gar asks Hammett's roly-poly detective, the Continental Op. "Miss Menbrook was walking north on Leavenworth," the Op explains, "and was halfway between Bush and Pine—when the shot was fired. She saw nobody, no cars, until she rounded the corner. Mrs. Gilmore, walking north on Jones, was about the same distance away when [Mrs. Gilmore] heard the shot, and saw nobody until she reached Pine Street. If Kelly had been telling the truth, she would have seen him on Jones Street. He said he didn't turn the corner until after the shot was fired." Give the Op a Belgian accent and he could be Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot wrapping up a traditional British mystery, the genre "Black Mask" was suppose to blow away.

I know there are still more uncollected Hammett stories, but I think this volume is it for me. My curiosity about the limits of Hammett's prose has been exhausted. Or more simply put, I suffer from Hammett burnout. A guy can only read so many car-chase-guns-firing-in-the-middle-of-the-night scenes before sniffing around for some Jane Austen to read. As for Brautigan, the "Edna" poems make Brautigan's best work seem even thinner. "Trout Fishing in America" is still a classic novel, but now I suspect that you just wouldn't want to examine it too closely.

Does my disappointment at reading Brautigan's and Hammett's leftover writings prove a larger point about the publishing of substandard posthumous work? Well, the Brautigan side of me wants every title in a writer's oeuvre to have its chance. Maybe there's a kid somewhere just discovering Brautigan who will benefit from reading his juvenilia. Then the Hammett side of me wins out. I think of all the mugs who claim a bad review in the Sunday New York Times is better than no review at all. They're wrong. They're the same jerks who say a lousy posthumous book doesn't soil a writer's reputation. Ha! Screw the kids. A tough guy's literary life stops when he croaks (if not years before then, as it did for Hammett). Nobody benefits from damaged goods. Save the posthumous stuff for eggheads in libraries.

Do I sound convincing? Let me tell you about the tigers and lambs ...

Hillard,2000

"The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings"
Tom Hillard
Western American Literature, vol. 35, no. 1, Summer 2000, pp. 221-222.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

"When I become rich and famous, Edna, this will be your social security," said a young Richard Brautigan to Edna Webster in 1956, handing her a pile of manuscript pages (ix). Webster was the mother of Brautigan's best friend, and her daughter was his first love. But at age twenty-one, the young poet had decided to leave Eugene, Oregon, for San Francisco, hoping to make it as a writer. As a farewell, Brautigan gave Mrs. Webster all the poems and stories he had written so far. Thankfully for us readers, she kept them. Now, more than forty years later, after Brautigan's international stardom in the 1960s and untimely death in 1984, these manuscripts have finally come to light. "Discovered" by a collector, then arranged and edited, those early poems and stories are now The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

This slender new volume by the perplexing author of Trout Fishing in America (1967) is indispensable for Brautigan fans. Not only is it the first "new" Brautigan in well over a decade, but it also covers material from his earliest years, a period which until now has been largely a mystery even to his closest friends. He simply never spoke or wrote about his childhood, save for cryptic and often dark allusions. Though much of this new volume is uneven and is obviously the work of an inexperienced writer, it does reflect the style of Brautigan's later work. For example, we see the brief, often abrupt haiku-like poems that grace his later books. However, many poems are trite and obviously the work of a love-struck adolescent, such as "nothing new," which reads: "There/ is/ nothing new/ under the sun/ except/ you and me" (16). Nevertheless, the manipulation of words and extended metaphors Brautigan later perfected were all there at this early stage. We also find conscious imitations of his favorite authors, including a short story titled "Somebody from Hemingway Land." Most of these early tidbits glow with his famous humor, both goofy and ironic.

The important themes of Brautigan's later work are also present: cruelty, death, imaginative escape, and, of course, love. Though a hopeless romantic at heart, even at an early age Brautigan clearly felt a strong sense of despair, of futility at the world's cruelty. Most startling are two short pieces that depict his teenage incarceration in a mental institution, the first called "A Love Letter from State Insane Asylum," and the other titled "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye," a haunting narrative that depicts a tormented child sent away "to the madhouse" (56). In "dear old mommie," he writes bitterly of his mother, who abandoned him early on: "God bless/ her soul/ that/ did a perfect/ imitation/ of a mole" (10).

In the end, The Edna Webster Collection is without a doubt a book for fans. Such nascent writings are most interesting to those curious about Brautigan's early life. Many critics will dismiss this book as merely juvenilia, a mediocre set of stories and poems whose quirky humor is its only redeeming quality. Some Brautigan aficionados may even consider the book a disservice, as it brings Brautigan's weaker writing to the limelight. Nevertheless, the book does bear witness to the blossoming of a young talent, and its poems and stories are also a window into the troubled mind of a 1950s Pacific Northwest youth. Anyone interested in the origins of the literary sensibility of the San Francisco counterculture is likely to appreciate this new addition to our understanding of Richard Brautigan.

Hjortsberg,1999

"Poetic Injustice? Maybe Richard Brautigan's early writings did not deserve to see the light of day."
William Hjortsberg
San Francisco Chronicle, 10 October 1999, p. RV-3.
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The recent publication of "True at First Light," Ernest Hemingway's posthumous fictional memoir, unleashed an onslaught of literary criticism, with Joan Didion leading the charge in the New Yorker. The gist of her (and others') objections was that an author's work ought not to be printed in an unfinished state, without those final personal revisions foreclosed upon by death.

This position overlooks the obvious. A writer can always destroy anything he or she wishes never to be published. It is for the legitimate heirs to decide what to do with the leftovers.

This seems a fair position when applied to mature work, but what about an author's surviving juvenilia? What justification is there, aside from morbid curiosity or scholarly rag-picking, in bringing to light a writer's long-lost, awkward first efforts?

This is the troubling question attending the appearance of Richard Brautigan's earliest known writing in a volume slim even by his minimalist standards. The book is more a catch-all grab bag than a unified collection, compiled from a variety of stray manuscripts and notebooks left behind with Edna Webster—Brautigan's confidant, adviser and the mother of both his first true love and one of his best buddies—when he left his hometown of Eugene, Oregon, for good in the late spring of 1956.

Has it any worth other than as a curiosity? While it's unfair to judge the efforts of someone just out of high school by the same standards applied to work done in maturity, observing the connecting threads can be an instructive exercise.

Many of Brautigan's signature images (tombstones, tigers, portals, trout) are present in his early poems, along with an abiding melancholy that remained characteristic of his singular style throughout his career. Two of the short stories ("James Dean in Eugene, Oregon" and "The Flower Burner") possess the same quirky charms as the stories in the author's later collection "Revenge of the Lawn."

If much of the poetry seems slight, it is because it was occasioned by post-adolescent heartbreak, a maudlin subject at best. Here and there, in poems such as "the unknown dreamer" and "all the cities at once," the bright promise of better things to come shines through like diamonds among the treacle.

The original typescript of "Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown" contains 53 poems; the present volume, 10 fewer. The editors maintain that "the weaker pieces have been culled," yet upon examination, it's difficult to understand their editorial choices. The real answer appears to be space. This book vainly strives to cram the most material into the fewest possible pages.

Brautigan was a stickler for proper layout and excellent design. He remains one of the few American authors ever to be granted design control by a major publishing house. In all his previous books, the poetry was given room to breathe, one poem per page. Even the early typescript of "Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown" was laid out in this fashion. Yet, in the current volume, the poems are stacked one upon the other, like cans of dog food on a supermarket shelf.

The new arrangement of the brief prose pieces from the notebooks is even more painful. The originals are all handwritten fair copies, meticulously detailing the author's intentions. Brautigan carefully places a sentence, or even a single word, on each page, a process akin to calligraphy. The artistic effect is achieved by the mystery of turning from one page to the next. Here, in this compressed version, the individual lines are arranged in a single column separated by dots, a design strategy canceling the author's intentions as effectively as hanging a painting upside-down.

Here, in the cynical merchandising of Richard Brautigan's first uncertain steps as a writer, we have only one more example of the cash register mentality infecting the book business.

Lewis,1999

"Before the Trout: Richard Brautigan's Early Years"
Judith Lewis
LA Weekly, 5-11 Nov. 1999, p. 43.
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IN HIS 27-YEAR CAREER AS A POET AND NOVELIST, Richard Brautigan would write, in his spare, hallucinatory way, about trout fishing and abortions, men who go criminal after losing their bowling trophies, and monsters that get turned into blue diamonds. But in 1955, at the age of 21, Brautigan mused relentlessly, almost exclusively, about love. He wrote about its joys ("I/galloped/like/an/enchanted horse/into love"); he fashioned brutal metaphors for its discontents ("Love is crueler/than the knife/of a man/who slit/the throats/of four children"). He wrote melodramatic laments to love gone bad and quirky odes to desirable women ("A nightmare came to me ... /wearing a bikini/bathing suit./Dig that/sexy horror!"). But even in love, Brautigan tempered his sentiments with self-mockery—he may have been young, but he was no love's fool: Ever present in his yearnings is an awareness that the flutterings of the heart, while irresistible poet-fodder, make trivial stuff for the serious writer: "Love is a white lamb/standing in soft spring rain and eating baby grass," he opined in "Love is ..." "Love is a god-damn poet writing/'Love is ...'"

This glimpse into Brautigan's beginnings comes from The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, a recently published sampling of the pages Brautigan left with the mother of his first girlfriend before ditching Eugene, Oregon, for the Beat life of San Francisco. Edna Webster waited 35 years before alerting rare-book collector James P. Musser to the manuscripts, which gave Brautigan's work just enough time to settle into a cyclical rhythm of cultish rediscovery, and deserve the literary going-over a collection like this inspires. Grown-ups tend to forget him, but college students continually unearth the epigrammatic prose of In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fishing in America and claim the author as their own—a dead poet cooler than Kerouac and less famous than Ginsberg who embodies both the absurdity and melancholy that defines life as one segues into adulthood. Trout Fishing has sold 3 million copies since its 1967 publication, and Brautigan's collected works are now available in trilogy from by Houghton Mifflin. The Edna Webster Collection arrived right on schedule.

These early poems reveal the young Brautigan-in-formation tinkering with metaphor and trying on styles—a Beat knockoff here, a stab at Hemingway there. But they also reveal that Brautigan's peculiar comic collision of literary allusion, morbid drama and colloquial speech was already his own. He resorted to melodrama often, but rarely without a tinge of silliness: "I cannot say to the one I love, 'Besides being the world's greatest unknown writer, I play a fair game of kick the can,'" he writes in a prose poem dedicated to Webster. "I cannot say to the one I love, 'Want to go to a cave and eat some popcorn, or would you like to saddle up a couple of goldfish and swim to Alaska?' ... Because Grace is full of embalming fluid." It's hard to think of another poet, Beat or otherwise, who would have described such fantastical heartbreak and, within the same year, penned a nine-line paean to a beautiful woman's fart ("incongruity").

Like so much work by young writers who later became famous, this collection sometimes reads exactly like what it is: writing practice. Subject matter sketched out here would resurface in more polished form: In "maybe this is the way the world will end," for instance, a woman kills her husband with an ax because "he made me so mad"; a decade later, in a single-paragraph story titled "The Scarlatti Tilt" included in Revenge of the Lawn, a woman shoots her boyfriend for playing the violin badly in a studio apartment. There is foreshadowing of Brautigan's style here, too: A conscientious and determined poet, he played tirelessly at painting with words, numbering and labeling small poems as "photographs," "still lifes" or "family portraits." The imagery is often forced ("photograph 8: Eternity/picking its/teeth/with the cross/that Jesus/was crucified on"), but occasionally he hit upon a giddily dreamlike, Dali-esque combination of the mundane and ridiculous, as in "still life 1: A set/of miniature false/teeth/sitting/on the seat/of a red/tricycle," or "photograph 6: A butterfly/taking/a shit." It's possible, here, to observe the inner workings of a young writer struggling to translate the visual and aural worlds into a written one without any trace of cliché or artifice. At the same time, Brautigan was figuring out how to elevate, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens?, everyday observations to poetic heights:

"Cats
I love cats.
Why do I love cats?
I don't know exactly,
but I think it is for the same reason
that I love the dawn,
and the sunrise,
and
the coming down of rain."

Brautigan's work become more varied and complex over the years, but it always centered on surreal renderings of ordinary things, and it always retained a wide-eyed bewilderment at both the beauty and sadness of life. He managed to break with his vignette style long enough to turn out whole narratives, including two endearing mysteries, Willard and His Bowling Trophies and The Hawkline Monster, shape-shifting dream stories of lovable outlaws. His most inspired lines, however, are the snippets of imagery and noise that grew out of his early experiments: semen collecting on a dead fish in Trout Fishing; a Hawkline monster that sounds like "the combination of water being poured into a glass, a dog barking and the muttering of a drunk parrot." Brautigan cultivated an ability to invoke visions that would resonate with nothing but their own comic weirdness and confusion of senses: "A seagull flew over us," he wrote in a vignette near the end of his 1964 novel A Confederate General From Big Sur, "its voice running with the light, its voice passing historically through songs of gentle color. We closed our eyes and the bird's shadow was in our ears."

What fed his imagination is anyone's guess: Not even Brautigan's close friends knew much about his childhood. In the introduction to The Edna Webster Collection, Keith Abbott, a fellow poet and Brautigan's friend for 19 years, claims that "I never heard him refer to any Northwest people by name—not his sister, mother, father or stepfathers, not his girlfriends or teachers ... All these were left without identification, existing as phantoms of a previous life." Abbott does recall Brautigan claiming to have met his father only twice, and he notes that references to Brautigan's mother in his poetry are not kind. Brautigan's forgetting, Abbott recognized, was essential to his survival: "His willpower, which was ferocious and constant (and which he probably considered his only true friend, along with his imagination), banished any memories in order for him to continue as an artist." That faith in the power of the mind to slay all dragons was probably the closest he ever came to a philosophy of life: The whimsical dramas of both Willard and The Hawkline Monster hinge not on tangible evils, but imaginings or perceptions of evil. Demons are demolished not by violence, but by acts of will. They prevail only because humans become resigned to let them.

This battle is, in many ways, typical of the one against mental illness, which Brautigan fought most of his life, and succumbed to at least twice. As a young man, according to Keith Abbott, he showed his poems to a girlfriend who criticized them, and got himself committed to the Oregon state asylum. (The Edna Webster Collection contains two prose pieces Brautigan wrote about his asylum stay, "A Love Letter From State Insane Asylum" and "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye," which consists of 83 chapters of one line each.) Then, in 1984, after his literary career had risen to extraordinary heights and fallen—a natural course of events that might have seemed to him precipitous—Brautigan confined himself to his house in Bolinas, got drunk and shot himself with a .44-caliber revolver. He was 49, and he had ceased writing much about romance. His last book, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, marked the first time in 10 novels, nine volumes of poetry and one collection of short stories that he broke through the safe carapace of amnesia to write about what his life was like in Oregon. Having given up on love, he was probably killed by the remembering.

Martin,1999

"Naïve Melodies: A Posthumous Book Unearths the Early Works of Richard Brautigan"
Richard A. Martin
Seattle Weekly, 7-13 October 1999, p. 41.
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During his prolific writing career, Richard Brautigan zigzagged across the thin line separating goofiness from charm more times than his Beat forebears sped across the country. Unlike Kerouac, the lanky loner from Tacoma found inspiration in the people—particularly pretty women—and the environment of the Northwest, and he reflected who or what he saw with a peculiar poetry.

While many in the literary establishment, and even some peers, considered Brautigan's naïve melodies the work of an undistinguished writer, he struck a chord with the hippies who had overrun his adopted hometown of San Francisco. They helped propel his mid-'60s opuses, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, into popular books.

But Brautigan's was a troubled soul. He could pen a microscopic vignette that somehow carried so much meaning, as in the 1968 poem "Map Shower," which reads in its entirety: "I want your hair/to cover me with maps/of new places,/so everywhere I go/will be as beautiful/as your hair." But he was also a quirky curmudgeon who spent the last 15 years of his life traveling between Montana and Tokyo, writing books that seesawed between dour and whimsical, between romance and misogyny. Then, in 1984, he apparently shot himself and died.

The just-published Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings helps reconcile Brautigan the benign chronicler of the lovestruck '60s and the self-doubting and sexually perverse mystery spinner of 1975's Willard and His Bowling Trophies (which starred a stuffed parrot).

On the verge of leaving his home in Eugene circa 1955, the 21-year-old fledgling author gave Webster, the mother of his girlfriend, the stories and poems in this posthumous book. Filled with the type of hubris common to many a young man with literary stardom on his mind, he addressed the package with the note, "When I am rich and famous, Edna, this will be your social security." In 1992, Edna decided to cash in, calling a Brautigan collector who in turn phoned rare book dealer Burton Weiss. As he spells out in a suitably brief introduction, Weiss flew to Eugene, met with Webster, sorted through the photos and manuscripts, and quickly arranged a sale; the resulting book, he says, was edited only sparingly.

Much like Brautigan's other work from the '50s and '60s, this new collection is mildly experimental in form, maneuvering from terse poems to prose sketches to what could be considered the predecessor of Saturday Night Live's sardonic Deep Thoughts segments. The young writer is at his most poignant when veiling his pain behind vivid, small-scale descriptions in "A Love Letter from State Insane Asylum." In another piece attributable to his six-month stay in a mental hospital, "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye," and in many of the other works included here, Brautigan reveals more of his detached and unhappy upbringing than in his other works. Whatever Ms. Webster received in financial remuneration couldn't buy the biographical insight summed up in the typically Brautiganesque line that punctuates his short poem "dear old mommie": "God bless/her soul/that/did a perfect/imitation/of a mole."

That Brautigan maintains his niche these many years after his death isn't a surprise. While his books aren't required reading in most university lit courses, any free-spirited college student will surely hear of the crafty Trout Fishing sooner or later. One obstacle to Brautigan's earning a place in the canon, or at least losing his asterisk-like tag of "counterculture writer," may be overcome with the release of The Edna Webster Collection. Now we may see Brautigan not as the happy-go-lucky freak who simply took a wrong turn, but as a gentle and confused artist who used words to paint a brighter picture of the world than the one he knew.

Sullivan,1999

"A Gift From Brautigan: San Francisco Writer's Earliest Poems and Stories Surface in Posthumous Collection"
James Sullivan
San Francisco Chronicle, 7 October 1999, p. E1, E6.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

At 21, the budding writer Richard Brautigan left his native Pacific Northwest for San Francisco. As a token of his affection, he presented a pile of notebooks to his first love's mother, Edna Webster.

"It'll be your retirement when I become rich and famous," he predicted.

Nearly a half-century later, 84-year-old Edna Webster—still living in the same house in Eugene, Oregon—says she always believed the young poet's promise. "I believe everything people tell me," she says with a laugh.

Webster's faith has been rewarded: Brautigan's earliest poems and short stories have just been published as "The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings" (Mariner, $12). Next Thursday, the Booksmith on Haight Street hosts a Richard Brautigan "celebration" in honor of the late poet and novelist who defined quirky San Francisco to a generation of easy readers.

Brautigan, author of the whimsical classic "Trout Fishing in America,'' died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in Bolinas in 1984. He was 49.

During the late '60s and into the 1970s, he was a counterculture celebrity, as much a representative of the Bay Area's lifestyle revolt as the psychedelic bands and visual artists whose lives his paralleled.

In his later years, however, an alcoholic Brautigan grew despondent and surly, and his writing, once sweetly absurd, suffered for it. Today he is remembered primarily as a curiosity, not a genuine talent.

That's a shame, says Keith Abbott, Brautigan's longtime friend and author of the 1989 small-press biography "Downstream From 'Trout Fishing in America': A Memoir of Richard Brautigan."

"There's a real problem with revisionism in literary history, which has dropped him and a great many other writers from the list of inventors," says Abbott, who wrote the introduction to the new Edna Webster collection. "You never know who'll survive, and you can't predict it."

Abbott, who teaches Brautigan to his classes at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says his old friend's best writing—"Trout Fishing," "A Confederate General From Big Sur," the story collection "Revenge of the Lawn"—holds up well alongside more enduring, youth-oriented authors such as Stephen Crane and J.D. Salinger.

"Richard goes over very well at Naropa. There's a toleration for eccentrics there," he says. Naropa is the Buddhist institute that serves as a home to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Although Brautigan would have agreed that he belongs at Naropa with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Abbott says, he didn't particularly like being called a "beat" or "hippie" writer.

"He thought of himself in the tradition of the Western writers of American literature—Mark Twain. He read Hemingway, and he considered him a Western writer."

"I dreamt/ that I met/ Ernest Hemingway,'' reads a short poem in "The Edna Webster Collection." "We had a terrible argument/ in the dream/ because/ Ernest Hemingway/ thought he was/ a better writer/ than I am."

Despite such youthful bravado, Brautigan seems to have changed his mind about his early verse. There is some indication that he intervened when Webster made a first attempt to publish the material in the mid-'70s, and his daughter Ianthe isn't endorsing the new book.

But Abbott says the manuscripts, the originals of which are now the property of the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library, are worth a look. "What's most striking is that, like Zeus, he came fully formed," says Abbott. "The writing style is there."

"I always thought he'd be famous someday," says Edna's son Peter Webster, 64, Brautigan's best high school buddy and brother of Linda Webster, the girl with whom the aspiring writer was smitten. "I always thought the work was lovely."

Webster, pastor of the Westpark Christian Church in Bremerton, Washington, says Brautigan taught him to fish for trout. "We had a couple of business ventures in our teen years. One was selling night crawlers. We'd go out on the University of Oregon campus at night and find them. We got a penny apiece for them.

"Another time we tried selling Christmas trees,'' he continues. "It was not profitable, but we had some good times."

When they had a falling-out over some petty cash Webster lent his friend, Brautigan threw a tantrum and got arrested.

"They shipped him off to Salem Mental Hospital because they couldn't understand him,'' says Webster. "Which is understandable. He was not a typical person."

It was Edna Webster's kindness and support during that bout of institutionalization, Peter Webster believes, that earned her Brautigan's lifelong indebtedness.

Brautigan's wild imagination was his ticket out of a troubled youth, says Abbott. And the loving detail with which he crafted his apparent trifles makes them unwitting but ideal Buddhist literature.

"It's awareness of the mind—being aware of what's going through your mind, and then tracking it. In meditation you let go of it. Richard wrote it down.

"He certainly had a very cracked imaginary mind."

"The old drunk told me about trout fishing," Brautigan wrote in his most famous book. "When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

"Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

"I'd like to get it right."

BOOK PARTY

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN: Edna and Peter Webster, biographer Keith Abbott and others will discuss the author's legacy and the publication of The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings at 7 p.m. October 14 at the Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., San Francisco. Free. Call (415) 863-8688 or go to www.booksmith.com.

Thorpe,1999

"Brautigan Arrives at Land of Giants"
Peter Thorpe
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, Colorado), 19 September 1999, p. 2E.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Often called "the last of the Beat Generation," Richard Brautigan was born in 1935 and committed suicide in Bolinas, Calif., at the age of 49 under a cloud of drinking and despair. He is best known for a brilliantly kinky book called Trout Fishing in America and for numerous literary excursions into the underground. Other well-known novels by Brautigan are A Confederate General from Big Sur and The Hawkline Monster. There are also nine volumes of superb poetry, including The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster and Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork.

The last-mentioned is emblematic of Brautigan's work, for he dabbled in surrealism, constantly juxtaposing ideas that normally have nothing to do with each other. Somehow, he was able to fit everything together, creating some of the most interesting and challenging writings of the later 20th century. His fame rose steadily in the '60s and '70s, and since that time he has been a dynamic fixture in American literature.

Although he reminds us of Haight-Ashbury and the "Beat" scene in San Francisco—Ginsberg, Kerouac, the City Lights bookshop and all that—Brautigan has transcended that scene, moving beyond regionalism to take his place among the giants.

It's a far cry from his impoverished and humble beginnings in Eugene, Oregon.

When Brautigan left Eugene at 21 to seek his literary fortune in California, he had already produced a substantial body of high-quality poetry and fiction, most of it about love. He left the manuscripts to a certain Edna Webster, whose daughter he'd been courting and whose son was his best friend. There was a note: "On this third day of November, 1955, I, Richard Brautigan, give all my writings to Edna Webster. They are now her property, and she may do what she wishes with them."

Edna kept the writings for nearly 30 years before releasing them, and they now reside in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings brings these writings to the public, where they should find a warm reception by aficionados of Brautigan and by newcomers to his strange and troubled world.

Much of the power of Brautigan lies in his ability to surprise convincingly. We are often led along on a prosy path, lulled into dropping our defenses, and then suddenly ambushed. The result is a mixture of discomfort and delight, as in "i dreamt i was a bird":

"I was
resting
between courting
sessions
when some kids
snipped me off
with a BB gun."

Among the prose sketches of The Edna Webster Collection, we find the same lovely treachery. In a mini-play called Linda, two lovers kiss while standing above the dead body of a young man who was heartbroken in love. After they walk hand-in-hand across the stage and disappear into the wings, we hear a burst of laughter and the curtain goes down.

The message, if there is one, seems to be that we will never really connect with each other; we will go on living physically close together and, spiritually, miles apart.

The isolation forces the individual to fall back on his own creativity. Perhaps, for Brautigan, there was no salvation but in art.

Readers will appreciate this glance into the young mind of an American master. In The Edna Webster Collection, we are witnessing one of the most exciting "finds" in the history of American literature.

Waddington,1999

"Brautigan again; 'When I'm rich and famous, Edna, this will be your social security'"
Chris Waddington
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota), 19 September 1999, p. 14F.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Written before Brautigan's 21st birthday, this recently discovered manuscript is uneven, but it reveals that this inimitable stylist (Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar) had already found his voice before joining San Francisco's Beat literary scene in 1956.

Uptight tastemakers always viewed the late Richard Brautigan with skepticism—too popular, too whimsical, too poetic and too distant from Manhattan in his California and Montana hideaways.

The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings should help overcome such blindered foolishness. Still, the timing couldn't be worse, now that so much of publishing resembles a branch of archaeology, with its most hyped and most feeble offerings retrieved from the graveyard of lost prose. This year, for example, the estates of Ralph Ellison and Ernest Hemingway allowed massively edited posthumous novels to appear, and Kurt Vonnegut is promoting a collection of his apprentice stories from the 1950s.

In that atmosphere, even ardent fans may wonder if the latest Brautigan book—a slim volume of early poems and short stories—should have remained in Edna Webster's safe-deposit box. But be assured: Literature owes a debt to the Oregon woman who preserved this flawed-but-revealing gift from an unpublished 21-year-old writer who told her, "When I am rich and famous, Edna, this will be your social security."

The best of these disinterred writings confirm that Brautigan's style and sensibility were already forming before he left Oregon for San Francisco's Beat scene in 1956. From the start one hears his familiar voice—sheepish but proud, matter-of-fact and poised to upset expectations:

"I am an unknown poet. That does not
mean I do not have any friends. It means
mostly my friends know I am a poet,
because I have told them so.

Let us pretend that my mind is a taxi
and suddenly ("What the hell's coming off!")
you are riding in it."

Many took that ride through Brautigan's 19 books. His best novel, Trout Fishing in America, sold more than 3 million copies to a youthful audience undeterred by surreal wordplay or a narrative that parodied naturalistic storytelling when it didn't ignore such conventions entirely. Trout Fishing made readers leap through a collage of prose fragments, tracing Brautigan's poetic associations instead of a plot.

Some of those same qualities appear in Edna Webster's manuscript. In "A Love Letter from State Insane Asylum," Brautigan triggers associative sparks by setting a melodramatic title beside his tale's deadpan language:

"Once I reached for a biscuit.
My daddy was mad.
He hit my hand with his fork.
That made me cry."

Here Brautigan borrows the hammering simplicity of Hemingway's earliest sketches—and puts it to his own use in a sleight-of-hand act of narrative compression that delivers an entire boyhood in a dozen grim vignettes.

As conscious of literary sources as Donald Barthelme or David Foster Wallace, Brautigan would often step back to comment on his own writing, or allow characters to do so. In one of these early stories, a dispute with a lover causes a man to say: "That's awfully damn nice." The woman responds: "Don't start talking like someone from Hemingway Land." In 1956, the game doesn't go much further; a decade later, Brautigan would learn to spin long comic riffs from such stuff.

The borrowing is less deliberate—and less successful—elsewhere in the current volume. Poems such as "A Woman's Eyes" or "Cats" resemble a high school boy's maudlin versions of e.e. cummings. Callow sentimentality mars "Would You Like to Saddle Up a Couple of Goldfish and Ride to Alaska," a tale of young love that goes flat when the beloved turns out to be another deceased maiden from the prop room of romantic poesy.

Then, when one is about to discard the book, Brautigan delivers:

"The Maggots
will eat
the brains
that felt
and wondered
and wrote
these poems.

Let the maggots
have their fun.
They
only
live once."

Such work has the epigrammatic intensity and truth-telling directness of graffiti from Pompeii. It may seem simple—but, of course, that's the hardest trick for a writer.

Brautigan's gift to Edna Webster has all the flaws of daring: To put sentiment in writing, one must risk sentimentality; to find wonder in the commonplace, one must sometimes seem commonplace in the eyes of ironic readers. Finally, however, the poet reminds readers that:

"Pretend
is
a city
bigger
than New York,
bigger
than
all the cities
at once."

Go there with Richard Brautigan and you might not want to return.

Davenport,1970

"C'est Magnifique mais Ce N'est pas Daguerre"
Guy Davenport
Hudson Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 1970, p. 154-161.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

[Text deleted . . .]

Mr. Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar are experimental pieces of quite spirited conception. The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster is a book of poems, and therefore exempt from our purview here. The first page of Trout Fishing in America is a photograph of the author and his wife dressed as character actors in a cowboy movie. Behind them is a statue of Franklin, and the setting is Washington Square in San Francisco. Mr. Brautigan explains the significance of the photograph:

"Around the base of the statue are four words facing the directions of the world, to the east WELCOME, to the west WELCOME, to the north WELCOME, to the south WELCOME. Just behind the statue are three poplar trees, almost leafless except for the top branches. The statue stands in front of the middle tree. All around the grass is wet from the rains of early February.

"In the background is a tall cypress tree, almost dark like a room. Adlai Stevenson spoke under the tree in 1956, before a crowd of 40,000 people.

"There is a tall church across the street from the statue with crosses, steeples, bells, and a vast door that looks like a huge mousehole, perhaps from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and written above the door is "Per l'Universo."

"Around five o'clock in the afternoon of my cover for Trout Fishing in America, people gather in the park across the street from the church and they are hungry.

"It's sandwich time for the poor.

"But they cannot cross the street until the signal is given. Then they all run across the street to the church and get their sandwiches that are wrapped in newspaper. They go back to the park and unwrap the newspaper and see what their sandwiches are all about.

"A friend of mine unwrapped his sandwich one afternoon and looked inside to find just a leaf of spinach. That was all.

"Was it Kafka who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . .

"Kafka who said, "I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic."

Mr. Brautigan's solicitude for the world he lives in and his impatient grasp of essences continue from their clear emergence in this opening passage all the way through an inspired book. Trout Fishing in America is a person, a place, a quality; anything, in fact, the author surrealistically wants it to be. It functions as a nonsense phrase of great power, and the author's spirited faith that he need never explain it is the happy—and only—ground on which we may approach the book.

Most of what's printed in our time is either spiel or bilge. Mr. Brautigan locates his writing on the barricade which the sane mind maintains against spiel and bilge, and here he cavorts with a divine idiocy, thumbing his nose. But he makes it clear that at his immediate disposal is a fund of common sense he does not hesitate to bring into play. He is a kind of Thoreau who cannot keep a straight face.

His prose is handy with apt similes. "Like astigmatism, I made myself at home." His imagination is magnificently nimble. His sense of the ridiculous is delirious, a gift from the gods. "The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section. It is the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food."

Mr. Brautigan is not a Surrealist, nor yet a fantasist. I would place him among the philosophers, for his central perception is that the world makes very little sense to a man with a plain mind. He has made his will stubborn against the tinsel and whorish fabric of society. He might even claim that he has described the world with a strong measure of accuracy; Lord knows novelists who sound a lot less peculiar than Mr. Brautigan have tampered with their subjects more than he to achieve such astounding fairy tales as the mysteries of Erle Stanley Gardner.

In Watermelon Sugar is a more sober and mysterious work than Trout Fishing in America. Mr. Brautigan calls it a novel, and it satisfies that designation in a very strange and new way. Trout Fishing is a festival, and invites a musical analogy; In Watermelon Sugar is myth, and is closer to the poem than the novel. Both these works show Mr. Brautigan to be one of the most gifted innovators in our literature.

[Text deleted . . .]

Feld,1971

"A Double with Christina"
Michael Feld
London Magazine, Aug./Sep. 1971, pp. 150-152.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Mr. Blurber tells us "Richard Brautigan is a young writer whose revolutionary prose style, already a cult among the young, has begun to win the awed admiration of Establishment critics." Mr. Blurber, pull those socks up! Your list of Richard's fans is unnecessarily scant.

> Aren't you aware psychiatrists doing a roaring trade in rich young ladies who've lost the will to live tip Richard as therapy in an each way double with Christina Rossetti? That he's currently heavily backed by pushers of brown sugar and watercress and nut omelettes—people so determined to achieve a more beautiful and profound vision of things they reconcile the implacable eating of "natural" food with the swallowing, inhaling and injecting of various chemical concoctions? Indeed, he's namedropped in most places where there's lots of sensitivity and modernity and drugs and no commonsense going on, where cool languid personalities slump about passing joints like sweaty kisses, speaking of power to the people and freedom and the plight of the gipsies. Such figures are fully paid-up members of the ever expanding market for Richard and his California prose poetry, an eminently greasy brand of verbal psychedelicatessen.

In Watermelon Sugar has the narrator and his friends "travelling to the length of their dreams, living . . . where the sun shines a different colour each day" and "in the Watermelon Works watermelons are turned into sugar which shapes their lives."

Have you the Rennies ready? Then swallow this extract.

"I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.

"If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
"That is my name.
"Perhaps it was raining very hard.
"That is my name.
"Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong . . . and you had to do something else.
"That is my name.
"Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
"That is my name.
"Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
"That is my name."

There are six more What You Dids and That Is My Names. All make you keener than ever to take up the invitation "Just call me whatever is in your mind." But no, mustn't be flip—better look on the bright side. For like most "revolutionary prose styles" what this one displays above anything else is a distaste for work. Consequently on some pages there's next to nothing. Page 40 is a bonanza in this respect. Under a heading "Hands" set a third of the way down the page we have "We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love." It's difficult to detect whether one is meant to be overwhelmed by the sentiment and phrasing of these handpicked words, or by a sense of relief at their paucity.

A Confederate General from Big Sur has a dustcover picture of Brautigan and a girl. The three novels have dustcovers featuring him and a girl but this is the best of the girls and she isn't very pretty compared even to Brautigan. Inside the world is a dopey wedding with storyteller Jesse linking with Lee Mellon who had a great-grandfather who was a Confederate general and they live in a Chinese dentist's house before moving to Big Sur where there are girls and alligators and frogs and everything is joyous and jubilant and packed tight with pulchritude. The book also has 186,000 endings per second—none of which come a moment too soon bearing in mind the writing goes something like this.

"There was the old standby, that faithful servant of the walls: the Manolete bullfight poster you see again and again upon the wall of the young ladies. How well they like that poster and how it likes them. They take care of each other.

"There was a guitar with the word LOVE written on the back, and the strings of the guitar were turned to the wall as if the wall should suddenly begin to plink out a little tune, a few snatches of "Greensleeves" or the "Midnight Special."

"'What are you doing?' Elaine said, staring softly at me. Sexual satisfaction had puzzled her face. She was like a child that had just awakened from its nap, though she had never been asleep.

"I was pleased with myself for it had been a long time or seemed so, and pleased I was with myself again, and again pleased to be pleased again."

In Trout Fishing in America Richard's pen dipped in shmalz herring evokes "a world of gentle magic and marvellous laughter, the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible." (This boy gets so much value out of that workhorse Beauty it's time her union pushed him for a holiday.) Specimen here-with.

"ANOTHER METHOD OF MAKING WALNUT CATSUP

"And this is a very small cookbook for Trout Fishing in America as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet and Trout Fishing in America had Maria Callas for a girlfriend and they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles.

"Compote of Apples

"Take a dozen golden pippins . . .

"And Maria Callas sang to Trout Fishing in America as they ate their apples together.

"A Standing Crust for Great Pies

"Take a peck of flour . . .

"And Trout Fishing in America smiled at Maria Callas as they ate their pie crust together.

"A Spoonful Pudding

"Take a spoonful of flour . . .

"And Trout Fishing in America said "The moon's coming out." And Maria Callas said, "Yes it is."

"Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup

"Take green walnuts . . .

"And Trout Fishing in America and Maria Callas poured walnut catsup on their hamburgers."

The author also expresses a desire to close the tract with the word "mayonnaise." The desire is fulfilled.

And despite an overdose of Rennies I suffer an oleagineous tasting aftermath from Richard's recipes. I burp and adjudge the flavour is similar to (a) wet and spurious Winifred God. Or (b) Papa Hemingway—when the emphasis was on the pap and his heart was in the wrong place, i.e. in his mouth. Like in the Lilian Ross interview when Papa claimed he loved his son very much and then went on to say in his lifetime he had also loved three continents, several airplanes and ships, the oceans, his sisters, wives, life and death, morning, noon, evening and night, honour bed, boxing, swimming, baseball, shooting, fishing, and reading and writing and all good pictures. Or (c) the kind of honest injun copy-writing favoured by cartels and monopolies in "prestige" flashyglib ads appearing in the "quality" press with the message, though we're vast we're no Sheriff of Nottingham, we're Robin Hood, do you realise half our turnover goes in developing new products for the benefit of humanity? Let's face it, I'm deranged. I can take a lack of harmony with psychiatrists and rich young ladies recuperating from insanity and cool languid naturally ed anarchical personalities and dope fiends and Mr. Blurber. I'd adapted to the news I was no longer young or on the side of the young. But to accept I'm never going to make the team as an Establishment critic—that's too much to bear.

Ketchum,1989

"Counterculture Classic: Richard Brautigan, A Whimsical Muse of Spirit of the '60s."
Diane Ketchum
The Tribune [Oakland, California], 5 Apr. 1989, pp. D1, D2.
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If Richard Brautigan had lived only four years longer, he would have enjoyed his own revival as a legend of the '60s. With nostalgia for that decade growing, Brautigan's publisher is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first trade edition of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar.

Published in 1969 with cover photos of Brautigan in full hippie regalia, these books transformed their author from just another scruffy San Francisco writer to a national spokesman for the counterculture.

The anniversary edition is a handsome omnibus paperback from the editor who launched Brautigan in the big-time, Seymour Lawrence of Houghton Mifflin. The first biography of Brautigan, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, by Keith Abbott, is also being published by Capra Press in Santa Barbara.

When Brautigan committed suicide at his Bolinas home in 1984, he wrote a sad end to one of the sweetest good-luck stories of the '60s, the life of a man who once was described as "crazy with optimism" by novelist Tom McGuane. It began with the 20-year-old Brautigan arriving in San Francisco in 1954 from the Northeast [sic], in time to join the tail end of the Beat Generation.

As his friend, UC English professor Ron Loewinsohn recalled at the time of Brautigan's death, he and Brautigan were among the poetry-struck kids who hung around North Beach with Allen Ginsberg, Michal McClure and Jack Spicer (Trout Fishing in America is dedicated to Spicer and Loewinsohn). Others remembered Brautigan later as a mature flower child in the Haight-Ashbury, where he worked with the Diggers during the height of the Haight scene.

His writer friends (what writer made and kept so many?) concur that Brautigan lived out the sunny spirit of that time in San Francisco, "the fun and freedom of the '60s," as novelist Herb Gold put it, remembering Brautigan's legendary street antics. He would accost women on Columbus Avenue to present them with his poems. He "published" seed packages with poems on the cover, titled Please Plant This Book.

It was during the '60s that Brautigan wrote four books that caught the spirit of invention and whimsy of what was called the counterculture. With their quietly musing heroes and quaint photos of Brautigan himself, these little books were creatures of the '60s avant-garde press, published by San Francisco editor Donald Allen's Four Seasons Foundation and by Grove Press.

Then in 1969, Brautigan was recommended to then Delacorte York editor Seymour Lawrence by Kurt Vonnegut, who had learned about him from students Vonnegut was teaching at Harvard. "He's a hero on college campuses," Vonnegut told Lawrence, who gave Brautigan $25,000 for his three books, which then sold 2 million copies.

Abbott's biography testifies to Brautigan's generosity once he became a money-making author. "When he was wealthy and a fixture at Enrico's outdoor Cafe in North Beach," Abbott writes, "I never saw Richard refuse a panhandler." He remained loyal to collaborators from his down-and-out days. He saw to it that the San Francisco photographer Edmund Shea, who took many of the memorable portraits, was written into the contract when his books were picked up by the big publishers.

Fittingly, the memorial edition has as its cover the most classic image of Brautigan, in his granny glasses and confederate general hat, in front of the statue of Benjamin Franklin in Washington Square park.

Of Brautigan's works, Trout Fishing in America is the book that transcends its interest as a hippie period piece. With its deadpan tone and sustained metaphor of the search for an unspoiled trout stream, it has its place in the tradition of American fiction, a successor in sentiment to Thoreau and Mark Twain.

"Trout Fishing" has the virtues Brautigan himself is remembered for in Keith Abbott's memoir—a sweetness of disposition, an original sense of humor, with a profound melancholy underneath. Brautigan's inventiveness as a street character comes to life in Abbott's biography. The two writers became friends in 1966 in the Haight-Ashbury, when they were both poor. Abbott records his days accompanying Brautigan as they took walks in Golden Gate Park, stopped off at City Lights Books and made the rounds of the North Beach restaurants and bars.

In the next decade, when he had money, Brautigan bought a ranch in Montana. He spent less time in San Francisco and Bolinas and more with Montana friends such as Peter Fonda and Tom McGuane. There were extended stays in Japan, where he met his second wife, whom he unhappily divorced two years before he died.

Although he kept on writing, friends such as his agent Helen Braun reported that Brautigan felt increasingly out of touch with his audience. Hostile reviews and dwindling financial resources were worrying him at the time of his death.

If there is a theme buried in these artifacts of Brautigan's life, it is of a talent for friendship that flourished during his bohemian San Francisco years, but led him into trouble later, when he began fraternizing with the famous. But the principal lesson from Abbott's book is that writer's lives do not necessarily make exciting reading.

There was nothing dramatic about the shape of Brautigan's life, nor should we expect there to be. As a writer, he was a miniaturist, an artist of the fleeting moment of personal perception. In even as celebratory a biography as this one, such moments can sound trivial. Brautigan was his own best biographer, distilling the artistry of his life in his books.

Maillard,1970

"Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar"
Keith Maillard
Broadside/Free Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), vol. 9, no. 5, 22 April 1970, p. 8.
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Well, the Delacorte Press has put Brautigan's three paperbacks into a hard back, tacked the exorbitant price of $6.96 on it, and, without much effort at all (the hard back is an exact reproduction of the paperbacks, all the way to the covers) have made themselves an easy buck. It's a pretty edition if you're into laying out that much money for a book; if you've got light fingers, it's worth picking up. Brautigan's stuff bears reading over and over again; the hardcover edition will stand up to that.

Brautigan's poetry ("THE PILL," etc) is in the Imagist tradition and is as good as the best in that tradition. He hasn't got a single hang up with "poetic diction" left, builds his short, hard poems out of everyday speech. It's harder than it looks to do this sort of thing, let down the tension of eye heart brain for a moment and it goes soft and flaccid. But Brautigan never falters. God knows what they'd tell us in some English department about him, but fuck that, he's good. This is my favorite:

The Quail
There are three quail in a cage
     next door,
and they are the sweet delight
     of our mornings, calling to us like small frosted
     cakes:
bobwhitebobwhitebobwhite,
but at night they drive our
     God-damn Jake crazy.
They run around that cage like
     pinballs
as he stands out there,
smelling their asses through
     the wire.

TROUT FISHING is a collection, or collage maybe, of little stories and anecdotes. There is damn little precedent for what he's doing here, a mood a little like Thurber, a style a little like the nutty old German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Each piece ends with a spark, like the charged ending of a haiku or a good joke, a kick in the brain. When I read Trout Fishing, I laughed a lot.

I've got to resist the temptation to call WATERMELON SUGAR a vision of an anarchist utopia, or an allegory. It's not like anything at all. It's a wonderful story, stayed in my head for weeks after I read it. In the Boston Globe of a month or so ago I saw a review of Watermelon Sugar laid out by some ass hole English professor. He put down Brautigan for being "sentimental." Shit. Sure he's sentimental. So what? When I have kids, I'll read Watermelon Sugar before they go to sleep at night.

McGuane,1970

"An Optimist vis-a-vis the Present"
Thomas McGuane
The New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 1970, Sec. 7, p. 49.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

"Three books in the manner of their original publication," says the publisher. These are photo-offsets. The original editions were part of the distinguished Writing Series, edited by Donald Allen and published by the Four Seasons Foundation in San Francisco. Now "Brautigan" is a fashionable watchword; and this fat volume shows us that, dangerous as it may be to his potent coterie status, he has earned the embarrassment of success.

It is often difficult to recommend Brautigan to an audience accustomed to being regularly bored by whatever apocalyptic surrealist of the week is blocking their drive-way. The usual factional slogans don't seem to help in explaining his magic. It is perhaps easier to make the common reader see it, with his ordinary expectations in fiction. For what is important is that Brautigan's outlandish gift is based in traditional narrative virtues. His dialogue is supernaturally exact; his descriptive concision is the perfect carrier for his extraordinary comic perceptions. Moreover, the books possess a springtime moral emptiness; essentially works of language, they offer no bromides for living.

The best of these three books is Trout Fishing in America. It is not really interesting to consider whether it is a novel, as it is called. Suffice it to say that it makes any number of rather generous bids for the reader's attention. Its comic apprehensions range with suppleness from some familiar Western yarn styles to something as seductively spaced as Michaux or Flann O'Brien. And yet a coherence, perhaps of pitch, allows Brautigan to elaborate the work without the disjunction familiar in the by now orthodox surrealist novel. The book strikes us as altogether serious without offering the familiar heavy-weight tags, the magnum themes which the heavies of big time Am. Lit. never tire of intoning.

Brautigan is conspicuously the performer. To the reader accustomed to novels tiresomely self-contained and scrupulously unsympathetic, he offers shameless fictional show-boating. He is not constantly tripping on the heart of darkness and coming up in maladroit black-humor glee to confirm our worst suspicions. He seems crazy with optimism. Like some widely gifted Rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere. Those who are claiming Trout Fishing in America as a classic might base their claims for continuity in exactly this optimism. Gentleness is his obsession, personal and ecological. Stylistically, his American next of kin is Kenneth Patchen; but the sunniness reminds the reader of not only people like Thoreau and W.C. Williams but the infrequently cited Zane Grey.

The poems (The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster) probably ought not to be taken by themselves, but as grace notes tempermentally continuous with the fictions. It is fairest to think of the poems as charming; at their worst, they are self-consciously occasional—camp, cheerful items, full of silliness and misplaced exclamation marks, by now brutally familiar in the hands of Padgett, Berrigan and others. Apparently relaxed in their poetics, they are in fact strenuously à la mode. Therefore, in a talent as heedless of convention as Richard Brautigan's, they disappoint. Without the fictions to refer them to, they would seem to be merely bad poems.

In Watermelon Sugar is a relentlessly enigmatic, even ethereal novel; and it cannot be summarized. In setting out its unearthly fictional conventions, it is concrete to the point of a kind of studied anti-selectivity. Through whole pages people talk assiduously of nothing whatever. But very gradually the fiction sets, in a cluster of related effects, quite new in feeling, in some ways the book is reminiscent of Sir Herbert Read's "The Green Child," and though the corollaries are doubtless accidental, Read's crystal universe and Brautigan's land of iDEATH seem to poise their weight at the same pitch to reality. The problem is that by restricting himself to an objective parable style, Brautigan has ruled out the strengths that make Trout Fishing in America so energetic and striking. Though In Watermelon Sugar is done with obvious capability, it seems to proceed from a kind of cerebral preoccupation with which Brautigan is not entirely comfortable.

But that is scarcely the main thing. This is an important publication, without the desolating tedium of recent literary "importance." These books are fun to read. By opening yourself to them, you can get all the old fictional good things. Right there in your own unimaginable home you can laugh, tingle, cry and admire. And much of the style lies in Brautigan's speed of delivery.

Norman,1969

"Energy and Whimsy"
Albert H. Norman
Newsweek, 29 Dec. 1969, pp. 54-55.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan's novels are as informal as an open house—everyone and everything is welcome. Touted by the underground, Brautigan has been entertaining his guests ever since Grove Press published his A Confederate general from Big Sur in 1965. The Delacorte edition, two novels and a collection of poems, was previously published in the Four Seasons Writing Series.

Trout Fishing in America is not a book for the sportsman to get hooked on. Brautigan is an outdoorsman, but far out. His work abounds with wildlife, but not of the Field and Stream variety. A compleat angler, Brautigan drops his lines into a clear pool of consciousness, and reels in some very strange fish.

Brautigan lures the reader with eclectic bait. He combines the surface finality of Hemingway, the straightforwardness of Sherwood Anderson and the synesthetic guile of Baudelaire. Blunt and sparing with his words, Brautigan packs his creel with evocative symbols. His stories are at once as open as the Pacific Northwest, and as meticulous as a water bug on Salt Creek. Wandering from stream to stream, Brautigan small-talks, writes letters, concocts recipes, makes love and even catches trout. His stories collapse like an accordion, bending everything out of shape. It all takes place so fast that his books must be called subliminal suites: in 28 lines, Leonardo da Vinci invents a new spinning lure, calls it "The Last Supper," sells 10,000 to the Vatican, and gets testimonials from 34 ex-Presidents of the United States.

Brautigan wants to befriend the earth, not shake it. His style and wit transmit so much energy that energy itself becomes the message. "There was a fine thing about that trout," Brautigan writes at one point, "I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy." Brautigan strains to live, he explodes every simile ("His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord"), makes all the senses breathe. Only a hedonist could cram so much life into a single page.

Brautigan's collected poems, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, are too uneven to be truly satisfying. He lacks the abstract depth of Wallace Stevens and the focus of William Carlos Williams. The poems are too casual, like an untucked shirt. The title poem is a typical example: "When you take your pill/it's like a mine disaster./I think of all the people/lost inside of you." The wit is aborted, premature. A poem like "Man" is simply too hurried: "With his hat on/he's about five inches taller/than a taxicab." Mocking the imagist tradition, and yet pointing up his own weakness, Brautigan writes: "A piece of green pepper/fell/off the wooden salad bowl:/so what?"

Tigers: In Watermelon Sugar, a novel in three parts, is Brautigan at his best. Every page is gracefully complex. The characters in this naïve allegory are as sweet as sugar. The writing melts in your mouth. He creates a backwater civilization reminiscent of Tolkien, a fragile world of polite chitchat, talking tigers and multicolored suns. The hero ("just call me whatever is in your mind") leads a gentle life. He likes Pauline, who makes good stew and wears a real nice dress. He doesn't like Margaret, who hangs around with inBOIL, a drunkard, and that gang of his. They all live in shacks near iDEATH, "a good place." The delicate balance of iDEATH is upset by Margaret's jealousy and inBOIL's scheming. A violent mutilation scene, more blood than sugar, fails to upset the final fantasy. Boy gets girl, iDEATH survives and everyone dances around a trout stream to masque-like orchestration.

"Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar," says the hero, "and then traveled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones." Brautigan, at 34, is carrying his craft down those same roads. "Expressing a human need," he muses, "I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word mayonnaise." Traveling on sheer whimsy, the Brautigan novel speeds by like a dream, encompassing everything—even mayonnaise.

O'Hara1970

"Happier (but Not Holier) than Thou"
J. D. O'Hara
Chicago Tribune Book World, 11 Jan. 1970, p. 3.
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Restless readers wishing to be in touch with the newest of the new; unfashionable readers tired of nightclub Jewish jokes and Maileresque navel-gazing; and readers without sexual hang-ups, tired of writers with them . . . come all ye to Brautigan and find peace. That's right, peace. Richard Brautigan, in those prose and verse works, is funny but seldom satiric, sometimes bored but hardly ever angry, frequently happier than you but never holier than thou. One of his verses imagines "a cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together," a world of people "returned to our mammal / brothers and sisters, / and all watched over / by machines of loving grace"; and this gently witty reconciliation of disparate worlds is one of his repeated achievements. Another is acceptance. His existence is like ours, full of aggravations and failures, but without being at all Pollyanna-ish he manages to make the best—however mediocre it might be—of a seedy world. One example: in Trout Fishing he tells about making love to his woman in a grim pond named Worsewick, stagnant and full of dead fish:

"I remember a dead fish floated under her neck. I waited for it to come up on the other side, and it came up on the other side.

"Worsewich was nothing fancy."

That's a marvelous understatement, and marvelously without bitterness.

The scene mentioned, incidentally, is no aquatic Kama Sutra. Brautigan's heroes are generally himself, more or less costumed; but unlike the modern author-hero he doesn't come on as a ramrod, a love machine, a superstar; in sex as in other areas he's mild, unassuming, and given to self-deprecation. In one of his verses, in fact, he laments: "If I were dead / I couldn't attract / a female fly." Such Twainian exaggeration and understatement locate Brautigan in an old tradition of West Coast humor, while the many fishing scenes recall the pastoral side of Hemingway. It's not a close resemblance, however. Hemingway's heroes go to nature (and women) to prove themselves and to escape civilization; Brautigan's couldn't care less about proving themselves, and they connect nature and civilization effortlessly.

Connection, in fact, is what Brautigan is best at; it characterizes his style. Here's his title poem;

"When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster,
I think of all the people
lost inside of you."

His prose is even better, and is loaded with pleasing connections: "a few stubborn rainbow trout, seldom heard from, but there all the same, like certified public accountants"; "when the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid." Sometimes connection achieves larger ideas, for instance Shorty, in Trout Fishing, "a legless, screaming middle-aged wino . . . descended upon North Beach like a chapter from the Old Testament," but before Brautigan's through with him he's a Western Ratso Rizzo, foully lovable. And what a fine connection of disparates lies behind one of Trout Fishing's best chapters, "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," in which the Yard has a used trout stream for sale (by the foot).

Alas for the hazards of being reviewed! Brautigan at secondhand is all too likely to sound merely whimsical and cute. He is not: what underlies these games is a modern fatalism, not maudlin fatheadedness.

The Pill is a collection of minor verses; Trout Fishing and In Watermelon Sugar are novels, roughly. Like his Confederate General from Big Sur (available in Grove paperback), Trout Fishing is about life in reality. In Watermelon, the scene is sweetly fantastic and the narrator is not a Brautigan but a simple-minded fellow chuckleheadedly pursuing happiness with, or at the expense of, two women. In the earlier novels the prosaic workaday surface of reality was repeatedly illuminated by the charm of the narrator's happy imaginings. In this one the spun-sugar simplifications of organized happiness the naive placidity of the narrator are repeatedly darkened by our perception of real misery, jealousy, frustration and unrequited love. It is more complicated technically and more disturbing emotionally than the earlier works, and it suggests that you should, while reading all the Brautigan now available, look forward to the Brautigan yet to come.

Parumba,1969

"Richard Brautigan's 3 & 1 & 3 in 1 Books"
Arthur Parumba
The Fifth Estate [Chicago], vol. 4, no. 16, 24 Dec. 1969, p. 17.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

O.K. now, I got to tell you about what I am writing about. It is 3 books and another one, and I guess, another one. They are called Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar and all three of them together (they cost about 2 dollars each in paperback and you can buy (ed. note: steal) all three of them together in hardcover for about 8 dollars). All from Delacorte Press, I guess, and The Confederate General from Big Sur (a buck ninety five from Grove Press) and they were all written by Richard Brautigan who is a crazy man.

Well, anyway, let me tell you what happened. You see, I run this gas station, and I'm not a hippy or anything like that but, well, I guess I can say it here, see I smoke a little stuff now & then cuz it is fun and I like to and I have a friend who is nuts kind of and well he gets me the stuff some time. Well, you see, one day he came to Parumba's Shell Station (whooppee, free advertising) and had some weed & this book about trout fishing he wanted me to read so I went home (I don't read very much, mostly just the sports page but I fish down at the river, behind Cobo Hall, once in a while and catch some sheepshead now & then & maybe a silver bass so I thought I'd read this book & maybe I'll like it) so I went home & smoked the weed & turned on the T.V. but the game wasn't on & I was fucked up, I mean, really Fucked Up & I couldn't think of anything to do so I ate some food & called up Sue (she gives) but she wasn't home so I went to bed, Fucked Up, & Then [sic] I remembered the book so I went to bed wearing my Shell pajamas with Artie written across the pocket. Just me, my PJs, & this crazy guy's book.

WOW

I really liked this book, I didn't understand it very much cuz it was really crazy but I like it & I laughed a lot & the whole things funny & about half way through my high started to wear off but another took its place & I couldn't believe it cuz I WAS FUCKED UP FROM READING A BOOK, I finished the book about three hours later & fell asleep with my toes smiling, and my stomach smiling, & my face was smiling too, & my bed, & my pajama's were smiling, a people were dying in Viet Nam with smiles of their faces, a cars were smiling as the crashed into one another & THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD WAS SMILING AS HARD AS IT COULD. that's what I dreamed & that's what I knew [sic].

So, the next day at work my friend came in again & he said how did you lke the weed & I said Nelson, that's his name, I said Nelson, the weed was good & that book was great, Great, GREAT, GREAT!!! & he just smiled & said he'd bring me another one. and two days later he did [sic]. And it was called The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster & it wasn't a story like the other one. It was poetry, & I told Nelson that (don't ever call him Nellie, cuz he will smash your head in if you do) and he said, yep, that's poetry all right but read it anyway & so I did & it wasn't like the poetry they made me read in school but it was good, I mean I liked it & it made sense to me & some were like on a trip & then some were real real, I mean about real things, like fucking, & VD, & getting high & catfish & it was good too & I liked it but I wouldn't want to read it for the rest of my life & I told that to my friend & he said OK, then read this one & it was about a town called Watermelon Sugar & it was so funny that I almost died laughing & I even cried in one part cuz it was sad & they were bad guys & good guys, & the good guys got all the broads & the bad guys were weird & everything worked out almost all right & I knew that it would & it's another good book for you to read if you like fun things.

Anyway I found out this guy only has one more book that you can buy & it's about living in the woods, & alligators & frogs so I asked Nelson to get it for me & he did & it's as good as Trout Fishing in America, the best thing I ever read, I mean it's a tie & everybody will like it & I read the fishing book and the Confederate General from Big Sur both four times now & they're both so good that even smart people will like them & people like me & everybody cuz they're the best books in the world & I was even going to take a vacation to this Big Sur place cuz I want to meet Lee Mellon & Jesse (they're the stars of this book) & ask them to come back to Detroit & work in my gas station cuz they'd be fun & if you can't come with me, then at least read the book read all 4 of them & tell everybody to read them & everybody will stop fighting cuz they'll know what the books mean & if you are not sure if you want to read these books, come by my gas station & I'll tell you some more.

I made all the people who work there read them including Jimmy who was the meanest baddest motherfucker you ever seen & after he read them he started smiling a lot & I went away for a weekend last month & when I came back my gas station was painted orange & blue & green & I found out Jimmy is the one who did this & everybody I know who has read these books is happy & even my gas station smiles now & everything is shiny, even the rest rooms & you'll always be happy & you can't get busted for reading his books yet & if you don't read them I'll come looking for you with a smile on my face, & with my gentle gun & I'll shoot you full of gentle bullets.

Walters,1970

"Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar"
Richard Walters
Masterplots 1970 Annual. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1970, pp. 56-62.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Lyrical jaunts through a singular land, a geography of joy, sadness, and special madness, hitherto uncharted and unrecognized.

Leave that hallowed pigeon-hole for more stodgy scholars, those who will, 'tis rumored, inherit the earth,—Richard Brautigan is not the promising young writer of the year. For he takes not his writing seriously, and he shall not be blessed; neither shall he receive his portion of the final inheritance. And as he is artlessly irreverent and so wildly funny, so shall he be sent to bed without his supper.

He blasphemes the continuing traditions of American literature, neglects the monuments of Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain, defies the timeless enigmas of man, and shuns the proper, proven subjects and characters. This is no way for a promising young writer to become " . . . a promising young writer, presently at work on another novel. . . ." This is no way for any writer to rest timelessly, smiling from his dust jacket like a suburban Buddha, with, surely, the Great American Novel up his sleeve. This is certainly no way to be "scorching," "searing," "revealing," "leering," "daring," "ruthless," "lusty," "loyal," "helpful," "friendly," "courteous," or "kind."

Or rich.

He wasn't in 1964 when the Grove Press published his A Confederate General from Big Sur, and he still wasn't in 1968 when they reissued it in paperback. It was a bad year for dark horses. And now that Delacorte Press has released under its imprint this collection, first published quietly in 1967 and 1968 by the Four Seasons Foundation in San Francisco, we have, in effect, three new short works by the author of nothing anybody ever heard of.

So it is difficult to proceed, unarmed as we are, with no convenient facts to gird our loins, with little literary reputation to take up and guide our venture, with no syllabus for another new school of humor. After all, it is difficult to be dapper and demure, when, in a bookstore browsing, say, we pull down this curious volume and calmly lift the cover, expecting words like molasses to gurgle out slowly—sturdy words, familiar and predictable. It's difficult when the front flap flashes its sole greeting:

"Welcome,
you are just a few pages away
from Trout Fishing in America"

But quite appropriate, if highly irregular! Is that clerk smirking, enjoying our befuddlement? Does it show? Is this like stumbling onto an unknown land, only to find it thoughtfully labeled "Unknown Land"? Are we laughing at Brautigan, or is he . . .? And with shaky dignity we nervously flip through the pages, hoping that if someone has our goat, he will return it quietly before we are forced to notice it is gone.

Yet this devilish overture is sincere enough: Come to Trout Fishing in America, come to Happytown, U.S.A., overlooking the banks of the Chase Manhattan, Come, meet the Kool-Aid wino who dissolves his youthful sorrows in unsweetened, half-strength instant nickel nectar. Come learn, when all else fails, how to catch more minnows with "the dregs of a distant vanilla pudding." Read how an eleven-inch rainbow trout died from a drink of port wine. Peer into the life a kindly book-pimp, into the trout fishing diary of Alonso Hagen, who lost 2,231 trout in the seven years he went fishing. Read how Trout Fishing in America Shorty was almost shipped to Nelson Algren in Chicago. Thrill to the deed of of the sixth-grade trout fishing in America terrorists who scribbled "Trout Fishing in America" on the backs of all the first-graders. Consider the Cleveland Wrecking Yard where a used trout stream is on sale for only six dollars and fifty cents a foot, waterfalls for nineteen dollars a foot. Come to Trout Fishing in America America, land of the endless camping craze, where "there's always a single feature, a double feature, and an eternal feature playing . . . ," and seldom is heard a discouraging world, and the skies are not cloudy all day:

"Unit 4 has a stove. It was a square metal box mounted on a cement block. There was a stove pipe on top of the box, but there were no bullet holes in the pipe. I was amazed. Almost all the camp stoves we had seen in Idaho had been full of bullet holes. I guess it's only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some old stove sitting in the woods.

"Unit 4 had a big wooden table with benches attached to it like a pair of those old Benjamin Franklin glasses, the ones with those funny square lenses. I sat down on the left lens, facing the Sawtooth Mountains. Like astigmatism, I made myself at home."

Like a poet (which he may well be), Brautigan is at home in this land, this jumble of unlikely similes, myopic understatement, provincial tomfoolery, and beguiling simplicity. Like a lyric improvisationalist (which is surely is), Brautigan dances on his homemade stage, nimbly skirting any semblance of plot, moving through position and impersonations, rakish and vaudevillian in his threadbare continuity:

"He wore a costume of trout fishing in America. He wore mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt. Deep water flowed through the lilies that were entwined about his shoelaces. A bullfrog kept croaking in his watch pocket and the air was filled with the sweet smell of ripe blackberry bushes.

"He wore trout fishing in America as a costume to hide his own appearance from the world while he performed his deed of murder in the night.

"Who would have expected?

"Nobody!

"Scotland Yard!

"(Pouf!)

"They were always a hundred miles away, wearing halibut-stalker hats, looking under the dust.

"Nobody ever found out."

Nobody? Is something going on between the lines? This doesn't seem to have much to do with trout fishing, really. What does Scotland Yard have to do with a Kool-Aid wino, the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, the trout fishing in America terrorists, Nelson Algren in Chicago? Whatever does Trout Fishing in America have to do with trout fishing anywhere . . . anything? Is this man trying to tell us something smuggling these peculiar passages out under the cover of Trout Fishing in America? Perhaps he is being secretly detained, a political prisoner paying for his nefarious associations. Perhaps he is being held in some mountain hideaway, ostensibly a respectable fish hook factory, a pawn of the junto? A Communist plot? An imminent takeover?

Help!

But this is fiction . . . remember? And it really is about trout fishing. No matter how divergent the text, the theme persists. It is, however, illusive, as insistent as fishbones in beanery fillet:

"The fish ran deep again and I could feel its life energy screaming back up the line to my hand. The line felt like sound. It was like an ambulance siren coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and taking to the air and becoming an air-raid siren. . . .

"There was a fine thing about that trout, I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood his body."

This is trout fishing, not just decent expository writing, lucid and fact-filled, a slick textbook for fishing buffs. For without satire, obtrusive symbolism or supratextual meanings, here trout fishing is the subject in earnest, presented honestly and without affectation. But here neither the sport itself nor the writing of it is utilitarian—this is, after all, in keeping with the proper attitude of fishing. Surely a fisherman in America does not fish merely to catch or to be catching, to eat or to battle the living, thrashing weight at the end of the line. Likewise, Trout Fishing in America is not written merely to be informative or to be engaging in its breezy, child-wise style. For the whole spirit of Trout Fishing in America is the very spirit of trout fishing—a consuming passion, not a sport; an insane urge to get out and tramp around the gigglyweeds; a river-fresh, quiet dialogue between all that's out there and all that's in here; a hushed unity. The seeming flippancy that Brautigan falls into is the same madness that makes fishermen rush to the vine-snarled arms, twisted limbs, and shimmering, yielding pools of the Great Outdoors. The fantasy and daydreaming he so often exhibits in his loose vignettes is the identical reverent, passive madness that Izaak Walton probably knew but didn't care to comment on, doubtlessly fearing exposure. By now, we should expect that of Walton and this of Brautigan:

"The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.

"Sometimes when I went fishing in there, I felt like a telephone repairman. . . ."

The plot thickens, as best it can under these bizarre circumstances, and every character is duped into compliance, ruthlessly maimed and named after the title. We knew it all along! This is more than mere poetic license; it must be one of the original, long-lost perversions to which other writers, the scapegoats of our uneasy social conscience, often succumb. We will not likewise be duped by this thin disguise—"WITNESS FOR TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA PEACE," indeed! It is as if every character were a slave, humiliated and profaned, a hardbound, jacketed copy of the very book Brautigan is supposed to be writing.

Now it is fairly common to make a movie about making a movei, and certainly there are many novels about writing novels. Never before, however, has anyone dared to write a book starring itself: Trout Fishing in America (L.C. #67-19577), starring Trout Fishing in America (L.C. #67-19577). This is an incest Faulkner never knew.

Probably there is something philosophical and semantic about this, but it should not be necessary to go into all of that. Even if we could . . . assuming, naturally, that it is not just our orderly minds that enforce this discipline. And since this book is so exquisitely funny, we should not be so serious about these things, anyway. For Brautigan supplies us both the poison and the antidote, the thesis and the antithesis—never presuming a synthesis, mind you, for this unemulsified combination of madness and philosophy. He is his own parody simultaneously chuckling at his reflection, naming his "characters" with suitable variants of the title,

" . . . as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet and Trout Fishing in America has Maria Callas for a girlfriend and they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles."

peopling his "stories" with mischievous personalities of the book he pretends to write:

"Well, well, Trout Fishing in America Shorty's back in town but I don't think it's going to be the same as it was before. These good old days are over because Trout Fishing in America Shorty is famous. The movies have discovered him.

"Last week "The New Wave" took him out of his wheelchair and laid him out in a cobblestone alley. Then they shot some footage of him. He ranted and raved and they put it down on film.

"Later on, probably, a different voice will be dubbed in. It will be a noble and eloquent voice denouncing man's inhumanity to man in no uncertain terms.

"'Trout Fishing in America Shorty, Mon Amour.'"

And like a mystic forest warden he thoughtfully posts signs to "guide" us through the upland trek, confusing us at every turn with an antic succession of names, labels, messages, and directions . . .,

"NO TRESSPASSING
4/17 OF A HAIKU

Or,

IF YOU FISH IN THIS CREEK
WE'LL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD"

Beware, a new comic is afoot, stomping on sacred toes left and right. Learn to recognize and fear him. Avoid him in dark alleys, on woodland trails, and do not accept candy from him . . . lest you die happy, a poor product of your times.

Less evangelical in its fervor and, sadly, much less successful in its overall effect is Brautigan's collection of verse, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, a selection of his poetry fom 1957 to 1968. This is a poor second to Trout Fishing in America, and frankly, it is rather embarrassing that such a meager poetic effort follows directly these brillant prose assemblages. Of course, may of them are as tidy and as humorous as fragments of Trout Fishing in America, but the precious magic is missing. Any resemblence, in fact, to any of his novels, living or dead, is purely intellectual.

Perhaps the finest poem and one of the few interesting entries is the first in this collection, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." Here Brautigan exhibits a tighter, almost classical structure, admittedly not one of his usual devices, and this together with his now familiar bouyant wistfulness produces a pleasant effect:

"I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

"I like to think
     (right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

"I like to think
     (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace."

No question here—this is indeed the proper substance and texture of poetry; it is praiseworthy where much of his verse is not. The distinction here, our root of judgement interestingly enough, is not how precise the word and image, but how fitting the form. Brautigan, like so many outstanding lyrical novelists, seems less adept at pure, crystaline poetry than we would allow . . . delivering just so much prose—bolt ends, leftovers—clumsily worked into poetry for disposal, so that nary a drop will be spilled. But this is both telltale and condescending. The distinction between poetry and prose should not be chiefly punctuation and, another variety of punctuation, the space-ordering of an otherwise blank and fully receptive page. Nor should imagery be a valid test, especially here with Brautigan who writes so often as rich a prose as is permissible. And since poems are seldom the same nice things that prose said quickly, neither should dimension be a distinction, the mass of poetry being properly no measure of it scope or content.

The important distinction should be phrasing—in poetry a phrasing so fine a seeing for the imagery and idea, so fine that a similar prose setting pales in the inevitable comparison. Take a suspect poem and, by changing only punctuation and space-ordering where necessary, rewrite it as a paragraph built of simple, cinder-block-like sentences. If it is still as meaningful, the original is not poetry. When rewritten as prose in this manner, many of Brautigan's poems betray their insufficiency in their original medium.

Still they are but harmless offenders, and many show their adolescent spunk even in the face of this indictment. And although we judge them at best as hybrids, this straight-laced fate is saddening and appears to be terribly hard-nosed. Perhaps we should be kinder and consider them only as footnotes secretly disguised as poetry, both footnotes to Trout Fishing in America and now a prologue to In Watermelon Sugar.

They are a prologue, however offhand and illfitting, to what to date is Brautigan's finest work, this time a novel in its purest form. For In Watermelon Sugar is his most highly stylized, and best-conceived and best-executed effort so far, a logical and durable combination of his casual, dazzling imagination, unusual and unpredictable eloquence, and honest humor. A Confederate General from Big Sur is a novel of manners, so to speak, a healthy serving of riotous, reeling joie de vivre, beach-bum style—a spirited comedy, Trout Fishing in America is rather a novel of madness and daydream, a novel only because it can be called nothing else decently, a sort of deranged pastoral. But In Watermelon Sugar is quite simply an opera, a complete story, fully staged and cast and set to the music of Brautigan's prose. And here he is more a poet than he is with his poetry:

"In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.

"Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.

"I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be.

"There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us."

Though it was written just a few years ago and only recently published, In Watermelon Sugar reads like an old, timeworn and perhaps time-honored testament of something very important, a testament of, perhaps, anything and everything here living. Certainly it doesn't read like every other novel and it isn't long, but every other word is sufficient. It is a legend about very real people in a very faraway land leading gentle lives, living and loving and dying, then to buried in quaint glass tombs at the bottom of a sparkling trout stream where they will be seen forever. It all happens at a place named iDEATH, a place where the principle activity is eating together and working at the Watermelon Works where everything that they need they make: "We take the juice from the watermelons and cook it down until there's nothing left but sugar, and then we work it into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives." iDEATH is a place where each day of the week the sun shines a different color, and the watermelons grow in those colors and become those colors, and all things made from them are those colors forever. iDEATH is a place in the shadow of the Forgotten Works where inBOIL and his drunken gang live and make the whiskey they are always drinking, making it from all the Forgotten Things they find. iDEATH is a place where the newspaper is published only once a year, where it is the custom to hold a dance in the trout hatchery after each funeral, and where Charlie, Fred, Al, Old Chuck, Margaret, Pauline, and the narrator (who doesn't have a name) all live and work together, making beautiful things of their lives. That's the way people do things there, in that strange fantasy land, In Watermelon Sugar.

But this is not really fantasy; it is the hard, cold order of things, tinted with fantastic colors. The characters are real, the emotions are real, and people really die there—only the places have been changed to protect our innocence. For without this protetive mantle of watermelon sugar, the story would be a betrayal, a sinisterly unrequited love, indefensible apathy in the name of a gentle life, and a mass suicide. Like opera, the stage is deliberately another world where every thought and emotion is a song, where daily tragedies portrayed seem beautiful and acceptable, elevated to the ranks of art, so that every horror is not another Auschwitz.

For In Watermelon Sugar is a near tragedy, initiated by Margaret's strange behavior and apparent betrayal, disappearing into the Forgotten Works to look for Forgotten Things for her collection the very morning inBOIL and his gang come drunk to iDEATH to show what iDEATH was "really like." In Watermelon Sugar is a near tragedy, advanced by the bloody conforntation in the trout hatchery where inBOIL and his drunken gang cut off their own thumbs, ears, and noses and bleed to death, sneering in some sort of mad and morbid protest. And In Watermelon Sugar is a near tragedy, confirmed by Margaret's eventual suicide:

"I saw Margeret climbing the apple tree beside her shack. She was crying and had a scarf knotted around her neck. She took the loose end of the scarf and tied it to a branch covered with young applels. She stepped off the branch and then was standing by herself on the air."

and later her burial, according to the custon, in silent, slow-moving waters:

"We saw the light shining up from Margaret, the light that came from the foxfire upon her robes. We took flowers and threw them upstream above her tomb.

"The flowers drifted down over the light coming from her: roses and daffodils and poppies and bluebells floated on by."

Remember the hilarious situations and lovably irresponsible characters of A Confederate General from Big Sur? Remember Trout Fishing in America with no situations and no characters to speak of, but nonetheless unforgettably and perhaps unforgivably funny, especially since Brautigan had the gall to write the book and we the nerve to read it? Remember how he continued his humor in a more fragmented fashion in The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and how we sentenced him to years of oblivion, post facto, for attempted poetry? Remembering all of this, we should be relieved that In Watermelon Sugar is not quite so outlandishly funny, that it is even sad and beautiful. Remembering all of this, we should remember also In Watermelon Sugar. The world will not, however, and has not. Brautigan, if he is hailed for anything, will be known for his comedy—pure and simple. Perhaps this is still another tragedy.