Aucoln,1980

"Crete Stop for Brautigan"
Jim Aucoln
Lincoln Journal and Star [Lincoln, Nebraska], 9 Nov. 1980, p. 15TV.
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The Tokyo-Montana Express is a railroad line that stretches from a small town in Montana to Tokyo, with a major stopover in San Francisco.

Its first stop, for the reader, is Crete, Neb. (the story is not supposed to make too much sense), where we learn of the death of Antonia, widow of Joseph Francl, a gold and all-around-adventure seeker in the late 19th century. After that the train moves on, seemingly without purpose, and never returns to Nebraska, except, of course, thematically.

Brautigan's latest book is less cohesive than his others, although cohesive plots have not been his literary birthmark. He has to be read much like a Fellini movie is watched, compiling the images one at a time into some coagulated whole at the end. The message is discovered somewhere beyond the nuts-and-bolts plot line and character development.

(There is no plot development in his book, nor is there very much character development; all the characters are presented as nameless pronouns.)

I have always enjoyed reading Brautigan. His books (this is his ninth novel) don't carry the weight of a great writer or even that of a great comic writer, such as Saul Bellow or perhaps Kurt Vonnegut (the jury is still out on the latter; the former has received a Nobel Prize). But he is a funny writer and, I think, a profound one.

It's awfully easy to pass off Brautigan's work as so much party potato chips: They're fun to ingest but not really anything to chew over. But I think he goes beyond the superficial and has meshed his general theme of the loneliness and emptiness of modern existence with his style of generic literature. It's simple. It's bare. It's unglamerous. It's a mirror reflection of reality in an age of nuclear proliferation, alientation and the lonely crowd.

There are many stark stares and bony scenes of loneliness in Brautigan's world, where the isolation of the human soul is accented by his sharp sense of irony and his harsh, black humor. To Brautigan, modern men and women cram daily into busy urban subways but remain always as alone as a single beat-up Chevy pickup bumping along a section of wide western Nebraska rangeland.

Brautigan is fun to read, but while he is yukking it up with the jokes, he is covering up a shattering sadness that indicts modern industrial society.

His greatest style strength is his conjuring up of image. The 1960s are characterized here as a middle-aged Indian woman searching for a lost tire chain in the snow. And this: "It was like trying to direct the events in a dream as we drove past him (a potential suicide victim standing on the Golden Gate Bridge) and on into San Francisco, the car moving like a reel of film, splicing and editing itself, taking us further away from him." Rubber bands become works of art, tossed perhaps uncaringly onto the sidewalk, to be pondered and then forgotten.

Brautigan gained a following in the culturally experimental 1960s and has held on pretty well, doing some of his better work just recently. Although The Tokyo-Montana Express doesn't rate as high as some, such as The Hawkline Monster and Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery, it clearly defines Brautigan's Wellanschauung, which is a view work knowing as America plunges into the 1980s.

Berry,1980

"Taking a Ride with Richard Brautigan"
John D. Berry
Washington Post Book World, 19 Oct. 1980, p. 14.
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Richard Brautigan's stories wear thin after a while. His strength is his originality, but after 13 years, the inversions and unlikely extended metaphors that caught our attention in Trout Fishing in America have lost their force. Maybe our attention was more easily caught in the 1960s.

Although I was delighted by Brautigan in the late '60s, I stopped keeping up with his books after The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, which came out in 1971. It was clear in that book that he was honing the edge of his writing, doing more extended and less diffuse work, turning his particular genius to more ambitious things. The gentle, comic writer of Trout Fishing and of that archetypal flower child's psychodrama, In Watermelon Sugar, was starting to create real characters and give them enough room to grow and change in the course of the story. In the succeeding years (while I wasn't paying attention) he wrote an erratic series of books, each one seeming to take up a single theme. The most sustained work is The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, with what for Brautigan is an elaborate plot, although its main characters come in pairs that are almost undistinguishable. The least successful of these later books is Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery, an examination of violence and arbitrary pain that reveals nothing.

Brautigan's new book, The Tokyo-Montana Express, is in the same mold as Trout Fishing in America. It consists of short, unrelated pieces, many of them less than a page long, which are little more than anecdotes and musings. This time he gives his title metaphor a break: although most of the pieces are set in either Japan or Montana, he does not belabor the connecting image. There's a focus now on aging that wasn't in Trout Fishing, and occasionally the daydreams are nasty. Most of the pieces are first-person, and they are all told from what seems to be a consistent point of view. In a prefatory remark, Brautigan says, "The 'I' in this book is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express," but the narrator is a character who may or may not resemble the real-life author but certainly gives the illusion of doing so. He resembles earlier Brautigan narrators, especially in Sombrero Fallout. This narrator seems to live part of the time in a small town in Montana and spends a long while in Japan, and at some points he has a Japanese wife. (She has no name; she is simply "my wife" or "my Japanese wife.") The book seems to be the sum of the narrator's idle thoughts over a period of several months.

Most of these thoughts are inconclusive. The anecdotal pieces are best when they give some human insight; they are mildly amusing when the metaphor is funny or particularly well woven into the narrative; and the rest of the time they are dull. The stories with the most character are the longer ones: "Shrine of Carp" and "The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You" are tiny moments of life in Japan that illuminate the people described, both narrator and object. The most memorable story is "The Menu/1965," which centers on one week's menu for the condemned men on Death Row in San Quentin, and the impact that menu has on the people the narrator shows it to. The menu (which features quite elaborate meals) also has its impact on the reader, to complement the story of other people's reactions. But too many of the pieces are like "Marching in the Opposite Direction of a Pizza," in which the narrator sees the Japanese workers at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor in Tokyo leaving work; in another book this might be a hook to hang either an irony or an amusing comment on, but in Brautigan's book this must stand alone.

Brautigan has kept his talent turning phrases in unexpected ways. His prose can be evocative for a sentence or so—waking from nightmares, "my eyes tunnelled out of sleep at dawn"—but rarely, in this book, for more than a paragraph. He has a roving attention span, which fastens on a tiny object or a train of thought and examines it briefly, in very close focus, then drops it and passes on. It is the peculiar juxtaposition that interests him. In "Dancing Feet" he says, "In conventional storytelling this would be a good time to say some things about the life of the businessman: Maybe his age, country, background, family, does he masturbate? is he impotent? etc. but I won't because it's not important." Brautigan spends most of his time describing things, and it is his unusual descriptions that catch our attention. But the interest lasts only as long as his descriptions stay fresh; after that, we look behind them for something more permanent. In The Tokyo-Montana Express the descriptions wilt after a while and there is nothing behind them.

Carpenter,1980

"Brautigan Writing at His Peak"
Don Carpenter
San Francisco Examiner, 2 Nov. 1980. p. 6.
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For several years I led an irksome existence as a writer of unproduced screenplays. In the middle of this period, my agent, a bright and talented woman, invited me to lunch. Never one to pass up a free meal, I walked the mile or so from my hotel and presented myself at the agency. We ate next door, in a restaurant that no longer exists, talked about my work and the general gossip of the business and went back up to her office. Then she told me, in pleasureful tones, that she had just sold a property to one of the major studios for $350,000, and that the studio had offered her $50,000 a year to come over and be a producer.

(This is not uncommon—I've had three agents shot out from under me that way.)

Stung by jealousy and irritated at the thought of having to break in yet another agent, I blurted out that I didn't think the property in question could possibly be made into a film. I explained why in a few choice phrases. Her expression changed to one of anger, almost repugance. "You are the most irascible and opinionated man I've ever met!" she snapped at me.

I trudged back to my hotel, threw myself into a garden chair out by the pool and sulked for a couple of hours. At the end of that time I felt better. What the hell, she was right. (And I was right, too, as it turned out. They never did make that damned book into a movie.)

I am irascible. I am opinionated. And I am going to inflict one of my opinions on you right now.

Damn it all, Richard Brautigan is a great writer. I know you're not supposed to say this about the living (and Brautigan is definitely alive) and you're certainly not supposed to say it about your friends (and Richard is my friend) but I'm sick and tired of hearing him described as over-the-hill or unimportant or silly by people whose sensibilities are, frankly, perhaps no better than my own.

Not since Ernest Hemingway has anyone paid so much attention to the American sentence. His little chapters, poems and stories are hand grenades of compressed American English, and all the more powerful because behind them works an intelligence and human sympathy that defy comparison with any but the finest. The people who think Brautigan trivial really can't have read him very carefully.

The title, "Crows Eating a Truck Tire in the Dead of Winter" has more pith in it than the complete works of many a writer considered hot these days, and is about as sentimental as a hammer.

Brautigan writes about simple things. Love. Death. Hunger. Empty lives. Bees. Men and women, and all the troubles they can get into with each other. He writes with simplicity and discipline, and with a surrealistic humor that has thrown many a critic into the rosebushes. Buying sections of a trout stream from the Cleveland Wrecking Company is not whimsy but surrealism, in my opinion, and says a lot about the state of America's disappearing wilderness.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is Brautigan writing at the peak of his powers. It is his funniest book, and at the same time the most powerful work he has ever attemped. If you are already his fan, you're in for a big treat. If you've never read Brautigan, this is a hell of a fine place to start.

Carver,1980

"Brautigan Serves Werewolf Berries and Cat Cantaloupe"
Raymond Carver
Chicago Tribune, 26 Oct. 1980, Arts & Books, Sec. 7, p. 3.
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The prose pieces that make up this uneven collection of prose pieces—it is not a "novel" by any definition of that word—range in length from a few lines to several pages. They are set in and around Livingston, Montana; Tokyo; and San Francisco. There is no ordering principle at work in the book; any selection could go anywhere and it wouldn't make the slightest difference. I think the first, and longest, piece is the best. It's called "The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska". The other pieces have such titles as "Skylab at the Graves of Abbott and Costello" "Five Ice Cream Cones Running in Tokyo," "Montana Traffic Spell," "A San Francisco Snake Story," "Werewolf Raspberries," "A Study in Thyme and Funeral Parlors," "Two Montana Humidifiers," "What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?", "Cat Cantaloupe," "Chicken Fable," "Light On at the Tastee-Freez." You get an idea.

There are 131 of these, and some of them are really good, and they're like little astonishments going off in your hands. Some are so-so, take them or leave them. Others—I think too many—are just filling up space. These last, the space filler-uppers, make you wonder. I mean you want to ask, "Is there an editor in the house?" Isn't there someone around who loves this author more than anything, someone he loves and trusts in return, who could sit down with him and tell him what's good, even wonderful, in this farrago of bits and pieces, and what is lightweight, plain silly stuff and better left unsaid, or in the notebooks?

Still wishing; one wishes there had been more to choose from. One wishes there had been 240 of these little things—or 390, like the number of Christmas tree photos; and then (still wishing) that the author had sat down with this good friend-trusted editor, and they had gone over all the pieces, looking at each piece as you would look at a poem, and looking at how many pieces stack up to make a book. One wishes that this imaginary editor-friend had been stern with the author now and again. "Look here, Richard! This one is just cutesy pie. And this one is finger exercise, laundry list jotting stuff. You want a good book? Keep that one out. But this one, now, this one's a keeper." And out of the 240, or 390, or even these original 131, maybe 90 or 100 had gone into the collection. It could have been a real book then, one filled with amazements and zingers. Instead, we have oh so many little reveries and gentle laid-back sweet notions that the author has been blessed with and saved up to share with us. But they don't need sharing, all of them.

Maybe none of this matters to the author. Maybe it's simply that we are either tuned into his wavelength, or we are not. If we're not, well, I suppose it could be said tough luck, so lump it. Or if our heads are where Brautigan's head is at, then perhaps everything and anything goes. What matter? But I have to believe—I don't have to believe anything; it's just a feeling I have—that Brautigan wants to write the very best he can, and write for grown-up men and women as well as just the easy-to-please younger set.

So you can take this book or leave it. It won't help you along any in this life, or hurt you, to read it. It won't change the way you look at things, or people, or make a dent of any size in your emotional life. It's gentle on the mind. It's 258 pages of reverie and impression, and some sparkly gleamings, of things past and present having to do with the author's life on "this planet Earth."

It's a book by Richard Brautigan called The Tokyo-Montana Express. It's not his best book by a long shot. But he must know this.

Crouch,1992

"Discontinuity in Richard Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express"
Jeff Crouch
The Midwest Quarterly, no. 33, Summer 1992, pp. 393-402.
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Whether we understand Richard Brautigan as a nostaliga-worn and sentimental hippie, an eccentric leftover from the 60s, or as a postmodern writer, a writer much engaged in the discovery of fictional forms, taking a ride on his Tokyo-Montana Express, we discover a fool's paradise, what Emerson calls "the indifference of places" (278). The seeming triviality of Brautigan's subject matter, in essence, the lack of the holy, presents itself in a variety of ways. Brautigan does not, however, recapitulate The Waste Land, lamenting the death of God and the loss of meaning in the world, and neither does he declare himself an existentialist, thrown into the act of self-creation. Yet, in "What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees"? (Tokyo-Montana Express, or TME), he investigates the nature of the abandoned Christmas trees, i.e. the death of God in a capitalist society, while in pieces such as "Football," "The Purpose," and "A Reason for Living," he faces the impossibility—and freedom—of determing meaning. Brautigan confronts this freedom in The Tokyo-Montana Express by letting go of the idea of the author/narrator as the ultimate center of meaning. He attempts to abandon his own subjectivity as a writer and engage in the possibility that what defines his world is a random series of events. Brautigan then creates the Tokyo-Montana Express as a series of events, a world aesthetically united in its incoherence—in short, a fool's paradise.

Brautigan's world contains: "To the Yotsuya Station," a piece where the narrator, on a subway beneath Tokyo, describes his compulsion for a Japanese woman, reflecting on her beauty and age, and with added emphasis, her chin; "Painstaking Popcorn Label," a piece about reading a popcorn label while getting drunk; and "The Smallest Snowstorm on Record," a piece about a snowstorm with two snowflakes named Laurel and Hardy. What do these pieces have to do with each other? Together they make up Brautigan's world of lists and experiences to be had: strange sensations, old lovers, post-consumer trauma, people out of work, prisoners, and ghosts. While these pieces seem to be reflections upon the absurd, they are, in actuality, the minute details of life. They portray the humorous side, the sadness and beauty, the inevitable loss.

Finding Brautigan's style in harmony with his vision, Michael Mason makes a similar claim that TME amounts "to a coherent meditation . . . united by a vision of something which is melancholy and alienated, and which is seeking assuagement of these feelings." Also, Mason finds the book centered around the motifs of "animals, death, memories, dreams, snow and rain, food . . ., empty or vanished buildings" (483). Variations of "things to do" range throughout the book, along with a kind of perspectivism evident in such pieces as "A Different Way of Looking at President Kennedy's Assassination"—a story that relates a 24-hour-a-day breakfast restaurant's sudden whimsy to stop serving pancakes between midnight and 4 AM to President Kennedy's assassination and "The Menu/1965," a story about a deathrow menu and its apparent absurdity. (Brautigan does not reduce President Kennedy's assasssination to the same level of importance as a restaurant's change in venue, but he feels that the disappointment, rage, and frustration are relatively the same for both incidents, lacking in any moral distinction between their sources.) Mason sees this "different way of looking" as Brautigan's comic means to correct the disproportion in our own lives. Indeed, Brautigan makes us aware of the disproportion in our own lives by artfully gathering fragments that come into our lives and arranging them in the strange, juxtaposed way in which they appear, wholly unassimilated.

The fact that Brautigan assembles 131 of these seemingly unrelated pieces and makes them the chapters of a book (TME) he calls a novel, often befuddles the uninitiated reader. Brautigan shears his book of readily available patterns—meaning traditional narrative patterns—whereby we can read his "novel," a feat that aligns him with James Joyce in Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio. But Brautigan works through a radical discontinuity, and his discontinuity is the aspect of his novel that most disturbs his readers.

Brautigan gives us several clues as to how we should read his work. Not only does the almost random order of his stories embody the discontinuity of the novel's structure, but the theme of the novel itself is discontinuity. A story such as "Another Texas Ghost Story" conveys not simply a ghost story but also the randomness of memory, the incongruity of memory, and the when and where memory makes itself present. There is another kind of randomness embodied in TME, too. Life, for Brautigan, often seems to lack direction. "Montana Traffic Spell" captures this lack wonderfully. Here, the story's narrator and a friend are at the only stoplight in a small town in Montana. The friend, who is driving, cannot make up his mind which way to do at the green light. A line of cars begins to back up. Finally, someone yells, "MOVE, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH" (100), and that gives the friend the impetus for his decision. In "A Feeling of Helplessness," Brautigan reiterates a theme similar to randomness—aimlessness—in a story about eating at a restaurant that does not have enough work for its waitresses. Again, Brautigan focuses our attention on what is lacking.

The title of the book itself, The Tokyo-Montana Express, is a title that calls our attention to the absence of the Tokyo-Montana Express. It is this very absence that informs the novel's structure. In a brief preface, Brautigan gives us the most puzzling clue of all. He outlines the perspective of the book. He says,
"Though the Tokyo-Montana Express moves at a great speed, there are many stops along the way. This book is those brief stations; some confident, others still searching for their identities.

"The 'I' in this book is the voice of the stations along the Tokyo-Montana Express." (vii)

The Tokyo-Montana Express and its stations along the track, however, are decidedly absent as the narrative structure of TME. They serve, only in a figurative sense, to give order to the book's odd juxtaposition of stories. This Express and its many stations are only an artificial—and Brautigan seems to want us to see it as artificial—design stamped, as the Express is stamped on the head of each chapter, on the discontinuity of the book's arrangement. The Express and its many stations provide this loose structure to tack together his various pieces of story out of the amalgam of his experience and present them without recourse to chronology.

At the close of TME Brautigan gives us a parallel to the artificial narrative structure created by the Express. "Subscribers to the Sun" completes the novel and gives it an eccentric strategy. This piece concerns a newspaper "Teletype" that will link Tokyo "with the events of the world as they happen" (257). Brautigan describes the machine's start-up and, in so conveying the material printed out on the teletype machine as it "awakens," conveys to us a message. Brautigan writes:

"The first test pattern ends with:
END HOW RCVD?"""

And, Brautigan finishes with:

"ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS:
GOOD MORNING" (258)

Of course, this is a clever metafictional trick on Brautigan's part. It recalls the history of the novel: how short pieces, either short stories or whole or parts of chapters, were once published serially before being published in book form. Brautigan teases us with the possibility that we have received a mistransmission and that his stories might be put together in a coherent way. Though theme and structure have an obvious relationship in Brautigan's work (aimless structure, aimless stories), why attempt a New Critical approach of finding order in this set of stories?

Marc Chenetier claims that his metaficational reading bridges Brautigan's artificial simplicity. He calls Brautigan a "novelist of the instant" (80) and claims that TME is an autobiography: "its unit is the structure of a life-span, itself constituted by a collection of moments, of varying length and interest" (81). The Tokyo-Montana Express is a fiction that produces a series of "arrests," of "refusals to move on," and these arrests, in turn, produce "a fragmented assemblage of places and instants which stand for compostiion" (83). Chenetier also finds TME's structure exhibits the "inclusion/exclusion" process found in Japanese art. Brautigan's use of this method, says Chenetier, is to capture "an evanescent reality" like the imprint of "tail-lights" on film (89). In sum, Chenetier concludes that TME's structure reveals a "fragmentary unity" to life, "puzzles" that "afford hope and stimulus" (91). Chenetier's reading of Brautigan, then, becomes a reading where the discontinuity of the novel, the "puzzles," depends on the reader for solution.

Yet, the fact to note is that Brautigan begins and ends with formal devices. We are given the explicit narrative structure (vii), "The Route of the Tokyo-Montana Express" (ix-xiv), a literal train in "To the Yotsuya Station," and finally "Subscribers to the Sun." This last piece not only parodies formal closure, saying "GOOD MORNING" instead of "Goodbye," but also indirectly addresses the reader with "END HOW RCVD?" Thus, instead of ending at a train station, TME ends at a teletype machine in the "lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel" (257), a travel image nonetheless and a similiar structural device to that of the Express. So, at least on the level of its artifical narrative structure, TME has some continuity. This artificial structure is deliberately contrived, however. As a contrivance, it forces us to review the way in which we super-add narrative structure into our lives, just as we add narrative to our own personal and disparate fragments of story.

In turn, and quite in contradictaion to the fragmentary nature of the work, the preface (vii) serves as a definition of the book's structure. The significance of the book's structure, however, does not rest upon the text of Brautigan's autobiographical experience. Though the discontinuity of TME reflects the piecemeal quality of dream, it is a fictional—rather than simply an autobiographical—method nonetheless, and Brautigan uses it to address the subjective and mental nature of experience. The "I" of the narrator, as Brautigan says, becomes the event itself, and these events are held together by the circuit of the text.

Reading Brautigan in a more traditonal way, Edward Foster sees TME in light of other American authors, especially Thoreau and Emerson. He reads it also as a comparison of East and West. Foster says, "If a book is 'about' anything . . . it is about two very different cultures, East and West, American and Japanese, and their effect on each other . . . with much traffic and exchange of goods, both physical and metaphysical." Foster finds the chapters, though seemingly unrelated, linked together in "metaphor, tone, and a subject" with chapters grouped "according to miscellaneous subjects" such as food or the weather. He sees Brautigan's "more abstract concerns repeatedly surface throughout the book: friendship, communications, suicide, [and] solitude," while Brautigan alternates between, "on the one hand, anecdotes and observations related geographically and/or culturally to Japan and, on the other, those related to America" (118). The Tokyo-Montana Express, says Foster, does not actually exist. As a narrative device, the "I" of the stations of the Express works only as a literary conceit. Foster claims that this "conceit refers to metaphysical travel in the trade of ideas between East and West." Here, Brautigan calls our attention to America as "a place of solitude and silence, the things men must expect if they obey the national imperative and dream of individual freedom" (121). This America stands in contrast to an industrailized Japan. Japan, says Foster, is the place we might expect "Zen solitude and contemplation" (122). Brautigan finds it, instead, in the American wilderness of Montana. (This is the theme that initiates the book in "The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska" (1-9), a story which alludes to Willa Cather's My Ántonia and parallels much of her book thematically.) Foster, then, assesses Brautigan as a writer much in the American traditiion, writing of individual freedom and the autonomous self (124). The structure of TME serves to emphasize the freedom of the individual and his experience.

Brautigan's kind of humanity shows itself in a piece like "Self-Portrait as an Old Man." Here, Brautigan recalls buying a German chocolate cake at the Pine Creek Methodist Church for $30.00. The event was an auction, and he wanted the cake. Brautigan excuses himself for buying the cake. He says, "I am not a Christian but neither is the cake" (195). Again, we see Brautigan (rather TME's narrator or narrative "I" to be precise, since the novel is "fiction") attempt to come to terms with an inconsistent world. Brautigan flashes forward to put the $30.00 cake in a future perspective, when coffee might cost $50.00 a cup. There is, however, no way he can smooth over the obvious disproportion in price. Brautigan, a non-believer in a faithless world of institutions, leaves us to face the problem of belief.

Brautigan refuses to connect what does not connect. Each of his pieces exists unto itself. They are, in a sense, memories and as such, are exclusive. Brautigan gives us the temporality of meaning. He works against plot and gives us, in its place, found life: the sense that life finds its meanings and significance in being lived, as is, without recourse to a beyond. The ordinariness of life and the magical expectations that enliven life and make life heartbreaking are both here. What comes into being is, and for Brautigan, we need not go beyond that presence in order to understand.

The Tokyo-Montana Express functions more as an anti-novel than a novel. The stories have no real lineage, no true timeline. Only a scant chronology exists and that between only a few of the stories. Distinct rhythms are evident here. A few patterns group some of the stories into distinct categories, as the critics have pointed out. Yet, these patterns afford little in the way of structure. They are a kind of rhythm within TME's discontinuity, not much otherwise. The unity of this work seems to lie in its discontinuity. Discontinuity, in part, is TME's major theme. Brautigan attempts to understand that vacuous space that lies behind us. He does not paint over this space with words or color in the blanks with casual links. He refuses to assume a continuity where he does not find one. The literary conceit of his The Tokyo-Montana Express is that it serves as a frame for his fragments without overtly forcing them together. In this way, Brautigan frees his novel from all narrative constraints.

To expect continuity, Brautigan warns us, is to bring upon ourselves disappointment. Not only does life remain tremendous in silence, a silence we must learn to bear, but it refuses our expectations. In one of his most beautiful pieces, "Castle of the Snow Bride," Brautigan chronicles more than the impossibility of sexual fulfillment. Brautigan begins the story with "what is missing here is much more important that what follows" (225). The narrator of the story is watching an erotic movie, a movie which gives him one of the most intense and thrilling experiences of his life. But he has to leave the theater before the movie ends. Of course, he wants to see the end of the movie. The movie is scheduled to show the next day. He goes back to the movie theater, but the theater has literally disappeared. He asks several experts if they know the movie; they have never heard of it. The narrator cannot retrieve what is lost. What is lost for the narrator of "Castle of the Snow Bride" is lost too for The Tokyo-Montana Express. Discontinuity is what remains. We can no longer make sense of life. It is a fool's paradise.

Greenwell,1981

"Lobster Eating"
Bill Greenwell
New Statesman, 8 May 1981, p. 21.
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Solo Domino Player

Yesterday, I read a book. It is a long book, full of fishy metaphors with trailing tails. There are 132 portions of writing inside it, like a ghostly row of dominoes of different sizes leaning together as if set up by some bored solo player who didn't have a complete set and had to invent some way of managing these crazy unrelated dominoes.

The writer says he is interested in tiny portions of reality.

The dominoes are in a 258-page box. There are words where the pips go, but you can't play a game with them. They don't want to play.

I picked out a short portion, expecting the others to knock each other over, collapsing the whole row.

I expected wrong.

The piece in my hand turned out to be a Mah Jong brick. I took a long look at it, longer even than the bullets that flew from the Book Depository store in 1963. The book is crammed with odd little stray thoughts like this.

I keep wondering: how did a Mah Jong brick get into a box of dominoes?

Lullabies

I was flipping through my stock of old Richard Brautigans last night, and I met the shadows of some old acquaintances. They said hello to me, and I shut them away on my shelf gently, as if they were fragile echoes of lullabies.

One lullaby was about a library in The Abortion. Its tune was: once there was a library where writers took their books to be filed. There were no borrowers. Another lullaby, in A Confederate General, concerned the counting of punctuation marks in Ecclesiastes.

They were quiet lullabies, like Japanese wild geese on a distant horizon.

The only lullaby in The Hawkline Monster was the sub-title.

It went: 'A Gothic Western'.

It was a soft subtitle lullaby in a wide sea of silent, forgotten waves.

A Lobster Passage

Sometimes a passage in The Tokyo-Montana Express dodges into my sub-conscious like a football player carrying a plate of lobster. Sometimes the game is in Tokyo. Other times, it is in Montana. The lobster is always dead, but succulent.

I like lobster, but I eat it very quickly.

You could consider a long time questions like how lobsters make love, or whether they make good punchlines for articles or not. It's curious, I spend very little of my life eating lobster, yet when someone says, 'What's your favorite food?' I say 'Lobster!' as if it were a certain thing.

I guess collections of writing like this are like shoals of lobster. Each one is the sort of stuff I say I like instinctively, but there are 132 of them.

I met a man once who compared Brautigan to a deck of cards. 'I keep shuffling the pack,' he said, 'but they're all the same shape. However, they have different numbers of spots, and there are two colors, and you can't see if the court cards are winking if they're profile only. Still, I like the odd hand.'

Maybe this is how I see him.

Lobsters.

Halpern,1980

"A Pox on Dullness"
Sue Halpern
The Nation, 25 Oct. 1980, pp. 415-417.
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[Reviews both Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (not included here), and Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express. Says, of Brautigan's collection of stories . . .]

If Robbins's pox on dullness had been issued earlier, we might have been spared The Tokyo-Montana Express, the most recent communiqué from Richard Brautigan. Now in his mid-40s, Brautigan continues to survive in the estimation of one critic "as the literary representative of that phenomenon in American culture known as The Hippies." Although the Death of the Hippies parade took place in San Francisco in 1968, Brautigan, who moved to Montana, has been publishing prolifically ever since. Someone must be reading his books.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is not a novel. It is a collection of vignettes held together by contrivance. At the outset Brautigan informs the reader:

"Though the Tokyo-Montana Express moves at great speed, there are many stops along the way. This book is those brief stations, some confident, others still searching for their identities. The 'I' in this book is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express."

It does not work. The "I" in this book is clearly the voice of Richard Brautigan—he often refers to himself by name—who is either extremely confused or attempting to disown this work.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is a peculiar travelogue that moves within the regions of the author's experience. There are pieces on Christmas trees, ghosts, Japan, Montana, light bulbs and candy wrappers. Despite this range, the reportage is flat and uninteresting. Perhaps this is a reflection of mind. Can this be too harsh an assessment of someone who writes, "umbrellas have always been a mystery to me because I can't understand why they appear just before it starts to rain"?

The vignettes are not all bad or boring, although many of them are. Many of them are brief, too—not more than a page—and this is not unrelated. When Brautigan takes the care to develop a story he can be entertaining and insightful, as in "The Good Work of Chickens," a revenge fantasy about people who abandon their dog in the middle of a harsh nowhere. Yet he rarely does this. At times, though, even his simple observations can be striking: these are usually in reference to death or beautiful women, where the contrasting image of an aging hippie is a sad, broken promise. All these pieces being equal, however, it is apparent that Brautigan does not know when he is good and when he is insipid. If someone was keeping score, it would be clear that good would not win out in the end.

The following "station" repeated in full, is illustrative of The Tokyo-Montana Express:

"All the People That I Didn't Meet and the Places That I Didn't Go."
"I have a short lifeline," she says. "Damn it."
We're lying together under the sheet. It's morning. She's looking at her hand. She's twenty-three: dark hair. She's very carefully looking at her hand.
"Damn it."

Who cares? Dullness may be evil, as Tom Robbins suggests, but it does not have to be a drag. Richard Brautigan has made it into the last quarter of the twentieth century: he is not laid back; he is supine.

Hill,1981

"The Tokyo-Montana Express"
Douglas Hill
The Globe and Mail, 17 Jan. 1981, p. ***?***.
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Richard Brautigan is, depending on how you look at him, a whimsical Walt Whitman, a radical free spirit foraging the plains of American Pop, a literary convention buster (in John Barthe's phrase) of a rather mild-mannered sort, a fading flower-adult, or a bore. Any or all of these. Certainly no one can match the particular kind of miscellaneous catalogue of image and experience he's been compiling, in poetry and prose, for two decades.

Perhaps no one would want to. Yet Trout Fishing in America remains, for those who remember jeans with hip-pockets, the quintessential sixties American novel. And it holds up still.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is no worse than Brautigan's other 20 or so books, and better than some I can think of. As for the title: "Though the Tokyo-Montana Express moves at great speed, there are many stops along the way. This book is those brief stations: some confident, others still searching for their identities." Episodes, then—fragments, beads on a string. There are little stories or meditations about women, fishing, houses, chickens. Titles like The Smallest Snowstorm on Record, Cooking Spaghetti Dinner In Japan, Hangover As Folk Art, Five Ice-Cream Cones Running In Tokyo, and so forth; conceptual art in print. The chapters seldom run longer than a page or two.

The book hangs together fairly well, considering. It's hardly an analytic study of of East-West attitudes, but the back-and-forth of Brautigan's attention does occasionally bring into focus interesting cross-cultural moments. There's some further thematic unity: repeated glances of love, death, the weirdness of consumer rites, the sadness of time passing and past.

"The 'I' in this book is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the the Tokyo-Montana Express," he writes. Not really. The voice is Brautigan, wandering from one "complicated little life ballet movement" to another, pausing for a small perception, circling around a smaller juxtaposition. He says it best himself: "I spend a lot of my life interested in little things, tiny portions of reality like a pinch of spice in a very complicated recipe that takes days to cook, sometimes even longer."

Maintaining this kind of miniaturist innocence—funny, delicate, engaging—demands exquisite control. When it's not there, banality rushes in. If you're going to say "wow" and "gee" you've got to be good or lucky to get away with it.

Brautigan's not an important figure these days, even in the underground. But he's still worth reading. He's always insisted quietly, that what he sees and feels counts, can be made to count, no matter how insignificant or fleeting it appears to be. And he's always taken pains to describe those feelings, and the insights they lead him to, with unpretentious honesty.

Kline1,1980

"Peripatetic Prophet: 'Express' Takes Readers on Journey That Rambles Through Author's Mind"
Betsy Kline
Kansas City Star, 21 Dec. 1980, pp. 1, 12D.
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Gentle, silly and maddeningly repetitive are just some of the adjectives that have been used to describe Richard Brautigan's novels. Thank goodness some things never change.

Although the characters and situations may differ, the same world shines through: a world that is perpetually optimistic but progressively confused. As always, it is Brautigan as author-narrator who stands at our side as the laid-back tour guide through the zaniness and sadness.

Since 1967 and the publication of his second novel, Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan has treated his readers and cult fans to healthy doses of optimism, curiosity and matter-of-fact honesty. He once said in an interview that he wrote poetry for many years just so he could learn to write a sentence. Then he made his sentence his trademark: blank-faced statements of fact that said more about his perception of the fact than the fact itself.

Reviewers delighted in referring to his "spaced imagination," which put the most commonplace occurrences in the light of discoveries that touched the soul. Each sentence seemed to have an unspoken "oh wow" dangling at the end. This quality was intoxicating for the reader, because it enabled him or her to share in the moment of discovery with the author, whether the discovery was a sparkling mountain stream or a gigantic potato carved in stone.

Brautigan's world revolves around the beauty and calm of nature. In Trout Fishing in America, he seeks his American ideal, the perfect trout stream, which has been polluted, degraded, chopped in sections and sold by the foot in secondhand shops. In Watermelon Sugar is a generous slice of life composed of sweet, insubstantial watermelon sugar.

On the whole, the plots of Brautigan's novels are not memorable, if indeed that exist in some cases. But it is difficult to forget the human portraits the author strews along the rambling, zigzag path of life. The pathetic but valiant characters in The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 float back to memory. Where else but in Brautigan's gentle imagination could a 24-hour-a-day library exist for the sole purpose of welcoming to its shelves the scribblings and outpourings of anybody who knocks at its door?

Brautigan's latest novel, The Tokyo-Montana Express, has the barest of plots, if it can be called that. Because the authors spends most of his time at home in Livingston, Montana or in Tokyo, he has chosen to collect vignettes of his experiences and impressions of life at "the stops" in between on his imaginary Tokyo-Montana railroad, which, as it happens, crisscrosses the far corners of the United States but always terminates in the streets of Tokyo.

Strung together, these short glimpses of Brautigan are not meant to compose a discernible story line, other than illustrating that its author-narrator is constantly on the move. Some of the chapters don't even fill a page. (Brautigan is the only writer I can think of, except Henry Fielding, who can make a long list of chapter headings fun reading.)

The chapters in The Tokyo-Montana Express are pensive moments shared with the reader. The hilarity of his other books appears here but in a muted, wistful way. The craziness of "What Are You Going to Do With 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?" mellows to a sad nostalgia as the narrator and a friend rush about San Francisco armed with cameras, snapping pictures of discarded Christmas trees, their beauty used up, tossed out when the celebration is over and left to be run over on curbs and empty lots. The emphasis shifts unnoticeably from the insane notion of photographing dead trees to the fickle wastefulness of the human race.

"The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You" grasps the remnants of a sweet memory of an anonymous vision of beauty and a slight act of thoughtfulness that returns to haunt the author. Most of the chapters in this book deal with wistful looks backward: a friend not made, a gesture remembered, an action planned and abandoned.

Brautigan's descriptions of things and places have a marvelous honesty about them, strings of words that have no right being in the same sentence, but, nonetheless come together humorously and naturally to describe a simple scene. There are the inescapable images of Brautigan's works: fish, water, graveyards and snow. When you think about it, these are inescapable commonplaces for someone who chooses to make his home in the Yellowstone National Park.

Some episodes elude the reader and seem out of place in the book, even as loosely structured as The Tokyo-Montana Express is.

Brautigan's prose is like a fishing expedition. Bobbing amid the vignettes of his tranquil life are some prize catches of life frozen in time. But luck and skill play a part in landing these prizes, and the rest is word tease and disappointment. The reader ends the expedition feeling content but unlucky: happy for the catches and wondering wistfully about the ones that got away.

Kline2,1980

"A Cult Figure in the 1960s, Brautigan Has Successfully Moved into a New Era"
Betsy Kline
Kansas City Star, 21 Dec. 1980, pp. 1, 12D.
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Richard Brautigan wakes up to the sound of birds chirping outside his windows.

He loves the winter and the glacial snows that visit his small ranch in Livingston, Mont., because of the peaceful isolation they bring.

It's not surprising, either that he surrounds his house with bird bells (feeders) in the winter. "I put them really close to the windows," he said. "The birds come down, and I can look at them. It's sort of the reverse of a birdcage, only I'm on the inside looking out. Birds are so wonderful to watch."

When the reclusive writer leaves his Montana hideaway, he plunges himself into "people" environments, crowded cities such as San Francisco and Tokyo.

It was in San Francisco, 26 years ago that Brautigan fell under the influence of Japanese culture. "I love the imagination, vitality and energy of the Japanese people," he said. His reverence for the gentle life is obvious in his books, from his earliest, A Confederate General from Big Sur to his latest, The Tokyo-Montana Express.

Although he does not have a home in Japan, Brautigan spends several months every year in Tokyo, drifting among friends.

"The Japanese are a very beautiful people," he said. "Japan has a very heroic landscape and nature. I love the heroic qualities of the Japanese people."

The influence of his gentle philosophy is evident in his many novels and books of poetry. Since his early days of distributing free samples of his poetry on the streets of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Brautigan has attempted to spread his philosophy of life-affirming optimism.

Although it is difficult to tell what his interests in life are from the strange titles of his books (Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Please Plant This Book, Loading Mercury witih a Pitchfork, and Willard and His Bowling Trophies to name a few), a reading of one or two is orientation enough.

About the only thing that bothers him about being a writer, he said, is that people seem to expect him to come up with a Son of Trout Fishing in America or a In Watermelon Sugar Revisited. "I have never been interested in imitation myself," he said. "I'm basically interested in and my work is one man's opinion of life and death in the 20th century.

"When I die, there will be a shelf of books that will give this one man's opinion of just that."

He certainly is not interested in standing still. He shies away from interviews and public appearances, but he said he was enjoying his current lecture tour because it was a growing and learning period for him.

"I found I have been very limited in the space I was living," he said. The question-and-answer exchanges with students feed his natural curiosity.

Brautigan admitted that he was pleasantly surprised to find students today who were able to make the jump into his earlier books, products of the early '60s. The peace and hippie movements of the '60s were his milieu but he has experienced no sense of displacement, he said, moving into what social-historians are calling the hedonistic '70s. "I'm not standing still in life," he said. "I'm not freeze-framed."

At 45, Brautigan still is the peripatetic prophet of peace.

The murder of former Beatle John Lennon, he said, left him shocked and disgusted. "It makes no sense . . .," he said. "It's so appalling when the creative artists of a society are assassinated.

"I wish that we had some signs that things would get better . . . I think we have to progress forward with as much hope and optimism as we can. There is no time for cynicism and anger. We have to commit ourselves to change in the future."

Locklin,1978

"Life through Child's Eyes"
Gerald Locklin
Independent Press-Telegram [Long Beach, CA], 1 Oct. 1978, p. L/S 3.
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What's there ever to say about anything as exasperatingly uneven as a Richard Brautigan book of poems? This one is the result of a trip to Japan, and here's what Brautigan himself says of it: "They are different from other poems that I have written. Anyway, I think they are but I am probably the last person in the world to know. The quality of them is uneven but I have printed them all anyway because they are a diary expressing my feelings and emotions in Japan and the quality of life is uneven."

As, for instance, in the poem, "American Bar in Tokyo":

"I'm here in a bar filled with
young conservative snobbish American men,
drinking and trying to pick up Japanese women
who want to sleep with the likes of these men.
It is very hard to find any poetry here
as this poem bears witness."

That's Brautigan for you, forcing a poem where it's least likely to be found; still, I always have the feeling that if he didn't operate in that way, he and we would miss out on such poems as, "On the Elevator Going Down":

"A Caucasian gets on at the 17th floor.
He is old, fat, and expensively dressed.
I say hello I'm friendly. He says, "Hi."
Then he looks very carefully at my clothes.
I'm not expensively dressed.
I think his left shoe costs more
than everything I am wearing.
He doesn't want to talk to me anymore.

"I think he is not totally aware
that we are really going down
and there are no clothes after you have
you have been dead for a few thousand years.

"He thinks as we silently travel
down and get off at the bottom floor
that we are going separate ways."

Yes, I'm glad that Brautigan is around, and I'm more than willing to put up with his misses for the sake of his connections with the Zen-Dada screwball that no one else would even have realized had been tossed. It is difficult to get the batting averages from poems, but men are beaned each day for want of what is found here.

Mason,1981

"The Pancakes and the President"
Michael Mason
The Times Literary Supplement [London], 1 May 1981, p. 483.
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Richard Brautigan is a writer whose mannerisms irritate many people, but these readers would be well advised to try him again in this new collection. It may sound odd to say that an author has arrived at a vision which is harmonious with his way of writing after a sequence of no less than eight novels, but it is a claim which can be pressed surprisingly far for Brautigan and the Tokyo-Montana Express. Two of the potentially irritating features of this writer's procedure are that he is laconic (affectedly so, for those in the irritated camp), and interested (perhaps self-indulgently or coyly) in a certain restricted range of experience: low-key. private sensations and ephemeral, minor constituents of the world. The Tokyo-Montana Express takes these tendencies as far as they have ever gone with the author. The book is an assemblage of about 130 short, sometimes extremely short, fragments with no easily discerned continuity. The book amounts, however to a coherent meditation or investigation: united by a vision of things which is melancholy and alienated, and which is seeking an assuagement of these feelings.

The reader may soon sense that there is more design to the book's fragments than appears at first glance. Certain motifs establish themselves: animals, death, memories, dreams, snow and rain, food (and foodshops, restaurants, faeces, cooking), empty or vanished buildings (especially shops). One of the shortest pieces goes as follows:

"Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty words to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armour and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit wood where he vanished forever."

The knight only had fifty words to live in: and the fragment is exactly fifty words long (in quoting it I have corrected two distracting misprints, and there is at least one other in this section of the book; in such bare prose they are particularly jolting).

A different sort of consonance—this time involving Brautigan's typical brevity—is achieved in "Her Last Known Boyfriend a Canadian Airman." It concerns a gifted and beautiful Chinese girl from San Francisco whose life effectively ceases with the death of her young boyfriend in the war. She takes a job washing dishes in a restaurant. And that is all. She has been washing dishes, never talking about the past, for thirty-four years. The abruptness of the telling is right. There is a refusal by the text to take up more than a page and a half, and there has been an equivalent refusal by the nature of things to grant the Chinese girl a full life. When her boyfriend died "she was a straight-A student" at college. People couldn't understand why she washed dishes, because "there were so many other things that she could have done."

Variations on this phrase, formulations about "things to do", sound throughout The Tokyo-Montana Express. The ruling theme of the collection is, indeed, that of human purpose or intentness upon an aim ("The Purpose" is the title of one fragment). There are many studies in obsession—for instance: an immigrant to America in 1851 (rather anachronistically described as a Czechoslovakian) who three times goes compulsively to California to seek gold, and dies there; a man staring at meat in a supermarket; a man fixated on his wife's infidelity; a woman who works all her life to open a restaurant (which fails) and a man who does the same with a bar; a man obsessed about Japanese women's feet, and another who takes thousands of photographs of beautiful women in Tokyo; a female taxi-driver in Montana who is fascinated by ice-ages, and a male one in Japan whose cab is full of pictures of carp.

If you are a taxi-driver, but really much more interested in ice-ages or carp, your ostensible purpose in life is at odds with your authentic one. Another group of fragments in "The Tokyo-Montana Express concerns activity without true purpose: the Chinese dishwasher belongs with the bed-salesman who can't bring himself to look like "somebody who sincerely wants to sell beds", the butcher who similarly is more concerned about his cold hands than about selling meat, and the four pizza cooks having time off from Shakey's Pizza Parlour in Tokyo, about whom the author knows "one thing for certain . . . they are not going to get a pizza." The cultural crossover, here is interesting. Being "sincere" about beds—that is, about what you are commercially associated with—is a variety of apparent purposefulness very readily locatable in America. But Brautigan more commonly makes the American end of his "express" the land of aimlessness. Choosing Montana as a main setting facilitates this, of course, especially when the contrasting community is Tokyo (and there are several vignettes of commuting Japanese). One of the touchstone pieces in the book—and one of many about having "nothing to do"—is "Montana Traffic Spell". It simply describes how the traffic is held up in a small Montana town when the author's friend cannot decide which way he feels like going at the only traffic light.

Unlike Mainstreet in that town, the railway from Tokyo to Montana does not exist, or only as a route in the author's thought. "The 'I' in this book", he says. "is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana express." What can we find to substitute for the usual purposes and routes in life since, as the book affirms in its melancholy, these are thwarted, or elusive, or at best survive as obsessions? Here that other typical note in Brautigan's manner, the narrow emphasis on certain kinds of experience, comes into play. There are three pieces in the collection which in a directly challenging fashion put the contrast between the small, transient and private, and what we normally regard as portentous and communally interesting. Food is a key notion in each of them. "Light on at the Tastee-Freez" is about the author's preoccupation with a light he sees in a closed milk-bar (one of the book's deserted shops):

"Sometimes when people are talking to me about very important things like President Carter or the Panama Canal and think I'm listening to them, I'm really thinking about the light on at the Tastee-Freez."

In a similar vein, "A Different Way of Looking at President Kennedy's Assassination" brackets together, perhaps implying that they are equally upsetting, the cancellation of pancakes from a menu and the shooting of Kennedy. And one of the longest pieces of all, "The Menu/1965," is about the author's visit to San Quentin, and his greater interest in the menu for Death Row inmates than in penological issues:

"I found the tamale loaf that was going to be served Thursday for dinner on Death Row far more exciting than the fact that ninety percent of the prison administrators in the country are against capital punishment."

This is the kind of thing which can bring on the allergic reaction to Brautigan, and there is nothing inadvertent in the provocation offered. But Brautigan is not, I think, glibly flourishing the idea of a shrugging, dismissive withdrawal from seriousness in such passages. Seriousness has its say in "The Menu/1965," when the author shows the Death Row bill-of-fare to a friend:

"It's so stark, so real," he said.
"It's like a poem. This menu alone condemns our society. To feed somebody this kind of food who is already effectively dead represents all the incongruity of the whole damn thing. It's senseless."
I looked down at the menu lying there on the table and for dinner Tuesday the men on Death Row were having

"Spaghetti Soup
Beet and Onion Salad
Vinaigrette Dressing
Roast Leg of Pork
Brown Sauce
Ground Round Steak
Mashed Potatoes
Cream Style Corn
etc.

"And this to become senseless?
How could beet and onion salad condemn our society? I always thought we were a little stronger than that. Was it possible for this menu to be a menace to California if it fell into the wrong hands?"

Menu as menace. Brautigan wins hands down this confrontation with seriousness. The apparent disproportions in his vision of things—pancakes and the assassination of Kennedy, Tastee-Freez, and Jimmy Carter—are there to suggest a correction to the opposite, more orthodox kind of disproportion in our attitudes. You can't only think of a beet and onion salad as a symbol of penological evil, and this goes for all the building-blocks of daily life. Moreover, Brautigan's mode is simply questioning, a proposed "different way of looking." After all, The Tokyo-Montana Express is full of obsessive people, and the author's high valuation of pancakes or Tastee-Freez (the name is flagrantly expressive of commercialism) may just be an internal version of what is seen from without in the man who stares at meat. Brautigan's description of the stations of his express is correct: "some confident, others still searching for their identities."

McEnroe,1980

"Brain Candy for Literary Sweet Tooth"
Colin McEnroe
Hartford Courant, 19 Oct. 1980, p. G8.
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.

If brain candy causes mental decay, reading Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins could give you a bigger cranial cavity than a looney lobotomist with a loaded laser.

Maybe it's unfair to tar them with the same brush; but let's face it: both writers are products of the "hippy novelist" movement that allowed cuteness to substitute for hard work and writing talent.

The best way to disparage Brautigan's new collection of pointless vignettes would be to publish a handful of them. They represent some of the most vacuous half-hearted drivel ever to be bound between hard covers. A typical chapter describes a cat eating cantaloupe rinds.

Brautigan wonders what else a cat might normally eat that would taste like cantaloupe. Then in a masterstroke of literary brilliance, he sums it all up in a glowing nugget of wisdom: "I have not the slightest idea nor will I probably ever have but I know one thing for certain: I will never walk into a grocery store and go to the pet food section and see a can of cat cantaloupe on the shelf."

$10.95 for this?

Brautigan has not always been quite so appallingly vapid. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 still ranks as a fine and moving novel, and even Willard and His Bowling Trophies contained a few poignant moments.

What makes The Tokyo-Montana Express so egregiously stupid and flimsy is the obvious laziness with which it was put together. Most of the vignettes and essays are no more than two pages long. There appear to be about 120 of them (I refuse to count), and they are not arranged in any particular order.

If roused from his intellectual torpor, Brautigan might be moved to argue that the segments are arranged in an intuitively determined order, so as to evoke a certain chain of emotions like a series of Emersonian poems or Greek epigrams. The proof is in the reading. Brautigan's passages evoke nothing more than disdain for a moderately talented writer lacking the gumption and courage to create something more meaningful and personal.

To his credit Brautigan is without pretension. He confesses to being a cerebral lightweight on any number of occasions. He writes that he prefers The National Enquirer to The New York Times and that, when people try to discuss world events with him, he would rather think about why the light is on late at night in his neighborhood milk shake shop during the winter months, when the place is closed.

The question that remains is: Does anyone else care enough about the light at the Tastee-Freeze to read 2 1/2 pages of wispy contemplations about it?

There are one or two flashes of Brautiganian imagery that recall the days of yore, when he seemed to have something to say. To wit: "My mind is racing forward at such a speed that compared to it, a bolt of lightning would seem like an ice cube in an old woman's forlorn glass of weak lemonade on some front porch lost in Louisiana. She stares straight ahead at nothing, holding the glass of lemonade in her hand."

Unfortunately, most of these images serve only to illustrate some incredibly trivial observation Brautigan wants to make. Most of these pearls of enlightenment are the sorts of banal, commonly known facts of life that mental patients often sputter about when they endeavor to strike up conversations with visiting strangers.

[Tom] Robbins is a slightly different phenomenon. Brautigan has published, for better or worse, 19 books. Still Life With Woodpecker is Robbins' third novel. His second, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues catapulted him into the spotlight and amassed for him a rather large cult of admirers.

For all its trendiness, Cowgirls was riddled with major flaws. Robbins showed all the signs of a severe case of the disease that occasionally plagued his literary godfather, Kurt Vonnegut. The ideas were good, but Robbins failed to write about his characters with enough honest passion to make them believable or sympathetic. When tragedy strikes the cowgirls, no one cares, because they were cartoon characters to begin with.

Still Life proves that Robbins has not taken a single step toward solving this problem. What's more, he has settled into a very formulaic writing style, riddled with silly puns and facile statements like: "Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently."

As usual, Robbins has a semi-mystically endowed heroine. Princess Leigh-Cheri starts to seem more and more like Sissy, of Cowgirls fame, as the book progresses. Just substitute flaming red hair for the long thumb. As usual, Robbins has tried to make literary capital out of some physical asset, hammering away at its implications every three or four paragraphs.

As usual, Robbins has crammed his book with trendy subjects: pyramid power, astrology, outlaw mythology and lunar birth control. He has the audacity to try to satirize that very sort of chic interest in New Age eco-mysticism while buying very heavily into it.

There's a queen who says "Oh-Oh spaghetti-o" until even the patient reader will want to paste her fazoola shut and a cocaine-snorting crone whose novelty wears off around mid-novel. The leading man is a terrorist named Bernard Mickey Wrangle whose persona makes about as much sense as the segment where Wrangle and the princess apparently plunge into the desert scene on a package of camels—a literary device that's more abused and overworked than the average J.P. Stevens machine operator.

As usual, Robbins has failed to present any of his characters with enough care and conviction to make us worry very much about what happens to them. As usual, he wanders off from his flimsy plot for any number of tedious discourses on absurd topics. He even apologizes for the failure to present a well-paced plot, but he doesn't do anything about it.

Another Robbins device in this novel is a series of interludes in which the writer discusses the typewriter he is using and the problems it presents. This is about as interesting (and as funny) as the section about the whaling industry in Moby Dick.

There are partially redeeming moments. A poet's brilliant and incisive attack on out-of-body insemination and a few funny lines and images come to mind. But they're just not enough.

Near the end, Robbins remarks to his reader "...you've been a good audience, probably better than an underdeveloped novelist with an overdeveloped typewriter deserves..."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Pintarich,1980

"Brautigan's Talents Lost in Gimmickry"
Paul Pintarich
Oregonian, 26 Oct. 1980, p. C4.
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 first, Richard Brautigan was a refreshing delight, a Tacoma native who removed himself to San Francisco where his staccato drollness and jump-out-at-you humor matched the fervor of the late '6Os and early '70s when writers lacking substance made it big as cult figures.

Now, however, Brautigan seems to have become a bulletin board whose personal advertisements for his own cleverness obscure the fact he has any talent at all.

This is unfortunate, not only for devoted fans, who will buy his books nevertheless, but for initiates as well—and for Brautigan himself, who should know the time for gimmickry is over.

Perhaps this is too harsh, for many of us had a lot of fun with Brautigan, and his early work, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar and the Oregon-set The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, created a fairly solid, innovative genre we hoped would strengthen and perpetuate itself. Disappointingly, this has not happened. Some of his recent stuff, notably his poetry, has simply been throwaway material, which implies a certain disdain for his readers and their intelligence.

Others in this area, notably Tom Robbins, have at least gone so far as to think they have something to say.

But Brautigan is telling us mainly that he is a scavenger of the eclectic who sponsors an occasional garage sale. And like many garage sales these days, the material is unsatisfying, unmemorable and insufficient; much like the carapace of a 1946 kitchen clock—white plastic, stained and cracked.

The Tokyo-Montana Express hints at a certain snobbery, since Brautigan now associates himself with that Big Sky state and its growing "Montana school" of writers, which includes Jim Harrison and various other literary types seeking solitude and the occasional trout.

But geography is the only comparison. Brautigan, who has been to Japan lately, lets us know this in some of these collected "short stories"; some which are so brief—a paragraph or two—that we wonder why he bothered at all. If nothing else, it reinforces suspicions that literature-hype is real, that once you have name familiarity, anything you write will be bought, sometimes read.

Reading time is no problem with The Tokyo-Montana Express, for the entire collection can be read within the space of an evening's television commercials.

An example is one offering: "Spiders Are in the House," here printed in its entirety:

"It is autumn. Spiders are in the house. They have come in from the cold. They want to spend the winter in here. I don't blame them. It's cold out there, I like spiders and welcome them. They're OK in my book. I've always liked spiders, even when I was a child. I was afraid of other things, like my playmates, but I wasn't afraid of spiders.

"Why?

"I don't know: just because. Maybe I was a spider in another life. Maybe I wasn't. Who cares? There are spiders living comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren't bothering anybody. If I were a fly, I'd have second thoughts but I'm not, so I don't.

"'...nice spiders protected from the wind.'

Brautigan's right, who cares?

He continues, persists, actually, in telling us about "Harmonica High," dogs, pizzas, hangovers and other prosaic aspects of life that, though he thinks they are profound, are no more than indulgences that should offend anyone who cares for trees.

In some 130 stories—in only 258 pages—there are clues to what Brautigan is doing. He is apparently uncluttering his notebooks, and it is obvious some of these pieces were originally intended as poetry but he simply changed the form. Even so, we're not missing anything.

In addition to the money, what we find wasted here is our time—and Brautigan's of course, a writer who has an innate comic talent that needs greater challenge.

Ponicsan,1980

"Brautigan Engineers a Train of Uncoupled Empty Thoughts"
Darryl Ponicsan
Los Angeles Times Book Review, 9 Nov. 1980, p. 1.
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 giggled my way through Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan's first book, in 1969, with great buoyancy of spirit. I couldn't crack a smile anywhere in this one, called a book on its cover, a novel in the publisher's pitch.

Brautigan was among the first, and now must surely be among the last, of the San Francisco flower children. He's a little older now, but still void of malice, benign as a blossom. He has to work hard to muster anger of any sort, even against the telephone company. His charm is in his dumb loving passivity and his almost universal compassion, not to mention his disarming honesty—he admits to a great fondness for television and the National Inquirer. But either I've outgrown Brautigan or he's lost his wit. An unhappy answer either way it falls.

The Tokyo-Montana Express, as a title, is a metaphorical stretching exercise, straining for a unity that does not exist in the material itself. All it really means is that Brautigan spends a lot of time in Japan when he is not in Montana or San Francisco, a locale omitted from the title but prominent in the work. The book is not a novel, not poetry, not a collection of short stories. What it is, I suspect, is Brautigan's journal.

Here is an entire chapter entitled "Football":

"The confidence that he got by being selected all-state in football lasted him all of his life. He was killed in an automobile accident when he was 22. He was buried on a rainy afternoon. Halfway through the burial service the minister forgot what he was talking about. Everybody stood there at the grave waiting for him to remember.

"Then he remembered.

"'This young man,' he said, 'played football.'"

Am I missing something?

The other chapters are more personal, when Brautigan reminisces, as in "17 Dead Cats":

"When I was 12 years old in 1947, I had 17 cats. There were tom cats, and mother cats, and kittens, I used to catch fish for them from a pond that was a mile away. The kittens liked to play with a string under the blue sky.
"Oregon 1947—California 1978."

Or he falls into casual conversations with near-strangers who make statements for which he can find no appropriate response. A Japanese poet tells him, "I live with three people over 80 years old." The poet and Brautigan stare at each other silently. The time seems endless.

One almost whimpers for a bit more, a little character development even, something to help bring an emotion or idea to Brautigan's observations.

"I spend a lot of my life interested in little things..." he tells us unnecessarily. So do the wet souls on Skid Row, many of whom can sustain an idea for a longer period of time and be more entertaining in the bargain.

The peak of tension on the Tokyo-Montana line comes when Brautigan makes a decision to go out to his Montana barn and change two light bulbs to ones of higher wattage. Even taking as a given the long dull winters in Montana, following him on this chore leaves the reader, well, unilluminated.

The best that can be said for these wee snippets is that they are harmless and inoffensive, occasionally even cute, with the possible exception of one that equates the loss of President Kennedy with Brautigan's discovery that his favorite all-night restaurant no longer serves pancakes between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m.

The worst that can be said I'm afraid I've already said. The writings are probably too lightweight to register on even the most aerated of consciousnesses.

Rimer,1980

"A Ride on Brautigan's Very Remarkable Train"
Thomas Rimer
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 13-14 Dec. 1980, p. 20A.
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Richard Brautigan's newest book shows him as outrageous, and, in his own special way, as sly, and as genuine as ever. If the juxtaposition of Tokyo and Montana strikes you as a bit, well, arbitrary, you can rest assured that he will make the connections amusing. Brautigan himself forms the bridge.

His particular observations of Japan, wry and often wonderfully deliberate, will tell you more about certain touching aspects of Japanese life than all the reruns of Shogun than you can imagine. And besides, who else is there who can fill us in on Montana?

"I spend a lot of my life interested in little things," Brautigan writes, "tiny portions of reality like a pinch of spice in a very complicated recipe that takes days to cook, sometimes even longer." The mixture of these tiny moments gives the book what structure it has, and there is a subtle sense of progression concealed in these seemingly random ruminations. Small moments—a quiet woman on a Tokyo train, a restaurant without pancakes, reading about Groucho Marx in Japan—give the pretext for Brautigan to give a whole series of glimpses into his terribly personal world that, in this book, at least, seems a winsome combination of bravado, self-deprecation, and commonsense headscratching at the virtues and vagaries of the world.

The very fact that we don't get vast descriptions of Kyoto temples or Montana landscapes helps give the book its breezy tonality, but when the moments of lyricism do come, they seem all the more intense. In the short section "Kyoto, Montana" he puts it all together.

"In Kyoto, there is a Buddhist shrine called the Moss Garden where moss grows in a thousand colors and textures and each variation of the moss is a form of music, so pure in detail that it shines like a green light for the soul to go. The moss garden is over six centuries old, so that's a lot of music and prayers rising like mist off the moss.

"Here in Montana there is a small canyon that narrows to a rocky gorge filled with a grove if cottonwood trees. In the autumn, they look like a yellow waterfall seeming to come and go from nowhere."

The Tokyo-Montana Express seems a bit more subdued than some of Brautigan's earlier efforts: the influence of his trip to Japan, perhaps, or the results of what he describes disparagingly as "middle age."

If you care at all for this most genial of the old flower children, who can interject a happy dose of self-mockery on the path to self-enlightenment, you will enjoy his invitation to step aboard this peculiar but very remarkable train.

Sage,1981

"Travelling Light"
Lorna Sage
The Observer [London], 19 Apr. 1981, p. 32.
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This is a parody travel book—the whole point about Richard Brautigan being that in most important senses he hasn't moved at all since Trout Fishing in America in the 1960s. As a student of space, he's terrific on time, an expert in the art of sitting still, and this collection of pieces is a loving, if slightly dismayed tribute to the places he has sat in over the past 10 years or so.

There are some stories, and a few tricky autobiographical anecdotes. He bows ceremoniously to his Japanese wife ("the smell of her perfume made it possible for me not to smell the dead mouse in my heart any more"); he feeds 18 dishevelled chickens somewhere in Montana down the road from the Tastee-Freez; he reads about Groucho Marx on a trip to Tokyo ("Sayonara, Groucho"); he sternly refuses to be sentimental in San Francisco ("This is a tourist town and people come here to look at French bread"). However, as these glimpses of his world may suggest, he's really interested only in the most oblique and fugitive conjunctions of things. The two-page dialogue between, say, a bucket of small, live eels and a pan of spaghetti in a Japanese kitchen—that's his style.

Absences, gaps in reality and disappearances are guaranteed to stop him in his tracks. One sinister, confessional tale—"How could I do it?"—features a jigsaw puzzle and a vacuum cleaner ("There was just too much blue sky"). Others savour the sensation of encountering an empty mailbox, a funeral parlour with all the lights out, an erotic movie of which, by some inverted miracle, he contrives to miss the end. "So there you have it: everything is here except that which is missing." How close the connection is, I wouldn't like to say, but he's a connoisseur of hangovers, sometimes nailing them with a stunning phrase—"Soaking wet monkeys were at play in my mind"—sometimes producing one of his rare purple passages, as in this description of "Hangover as Folk Art":

"The folk art took the shapes of badly carved, smelly little dolls, undesirable tainted trinkets constructed from rusty beer cans and coal, paintings of alligator shit on swamp bark, and of course, last but not least, colourful native shirts woven out of the underwear, removed from corpses by albino grave robbers."

Time has told, a little. Old men stopping him in the street with handbills for massage parlours remind him, sadly, of himself. "Sometimes when I finish writing something, perhaps even this. . . ." And in this vein his mock-naive manner gets uncomfortably close to the real thing: "I feel very dull like a rusty knife in the kitchen of weed-dominated monastery that was abandoned because everybody was too bored to say their prayers anymore. . . ."

Not that he does it badly, but—for me—he's most serious as a comic. The gag is the nearest analogue to his elegant two-page conceits. It's tempting, given the Japanese connection, to suppose he's learnt a thing or two from haiku too, but no. He doesn't put down roots in any culture that way, he travels light; in his time capsule.

Story,1981

"Cult Express"
Jack Trevor Story
Punch, 29 Apr. 1981, pp. 679-680.
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.

Ernest Hemingway fished gargantuan barracudas in Cuban waters, Richard Brautigan catches a 13-inch trout in his home stream in Montana, recorded in this new book of literary pieces, The Tokyo-Montana Express. Here the similarity between the two writers only begins. Hemingway by my judgement came out of Gertrude Stein, Brautigan on the basis of reading him now comes from third generation, smaller fish Hemingway. I had not heard of Brautigan but I have now.

"Brautigan is rather a cult figure among American universities." This is my agent talking, Anne; free and instant research. It figures. I was working in films and for Village Voice in New York in the late Sixties and there is a kind of familiar ring here; I think it's an ear-ring. Clues. Printed in America—that means cheapo publishing by Cape. Bad. Single-handed the writer now has to overcome my huffiness. Printed in America (a photo job) means even if they can't get a paperback deal nor even the last ten pounds from the Arts Council, the sales return—with waiting disciples and all—will be not too bad. Also the book bears the seal of American approval. One thing—it's like sitting down to an exciting, fresh, original tinned lobster.

Tokyo-Montana Express is Richard Brautigan's allegorical train journey into his own soul or bowels. I have now read from the beginning of this interesting journey to what I am certain is not yet the end. His adventures appear to be getting less exciting and therefore easier to come by. Well, according to my friend Christopher Challis, a doctor of literature himself, with his own ear-ring, Brautigan's earlier books, especially Sombrero Fallout and Trout Fishing In America, were very good books. Now this one I would like to like to please Chris. I do already like Richard's enthusiasm for writing which shows through all the time. But (and how I too hate that word), standing on the beach imagining the Pacific Ocean engulfing the whole world makes for shallow waters. Eating in a cafe where you are the only customer; the poor Japanese lady owner goes broke finally and joins mass production with the rest of us. This is perfectly viable subject matter I know; look at Ambrose Bierce with his shot soldier at Owl Creek. But Ambrose vanished in Mexico before Hemingway met Stein in Paris; a meeting that changed the face of western literature.

Ernest Hemingway stole Gertrude Stein, ripped her off as we say today. He was being driven mad with envy of Scott Fitzgerald who kept getting enormous cheques from The Saturday Evening Post. That fury of Hemingway's set a million ear-rings chiming right down through Haight and Ashbury and City Lights book shop. The anger of the sad ephemera, "Boy With John Bull Printing Set On Wet Saturday And Nothing To Print."

There is a tide whose flood began with cryptic Gertie and whose running (down to the last mussel on the last beach) is disconnected from the moon. Do-it-yourself poets arrived. I never get past the first chapter of my big one—Kerouac. Maybe Brautigan got wise to this resistance and so invented the micro-chapter:

"All The People That I Didn't Meet,
And The Places That I Didn't Go.

"'I have a short lifeline,' she says. 'Damn it.'

"We're lying together under the sheet. It's morning. She's looking at her hand. She's twenty-three: dark hair. She's very carefully looking at her hand.

"'Damn it!'"

Length has got nothing to do with my personal dislike of this author's kind of mannered prose. It does contribute though to a declamatory element which betrays attitudes. A male elitist attitude, an awareness of cosmic utterance and an unnatural or unnaturally emphasised love and obsession with Japan and the Japanese. I expect it's only bomb guilt and therefore okay. What it sounds like this:

"Hear me! Hear me!"

Spotty undergrads are likely to scuttle up as they do around Hobbits and Rabbits and start nodding their heads like car-window doggies. There is a kind of mass hysteria that passes as culture without having to work at it and your young intellectual, tomorrow's Writer, will go for something short and easy to remember:

"There Is No Dignity,
Only The Windswept Plains Of Ankona

"There is no dignity, only the windswept plains of Ankona, he thought..."

But ignoring these natural irritations of an older writer, Richard Brautigan's book holds lots of common-sense (ban umbrellas, encourage rain) some good ideas for stories (which he himself can't be bothered to write), some neat insights and observations. The writing style is truly awful unless—and I give Cape this though I haven't costed it—he does his next book in needle-point. At the Tokyo end of the line the author's world philosophy (he meets a middle-class snob who won't mix with Japanese waiters) comes down to that Englishman who goes to Greece and dances on a table.

Swigart,1981

"Still Life with Woodpecker, The Tokyo-Montana Express"
Rob Swigart
The American Book Review, 3 Mar. 1981, pp. 14-15.
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.

Usually we think of the very good and the very bad as far apart, the very bad somewhere down on the bottom, beneath sight or contempt, and the very good as a lofty and visionary peak where esthetic rapture dwells. But I think now that the very good and the very bad are not far apart at all, but close together, and that some writers work close to that line the way a bullfighter works close to a bull's horns. Too close, and it's very bad—gored by the horns of sheer tastelessness. Just close enough and it is truly sublime.

A couple of recent books have suggested these notions: Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker, and Richard Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express.

Both books were surprises. Here were two popular and important writers associated with the sixties counter-culture. Like the Beats before them, these writers were romantics; intuitive, irrational, concerned with extravagance both of behavior and perception.

But this is a matter of style, really. One supposes there are romantic bullfighters and classical bullfighters, and that is how close to the line they work which determines the quality of the performance.

[Material deleted . . .]

I thought that with Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express it would be as if I were going to the bullfights in a small Mexican border town on a three-day pass from the army. I expected a stand-off, with twilight gathering over the ring and the audience at last tossing rented pillows at the exhausted contestants before heading home through the desolate evening traffic. I had read one or two other Brautigan books, and wondered what the fuss was all about. Surely his proper arena was that small and dusty bowl in Juarez. To me his popularity had been inexplicable, like Tiny Tim's.

I was wrong. Here were passes that were understated, even subtle. A quiet, compassionate and serene style, working quite close, Manolete in Nuevo Laredo. Not always close, of course, not consistently brilliant in that quiet, unpretentious way. Not always possessed of that sense of quintessential Japanese sabi, or wabi, or shibumi, that self-effacing expertise and quiet "poverty" so important to his style. But often enough there is something memorable, an anecdote or a fancy one wants to share, pass on or make one's own. When I finished the book was dogeared with stories I wanted to reread. Stories that seem to work quite close and never get gored.

The curious thing was I expected him to die, to be skewered and bleeding before the trumpets had finished, dragged off, and the next contestant out there in the ring. Instead, I found myself applauding the small motion, the brief compassion or revenge or observation. Brautigan's real strength is these quick but detailed anecdotes of a writer surprisingly free of arrogance or conceit, surprisingly graceful.

[Material deleted . . .]

[When publishers and authors succumb to the allure of the quick buck the fear of not being able to produce is present.] The fear is there in all of us, in anyone who must perform. In part it is the fear of not being able to do it again, of not coming close to the line, of, in fact, falling short; so it is not really the fear of crossing the line, it is the terror of producing a bad second book, or fourth book, or nineteenth book. And when someone dies in the ring like this, everyone feels the cold wind.

Brautigan fell under the lure of having to perform, to answer the cries of the crowd; he crossed the line, and recovered.

Recovery may depend on a kind of humility. It may depend on a sense of belonging, no matter how strong the rebellion. Many American writers are Hemingway's children. Whatever one thinks of Hemingway as an ancestor, he is American, and he gave us the bullfight as a metaphor.

Hemingway is there in Trout Fishing in America, and in the Montana sky, in a closeness of observation and simplicity of language. Themes and landscapes are similiar—and they are, even when they appear foreign, American themes, American landscapes. The Tokyo-Montana Express mixes the hippy interest in the east with the Montana sky, the New Mexico desert.

The best stops on The Tokyo-Montana Express have an authentic gentleness and lack of sentimentality, an acknowledgement of ambivalence and paranoia, spite and the hunger for revenge which is the result of an evolution begun in the fifties with the Beats. The prevailing mood then was that the military-industrial complex mentality blamed it all on "them," the Russians, the Communists, fellow-travelers: them. Then, in the sixties, "they" became the military-industrial complex itself, those paranoids in Washington, or Detroit, or Dallas. The great discovery of the seventies was to look inward, and to discover that "they," in fact, were "us."

So I applaud him, for here is an unflinching appraisal of himself and his culture, not so much with the wisdom of hindsight as with an acceptance of growing older, of responsibility: things rejected in the sixties's rush for liberation. Since I too am growing older, I appreciate Brautigan's efforts; and since so many of the media heroes of that time have become stockbrokers or est devotees or professional talk-show guests, it is good to know that with one writer from the sixties at least, Socrates' dictum has come back into fashion. Brautigan has returned to the study of himself, and has gotten to know what he is studying with grace and humor.

While Robbins appears to hand us . . . what was indulgent and ultimately false from the sixties, Brautigan often gives us a homely and valuable truth.

Taylor,1981

"Richard Brautian"
David M. Taylor
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980 Edited by. Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld. Gale Research Co., 1981, pp. 18-21.
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.

Noted for his taciturnity about biographical information, Richard Brautigan perhaps views his personal life as a work-in-progress, an appropriate view in light of the highly autobiographical character of his most recent works, June 30th, June 30th (1978) and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980). Brautigan is currently headquartered at his small ranch outside of Livingston, Montana, seat of Park County, which is bordered on the south by Yellowstone National Park. The sparsely populated, mountainous region with its protean horizons and bountiful fishing is congenial to an author who is frequently compared to Hemingway in his affection for nature. "I get a lot of my work done at the ranch. There's isolation here, a beautiful relationship to the fierce, stark hugeness of the land," Brautigan tells New York Times Book Review columnist Herbert Mitgang. Brautigan leaves the pastoral Montana setting for occasional readings and for frequent trips to San Francisco and Tokyo. "One day I'm here, the next day I'm there," he tells Mitgang. "And I find a kinship between Montana and Japan; the people are dynamic in both places."

June 30th, June 30th, a collection of poetry in diary form, records Brautigan's first visit to Japan in the spring of 1976. The title is based on the date of departure for the United States after his seven-week sojourn, the date repeated because the day is recaptured as the airplane crosses the international date line. Brautigan's introduction to the collection explains the evolution of his "deep affection" for the Japanese. The six-year-old Richard Brautigan, growing up in Tacoma, Washington, at the advent of World War II, adopted the adult world's attitude toward the Japanese. His imaginary slaughter of the enemy is the kernel for "The Ghost Children of Tacoma" in Revenge of the Lawn (1971). His hatred was brought into sharp focus by the death of his Uncle Edward, "indirectly" attributed to the Japanese. Brautigan writes of the death in the poem "1942," collected in The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968) and repeated in the introduction of June 30th, June 30th. As he matured into his midteens, Brautigan says, the hatred gave way to a self-righteous and patronizing forgiveness, and as he approached his twenties, a growing awareness of Japanese culture&$8212;through Japanese literature, paintings, scrolls, religion, food, movies, and friends—brought an admiration and affection that led inevitably to the visit.

The tone of the seventy-three poems and four fragments in June 30th, June 30th shifts at fairly identifiable junctures in correspondence with the author's changes in mood. Most of the poems written during the first five days of the visit are marked by a childlike naivete and awe occasioned by the speaker's confrontations with ordinary Japanese life. Brautigan commemorates his first Japanese bird and fly, celebrates his first solo order from a Japanese menu, and, upon winning a game of pachinko (vertical pinball), exuberates, "I feel wonderful, exhilarated, child-like, / perfect." As the novelty of the cultural encounter wanes, the tone becomes increasingly one of loneliness. The language barrier heightens the sense of isolation, but the speaker notes, "I've been there before / in Japan, America, everywhere when you / don't understand what somebody is / talking about." The speaker's depression diminishes as the diary progresses and human contacts are made, relationships formed. Dispersed throughout June 30th, June 30th are panegyrics upon Oriental pulchritude ("If there are any unattractive / Japanese women / they must drown them at birth."), reminiscent of the romanticized descriptions of Yukiko, the estranged mistress of the American humorist protagonist of Sombrero Fallout (1976). Also included are denunciations of smug Caucasians in Japan and Brautigan's familiar musings on time—recognition of the past's fateful gestation of present and speculation on the enigma of future.

Critics have noted the disparate quality of the poems in June 30th, June 30th. Some equal or surpass the best of Brautigan's earlier poetry; a few are solipsistic indulgences that serve primarily to mark times and places in the diary. A reviewer for Choice suggests that the volume, "an often good book," will be "served well by the winnowing process that will eventually take place." In his introduction, Brautigan himself acknowledges the "the quality . . . is uneven," but adds, "I have printed them all anyway because they are a diary expressing my feelings and emotions in Japan and the quality of life is often uneven."

The Tokyo-Montana Express, which Brautigan says took three years to compose, shows promise of providing literary taxonomists with hours of activity—as did Trout Fishing in America (1967). Called by Brautgan in his interview with Mitgang a "novel" but more prudently labeled a "book" on the dust jacket, The Tokyo-Montana Express is a pastiche of 131 entries, several previously published, set primarily in Tokyo, Montana, and San Francisco. The entries, unrelated by plot, are held together tenuously by the metaphor of the train. Brautigan explains to Mitgang, "The novel is arranged like a train trip. There are stops along the way, and the "I" in the story is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express. Each chapter is separated by a photo of a medallion of the last coal-burning train that I saw in the transportation museum in Tokyo." Providing greater cohesiveness, though, are the strong identity of the narrator and the elaboration of his concerns. The work appears largely autobiographical, more so perhaps than any of Brautigan's earlier novel-length prose, but, as Robert Novak cautions in Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 2, although Brautigan's "stories often seem to have . . . many autobiographical details, he obviously invents freely."

There is a fair sprinkling of the celebrated Brautigan humor in The Tokyo-Montana Express, but the tone is more often one of melancholy, nostalgia, and the common motifs are unfulfilled dreams, aging, death. It is a book fraught with endings: failed business ventures—pale epitaphs to the illusionary American Dream, discarded Christmas trees, dead and abandoned animals, a death-row menu, drowning, and suicide. Past decades are recalled, the 1960s with a vignette of a middle-aged Indian woman searching in the snow in New Mexico for a lost tire chain as her brother casually waits with his foot propped on the running board of his "blue Age-of-Aquarius" pickup truck," and the 1970s with a poignant metaphor of a caged wolf, the "pet" of an insensitive owner, amilessly but persistently pacing his life away. The narrator, often preoccupied with gloomy thoughts about aging, eschews the complexities of the modern world, trades his Sunday New York Times for the National Enquirer, and announces that "sometimes all I want to do is have a little mindless fun with the years that are left in my life." The desire for simplicity is evident in the subject matter of the work, drawn largely from the quotidian. With varying degrees of artistry, Brautigan unleashes his fertile imagination on discarded chocolate wrappers and rubber bands, on umbrellas and an empty popcorn jar—a validation of the narrator's comment that "I spend a lot of my life interested in little things, tiny portions of reality like a pinch of spice in a very complicated recipe that takes days to cook, sometimes even longer. Any more spice than the single pinch and you're walking on dangerous ground." The penchant for the uncomplicated is also apparent in Brautigan's figurative language. The vehicles are Frostian in their simplicity; it is the elaboration that marks a figure as Brautigan's: "My mind is racing forward at such a speed that compared to it, a bolt of lightning would seem like an ice cube in an old woman's forlorn glass of weak lemonade on some front porch lost in Louisiana. She stares straight ahead at nothing, holding the glass of lemonade in her hand."

After a lenghty excursion into more traditional plot handling in his novels published in the 1970s—Brautigan may be flirting in The Tokyo-Montana Express with a return to the method of his first-written and most highly acclaimed novel, Trout Fishing in America, the work which critics have been wont to use as a yardstick in pointing out shortcomings of subsequent works. In City of Words (1971) Tony Tanner describes Trout Fishing in America as "self-dissolving or self-canceling writing," and his comments on the work befit The Tokyo-Montana Express: "Each chapter is a separate fragment, unpredictable because unrelated in any of the usual ways. Each one engages us for a moment with its humor, or strangeness, or unusual evocation, and then fades away. . . . It is one of Brautigan's distinctive achievements that his magically delicate verbal ephemera seem to accomplish their own vanishings."

Brautigan still counts—and attracts—a limited audience, largely the high-school and college reader who is near the age of Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, born in 1960. In 1978 his works became the center of a book-banning controversy in a northern California high school. The American Civil Liberties Union and Brautigan's hardcover publisher, Seymour Lawrence, Inc., joined several students and teachers in a suit against the Shasta County school board after several of Brautigan's works were removed from the classroom. The publisher reports that the case was decided in Brautigan's favor.

In his fourth novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), Brautigan introduces himself as a character in the form of a contributor to the unique library of the novel. "The author was tall and blond and had a long yellow mustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance," Brautigan writes about himself. "He looked as if he would be at home in another era. This was the third or fourth book he had brought to the library. Every time he brought in a new book he looked a little older, a little more tired." In The Tokyo-Montana Express the narrator describes himself in one entry as looking "like a fading middle-aged hippie" an in another comments that "what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed." Popularly identified as a chronicler of the youth movement of the 1960s, Brautigan displays in his recent work a sense of displacement and a longing for halcyon days. "Now, at 45," reports Mitgang, "I feel that I'm maturing and weathering. The weather is very nice in Montana."

Thomson,1981

"Brautigan's Express Trip past 130 Stops"
Robert Thomson
Oakland Tribune, 11 Jan. 1981, Calendar Section, p. I-10.
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 never does the same thing twice. In 20 years of writing novels, short stories and poetry, he has found as many styles to write in as he has found worlds to write about. He takes on language and reality as a child approaches new toys, always tinkering, always experimenting.

In the early 1960s, he chronicled the adventures in Big Sur of the rebellious "descendent" of a fictitious Civil War general. Later he created a harmonious, but somehow horrifying world made largely of watermelon sugar. In the late 1970s, he established his own version of the hard-boiled detective.

About the only thing Brautigan has managed to do consistantly in two decades is to turn the ordinary into a strange new experience. His toying continues in his latest work, The Tokyo-Montana Express, but the action is speeded up.

There are 130 stops on this mental train ride through the American and Japanese landscapes. Some of the stations are a few pages long, others no larger than a paragraph.

One hundred thirty stops isn't a very good record for an express, and the technique of defining that many scenes or events in a few lines has its limitations. An image seen through the express train's windows may just become clear as the train lurches from the station and heads for the next stop.

Other times, we'll be hooked on the landscape and the people we've met and want to settle down for at least a few chapters when the author calls us back aboard.

The first stop in his book is for a look at the diary of one Joseph Francl during the musician-turned-pioneer's western travels in the late 19th century.

"I find the breaks in his diary very beautiful like long poetic pauses where you can hear the innocence of eternity."

Life on the Brautigan express is an effort to capture that type of innocent adventure. Through the author's stops—the equivalent of brief entries in a diary—we become aware of ourselves as life-travelers. The passenger disembarks, not with the travelogue reader's well-developed remembrances of places and names, but rather with a new taste for life's adventure and a fear that we can't really control the speed and path of our own express train.

Witosky,1980

"Riding the Rails with Brautigan"
Diane Witosky
Des Moines Sunday Register, 28 Dec. 1980, p. 5C.
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 ninth novel is a train trip through life, shuttling between Montana and Japan via a series of parables.

Told in a series of stories, Brautigan's book captures the rhythm of the rails. Some of the stories are fleeting glimpses through the window—a young boy playing with a pair of drumsticks flashes by—while others are full stops, giving the reader time to stretch his legs and walk around the station.

It is this sense of the flow of life that keeps this book on track as a novel and not merely a collection of short stories. There are some recurring topics. Brautigan's chickens and his passion for firm-breasted Chinese women are two.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is a mid-life journey. There is no discussion of birth, but a great deal of consideration of aging and death, of human achievement and human loss, of lust and passion and the ending of relationships.

Brautigan deals with these subjects with his characteristic humor; sometimes there is cynicism, occasionally crudity. There are moments of whimsy, Laurel and Hardy snowflakes in "The Smallest Snowstorm on Record," and surrealism, "Werewolf Raspberries."

There also are moments of pain, as when he relates the story of a young Japanese boy who commits suicide rather than live with only one arm, and there are moments of tenderness, as he explains "The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You."

Brautigan has been called by some critics a modern Mark Twain. The comparison is fitting. His writing flows smoothly, carrying the reader along with humor and warmth. It is only afterward that the reader becomes aware of the underlying anger and perhaps a tinge of bitterness.

The Twain image fits Brautigan the person, too. He has been described [by Stephen Schneck] as "a 6-foot country boy, with wire-rim glasses and a homemade haircut and a shaggy wild-west mustache that doesn't quite hide a perpetual grin ... Inside this hulking innocent, this country bumpkin, is a special (very special) correspondent for a terribly literate sort of Field & Stream magazine."

As in his previous works, the narrator, or conductor, on this train is not Brautigan, who is actually a private person who will not permit publication of any biographical information. In his short preface, Brautigan explains: "The 'I' in this book is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express."

Whoever the "I" is, he has a deep feeling for people. His sketches of women are especially sensitive, seeming at first to dwell on the physical but soon turning into emotional portraits.

Some of his chapters have tongue-in-cheek morals attached, but each also carries a message. For example, Brautigan decries American's willingness to waste objects and lives as he describes discarded Christmas trees as lying on the streets like fallen soldiers. Another time he makes his point by comparing the soft, glowing eyes of a happily subservient Japanese wife to the hard, hate-filled eyes of feminists he supposes are reading the piece.

Brautigan's previous books have been criticized for being too optimistic, too willing to ignore catastrophes. But it is this very trait that makes his view of life and death work. His ability to look at human loss, including death, with compassion, then move on to a flight of fancy, fits life's cycle and, again, the rhythm of his train.

If this novel has an over-all message binding it together, this is it: Life goes on.

From his opening story of Joseph Francl, who died "not unhappily," to his closing view of a teletype machine chattering a bright "Good morning, subscribers," Brautigan's train takes the reader on a thoughtful, thought-provoking trip.

Yourgrau,1980

"An Uneasy Middle-Aged Soul"
Barry Yourgrau
The New York Times Book Review, 2 Nov. 1980, Sec. 7, p. 13.
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 confess I've never been much of a Brautiganite. He's always seemed too exactly one of the voices of the barefoot 60's: at best a kind of dopey Will Rogers, at worst a hippie Lois Wyse.

So here comes The Tokyo-Montana Express, the ninth and newest of Brautigan's novels, a 131-station milk run of anecdotes, reminiscences, impressions and whimsies, set mostly in the late 70's (a few revisits to the 60's) and structured in the main by what I presume are the author's autobiographical experiences out at his country place in Montana (the winters are very cold; the author/persona keeps chickens and watches a lot of television) and in Tokyo, where the author appears to have spent a great deal of time musing on female strangers in the subways or holing up in his hotel room alone, reading of Groucho Marx's last days.

Now I have nothing against promulgations on a morsel. On occasion I can live with sentimentalism. But there are things in The Tokyo-Montana Express that belong in anybody's museum for the trivial and the goofily mawkish. For instance: "Spiders Are in the House" ("nice spiders protected from the wind") or "Cat Cantaloupe" (weird pet food!) or "The Last of My Armstrong Spring Creek Mosquito Bites" ("Good-bye mosquito bites") or "Times Square In Montana" (stronger light bulbs in the barn!). I realize much of this is in the slight nature of the Brautigan animal, which diets on butterflies. But a number of these items strike me as just doodlings falsely promoted from the author's notebooks. Their only function seems to be to make the book fatter the shelf.

On a more profound level I find myself exasperated by Brautigan's indirectness. For a writer who seems so intimate, he is really quite unrevealing and remote. He is now a longhair in his mid-40's, and across his habitually wistful good humor there now creep shadows of ennui and dullness and too easily aroused sadness. The telltales of an uneasy middle-aged soul peep darkly among the cute knickknacks of The Tokyo-Montana Express: dead friends, dead strangers in the papers and on the street, ghosts, regrets over wasted years, regrets over women, bad hangovers, loneliness, phone calls long after midnight. All these point toward hard, somber themes; but Brautigan's instrument is the penny whistle. So either he's trilling cutely, as in the moment of "The Man Who Shot Jesse James," when suddenly he finds his memory falling on who killed his boyhood hero, or he's tweeting melancholically under the bedclothes, as in "Tokyo Snow Story" or he's simply giving a maudlin squawk in the face of the human condition, "A Death in Canada." Whichever, the results are glancing and inadequate for the larger, intimated subject. One feels there is stormy stuff going on in the autobiography of Brautigan's "I"—but what, exactly? The author either can't or won't put us in the know. Brautigan's frail pipings are only random marginalia, quotes without a context; the revelations - the body of the text—are elsewhere.

Having said all this, I must admit that The Tokyo-Montana Express does yield its diminutive pleasures. Brautigan does have something going. His persona of the sweetly humorous, self-depreciating eccentric/naïf manages to survive as a genuine and pretty much first-hand article, despite its volatile preciousness. Coupled with a certain poetic temperament (nine books of poems among the author's opening credits), it can turn a piece beguilingly on a single image or figure—"Shrine of Carp," for instance. Brautigan can, in fact, sustain an amiably wistful atmosphere and he can demonstrate a bit of touch, a sly eye. "Homage to Groucho Marx," for example, is simply funny and nimbly fashioned; "Toothbrush Ghost Story" disposes of a love affair with a wry detail of bathroom diplomacy. Other moments furthermore show sinew, such as "Farewell to the First Grade and Hello to the National Enquirer," a mini-essay built up out of childhood difficulties, or "The Great Golden Telescope" a pinprick of countercultural social observation. I wish there were many more of these, and more like "Tire Chain Bridge," which quietly promotes a symbolette of the 60's—odd, resonant, low-key—through a happenstance of workmanly realism.

By comparison, Brautigan's signature work—Trout Fishing In America—works better. It's more of a whole, that first book. The nature and scale of its continuing subject—splashing around after fish—seem better attuned to Brautigan's temperament. It's pretty much a carefree (by which I don't mean tipsy) enterprise. Rereading it now after more than 10 years, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it has a certain tartness about it, a little bit of an edge. And the author's hippieness comes across really as a species of an abiding American voice—sort of Kool-Aid cracker-barrel.

Francl,1968

"The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska"
Richard Brautigan
The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl: The First Bohemian to Cross the Plains to the California Gold Fields. San Francisco: William P. Wreden, [16 Dec.] 1968.
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.

PART 1: OFTEN, CLOAKED LIKE TRICK OR TREATERS IN THE CASUAL

On the third day out from Lucky Ford River we found a corpse almost eaten by wolves (which are very numerous here, howl in concert at night and keep us awake) and scalped by the Indians . . . We buried him and went on our way, with sorrowful thoughts.— Joseph Francl

Often, cloaked like trick or treaters in the casual disguises of philosophical gossip, we wonder about the ultimate meaning of a man's life, and today I'm thinking about Joseph Francl: a man who brought his future to America, God only knows why, from Czechoslovakia in 1851, and completely used up that future to lie dead, facedown in the snow, not unhappy in early December 1875, and then to be buried at Fort Klamath, Oregon, in a grave that was lost forever.

I've read the surviving sections of a diary that he kept on a long unsuccessful gold mining expedition that he took in 1854 from Wisconsin to California, and some letters that he wrote back from California.

His diary is written in a mirror-like prose that is simultaneously innocent and sophisticated and reflects a sense of gentle humor and irony. He saw this land in his own way.

I think it was an unusual life that led him inevitably, like an awkward comet, to his diary and then later to his death in America. In the beginning Joseph Francl was the son of a man who owned a brewery and a glassworks in Czechoslovakia, so he was probably surrounded by a stable world of abundance.

He became a classical musician who studied music at the Prague Conservatory and travelled with an orchestra that gave concerts in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany.

I keep asking myself a question that can't be answered: Why did Joseph Francl come to America in the first place and leave so different a life behind him ? There is just something inside of me that cannot understand why he came here.

Gee, it's such a long way from giving a concert, perhaps Beethoven or Schubert, in Berlin or Vienna, to Joseph Francl describing the American West: . . . after supper, we received a visit from a real wild Indian, a chief of the Omaha tribe. He said he was looking for his squaw. He had not seen her for two days, she was wondering around among the emigrants.

That is quite distant from a concert audience waiting for the music to begin. Joseph Francl left his own Czechoslovakian-born, American-courted wife Antonia whom he called Tony and his young son Fred behind in Wisconsin when he went out to California to find gold.

I've thought about him leaving Antonia behind. I've thought about her waiting. She was just twenty years old. She must have been very lonely. Her husband was gone for three years.

PART 2: JERKY OLD TIME SILENT MOVIES (TURKEYS, QUAIL)

In the 1854 West of Joseph Francl one sees many birds like jerky old time silent movies (turkeys, quail, ducks, geese, snipes, pheasants) and many animals like actors in those movies (buffaloes, elk, wolves) and many fish like swimming silent titles (pike, catfish, perch) and vast lonely areas that are not like movies where no one lives and the road is slender and easy to lose: We realized that we were wandering. The road we are on looks dim, no one has been over it for a year. There are no human tracks, but there are signs that wolves and larger animals have passed here. An overpowering stillness oppresses us.

It is a land inhabited by sly, dog-stealing Indians who know how to get the best of you, even when you mount a small army and go to their camp and demand the dog back, threatening the Indians with WAR! if they do not return the dog (how very distant this is from Prague, Czechoslovakia, and a brief career in classical music!) but the Indians are crafty in their dog-stealing ways and offer a horse in return for the dog, but work things so that the horse never actually changes hands, and the men return (including Joseph Francl) dogless to their camp and without the promised horse, knowing that they have been had. The dog is lost and the Indians are just too God-damn smart.

The people that Joseph Francl met on his way West are mentally cross-eyed and archetypically funky. I do not think your well-balanced section of society chooses to pioneer the frontier. It is always a breed of strange, half-crazy people who go to make their lives where no one else has lived.

Joseph Francl starts right off in the beginning, I mean, he doesn't fool around, travelling with three insane German brothers and another German who dreams of German military glory and world supremacy.

This was in 1854!

And of course they all got drunk on their first day out and were terribly hung over, including Joseph Francl who cared for his beer and other liquors, too.

In and out of his travelling vision of the West, wander a cheating landlord, a charlatan doctor, a cynical farmer, wild, Godless hunters and trappers whom Joseph Francl thinks would look strange in the streets of Europe: Their clothing speaks for them. They could not walk through the streets of any European city, nor would they be per-mitted to do so, without bringing a crowd around them, the members of which would ask each other what sort of comedians are these?

He meets a smart-assed adulterous wife and her simple good-hearted stupid cuckolded husband, a judge going out to Utah to administer justice and cleanup at the same time with $25,000 worth of dry goods that he's going to sell to the Mormons whom Joseph Francl considers to be an unchaste breed of humanity, a hungry Indian chief who did not thank Joseph Francl for giving him dinner, a licentious clergyman and his pretty mistress-cook, a band of extorting Sioux Indians, just back from war with the Pawnees, carrying with them twenty-one Pawnee scalps which they show a great deal of affection toward, and the kind owner of a wagon train that gave Joseph Francl some dinner and some flour when he was very hungry.

In the Placerville gold country of California he met two men who gave him a bad deal on a dry claim and he dealt with merchants that extended credit to him for his unrequited search for wealth while he lived in an abandoned Chinaman's shack, looking for gold, and finally he had to go to work for someone who wasn't very well off himself. Things just did not work out for Joseph Francl in California, a land that he describes as this beautiful but unfortunate country.

And all the time that he was gone his wife Antonia waited in Wisconsin for his return. She was also in poor health. Three years passed. That's a long time for a young woman who's not feeling well.

PART 3: THE LONG DOORS OF JOSEPH FRANCL

We arrived in camp on the third day amid a big rain and thunder storm and supper was served with difficulty. I was just pouring out the tea when I heard—

But we'll never know what Joseph Francl heard because part of his diary was lost right after when I heard—I find the breaks in his diary very beautiful like long poetic pauses where you can hear the innocence of eternity.

Just before when I heard—he was working as a cook on a wagon train and there was a lot of Indian trouble. Some Pawnee Indians were really making it hard on them. Most of the Indians didn't have any clothes on. They were running around naked, except for their weapons, and they did not have pleasant ideas in their minds.

... when I heard—

We'll never know.

When we are returned to his narrative, we find him at the beginning of the Great Plains, and what he heard is lost forever.

The next break in his writing is a chosen one. He is at Fort Laramie and he says, I will not describe the rest of my journey to Salt Lake City, for I do not remember that anything of interest occurred.

Then suddenly he is in Salt Lake City and nothing is described in between as if the distance from Fort Laramie (over 400 miles) to Salt Lake City were just a door that you opened and you stepped through.

Joseph Francl's diary ends with him in the Sierra Mountains, waking up in the morning covered with snow.

And Antonia waited in Wisconsin for her husband, who was Joseph Francl covered with snow, worrying about him, and when he would be back.

Three long years passed.

PART 4: TWO CZECHOSLOVAKIANS LIE BURIED HERE IN AMERICA

Joseph Francl finally returned to Antonia who was now twenty-three years old. She must have been very happy. She probably threw her arms around him and cried.

Then he settled down for a while and they had five more children and he returned to his old Prague musical ways. He taught the piano and singing and was the director of the Mendelssohn Singing Society in Watertown, Wisconsin.

He also worked as a county clerk for years and then in 1869 he moved to Crete, Nebraska, and started a general store there in 1870, but business was bad, so in 1874 for some God-damn California dreaming reason, he left his wife Antonia and a bunch of children behind in Crete and returned to Placerville, looking for gold again. This was years after the gold rush was over.

He didn't write about this trip to California this time. He just went there. Of course things didn't work out for him this time either. He even lived in the same Chinaman's shack that he lived in twenty years before.

Joseph Francl was never destined to make anything out of California, so he went to visit his oldest son Fred who was now grown and living up near Walla Walla, Washington, chopping wood for a living.

Fred was the American grandson of a Czechoslovakian brewery and glassworks owner. How distant the seeds of blood are blown over this world.

In the spring of 1875, Joseph Francl walked from Placerville to Portland, Oregon. That's 650 miles of walking. He turned right at the Columbia River and walked up to the Blue Mountains where his son lived.

Working conditions were poor in Washington, so he, his son, and a friend of his son decided to go to California where things might be better (Oh no!) and Joseph Francl was off on his third trip in California.

They travelled on horses, but it was a bad winter and Joseph Francl's son Fred decided to turn back and go by ship to California, leaving his father and his friend to continue on horses to California.

OK: So now it was son by ship and father by horse to California. Things are really getting strange now. The story of Joseph Francl is not an easy one.

Joseph Francl got sick travelling through Oregon, and he didn't eat anything for eleven days and then he was delirious for several days. I do not know what form his delirium took but perhaps Indians and concert halls were a part of it.

Then Joseph Francl got lost from his travelling companion who looked for him, then went for help. When the search party found him a few days later, he was lying facedown in the snow, dead, and he was not unhappy.

In his delirium he probably thought that death was California. He was buried at Fort Klamath, Oregon, on December 10, 1875 in a grave that was lost forever. It was the end of his American childhood.

Antonia Francl died in Crete, Nebraska, on November 21, 1911, and all the waiting that could ever be done was over now.