Cross,1992

"A Refuge in Montana: The Gossip-Column Set Slips Quietly into the Woods"
Robert Cross
Chicago Tribune, 20 September 1992, Travel Section, 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.

The gravel road wobbles toward infinity across miles of high plains ranch land. Not much out there but grass, scattered boulders, some fences and distant peaks of the Absaroka Range, which provide just enough scale so you know you aren't driving on a length of white shoelace or the foul line for a spectral and endless baseball game.

In late afternoon, that virtually empty stretch of Swingley Road seemed to be a needless scratch across the pristine landscape. Vehicles came along so infrequently that each one raised virgin dust. I counted three during the hour-long drive to William Hjortsberg's cabin. The last of those was a Federal Express van.

Hjortsberg writes novels ("Falling Angels") and screenplays ("Legend"). He lives alone in a small log house amid the multi-million-dollar ranches and luxury hideaways that pepper the meadows, prairies and foothills southeast of Livingston.

A significant number of landowners in the area—loosely known as Paradise Valley—work in the film industry, television, publishing and various other high-visibility enterprises. They presum111ably can lower their profiles a bit here, where the trout fishing is thought to be the best in the world and where the horizons provide an illusion that one is separated from the clutter of ordinary commerce (a myth readily dashed by the intrusions of fiber optics and satellite transmission).

Montana has become a popular refuge for those who can earn their livings anywhere or who pull down the sort of income that allows nearly unlimited freedom of choice. Hjortsberg, an Easterner who was part of the great westward hippie migration of the '60s, can sit on a bench outside his cabin and let the scenery answer that dense, city-slicker question so frequently heard during calls from L.A.: Why live here?

A sheer cliff to his right makes the sunset fast-forward into soft shadow, while the valley displays a somehow disquieting picture of eroded rock, pastures littered with huge boulders, vividly green pine forests, the whitecaps of the Boulder River rapids and occasional heron flyovers. Straight ahead, peaks rising above the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness mark the way toward Yellowstone National Park, some 80 miles distant.

"I've been here eight years, and every day I step out and I feel a sense of awe," Hjortsberg said. In the past, he would hike the back country and really get into the heart of this paradise, most of which cannot be penetrated by automobile. Now, writing a novel set in the Middle Ages and working on a biography of his late Montana colleague, poet-novelist, Richard Brautigan, Hjortsberg seldom strays far from the cabin.

"It gives me so much pleasure to sit right here, that putting 60 pounds on my back and humping 10 miles into the wilderness—I've somehow lost my enthusiasm for that."

The life in and around properties like his fosters an individualism born of solitude, but not reclusiveness. Hjortsberg keeps track of the neighbors, and he may join them for a spring branding session or get-togethers in the Livingston restaurants and bars.

> "You passed Tom Brokaw's place and Whoopi Goldberg's place and Michael Keaton's place all on your way here," he informed me. The huge ranch owned by retired Levi Strauss magnate and Oakland Athletics owner Walter Haas stands just across the road. And Hjortsberg neglected to mention Dennis Quaid, Jeff Bridges, Brooke Shields, Peter Fonda and several other household names with hideaways nearby.

A few of those people have indulged in excesses of home construction or subdivided their spreads into bizarre land configurations, he complained. But most have slipped quietly into the community.

"Everything else, like Brokaw's or Keaton's place, has been beautifully low-key, in tune with the environment, nothing that declares itself," Hjortsberg observed. "This is on the edge of some very wild country here. I've had cougars on my deck. I've seen moose and bear. It's definitely not the suburbs."

Yet the writer can and does find human company easily enough. "The best thing about Montana," he said, "is how people treat each other. First of all, no one judges you. They take you at face value, which I really like. And neighbors are really neighborly. You can count on them if you need help with something. And likewise you help out whenever asked. I find that to be one of the most humane aspects of living here."

Livingston, the nearest civilization to Hjortsberg's home, is an old railroad and cattle town and might be thought of as the "real people" counterpoint to such heavily publicized celebrity spas as Aspen and Malibu. Yet those who study magazines that feature famous personalities will find southwestern Montana mentioned almost as much. Groupies would have difficulty surmounting the determined anonymity of the region, however. And anyone following a map to the stars' homes, if such a chart exists, would be well advised to top off the gas tank, carry plenty of water and pack a snake-bite kit.

Even if they never see a familiar face, sightseers find plenty of gratification. The rich, famous and self-employed retreat to Montana for a reason, and that reason becomes apparent at every graveled turnoff into public-access fishing sites, where pure, bubbling offshoots of the mighty Yellowstone River yield cutthroat trout and hefty rainbows.

In the summer of 1991, director Robert Redford filmed scenes for "A River Runs Through It" in and around the Gallatin River. The Gallatin twists south through Bozeman (26 miles west of Livingston), parallels U.S. Highway 191, gurgles past the Ted Turner-Jane Fonda ranch, skirts the lush Big Sky resort complex, ducks into the gorgeous Gallatin Canyon and ends up near lofty Gray Peak in Yellowstone National Park.

In "A River Runs Through It," the water carries a heavy metaphorical load, and the Gallatin River seems up to the task. The movie (opening in Chicago on Oct. 9) is based on the classic novella of the same name by the late Norman Maclean, the University of Chicago professor who so beautifully tied in trout fishing with the complex, delicate and sometimes tragic life of an immigrant family that had made its way from Scotland to western Montana.

Maclean's fishing scenes took place on the Blackfoot River in 1937, but the Blackfoot has deteriorated since then through overuse by anglers and campers, erosion left by timber harvests and the formation of silt deposits from lumbering operations, which bury trout-spawning beds during spring runoff. Consequently, Redford set the fishing scenes on the Gallatin, about 30 miles south of Bozeman, and let Livingston—which still has an Old West air—stand in for the towns that figure in the story.

Back in town, trout-fishing outfitter John Bailey seemed hopeful that the movie would do some good. "I understand most of the film's proceeds will be going to Trout Unlimited (a conservation group) for the restoration of the Blackfoot," said Bailey, who was a technical adviser for the movie. Orvis, the ubiquitious outdoors supplier, also plans to contribute. "There's going to be a fair amount done in conjunction with the movie, with a payoff for the Blackfoot," he said.

Bailey's late father, Dan, founded the family business in 1938. "When he came in, hardly anybody used the dry fly," Bailey said. "He probably did as much to popularize dry-fly fishing as anyone. The fly-fishing market has really grown since the '60s. In the '70s, it boomed. The tackle has gotten much, much better."

The Bailey operation, known as Dan Bailey's Fly Shop, reflects that boom with its spacious showroom in downtown Livingston and an adjoining storefront where workers, clearly visible from the sidewalk, hand-tie flies and prepare thousands of items for shipment around the world. Early in the morning and late in the evening, Livingston streets teem with fishing enthusiasts loading or unloading their vehicles and combing the outfitters' shops for just the right feathers and hooks.

In a town where the prospect of a Yellowstone cutthroat trout, a grizzly or a mountain goat excites the average resident or tourist far more than a movie star sighting, the gossip-column set easily blends into the scenery. Last year, when Redford noticed that diners at a local restaurant were ignoring him, he sent his bodyguard back to the hotel.

In the days when Westerns still had box-office appeal, Montana was virtually a back lot for the film industry, and word began to spread in Hollywood and other entertainment-communications centers about the cowboy paradise tucked into quiet niches of the Rockies. Steve McQueen was a regular. Sam Peckinpah often holed up for weeks in a suite at the Murray Hotel (see accompanying story).

Writers, for their part, came for the trout, the non-restrictive horizons and freedom from three-martini lunches with publishers and agents. Novelist Tom McGuane often gets some of the credit for moving the colony from Key West, being, as Thomas Carney noted in Esquire magazine 14 years ago, "the sort of placeless man who makes places wherever he goes."

Tim Cahill, the humorist and adventure writer, occupies a crisp white bungalow in a quiet, midwestern-style Livingston neighborhood. He fled there from San Francisco in 1978 and said he finds it the perfect compromise between the big city and his boyhood home in Waukesha, Wis.

"This town is a little smaller than Waukesha was when I was growing up," he told me during a chat on his big front porch. (Livingston has about 7,000 residents, Waukesha now has 50,000.) "The woods where I used to walk as a kid is now a Kmart."

Livingston, however, has been slow to change, except as a center for people bucking the tide of discount stores and strip malls. The Montana literati have scattered themselves all over the state, with concentrations in Bozeman and Missoula—both university towns—and Livingston with its superb fishing and cattle-ranch rusticity.

"Now that we have Federal Express, computer modems and fax machines, there's no reason for a person who does what I do to live in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles," Cahill said. In the warm months, after knocking off work, he loads his small boat into the back of his Jeep Wagoneer and drives a few blocks to the Yellowstone River and an evening of fishing.

"It gives you a lot of humility to match wits with an animal that's got a brain the size of a fingernail clipping," Cahill reflected. "I'm not a sophisticated fly fisherman, nor do I care to be. Some day, I'll study all the different bugs on the river and learn what they are, but that will be sometime in my 70s or 80s. It's not high on my list of priorities. I just like being on the river."

After fishing, Cahill might stop in for a beer at the Murray Hotel lounge or the Owl, a dark saloon where Harley Davidson fanatics and writers mix freely. The Owl back-bar holds a dramatically lit display of books by local authors in the place of honor usually reserved for hooch.

"The conversation is not literary conversation about various techniques and crafts. It's more like, 'Those stupid editors! You know what they did to me this time? You know how much money my agent took?' "

Livingston is small enough that barroom carping might drift from street level and into the open windows of Clark City Press, a small, exquisitely tasteful publishing company founded by the renowned Western painter, sportsman, gourmet and raconteur Russell Chatham. The dark corridors and bright workrooms of Clark City resemble those of a college newspaper office, with young editors and clerks running about and occasionally hiding from hungry authors in search of royalty checks.

Besides griping about editors and agents, members of the literary crowd frequently turn their attentions to the influx of celebrities and assorted millionaires. At Clark City Press, Jamie Potenberg, an editor, jokes derisively about the "Jane and Ted Show," an indefinable feeling of excitement that seems to take hold locally when Fonda and Turner make the rounds.

The walls at Clark City Press and at Russell Chatham's gallery a block away are heavy with autographed photos of party scenes, indicating that Chatham, author McGuane and such assorted celebrities as poet/novelist Jim Harrison (Potenberg's father), journalist Hunter Thompson and dozens more have put on quite a show of their own over the years.

Still, a good many of the entrenched residents accept the upscale dudes with equanimity. Ray Atteberry, a Bozeman real estate agent, said the big spenders haven't distorted prices so far.

"Who can pay $22 million to compete with Ted Turner for a ranch?" Atteberry asked rhetorically. As a relocation specialist at ERA Landmark, Atteberry said he sees a lot of "ordinary" people from the cities longing for clean Montana living but unable to find jobs.

"The main impact of the rich and famous," he said, "is that they get more press and bring more attention to Montana, which then might attract more people to come here."

Tim Cahill indicated that he views the big shots as a welcome deterrent to overbuilding. "No celebrity or commodities broker from Chicago is buying a place here to make money," he noted. "They tend to keep places just as they first saw them, because that's the way they fell in love with them. You can almost bet that the big hunk of land they bought is not going to become a trailer park, a condo development or a golf course.

"This is an old railroad town. There's still grain elevators and tractor stores out on the main street. We don't have a whole lot of cute shops or a mortuary called Death 'n' Stuff."

Along what might be termed the literary-celebrity corridor from Livingston to Missoula, the tourist-tacky aspects have been kept to a minimum, and most of the manmade attractions appear tasteful and solid. The old Northern Pacific depot in Livingston, for example, has been converted into an elegant museum featuring Old West artifacts. The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman offers excellent displays of Native American culture, intriguing finds from nearby dinosaur digs and lucid, often humorous, explanations of Yellowstone geology and the social dynamics of its visitors.

Bozeman, home of Montana State University, does sport a few boutiques and other self-conscious enterprises. Bandana-heads park their skateboards and plop onto benches in front of the Leaf & Bean, a Main Street coffee shop and artsy hangout owned by actress Glenn Close and her sister Jessie. Next door, the Sun Dog Cafe serves ambitious Southwestern specialties in an atmosphere of Crate & Barrel Adobe.

Meanwhile, the people with famous faces slip into the unpretentious Western Cafe down the street. According to one Chamber of Commerce official, "The celebs like to hang out there because nobody there cares who they are."

Writers, by and large, command more reverence in Montana than screen personalities do. Bookstores work hard at whipping up an audience for regional authors. Sax & Fryer in a storefront below Clark City Press in Livingston dates to 1879 and carries a full complement of books by writers in residence, but it never has been a salon.

"It's not like a Bloomsbury, or anything," said proprietor John Fryer, referring to the district in London where a large group of artists, economists, critics, philosophers and authors gathered in the first three decades of this century to discuss truth, beauty, ethics and the latest scandals.

Any Big Sky Bloomsbury would lack a focal point because of the wide-open spaces involved, but a window display at Garden City News on Higgins Avenue in Missoula illustrates the depth and diversity of regional literature by authors living and dead, residing in other parts of the West or just passing through Montana: "All But the Waltz" by Mary Clearman Blew; "Owning It All" by William Kittredge; "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean; "This House of Sky" by Ivan Doig; "The Muddy Fork and Other Things" by James Crumley; "Epiphany at Goofy's Gas" by Greg Keeler; "Death and the Good Life" by Richard Hugo; "Fools Crow" by James Welch; "Angle of Repose" by Wallace Stegner; "Rock Springs" by Richard Ford.

Missoula bookstores have proliferated along with the pawnshops and resale outlets downtown, and out by the university, Freddie's Feed and Read sells serious literature on one side of the store and deli items on the other.

The University of Montana creative writing program, founded in 1920, has uncovered and nurtured outstanding talent almost from the beginning. Poet Richard Hugo gave it impetus for almost two decades, until his death in 1982, and its classrooms have seen the likes of Leslie Fielder, A.B. Guthrie Jr., Dorothy Johnson and Walter van Tilburg Clark.

Blackfoot poet and novelist James Welch, who came to the university after attending reservation schools, told the Los Angeles Times a few years ago that Hugo "made us all feel that anybody could write. He made us realize we came from undiscovered territory."

Pockets of civilization in Montana quickly yield to wilderness and a sense that much remains to be discovered.

Less than half an hour after spotting actress Andie MacDowell shopping at Worden's Deli in Missoula or listening to writers grouse in the scruffy Charlie's Bar across the street, a visitor can plunge into the Bitterroot River valley with only trees and mountains for company.

Turning off southbound U.S. Highway 93 at Montana Highway 43 and heading east, the perils of the creative life fall under the shadow of a symbolically significant episode in American history. The mountains give way to an ocean of gentle hills marked only by some intersecting creeks and a few willow trees. There, on Aug. 8 and 9, 1877, in the valley called Big Hole, a Nez Perce band fleeing certain confinement to ever more restrictive reservations fought U.S. army forces in an ultimately futile effort to continue roaming the West freely.

The Nez Perce survived the army attack and won the battle of Big Hole, but during the four-month Nez Perce War that covered a 1,170-mile exodus from the southeastern tip of Oregon, the band lost 480 members of its original 800. The warriors among them were devastated. Women and children were dying of cold and starvation. Early that October, those who survived surrendered to their pursuers at Bear Paw Mountain near the Canadian border.

Sensitive people now look to Montana for escape and replenishment. Some of them come for the trout, some for the peace, some for the scenery, some for the drama and the ghosts. If they come only for the show-business/literary "scene," they probably will have a lot of mountains to climb and pastures to cross. And even then, at any bend in the road they are likely to discover that the real West was far more harrowing, beautiful and mysterious than any fiction.

Patton,1993

"The Dude is Back in Town"
Phil Patton
The New York Times, 18 Apr. 1993, Sec. 9, p. 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.

Tom Brokaw couldn't be at the opening of Big Sky Western Furniture because he was in Big Timber, his ranch in Montana. Bruce Springsteen, who bought $400 worth of used boots up at Whiskey Dust, Mervin Bendewald's other store, couldn't be there either, but a hundred other Western-garbed guests were, confronting a choice of champagne and sarsaparilla, offered by cowgirl hostesses, forbearing to shoot a piano player pumping out country and western—and making it clear that dude style is back. Again.

Just when it looked safe to leave the ranch house, the outlaws have circled and returned, like Clint Eastwood in "The Unforgiven." After seeming to have vanished like the iguana atop the Lone Star Cafe or Ronald Reagan to Santa Barbara, Calif., dude style was quietly preparing a comeback.

The new dude style is led by a generation of younger designers, like Katy K., who have begun to flourish somewhere between the traditional Western wear suppliers, like Rockmount, and mainstream apparel houses. Western styles have shown up in lines from DKNY and Ellen Tracy. Hot Sox now offers designs with the patterns found on a spotted steer, a pinto horse and a red bandana.

At Big Sky, in SoHo, they show how to dress up an apartment as a ranch house. It's the West as shadow theater, silhouetted against an eternal sunset. Cast-iron and rawhide chandeliers hang from its ceiling, blankets and the odd stirrup or two from its simulated log walls. Lamps bearing wildlife scenes by Steven Blood, just like those in the Old Faithful Inn, lend romantic light.

The Wyoming-style furniture of J. Michael Patrick and his New West furniture company is deployed in "roomscapes." In the tradition of Thomas Molesworth, who created the interiors of ranch houses for wranglers like Robert W. Woodruff of Coca-Cola, the publisher Moses Annenberg and Dwight D. Eisenhower, it combines Chimayo blanket upholstery, lodgepole sidetables, recliners adorned with moose antlers and twisted lamps of burl.

Like the lead-filled outlaw who staggers improbably forward, six-gun blazing, dude style just keeps coming. Its return to New York began with the settling of the Hudson Street block (between 10th Street and Charles streets) where in 1989 Mr. Bendewald opened Whiskey Dust, and Sherry Delamarter creatd the Cowgirl Hall of Fame restaurant.

Working on the theory that the best way to dress up as a cowboy is to dress up in things a real cowboy wore, Mr. Bendewald developed the Montana Broke line of used jeans, imported from that state and accompanied by a guide explaining the origins of all the rips and wear marks. The likes of Eric Clapton and Bon Jovi have paid $70 a pair. Also among his stock of what Mr. Bendewald unabashedly calls his "Western oddities" are old boots, longhorn-and-cactus-patterned "trash belt buckles," Gene Autry pocket knives, Little Joe beef jerky and a candy called Happy Trails, endorsed by Roy Rogers.

The word "dude" is at least a century old, but no one is quite sure where it came from; the best guess is some joking play on "duds." It is to real cowboy clothing as rodeo is to the real round-up. It glitters with little ironies likethe rhinestones on a country and western star's suit.

Dude is not about authenticity of detail; its about authenticity of yearning. From Patsy Montana's 1935 song "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart" to Pam Houston's book "Cowboys Are My Weakness," it has always been about distance and desire. As the narrator of Ms. Houston's title story puts it, "I've always had this thing about cowboys, maybe because I was born in New Jersey."

In the 60's, dude was generalized, especially in African-American street lingo, to mean a fancy dresser. In the 80's, it became further abstracted as a synonym for "guy," a linguistic turn that suggested cowboydom as the archetypal core of male behavior.

There is no more striking form of dressing up like a cowboy than dressing a girl up like a cowboy. The new dude style pushes the cowgirl to the forefront. Cowgirls have been around nearly as long as cowboys—Annie Oakley shot and roped for audiences beginning in 1885—but they have been recast in the light of neo-feminism. Gail Gilchriest's "Cowgirl Companion," offering cowgirl history, poetry, recipes and dating tips, is scheduled to come out in June from Random House. Cowgirl makes cowboy problematic: today's cowgirl no longer necessarily wants to be a cowboy's sweetheart. Witness the success of cowgirl figures like K. D. Lang.

Authenticity in cowboy land has always been relative. Buffalo Chips in SoHo accents its line of new boots with old Randolph Scott film posters, genuine deputy marshal badges and risque cowgirl prints from the 40's. Dakotah fabrics recently signed a licensing deal with Roy Rogers for embroidered pillows, tufted chenille and other items. Rogers was a boyhood idol of the company's president, George Whyte.

But nothing satisfies like owning a real piece of the old West—a vintage saddle or a pair of spurs. Prices for a pair of prime McChesney's spurs, the most distinguished name among the strap-and-rowel set, have leaped from $500 to $1,500 in the last couple of years, said Lee Jacobs, a collector and expert in the field. Ads for the National Bit, Spur and Saddle Collectors Association in the antique tabloids proclaim "rapid growth eastward." Guns are also prized—even rusty ones like the the six-shooter depicted in Michael Friedman's book, "Cowboy Culture" (Schiffer Publishing), with notches on its barrel and the hammer locked as if it had been dropped in a gunfight.

Collectors of cowboy artifacts pursue their quarry with all the fervor of Mr. Eastwood himself. A couple of years ago, Mr. Jacobs said, a father and son-in-law were caught up in a dispute over a collection. They proved their commitment to authentic western values by shooting each other dead.

WHEN EASTERNER MET WEST

Circa 1850—John B. Stetson, a Philadelphian, goes west to cure his tuberculosis, discovers cowboy hats.
1883—Theodore Roosevelt goes west. Equipped with a Bowie knife from Tiffany, he takes up ranching in South Dakota and becomes an object of derision, called "Four Eyes." When he sucker-punches a cowboy in a saloon, derision turns to respect and he gets a new nickname: "Old Four Eyes."
1879—Struthers Burt, a former Princeton professor, opens the first dude ranch, outside Jackson Hole, Wyo. The Bar BC guest list resembles the New York Social Register.
Circa 1885—William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody figures out there's more money to be made in Wild West shows than in the Wild West. He tours Europe, introduces the cowgirl, personified by Annie Oakley.
1903—The first Western, "The Great Train Robbery," is shot near Dover, N.J.
1929—Georgia O'Keefe makes first trip to Taos, N.M., discovers the beauty of a cattle skull and brings it back to New York to paint, unwittingly creating the single most widely dispersed cliche of dude decor.
1935—The singing cowboy, Gene Autry, first warbles on screen. Patsy Montana sells a million copies of "I Want to be a Cowboy's Sweetheart."
1936—Lon Smith, in "Dude Ranches and Ponies," pushes the term "dudeens" for females. It fails to stick.
1946—Jack Weil founds Rockmount Western Wear in Denver, introduces first commercially produced snaps on western shirts.
Late 1940's—Victor E. Cedarstaff, of Wickenburg, Ariz., claims to have invented the bolo tie after his horse runs into a tree.
1957—Ford introduces the Ranchero, half pickup truck and half car, the ultimate dudemobile; Chevrolet's El Camino follows two years later.
1959—"Gunsmoke" is top-rated television show.
1967—Roy Rogers's horse, Trigger, dies and is stuffed and put on display at Rogers Museum, Victorville, Calif.
1969—"Midnight Cowboy" and "The Wild Boy" revise the 60's rebel into existential cowboy.
1973—Henry Kissinger tells Oriana Fallaci that he thinks of himself as a cowboy.
1976—David Allan Coe, the "mysterious rhinestone cowboy" and ex-con, makes it big in Nashville.
1977—Ralph Lauren visits Denver on business and is disappointed with the clothes. The next year he introduces his western-wear line. He buys a ranch in Colorado, has cabin torn down in mid-construction because the logs are too small. He chases down a vintage pickup truck and immediately buys it from its owner.
1978—Billy Martin's western-wear store opens in Manhattan.
1979—National Bit Spur and Saddle Collectors Association founded in a livestock building at Larimer County fairgrounds, Loveland, Colo.
Late 70's—The dude cowboy, redux. Livingston, Mont., becomes a Big Sky Bloomsbury, with the writers Tom McGuane, Richard Brautigan and William Hjortsberg, the actors Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the painter Russell Chatham in residence.
1980—"Urban Cowboy" is released. Ronald Reagan is photographed in cowboy duds at his Santa Barbara, Calif., ranch. In "The Electric Horseman," Robert Redford rides through Las Vegas in a lighted suit.
1980—The Lone Star Cafe in Manhattan mounts a 16-foot-high model iguana on its roof. In Sam Shepard, the existential cowboy metamorphoses into the cowboy of New Age angst, the dysfunctional dude. "True West" premieres. 1984—Wim Wenders's "Paris, Texas" is released.
1989—The Lone Star Cafe moves uptown. The Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Whiskey Dust open on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village.
1990—Buffalo Chips—an offshoot of the New Jersey original—opens in SoHo, selling boots, jewelry and memorabilia.
1991—Billboard magazine's new Soundscan system sales reveals country and western sales higher than previous estimates. Garth Brooks crosses over to top of pop chart; a new generation of country stars arrives. Bruce Springsteen, who sports bolo tie on cover of "Tunnel of Love" album, buys $400 used cowboy boots at Whiskey Dust.
1992—"City Slickers" presents dude ranch as meaningful yuppie experience. Billy Crystal bonds with calf.
1993—Opening of Denim and Diamonds, on Lexington Avenue, and Big Sky, on West Houston Street. "The Unforgiven" sweeps Academy Awards. Gus Van Sant begins filming "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," starring Uma Thurman.

GRAPHIC: Photos: Like the lead-filled outlaw who staggers improbably forward, dude style keeps coming. Above, the party for Big Sky Western Furniture. (Miles Ladin for The New York Times); John B. Stetson (Associated Press); Theodore Roosevelt (Underwood & Underwood); William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody (Associated Press); Gene Autry (Culver Pictures); Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy." (United Artists); Ralph Lauren; Robert Redford in "The Electric Horseman."; Sam Shepard (Melinda Wickman); Uma Thurman in "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." (Abigayle Tarsches)

Thompson,1993

"Out There: Livingston, MONT: A Rumble Runs Through It"
Toby Thompson
The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1993, Sec. 9, p. 3.
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.

Ramblin' Jack Elliott was yodeling a third chorus of "Black Snake Blues" when a deep rumble distracted the hundred or so Montanans gathered in the darkened lobby of the Murray Hotel. They had already suffered distraction from guest sets by Dobro Dick Dillof and the novelist Peter Bowen. But now there was this rumble. The crowd peeked toward the left as the glass doors of the Murray's 1922 elevator slammed shut, and a leering Jack Palance rose like Dracula toward his fourth-floor accommodations.

The Murray is to Montana hostelries what the Chelsea is to the hotels of New York: an antiquated classic. Across from the old Northern Pacific depot, and hard by Dan Bailey's fly shop, it's a timeless caravansary of Western disorder, a place where saloon patrons who've been swaying to the jukebox since 11 A.M. may be gaga over a live band by 9 P.M.; where on any given night one may observe tourists on their way to Yellowstone National Park, backpackers, fishermen or old-fashioned wanderers—like Tom Waits, Keith Carradine, Rip Torn, James Woods, Donna Rice and Whoopi Goldberg.

Livingston, a city of fewer than 7,000, has a reputation as the Montparnasse of the Great Northwest, and the Murray is its lifeblood. Robert Redford shot the movie "River Runs Through It" in and around Livingston; he frequented the Murray bar. Richard Brautigan kept rooms at the Murray, and Warren Oates was a patron.

From outside, it's difficult to imagine what drew them there. The facade, behind a dazzling neon sign, is unassuming brick. But like all good hotels, it epitomizes its geographical milieu: in this instance Montana, which many consider to be the last best place.

In recent years, a fuss has been made over country inns, but the great age of American hostelries coincided with that of the railroad. Fine hotels were built near depots, luring notables, and were inevitably at city center, providing a cultural nexus for their region.

Some 57 miles north of Yellowstone, the Murray epitomizes Livingston: not only the physicality of its mountains, big sky and muscled-up river but also its metaphysicality, as expressed in Western art, horse opera, the dime novel and penny journalism. The Murray is nearly as old as Livingston, which was founded in 1882.

The hotel opened about 1897 as the Elite (pronounced EE-light by locals). Its owner, Josephine Kline, received financing from the family of Senator James E. Murray of Montana. The Murrays foreclosed on the loan in 1925. Legend has it that Mrs. Kline and another woman walked to Washington, D.C., to confront the Senator. But the Murrays took over and gave the hotel their name, and for several decades it was considered one of the grandest in the Northwest.

In 1922, Mrs. Kline had expanded the hotel to four floors, and it then boasted the city's only elevator. Its lobby quickly became a favorite rendezvous. "If you wanted to see who was in town, this was the spot," said Ralph White, the Murray's retired manager and "clerk emeritus," who has lived there since 1941.

The Murray's decline, in the 1960's, coincided with a growth in the Interstate highway system, a consequent decrease in rail travel and an explosion of motels. But recent years have heightened its charm.

A first-time visitor in the summer of 1976 stayed on for two and a half months. He slept in a wide iron bed, bathed in a six-foot-long tub and was privy to a parade of characters through the lobby and scenes never to be forgotten: a woman trucker with an 18-wheeler idling outside, who asked the bar crowd if "some fool don't want to ride out by the Husky station and hear my party tapes"; Mr. Brautigan with Custer-length hair and an absurd fur hat, his head held high among the lobby's stuffed trout; Jimmy Buffett drawling songs in the parking lot at midnight.

Sam Peckinpah lived there from 1979 until his death in 1984 in California. His home was a suite once occupied by Walter Hill, a son of James J. Hill, the Great Northern Railway Company tycoon. Mr. Peckinpah was rarely heard from, except for an occasional shot fired through the roof or a call to the bar.

What is it about the Murray that draws outlaws like Mr. Palance and Mr. Peckinpah? Its ambiance, certainly—antique furniture, red oak doors with hand-painted numerals, a lobby with 700 square feet of marble -- and its convenience. At Second and West Park streets, it's within spitting distance of Livingston's simplest delights: cowpoke saloons, the Depot Center Museum (at one time the Northern Pacific depot), an all-night railroad cafe, Yellowstone River, the Absaroka Range and lush Paradise Valley—plus Sax & Fryer's, the book and general-merchandise store.

In 1978, Pat Miller, a Livingston rodeo queen, and her husband, Cliff, a rancher, bought the hotel at auction. They sold the establishment to Dan and Kathleen Kaul in 1991. Mrs. Miller had revived the hotel with new furniture, plumbing and decor.

The Kauls have gone several steps further, enticing Mark Glass, a celebrated Montana chef, to run the hotel's Winchester Cafe. The restaurant has become south-central Montana's foremost, its simple Mission-style furniture and hearty post-80's food—local trout, elegant chops, rich pasta—a comfort.

Mr. White, who is 82 and regularly holds court with visitors in his room, is legendary for his grouchiness. Yet, even he has admitted "things're looking up." Bruce Weber shot a fashion spread for New York magazine last June, and tourists crowd the Art Deco bar.

Mrs. Miller is still active, planning a Murray Hotel Writers Conference, with the help of the writers Thomas McGuane and William Hjortsberg and the painter Russell Chatham.

On the evening of Mr. Elliott's concert last July, Peter Fonda was on stage, singing an old Bob Dylan ballad to extended applause. Afterward, he trailed the crowd outside, pausing at curbside. Immediately he was asked for directions, but the traveler interrupted him before he could finish. "Aren't you Peter Fonda?"

"Well, yeah," Mr. Fonda said.

The traveler gauged the hotel warily, then tightened on Fonda. "That's amazing," he said. "You look just like him."

Ackroyd,1975

"Grotesquerie"
Peter Ackroyd
Spectator, 5 Apr. 1975, p. 411.
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.

"This novel is for the Montana gang" and so immediately The Hawkline Monster plunges into that world of rough and tough guys which, judging by a rather limp photograph of Mr. Brautigan on the cover, is going to be sent up rotten. He describes his book as a "Gothic Western," and it certainly has that mid-Atlantic and cross-cultural flavor which I associate with extremely bad novels. Cameron and Greer are professional hit-men, who will do anything for the money. Richard Brautigan has obviously learnt something from them. He rattles out his jokes like wax bullets, he almost hits his targets—it is surprising he doesn't get a little closer, since they are the remarkably large ones of conventional horror and conventional adventure—and he uses that ironic and dead-pan manner which is supposed to imply everything but which actually means nothing.

A young lady called Magic Child hires Cameron and Greer for five hundred dollars; they all 'sleep' in a barn together; they travel through the Dead Hills until they reach Hawkline Manor or, as Mr. Brautigan puts it in that delightfully ironic way which has won him the plaudits of American hippies and underdone English academics, "the road stopped like a dying man's signature on a last minute will." There speaks the authentic voice of the American tradition. Meanwhile, Cameron and Greer meet a second young lady who is identical in all respects to Magic Child; Cameron and Greer then go in search of the Hawkline Monster, which, delightfully and ironically turns out to be an itinerant light that has escaped from a somewhat mad Professor's retort. When I tell you that an umbrella stand is transformed into the Professor after the monster has been put out, you will see how ironical it all is.

The Hawkline Monster contains a great deal of fancy but no imagination at all—this is presumably what the publishers and Mr. Brautigan mean by "gothic"; fortunately, the novel is arranged as a series of brief chapters, and the print is very large, so the tedium of its self-indulgent whimsy is camouflaged for quite long periods. But you can never hide your darkness under a bushel, and Mr. Brautigan's prose eventually becomes flat and uninventive, his narrative stale and repetitive. The publishers, of course, tell us that it is "beautifully evocative, funny and observant" but I presume that none of them actually read the book.

I hear that Russell Hoban has been compared and contrasted with Richard Brautigan, and this seems very unfair to Mr Hoban. His Turtle Diary is a pleasantly sentimental novel and, being a sentimentalist myself, I found it loveable and entertaining. Sentimentality is, of course, and extremely powerful force since it can contain any number of disparate emotions without noticing the strain. And there is a special kind of sentimentality which attaches itself to brute animal life (if there are no animals around, children will serve) at the same time as it lets out a few mawkish yelps at the generally depressed condition of "life," "reality" or whatever. Mr. Hoban's characters, William G and Neaera H, swim in this particularly fishy soup. They both suffer from the helpless and debilitating loneliness which comes from acquiescing in something optimistically known as 'fate', and both of them are searching for the romantic self-sufficiency and natural mindlessness which elderly turtles seem to represent for them.

This novel is composed as a series of inner monologues as William and Neaera float towards each other, arms outstretched, and watching their slow movements with expressions ranging from surprise to horror. Their plan is to free the turtles from their cosy aquarium in the local zoo and to thrust them back into the cold and unpredictable currents of the ocean. I would have thought that the aquarium was at least one ecological niche above the Atlantic, but William and Neaera are fantasists—Neaera writes books for children and William works in a bookshop—and they cannot be expected to see it like that. They drive down to Cornwall and set the poor creatures 'free', and then the two of them drift back into the sheltered aquarium of their own lives: dreaming, naturally, of the great beyond.

It is a very attractive story and, despite the characters' fascination with their own lives, what emerges is Mr. Hoban's individual and very distressing imagination. He collects his insights like bright and tiny stones, and he uses a ferocious but slightly awkward prose which keeps everything to one side. Now the side-line is a very honourable position to be in, since it is the only one which encourages the warm glow of sentimentality, but Mr. Hoban is continually fretting and straining to be somewhere else. There are continual references to the small scale on which he is forced to work (there are descriptions, for example, of those small but perfectly complete model towns through which sentimentalists love to wander), and Mr. Hoban probably hates himself for those moments of great preciousness and whimsy which I much appreciated. It is an eclectic but at the same time highly organised book, and one that is full of stray insights and descriptions which are united by Mr. Hoban's mercurial creative temperament. My only complaint is the dialogue, which is uniformly artificial: real sentimentalists—like turtles—never open their mouths except to be fed.

Agapow,1997

"Review of The Hawkline Monster"
Paul-Michael Agapow
The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive 16 Oct. 1997.
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.

In the early 1900s, two professional killers travel to an isolated house. The (ubiquitous) mad professor has created his masterpiece, but then disappeared, leaving his two (also ubiquitous) beautiful dAugustters alone, a monster roving around the basement and strange things afoot . . .

"'This sure is a weird place,; Greer said.
'It ain't any weirder than Hawaii,' Cameron said.
As it turned out, Cameron was wrong."

The Hawkline Monster is a strange book and probably uncategorisable. It was originally published in 1975, Brautigan being the author of the famous Trout Fishing in America. It dips and weaves between genres, part gothic thriller, part morality tale, part '50s B-grade SF, part Western. If you were looking for authors whose style was similar, there might be someone midway between Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Moorcock. As the two assassins (who "look about the same, except they had different features and different builds") drift closer to the heart of the mystery, they have circular conversations, encounter odd bystanders, hear ludicrous history recounted in a deadpan serious manner. Think Lost Highway meets Frankenstein.

As a serious piece of speculative fiction then, The Hawkline Monster is not a contender. Hell, it's not even in the race. But it might be more accurately seen as a comedy, not a broad farce (a la Pratchett), a shaggy dog story (a la Asimov) or a sly dig (a la Zelazny). It's a dry but quirky tale, that stays just this side of dottiness. As such it's very funny and once again Vonnegut is the nearest reference point:

"'It (the monster) sounds like the combination of water being poured into a glass,' Miss Hawkline said, 'A dog barking and the muttering of a drunk parrot. And very, very loud.'
'I think we're going to need the shotgun for this one,' Cameron said."

Perhaps not very deep, but entertaining as all get out. And at its length, it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Anonymous,1974

"Books"
Anonymous
Playboy, 21 Sep. 1974, pp. 22, 24.
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.

America's legendary trout angler is back again, this time with two hired guns at the turn of the century in the Dead Hills of Oregon. The Hawkline Monster (Simon & Schuster), subtitled "A Gothic Western," by author Richard Brautigan, is as slim and grotesque as a Victorian hag creeping through ice caves and about as subtle as a flying buttress.

The affable killers, Cameron (who counts everything from bullet holes in a cross to the number of times he chews his food) and Greer (who seems to have Brautigan's knack for timely assertion), are hired by Magic Child, "quite a pretty" Indian girl who "looked so calm you would have thought she had been raised in a land where bodies hung everywhere like flowers" and who has studied at the Sorbonne.

The job: Kill a monster who skulks and howls in the ice caves beneath the now-deceased Dr. Hawkline's basement laboratory. Dr. Hawkline had created his monster from ingredients ranging from Himalayan potions to drops of something from the Egyptian pyramids and, it was rumored, Atlantis. In return for the gift of life, the monster turns Dr. Hawkline into an elephant's-foot umbrella stand. Hawkline Manor is occupied by the doctor's identical daughters. Miss Hawkline and Miss Hawkline (who are identical to Magic Child). All three are exactly identical, which seems to bother nobody but the Hawkline Monster, and everything bothers it. Phosphorescent and assuming small changeable forms, sounding like water being poured, a barking dog and a drunken parrot, it is followed by its well-meaning, independently minded but physically bound shadow as the monster drags it through Hawkline Manor, a kind of "back East" St. Louis mansion,

And there is a real plot and a thread of continuity that runs through chunky one-page chapters containing passages that run a gamut of style from Poe to Zane Grey, from Ian Fleming to George V. Higgins. This is certainly Brautigan's most simultaneously unified and eclectic work.

Cook,1974

"'A Gothic Western,' He Calls It, and He's Right"
Bruce Cook
The National Observer, 14 Sep. 1974, p. 23.
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.

Anybody who comes unsuspecting onto a book by Richard Brautigan is in for a surprise. Not a shock—shocks are unpleasant, right? And Richard Brautigan is good for you. He will surprise you by being totally original. No writer you can think of is quite like him today, nor was any writer anytime—unless you can imagine the kind of things Mark Twain might have written had he wandered into a field of ripe cannabis with a pack of Zig Zag papers in his pocket. That's about as close as I can come to Brautigan, a kind of cracker-barrel surrealist whose humor is essentially Nineteenth-Century Western American.

Which is not much in the way of a description, I know, but you can only really get to know what he's like, after all, by reading his books. And there is a new one out now—The Hawkline Monster, for which he provides an odd but accurate subtitle, "A Gothic Western."

Is this one a good place to start? Well, Brautigan has now written five of what he calls novels. The others—and please note the titles class— are Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion. Mostly, they are as screwy as they sound. They are loose narratives—in Trout Fishing, there is no narrative at all—dribbled out in brief, topical sections that treat various aspects of the subject at hand.

The most realistic of them is A Confederate General from Big Sur, a kind of extended beach idyll—the adventures of two flaky guys in Monterey and environs. And that's the way The Abortion should have been, too, but Brautigan began taking himself seriously as an absurdist, and he seemed to feel he had to deck out what was essentially realistic and probably autobiographical material in an arty what-does-this-mean? sort of frame; the clue here is that the book doesn't really take off, has no reality, until Brautigan begins to tell us about that sad trip down to Tijuana for the abortion.

Crazy, Inspired Images
He was probably conned into this by the success of Trout Fishing in America, which everyone (me included) seems to agree is his best book. It says a lot in an odd way about ecology, living in San Francisco, and growing up in Oregon, and it says it in crazy, inspired images that are sure to stick with you for years and years to come.

Besides which, he has had several collections of poetry that are, in their several separate ways, just as rare as his fiction. There's Please Plant This Book, which seems to be mostly just a packet of seeds. There's The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, whose title poem seems made-to-order for the "Right to Life" folks:

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

There are many other poems and a couple of other books, but that should give you a pretty good idea of Brautigan, the poet.

He's a short story writer, too—a very short story writer. In fact, some of the shortest stories in the English language are by Richard Brautigan. Here's one he calls "The Scarlatti Tilt":

"'It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin.' That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver."

That says it all, doesn't it? I mean, as Rabbi Hillel put it, "All the rest is commentary." "Scarlatti" is in a collection titled The Revenge of the Lawn; all the other stories in it are longer, though many of them are not by much.

The 'Lookalike' Killer
Getting back to The Hawkline Monster, then, how does it fit in with all the rest? Well, it's good, representative Brautigan, maybe not quite up to Trout Fishing in America but a damsite better than The Abortion. It's got a stronger narrative than the rest of them and stronger characters too—sort of. It's about a couple of Wild West hired killers named Greer and Cameron who are different from everyone else but pretty much like one another: "They both looked about the same except they had different features and different builds. . . . One of them was taller than the other but once you turned your back on them you wouldn't be able to remember which one it was." Not only that, but it also turns out that the handsome young lady they come to do a job of work for out in eastern Oregon is twins.

What she wants them to do is a little out of their line. The big old turreted, gabled Victorian monstrosity of a house where she and her sister live is haunted by a monster. She knows it, and she wants Greer and Cameron to get rid of the thing. Eventually they do, but not until after they have fought out a queer and protracted battle with it up and down and all around the house. After which the girls are then reunited with their mad scientist father who unwittingly created the monster in the first place.

Texture Is All
I know, I know. It sounds pretty wild, doesn't it? But just remember that with Brautigan, texture is all. He can pull off some of the craziest, silliest stuff any writer ever attempted simply because he gives everything he writes a very firm basis in reality through his telling use of specific details, and also through his diction, which is flat, colloquial, and rock solid. All this has the effect of encouraging us to suspend our disbelief. Reading a Richard Brautigan book is like watching a movie: You believe it as long as it is happening.

The Hawkline Monster is like movie-watching in some other ways too. It is visually suggestive, cool, understated, and elliptical in style, and it seems always to exist in the cinematic present. Brautigan says that whenever his inspiration begins to flag, he rushes down to a fleabag theater in San Francisco and sees a quick triple feature, then runs back to the typewriter. Well, it's beginning to show. And on him it looks good.

Cunningham,1975

"Whiskey in the Works"
Valentine Cunningham
The Times Literary Supplement [London], 11 Apr. 1975, p. 389.
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.

One of the most embarassing events in all of literary history must surely be that moment in 1936 when, horribile scriptu, Dylan Thomas took it on himself to hand out tea cups filled with string as his contribution to the first London Surrealist Exhibition. As a jab at épatant le bourgeois it was an uninventive flop: small potatoes for a liberating delve into the subconscious. When you take on the surreal you must clearly watch out for its near and merely embarrassing neighbours, triteness and banality. Richard Brautigan is not, on the whole, half watchful enough.

The Hawkline Monster, "A Gothic Western", invites an unusual degree of regard for its author—at least the reader is compelled to regard the behatted, bewhiskered and bespectacled physiognomy of Mr. Brautigan that regularly adorns his fictions, twice over. And unavoidably so: for if, enraged at yet another snap of what looks like an owlish cowhand, you chuck away the jacket, you will find an enlarged version of it printed on the boards of the cover itself.

The complacency is not uncharacteristic of what is to be found inside the covers. A quietly convinced deadpan voice tells how a couple of really tough hombres, Greer and Cameron, are hired by an Indian girl called Magic Child to bump off a monster. They are taken to Hawkline Manor, a curiously cold place, built over some ice caves by a hard-swearing but benign Harvard professor and father of two beautiful, identical girls, for pursuing his research into The Chemicals. Far from benefiting mankind, however, the professor's substances have emanated an evil force that has turned him into an elephant-foot umbrella-stand, that kills and shrinks his seven-foot two-inch butler, has turned one dAugustter into the Indian, takes away people's clothes from time to time, and generally messes up their minds. The cowboys are not so stupid as to try their firearms on such a foe, and succeed in killing it with a glass of whisky smartly infiltrated into its storage jar. The dead are restored to life, and everybody lives unhappily after.

All in all it is a plot that leaves one decidedly out of thrall much of the time. And as for Gothicism: as oddities, this lot scarcely packs much of a frisson. "What does supernatural mean?" Cameron asks. "It means out of the ordinary", one of the Misses Hawkline informs. But, though events in The Hawkline Monster can certainly range far out of the ordinary, the more bizarre they come the flatter tends to be their impact. The dull, accepting tone is largely to blame, and there is little to be said for it as a narrative means except perhaps that it can welcome the ordinary quite unhectically. It is extremely liberating to find everyday things like four-letter words, the sexual act, and the desire of omen for men, making for once an unstrident appearance in fiction. "'Fuck me', Magic Child said . . . Greer blew the lantern out and she fucked Greer first."

But even—perhaps especially—in regard to sexual events narrative inertness speedily numbs. In fiction where nothing is allowed to perturb, the reader quickly feels nothing matters all that much. "An Early Twentieth Century Picnic" is the chapter heading when Hawkline Manor blazes, the Monster dies and "a scientific dream" ends. But the novel is much too enervated to make the implied case about our times actually stick on anyone or anything.

Grubber,1977

"Meanwhile—Back in the Jar"
John Grubber
Vortex, vol. 1, no. 5, May 1977, pp. 47-48.
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.

No doubt some of you have read this book, since it was first published in 1975. But most of you probably haven't, and even if they have, who cares?

I'm not going to give away the monster's secret in this article, because that is up to the reader to find out. But I can tell you that it's the most original 'monster' story I've ever read. And also the funniest.

Because the chief aspect of this book is its humour; in fact, its ridiculous and bizarre theme could give it no other aspect. Brautigan's style, which is a simple and almost vocal narrative, adds to this humorous effect, in much the same way that Joseph Heller's technique makes Catch-22 even better than its idea-content alone could make it.

So, on to the story:

Cameron and Greer are two gunmen in the wild west of 1902. We meet them on Hawaii, where they can't shoot a man they've been hired to kill, because he's teaching his kid how to ride a horse. So they forget the money, and Hawaii, which is a unique scenario for a Western, and probably wouldn't work. They head back to San Francisco, do a job, then go on to Portland, Oregon.

In Portland, they are met by an Indian girl called Magic Child who is very beautiful and bears a certain relationship to a certain Miss Hawkline. Magic Child takes Cameron and Greer to meet Miss Hawkline, who lives in Hawkline Mansion, in the dead centre of the Dead Hills of Eastern Oregon. On the way they meet a few people who bear no relation to the plot but without those people where would anyone be? They provide more humour, which is the purpose of the book. People such as the barbed-wire drummer, a man whose middle name is Cora. People such as the members of the Morning County Sheepshooters Association, who say that it's all right to shoot sheep.

As they reach Hawkline Mansion, coming to within a hundred yards of the building, there is a sudden drop in temperature of about forty degrees. The grass is frozen, despite the fact that it is an ordinary desert summer, with temperatures in the nineties. They learn from Miss Hawkline, who resembles Magic Child very much, that this fact is due to the Ice Caves below the house.

This is very interesting. The only problem is that the Ice Caves are inhabited by a monster, who killed Miss Hawkline's father, who was a scientest called Professor Hawkline. Miss Hawkline wants Cameron and Greer to go down and kill the monster.

While this problem is being discussed, Magic Child dies. This death is one of the neatest and cleverest in modern fiction. Magic Child's place in the story is pretty adroitly taken up by Miss Hawkline, who is Miss Hawkline's sister.

Below the house, apart from the Ice Caves where the Hawkline monster lives, is a laboratory which used to be run by Professor Hawkline, until the monster got him. This laboratory is connected via a strong metal door to the Caves, and in the laboratory is The Chemicals, an experiment started by Professor Hawkline and presently being continued by his dAugustters, Miss Hawkline and Miss Hawkline. The Chemicals has the property of messing around with the thoughts in people's heads, and all sorts of other childish pranks. To Cameron and Greer this sounds more dangerous than the monster, but the Miss Hawklines are adamant that The Chemicals will one day benefit mankind.

Cameron, Greer, Miss Hawkline and the other Miss Hawkline are on their way to kill the monster when the butler, who is seven feet two inches tall and weighs over three hundred pounds, is struck down dead. Then The Chemicals interferes with the thoughts of the Miss Hawklines and they drag Cameron and Greer upstairs for a spot of love-making. They wonder how they're going to bury the seven foot, two inch tall butler; this problem is solved when they return downstairs to find him shrunk to thirty-one inches, and they bury him in a suitcase.

Finally, they return to kill the Hawkline Monster. But meanwhile, Cameron and Greer have come to a conclusion about the monster, which will remain unrevealed here, but puts a whole new complexion on the business of killing it. And also provides some hilariously ridiculous chapters like 'The Hawkline Monster in the gravy' and 'Meanwhile, back in the Jar.'

Cameron and Greer have a job, but eventually they persuade Miss Hawkline and the other Miss Hawkline to let them kill The Chemicals as well, since The Chemicals seems to be a pretty nasty threat. So off they go, finally, to kill a monster and a jar of chemicals.

The battle between the Hawkline Monster and Cameron and Greer is joined, and it is a terrible struggle; a third force, called The Shadow (actually the shadow of the Hawkline Monster), intervenes on the side of the humans. Cameron kills The Chemicals by pouring whisky into the jar. The sparks which fly as a result of this threaten to burn the place down, so Cameron and Greer rush from the scene.

The Ice Cubes melt to form Lake Hawkline; the Hawkline Monster is killed and, as a result of its death, the evil that it has done is reversed. The Miss Hawklines are reunited with their father, and the faithful butler is resurrected and returned to his former bulk—which event makes one hell of a hole in the ground. The mansion burns down and the Hawkline Monster's reign of terror is over.

As for whether or not they all lived happily every after—that, also, is up to you to find out. And it's well worth the effort.

Kincheloe,1976

"The Hawkline Monster"
Henderson Kincheloe
Masterplots 1975 Annual. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1976, pp. 144-146.
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.

Author: Richard Brautigan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster (New York)
Type of work: Novel
Time: 1902
Locale: Hawaii, San Francisco, and Oregon

An amusing short novel which parodies traditional Western stories, gothic romances, and symbolic tales of good and evil

Principal characters:
Greer and Cameron, two professional killers
Miss Hawkline, a professor's daughter
Magic Child, another Miss Hawkline dressed first as an Indian girl and later like her identical twin sister
The Monster

It's a long, long way from the pages of Bret Harte, Zane Grey, Max Brand, and other Western writers to Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster. The novel contains many of the ingredients that have gone into Western stories for a hundred years or more: San Francisco's Chinatown, two killers for hire, prostitutes, a pretty Indian girl, a traveling salesman, a stagecoach, two frontier towns, a hanged man, a town marshal, a barren landscape, and a lonely house in the hills. But Brautigan's subtitle, A Gothic Western, partly prepares the reader for other ingredients that the early Western writers would scarcely have dreamed of putting into their stories. This novel, for example, has a whorehouse with naked teen-age whores (Bret Harte always used fancy circumlocutions to avoid calling older females of that sort by their professional titles), and an Indian girl who graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe, attended the Sorbonne, and studied medicine at Johns Hopkins, specializing in surgery. It has a former Harvard chemistry professor with an underground laboratory in a huge yellow Victorian mansion isolated in the Dead Hills of eastern Oregon, and mysteriously surrounded for a hundred years by grass that remains frozen even under a hot July sun, and great caves of ice beneath the underground laboratory. It further sports and evil influence "mutated" from a chemical mixture in the laboratory; a man spellbound in the form of a piece of household furniture; another man shrunken after death from a seven-foot giant to a thirty-one-inch dwarf and then returned to life and to giant size after burial in a suitcase; and a number of verbal vulgarisms, one of which is used variously by the author and all of the main characters, including the monster, as verb, present participle, noun, or violent expletive (the monster utters it explosively in large capital letters in the climactic scene of the story).

The Hawkline Monster's plot is wild and simple. Magic Child, an Indian girl, finds Greer and Cameron, two professional killers, in a Portland, Oregon, brothel and interrupts their entertainment with two of the young nude inmates in order to pay them $2,500 each for an unspecified task to be explained to them later by Miss Hawkline. Miss Hawkline, who lives in an enormous, many-gabled Victorian mansion in eastern Oregon, is the identical twin of Magic Child who, divested of her Indian garb and reclothed at home, cannot be distinguished from her sister. Miss Hawkline wishes Greer and Cameron to kill a monster that inhabits immense ice caves beneath a chemical laboratory under the house. The monster apparently murdered Professor Hawkline, the twins's father, who disappeared into the ice caves in pursuit of the monster. Cameron solves the mystery of the monster and destroys it in a fire which burns the mansion and creates a permanent lake when the fire melts the ice in the caves. The destruction of the monster also releases to normal life both Professor Hawkline who, under a mischievous spell, has been serving as an elephant-foot umbrella stand; and Mr. Morgan, the butler, who, after a sudden and mysterious death, shrank from a giant corpse to that of a dwarf before being buried, and who later popped out of his dusty grave in his original seven-foot two-inch, three-hundred-pound form.

The Hawkline Monster combines characteristics of classic Westerns, modern gothic romances, and symbolic takes of good and evil. Brautigan also spoofs all three fictional genres in telling the outlandish story; in the casual and frequently joking presentation of his characters, their language, their thoughts, and their eccentricities; and in his many shifts of style and point of view. He often repeats information for the benefit of rapid or inattentive readers who may have forgotten something of been distracted by the scattered scenes of sexual activity or by minor characters and details introduced without any real reason.

Brautigan throws in occasional figures of speech suited to a coarse folktale. A stagecoach driver has gone upstairs to have "coffee" with a boarding-house keeper, and "The squeaking of the bedsprings shook the house like mechanical rain." A town marshal apologizes for his vulgar speech in the presence of Magic Child: I've got a tongue that was hatched on an outhouse seat." (He should hear her colorful language, picked up from her father, which can sometimes match his.) When Magic Child sees the brass bed on which she will have first Greer and then Cameron, the second while the first is contentedly resting, the bed, reports the author, "shined like a pot of gold beneath the rainbow."

Some speech figures, of a different sort, might well be used to describe a surrealist painting. Over a field of slaughtered sheep, vultures hover "like flesh angels summoned to worship at a large spread-out table." In the barren Dead Hills a road wanders "like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills," and when the end of the road is reached (some pages later) the figure is completed: "The road stopped like a dying man's signature on a last-minute will."

The jacket of The Hawkline Monster announces that it is a major novel, but this claim should be regarded no more seriously than Brautigan obviously considered the book in writing it. Some symbol-conscious young English instructors or their bright students may be tempted to search for profound meanings in passages about the monster representing a force for mischief or evil, and about its shadow desiring to be freed from following it. This would be a waste of time and effort. The novel should be read for fun. This it will provide, if the reader is not repelled by the repeated vulgarisms, or the occasional coarseness.

Kusnír,2007

"Reconsideration of Nature, Myths and Narrative Conventions of Popular Literature in Richard Brautigan's Novel The Hawkline Monster: a Gothic Western (1976), or Gothic Novel and Western in One"
Jaroslav Kušnír
American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. ibidem-Verlag, 2007, pp. 55-63.
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.

In his book entitled Waiting for the End (1964), Leslie Fiedler argues that

"Not only in our literature but in our lives, we have shuttled back and forth between a romantic nature cult and a Philistine anti-nature religion: on the one hand, becoming enthusiastic advocates of nudism and the world's warmest supporters of Freudian psychology; on the other, joining movement after movement against whatever pleasures of the flesh; alcohol, meat, tobacco, drugs. In fact, we maintain these two polar attitudes not alternately but simultaneously, choosing duplicity rather than compromise; and this, indeed, is the essence of the American way" (Fiedler 1964: 140).

This results, according to Fiedler, in contradictory policies simultaneously corresponding to each attitude, one to

"[. . .] stamp out nature: chop down trees, kill off buffalo, slaughter whales, rape and ruin the wilderness, join the Christian Science Church" (Fiedler 1964: 140)

and the other to

"[. . .] disappear into Nature: preserve our primative areas, guard our natural resources, provide summer camping grounds with real live bears, strip to the buff and lie in the sun" (Fiedler 1964: 140).

After a certain celebration of the power of nature, spirituality and imagination in his essay Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson gives rather a pessimistic vision of naure in his other essay Experience. In most of his novels, Richard Brautigan favours idealistic and romantic nature characterized above as the Rosseaueaque or Emersonian kind (Fiedler 1964: 140). It manifests itself especially in his novels A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) or In Watermelon Sugar (1968). According to Manfred Pütz,

"[. . .] in Brautigan's fiction, locale and setting—as significant materializations of the fictional counterfield in the sujet movement of pastoral identity stories—take on decisive importance. It is here that Brautigan interconnects a wide range of topoi, motifs and codified elements from various literary traditions falling within the circumference of pastoralism" (Pütz 1979: 111).

For most of Brautigan's protagonists, society represents danger and threat and is in opposition to nature and imagination. However, in his novel The Hawkline Monster (1974) the Gothic Western, Brautigan does not use idealized natural pastoral imagery. In this novel he employs several conventions of popular literature genres, especially the western, the Gothic novel, fantasy or even science-fiction. Gordon E. Slethaug identifies the exact sections and number of pages devoted to particular genres in this book. In his view,

"Book 1 (59 pages) depends upon a western format, Book 2 (18 pages) upon the Gothic, and Book 3 (113) upon a combination of fantasy, science fiction, and then the detective story, concluding with a turn to realism" (Slethaug 1985: 139).

In contrast to other Brautigan novels, in The Hawkline Monster nature and landscape represent terrifying, threatening and destructive forces, ultimately turning both into objects of parody. This paper analyzes the way Brautigan undermines the traditional symbolic meaning of nature as a positive force. At the same time, it attempts to show the way Brautigan distorts the traditional narrative conventions of popular literature (the western and the Gothic novel) in order to make a critique of some issues associated with American cultural identity (the idea of success; the American Dream; and the belief in technological progress).

In Book 1, entitled Hawaii, the landscape evokes a romantic or pastoral atmosphere. The narrator gives a description of harmony among people, nature and culture in a place generally evoking the image of a tourist paradise:

"The man and boy and the horse were in the front yard of a big white house shaded by coconut trees. It was like a shining island in the pineapple fields. There was piano music coming from the house. It drifted lazily across the warm afternoon" (Brautigan 1976: 10).

This atmosphere is, however, at odds with the function and roles of the cowboys named Greer and Cameron. Hired to kill the family acting as typical cowboy characters, they in fact refuse to spoil the idealistic natural atmosphere. In this way they become only parodic versions of their western prototypes. Nature functions here only as a background for Brautigan's parodic intentions. In addition, the cowboys are geographically, spiritually and emotionally displaced; they are far removed from the context of the western setting and characters. The narrator portrays this displacement in the following way:

"Greer and Cameron were not at home in the pineapple field. They looked out of place in Hawaii. They were both dressed in cowboy clothes, clothes that belonged to Eastern Oregon" (Brautigan 1976: 9).

This depiction of the natural landscape is in contradiction with the landscape typical for the western genre. On the other hand, the journey of the cowboys back to the western cities of Portland, Oregon; Gompville; Brooks; Billy; Central County and Dead Hills means a return to the typical setting of the western genre. This setting involves a version of nature which is not a positive force, but rather rough and threatening. At the same time, nature creates a symbolic background for the "roughness" and cruelty of the cowboys' nature. The final destination of their journey where they are hired to kill "the indefinite monster" is near the Dead Hills, a landscape characterized as mountainous and rough:

"There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as if they had wandered away like sheep from the mountains and out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able to find their way back [. . .]" (Brautigan 1976: 24).

Brautigan's depiction of nature is presented there, on the one hand, in keeping with the conventions of the western genre. On the other hand, the rough landscape is not reflected in the otherwise expected rough nature of Greer and Cameron. These characters are only parodied versions of killers, indulging in sex, alcohol and the meaninglessness counting of different objects (Cameron). The depiction of nature gradually gains a terrifying, threatening character and Gothic atmosphere that culminates in Book III. With the physical movement of the two protagonists approaching the Dead Hills and the city of Billy to which the murder hirer's (Miss Hawkline's) house and the monster are situated, the reader is gradually prepared for tension evoked by this atmosphere. The landscape shortly before the protagonists meet Miss Hawkline is without life, barren and desolate:

"The road was very bleak, wandering like the hand-writing of a dying person over the hills. There were no houses, no barns, no fences, no signs that human life had ever made its way this far except for the road which was barely legible" (Brautigan 1976: 52).

While Brautigan heightens tension as the protagonists (Greer, Cameron, Magic Child) approach the Dead Hills, this atmosphere is weakened on the other hand by the author's depiction of the seemingly typical western tough characters/gunfighters. These characters are hired to kill people for money, but they indulge in sensual and sexual experience with Magic Child, a double of Miss Hawkline. The cowboys become only parodic versions of the typical western characters. Narrative conventions of both the western and the Gothic novel are undermined not only in this way, but also through Brautigan's use of irony. The narrator comments on the protagonists' observation of the country in the following way:

"Finally they came across something human. It was a grave. The grave was right beside the road. It was simply a pile of bleak rocks covered with vulture shit. There was a wooden cross at one end of the rocks" (Brautigan 1976: 54).

Brautigan's use of irony passes into parodic imagery expressing the banality of the typical icons of western literature and film, such as desolate graves for example. The grave standing for violence and death supported by the image of vultures becomes only a banal icon and an unimportant detail when Brautigan uses the expression "shit." Here the Gothic landscape and atmosphere are similar to those known from the traditional Gothic novels depicting castles, manor houses and mysteries. This atmosphere culminates at the end of Book II and continues to the end. The final, fatal destination of Greer, Cameron, and Magic Child—Miss Hawkline's double—at her house, is described as:

"[. . .] a huge three-storey yellow house about a quarter of a mile away in the center of a small meadow that was the same color as the house [. . .] There were no fences or outbuildings or anything human or trees near the house. It just stood there alone in the center of the meadow with white stuff piled close in around it and more white stuff on the ground around it [. . .]" (Brautigan 1976: 5).

Brautigan gradually draws the reader's attention to the geographical and topographical imagery associated with the East (New England) and West (Oregon), the USA and Europe, culture and primitivism (nature). The Hawkline manor house is further referred to as

"[. . .] a classic Victorian with great gables and stained glass across the tops of the windows and turrets and balconies and red brick fireplaces and a huge porch all around the house [. . .]" (Brautigan 1976: 58).

This Victorian setting is supported by the interior of the house referred to as "[. . .] filled with beautiful Victorian furniture and very cold" (69) [. . .] The parlor was exquisitely furnished in an expensive and tasteful manner" (86).

This all represents the imagery of the Gothic novel, which is further supported by Brautigan depiction of characters and events typical for this genre: an old faithful butler; a desolate house and mystery (the monster). The depiction of such setting and characters refer to European (British) tradition and its "refined culture." Fowler argues that

"the word gothic initially conjured up visions of a medieval world, or dark passions enacted against the massive and sinister architecture of the gothic castle [. . .] The gothic is characterized by a setting which consists of castles, monasteries, ruined houses or suitably picturesque surroundings, by characters who are, or seem to be, the quintessence of good or evil [. . .] irrational and evil forces threaten both individual integrity and the material order of society" (Fowler 1987: 105).

Although the Gothic "landscape" and atmosphere in Book II and further on is in keeping with the conventions of the Gothic novels (the house, the terrifying landscape and setting, "irrational and evil forces threaten both individual integrity and the material order of society"), Brautigan alters the function of both the Gothic novel and the western. The gothic writers' typical landscape of the British kind seems to be geographically, topographically, emotionally and spiritually incompatible with the American setting. In a broader sense, it is incompatible with American culture represented by Brautigan's use of the conventions of the western genre as well as of natural imagery. This natural imagery intensifies the incompatibility of the British Gothic tradition and culture witih the American cultural context. The narrator says that

"[. . .] the house [. . .] did not belong out there in the Dead Hills [. . .] the house belonged [. . .] any place other than where it was now [. . .] the house looked like a fugitive from a dream" (Brautigan 1976: 59).

The whole Victorian Hawkline manor becomes a "melting pot" of different genre conventions, rationality and irrationality, reality and fantasy, seriousness and humour, past, present and future. The house becomes a symbol of traditionally optimistic cultural expectations and its incompatibility with reality itself. The vision of a house in an isolated area is reminiscent of John Winthrop's vision of "a city upon a hill" alluding to the idea of a cultural experiment in a new country (Willis 1981-82: 37), which is further supported by Brautigan's depiction of the mysterious and absent character of Professor Hawkline and his chemical experiments. The result of this experiment is a monster representing an evil and destroying force acting against its creator. Not only the chemical, but also the cultural experiment of the Puritans and consequently the New Englanders (symbolically represented by educated Professor Hawkline and, for example, Magic Child/Miss Hawkline who accompanies the cowboys) seems to fail in the cultural environment of America. The narrator argues about Magic Child/Miss Hawkline that "She was a member of a prominent New England family that dated back to the Mayflower. Her family had been one of the contributing lights that led to the flowering of New England society and culture" (Brautigan 1976: 56).

Brautigan symbolically shows that a rationalistic understanding of and approach to life and society can be only partly successful. It can bring some technological progress, whose result is, however, unsure, (Professor Hawkline and his product, the monster). Rationality represented by Greer and Cameron can temporarily destroy the life-threatening forces, but it cannot definitely bring happiness. Greer and Cameron, representing parodied versions of gunfighters and therefore the rationalistic approach to life, must face the irrational world of fantasy at Hawkline Manor and are unable to transcend its boundaries. The only weapon they want to use to destroy it is typical for the western characters—guns, violence and a rationalistic, however parodic, handling of the situation. The world of fantasy and imagination, as well as the symbolic, spiritual and intuitive approach to life, is strange to them:

"'What does supernatural mean?/ Cameron said [. . .] 'It means out of the ordinary,' Miss Cameron said.

"'That's good to know,' Cameron said. He did not say it in a pleasant way" (Brautigan 1976: 89).

Although their rationalistic, commonsensical and pragmatic ways help the cowboys to destroy the monster (by pouring alcohol on it), it does not bring them happiness and makes them the parodic clichés of the Hollywood films of the 20th century. Professor Hawkins is saved, but nature, and symbolically the past, present and especially the future are still terrifying. This is expressed in the final apocalyptic situation, reminiscent of Edgar Alan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Hawkline Manor is destroyed in an almost ritualistic way:

"The flames roared high into the sky. They were so bright that everybody had shadows (181) [. . .] By the light of the morning sun the house was gone and in its place was a small lake floating with burned things [. . .]" (Brautigan 1976: 183).

The narrator characterizes this situation as "the end of a scientific dream" (182) and continues: "It was almost like something out of Hieronymus Bosch if he had been into Western landscapes" (183). According to Lonnie Willis,

"Brautigan reveals his theories about America's apocalyptic future, to be wrought by a national inability to distinguish between illusion and reality" (Willis 1981-2: 44).

Here nature is not a source of Emersonian inspiration known from his earlier essays, but represents a force of destruction, a symbol of failed ideals and failure of the American Dream represented by the cultural expectations associated with new land and its possibilities. The Gothic landscape turns out to consist of ordinary, plain soil of no importance at the very end of the novel. It turns into a park.

"[. . .] but being in a fairly remote area of Oregon with very poor roads, the lake never developed into a popular recreational site and doesn't get many visitors" (Brautigan 1976: 188).

According to Willis

"The Hawkline Monster investigates the failure of the American experience to harmonize expectation and reality, and it calls attention to illusions that have distored the national vision" (Willis 1981-82: 37).

Willis goes on to argue that

"The Professor's idealism to the contrary, the novel fails to provide anything but a sense of doom for the American experiment [. . .] the dream and the myth beckoned Americans into the big white house of illusion: the reality of America is to be revealed back in the Hawkline mansion" (Willis 1981-82: 37).

Brautigan's novel here becomes a symbolic expression of scepticism and a negative vision of the future. With one exception—Cameron, the typical representative of a success story—the protagonists end tragically at the conclusion of the novel, unable to adapt to the new technological and commercial conditions of the forthcoming (20th) century. They become anachronisms and clichés belonging to Hollywood films rather than to 20th century reality. According to Pütz, in Brautigan fiction

"[. . .] the corporate state and technocracy obviously comprise the mechanisms of urban life, the pressures of an all-pervading economic machine, a society which defines its objectives as the circuitous structure of efficient producing and affluent consuming, the degradation of everything to a commodity, and the functional utility of individual life" (Pütz 1979: 126).

For Brautigan, nature in this novel is not idealized, it is not a source of inspiration or a place of escape known from his earlier novels (A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1967), and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). While in most Brautigan novels his protagonists' imagination represents a renewed unity of nature and man (Pütz, 1979), in this novel, as Pütz argues, [. . .] nature and divine primitivism have lost their symbolic qualities" (Pütz 1979: 128). In this novel, in line with Thoreau, Brautigan rejects the materialistic and commercial character of society, but unlike Thoreau he presents nature not as a place of escape and inspsiration, but only as a cliché-like icon. At the same time, through his treatment and depiction of nature, Brautigan presents a critique of some American myths related to American cultural identity (the heroism of frontier cowboys, a retreat into nature). Through his parodic use of the conventions of popular literature (the western, the Gothic novel, the sci-fi novel), he expresses a critique of materialistic and consumerist culture. In addition to this, Brautigan criticizes the commodification of national symbols and myths thus challenging the illusory vision of national cultural identity, its history and alleged success. At the same time, Brautigan's parody of the typical American genres of popular culture expresses a critique of American cultural symbols, especially the idea of the success story and the American dream.

Lee,1975

"The Hawkline Monster"
L. L. Lee
Western American Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 1975, pp. 151-153.
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.

It would be easy to argue that popular literature and pop literature are books of a different order. Popular literature is the art of the literate masses, people who accept their art as what it is, i.e., entertainment, escape, consolation, and sometimes, information. It is these which matter, not the "art." It is, then, a conservative art, built on archetypal clichés, changing only under great pressure. It tells a story and in relatively plain terms; if the writer goes in for poetic passages, he soon drops them, for the audience will take only so much. (New academic studiers of popular literature take it seriously, as they should, so long as it is taken as subject; the surprise occurs when academics suddenly discover high art in low art, or, like Leslie Fiedler, substitute archetypes for literature. They bring their own intelligence to the works and then assert they found it there—Narcissus could not love himself better.)

Pop literature, on the other hand, is the art of an elite, the college educated or at least college-influenced bourgeois child. And it is a literature that takes itself and is taken most seriously as art. It would seem daring, new, indeed experimental, intellectual, complex, at least so far as words go. For pop litterateurs are stylists, concerned with words, with their relationships within sentences, although they are seldom concerned with structures beyond the paragraph, so that pop literature is likely to be discontinuous, epiphanic, apercus thrown out and then passed by; it is a literature of moments, of time passing. It tends then, to ignore story, or, at least, story of any length.

But, of course, they are one under the skin, both audience-centered, and the audience is father and child. Rooted in sentimentality, in "feeling," and, of course, in this sense of archetypal meanings, both are consolation and escape from complexity. If pop literature uses the clichés of popular literature with a knowing smile, it uses them nevertheless with a secret sympathy. It is, then, the literature of the middlebrow intellectual.

Richard Brautigan, as the doyen of pop litterateurs, has an uncanny sense of audience. If the audience has changed somewhat from those whom Trout Fishing in America appealed to, if the new collegians are more goal-oriented, less anarchistic, he gives them a little more story in this most recent endeavor, The Hawkline Monster, subtitled "A Gothic Western", a novel neither very western nor very gothic.

So there is a kind of plot that leads the reader on through a series of very short chapters, no one of which is long enough to fatigue the bored twenty-year old, giving us a pleasant fantasy that does have charm. And the sentences are nicely simple, primerish, almost lucid, but with a touch of the fey, and with few of these manufactured similes Brautigan used to be fond of.

The first chapter, however, reveals the novel: in 1902, the two hired "Western" killers who are the heroes of the book decide not to shoot their intended victim in Hawaii because he's teaching his son how to ride a horse. This may be parody, but I think not; Brautigan loves his two clichés of heroes (whom he distinguishes between by making one of them a "counter"—i.e., he counts things), for they and he are sentimentalists.

Back in Portland, the two are hired by an Indian girl to return with her to Eastern Oregon to kill a monster. They go; they come to the Hawkline mansion, and they discover the monster. I won't tell the "plot", so as not to destroy it, except that there is a happy ending to the main story, with an "unhappy" 18th-19th centuryish wrapping up, a "wry" attempt to slide over that fairy tale ending.

Fairy tale is the key phrase, though. For The Hawkline Monster is a fairy tale for delayed adolescents. And, although I've said elsewhere that the intelligent young are no longer reading Brautigan, I may be wrong—Simon and Schuster need only to bring out a paperback (students don't buy hardbacks) in order to have a fairy tale best seller. But wait—the Book of the Month Club offers it along with an enthusiastic quote from Erich Segal, he who wrote Love Story. That audience is still out there, with its warm, soft, and conservative heart.

Quintana,1981

"Monstruo de Hawkline: Un Western Gotico" [The Hawkline Monster: A Western Gothic]"
Juan Quintana
Nueva Estafeta [New Courier], no. 30, May 1981, pp. 102-103.
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.

The name of Richard Brautigan is united with the effervescence of the bygone years of the 1970s, to the marginal youth and to the underground movement of the United States of America. In direct line with the North American humorists, Brautigan culminates in this book not only in the western and the gothic novel, but also included a delirious science fiction, in a narrative manner full of jokes in which it appears we enjoy ourselves with his earthy anecdotes, his comic situations, his sharp alternatives. If his first novel was avidly consumed by the North American youth and served to give its title to a periodical, in The Hawkline Monster, we are introduced to a grotesque world, which includes two gunmen who contract with the Misses Hawkline in order to undo the monster created by the experiments of their father, who are categorical caricatures of the classic western bandits.

One has to see only a little of Brautigan's literature with its apocalypses and frenetics, if that is the consequence which the author gives to his literature, to encounter in its pages still the tracks of the beatnik and the hipster, more closely to the characters of Mark Twain than to the howling of Ginsberg and the vagabonding of Kerouac.

That of Brautigan is not the distant humor of the traditional North American currents. [The anecdotes are sufficiently sparse to be ambiguous.] Best is the ingenuity of the characters and their contrast with the hardness of the traditional bandit of the North American cinema who moves us to register humor, washing us through absurd clichés, [aligning] us in the surreal, of the most acceptable descriptions and the most logical arguments, conducting us to a confluence of events which slip away from us, paralyzing our norms of reading and making us go for the improbable course which this delightful Richard Brautigan gives us.

Since then in order to read Brautigan, one must have all strengths; it is not he does not forget to allow us to carry the most transcendental positions between the pages of a book, that one reads with a big facility, owing not only to the short extension of capitols, some pages with hardly any, but also owing to the progression of the events riddled with humor of a good caliber.

With a pleasurable sum, between the creaky swinger of the diligent, the generous sexuality of the Niña Mágica (Magic Child), the excessive arsenals that carry the fabulous Greer and Cameron, the same as the terrifying monster closed in the dark basement of the mansion of Dr. Hawkline, we will discover that a good glass of whiskey can flatten bad feelings of the "dangerous," luminous fetus emerged from the laboratories by an accidental exchange of chemical products.

To read Richard Brautigan makes us raise the question of ourselves, of the stereotypic role of languid music, flippant youth or of innocent bearer of success that the system helped to spread like the respective marginal young North American of the past decade, is not excessively simple. Despite that the literature of Richard Brautigan, with his immense nonsense, does not give us more than the other side of the happy generation, we can realize, without difficulty, that in those boys could exist, also, a mode of healthy life, a great feeling of humor and including approaches of self-criticism more serious than that which appears to the simple view.

We do not forget that these same boys were those that were protagonists of the events of the '78, those who could fight in Viet-Nam despite their almost total rejection of violence. Effectively, this irreverent generation questioned the "happy world" of its elders. But though the most accredited propaganda was that of resignation to be today submissive parents who had an impatient respect for the happiness of life who, dammed up among the ordered jeer, sometimes surface among books and records with a clear supremacy of compassion before the elated alternative of the low representations of a terminally ill consumerism which is now at the point of alighting from the sacrosanct recognition of the lovers of power.

To read Richard Brautigan is not long a path towards a prolonged lAugust, but also to return to remember those gratifying models of being in this world which is today in a sorry state.

Slethaug,1995

"The Hawkline Monster: Brautigan's 'Buffoon Mutation'"
Gordon E. Slethaug
The Scope of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the First International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film: Culture, Biography, Themes, Childrens Literature. Edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearle, III. Greenwood, 1985, pp. 137-145.
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.

Despite the affirmative critical reception of previous books such as Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan's Hawkline Monster has come in for some severe drubbing. Its peculiar blend of the western and gothic and its galloping sequence of events lead to Phoebe Adams' complaint in the Atlantic Monthly of the lack of direction: "The author calls his novel 'A Gothic Western,' and perhaps one should leave it at that . . . for it looks as though Mr. Brautigan himself never quite decided where he was headed." Roderick Nordell of the Christian Science Monitor is similarly negative about the structure of the book, finding the parody of the gothic western too contrived and precious. Even John Yohalem of The New York Times Book Review, although defending the wit and entertainment value of the book, suggested that it is a slight thing of little consequence. Essentially, this book by Brautigan is drummed out on the basis of its superficiality and its parodic use of popular literature techniques. Yet I contend that both the contrived atmosphere and techniques drawn from escapist literature of the romance genre exactly suit Brautigan's serious concerns about the relationship between escapism and reality. Following the venerable tradition of the burlesque, by exploiting accepted conventions of literature and life, he asked that we rethink our way of perceiving things.

The title of the book itself functions to alert readers to the centrality of the relationship between content and form, in short, the point of the parody. By calling his book The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, Brautigan pointed the readers' attention in two directions: to the fictional center of the tale—the monster itself—and to the formal structure of the narration. Although the two elements may seem too discrepant to be so twinned, both monster and form relate integrally to each other. The typically evil-hearted Hawkline Monster, inadvertently created by Professor Hawkline from a batch of chemicals through which he has passed electricity, also has a shadow, "a buffoon mutation," bumbling, inept, angry to have to follow his master, but essentially good-hearted. "Gothic western" refers to two of the prototypal romance forms upon which the book draws; as with the monster's shadow, the form of the book becomes a shadow of the original forms, in effect, also a buffoon mutation. The book, itself a mutation and about mutations, ultimately spoofs the romance forms it uses and suggests that humanity's attempts at escape, whether in fiction or in life, are in good part doomed to disaster, for we cannot escape the problems we create.

The title character of the book, the prey for and antagonist of the heroic gunslinger/monster killers, has been created from an elixir of chemical compounds and magical substances gathered from all corners of the globe: ancient Egypt, South America, the Himalayas, even Atlantis (HM, p. 111). When combined, these substances form a volatile mixture with wholly new characteristics and properties; they are transformed into "The Chemicals" out of which a monster and its shadow are born. This transformation is the first, chronologically, of many within The Hawkline Monster.

The monster created from The Chemicals develops a malevolent will as formidable as those of other literary monsters in the works of John Gardner, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mary Shelley, and John Milton and in Beowulf. This development is a gradual process, however. At the beginning of its career it "was benevolent, almost giddy with the excitement of having just been created. There was a future with the possibility of help and joy for all mankind" (HM, p. 155). But as with the archetypal Satan, it does not long remain innocent and helpful. Discovering its own peculiar abilities, it asserts itself, pulling pranks on the professor and wandering out of its womblike crystal jar in search of new territory and experiences. It first contrives only silly pranks, such as covering things with green feathers or suspending a piece of pie in the air. But the pranks become more harmful and the results more devastating. It turns the Professor into an elephant-foot umbrella stand and "kills" the seven-foot, three-hundred-pound butler, shrinking him to a thirty-one-inch, fifty-pound dwarf. It changes one of the Professor's dAugustters into an Indian maiden, Magic Child, and turns both the dAugustters' thoughts to lovemaking at wholly inappropriate times. It has the capacity to alter both the victims' shapes and thought processes. Ironically, resembling a pool of light (perhaps like the Luciferous side of Satan but generally out of keeping with typically dark and foul monsters), this monster is described as an "ungodly waterfall," "the true amalgamation of mischief and evil" who conceives of "a diabolical fate" for its human victims, hoping to alter their forms so they will become mere shadows of himself (HM, p. 165).

The monster has still another dimension, a shadow, a "buffoon mutation," and a "reluctant complement of darkness" (HM, p. 158), that is forced to follow along, but that refuses finally to be type cast in the same role as the monster, even wishing "the Hawkline Monster were dead" (HM, p. 155). Until the heroic battle between the monster-killers and the monster, the shadow is forced to bumble along in its auxiliary capacity. Fate (The Chemicals) has decreed that it will, with its limited powers, be an unwilling "participant observer" of the monster's evil deeds, even though its nature is essentially good and its will uncorrupted.

The shadow, then, holds many features in common with the monster. It has been created from the same batch of chemicals, has had the same electrical current passed through it, and has a form resembling the monster's; but it is still a comic parody (buffoon mutation) of its master, with the shared characteristics functioning to different ends; that is, it wills to do good and finally helps defeat the evil purposes of its monster twin. In effect, this most recent buffoon follows a long tradition of comic buffoons dating back to Attic comedy in which the buffoon pretends to clownish foolery to save the hero from the threats of a self-aggrandizing imposter. It is the buffoon who significantly helps to restore a proper social order.

The structure of The Hawkline Monster reinforces the role of the buffoon mutation with its comic parody and burlesque masking its thematically serious function, in effectalso following the buffoon tradition by functioning as a social corrective. The book is divided into three major comic portions of unequal length. Book 1 (59 pages) depends upon a western format, book 2 (18 pages) upon the gothic, and book 3 (113 pages) upon a combination of fantasy, science fiction, and the detective story, concluding with a turn to realism. In each of these instances Brautigan used elements typical of that form or genre and then distorted or transformed them, resulting in a buffoon parody of the form itself.

In the first portion Brautigan introduced the main characters, setting and tone—all clearly unrealistic and depending upon romance elements typical of the western. With its bleak, parched landscape, rattlesnakes, and abandoned grave, the Dead Hills strikes a chord, resonant of other classic westerns. Moreover, the town of Billy has its own share of stereotypical frontier characters, including Ma Smith, the Cafe owner who cooks a stout meal of fried potatoes, steak, biscuits with gravy, and blackberry pie for the local men; Jack Williams, the six-foot, two-hundred-pound marshal-saloon owner, known for being "tough but fair" and for having an ungovernable tongue; and Pills, the owner of the local corral and its wretched horses.

Other aspects of the book are a slight turn of the screw away from the normal conventions of the western. For example, although the two heroes, Cameron and Greer, are prototypically hard-headed on certain occasions and sentimentally soft on others, rather than being the expected lawmen or gunslingers who have been driven to vigilante justice by personal tragedy or lack of proper justice, they are hired killers with little motive other than doing a job well for pay.

Ironically, although they are manly enough for almost any bizarre killing, they find seasickness completely unnerving: "even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die" (HM, p. 10). If the characterization is just a bit off, so is the setting, especially at the book's inception, where the action begins in a pineapple field in Hawaii, then moves to Chinatown in San Francisco, and next goes to a whorehouse in Portland, Oregon, before finally settling into the prairies of eastern Oregon. Even the location of eastern Oregon does not ring true when compared with the typical cowboy setting of the Dakotas, Montana, Nevada, Texas, and Wyoming. The date, too, is off. Most cowboy fiction is set about the time of the Civil War, just when the western territories were opening. But 1902 is about two or three generations late—perhaps an accurate enough time for the settling of eastern Oregon but not appropriately conventional for a western. Then, too, the confrontation of the heroes with one of the heroines, Magic Child, in a Portland whorehouse is truly exceptional for the typically asexual western. The second of the two heroines, Miss Hawkline, is introduced as sitting naked on the floor of her mansion in "a room filled with musical instruments and kerosene lamps that were burning low" (HM, p. 13). Indeed, Book 1 might well be considered a "liberated western," for the heroes and heroines relish sexuality; ironically, in this topsy-turvy western it is mainly the women who do the seducing, suggesting an inversion of the conventional roles of men and women.

In addition to the stereotypical roles of hero and heroine in a western, one of the most sacrosanct roles is that of the horse. The horse ought to be strong and powerful, capable of carrying a rider into and out of nearly insurmountable difficulties. But not so with the nags of Billy. One horse "was so swaybacked that it looked like an October quarter moon" (HM, p. 37). One "didn't have any ears. A drunken cowboy had bitten them off for a fifty-cent bet" (HM, p. 38). A third actually drank whiskey, and a fourth had a wooden foot shaped like a duck's foot.

The nature of these inversions and irregularities moves us away from the conventions of the western, causing us to lAugust both at the conventions and the irregularities. The transformation of expected conventions causes the burlesque to cut simultaneously in two directions: although we cannot take the western conventions as normative, neither can we accept the liberated elements as superior. In effect, prototype and parody are both reduced to the absurd—as absurd as the grave beside the road leading into the Dead Hills: "It was simply a pile of bleak rocks covered with vulture shit" (HM, p. 54).

In Book 2 the element of structural transformation works in roughly the same way as in the western. Here in the realm of the gothic we are hardly into the section at all before the stereotypical elements give way to parody. We enter this section when the road through the Dead Hills deadends at the Hawkline Manor—a huge, yellow, gloomy Victorian mansion with stained glass windows, balconies, turrets, and red brick fireplaces—looking "like a fugitive from a dream" (HM, p. 59). The snow piled around it in the midst of ninety-degree summer prairie weather gives it an air of the bizarre, slightly sinister, macabre, unreal and also humorous. The household furnishings—elephant-foot umbrella stand, fine china, crystal chandeliers, and pictures provide an image of elegance, associated with the mystery inherent in gothic tradition. The main sense of mystery in the house is conveyed by the presence of something extraordinary, spooky, and even supernatural. First observed by Cameron and Greer in an upstairs window, this phenomenon sets the stage for knowledge of the experiments and resulting monstrosities of Professor Hawkline, the misguided scientist. Blackness and the dark, so often associated with evil in gothic romances, are here reduced to the humorous association between Miss Hawkline's "long black hair," "high top shoes," and coal: "The shoes were made of patent leather and sparkled like pieces of coal" (HM, p. 63). The traditional gothic elements of the story do add to the story's suspense, its main story line, and impact, but the incongruity and disproportion suggested by the use of blackness helps to undercut and transform the intense gothic atmosphere into one of comedy.

This sense of mystery, the macabre, and monstrosity coupled with the comic continues in book 3 as we hear more about the Professor's misdirected experiments, one of which "got out of the laboratory and ate . . . [the] family dog in the back yard . . . [while] the next door neighbors [in Boston] were having a wedding reception in their garden" (HM, p. 83). Clearly, the latest experiment, the prankish monster, has done away with the Professor himself. With this information the readers understand that the fiction has moved away from the western and gothic to fantasy, science fiction, and, eventually, the detective story.

Appropriate to the hunting of such a monster of science and magic, the western gunslingers virtually change character before us. They desert their cowboy stances and become part of a different order, taking tea in the parlor, drinking sherry from decanters, and ultimately stalking their monstrous quarry. They have their appointed task or quest; no matter how perilous, this new questing beast must be pursued. The two men have been specially chosen to accomplish a heroic task that no one else is equipped in any fashion to undertake. They have been sought out in a Portland whorehouse, because they have the right look: the finger of fate (or is it the Hawkline Monster?) is upon them. Magic Child outlines their specific duties with regard to the petrifying monster: "We're afraid someday he'll break the doors down and get upstairs into the house. We don't want the monster running around the house" (HM, pp. 75-76). But this monster is no simple ungainly and unmasterful hulking beast. It can bend the mind so that the questers cannot keep their minds on their appointed tasks. With a monster so preternaturally tricky and mind bending, the questers must be certain of the nature and tactics of their quarry. Consequently, they adopt the methods of sleuths or private eyes to get to the heart of the matter (a device Brautigan exploited fully in Dreaming of Babylon: A Detective Story). Cameron mentally counts everything, including the appearances of the brilliantly hued light and its inept shadow that appear in different locations of the house, but that initially appear to be something other than the fabled monster of the ice caves. Greer conducts an official inquiry of the Hawkline sisters regarding their nonexistent knowledge of Magic Child, the form that the puckish monster has previously given one of the Hawkline sisters. Both of the men grill the girls about their knowledge of the monster in the caves, so much so that one of them says; "Why all these questions? We've already told you everything that we know and now we're telling it to you again" (HM, p. 135).

In keeping with the parody of fantasy, science fiction, and detective-story forms, the latter scenes of the book present a blend of the conventional and the ludicrous. When the questers-sleuths have gathered information about the monster, they suspect it does not live in the ice caves but resides in the Professor's laboratory. They then go in search of it immediately after midnight, an appropriate time for the final battle of any such quest. Although traditional tools of the quest—whether from fantasy, science fiction, or the detective story—might at first seem useful, the two heroes—Cameron and Greer—find that since they are coping with such an unusual monster, normal weapons are useless. In effect they must lay down their guns; accordingly, contrary to convention, they carry neither munitions nor amulets, only a glass of whiskey. The battle is hardly a battle at all, for the monster's shadow blocks the monster's vision at just the time that the heroes throw whiskey into The Chemicals. Consequently, even the final showdown between the protagonist and antagonist of fantasy and science fiction is parodied here.

The "happily ever after" conclusion similarly receives a serious challenge. Following the explosion resulting from the whiskey mixed with The Chemicals, the Hawkline manor burns to the ground and the ice caves are melted, turning the area into a lake, later designated a park, although it is poorly maintained and seldom visited. The two Hawkline sisters, out from under the naming curse of the monster, each go separate ways. One marries Greer, runs a whorehouse, and gets killed in an auto accident. The other goes to Paris, marries a Russian count, and is killed during the Russian Revolution. Greer is arrested for auto theft and is put into prison. Only Cameron survives in the "real world." He becomes a successful movie producer in Hollywood, probably with his own stock-in-trade of illusion and romance.

The Chemicals, the monster and his shadow, the romance prototypes and their parodies (in addition to the final transition from romance to the real world)—these are the main mutations or transformations within the book. There are secondary ones as well, which tend to reinforce the primary ones. We have the change of one Hawkline sister into Magic Child, the alteration of the huge, living butler into a dead dwarf, the metamorphosis of Professor Hawkline into an elephant foot umbrella stand, the change of the ice caves into a lake, and ultimately the evolution of the monster and his shadow into a handful of diamonds and their shadows. Even Brautigan's use of certain symbols seems somehow transformed; for instance, light tends to symbolize evil and darkness good.

One appropriate view of the book's mutations is that Brautigan was having an immense amount of fun playing with the conventions of the romance, mixing them together in a delightful literary potpourri. Looked at this way, the buffoon mutation may exist solely to illustrate how conventions can be wrenched, twisted rendered ribald and ludicrous, in a meaningless and zany way.

Brautigan, however, clearly used these mutations for larger and more universal concerns and criticisms. The chapter "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey, Won't You Come Home?" stands out from the others in suggesting Brautigan's concerns, those concerns depicted in Professor Hawkline's experiment that was begun out of utopian expectations for a better world: "Only a man of Professor Hawkline's talent and dedication could have joined these chemicals together in friendship and made them good neighbors" (HM, p. 112). The book conclusively shows that the Professor's hopes were dead wrong, with chaos and destruction resulting from his experiment. A perfect blend of materials, especially in any kind of attempt to achieve a blend of the past and present, is wholly impossible to attain. The narrator's comment about the twentieth century makes it clear that modem humans are reaping the folly of just such a failed vision as Professor Hawkline's: "The death of the Hawkline Monster and the end of a scientific dream" (HM, p. 182). Brautigan hinted that chaos and destruction are part of a legacy of the past and will in all probability be part of our legacy to the future. Essentially, Brautigan's was an apocalyptic vision, suggesting that humankind's lot is not one of betterment but perhaps one of self-destruction. Nothing, including science, is really able to alter this view: when science tries it only creates monsters and destroys the landscape. So apocalyptic and despairing is his surrealistic vision of disaster that "It was almost like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, if he had been into Western landscapes" (HM, p. 183).

But if Brautigan raised questions about the value of science and utopian schemes in directing human affairs and solving humankind's problems, he certainly did not take the opposing view that humans ought to escape from reality. He made this position clear in two ways—by the use of formalistic elements of the romance and by the use of The Chemicals. The romance forms and their parodies ultimately function in the book to spoof forms of escapism As we have seen, Brautigan used just enough conventions to make the work convincing within the traditional romance frame of reference and then added the parodic elements. In effect, he made us conscious of these forms not just for their own sake but so that we become aware of a larger question, the question of the proper relationship and balance between romance and reality. He presented the elements so that we do not accept them as realistic in any sense: we know we are in a fabricated fictional world, as indicated for instance by the singularly flat and undeveloped characters with no significant individuality who people this book. The only difference between Cameron and Greer is that one counts and one is taller than the other, although we are told that the observer is never sure which man is taller after he has taken his eyes away, and it really doesn't matter. Similarly, the Hawkline sisters are totally interchangeable within the fiction. The book points to such doubling and conventional character depiction within the romance fiction and spoofs it, so that we become aware that this book is in no way realistic and, furthermore, that we are aware of the limitations of escapistic romance fiction.

In another way also Brautigan underlined his views on reality and escapism: through his depiction of The Chemicals. Although within the book The Chemicals are simply a collection of magical and scientific ingredients through which electricity has been passed, the very name "Chemicals" suggests hard drugs. As modern readers well know, chemicals (hard drugs) and whiskey mix only with fundamentally harmful and lethal effects. Escape through The Chemicals may be fun and nonthreatening for awhile—as the Professor discovers—causing the world to look benevolent and hopeful, but finally it shows its dark side, the monstrous effects. This is certainly Brautigan's statement on the use and abuse of escape through drugs. The drug trip may start out beautifully with pleasing and unexpected things happening, but with increased usage and dosage the trips become nightmarish, with addicts becoming prisoners of their own dreams. The drugs become mind bending and mind destroying.

Ultimately, Brautigan suggested that humankind cannot depend upon utopian hopes, drugs, wish fulfillment dreams, or escapistic fiction; humans will have to exist primarily in their own world of reality, inadequate and threatening though that world may be. But Brautigan did give us an indication of the way we human beings can find some degree of meaning and fulfillment in this world. He showed this by means of the characterization of Cameron, the only one of the heroes and heroines to survive in the "real world." He is the one who counts and keeps track of things. In effect, we assume that he is the most rational of the four, but he also has a totally spontaneous side and is clearly ready for a joyful sexual romp. He has both the rational and emotional sides, a balance that is perhaps behind his success as a movie producer in Hollywood. As an artist, one with imagination in addition to reason and emotion, he can create illusions for others but as a manipulator of the media, he is almost certainly not taken in by those illusions himself. As with the young Ambrose in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, "he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." Brautigan indicated that we need moments of escape (after all, that is the role of the imagination), but those moments must never overwhelm us and upset the ever delicate balance between romance and reality.

Escape through romance, drugs, and utopian schemes will help humans but little to cope with their real problems, although such escape may seem temporarily satisfying. By using the romance form Brautigan successfully debunked an overly romantic view of life. His "buffoon mutation" has a distinctly social and philosophical function with a sure message, even while it is sheer delight to read.

Willis,1982

"Brautigan's 'The Hawkline Monster': As Big As the Ritz"
Lonnie L. Willis
Critique, vol. 23, no. 2, Winter 1982, pp. 37-47.
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.

In contrast to the respectable critical attention given to his novels of the sixties, In Watermelon Sugar (1967) and Trout Fishing in America (1967), Richard Brautigan's mid-seventies novel, The Hawkline Monster (1974) has received little attention beyond initial reviews. The novel probably merits notice if for no other reason than its resolution of some issues characteristic of Brautigan's earlier work. Unfortunately, the novel's pose as a "Gothic Western" has led some readers to view it as a mere parody of two popularized genres. Although it may be "more of a parody than any of Brautigan's other fictions," The Hawkline Monster continues Brautigan's serious concern with failed American dreams, with what has been defined in another context as his "concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past."

The Hawkline Monster investigates the failure of the American experience to harmonize expectation and reality, and it calls attention to illusions that have distorted the national vision. Professor Hawkline, the transplanted New England alchemist who attempts to create the synthetic resources for a better world in Eastern Oregon laboratory, represents the American national design. When he fails in his idealistic purpose, he nevertheless continues to think "right up to the moment the monster did that terrible thing to him that he would be able to correct the balance of The Chemicals and complete the experiment with humanitarian possibilities for the entire world." The Professor's idealism to the contrary, the novel fails to provide anything but a sense of doom for the American experiment. Customarily Brautigan has been regarded as despondent but not ultimately without hope. While a "sense of failure and loss" pervades Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan is nevertheless "a legatee of an uncompromisingly idealistic strain of American writing that wills to redeem America through formal achievement." The Hawkline Monster, however, provides no more sense of uncompromising idealism than does Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," a story with which it shares not only a sense of futility but also more than a few similarities in organization and theme. Parallels between Fitzgerald's story and Brautigan's novel provide both a sense of tradition for Brautigan's skepticism and a source for his "monster."

Fitzgerald's tale of futility originated in his reading of Twain's The Mysterious Stranger during the winter just before he wrote his story; that reading evidently directed Fitzgerald to Van Wyck Brook's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, where he found "a cynicism equal in strength to his own." Twain, Brooks, and Fitzgerald had all "succumbed to a sense of futility about American life, with no redeeming sense of latent grandeur." Not only, therefore, was Fitzgerald's attitude sustained at a time of personal cynicism about American life, but he also took the very pivotal idea for his plot, that of a mountain-sized diamond, from this triangulation of Brooks and Twain with himself: "Mark Twain wrote a novel, Fitzgerald learned from Brooks, where the hero finds a mountain full of coal; Fitzgerald thereupon wrote a novella in which a Civil War veteran, prospecting in the West at exactly the same time as Mark Twain's hero, came upon a mountain full of diamonds." Brautigan, of course, can have arrived at his own attitudinal judgments about the failure of American experience without explicitly being influenced by Fitzgerald; however, his terminal skepticism about the national vision is an honest one that places him in a stream of "concern with the bankrupt ideas of the American past" that includes Fitzgerald and has its headwaters in Twain. Given a base for skepticism in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," Brautigan may also have found his monster close at hand.

Such a suggestion makes sense by placing The Hawkline Monster at the end of a line that begins with Twain's The Gilded Age which features a home more or less atop Sy Hawkins' "mountain full of coal" and continues through Fitzgerald's story about Braddock Washington's chateau on a "mountain full of diamonds" since The Hawkline Monster can be summarized as a short novel in which two gunmen travel through the West (at about the time that Fitzgerald's hero takes possession of his father's diamond) and come on a Victorian mansion constructed above ice caves as big as the Ritz. Faint echoes of The Gilded Age also occur in Brautigan's novel: when the Hawkline (Hawkins?) mansion is described as a house that "towered above them like a small wooden mountain covered with yellow snow" (76), beside which rises "a gigantic mound of coal" (68), one hears the echoes of both Twain and Fitzgerald, especially in concert with Brautigan's critical direction.

When Fitzgerald wishes to criticize American illusions about wealth in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," he dispatches his hero, young John T. Unger, on a journey into an isolated Montana valley where "the sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky." Amid such isolation the Washington chateau is discovered:

"Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite chateau rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace... The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light... all trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland... Then in a moment the car stopped before wide, high marble steps... At the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them."

In like fashion when Brautigan proposes to criticize American illusions about its national design, he first posts his heroes, the cowboys Greer and Cameron, to travel into an isolated Oregon wilderness called the Dead Hills which "looked as if an undertaker had designed them from leftover funeral scraps," and their "road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills," and the Dead Hills "disappeared behind them instantly to reappear again in front of them and everything was the same and everything was very still" (57, 61). In similar Western isolation Greer and Cameron are greeted at the Hawkline mansion:

"There were no fences or outbuildings or anything human or trees near the house. It just stood there alone in the center of the meadow with white stuff piled close in around it and more white stuff on the ground around it...

"There was a gigantic mound of coal beside the house which was a classic Victorian with great gables and stained glass across the tops of the windows and turrets and balconies and red brick fireplaces and a huge porch all around the house. There were twenty-one rooms in the house, including ten bedrooms and five parlors... and you knew that it did not belong out there in the Dead Hills surrounded by nothing... so the house looked like a fugitive from a dream.

"Heavy black smoke was pouring out three brick chimneys. The temperature was over ninety on the hill top. Greer and Cameron wondered why there were fires burning in the house... As they rode slowly down the hill toward the house the front door opened and a woman stepped outside onto the porch. The woman was Miss Hawkline. She was wearing a heavy long white coat... She was tall and slender and had long black hair. The coat flowed like a waterfall down her body to end at a pair of pointed high-top shoes...

"She just stood there on the porch watching them approach. She made no motion toward them. She didn't move. (67-72)"

In spite of expected dissimilarities of style and a tendency on Brautigan's part to fool around with comic interludes, the heroes of both tales find themselves in substantially the same country, the land of fantasy and fable—even myth. The perspective in both passages lies outside the real world's geography and time; where Fitzgerald translates into fable, Brautigan translates into myth, though their comparable properties of the fabulous hint at relatedness.

The fabulous atmosphere of "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" has caused the story to be called a "fable about a fantasy world," and the mythic substance of the "fantasy world" of The Hawkline Monster has also been noted: "All the ingredients of a Good Old Myth are present." Though the term may hint at one reader's wry attitude toward the book, "Good Old Myth" is as common to Brautigan as is his continuing theme about failed America: "Brautigan relates his narratives always in terms of the myths they impart" and is "par excellence the 'reader of myths' whom Roland Barthes describes at length." Such persistent narrative reliance on myth helps to explain the energy of Brautigan's appeal to a deep and underlying sense of the universal mysteries of human experience. Fitzgerald's story, with its modest focus, has less such appeal, for it relies more on elements of fantasy and merely uses some connections with Christian myth in order to effect satiric thrusts at American materialism. Fitzgerald, for example, mocks his countrymen's worship of Mammon by making John into "an Unger—from Hades" and passes him through the village of Fish where "the twelve men of Fish" gather in the fashion of disciples at the depot to confront "the Great Brakeman." Myth, however, endows the narrative structure of The Hawkline Monster with marked power to make the reader question the very meaning of America, and one instructive way of obtaining meaning from Brautigan's structural design is to allude to his use of one common, vital myth in order to effect his own judgments on the failed myth of America. The "monomyth" of the hero and the hero's quest can be seen to dominate the novel's structure: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." Brautigan's novel unfolds in response to the myth until its conclusion; his heroes, unfortunately, prove unable to "bestow boons" on anyone.

The place where Brautigan's heroes, the two hired gunmen Greer and Cameron, find themselves at the beginning of the novel is, if not supernatural, indeed a "region of wonder"—Hawaii in the summer of 1902. Having just completed terrifying voyage by boat from their "world of common day," San Francisco, they are squatting in a pineapple field, intent on bushwhacking a potential victim with their 30:40 Krag and 25:35 Winchester. Nearby and in their gunsights, the intended victim is teaching his young son to ride a horse. The description of the scene emphasizes the "shining" quality of both nature and people: "The man and the boy and the horse were in the front yard of a big white house shaded by coconut trees. It was like a shining island in the pineapple fields. There was piano music coming from the house. It drifted lazily across the warm afternoon" (10). The human paternalism of the scene is as warm as the afternoon, and as the previously efficient Greer and Cameron observe the father-son tableau, a strange thing happens; sentiment subverts their mission. They cannot gun down the father while he is teaching his son to ride.

Greer and Cameron can only continue to watch as "a woman came out onto the front porch. She carried herself like a wife and a mother. She was wearing a long white dress with a high starched collar. 'Dinner's ready!' she yelled. 'Come and get it, you cowboys!'" (10). With their mission now deader than their victim, the two gunmen face a truth that is more formidable than sentiment: "Greer and Cameron were not at home in the pineapple field. They looked out of place in Hawaii. They were both dressed in cowboy clothes, clothes that belonged to Eastern Oregon" (9-10). In this ideal pastoral scene, a composition that relies heavily on both the father-son relationship and the mother-home connection, a scene that is set like a cameo in Hawaii, Brautigan's Oregon cowboys are so out of place as to suggest that in their voyage from their "world of common day" to a "region of wonder" they have turned themselves into anachorisms—into geographical misfits. These cowboys have carried the concept of "Westering" to its extreme; they have boated (an uncommon means of transporting cowboys) off the map of America into the Pacific Ocean.

The occupation of the Far West of America has been called "a highway to the Pacific." At the end of that "highway" lay "The Garden of Plenty," that mythic place in the sun made up of the Pastoral ideal and the Edenic myth. Brautigan's pineapple field, that "shining island" where the loving wife and mother calls her "cowboys" in to a Victorian dinner inside a big white house from which drift strains of piano music, becomes that Eden-like "Garden of Plenty." When Brautigan's cowboys find themselves there, they are clearly not cowboys who have come to dinner. Brautigan wants the reader to see them, rather, as figures from an authentic American West that stands in opposition to the mythic West. Therefore, they are anachronisms in the garden, out of place in time also, and they can only take flight back into the reality of America. Greer speaks for both at the end of the first chapter when he says, "Let's get off this God-damm Hawaii." Like the woman in the white who calls to her cowboys, Brautigan insists, the dream and the myth beckoned Americans into the big white house of illusion; the reality of America is to be revealed back in the Hawkline mansion.

The magic journey to the Hawkline estate really begins on the arrival of Greer and Cameron in San Francisco, where they feel at home and where they promptly function capably in their roles as hired guns. Equally true to their roles as authentic Westerners, they celebrate their return to America by taking contracts to assassinate a citizen of Chinatown in order to earn some travel funds to Portland. Neither Greer nor Cameron realizes that a mysterious agent is designing a heroic mission for them; even as they spend part of their new money in a Portland whorehouse, their own manifest destiny begins to open a road for them into the Dead Hills of Eastern Oregon. The mystical bond between them and their imminent quest is made clear when they are "found" by the girl-spirit, Magic Child, whose purpose is to follow the bidding of Miss Hawkline and conduct them safely on a magic journey across Oregon. Brautigan points out that "Miss Hawkline was thinking about Greer and Cameron, though she had never met them or heard about them, but she waited eternally for them to come as they were always destined to come, for she was part of their gothic future" (16). Thus, when Greer and Cameron leave with Magic Child, they have no clearer sense of their mission than Gawain of Perceval had, all sharing common behavior for heroes, for "the hero sets out on his journey with no clear idea of the task before him."

While one has been accustomed to linking the gothic spirit with the past, Brautigan associates it with the future. Such association is seen to be relevant, however, when the reader follows Greer and Cameron as they are led by Magic Child through an adventure to Eastern Oregon that is like a newsreel of the American past but which takes everyone to the future of America. The holographic young woman who has been dispatched to bring the cowboys to the mansion is called Magic Child for good reason; she seductively leads them, and the reader, through scenes in the novel that are often comic enough but which seriously represent a short, critical history of the American West: conflicts between cowmen and sheepmen, skirmishes with Indians, lynchings by vigilante groups. In concert these short chapters, often give curt and whimsical titles like "Indian," "Gompville," "Binoculars," and "Ma Smith's Cafe," offer a history of the West in terms of its own clichés to which Brautigan gives sly twists. Brautigan's old-West peace officer, for example, the six-foot-tall and equally heavy Jack Williams, resembles a sheriff on any movie lot, but he refuses to wear a "regular gun belt" for fear of it being too close to his maleness; instead of shooting troublemakers he would, says Brautigan, "throw you in the creek" (40). Out of these episodes Magic Child brings Greer and Cameron to the Hawkline mansion where they will encounter the "fabulous forces" of the monster which resides in the basement. Here also Brautigan reveals his theories about America's apocalyptic future, to be wrought by a national inability to distinguish between illusion and reality.

When Fitzgerald poses his protagonist's cheerful but blind idealism about wealth ("I like very rich people") against the dark practices of "the richest man in the world," Braddock Washington, the background is so fantasy-like as to be futuristic. His towers, fairyland, and aeroplanes resemble some kind of Art Nouveau science fiction. By allowing John Unger to watch the insular world of the "richest man" disintegrate during an attack by flying machines, Fitzgerald shows how the impingement of the outside technological world, grown so during Washington's isolation, creates an apocalypse which leaves John aware of his birth of consciousness about "the shabby gift of disillusion." Brautigan's apocalypse, however, takes place in a setting more reminiscent of the past, the Victorian mansion of the Hawkline family. Most of the gothic furniture is there, and in the basement laboratory lurks the monster. The destruction of the mansion, however, is futuristic, though brought about by a collusion between outside and inside forces. In the context of his own dream-like setting amid the Dead Hills of Oregon, Brautigan pits his heroes against the required "fabulous forces" in the form of the treacherous Hawkline monster which makes terrible noises in the basement and which "can change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind" (129). When Greer and Cameron marshal their armaments, which also represent the technological world, "a 30:40 Krag, a sawed-off shotgun, a .38 and an automatic pistol" (118), and launch their attack against the Hawkline monster, the result is again an apocalyptic ending to a kind of insular world where illusions play like ghosts in the daytime. To effect the conclusion of their mission for Miss Hawkline, to destroy the monster that changes reality mischievously, they must also destroy its source, the Hawkline mansion itself; to bring this about they pour whiskey into the mixture of chemicals in which the monster resides. Sparks from the explosion catch the mansion afire, and the monster is turned into diamonds. Greer and Cameron rescue all the people who then stand "for a long time watching the house burn down" (209).

Not until midway through the novel does one learn the identity of Brautigan's celebrated "monster"; it is actually a strange mutation that has taken the form of light and shadow in an experiment of Professor Hawkline's which he calls "The Chemicals" and keeps in a jar in his laboratory. The narrator says that only Professor Hawkline could have joined the disparate chemicals in such a way as to "make them good neighbors" (127). The concept of "good neighbors" is significant, for The Chemicals bring together elements that are clearly suggestive of the elements that comprise the American experiment in democracy with its borrowings from many national cultures and symbolize, then, the complexity of that experiment:

"The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world. Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain. There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C.

"There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas.

"Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar. Witchcraft and modern science, the newest discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar. There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis. (126-27)"

To this mass of foreign and competing elements the Professor brings the talent and dedication which establish "harmony between past and present in the jar" (127). However, when the mutation is born in the jar and an "epidemic of mischievous pranks" grows into the "horrible sound" (128) that echoes among the ice caves beyond the basement, the heroic mission of Greer and Cameron becomes the only means of quelling the monster. That completed mission, however, does not bring a good; it does not result in boons for the heroes' fellow men, nor does it bring healing waters to a dry land. Brautigan's use of the myth of heroic quest does not include the concluding sense of hope.

Brautigan uses The Chemicals in their original purity as a metaphor for the potential harmony between past and present that he considers necessary for the American experiment in human felicity. When he speaks of "The Chemicals promising a brighter and more beautiful future for all mankind" (127), he intends that future to develop from realistic attitudes toward the national history. But that future reasons without the monster which changes the "nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind." Myth may produce truth; illusions, though, bear failed dreams.

The most striking episode from "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" which Brautigan parallels and which throws light on his own theme regarding failed dreams is the story's concluding impromptu picnic, where John Unger and the girls, Kismine and Jasmine, both just saved from the burning wreckage of the chateau, "spread the tablecloth and put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it." The ironic discovery during this pastoral scene is that the two remaining handfuls of Washington diamonds, which the girls have saved, are mere rhinestones. That revelation leads Kismine to draw a parallel between the "diamonds" and the stars and to say that they make her feel "that it was all a dream, all my youth." Brautigan also explicates his theme most openly during the final episode of The Hawkline Monster, given the form of an impromptu picnic that brings together the protagonists, his two heroes, with the two sisters, Susan and Jane Hawkline. Brautigan's observations on this scene indicate clearly that one is here looking into the gothic future of the American experience: "The way everybody was sitting it looked as if they were at a picnic but the picnic was of course the burning of the house, the death of the Hawkline Monster and the end of a scientific dream. It was barely the Twentieth Century" (210). If what follows in the novel is, then, any indication of what Brautigan expects for America's future, it will be one of wasted expectations. In the next-to-last chapter Cameron dives into the lake created by the melting ice caves and returns with the "handful of blue diamonds" that are the final remains of the monster. His expectations hopeful, Cameron says, "We're rich." However, the final chapter, a summation of the major characters' latter histories resembling the conclusion of a Victorian novel, proves Cameron's hope to be a deception, for not only are the diamonds wasted but so are the lives of their owners. Greer and Jane start a whorehouse in Butte; they are then married and divorced before she is "barely killed" in an automobile accident. Greer ends up as an inmate and a Rosicrucian in the Wyoming State Penitentiary. On their side of the Hawkline family, Susan and Cameron argue until Susan moves to Paris, France, where she marries a Russian count and then dies of a "stray bullet" during the Russian Revolution. Cameron's fate may be even worse: he becomes a movie producer in Hollywood.

As one looks back at the Fitzgerald picnic, one finds John making the following pronouncement on Kismine's suspicion that her youth, like diamonds, has been a dream: "It was a dream," he tells her. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." So, too, was Professor Hawkline's dream a form of "chemical madness," given to him by his creator as though Brautigan had been a visitor at Fitzgerald's picnic. Brautigan's reader, being aware that Professor Hawkline's dream is the dream of America, will perceive how unlikely the prospect is of maintaining the harmony of expectation and reality when the Hawkline monster's shadow falls between them. He will think with Eliot in "The Hollow Men": "Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow." Thus reads Richard Brautigan's final pronouncement on America's failed dream.

Yohalem,1974

"Cute Brautigan"
John Yohalem
The New York Times Book Review, 8 Sep. 1974, Sec. 7, pp. 6-7.
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The Hawkline Monster can be read as one more of Richard Brautigan's surpassingly pleasant divertissements in prose, for it is, like his other four novels, wanly pretty, curious, unexciting, winsome, sprinkled with both sparkling and foolish wit, likeable, wispy. Brautigan's writing inspires adjectives, not nouns. The atmosphere is the thing, not events or characters or emotions. Better not dig too deep. No veins of anything solid here.

In The Hawkline Monster, which is subtitled "A Gothic Western," there is a difference. There are fewer jokes and they are not so amiably odd. Brautigan is more literary. There is a sort of plot, with tension, conflict and relief—if you watch for them carefully and don't blink. Eastern Oregon takes on the look of Yorkshire moors; the mysterious mansion and the whimsy of the supernatural something below stairs recalls Otranto; and the finale is a grand old device used by many writers but still workable if you can get up a good head of steam. There is an unsung, self-sacrificing hero, and even a moral if you like—Brautigan does not insist on it.

The story is partly satire and partly an excuse. The excuse is for Brautigan's wit, which consists of anecdotes and similes. The anecdotes are like this one, quoted in toto:

"He had another horse that didn't have any ears. A drunken cowboy had bitten them off for a fifty-cent bet.
"'I bet you fifty cents I'm so drunk I'd bite a horse's ears off!'
'God-damn, I don't think you're that drunk!'"

His similes, likewise, are not quite your everyday poetic similes. In his fiction Trout Fishing in America he writes: "The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then lit with a match and said 'Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,' and put the coin in my hand but never came back." In The Hawkline Monster, though there is less of this sort of thing, we hear of a road "wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills" and of "yellow grass which was frozen hard like strange silverware."

Brautigan is, in a word, cute. To be cute is, for the novelist, to enter a dangerous country. It requires a very precise judgment indeed. But Brautigan is the region's Mountain Man—he braves this wilderness fearlessly.

Besides being cute, the action of a Brautigan fiction is as lazy, as airily inconsequential as the behavior of his compatriots in Big Sur. The emphasis is on unflappability. Go with the flow, man. There's a monster downstairs. Gotta kill it. For sure. But the ladies come first. And then dinner. Then the monster.

There is, of course, lots of casual sex, casually described. The sex is less an event that matters than a thing the stick-figure people do to kill time. All the actions here are just as casual. It is as if Brautigan had given up on personalities and their motivations when he began to spend more time on plot. In In Watermelon Sugar he presents the reader with a quandary, for the morbid inBOIL and the tragic Margaret do have personalities and do take at least the actions of their suicides seriously, giving the reader a more sympathetic focus for his attention than the pallid, Brautiganian types in the foreground. This could be mastery or clumsiness on the writer's part. The reader is not sure which.

In this latest work it is only the Monster and its shadow that matter to us. The nominal heroes are hired murderers who "could handle any situation that came up with a minimum amount of effort resulting in a maximum amount of effect." A minimum amount of effort is what they take, too, and they have no effect on the reader at all. One would like to care about the Miss Hawklines but, although their creator limns their bodies and their inherited predicament in some detail, they remain chance acquaintances. Perhaps Brautigan is celebrating the obsequies of the persona and I am out of fashion, but it looks more like his characters have all become the shadow into which the Monster at one point hopes to change them.

Richard Brautigan is a popular writer. He is clever and brief; he touches themes and myths close to the current fantasy without being too difficult or too long to complete and understand at a single sitting. He is witty, likeable, even literate—a rare virtue nowadays. The Hawkline Monster read through once is enjoyable, can even provide a belly laugh. Skimmed through a second time it was, for this reason, unbearable.

It's a merry little book, good for reading by flashlight to friends toasting marshmallows during the next energy crisis, or else to be picked up for 15 minutes in a bookstore. You'll enjoy that quarter hour.