Barabak,1984

"Brautigan's Suicide Rekindles Bad Feelings"
Mark Z. Barabak
San Francisco Chronicle, 30 Oct. 1984, p. 3.
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The suicide of author Richard Brautigan has touched off confict between his mother and a man identified as the father the writer never knew.

"It really makes me sick," Brautigan's mother, Mary Lulu Folston of Eugene, Ore., said yesterday. "It's been almost 50 years and this stuff has to come out now. It serves no purpose at all."

"This stinks," concurred Bernard Brautigan, a retired lumber worker in Tacoma, Wash.

It was the only thing they could agree on.

According to Bernard Brautigan, he had never heard of Richard Brautigan before his former sister-in-law called last Friday to say the author was found dead in his Bolinas home.

The Marin County coroner's office ruled yesterday that the 49-year-old author died from a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

"I said, 'Who the hell is Richard Brautigan?'" Bernard Brautigan recalled. "She said, 'Well you call Lu, that's the boy's mother.'"

So, Brautigan said, he called his ex-wife, and talked to her for the first time in 50 years.

"She said, 'You know, I was pregnant when you left.' I said, "The hell I did!' Then I hung up. And that's as far as it went."

He adamantly denied any connection to Richard Brautigan.

"Hell no! If I had anything to do with it, how come she waited 50 years?" he demanded. "I discovered she was running around with another guy, that's why I left."

"Oh, of course he knows," said Brautigan's former sister-in-law, Evelyn Fjetland of Tacoma. "How can you live with a woman for eight years, know she's going to have a baby when you leave, and then claim it's not yours?" . . .

The Tacoma News Tribune said it confirmed Bernard Brautigan's relationship to the author by obtaining a copy of Richard Brautigan's birth certificate at the Pierce County (Wash.) Health Department.

Folston said Richard Brautigan "never questioned who his father was and never was interested in it."

She said her ex-husband "called to say he didn't have any son. And that's the way we're going to leave it. He's nothing but a reformed old drunkard, who I left in the dark."

Brautigan's badly decomposed body was found by a private investigator hired by the author's New York agent. The agent was trying to reach Brautigan, whose career had hit hard times, to inform him of a new contract offer.

Hinckle,1984

"The Big Sky Fell In on Brautigan"
Warren Hinckle
San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Oct. 1984, p. 4.
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Richard Brautigan's life was divided into three parts: Tokyo, North Beach and the Big Sky Country of Montana. A friend believes the third part helped kill him.

Brautigan owned a back forty in a jet-set colony in a place called Paradise Valley on the edge of Yellowstone National Park in the high country of Montana.

This was his refuge when he got tired of Japan, where he went often, possibly because his books were more popular there than in California.

And when he felt the need to take a hike from North Beach locals such as Specs' and Enrico's where he took his daily potions of Meyer's Rum, when they had run out of Calvados, which Brautigan dearly fancied.

"He'd call me on the phone and say to come up to Montana and bring a couple of bottles of Calvados with me," said Ken Kelley, the writer and Playboy interviewer who became Brautigan's friend in the last decade of the writer's life.

Kelley's visits to Brautigan's ranch-style log cabin came as a shock to the journalist who was used to madness as a way of life. He thought Brautigan was killing himself.

"The house was full of bullet holes. There were bullet holes in the clock, in the kitchen and bullets in the living room floor and bullets in the ceiling," Kelley said yesterday when I visited him in his Oakland home.

"Richard liked to get drunk and shoot things," he said.

Kelley had just hung up the phone from Montana. He had been talking to actor Peter Fonda and his wife Becky, Brautigan's Big Sky neighbors. "Everybody up there is short on details," Kelley said of Brautigan's apparent suicide in Bolinas.

Brautigan was a celebrity in San Francisco, but being a celeb here is lazy man's work. You just have to stand at the bar and accept the compliments. Unlike L.A. and New York, there is little celeb competing to do here; the really famous people live elsewhere, which is the way a lot of us locals like it.

But Brautigan, said Kelley, was caught up in a better-than-thou syndrom that manifested itself at its violent worst in the jet-set enclave in the wilds of Montana.

"Up there you had a bunch of artistic weirdos living in rancher country. And the artists seemed compelled to compete in macho terms against the cowboys, and then tried to out-macho each other," Kelley said.

"Every night seemed to be the boys' night out. You had to get drunk and get your gun and shoot off more bullets than the other guy.

"It was all so competitive and so incestuous. Everybody knew everybody else and was sleeping with everybody else, et cetera," Kelley was saying, pacing furiously around his Oakland deck.

"When Margot Kidder hit town, Tom McGuane, who was married to Becky at the time, took off with her and so Becky took up with Warren Oates, and then Margot Kidder married Tom McGuane for a while and then Peter Fonda married Becky and meanwhile Elizabeth Ashley was running all around, dating everybody.

"Part of Richard's way of competing ws that he really got kinky up theremdash;into bondage and stuff. There were always stories about women fleeing his house on Saturday morning, seeking sanctuary at a neighbor's."

"I mean it was really something up there."

"It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard," Kelley said. "The books he wrote up there, like "Hawkline Monster," were full of violence—nothing like in the earlier hippie novels."

"He would really get whacko up there. One moment he resented anybody who could write, and then the next moment he'd be down on the floor playing with little kids and as gentle as could be, and then that night he'd be shooting guns through the ceiling."

Brautigan is not the first writer bedeviled by a macho sense of competition. "You cannot do something someone else has done, though you might have done it if they hadn't," Hemingway, another writer in love with guns, once said.

Kelly yesterday was sipping Jack Daniel's and attempting to deal with the contradictions that led to his friend's apparent lonely death by his own hand.

Although Brautigan's most famous novels were part of the '60s counterculture, Brautigan himself did not do drugs, Kelley said.

"He called drugs cowardness."

"Yet he took the ultimate drug—he shot himself in the head."

Liberatore,1984

"Richard Brautigan Dies in Bolinas"
Paul Liberatore
San Francisco Chronicle, 26 Oct. 1984, pp. 1, 18.
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Author Richard Brautigan, whose 1967 novel "Trout Fishing in America" made him a literary celebrity of the hippie era, was found dead yesterday at his home in Bolinas.

Publisher Seymour Lawrence of Delacorte Press in New York said the 49-year-old Brautigan's body was discovered by two friends who were worried because they had not seen or heard from the writer in several weeks.

The Marin County coroner's office said the body was decomposed and the cause of death was not immediately known.

Novelist Tom McGuane, a long-time friend, said Brautigan apparently had been dead for several days.

Lawrence and McGuane said the last years of Brautigan's life had been extremely troubled and the writer had been drinking heavily at the end.

"When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bathwater," McGuane said.

San Francisco writer Curt Gentry, a friend for 25 years, said, "Richard was always a heavy boozer. Obviously, he wasn't happy, but he'd always managed to pull himself out of despair before. Whatever agonies he was suffering this time, I don't know."

Another friend, novelist Don Carpenter of Mill Valley, last saw Brautigan two months ago.

"He was full of good cheer and optimistic about doing good work," Carpenter said. "He was in good spirits."

Brautigan was an unknown Haight-Ashbury poet until he published "Trout Fishing," which sold 2 million copies, and "Confederate General from Big Sur."

His offbeat style, a compost of outrageous imagination, strange and detailed observations, whimsy, humor and satire, made him an underground favorite who managed to climb into the mainstream, although he never was really accepted by the East Coast literary establishment.

Carpenter once wrote that "Brautigan writes about simple things. Love. Death. Hunger. Empty lives. Bees. Men and women, and all the trouble they can get into with each other."

Among his other novels were "In Watermelon Sugar," "Revenge of the Lawn," and "The Abortion: An Historical Romance."

Tall and gangly, he was the stereotypical hippie writer with his long hair, wire-rimmed glasses and droopy moustache.

"He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy," McGuane said. "He once told me that because of a childhood illness he had to grow up in darkness. I guess his mind became his only toy during that time."

Lawrence said that in the last years of Brautigan's life, he had been out of favor with American critics, who criticized him for failing to live up to his early promise and dismissed him as unimportant and trivial.

A Chronicle reviewer described his 1982 novel, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," as "a thin piece of labored eccentricity."

"He felt at the end of his life, he wasn't appreciated. But he was still revered by the Japanese and the French. His books still sold very well there," Lawerence said.

Literary reference books reveal few details about the personal life of Brautigan, who rarely gave interviews to journalists.

He was born in Spokane, Wash., and suffered complications from appendicitis that nearly killed him when he was 8 years old.

"At the hospital they talked of my autopsy," he once told an interviewer. "I went to a place . . . It was dark without being scary."

Asked if he was afraid of death, Brautigan, then 45, told the interviewer:

"I don't give a s--- about death, man. I have no fear of it at all. I'm interested in life. People wouldn't take life seriously if they didn't know it would turn dark on them."

Lawrence, his publisher, said "I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American Loneliness. He was quite alone at the end."

Brautigan spent a good deal of his time in the Bay Area and in Japan, but also had a ranch in Livingstone, Mont., where his neighbors and friends were McGuane, actor Peter Fonda and artist Russell Chatham.

"He was an American original," Carpenter said. "I've been crying and laughing all day. We're just not going to have fun with Richard again."

Brautigan is survived by a daugher, Ianthe, from his marriage to Virginia Dionne, which ended in divorce in 1970.

McDowell,1984

"Richard Brautigan, Novelist, A Literary Idol of the 1960s"
Edwin McDowell
The New York Times, 27 Oct. 1984, Sec. 1, p. 33.
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Richard Brautigan, a literary idol of the 1960's who eventually fell out of fashion, was found dead Thursday [October 25] at his secluded house in Bolinas, Calif. The Marin County coroner's office reported that the author of "Trout Fishing in America" and "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away" apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound four or five weeks ago. He was 49 years old.

"He told everybody he was going away on a hunting trip," Helen Brann, Mr. Brautigan's literary agent, said yesterday. "He did disappear from time to time when he was working on a new novel, as he was at the time, so we never worried." Mr. Brautigan's body was discovered by two of the writer's friends.

Mr. Brautigan had been troubled and drinking heavily, according to Seymour Lawrence, who published a number of Mr. Brautigan's books, and Thomas McGuane the novelist. "He was a true American genius in the tradition of Twain and Lardner," Mr. Lawrence said.

"Trout Fishing in America," published in 1967 by the Four Seasons Foundation in San Francisco, was published nationally in 1970 by Mr. Lawrence who then had his own editorial imprint at Delacorte Press. Miss Brann said the novel has sold more than two million copies worldwide.

Mr. Brautigan became a familiar figure in the Bay Area of California, handing out copies of his poetry on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and in Berkeley.

None of his early books sold well in the beginning including "Trout Fishing in America," his second novel. But Mr. Brautigan began developing a reputation in the literary underground. "In 1968, a client of mine phoned from the West Coast and said this writer is enormously talented and you should take him on," Miss Brann said. She promptly offered three of his books at an auction, at which Mr. Lawrence was the high bidder.

All three books—the novels "Trout Fishing in America" and "In Watermelon Sugar" and a collection of poems, "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster,"—were published in one volume in 1970. Mr. McGuane, who reviewed the volume in The New York Times Book Review, said: "He seems crazy with optimism. Like some widely gifted Rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

But the sincerity and the disconnected. elliptical style that so charmed critics and readers in those days eventually began to pall. For example, reviewing "The Tokyo-Montana Express," a Brautigan novel published in 1980, Barry Yourgrau, a poet, wrote in The Times Book Review, "He is now a longhair in his mid-40s, and across his habitually wistful good humor there now creep shadows of ennui and dullness, and too easily aroused sadness."

Mr. Brautigan did not care about the opinion of critics. Miss Brann said. "But what he couldn't bear was losing the readers. He really cared about his audience. The fact that his readership was diminishing was what was breaking his heart." The agent said that he is currently very popular in Japan and France and that his works have been translated into 12 languages.

Mr. Brautigan, born in Spokane, Wash., moved to Bolinas about a year ago. Previously he divided his time between San Francisco and a small ranch near Livingston. Mont. He never learned to drive, never owned a car and by his own admission was inept at almost everything but writing.

Married and divorced twice, Mr. Brautigan is survived by a daughter, Ianthe Brautigan Swenson of Los Angeles.

Polman,1984

"A '60s Hero's Pained Soul Is Finally Bared, in Death"
Dick Polman
Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 Dec. 1984, pp. E1, E5.
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I had a good-talking candle
Last night in my bedroom
I was very tired but I wanted
Somebody to be with me,
so I lit a candle
and listened to its comfortable
voice of light until I was asleep.
—Richard Brautigan

Bolinas Calif.—The house has been barren since the body was found. The rain gutters are broken, snapped in two like twigs from a tree. Yellowing newspapers dot the driveway. The pantry is bare, aside from a box of raisin bran and a jar of Yuban.

From a third-floor window, you can look south across Bolinas Bay toward San Francisco gleaming bone-white in the distance. Indeed, there was a time when the owner of this house was the toast of that town, for he was Richard Brautigan, literary guru for millions of college kids who yearned to spurn the rat race and groove with nature. His income, buoyed by whimsical works like Trout Fishing in America, had jumped from $3,000 in 1968 to $100,000 in 1970, and he grew to relish his fame, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Sold Out: Why Didn't I Think of It Sooner?"

But by the fall of 1984, the gravy train had dumped him on the tracks, and when his corpse was found Oct. 25, next to a .44-caliber gun and a bottle of booze, his friends were quick to diagnose his downfall.

"Richard's readers grew up, and Richard didn't," says Curt Gentry, a San Francisco writer, "and he was having trouble with the sales of his books. Like all of us who have ridden the success roller coaster, he thought it was going to keep going forever. And when he discovered that it wasn't, it was a tremendous blow to him. I just don't think he wanted to be poor again."

"The audience just fell away," says Seymour Lawrence, who published nine Brautigan books at Delacorte Press. "The '60s were a very freewheeling period in American life, but his readers became more attuned to conservative ways in the '70s and Richard was a victim of that change in tastes."

No other '60s literary figure rose so high and fell so far. As Lawrence points out, Kurt Vonnegut was big at the time, but he can still write a best seller today. Ken Kesey scored with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but its sales didn't rival those of Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Besides, Kesey has been farming in Oregon for 16 years, free from the hunger for attention that always burned in Brautigan's belly.

Yale law professor Charles Reich wrote The Greening of America, then returned to Yale. Young readers later bought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but author Robert Pirsig never became a cult figure. Says Lawrence, "Nobody else had that great hold on the imagination of the youth."

At the outset, Brautigan was just one of thousands of kids who flooded San Francisco when the Beat generation was coming of age. He was 19 when he arrived in 1954—a solitary, impoverished youth from the Pacific Northwest whose father had vanished before he was born—and poet Joanne Kyger of Bolinas can remember when she and Brautigan were "just plain people fighting over the markdown pork chops at Safeway."

He earned about $2,000 a year between 1954 and 1967, and sometimes he would hand free poems to riders alighting from the cable cars. Most of his works were suffused with sunny whimsy; one typical entry featured a poet who took over a hamburger stand and began serving flowers instead of food.

His first novel, written in 1961, overflowed with eccentric observations about the environment (a junkyard that sells pieces of a trout stream at $6.50 a foot), meaningless death (a war monument covered by snow in a remote forest), and the allure of taking solitary treks far from the strictures of civilization. But it would not be published for six years.

A small San Francisco publisher took the plunge in 1967, at a fortuitous time when thousands of foot-loose hippies were swarming into town, hungry for new voices. Trout Fishing caught on locally and ultimately sold more than two million copies after Dell Publishing came aboard. Book critics began calling Brautigan "the Love Generation's answer to Charlie Schulz."

His books overflowed with the imagery of nature; a girl's body "was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves." Big sellers like A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion were replete with preening sweetness. "There are high arched windows here in the library above the bookshelves and there are two green trees towering into the windows and they spread their branches like past against the glass. I love those trees."

Brautigan was tagged as a "hippie writer," someone who was urging his readers to get high and happy. Indeed, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet, scoffs that Brautigan "got the hippie audience because his books had just enough simple words and sentences fro a grade-school kid to comprehend."

Yet his artistic friends way that, on the contrary, Richard Brautigan was a gun-loving, drug-hating, hard-drinking loner who stressed the joys of temporal pleasure as a hedge against death and meaningless misery; in the words of poet Gary Snyder, Brautigan was busy cultivating "flowers for the void."

But, misperceptions aside, "Richard wanted all the readers he could get," says an old friend, novelist Don Carpenter. And he nurtured his cult status by appearing, with boots and beads and granny glasses, on the covers of his books. At his peak, he was mobbed on the street. Girls would send nude snapshots and pledge their fealty. The once impoverished poet earned $100,000 a year in the early '70s, and spent it lavishly—staying in the best hotels, buying homes in Bolinas and Montana. "Richard," sighs Carpenter, "was the only man I know who could go through that much money without ever touching cocaine."

Looking back on what went wrong, poet Joanne Kyger says: "He really sold himself, sold his image, put himself out there as this public figure. And I don't think there was any back room for him to go to when things went bad. There wasn't any Richard behind the [public] Richard that he could feel comfortable with. There wasn't any way for him to escape from his own image of himself."

Although he loved the limelight that came with being a "hippie writer," he had always hated the label. After all, Trout Fishing was written long before flower power bloomed. But his books became synonymous with a vanishing era, and by the mid-'70s, sales were dwindling.

"Richard always kept up this incredible pretext of success," says Curt Gentry, who co-authored Helter Skelter with Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who prosecuted Charles Manson. "I could pick up Publishers Weekly and know what a first printing had been on a book of his. And Richard would give me some inflated figure. Instead of 10,000 copies, he'd say it was 100,000. He wanted to keep up that front all the way to the end."

Brautigan loved Japan, where his prose was popular, but he would exaggerate his Far East fame to compensate for his eclipse at home. Gentry recalls, "We'd be walking down a street in Japan, and Richard would be dressing strangely, with his weird mustache and cowboy hat. The Japanese would look at him, too polite to laugh, so they'd cover their mouths, especially the little kids. And Richard would turn to me and say, 'Everybody in Japan knows me, everybody recognizes me from the book jackets.' And he really believed it."

By 1979, his income had dropped to $47,000 and his publisher was doling out smaller advances on his new works. He was writing westerns and mysteries, trying to find new readers. In 1980, he went through a costly divorce from his Japanese wife of two years. According to Gentry, who was privy to the legal maneuvering, Brautigan's lawyer tried to blunt the settlement costs by citing the author's sluggish sales. "But this was so damaging to Richard's ego," Gentry says, "that he later got up and told the judge about how popular he still was. So the judge would up giving Richard's wife more money."

In 1981, People [Weekly] magazine ran a photo of Brautigan sitting at a San Francisco watering hole, sharing a laugh with Gentry and Carpenter. But as Gentry now recalls, People had hoped for a very different photo: "They wanted all of Richard's friends, people he knew, to get together for a picture. Well, nobody showed up. At the last minute, Carpenter called me and said, 'Richard's really down. He doesn't feel like he's got any friends left.' As soon as I got that call, I ran down there . . . He usually didn't act insecure, but he wanted praise that he wasn't getting."

Brautigan had always been a solitary soul, loath to reveal his inner pain, and when he returned to Bolinas in June, after a long sojourn in Japan, he seemed "antisocial and paranoid," in Joanne Kyger's words. He drank heavily and was banned from the only bar in town after he hoisted a male patron by the crotch. He went for a walk with Kyger and became obsessed with a dead sea lion that had washed up on the beach. "He spent an hour looking at it," says Kyger. "It was like meditation. He said he was interested in decay."

"He'd tell me he was writing 20 pages a day," says singer Bobbie Louise Hawkins, a friend and neighbor. "But if I came to visit him, his typewriter would still be packed up, with dust on it. And what's interesting is that he claimed he was writing. He was this rotten-poor kid who had invented himself to be this famous writer, and his sense of personal worth was absolutely wrapped up in it. It's the American syndrome of 'What do you do for a living?'"

When he dropped from sight in mid-September, nobody paid attention; he was always prone to wanderlust. But a month later, his friends finally broke into the house and found what was left of Brautigan, who apparently had used the gun found at his side.

"What happened to his sales happened to a lot of authors," says published Seymour Lawrence. "They hit a peak, and then they lose much of their audience. But Richard must have taken it harder than most."

Kurt Vonnegut was the one who first told Lawrence about Brautigan back in the late '60s. Ironically, Vonnegut believes he hit his own peak in 1969, with the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, and he's not sure his writing has much direction anymore.

"American literary careers are very short," he says. And about Brautigan, "When you lose your audience, you lose your income. Loneliness really killed him . . . Depressions comes with the territory, so there you are. That's what drives some people to suicide."

In death, Brautigan made the local TV news for the last time—squeezed between pieces on panda mating habits and the perils of skateboarding. And amid the post-mortems, Don Carpenters recalled an incident with his friend: They had gone home with two women of instant acquaintance, but Brautigan soon emerged, naked from a bedroom, in bitter defeat. The woman, still fully clothed, told Carpenter, "He got undressed without saying a word! Is he nuts or something?"

Today, Carpenter calls this "a surrealitic image of Brautigan's career, for there is something quite sad about an artist who bares himself so willingly for an unresponsive audience. And not even the voice of light from a good-talking candle could quench the loneliness any longer.

Snyder,1984

"Brautigan Prepared for Death Since Summer, Friend Says"
George Snyder
San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Oct. 1984, pp. 1, 14.
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Writer Richard Brautigan, who was found dead Thursday in his Bolinas home, apparently committed suicide—and a close friend said yesterday that the author had been preparing for death for some time.

David Fechheimer, a San Francisco private investigator, said: "Toward the end of summer he seemed to be taking care of a number of housekeeping details. For example, he cleaned out his North Beach office upstairs from Vesuvio's and put everything in storage.

"Ironically," said Fechheimer, "he seemed to be in better shape in the last few months than he had been for a long time.

"He had a difficult divorce four or five years ago," Fechheimer added, "and it seemed as though he had finally gotten over it.

In retrospect, I guess it was plain he thought he was coming to the end. He had deep emotional troubles. He complained about his back hurting him and he had problems with his teeth, for example.

"If they say it was suicide," Fechheimer said, "there is no question but that I believe it."

The Marin County coroner's office withheld such a ruling yesterday. An official said formal identification of Brautigan's body and a determination of the cause of death for the 49-year-old author will not be released until Monday at the earliest.

A coroner's spokeswoman said her office is waiting for dental charts to be sent from Livingston, Mont., where Brautigan had an 80-acre ranch in Paradise Valley.

Brautigan's badly decomposed body, which had been in his three-story Bolinas home for up to three weeks, was found in a second-story bedroom with a large-caliber pistol nearby, according to sources.

A nearby wall, they said, was splattered with blood.

Fechheimer said a call from Livingston led to the discovery of Brautigan's body.

"I got a call from Becky Fonda—Peter's wife," he said, "saying that they hadn't heard from him in a while and that they were worried."

Fechheimer said he called a mutual friend—whom he declined to identify—and asked him to check on the writer. The friend went to the house and found the body.

Fechheimer said Brautigan, who spent his winters in Japan and summers in Montana, had been living in the house since June.

Another Brautigan friend, a free-lance journalist who asked to remain anonymous, said he believed "Richard came to Bolinas to die.

"I know he killed himself from what the people who found him said," the friend said. "They found a pistol there.

"His second wife was Japanese," he added, "and after their divorce he spent a lot of time in Japan. He had a thing for Asian women.

"He spent time there and time at his ranch outside Livingston. The last thing he told people when he left the ranch was, 'I'm not coming back." I don't think they believed him," the friend said.

Fechheimer said that Brautigan's body will be cremated without any formal services. His ashes will be placed in an urn being brought to California by a friend, novelist Tom McGuane.

The urn, he said, will be given to Brautigan's daughter by his first marriage, Ianthe Wiston [Swenson] of Santa Rosa.

Abbott1,1998

"In the Riffles with Richard: A Profile of Richard Brautigan"
Keith Abbott
California Fly Fisher, Mar./Apr. 1998, pp. 44-45, 47, 69.
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"The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out."
— from Trout Fishing in America

When I first met Richard Brautigan in 1965, he was living in rear flat of a spooky San Francisco Victorian which was a few minor aftershocks away from being a ruin. Surplus parachutes were strung along the long narrow hallway to keep chunks of ceiling plaster from hitting people on the head. His home decoration consisted almost solely of funky folk art and/or funky fish art.

The walls and bookshelves and floors and kitchen tables and window sills held icons of trout or trout fishing. Books on fishing, a quilted fish, book shelves with trout stream pebbles, childish line drawings of fish, and a giant butcher paper poster announcing a Richard Brautigan reading of Trout Fishing in America, which was unknown to me, as the novel was still unpublished. In the useless marble hole of a former fireplace squatted a rusty old pot-bellied camp stove with a thick layer of candle wax blanketing its shoulders. Perched on top of this waxy mound was a U.S. Army manual on Trout Fishing.

That grey manual intrigued me, never imagining that the Army went in for such instruction. I fantasized boot camp: "Awright, grunt, let's see you rollcast twelve of fifteen of these here Pale Morning Duns inside that old Jeep tire."

My first thought was, "Either this guy will read anything or he's a total nut about fish." That turned out to be right on both counts: Richard was a voracious, though eclectic, reader, and he doted on trout.

Talking to Richard for five minutes confirmed that the Army had never trained his mind in the secrets of the U.S. Government Trout Fishing regulations.

When he was a boy in the Northwest, trout fishing had given his days a purpose and had stoked his imagination. He had lived for the moment when a trout took a lure "like an ambulance coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air raid siren."

That shared pleasure provided a jump-start for our friendship. It turned out that we had many things in common. Richard had been born in Tacoma, Washington, and so had I. Richard had been obsessed with trout fishing as a teenager in the Northwest, and so had I. He was now a penniless poet and struggling novelist in California, and so was I. And although he had published one novel, and I hadn't even written one, we had a mutual friendship with that novel's hero, Price Dunn, who had driven me up from Monterey that day to meet Richard.

After viewing Richard's eccentric collection of trout memorabilia, Price, Richard and I went out on what was to become the first of a long series of adventures in San Francisco. It was fitting that this first afternoon's high point involved the romance and art of fishing.

Richard had cast Price as his hero Lee Mellon in the novel, A Confederate General From Big Sur, and while he retold his adventures with Price, such as silencing a pond full of frogs with two well-placed alligators, my first reaction upon reading the novel was "This is hilarious, but this Richard guy only told a fourth, at best, of the loony tune life of Price."

Here was a guy who ran a moving service called Blue Whale Movers, a guy whose constant need for new phone service (born from a firm belief that utility companies had more than enough money and didn't need his cash) caused his new phones to be listed under William Bonney, Delmer Dibble, Rufus Flywheel, Jesse James, and Commander Ralph G. Gore, and a guy whose first act upon renting a new house was to chainsaw all the interior walls, "because a man needs space to breathe."

An Alabama hedonist who loved good meals, good books and good classical music, Price could also play the role of macho hero with his barroom brawls and amazing seductions. There were unexpected moments when he revealed a startlingly vivid gift for verbal invention and runaway fantasies.

What Richard and I shared the most was an admiration for Price's imagination, which far outstripped both of ours simply by the fact that Price acted on his fantasies. Price not only acted on his, he sometimes inflicted them on the unsuspecting world. Some of his landlords, for example, who had uses for those interior walls.

Of course, Richard's appearance matched his notion of home decorating. In those prehippie days, Richard was already dressing like one: he wore a felt Injun Joe hat, granny glasses, a chambray shirt under a vest decorated with Hells Angels buttons, homemade beads, and faded jeans. On his feet were some gunboat-size black Beatle boots. With unruly blonde hair, a drooping blond mustache, and a stooped, high-hipped, long-legged six-foot-four frame, Richard looked like a cross between Mark Twain and a heron.

That afternoon, when we entered the Steinhardt Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, we were not mistaken for tourists by anyone. We were happily yakking to each other and cruising the fish tanks when Price turned the corner ahead of Richard and me, stopped in amazement, and yelled "Gars! Why we used to land them just as big as that down South!"

All heads turned toward us as Price advanced on the tank. We were surrounded by herds of tour-bus tourists, and Price's shout got their attention. Price pointed at the gigantic, improbable looking gars, with the bodies of monstrous carp and the snouts of alligators.

"Alligator gars!" Price yelled again. "Why, I haven't seen one of them in years. You know how we used to fish for gars down South?"

Behind the gathered assembly, the walls seemed to have exuded schools of Japanese tourists and they were all watching and listening to us. They looked puzzled and interested about this new tour guide.

"Well, first you got to get corn cob, and then a good long bamboo pole. Then you get a nylon line, high-test, because you can see how big those babies are, and then you put a hook on the end and put a corn cob on the hook."

More people were arriving in the space, but no one was moving out because they were all staying for Price's story.

"Then you throw the line out in the river," Price imitated the act with such vigor that he reeled back, pushing the crowd together even closer, "and let that corn cob drift down, and when that old gar comes up for the corn cob, you can see him real clear," Price's voice lowered as he dug deep into his boyhood memories. "Hell, they're as big as a house, anyway."

The crowd involuntarily leaned forward to hear better.

"So, when that old gar's comes up for your corn cob," Price lowered his voice further, crouching to show how the pole was held, his eyes on the huge six foot gars torpidly circling the tank, "and you can see those old gars real clear," Price shouted, "why you drop the pole, pick up your rifle and you shoot it!"

There was a stunned silence and then the crowd jerked back and fled, sure that Price and his two weird henchmen were about to relive those childhood memories by yanking out their Winchesters and blasting the tanks of gar fish in a Sam Peckinpah slow motion, glass-shattering, water-flooding slaughter.

Richard and I looked at each other. We were both Northwest fishermen, raised with a code for catching trout, an almost chivalric set of rules where craft and guile were the only skills allowable. This was most bizarre way to fish that we had ever heard.

You don't shoot fish, you catch them on hand-tied flies with little hooks!

And that was the moment when Richard and I really bonded. That day started our practice of Price as a subject of comic routines between us. From then on, whenever Price would retell one of his adventures, we would check each other out to determine who owned the literary rights to the story.

"Have you got that one?"

"Naw, that's too weird for my work, you take it."

Strangely enough, in the nineteen odd years I knew Richard, I never went fishing with him. I only witnessed Richard preparing to fish, much later on, in Montana in the mid-1970s. He bought a house near Livingston and used to spend his mornings on Pine Creek and other streams nearby.

All the time I was around his decaying flat on Geary Street in the 1960s and early '70s, I never even saw a pole or any fishing gear, certainly never a stuffed and mounted trout. The only representations of trout Richard allowed in his digs were ones that had passed through someone else's imagination.

Money had something to do with it. In his dirt poor days up until 1969, lack of it prohibited him from any fishing trips in California. And after he hit it rich with his writing, the fact that he didn't drive inhibited his travels and opportunities to fish, as did the sleigh ride of pleasure he enjoyed while servicing his growing fame with regular readings and book tours. The harvesting of the young lovelies who flung themselves at him also reduced his stream time.

As I learned more about his childhood in Washington and Oregon, however, I understood why trout fishing occupied such a large chunk of his imagination and functioned the way that it did in his books.

In his impoverished childhood, he lacked money, love, security and most of the normal pleasures of growing up. Novelist Tom McGuane once aptly characterized Richard as being the goofy kid "whose only toy was his brain." And this was true. "Poverty" is a word that doesn't do justice to his experience as a boy.

In Trout Fishing in America, Richard described the equipment for his first fishing trip: "I bent a pin and tied it onto a piece of white string." While written for a work of fiction, this was also probably no exaggeration.

But one of the pleasures of nature was the thrill and satisfaction of good fishing that was available during the '40s and '50s to practically every rural kid who could borrow a pole. For a boy dealing with abusive stepfathers, a wayward mother, daily drunkenness, welfare-motel life and, at times, abandonment, a trout stream's promise of adventure, thrills, and victory was one of the few things capable of sustaining a note of delight.

In Trout Fishing in America Richard wrote: "As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine. . . . The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal."

Richard never lost that idea, that vision. Although he was one of the funniest and most companionable friends I have ever known, he never was a happy man. He was subject to insomnia, melancholia and depression. The solitude and peace fishing provided was a godsend to his childhood, and his reverence for it never diminished. He loved trout fishing because it saved his young life and his sanity, many times, when his days and nights were truly awful.

The peace that trout fishing can bring was well known to me. My father and I fished every weekend he could, from opening day to closing, and together we caught, killed and ate hundreds of trout all over western Washington. On summer vacations we fished in Vancouver B.C. and all around National Parks in the western states.

For my father, fishing a new lake or trout stream was as calming and reviving as prayer might be for others. Saturday or Sunday afternoons as we drove back from a morning of fishing, he felt grateful. He had usually revisited his sense of wonder and his sense of humor at our luck or lack of it.

For Richard, fishing renewed his lyricism, fueled his off-the-wall humor and restored his pleasure in the unexpected bonuses of travel and life. In Trout Fishing in America he describes the end of a productive day: "traveling along the good names—from Stanley to Capehorn to Seafoam to the Rapid River, up Float Creek, past the Greyhound Mine and then to Lake Josephus."

Hear his delight in those names and their histories becomes an infectious catalogue of found poetry shining in the list.

After catching his limit at Hell-diver, he describes his daughter's antics on their return to the shore of Lake Josephus: "She was soon running around with a big cutthroat trout in her hands, carrying it like a harp on her way to a concert—ten minutes late with no bus and no taxi either."

Richard was not a practical man. He learned what he had to learn to get by, but basically he felt he belonged to some other era. This feeling surfaces in his early fiction.

In A Confederate General From Big Sur, the two heroes, Lee Mellon (Price) and Jesse (Richard), are stone broke in outback Big Sur when they catch two teenagers trying to siphon their gas. Lee throws down a rifle on them which, unbeknownst to the kids, is completely out of bullets.

"'Howdy, Jesse,' Lee Mellon said. 'Look what I got here. A couple of smart fuckers, trying to siphon our gas. Guess what, Jesse.'

"'What's up, Lee,' I said.

"Do you see how perfect our names were, how the names lent themselves to this kind of business? Our names were made for us in another century."

His sense that he was out of place also surfaced in his daily habits. Richard always relied heavily on his pals for the right information, whether it was about pots and pans, freezers, or flags. He would detail the friend's pedigree as an expert before reciting the preferred makes and models, as if to reassure himself doubly that he was doing the right thing.

Richard often enlisted my aid before trips, especially for any equipment purchases, not only because I owned a truck, but also because he relied on second opinions to counter his sometimes screwy, over-amped takes on reality. And sometimes that "sometimes" was fairly lengthy. It didn't take much for Richard's imagination to conduct him to La-La Land.

One of our buying trips was to R.L. Winston rod and tackle store in San Francisco to outfit him in new fishing gear. Richard was making his first visit to Montana, going up to visit his new friends, the novelists William Hjortsberg and Tom McGuane, and actors Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. He wanted to outfit himself for the trout streams there, and Tom McGuane had recommended R.L. Winston.

This was around 1974 or so, during the heady period when Richard's books were selling in the hundreds of thousands. Every new release of his was widely reviewed, optioned for movies, and usually the translation rights sold in up to seventeen languages. Richard did not lack for money, and he wanted the best for himself.

So, with this visit to the R.L. Winston store, not only was he buying something he needed, Richard was validating his new savvy friends and, by extension, his new fascinating life as a celebrity. This habit irritated some of his old friends, who thought it mere name-dropping, but I thought he was entitled.

Richard was the quintessential outsider. He was well aware that his grungy early life had largely taken place on the underside of the bottom rungs of society and he recognized that this had damaged him, deprived him of social graces and practical knowledge. Anything that relieved his perpetual insecurities was okay by me.

He prepared me for the store by repeating what McGuane had told him about the excellence of supplies there and detailing what honors Tom had recently reaped as a fisherman. He also assured me that, although Winston's shop was in the grotty wino-strewn part of San Francisco, this was the best.

The milieu was not misrepresented. Broken glass, desolate parking lots, and junked cars surrounded the place. The drunks were largely of the sitting stripe and when they did move, they moved slowly. Most had a sooty fashion look from coatings of asphalt dust and diesel fumes. This patina came from sleeping in the old delivery cellars tucked behind buildings. Very few panhandled, probably because it disturbed their concentration on alcohol.

Third Street was rasty. Richard's imaginary legless wino, Trout Fishing in America Shorty, would have swam with this school of bottom feeders.

The windows of Winston were high, small and barred, set in cement block walls. The sign gave no indication that this was anything more than another faceless supply depot that populated the area.

Richard was bursting with enthusiasm, hot to turn the itemized list in his pocket into reality that day. He also had a wallet full of hundred dollar bills. He never trusted that any shop would accept his checks, largely because he still dressed in chambray shirts, jeans and black Beatle boots. So he came prepared for his purchases with crisp Franklins.

Once inside, we saw that it was indeed a fisherman's paradise. In the workshop in the rear the shopkeeper raised his head when we entered, to check that we weren't winos and then, let Richard and I ricochet around the store. He took his time before he ventured out into the front.

The shopkeeper was completely unimpressed when Richard dropped McGuane's name. His eyes got a faraway look, as if he were mildly put out by any effort to conjure a face to fit that name.

Richard was too impatient about his upcoming buying spree to even notice the guy's reaction—beyond registering that he had failed to nail down Tom's importance.

And Richard pushed the point one step further, saying something about how McGuane had landed a state record for a brook trout recently in Montana, then waiting for a response.

At that point the shopkeeper turned Western.

He looked up at the ceiling, working his lower lip, turned and looked back in the corner where there were stacks of huge bamboo trunks leaning, took that short snorting inhale through his nose that sometimes signifies someone's about to say something—but might not—and then he cocked his head and, well, he ah-hummed.

It wasn't a short ah-hum.

It was long and deep and wide.

Richard felt his momentum falling into that vacuous ah-hum. Richard added that McGuane had sent him.

And the shopkeeper might have added this piece of info to his silent considerations, too, and then again, he might not have.

Richard started to tell something about McGuane's landing something fantastically difficult in Florida, a huge bonefish or a permit, on ridiculously small tackle, and then Richard faltered when he recognized that this story was having no effect at all.

At that point I wanted to take Richard by the arm, lead him outside, and enter all over again. Richard was way up the wrong trail with this guy.

There was a long silence.

Then the shopkeeper regarded the top of the wall behind us, examining it closely but still possibly thinking about that record brookie or whatever up in Montana, and finally, slowly, he nodded.

With that response, Richard almost jumped in with something else, but caught himself.

The shopkeeper's eyes ran the length of the entire wall to the corner and then back again.

"Yeah, Tom's come . . . ," the shopkeeper paused for just the right words, "come a long ways," and then paused for several beats, "in a short time."

His "in a short time" was Western code for "Don't tell me about anyone's fishing skills until they've done it for seven hundred years, and in the snow."

By the time we had bought two very expensive rods and a mountain of related equipment, the shopkeeper was tired of Richard, completely unimpressed by his Franklins, and impatient to get back to whatever it was he was doing in his workshop.

Richard did a final check of his list again and discovered he forgotten waders.

"I never needed or owned them before," Richard said. "When I was kid, my waders were tennis shoes. It rained so much in the Northwest, I was wet all the time anyway, so stepping into a river meant nothing to me."

Once he got to looking at the different types of waders, too many decisions about too many purchases had depleted his common sense. Richard turned instead to his abundant, fertile, and uncontrollable imagination, that other, much larger riot zone of his mind, where the simplest things became complex.

Suddenly he fretted that the waders weren't high enough for Montana trout streams. After all, he was going to be there in the spring.

Torrents of snowmelt deluged his imagination. Glacial runoffs foamed behind his eyes. Richard swept off his rubbery feet to a watery doom.

The shopkeeper looked up at Richard's six-foot-four-inch frame and then at the extra long waders in his hand and an amused interest entered his eyes. The pair of waders Richard was holding would have come up to his armpits, if not over his neck.

Richard's mind shifted to contemplation of a further possibility for disaster. "What happens if these fill with water?" he asked, holding them up and letting them pooch out so he could check the potential in gallons. "I could drown."

"Son, to fill those waders with water," the shopkeeper advised him gently, "you'd have to climb up on a rock and dive headfirst into a stream."

At the end of the 1970s, Richard's life went sour. Alcoholism, a failed marriage, declining sales of his books and his increasing alienation from his friends and admirers all contributed to his suicide in 1984.

During this time he alternated living between houses in Montana and Bolinas, with long visits to Japan. There his work was enjoying fame and success that almost matched his popularity in America ten years earlier. But even this return to the spotlight could no longer sustain him.

His friend, the photographer Erik Weber, said that during this time Richard "went down the list of his friends, knocking them off one by one."

While I never was one of those, I stopped making any effort to see Richard sometime around 1982. He was too angry, too drunk. He would call occasionally, but he was always sodden with booze, monomanically detailing grievances and complaints against other old friends.

His Montana retreats apparently ceased to involve fishing. Actor Rip Torn stopped by his ranch house in Montana to do some fishing, but Richard claimed he was working and refused.

One of the last things Richard did before leaving Livingston was to give his Winston rods to McGuane to store. He had made up his mind to commit suicide by then. He told his Montana friends he was in Bolinas, and he told his Bolinas friends he was in Montana. His body lay undiscovered for several weeks in his house. After his death McGuane opened the package and found his rods wrapped in dried flowers, along with a Japanese funeral urn.

Abbott2,1986

"Brautigan in Bolinas"
Keith Abbott
Exquisite Corpse, vol. 4, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1986, pp. 12-13.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

When Richard first bought his house in Bolinas I thought it was a wise move. There he entertained people who had helped him in years previous, something which he couldn't do in his Geary Street dump and which he took great pleasure in doing. More importantly, Richard needed a retreat from the temptations of San Francisco, where his habitual afternoons at Enrico's had provided him with a surplus of young women, all in love with his fame. He also needed a place to park himself after his own writing jags—which left him exhausted, nervous and plagued with insomnia. But, as with most things Richard did, the house turned out to be a mixed blessing.

I heard about the Bolinas house from Price [Dunn], who had accompanied Brautigan on the first furniture moving jobs there. I imagined it to be a sunny and bright oceanside place up on on the Bolinas mesa. Instead, the house turned out to be a tall old redwood three-story with a big deck in front. With no view of the ocean, it was set back under some trees on a slope facing more trees. My first impression of the house inside was that it was dark, damp and shadowy. I couldn't figure out why Richard had bought it—given that with his money he could have bought a place facing the ocean with lots of light.

Later, down in Monterrey, I asked Price why Richard bought that particular house. Price snorted at Richard's folly. "Ah, Keith, it reminds him of a Northwest treehouse, that's why he bought it," Price said. "He can look out any window and only see trees."

By 1973 I was living in Berkeley. Because I had a truck and was unencumbered with a steady job, Richard enlisted me for his various attempts to make the house habitable. On my first day, I trucked in boxes of books and other minor items for storage in the downstairs storeroom. Richard was coming out later that afternoon from San Francisco. While I was having a look around, I wandered upstairs. There were three bedrooms there and a bath. The last place I looked in was the east bedroom. Set in a low corner of the house, it was quite small and filled with junk, bed frames and such. As I was leaving, I turned and had the strong sensation that someone was there and in my mind's eye, almost like a slide being placed in a projector, I saw a girl in a white nightgown. I didn't think much of it, it was so fleeting. Being a writer I pay close attention to my mental tics, but his was so mementary, I assumed it was just a mild hallucination or memory.

That night when Richard arrived, I made a joke about it. "Who's the girl in the corner bedroom?" I said.

Richard blanched. "You s-s-saw her?" he stuttered.

"Sorta; I didn't really see, I only had this sensation," I said. "Who is she?"

"I don't know," Richard said, "but you are the fourth person who has seen her upstairs. You don't know the other three who saw her, so I've got to believe you."

It seemed comically right to me that there should be a ghost in the corner bedroom of Richard's new house. Along with his short stories in the recently published Revenge of the Lawn about his boyhood fearlessness in the face of the supernatural, I thought a ghost was the perfect companion for his Northwest Gothic sensibilities to mull over.

In any case, Richard didn't seem terribly bothered by her; the ghost wasn't scary. He was more curious than spooked by her. Later Richard researched the history of the house. He uncovered that a young girl had died there around the turn of the century and was buried in the back yard, which event could have explained the various sightings.

Years later, Richard offered the Bolinas house to his friend Don Carpenter, after Don's apartment had been damaged in a fire. I helped Don collect any usable stuff from his place in San Francisco and drove him to Bolinas. I was busy unroping the load, when Don went into the house. He came right back out and told me to pack it up again. He refused to stay there, maintaining that the joint was haunted. He ended up taking all his stuff to Mill Valley. There he stayed with his ex-wife, rather than living in the Bolinas house—an act Don seemed to feel demonstrated the severity of his reaction to the house's ghostly ambience.

As his finances bloomed along with the generous side of his personality, Richard entertained the idea of setting up a foundation to help struggling artists. When he mentioned this to the Bolinas poet Joanne Kyger, she told him that it was one sure way for him to make a lot of enemies. She reminded him that poets generally reacted badly to the news that other poets got windfalls, not to mention how badly poets acted toward patrons once they themselves got one; she said he would only put himself in a no-win situation. Generally Richard was a soft touch, and so he kept such notions on a personal level. According to his daugher Ianthe, practically no money was ever repaid on most of his many loans.

Richard was always pleased to have his favorite people around. When Richard liked someone he would often go to amazing extremes trying to please them. In a way it was much like his writing. Richard would worry and fret over the smallest details, in order to have something come out right. Of course, often this gave him tunnel vision, and nothing turned out the way he wanted. One example that comes to mind is an evening in Bolinas when Richard invited Joanne Kyger, Don Allen, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, along with her husband, Robert Creeley, over for dinner.

Everyone showed up on time, except for Creeley. When Bob finally arrived, he was about one drink away from closing the only eye he had left. Richard was quite familiar with his condition, and solicitously ushered Creeley to the couch in front of the fireplace. There was a big fire and everyone was gathered around, having a glass of wine before dinner.

Bob apologized for being late, but he allowed that he had had real trouble getting out of Smiley's bar in Bolinas. Once he got comfortable on the couch, he seemed to imagine that he was at a party after one of his lectures, and he began talking to himself in a language almost completely made up of abstract words, formulations, reifications, and such, making it extremely hard to follow his line of thought. No one paid much mind to the steady stream of academic buzz words issuing from him.

When Creeley left the room for a moment, Don Allen leaned over and asked Bobbie Louise if Bod had been unhappy lately?

"Not any more than usual," Bobbie said curtly—not being too thrilled with her husband's performance.

Just before dinner was served, Richard made a big show of putting on a Grateful Dead record. He said that he had been saving the record as a surprise for Creeley. Intensely involved with his train of highly abstract thought, Bob only nodded his thanks and then returned to his imaginary lecture.

When the first cut started, Creeley brought his head up abruptly. "This is my favorite cut on that record," he announced.

Richard beamed happily. As Creeley listened to the song, Richard told a story of all the obstacles that he had encountered during the day in his attempt to find this particular record for Bob. Content that he had made Creeley happy, Richard went back into the kitchen to attend to dinner.

When the song was over, Creeley got up, went over to the stereo and, trying to play the cut again, raked the needle across the record, ruining it. "Oh-oh," he said. Then he went back to the couch and resumed his discussion.

At the sound of the record being ruined, Richard came rushing out of the kitchen and stood there watching the whole oh-oh performance by Creeley. Going over to the stereo, he brought out a second copy of the album from the stack alongside it. In his own funny, precise way, Richard congratulated himself. "I'm ready for Bob this time," he boasted. Then he went on to relate how Creeley had wrecked the very same album on a previous visit.

Creeley barely acknowledged any of this. But, after Richard left the room, the first song finished once more and Creeley look and said, "That's my favorite cut." He went over to the stereo, lifted up the arm and then, shrreeak, ruined the second new album. "Oh-oh," Bob said.

Upon hearing the shrreeak of the needle being gouged across the record, Richard came back from the kitchen. He had a very somber look on his face. Taking the record off the stereo, he carefully put it on top of the other ruined one. Then, with a look of chagrin which was so common when his best-laid plans went awry, he trudged back to the kitchen.

Stories or artists's unbridled and eccentric habits while producing their art were popular with Richard; they made him feel less freakish, I suppose, and more a part of a tradition. He romanticized the poet's life too, one mark of his roots in the North Beach hype with its self-destructive and negligent attitudes toward both the role of the artist and art itself. I never particularly cared for this, but I understood its place in Richard's life, given his apprenticeship in his youth to the poet Jack Spicer, who drank himself to death, leaving his poetry for others to collect and publish. Spicer, like Creeley, was very important to Brautigan because both poets recognized his particular writing skills and, in Spicer's case by editing and publicizing Trout Fishing in America when it was first written, instrumental in getting his fiction proper recognition.

Of course, Richard was aware of the humorous side to such antics. One morning in Bolinas I was out on the deck and I saw Richard walking around inside the house, picking up things. I assumed he was just cleaning up after the party. When Richard came outside, both hands were cupped in front of his face.

"Keith," he said, "do you want to see something?" He held out his hands for me to see. Scattered over his palms were many pieces of torn paper, envelope flaps, and newspaper margins, each with indecipherable ant-like scrawls on them.

"These are the latest poems of Robert Creeley. Whenever Bob comes over, he always leaves these lying around the house," Richard said. Then, with great mock solemnity, he fixed his gaze on me and said, "I keep his collected new poems in a bowl above the piano for posterity."

Partly because of the treehouse aspect of the Bolinas place and partly because of his pleasure in Creeley's company, Richard felt comfortable enough to open up about his childhood, a subject which he had previously kept mysterious for good emotional reasons. (I was told that when he first came to North Beach, Richard claimed to be an orphan.) One night, when we were with Creeley, I told some stories of my teenage gang in the Northwest. How once we stole a gunny sack full of golf balls from a driving range, about 500 in number, for no particular reason. Then we tried to figure what to do with them and ended up spending a Sunday morning driving them down a stretch of uncompleted freeway. It wasn't a driving contest or anything; we did it just because the white balls showed up so well on the tan bulldozed dirt.

Richard talked about how his teenage gang was the same way, ready to do things simply because there was a danger to it. He related how once he and his friends had been walking along and they'd come across a large dog—a great dane, if I remember right. Without a word they had picked up the great dane and carried it around. Richard made the point that his gang didn't know why they needed a great dane at that moment, but they were sure that they'd find a use for one—it was an aesthetic decision, of sorts. Finally they came to a hospital. One guy went in to scout out the place, and then they carried the great dane into an empty operating room and left it there.

With considerably less humor he also remembered spending a night under a chicken house when the neighbors, having had enough of his gang's little tricks, went on a vigilante rampage. I believe this particular trick involved a balloon filled with chicken blood and water. Richard said that his gang took this neighborhood uprising as a sign they should move their action out of their own neighborhood.

But most interesting of all were Richard's comments on his father. He claimed that he had only seen his father twice. The first in a hotel where, "I was pushed into this room and a man there gave me a silver dollar to go see a movie." The second time he saw his father in a barbershop. "He had shaving cream all over his face and I said who I was and he gave me some money to go see a movie that time, too."

When he told these stories he had that particular look on his face that he adopted whenever he was stonewallling something. A kind of determined monotone crept into his voice then, and he would relate these things in plain, emotionally neutral sentences, as if saying, that's the way it is; that's all there is to this; these are the bare facts. He never would admit to being hurt; the would use this tone and attitude instead, cutting himself off from any further expression.

There was a lot of pain from his childhood to stonewall. According to Creeley's testimony in an interview in 1971, Richard had a childhood full of stepfathers and some treated him very badly. When his mother was without a partner, they lived in welfare hotels and moved around a great deal, guaranteeing that Richard grew up a loner.

Whenever he spoke of his childhood, Richard told plain stories of stark poverty and emotional desolation. In one of my favorite stories by him, A Short History of Oregon, Brautigan ends with a vision of himself standing before an isolated house in the woods with rain pouring down. A bunch of ragged children stare at him from the porch. The yard is full of metal debris. He says, "I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this."

By writing about these times in his short stories, I imagined at the time that Richard was facing these childhood traumas and putting them to rest. But then I believed, too, in the healing and redemptive qualities of art, and I'm not sure that Richard ever did believe that.

Abbott3,1985

"When Fame Puts Its Feathery Crowbar under Your Rock: Reflections on the life and times of Richard Brautigan"
Keith Abbott
California Magazine, Apr. 1985, pp. 90-94.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

When I review the eighteen years that I knew Richard Brautigan, one incident comes back to haunt me. It happened on a hot July 5 in Montana. I had spent my first day in Montana at the Fourth of July Livingston Rodeo with Peter and Becky Fonda. After breakfast the next morning, Richard said he had something to show me and he went into his cabin/bedroom off the main ranch house. When he came back to the kitchen, Richard put a .22 rifle, a beautiful old Remington pump action, on the table. "Isn't this a beauty?" he said. I picked up the rifle and admired it, and Richard said that he'd never had it sighted in.

"I'll do it," I said. "There's time before we drive into Livingston this afternoon. Where's a good place to shoot?" Richard pointed out the window, indicating the old creek bank behind his barn. He said that the ranch garbage dump was out there and that I could shoot at old tin cans against the bank.

Richard pointed out the window, indicating the old creek bank behind his barn. He said that the ranch garbage dump was out there and that I could shoot at old tin cans against the bank.

"This really sends me back to childhood," I told him. "I spent years shooting tin cans at a quarry."

Richard smiled; he had a way of acknowledging such emotions so gracefully—it was one of the pleasures of being around him. "Oh yeah, so did I. A .22 rifle, a box of shells and an old sandbank—that used to be heaven to me."

I asked him if he wanted to come along. Suddenly the smile was gone. Richard turned away from me. "No," he said. "I don't like to go shooting with anyone else. I had an accident when I was young. Maybe you can take my daughter out. No one has shown her how to handle a rifle. She should learn."

"Oh sure," I said. I was a little nonplussed by the quick change of mood. I added that if Ianthe came back, I'd be happy to instruct her.

Richard got a box of .22 ammunition from the cabin and put it on the table. I picked it up and walked out the back door and across the high grass of the back lawn and continued up the path past the barn. Back in the low ranch house I could see Richard watching me from the kitchen windows. There was a strange look on his face. I realized I had forgotten to ask where he would be. I should have told him to call for me rather than come and get me. I didn't want any accidents.

After a while I stopped shooting. I thought about my own worries about someone coming around the barn and straying into the line of fire. Then I realized that it wasn't me, it was Richard; I had gotten some contact paranoia off him. Then I reran the look on his face as he stood on the porch. It was the pleased, guilty look of a boy who was about to risk something vicariously by sending a pal out to do something he wouldn't do himself. Then I explored that look a little further, and I knew that it was as if he were expecting me to have an accident.

That realization really spooked me. I took the rifle back to the house, cleaned it, and put it in the corner of the kitchen where Richard could see it when he came back in. I never shot the rifle again, and Richard never mentioned it again. But when he took it back out to his cabin that evening, he picked it up and glanced back at me with that same look—guilty complicity—and it made me extremely irritated. It was as if I were seeing something unhealthy in my friend, something so creepy and adolescent that I never should have seen it.

San Francisco, 1966-1975

In 1965 I had come from Seattle to live in Monterey. There I had made friends with Price Dunn, the model for Lee Mellon in Richard's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur. From Price's stories about Richard I learned that we had much in common. Like Richard, I was born in Tacoma, Washington, and I felt an affinity for Richard's short stories about his Northwest working-class childhood and especially for his marvelous imagination.

Early in 1966 I moved to San Francisco, and when Price came up from Monterey he introduced me to Richard in his slum apartment on Geary Street. Without Price acting as a catalyst, it probably would have been difficult to make friends with Richard, as he was very shy and reserved. But once Price got Richard going with his stories, it was easy to join in, Despite being a loner, Richard had a great capacity to let other people into his life. His fiercest allegiance was to the imagination, and once he felt you shared that with him, his loyalty and friendship were total.

Richard was the most willful person I have ever met. As a young, almost completely unpublished writer, I was impressed that he was living on whatever money he made from his writing. He was determined to make it as a writer on his own terms. Coming from his background of poverty, neglect and practically no formal education, it was a miracle that he should have written anything at all. In 1966 he had three unpublished novels, no agent, no publisher—and yet he seemed supremely confident of his talent and work.

In those days, going around with Richard was like traveling inside one of his novels. With friends he talked just as he wrote. Outrageous metaphors and loony-tune takes were commonplace; one-liners, bizarre fantasies and lightning asides darted out of him one after another. He loved to improvise verbal games, but he would do them deadpan; he seldom cracked up. One of the few people who could get Richard laughing was Price, who had a runaway imagination and a life to match. We spent hours trading skewed dialogue from a Bogart movie or talking in weird rewrites of Beatles lyrics.

Richard's willfulness played a part in these routines, too. Although he was open to inspired changes, he liked to control the games. He often dictated what the shared reality was to be for the day. For example, one afternoon as we passed the hamburger joint outside his apartment, he sniffed, "Ah—the smell of grease on the winter wind." Then, very solemnly, "Li Po, I believe." While we went about our errands for the rest of the day, we improvised fake Chinese poems randomly, always careful to end them with fictitious attributions and the pompous phrase, "I believe." Richard liked to say these routines "disappeared in their becoming." He believed in the magic and spirit of play and worked very hard to get that quality into his writing.

Until the autumn of 1966 I lived below Divisadero on Haight. Richard was so poor that he used to walk over from Geary for visits—even though the bus was only fifteen cents. Once I asked him if he would like a sandwich before we walked up the hill to the Haight-Ashbury. The way he said yes and the way he ate that peanut butter and jelly sandwich stayed in my mind. From then on I would have food ready when he dropped by, and we would eat before we started our rambles. One of his routines with Price was soon one of ours. If either of us lacked money, all that had to be said was, "Do you have that dollar you owe me?," and the money would be exchanged.

For Richard, writing was serious business, and his apartment showed this. His long, dark hallway was lined with posters for his readings, pasteups of the covers for his poetry pamphlets, mimeo poetry broadsides and fan letters. Each new publication was propped up in a place of honor in front of his aged mason jars and rusty mementos of his bleak Northwest childhood—almost as if they were offerings to the demons he had fled there.

When the Haight-Ashbury became nationally notorious in early 1967, Richard's work was appearing in free mimeo editions of 500 copies. In the space of two years he was selling books in the hundreds of thousands and had his picture in Life magazine. His novel Trout Fishing in America brought him a huge audience. At a time when New York publishers were looking for the "Catch-22 of the hippies," this small-press novel became one of the media symbols for the Haight, quickly running through several printings, then going on to sell thousands in trade paperbacks.

The strength of Brautigan's best writing came from the same source as his weakness in life: an awesome ability to ignore common sense and concentrate on the uncommon sense which his mind was constantly stewing up. If it is true that the brain contains layers of filters for experience, then Brautigan's lacked some, for he could see things in startlingly primal ways—his major connection to the psychedelic generation. When he wrote in Trout Fishing in America that a mother's nagging voice was "filled with sand and string," it made sense to kids who were listening to the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby keeping her face in a jar by the door or to Bob Dylan's song about a conductor who "smoked my eyelids and punched my cigarette." And, for people who were being busted down to point zero by LSD, Richard's use of simple and direct speech was a natural. The irony is that he himself never took psychedelic drugs, preferring wine or whiskey.

With national attention, Richard's confidence in his work bloomed, and he wrote his best short stories, later publishing them in Revenge of the Lawn. With his friends he was very generous with both his money and his literary connections. In that sense, fame was good to him, but it did hit Richard hard—much harder than he would admit. Essentially a loner, he was ballyhooed as the head of a communal generation. He was stereotyped as the gentle hippie—an image his poems supported but which his novels, with their bleak and elegiac sense of human relationships, did not.

Richard's dark vision was inspired in part by his Northwest upbringing. For most of his childhood he was an outcast—the weirdo on welfare, the goofy kid whose brain, as Tom McGuane has so aptly said, "was his only toy." Richard once told me that in junior high he was a holy terror, but that one day, out of boredom, he decided to do everything right. For a semester he got straight As, astonishing his teacher, but he abandoned the experiment because he couldn't find any reason to continue: none of the rewards were worth the trouble. Willfulness, self-reliance and solitude—this was how Richard began his sudden rise to fame, and it was this which would also mark his fall from it and, in my opinion, contribute so much to his eventual suicide.

Richard's only protection when assigning value was to do it totally. People were in or out, actions good or bad, things terrible or terrific. If someone crossed Richard, he rejected him. Forgiveness was never one of his strong suits. In short, in some crucial ways, Richard remained an adolescent all his life, and like a teenager who lets himself be dominated by his emotions, he could be remarkably blind to his own contradictions. Once, when we were on Clement Street heading for some Chinese food, he stopped at a record store and pointed at the album covers "Another rock star posing on the front of his record—I'm so tired of that." He was completely oblivious to his own book covers in the window of the bookstore next door, prominently displaying him and his various girlfriends.

From the first, Brautigan's popularity had circumvented the established literary routines, and so his work was held up to a withering critical crossfire from, in Tom McGuane's words, "the pork and beans reviewers." The bottom line was that, in the beginning, Brautigan didn't need critics and that was enough to doom his good writing to mediocre reviews, with the exceptions of his fellow writers—such as Guy Davenport, John Barth, Tom McGuane and Don Carpenter—who were able to articulate the immense discipline, seriousness and skill with which Richard wrote. He never bowed to anyone else's opinions, although he himself could be quite candid about the qualities of his writing. Around 1970, when his poetry was being bought in editions of thousands and getting trashed in the few critical articles written on it, he was puzzled and a bit incredulous. After showing me one such review, he remarked, "I'm a minor poet. I don't pretend to be anything else." He always returned to his fiction, but by then his work had become an emblem of something far larger than his skill as a writer.

If pride sustained Richard through his lean years, once he was famous it only allowed him angry amusement and skyrocketing sales as defenses against parody and ridicule. When sales dropped, his amusement turned to just anger, and thence to bitterness and fear, and lastly to a kind of loathing which poisoned his spirit and partially eliminated his ability to respond to life and its small happinesses. When "fame puts its feathery crowbar under your rock," was how Richard ruefully phrased it.

At his dank Geary Street apartment, fame's impact was immediately evident. Now, Richard was comically inept when it came to the practical matters of life. His idea of home decoration was U.S. Army trout-fishing manuals and a rusted wood-burning stove. As young women and eager acolytes passed through his life, they painted his apartment, hung orange parachutes, selected for him new saucepans, matched dishes and an old-fashioned brass bed with a lovely handmade quilt. He also was given a World War II Japanese machine gun to set inside a charmingly childish outline of a trout drawn on the floor. He said the machine gun reminded him of how he learned to read at age six, when he understood a headline about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and made the connection between letters and reality.

By the end of 1975 I judged that Richard had largely overcome his difficulties with fame. Owning houses in Bolinas and Montana seemed to have grounded him, but more important, after years of work he had finished his novel The Hawkline Monster. The critical and popular reception of it indicated that he was reaching a wider audience. And, for the first time, he sold his work to Hollywood. And last, he seemed to have a more stable emotional life with a new woman friend, Siew Hwa.

In 1975 Richard finally moved out of his Geary Street digs and into a new apartment on Union Street. The move was fraught with the usual nuttiness—Richard ducking out for this and that reason—but it was enjoyable enough for me, and on the last day, I brought along my daughter Persephone, age seven. Children generally liked Richard, recognizing an ally in anarchy, but that day Persephone was grumpy. Richard, who was hung over, was quite solicitous. He immediately promised her ice cream goodies at Enrico's when we finished loading his stuff on my truck. Persephone would have nothing to do with him. She sat in the kitchen with a Coke that Richard had bought her at the corner store.

The last things to go were stacked in the living room, and I carried them out, leaving it bare. Now, Richard had a habit of emptying his pockets of change on the floor. So, around the front room floor there were all kinds of coins. He once told me the story of how he had acquired the habit.

One spring he had been totally broke in San Francisco when a friend had called and promised him a job in Reno as a laborer on a construction project. Richard had borrowed enough money to get to Reno, but when he got there, he was told the job wouldn't start for three days. He had no money for a room. On his first night he had a series of comic encounters with a Reno cop who had a genius for finding him curled up somewhere. Threatened with jail, Richard hiked to the outskirts of town and found an old easy chair abandoned in the corner of someone's yard. For three nights he would wait until their lights went out and then he would sleep in the chair with his three sets of clothing on to ward off the cold. "The last thing I put on was a quilted jacket, and with all those other clothes on, I looked just like a Chinese communist," he said. "You can imagine what those Nevada folks would have done if they woke up early and found one of them in their backyard." His first day on the job, Richard drew an advance. After he got a motel room, he was so happy to have any money at all, he yanked out his pockets and sprayed change over the room. He had continued the practice ever since.

Anyway, on this moving day, Richard was facing reality from inside one of his mental whirlwinds, hung over and sour with worry. More to distract him than my daughter, I suggested that he give Persephone the job of sweeping the floor. At first Richard didn't understand what I was saying—he thought I was suggesting child labor or something—and then he recognized what was on his floor. He got a broom and dustpan and brought them to Persephone, who was staring at the gas range in terminal boredom.

"Persephone," he said, "would you like to sweep my floor?"

Persephone looked up at me with the universal Do I have to, Dad? question in her eyes and I nodded. She sighed and took the broom and dustpan from Richard.

"No, not the kitchen floor," Richard said, playing dungeon master and pointing. "The floor in there."

As she passed by me, Persephone gave me one of her sideways looks—your weird friends—and dragged the broom into the next room.

Richard was in an ecstasy of expectation as Persephone tiredly dropped the dustpan on the bookshelf and then looked down at the end of the broom for that first sweep. There was a wonderful moment as her eyes saw the money and then glazed over with childish greed. Richard could barely contain himself. In his glee he hopped to his back porch and came out with an empty mayonnaise jar and held it out to Persephone. She glanced up, jerked it out of his hand, put it on the bookshelf; and then the broom really began to fly, sweeping piles of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.

Whenever I remember Richard, I like to think back to that day, the look on his face as he stood in the doorway, his hangover banished, watching delightedly as Persephone swept his floor clean in a daze of joy. He knew that this would become a legend of her childhood. It was a good way to leave his Geary Street apartment and the 1960s.

Montana, 1976

"Too many things were out of proportion in his life in relationship to their real meaning." — Sombrero Fallout, 1976

When Brautigan invited me up to his ranch in 1976, I had not seen him very much in the past year. He had been staying alternately in Japan and Montana. The acceptance of his work by the Japanese intelligentsia had culminated in his forthcoming novel, Sombrero Fallout, being published simultaneously in the United States and Japan. Richard was quite proud of the welcome he received in Japan. He showed me a Japanese edition of his short stories and told me that this was now being used as a textbook for teaching English. "Not bad, huh, pal, for a guy who took a couple of years to get through first grade?" he said. He found it delightful that his work should be taught in Japan when he had learned to read from the 1941 headline: JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR.

Richard had been in Tokyo all spring and had not been able to return to Montana in time to arrange for the ranch work to be done. He called me and asked if I could come up and help him get the place in shape. I told him I had not done any ranch work since I was nineteen. He was so desperate that he offered to pay my way plus wages to compensate me for canceling a job I had lined up in Berkeley. I considered it a paid vacation and took a flight up, planning to stay a month at the most.

The ranch turned out to be a large one-story house, a barn and an outbuilding which Richard had converted into his bedroom. He had built a writing room in the loft of his barn, facing east. It was clear that Richard was not exaggerating about the ranch. It was in bad shape. Although he had no livestock, the fences required mending, the fields needed cutting and the irrigation ditches had to be dug out.

Besides his helplessness at ranching, Richard had another handicap: he didn't drive. To get around he relied on neighbors or the Livingston taxi service. When I arrived, he had Peter Fonda rent a car for us on his charge card—Richard had no cards. He claimed that credit card companies routinely denied writers cards because of their bad credit histories and bad characters. The way Richard told it, the denial was like a badge he had been given for being judged dangerous to banking. So, instead of a peaceful house away from it all, Richard had put himself in a situation where he was at the mercy of others.

After the July 4 rodeo and partying were over, I set to work on the ranch. But almost immediately I realized that my real problem was not my rusty ranching skills; it was Richard: he was going through a serious crisis. I tried to set up a work routine. In the morning I got up early, around 5 A.M., made breakfast and then went out to the fields to mend fences before it got too hot. The late July afternoon temperatures were brutal in Montana, so I used that time for siestas. The first few days, Richard would come rocketing into the kitchen, compulsively talking up a storm even though he looked haggard and distracted—he'd clearly not slept. In the afternoons, when I wanted to nap, he wanted to drink wine and talk. The talks quickly became very one-sided, consisting mainly of Richard's byzantine grievances about running the ranch. For the remodeling, he had hired some people from Seattle, friends from the Haight-Ashbury days, and they had done a bad job. He was afraid to hire local people, wanting to preserve his privacy.

I was used to Richard's ineptness at scheduling his daily life, but I wasn't prepared for how he literally had lost all sense of proportion, both about his writing career and his social life. It was frightening to me. I had seen him loopy before, but not all the time. There were very few instances when he regained his old detachment that created his sense of humor. Except for some grim, rather macho kidding—of which the term "pal" was a new affectation for him—he seemed harried, manic and humorless. Instead of the little vignettes of daily life that he habitually told (and later would turn into writing), there were stories of hobnobbing with Hollywood stars. His store of anecdotes began to resemble People magazine filler—how Warren Oates put down X or the time Richard beat Jack Nicholson one-on-one in basketball for $50 (neglecting to mention that Nicholson was perhaps half a foot shorter than him). These little fillers all had power-tripping as their subject.

I first noticed his instability after I cut the long summer grass. Since Richard had no tools around the place, I had to go into Bozeman and rent a field mower. I had finished the job when Richard came out and noticed the cut grass had revealed there was a damp corner of the lawn. The dampness seemed to run under the northeast corner of the house. To my amazement he went into a tirade about the phone company: how no one in America knew how to do anything anymore—in America there was nothing but bad help anymore, not like Japan.

At first I couldn't figure out what he was talking about, but then the story came out. Richard claimed that when the phone company laid the new cable for the valley, the irrigation ditch on the other side of the road had been damaged, allowing water to flow under the road onto Richard's property.

Richard's tirades went on all day; each time I came into the house, he was making another phone call, talking to phone company supervisors and claiming that they were the cause of all his foundation problems. The vendetta went on for two days, with Richard becoming more and more enraged, until the phone company refused to return his calls. Then he called his lawyer in San Francisco. He was referred to a local lawyer, who affirmed that he had a right to protect his property in any way he wanted. Richard fretted for another day about hiring a backhoe operator to dig out the ditch on the other side of the road in front of his house. His indecision alternated with tantrums against the phone company. In a short time I tired of hearing about it, so I took a look for myself.

Brautigan's house was situated on a low slope behind the grade for the road passing over Pine Creek Bridge a little farther north. On the other side of the road, east of his house, was a pasture that served as a drain field for the creek. I crossed the road, walked across the pasture, and looked things over. The northeast corner of the house was in the path of the drain field.

Trying to convince him of the futility of hiring a backhoe, I led Richard to the pasture. "Imagine that the road and the grade aren't there, Richard," I said. "Look at how the land lies. The water is coming from behind us. Gravity makes it run under the ditch, under any protective lining on the ditch, under the grade and directly past the corner of your house down to the creek."

"You got it wrong, pal," Richard said. "The phone company is responsible. My lawyer told me I am within my rights to dig out that ditch and remove any weeds that are causing this."

"But weeds aren't causing this. Gravity is. Gravity doesn't care about your rights. The water is simply following the lay of the land."

He remained unswayed. "No, it's the phone company's fault." He smiled grimly. "Let my lawyer handle this."

Richard hired a backhoe operator, and the next morning the backhoe dug up the ditch. It also dug up the phone company cable and knocked out phone service for the rest of the valley south of Richard's place. This didn't endear Brautigan to his neighbors.

The phone company sent out a man to fix the cable, but Richard was sure that a lawsuit was forthcoming. He called his San Francisco lawyer at 4 A.M. "I forgot what time it was," he said, excusing himself from any blame. "My lawyer told me, 'Richard, don't ever call me this early in the morning, unless you've got a smoking gun in your hand and a body at your feet.'"

I thought of excuses for his behavior. He had just finished proofing Sombrero Fallout, and he was such a perfectionist that normally he was a basket case after proofs. He had just broken up with a girlfriend and still engaged in long-distance shouting matches with her over the phone. And he was drinking heavily and suffering from insomnia. But somehow none of those explanations sufficed. From the incident of the .22 on, it seemed to me that something new and unhealthy was emerging in Richard's life: it was a bitter disrespect for other people, unless they had power. He regarded the foibles and minor vices that others displayed in their dealings with him as massive, intentional insults.

Since Richard was incapable of planning anything as complex as the food for two days running, let alone anticipating his other needs, he kept calling me in from the fields to make trips into Livingston, sometimes three times a day, until I told him that I couldn't do both jobs—ranch hand and driver. So he hired a housekeeper, a friend of the Fondas who was staying in Livingston. At night his behavior became so erratic that the housekeeper and I arranged to take turns staying up with him and trying to talk him down from his often paranoid rants, while also trying to restrain his alcohol consumption.

One night he told me that he couldn't go to sleep because he was afraid of his dreams. I don't think I've ever heard a fellow writer confess a more disheartening thing to me. To me dreams are essential to any imaginative process. Richard added that he had a prescription for Stelazine, which he said knocked him out for two or three dreamless hours.

I was very disturbed by this admission. I had never known Richard to take any drugs other than caffeine and alcohol. At the time I judged his alcohol intake to be up to three liters of wine at dinner, often ending with whiskey past midnight, so I told him to stop taking the drug because he'd kill himself. I also said that I didn't think Stelazine was supposed to be used as a sleeping pill; it was a long-term anxiety medication with a huge list of side effects. He didn't seem to take my warnings very seriously, but by then I noticed that Richard didn't seem to be taking advice from anyone, including Tom McGuane and William Hjortsberg, two of his closest friends in Montana.

I decided to limit the amount of alcohol bought on our shopping trips, cutting the wine in half by buying fifths rather than the half gallons of Almaden that he liked, and "forgetting" to pick up brandy or whiskey. I noticed that most of the time Richard wouldn't drink alone, so I also took car trips during the afternoon and thereby aborted any early starts on the evening's drinking. Less booze combined with a fly fishing trip seemed to calm him down for a few days.

About this time the jacket copy and bound page proofs for his novel Sombrero Fallout arrived. Apparently Brautigan had final say over the jacket copy, and he enlisted my help in rewriting it. I spent a couple of evenings listening to Richard as he obsessively wrote and rewrote the description of the novel. What he was trying to find was a way of talking about his work that avoided the 1960s hippie buzzwords. Richard called the project the "dewhimsicalizing" of his literary reputation.

This notion serves both as a measure of his determination and of his naïveté. Dust jackets don't convince reviewers, and they are certainly ignored by critics. In Richard's mind he was the only one who could effect this change in the critical climate; he was scornful of the copy Simon and Schuster had sent him. It was a heroically misguided notion. The novel seemed an unlikely candidate to rescue Brautigan's critical reputation; it was thin, unreal in an unpleasant way, without engaging characters. With its strained attempts at humor, I judged it unlikely to be a popular book with his fans either. I found one detail fascinating, though: in Sombrero Fallout the hero, "a humorist," tears up a false start on a story and the pieces of paper go on to have a life of their own, enter reality and start a war. I took this as an artistic recognition by Richard that his work was out of his control.

As we worked on the jacket copy, Brautigan talked about what he was trying to do with his latest novels by combining genres in their subtitles. He called The Hawkline Monster a "Gothic Western," Willard and His Bowling Trophies a "Perverse Mystery," and Sombrero Fallout a "Japanese Novel." It became clear that Richard, with his belief in names—that giving something a label made it that thing—was trying to influence his critics. Another of his gambits was shortening the time span of his stories. Willard had occurred in 24 hours, Fallout in an hour, and he predicted his next novel would take place in the space of a minute. He was also consciously writing about serious concerns: violence, irrational hate, grief, and loss of innocence via the modern sexual diseases. He was trying to do all this with his usual writing skills: irony, startling metaphors and juxtaposition of images. Unfortunately, these genres and themes demanded either psychological characterization or bold dramatic action, neither of which he could use effectively, given his style.

Brautigan could not face the fact that he was losing his popular audience. From his comments I began to suspect that his stay in Japan had done the worst possible thing—restored his inflated image of his importance as a writer without giving him new material or insights. A friend who accompanied him to Tokyo said that Brautigan had an audience of top Japanese authors, intellectuals and avant-garde artists; in America he had nothing comparable.

Taking advantage of Richard's preoccupation with his book, I conjured up an excuse to leave early and arranged for a flight out. Needing someone to oversee the irrigation-ditch digging I had set up, Richard called our old friend Price in California and asked him to fly up and take my place. Afterwards I felt bad that I didn't warn Price about Richard's unstable state of mind. Since they were the oldest of friends, and since Richard always had an immense respect for Price, I thought that perhaps his benevolent presence would help Richard find some peace. As it turned out, a week later the friendship of over twenty years ended in a scene straight out of a B-grade gothic horror show.

At the Bozeman Airport I left the car keys at the rental desk for Price, who was flying in that night from San Francisco, along with one of Richard's girlfriends. I felt very happy to get out. A couple of weeks later, I received a series of grim late-night calls from Richard. Price had betrayed him. They could never be friends again. He told me an incoherent story about Price "abandoning" Richard at the ranch and destroying the rental car. Richard claimed that this act had "almost wrecked" his friendship with Peter Fonda. It wasn't clear what was going on, only that Richard was obviously in one of his manic drinking phases again, making late-night calls to all his friends and detailing his grievances in the monotone voice he used for such tales.

With some cross-referencing to other friends whom Brautigan had called, and finally a call to Price himself in Monterey, I found out what had happened. Richard's girlfriend had caught a ride into Livingston on Friday to do some shopping. Richard had asked Price to go in and pick her up around six that night. Price found her at a local bar being entertained by several local cowboys. Price tried to convince her to leave, but she was drunk and her admirers did not want her to leave. Price was not foolish enough to try to argue with a bunch of cowboys on their Friday night out, so he bided his time. Another woman in town who fancied Price shanghaied him away for a while. When he returned, Richard's girlfriend had drunk herself out of enough admirers that Price could separate her from the remaining hopefuls and sober her up with coffee for the drive back.

At the ranch Richard was waiting in a jealous rage. He had taken all of Price's clothes out of his room and thrown them on the front lawn. Price and the girl retreated to a neighbor's house and slept there that night. In the morning Price changed his clothes, put the old ones in the trunk of the rental and absentmindedly left the car keys in his pants pocket. After Richard refused to talk to him, he decided that he had had enough craziness. But the keys were in the trunk now, the car locked, so Price took a cold chisel and knocked a hole in the trunk. Then he drove to the airport, turned in the rental car and flew back to California. The rental car people billed Fonda for a new trunk. Fonda called Richard in his own rage over the large bill, which Richard paid.

The most revealing thing about the episode was that Richard never admitted to his jealousy. In his arrogance he simply could not tolerate the idea that Price could have stolen his girlfriend, nor that she might have found life in town more interesting than Chez Brautigan.

When I got back, I noticed that Richard had written—under his signature on the proof copy of Sombrero Fallout he had given me in thanks for my work on the dust-jacket copy—"Montana Faust." It was an act of such Olympian delusion and hubris that it astounded me. When I told Price of it, he said simply, "Richard's gone insane."

California, 1977-1982

From 1977 until 1982 I saw Richard infrequently, but I knew him to have two periods of calm during that time, when he seemed like the person I used to know. The first was some months after my stay in Montana. Richard had gone to Tokyo and had returned with a broken nose. When he described how this happened, he quite frankly said that he was bad-mouthing someone (he used the phrase "running them down viciously"). A man sitting next to him, whom he didn't know, had turned around and flattened him, breaking his nose. This rude and deserved punishment seemed to bring Richard back into the real world for a time. He actually inquired about my life, seemed interested in my replies, and acted as if he cared.

His marriage in 1977 to a Japanese woman, Akiko, also seemed to help him at first. Most of the personal, though often solipsistic stories in The Tokyo-Montana Express were written while she was with him. Once the marriage soured, Richard became more and more alcoholic and depressed. His isolation increased, as did his late-night phone calls, all recounting over and over, as if his memory were gone, the details of his impending divorce. Fueled by calvados, they were unbearable conversations.

During this time Richard told me that "I guess the only thing I can do is write. If that's so, then that's all I'll do." He seemed to be saying that he was going to forego any other contacts with people, and I think that he did just that and it killed his spirit. Writing alone cannot sustain a man, but in his willfulness, Richard thought it could.

My last face-to-face contact with Richard occurred after The Tokyo-Montana Express was published. He was determined to hustle the book and make back the money he felt he was going to lose on his divorce settlement. When he got back to reading at various colleges, he was dismayed by how badly his audience had shrunk. He found that he was no longer even known by young readers. "They don't read," was what he said, but what he meant was that they no longer read him.

When I read his last published book, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, I found a possible explanation for the incident with the .22 in Montana. In a strangely disjointed narrative, the book's teenage protagonist relates how he accidentally shot and killed a friend with whom he was out plinking. Had this adolescent trauma—whether real or imagined no one seems to know—haunted him all his life? I took it as another sign that he was in the worst shape of his life when, for the first time I could recall, there were clumsy, badly written sentences in his fiction.

Whenever Richard called, it was as if he were drunkenly playing a tape of the last conversation we had, constantly referring to his status in Japan and lack of it here. His anger, his bitter self-imposed isolation, were magnified by his now-unrelenting arrogance. Compulsively in need of friends, he was just as compulsive now about abusing them. From his German translator, Güter Ohnemus, I received a report that during his European trip in 1983 he had become uncontrollably alcoholic, had skipped or trashed readings, had lost his agent, and was now claiming that a computer in a Tokyo hotel was going to handle all his writing business. Günter also said that through botched business deals Richard had also lost a considerable amount of money. Even though his death by drink or misadventure seemed inevitable to me, I didn't think he would kill himself. At the wake, when asked if he had expected it, his first publisher, Don Allen, said, "I wasn't surprised."

For my part, all I can say is that no man had more need for friends, or less use for them.

Abbott4,1983

"Garfish, Chili Dogs, and the Human Torch: Memories of Richard Brautigan and San Francisco, 1966"
Keith Abbott
Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 3, no. 3, Fall 1983, pp. 214-219.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I first got to know Richard Brautigan in San Francisco in 1966. I had moved from Monterey to San Francisco that spring and I had got a job at Pan American airlines. In Monterey I had run around with Price Dunn, who had served as a model for Lee Melon, the hero of Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur. When Price came up to San Francisco, we drove over to Richard's apartment on Geary Street. He answered the door.

My first impression of Richard was that he looked like a tall slim cross between Mark Twain and a heron. He turned and led us down a long hallway to his apartment in the back of the slum building. The hallway was lined with old tongue-and-groove shiplap paneling and there were posters of readings hanging all over. I glanced into Richard's writing room and saw a large old IBM typewriter and piles of magazines and manuscripts.

Price and Richard traded jokes. They had several routines to choose from. One was Price's coffee. Richard had only instant coffee. He was too poor to afford any better. Price only used the strongest commercial coffee available, but then he had money from time to time. Price would make "shepherder's coffee." He boiled water in a saucepan, would throw in the coffee on top, turn off the heat and let it steep. Then, when the coffee formed a rich thick scum on the top, he would blow it off into the sink and then add a little cold water. After letting it settle, then he would pour out the coffee into cups. It was electrifying coffee, mainly because Price was an extravagant person and never used too little.

I left them to their routines and went into the bathroom to take a leak. The bathtub had a tear-shaped rust mark under the nozzle. The ceiling plaster was hanging down. Then I saw the royalty statement. It was from Grove Press. Confederate General had sold 743 copies. From its position above the toilet paper I could imagine what Richard thought about this.

At that time Richard had only published three very slim books of poetry plus Confederate General. I was a young writer with no books published, a few poems in literary magazines. So far in my career, I had earned one dollar as a writer. I identified with Richard's situation and for that reason—he was also living in poverty. But we had other things in common.

Both of us had been born in Tacoma, Washington and grew up in the Northwest. We had both left young. We both were Aquarius and given to extravagant thinking. We shared a sense of the lower-class rural life in the Pacific Northwest, although we were ten years apart in age.

In his story, "A Short History of Oregon," Brautigan ends with a vision of himself as a teenager standing before an isolated house in the woods with rain pounding down. A bunch of ragged children stare at him from the porch. The yard is full of metal debris. He says, "I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this."

That isolation, rain, dark woods and poverty I had fled too. We used to joke about the Indian stories from the Northwest, the long fantastic adventures of Coyote and others. What else is there to do but get out of the rain and fantasize? I felt a kinship with Richard's work because he had solved the problem of what to write about and what to use. If his work is read carefully, it becomes clear how fragile the things of culture are in his work. His style functions with that fragility, in its ability to fantasize change rapidly. To me that is a very Northwestern trait.

We used to joke about the fact that we didn't know anyone who could be called an artist when we grew up. In the hard lower-class life of logging and commercial fishing and "stump-ranching" on poverty-stricken farms, there was no room for art. Once he said to me that he didn't know anyone who was now an artist, who had been given any encouragement when young.

From the homely and shopworn images around him, Brautigan created his art. He was aware of this process. The chapter in Trout Fishing in America about the Kool-Aid wino provides an instance of this self-knowledge. His art insisted on the value of the present living life, no matter how ephemeral or insignificant it might be in accepted cultural terms.

The job was clear: the art had to be self-created. And it had to be created at enormous odds, out of the materials at hand, no matter how banal or one-dimensional or fantastic they might seem. In his first two books, Trout Fishing and Confederate General, the primacy of the will and imagination is insisted on and much of the humor comes from the collision of the learned cultural knowledge with the lived cultural knowledge.

I was very much taken with this view of life. I had attended college in the Northwest for a few years and I had been told that culture was somewhere else, back East, in Europe, and I was given examples very strange to my life in the Northwest. With the exception of Gary Snyder's early poetry, no on else that I was reading in 1966 used the places, names and attitudes of the Northwest to create poetry and fiction. Of course, Snyder was multi-cultural, using Indian myths, Japanese and Chinese models, and anything else that would help him write. With Brautigan's work, the starting place was always very primal. He found ways of seeing famous cultural items in a Northwest down-home perspective. If Leonardo da Vinci lived in America, of course he would invent a fishing lure called The Last Supper.

But to return to that first day with Richard and Price: we went to Golden Gate Park. We ended up at the Steinhardt Aquarium. By the time we had walked there, the three of us were already creating a stream of running jokes and allusions and inventing myths for each other. Of all of us, Price had the most fantastic imagination. And he was not a writer. The thing about Price's imagination was that he acted on it. There was never a clear line with Price between what was real and what was imagined.

I remember we were standing in front of the tank of garfish when Price crossed the line. That was the first time I had ever seen a garfish. They are a southern fish, found in the rivers. Their huge bodies have an alligator snout tacked to the front of them. Bizarre fish.

"Garfish!" Price shouted. He pushed his way through the tourists and stood there beaming at them, as if they were all buddies of his. "You know we used to catch them down South!" Price shouted back at us. Richard and I drifted in behind him. A few of the spectators began to shift into positions of flight. They didn't like the looks of us, and indeed, they were right.

Richard was wearing his battered gray hat and his vest with various emblems stuck on it. I was in a large white knee-length smock with HIPPO embroidered on the back, and Price was in his usual gear of jeans and a T-shirt with broken granny glasses and curly fizzed hair, looking like a Hell's Angel on a lunch break.

"Gars!" Price hooted again. "Why we used to land them just as big as that. You know how we did it?"

Neither Richard nor I said anything. We were watching the rest of the tourists watching Price. There were a great deal more of them than us and Price's exuberance was sure to offend some of them.

"First you get a corn cob," Price said. People were backing away from him. "And then you get a long bamboo pole, you know the kind. Put a line on it with a hook and then you put the corn cob on the hook and you throw it in the river."

Price waved at the huge 6-foot-long fish swimming around in the tank with the improbable snouts of alligators.

"And when that old gar comes up for the corn cob, you can see them real clear, and hell they're big as a house anyway—so when the gar comes up for your corn cob, you . . . drop the pole and pick up your rifle and you shoot them!"

Price leaned on the rope separating him from his beloved garfish and the happy memories of blasting them out of the water as the gallery was emptied out behind him. The minute that Price had said he shot the fish, the tourists had fled, sure that he was about to relive those childhood memories with the help of his two weird henchmen, who were probably concealing the guns under their clothes.

Richard and I looked at each other. Both of us had been seasoned Northwestern fishermen, raised with a reverence for trout and the almost chivalric code of catching them. We took Price by the arm and led him away from the gars. We both had the same thought: this was the most bizarre way to get a fish we had ever heard but more than that, you don't shoot fish, you catch them.

The other thing I remember about that first day with Price and Richard was chili dogs. Strange to say, I had never eaten a chili dog before. We were broke, and so we stopped off at the Cable Car Drive-In for something cheap, and Richard pointed out that the chili dogs were the best value for our limited funds.

As a young writer I was fascinated how Richard lived. He had no job except that of a writer. It is no exaggeration to say that in 1966 I had never met a writer who supported himself with his work. All the writers I had met were teachers of some sort, or had jobs doing something else. None of them were just writers. Richard was. Richard tried to live off the money he made from reading his poetry or selling his writing. For me he became an example of a dedicated artist. So what he ate became important and so I became introduced to the chili dog. These chili dogs at the Cable Car Drive-In can now claim their place in American literature for sustaining and nourishing an American writer. I can think of no more fitting monument than a bronze replica, about as tall as Richard, of a Cable Car Chili Dog to commemorate him and his place in San Francisco literary history. And perhaps at the foot, a small concrete replica of an Alka-Seltzer packet.

Of course, at the time, Richard was not famous, only that worst of all possible artists in San Francisco, a local writer. I was living in a back slum apartment myself at 777 Haight Street, just below Divisadero. I was aware of only two writers personally then. Besides Richard, Kenneth Rexroth lived around the corner from me and walked his dogs. I was too shy to go up to him and talk. I had moved into the district because housing was cheap and available. Once I started to walk around the neighborhood, I discovered a lot of people who were similar to me. These people turned out to be hippies, according to the newspapers. At the time, they were simply local people who wanted cheap apartments and pleasant nearby parks to walk in. They were, like Richard, strictly a local phenomenon.

Brautigan's relationship to this phenomenon has been both a blessing and a curse to his work. His work, with its penchant for self-creation and joy, was representative of what people were doing on Haight Street in 1966. (I would not say it had much to do with what people were doing after 1967 in the Haight district.) I am sure that his work would have survived without it, but the fact is that without the audience that was there, it is difficult for me to say that his work would have reached as many people. That is a blessing, a mixed one, but still a blessing.

However, something needs to be made clear about this relationship between Brautigan's work and the hippie scene. Richard had already written his first four novels before 1967. He did not produce those books to cash in on the craze.

As I got to know him, I discovered that he had been on the dole from Grove Press. They had bought his first novel, Trout Fishing, and his second, Confederate General. They had only published Confederate General, in 1964; it sold the aforementioned 743 copies. His third, In Watermelon Sugar, had been rejected, and there remained an option on his fourth, according to his contract. Each dole check put Richard deeper and deeper in debt, and there seemed to be no way out for him.

He left the Grove Press dole when he submitted his fourth novel, The Abortion. He gave them a month to reject or accept it. They rejected it and he took himself off the dole.

I don't know if this account is correct in its details, but at the time I admired him for his courage and his belief in himself. All I am sure of is that Richard was extremely poor at the time I first knew him.

How poor? He would walk over to my apartment on Saturdays or Sundays from Geary Street. The bus fare was only 15¢ but he walked. Once I asked him if he would like a sandwich before we walked up the hill to Haight Ashbury. The way he said yes and the way he ate that peanut butter and jelly sandwich stayed in my mind. From then on I would have some food ready when he dropped by and we would eat a bit before we started on our rambles.

He was very proud and he never said anything about his money situation. Price told me that on rent day Richard would check down at City Lights to see if any of the copies of second and third books of poetry—Lay the Marble Tea and The Octopus Frontier—had sold. (In his writing room I had seen the boxes with copies of the small pamphlets and I had wondered what he did with them.) Then he would make the rounds of North Beach and see if he could put the touch on anyone for some rent money, if he was flat broke and no books had been sold.

I never saw any of this. I loaned him a few dollars from time to time and provided him with transportation. I had a 1951 Chevy truck and after I quit my job at Pan American, Richard and I would roam around San Francisco, meeting his literary friends, Lew Welch, Don Carpenter, and Michael McClure, among others.

We talked literature. He had been influenced by the poet Jack Spicer, although he only spoke of Spicer as a man and never of his work. He recommended the Greek Anthology to me. His library was a writer's library, only literary works; the rare anthologies or textbooks were ones that were given to him or he had work in. Not surprisingly, he liked precise writers, economical in their means.

One of the poets who he recommended was Kenneth Fearing. He was forgotten by this time and Richard thought his work interesting. Looking back on it, I suppose here might be an example of a writer looking at another writer, who had books published but was forgotten, a minor writer. At the time, Richard had no publisher, he had no agent, and his only published novel was forgotten, and there had to be some fear that this was the way he could go himself, if he didn't have some luck.

It is hard to remember what exactly we did and what exactly was going on that fall in 1966 because that period was so full—every day was an immense adventure for me. I do remember the day I left San Francisco. I was going to Monterey and live on unemployment and start, as it turned out, my first novel, Gush. The night before, one of my old friends from the Northwest had arrived in town.

She had a bag full of diet pills. I took her to two parties, one on Haight Street and one around the corner. I had taken several pills, drank a lot of beer, and smoked two packs of Lucky Strikes while I was showing her the town. The next day I had an alcohol, amphetamine, and nicotine hangover. I felt like death warmed over.

I was in the middle of my apartment, looking at the boxes of stuff, when the doorbell rang. It was Richard. "Need some help moving?" he said. Then he took a closer look at me. He took off his Levi jacket, propped open the front door, and began to pack the boxes down to my truck while I turned in circles in the front room looking for that mysterious box that contained something I needed, badly: a new body and mind.

That day remains memorable for two reasons. The first was that I stopped smoking cigarettes that day. My tongue was raw from all the Lucky Strikes I had smoked while I was ricochetting from party to party. Each time I reached for the pack of cigarettes, my tongue ached. I could not force myself to do it, no matter how badly I wanted the nicotine. I had no choice. I would never smoke again.

The second memorable thing concerns Richard. As he carried my stuff down to my truck, he talked to me. He has always had a deft hand with hangover patients. "You look like walking death," he said. "When I'm done with this, we'll take you out back and shoot you," he said. "Maybe we could just burn you at the stake," he said. "We could take you up to Golden Gate Park and give the simple tourists up there a human torch to look at," he said. "They'll be having a picnic on the grass and the kids will gather around you and say things like, hey daddy, come over here and look at the human torch!"

The whole time he was going up and down the stairs. "I'd say that you'll burn for at least a day," he said, "what with all that leftover alcohol inside you."

His abuse of my delicate condition is not what is memorable about this day, although I remember it quite well. The second reason why this day is memorable is because, on that autumn day in 1966, that was the last day I ever saw Richard do any physical work.

I know that this sounds impossible. But it is true. He has never done any work since that day that I have seen. I have an excellent memory, as this essay proves—even when I am hungover and tormented, my memory still functions. So when I say that he has not lifted a finger since 1966, I have experience and a good memory as my witnesses. By the next time I saw Richard, he was on his way to becoming a famous writer and he had lots of people who were happy to get his groceries, clean his apartment, take out his trash, and peel his grapes for him. Among my acquaintances he has the record: 16 years and running. I remain awed and moved in front of such a record.

Part Two: Free Pornography, Media Crush and a Bucket of Clams

Monterey in 1966 was perfect for me. I did not miss the excitement of the Haight Ashbury then. I collected my unemployment and found a wonderful house in Pacific Grove, overlooking the bay. I began to discover a way to write prose that satisfied me. I got the idea for writing my novel, Gush, and I did sporadic work on it, trying to find a way to get what I wanted.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco the Haight Ashbury had attracted the news media. Scandalous articles appeared in the newspapers, the national media picked it up. Rock concerts were condemned by the press. The government worried that the youth were going to damage themselves before they could be given the chance to fight for their country in Vietnam. There was no representative of this way of life in writing.

The prevailing literature in San Francisco was leftover beats. The writing was outdated and negative and largely self-destructive. Popular writers, such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, were regarded as forefathers and teachers by my generation. But they were old hat, too.

Someone new was needed to write about what was going on. To my recollection Brautigan's work wasn't considered fitting. Because he had published some work in Ferlinghetti's City Lights Journal and had a novel from Grove Press, he was also old news to the literary people in San Francisco. Again, a local writer. But literary agents and editors were anxious to find someone who would write about these hippies. Once a literary editor told me that what was needed was "the Catch 22 of the hippies." In other words, a Gone with the Wind about hippies, a big mover, a big fat novel. Brautigan's work didn't fit the bill.

Eventually a small press, Donald Allen's Four Seasons, put out Trout Fishing in America. I believe that Allen had to buy the novel back from Grove Press, who still held the rights and refused to publish it.

(It is interesting to note that during Brautigan's rise to literary prominence Grove Press held onto the rights to Confederate General. They never reissued it until his novels were selling in the thousands. And even then they republished it in small editions, which sold out instantly. I remember Richard complaining about this.)

So, as the agents and editors looked for that writer to represent what was essentially a nonverbal phenomenon, Trout Fishing sold out in its first edition. The second edition hit a snag with the printer. I remember Richard very upset with this—the printer wouldn't reprint it as it had dirty words in it—because the time, he knew, was ripe for him. Then a third edition of it came out along with his collection of poetry, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. These sold out instantly.

At the time, I had only read Confederate General and a few chapters of In Watermelon Sugar in manuscript, and I was pleased to see how good his first novel was. The mobile structure of the novel (at that time I did not know of Butor) with its recurring themes as a melodic background for the diverging episodes spurred me on with my own work in prose. The mock narrative ("Seventeen years later I sat down on a rock") and its spare prose with the metaphors that opened little doors to alternative worlds was exactly right to my sense of prose at the time.

It should be noted, though, that until this edition of Trout Fishing was published, it was Richard's poetry that was being published, in mimeo editions that were given away free in the streets.

This was how his audience was created, along with his readings. He seldom reads his prose at readings and it was poetry that amused and instructed his fans. These broadsides and books were distributed by hand. The Diggers did the work, and the Communications Company published them. This was an instant literature, without contracts or conferences or editorial quibbling.

During this time I was commuting back and forth from Monterey with some other writers, whenever anything exciting was happening in San Francisco. We would load my truck and make the trek up the coast. I remember one evening when I attended a meeting of the Communications Company at Emmet Grogan's apartment. The discussion was on distributing a book of pornographic cartoons. At the time, porn was only available under the counter. The idea was to devalue it by giving it away free. It wasn't until ten years later that I saw the book. The writer Don Carpenter had his apartment smoke-damaged and I helped him clean up. He had a collection of the Communications Company editions and showed me the book. He said the work was dumped on the street corners in San Francisco and was out of print one day after it appeared. This reinforces my sense of the speed of the events that were happening then, and the ephemeral nature of its products.

Recently I was talking to some Polish editors at a luncheon and I tried to explain how literary popularity on the West Coast largely depends on readings and word-of-mouth. There is no central magazine or press here. There are only the New York publishers for authority figures and not much of their gossip and news makes a dent here. Richard used to say about this geographical problem for West Coast writers: "It never gets past the Rockies." So, in 1967, with the media closing in on the Haight Ashbury, the process was reversed and the news went back there. The media crush was on. And what they found were not published books, at least ones that could be bought in the stores, but writing that was given away free on the streets, if you were there to get it.

Media overloads such as this one create incredible problems. Interviewers, TV and newspaper reporters, they all showed up to extract their five minutes of news and get somewhere else fast. With them came the middle-class kids to get wiped out on dope and free concerts and spread disease and despair and stupidity. By 1968 the only person I knew who was still living in the Haight Ashbury was a printer, Clifford Burke, who eventually moved out.

Fame came to Brautigan's works and to the man himself. He told me once that he knew that he was in for a ride when he walked into his neighborhood Chinese grocery store and the teenage girl at the checkout counter was reading his book. Although he had shopped there for years, there was no way that he could have ever convinced her to read one of his books. He realized it was now out of his hands.

Possibly the last time the media crush was evaded and the community of the Haight Ashbury tried to present itself free of it was when the Invisible Circus took place at the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. Since I had a truck, Richard enlisted me to help with the setting up of what he called THE JOHN DILLINGER COMPUTER COMPLEX.

This was the mimeo machines and typewriters and stencil cutters, etc., of the Communications Company. It was to be an outlaw media center. Anyone who wanted to print something could come in and do it. There were also readings scheduled for that night, and I was invited to read along with others.

There were no advertisements of this event, no tickets, no interviews or notice given. The word went out. And thousands showed up. The sheer volume sent the publishing center into breakdown. Machines ran until they broke.

The church was filled with people doing events. Richard came back from going downstairs to a coffee shop that someone had set up in one room. There were tables and chairs and waitresses, he said, but there was also a large white sheet hung up at one end of the room and a pornographic movie showing on it. Richard said that I shouldn't bother to go down and see it. It was already gone. He said he was talking to a friend when all the waitresses disappeared and the sheet split in two and out came a bunch of belly dancers backed by a three-piece rock band.

Another room had been filled with foam. This was a tactile room until someone turned off the lights and it turned into a group grope. The bridal room off the chapel had been converted into a sensual chamber and for a half hour each, couples could go in and do whatever they wanted to on fur with incense, etc.

All this sounds curiously dated now, but at the time it was not available anywhere else, and certainly not at the speed that it occurred. The saddest memory I have of the night is when Richard abandoned the John Dillinger Computer Complex and read. He had brought a bucket of clams with him. Or someone gave him one. I was behind him when he started to read, and I saw that the audience was completely amok. The noise was deafening. I left. The Invisible Circus was closed down at 4 that morning by the police. In the estimate of many, the entire thing was a mess.

I go into detail about this because it provides a background to what occurred to Brautigan's work. There is one way to become well-known in America as a writer. That is to have your work represent something sociological. Whatever literary values a writer's work might have are of no concern. Kerouac's work was said to represent the media event of the beatniks. Brautigan's work was said to represent that chaos that was out in front of the altar that night in 1968. And it was chaos.

It is hard to imagine calling his writing chaotic. His books didn't hold be-ins or smoke dope or ride in funny buses. His prose style didn't overdose in an alley with a high school band uniform on.

This has to be said. The events of those years had nothing much to do with writing the next book and the book after that, making something original and human out of sentences.

As Robert Creeley has said in his interview with Michael Andre, Brautigan was well-aware of how fleeting it was going to be and he kept writing and making whatever money he could. Certainly the poetry he wrote was responding to everyday events, but the prose came out of a much longer and precise attention to the world, no matter if the books succeeded or failed. The media event of 1968 still taints the treatment his work receives from the critical press. The situation is similar to the one shown Kerouac. Only Brautigan didn't let it kill him, he continued working. His life changed, certainly, but that is another story.

Anderson,2009

"'Freedom?' Richard Brautigan's First Wife, Virginia Aste, Speaks in a New Interview"
Interview by Susan Anderson
Arthur, 25 Dec. 2009.
[arthurmag.com/2009/12/25/virginia-aste]
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.

Edited with Introduction by Mike Daily, with biographical information contributed by John F. Barber, Richard Brautigan scholar.

Less-than-revered by his Beat peers (Ginsberg gave him the ungainly nickname "Bunthorne," Burroughs once observed him—drunk—crawling along the floor of a hotel after a reading event, Ferlinghetti said he "was all the novelist the hippies needed" because "[i]t was a nonliterate age"), Richard Brautigan became internationally famous in the late '60s for writing simple-yet-surreal poems, short stories and novels that made readers marvel and burst out laughing. Brautigan's personal life, however, was no laughing matter. Severe alcoholism (drinking a bottle of brandy and two fifths of whiskey a day during binges, according to friend Don Carpenter) and depression over declining book sales led to Brautigan's suicide in September 1984. He was 49.

Brautigan began writing Trout Fishing in America in 1961 on a camping trip he took with his first wife, maiden name Virginia Alder, and their one-year-old daughter, Ianthe. Married in 1957 and separated in 1962, they officially divorced in 1970. Before the separation, Virginia Alder had become involved with one of Brautigan's drinking buddies, Tony Aste, with whom she later had three children (the first in 1965, the second in 1968, the third in 1969). There is no known record that she and Tony Aste ever wed, though she took his last name. Virginia Aste eventually moved to Hawaii in 1975, without Tony, who remained, living in Bodega Bay, California, and then San Francisco, where he died in 1996.

Today, 75-year-old Virginia Aste is a political activist working as a substitute teacher in one of the most violent school districts in Hawaii. Susan Anderson, a fellow educator at the school, recently met Virginia Aste and interviewed her about her early life and travels with Brautigan. "Virginia Aste is not a 'little old lady type,'" Anderson writes. "She is almost six feet tall and wears glasses, well-fitting outfits and interesting jewelry. Her gaze never wavers. She laughs easily and speaks in a measured, self-paced, quiet tone. She is quite funny and self-effacing, able to laugh at herself."

"Much of Brautigan's past has remained shrouded in mystery for so long as to become mythology," says John F. Barber, curator of the comprehensive, multi-media online resource Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. "Virginia's comments and insights [in this new interview] are important because they help us better understand the stories behind Brautigan, his life and his writings."

Like a Waterfall
Arthur: What were the '60s like?

Virginia Aste: The '60s were a lot like the '50s, a continuation of [the '50s], except for '68 and '69. Then, everything changed. For example, I took Lamaze [childbirth classes] for Ianthe's birth. They didn't know what I was talking about in the hospital. They gave me some pillows and helped me lie on my side. That was that.

The change came with the music. There were concerts every day—really, really good concerts every two weeks or so. Groups from New York came. The concerts were in Golden Gate Park.

At that time there was the Cow Palace, a big stadium—George Wallace was to speak. All I remember was the atmosphere of hostility and women there. This [Cow Palace] was a place where women burned their bras; where riots happened. It was a feeling of a mob and impeding violence and we just had to leave. We had gotten Ianthe a new raincoat from her dad. Ianthe's raincoat pocket caught on a car as we were leaving and she started to cry. It was no real riot that time, but it felt like it could've been. What we were witnessing was a lot of yelling and Wallace was yelling back. He was ranting. It was an awful ending to an awful day.

For a year, there were free concerts every other week. It was wild. Of course, there were precursors to this, pre-'60s. I purchased a Rudi Gernreich bra—it was see-through—and took off my shirt during a party. We saw how many people could crowd into a phone booth at a time.

In one house where we lived, there was something wrong with the plumbing so the water ran and ran. It was like a waterfall. We turned it stronger and then back again or we just got water.

We moved out of North Beach and out of Haight-Ashbury. There was a lot of alcohol and pot use. There was the Ice Cream Store where bikers and bus drivers took pills—early speed, the chicken egg-producing drug, methedrine, cheaper than heroin. It was the time of the Alphonse Mucha art style on concert posters: big bicycle wheels on bikes, elongated figures riding, and the skulls and roses of the Grateful Dead.

Richard admired the Diggers. Our whole thing was a proletarian idea that you take care of everybody. I remember baking bread in coffee cans. I did. We had everything available to us at the free store. We never had any money. I don't remember paying for anything for a while. This was the last half of the '60s.

Trout Fishing In America
Arthur: How did you meet Richard Brautigan?

Virginia Aste: I met Richard Brautigan at a laundromat in North Beach. I had wanted to meet him. He was very alluring and I thought he might've been from Germany. He didn't say much. I had Ron Loewinsohn introduce us.

Richard was working in a lab that manufactured barium powder. People drank the powders for X-rays—there were different flavors like peach, strawberry, lemon. He came home smelling like those different flavors. They hired Richard for one dollar an hour.

I was working downtown as a secretary. I carried the typewriter home with me. It was very heavy. I typed up his poems. He began sending them out to places like The Nation. He started with fifty poems.

I was working for two dollars an hour. I was good at Dictaphone. From our tax return and claiming Ianthe as a dependent, we bought a 1951 Plymouth station wagon and took a trip across Idaho, five hundred or six hundred miles across the Snake River. This became Trout Fishing In America. Jack Spicer helped edit it. I helped edit, too, and typed it because I could read his handwriting. I used to read lots of [scrawly] doctor and lawyer handwriting.

In the Afternoon
Arthur: Did he read a lot? What was his writing routine like?

Virginia Aste: He would write in the afternoon because he watched Ianthe in the morning. That became a routine because I was working. He needed time and space, time and silence, but not totally. He did not lock himself away.

Between me and Jack Spicer and Richard reading us stuff, we would tell him to take out a lot. There wasn't much left. That was Spicer's thing.

He read incessantly at the Mechanics' [Institute] Library. It was a library founded by a union in San Francisco. He'd read fiction on the 2nd floor. He'd read the Ladies' Home Journal. His earliest reading was the National Geographic. He'd read old issues when he was in elementary school and later read the Ladies' Home Journal. He read Faulkner, Jack London, he read poetry.

I translated Neruda's work for him into English. Also Mayakovsky. I took Russian then. A lot of people were killed under Stalin. People still talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War in those days.

B Vitamins
Arthur: Did you see his writing as genius writing?

Virginia Aste: Yes, Richard was a genius in his writing because of his humor. He was like Mark Twain or Saroyan because of his use of irony. He would be right on target.

He also had a sense of the tragic. He had sentimentality for his dead relatives but he was never syrupy sweet in that way.

He was very caring . . . cared very well for Ianthe. He paid the rent six months in advance. He had a stockpile of food in the cupboards. Probably because he cared for his sister, Barbara, while they were growing up. He had grown up very poor. I almost got him sobered up. I gave him a lot of B vitamins. After our baby, he began drinking heavily. Lots of socializing.

I read on the Internet that he had had homosexual liaisons at this time. It was when Ianthe was about four.

He had new fame. It was tremendously exciting. He began drinking heavily and became abusive. One night, he wanted to have sex and became violent—I shut him out of the bedroom. There were these thick wooden doors. The next day I left with Ianthe.

What happened was totally against what we were all about. We were so pacifistic. This was the dark side of what was going on. On the other hand, he did love guns and loved going shooting.

To Say the Least
Arthur: Did he talk the way he wrote?

Virginia Aste: Yes. Yes! He had a constant dialogue going and had constant jokes. He was interested in everything about art. Dada was one of the themes. Jack Spicer said that one should pick out the worst thing from a piece of writing and keep that and then write from that. He told Richard that and he did that.

He was experimental like William Burroughs and the same [in the sense] that he traveled around and had a huge following. Burroughs would tear a page of his writing down the middle and then match up the halves to different pages, creating interesting sentences, to say the least.

I think Richard was very sad when I left him, taking Ianthe with me. People didn't talk about addiction—about drinking—then. Oh, I should've . . . maybe stuck with him. It was a few years later when the lawyer had me sign for a divorce. I didn't make any claim to his work.

All of his early books, I know exactly what and where he is talking about—even though the writing is ambiguous on purpose. I can picture this or that place.

Once we lived in Big Sur, in a cave that was carved out of a hill with a little roof jutting out of it to keep the rain off. He was very interested in the history of WWI and WWII. Especially WWI and the Civil War. He was particularly interested in the campaigns of the southern generals. He talked about the Holocaust. He was fascinated with the personalities surrounding Hitler and in the atrocities dictated by the S.S.

Into the Creek
Arthur: Was he a history buff, a ghost town buff?

Virginia Aste: He was very interested in graveyards; gravestones. Interested in imagining what people's lives were like—the food they ate, the clothes, one hundred and two hundred years ago. He was interested in the working people.

On our trip to Idaho, we read gravestones on old cemeteries.

He was always connecting different times and people and places together. He did this constantly—made connections. He had a maniacal laugh. Ianthe has the same . . . a real wild laugh.

In '57-'58, we did crazy things. Climbed up on the Palace of Fine Arts and looked over the city—all the heads of statues toppled over. Once with Kenn Davis, who was selling paintings at the time, we went to a reading. The hood of our car flew off at one o'clock in the morning as we approached the Bay Bridge. Richard jumped out of the car, opened the trunk and threw it in. He could move really, really fast when he had to.

We were cooped up inside five days once in Big Sur, up a little creek. Water came down and we could not get up to the highway. He jumped into the creek and got me. He never could swim. He never did learn to swim.

He was capable of athletic feats nobody thought he could do.

In Big Sur, Richard was very interested in Price Dunn, who was "the Confederate General of Big Sur" [from Brautigan's book of the same name]. Price read the Greek Classics, etc., as a child in Alabama. He took us down to Big Sur. We were two or three weeks there. We talked, fixed meals, had two cases of wine. I remember there was an invasion of frogs there. We poured wine around the porch to try to kill the frogs. They were kind of like the coquí in Hawaii.

As one of my friends said about Richard, "He was like shining too bright a light on too small a thing." His writing was not voluminous. By the time it got pared-down, and pared-down, there weren't a lot of words. There wasn't a lot to work with.

He was good at listening to criticism. He worked with and listened to Ron Loewinsohn, an academic and a poet. He wasn't like Robert Duncan who was a traditional poet, or Ken Rexroth, who was a target for poets because he was so academic.

Richard was contemptuous of literature taught in college. He got to become the flavor-of-the-month for a lot of them. He liked the Black Mountain College poets [Creeley, Dorn, Olson]. Richard knew Lawrence Ferlinghetti; some of the artists. Artist Tom Field was a really neat guy. He lived with us for awhile and was an inspiration to Richard. He taught Ianthe drawing when she was two.

A Great Fan
Arthur: What do you think he would've thought about current technology, the Internet?

Virginia Aste: In "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" [1967], Richard anticipated the impact of computer technology. He was happy to get an electric typewriter. It was a lot of work making corrections on copies of his work, and typing it over and over. It took a lot of time. It was a lot of work.

He would've been a great fan of the word processor because he couldn't spell.

I think he ran out of things to write about, unlike Styron and Mailer—who he didn't like. Alcohol shut down his spontaneity and depressed him and accelerated/exaggerated the parts of his personality that was pessimistic about people. I'm pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife. He believed in art and the arts as the highest people could live for.

Freedom
Arthur: Was it unusual to be traveling and camping—going on a road trip—with a child in Idaho? Did you grow up there, is that why you went there on the infamous Trout Fishing In America road trip?

Virginia Aste: I grew up camping a lot. In those days, if you were a hundred miles out of L.A., in Mojave, for example, you were in the mountains. My father was a fisherman, he liked to fish. He was one of eleven children. My mother was a school teacher. It took her sixteen summers get her teaching license.

We took two trips. We had an Indian theme going with Ianthe in a little pack. We almost suffocated Ianthe.

Arthur: A cradleboard?

Virginia Aste: Some misguided Indian thing. We were gone two weeks to the Klamath River. Ianthe was too hot. When we took her out [of the cradleboard] she sort of unwrapped herself and threw a fit.

On our trip across the Snake River we could watch Ianthe because she had a pink fabric leash [harness] like a dog that we tied to a tree. We used it one time. We had to be absolutely sure about her because we were very close to the river. It had a steep cliff. A sharp drop-off to the river.

We almost didn't make it. The first night, we drove down into an old lake bed— I think it was called Dollar Lake. Oh, was it there? Anyway, we had boxes in our 1951 Plymouth, books, boxes of clothing in the back of the station wagon in wooden crates, paper bags, baby stuff. Lots of Dostoyevsky, we couldn't go without Dostoyevsky! God forbid we go without that! Ha!

That night we slept inside the back of the car. Everything was on the ground. Then, within minutes, a huge cloud burst. There was going to be a flood of mud, huge raindrops, dollar-sized, the area began filling with water. I put Ianthe somewhere. I started driving up this road and I couldn't see.

Arthur: Richard was guiding you up?

Virginia Aste: Yes, we were in the middle of a huge cloudburst, we were stuck—Dollar Lake or wherever that was. The road wound around and around. It was so impossible to see. That was the first or second night of the trip. That was the beginning of Trout Fishing In America. Sleeping in the back of that station wagon. That's why it was so crazy. It was a shift car with the shift on the wheel.

Richard ate a lot of watermelon and had to pee in the night. That's how we found out the lake bed was filling in.

Arthur: Lucky.

Virginia Aste: So, I don't know why we did the trip. Re-visiting Idaho, I guess. We saw the Snake River in the beginning of its decline and urban development. It was Indian-based.

Arthur: Romantic.

Virginia Aste: So romantic. Very romantic idea.

Arthur: Did a lot of writers take off with their families at the time and camp?

Virginia Aste: We were ahead or behind the times. Having a child was unusual at the time. Well, some had children. David Meltzer had three kids. Ron Loewinsohn had a child later. Robert Creeley. But from what I read of Kerouac, his trips were not family-oriented.

Arthur: This seems a bit different compared with trips other writers were taking across the country. Do you think?

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was quite amazing. The clutter of the station wagon. Now, there are containers for everything. There weren't then. [We used] wooden crates and paper bags. We had a ridiculous tent. Stakes for the tent, food. The tent had to have stakes. It was canvas. It did not pop up. If a stake was lost, you had to find a tree, cut a new one.

Arthur: It sounds like homesteading.

Virginia Aste: Re-enacting a whole bunch of stuff—it was a long trip. A canvas tent during the day is hot. Washing diapers in the streams . . . we weren't conscious of the fact that it was polluting.

Arthur: You were mostly alone at the camp spots?

Virginia Aste: Yes, usually the only people except for local fishermen. We saw some sheep, sheep farmers, and had to go through the herd of sheep and then came back round again. The sheep men just smiled. They knew [we weren't getting anywhere]. Richard wrote about this.

Arthur: You were really wild, adventuresome.

Virginia Aste: There were no maps, no guides. We went up and down the creeks until we found a good place. Taking that tent up and down . . . we were re-enacting some parts of our pasts.

We had traveler's checks and finding a place to cash them was hard. There was nowhere to cash them. Like in those novels where you read about the South, very backwoods. It wasn't convenient.

Our baby was always an icebreaker. Richard had a song he sang, "Orofino Rose." He sang that over and over to Ianthe to get her to sleep.

Arthur: Why didn't you just use cash? I mean, what was the point of traveler's checks? Because you were travelers?

Virginia Aste: Yes. We had gone to Mexico, to Oaxaca and had traveler's checks there. That might've been a role model for that. Richard was paranoid about losing money.

Arthur: It sounds sort of urban, but you were both raised in rural areas. Or at least, not in big cities.

Virginia Aste: I was raised in the San Fernando Valley. It doesn't exactly inspire your imagination there. San Francisco was really inexpensive when we lived there. It was a city life, lots of poetry, but then—

Arthur: You wanted nature, adventure, taking the trip to write about it on purpose?

Virginia Aste: Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn't know what he was writing until later. He was always taking notes. His short paragraphs were like poems. Real different writing. Coming back [after the trip], it was very short on words, not prolific, turned into short chapters that were almost poems. They were so funny.

But everything changed. Ianthe was two when I met Tony [Aste], my later lover. Richard had become so abusive from alcohol. What boys see done to women in their youth . . . Richard and I weren't about that at all, we were into Camus—not towards others, but how we viewed ourselves.

Richard was fascinated by war—by WWI and WWII. He shot up one wall of his house in Montana which had a clock on it.

Arthur: That must've been really loud.

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was like a war, the sound of war. I didn't mind him going shooting, but . . . we had this spaghetti party, and afterwards he yanked the door open. He didn't wake Ianthe, but he was very violent. I left soon after with Tony.

In Richard's poem, "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace," his writing is a predilection in a way. It has come true. There isn't anything you can do. The ether is full of good deeds and misdeeds—it all gets recorded. I've never looked back. I don't sit around and reflect on the past. I'm in the moment, in the now. I've lived that way my whole life.

People were living in communes and trying to be peaceful. What it came down to was falling into prior patterns. Richard just fell into that as far as I could see. He liked Katherine Anne Porter a lot and also Eudora Welty.

I think he had a special admiration for writers who were profound and humorous at the same time. He really liked the Armenian short story writer [Saroyan] who wrote, My Name is Aram. There were so many things that I didn't ask Richard about. It was us against the world and rebellion. Like living in a bubble. What did we want?

Arthur: Freedom?

Virginia Aste: Freedom from the society that had jammed people into unhappy relationships and war. Freedom from that.

Bishoff,1993

"Author's Life Was Shaped in Eugene"
Don Bishoff
The Register-Guard, 25 Aug. 1993, pp. 1B, 2B.
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.

Writer Richard Brautigan didn't make it to his 40th Eugene High School reunion last weekend, but Bill Hjortsberg did—in search of Brautigan.

Not literally, you understand. Brautigan killed himself in 1984.

But Hjortsberg is looking for pieces of the Brautigan life story, a story with enough bizarre touches to be one of Brautigan's own weird works of fiction. Such as the time he threw a rock through the Eugene Police Department window—and apparently got committed as a result.

The flamboyant Brautigan was one of the comets of the literary cosmos of the 1960s and '70s. He wrote scores of short novels, short poems and really short stories—with strange metaphors and stranger titles—and captured the imagination of the hip generation.

"Trout Fishing in America" sold 2 million copies. Other works included "A Confederate General from Big Sur," "In Watermelon Sugar," and "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster."

"Richard so thoroughly embodies the spirit of the '60s—he was the '60s," said Hjortsberg, who has an advance from publisher Alfred Knopf to do the biography. "His writing helped create what became the ideology of the '60s. As much as Jerry Rubin or Ken Kesey or anybody else, Richard Brautigan was a player in that."

Personally, I hated "Trout Fishing in America." Indulgent nonsense. But Brautigan's short story "Revenge of the Lawn" is one of the funniest I ever read.

Like most of Eugene, I never knew of his local connection until Hjortsberg—a novelist, screenwriter ("Legend") and former Montana neighbor of Brautigan's—began his biographical quest two years ago.

Brautigan and his mother had moved to Eugene in 1945 and lived here until 1956. He attended Lincoln Elementary, Wilson Junior High and the old Eugene High School at 17th and Olive.

So Hjortsberg got himself invited to the Class of '53 reunion at Valley River Inn in hopes of mining lots of Brautigan lore. But Brautigan turns out to be the proverbial prophet without honor.

"Most people have never heard of him as a writer," Hjortsberg said. "And most of them couldn't remember him from high school. It was along the lines of 'Oh, yeah, the tall blond-haired kid. He was kind of a loner.'"

But Hjortsberg did meet two Brautigan teammates from a church basketball team, and got phone numbers of others. (Brautigan was the center, and the other starters were two sets of twins—which sounds like something from one of his stories.)

And he learned that Brautigan's English teacher, Juliet Gibson, may have been a major early influence. He's asking that anyone with information about Gibson phone him today or Thursday morning at his motel (342-6383).

While here, Hjortsberg also reinterviewed Brautigan's mother, Mary Lou Folstom who still lives in Eugene, and Edna Webster, who was sort of a second mother.

Webster's son, Peter, was a school friend, and Brautigan hung around the Webster house. He spent a lot of time talking to Edna and falling in first-love with her teenage daughter, Linda—who wanted nothing to do with him.

That put him in such a funk, Edna Webster said, that he went to the police station in the old City Hall at 11th and Willamette and asked to be arrested. When the cops turned him down, he threw a rock through the window.

Then they arrested him.

He was sent to the state mental hospital in Salem for observation and—he later claimed to Webster—shock treatment. In old microfilms of The Register-Guard Hjortsberg found a front-page 1955 story about the rock throwing, but is still searching for documentation of the state hospital stay.

Brautigan left Eugene in 1956—and, for still-unclear reasons, never again had any contact with his mother, stepbrothers or stepsisters. But he left Edna Webster with a batch of notebooks—full of handwritten poems and stories—and a letter.

He told Webster that the notebooks were for her "Social Security when I am rich and famous."

Webster put the material in a safe deposit box long ago—and lost the key. Last year, Hjortsberg paid to have the lock drilled, made photocopies of the notebooks and then put Webster in touch with a rare-book dealer.

The dealer paid her $23,000 for the material. But the 78-year-old Webster said, "I can survive on what I have." So she donated the money to Renual, a non-profit agency she co-founded to help people in financial trouble.

One of Brautigan's last works, "So the Wind WOn't Blow It All Away," is full of references to Eugene and Oregon, Hjortsberg said. But Brautigan's comet already had begin to flame out, and the book was panned. His publisher rejected his next one.

Brautigan had been married and divorced twice. He had one daughter, Ianthe, who is married and living in California. In September 1984, at the age of 49, he shot and killed himself at his home in Bolinas California.

His body wasn't found until the next month.

"I think he had this sense that he'd ridden the crest and tasted quite a lot of fame and had quite a lot of money—and that this was all ebbing away," Hjortsberg said. "I think he thought—this is all speculation—'What is left? What do I become, an assistant professor at some junior college in Kansas?'

"I think he just decided, 'To hell with that. A legend has a legendary end.' So I think that this was just one more step in his shaping, in his creating, the legend and career of Richard Brautigan."

Blei,1984

"In Memoriam: Richard Brautigan"
Norbert Blei
Milwaukee Journal, 11 Nov. 1984, p. E9.
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.

"Oh, well, call it a
life." — from "Melting Ice Cream at the Edge of Your Final Thought"

He looked like a poet. Dressed, drank, moved, loved, lived and died as one. If a child were to ask: "What was a hippie?" one could point to any photograph of Richard Brautigan—flowing hair, droopy mustache, funny hat, vest, Levis, boots, mischievous expression—and know the man and his American-pie times, the '60s.

The Reagan-culture '80s deemed him history. He was disarmed, no doubt, and bemused.

Yet he was a writer in his time who attracted considerable attention. Thousands appeared at his readings. Trout Fishing in America sold more than two million copies. Brautigan tickled everybody's funny bone. He was the heir-apparent to the Beat Generation's Ferlinghetti. When the critics ask, where is the literature of the '60s, they will have to come to terms with the world of Richard Brautigan.

The very titles of his books were cause for celebration: A Confederate General from Big Sur; Sombrero Fallout; The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster; Please Plant This Book; Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt; Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork; June 30th, June 30th.

He was our Apollinaire (Baudelaire, Rimbaud) and then some. Cumming's whimsy. Saroyan's mustache. The shadow of Bodenheim. Variations on Vonnegut. He was all your eggs in one basket—small, extra-large, white, brown, Easter-colored, cracked; yes, throw in the kitchen sink. Wizard of weird metaphor. Savant of smiling similes:

"She's mending the rain with her hair;" "Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind;" "Like distant gestures of solemn glass;" "Six huge crows black as a blindman's dreams."

One can hardly read a line of the man and not smile. "I have never been able to understand umbrellas because I don't care if I get wet." You say you don't like poetry? Begin with Brautigan.

He can teach the human condition:

"I watched a man in a cafe hold a slice of bread as if he were looking at the photograph of a dead lover."

He can deliver a social message:

"You've got
some 'Star-Spangled'
nails
in your coffin
kid.
That's what
they've done for you
son".

He can humor love's cause:

"I'll affect you slowly
as if you were having
a picnic in a dream.
There will be no ants
It won't rain".

He can hit and run, as in these lines written Jan. 24, 1967, while he was poet in residence at the California Institute of Technology:

"At the California Institute of
Technology
I don't care how Goddamn smart
they guys are: I'm bored.
It's been raining like hell all day
long
and there's nothing to do".

He wrote novels, short stories and poems. Yet all his stories were poems, all his poems, stories. His one collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn, contains this short classic: "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."

Loneliness shadowed his later years: "I will sleep alone tonight in Tokyo/raining."

Then the music died . . . too soon, too soon . . . Brautigan dead at 49. Lethal weapons—the bottle and the gun. Self-inflicted wounds. Always a poet's death—and by his own hand, figuratively speaking. His body badly decomposed. The ghost of Brautigan musing in the corner. . . . When you guys going to find me? Discovery would take several days. A Western Gothic romance of Brautigan proportions. Hear the long-haired, white-haired hippie chortle. California dreaming.

"Death is a beautiful car parked
only to be stolen . . .
You joyride around for a while
listening
to the radio, and then abandon
death, walk
away, and leave death for the police to find."

You won't rest in peace, Richard. Promise?

Bond,1985

"Richard Brautigan 1935-1984"
Peggy Lucas Bond
St. Petersburg Times, 2 June 1985, p. 7D.
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.

Fifteen years ago I met Richard Brautigan. That is, I read Trout Fishing in America. The circumstances of where I purchased and read the book are amazingly clear. I was an ocean engineering graduate student at the University of Delaware, the book was on the third row from the bottom in the poetry section of the University Bookstore, where all books were discounted 15 percent, and I read it in my office surrounded by electronic calculators, slide rules, drafting boards and all those typically engineering things.

Trout Fishing in America took me back to the streams of my childhood in rural Idaho and reaffirmed my determination not to spend my professional like locked away in a cubicle designing and redesigning minute parts of some "engineering marvel." I liked Brautigan's picture of America. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, race riots and Vietnam made America somewhat less than ideal. How unaware I was until Brautigan that the American wilderness was also wasting away!

Several years later I married a Bolinas poet and moved to San Francisco. Although I have never bought another Richard Brautigan book, I read most of them during the hours I spent browsing in Ferlinghetti's City Lights book store, a favorite hangout of Bolinas poets. None was ever like Trout Fishing in America, something for which many critics never forgave him. Yet his writing was never dull.

Among other things he wrote short stories that reminded me of songs. When I read "Coffee" in Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, in which the "hero" repeatedly (21 times in 4 pages) seeks feminine companionship over a cup of coffee, but is given the coffee and denied the company, it brought to mind the refrain Gordon Lightfoot's "Second Cup of Coffee": "And if I don't stop this trembling hand / from reaching for the phone, / I'll be reaching for the bottle, Lord, / before the day is done."

News of Brautigan's death greeted me from the front page of Montana's Billings Gazette as I was having breakfast with my husband and one of Richard's friends. We knew Richard not only for his writings but also because he was a sometimes Montana neighbor. My husband had read poetry with Richard here in Montana, and we had all partied together when Richard had taught a course at Montana State University. That was also the winter that Richard broke his leg.

The situation was Brautigan humor in reality. He did not drive a car, which is not a problem in Bozeman where everything is within walking distance, unless it is a snowy winter (which they all are in Montana) and you have to walk the icy streets in a cast. So there he was, "A six-foot country boy," as someone once described him, "with wire-rim glasses and a homemade haircut and a shaggy Wild West moustache that doesn't quite hide a perpetual grin" but with his leg in cast, caught in a blizzard.

Richard Brautigan did not talk about what or why he wrote. He just wrote. According to his friend Greg Keeler?, poet and associate professor at Montana State University, writing gave Richard a pattern to his whole life. He made a habit of writing every morning and often "holed up," locked the rest of the world out, to write new manuscripts.

His works were translated into at least 12 languages, and his most recent books were more popular in Europe and Japan than in the United States. His last published work appeared in a West German newspaper, and he was planning to publish two manuscripts in Japan or West Germany prior to their publication in the States. In July 30th, July 30th, he wrote, "My books have been translated into Japanese and the response is very intelligent. It inspired and gave me the courage to continue in my own lonely direction of writing like a timber wolf slipping quietly through the woods."

Literary critics have compared Brautigan's works with Hemingway's in that they focus on simplicity, honesty, fellowship, loneliness and the naturalness of experience. With Richard's death, I wonder if the analogy goes further. Hemingway took his life because he did not want to let cancer eat away his life. What was Richard's cancer? His publisher, Seymour Lawrence of Delacorte Press said, "I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American loneliness." Was it an American loneliness brought about by the prevailing American attitude that the artist's worth is measured in dollars, copies sold and marketable personality, not in the value of his written word?

I don't know if I could so easily define Richard's cancer as American loneliness. His cancer, if we want to call it that, was more complicated. It was composed of concerns for the vanishing American wilderness, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear war, and what a reviewer once described as "an American whose emblem would be no war-god eagle, but an elusive cold fish."

Maybe his death can best be explained in his own words:

When dreams wake
life ends.
Then dreams are gone.
Life is gone.

Brissie,1985

"Memories of Richard"
Carol Brissie
Christian Science Monitor, 1 Feb. 1985, Sec. B, p. 2.
Copyright © 1985 by Carol Brissie. Reprinted by permission of the author. Inquiries regarding use of this article should be directed to the author at ceebrissie@yahoo.com

I was stunned when I saw the brief obituary in Publishers Weekly. "Richard Brautigan," it said, "whose 'Trout Fishing in America' and other novels had a devoted following in the late 1960s, was found dead October 25 in his home in Bolinas, Calif. He had apparently shot himself . . . . He was 49." There was a bit more, but I barely noticed because my mind stopped and then slowly moved backward to 1969.

That was the first time I met him. Delacorte Press had just published three of his books in one hard-cover edition: "Trout Fishing in America," "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster," and "In Watermelon Sugar." I asked for his autograph.

He stood very quietly as we were introduced—a tall man, ever so slightly stooped, with long blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and an imposing moustache that nearly touched his mouth, except when he smiled. He looked like a gentle, 19th-century outlaw of the Wild West visiting the 20th Century. He was 34, and so shy; we went to a party together that evening and he barely spoke 10 sentences.

As we became friends, his shyness melted and I saw how much Richard resembled his own writing: often gentle and beautiful, sometimes harsh, usually whimsical, and always imaginative. "The sun was a 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," he wrote in "Trout Fishing in America."

One learned to expect the unexpected from Richard. I remember one eveing in the middle of conversation, when he suddenly jumped out of his chair and leaped around as if his clothes were afire. "A pencil! Paper!" he yelled until I handed them to him. Moments later, he looked up from his writing and smiled. "Amelia Earhart Pancake," he said—a poem he had been working on for five years. He said he wasn't sure it was quite right yet. Come to think of it, I have never seen it in print.

Richard, who did not drive, just loved taxis. I think he liked New York more for its abundance of cabs than for anything else. He thoroughly enjoyed stepping off the curb, waving a hand, and watching a cab pull up. I think he thought it was magic.

But then, Richard's world was magic. Being with him was like being in an enchanted forest. Reading his work is like that, even now. Fantasy and reality blend seamelessly; time is irrelevant; objects have lives and people become objects.

And, of course, there is the beauty. In his book "Revenge of the Lawn" is a "lost" chapter from an earlier work in which he talks about a special place: "Often I think about Rembrandt Creek how much it looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets."

And that's how I shall remember Richard.

Carpenter,2004

"My Brautigan: A Portrait from Memory"
Don Carpenter
Unpublished manuscript; Copyright © 2004 The Estate of Don Carpenter
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.

FIRST MEETING
In the early 1960's I was writing a novel about the life of an institutional man, traveling from orphanage to juvenile home to prison, and then into and out of marriage. The character was partly based on a friend named Bob Miller. Bob had spent eighteen months in San Quentin, later became a buddy of Jack Kerouac's, and fascinated me, both as character material and as a person.

One night I went over to Russian Hill to visit Bob and there was another man there, a tall stoopshouldered blond with a diffident manner and a weak, slightly moist handshake.

"This is Richard Brautigan," Bob said.

We sat and drank and talked for a while. It developed that Richard was a poet, one of the North Beach crowd nobody called the Beat Generation. I had never read any of his stuff, but we had some mutual friends—Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder—and so the conversation was relaxed. Brautigan seemed like a nice guy.

At one point somebody, probably Bob, suggested that we play some poker, just nickel dime quarter stuff.

"Ah, poker, yes, poker. Let's play poker," Richard said (or something like it), and we sat down at Bob's tiny breakfast table, moved aside the salt, pepper, vinegar cruet and catsup bottle, and started to play. This would be fun; I considered myself an expert poker player, needed all the money I could get, and poker would be a good way to show this poet I was a real macho fellow, somebody worth knowing.

"First jack deals," Bob said, and began flipping the cards around. We had all our money on the table, a total of maybe twenty dollars in bills and change. Bob and I had our bills stacked neatly with the coins on top, nickels in one stack, dimes in another, quarters in another. Richard's money was just in a heap.

Richard got the first jack. Bob stopped dealing and handed the deck to Richard.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"It's your deal," Bob said. Bob is a hardlooking man. He was once described as a hunk of petrified wood with blue eyes. "That was the first jack," he said.

"Oh," said Richard. He looked at the cards on the table.

"I'll deal," I said in a friendly tone. This was going to be great. The guy didn't know the first thing about poker.

I was right. As we played it became clear that Brautigan thought of poker as an exercise in surrealism, in which the money distributed itself according to laws unknown to mankind.

Hot puppies. Bob and I could whipsaw this jerk out of his entire roll. The game went on.

Five card stud. I have a pair of nines showing, with a king up and a king down. Bob folds as I bet fifty cents. Richard has nothing showing, not even a pair. After long deliberation he raises me fifty cents. I count his money, and then bet everything he's got. After no deliberation at all, he calls me.

"You're beat," I say flatly.

Giving me a cold hard look, he says "I have a pair of tens." He turns over his holecard, a ten. I turn over my down king.

"Two pair," I say, pulling in all his money, a little regretfully. Because now of course the game was over, and I kind of liked this big goofy poet, who couldn't even play poker.

"You must be the finest poker player in America," Richard said to me, his eyes glowing with affection.

I modestly denied this.

"It's not that, Richard," Bob said. "It's that you're the worst."

Richard finished his drink. "I want another drink," he said. "Let's go down to North Beach."

Bob had to work in the morning, so Richard and I walked down the hill together. We went to Vesuvio's, then a hangout for fifties leftovers like us, a busy bar, a noisy bar, a place where anything could happen. We jammed ourselves up to the curve in front and waited for the bartender. The joint was packed, the music loud, the slide show in progress, Victor's primitive paintings on the wall—paintings you could buy for fifteen or twenty dollars that now go for thousands if you can find one for sale—poets, writers, photographers and painters, bums and hangers-out, the mood was fine, the evening full of promise.

Then I remembered that Richard had no money.

"Can I buy you a drink?" I asked him generously, his six dollars burning a hole in my pocket.

"I have to bleed my lizard," he said, and moved down the crowded aisle toward the stairs down to the toilet.

He never came back. Later I saw him down by the pay phone, animatedly talking to a couple of pretty women, a drink in his hand. I waited another half an hour, but he did not come back up to my end of the bar. This made me angry, and I set off for home and my family.

I could not have dreamed, of course, that this man would become my closest friend, that he was the craziest, funniest, most gloomy and pessimistic man I would ever meet, that he was an artist whose worth is yet to be decided, who flirted with the bitch Fame and is now beginning his affair with the bitch History.

All I knew was that I had beat him out of six dollars, and I needed the money.

CHANGE MAGAZINE
Back then it seemed possible to take control of American literature by simply starting your own magazine, printing your friends, and letting the world come to you. City Lights bookstore was a tiny triangle of cramped space with Shigeyoshi Murau at its center, behind the cash register. The front rack, under the window and to Shig's left, was littered with hopeful new poetry magazines, ranging in price from FREE to $10.00. Brautigan and his friend Ron Loewinsohn decided to add to this blizzard of literature.

CHANGE was the name of their magazine, a bold announcement of what was about to happen to the world of art and letters. CHANGE was mimeographed on cheap 8X10 paper. It was priced at one dollar per issue and four dollars for a year's subscription.

Brautigan and Loewinsohn met me at a cafe on the corner of Columbus and Pacific. The place was shabby and full of poets, all glowering at each other and themselves. We sat near the window and glowered out at the citizens passing by. Ron Loewinsohn was and is a small handsome man with snapping eyes and a bright laugh, a poet with ambitions.

To keep us from being thrown out, I ordered coffee and probably paid for it, too. After all, they were poets and editors, and I was only a part-time teacher. Over coffee they talked and I listened. Their magazine was ambitious—they would be printing in their first issue Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and I don't remember who-all. It sounded pretty good to me, and I said so.

"That's just it," Richard said, looking at me fondly. "We would like to offer you the position of first subscriber."

I didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted. Had they combed North Beach and discovered that I was the only person they knew with four dollars? Maybe so, but I decided to be flattered.

"Thank you," I said, and forked over the money.

Some time later I got my copy of CHANGE, Volume One, Number One. As advertised, it was full of poets who have now, with the passage of more than twenty years, become famous as the centerpieces of the Beat. I still have my copy, tucked away in lightsafe storage. Volume One, Number One was, of course, the only issue of the magazine to appear.

There is more to life than editing other people's work, Brautigan and Loewinsohn must have decided. As for me, their only subscriber (it turned out), they owed me three dollars. At that time, three dollars was a hell of a lot of money, and I frankly never expected to see it again.

But no. These were honorable men. About three months after I had forgotten all about the whole thing, Richard came up to me on the street.

"Ah," he said, "I've been looking all over for you. Where have you been keeping yourself?"

I explained that I had a wife and family over in Noe Valley, and that domesticity and work kept me out of the Beach, often for days at a time.

Not hearing the sarcasm, Richard pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. "This is yours," he said. "Your refund from CHANGE."

I was very pleased. In the world of poetry, in the North Beach of then, money was a scarce item. This bit of businesslike honesty was endearing to me. I liked Brautigan better than ever.

The fact that the envelope contained three-cent stamps instead of cash was irrelevant. People can always use stamps.

THE NIGHT OF THE TWO BOB MILLERS
After a boring couple of hours shooting fifty cent snooker at the Palace Billiards on Market, I had gotten into a poker game with a bunch of strangers in an apartment out Market near Castro. By suppertime I had won over eighty dollars on an investment of less than twenty. When I got home I was too feverish to eat. I lay on our bed, thoughts of gambling racing through my mind. I had promised to return to the game, and there were hundreds to be won. But on the other hand, maybe I could get sapped and robbed. Or even lose.

Brautigan telephoned and asked if I was busy. This solved my dilemma about the poker game, and so with a kiss goodbye for my wife and daughters, I drove over to 123 Beaver Street, where Richard was living.

123 Beaver, just a couple blocks up Castro from Market, was owned by Tommy Sales, who lived in the upstairs and rented out the downstairs to a variety of remarkable people. At the time I'm writing about, Brautigan had the front room, Lew Welch had the middle room, and Philip Whalen had the back room off the kitchen they all shared.

I used to visit Whalen a lot in those days, and as I would walk up the path under the gigantic avocado tree I would hear Richard in his room, typing steadily away. I didn't know what he was writing at the time [In Watermelon Sugar], I only knew he wrote steadily, every day.

Anyway, on this particular evening, when I got to Richard's I found two other men there, one sitting on the bed and one on the chair. Both of them were named Bob Miller. I knew one, the blue-eyed hunk of petrified wood. The other was introduced to me as having just gotten out of San Quentin. He was a short stocky man with merry eyes and a gift of gab.

There was whiskey being drunk, and one of the Bob Millers had some marijuana, and the conversation bubbled and flowed. The new Bob Miller was eager to hear about what had been happening in the city during his absence, and we filled him in as best as possible. But then it was time to go out, hit the bars, make a sweep, play the toilets.

"I have an idea!" I said brightly. I was still pretty jived from my day of gambling, half-drunk, and a bit stoned. "Let's go to Sausalito! The chicks over there are fantastic!" We all piled into the new Bob Miller's Cadillac sedan and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The rest of the evening was a chaos of elephantine drunken escapades. The new Bob Miller, who owned a refrigeration business in San Francisco, also pimped a little on the side, more as a hobby than anything else, and while we sat in the crowded no name bar, Miller would point out the various women he said he could turn out.

"Lots of chicks are natural-born hookers," he said, and pointed at a woman with a group of well-dressed professional types. "See that one?" With the snotty look? She'd drop her panties for a dime."

We ordered another round of drinks. "I don't believe you," Richard said. He had been staring hard at the woman as she laughed and talked with her friends.

"You don't understand women," Bob said. "You're a romantic."

Bob Miller, Bob Miller, and I were talking about something else when Richard got up from the table and went over to the woman. I don't know what he said to her, but in a few moments the four of us were out on the street.

"What happened?" I asked. I was full of nervous energy, booze, pot, and aggression. I wanted a fight.

"Never mind," somebody said. We went up to Zack's, where, at the time, they were having a lot of chess matches. I grew critical of someone's play and made a number of helpful remarks, and lo, we were out on the street again.

"The hell with this town, let's go to North Beach!" I cried. "I'm never coming back to Sausalito again!"

Vesuvio's for a couple of drinks, then across to Tosca's, then up the road to Gino & Carlo's, which is one of the strangest bars in San Francisco, perhaps the world. G&Cs opened early in the morning, and its regular customers were longshoremen. In the afternoon the place would be quiet except for a few old Italian men, in blue suits, gray hats, smelly cigars and glasses of red wine. But then, around suppertime, poets would start drifting in, male and female, young and old; poets and the friends and hangers-on of poets. By midnight the place would be jammed with the poet crowd, hookers, pimps, book clerks and pool shooters. There were two quarter pool tables, which were always busy at this time of night. Jack Spicer, the unofficial king poet of the place, might be hunched over the pinball machine talking about baseball or Raymond Chandler; Aldo, Dino and Donato would be behind the bar and anything could happen.

The four of us barreled into the place around eleven, and I got into a pool game that cost me every cent in my pockets, all I had won at poker and all my own money besides. I was as drunk as I had ever been. Richard helped me to the car, drunk as he was, and held me in the back seat as I vomited. They left me on my doorstep and rang the bell.

The next morning I felt pretty bad. Guilty. I had thrown away money that belonged to my family. I was unfit for human society. I had even lost my glasses—there went another forty bucks—and when, oh when, was I ever going to learn?

The telephone rang. Wincing with guilt, I answered it.

"This is Richard. Are you all right?"

"I'll live," I admitted.

"I want to put your mind at rest about one thing," he said. "I have your glasses."

For the first time, I felt love for the man. It was a small thing, a thing maybe anybody would have done, but in my condition his keeping my glasses safe and calling me the next morning to reassure me, seemed like an act of pure humanity.

EAST COAST LITERARY MAFIA
It was a cold gray gritty windy day. Richard and I sat at one of the marble-topped tables outdoors at Enrico's, glumly drinking away the afternoon. A lot of time had passed, and a lot had happened to us both, since the night of the two Bob Millers.

When I met him Richard had, with three slender books, already established himself among the poets. Then one day we ran across each other on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He told me Barney Rossett of Grove Press had bought two of his novels, A CONFEDERATE GENERAL FROM BIG SUR, and TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, for an advance of one thousand dollars. One thousand dollars! Richard was properly full of himself and proud; I was properly impressed and envious. I had been writing for more than ten years and had not received a penny for my work.

Well, CONFEDERATE came out and died at 800 copies. Barney Rossett of Grove Press decided not to publish TROUT FISHING. There was simply no market for Brautigan's fiction. But Richard was stubborn about his work, and soon Donald M. Allen published TROUT FISHING through his Four Seasons Press, a small edition of 4500 copies. Richard begged both Herb Gold and me to review the book in THE CHRONICLE, and we both did. The 4500 copies sold out in one week, mostly from Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore.

Everyone but Richard was dumbfounded. He immediately negotiated a three-book contract with Delacorte Press, and his career bloomed like a cherry tree. My own first novel, HARD RAIN FALLING, had meanwhile been published, and I, too, had made a lot of money (it seemed like a lot at the time, anyway). There was nothing ahead for us but endless days of good writing and automatic public acceptance.

Richard bought real estate in Bolinas and Montana, and I moved my family to Mill Valley. When he was in San Francisco, living out on Geary in a Gothic old apartment building near Sears, we used to meet often for breakfast. After my wife threw me out and I moved back to the city, these breakfast meetings happened more often, first at Zim's out on California, then later at Mama's on Washington Square. After breakfast we might walk around the square ten or fifteen times, talking about life and art. And then to our separate desks.

Over the years these walks and talks got to be more and more about what Richard called the East Coast Literary Mafia. Richard's work was known and respected all over the world, in many languages, but somehow he could seldom get a good review in America. He made the whole thing into an East vs. West issue, which maybe it was and maybe it wasn't.

Richard's immense audience was dwindling, that was a fact. It continued to dwindle, but Richard took this the way most writers do—you don't want any buyers who aren't readers. And you don't want any readers who aren't lovers.

But with dwindling sales comes dwindling income, which brings us back to Enrico's on that cold windy afternoon. My own literary career up to then had been sort of interesting: my first novel sold well, but nothing else I wrote even made back its advance, although I always got stunning reviews. Everybody envied me for my reviews. They were wonderful reviews. But they sold no books.

Now I had just published the most painful and difficult book of my career, THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF JODY McKEEGAN. E.P. Dutton published the book as if they were ashamed of it, and the first public notice that the book even existed came from a total trashing in the New York TIMES. There was not one single ad or press release from Dutton, and nobody back there would answer my telephone calls.

"Book reviewers," Richard said. He made a spitting sound.

"Little people," I said. "Drab little people with unhealthy complexions and attics full of unpublished manuscripts."

"They are the kind of people you can't trust around livestock," Richard said. We ordered more drinks from our sullen waiter, Kenny. Traffic soared and ground past. Herds of inferior genetic material shuffled by, bent on worthless errands. I was in a wonderful humor. A movie I had busted my hump over for two bloody years had died at the box office, and now this novel I had hoped would get me even promised nothing but bad news.

"I don't care about the negative opinions," I said, beginning the writer's litany.

"It's that they take the money right out of your pocket," Richard said, finishing it for me.

"The dirty bastards," I said. "I got a buddy in New York, Burt Britten, works in the basement of the Strand Bookstore on Broadway. You know what he does all day? He buys review copies of books from the book reviewers. I stood there all afternoon once and watched them coming in with their armloads of books. Little gray people with shifty faces, college professors with greedy ex-wives, half-assed intellectuals who haven't brushed their teeth or taken a bath since they got out of graduate school, really, the scum of the universe."

"This was your first total trashing," Richard said, draining the poisonous whiskey from his stupid glass. "You better get used to it."

"Oh hell," I said despondently. "I have something horrible to confess to you."

"Go ahead," he said. "I want you to be honest even if it ruins our friendship."

"It probably will," I said miserably. "You know all those nasty things we been saying about reviewers? All true, right? Well, it's all true of me. I'm a reviewer. I review books. I do it for the money, and the power."

"That's not so bad. We all do things we're ashamed of, for money. I once worked in a photo lab, for instance."

"You don't understand," I said. "You just don't understand." I waved my empty glass. "Kenny!"

"What don't I understand, darling?" Richard asked.

"TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA," I said. "Remember? You begged me to review it?"

"And I thank you still," he said. "I will always thank you. Not all book reviews are bad book reviews. Some are good book reviews, by good book reviewers."

"No, no, no. You don't understand. See, I was working on my own stuff at the time, and couldn't read your book. I just couldn't. So I wrote the review without reading the book. Don't you see? I'm the worst one of all. I'm worse than all the cheapass book reviewers rolled up into one—I didn't even read the book! I'm a liar! A cheat! Filth!"

But he was not listening. Two pretty young Japanese women had seated themselves at a nearby table. I wasn't there anymore.

I had one more surprise that day. When I left Enrico's I found that while I had been complaining about my bad review in the NYTBR, my car had been towed away.

"I CAN'T GET LAID IN THIS PLACE"
"I can't get laid in Sausalito," Richard declared to me more than once. This was back in the schizoid days of the early seventies, when America had one foot stuck into the horror of Vietnam and the other deep into social revolution. Richard and I were both single men too old to fight, and so we spent a lot of time looking for women. We called it "getting laid." In front of women we were, of course, more circumspect.

Singles bars, or "meet racks" were a new idea. Imagine! Bars where women came along, more or less expecting to be picked up! All you had to do was be presentable, pleasant, open, and pay for your share of the drinks.

Richard was at the top of his celebrity. His hunched six-four frame, with its pale gray uncreased cowboy hat, blond locks, and Mark Twain mustache, was familiar to nearly everybody. Walking down Bridgeway on a sunny afternoon among the throngs of tourists, hippies, and locals, Richard would be smiled at or stopped every few feet by people who loved his writing. Beautiful young women would run up to him, their eyes glowing, and ask for his autograph. Then they would run off and rejoin their young boyfriends.

Richard and I might start at the no name bar, where I loitered almost every day after work. I had a lot of friends there and loved the place, but Richard was always impatient in the no name. "I can't get laid in this place," he told me. So we would have one drink and then move on down to Patterson's. But Patterson's was no fun if you were with a guy who never got laid in Sausalito, and so after one drink, we would move on, usually to the Trident, with its famous waitresses.

The theory at the time was if you couldn't get laid out of the Trident, you probably couldn't get laid. (I remember the first Trident waitress I tried to pick up. She was wearing a harem costume, and after a couple of undoubtedly charming remarks about her navel, I asked her if I could take her out. "Don't hold your breath," she advised.)

Well, one night Richard and I decided to have dinner at the Trident, talk about art and life, and see what was what in the lady department. We were seated near the windows, with San Francisco glowing across the bay, and two attractive single young women at the next table. And heigh ho! They recognized Richard, loved his books, and soon a foursome had formed. Drinks, dinner, excited conversation. And as the meal ended, one of the women suggested we go up to her place for some wine and marijuana.

Richard and I followed their car up into the hills. Richard did not smoke, but I did, and I looked forward to a night of rock'n'roll, dope, and tender young flesh. Wasn't this what life was all about? We were silent in the car, both of us savoring what might happen.

But once inside the house things went to pieces rapidly. My "chick" got on the telephone at once, and, lying on top of me fully dressed (both of us on the floor), she telephoned her boyfriend and conducted a long murmuring conversation, passing me a joint and letting me squeeze various parts of her body.

I hoped Richard was doing better in the next room, but no. Soon he came into where we were. He was entirely naked, but had a bitter look on his face. "Let's go," he said.

"What's the matter?" I asked. I worked my way out from under the girl, who was still muttering into the telephone.

Richard's girl, fully dressed, stood in the doorway. "He got undressed without saying a word," she said. "Is he nuts or something?"

Richard did not speak, only stood there naked. Later, when we got back outside and in my car and on the way back to the city, Richard said "I told you."

"You told me what?"

"I can't get laid in Sausalito," he said. "I don't know why that should be."

"Maybe it's your approach," I said. "Too subtle."

"That's it," he said.

We laughed all the way across the Golden Gate Bridge.

PORNO XMAS
One Christmas in the late 1970s Richard called me at about six in the morning. He often called me, and often at odd hours.

"Good morning," he said. This in itself was unusual. Most of his telephone calls started right out with what he wanted to complain about, and would continue until he was finished complaining. Then he would abruptly end the call with, "Somebody at the door!" or, "Something happened!" or "I'll call you back!"

"Good morning," I said, not to be outdone.

"Here it is again, our favorite day of the year," he said.

"Yes," I said. I knew he was building up to asking me to breakfast, which meant he hadn't gotten lucky the night before. Christmas Eve is a tough night to score, maybe. Our breakfast meetings had been happening less often since my apartment in the city had been wrecked by fire and I had moved back to Mill Valley.

"Are you going to spend the day under your bed as usual, or do you want to come out and play?" he asked. He knew me pretty well. Christmas blew me out. Having satisfied my family obligations the night before with a brief embarrassed and thoroughly uncomfortable visit, the dropping off of ill-wrapped presents, the stammering redfaced acceptance of gifts from children I loved but could hardly talk to—typical, probably, of lots of kicked-out fathers—I was ready for a hard-edge day, something without sentiment.

Breakfast with Brautigan would be perfect. He, too, was an abandoned father, fleeing self-pity.

I picked him up and we drove out to Zim's on California, for old times' sake. Kate, the plump waitress who had always served us in the past, was delighted to have us back, and especially on Christmas morning. All the employees were in a good tough mood, and the few Christmas morning eaters were included. People shouted rough jokes from table to kitchen, from counter to table. It was a good breakfast. I had three pancakes with three eggs over medium and a glass of orange juice. Richard had half a grapefruit and a slice of cooked ham.

At the end of breakfast it was only around eight-thirty, and Christmas day stretched out ahead of us, an American holiday wasteland. I didn't want to take Richard home and then go home myself. I didn't want to be alone.

"I know what let's do," Richard said, breaking into my thoughts. "Let's go down to Market Street."

Perfect. Market was almost deserted. I parked, and Richard and I walked among the others who had no place to go and nothing to do on Christmas morning.

The self-pity was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

After favorably comparing ourselves to the walking wounded of Market Street Christmas, Richard said, "Look, this is boring. Let's go see a movie, or something. What do you want to see? A good Western? A Samurai movie? Clint Eastwood?"

"Maybe Enrico's is open," I said hopelessly. Enrico's would not open until eleven, if then. We continued walking down the wide nearly deserted sidewalk. Then we came to this little box office, with an old woman in it reading a magazine.

"Here, this looks like a good place to get out of the weather," Richard said. The movie playing was DEEP THROAT. I had never seen DEEP THROAT and besides, Richard had already paid for the tickets.

Inside the theater after my eyes got adjusted, I could see three or four males, all sitting as far apart as possible. Only Richard and I were sitting together.

Well, you can certainly say one thing about DEEP THROAT. It sure takes your mind off Christmas.

You might think this was an unusual happening, but no. Richard and I went to porno movies on two Christmas mornings, and one Thanksgiving morning. I don't know why.

BRAUTIGAN VS. BRAUTIGAN
All the time I had known him, Richard had been interested in women. He liked the company of women. He liked to talk to women. But above all, he loved the Game. I don't know what else to call it. Richard's love life became something of a joke among his friends, and the joke went like this: Richard would meet a woman, become attracted, and begin showering her with attentions. There would be little gifts, odd things, Brautigan things. He would take her everywhere, nothing would be too good for her: they would fall in love. The honeymoon, the ecstasy, the high, could go on for months, and Richard simply would not be available. Then he and the woman would move in together, to begin their future life.

Within two weeks, Richard would be on the street again.

Over the years many of Richard's women came to me, not so much for solace as for answers: What was the matter with the man? Why did love and attention turn into obsession and...well, he just becomes this incredible endless pest!

I never had much sympathy for Richard's women. I thought they should have known going in that Richard was an extraordinary man and that his private life was bound to be pretty extraordinary, too. If they wanted the fun of running around with Brautigan, then they would have to put up with The Monster.

Richard's fondness for Oriental women began at a time when the social structure of San Francisco was undergoing one of its many upheavals, and there was something of a cachet attached to having, say, a Chinese woman on your arm. A lot of people thought that was it with Richard.

"He just likes to be seen with them," I heard often. But it was more than that. I don't know what, but it was more than mere vanity or Frisco macho.

Then one morning at about four-thirty, I was awakened by Richard's faint, strained and obviously very drunk voice, coming to me from Tokyo. I was in Los Angeles at the time.

"Oh, Don, I'm so much in love," he told me. I sighed and settled back, prepared for an hour or so of boring, repetitive maundering monologue. When Richard got like this, I just listened.

But this time it was different, and I began to pay closer attention. He had met a woman there in Tokyo, married but lovely, so lovely they had bitten the apple together, she was to leave her husband and they would marry. Marry!

"Richard!" I said, alarmed, but he burbled on and on about how much he loved her, he had never loved anyone like this, she was the perfection of Japanese womanhood, daughter of a Samurai (!), and their forbidden love had turned to delicious fulfillment. And on and on.

My foreboding was based on two things: what I knew about Richard made me feel he was not good marriage material, to put it as nicely as possible; and, in my mind, stealing another man's wife was bad. There would be consequences.

I said all this to Richard, even yelling, but he seemed to hear none of it.

I could hardly wait to meet Akiko, but while Richard's last name came from the German brautigam, or bridegroom, I didn't think he would make a very good one.

They came to San Francisco to begin their new life together. Akiko was beautiful, young, accomplished, intelligent, altogether a fine catch, even for an internationally famous poet and novelist. They started in North Beach, in a nice big apartment on Telegraph Hill. As soon as they got all settled in, Richard took his new bride up to Montana, to his 40-acre ranch near Livingston. After a couple of weeks introducing Akiko to his Montana friends, Richard suddenly went back to Japan, leaving her alone.

She telephoned me. I was practically the only friend she had in America. "Why did he leave me here in the middle of nowhere, with no company, no friends, and nothing to do all day?"

"He must be crazy," I said, and I wasn't kidding.

It is easy for me to say the marriage was doomed. But after two years of fighting, splitting up, getting back together, both of them being by turns unforgivable and unforgiving, the marriage died.

One day the telephone rang. It was Richard. "I have no place to go. I need sleep. Can I sleep at your place?"

I only had a single bed in a one-room apartment, but I said yes immediately. I could spend the night at a friend's in Sausalito. Richard showed up at my door a couple of hours later. He was overweight, puffy, with red blotches on his face. His eyes were tiny behind dirty glasses. His hunting hat had its earflaps down and he was bundled up in a heavy jacket, even though it was warm out.

"I haven't slept in days," he said. He stood looking around my apartment, which he had never seen before. "She's impossible to live with!" he declared. I kept my mouth shut.

He found my bed and climbed into it without removing his clothes, his hat, or his cowboy boots. He lay stiffly with my yellow coverlet pulled up to his chin. He looked bad, angered deeply, hurt, not so much confused as dazed.

"I'll let you get some sleep," I said, and left.

When I got back the next day I found a note:

"I couldn't sleep. You have a nice cat. Love, Richard."

The divorce broke him.

RICHARD THE TERRIBLE
During the infinity of the divorce action, Richard lost a lot of his friends. In the old days, Richard had been bad from time to time, but he always made up for it by coming back charming, funny, original and just the best fun you could imagine. But not anymore. Everything was going against him, and he telephoned all his friends and endlessly ranted. He would say the same things over and over, not even bothering to pause between repetitions, not allowing his friends to get a word in edgewise, and then hanging up abruptly if there was a suggestion that maybe he might be even slightly in the wrong. He needed money, and by coincidence none of his friends were able to lend him any. Money was coming in from all over the world, but it was being sucked into that incredible divorce vortex.

Richard became hateful. He was no fun. He was not hot. He was not attractive. He talked about himself incessantly. He got horribly drunk and threw tantrums. He would fasten on women who didn't want him, and he didn't seem to get it.

The last time he called me he apologized for having insulted me the last time we met. It had been a minor insult, but I had flared up and he apologized at once. But here he was, on the telephone, still apologizing. Then we talked about the future a bit. He was going to go up to Montana soon, to sell his ranch. He was through with Montana.

"Well, darling, I love you," he said finally. "Goodbye."

That was odd. He had never said goodbye to me before, that I could remember. Always some excuse to get off the phone, but never goodbye.

SAKURA
The Japanese, with whom Richard was obsessed, have their own obsession over the cherry blossom. I do not understand it, but I know it runs deep in the Japanese soul. Sakura has to do with the beauty and brevity of life. I saw, in Tokyo, two old people standing in the middle of a sloping cherry orchard, openly weeping at the fall of the blossoms.

That is how I feel about the death of my friend.

Chappel,1980

"Brautigan in Montana"
Steve Chappel
San Francisco Chronicle Review, 2 Nov. 1980, pp. 4-5.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

If there was one writer who symbolized that gentle surge of barefeet and incense and loving-the-one-you're-with which condensed on Upper Grant Avenue, somehow, and quickly washed across New York, London and Katmandu in the 1960s, it was Richard Brautigan, a crusty Oregonian who never considered himself a hippie, really, and whose shelf full of writings like Trout Fishing in America, Confederate General from Big Sur and The Abortion preceded, in fact, the Summer of Love by five years and continues far stronger now, a dozen books and as many translations later.

We would set out fishing at sunset when the trout are rising to the surface.

The Yellowstone near Brautigan's house is best fished with a float-boat so we'd take out a Mackenzie dritter. that strangely efficient wave rider bent up at both ends like a shoehorn. Brautigan's Montana neighbor, Tom McGuane, the screenwriter, popularized this boat in the classic little film about Livingston, "Rancho Deluxe."

We'd have to have a third person to do the rowing, of course. We'd invite Trout Fishing Shorty along.

Trout Fishing Shorty, you recall, was the legless, screaming, middle-aged wino who descends upon North Beach like a chapter from the Old Testament. He staggered around in a magnificent chrome-plated steel wheelchair and gave the birds, wrote Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America, "reason to migrate in the autumn.

Brautigan would plop T. F. Shorty between the oarlocks, and we'd both sternly warn him not to curse the deer along the bank, or the ducks, and especially not the trout, even if, as Brautigan would point out charitably, these speckled fish did chop off Shorty's legs years ago. We need his big shoulders.

Soon we're out in the water following the current line. I'm spatting my Trude Coachman dry fly close to the bank, just as you're supposed to, allowing no phony drag to warn the trout.

Brautigan's in no hurry. He stands six feet four inches tall, a lightning rod in the front of the boat with another ten inches of battered black cowboy hat above his long straw hair.

He smiles the bare smile, and follows my floating fly. "Dry fly fishing is like watching Nureyev do a pirouette," he says. Nymph fishing is like illusion. I like nymph fishing." He ties a tapered leader to his line slowly. Dawdling, "As I get older I am more interested in the mystery of what goes on under water."

But Brautigan does not bother to tie his Jackson Special Wooly Worm nymph to the end of the leader.

The Mackenzie boat drifts into a strong back eddy below a sheer mud cliff where dozens of swallows have built their nests. Because the swallows are messy eaters who drop worms and wasps into the water, big fish line up down below in a brown trout cafeteria.

"Paste it under those f------g bird holes! rasps Shorty.

I do.

Nothing happens.

Brautigan still doesn't have his Wooly Worm on. He's reminiscing about hooking a hunchback trout along a creek so narrow it was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row.

"The line felt like sound," says Brautigan, "It was like and ambulance siren coming straight at me."

"Fish jerk," growls Shorty. He hates trout. He's hungry too.

No matter how I place the fly among the eddies I can catch nothing.

Brautigan waggles his fingers in the water to get the attention of the trout.

Then he begins to speak to the water and the fish. He tells the trout about the Carthage River, a river so arrogant, it loved to tell everybody (everybody being the sky, the wind, and a few trees) what a great river it was.

"I am the mother and father of myself," Brautigan quotes the Carthage River. "I don't need a single drop of rain, I am my own future."

The trout love this. They poke their scaly noses out of the river. Brautigan is Lewis Carroll's carpenter cajoling the oysters.

"You got 'em swimmin'," coughs Shorty.

As Brautigan tells the silly trout how the Carthage River suddenly dried up, Shorty lowers the net. The ten biggest fish, ten being the limit in Montana, swim right in.

Shorty reaches for his blackjack to break their brains, but Richard Brautigan stops him.

"Here on the Yellowstone, I always kill my limit with port wine."

And he pulls a bottle of cheap thick port from his wicker creel and pours a slug down the gills of each trout.

"Trout Death By Port Wine," finishes Brautigan.

It's time to land the boat and go to dinner.

"To me the imagination is as real as a tree. When people see me as a fantasy writer, I have difficulty understanding them because to me fantasies are real."

Brautigan is talking from his kitchen. He pours us drinks, and I can't help but notice that Richard Brautigan pours George Dickel bourbon as if he were serving Dr. Pepper at a Southern governor's conference.

On the wall there is a clock without hands which has been savaged by bullet holes. The clock has a title, "Shoot Out at the OK Kitchen," but Brautigan refuses to explain. "Some things are not understandable outside of Montana," he says. The door is guarded by the head of a stuffed brown bear named "Teddy Head," and a second bear lies in the living room. The living room bear is a normal teddy, and its name is "Whimsy." Brautigan hands us our smooth choker bourbons and begins to talk of his new book, "The Tokyo-Montana Express," and of his plans to move to Japan for a year.

"Whimsy is not a word used in reviews of my books in Japan," he says. "Trout Fishing in America is not taken as a rolling picaresque hippie novel in Japan but rather as a questioning of man's relation to the environment. My books are often seen as fragmented and plotless in America, not in Japan. They appreciate the structure of my novels there. I like to get in, get out, get the job done. They understand that."

Brautigan regards Tokyo as "my New York". His books are so popular in Japan that they are sometimes mentioned in advertisements. One eyeglass company uses the very Japanese (and very Brautigan) ad line: "Reading 'Trout Fishing in America' the night passed through my eyes."

Brautigan re-ices our drinks. My friend Kathy fills them to the wet lips. We sip them down like Southern governors. I wonder if good bourbon can direct an interview the way that a good table of contents (and those in Brautigan's books are poems on their own) can order a book.

Has living in Montana influenced his writing?

"Montana," says Brautigan, "has re-established my proximity to heroic nature."

He looks at the sky. The cloud pattern has changed once again. "I come up here for the weekend and stay the winter." He laughs.

Brautigan was first invited to Montana by Tom McGuane in 1973. He fished for a month, rented a small tourist cabin and stayed on to write The Hawkline Monster and Sombrero Fallout. McGuane, science fiction writer William Hjortsberg, Peter and Becky Fonda are part of the "Montana Gang" that Brautigan dedicated Hawkline to, the people "I drink and fish with."

By now the first Dickel soldier has fallen. I think of a forgotten Western classic called "The Cocktail Hour In Jackson Hole." The cocktail hour in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, lasts from November through May, all winter, and it could have been written from Livingston.

Brautigan is talking of women. Brautigan rarely does interviews. There was a time, I recall, when Richard Brautigan posters in San Francisco listed his home phone number.

"I don't write Dick, Jane and Spot novels. 'Spot has an enormous decision. He has hemorrhoids. He must tell the vet. How is he to do it? He cannot speak.'"

"I admire the intelligence of women," says Brautigan. With women I don't have to prove things. With women I don't have to be a man. I can be human."

Pushing to the bottom of the second fifth of bourbon, dinner still over the horizon, the one woman in the kitchen, my friend Kathy, feels that her humanity cannot be maintained without food. She leaps up, somehow, slides the steaks into the broiler, tosses a salad, and disregarding literary convention, stumbles into the living room and collapses on the couch beside Whimsy.

The kitchen caucus continues.

"There are many more references to death and middle-age in Tokyo-Montana Express than in Trout Fishing. Trout Fishing in America was a book written by a boy. This is a book written by a man. I'm no longer a boy. that's the difference.

Brautigan is now 45. Are older novelists more concerned with death?

"I don't give a s--t about death, man. I have no fear of it at all. I'm interested in the role it plays in others. It defines our lives. I use death to emphasize life. Death is the electricity of life. People wouldn't take life seriously if they didn't know it would turn dark on them."

"How can you be so unconcerned with death?" I say eating a potato with my fist. It is midnight. I am so hungry.

"I almost died once," explains Brautigan completely lucid. "I was 8. Appendicitis. I got peritonitis and filled up. At the hospital they talked of my autopsy. I went to a place . . . it was dark without being scary. It was dark without dimensions. There were no memories there. It was so spectacular, Steve, dark without being warm. The reason I'm not afraid of death is that it would have been OK."

It's 2 a.m. now. The quarter moon is cutting across the Crazies, the mountain range north of Livingston. Dessert has revived Kathy. Whimsy is on the floor.

"You know," says Brautigan, "I didn't leave San Francisco because of any dissatisfaction with the city. I am just in a transitional period now. I'm in the process of recreating myself for another decade. Who knows? I may have an apartment in San Francisco in six months, not in Japan, and I might be happy as a clam. Now I'm following the future."

3 a.m. Time for us to leave. I figure I've heard the trout are always asleep by 3 in Montana. The roads become safe again and at last you can reach your hotel without ending up like Shorty.

Chatham,1988

"Dust to Dust"
Russell Chatham
Dark Waters. Clark City Press, 1988, pp. 28-34.
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.

Late one night in the fog, just before Labor Day of 1984, upstairs in a hollow old summer home in the northern California beach town of Bolinas, the author Richard Brautigan let himself have it with a .44 magnum. What was left of him was found four or five weeks later because, according to the papers, when he failed to arrive in Montana for the hunting season, worried friends up there called the Bay Area and sent someone over to check out his house.

I was a friend of Richard's for nearly twenty years, which was long enough to have watched him shoot to smithereens any number of unlikely items including an entire wall of his Montana home, clocks, telephones, dinnerware, sport jackets, and, his favorite target, television sets. It was enough to make me feel downright effete for shooting at the stars from the yard of my house just a few miles away.

In any case, during all the years I knew him, both in California and Montana, I can never remember him going hunting, or even talking much about it except in passing. Once he presented a gift of a sixteen-gauge, double-barreled shotgun to Jim Harrison, inscribed "Big Fish," to commemorate a four-pound brown trout Jim had landed in the Yellowstone River, but that was it.

The word "macho" appeared in the postmortem press just as it so often does when journalists turn in a report on a man reputed to like the blood sports, and who happens to live someplace other than in a condo or co-op apartment on one of the Dream Coasts.

Webster gives macho a certain amount of negative weight by defining it as, "A virile man, especially one who takes excessive pride in his virility." Interestingly enough, there is no correlative word which unflatteringly describes the female who is feminine and who "takes excessive pride in her femininity." Even the archaic term feminie, which means womankind (especially the Amazons) is largely meaningless to us. The closest female equivalent of machismo may be what some modern women—secretaries and shop girls in particular—refer to among themselves as femme femme. This term describes a woman who is preoccupied with feminine sexuality as well as perhaps the coy and stereotyped behavior usually listed under the heading of the Feminine Mystique. Unlike the obviously macho male who is scoffed at by nearly everyone, the femme femme woman is disliked only by bull dykes, resentful spinsters and certain humorless members of the clergy. This is true even in San Francisco where the board of supervisors recently declared the three-dollar bill legal tender.

The media, with the exception of that small part of it devoted specifically to the blood sports, tends to view hunters as people of imperfect character; macho, overly competitive boors who are boisterous, boastful, uncultured, rude, insensitive and violent.

The sad truth is that probably eighty percent of those who go afield with a gun or rifle fit the above description. These people aren't hunters in any true sense of the word. They're gunners trespassing in the woods under direction of some very suspect motives.

One often hears, especially from non-hunters, that men confuse their guns with their penises. This has never happened to me, and so it seems absurd, something like confusing your nose with a car wash. The confusion might have been started years ago, the first time an army recruit mistakenly referred to his rifle as his gun during boot camp, and the outraged drill sergeant made him parade around the grounds with his rifle in one hand and his dick in the other, repeating over and over, "This is my rifle, this is my gun, one is for fighting, the other's for fun."

In a similar vein, psychoanalysts love to make inferences and draw conclusions by relating real events to hypothetical ones. For instance, a friend of mine told his therapist he had always wanted to make love to his aunt. The doctor explained what that really meant was he wanted to make love to his mother. "No I don't," my friend replied. "My mother was a dog. My aunt was beautiful. Nobody in his right mind would want to screw my mother." So much for Freud.

Richard Brautigan was not a macho man. He was unyielding and often infuriatingly obtuse, but he had a certain defiant dignity and great personal strength because of his strict literary convictions. At the core he was essentially fragile and sensitive in a society which tends to reward those virtues with poverty and an early death.

[Chatham's account of learning to hunt with his father, and his father's lessons about gun safety deleted . . .]

I went on a controlled pheasant hunt in California recently. As we were uncasing our guns, a young boy, hunting nearby, accidentally shot the man who had taken him out. I saw how it happened and it was clearly not the boy's fault. The kid became hysterical, and was largely ignored in the confusion that followed. The man didn't die, but it was close. The boy had not been instructed on how to use the gun, and the man foolishly and carelessly stepped in front of him to flush a bird which was being pointed by the dog.

There were many reasons for the accident, all of them having to do with lack of proper teaching. The boy didn't know exactly how the gun worked physically, and he was not prepared to deal with the excitement of the flush or the ease with which the trigger could actually be pulled. Most of all, because of the casual, commercial, obvious, easy way these birds were dumped in the field only to be harvested hours later, he had no reason to adopt an attitude of wonder, reverence and respect for the incomprehensible mysteries of a real hunt. I suspect that boy will not want to hunt again for a very long time, if ever.

Richard Brautigan's last published book was called So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. It is, in part, about a family who sets up a living-room group of furniture on the shore of a lake.

"I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I think they had forgotten all about me. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

It is also about how he, Richard, accidentally shot and killed his best friend with a .22 while out pheasant hunting.

"'What happened?' I said, bending down to look at all the blood that was now covering the ground. I had never seen so much blood before in my entire life, and I had never seen blood that was so red. It looked like some liquid flag on his leg.

"'You shot me,' David said.

"His voice sounded very far away.

"'It doesn't look good.'

"So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away

"Dust . . . American . . . Dust"

I love you Richard, and although hunting has saved my life more than once, and I don't want to go on without it, I understand perfectly why you wanted to shoot Sonys rather than roosters.

Staff,1984

"Brautigan Dead: Poet-Author Who Had Ranch Near Livingston Found in Calif. Home"
The Bozeman Daily Chronicle Staff and The Associated Press
Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 26 Oct. 1984, pp. 1, 2.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan, vagabond poet, off-beat novelist and part-time Paradise Valley dweller who became a literary cult figure in the 1960s, was found dead in his Bolinas, Calif. home Thursday by friends, an apparent suicide victim.

Sheriff's investigators have yet to positively identify the writer's decomposed body, which had apparently been in the house for about a month. There is evidence the man died of a gunshot wound, an officer said.

However, friends who found the body were sure it was Brautigan, the gangly, bushy-haired and bespectacled 49-year-old author of such popular works as "Trout Fishing in America" and "In Watermelon Sugar."

"I believe it was suicide," said David Fechheimer, a San Francisco private detective who said he found the body.

"He wasn't away," said another long-time friend, writer Don Carpenter of Mill Valley, Calif. "He was in the place. The last time we talked he wasn't going to go away."

Carpenter said he had seen Brautigan five weeks ago and he was working on "several projects . . . was full of good cheer and optimistic about doing good work. He was in good spirits."

The body, which coroners planned to identify using dental charts, was discovered by friends who became concerned after not hearing from him, according to his publisher, Seymour Lawrence of Delacorte Press in New York.

A prolific writer born in Tacoma, Wash., Brautigan rose from obscurity amidst the "flower children" of San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury district.

With the 1967 publication of "Trout Fishing in America," which sold 2 million copies, Brautigan suddenly found himself famous and in demand as a speaker and spokesman for "new fiction" on college campuses throughout the nation.

In a 1982 interview with The Chronicle, Brautigan said he was pleased by the popularity, but puzzled by the "hippie writer" tag.

"I never thought of myself as a philosopher, either," he said. "My writing is just one man's response to life in the 20th century."

His other novels included "Revenge of the Lawn," "The Abortion: An Historical Romance," "A Confederate General from Big Sur," "The Tokyo-Montana Express" and "The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining [sic] Disaster."

Paul Ferlazzo, head of the Montana State University English department, said today he thought Brautigan would be remembered as an imaginative experimentalist who told amazing stories with great symbolic value.

"His poetry was childlike and captured the freshness of experience," he said.

Ferlazzo, who talked the author into teaching a creative writing class at MSU in 1982, said Brautigan was someone he always thought he'd see again.

"I was expecting him to pop up momentarily in Bozeman. He was always turning up," Ferlazzo said. "Or I would get a midnight phone call from Hawaii or Paris. He'd call just to talk."

"The saddest thing is that a man with all the friends and all the contacts he had would end up for month alone in his house before he was found," Ferlazzo said.

With literary fame, however, came problems. Brautigan was known as a heavy drinker. After buying a Paradise Valley ranch in 1973, he became a familiar sight in Livingston and Bozeman-area watering holes, swilling George Dickel whiskey with friends and admirers.

"For his friends he was really both a frustrating and lovable person," said Greg Keeler, associate professor of English at MSU. "Frustrating because he made a lot of demands of people. Lovable because it was usually worth it. He had a lot of charisma."

Brautigan liked to fish. He also spent a lot of time in the Bozeman Eagle's Club and once praised it as "the best bar in the state of Montana."

He would spend hours talking there with his friends and was very open to others who stopped by. He was very fond of whiskey and often got others to buy drinks for him.

Brautigan did not have a driver's license and relied on friends to get around.

"When the '60s ended, he was a baby thrown out with the bath water," said another long-time friend, author Tom McGuane, who lives near Brautigan's Paradise Valley ranch.

"He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy," McGuane said. "He once told me that because of a childhood illness he had to grow up in darkness. I guess his mind became his only toy during that time."

A close friend and neighbor who lived adjacent to Brautigan's Pine Creek ranch, Marian Hjortsberg, said Brautigan had a "gun fetish," and liked to target shoot. He "fooled around with guns in a way that was almost dangerous," she said.

"It took me a long time to get to know him because he had a gruff exterior and drank heavily," she said. But underneath that gruffness he was very kind," she said.

"He used to joke about how his first wife and all his girlfriends, when he gave up drinking, begged him to start again," Hjortsberg said. "He was a very meticulous and exacting person when he he wasn't drinking."

She said she wasn't surprised at the news of Brautigan's death.

"I had a sort of feeling always that he would go in a way sort of like that. He would get real depressed sometimes. He was very lonely deep down."

Although he kept a home in Montana, Brautigan was something of a literary vagabond with a particular affection for Japan, where he also lived and wrote.

Those who knew him, including San Francisco writer Curt Gentry, said Brautigan suffered from loneliness despite a legion of acquaintances.

"Richard was always a heavy boozer," Gentry said. "Obviously, he wasn't happy, but he'd always managed to pull himself out of despair before. Whatever agonies he was suffering from this time, I don't know."

Lawrence, Brautigan's publisher, said the author "was quite alone at the end."

"I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American loneliness," he said.

Married and divorced twice, Brautigan is survived by a daughter, Ianthe.

He was last in Montana a year ago, when he left for a writer's conference in Amsterdam. He traveled both in Europe and Japan in the past year before going back to Bolinas in the late spring, Keeler said. Keeler and his wife, Judy, visited Brautigan in Bolinas in August. Brautigan told them he was happy.

He was working on several different projects at the time, including a couple of screenplays and had several novels "sort of ready to go," Keeler said.

"I know he was really vacillating about where to live and what to do with his life, but he was always doing that," he said.

Brautigan liked Bozeman a lot and was thinking about moving here, Keeler said.

Brautigan was frustrated by the reaction of American critics to his work, friends said.

[NOTE: The following paragraphs were deleted from the 31 October 1984 reprinting of this memoir . . .]

Eastern literary establishment critics who like complexity and depth, "decided that since (Brautigan's work) was simple it was simple-mindied" or pegged him as a "Mr. '60s flower generation" writer, Keeler said.

"He used to say he didn't care (about the critics) but he used to keep their clippings all the time," said David Schrieber, a Bozeman bartender and MSU student. The Europeans and Japanese appreciated his work much more, he said.

Brautigan actually was a "deceptively simple" writer whose works operate on many different levels, Keeler said.

Brautigan was very happy that French post-modernist critics were taking his work seriously and a book was being written on the many different levels of his work, Keeler said.

Brautigan's latest book, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," was published in 1982.

"I think he put himself totally into that book and was upset that it got such a slack reception," Keeler said.

Brautigan had problems getting publishers to pay him for his work and lived in a sort of self-imposed poverty for much of his life, Keeler said. His house in Bolinas was large but he had sealed off most of it and was living in only a small portion.

"He was a child of the Depression and he never got over that," Keeler said.

Condon,1984

"Locals Remember Brautigan in '60s"
Garret Condon
Hartford Courant, 3 Nov. 1984, pp. D1, D8.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

When Robin Gorman of Hartford was at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1960s, one of his classmates—he doesn't remember her name—was an early hippie and a friend of an obscure Bay Area writer named Richard Brautigan.

"She and her friends were genuine hippies, with the van with the Day-Glo paint and everything. She knew Richard Brautigan. She [a photo of her with Brautigan] ended up on the cover of a couple of his books."

In the late '60s Brautigan became a celebrity as his novel, "Trout Fishing in America," sold 2 million copies. His popularity waned with the demise of the counter-culture.

"There was a quality of innocence about his work," said Gorman, 38, who works at Huntington's bookstore and says he's never been a big Brautigan fan. "It [Brautigan's work] implied that anything is possible. I think young people don't really feel that way anymore."

Brautigan, 49, was found last week in his Bolinas, California, home, dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Novelist Thomas McGuane, a friend of Brautigan's, suggested that Brautigan's success went the way of Day-Glo vans. Gorman, local college teachers and a Hartford lawyer agree that Brautigan's avant-garde work just didn't seem relevant in the 1970s and 1980s.

"He was someone they didn't teach in school, and that was reason enough to read him," recalls lawyer Gerald Sack, 31, who used to imitate Brautigan's poetic style in poems he wrote for The Wyvern, the student arts magazine at Kingswood School in West Hartford.

"I think what I found different about his work was its rhythm. There was a rock 'n' roll rhythm in his poetry," Sack says. But when he started at Yale in 1971, Sack quickly dropped his interest in "Trout Fishing in America."

"He was yesterday's paper," says Sack. "He was leftover from the '60s."

During the late 1960s Brautigan was taken seriously enough to be included in college literature courses. Paula Smith, 59, an English professor at Trinity College, included Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" in a course on experimental fiction.

"His ideas were anti-establishment," Smith says. "He was opposed to the straight, narrative form of fiction. He was simply more a poet. His talent was in brief, beautiful and evocative descriptions of scenes that were not necessarily linked together. You had a series of isolated moments." Although there are those who find "Trout Fishing in America" formless, Smith says Brautigan had a pattern in mind. "It's a pattern of recurring scenes and images that does reach a kind of climax."

Ann Charters, a biographer of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac and an English professor at the University of Connecticut, says she never taught Brautigan's books at UConn, but admired his work and wanted to meet him. "My favorite book of his was 'Please Plant This Book,'" she says, referring to Brautigan's "book" of eight poems, each poem printed on a separate seed envelope filled with flower seeds. "As an author, he wanted to beautify the world and he thought this would be the most direct way of doing it. It was part of the whole Beat Generation concern with experimental writing."

But if the seeds he "published" grew, his stature as an artist did not, Smith says.

"In some ways, he had a talent that was victimized by the public," Smith says. "It happens to a lot of writers. They do something that is immediately successful, then they turn off and just imitate themselves. I always felt he never surpassed 'Trout Fishing.'"

In addition to "Trout Fishing in America," Brautigan wrote "A Confederate General from Big Sur," "In Watermelon Sugar," "Revenge of the Lawn: Stories," and "The Abortion: An Historical Romance." His best-known book of poems is "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster." He published 22 books: 11 novels, nine collections of poetry and two works of non-fiction.

His most recent book, the 1982 novel "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," perhaps revealed something of the author's recent state of mind. "For Mr. Brautigan, life seems to be a pointless mess," Eve Ottenberg wrote in her review of the novel in the New York Times Book Review.

But recent Brautigan books have not sold well at Huntington's or anywhere else. Gorman says customers rarely ask for a copy of a Brautigan book.

"His style never changed, essentially," Gorman says. "I suppose his fans grew up and outgrew it."

Cook,1984

"A Weekend of Memories of Brautigan"
Stephen Cook
San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, 28 Oct. 1984, pp. A1, A24.
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 was a weekend for the friends of Richard Brautigan, literary darling of the flower generation, to gather and remember and talk about endings.

Brautigan, who so disliked neat endings that he took three pages of his 1967 novel, "Trout Fishing in America," to finish with the word mayonnaise, finished his own life with a bullet to the brain.

His death was discovered Thursday, and in the homes of friends in California, Montana, New York and elsewhere, discussions began. To make sense of the ending, it was important, said friends, to realize that Brautigan was:

A bookish boy whose commitment to writing was a thousand miles deep.

A trout fisherman and hunter.

A good-bad boy.

An alcoholic gunslinger who, on his way through two bottles of George Dickel bourbon a day, might well be found shooting at the stove, the walls, the clock in the kitchen of this Big Sky Country getaway ranch.

A 20th century man who never owned a car, never learned to drive.

A writer who cared most about appreciation of his work and the fact that readers had gone away.

A victim of the East Coast literary establishment.

A lonely man.

A man still distrubed by his second divorce a few years back.

The victim of an alcoholic accident.

A suicide.

Tom McGuane, the novelist and screenwriter, remembered his first encounter with Brautigan. It was in Bolinas, during the '60s.

Brautigan was still only a San Francisco phenomenon but, with publication of "Trout Fishing. . .", on his way to stardom and 2 million in sales.

Brautigan entered the room, "a funny, soprano, gawky, hippie-looking guy," McGuane recalled.

McGuane told him how much he'd liked the book and Brautigan, the 6-foot 4-inch blond and quiet writer with Mark Twain moustache, just beamed.

He was so happy that people liked the book, McGuane said. He wondered yesterday if this hadn't been an early indication of the vulnerability that eventually betrayed Brautigan, four months shy of his 50th birthday.

It's so unfair, said Becky Fonda, but "something every artist should be brainwashed with—that this is going to be part of the deal."

It's the fickleness of fame, said Becky, who was married to McGuane when she first met Brautigan. She is now married to Peter Fonda.

McGuane was the leader of the Montana gang—the Fondas, Brautigan, other writers, artists, movie people—who settled in the 1970s in a valley near Livingston, just outside Yellowstone National Park.

It was Becky Fonda, concerned that Brautigan had not made good his promise to come back this fall for the annual grouse hunt, who prompted Bay Area friends to break into the writer's Bolinas house Thursday. There they found the body, the large caliber revolver, the open bottle.

"One minute you're the darling of the fleet; the next minute they go right over you," Becky said.

"Richard was really undone by it. He couldn't believe what was happening to him. Less than 10 years ago, walking with him in San Francisco, we had to run for cover into Peggy's Used Clothing Store because he was being mobbed."

In San Francisco, writer Curt Gentry said that what seemed to hurt Brautgan most "was the thought that he had lost contact with his readers."

That was true in the United States, but not the world. Brautigan was still very popular in Europe and Japan. That popularity was so important to him that he exaggerated it, said Gentry.

"He was popular in Japan, but he had some over-inflated idea of his own importance," Gentry said.

"We'd be walking down the street in Tokyo. Richard looked particularly strange, out of place—tall, blond, with that mustache, a Levi jacket. The Japanese would turn and stare at him and kind of laugh as he went by.

"Richard would say, 'Everyone knows me in Japan. Can't you see that?'"

McGuane was bothered yesterday by the knowledge that Brautigan was so much more than a writer who committed suicide. He worreid about the American public's appetite for "the hook of the soap opera ending, as though how it ends is the story."

Still, he found himself talking about the ending, and the events that foreshadowed it.

When Brautigan left on his latest visit to Japan a year ago, McGuane recalled, "he brought me his trout rod—this seems sort of spooky now—and a Japanese burial urn to keep until it was needed. And he brought me his typewriter."

This was after some very serious conversations about drinking, death, about behavior that was slowly shutting Brautigan off from his circle of friends.

"He was behaving in ways that seemed to show less and less regard for the idea of surviving," said McGuane.

"He was a good-bad boy, irascible," said Becky Fonda. "He was good-hearted, kind and sensitive, but he could be just an impossible boy. He'd drink too much . . . Tom McGuane told him he had to stop drinking."

What had happened to the funny, soprano, hippie young writer of San Francisco? McGuane says he believes part of the problem was in the writer, part in the critics:

"Richard became an internationally famous writer without any help from the American literary establishment. When the crest broke, I think they were eager to injure them. I think they tried all the time.

"Everybody from some pork-and-beans book reviewer in New Jersey to Garrison Keillor (sardonic host of Naional Public Radio's Prairie Home Companion and writer for the New Yorker) took a shot at him. They hurt his feelings."

"He was very much a person who was self-enclosed, hard to break through. Everyone says if he had only reached out to someone. That's sort of the last thing Richard would do. He was a lonely person. That loneliness goes back to an early time in his life, to when he was a kid.

"I think loneliness was the theme of Richard's life and also the thing that threw brillant light over Richard's literature. It was a big price to pay."

Brautigan didn't share fully the details of his childhood, McGuane said, but "I gather he was a child somewhere between abandoned and left frequently alone."

Yesterday, in Tacoma, Wash., Bernard Brautigan, 76, said he was the writer's father and that he had not know he had a son until he learned of his death.

A drunken suicide is not what is to be remembered of Richard Brautigan, says McGuane.

"The Richard I knew was the Richard who was the bookish boy, who was the magician whose dedication to writing was a thousands miles deep, who lived and breathed writing," McGuane said.

"The main way to know Richard Brautigan is through his writing. In that writing you don't see a miserable person. You see a person with a mercurially humane view of the world."

Brautigan's is "probably the most significant literary death since (Jack) Kerouac," said his friend and novelist Don Carpenter of Mill Valley.

But the suicide, he said, "is irrelevant to his life and work."

"It think it was an alcoholic accident. He might just as well have gotten drunk and driven into a telephone pole," Carpenter said.

What is important, Carpenter said, is Brautigan's "example to writers, everywhere."

"He wrote everyday. Writing was everything to him. His prose looks easy and it looks quiet, but I can testify. . . . The man worked 12 hours a day every day of his life," Carpenter said.

"He always had an office in his house, but he'd be just as likely to be sitting at a table at Enrico's writing. He'd write on napkins, save them up for two or three years, then work them in his office, over and over."

He said that in Montana, the office was built in the attic of Brautigan's barn, and he would walk to the barn every day to write.

"As for sitting and drinking alone," said Carpenter, "we all do that. Writers are loners mostly anyway.

"Richard was a hunter and fisherman. Like a lot of those guys he has a lot of guns. There were episodes of sitting in the kitchen, getting drunk, picking up one of the new firearms and just start firing at the stove, the walls."

The last day many of Brautigan's San Francisco friends saw the writer was Sept. 13.

He was seen quarreling with his ex-wife. It was the first time he'd seen her in years. He borrowed a pistol from a friend, a downtown restaurateur, telling him he was worried about living alone out in West Marin.

Gentry saw him that night in Gino and Carlo's, a North Beach bar. They didn't really talk.

"He was blind," recalled Gentry.

No one in the Montana Gang used guns the way Brautigan did, said McGuane. He used to call Brautigan's back yard "lead Disneyland."

Bottles were set up on stumps in the yard and Brautigan liked to take his friends out on the back porch for target practice.

"He was fascinated with guns as machines," said McGuane.

"I thought I took the last one he had away from him. I thought he'd hurt himself with it. I guess he got another one."

Donovan,1996

"Food Stamps for the Stars"
Brad Donovan
Firestarter, June 1996, pp. 4-5.
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.

Brautigan took his parties seriously. They were planned like a military campaign, anticipating heavy casualties. But I had yet to "come under fire" on that innocent fall day when Richard called to invite me and the little keeper to a barbecue.

It was the last reel of the Seventies and we had moved here [Bozeman, Montana] because Richard invited us to go fishing. Then I forgot I had a career and joined a group of misfits who drank too much, raised lying to an art form but were good-hearted about it.

It was a fun scene and we were proud to do our bit, like extras in an Eskimo beach movie. So when Richard called back to ask me to bring some food, I agreed. A quick tour of the supermarket brought back a mound of burger and an armload of condiments. Sloppy Joes, the secret recipe kind. Then Richard called back to say that so-and-so was coming to the party, could we get more food. Hearing the famous name made my little helper search for something sexy to wear, and me to search for something interesting to say. She had more luck than I, but that is the reason for our story, to reveal how, at one of Brautigan's parties, we joined the stars in a conspiracy against the Department of Agriculture.

At the IGA we decided we could not feed these special guests mere Sloppy Joes, but needed something sophisticated, continental, like spaghetti. I spent all our cash on Dago Red, then crossed that line when I nonchalantly tossed down the last of our food stamps to pay for a shopping cart load of Ragu.

"We're Mormons. Italian Mormons," I explained.

Now government regulations forbid feeding other poor people with food stamps, let alone the rich and famous, who must eat a lot to satisfy our appetites. But it was a day that felt like a happening, the smoky air thick with meaning.

Richard's house in Pine Creek was western Gothic. A hacienda sort of house with a graceful arched front porch and a wrap-around back porch, and a kitchen that was the center of activity. The place was all trimmed in redwood. It had its own unreal aspect because of the huge weird trees. The grand red barn, the Montana trash garden of old cars, the shooting range in the backyard: all these were normal, and the house was fine and normal. But the place, like its owner, added up to Normal Plus.

For instance, as I began to prepare my secret sauce, Marinara In A Drum, Richard brought up pesto sauce. I did not know that recipe. So he recited the history of pesto, variations on the sauce, which stores in two counties had canned pesto and which aisles of those stores it was in, and the substance of olive oil. There was a narrative counter-melody too. The novels of Don Carpenter, writing a song for his friend Janis Joplin (who called it "Sweet. But not my style."), Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . . . no kidding.

Then Richard left for the phone, shoving Dennis into the kitchen to help. I did not trust the guy. He was a recovering English teacher, writing a book, poor bastard. And at the July Fourth rodeo, he had worn an Arab burnoose. Worse yet, during the intermission show, when Buffalo Sam pretends to sleep as his pet buffalo comforts him, the ancient bond between man and beast symbolized by this buffalo bending over Sam in felonious manner, Dennis shatters the sacramental silence by demanding, "Make it good for the buffalo too!" For a moment, human sacrifice was a real option. But he stashed the burnoose, and the crowd wallowed around a bit then settled down to wait for the bull-riding.

Not the sort of guy you'd expect to be handy in the kitchen, but typical of Richard's friends: fun-loving, witty, tactful.

I was chopping onions when Dennis pulled a bookmark from some paperback and said, "Look what I found."

"It's a bookmark. An edible bookmark. Try it." He tore the paper in half and ate one piece. There was a purple dragon on my slip of paper, some sort of Eastern spice, he said. I ate the dragon-spice bookmark but did not taste anything. Richard had published Plant This Book, a collection of poems that included packets of vegetable seeds. I figured the bookmark was another of those medium-is-the-message trips.

I cannot remember when I have had so much fun cooking. Smashing the tomatoes was jolly, chopping onions had me in tears, the sight of Dennis frying burger was a real howler. I stirred in anything that looked like food, emptied Tabasco on it.

"Are you guys alright"? Richard inquired. "Come out here and meet a few people."

Why not? We were done in the kitchen. It looked like a produce truck had crashed into a cattle hauler.

My first star sighting was Clark Gable. I learned fact number one about them: they look like you expect them to look. It is disorienting to see a person for the first time and feel the sense of familiarity, of recognition, we reserve for our friends. Young Clark was gracious, casual, but not as big in person as on the screen where he is a celluloid shadow twelve feet tall.

We were passing the time by blowing holes in stuff with large caliber firearms. A TV set, a Pachinko game no one could figure out, dishes from a teflon party that had been snowed in and driven to cannibalism. Young Clark shouldered a rifle, sighted in on a Tab can, and I saw it meant more if he shot or missed the can, than how I shot because no one would remember my results. A clutch shot and he blew it away along with our tension when he joked, "Did I hit it?" like a guy who frankly did not give a damn.

Then Doris Day walked up to me and we talked recipes. She was that rarity, a beautiful woman who does not make you nervous. She appeared fascinated by what I was saying, or maybe she was curious about what language I was speaking. Anyhow, she made us feel welcome and we still think of her with fondness. Her dancing partner, Fred Astaire, was classy and eloquent, well informed, opinionated. And I realized that I had been judging these strangers as if they were required to measure up to our illusions, which is rule number two: Stars better do it right.

The cooking alarms where chiming that dinner was ready, so I flew into the kitchen. The man sampling the sauce was . . . are you ready . . . Humphrey Bogart!

"What the hell are you looking at, kid?"

"But you're dead," I suggested.

"I know I haven't worked in years. I've signed with a new agency, which doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this world."

Thus I came to rule number three: Stars must be tolerant because we ask them to explain the obvious.

We ate dinner. Most of it found my face. The noodles stopped their twitching but the spicy squid, the smoked whitefish from Japan and the salad from hell made a unique dining experience.

Back in the living room, I met Nixon, or the actor who played him on TV. He removed the false teeth that changed him from a real person into Nixon. Nixon's teeth took on a life of their own, enjoying a free lunch, on the dole. Torn loose from its moorings, the conversation grew like a swarm of fireflies. The actor, and Richard, when younger, had rented a station wagon to go trout fishing in the Sierra Nevada. They blew four tires, sideswiped a tree, modified some big rocks. "How to return the car to the rental agency?" they wondered. The actor put on a Dr. Caligari disguise, along with an émigré accent and raved at the rental clerk about vandals, crime in the streets and that the car was in the ghetto. Is that a problem?

They did not go to jail, which shows one of the uses of the imagination. The rest of the evening was filled with similar stories, a string of ephemeral moments wired together by Brautigan's willpower. All of his books, and all of his days, were marked by the capacity for surprise and the knowledge that life is fleeting. He told the story about Baron von Richtofen, how the Red Baron, after dueling in the skies, would go into the forest at night and hunt wild boar with a knife, to unwind after a tough day of being an ace. He acted it out, and I saw him as some prehistoric hunter wielding an intellect that was not nice.

After another story about Richard's friend Ken Kesey, Dennis rambled on and on about who was hip, who on "on the bus" . . . a topic for nostalgia buffs now perhaps, but this was before the Internet.

Dennis announced that he was on the bus. He had a ticket to go where no culture had gone before. We considered whether this was so. Then Richard drew himself up, acquired a solemn look and explained why the hippies had failed: "A bus ticket is not a license to kill."

We were stunned. We were speechless. Dennis drank a fifth of Calvados brandy and I drank the other one. It was almost dawn and we were still stunned but unfortunately not speechless.

Dennis greeted the fresh day from the roof of the chicken coop shrieking, "I'm a morning person." After that, the fresh day is a bit vague.

The memory is a trip of its own and maybe everything did not happen exactly as is related above. I remember the sunrise was awful loud. While puking in the front yard, there appeared to me a ring of mushrooms, and underneath them, a busload of leprechauns partying down. Recycled spaghetti and a river of booze rained down on their parade. The little people were not surprised by this treatment from a big star like me.

Richard peeked around the corner of the house. He looked like Mark Twain, and in a flash I accepted reincarnation. Like I said, it was a weird yard.

I got over my guilt about misusing my gifts from the Department of Agriculture. I had used official food to propitiate the gods, which is like feeding the homeless.

There would be other parties, equally magical and difficult to recall. Then Richard booked his trip on the choo-choo to nowhere.

What remains of the most original prose writer of his generation is in the books. As for the man, all we should feel is sympathy . . . not for him, but for the party-goers in his next life.

Dorn1,1985

"In Memoriam: Richard Brautigan"
Edward Dorn
The Denver Post, Empire Magazine, May 19, 1985, pp. 22-23, 25, 27.
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 sensationalism surrounding the death of Richard Brautigan has been odd. It has met all the qualifications of National Enquirer—calculation, decay, disease, drek sexuality, and a fate conveniently beyond explanation. Richard would have enjoyed that part of it because he was drawn to such style of coverage, and, in fact, might have had it in mind, since he arranged for his body to rot for several weeks before the likelihood of discovery.

The first thing to understand about Richard's mind was that he idealized the common intelligence. That's why he was abruptly popular, and why, in the end, he was systematically forgotten: The people who were surprised by him never abandoned their hatred of him, and the ones who loved him, never a large number, never abandoned him. Even toward the end you could meet people who thought So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away was the truest account of growing up ever written. The only trouble with his admiration of the National Enquirer audience was that they never heard of him. He was condemned, and he knew it, to be one of us.

Last fall, when the news of his suicide came through the wire, there was a blizzard of speculation. A lot of the turbulent guesswork was simply the confusion of the strange man's friends. They felt the triumph of an adversary's death. And, in fact, it was a strong coup. Literary personalities overwhelmingly die in the presence of at least one other person. To die as he did, with calculation, with everything working—ights, radio, telephone machine on in a house with a Do Not Disturb sign—was a disturbing afterthought to a public not yet accustomed to free-market euthanasia.

The comparisons with Hemingway are quite erroneous: Brautigan was not a shotgun man. The pronouncements that women drove him to it are equally off the mark. He mostly got along with women better than men: He was more confidential with them and more friendly toward them. The fact that he was disappointed in marriage had to do with his alienation from humanity in general on a constant basis. He looked to men for the kind of respect that the exclusiveness of marriage denied. The aesthetic which led him to prefer Japanese women was at the heart of his essential lack of interest in domestic routines. His views on these matters are very eloquently expressed and recorded in Sombrero Fallout, a deeply lyrical presentation of the contrast of American and Japanese traits.

He was a roamer, always looking for the odd sign and the direct encounter, and he was naturally dubious of explanation and analysis, because he felt the phenomenon itself was complete. And so did his readers, during the early years of his success. He didn't write fiction so much as observation, honed and elevated so as to catch the light emanating from the most presumably insignificant of details. The only respect in which he was a Christian was the interest he shared with Christ in professional women.

He was a true macho in that his challenges were thrown at men. He loved sharp arguments the nastier the better. He craved for verbal contest to reach a point where he was compelled to say "Watch it! You're going too far." Those who knew him well, and who played that game with him, took it as a compliment if that theater of combat was reached. Although his writing is not violent, there was no end to his search for the bounds of violence. To Richard Brautigan, the idea of fate itself was comic. That attitude has always made as many enemies as friends.

He has no history of morbidity. All his writing—the lonely, wry, preoccupied, lapidary miniatures he published as poetry, or the spare boldness of his micro-prose—was devoted to coaxing life to live up to its obvious possibilities. Death was a fact to him, not just another attraction. Richard could be vicious, but he was not sour. He had too much pride for that.

Brautigan saw himself and often referred to himself as a humorist. That's a designation not much used about anyone anymore, since everybody in the whole nation has become a comic. But it has been a rare thing when an artist has identified with any tradition in this century. There is a distant similarity between Brautigan and Twain. It consists almost solely in a natural innocence in regarding the evil disposition of mankind. But whereas Twain's treatment of the condition is streaked with acid intelligence, Brautigan's is amazingly tolerant, if not gleeful, and resembles an anthropologist's understanding more than that of a literary man.

Contrary to what is often claimed, Richard spoke easily of his childhood and its tribulations. He was without recrimination, so his stories were saucy versions of the School of Hard Knocks. His work appealed to those who had decided not to mock their chains but to pick them up and carry them out of the hippie slums of the West Coast back to the Rocky Mountains, much as the disappointed seekers of '49 gradually made their way following silver rather than gold to the East again.

One night in August 1980, Richard delivered a little talk and read from his work at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder (Colorado). There were about a thousand old-timey people from the hills to hear him. He was very impressed that forerunners like Billy Sunday and William Jennings Bryan had spoken there. He liked those old echoes. The audience of freckled, ginghamed women and their freckled, ginghamed children and their homespun fathers obviously loved him, and he openly returned their regard. It was a touching reunion filled with gentle, reflective laughter.

That summer in Boulder was special in a number of ways for Brautigan, and he was fascinated with the town itself. It represented many elements of the new life, the untested but already discernible motion of the '8Os at the brink. He was impressed with the liberal sprinkling of beautiful women in the crowds. He stayed at the Boulderado for about a month and felt at home in the ornate, turn-of-the-century ambience. In 1980 the hotel was still a little rough-edged, although some of the present amenities were in place then. The heyday of the hotel in Richard's terms would have been slightly earlier, in the '7Os, when the clientele was a loose traffic of waywardly successful odd-balls with specific intentions if they could ever "get it together."

It was while he was staying at the hotel that he met Masako one evening at a party in his honor given by Ginger Perry. Perry had apparently managed to find the one Japanese girl in Boulder that summer. Masako was very young and very Japanese. She called him Lichad.

Boulder became even more absurdly intriguing in his estimation. He glowed with possibilities and talked about new writing projects. Fishermen came and went. There was a fair amount of talk about fishing the in-town course of Boulder Creek. And then, eventually, he took Masako off to Montana. They didn't live happily ever after, but they were very happy for a while.

His second wife, Akiko, has related how she saw him inadvertently in North Beach very shortly before his suicide. The sight of him was so affecting she followed him along the street and into Vanessi's, an old and still classy Italian restaurant on Broadway, near the crossroads with Columbus Avenue of San Francisco's bohemian quarter, and haunt of sailors and internationalists, and except for the Spanish Mission and Presidio, the oldest inhabited part of the city.

She stood there by the door, she said, until Richard saw her. He closed his eyes. In this sign she thinks he saw her as a ghost. But as everyone knows, if you're lucky enough to see a ghost, you open your eyes. What Richard actually saw, from the testimony of his own record, was yet another instance of the distortion of the dream he had had. It was the final judgment of the truly poor that everything be perfect.

Dorn2,1985

"The Perfect American"
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn
The Denver Post, Empire Magazine, May 19, 1985, pp. 23, 31.
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 first time we spent any considerable time with Richard Brautigan was in 1969. The occasion was the writers' conference at a private college in San Diego. It was about two weeks following the birth of our son, Kidd, on the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos, New Mexico.

A strange and provocative little gathering typical of those heady days, the company included Richard Brautigan and Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley and his wife (the writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins), the prominent San Francisco renaissance poet Michael McClure, and Jim Morrison.

A few years and many miles later, we lived across the street from Richard in San Francisco—first out on Geary Boulevard and then in North Beach. In the summer of 1976, he invited us up to his small ranch on the Yellowstone River, outside Livingston, Montana.

He was a generous host and an enthusiastic cook. We went trout fishing. We went to Chico Hot Springs, a scruffy, but marvelous local spa. Richard was such a keen student of life that he even turned the pathetic, worn-out cowboy nightlife of Livingston into a tour de force.

The night before we left, we stayed up drinking Dickel with him and arguing about Patty Hearst and Symbionese Liberation Army. Richard did not like the idea of revolutionaries running around killing people. In fact, as a reasonably well-off landowner, he was not about to support a revolution of any kind.

It was when he moved in across the street from us on Kearny in San Francisco that we met Akiko, his quite beautiful second wife. They appeared to be very happy, and Richard was more that ever bowing and tiptoeing around, using quaint Japanese mannerisms. He had Akiko read us Japanese poetry and serve us tea.

Despite his tendency to inspire an almost competitive urge to drink up the night hours, it was a pleasure to see Richard. When he came to stay in Boulder for six weeks in 1980, we saw him almost every day. However obnoxious his behavior might have been the previous evening, it was easy to forgive him. However deep his troubles—and he was going through complicated and painful divorce proceedings at the time—his mischievous or drunken behavior was more like that of a naughty boy than that of a disturbed adult. It was like he hadn't grown up.

He once told us that he grew six inches in his 13th year, all the growth occurring in the area around his knees. The doctors attributed it to a gland, which they proceeded to remove, using a local anesthetic. Watching his gland come out Richard described as one of the "memorable moments" of his life. The four additional inches he grew to become 6-feet-4 were "normal," but he had become a freak of sorts, and he seemed to carry that sense of himself in the slope and stoop of his narrow shoulders, in the strange, giraffe gait to his walk, and above all, in his vivid, almost child-like imagination.

It was as though something of that 12-year-old had always remained with him. In this respect, his last book, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, is particularly revealing. It provides biographical detail about Richard's boyhood—the drab, welfare household of females from which he escapes every day to explore the big world and to search for characters who might have been his father. When I asked Richard whether the incident in which the boy narrator kills his best friend was fiction, he laughed and said yes.

When we went to Montana in July 1982, we were thinking of Richard, but we were out of touch. We had driven to Bozeman, to the trailer home of a former student of Ed's, Brad Donovan, who was now living on the bank of the Gallatin River. Although we knew that Brad and his wife, Georgia, saw quite a lot of Richard, we were surprised and delighted to see him sitting on the trailer steps when we pulled up in our station wagon. We were touched that he was there to greet us, to be our host again in Montana.

It was early in the afternoon, and Kidd, just a few days away from his 13th birthday, was anxious to go fishing. Richard had already started on a quart bottle of Dickel. Brad, an experienced Michigan fisherman, invited Kidd to go fishing in the Gallatin. It wasn't long before our daughter, Maya, came running back to tell us Kidd had a line of something big.

As we all stood watching Kidd with his line bowed across the flood water, angling his first fish, Richard looked on like Uncle Trout Fishing in America himself. The moment was caught, along with the trout, in Georgia's snapshot. It was the kind of coincidence Richard considered perfect—where real life mimics fiction.

He was careful, on bringing out his firearms the next day, to make certain the children understood they should never point guns in the direction of people. He then took them down to his target range and set them up for the afternoon shooting beer cans with an air rifle.

He rejoined us on the back porch then, laughing with that high-pitched sequence of hoots and howls of his over some monstrous joke he'd told the kids. Life was a very simple progression for Richard: He was pure American for who Japan was the final frontier, the ultimate Out West.

Foote,1985

"An Author's Last Will: Richard Brautigan: The '60s Cult Hero and His Long Descent to Suicide"
Jennifer Foote
Washington Post, 23 Jan. 1985, pp. D8-D9.
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.

On tape, Richard Brautigan was talking to some Japanese broadcasters from Tokyo, to whom he had served George Dickel whiskey in the woods, and he was shooting a Winchester .22-caliber rifle at cans from the back porch of his ranch.

He was saying tidy little things in a formal tone between blasts of gunfire and spliced-in swells of Ry Cooder music. His gun, he said, was "mechanical poetry," and be had never used it to kill "and never will."

"My name is Richard Brautigan," he said. "To me, a good sentence is the same as a bullet . . . moving and hitting a target."

Somewhere around September 15 of last year, about four years after he recorded this tape, Richard Brautigan directed a bullet from a .44 magnum at himself in the dank main room of his home in Bolinas, Calfornia. Like the books he had written, his suicide inspired a lot of curiosity about him.

Many of the reporters who wrote about his death treated him as a washed-up "hippie writer" whose simple style—and whose most famous novel, Trout Fishing in America—had been discarded in the '70s as trivial.

Some of the reporters dug up ironies: that he died just before he was about to score two new book contracts. Others found still-bitter acquaintances who recalled the writer as arrogant and miserly. One depicted Brautigan as a violent cowboy fond of bizarre sex who blasted himself dead like a "coward."

In Bozeman, Montana, the stark Big Sky town where Brautigan had a home and friends, and where he drank, taught school and ate Burger King onion rings, that picture is said to be all wrong. Some 30 miles away in Livingston and in the Paradise Valley beyond, where Brautigan had a ranch, there is outrage among his friends about the comments on the writer's death. There is still more anger among Brautigan's acquaintances in Bolinas, San Francisco and New York.

But not one of his friends claims full understanding of Brautigan's suicide. The wretched childhood, the failed marriages, the numbing alcoholism, the harshness of the critics and his dwindling income are dead-end clues to the suicide.

"Richard would want it like that," said his Montana neighbor, Marian Hjortsborg. "If he ever thought that anyone or everyone could figure him out, that would have been very depressing to him."

Brautigan was born on January 30, 1935. He grew to be a tall, blond man who sported a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He published a book that bombed, A Confederate General in Big Sur, but he bolted from obscurity to national prominence in the late 60s with Trout Fishing in America, which sold 2 million copies. In other slim volumes—In Watermelon Sugar, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, The Abortion—Brautigan demonstrated his humor and wrote about what he saw as the betrayal of the American dream. Each book had a picture of the author or a wholesomely beautiful girlfriend—or both—on the front. They sold and sold, and Brautigan became a cult hero of the '60s.

He continued to work into the late '7Os, but sales of his books were no longer phenomenal. Critics who had praised the earlier books concluded that Brautigan was a flower-power prodigy whose work didn't hold up under cool literary analysis. For many of his early readers, the news of Brautigan's death was the first they'd heard of him in years.

Mary Lulu Folston never read Brautigan. She hadn't even heard from her son since 1956, when he left her home in Tacoma, Washington, at the age of 21.

"He just left is all," she said. "Didn't say where he was going. He just disappeared, like people do."

His father, Bernard Brautigan, left Folston when she was pregnant with Richard. He didn't know he had a son until the writer died and Folston revealed her story to him.

"This stinks," he told a newspaper reporter, but not much more.

"He was a very good boy, a very quiet boy," Folston said. "Never drank, never smoked, never dated girls."

He was helpful, too, she says; he caught fish and shot birds for the "meat portions" of family meals during World War II. He'd go to bed each night with the Bible.

"I don't think he was very fond of my husband," Folston ventured. "They went hunting once, and there was a rift." Young Brautigan came back from the trip and told his mother that Uncle Larry, her husband's brother, had poured cold water in his ear as he lay in his sleeping bag and then killed a deer and rubbed the blood all over him.

"Richard was shocked," she said. "After that there was cold dead silence."

After Brautigan left home, Folston never wondered what he was up to: "When you know your child is famous, you don't worry, do you?" Still, his suicide gave her nightmares.

"You get to thinking . . . about how you can lose touch with a person," she said.

Brautigan had tried to leave home and live in San Francisco's North Beach four times before he actually had enough money to stay there. He circulated among the Beats and wrote constantly.

Sometimes he drank coffee in the Minimum Daily Requirement, a coffeehouse owned by Kendrick Rand. Brautigan was a poor, slightly goofy-looking person who could be shy and very private. He couldn't drive and would never learn, but Rand was a glad chauffeur who shuttled Brautigan from poetry readings in Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara to his near-empty San Francisco apartment.

"We used to have breakfast at Mama's on Washington Square and then walk around it 12 or 15 times, talking as we went," said Brautigan's friend and fellow writer, Don Carpenter. "He was a surrealist. He might say, 'That guy over there looks like a block of concrete.'"

When he published A Confederate General in Big Sur, Brautigan told Carpenter that he would be paid $1,000 for the book. It was about a third of what he was accustomed to earning in an entire year. But the book came out and "died like a cockroach underfoot," Carpenter recalled."Richard was thrown in the dumps."

When Trout Fishing in America became a hit, "everyone was stunned," Carpenter said. "But Richard thought it was what he was due."

Brautigan changed little as the royalties rolled in and the groupies began swarming. "He remained in his living habits as simple and uncorrupted as anyone I have ever known," said Helen Brann, Brautigan's literary agent since 1968. "There were years when the 'Today' show and Johnny Carson and a whole lot of people were after him—they would have put him across as a brilliant eccentric—but he never gave in to that kind of thing."

After spending some time in Bolinas, a coastal town north of San Francisco, where he wrote In Watermelon Sugar and met writers Tom McGuane and William Hjortsborg, Brautigan used some of his Trout Fishing earnings to buy a big house there in 1970. By then he was divorced from Virginia Adler, whom he had married in 1957 and with whom he had a daughter.

Brautigan used the house only on weekends. "He would usually come out with a friend," said poet Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who still lives in the town. "Usually it was a lady friend who could drive and who could cook." They'd prepare big spaghetti dinners, playing host to writer friends from San Francisco. Sometimes he'd work after the guests had gone, perching his typewriter on the porch.

"Richard was getting rich, fat and famous and drinking too much," Carpenter recalled. "Often he would motor-mouth about himself, get obsessed. And he was always looking for two things: always looking for love and trying to improve his work."

"He had that quality of massive, yet somehow inoffensive self absorption," said McGuane. McGuane had written the first rave review of "Trout Fishing" for The New York Times Book Review and moved to a ranch is Montana's Paradise Valley not long after meeting Brautigan.

One summer, according to McGuane, "Richard sort of showed up here." After several summer visits, Brautigan bought a ranch next door to William and Marian Hjortsborg and went about installing a writing studio in the barn. Montana became one of Brautigan's favorite temporary homes.

Another was Tokyo, where his popularity grew as it declined in America. "Richard became a worldwide literary success without the help of the American critical review establishment," McGuane said.

"The critics got to him more than they would have ever hoped," said Becky Fonda, who with her husband, Peter, was a neighbor of Brautigan's in Montana. "They devastated him."

In 1978, after many trips to Japan, Brautigan married his second wife, Akiko, and took her to Montana. After two years of marriage, they divorced. "The marriage seemed doomed, and it tore him to pieces," Carpenter said.

Brautigan aggravated his misery with drink. "Through all of the horror show, through everything, he kept writing." Carpenter said. "No matter what else he did, he wrote."

Montana—his ranch and the towns of Livingston and Bozeman—remained Brautigan's refuge. In 1982, he taught at Montana State University in Bozeman and knocked around with the students who took turns driving him from bar to bar.

They would often stay up late drinking until "a horrible time at the end ot the night," said Greg Keeler, a poet and professor in Bozeman, Then Brautigan "would slip into what I thought was a funny Oriental voice and get horrifyingly incisive about things. Be would come up with some really scary stuff about life and about death."

"He hated to be bored, so he made things happen," Keeler said. He loved Americana, like the Eagles bar where Brautigan would indulge in crowd-stopping antics, such as planting a big kiss on Keeler's mouth in a room full of cowboys. He liked to watch "The Love Boat" or "The A-Team" or read the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, the letters of Ernest Hemingway or the National Enquirer and then talk about them with courtly precision.

But as Brautigan's drinking got worse, his talk turned increasingly to self-centered rambling. "Frankly," said McGuane, "it became harder and harder to be around him."

By the time he left Montana for the last time, after a stay from August to October 1983, Brautigan and a friend, Brad Donovan, had finished a screenplay called "Trailer," about a mobile-home park. LEARN more He had also completed a novel, called "The Unfortunate Woman," but his friends, agent and publisher all advised that he should set it aside.

Brautigan was having money problems. His profits were tied up in real estate, and his foreign publishers, who represented a last source of steady income, were slow to pay him. He put his ranch up for sale, announcmg that he was disenchanted with Montana, and set off on a tour of Europe and Japan. He told some people he might never come back.

Brautigan was fond of final statements and the drama they might produce, yet there were peculiarities in the last departure from Montana. The day before he left, Brautigan packed up his things to take to McGuane's ranch, as he did every time he left. This time, however, he left behind his typewriter, his guns and his fishing rods, to which he had taped dried flowers.

Brautigan also gave McGuane a wooden box, saying that his friend would get instructions for the object one day in the future. It was a Japanese burial urn.

"My judgment at the time was that it was meant to mildly suggest that I might never see him again," McGuane said.

On the road in Holland, France and Germany, Brautigan wrote his friends playful letters but also made morose, drunken telephone calls in the wee hours. When Brautigan returned to Bolinas in June, he visited Bobbie Hawkins. She gave him dishes and utensils but was pained by his manner. "Suddenly it was like one saw too much of him and seeing more of him made him less tolerable," she said.

Depending on the day, the hour, the person he was seeing and the amount he had drunk, Brautigan was either jolly or morose. When he visited Kendrick Rand, Brautigan was ecstatic, giddily announcing that he just had written for 10 or 12 solid hours.

He told friends in Montana and his publisher and his agent the same thing, that he was hard at work on a novel and a book of poetry. He was ready to get into theater and movies, too, he said.

But Hawkins and writer Bill Brown saw him at his worst in Bolinas: drunk, bitter and angry. "He'd come here and sit and talk to himself," Brown recalled. "His kind of paranoia was that he was worried about his carcass, someone getting him."

Brautigan had told Hawkins that he was writing about 20 pages a day, but when she visited, she found his typewriter on the porch covered and dusty. Inside, Brautigan had shut off all but the main room and the adjoining kitchen—living and working in a room with a tattered Naugahyde couch, a barren table, a stacked mattress bed and a TV leaning against a cold fireplace.

Hawkins would find him talking in a paranoid haze, sometimes about himself in the third person. "It got to a point where anyone who would say something to him or look at him like they recognized him would just increase his paranoia. He was getting involved with his gun—like if anybody came after him, he would have his gun."

The gun was on loan from Jim Sakata, who had become a friend during the past five years. Brautigan would visit Sakata's Cho Cho tempura bar in San Francisco and talk to Sakata about everything from Japanese writers to firearms. "Early in the summer, he borrowed the pistol," Sakata said. "He said he was lonesome at Bolinas and wanted some company."

Sakata had discussed death with the writer, but it never occurred to Sakata that his friend would kill himself.

When it happened, nobody knew it. For five weeks, Brautigan's body lay between his bed and his desk, the gun to one side, a couple of empty bottles of bourbon nearby.

It wasn't that no one cared. "He had a lifelong habit of moving quickly and quietly," Bill Brown said. His friends in Bolinas and San Francisco thought he had gone to Montana or Japan.

His agent and publisher mailed letters full of business details, but when the mail was returned unopened, they thought Brautigan had simply fouled up forwarding details.

Friends in Montana expected Brautigan in early October. When he didn't show, Becky Fonda initiated a search, finally enlisting a private investigator to track Brautigan down.

Confronted with the horror of Brautigan's suicide, his friends found hints of it in their last encounters with him. Carpenter recalled that Brautigan had never said good-bye at the end of phone conversations—he usually blurted out a reason to hang up and then did so. But when he called a couple of days before the estimated time of the suicide, Carpenter remembers, "He said, 'I love you,' and then he said goodbye."

Some thought Brautigan had killed himself in the calculated spirit with which he did most things. "It's very simple in a way," said Brad Donovan. "He decided to die and did it. There is no comparing it to why ordinary people do things."

Others thought it was a drunken blunder. Brautigan had seen his ex-wife, Akiko, several days before he was thought to have shot himself. They argued, and some speculate that Brautigan got drunk and aimed the gun.

Some speculate that the writer died because of lack of appreciation. But two of his closest friends point to a more profound disjunction in Brautigan's life.

Marian Hjortsborg remembered Brautigan's tender expectations of himself and his friends: "The cynical world he found himself in was in direct conflict with the innocence that was the wellspring of his artistry."

Tom McGuane said Brautigan rejected sobriety because "his expectations of the world and people around him were so precise it was hard to bear. A guy pulls himself out of a world he fears and hates, makes a world in which he is very happy and for various reasons that world is piece by piece taken away from him, and he can't bear to live in a world that doesn't have the things he created."

Fujimoto,nodate

Unpublished memoir by Kasuko Fujimoto
Translated by Masako Kano

"According to "Tokyo Diary," it seems it was June 1st, 1976 when Richard was taken to my shop "The Cradle" for the very first time. I had not read his books, and therefore had no previous fixed images of him. We continued to drink together after all the guests left from the bar that night. I felt that Richard was very pure and honest man. I also felt that I did not need to worry about how he would think of me or whatever I said to him. That was my strong first impression of Richard. The last time I saw him was May 11th, 1984. I kept that first impression of him until that last day.

"I never thought of him as a visitor. He stayed at the Keio Plaza Hotel for the half of the tariff thanks to my friend's introduction. Usually he spent the afternoon at the café in Harajuku, and at the night came to my "The Cradle." We often traveled together,visiting my friends and my family, and I took him to the concerts, the theaters, and the opening parties for solo exhibitions. Of course, the bars we went together to drink thorough the nights, were numerous. So, I think that he spent his time in Tokyo not as a tourist, but as someone closer to the people who live there. When he woke up, without exception, he called to greet me,then when he was about to sleep, he called me and reported what had happened to him throughout that day.

"The playwright Ken Miyamoto told Richard, "I try to speak in broken English when I go to U.S.A, you have to speak in Japanese in Japan." "I am trying to speak Japanese, but could not do it," Brautigan told me sadly. He did his best, but never mastered speaking Japanese until the end.

"In the beginning Richard asked me to become his lover, but I could not really feel romantically involved with him. "Lovers and a couple may separate, but the brother and sister are together for life, why not become brothers, shall we ?" I said. So after that, he started to call me "my sister."

"I paid all his expenses while he was in Tokyo: the travels, the tickets for theaters,the food and drinks at the bars we visited together, and of course, never asked him to pay for the food and drinks at my bar "The Cradle." To me, that was very natural thing to do. I gave him, the glasses, the plates, the knife and the folks to use at his hotel room, and prepared his supper at "The Cradle" and let him bring the boiled eggs and the cans of tuna for his breakfast at the hotel.

"When he came to Tokyo for the last time, he got stuck with the payment for the debt of three months tariff to the Keio Plaza Hotel because he said he could not receive the cabled money he needed. So, I borrowed the money to pay off his debt. He asked me, "If anything happens to me, shall I write an I.O.U. ?" I said "Nothing will happen, so I do not need such a thing." After he returned to USA, he never brought up the topic of the money between us during our conversations over the phone, but I felt strongly that Richard was feeling very bad about the fact that I had to borrow the money for him and wanted to pay back as soon as possible. So my conviction was that he would have never ever committed suicide before returning the money to me. It could not be.(1)

"Once, while I was busily working inside the counter table at "The Cradle" and came to Richard who was drinking in the same seat in the corner. He said, "My sister, if you want me to die for you, I will die for you immediately."

"Silly thing you say. I would not be happy at all by you dying for me !" I laughed.

"But he said to me again in a deeply thoughtful way, that if they asked him to, he could immediately die for three people: Norman Mailer, Ianthe and I.

"While he was writing Tokyo-Montana Express, I was pregnant with my daughter Mioh. But we went out together even with my big bump. We went to Amishiro to send the letter inside the barrel of sake into the river, went to fish the cultured trouts in the trout farm at the bottom of Mount Fuji. We invited the movie director, TakeoUrayama and the actor Chojyurou Kawaharazaki to a big sake banquet with my father at my family home. We dined with Junnosuke Yoshiyuki at the traditional restaurant "Hamasaku." I went to help him register his foreigner's identity card at the municipal office. That summer was an heatwave and because I walked around so much for Richard, my baby was born much earlier than the due date. I said jokingly to Richard, "Because of you, my baby was prematurely born !" He then bought the same weight of kilograms of American Cherries as the weight my baby was supposed to have had on the due date. He gave me this as a present along with a few baby clothes wrapped like the bouquet of flowers, adding some more grams of "ungained" weight of my baby.

"He was so very fond of my daughter, Mioh. When she was so crazy about E.T., he brought every kind of E.T. character toys from USA. It was so fun to observe the two, without any verbal understanding of each other, playing so happily, shouting "E.T.! E.T.!"

"I only once visited USA during eight years of knowing Richard. He said, "You took care of me all the time when I was in Japan. I will take care of you when you come to USA." When I arrived in Los Angels, Richard welcomed me with a bouquet of flowers. The next day, we had lunch at a restaurant where he introduced me the actor Harry Dean Stanton. Richard said to me, "While you are in Los Angeles, Harry Dean is yours." The three of us had great fun together that night. I went back to my hotel room at the Sunset Marquise Hotel, and found Harry Dean asleep naked on the double bed in which I was supposed to sleep. That was what Richard meant. I recognized then, but did not feel like slipping in next to him on the bed, so I slept on the sofa that night. When I woke up next morning and went to the window, Richard waved his hand with his big smily face across the swimming pool from his hotel room window.

"He arranged a hotel for me and the theater plays during the time I stayed in New York City. And in San Francisco, he hosted wonderful dinner banquet with twenty of his close friends. We visited his friend's house. We went to his Bolinas house. We went for a walk along the beach. Everything was so joyous. Drunk merrily together we came back, and there was the man waiting for me wearing a crown costume and he invited me to dance with him, and of course it was Richard's idea to surprise me.

"When he was in USA, mostly we talked on the phone rather than exchanging letters. But I found one letter dated August 11th, 1984(2)."

Bolinas
August 11th, 1984

Dear Takako,

Hi!

I met Tom Rady on the street in San Francisco a few days ago, and he told me a long and fun greeting from "The Cradle."

I continue what I do. Work.

This morning, I saw two seals in the sea about 50 meters above the beach. If E.T. saw them, she would be pleased. The two seals came together, and talked much in the seals' manner. Then they swam away in different directions. They were jumping in the water and stayed in the area for a long time, so I guess they were hunting for breakfast. They passed the morning with fun.

They looked beautiful to my eyes. The Pacific Ocean bore a comfortable mist, and the air carried a fresh nice fragrance. I was thinking about E.T. How much I love her, how much I love you.

Richard

P.S: This letter, I will post today, Monday [August 13th, 1984]. Last weekend I finished the draft of the script of my first movie. It's a Western Movie! I want you to tell your gentleman in Tokyo who loves B Western movies that I was thinking about the content for him to watch and to enjoy when I was writing this script.(3)

P.S: 2
I got the telephone . . . 451-868-24xx

Translator's notes

(1) This means Takako clearly believed that Richard's death was an accident, not suicide. I found the blog of an editor who knew both Akiko and Takako, and wrote about Takako talking to him that Richard "often played the russian roulette game" when he got drunk at "The Cradle" bar. Does this mean that Richard carried a gun in Tokyo? In my faded memories, I only recall he was fascinated with the scene of Russian roulette in the movie "Apocalypse Now."

(2) This is the last letter Richard sent to Takako. "Your gentleman" means her boyfriend at that time. "E.T." refers to her daughter, Mioh. The last letter to me [Masako Kano] was dated 12th of August, then post scripted by hand, telling me that he would come back to Japan later in the fall. He said he received my card telling him I would not coming to USA on the 13th (a little lie actually, for I went to Pheonix on a business trip in September). So I think he posted the two letters on the same day, the 13th of August.

(3) If this is true, this is a movie script different from the one co-written with Brad Donovan.

Hayward,2007

"Glimpses of Richard Brautigan in the Haight-Ashbury"
Claude Hayward
Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Edited by John F. Barber. McFarland, 2007, pp. 113-120.
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.

Because I printed some of Richard's work and got to know him slightly during the year I lived in San Francisco, John Barber asked me to remember what I could about Richard in that context. The following is as disjointed and out of synch as were the times described. I do not remember as much as I thought I did and in it are only glimpses of Richard Brautigan.

I was just a typical American boy: immigrant mother, broken home, bad relationship with a step-father, alienated teenager. I was born in that unique moment in 1945 after the surrender of the Fascists in Europe but before the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I escaped my family in 1963, I also escaped a whole future that could have gone down an academic pathway or perhaps some future in the emerging new technologies; one of my high school classmates, I heard, forty years later, learned some computer stuff in the Navy and then hooked up with a guy named Cray who had some project going. Now he and his wife have separate Learjets. My own brief experience in the corporate world had been as an apprentice at the National Cash Register Company, where I was thoroughly schooled in the intricacies of mechanical cash registers, a trade that was obsolete within a few years, as moving electrons replaced moving chunks of metal as compilers of information.

I followed I am not sure quite what, perhaps a quest for some self-view of authenticity. I had read the Beat poets and novelists, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village as a child. My path led to Venice West and the tattered remnants of the Beats still there after the police pogroms drove the core of the Beat scene to San Francisco's North Beach. The Venice West Café was still there, and it became my door into the Underground. The path led through KPFK, the pioneer Pacifica radio station founded by WW2 conscientious objectors, where I was a newsroom volunteer under the tutelage of Vaughn Marlowe, the news director at the time. That led to the LA Free Press in its first two years, when its office (and editor and publisher Art Kunkin's secret crash pad) was located in the basement of Al Mitchell's underage coffeehouse that was called the Fifth Estate, on Sunset across the street from the notorious Chateau Marmont. I was editor's devil and chief dogsbody, rising to "advertising manager" by the time I left to go to San Francisco in late 1966.

Arriving in San Francisco essentially penniless, with a pregnant partner and no job, I found a flea-infested flat on a soon-to-be "Urban Renewed" block near Third and Mission that we could stay in exchange for fixing it up, a hopeless task if ever there was one, and probably a polite fiction to cover the owner's generosity. I happened across the first issue of the Sunday Ramparts, a rich man's folly perpetrated by Warren Hinkle III, editor of Ramparts magazine, and presented myself at his office, where I managed to talk myself into a job as "advertising manager" of the Sunday Ramparts, that having been my previous experience in the emerging "Underground Press" and cachet enough. I was given an office to share with an up and coming young rock music reviewer named Jann Wenner, a protégé of the mighty Ralph Gleason, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Jann was designated "rock-n-roll editor" for the paper.

Ramparts occupied a heady place in the journalistic world in 1967, a slick magazine blowing the lid off of one scandal after another and helping to push opposition to the Vietnam War into the mainstream of American consciousness. Hinkle III, raised in the old-school Catholic social activist world, acquired a whole stable of counter-culture types on his staff, including Eldridge Cleaver as house Black radical, Wenner as house rock maven, Robert Scheer as house student radical, David Horowitz as house left intellectual, later to become a darling of the Right, Gene Marine as archetypal noir crime and sleaze reporter and many other noteworthy journalists whose names now escape me. I was house hippie, uniquely placed to lead the search for the elusive and enigmatic Diggers and other so called community leaders of the Hippie scene over in the Haight-Ashbury, when Hinkle decided the burgeoning scene over the hill warranted Ramparts magazine's scrutiny.

As "advertising manager" of the Sunday Ramparts, I was essentially worthless, not really having, at age 21, much of a clue as to how to operate in the business world. I did let myself get talked into hiring the San Francisco Mime Troupe for a PR stunt by Harvey Kornspan, their business manager. Harvey's scheme was to dress up a few Troupers in gaudy costumes and go up to the offices of the major ad agencies to sing Christmas carols and pass out promotional literature for the Sunday Ramparts, to attract advertising revenue. Needless to say, it produced little revenue, but some marvelous scenes of gorillas and Santas emerging from high-rise elevators and singing to the bemused office staff while I handed out ad rate cards and promo stuff. Harvey later found a newly-arrived kid from Chicago named Steve Miller and got him to open for Big Brother and the Holding Company at a benefit for the Communication Company on March 5, 1967. Then he got Steve his first gig at the Matrix club over the hill near the Marina District. As Steve's manager, Harvey corralled us into going down and listening to his wunderkind do his stuff. Miller just filled the tiny Matrix with his raw energy and blew down the doors; afterwards he would shyly invite us to his place to smoke some reefer and unwind after the show. We were the only people he knew in that first month or so, but we lost touch in the bubbling ferment of the Haight.

The Mime Troupe was a hotbed of activity and some of its members had secret lives as political and social activists. From this group emerged the Diggers, who challenged the prevailing vision of thousands of young people descending on San Francisco's Haight scene in innocent droves seeking the liberation of peace, love and good vibes. Terminally pragmatic, the Diggers asked such questions as "Where will they sleep?" and "How will they eat?", not to mention where would they shit. The Diggers led by example, anonymously providing cooked meals for any takers in the Panhandle Park that bordered the Haight, organizing food runs to farmers' and produce markets and establishing gleaning rights with various growers and opening a succession of "Free Stores" where clothes and gear were made available. Key to the digger energy was its anonymity and lack of hierarchy. Nobody was the leader and anybody was the leader. People were encouraged to "make it happen", to actualize their own reality.

Around Christmas time, 1966, once I had been working for a while, we escaped the fleabag apartment and rented a flat on Duboce Street. at the south end of Fillmore, ten blocks or so southeast of the Haight-Ashbury epicenter.

Somewhere, in the midst of all that, I encountered Chester Anderson, newly arrived on the scene with a minor literary reputation and some money he had been paid for a paperback novel. My partner at the time, H'lane Resnikoff, recalls that Chester and I connected at Ramparts, and he joined up with us in the flat at Duboce Street. At some point, inspired, I believe, by the hard-hitting broadsides being handed out in the Haight by the Diggers, Chester proposed that we pool resources and acquire some advanced mimeograph equipment and start a street press to serve the community. He led me down to the showrooms of the Gestetner Corporation, a German based firm that was at the leading edge of refined mimeographic copying technology. The heart of the system was the Gestefax, a stencil cutting machine that would reproduce a layout as a stencil for the mimeograph machine. Its pre-digital technology involved a beam of light reading the original as it spun on a revolving drum while burning through the thin rubber paper-backed stencil, rotating simultaneously next to the original, with a spark modulated by the scanning light. It was advanced for its time, and it allowed us to reproduce anything from text to halftones faithfully and rapidly. We were sold. Chester had a few hundred bucks for the down payment, and I had the steady, verifiable job to sign the payment agreement. The Communication Company, ComCo, was born.

The first ComCo sheet laid out our vision: "love is communication," and our noble objectives: provide printing, function as the communication arm of the Diggers, be a more immediate and responsive medium than the hip weeklies, to raise Hell and, last and least, to make our payments on the machinery. We spelled out what we could do and invited participation. No prices, no address, our names and a phone number, which I remember to this very day.

I continued with my job at Ramparts, while Chester and H'lane manned the machinery with the aid of successive young men that wandered in and out. I set up a workroom for the press in the small room over the stairwell, handy to intercept incoming traffic. The machinery was straightforward and fairly foolproof and I quickly trained everybody in the basics. The actual process using the Gestefax involved positioning the camera-ready copy or the original side by side with a fresh stencil on a cylindrical drum and clamping them into place. The drum was set to spinning and the simultaneous scan and burn took from six to eighteen minutes, depending on the sensitivity selected. What emerged was a thin film of rubber on a paper backing, perforated by the spark that, when peeled from the paper and installed on the silk-screen drum of the mimeo, placed ink in a duplication of the original. The actual printing took less time than the preparation and 500 copies could be out the door in less than half an hour.

Sunday Ramparts only lasted a couple of months before Hinkle pulled the plug. Owing to Hinkle's insistence on producing the paper with antique technology, actual Linotype, huge matts and cast lead plates for rotary web presses, the Sunday Ramparts never really made it off the ground, financially. Hinkle's fascination with the minutiae of assembling the pages as actual blocks of type was clear on the several occasions I helped him put the "paper to bed" in the aging pressrooms of one of the City's dailies. He also insisted on the large sheet format, reminiscent of the London Times. The final touch to the ritual was screwdrivers and egg sandwiches at the nearby newsman's bar around the corner as dawn was breaking.

I became full-time operator as ComCo "business" or, more properly, "activity", increased. As the archive shows, a steady stream of broadsides went out, and a steady stream of San Francisco literary figures augmented what came in off the street.

It was not long after ComCo started doing its thing that people started to check us out. Richard Brautigan showed up and started spending time at the Duboce Street location. Sophisticated observers like Richard were quick to pick up on the action. I am not sure if he found us on his own or if he was pointed at us by the Diggers. The Diggers were constantly funneling their various manifestoes through the Gestetner.

Richard was an imposing figure, tall in stature with long, straw-blond hair and a walrus mustache, and always dressed in that heavy range coat, and worn boots that had seen the prairies. He had recently published (I think it was) Trout Fishing in America with the aid of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Margot Patterson Doss, and was a presence in the literary scene. I had seen him at various poetry functions and around in the street. He was friendly and cordial and clearly cut from different cloth than the average hippie. But Richard was an observer, an acute, bemused one with a keen eye for the absurd and surreal. I do not know how long he had already been in the Haight when I got to know him. By that time his book had received critical acclaim in the San Francisco literary world and he was an acknowledged lion on the scene. But he got right out into the streets and felt the full effect, without being swept away by it. I knew he was storing it all away, grist for his fine-grinding poetic mill. Richard was both sardonic observer and willing participant. His poem about taking a leak and gazing down at his penis, knowing it had been inside his lover twice that day, and how that made him feel good always seemed to me to be the perfect metaphor for the innocent romanticism of the free-love hippies.

Richard became a part of the community stream that passed through our door. I know he enjoyed our company, although he sat mostly with H'lane in the kitchen, where she, enormously pregnant with Clane, our first child, held court and kept the coffee going. He and H'lane had many a long caffe-klatsch while the fervor of the ComCo office swirled through the apartment. I would be deviling about, running the press, and Chester might be there or ensconced in his room churning out his latest meth-inspired screed, or prowling the streets in search of good company, news and speed. Richard would never smoke reefer with me, graciously declining, and I do not think he ever did any of the rampant psychedelics that were endemic to the scene, but he was ever-ready for a nip of whiskey if that was about. I never saw him drunk or incapacitated; he was always his seemingly mellow self, usually reeking of patchouli and always wearing the pea coat and the battered, yellow, ten-gallon stetson that was his trademark appearance. He could always be spotted in a crowd, the hat towering above all and his all-seeing gaze not far behind.

His first project for us was the single sheet edition of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," of which I printed perhaps 500 copies, which he quickly distributed. He returned shortly for another run, with a slightly different background, which had more copies.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," the poem, caught me with its magical references to benign machines keeping order. The potential of the cybernetic revolution was beginning to dawn on some of the heavy digger thinkers, and I had been hearing a lot of raps explaining how the machines were going to free humankind from the awful soul-killing drudgery of machine-like labor and there would be a great explosion of creative energy as people were freed to realize broader potentials than standing in front of a machine pulling a lever. Silly dreamers; we should have realized that of course the machines would be enslaved by the owners to create wealth rather than liberate workers. Richard's poem, though, at the time fit right in with our optimism over the promise of the computer.

The third-floor flat on Duboce Street at the corner of Fillmore was just far enough from the Haight action that we did not get casual drop-ins off the street, and yet close enough to be there with a brisk walk. The free street communication that we provided amounted to almost a blog of the scene, of sorts, in that it had the stream-of-consciousness spontaneity of a Web log and access to it was free. Moreover, in a scene in which the hot media were increasingly tuned out by the inwardly looking participants, a medium as cold as a piece of paper put in your hand in the street by someone who looked like you (was another hippie) instantly grabbed the attention and involvement of the reader, who most likely showed it to someone else, and they would see it posted around the neighborhood. Remember that this was going on in early 1967, as the scene began to emerge into national consciousness and the Haight became more and more crowded. We gained massive street credibility by being as unrefined and unfiltered and unstructured as we were, which stood in sharp contrast to the conventional media.

Our open-door policy meant that we would put out anything that came in. In those pre-fax, pre-digital days, it all walked in the door and they had to find us, as we did not advertise. So if a disheveled young man walked in with a poem he had written, inspired by a free meal in the Panhandle, I printed it and he published it by walking out the door with one hundred free copies and handed them out. I have no doubt that there were little handouts like that that never made it into anybody's archive. Even Steve Shneck, who claimed to have an archive in his name at Boston University, to whom I often gave copies of the latest runs on my visits with him on my way home from the Ramparts office, did not get them all.

Brautigan became inspired by the simplicity of our process, which contrasted sharply with the methodical and time-consuming processes which went into straight world publishing. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (the yellow book) happened within a few days of his bringing it in. His text was already typescript so it passed rapidly through the Gestefax. The photo on the cover took a few hours' tinkering to get the right degree of graininess against the bright yellow. I do not remember where the paper and ink came from. Richard provided it, of course, but I do not remember if he brought it to us himself or came with me to buy it from the supplier. There would have had to have been a vehicle involved, because 1,500 copies was four cases of paper. We laid out the book in a format of four pages to a single legal size sheet. I did the printing in an overnight burst of energy. By that point in our operation we had acquired a folder and a stapler, and in a massive collaboration we collated the pages and folded and stapled it all up in a day-long run, Richard helping us with the tedious dance of walk-around-the-table-collating technology, and then he spirited them all away and I began to see the familiar yellow book at bookstores everywhere I went, always priced free. Nowadays, mint examples of that book bring $500 from collectors.

I have been told, although I have no personal knowledge of it, that a later edition of this book, similar in appearance, was rumored to have been printed by someone that commandeered the strike-idled presses at the San Francisco Chronicle. I have never seen an example of this edition, if it exists, although I have handled a mint specimen of the book I printed as recently as June of 2004, and there is no question as to the origin of this original edition. Nancy, the widow of Robert Levy, who worked at City Lights Books for decades, saved it from the original stock that Brautigan delivered to City Lights.

Later, Richard brought us another project, Please Plant This Book, which involved printing on little envelopes to be filled with flower seeds. This was a project I could not do for him, for technical reasons; as best I remember there was a problem with getting the little envelopes through the machine and keeping good registration for the multi-color he wanted. I also had to turn away Robert Crumb, who came to me with his art for the first Zap Comix, which was too large a format for our machine. It had to be standard comic-book size, and besides, Crumb was trying to make some money (rightfully so, considering his talent) and by then we were a digger free service so there would have been an ideological self-conflict. He did later do a poster for our fund-raising concert.

I really caught that free thing bad; four years later I could not sell some Digger land that I had "liberated" with a generous donation from Bill Buck (William Benson Buck III, whose heirs, I believe, founded the Buck Foundation that does so much for Marin County) and I had to find a steward to pass it on to for free who would take on its care. That land is still "liberated", removed from commerce by virtue of legal legerdemain and blessed with an extended family of stewards to this day.

Out of all this ferment in Haight-Ashbury-era San Francisco arose the grand scheme that I know Richard played a part in promoting with his literary reputation. The Invisible Circus grabbed the attention of the literary underground and brought that together with "happening" (as we called it then) artists, performance artists experimenting with the immediacy of now. Richard brought us into it with his vision of the "John Dillinger Computer", an in-your-face gangster of communication, robbing the rich to feed the poor. I, of course, saw very little of it, as I spent most of the weekend in the basement, running the press. A constant flow of paper came in, was duplicated, and left in a rush; a constant on-going commentary on the upstairs scene, with immediate art criticism of the events and random poets flinging poems out to the revelers. Free Wheelin' Frank, the Hells Angel poet, sat in the corner and painstakingly wrote a poem in the midst of the chaos. Somebody went into the bar across the street and sat overhearing a conversation, rushed down to the press room and wrote breathless reportage of the conversation, we printed it up, and then he ran back to the bar to hand the commentary to the still-gabbing drunks. Richard was coming in three times an hour with a poem or another announcement we had to get out.

I doubt that anybody has the complete picture of all that went on during that event, but many descriptions of it, like the blind men in the room with the elephant, have captured the essence of an event that, like the ill-fated Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, has become mythic in its remembrance. Enough has been written of this that I will defer to those who were upstairs to describe, as best they can, just what it was that happened. As concerned Glide Memorial Church deacons surveyed with dismay the wreckage, I myself staggered out of the Glide Church in a pre-dawn Sunday haze, in search of the Gully Jimson Memorial Opera House, but I never found it.

I did find New Mexico, finally, after a few more years in northern California that saw the end of my publishing career and have been here, in sight of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, since 1971.

Heilig,2004

"Ianthe Brautigan Interview"
Steve Heilig
Bolinas Hearsay News, 28 Jan. 2004, pp. 1-4.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) was arguably the most widely-known resident Bolinas has had; he resided here at least part-time from the 1960s until his suicide in 1984. For a decade or so, from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s, his books were not only best-sellers but touchstones for an era. A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, The Abortion, Revenge of the Lawn, and others were read everywhere; the author himself was mobbed on the streets and featured in LIFE magazine, unheard-of stardom for authors of the time.

As January 30—this Friday—is Brautigan's birthday, and this year marks 20 years since his death, we decided to honor him here. Ianthe Brautigan was Richard's only child and recalls—and reckons with—his legacy in her own poignant book published in 2000, You Can't Catch Death. She lives with her family in Sonoma County.

SH: I was looking at In Watermelon Sugar and it says that the book was "started May 13, 1964 in a house in Bolinas" (and dedicated to Joanne Kyger, among others). You were very young then. What is your earliest memory of Bolinas?

Ianthe Brautigan: It was probably that same year, 1964, when I was about 4 years old. My dad was really tall, and when I was young, he was very poor. So we walked a lot of places, and I would hold onto his thumb, so he could pull me along. We had to walk from downtown up to the Mesa, which was just too much for me. So he and his girlfriend got a long stick, and I hung from it with both hands while they dragged me along!

Many people think that Bolinas served as the model for the village in In Watermelon Sugar. Did he ever mention that to you?

Hmmm, I've never heard that. Could be. But it could be Big Sur too, so I'd hesitate to say...

So you were here intermittently from that time?

The Doss's had a house there, and I might have gone out there with my dad and one of his girlfriends—as my dad didn't drive. We might have been there before my dad bought a home there, in 1971. From then on I used to go out there on weekends, spring vacations and so on.

This was the house on Terrace?

Yes, and I really liked it too. It was a very haunted house for an 11-year old, but I enjoyed it, at least in the daytime. In the nighttime I wasn't so keen on it.

You write about the "haunted" aspect of it in your book, but I've heard others say that was sort of a hoax cooked up while your dad and others were sitting around drinking one night. But for you it seems to have been a very real feeling...

Oh yeah. Some of it was just the structure, 3 stories, lots of stairways, all grown over. But I once lived there by myself from January to June in 1979 or 1980 and was just fine. My dad did think it was haunted too, but not in a bad way. He said there'd been a suicide there or something, which he really just thought was kind of interesting rather than gloomy. But it's very different now and wonderful people live there and its all fine. I feel like the house has been "rehabilitated" or something.

At that point your dad was in Montana a lot, right?

Yes, and I think in Japan too at that time. I was at College of Marin and drove back and forth. It was lovely. For one thing, it was the first time I remember having lots of room to live in. My dad had always lived in the city in apartments which were very small and dedicated to a writer's life, without any room for anyone or anything else, not even for a girlfriend really. When he moved to Bolinas all of a sudden I had a bedroom! I had a lot of fun. It was an old house and the people that had lived there before had left lots of stuff, old magazines from the [19]30s and [19]40s, and I loved to read those and explore the house. And my dad had friends out, and there was lots of cooking and eating in the big old kitchen. And I played tennis down at the little tennis court, and went to the beach, and walked around... Terrace is close to downtown so I could cruise around. I didn't know anybody but I had a lot of fun. It's very beautiful there but I don't know if you want to put that in here and get more people flocking there.

Our readers tend to already know that, so no problem in this case.

I do remember the beach being "iffy" as at that time they were still dumping sewage and I remember a hepatitis breakout. I remember being there for the 4th of July and the tug-of-war with Stinson Beach. And it's a funny trip to get there, but I think because of that I had a kind of sense of safety. When I was driving back and forth from College of Marin, I'd not be afraid to pick up hitchhikers even at night—like a pregnant lady with all her groceries who I could not see until she got in, and her big concern was that her ice cream might melt before she got home. And when my car broke down once a car full of guys picked me up and I wondered whether I should get in with them, but they took me all the way back to Bolinas.

Now a nice van service has started up again to give people rides over the hill. It's kind of ironic to hear you talk about feeling safe as right now there is a lot of concern here about aggressive street people, drunks, etc downtown. And there were lots of them when you lived here, even more than now.

Yes, I remember that some drug rehab counselors I knew in the 80's referred to Bolinas as "the Bermuda triangle." But the whole time I was there I never felt unsafe. Nobody bugged me. Plus you kinda felt that the street people actually had a shed or something to sleep in, so it seemed less desperate than in San Francisco or somewhere else.

Lots of them do have places like that.

Good. Bolinas always seemed both sleepy and edgy, so maybe its the changing times rather than the street people themselves?

Good point. Any other stories from your time with your dad here?

Many of my memories are of going to sleep during adult parties, with lots of fun talking and drinking. My dad had a peculiar relation to music, and never had a big record collection and I think only bought a stereo when he moved to Bolinas. I remember one time Robert Creeley came over with a bunch of people and they were having a lovely time, with records playing. I woke up after this particular one and this record was lying there broken, as apparently my dad got really drunk and insisted on playing this one song over and over all night until Creeley finally grabbed the record and broke it!

Any idea what record it was? Creeley might have been justified...

I'm not sure. I seem to remember it was a Joan Baez record. We'd also sit around by ourselves and watch baseball on the first TV he'd bought, a big old black and white one.

Did it feel strange in any way being the daughter of such a famous guy?

Not really My dad had very countercultural values. He didn't consider himself a hippie and he raised me that way too. My daughter is that way too, she marches to her own drummer, not caught up in shopping and owning stuff and all that. So for me Bolinas was very fun.

Do you have a favorite among his books?

That is really difficult. What's yours?

Hmm. I was afraid you'd do that. Probably the short stories in Revenge of the Lawn And I still love A Confederate General from Big Sur too as it's such a hysterical story. And of the later ones, his last, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away, is amazing, although dark.

Yeah, and at that time he was so . . . well, the last time I saw him, it was like, "Four o'clock, I need a drink." I'd never seen him like that. Anyway, for a long time Revenge [of the Lawn] was a favorite of mine too. But now I'm really keen on Dreaming of Babylon, and Sombrero Fallout. But it changes, and I want to read In Watermelon Sugar again.

Do you ever come back to visit here?

It's really hard for me. I have layers of memories there. Going to the house is even harder, but the people living there now have been really great to me.

You know, some tried to blame the town for your dad's death in some way—the culture or climate or house or certain people.

Oh no, no. no. It was nothing like that. And I've heard people say "oh, he should have been on Xanax or Prozac or something like that." I'm sure those help sometimes. But my dad just lived his life. I can almost hear his voice laughing and joking "Oh yeah, it was all Bolinas' fault, ho ho ho."

And boozing was hardly unusual for accomplished writers. Alcohol is a tricky one that is an "upper" in the short term but the opposite in the long run.

Yes. But you know, I think that for awhile alcohol might have saved my dad's life, keeping things at bay, but in the end it was not a helpful factor. But I don't know that its absence would have changed the outcome. maybe if he had been hospitalized for a week he would not have committed suicide—then. But still he might have later. Of course I've wondered over and over if there was something we might have done better.

I think that kind of self-guilt-tripping is universal among survivors of suicide.

Right. Lots of people did try to stop him from drinking but you know it's useless if the person doesn't want too. And it wasn't all gloomy, as a lot of people had a great time.

I've heard he was not big on other drugs, even though many readers associated at least his early books with psychedelics.

Right. He didn't lecture people about it much, though. He did lecture me against speed—he said he'd seen some talented artists destroyed by it. And he hated tobacco—he joked that when he got old he might take up chewing tobacco and go spit on the floors of smokers! The funny thing was, he was not big on breaking laws—he'd trespass to go fishing, but other than that, not much. And he hated dogshit.

Dogshit? Now THAT could have been a problem for him here in Bolinas. Despite how his life ended, your memories of him seem mostly very positive.

Anybody who knew my father knew he was a most forceful individual in a most lovely way. You don't go from being dirt poor "white trash" as he put it, with no prospects or expectations—to being a world-renowned writer without having something extraordinary within you. I only recently realized that most people would have given their right toe to have written almost any one of his books, let along all the incredible body of work my father wrote in a relative short period of time. And that should be enough. He doesn't have to be a tragedy too, he just lived his life. I think I owe him a lot.

My two favorite authors as a kid were Tolkien and Brautigan. I read all your dad's early books when I was very young, in school classes even and getting them confiscated by teachers, and then went on to others like Kerouac, Hemingway, Kesey, and many more, at least partly due to him.

I hear that kind of story from many people. Oh yeah, he had great influences, like Faulkner too, he read tons of Faulkner...And somebody told me that Ken Kesey once said something like "500 years from now we'll all be dust but whoever IS around then will still be reading Brautigans."

A fitting tribute. Any final thoughts for us?

Well, I'm very pleased you and Joanne [Kyger] are doing this, and that people remember him. He'd love that. Obviously Bolinas had a very fond place in his heart.

Hershiser,2011

"From a Damselfly's Notebook"
Deanna Hershiser
Rosebud, no. 51) October 2011, p. 76.
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.

There were great fires going under the two vats, and Peter was feeding wood into them . . . I like Pete. We've been friends for years.
— Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

I tug from a manila envelope the plastic sleeve, letting the magazine slide onto the table. A musty aroma, but otherwise it's in good condition. Bright blue, with a front-page cartoon graphic of a family on a motorbike—father, mother, baby daughter in mother's backpack—and they are smiling and chunky and flowing, like the characters in the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. In a photo on page 49 he crouches beside a rushing California stream. Handlebar mustache, sandy hair, and round, wire-rimmed glasses.

The article says by this point his third, fourth, and fifth novels had each sold 100,000 copies. He received speaking invitations from Harvard. A communal school in Cambridge had been named after his first success, Trout Fishing in America.

I bring the copy to my parent's house, open it to the article, and hand it to Peter Webster, my dad.

"Can you believe it?" I say. "Life, from August 14, 1970."

Dad says, "Oh," and reads a few sentences. Then he sets the magazine down.

Mom tells me how happy the rhododendrons look that Dad transplanted out back and I should come see them. I wish Dad would take more time with the magazine. I would love to see him search the photos, read news from that day, from his friend's life. But Dad is quiet. He goes to his computer and starts a game of solitaire.

Before now I have coaxed Dad into sharing stories from the years he and Richard Brautigan, the man in the magazine, knew each other. He has obliged me, most notably on a long afternoon at his kitchen table. For hours he reminisced, lost in time spent during 1953-55 along the rivers, reservoirs, and streams around his hometown, Eugene, Oregon.

I value everything he says about their friendship because of what came after. One left the state for seminary, a committed family man, and earned his preaching degree. The other followed his dreams to San Francisco and forged a writer's legacy.

If I had any power over history, I would make both their stories, rather than only Dad's, arc back to Eugene. In retirement the two would have come together again, having survived like crafty, wild rainbows. I wish it could have been so.

Instead, there are Dad's memories. He has answered the questions of others—biographers and news people who occasionally call. No one from the likes of Life shows interest anymore, but the local paper has run stories, and there is an amazingly detailed website for Richard's cult fans around the world. What Dad hasn't offered, because no one knows to ask, are the almost spiritual fishing adventures he had with Richard. He doesn't mention, either, the conflict between them or its years-later resolution. Scenes from Dad's memories color the pages of his existence and have bled onto my own, enriching them.

Dad's friend Richard moved to Eugene during high school. They met in 1951 playing church basketball. Richard went to First Baptist, Dad to First Christian. The night of their initial match-up Dad's team groaned ahead of time, thinking their winning streak over. First B's team boasted twins who each stood 6' 3", and Richard topped them at 6' 4".

Dad's first thought when he saw Richard was that Ichabod Crane had come to life with sandy hair. Guarding Richard under the basket was easy. All Dad had to do was give him a hip, and Richard lost his balance. First Christian won the game.

After graduation they met again, both working the summer of 1953 for Eugene Fruit Grower's Association canning vegetables. Dad was in green beans, while Richard stood on the beets line. One early August morning they showed up to find a sign posted on the locked door. No work today, due to too little produce from the fields.

Richard and another beet man, Stan, approached Dad at his car, a 1937 Ford. It wasn't an impressive ride—rarely starting on first try, fuel gauge broken. But it ran.

"You want to come fishing?" Richard asked. He always carried extra tackle with the creel slung across his back. He and Stan needed wheels.

Though he had barely fished before, Dad agreed to go. He drove them a long way upriver to the McKenzie's South Fork, Richard's favorite spot.

As Dad shut the car door, civilization faded. They had left behind traffic's bluster and the heat of town. Richard tramped a path through fern, Queen Anne's Lace, huckleberry, wild grape. Pillars of cedar, hemlock, and Douglas fir chambered this mansion, their branches opening a hundred feet overhead, their scents a biting aroma. Ancient logs stretched off into silence.

Dad followed Stan and Richard to the river. They showed him how to cast a fly. Richard's equipment had names like two- and four-pound tapered lines with test leaders. He and Stan waded into the water and began hooking trout.

Dad tried. He hooked twigs, leaves, and submerged wood. Casting again and again, fruitless, he watched the other two enjoying themselves. "Try one more cast," they said as evening came on. But he gained no technique, no skill that day, beyond coming to understand what "skunked" meant.

He didn't mind. Sinking onto a boulder, he breathed cooling air and prayed his thanks. Richard and Stan's muted voices rose and fell over the stream.

Perhaps he caught a glimpse of his future: hands grasping pulpit like a helm, his gaze on people listening from the pews, his voice steady and sure about his subject—"Peter told the other disciples he was going fishing."

That moment fading light slanted between sapling leaves. The water's music played. Dad was hooked.

Many rivers had flowed past those seventeen years, and thousands of trout . . .
— Trout Fishing in America

The years have brought Dad and Mom back to Eugene. I moved here before they returned, but I hadn't fished since childhood. At Dad's request I've since ridden several times with him up the McKenzie to Leaburg Reservoir.

Trout season is a lovely time of year for him, now that he's no longer responsible for a church sanctuary's upkeep and haggling with board members over budget issues and choosing five hymns for Sunday.

In his boat on the reservoir I enjoy the way the sun lights the hills and shows Dad's hair surrendering its last shock of brown to silver. While he concentrates on the business at hand, I gather more crumbs of information. I discover that one excellent thing about his first experience preaching was the church's location, just downriver from here in Walterville.

It was a student pastorate, a job he did in 1956 and '57, while completing his degree and before becoming ordained. He and Mom were newlyweds and usually drove together on Sundays out to the tiny Walterville church for morning and evening services. When Mom couldn't accompany him, Dad's fishing gear sufficed. Those days he left home early with tackle box and a metal cooler. Beneath Hendricks Wayside Bridge he cast into the McKenzie. His excitement about the morning ahead swirled like fog over water. He wanted to give his aging congregation a fresh vision of their mission and hope in God. Already, though, he was learning how currents of apathy and criticism flowed among people set in their spiritual ways.

I picture him in black suit, hair groomed to a sheen, bouncing on the balls of his bare feet. His polished shoes were nestled in damp grass farther up the bank. He reeled in then like he does now from his boat, a couple of clicks, and the weighted line bumped the river bottom.

Dad was completely smitten by Mom, but she didn't share his fishing love. When their Frigidaire's small, inner freezer became stacked with fish like cordwood, Mom complained.

He missed Richard. His friend had left Oregon for San Francisco. Richard had asked Dad to come, but Dad turned him down.

When he was a boy in the Northwest, trout fishing had given his days a purpose and had stoked his imagination.
— Keith Abbott, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan

The summer of [19]'53, he and Richard began to bond the second time they fished, the day Dad drove them between mountain teeth.

An early start brought them to Clear Lake, the head of the McKenzie, before noon. They rented a rowboat and used weighted lines and worms instead of Richard's flies.

Dad still failed to catch anything, his problem the water. True to its name it was glassy. A fish coming at the lure was shockingly visible. Though he aimed to set his hook the way Richard did, the fish spooked Dad every try.

Late in the afternoon, Richard suggested they take the Ford higher into the mountains to see the view.

They chugged up hairpin turns to a chuck-holed, boulder-dotted road. Dad kept having to steer far around the rocks, so that by the time they reached Santiam Pass, he worried there wasn't enough gas to get home. With a useless gauge, he could only guess.

Dad didn't voice his fear about the fuel or his concern, heading back down the mountain, that the brakes might give out. He was good at wearing a confident mask—one result of growing up poor in a middle class neighborhood.

Later in their friendship he would learn poverty had shaped Richard's personality more than his own. But tonight, as the ground at last leveled, Dad worried in silence.

Richard dozed, his head against the passenger window. When a log truck with an antsy driver came up behind and dogged them for miles, Dad's nerves danced on the breaking point.

At a straight stretch, the truck started passing them. Something in Dad snapped—he didn't want the truck to win. He gunned the engine.

Awake now, Richard hung on, his eyes growing wider. After a minute he yelled, "Let him pass!" That brought Dad back to reality, and he slowed down.

My guess is Richard understood Dad's anger. He knew the same fear of being disadvantaged, of what might overtake him.

They both grew up without fathers. Through high school, Dad struggled with anger at his family's circumstances. His pressure-release valve was football—rage made him a star defensive end. But he didn't want to destroy anyone with what he held inside. He turned down sports scholarships and registered, with church members' grants, for Christian college the fall after he graduated.

In Richard's mind writing was the savior. A poet who longed to pen novels like Hemingway, he carried a book as often as his pole and tackle—A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea. He dreamed of escaping the Northwest and making it on the strength of his words. He relied on no one.

Fishing would make the two of them equal partners in escapes into deeper realities, into the spirit of the wild, where Dad saw God's handiwork and Richard heard poetry.

He was handing out poetry broadsides gratis to Haight-Ashbury passersby and publishing little folios, free for the taking in community shops. One such work, which he calls "true underground poetry," was Please Plant This Book, a collection of eight packets of real seeds, each printed with a poem and planting instructions.
— John Stickney, "Gentle Poet of the Young," Life, 1970

After fishing, Dad's next outdoor love is growing things, one he shares with Mom. They each came of age tending WWII victory gardens, and in the Midwest Mom learned canning and baking extraordinaire. While I grew up, our vegetable garden varied in size and duration. My parents served one church on Tacoma's gang-ridden Roosevelt Heights, together tending children of broken lives and families. Their task allowed few summer squash moments. Even then they grew flowers and were soothed by daffodils in a vase, rosebuds on new shoots tight with promise.

On a mellow morning this past spring, I helped Dad wrangle a pea vine trellis into place. As he crouched in mounded soil I mentioned I had found some of Richard's early poems on the Internet. There was one about Jesus at Christmas, written for their high school paper.

Dad's breath puffed as he punched a trowel under the stubborn trellis foot.

"Richard was a Christian who didn't know it," he said.

I cocked my head. Dad sounded as though he had just buried his lifelong doctrine regarding each person's need for conventional salvation. I almost asked him to clarify.

But I remained silent, loving the simplicity of what Dad shared—his heart's wish.

It's good to name creeks after people and then later to follow them for a while seeing what they have to offer, what they know and have made of themselves.
— Trout Fishing in America

No photograph exists of Dad and Richard together that first autumn, 1953. There are only stories. One trip took them west of Eugene, up Indian Creek and into wonder. Eight feet wide, the creek flowed between steep cliffs. Rain still hadn't fallen, Oregon's usual wetness holding off for the equinox. They waded against the current, stopping to cast. No fish were biting.

Trees branched far above them. Water rushing faster sounded ahead, becoming a steady rumble.

As they rounded a slow bend, Dad caught his breath. A narrow, forty-foot waterfall surged and sparkled between the cliffs. He no longer cared whether there were trout here or not.

The two of them stood a while, taking in the view. For Dad, the glory of God shone everywhere. Richard said, "Let's climb up."

It was a scramble, grasping roots, finding footholds. Fortunately the dirt was drier and firmer than would be the case in a month or so. They made it to the top and continued wading upstream, the falls' voice softer in their ears. For their efforts they caught only shiners—small trout, as Richard described them, "not worth spitting at."

The adventure would ever linger in Dad's memory.

You're supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn't any sugar to put in it.
— Trout Fishing in America

To support their fishing habit, the two needed funds. They took to hunting night crawlers, their flashlights cutting swaths in the dark over lawns around town and across the University of Oregon campus. October rains failed to soak their quest. And 1500 worms, sold to the bait shop, brought them $15.00, enough to buy lots of tackle and gas.

Another business venture didn't go so well. After Dad's first college term ended, they tried selling Christmas trees. They got permission to use a parking lot on West 11th Street. Then they rambled off in Dad's car to "borrow" young trees no one would miss from riverbanks here and there.

Dad and Richard strapped each tree they culled to the top of the Ford. It took many gas tank fill-ups, driving between the woods and their lot with a prize or two each time. And Christmas was only a week away. They would end up losing money on their five trees sold. But Dad remembers the best part of the enterprise.

One afternoon, halfway across a mountain meadow, he paused and stood still. He had been intent on finding trees, but now the scenery overwhelmed him. Grass blades bent where animals had lain. Dad reached wide, as if to embrace the forest, and let himself fall backward. Above him hung a fir-rimmed cloud ceiling. Through chilled mist his breath steamed skyward.

Richard saw him from across the clearing and ran over. "What's wrong?" he repeated several times.

Dad sighed and reassured him. Everything, really, was fine.

Richard sank down cross-legged. He smiled. They stayed there a while, silent, before moving again.

They fished through spring and summer 1954. Their journeys likely continued the next year in similar fashion. Tales flow together in Dad's mind.

Trout fishing's opening day at Leaburg, Richard almost caught a 14-incher, and then he hooked one nearly that size when they ventured along Gate Creek, near Vida. Richard used his four-pound test line and a two-pound leader, blowing Dad's mind, because it was like working with a spider's web. After a long, elegant fight, Richard caught the trout. Dad cheered and helped him pack it in ice to take home.

These were their final, glorious days of freedom, before either man launched into life's deeper responsibilities. Like fingerling trout, they fed on the river's gifts.

Two years later, Dad and Mom would be planning their wedding. Richard would finish a three-month stint in a mental hospital fifty miles away and finally leave Eugene for good.

Dad recalls clearly how he felt about Richard's writing. As a college sophomore, Dad typed term papers in Richard's rented room, both of them up most of some nights. Richard would read to Dad. The poems and short stories gave Dad a sense of something wonderful, like no writing he had heard before, and he encouraged Richard to keep at it. Richard would be a famous writer someday, Dad just knew.

He didn't foresee the guilt he would carry from their friendship.

Dad thinks it happened because he refused to loan Richard twenty dollars. Dad was a junior. It was cold out. Richard faced money troubles, but Dad didn't know how serious they were. Throughout their friendship, he had loaned Richard a dollar here and there. This time, at Richard's request for more cash than it took to buy good shoes, Dad answered, "I'll loan you twenty dollars after you pay me back all the other money you've borrowed."

Richard left, upset. Dad learned later that his next stop was the city jail. Richard demanded they arrest him. As a starving artist, he apparently figured at least the food would be free.

When the police staff refused Richard's request, he threw a rock at their window and broke it.

Dad came down to the station.

"What are you doing here?" a sullen Richard asked.

"I'm your friend. A friend comes to see you."

Dad doesn't remember the rest of their conversation, but it wasn't good. The next day, wheels turned to get Richard committed to the state mental hospital. There he spent three months and endured electroshock treatments. Dad hated this. He guessed those episodes obscured or erased Richard's memory of their fishing trips. In any case, the two of them didn't go after trout together again.

Tonight, late, as I was going through some of his unpublished poetry I found myself looking for a sign, a note, something to tell me why. For a few seconds my heart beat fast, and I actually thought I might find a reason. I didn't. They were just poems, not reasons.
— Ianthe Brautigan, You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir

In 1970 Dad attended a minister's conference in Berkeley. His free afternoon found him buying one of Richard's books and discovering, to his amazement, Richard's address and phone number printed inside. He made his way to Richard's apartment on San Francisco's Geary Street and knocked. Above his heart's quick rhythm, he heard nothing. No one was around.

Back home at the kitchen table, Dad showed Mom his book over breakfast. I was ten. I picked up the volume and opened to a page with a swear word. Quickly I closed it again.

Dad was saying, "I'm going to give him a call."

He tells me, now—weeks after I bought the Life issue featuring Richard—that when he dialed him in 1970, Richard answered on the first ring.

"It was really something," Dad says. "Like he had been talking to me yesterday. Like we left off mid-sentence."

Richard told Dad he just got home from a ferry ride. He launched into descriptions of his adventure on the boat: the wind, the colors, the raucous afternoon. Though it left him nearly dizzy, Dad enjoyed their conversation.

He says, "That was the last time I talked to him."

In 1984 Dad learned of Richard's suicide. He was deeply saddened. After thinking about it, he wasn't greatly surprised, because Richard's idol, Hemingway, had chosen the same way out.

The people I've read who knew Richard—his daughter, Ianthe, and his friend Keith Abbott—regret how drinking and sudden celebrity apparently fostered his decline into depression. Those close to him remember his zany antics and off-the-ceiling humor. They never knew what to expect next, and that was great with them.

My heart wishes Dad and Richard could have hiked together into the wild in middle age. If they had again wandered their streams of healing, maybe Richard's story could have followed a different channel.

Last summer Dad and I had one fabulous day up at Leaburg Reservoir. We both caught our limits. Watching my father reel in trout after trout—big ones—made me want to dance. Fishing with Dad is like reading his own poetry. It's the rhythm of his life on display. In this joyful work, he is completely at home.

I am more grateful than I can say for Richard Brautigan's influence on Dad, on me. Whenever I hear the old stories again, I become a damselfly on a log beside the two of them, privileged to absorb something wild and free and almost lost.

I can't help believing Richard held onto memories, as well, during all the years he plied his craft. Though he is gone, Richard's younger days exist within his writings.

Of many tales I've scribbled down when Dad tells them, I think my favorite is about when the two of them feasted.

This time they traveled west of Eugene, past Fern Ridge Dam to Long Tom River. Leaving the car at a wayside park, they hiked to the 12-foot wide flowing stream. It was knee deep. They walked up the river, fishing.

Eight trout later they returned to the park, where there were grills for cooking. Dad remembers how well prepared Richard had come. He had brought a pan, some lard, and some potatoes. Dad fed the fire while Richard started the trout and made sizzling fries.

Telling me the story, Dad sits back in his chair. His face is relaxed, almost boyish. "We each had four fish to eat." He closes his eyes.

I imagine the smoky taste in the air, a cricket's tune rising, twilit trees in the forest beyond, the pleasure of easy company.

"It was one of those moments you never forget," he says. "The two of us—we could have lived forever." Dad smiles. "If we'd had enough fish."

Keefer,2000

"Beauty, Pain and Watermelon Sugar"
Bob Keefer and Quail Dawning
The Register-Guard, 30 Jan. 2000, pp. 1H, 2H.
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.

Today is Richard Brautigan's 65th birthday.

Or it would have been, if he hadn't shot himself dead 15 years ago in sad obscurity in California.

Readers of a certain age are likely to remember Brautigan as the long-haired, '60s celebrity author of such counterculture gems as "Trout Fishing in America"—a book that had little to do with angling—and "In Watermelon Sugar."

What almost nobody seems to know is that Brautigan grew up in Eugene.

He went to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School here. He has his first crush here. He was locked up for a while in the state mental hospital in Salem.

After he graduated from Eugene High School, Brautigan hung around town briefly before moving to the North Beach section of San Francisco, where he joined the poets of the Beat generation and became internationally famous.

We are two Brautigan fans—one, a 48-year-old reporter who discoevered Brautigan as a college student a generation ago; the other, a 17-year-old home-schooler who writes for the 20Below section of this newspaper and first heard about Brautigan's work from her mother.

We've spent the last three months re-reading his works and searching for the ghost of Richard Brautigan in Eugene. Here is what we found.

"I would do things like that when I was 16. I'd hitchhike 50 miles in the rain to go hunting for the last hours of the day. I'd stand alongside the road with a 30-30 and my thumb out and think nothing of it, expecting to be picked up, and I always was."
— Richard Brautigan, "A Short History of Oregon"

Bob Keefer and I walked into the lavender halls of South Eugene High School, a young journalist and an experienced reporter, an unlikely pair determined to cooperate on tackling the story of Beat generation writer and poet Richard Brautigan and the days of his youth, most of which were spent here in Eugene.

As the two of us made our way toward the library, swarms of noisy students surged past us on their way to lockers and classrooms. Here, in high school, one often looks into the faces of the future. We were searching for faces from the past.

I can remember when I was a little girl, hearing my mother talk to one of her friends about Brautigan's novel "In Watermelon Sugar" and how it had affected her. I listened carefully, taking in every detail about the "watermelontrout" oil lanterns, wistful fantasy lamps with faces of children, trout and tigers that guard the bridges in the book: and the sun that shone a different color every day. It sounded very magical and appealing.

For years, memories of Mom's description of the shunned Margaret, a powerful character from the book, would come to me, and she seemed to be the epitome of sadness. I imagined her young, pale and afraid.

In 1997, I finally picked up a copy of "In Watermelon Sugar" from my mother's bookshelf.

It excited me to find the book. Although I had always remembered my Mom's description of it, I had never read it. When I did, it was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined, and from that moment on, I was hooked.

One of the things that attracted me to Brautigan's work was the fact that I wrote like him, and he like me. We both seemed most to enjoy focusing on the everyday details of life. Through reading his poetry and stories, I learned that it was OK to write about pointless beauty and absurd thoughts. Brautigan quickly became my idol and my inspiration.

Despite my passion for his work, I did not know that Brautigan grew up in Eugene until only a few months ago. By coincidence, shortly after I discovered Brautigan's Eugene connections, I found out that Bob Keefer was also a fan of Richard's work. And thus began our quest for information about the writer's younger years.

Early in our search, we found ourselves in the library of South Eugene High School, browsing through the yearbook closet.

Glancing over the pages of black-and-white photos, I saw ink arrows and pencil-drawn stars labeling the classmates once favored by the original owner of the yearbook. When I found what we were looking for—a skinny, pale teen-ager who was unmistakably Brautigan at age 17—there were no stars or arrows next to his picture. But within 10 minutes, we has also found the yearbook photos of Brautigan's high school best friend, Pete Webster, and Pete's sister, Linda, Brautigan's first crush.

When I looked at the three pictures of them—Pete, Linda, and Richard himself—I saw a trio of young, almost familiar faces. It inspired me to know that this writer, whom I idolized so much, had a life, a past, and had spent time in some of the same places I spend time in now.

Although Brautigan would later move to San Francisco to write about beauty and pain, love and death, these faded pictures were proof that he had once been just a lovelorn young poet wandering the rainy streets of Eugene, Oregon.

"chapter 5
The car
chapter 6
left my hometown, Eugene, Oregon,
chapter 7
and started towards Salem,
chapter 8
where the State Insane Asylum is located."
— "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly By"

We found Edna Webster in the same little white house on Madison Street where Brautigan used to come to visit her sons, Pete and Danny, and his first love, her daughter, Linda.

Me, I discovered Brautigan three decades ago, when I was 17 and just starting out in college. My freshman roommates and I used to sit on winter days with our feet warming in the bathtub and read aloud from "Trout Fishing in America" and "A Confederate General from Big Sur."

Gently subversive and wickedly funny, Brautigan was the first published writer I encountered who made me think you could write about the world the way it really was. Unlike so much of what happened in the '60s, Brautigan still reads well 30 years later, though few people seem to know of him anymore.

I'd had it in the back of my mind for several years to dig up Brautigan's background in Eugene and write a story.

So I was truly surprised one day at a meeting with 20Below writers to discover that Quail Dawning had not only heard of Brautigan, but had read his books and wanted to write a story about him, too.

Let's do this together, I said.

Webster, white-haired and cordial, was sitting in a recliner looking out through her screen door when the two of us appeared on her doorstep one warm fall afternoon. It almost seemed as though she had been waiting for us to show up.

"Richard was madly in love with my daughter," she recalled. "But she was only 14 then. He thought he was crazy to love my daughter so much. I said, "I don't think so, especially at your age."

Webster described an awkward lonely boy who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall. Brautigan played basketball, he was on the team at First Baptist Church in Eugene . . . and loved to hunt and fish. "He didn't have a happy home life," Webster said, "with one stepfather after another passing through his troubled household."

Quail and I visited Brautigan's mother, who also still lives in Eugene. She stared blankly at us one day when we knocked on her door and asked to talk. She told us to go away, but took my card and promised to call back. I left several cards in those weeks. She never called!

Writer William Hjortsberg had sent us to Edna Webster. Hjortsberg, who lives in Montana, was a friend and neighbor of Brautigan's for eight years. He's spent the last nine years working on a Brautigan biography, to be published one of these days by Alfred Knopf.

Why is he writing the biography of a now obscure writer and poet?

"Well, you know, better me than somebody else," he laughed when I called him, and mentioned Brautigan's reputation as a cheapskate. "I actually like Richard. I think he was a great writer. Maybe he wasn't the best person, but who is?"

Hjortsberg said Brautigan hated being associated with the hippie movement, even though that was where he drew much of his fame and fortune.

"We were in a bar in Livingston, Montana, called the Wrangler. There was some traveling salesman guy, a guy in a polyester plaid suit, knocking them back, and Richard had his glass of whiskey in his hand. 'God, you hippies have it made,' the salesman said. And Richard looked at him with such scorn. 'I am not a hippie, sir. I work for my living.'"

Brautigan, who never had much luck with girls in his early life, pined so hard for Linda Webster, Edna's daughter, that he bagan to fall apart.

"He decided he was crazy." Webster said. "He went down to the police station. They said, 'You're not crazy.' So he threw a rock through the police station window."

That's how he got locked up in Salem, where he received electroshock treatments for his depression.

Soon after that, he left for California. Before he left, Brautigan gave Webster a stack of his poems. He was 21 years old and already knew he would be famous some day.

"He gave me those manuscripts and he said they would be my social security when he became famous."

"There are comets
that flash through
our mouths wearing
the grace
of oceans and galaxies."
— "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster"

Richard's one-time best friend, Pete Webster, now a minister in Bremerton, Washington, spoke with Bob and me on the phone in the early part of a wintry day. Webster is a friendly man with a warm voice and a kind manner. He spent the first part of the conversation making jokes and sharing small, precious details about his life.

Webster told us of hunting and fishing with Brautigan at Fern Ridge Reservoir, selling nightcrawlers and Christmas trees, and staying up late in Brautigan's rented room near 17th Avenue and Lawrence Street in Eugene, comparing term papers and poetry. "He was a real good poet even then," Webster told us, "and I loved the sound of his voice."

The stories Webster shared were beautiful moments captured in time by the power of memory. He recalled wonderful trout fishing adventures on a stretch of the McKenzie River now obliterated by Cougar Reservoir, savoring the taste and smell of the fresh fish and enjoying the company of a true friend.

Once, while they were cutting fir trees to sell during the holiday season, Webster said, "I became so overcome with the beauty of it all that I threw myself down on my back to look up at the sky. Richard came running over, saying, 'Are you all right?' And when it was all explained, Richard said he liked that very much."

Webster and Brautigan saw each other only once after Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1956, but even then, Webster says, their bonds were like those of brotherhood.

When Brautigan killed himself in 1984, Webster remembers thinking that it was a very sad situation.

"No one found him for a few days, and when that happened, I realized Richard must not have had very many friends at that point."

We then set about contacting Webster's sister, Linda, Brautigan's one-time heartthrob.

Linda, who lives in Hillsboro and works as an importer, is a gentle, soft-spoken woman who still has fond memories of Brautigan. At the time of their brief romance, she was a 14-year-old freshman in high school. Brautigan was 19.

Though she declined to comment on her feelings regarding Brautigan's suicide, Linda did tell us about the summer of 1955, which the two spent together writing poetry.

"And guess whose was better?" Linda quipped.

Brautigan would write stories and send them to magazines in Linda's name, she said, "hoping to win points." The stories were all rejected. She never saw him again after he went to San Francisco, but she owns all of his books.

I asked Linda what one thing she would like to say about her relationship with Brautigan.

"I would like people to know it was not terrible, that time I spent with Richard. I've said things before about how I used to hide from him, climbing trees and things like that, but we were playing a game. Richard and I got along well, we had fun together. Reporters in the past have made it sound like I hated him, when really I cared about him quite a lot."

I return as if in the dream of a young American duck hunting prince to Elmira and I am standing again on the bridge across the Long Tom River...

Whenever I walk through Elmira I stand and look at the Elmira Union High School. The classrooms are always empty and dark inside. It seems as if nobody ever studies there and the darkness is never broken because there is no reason to ever turn the lights on.
— "Elmira"

No one at Elmira High School seems to know that Richard Brautigan once wrote these lines, as Quail and I discovered when we drove out there one afternoon. It was a perfect Brautigan day—sunny and sparkling, the fall light glinting off the Long Tom River where Brautigan once liked to fish, and which winds like a dark presence through much of his writing.

Though she had no idea he had grown up around here, Elmira English teacher Cathye Tritten teaches a Brautigan poem, "Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4" from an anthology of American literature.

Tritten is old enough to have encountered Brautigan during his years of fame but doesn't remember reading him in those days.

"I don't think I studied him, per se," the English teacher said, "but I remember his name, as being a little anti-establishment. Rebellious."

It was in the Fern Ridge wetlands near here that Brautigan loved to hunt with Pete and Danny Webster. One day, the three of them went out hunting for ducks. Brautigan became separated from the two brothers. A duck flew up. Brautigan fired, and a shotgun pellet struck Danny in the ear, injuring him only slightly.

About the same time, a 14-year-old boy named Donald Husband, the son of a prominent attorney, was shot and killed in a hunting accident off Bailey Hill Road. Brautigan confabulated the two stories, his own and Donald Husband's, into his last book, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away."

In it, the 13-year-old narrator shoots and kills his best friend in a hunting accident. "Too bad I couldn't grab the bullet out of the air and put it back into the .22 rifle barrel and have it spiral itself down the barrel and into the chamber and refasten itself to the shell and be as if it had never been fired or even loaded into the gun," the book begins.

"Almost everything Richard wrote about was connected to his life in some way," Hjortsberg said.

Brautigan moved on from Eugene in 1956 and never looked back. Most people who knew him after that never knew he had lived in Oregon, and he never talked about his past.

"He never saw his family again after the age of 21," Hjortsberg said.

Pete Webster thinks it might have been the electroshock treatments in Salem that wiped out his memory of the early years. Hjortsberg, though, says Brautigan's home life was bad enough that he probably wanted to erase his own past and start over.

Fame certainly changed his life. "Trout Fishing in America" sold 2 million copies after it came out in 1967. The shy young man who had chastely pined for Linda Webster suddenly found himself enjoying the company of a succession of lovely women. The poor Eugene kid who sold earthworms and Christmas trees had money to travel the world.

And then, just as suddenly, fame deserted him. The '60s ended, and no one wanted to read gentle, ironic, love poems anymore. Brautigan's last book, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," is a sad, dark, vision compared to his earlier work.

Published in 1982, the book flopped both in sales and with the critics. In late 1984, Brautigan was living alone in a trailer in Bolinas, California. He shot his dog and himself. Their bodies were found on October 25, they had been dead for several weeks.

Hjortsberg, not unkindly, called the suicide a career move.

"Richard had always modeled himself on Hemingway," Hjortsberg said. "Right down to the same attention to sentence structure. Hemingway committed suicide. And Richard spent 10 years off and on in Japan, where suicide is an honorable thing." Hemingway also had receoved electroshock therapy.

"This wasn't some spontaneous, drunken decision," Hjortsberg said.

Last year, Edna Webster sold her manuscripts to a book dealer in the San Francisco Bay Area for about $20,000. The collection, which includes poems and stories such as "Poem for Linda Webster When She is Old Enough to Find Her Way Around in the Valley of Poetry" and "James Dean in Eugene, Oregon," was published last year by Mariner Books as "Richard Brautigan: The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings."

"My name is Richard Brautigan," it begins. "I am an unknown poet."

Getting started with Richard Brautigan
Fifteen years after his death, the writing of Richard Brautigan is enjoying renewed interest among a generation of readers too young to have known him the first time around.

Though he won't ever attain the status of a major writer—he has never attracted more than cursory critical interest as a second-tier member of the San Francisco Beats—Brautigan has always had a steady following. Most recently, he's become the subject of dozens of Web sites created by dedicated fans.

Here are some recommendations for starting to read his work:
"Trout Fishing in America":
Published by Dell in 1967—it had enjoyed a much more limited publication in a literary journal a few years before—this eccentric novel chronicles the adventures of a fellow named Trout Fishing in America as he searches a bizarre landscape for enlightenment. Brautigan's best-selling and most celebrated novel.

"In Watermelon Sugar":
Brautigan's most lyrical story, it was published by Dell in 1968 and tells the tale of a group of people living in a fantastical community where the sun shines a different color each day.

"Revenge of the Lawn":
This collection of short-short stories, published as a set in 1971, contains, in the title story, what may be Brautigan's funniest piece of writing.

"The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster":
A good cross section of Brautigan's poetry, which—like all his writing—is quirky, sad, funny and a quick, easy read.

Houghton Mifflin Co. has been republishing some of the works; you can buy "Trout Fishing in America," "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster" and "In Watermelon Sugar" bundled together in a single volume for $15.

Manso,1985

"Brautigan's Wake"
Peter Manso and Michael McClure
Vanity Fair, May 1985, pp. 62-68, 112-116.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan was a god of the sixties counterculture, but when he died last fall, he had long been cast out of the temple of Hip. East Coast writer PETER MANSO and West Coast poet MICHAEL McCLURE re-evaluate the fallen idol through the voices of his peers—Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Tom McGuane, and others.

Sometime around the first of October 1984, Richard Brautigan, forty-nine, shot himself in the head with a .44 magnum handgun. The maggot-infested body of the poet célèbre of the sixties lay decomposing on the floor of his two-story wood frame house in Bolinas, California, for a month or more before anyone went to look for him. A half-pint of Jack Daniel's, two dollars in change, some tranquilizers, and an answering-machine tape with only one message on it—these were the last memento mori of the man whose name had once been synonymous with America's counterculture.

He had arrived on San Francisco's Beat scene in 1956, shy, gangly, and penniless. His experimental poems, collected in mimeographed booklets with titles such as The Galilee Hitch-Hiker and Lay the Marble Tea, were short, haiku-like, and absurdist. He hung out in Bay Area bars, gave occasional readings, and worked odd jobs to raise rent money. In 1965 Grove Press published A Confederate General from Big Sur, and with Trout Fishing in America, which sold more than two million copies, Brautigan became the writer of his generation. For the counterculture his work was an embodiment of the revolution in progress—subversive, surreal, and anti-establishment. Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Life put him in the pantheon of protest alongside Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary.

With his newfound fame and fortune, Brautigan traveled widely. He bought the house in Bolinas and a forty-two-acre ranch in Montana. But success was not easy for him. Hard drinking, the seduction of fans, and the allure of newly available women began to take their toll. The East Coast critics didn't help matters; they panned or neglected his later books, including Dreaming of Babylon, The Tokyo-Montana Express, and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. The sixties dwindled into the seventies. Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street, Abbie Hoffman fled underground, many of the flower children turned to Yuppiedom, and Brautigan, once hailed as the "gentle poet of the young," sank into decline. His alcoholism, self-absorption, and paranoia deepened. By the end he found himself unpublishable.

The obituaries revealed strange facts about him. Friends reported, for example, that Brautigan had bragged that he never finished high school. Brautigan's father, who had left his wife when she was pregnant, told reporters he had never even known he had a child named Richard Brautigan. Brautigan's mother said she hadn't heard from her son since 1956, when he had left home in Tacoma, Washington, and headed for San Francisco.

To untangle Brautigan's life and death, Peter Manso and Michael McClure canvassed the people close to him and posed some critical questions.

MICHAEL McCLURE: When I think of Richard, I remember the smell of white port wine and the metallic taste it had in the sixties, when one nipped it out of the little green Gallo poor-boy bottle. We'd sit drinking in the middle of my living-room floor and gossip literary stories, and Richard would get companionable and dewy-eyed behind his wire-rimmed glasses. His schizy wit was charming; sometimes the stories didn't gel, but there was a sudden illumination to many of them. Other evenings Richard would be devastated with small, obsessive details of his growing career. Richard seemed happiest when he was on Haight Street with the Diggers, an activist group devoted to cultural revolution, handing out to passersby sheets detailing by means of one of his poems instructions on how—for instance—to find the V.D. clinic. Most of the writers in San Francisco were pleased that Trout Fishing was such a success. For them he was the ugly duckling turned into the swan, or a gawky wolfhound puppy growing a deep chest and getting sleek. Richard dedicated In Watermelon Sugar, his third novel, to his publisher Donald Allen, the poet Joanne Kyger, and me. Richard was high-strung. Parts of his personality began to teeter, and as the money and acclamation grew, be made vaster and more impetuous demands on his friends for help and for tolerance of his growing dark side. Sometime around 1972 I ceased speaking to Richard. My feelings were still deep, but I hoped he'd turn over and be someone like the old Richard again.

After Richard's suicide, I reread him. It's a body of work, and there's nothing resembling it in American writing. It's as West Coast as a Douglas fir, but more broadly it's peculiarly American and Rube Goldbergian. This writing goes beyond eccentricity and into vision at times, and at others it is personal symptomology. It's not just a string of books ranging from witty and sensual to decadent and misbegotten, it's a rippling, flashing river for the critic and reader trout fishers and gold panners of the present and future to explore.

PETER MANSO: Every suicide remains a partial mystery, and that of an artist is especially complex, for one tends to ruminate not just on the individual but on the failure of the world at large. The reaction is instinctive. Yet Brautigan's story seems different—an artist not at odds with his time but too much in step with it; an artist not unappreciated but too much celebrated; a cult victim but also a cult hero. Was his suicide a coda, a tragic re-enactment of what had brought the tumultuous sixties to an end, not with a bang but a whimper? Was the death itself inevitable, the price paid for overnight literary fame in a decade of media hype and narcissistic self-congratulation? Would it have come about had Brautigan torn himself loose from the adulation of San Francisco? Or were the demons completely internal and personal, more clinical than emblematic of a culture gone wild? I consider Brautigan's work to be of very dubious significance, but I find his personal story compelling. To me and to many of the people I know, he was a sad symbol of an energetic but troubled age. His readers were mainly young, unread, and uncritical, more in need of the sanction for a divergent life-style than of literature. To say that San Francisco and the sixties is what killed Richard Brautigan may sound glib, but it's a sure entrée to the dynamics of his career.

RON LOEWINSOHN (poet): I first met Richard in the winter of '56 or very early in '57. He had recently blown in from the Pacific Northwest. He was very strange, six foot four, very blond, with glasses. He wore a leather jacket—only it was Naugahyde—zipped up to his chin. He almost never spoke, and walked around with his hands in his pockets, like he was hiding from everybody. At some point during that winter I ended up in somebody's kitchen with him, and while we were talking, the lady whose house it was came in, and I said, "Hey, this guy writes good poems." The look on Richard's face was delicious, like somebody had accepted him. At the time, he was delivering telegrams for Western Union and lived in a terrible flophouse, writing ten, twenty poems a day. One day he walked up to me on Grant Street and handed me a little notebook. On one page was a poem in this incredible handwriting, a six-year-old's handwriting, which was called "A Correction," and it went, "Cats walk on little cat feet and fogs walk on little fog feet, Carl." That was the whole poem. I chuckled, handed the notebook back to him, and he just walked away.

This was about the time he got involved with his first wife, Ginny. Virginia Adler was bright and confident, had been going to college and was pretty literate, even politically sophisticated, much more so than Richard. She was crazy about him and took him in at her place, and within six months they were married. She worked secretary-type jobs, effectively supporting him. He did a lot of hanging out, as did Ginny too until the baby, Ianthe, arrived. That was part of the growing friction: she was stuck home with the kid and he'd be out prowling with his buddies.

McCLURE: Richard was like someone who had been orphaned. He always needed a family, whether it was Don Carpenter, who was the "older brother," Ron Loewinsohn, another "brother," or my wife, Joanna, and I, who provided a kind of hearth for him.

RON LOEWINSOHN: There was a circle of people led by Jack Spicer who were literary, college-educated, and gay. Spicer and that crowd were really very suspect to Richard and me, although Richard went to their meetings.

McCLURE: Spicer became the mentor for the peculiar prose poem which became Trout Fishing. There was a small public reading of Trout Fishing attended by the more influential poets, and it was a talked-about event for days. Despite his shyness, Richard had an uncanny gift as a reader. He had a poised sense of timing, not Jack Benny timing but Brautigan timing. It was sweetly profound.

DON CARPENTER (novelist): Richard would sit in a café—generally Enrico's—and write. And he saved everything. He was untidy in a bachelor way. One time I was sitting in the kitchen of a place where a bunch of poets lived on Beaver Street, and Richard came in. Didn't say anything. Went over to the counter and opened a can of Franco-American spaghetti, dumped it in a cast-iron frying pan, turned the heat on full, stirred it, turned the heat off, ate it right out of the pan. Then he went over to the sink, cleaned out the pan with a paper towel, and left.

RON LOEWINSOHN: His marriage broke up in '63, and it was dramatic. Richard was in the habit of bringing friends home for dinner. They would go on and on, boogying and drinking, and one of these guys eventually got it on with Ginny. Richard was devastated. Ginny, her boyfriend, and the baby left town for Salt Lake City, and Richard started drinking and taking pills.

Afterwards, Richard lived with me for about three months, until we had a fight when we tried to do a magazine together, Change, the Fastest Car on Earth, which lasted only one issue. You couldn't work with Richard; he wasn't reliable or stable. So I'd get pissed, and if you criticized him he would clam up and wouldn't talk to you for six months, which is what happened.

DON CARPENTER: Richard needed his friends obsessively. He was the loneliest, most terrified little boy. He would often call up to take hours of my time checking commas, paragraphs, and spelling. "What about this word throughout? Is that one word or two words?" I'd tell him, but he'd argue. "Can't it be two words? Richard had the kind of mind . . . well, it's difficult to relate to if you haven't been there, but if you ever take cocaine for four or five days without eating or sleeping you'll get in a state that was normal to Richard all the time. Telephoning was one of the things that he spent a lot of money on when he finally had it. A couple of grand a month.

RON LOEWINSOHN: Richard's spelling was no better than a grammar-school kid's, which was one of the reasons he wouldn't show people manuscripts. In the last year before he died he said, "I finally figured out I'm dyslexic." He spelled like a person who didn't ever read, which in fact is true; he scarcely read at all—Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Updike, Malamud, none of them. But what he read, he read all the way through, and he became an expert on the Civil War.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (poet and publisher, City Lights Books): As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.

DON CARPENTER: I remember the day he walked up to me and said, "I just sold two books. Two novels." He looked me right in the eye, I who had never sold a thing. "Two novels to Grove Press for a thousand dollars apiece!" Don Allen, the man who invented the Beat generation, had sent the two manuscripts to Barney Rosset in New York. A Confederate General from Big Sur was the second of the two to have been written, but Rosset published it first because it was more like a traditional novel. Then Rosset refused to publish Trout Fishing in America, and Richard was desperate. Don got the manuscript back and published it in '67.

DON ALLEN (editor and publisher): What struck me about Trout Fishing in America was that it seemed original and delighifully amusing, with a poignant undertone. It went through four printings, approximately 30,000 copies, with ads in the underground press. It was a runaway best-seller. Young kids were buying the book, and I think Richard was very happy he'd found an audience. Helen Brann, the New York agent, shortly took Richard on, put together a package, and sold Seymour Lawrence on it—at the time he was advising Delacorte. I still had the rights to the books, as well as to several others. Lawrence wanted to offset an edition, so he called me and we decided that $250 would be fair for each book. At first I resented the abrupt way that Richard had left; four books were taken from me, and he was never sensitive to what I was giving up. He just left, without explaining himself or thanking me.

HELEN BRANN (literary agent): Another client of mine had sent me Trout Fishing, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. I read them, loved them, called Richard. Sam Lawrence and his wife were staying in my apartment, and Sam said, "Richard Brautigan! Vonnegut just mentioned his name to me the other day. I want in." We got an offer of $20,000, and Sam brought them out in one volume.

The next contract was for two books, The Abortion and a book of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn. We ended up getting $175,000. That's about 1970. Richard was read in the colleges, and his strength in paperback, even more than Vonnegut's, helped change the entire publishing business.

RICHARD HODGE (confidant and California Superior Court judge): As a lawyer I had been representing a number of Bay Area rock groups, like Country Joe McDonald and Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, and what I became for Richard was his conduit to the outside world, although this is to talk about him as if he were helpless. In fact, Richard read a contract and understood the publishing business very well.

RON LOEWINSOHN: When Trout Fishing hit, I was back in Cambridge and talking to him on the phone. "Jesus, you make an awful lot of money," I said, and he replied, totally serious, "Yeah. Literally more than I know what to do with. I always wanted a big brass bed, so I got myself one. And a friend wanted a coat, so I bought her a coat. Another friend needed a chicken coop, so I bought her a chicken coop. I don't know what to do with the rest."

BOBBLE LOUISE HAWKINS (poet and performer): The first trip Richard ever made east, he was standing in Harvard Square, and up Mass. Ave. there comes a parade in the very front row of which are four young women. The middle two are carrying a gigantic papier-mâché trout, and the outside two are carrying poles with a banner between them reading, TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. The parade was for some school in Cambridge named for the book, and Richard's reaction was sheer ecstasy and delight. Once Richard was recognized, he joined the parade. I don't think he had any awareness of how damaging celebrity might be.

RON LOEWINSOHN: He read at Harvard, and I introduced him at Quincy House [The Quincy Poetry Forum, Quincy House Dining Room, March 25, 1969, 8:30 PM] where he gave a fine, straight reading—poems, stories, chatted a little. Six months, a year later he came back, but by then he was so big, so famous, that there must have been seven hundred people in Lowell Lecture Hall. After reading for about fifteen minutes in a disdainful, contemptuous tone, he just quit. People came up to him for his autograph, and he'd tell them, "Fuck off."

DAVID FECHHEIMER (private investigator and friend): I don't think he was troubled that his audience was principally kids. There was a time that people have forgotten—it lasted for about six months—when we all believed in the hippie vision of the future. We really believed.

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN (daughter): I never had anything to do with the whole sixties North Beach scene. I was too young, but more importantly, my father kept me away from it. The only thing I remember is that when I was with him people would stop and say, "Oh, you're Richard  Brautigan."

DON CARPENTER: Richard became a minor deity, the big buffalo. Scouting parties from East Coast publishers came out here to find more Brautigans.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: He gave up being a San Francisco poet. People would ask him to read at local poetry events and he'd say, "Oh, no, I'm not a San Francisco poet."

MANSO: The irony is that—however private Brautigan's vision—San Francisco in the sixties had cornered the market on the counterculture and media-ized itself beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Would Brautigan have had a readership without San Francisco, or even gotten off the ground? More than any writer in recent times he had the advantage of time and place.

DON CARPENTER: The differences between the West Coast and New York? At a New York cocktail party the colonels cluster with the colonels, the majors with the majors, and the privates with the privates. That doesn't happen here.

When Evergreen Review, Number 2, was published in 1957, it set off an echo all over the English-speaking world, and people said, "Hey! these guys are thinking about the same shit I've been thinking about. I've gotta go to San Francisco!" So they came, and there was a wonderful anthill clusterfuck for about a year or two. Then in came the phonies, the assholes, the drug addicts, the motorcycles, the bums, the fuckers. This happened again in the Haight, only it happened three times as fast.

Richard was never a hit in New York. He used to call me and say he wasn't being treated well, and it infuriated him. His idea of New York big time was being seen at Elaine's. Pretty bush-league. When he came back he would be angry. He saw New York as Moloch.

HELEN BRANN: Richard hated New York. When he visited we'd go to the Palm for dinner and have those huge lobsters, and thousands of drinks later I'd be tottering out the door, and he'd be saying, "Now I've got to go find a girl." He was miserable.

McCLURE: Richard had no capacity for self-analysis. He was one of the most complex men I've known, and also one of the most lacking in the ability to conceive of the personal / historical / factual / childhood / day-before-yesterday causes of the most blatant worldly actions.

PETER BERG (founder, with Emmett Grogan and Peter Coyote, of the Diggers): Before he was rich, Richard hung out with the Diggers. But if you asked him about the class system he would reply, "There are no classes in a lake," his point being that nature is grander than classes.

Brautigan was very polite and meticulous. Emmett Grogan's idea of feeding people would be to go and get the corpse of a whale from the marine-biological station, cut it into steaks, and barbecue it in an open pit. Brautigan's idea was to spend two hours making a spaghetti sauce and making it meticulously. He insisted on things being as beautiful as possible, and was even a little fey or precious about it.

The Diggers were a self-supporting, supportive group of individuals who were behaving in conscious political-outlawry. We weren't Left, we were assuming that a generational cultural change had occurred and that that change would demand a new kind of politics. We all did events in those days, and sometimes huge numbers of people showed up. For example, as a memorial to someone who had died, Richard wanted to have an event called "The Candle Opera." It sounds like candelabra, right? We had to find 10,000 candles; then Richard had everyone light the candles at the same moment. Women were holding up white sheets, everyone was holding candles, Richard was beaming.

He never talked about poverty, the war, racism, or police brutality in his writing. He more or less forfeited political analysis to people like myself.

TOM McGUANE (novelist): Richard wasn't very political in any kind of coherent or structured way, but you could probably call him a populist. He mentally aligned himself with where he thought he belonged, among the plain-speaking, ordinary Americans.

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: My father voted for Johnson in '64 because he thought he'd end the war. But when he didn't, he never voted again, because he felt so guilty about Vietnam. Basically he was always conservative, though, like "Right is right, wrong is wrong. You don't lie, fudge on your taxes, or do illegal things." But he believed firmly that children should always have free medical care. Myself, I voted for Reagan. I believe in free enterprise.

DENNIS HOPPER (actor): One night we were both drinking, and he said he was very much against any kind of social welfare. He felt that if people couldn't help themselves the government shouldn't help them, and he kept saying that America would only be remembered for maybe another hundred years and then the idea would be a dream, a word people would repeat like a fantasy, as if it all had been an idealized moment in the past. He never got into specifics, but he wasn't joking.

McCLURE: Richard wasn't a literary revolutionary. His wasn't a dangerous voice so much as a voice of diversity, potentially liberating in that it showed the possibilities of dreaming, of beauty and the playfulness of the imagination. Look at the Dadaists and how they saw the First World War—they said if Western civilization is war, we reject it and demand Dada. Now, the absence of morals in Brautigan's work I liken philosophically to the position of Dada: if morals bring us to build bombers to drop napalm on Asian fishing villages, let us be through with morals and have what one might call iconoclastic whimsy.

MANSO: Not all moralistic thinking has to be misguided or the voice of the Pentagon, though, and I think that Brautigan and his readers failed to understand that. Trout Fishing is roughly contemporaneous with some of the best of Baldwin and Mailer, Exley, Capote, Didion, Wolfe, Pauline Kael, even Hunter Thompson. Yet on the simplest level it denies what sixties literature is all about—a rendering of experience and crises so as to disturb and stimulate.

McCLURE At the time, I suggested that people read Shelley and Sartre, but if reading Brautigan's books gave an experience of self to two million young kids, great. It was a TV generation, and in Trout Fishing they found something for their imagination other than television.

MANSO: But Trout Fishing is as close to television as you can get. Neither disrupts so much as it soothes. It is also emblematic of San Francisco—where style and surface and the latest in cults and gurus are paramount.

TOM McGUANE: In '72 or '73, Richard Hodge gave a party for me when Ninety-two in the Shade came out. I brought Robert Altman, the director. Brautigan and Don Carpenter took him aside and gave him a lecture: "You've got to learn something, mister. You're not in L.A. anymore, you re in San Francisco." They ripped into him for about forty minutes. Altman's reasonably tough, but finally he said, "Listen, boys, I've heard as much of your shit as I'm going to listen to," and he read them the riot act. Their whole pitch was San Francisco is the center of the civilized world. Self-righteousness with a little Orientalism laid in.

DON CARPENTER: After he first made it big with the Seymour Lawrence deal, a great wall of secrecy grew around Richard's financial dealings. What he didn't spend on real estate he put into living. I have no way of judging precisely how much Richard made. A minimum of a million and a half, though. Where did the money go? The man spends like five years living in luxury hotels and phones all over the world five times a night. Don't ask where the money goes.

PETER BERG: Richard would talk about how many books he had sold last week, or what a fool he had been not to bring out In Watermelon Sugar before Confederate General, because it would have made more money. "Peter, I've gotta come over and show you this review from the New York Times . . . Peter, my agent tells me that we're selling in Cleveland." It was constant, to the point where that was his only conversation, and I started calling him Richard Career. That was the end of our relationship. He'd become uninteresting.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: I saw Richard several times in London in the early seventies. In the Ritz hotel, people were coming around just to see him.

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: I remember one summer when he had all these girlfriends and I called them his harem. But this was just one kind of wild period. I mean, basically, he was a steady person as far as I know, and he always had extremely nifty girlfriends. Really nice, like Siew-Hwa Beh. They lived together in San Francisco, and I think that was like one of the last women who truly loved him to pieces.

SIEW-HWA BEH (girlfriend): Ironically enough, when we first met, the biggest attraction for him was that I didn't know he was a writer. I didn't know where North Beach was, and when I asked him what he did for a living, he said, "I write. I wrote Trout Fishing." I said, "Well, I really am not into fishing." That turned him on, because he had never met anybody who was educated who'd never heard of him.

MCCLURE: He liked well-dressed, clean-haired women with expensive, sweet-smelling sheets, and that's what he moved into when he became successful. He deliberately set about to make himself a kind of sex figure. Just look at the jacket photo of The Abortion: the upward shot of him sexily posed like Mick Jagger—the cocked pelvis, the granny glasses gone. Richard was set on being the image of a gentle Beatles antihero.

DON CARPENTER: During the mod period in '71 or '72, he was conscious that everyone was dressing mod except him, so he bought himself a new ensemble. He was uncomfortable, though, wore the outfit only four or five days, and that was it.

RICHARD HODGE: He viewed himself as being very attractive to women, and he viewed that attractiveness as coming from the power of his writing.

SIEW-HWA BEH: One of the more complex things about Richard was his mood changes. There was no pattern. It could be hour to hour, it could be days. A lot of that was mediated by drink, but it was very hard to deal with. He could go from being real exuberant to very dark and depressed, or he could get mean and nasty, or nostalgic or sentimental, and sometimes transcendent, philosophical. Richard wouldn't ever talk about what was upsetting him, though. Instead, he'd tell a story or think of something witty.

A lot of people think of him as being sexist and male chauvinist, and he was certainly capable of all that, but to me he was a perfect house-husband. He would cook every day, broil salmon, make his famous spaghetti sauce, or just fill avocado halves with shrimp. It was the first time he ever had a real home.

Neither of us wanted children, but he came home one evening—he was a bit drunk and sort of sad—saying, "I know you'll want children; you're only twenty-eight, twenty-nine." He was afraid of the responsibility.

Richard destroyed the relationship—I'm not uncomfortable saying that. He started initiating a lot of destructive things that would cause rifts, like staying away until all hours of the night. He never brought women back to the apartment, but he would see another woman and come home and say, "Oh, now there are three of us." I'd say, "Richard, you're causing the breakup, and if you cause it, you can stop it." We were together for two years—it seemed like a decade, it was so intense—and finally he called a friend who had a hauling truck, just wanting me out of the place.

It didn't end there. Richard kept trying to resume the relationship, even after [line missing] Malaya.

He was very fond of saying, "Nobody changes, I don't believe in change." That, I think, was the tragic flaw: he could have laser-beam insight, but somehow he was suspicious of analysis. Analysis would somehow take away his craft, his skill, his talent. He'd listen to you, and sometimes things seemed to be O.K.; then all of a sudden the darkness would come over him and he'd say, "No, it's not possible."

DON CARPENTER: Richard drank three fifths a day, two fifths of whiskey and a fifth of brandy. Not on a 365-day-a-year basis—I'm talking binges.

SIEW-HWA BEH: In his writing room he had six cases of Dickel stacked floor to ceiling.

BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: All I can tell you is that every time I saw him he was drunk.

TOM McGUANE: From some fairly early point Richard was a medically severe alcoholic. One time he was quite drunk and said a lot of offensive things to me, personal things, things about my work, destructive, competitive writer talk. I got sore, and a day or two later I told him what he'd said. "I couldn't have said that, that couldn't have happened," he insisted. He was practically sticking his fingers in his ears.

Not long after that, he quit drinking for a while. He never quit for very long, but there would be an instantaneous revolution: he'd look and act different. He must have been able to write when he was drinking. But when he was sober, he had a vast capacity for work, almost around the clock.

With the sober Richard, you'd notice his tremendous bashfulness. He also had a quick sense of humor that was so striking and intricate that it took your breath away. He was very complicated—as free of clean edges as anyone I've ever known.

McCLURE: His self-killing was a culmination of the awkward kid's triumph over both his enemies and his friends. Right out of the nowhere of the Depression-ridden Pacific Northwest he'd surfaced and triumphed and mined himself. What was left?

MANSO: Once the sixties started sliding by, Brautigan dropped San Francisco and began hanging out in Montana with stars like Peter Fonda, Tom McGuane, and Warren Oates. His needs were endless.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: The way it happened, roughly, is that Tom McGuane and Bill Hjortsberg were in the writing program at Stanford in the late sixties and living in Bolinas. McGuane had an early success and bought a ranch in Paradise Valley, and one by one all these people followed him out there. Then a lot of people started flying in from Hollywood. All these very public figures had a great deal of privacy there. Brautigan was there to be with his male friends. It's a cowboy atmosphere; hard-drinking men and supportive women. It's out there with the boys, fishing every evening in the Yellowstone river, drinking in cowboy bars, shooting up the countryside.

TOM McGUANE: I was startled when he first appeared in Montana. I had seen him in Bolinas, I think, and said something like "You ought to come up to the ranch" the sort of thing you say to a hundred people. Then one day he just arrived. I don't remember exactly who was with him—he usually had a kind of entourage in those days—but he kind of settled in.

Although he wasn't the type to handle the practicalities of rugged ranch living, he saw himself as very much of a Westerner. He was always full of himself, mostly in a nice way, and his personal mythography included a sense that west of the Mississippi was his terrain to raid for language and imagery. Since I didn't know him before the late sixties, I can't say why he never learned to drive a car. Perhaps it had to do with his quirky antiquarian air. He was, in some strange way, hell-bent on the image of himself as a sort of Mark Twain, funky-looking old-timer.

His move had to do with the feeling we all had, that by '72 or '73 Northern California, which had been marvelous, was used up and overrun. San Francisco was getting to be a zoo, and even Bolinas, near frantic with people suddenly moving in, like most of what was then known as the New York School of poetry. So a lot of us moved to Montana. And then as a result of my movie Rancho Deluxe being made here, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sam Peckinpah were around. Peter Fonda came in about '77 or '78.

SIEW-HWA BEH: The more legitimate Richard became, the more he had to be one of the men. Even his fishing—that too turned into a macho act, because all the other guys were doing it.

TOM McGUANE: Richard had a superficial sort of dramatic, literary knowledge of guns. I don't think he could strip and clean a gun. In fact, the only physical thing he did very well was type, which he did fabulously. The first five years or so I was around him, he wasn't all that enthusiastic about guns, and when he got into his gun mania he seemed to see a kind of maniacal humor in guns. He'd tell about blasting a garbage pail full of beer bottles and laugh like a hyena. Or he might fire at Campbell's soup cans—he liked the tremendous splashy effect. I saw it as a little boy smashing all the jam jars.

I still have some of his guns here: a .357 magnum Ruger Security-Six, a .22 Winchester, a .30-30 Winchester, maybe a shotgun. He also had an old standard army automatic. It's got a lot of kick and makes a big hole, but what he liked about it was that he thought it was a completely honest product of American manufacture. He had a fascination with the army Colt because it seemed to sum up gun owning, democratic gun manufacture, and excellence, all in one thing.

PETER FONDA (actor): He did not have gentleman's guns; he didn't have to. All his friends did.

Richard was often here from before the mayfly hatch until the end of the game season. Then he took to traveling to Europe or Tokyo, but what I think he liked about Montana was the clarity. Really, it's survival day to day. Simple things but nevertheless natural things, like cutting wood for the stove. And Richard did those things if he had to. Mainly he wanted to write, though.

TOM McGUANE: Harry Dean Stanton never bought a place, but he was around a lot, and once, when he was visiting, Richard had a number of hippie carpenters remodeling his place. In the middle of the night Richard went amok and started beating on the walls with a claw hammer. The carpenters were shouting, "You're destroying our work," and one of them came out with a .44 magnum. Harry Dean saw the handwriting on the wall. He rocketed out of the house and hid under a car.

IANTHE BRAUTlGAN: I don't know why he didn't live in Montana year-round, except that he couldn't drive and Livingston was twelve miles away, so he was stuck out on the ranch.

HELEN BRANN: I felt that San Francisco and Montana were increasingly bad influences on him and his work. In Montana, McGuane ran the show. I think Richard genuinely fell in love with the beauty of the place, but it seemed he couldn't ever keep up with those guys. He was completely different and didn't fit in.

TOM McGUANE: Richard was in love with the things he wasn't. For example, although he wrote wonderful, poetic surrealistic and comic prose, he had no interest in poetic surrealistic prose or even comic writing, like Vonnegut. He thought that was silly, and he liked doggedly realistic stuff, like Hemingway or history. Of all my writing, he liked my journalism best. I never saw him envious of my audience, but I think he considered himself a slightly older writer who could help me avoid some pain. When my novel Panama got hammered and I was hurt, he told me, "I could have told you. After your first book made you a golden boy of younger American letters, you were going to get killed, no matter what."

He went in for "writer talk," but he became a monologuist about it. There was a kind of naïveté to his egocentricity because it was so unacceptable by normal social standards. He'd be so maniacally egocentric that it was clear he had no sense of how he was affecting his audience. It became progressively crazier and more self-centered, but again I see it attached to his alcoholism.

DENNIS HOPPER: He would talk an awful lot about Paradise Valley and how important it was for him to get away and go there. But he also said he'd be out at the ranch watching the deer, or out on the river fishing, and suddenly he'd say to himself, "God, what am I doing here? I have to get back to the city."

PETER FONDA: The last time Richard was here he wasn't alienating anyone. In fact, he had given up drinking for Tom McGuane's sake. Also, he gave all his guns to Tom because he didn't want to leave them around the house. Someone had busted into his car and be was paranoid.

McCLURE: Montana got him out of San Francisco at a time when he had burned down San Francisco. I'm talking about his alienating a lot of people. I'm also talking about his making a horse's ass out of himself by sitting around Enrico's. There was also Japan. Richard had to have another base, which for him became Tokyo. He wrote one of his best books, June 30th, June 30th, on his first trip there, which ended in June '76. He met his second wife, Akiko, in Japan, and she came to live with him in San Francisco until their divorce.

SIEW-HWA BEH: He was read by intellectuals in Japan, avant-garde people who prided themselves on discovering new frontiers in American literature, and so Japan was a substantiation of himself as a writer. Here in this country he wasn't read by intellectuals, and I think he was conscious of the fact that he never quite finished school, which tied into the belief that he was somehow illegitimate.

RICHARD HODGE: May '83, I was in Japan with Richard for three weeks. We'd go to dinner, then to the Cradle, probably the leading literary bar in Tokyo and owned by Takako Shiina, the woman on the jacket of The Tokyo-Montana Express. Generally I'd leave about midnight and go back to the hotel. I'd get a phone call about 6 or 6:30 in the morning and it would be Richard, coming in totally wasted.

MARGOT PATTERSON DOSS (writer and columnist): He once called us from the Tokyo airport and said he was coming in and could John arrange for him to see a physician, because be had got punched out by a drunk karate type and the man had broken his nose.

JOHN DOSS (doctor and friend): He was totally devastated, and drunk. And the thing he wanted was to get his nose fixed at any cost—for Aki, because Aki had said he had a beautiful nose.

MARGOT PATTERSON DOSS: Once the nose had been attended to and we sent him off to a hotel, he called up at three in the morning: "Margot, please, can I come and stay with you?" I felt sorry for him, so he lived with us for a month. Most mornings I would come down and he'd be blotto on the kitchen table and I'd have to put him to bed. Why did people put up with it? Because we loved him.

MANSO: Montana and Japan, then finally Bolinas, the small coastal town some twenty miles north of San Francisco. However beautiful, the place is an enclave of leftover activists, writers, and ecologists who spaced out in the psychedelic sixties and never came back. It's here that Brautigan fled before the suicide.

BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: When he returned from Tokyo in the spring—I think he came out to Bolinas in June—he didn't want to acknowledge he didn't have any money. Yet I knew he didn't have money, because he didn't have the second half of the $600 he owed someone for tree work.

JOANNE KYGER (poet): Throughout the summer he was in a paranoid state, and especially hostile to me because I was an older friend. He was arrogant, standoffish, and aggressive, saying things like how he might just take the dedication to me out of In Watermelon Sugar when he reprinted it. I hadn't realized he was so deeply disturbed. The drinking was heavier, no longer fun, and the object of his paranoia was that people were out to get him. "Richard," I said, "I can't understand you anymore," and finally I stopped talking to him as of about August 10.

RICHARD HODGE: He called me saying there was a cabal out to get him. He said the cabal had sent out somebody to cause him harm, a Vietnam veteran who was a little crazy and prone to violence. Several days later he called back and told mc that he'd worked things out.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: No question, Richard was belly-up broke. I know he was broke because he borrowed money from me in May. Also, Richard's lawyer in Montana called Becky Fonda since he was concerned that Richard was seriously overdrawn, and I know he had borrowed against the place in Montana, about a hundred grand or so. Altogether he was in the hole about $150,000.

RICHARD HODGE: The house in Bolinas, though, was unencumbered. He owned it free and clear, and it was worth about $65,000.

HELEN BRANN: At his death, Richard was averaging about $20,000 a year coming through my office, not a lot but not starvation either. Between '68 and '75, however, he'd made nearly half a million dollars, and I talked to him ad nauseam about investing his money.

DON CARPENTER: When you're that poor as a kid, you think that money can solve everything, and of course money solves no problems at all. Every dollar brings a dollar's worth of trouble with it, so the more money Richard had, the more trouble he was in. Yet the less money that was coming in, the more trouble he was in too, so the trouble doubled and trebled, and he couldn't stop the machine. Members of the middle class know how to handle money: they put it in the bank, they deal with it. Richard couldn't.

TOM McGUANE: In day-to-day matters he was unsophisticated, like he didn't know how to put a coat on, and I can't imagine him knowing how to knot a tie. And he was funny about money. He'd get a receipt for a stick of gum. He'd have bursts of virtually giving it away, but that seemed sort of calculated. Fundamentally, he had an almost hysterical fear of poverty. Now that I look back, one of the things he did with his money was haul his ass to whatever parts of the world viewed him as a serious writer, be it Amsterdam, Tokyo, or Berlin, and that was expensive.

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: The last time I talked to him was at the end of May, when he called from the neighbors' house. He said he didn't have a phone, because he didn't want to call people and didn't want to be bothered. All he wanted was to hole in and work.

HELEN BRANN: In late '83 Richard knew he wasn't going to get his new book published, at least not then. What he said was "Helen, I'm not going to write anything for a year or two. Or I may write, but I'm not going to try to publish in this country. Let the fuckers just sit and wait until the attention I'm getting in Asia and Europe really starts to build; they'll do a revisionist Brautigan thing and I'll be solid again."

I was no longer operating as his agent. He had sent me a new novel. I'd read it and called Jonathan Dolger, who'd been Richard's editor, saying, "I think if I tell Richard what I think of this novel, he'll leave me." I then called Richard and told him I felt the book should be put to one side. The next day I received a letter saying, "Good-bye." A two-line letter as if he were writing to the bank. The book was extremely autobiographical, all about his disastrous marriage to Aki, very self-pitying and middle-aged.

TOM McGUANE: Sometime that last winter, before he went to Japan, he brought me his fishing rods and his typewriter, as he usually did before he went away. This time he had taped dried flowers to the rods. He also brought me a box and said, "You will receive instructions when this is needed." Even if I'd known it was a funeral urn, my response would've been: "Another one of Richard's crazy jokes."

He was fairly bombed. I took him aside and said, "You've got to do something about this. I had a drinking problem too, so I know it's stoppable." He listened patiently and then said, "I'm not committing suicide."

It's astonishing now. At the time, I thought he meant he wasn't drinking himself to death. I probably saw that and his "You'll receive instructions" as having something to do with his demise, he often spoke of death. Once he said to me, "When I go, it will be by my own hand."

TONY DINGMAN (friend): I saw him the first of September, and we packed up his office. Some of the stuff he took to Bolinas, but most of it he stored. Then he went out to Bolinas and was back in the city on the thirteenth or fourteenth. That's when he saw Aki on the street and got drunk. The next night I think he decided that he was going to try and commit suicide, so he took pills, which didn't do anything. Sleeping pills. He'd tried it once before, right after he and Aki split up, which must have been '81. The body was found on October 25.

PETER FONDA: The boys had gotten together to go shooting. Everyone missed him, and we began calling San Francisco. As it turned out, those freaks in Bolinas never went in to check out what was happening. If it hadn't been for Becky, my wife, I think Richard would still be there. She called David Fechheimer, and it took Fechheimer to figure out that we were serious. Checks had been returned, telegrams returned, and even his agent hadn't been able to get hold of him.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: When Becky told me that the lawyer had called her and said that Richard hadn't written any checks for a month, I knew immediately he was dead. Becky asked if I'd do something, so I called a friend in Bolinas who climbed up onto the second-level porch of Richard's bedroom, and there he was.

KEN HOLMES (assistant coroner, Marin County): The body was badly decomposed, and the abdomen had ruptured from the distension of gases, so its contents had become available to insects, flies, and maggots, which had eaten away most of the soft tissues, including the fingers and facial features, leaving only remnants of his genitals. At first inspection it was impossible to say whether the body was male or female, white or black, and we had to identify it by dental records. The house was filled with flies, and the odor was overwhelming. He had been at the foot of the bed looking out the window when he shot himself. The shot pretty much blew away the rear portion of his head.

ANTHONY RUSSO (detective sergeant, Marin County Sheriff's Office): There was no question that it was a suicide—the location of the body, the location of the gun, the location of the spent bullet, which we found up in the wall. Apparently the shot didn't throw him across the room. The suicide was done standing up, and he fell backwards on the spot, legs straight out.

BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: People were not that surprised by Richard's death. When I heard he was dead, my assumption was that he'd OD'd on alcohol. Not eating, drinking a lot, and just doing a going-to-bed-and-dying number. But I wasn't surprised.

TOM McGUANE: I don't know when he became what people called paranoid. Nor do I connect it totally to his drinking. The first time he arrived on my doorstep in Montana, whatever he said—it could've been just "I'm here"—seemed so loaded that I always saw him as having his antennae out 10,000 feet. He was always a spiky, darty-eyed, suspicious, thin-skinned individual. From what I hear about the way he was at the very end, it's what anyone would call paranoia.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: I think he'd decided to do it maybe a year ago. He was more at peace during the summer, like he'd passed the hurdle. Also, health-wise he was falling apart. Things were almost coming off his body. Four years ago he had his whole mouth rebuilt, going to the dentist at six every day with a pint of whiskey in his pocket.

DON CARPENTER: Richard also had herpes, which he took as a personal affront. I kept telling him that there are no cures for herpes, but he would say, "No, no, no, there's this guy who's got these monkey glands over in Switzerland, I'm the only one who can get it in the United States, and it only costs $5,000." Women meant a lot to him.

JOHN DOSS: The last conversation I had with him about herpes, he was worried about the boots that either he or his lover was wearing, and he wanted to know how to get them clean. Whether he was being fondled by the woman's boots or whether he was fondling the woman with his own, I have no idea. I said to him, "Richard, that's bizarre. You can't get herpes off of boots." He had herpes from the middle seventies and considered himself a sexual leper, which only made him drink more. Also, he wanted to be a stud, which he wasn't, so he overcompensated.

RON LOEWINSOHN: The breakup with Akiko was much more devastating than he'd let on. Akiko called when she heard about Richard's death and told me she had run into him near Enrico's. He closed his eyes as if he had seen a ghost, turned away, and went into a bar.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: Aki was in San Francisco with a film crew, getting cigarettes at the Dirty Book Store on Broadway next to the Condor Club, when she saw Richard go by, and without giving it any thought she followed him to Vanessi's and tapped him on the back. And he just froze. She backed off and left, because he was horrified. She realized she'd hit all his nerves. He immediately junked his dinner plans, went to Cho-Cho's and got the gun from Jimmy Sakata, the proprietor, then went up to Enrico's and, from what I'm told, got absolutely shit-faced.

IANTHE BRAUTIGAN: The wake was at Enrico's café. It was nice, very quiet. His ashes are here at my in laws' on the [line missing] I don't want them scattered; I want it to be someplace permanent. I feel a real strong need for a place where I know that he is.

TOM McGUANE: In Montana we all talked about it and I wondered, "Why does Richard's suicide make us all so bitterly sad, when before he'd been driving everybody crazy?" I don't know the answer, except that between the alcohol spells a sweet, whole, loving person emerged. We subconsciously believed that was the real Richard, even though the Richard we mostly saw drove us nuts. But it was like a nickelodeon. You run those images, and then another image floats up from behind; the image that was trapped inside this monster was a really good fellow.

McCLURE: Richard cherished beauty. He was not vicious or cruel or mean or petty. I mean, he was all those things, but his overall character was not. He resembled Poe or some nineteenth-century writer. He was like a sweaty, lovely flower. He blossomed and he went with the wind.

MANSO: Indeed. Only in the end it wasn't the wind that blew him away, was it?

NEWSWEEK, December 29, 1969: Brautigan wants to befriend the earth, not shake it. His style and wit transmit so much energy that energy itself becomes the message. "There was a fine thing about that trout," Brautigan writes at one point, "I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy." Brautigan strains to live, he explodes every simile ("His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord"), makes all the senses breathe. Only a hedonist could cram so much life into a single page.

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, August 14. 1970: Trout Fishing in America is playful and serious, hilarious and melancholy, profound and absurd . . . To describe it as a book written in a protesting spirit would give no sense of the light-hearted ripple of its pervasive humour; just as to label it some kind of quasi-surrealist comedy would be to miss the quite specific causes of its underlying sadness and anger. Such preliminary remarks perhaps suggest how idiosyncratic, how delightfully unique a prose-writer Richard Brautigan is.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 2, 1980: For a writer who seems so intimate, he is really quite unrevealing and remote. He is now a longhair in his mid-40's, and across his habitually wistful good humor there now creep shadows of ennui and dullness and too easily aroused sadness. The telltales of an uneasy middle-aged soul peep darkly among the cute knickknacks of The Tokyo-Montana Express: dead friends, dead strangers in the papers and on the street, ghosts, regrets over wasted years, regrets over women, bad hangovers, loneliness, phone calls long after midnight. All these point toward hard, somber themes; but Brautigan's instrument is the penny whistle.

McClure,1993

"Ninety-one Things about Richard Brautigan"
Michael McClure
Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary. University of New Mexico Press, 1993, pp. 36-68.
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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Vanity Fair asked me to write an article about Richard Brautigan and his recent suicide in 1985. These are notes written at typing speed as I reread all of Richard's writings. The article appeared in Vanity Fair and these notes, none of which appear in the magazine, are published for the first time.

Ninety-One Things about Richard Brautigan

1. For a long period I was probably Richard's closest friend and he was probably mine. He was here visiting two or three nights a week. We talked and drank Gallo white port, sitting on the floor. This was when we did not have any furniture. We were still poor. The first sip of white port hits the mid-chest and brings on sudden intense warmth. The second swallow begins warming the shoulders. After that you slip into a sweet yellow-warm glow and become great storytellers and listeners. Richard had an open face and mobile eyes behind his round glasses—the movements of his mustache emphasized his jokes and stories. As I remember, a pint of port was thirty-seven cents. We bought it at Benedetti's Liquors on Haight Street, where we bought most of our bottles back in the mid-sixties.

2. Richard was a disciple to some extent, or more aptly a pupil, of Jack Spicer. He must have met poet Jo Anne [sic] Kyger through Spicer, and maybe Joe Dunn that way too. (Dunn published Richard's first book in his White Rabbit Press series.) Richard was an aficionado of Gino and Carlo's Bar, Spicer's hangout. When I first met Richard, there was something skittish about his literary background—probably Gino and Carlo's and Jack Spicer. I liked Richard because of his angelic schitzy wit and warmth.

3. I arranged a poetry reading for Richard at CCAC [California College of Arts and Crafts] and I made a poster for it. It was like a boxing poster of the time. I drew it by hand, Richard face-forward with his glasses, hat, and mustache. Across from that I drew his profile, then wrote DIGGER under one and POET under the other. Richard kept that poster up on the wall forever, along with other posters, and good notices. He loved it. Everything got very old on his walls. He would hang new things but he would never take anything away or down. The things about him comforted him and got cobwebby. It was like an old museum of himself.

4. Richard always dressed the same. It was his style and he wanted to change it as little as possible. (I was like that myself at the time. We were all trying to get the exact style of ourselves.) Richard's style was shabby—loose threads at the cuff, black pants faded to gray, an old mismatched vest, a navy pea-jacket, and later something like love beads around the neck. As he began to be successful he was even more fearful of change. When the three-book-in-one edition of Trout Fishing In America, The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar was published, it faithfully reproduced the earlier avant-garde editions of his work—including cover photos, critical comments, and pagination. It was a magic formula and Richard did not want to jiggle it.

5. The planning of each book was a huge strategy and Richard was a Confederate general scheming a campaign. He was the same way about placing a story of his. He could not simply do it and be done with it. He had to go over everything endlessly. He wold phone me half a dozen times each day to talk to me about a cover photograph he was thinking up. How to do it? Who should do it? He probably phoned novelist Don Carpenter that many times a day too. He became even more obsessive about contract details with his Delacorte Press publisher and with Grove Press. It was maddening and painful and dull to go over it all with him. He would laugh about it—but it was obsessive. He would sweat over whether to take an advance of $60,000 or whether to hold out for $65,000; he would torture out details regarding advertising his book. It was endless, and painful for his artist friends who were supporting him emotionally but were in near terminal poverty. You wanted to help, he needed it, but he also needed to hurt with his success. It was awful for everyone.

In his book Marble Tea there is a poem—a prose poem reminiscent of Blake's "Memorable Fancies"—in which Richard describes cutting a worm in half on an April morning. Part of the worm crawled toward the infinite and part towards infinitesimal. Richard's success—to my eyes—cut him in half. Part of him was crawling on to creation and another part was crawling towards destruction of friends and self through booze and the birth of envy. As his writing became more divine, Richard became more sexist and more alcoholic.

6. Richard convinced his agent Helen Brann to represent my short plays Gargoyle Cartoons and my novel The Adept. Richard believed in my work the way I believed in his. His poem "For Michael" is beautiful, and his dedication to me and Don Allen and Jo Anne Kyger in In Watermelon Sugar is lovely. Especially so since it is his most perfect book.

7. The first thing about Richard and guns that I remember is when he was beginning to get goofy with drinking and success and he gave Gary Snyder a broken, vintage Japanese machine gun for his son Kai. "So he won't lose his Japanese heritage," said Richard.

8. As Richard became a kind of monster, his public appearances became sweeter and more like his creative, imaginative, and beautiful person of before. He was a wonderful reader—his voice was smooth as honey and warm and personal, almost sweetly drunken to the ear. And his eyes sparkled with a cross between happiness and the resignation to the ineffability of everything. It was real. He felt it. It is all there in the work and in his earlier person. At a reading he literally loved everyone and they literally loved him back. They were wowed by the beauty of his poems.

9. When my wife of the time bought a Russian wolfhound puppy we named him Brautigan. He was skinny and angular, long-faced and long-nosed, and he looked like he had loose threads on his elbows.

10. Richard and I were always showing up in the newspapers, usually the Chronicle. My play The Beard was a topic of conversation and the play's censorship was still going on, I was writing Hells Angel Freewheelin Frank's autobiography with him, I was doing a video documentary on the Haight Ashbury. Richard had stories and reviews appearing everywhere, and columnist Herb Caen loved to mention us. When either of us had our name in the paper we declared ourselves to be a "Ten Day Baron of Cafe Society." We proclaimed that we were famous for ten days and we rushed off to drink at the sidewalk tables of Enrico's Cafe where we could be admired by mortals. We drank Enrico's stemmed glasses of cold white wine in the afternoon and watched record scouts digging in for the new rock 'n' roll of Frisco, or literary agents, or visiting L.A. stars come to ogle the City of Love. After a couple of glasses Richard began to get owlish and silent with bursts of slightly tipsy talk and I began to get winishly ennobled in my own ways. I contended that nobody—not even Frank Sinatra—could be famous for more than ten days in Frisco. Often Richard and I were simultaneously Ten Day Barons of Cafe Society and sometimes we would get on a roll and manage to keep a Barony for a month at a time with overlapping newspaper references. One rule, though, was that you could not accrue Baronhoods. A Baronhood only lasted ten days after the mention or article. A second rule was that it could not come from your name being in an advertisement. Richard would phone me or I would phone him. "Hey, I'm a Baron. Let's go to Enrico's."

11. One of the things I liked most about Richard was that he was the real poet of the Diggers. He was often on Haight Street passing out papers from the Digger Communications Company. I liked that activism. Richard was doing it because he believed in it. I got so I would go down there and do it too. And I was a lot more self-conscious on the street than he was. Richard would pass out papers from the Digger Communication Company urging all the "Seeker" youngsters at the Summer of Love to go immediately to the VD Clinic at the first sign. Richard has a poem about clap in [The] Pill [versus The Springhill Mine Disaster]. It might have been a Communications Company broadside. It was his example that got me involved with the Communications Company, and I wrote a poem—"War Is Decor"—and helped pass it out, then read it later on Walter Cronkite's national television report on the Haight Ashbury.

12. Richard was crazy about beautiful women, smoothly glabrous ones with long hair and big eyes. Blonde or brunette did not matter. He would been considered real homely all his life (I am sure), but like a Russian wolfhound puppy he knew better. When his sex appeal bloomed with his fame he loved it. He loved all the lovely sex around him. Real sensuality—clear and lucid like you read in poetry of the Greek Anthology—began to come out in his poetry . . . But that worm got split about the same time and the secret sexism began to become obnoxious.

13. Rereading Trout Fishing I began to fear that it would be an apolitical and purely esthetic document and there would be no comment against the monster war in Vietnam. Then there it was, near the end: the Trout Fishing Peace March. It must have touched millions.

14. It was Richard buying the house that David and Tina [Meltzer] lived in right out from under them and their two children that was the straw that broke my camel's back. I thought he should have bought it and let them live in it for nothing. Or even have given it to them.

Suddenly Richard was wealthy and not only real tight but afraid that people would find out he was wealthy. It was a shock to him and he had broad anal streak anyway. It was too much for him to handle. I felt that he was not only after me with his success but also after David because David was like Richard's anti-type. David poured creativity, and in vast spontaneous amounts. I think Richard just had to get at David. So he bought the house and left it standing empty.

Later, Richard shot and killed himself in that house.

15. When I reread Trout Fishing, In Watermelon Sugar, and the early poems, I had a flash of intuition. It is wrong to look at Richard as a novelist. What he is doing seems more akin to Lautreamont, to his Chants of Maldoror. Lautreamont was a young South American intellectual named Isidore Ducasse. Ducasse was inspired by Rimbaud and wrote a book length prose poem. This began a chain of thought: Richard should rightfully be compared to Rimbaud, Lautreamont . . . Baudelaire. He should be compared to the dark school of French writers, to the maudites. His suicide closes his life. Compare him to Alfred Jarry who also changed personality and became gross and fat and took ether and alcohol. Richard reminds me of the mystic poet Gerard de Nerval also. Further, Richard could be compared to the German visionary Novalis. Novalis was full of aphorisms—his works were studded with them. Richard lacked that in his writing, but it is a world of the imagination and of nature melted into the imagination, as is Novalis.

16. The tigers in In Watermelon Sugar are surely Blake's tygers from "The Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction." They have beautiful voices and The Nameless Hero asks them for aid in his math problems. The black world of Death is the interwound topology of the primal (unformed and still forming) material, and the unconscious, and the universe of anti-matter.

Richard lived across the street and down a few yards from the big Sears Roebuck department store on Geary Street. Sears is the Forgotten Works in the novel.

In Watermelon Sugar might have been written by an American Lorca, it has the darkness of one of Lorca's late poems: "Nobody understood the perfume of the dark magnolia of your womb. . . ."

On the other hand, In Watermelon Sugar on the whole is simple-minded, which Richard was not. What the prose lacks, as does Trout Fishing, is conflict. In both books Richard almost abolished interpersonal conflict to create a "gentle" (the word is used over and over) world of the imagination and sensory perception and memory melted into a pool that Richard took us swimming in, a stream that he fished in. Those two books are his great struggle to cancel conflict and confrontation. There is never confrontation because each chapter is in a new place or new situation.

One cannot create a long dramatic work without conflict.

17. Richard can be seen as a phenomenon of the Haight and the sixties. Or as an American artist. I think one might say Artist rather than either poet or novelist. I think of myself as an artist, with a capital A. Artist. West Coast writers of the period tend to see themselves as Artists, not so different from the painters or musicians they admire. Artists are free from the specter of the possibility of monetary success or national acclaim which in those days they knew they would never get. In the fifties Gary Snyder used to tell young poets to learn a trade, meaning there was no way to support themselves through their art; learn to be a merchant seaman or a carpenter.

18. Richard can be seen as a West Coast writer—not that his success was not national or that he is not a national artist. The West Coast looks to the mountains and the forests and the deserts and Big Sur and Mendocino and Puget Sound around it. When strangers visited I would sometimes take them across the bridge to Mount Tamalpais—or into Muir Redwood Forest. San Francisco is part of the United States but it is also part of the Pacific Basin and as part of the Pacific Basin we were connected to the Orient, to Japan and China. New York looked to Paris and London. San Francisco looks there too. In 1955, Frisco looked like Cow Town, USA. No tall buildings. There were Asian people all around. They had a different cuisine. Buddhism was something real to them and lots of them practiced it in churches.

Kenneth Rexroth was the ideologue. He showed us that we could define our own personal anarchism, that we were free to invent our own mysticisms or follow old ones—agnosia by way of the Areopagite, or Kundalini Yoga via Arthur Avalon, or practice Zen Buddhism. Everyone was free to invent or reinvent their own intellective structures of understanding time and space, music and painting. The West Coast was full of deep readers who were also involved in soul-building by means of travel and mountain and forest experience. We were different.

Kenneth Rexroth did something else, too. He showed that we could look to the Orient for poetry and cuisine but that also we could look back in time—we could look to 1000 A.D. to Sung Dynasty China, or back to Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tsu in Chou Dynasty China. Most of us did some Oriental time-travelling by way of art and poetry.

19. Editor Donald M. Allen "discovered" Richard—he put his faith in Richard, publishing Trout Fishing, then In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill [versus The Springhill Mine Disaster]. It was Don who brought together the San Francisco Issue of Evergreen Review in 1957, linking up [Allen] Ginsberg, [Jack] Kerouac, [Robert] Duncan, [Jack] Spicer, [James] Broughton, [William] Everson, [Philip] Lamantia, and me for the literary public eye. And it was Don who edited the major and poetry-world shaker, The New American Poetry, in 1960. Richard was not in that anthology as he had not made any impact as yet. Don was the first business world literary gentleman to recognize Olson, Duncan, me, and many others.

20. Regarding information on Richard and the "Orient": Shig Murao (who was the man busted for selling Howl at City Lights in 1957) tells me that I should contact Albert Saijo about Richard because it was Albert who got Richard the job testing meat samples that he had in the early sixties. I'm told incorrectly that a Japanese restauranteur loaned Richard his final gun. Richard had a Japanese wife. Richard had—if I understand correctly—as big a vogue in Japan as he had here.

21. On the phone I asked Shig Murao if Richard was not part of the Jack Spicer—Gino and Carlo's Bar crowd. Shig said that Richard came here when he was seventeen or eighteen and hung around North Beach "in the early days." Shig said Richard liked to hang out at The Place, which was mostly a painters' and poets' bar in the mid and late fifties. Shig said Richard liked to recite a poem about pissing in the men's room sink. I do not know of that poem. Jay DeFeo had a show of painting in The Place, and Allen Ginsberg had a show of his poems hung with the flower paintings of Robert LaVigne there. The Place was the corner bar for me in 1954, the Deux Magot of Frisco; it put the X into San Francisco Existentialism. The Place was where I could get high on the beauty of Jay DeFeo's gouaches hung on the walls.

22. Poems of Richard's in The Pill intrigue me lot. Often the word surrealism is used inaccurately. "Horse Child Breakfast" might be called a "surreal" poem by someone, though actually it is quite lucid. Some young woman looks like a horse to Richard—probably she has a long palomino mane and sleek legs. Also, she looks like a child to Richard. I imagine she looks like a horse-child to him also, a filly. She is there the whole night and they have breakfast together, which she probably fixes, as it is hard to imagine Richard fixing breakfast. She becomes Horse Child Breakfast and Richard addresses her as such. That is not surrealism. Actually, it is a love poem owing more to Richard's imagination of Sappho's poems—to their lucid sensual and sensory address of another person than to a surreal impulse.

In fact, the use of three words—Horse and Child and Breakfast—probably owes much to Oriental poetry as we understand it. Richard was aware of [Ernest] Fenollosa's text on the origin of the Chinese ideogram and how elements combined to make a calligraphic character, as well as the "concrete" use of three words, not normally syntactically connected to create a verbal construct.

It is quite a delicate poem. It may be naively combining the Greek and the Chinese—but it is canny and memorable. It is gorgeous!

23. A big figure on the West Coast in the fifties was philosopher Alan Watts. He was speaking visionary Buddhism and new hipness and mystical Taoism on his radio program. The poet Kenneth Rexroth also had a great and eccentric book review radio program in which he reviewed, in the most intellectual and learned terms, everything from the Kabalistic aspects of the Shekina to the geography of Han Dynasty China and texts on Byzantine Greek theology. There were carpenters and printers and news-reporters around who were members or ex-members of anarchist-pacifist discussion groups. San Francisco was a rich network of streams to "trout about" in. Richard must have loved it all as much as I did. Vibrancy of thought was in the air. Consciousness of California landscape and Oriental thought were in the air we breathed, and it was made dark and moist by the Pacific beating on the coast of Monterey. Steinbeck country was nearby, Henry Miller lived down on Partington Ridge, Robinson Jeffers was in his tower in Carmel. Kenneth Patchen was in town. William Carlos Williams came to read for the Poetry Center. Robert Duncan had a class in poetics at S.F. State. A Jack Spicer disciple group met at Joe Dunn's house to read and discuss poetry. Brother Antoninus was in a nearby monastery after his previous career of being poet William Everson. Philip Lamantia was around—he had been acclaimed a major surrealist poet at age fourteen by André Breton. Kerouac came to town. [Robert] Creeley visited and ran off with Rexroth's wife. The buckeye on the mountainsides was in flower—everything smelled like redwood and bay. One could see the first reappearance of sea otters down the coast. I met Ginsberg at a party for W.H. Auden. I can not remember when I first met Richard.

24. An intriguing passage of Richard's in The Pill is "Our Beautiful West Coast Thing." It begins with an epigraph by Jack Spicer: "We are a coast people. There is nothing but ocean behind us." Richard says he is dreaming long thoughts of California on a November day near the ocean. He says he is listening to The Mamas and The Papas. Naively he says in caps, "THEY'RE GREAT." They are singing a song about breaking somebody's heart and "digging it!" He gets up and dances around the room.

San Franciscans were inhabiting their bodies by learning to dance communal dances with Billy the Kids and Mae Wests and Florence Nightingales and Beatles' Sergeant Majors in the Fillmore Auditorium and in the Avalon Ballroom. Everyone was putting their booties down to the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The dances were free-form—you could make any beautiful step or wave of arm that you wanted with anyone around you on the floor. Tribal stomp! But a lovely stomp, even "gentle," as Richard would say, amid the gross amplification and the strobe lights and large moving patterns of colors on the walls.

25. It is easy to read free-form from chapter to chapter in Trout Fishing after dancing free-form at the Fillmore or Avalon Ballroom. You danced with the partner who was behind you when you turned around. She had on a dreamy costume and had lovely bare arms. Maybe you had had a hit of windowbox grass and she was high on acid. She was a goddess. You were some god. Goethe said, "Experience is only half of experience." The details could shift a lot but it was all holy. When Brautigan speaks about dancing in the poem he is making reference to W. C. Williams dancing solo in his home being the happy genius of his household, but the dancing that Richard saw and did in the Fillmore helps explain the chapter structure of Trout Fishing. It was what people were doing.

26. Richard was five years younger than me. He was from the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle. As a kid, the newspaper comic strips that I read were probably the same ones he read. I remember "Smokey Stover," where the goofy firechief with the blank eyes and big smile tooled around in his three wheeler car from panel to panel with almost no connection and a host of weird characters. There were little signs on sticks that said "Nov Shmoz Kapop" and "Notary Sojac." I also read "Toonerville Trolley," which was often just one big panel with dozens of strange countrified and shaggy, shabby, angular whiskerandos and old ladies and terrible children clinging to the country trolley. In "Smokey Stover" there was little need for continuity—just a good old-fashioned sense of humor and appetite for the strange and amusing—and a basically good-natured view of the world and its tiny tribulations and ambitions. A chapter of Trout Fishing had as many things clinging to it, and riding on it, as did the "Toonerville Trolley" on a crowded outing to Blueberry America.

I wonder if Richard read my other favorite newspaper cartoon strip, "The Nutt Brothers: Ches & Wal"? It was so far out that it made "Smokey Stover" read like Ecclesiastes or the Odes of Horace. Ches and Wal Nutt changed not only costumes from panel to panel but even bodies. Each strip was based on some far-reaching pun. It was a wonder to look at—it had whales in it and bathtubs and fezzes.

Trout Fishing reiterates the American comic strip of the period Richard grew up in, the late 1930s and early 1940s. He read all those panels and they must have delighted him. So he wrote Trout Fishing in panels.

I would guess he got desperate about reaching out in [A] Confederate [General from Big Sur]—trying to write an On The Road—and afterwards he went back to what he knew, loved, and could do. Part of what he did was to make far-out comic strips, but with an enormous, liberated imagination, using only words, and childhood, and everything he ever felt, or saw, or thought that fit in. Thus, In Watermelon Sugar was his second big comic strip. I cannot think of any comic strips like it, save maybe an imaginary one: "The Adventures of Federico Garcia Lorca in Samuel Palmer Land." Samuel Palmer was a disciple of William Blake who etched dark nightscapes of sheep and kine and shepherds walking past black kirks in the Lake Country. The funny thing is that there might be a grain of truth there—Richard certainly knew Lorca and no doubt he knew some of Palmer's works.

27. Novalis wrote, "Man is a sun; and the senses are planets." Richard would have liked that.

28. I think of Bruce Conner as an Artist. He is known now as a filmmaker but he is a master sculptor in assemblage and in wax, and there is no better painter or draftsman around than Conner. Bruce wrote terrific rock lyrics and learned to play electric piano; he is considered by some to be a fairly fine mouth harpist. Richard thought of Bruce Conner as an Artist and he would have thought of himself as an Artist. I cannot imagine that Richard thought of himself as a "novelist," except, that is, for public consumption. I do not mean that he looked down on it at all—he admired novelists. But he was an Artist.

29. Richard's mutation interests me. By "mutation" I mean metamorphosis. I love to see metamorphosis in an artist. I love Mark Rothko's change, over a period of five years in the forties, from his spirit-figure paintings to his color fields. I love Rimbaud's teenage change to explorer. I even love Dali's change from Salvador Dali to the person renamed (in anagram) Avida Dollars—the money-hungry genius satirized by André Breton. Oddly, I couldn't stand the big change Richard made in front of me from Richard to Dark Richard. Only now can I begin to appreciate it.

I have spoken about the transitions from Confederate to Trout to Watermelon—equally intriguing like the graceful hops of the katydid are the leaps between his first books of poetry. Only a visionary literary critic would ecstasize over Galilee Hitchhiker. It is a small collection of whimsical, poignant, intense to some extent, momentarily witty poems with the central thread being the changing presence of Baudelaire as an occupant of the poems. Sometimes he is a monkey, sometimes he is driving a car, sometimes he is a flowerburger chef. (This again reminds me of Smokey Stover and the Nutt Brothers. Persons change their bodies and their occupations with no rational linear reason except the pleasure of fantasy and expression.) Galilee is mimeographed and not prepossessing, except to the au courant literati who recognized that it was published by a ring of intense young poets surrounding the ideologue older poet Jack Spicer. That was in 1958.

Next, in 1959, appeared an equally unprepossessing book of twenty-four small poems, titled with a quote from Emily Dickinson: "Lay the Marble Tea." But the poet's skill has expanded! The obsessive crispy Baudelaire persona has gone and the poems are inexplicable artifacts and penetrating insights into childhood. They are both soft and terse and they lack the compression of statement that a [Ezra] Poundian poet would have written. These are literary poems with reference to [William] Shakespeare, [Herman] Melville, [Franz] Kafka, and Dickinson. Though the references are whimsical, they are inherent to the poems and not decoration. Richard is clearly quite literary.

In the front of this book is the first sight of Richard's trademark—his teardrop-shaped trout drawing. The book is published by Carp Press. One of Richard's fish drawings is there and next to it are the words: The Carp.

The next katydid hop is to his 1960 book The Octopus Frontier. It has Richard's first photographic cover, looking as deliberate and planned as the cover of Trout Fishing. The photo is by North Beach photographer of the fifties (and daughter of folklorist Jaime de Angulo) Gui de Angulo—she used to photograph all of us. It is a bleed photo cover showing what is apparently Richard's foot on the suckered tentacle of a large octopus. It is striking and just misses being sinister. It is startling and not funny. It is a non sequitur . . . and a memorable one.

The poems of Octopus Frontier are filled with large simple images of vegetables and pumpkins floating on the tide, a poem about Ophelia, and poems about childhood. At this point there is a recognizable Brautigan style, though it would still be hard to recognize the gleam of gold in the poetry. Now there are three stepping-stone books of poems, and Richard has been lucid and readable in every one of them, but there is no indication that this work is greatly above the level of much North Beach poetry. There is not any reason for even a keen reader like Donald M. Allen to note any of this for his important anthology.

Keats said, "Life is a Vale of Soul-making." Richard was Soul-making—carefully, cautiously, tersely, but still with some sweetness and even courtingly. The three little poem book "hops," in all their sharp-edged softness, add up to a stepping stone big enough to move him into poetry of true richness. That rich poetry shows up in the Pill. But the Pill is a "selected" poems. Richard carefully seeds and manures it with selections from these three early books. He puts them all together in the Pill into what he finds to be a courtingly enchanting—and otherwise inexplicable—order.

Later in Please Plant This Book he not only passes out the free poems by way of the Diggers, but real packets of seeds along with the writings. Richard's metamorphosis is made of little mutations, skin-sheddings like those of the instar of a katydid.

30. I like the little "Dandelion Poem" that Richard dedicated to me. He also reviewed my Beast Language poems, Ghost Tantras, in a mimeo magazine of the day called (if memory has it right) Wild Dog Review. It was one of the few reviews that book ever had. I said earlier that Watermelon is dedicated to Don Allen, Jo Anne Kyger, and me. Richard really knocked himself out to please people the liked or loved. He wrote a lot of poems for women he loved and men friends that he was close to, and he dedicated all his books in the most generous and heartfelt way.

31. Except for Don Carpenter—who never broke off with Richard—I was the last of his old close friends to cut away. It tears me up to think how close we were and how wonderful he was in many ways. Could I have stuck by him longer? Then I realize—yes, I could have. . . What? For a month more? A year more? But to old friends he was like a cat on its back clawing the stomach out of a hand.

32. Writer Ron Loewinsohn first met Richard in 1957. He says that Richard's natural form was the short story. Ron and I are probably the only two around to whom Richard had expressed his admiration of Henri Michaux's prose. Michaux's Miserable Miracle, about mescaline, was the take-off point for me to write my essays titled "Drug Notes." I felt I could be more truthful, more American in my description of peyote.

33. Trout is dedicated to Ron Loewinsohn and Jack Spicer. Ron confirms that Richard wrote Trout before Confederate, and that Spicer was responsible for much editorial contribution. So young poet Brautigan was helped with his first novel by Jack Spicer.

34. I told Ron that the beginning of The Abortion reminds me of Franz Kafka. Ron pointed out that in the prologue to Trout, Richard notes that Kafka learned about America from reading Benjamin Franklin. Then there is that poem, "Kafka's Hat." Then there is Richard's ever-present hat.

The situation in the beginning of The Abortion reminds me of Kafka's novel Amerika. The Abortion's a real book about an imaginary America.

There is a real library in a real place in San Francisco, but in the novel it is open twenty-four hours a day and the librarian lives there and cannot leave. It is as if he were involved in a "gentle" and voluntary Trial.

35. Today most students at California College of Arts and Crafts do not know who Richard is. One student asked me if Eleanor Dickinson was famous—she teaches at CCAC. I said, yes, for her drawings and television documentaries. The student thought he had her seen picture on a stamp. He was thinking of Emily Dickinson. Television has collapsed time and history for these students. Trout collapses Time and History and Memory and the topological separations of Places. Trout changes channels every few hundred words.

36. Poet and critic Bill Berkson says when he went up to a radicalized Yale [University] (late sixties) to teach, he asked who the students were reading. They were only reading Richard.

37. Ron Loewinsohn thinks that all of Richard's later (post-Abortion) works are based on a two-screen principle—shift from one location to another, then back to number one, then back to the other. This would be a desperate attempt to eliminate conflict or confrontation. It is also literary, a device. It is also romantic, turning from partner to partner and never looking at one long enough to see the flaws.

38. People sometimes mixed up James Broughton and Richard Brautigan. Before Richard was famous—on his way up—film-maker and poet James Broughton was making a film called "The Bed." It featured celebrities on a bed. Broughton filmed Brautigan for the film. Richard was thrilled about it. He was genuinely excited to be recognized as an art-celebrity by a world-known film-maker like Broughton. When the film came out, Richard was not in it. For a long time Richard went around with damp eyes, lashing his tail.

39. There is a "grandmotherliness" in Richard's Abortion. In addition to the smarminess of the dialogue, metaphors like "Vida and I were so relaxed that we both could have been rented out as fields of daisies" begin to become underwhelming. The dialogue is almost mincing. Not only is Richard skipping the confrontation and conflict, he is also using filler, and it is hard to put filler in such a small book. There are small dialogues about nothing at all in simple-minded phrases.

40. The American painter of the 1920s and 1930s, Arthur Dove, had a naive simplicity in his work—a simplification of landscapes or mood-scapes derived from vistas in broad, sweet, looming colors. Dove also did grandmotherly sentimental and exquisite collages using materials that might have come from grandmother's trunk or her life . . . pieces of lace, a spice label, and an elegant piece of veneer, or a page from an old letter in lovely elder handwriting of a previous generation. In doing those collages, Dove was not only American-Grandmotherly—he was French. There is something French about American-Grandmotherliness. It is perfectionistic. Sweetly anal. Exquisite. Even more than the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell.

41. To go back a step, Trout was written before the Fillmore dances, but I think for readers it mirrored their tribal dances in the switching of partners and chapter-channels. To paraphrase Samuel Butler, life is like a violin solo that one is playing in public but one is learning the violin as one plays. That is what Richard was doing—learning to write novels in public as they were being read. That is entrancing for a reading public but perhaps dangerous for Richard. He was always on the brink. He was always risking himself like a cautious acrobat and he was firmly trying to keep his shabby, personal, angular, wire-rimmed image unaltered. But he was also trying to become a male sex image and a wealthy artist.

42. Richard's description of the airport in The Abortion sounds like the world as seen by a schizophrenic—the nets of travel hanging in the air and catching people is a most real idea—most real and schizophrenic. Seeing the people as generalized robots seems schizophrenic. Seeing airplanes and airports as medieval castles of speed and so forth seems not only accurate but over the edge. This is a highly perceptive and accurate book but I am afraid it is no longer fiction—it sounds like a "gentle" case history being written. The writer seems alienated, childlike and incapable. It seems like an accurate set of descriptions about a real fantasy about incapability.

It occurs to me that the latent madness or hysteria is being salved by constant grandmotherliness. The hysteria a nanosecond beneath the surface is being calmed by cliches, figures of speech that are reassuring, and a willingness to be satisfied with images like "blank as snow" as capable acts of writing.

Richard, like the protagonist of The Abortion, did not know how to drive.

43. Richard keeps referring to the coffee spot on the wing of the plane through his protagonist. When the protagonist looks out of the cab and sees there is no coffee spot out there on the wing of the cab which is not there—then, I begin to worry about Richard. This seems to be Richard flat-out describing schizophrenia. It is the raw stuff of mental cases.

By the time Richard wrote The Abortion we were both clearly "controlled" alcoholics. I wonder how much he had progressed later into uncontrolled alcoholism which may have acted as a balm of drunkenness—as per the balm of grandmotherliness in the novels. Alcohol is a numbing, godly, poisonous, liberating high.

44. The Abortion may be as mad and daring an act as Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings. Both books are lovable for their vulnerability. I mean that both Richard and Norman dare to make themselves vulnerable. Are these voluntary acts of literature or are they uncontrollable obsessions? Great literature surely must be obsessional, and surely both of these books are obsessional.

45. Because it is so self-referential and so highly literary, Richard's oeuvre seems almost decadent, as if it were a part of a long tradition of intra-referential, self-referring works. Richard's works seem like Wen Fus written about other Wen Fus in a tradition of Wen Fu writers (the Wen Fu being an old Chinese form of highly literary prose poem). Clearly Kafka is there, and Michaux, and [Kurt] Vonnegut, and Spicer as mentor, and, I suppose, Hemingway into extremis. The writing is so au courant that Richard's oeuvre writes itself out and seems mindless and spontaneous and unliterary, or anti-literary. But it is just the opposite. Richard is a highly-honed esthete writing esthetic documents and works of art of great, great refinement.

Like Baudelaire, Richard is a refined Dandy. His dress was the dandyism of Beatles style as well as Haight Ashbury style. The impoverished Dandy dresses in the most carefully chosen stylish rags of no-style. He makes an elegant sculpture of himself while he works obsessively in his garret. And as he interwinds the topology of his works, picturing himself on the cover of the work, his schizophrenia becomes its subject

46. As I finish reading The Abortion, it seems inept. Richard had few adventures in his life when I knew him. He had apparently had an abortion with some woman, he had had a number of trips to Big Sur, and he had had a dream that became In Watermelon Sugar. In the fifties none of us had had many adventures—we were poor and broke and young. Some of us shipped out to Asia and some of us had sexual adventures; some had been in the forest service; a few were criminals and drug addicts, or dope dealers, or had been through the post-midnight romance of bop at Black nightclubs and in sleazy hotels. Richard must have missed most of the few opportunities there were for adventures—he just wasn't adventurous, he was cautious. And with good reason, judging from the mental state of the narrator of The Abortion.

47. Our biggest adventure in the fifties (and it was huge and without proportion, on the scale of our nervous systems and the Universe) was literature, and trips of the mind through literature, and the literary wars for dominance in North Beach and elsewhere in San Francisco. Our study of poetry and each other's poetry was marvelously, miraculously intense. Richard was on the edges of that in the fifties, but he must have feasted on it mentally and in the bar life, as a whale feasts on the bloom of krill in the Antarctic Sea.

48. The opening of The Hawkline Monster reminds me of Richard's enjoyment of movies. It is a carefully-studied movie opening for a slightly far-out cowboy movie. To open with cowboys on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii in 1902 reminds me of movies like Chinatown: the subject is popular, specific, and a little off-beat, but realistically satisfying and intriguing.

I remember Richard's pleasure in retelling scenes in movies. There is Richard in my mind's eye retelling a favorite scene (from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) He tells the scene over in a precise and pleasurable way—juicy in the telling (from the warmth of a glass of wine in his shabby flat across from Sears)—but it is deliciously precise also.

49. Hawkline has a strong opening in the third person as compared to the mentally inept and grandmotherly sweet Kafkaesque opening of Abortion. (Was not Hawkline the next novel after The Abortion? Answer: No, I remember Richard telling me about Willard and His Bowling Trophies, though I had not seen the manuscript.) There is an enormous jump between The Abortion and the opening of Hawkline. It is not just the shift of person in the narrative—Hawkline is deliberately macho. Cameron and Greer are right out of macho cowboy movies. Maybe they are a split person. They are Sun and Dance, or Butch and Cassidy.

50. Richard really wanted to be MACHO—he wanted to be one of the Big Boys. It was childlike, or maybe childish. After I quit speaking to Richard I wrote an angry poem about him:

NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

SO, AT LAST YOUR PERSONALITY
HAS BECOME A COPROLITE!
((Fossilized shit!))
HOW
painful it was
to grow up in the fifties!
WE LEARNED:
materialism
macho-competition,
greed.
BUT STILL I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE
that you sit there telling me
about the women you fuck,
how much money you make,
and of your fame.
As if
the last twenty years
never happened.
You seem pathetically
foolish. But there is a viciousness
in
our generation.
YOU
ARE
REALLY
SET
(like a robot)
ON OVERKILL.
And you believe
in social appearances.
You want to be like
The Big Boys.
Whoever they are!

I put the poem in September Blackberries and I did not edit it out when I edited scores of pages from the manuscript. It meant something to me—it was a point I had reached. It was a node. I saw the degree of my own materialism, sexism, and macho in Richard's actions and yet I was slightly aghast at Richard.

September Blackberries was the first book I published after the break with Richard. I hoped he would never see the poem, and I believed that he would accept our break so abruptly that he would not read the book.

51. Last year Richard upset producer Benn Possett and his co-organizers at the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam. Apparently, Richard came on stage too drunk to read and he either read a bit or not at all, and maybe delivered an insult or several. Then he drunkenly howled and yelled and demanded for a woman who would fuck him. That must have been October of last year, and Benn was still talking about it in March when I saw him in Amsterdam. A couple of other people also mentioned Richard's scene. He was outrageous enough to anger the Dutch literary bohemians. It must have been something!

52. [Percy Bysshe] Shelley and [Lord] Byron used to practice with pistols together regularly. They were both so highstrung that there was apprehension of a duel arising in a moment of anger. Shelley was the better shot.

53. Years ago in The Summer of Love days I asked composer George Montana why so many of the rock musicians were so terrible, and why they were listened to, and why they did not learn their instruments. George said that was the way it is supposed to be. George's idea was that anybody could learn to make sandals, and anybody might make them and be a sandal-maker. The same with music. He believed anybody could be a musician—it was just wanting to do it that was the necessity.

I wonder if many young sixties people felt that Richard was just their casual sandal-maker novelist, and that they could themselves write just such novels as Richard did if they sat down (by candlelight on acid) to do so. Probably no one realized he had been rewritten some passages sixteen times with labor and fastidious obsession.

54. A few nights ago I had a dream with Richard in it. There was a vast auditorium as big as the Fillmore Ballroom, but it was clean and shiny, with waxed floors, and the air was clean, and people were dressed in respectable suits. A band was playing (a regular band, not a rock band) and there was an enormous circle of people and gray plastic folding chairs. It was a game of musical chairs. Richard was directly in front of me in the line and the band started playing. He just stood there owlishly, holding up the whole line. He did not know he was supposed to move.

55. June Thirtieth is a terrifically good book. It does things that a book—and poetry—should do. It is a book of travel poems, poems about place. There is a tradition for this "genre" of book. It is the tradition of haibun; that is, a collection of haiku gathered into a story line. I think especially of Basho's haibun Narrow Road to the North.

56. June Thirtieth reminds me, in an odd way, of what I love about Kerouac—Jack giving me his perceptions with the lucidity and athleticism of his sensorium. I love to read Kerouac for the clarity with which he sees the same things I see. We see differently, and thus Jack gives the lucid gift of his perceptions. With Norman Mailer it is a different case—I see things almost the same way as Mailer does, as if we are twins. But Kerouac is a little odd and quite understandable to me.

In June, Richard is giving the gift of a rare and delicious combination of his perceptions (sensory) and his imagination (uniquely personal). His perceptions are quite unlike mine—they would not interest me except for the potent charge of his interest. Richard can be potent and spontaneous in this little book. It is quite daring. Being in Japan is a big adventure for Richard. He is safe (God, is Japan safe), so he is less cautious. He is playing: going to Japanese bars, courting and loving women of different appearance, discovering television all over again. He is seeing flies and elevators differently. This book is fabulous stuff. And it is the right length in the sense that one does not feel that things are being squeezed off early.

The "quality" of the poems is uneven—as Richard notes in his introduction—but so what? It is a glorious whole and Richard is letting himself go, finding new stops in his flute. There is divinity in this book.

Thank you for these poems, Richard.

57. If someone knew nothing about Absurdism or Samuel Beckett and went to see Waiting for Godot, that person might think Beckett was a literary Naive. There are two things typical of Absurdist theater that are usually not commented on. Each Absurdist play takes place in a different universe with its own rules—such as people turning into rhinoceroses, vaudeville bums standing in empty fields speaking existentialist thoughts, and etc. Beckett has a different universe for each play. Endgame is similar to Godot, but only similar. It is a different universe. Second, though Absurdist theater is quite literary, it is heavily influenced by the popular media, using films and comic strips as sources.

Each of Richard's "novels" is a different universe. Each one (except for Trout and Watermelon) reminds me strongly of Absurdist theater. (Trout is complex to a degree that is unsustainable in theater, and the "decor" of Watermelon is too lovely to be Absurdist theater.)

58. Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork reads as dry and trashy, with an occasional smart aphorism. The "poems" are flat and Richard is trying to pretend that he—and the reader—are hearing something special in the flat prosy lines. Once in a while I am almost convinced.

59. What is interesting about Mercury is that it is Artful. It is almost all on the same level of flatness and dryness; it all inhabits the same vibration of possibilities that Richard has chosen to write in. As ever, Richard has edited it into artful bundles. The nature morte of "Group Portrait Without Lions" almost works—but, of course, there are no lions. There are no lions growling, nor any gazelle blood, in any of the poems. It is a strain to read it, and I can imagine some self-horror in this book.

60. The poem "Ben" in Mercury is about a phone call to Ben Wright in Oklahoma. Ben is not in his house trailer to answer Richard's call. Ben is a brilliant and intense man moving from one terrible affair to another after his wealthy Oklahoman father's death. When Richard and I first met Ben he was at U.C. Berkeley working on a paper about Mark Twain. He said the Twain archives were being ransacked and everything interesting was being stolen out of them. Ben lived in San Diego, and Richard and I saw a lot of him. Ben was tormented and hyper. He always said, "I've got the whips and jingles."

61. I finished The Hawkline Monster easily, but Richard's novel Dreaming of Babylon is awful, pathetic. I am more than a third of the way through and I feel stuck. It is hard to look at the page. This little universe was hardly worth creating and barely has enough energy in it to sustain the fact of the ink upon the page.

The novel is a double removal. It is removed in time and space to 1942. Then the private eye protagonist removes himself like Walter Mitty to his imaginary Babylon. The Private eye character is barely there as a persona (another post Beatles loser), and to have him go off into a personal removal to his fantasy world leaves only words on the page—there is barely any coherence of "story." It is a book constructed of props: private eye, peg-legged mortician, a blonde, a gun, absence of bullets, a lovely corpse, reminiscences of the Spanish Civil War. But the props do not come together to make a story.

62. Kenneth Anger titled his book Hollywood Babylon, a deliberate use of the pun "babble-on."

63. The Hawkline Monster owes less to [Edgar Allan] Poe than it does to Disney movies that Richard and I grew up watching. Hawkline uses the same color palette as Disney's Fantasia, and to a certain extent the same sleek glabrous non-threatening biomorphic monster shapes and shadows of monster shapes. The monster is ultimately cute and plays his role on the steep steps to the basement, or on the surface of the gravy bowl, or mingled with the pearls on the lady's bosom as a pattern of light. Finally, the monster becomes diamonds.

64. Poe used some of the following, but Richard used them all over and over in tandem and in rotation, one on top of another, in a musical series like a tone-row composer: doubles; revenants; periods of forgetfulness; confusion of self; childlike view of self; confusion of places and proper names of persons; interruptions; ruptures of transition; pointless dialogue. These seem, when they show up in abundance, to be like symptoms, and they are the solid stuff, the structural stuff, of Hawkline.

65. Some chapters of Hawkline seem like symptoms.

66. A description of Freud's Unconscious in Hawkline: "But they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by the mutated light in The Chemicals, a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind." All things are possible to the monster—as to the Unconscious of Freud—and the monster is just beginning to learn to use its powers.

67. In Hawkline the monster dies when whiskey is poured on The Chemicals. Richard poured a lot of alcohol on his monster.

68. Dreaming of Babylon ends with the beautiful whore corpse tucked in the protagonist's refrigerator. To my earlier list of Poe/Brautigan symptoms I will add: inability to accept the body.

69. A few years ago I looked up and saw Jack Nicholson standing by the stairs in Cafe Sport Restaurant. Jack was facing the dining venue and he had on his HUGE Jack Nicholson smile. He was standing so everyone could see him would see him—would notice him—would have their "minds blown" that they were looking at Jack Nicholson. Jack loved it. I liked him for his flagrant egoism. It was heroic. Irish.

Richard got so he liked to sit at Enrico's outdoor tables to drink (it was the most visible place in North Beach), and to be seen. He wanted to be seen, to be admired, and perhaps to be envied. He seemed to like being there by himself. He managed a look that was at once wistful, self intent, and intriguing. He looked like the great man of himself sitting there. This was not the boyish show-off macho of running to Enrico's to be Ten Day Barons of Cafe Society. This was serious.

70. Someone describes Richard at Enrico's after he separated from his Japanese wife. She was suing him for alimony, I suppose. The friend tells me about how Richard told him the whole dismal financial story, and no doubt with juicy precision mixed with intense and slightly wet-eyed anguish. Richard told how he was being ruined, how the woman wanted to strip him financially, how she was doing it, what he was doing, and so on. Painfully detailed, yet probably Richard was not telling any personal secrets and was keeping much under the table. Then Richard told the next person who came into the bar, apparently the same story with slightly different wording. Then Richard found someone else and told the story yet again. And the next . . .

71. Bruce Conner knew Richard's wife Aki and liked her. When she wanted to get a divorce from Richard she phoned Bruce and asked him how to get hold of a lawyer. She had been, Bruce says, some kind of an executive at Sony in Japan. Here in San Francisco, when Richard went off on trips to Japan to "do his writing," she stayed at home.

In Japan the home is the province of the woman, Bruce explains. Richard got a Pacific Heights apartment for himself and his wife. I imagine it to be large with high-ceilinged rooms and a view of the Bay. Bruce describes Richard bringing home his drinking buddies, being quarrelsome (dish-throwing), and also bringing home girlfriends. Bruce is sympathetic to Aki, though he is a firm friend of Richard.

72. Bruce reports that Aki's family was hostile to Richard when he was in Japan. Bruce stayed in Tokyo for a month to write a film script with Richard, but Richard did not show Bruce around Japan and stayed in his hotel room much of the time. The script aborted because they could not agree on a working style to compose it. Bruce pictured Magritte-like and Troutfishing-like ideas for the film. One idea was to show Dennis Hopper disappearing into quicksand. Bruce wanted to do sixty or so takes—he imagined Dennis would do it differently each time.

73. The writing of the script bothered Bruce because Richard would only have people on screen telling what they were doing. He would not, or could not, have them actually do actions on the screen.

I commented that none of the "novels" had been made into films. Bruce said that Hawkline was optioned for a film. I replied that only Disney could have done it, meaning as an animated cartoon. Later, I imagined it might make one of those strange combinations of animation and film. A real lady, with real pearls, but an animated Hawkline monster slithering around on her pearls.

74. Bruce asked me if I had any idea why Richard killed himself. Then he proposed several reasons: a. To get people to read his works; b. To emulate what Richard postulated was Hemingway's reason, i.e., Hemingway intended to kill himself when his faculties dwindled; c. Serious depression. Earlier in our conversation Bruce led me to believe that in Japan Richard might have learned from the Japanese culture that suicide is an acceptable way of dealing with problems.

75. In the late sixties, Richard phoned Don Carpenter one day and told him he had had dinner at a Japanese restaurant with Rip Torn, and he recounted some of what he had said, and what Rip had said, and so forth. This kind of ego-building and one-upping mysteriousness was typical of Richard. Don was excited to meet Rip, who was his favorite actor. Finally, he demanded that Richard tell him where he had met Rip. Richard said chez McClure, then Don came by and, as he puts it, just leaned on the door and smiled. Then Don and Rip became friends and Don wrote and produced the film Payday for himself and for Rip. How often, how endlessly, Richard would phone with some great coup of his and tell you about someone you would like to meet, but then nor let on where it happened or who his connection was. He was trying envy and its discontent on his friends. It was unpleasant and highschoolish, but it was a fundament for what he was to do to friends later.

76. Driving back from Mill Valley after having lunch with Don I had an idea: Why did Richard kill himself? Possible answer: Because he had made his point. Clearly in the process of making his point he had used himself up, "fried his brains with alcohol" as someone unkindly put it. That would not take into account what Richard's liver and insides looked like. I am making a subtle "take" on human spirit. Perhaps Richard killed himself because he had made his point and used himself up like a butterfly uses itself up in the process. If Richard's point was the fulfillment of blind groping hungers of the Freudian Unconscious, he had satisfied a lot of them that must have looked unsatisfiable during his early life: he had become a male sex figure to some great extent; wealthy and propertied; a successful artist; admired by those he despised in the colleges; had some adventures; tasted glory. And he had triumphed over his enemies and most of his friends. It may have taken all of the physical and spiritual substance—and the fuel of alcohol—that Richard could manage to make such a triumph.

There are ways of looking at death. One might say that Richard killed himself in an extreme depression, or that he killed himself because his faculties were going (as per Hemingway fears). Those could be the series of impressions in Richard's consciousness preceding his death.

In a different stance I can observe Richard's whole life and say what a grand triumph—he won on all scores. He got the things he seemed to want so intensely. He went from threadbare recluse born too late, unwanted child, and has-been, all the way to the stars.

Richard had made an immense number of points against his friends and enemies. It took everything he had to make the points and he ended the game. This is not to infer that this was a rational process of the conscious mind. He did not sit there with a gun and think, "O.K., I'll do it now. I made my point." Of course, he was drunk and in agony, or drunk and numb, and uncrystallizing himself.

But Richard's life doesn't look like a failure to me. It looks like a win in the overall. Even if Richard thought he was losing, his whole life says something else.

77. One mutual friend says he bedded several of Richard's women friends—they went to him after they left Richard. He says that Richard worshipped one woman who appeared on the cover of a novel, that he went down on his knees in front of her and worshipped her. Like worshipping a goddess or a Mary or a mother, I suppose, and I imagine with maddest religious-sexual and religious-fervor bound together. She must have been Richard's first real bravissima, glorious, non-bohemian, long-legged sleek beauty with perfume and clean expensive sheets. Why not!

78. An old friend's reactions to some stories about Richard being "into bondage" is that, yes, it is likely Richard was involved in leather or whatever. He treats it casually and as a minor foible—not implying that Richard would have been very deeply involved. He believes that Richard might have become involved because it is a "national pastime" in Japan. It would be ordinary enough to be a bit intrigued after a number of sexual adventures in Japan, he says.

79. Don Carpenter disagrees with me when I say that Richard was well-read. He asserts that Richard was only well-read about [Adolf] Hitler and the Civil War. I reply to Don that Richard could talk about Blaise Cendrars or Michaux. Don's reply is that Richard only "read the odd stuff."

This is certainly to be taken con grana salis to my over-assertion of Richard's literary breadth. Richard probably could not talk for long about [Edmond] Spenser. He had not been to college—his reading in literature may have been delvings into the "odd" plus, however, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, [Herman] Melville, [Ernest] Hemingway, and etc. Richard's reading was quirky, thorough, broad in the directions he chose. Probably he had not read the usual literary traditions of Beowulf, Chaucer, Spenser. He did not know the college English Lit canon, but none of us cared about that much anymore because we were the New Mutations.

80. The below-zero, cold, black sombrero in Sombrero Fallout reminds me of the ice caves in other books. The crowd going mad and running out of control reminds me of the "body"—I mean the sexually huge out-of-control body of Vida in The Abortion.

81. Actress Mie Hunt is on the cover of the Japanese publication of Sombrero Fallout. There was a simultaneous Japanese and American publication of Sombrero. It reminds me of Richard's other tinkerings with topology and making novels into real and unreal events. The simultaneous printings make me think of a set of intentions similar to those behind making the cover of Trout a real place with the real author on it—and referred to in the interior of the novel.

I like those topologizings and meltings. They are poetic in intent, as well as egoistic. They are embedding Richard in the work as the artist of the work. Richard is using the possibilities (some new ones) of the media. Many of us were doing similar things, or wanted to.

82. Please Plant This Book, poems printed on seed packets, is not only a coup in gaining an audience through a startling book and object, but it also creates a new image of the book and is a true poetic act. [Stéphane] Mallarmé said the book is a spiritual instrument. Richard made one that would spread carrots, lettuce, parsley, squash.

The free book is taken in concept from Wallace Berman—it is an extension on Berman's give-away packet magazine, Semina. The tomb screened cover photo and the triplication of it is also sheer Berman.

83. The screens of Sombrero Fallout: To use Ron Loewinsohn's image, there are not two but three screens. The screen that contains the sombrero that has fallen to the street is the first. The screen with the humorist writer protagonist is the second. Screen three is the screen of Yukiko, the lost lover of the protagonist. The first screen which is the continuation of the story begun on the torn scraps of paper in the wastebasket interests me almost not at all. Richard barely tried to make the expanding story of pillage, mayhem, and civil war interesting or even amusing. I imagine that it was his strategy to not even try. It gains a little interest because there is no effort to make it believable or funny. It is odd. But I tend to sight-read those sections—I turn the pages and the words on them are obvious and repetitious.

The second screen: The screen of the protagonist/author interests me more because Richard is presenting a highly and carefully doctored self-portrait. I wonder when he is presenting himself and when he is deliberately not doing so. I wonder when he is presenting himself and thinks he is not—and vice versa.

Yukiko sleeping is the third screen. It is a worshipful portrait of the beauty of a sleeping, long-haired Japanese woman. Much of it is exquisite prose poetry. Just now I thought of Pierre Louys, though it is not like that. Still, perhaps Richard shares some things with Pierre Louys.

The Yukiko screen gives birth to another screen. Her cat has a screen all to herself and is an entity splitting from Yukiko. It is one of those rare and delicious animal portraits, and its wholly anthropocentric nature contains a wonderful believable cameo of a cat expressed in human terms. It feels like a cat. The cat chewing the soft but crunchy diamonds of the catfood. The cat lapping a drink of water but forgetting the five or six bites of food and then returning for the dainty nibbles. The self-involvement of the cat, its inherent bored indifference. As in the accurate descriptions of schizophrenic observations of the airport in Abortion, I am moved. Of course, a cat does not imagine the cat food as soft diamonds—but what an analogy!

84. The descriptions of Yukiko's dream life are interesting perceptions of dream life, and relationships of dreams to the exterior events—like the cats purring or stirring—are most psychologically credible.

85. Pierre Louys wrote a book titled The Daughters of Bilitis. My mother had a copy of it on her little shelf of books where she kept Kristin Lavransdatter and Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads and the Book of Stag Verse. After almost forty-five years I remember Daughters of Bilitis as being an erotic but not explicit book of prose poems describing, in sensual and delicate terms, acts of female romantic homosexuality.

86. Here is an aspect of Sombrero Fallout that intrigues me: the description of the cat purring and the relationship of the purring to dreams, the description of the cat itself; the renderings of the dreams themselves remind me of poetry. Richard's decadent poetry is written as prose. Further, this decadent poetry written as prose is basically a comedy.

I am not using decadent perjoratively. I mean by decadent a style that is overly aware and lush. It is playing with the edges of our acceptance by means of its delicacy and accuracy regarding a human fringe of feelings. In Sombrero there is a lushness at times and it is achieved with sparseness. This reminds me of certain Oriental works and is certainly not part of the English/American tradition of literature. It is contrasted to the cartoonishness of the Civil War that is started by the hat in the street.

87. On the phone Dennis Hopper tells me about sitting up late at night with Richard arguing politics. They shout, presumably extremely drunk. Richard's wife Akiko comes into the room and asks them to stop shouting at each other, but Dennis tells me that he and Richard were shouting into a corner of the room and not at each other. They had made that decision. Dennis comments on how right wing Richard's politics had become.

In large part, Richard's "politics" had much to do with my ceasing to speak to him. His feelings about women, other artists, and the growing lack of sympathy for the Digger ideals he had help build were clearly growing into right wingism. It was awful to hear, especially when he acted sweeter and more sugary and sincere on stage or in public utterances of kindness, love, and social concern.

88. Robert Duncan in conversation is negative about Richard. He remembers Richard for writing a wonderful book called Trout Fishing in America, and he remembers he and Spicer going to Richard's public reading of the book. Robert declares that Richard did not write anything else of worth. Robert dislikes—maybe despises—Richard's poetry. He sees Richard as a talented stand-up entertainer, recollecting that people would stay to the end of long multiple poetry readings just to hear him. That is a fact.

Clearly there were a number of people who read Trout and were disappointed by all the books afterwards. There were others who bought Richard's "package" of Trout, Pill, Watermelon and then read no more. I can imagine that The Abortion stopped many or turned them around in their interest in Richard.

89. Like Abortion, Richard's last novel So The Wind deals with a Kafkaesque American landscape, another example of visionary schizophrenia. So The Wind seems at one moment exactly right in its depictions of Northwest small town post-Depression boyhood; at another moment I realize the "landscape" of small town America is as unlike how it really was (I grew up in the Northwest also) as the protagonist is dissimilar to Richard. This double intention on the part of the artist gives me a sense of great skill.

90. So The Wind is ominously depressing. I feel terrible while I read it and I still have four or five pages to read. It is depressing to read a novella of more than a hundred pages when one knows from the very beginning that the protagonist is trying to call back a bullet that has killed someone. The landscape is relentlessly depressing, from children's funerals to rundown motels to hooverville huts where old sawmill guards live out pointless, impoverished, neat lives.

91. In So The Wind, the protagonist's killing of his "classy" junior high school friend makes me think of Richard's own "murderings" of his friends in the late sixties, early seventies. Killing a special friend seems to be a primal event in Richard's consciousness. He did it often enough in real life and then it returns (no, it emerges) as a subject in a novel shortly before he kills himself. Just as the protagonist is not to blame—not responsible for the bad luck of having shot his friend—so I feel, in a similar way, Richard is not to be blamed for killing off his friends.

Richard's alienation and attacks on the capacities of his friends seem mindless. He was not able to control the impulses he acted out and I cannot imagine that he had any insight into what he was doing. I always felt that what Richard was doing was somehow programmed. I felt that Richard was acting out directive impulses that he had no awareness of, that he had little or no conscious contact with them. We are like that much of the time. When it is in such a crucial area as friendship and when one needed friends as Richard did, then it is tragic.

The child, the twelve-year old boy, in So The Wind is as mindless as Richard often seemed. The boy is a mirroring reflection of what catches his senses, and he follows the most simple animal directives—to get some bottles to sell so he can buy a hamburger or some bullets. To blow apples apart with his gun. To try to imagine what an enemy boy might have gotten with the returnable bottles that he did not get.

Bruce Conner said he saw Richard as a tragic child. And he was. And he is.

Mergen,1985

"A Strange Boy"
Barney Mergen
San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Jan. 1985, "This World" section, p. 20.
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.

Hearing of the death of Richard Brautigan last October brought back the memory of a warm June day in 1956 when he appeared at my door in Reno, Nev., introducing himself, "Hello, I'm Richard Brautigan and I'm apoet," and scaring my grandmother half to death.

"There's a strange boy asking for you," she said as I got out of the bathtub after a day on a construction job. At the door I saw what she meant. About 6 feet 3 and thin as a reed, with blond bangs cut straight above his eyes, Richard did look different. Even in the "Biggest Little City in the World" men wore their hair short in 1956.

He told me that he was on his way to San Francisco from Portland, now that he was 21, and that he always wanted to see Reno. He had found my name in Brushfire, the University of Nevada literary magazine, and correctly guessed that I might be sympathetic to a homeless poet.

He asked if he could leave his belongings with me while he looked for work and a place to live. He could see that the apartment I shared with my mother and grandmother, in the only honest-to-goodness rickety tenement building between Chicago and Sacramento, didn't hold much hope. His possessions were packed in two cardboard boxes a little smaller than a case of beer. One contained manuscripts, and one held some socks, shirts and underwear.

We wandered around town that evening, getting bounced from the gambling clubs because I was underage and Richard looked "funny." We went to the coffee shop of the Mapes Hotel, and when the waitress said, "What do you want?" Richard replied, "A watermelon milkshake." The waitress narrowed her eyes, curled her lip and snarled, "You some kind of wise guy?" Richard smiled beatifically and we ordered coffee. I knew I had seen the future, and it worked.

We spent a lot of time together in the next few days. He found a cheap rooming house off Highway 40. He told me about his childhood. His father had been named Bernard; maybe why that is why he confided in me. I have forgotten many of the details, but it seemed his life had been remarkably like mine, only rougher. Abandoned by his father, he had grown up in extreme poverty. He had lived in the slums and worked in the canneries of Portland through high school.

A poor, skinny, dreamy kid, he had been picked on by other children and adult dogooders in ways I appreciated. He told me about the time a bunch of men from some service organization had taken him fishing. After an evening of drinking around the campfire, one of the men suggested that they take Richard to a whorehouse, an act of charity common enough in those days, but only if he could prove himself worthy by showing then 10 inches. As Richard told the story, I understand that there were two points to it: one, that he had demonstrated the necessary length; and the other, that the episode proved man's inhumanity to man. Richard's mordant humor was deeply rooted in the past.

He talked about writers. He idolized Truman Capote for his audacity and William Carlos Williams for his style. We agreed on the greatness of Whitman. He criticized my poetry, and I gave him a bookish analysis of his. He showed me his unpublished poems and "novels," some only a few lines long.

Then he went off to work in Fallon, a small town east of Reno. The editor of the local newspaper liked his poetry and published two poems ["Storm Over Fallon" and "The Breeze" in the July 25, 1956 issue. See Poetry > Uncollected for more information]. I have carried the clipping with me for 28 years.

These may be Brautigan's first publications. He left for San Francisco shortly afterward and I never saw him again, but I followed his career through friends and his books and poems. I read the early poems: "Trout Fishing in America," "A Confederate General From Big Sur"; then I got bored. I always thought he masked conventional ideas in an easy surrealism; it was what made him so accessible and popular for a while. But I always admired his tenacity, his courage.

Richard was a product of the social class system of the West, a system that dictated that poor kids worked in the canneries and gas stations and didn't write poetry. Richard rose above the stereotype. Like Gatsby, he created an image of himself, which, though fatally flawed in the end, allowed him to write a few very good books.

Richard made us see watermelon milkshakes in the tawdry Lexalt flats of Nevada's casinos. He was a character out of a novel by James Crumley or a poem by Richard Hugo, making a stand for his own vision in a landscape where tourists go to play. He really was Billy the Kid and Trout Fishing in America and the last Confederate General. I miss him already.

Roiter,1984

"Death of A Poet: String Was Cut between Brautigan and the World"
Margaret Roiter
Bozeman Chronicle, 31 Oct. 1984, 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.

On the first Wednesday of spring quarter in 1982, I and 14 other students were sitting in a small classroom in Wilson Hall on the campus of Montana State University. There was not a lot of conversation between us. Those of us who knew each other spoke now and then to one another quietly. The classroom was filled with an air of nervous anticipation as we awaited the appearance of our instructor. The class was a creative writing seminar and the instructor was internationally renowned author Richard Brautigan.

At the apppointed time, Dr. Paul Ferlazzo, head of the Department of English at MSU, entered the classroom followed by a tall, barrel-chested, curly-haired, red-blonde man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a blue-denim jacket, blue jeans and Western boots, walking difficultly with a cane. His first words were something like: "Yes, there is something wrong with my leg. It is broken. I tripped over a footstool in my living room in San Francisco last week." He had refused to have a cast applied, so he had gone instead to a specialist in the Bay Area and was treating his leg with daily vitamins, meditiation, and I can't remember what all. He lived in pain, but he dealt with it in his own way.

And that, as I came to learn over the next several months of contact with Brautigan, was the approach he used at all times.

For most people who knew him only through his writing, this unconventional approach to life was readily seen in his work. To say that "Trout Fishing in America" or "In Watermelon Sugar" are not your typical works of fiction is an understatement of gigantic proportion, somewhat like saying the Elton John is not just another male vocalist. Richard Brautigan was definitely a one-of-a-kind individual.

When Brautigan was in his heyday during the 1960s, I was a very naive teen-ager who had never even heard of him, much less read him. And when I did encounter Brautigan through his novels, not only "Trout Fishing in America" but also "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966" and "The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western," which I read prior to meeting him in class, I found his work to be wholly outside my spheres of experience or comprehension. He seemed like a totally weird person to me, and I suppose, both by my standards and most other people's, he was.

And yet despite his idiosynchroncies, his rough language and crass mannerisms, there was a softer side to this heavy-drinking, monstrous-sounding man.

My first glimpse of it was during a public reading of his poetry. I had never read his poems before. But hearing him read them, between his sips of something from a styrofoam cup that he had replenished from something hidden in a brown paper bag, gave them such force, such reality, and such life that I began seeing him as something other than a weirdo.

Some of his poems are on the strange and rather funny side, like "The Necessity of Appearing in Your Own Face" (from "Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork," Simon and Schuster, 1971); "There are days when that is the last place/in the world you want to be but you/have to be there, like a movie, because it/features you." Or "Postcard" (from "Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt," Dell Publishing Co., 1970): "I wonder if 84-year-old Colonel Sanders/ever gets tired of traveling all around America/talking about fried chicken?"

His poems are like photographs, each one not seemingly terribly important or impressive on its own, but many together creating a montage of life: things funny and offbeat, things and people that don't make any sense at all, the attempt to connect and form relationships with others, the dislike but acceptance of self, the fear of being alone, and the fear of death.

The Richard Brautigan I got to know both in class and on a couple of occasions at his Pine Creek ranch seemed to me to be a vulnerable man. He seemed to have a lot of friends, but also seemed to be lonely. He seemed to have the feeling of having experienced it all, of having seen everything, of being surprised at nothing. He often talked about the two years he spent in a library as a young man, trying to learn how to write a sentence, but confessed to having to read next to nothing since that time because nothing was new to him any longer. Possibly his life had been riddled with problems, he was empathetic toward others and their problems, but he seemed to be a man incapable of upholding an enduring relationship on a one-to-one basis. He told us he had been married twice but had lived with enough women at various times to consider himself having been married seven times.

He related an incident to us which, he said, proved to be the beginning of the end of his second marriage. His wife came out to his studio while he was writing and asked him if he knew where the Bisquick was. He had been in the middle of another of his existential crises, panicking over the seeming lack of meaning to life, and he blew up at his wife's mundane, idiotic question. He deplored what he sensed as the breakdown in the American family yet was barely on speaking terms with his only daughter, with whom he was angry because she married a man he didn't like. He, in his own words, "boycotted" her wedding and told his daughter he would like her second husband "a helluva" lot better than her first. He told me he disliked children. He was not a happy man, or even a satisfied one. In spite of his fame, he was often alone. He kept looking for meanings in his life, but could find none. He felt like he had seen and done everything.

In class and out he talked about death a great deal. One of assignments was to bring in the obituary column from the Billings Gazette. I think he was afraid of dying, of having his life and his works forgotten, thereby rending them meaningless. His final novel, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away," was, I believe, his last attempt to both describe his fear and disprove it.

Throughout much of his work, in many of his poems and particularly in his last novel, Brautigan often used the symbol of wind as an effacing agent, an eraser of people's existences. In his first novel he conscientiously recorded seemingly irrelevant details about unimportant people. It was important for Brautigan to write about an alcoholic night watchman, a financially ruined old man living in a packing crate shack on the edge of a pond where he built a beautiful dock and boat which he never used, and an eccentric older couple who moved their living room furniture every evening to the shores of the pond so that they could do their fishing in comfort. He needed to write about these obscure people so that their lives would not be totally fogotten and therefore rendered meaningless. Life, it seems to me that Brautigan was saying, is perhaps the only precious commodity there is. And we have to recognize each person's value simply because they have lived, "so the wind won't blow it all away."

Brautigan worked very hard on his last novel. He told us it had been in his head for 17 years. When it was published and was not highly acclaimed, I believe he was fatally disappointed. It seems to be a great irony that a man to whom life was the only thing worth having should decide to take his own. Perhaps in the end he felt totally misunderstood and alienated from the human race.

In his last novel he wrote a passage that seems fitting to be among his last:

"If ever I get pneumonia, I wanted whoever was there to tie a very long string to my finger and fasten the other end of the string to their finger and when they left the room if I felt I was dying, I could pull the string and they'd come back.

"I wouldn't die if there was a long piece of string between us."

In the end, there must not have been a string between Brautigan and the world. He died alone, not of pneumonia, but of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Smith,1984

"Friends Say Stories Sensationalize Brautigan's Life after His Death"
Barb Smith
Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1984, p. 29.
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.

Did Montana's Big Sky country kill Richard Brautigan, the vagabond poet and off-beat novelist?

One California writer friend has claimed it did, that Brautigan killed himself because he couldn't "out-macho" the cowboys in Montana.

Brautigan's Montana friends say the idea is absurd.

"It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard," Ken Kelley, a writer and Playboy interviewer, is quoted as saying in a recent San Francisco Chronicle story by columnist Warren Hinckle [See "Obituaries" menu tab].

Brautigan was caught up in a better-than-thou syndrome that manifested itself at its violent worst in the jet-set enclave of the Paradise Valley, Kelley said. One way Brautigan competed was by getting into "kinky" sex he claimed.

Kelley told Hinckle in the article that he had visited Brautigan's Montana home as was shocked at the "madness."

"The house was full of bullet holes. There were bullent holes in the clock, in the kitchen and bullets in the living room floor and bullets in the ceiling," Kelley was quoted as saying. "Richard used to get drunk and shoot things."

In the article, Kelley blaimed it on the "bunch of artistic weridos living in rancher country," he said. "Every night seemed to be boys' night out. You had to get drunk and get your gun and shoot off more bullets than the other guy."

"That's absolute hogwash," said Marian Hjortsberg, a close friend of Brautigan's and neighbor in the Paradise Valley near Livingston. "It is just definitely not true."

Hjortsberg said guns held a fascination for Brautigan but beyond that, "that article was pure sensationalism."

Who knows what killed him, she said. "It certainly wasn't Montana."

Another long-time friend and Paradise Valley neighbor, novelist Tom McGuane, said, "The people in Montana were the only people who seemed to care about Richard after San Francisco had used him up."

"I personally made a great effort, in fact, I have the last revolver he had around here," he said.

McGuane said Brautigan's friends in Montana worked hard to keep him from being self-destructive.

"It was a major occupation for his friends. His friends who lived around here spent the last five years in concern and terror."

Richard was a troubled man, McGuane said, "but he really never did any harm to anyone."

He said Brautigan lived increasingly in solitude, that he often started his work days at 3 in the morning and that he did a lot of drinking.

Before Brautigan left Montana, he brought his fishing tackle, guns and a box to McGuane's home to store. McGuane said it wasn't until after Brautigan's death that he opened the box and found a Japanese burial urn.

McGuane said the San Francisco Chronicle column suits California stereotypes of what goes on in Montana.

"All that article was was a failed writer talking to another failed writer, and publishing it in the newspaper," he said. "It was so untrue and so cruel, it had a shattering effect on his (Brautigan's) own daughter."

Brautigan's decomposed body was found with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Bolinas, Calif., home on Oct. 25. A positive identification of the body was made by the Marin County Sheriff's Department this week.

"We are 95 percent certain it was a suicide," said Sgt. Tony Russo of the Marin County Sheriff's Department. Russo said they should know definitely whether it was a suicide by the end of the week.

Brautigan, 49, was a literary cult figure in the 1960s. With the 1967 publication of "Trout Fishing in America," which sold 2 million copies, Brautigan suddenly found himself famous and in demand as a speaker for "new fiction" on college campuses throughout the nation.

In recent years, though, Brautigan was frustrated by the reaction of American critics to his work, friends said. He also had trouble collecting his royalties.

He divided his life between California, Japan and his home in Paradise Valley near Livingston.

Another long-time friend, Paradise Valley artist Russ Chatham, questioned whether Brautigan might still be alive had he been in Montana instead of California.

Even if he had killed himself here, "I can guarantee you it wouldn't have taken four weeks afterwards to find him," Chatham said.

The novlist had friends here, whom he would be more apt to see every day, Chatham said.

"In Bolinas, he was dealing with bar acquaintances."

Chatham said he suspects there are circumstances surrounding Brautigan's death which friends don't know and may never known.

People aren't macho because they have guns, Chatham said. "Richard owned a lot of guns. I own 40 to 50 guns."

Chatham denied Brautigan's Paradise Valley house was full of bullet holes.

"There was one incident years ago where Richard and a friend in a gay mood one afternoon did in fact shoot the clock," he said. "I think it was a prankishness. It was not an ominous occurrence."

"Richard was a wonderful artist," Chatham said. "He was also a very gentle, fun-loving and generous person. The idea that he was violent or wrote books filled with violence is simply not true.

"He was deeply saddened and grieved by his divorce and I felt that he never really quite recovered from the effects of it, for whatever reason," Chatham said.

"Something happened to Richard in the last couple of years that made him attempt to alienate his friends and acquaintances," he said. "He succeeded in doing that pretty much."

Chatham said Brautigan was left with a "pretty hard-core set of (Montana) friends who just wouldn't accept that."

Bozeman was Richard's safety net—a place for him to fall into when things got rough, said friend Greg Keeler, an associate professor of English at Montana State University.

Keeler said Kelley didn't know Richard at all. "He wanted to make it sound Hollywood," he said.

"If people liked Richard because of his fame, he'd make sure they suffered for it," Keeler said. "The only thing left was to like him for a friend."

Keeler said it was obvious Kelley hadn't read the books Brautigan wrote while in Montana.

Richard dedicated his book, "So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away," to Becky Fonda and Marian Hjortsberg, because he liked them as friends, Keeler said.

"Richard had borrowed money from everyone all his life," Keeler said. "He borrowed money from anyone who would lend it to him."

Keeler said he still isn't willing to believe Brautigan killed himself on purpose, but if he did, it wasn't because he was broke.

"He could have paid off his debts if he had to," Keeler said. Brautigan owned homes in California and Montana and had royalties from his books, even though "he practically had to beg publishers to pay him."

But while Brautigan borrowed money, he also paid it back and loaned money to his friends, Keeler said. "Loaning and borrowing money were part of friendship to Richard."

McGuane questioned why journalists are taking such a morbid interest in Brautigan's lifestyle now that he's dead. It's too bad they didn't do something on his work when he was alive, he said.

"He was a wonderful man who made a lasting contribution to world literature," McGuane said. "It's not an accident that he was translated into every important language in the world.

"In the month of his death, people have taken pen and paper to insult him," he said. "I just think it is very sad.

"Why is he widely known and liked around the world?" McGuane said. "He has influenced writers in every country in the world."

Now everyone wants to know what was wrong with him, he said. No one asks what was good about Richard Brautigan.

"History, I think, will be fairly kind of [sic] Richard," McGuane said. "He just has to survive press this year. He'll be fine."

Caen,1985

"New West Notes: Letter from the North" [interview with Herb Caen]
T. B. [sic]
California Magazine, Jan. 1985, p. 116.
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.

[An account of plans by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to drain Rush Creek, thus threatening trout fishing there deleted.]

While we're on the subject, where is the author of Trout Fishing in America now that we need him? In an urn destined to be emptied over a mountain in Montana is the sobering answer. North Beach hasn't been quite the same since Richard Brautigan shot himself with a borrowed .44 magnum last October, leaving no note and an empty bottle of bourbon on the floor. The 49-year-old novelist had been a fixture of San Francisco's writing community for nearly three decades, and judging by the stories about him that circulated at the wake held at Enrico's restaurant, his biographers are going to have fun. A few weeks later I invited North Beach doyen Herb Gold to meet me at the Broadway establishment to share his reflections.

"I met Brautigan in the early 1960s," he began. "I remember his girlfriend's closet was lined with bottles of Wild Turkey—full ones. It was the most Wild Turkey I'd ever seen. He never wanted to run out.

"In those days, North Beach was like Montparnasse when all the writers lived there. Ginsberg set the North Beach style, then Kerouac. Performers from the Hungry i—Lenny Bruce, Streisand, Woody Allen. Mort Sahl—came to Enrico's, so writers came around, too. You could eat at any hour, and people came to sober up after the opera—you'd see Kenneth Rexroth in his moldy tux. Eventually, Brautigan replaced some of those people as a celebrity there.

"Richard used to come to my door to deliver a manuscript, pressing for help, but when he became famous, he became arrogant. He handled publicity to the detriment of his personal life. He stipulated that all his book jackets have his photo on the front cover. It was always with a different long-haired girl. He's indifferent to her; she's in a groupie posture—almost with her head in his lap. I thought it was odd for a writer to be on his book jackets with anonymous, pretty flower children.

"What happens to a writer who has no strong connections with people, with family, with anything? When you hit your forties, you have to have some connection with the past. Brautigan was isolated. He had only intermittent contact with his daughter. He didn't consider others important. He didn't want to think about his family. He never dealt with his [absent] father. He could have done something moving..."

Cars hissed by in the November rain, and we contemplated the table, center rear in Enrico's portico, where Brautigan had whiled away the afternoons. "I have a feeling that the great characters of North Beach are going away," Gold said, "and I don't see the replacements." Indeed, no one had come to sit in Brautigan's chair.—T.B.

Thomas,2002

"Richard Brautigan: A Memoir"
John Thomas
Transit, no. 10, Spring 2002, pp. 18-20.
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.

Most people would connect Richard with the Hippies, I guess, but really he dates way back. In Beat days he wanted to be a poet, studied formally with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, put out little stapled pamphlets of his verse. He was a walker, that man! Well, a shambler. But he shambled (usually alone) all over San Francisco. You'd see him everywhere. Market Street, the Mission District, Potrero Hill, Golden Gate Park, on the bluffs out behind the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Shambling, shambling. And even at a distance (at least in profile) he was recognizable. A blond vulture. What I mean, with that fleshy beak of his, and his yellow soup-strainer mustache, the sway-backed forward bend of his neck . . . and in those days he always wore a jacket with a fake fleece collar, which uncannily resembled the ruff of a turkey buzzard. A blond vulture, and all over town.

I mean, dig, see him moping along Grant Avenue past the Cafe Trieste, then you'd grab the Union Street bus, go over Russian Hill to Polk Gulch, walk briskly down to the Marina . . . and there Richard would be, vulturing slowly, myopically, along the water's edge. How the hell did be beat you there? Remarkable. Almost eerie. I suppose he recognized me, too. We hadn't really met, but if we passed one another on the street, he would always nod.

The first time I truly met him? A book of his prose had just come out. Trout Fishing in America? One of those. And he threw a party at his place. He lived out around Clay and Masonic then, I think.

Poet Geoff Brown was going, with his wife Judy and Monk. Remember Monk, their little pot-head pup?

"Come with us, John. There'll be lots of food, and he's bought several cases of good wine. Besides, he told us he'd like to meet you."

I didn't believe that "he'd like to meet you" part, but the prospect of food was decisive. I'd been living on peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches for days. So we all took off, crowded into their little black Bug. (This was once upon a time, when Volkswagens had 6-volt batteries. Remember?)

The party wasn't worth recounting here, except for our formal introduction. Brautigan was already pretty boxed out when we arrived. I grabbed a chair beside the food table. Dips, chips, cheese, sliced roast beef, and ham, the usual—but, as Geoff had promised, plenty of it. Samuele Sebastiani wine (Sebastiani made a pretty good red back then).

I was scarfing meat by the handful when Richard lurched up, "working the room." Geoff introduced us. And I paid him an extravagant compliment on his new book. He blushed around his moustache. "Thank you very much." And with that, embarrassed, he tried to make a formal bow. A clumsy cat, Richard: the bow was more a combination of curtsey and tangle-footed jig . . . and he fell into my lap. Where he stayed for a good fifteen minutes, while we discussed Jack Spicer, the poet we both liked best. Funny, I guess: one straight guy sitting in another straight guy's lap, swapping quotes from the verses of one of the gayest of the gay. But Jack was such a fine poet. Come to that, I'd do it again tomorrow. Fall by, manly reader, and sit in my manly lap, and I'll talk Jack Spicer with you for an hour. After that party night (from which I returned with my pants pockets full of greasy beef and melted cheddar cheese), Richard and I talked with fair frequency. The Coffee Gallery or La Pantera or Vesuvio's (Richard and I both liked Lemon Hart's, a dark 150-proof Jamaican rum they stocked at Vesuvio's). Just chance encounters. But I don't recall the subjects. No, hey, wait. One thing does stay with me. Richard was often cranky, and he always groused about the same thing. Seems he was uncircumcised, and love-making often caused him to tear the tip of his too-tight foreskin. An hour of passion followed by a week of penile discomfort. He'd grump about it at length, in clinical detail, and to nearly anyone.

The last time I saw Richard was at a 1982 Poetry Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts. I had come up from Los Angeles by train. My reading was scheduled for the evening, but in the afternoon there was a book-signing at City Lights. Several of us (LeRoi Jones, Isaac Bashevis-Singer, some others) sat at a long table behind name cards and stacks of our books to autograph. Richard came in. We hadn't seen one another for maybe fifteen years, but he recognized me and crowded in beside me. We signed books and chatted and he presented me with his fancy Japanese ball point pen. Turned out his reading was that evening too.

"Let's take a cab together, John." "Fine. But it's still pretty early."

"We'll kill the time at Tojo's."

"Tojo's?"

"It's a Japanese restaurant over on Green Street. They have a new bartender, straight from Nagasaki, and he fixes drinks just the way I like them." "Okay, man. Sounds good to me."

After the signing (he sold twenty times as many books as I did) we walked to Tojo's. I'd been slipping him dexamyls all afternoon, so he was in fine fettle and talking, talking, talking. Tojo's was small and dark, with a narrow bar. Richard had a tab there. The new barkeep looked very much like our Hawaiian senator, Daniel Inouye, except that he still had two good arms. With which he served us drinks, lots of drinks. And what was Richard's big favorite? Just sake, ice-cold sake. What the hell was that? Sake you drink piss-warm, right? But Richard insisted that nearly-frozen sake was the current "in" drink of Japanese artists and intellectuals—and he'd recently been to Japan, marrying that beautiful Japanese gold-digger (I forget her name), the one who had come back with him and dumped him not long before. But ice-cold sake? It was drinkable, yet, but I couldn't believe that all the hip Japanese were guzzling it. I think they were just putting him on.

We stayed pretty late, while Richard told me all about Japan and his Japanese marriage disaster ("She's just a whore, John!") and —yes, right, about his current foreskin tear. Left in a hurry, hailed a cab, jumped in. But half a block down Columbus, there she was on the sidewalk. Ravishing. Richard's gold-digging ex-wife.

"Stop the cab!"

Richard talked her into the back seat with us and off we went to the Palace of Fine Arts, which they entered arm in arm, hip to hip. Poor Richard. A few years later he shot himself in a cabin up there in the wood. Wasn't found for . . . eight days, was it? Not pleasant. But peace be with you, my man.

Torn,1988

"Blunder Brothers: A Memoir"
Rip Torn
Seasons of the Angler. Edited by David Seybold. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, pp. 127-139.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I had met Richard Brautigan in the fall, in a sushi bar in San Francisco. Now I was back in San Francisco, not to see Brautigan, but to meet with the poet Michael McClure and discuss directing his avant-garde play The Beard, which was to be produced in New York. I waited for McClure and some of his friends, who wanted to check me out, at Enrico's, the writers' bar across from the City Lights Bookstore. Along with McClure came Don Carpenter, a novelist and playwright; Emmett Grogan, author of Ringelevio and a famous outlaw; and Jim Walsh, a producer from New York. Jim had seen my production of Kenneth Brown's The Happy Bar at the Actors Studio and was championing me as director of his project.

What I remember of that day at Enrico's is excellent linguini and white clam sauce, and the sight of Shirley Temple Black at a nearby table. I nodded in her direction, and she coolly nodded back. We were of different political persuasions, but belonged to the same fraternity of acting. This cut across the status barrier—she a UN ambassador and me a prolabor, unemployable, troublemaking movie actor.

But Richard wasn't at Enrico's. In fact, it wasn't until after the owner, Banducci, sat with us and treated us to espresso and Courvoisier that Richard's name was even mentioned. McClure, who could tell I would have been just as content to stay at Enrico's all day, started to giggle. "I wish I didn't have to work today" he said to me. "Well, we won't wait up for you tonight. You and Richard are going fishing. Two Aquarians!" And he laughed and shook his head. "Try to get back before the week ends."

Carpenter said, "Are you really a fly fisherman? Richard's one of the best. He's going to take you down to Stinson Beach."

Richard had an apartment on the north side of Geary, where it tunnels under Presidio. Sears was right across the street. The door opened. A woman friend of Richard's said, "I'm on my way out. Richard's in the back brewing some tea." I stepped over the threshold and over the sign of the fisher of men. There was another fish on the floor in the kitchen. When I had first met Richard at the sushi bar, he had hidden from me. This day I got a better look. Richard was a giant, but he stooped; standing up, he would be around six four. His turned-up hat and old-fashioned glasses made him look like Custer or Mark Twain surveying the terrain with a falcon's gaze. He truly was a Confederate general.

We drank tea and talked about McClure's play, about the San Francisco poets, about Beowulf about fishing for half-pounders in Oregon, where Richard grew up, and all the time he was rummaging through tackle looking for some 7X tippet material, which we would need to go after these small nine-inch fish bottled up in a fresh pond behind the sand bar. I was fishing a twelve-dollar Berkley Sweetheart and getting it rigged up. Taking some needle-nosed pliers, Richard bent down the barbs of a few size 18 Royal Coachmen and Mosquitoes. We ran over to Sears to get some fly dope, picked up my rental car from the Sears parking lot, and were on our way to Stinson Beach.

"Everybody says I'm crazy," said Richard, "that these fish are just rainbows planted by the parks department, but I think they're little steelhead waiting for a rain so the creek will cut the sand bar and they can go to sea." Here he handed me a pair of hemostats. "We won't even take them out of the water."

Richard checked out my gear. "Bass fisherman." He grinned. "I think you'd better use a tapered leader," and he took leader spools from his vest. He tied me up a good nine-foot trace with a 7X tippet. I followed suit, biting my tongue to get the blood knot right. I didn't cast badly but nothing compared with Richard's effortless form. I confessed I didn't know a thing about trout fishing and that all I had ever caught on dry flies were bluegills, and that even then I preferred a Black Gnat fished wet. Richard caught and released three small fish, and I caught one.

"Look," he suddenly confided, "so many times someone will want to go fishing with me, and I end up tying all their knots, taking off all their fish, rebaiting their hook. Hell, if I wanted to be a gillie, I'd get paid. We're all friends of McClure's. We hear you're right to direct his play, but I'm leery of New York and, well, I figured if you checked out as a real fisherman, were telling the truth about that, you were probably straight in the art department, too. Let's leave these little fish to the Rain God, who can get them to sea, and go to Sausalito and have a sundowner at the No Name Bar. We'll plot some real trout fishing."

Sometime after our afternoon in the No Name, Richard called to say he wanted to go fishing on Deer Creek, below Big Sur. I remember his words tumbling over each other and the funny chortling noises he made. "I don't know, Richard," I said. "If I can get a real cheap flight, I will."

I was married to Geraldine Page then, and she was going to L.A. to do a film. She decided to fly out early with me and take the kids. We flew to San Francisco, borrowed a car, picked up Richard, and drove down to Monterey, where we visited Bruce and Price Dunn, friends of Richard's who were going fishing with us.

At the Dunns' home, we sat on cushions at a round table for supper, and the boys had prepared an apple-box table for our daughter, Angelica, and twin boys, Tony and Jon, who were two and in diapers. We planned our fishing trip over linguini and pesto, and Gerry and the kids decided to visit with the Dunn women and not leave for L.A. right away.

The men piled into Bruce's car and rocketed down the Coast Highway toward Big Sur and Deer Creek. Richard said that Deer Creek was supposed to have a lot of trout, maybe some steelhead—but no one really knew.

Sometime near noon, we turned off onto a dirt road that led to the creek. Excitement built as we traded stories about growing up in small towns, about fishing set-hooks, trotlines, and jugs for channel cats, about going "noodling" for big yellows. (As a kid, I wouldn't stick my arm under a riverbank or my hand through willow roots into the den of a sitting mama catfish weighing almost a hundred pounds—past the cottonmouth and past the horny beak of the snapping turtle, a finger to tickle the mama's chin in order to get your hand in her mouth and out past her gills to grab the plate and then try to tear her from her nest. Those big mama catfish could drown a man, and sometimes did.)

We were all more civilized now, using light tackle, but we delighted in describing the terrible outlaw ways poachers used—mashed buckeyes in a sack thrown in a pool, a field telephone to crank them up, dynamite, so popular in Mexico, the Philippines, and the USA.

We were a mixed bag: Bruce, a spin-caster: Price, a bait-dunker; and Richard and I fly fishermen. Soon we hit a turn, an abandoned farm perched right on the rim of the deep gorge carved by the tiny glint of water far below—Deer Creek. Like military men, like the crackers they were, Richard, Bruce, and Price surveyed the best route to take. Fixed on that glint below, they ignored the old machinery and farm houses, grabbed tackle and beers, and over the edge we plunged, whooping rebel yells.

It took us about forty minutes to hit the creek and about three hours to climb out. But down at the bottom, the creek was nearly dry "It looks like—" Richard paused—"it looks like an army of hippies has bivouacked here." Sinkers and lines and hooks were draped over every tree, bush, and boulder What trout we saw were so terrified, they burrowed like gophers between the rocks in the shallow water. I told a trout, "I'm not going to bother you, fish." There was one campfire that had gone out, with the remains of a card game thrown in it. Burnt kings, queens, and deuces.

The Confederate general surveyed the terrain. "Better get out of this canyon before it gives me the willies." For a while, I kept up with Richard and Price. Richard started to chortle. "Rip, do you think Hollywood would be interested in a series called 'The Blunder Brothers'? We've got a fine cast here. We could profit from our blunders, and, looking at this crew, I doubt we'd run out of script, even if we ran as long as 'Gunsmoke.' What do you think? Hell, this bunch could never run out of blunders! There's two cold beers in the truck. First up top gets 'em." Richard and Price poured on coal, and soon I was trailing, climbing now with Bruce. Halfway out I panted, "Hey you don't have to meet nobody for dinner, do you?" He said, "What do you mean?" "Well," I said, "they've got the beers and done 'em, so there's no reason we shouldn't sit down and have a smoke, take a break." "Oh, Lordy," said Bruce, "I was hoping you meant that."

A little later, we came up out of the canyon. Richard looked at his pocket watch, tapped it, and said, "We've been here, I don't know, thirty-five minutes. Time to have a game of cribbage." I said, "It's more like fifteen." "Here—" he pitched me a cold can—"we saved you laggards a brew to share."

Blunder Brothers, we plotted our way up the coast. Well, what is the most famous fly-fishing river in America? We didn't know. In Montana, the Madison. In the East, the Au Sable or the Yellow Beeches, or maybe the Beaverkill. But in Northern California, we agreed, it was the Feather, the north fork of the Feather River.

About five months later, I got a call from Richard. "I'm getting another Blunder Brothers Act together. Interested in a Feather River adventure?" "Damn right!" I yelled back. And the Blunder Brothers plus two fellows from Boston, whose names I can't recall, got together in another old car and headed toward Sacramento, where Richard was to give a poetry reading at a small college.

Richard was a splendid reader, of his poems and of others', and the crowd was excited. He became interested in a redhead in the audience, a nurse. She looked enraptured with Brautigan, but leaving the party after the reading, Richard said, "I talked too damn much and ruined it. I scared her off Dammit! They said they were going to feed us, and all they had were dips and cheese balls and cheap wine."

We stayed near the college in Sacramento. It was an upstairs back-of-the-house apartment with a screened-in porch. We had half a bottle of Jim Beam, a few beers, and, on the stove, a vegetable stew that we kept dosing with bonita flakes, lemon, and Tabasco.

Down to his skivvies, Richard headed for the mattress on the porch. He poked his head in the door "Ah, dammit! No blanket. I hate to ask you, but I'd hate worse to have to get dressed again." I was going to sleep in the car, where the bedding was. "Sure, Richard, I'll get you one." He sighed and scratched. "You see, I talked too much." But as he lamented, there came a shy knock at the door, and in walked the red-headed nurse. By the time I got back up, they were out on the porch and on the mattress.

"You want your blanket? I'll leave it on this chair next to the stove." "Forget the blanket; where's that Jim Beam?" Richard asked. "I'll take a snort and leave it right by the door," I said. "No, bring it here. I'm a poet and she's a nurse. We don't care. You can have a look. She's beautiful. Give old Rip a look. It'll keep him warm." They laughed as I set the bottle of Beam inside the door sill. I went out and down the stairs to sleep in the car It sure got cold in the night.

When the nurse left in the early morning to go to work, she forgot to cover the bare-assed poet, and he caught a monstrous head and chest cold.

We got on the road and hit the north fork of the Feather about sundown. By the time we made camp, it was dark. A blunder of a camp. It was right off the road, and what seemed a nice clearing was studded with root gnarls and outcroppings of stone. And, at about five in the morning, a squad of motorcycles roared up the canyon, about seven in all. The Feather River Commandos. Geronimo! Here come some more! Battle stations!

Around eleven-thirty, I burned out on the Feather and sat on the bank airing out, my waders down at the knees. Richard came down the river and then turned to fish the tail of a great pool. The sun, nearly overhead, shafted down into deep blue holes, intersected by giant stone ridges and caverns. Gorgeous water that should have had some real alligators in it, big old cannibal 'bows or browns. Richard didn't like to false-cast, but he did. He lengthened his line and with effortless grace sent it to the far end of the pool, some sixty feet away. The poet was poetry in performance. The line and leader floated down. "Why aren't you fishing, Rip?" "I don't know, Richard. There's something funny here. I haven't seen any fish except those two little suckers over there. There's also no insect life in the weeds or on any stone that I can find."

He cast again and chortled, "It's like fishing over mausoleums." Reeling in, he said, "Let's go into Oroville for a chicken-fried steak. I'm gonna feed this cold and get some medicine before it kills me. After chow and the drugstore, we hit a grocery and tackle shop, where we bought size 14 egg hooks, spinners, and three jars of Balls 0' Fire salmon eggs.

"Want any corn, marshmallows, worms, boys?" asked the owner. "We might use Velveeta, if we stay skunked," said Richard. "Where ya been fishing?" asked the proprietor. "North fork of the Feather, one of the premier fly-fishing rivers," we replied. "Usta be, boys, usta be. Didn't ya know? Couple years ago, PG & E and the Fish and Game Department established a put-and-take policy on the Feather, and at the end of the season they poison the river to check the program. What they've done, though, is poisoned the entire historical life of the Feather, killed everything wild, including the bugs, to promote hatchery trout that eat poultry pellets. Try the north fork of the Yuba, boys."

That afternoon, we fished the Yuba. I was amazed at how a trout could come rocketing up to snatch a bit of bait in the tumbling white water. Throwing spinners and eggs, we all caught fish in the wonderful clear waters that cascade past old gold digs, boulders, and tailings, past rusting machinery that once sluiced the gravel banks and turned the Yuba muddy.

"Here," said Richard, pulling in another one, "we're finally gonna eat fish! I'm tired of chicken-fried steak. We've caught enough with bait. Put this on, Rip." He bit off my egg rig and tied on a tippet and a Royal Coachman. "See right there? That big boulder in the cascade? There's fish behind that boulder. You can't see them because of the bubbles, but then, they can't see you either. Cast right where that rill comes over that crack in the stone."

"Gimme some fly dope, Rich," I said, "some gink to smear on this fly. How am I gonna keep it dry on top in that water?" Richard replied, "If it floats, fish it dry. If it goes under, fish it wet." I placed the Coachman right on top of the boulder. For a second, it spun around in the rill and then washed over. Like an electric spark, a silver-blue-and-pink flash hit the Coachman and was hooked. "That's him, Rip, downriver." The fish jumped, a good two-pounder, and was barreling down the river with me in hot pursuit. My heart was pounding so hard in that thin, cold air that I didn't notice I had skinned my ankle. I slid the 'bow onto a tiny beach of sand, jumped on him, and flung him back into the rocks, where I hollered like an Indian, quickly thumped him with a stone priest, and took out my old yellow Case pocket knife, so I could gut my fish and examine its innards. Sticks and gravel.

"These are caddis houses, or casements, and this little fellow"—Richard pointed to a small, cream-colored worm he had pulled out of its house of sticks and stones—"is the caddis worm. I've caught a lot of fish using these on a fine hook and . . . Come on! We've got enough fish. We're gonna fry 'em up with some bacon and onions. We got ketchup and lemons and parsley and potatoes." And, stumbling, wheezing with his flu and rattling excitement, Richard set off.

Richard loved to cook, and we really rustled up that grub, because nothing compares with fish that are taken right from the water to the flame.

We camped on the river, across the road from a high butte. When the sun went down, it was like opening the door on a freezer. All the cold air in the world flowed down that butte to our little camp. Gorged to the gills with trout, Brautigan was wedged between two boulders. He was asleep, but he was shaking and didn't sound good at all. Bruce Dunn said, "Do you think he'll make it through the night?" I replied, "He might, but I'm not sure about myself. We need to get some medicine, like a big bottle of Spanish brandy." We counted out change and uncrumpled bills. I talked to the boys from Boston, and they coughed up some. Bruce put another blanket on Richard and woke him to get the rest. "Hurry!" wheezed Richard. "Look at this!" His hand was puffed up and red. Somehow, in spearing fish or bacon or spuds from the skillet, telling a story with a wild comical gesture, Richard had stabbed himself with the tines of the barbecue fork. With a groan, he pulled the lobster claw back under the covers and disappeared between the boulders. "Thanks for the blanket, boys. Why didn't you give it to me sooner? Hurry up!" he croaked.

Legend has it that Richard's mother was a barmaid, a good-hearted woman with lots of boyfriends. She had a baby boy and an older girl and sometimes abandoned them for long periods to run and throw a fling. Richard told me that, at about age four, his mother took his sister and left him in the care of a boyfriend, a fry-cook who lived in a corner room of an old hotel and worked in the kitchen below. The fry-cook, having no funds for a baby-sitter, tied Richard to the bedpost. Richard remembered this man with affection. "He gave me enough slack so I could get to the can and, more important, I could get to the corner and look out the window."

The mystery of Brautigan is: How, out of that tortured childhood, did he manage to find the joy and the cheer and the enthusiasm that shone from his character? In those days, he had a lot of friends, and on that cold night along the Yuba, two of them were hurtling through the dark, following the headlights in search of a roadhouse.

About an hour later, after conversation with the locals at the bar, we wheeled back to the river with the medicine. The brandy we located wasn't Mexican or Spanish, but a California brand, which wasn't good. Richard may have grown up dirt-poor, but he had exquisite tastes, leaning to the likes of Courvoisier and Martell, at least three-star. Since he had contributed a lion's share to the cost, we decided we'd better sample this quarter-star stuff to see if it was worth his while. After all, we had driven all that way and not yet touched a drop.

The hardest part of our journey was from the road, where Bruce parked the ear, down to the river to find the patient. The Blunder Brothers had picked a ghostly old gold camp to bed down in. So Bruce and I eased along the spoil bank to locate Richard. Slipping on the rounded stones, we finally stood where we had left our partner. He was nowhere to be found. Did we walk by him in the dark?

Bruce reminded me of my uncle Weldon before he gave up the sauce. "You better grab the bottle if you want a drink." I did. "Hold it, Hoss—save some for me," said Bruce. It was then, while we were sampling the medicine, that we heard a muffled groan and felt the ground shift. We hadn't lost Richard. We were standing on him.

I didn't see Richard for a few years after that. When I did, it was during the time when I had been eighty-sixed from films, television, and Broadway, and was doing a summer-stock tour It was just before our opening at the summer theater in Westport, Connecticut, that I got a call from California. It was Richard, and he wanted to come east and fish in the Catskills. I warned him that I hardy had time to piss, much less fish, and that I'd probably only see him after the show at night. He came anyway. because of a publishing party to be given in his honor in New York.

I finally got some time and called Richard in the city. "I've caught my breath," I said, "so we can talk and maybe fish the Saugatuck, which flows into Long Island Sound at Westport. They say the river's got some sea-run browns in it."

Gerry, the kids, and I were staying at a farmhouse near the salt pond in Westport, and the moment Richard set foot in the place he became itchy and perturbed. He didn't like the family we were living with. And one night after our host had told us stories of the old days in Connecticut, which I thoroughly enjoyed, Richard and I stayed up alone, and I asked him, "Didn't you enjoy those stories, Richard?" He shot back, "Hell, no! They're so goddamned middle-class. I come across a continent to talk with you, and what do you do? You sit around bullshitting with those damn people. I'm going to see your plays, we're going to fish, and I'll ride back to the city with you and your family, because I want you to go to my publishing party."

"Okay General," was all I could say.

We fished but didn't catch anything more than five small bluegills and one stunted bass. On our way back from fishing, I tried to joke about our not catching any trout and pointed to a sign that suggested why we hadn't. Painted on an old and abandoned factory, it proclaimed, EMBALMING FLUIDS. "Look, Richard, it's Trout Fishing in America." He was not amused. I never went to the publishing party.

More than a decade passed before we got together again. In that time I had separated from Gerry and gone to live with Amy Wright in California. That didn't work out either, so I lived by myself in a place above Malibu and below Paradise Cove.

Gerry called me one day to announce that she could no longer manage the twins. They were sixteen and undisciplined. "They want to go out and live with you. Now we see who they love," she said. I told her I'd give it a try but that it probably wouldn't last long. "Tell 'em it'll be a different ball game living with old Dad."

So my boys came west, and at sixteen they were writers, directors, actors, and poets. They devoured books and movies and television. "Listen, boys," I said, "if you want to be artists, learn from life. And learn some discipline." They had no discipline. They couldn't even keep their shoelaces tied.

What my boys needed was good old-fashioned work. I wanted them to learn what it was like to work all day and sweat your ass off and feel good about it at the end. I called my friend Joe Sedgwick in Montana. Joe owns a ranch on Big Elk Creek, above Two-Dot, and is a champion Montana cowboy. I couldn't think of a better place for my boys to learn about hard work.

Joe said, "Hell, Rip, I ain't got time to entertain 'em." And I said, "I don't want you to entertain 'em. I want you to work the piss out of 'em." There was a pause while Joe considered what I had said. "You mean shoveling shit? Pounding post holes?" I laughed and said, "Sounds just right." His answer came without hesitation "Send 'em up, Rip. We've got enough of that kind of work for everybody!"

So I put the boys on an airplane and sent them to Montana. When I visited them a month later, they were a lot closer to being men. We fished Big Elk Creek and the Musselshell near Two-Dot and caught some nice browns on spinners.

After our day of fishing, we went down to Chico Hot Springs to have dinner and visit with Mike Art, who owns the place. I asked about Richard. "I've lost touch with him. He's been eighty-sixed out of every bar from here to Bozeman. He's welcome here, but he's mad at me... or someone. We're worried about him. I'll call him for you, but he won't come," he said. "Tell him I'm here with my boys. Tell him Jon and Tony are here," I replied. "Okay, but..." Mike said as he sauntered out to the office. Mike came back with a big grin. "Son of a bitch! Richard'll be here in about forty-five minutes." And amazing everyone, as if a ghost had appeared, Richard slouched in a while later. He'd never looked better.

He was tickled to see Tony and Jon and asked questions and teased the hell out of them. Richard had on the kind of Norwegian cap with a button on top that Montana ranchers wear instead of Stetsons. At some time in the evening, he wanted to trade hats with me. We wore about the same size. I got his blue one and he got a black bill with the logo "CAT." I had worn that cap in a film called Jinxed.

Someone was puking in the men's room, and Richard smiled and said, "I'll try the road—and a little air." He went out for a moment. Mike Art said, "That's the old Richard."

Richard came back in the bar and gave me a hug. "I want you boys and your dad to take a walk with me down the road. Let's drink to Tony and Jon," he said. "I like these boys; I liked them when they were tykes and I like 'em now. They get on their feet, come to you, and shake your hand hard and look you in the eye." And he hooted a rebel yell. "Hey, Jon, can you catch?" Jon, who was famous in the family for his fumbles, said, "Okay, sure." And Brautigan rifled a bottle of brandy across the road. Jon caught it against his chest with one hand, and we cheered that night in Pray, Montana.

The last time I saw Richard was the summer after our reunion. The twins and my daughter, Angelica, were working for Mike Art at Chico. One day I took them to visit Joe Sedgwick and his family. I taught the kids to drive in a little rental car with the stick on the floor. We shifted gears and bumped down the road where Richard's house stood and left him a note asking if he would like to get together with me and the kids.

To everyone's surprise, Richard invited us over. He came out of the top of his barn, waved, and came down his stairs to the ground between his house and barn. He blinked in the light like an owl, yawned, scratched his pot under his union suit, squinted at the sun—Custer, Mark Twain—hooked his thumb, placed his hand on his back. He looked his falcon look at each of us and spoke to my kids. "You see your dad's timing is still good." Then he grinned. "Let's jump in your car and get some groceries. You see, today just before you came here, I was finishing my novel. It's done. I've turned into a hermit, but I want to celebrate." We rocketed to the store and back to Richard in his extended living room, one of the old cars in his yard, the General with a battle plan. "I don't fish anymore!" He smiled shyly, as if to say he'd given up making love or drinking. "No, I don't fish anymore," he said. "I've given my gear away."

I went out alone and caught two trout, and that evening we had a party. From somewhere appeared a bottle of champagne and some kind of hooch—Daniel's or Dant. Richard's old chortle, his grin and excitement made him a kid again. As for the trout, we discovered a can of mushroom soup, and Richard said, "Let's poach these beauties in this soup. And how about a dash of champagne?" I and my kids and the hermit had a feast. Toward dawn, Richard went to bed and we went back to Chico.

I never saw Richard again. His last book, Before the Wind Blows It All Away, was savaged by the East Coast critics, for whose approval Richard greatly hungered. His career was reassessed and found wanting, and Brautigan was dismissed as unimportant. The main damage was not to ego, but to income, and Richard knew he had to lose his place in Montana. He retreated to Bolinas, facing a taste of the poverty that he had escaped for a while.

I was in the basement of the house that Gerry and I shared in New York when my son Tony came downstairs to talk with me.

"I suppose you saw that small notice on Richard in Time magazine," said Tony.

"About his book? I heard they killed it," I said.

"Yes, Dad," said Tony "They killed his book, but I guess you don't know . . ."

"Don't know what?" I said.

"Dad, Richard shot himself. He's dead."

I called Don Carpenter, and he told me what he knew about Richard's last days. Richard had gone to North Beach, in San Francisco, and had run into Akiko, a Japanese woman whom he had broken up with some time before. The story goes that when they met, Richard ran away from her but she followed. He ran into a bookstore and she came up behind him. When she put her hand on his back, Richard fled. He went to a friend's house and borrowed a gun, then returned home to Bolinas to kill himself. Cut up by the critics, his ex-wife counting coup on him, Custer went for his gun. Brautigan was standing when the bullet hit him. That's the story they tell.

Richard, when I was in San Francisco I visited Carpenter in Mill Valley, and there was your picture on the wall looking at me over a bedpost. I said to Don, "Let's go to North Beach to Enrico's and see if Richard's there." We sped across the Golden Gate Bridge. Enrico's has been remodeled. We sat at the new bar under the portrait of Bill Cosby and had a brandy in your honor, Richard. Don doesn't booze anymore and had a soda-and-lemon. We saluted the owner, Banducci, who nodded back. I said to Don, "Richard isn't here," and Don replied, "No, he isn't." We paid the check and left.

I lift a fly rod and get glints of you, Brautigan; I salute you, Blunder Brother. I'm on the road now, Coast Highway I'm reporting to you, General. Zuma, Paradise Cove, home to Hidden Beach. Black horse up on the hill, fields of mustard. Sky's blue and clear out here on the Pacific shore of America. Brother, I'm praying for your tormented soul. Be at ease. Stand in clear water that rushes to the sea. Keep that humor and enthusiasm you had on earth in the days before you stopped fishing.

In a play by John Arden, a soldier, facing the threat of imminent death, says:
". . . a man can laugh, because or else he might well howl—and howling's not for men but for dogs, wolves, seagulls—like o' that ent it?"

Wright,1985

"The Life and Death of Richard Brautigan"
Lawrence Wright
Rolling Stone, 11 April 1985, pp. 29, 31, 34, 36, 38, 40, 59, 61.
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.

After he died, the friends of Richard Brautigan gathered at Enrico's, Richard's favorite San Francisco bar, to drink his spirit to rest. Some famous people were there, movie people, poets and writers, some old hippies from times gone by, one of Richard's ex-wives, several girlfriends and a double handful of the alcoholic idealists whom Richard collected like spare change. The bartender wore an electric tie. They talked about why Richard died, and what killed him. Some blamed Ernest Hemingway, but most of them spoke of alcohol, women—and ghosts.

Now Richard was his own ghost, and he walked through Enrico's with a glass in his hand, a little drunk already, collecting memories of himself. He was always vain that way: he could never pass a mirror or even a shop window without casting a glance at his reflection. And he was morbid as well. How could he miss his own wake? It was a party he had planned for himself, a bon voyage for a man who had never fit comfortably into life. But it was also, Richard's ghost remembered sourly, a party five weeks late in starting. When his body lay rotting on the floor of his house in Bolinas, where were his friends then?

Richard's ghost eavesdropped on the obligatory anecdotes, the little tales his friends traded of Richard's fame, and his fall from fame. They talked about his generosity but also about his legendary stinginess. Some knew him as a wealthy man, others as a near beggar. Some spoke of his love of life, others remembered his longing for death. They were trying to piece his life together, yet their stories were like the shards of two different pots: How could they have contained a single man? Why did he fail? Why did he kill himself? What was his problem with love? Questions floated about, unasked and unanswered. Richard's ghost turned away and went looking for himself at the bar.

One of the tricks of death is holding on to time. Richard slipped across the room and found himself at his usual spot beside the cigarette machine, though he was not the red-faced, middle-aged drunk with the dirty mustache that he had grown used to seeing in the mirror, but a tall, blond, clean-shaven young man, abjectly shy and full of secrets. Richard must have dropped several decades, for it was himself at twenty-one, wearing jeans and a torn T-shirt and cheap, large eyeglasses. He stuck his hands in his pockets. Not a dime.

Oh, yes, he remembered what it was like to be broke and alone. But he had forgotten, somehow, what it was like to be young, unknown, uncorrupted and full of promise. This was a moment of life he would like to relive. He walked past the crowd of mourners, through the open glass doors of Enrico's.

Outside it was 1956.

It was a historic moment in America, but the country was not yet aware of it. Every Friday evening, at the poet Kenneth Rexroth's, you could find Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan—a fleet of ambitions awaiting the tide of fame. Lenny Bruce was appearing at the hungry i. Jack Kerouac had hopped a Southern Pacific freight to San Francisco, with the unpublished manuscript for On the Road in his rucksack. Allen Ginsberg was a baggage handler at the bus station, but he had already read Howl in public. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was running a bookstore at Broadway and Columbus called City Lights, a mecca for young writers and poets. Literature had found an angry, new American voice—a wild, jazzy sound of sex and neurosis—but it had not yet been heard beyond the coffeehouses of North Beach. They called themselves the Beat Generation.

Richard Brautigan lurked in the background, a little star struck, too shy to read his own poetry. He had a queer sense of humor and a benign feeling toward humanity that was quite out of fashion with the indignant Beats. Ginsberg called him Bunthorne, the winsome poet of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience, who believed that

"You must lie upon the daisies and
   discourse in novel phrases of your
   complicated state of mind,

"The meaning doesn't matter if
   it's only idle chatter of a
   transcendental kind."

Richard had a job delivering telegrams in the financial district. Sometimes he passed a girl with long brown hair, dressed in black—the emblem of the Beats—named Ginny Alder. She would say hello as he whizzed past on his Western Union bicycle, but he never responded. Because he was so intensely blond, she decided he was Austrian and couldn't speak English.

One day, as he walked down Broadway, Richard passed another poet named Ron Loewinsohn. Ron was eighteen then, Richard twenty-one. Richard had seen Loewinsohn around and wanted to meet him, so he handed him a poem. It read:

"A Correction

Cats walk on little car feet
and fogs walk on little fog feet,
Carl."

Because Ron laughed, they became friends. They were both broke. They slept in parked cars, and on cold days they met in a laundromat to talk.

They were sitting in the laundromat when Ginny walked in. That night she took Richard home with her. She didn't know he was a virgin.

Time moves fluidly in death: Richard's ghost swam in memories of marriages and love affairs. Here was Ginny at his wake, with their daughter, Ianthe. Some of the mourners looked at Ianthe and drew a breath, for she reminded them of the young Richard, but dark and female, quite tall, quite beautiful, with Richard's laugh, so that she was herself a kind of Richard ghost.

Richard's ghost saw himself standing beside Ginny now. He was six feet four, still baby-faced, although he had grown an impressively bushy mustache to cultivate an imagined resemblance to Mark Twain.

"It was 1961," Ginny said. "That was the year we discovered Schedule C of the federal income tax—the self-employment form. We got back $350 and bought a ten-year-old Plymouth station wagon, which we loaded down with books—Rimbaud, Thoreau, Whitman—a Coleman stove and a Coleman lantern, a tent, sleeping bags, diapers, and we took off for the Snake River country of Idaho.

"We'd camp beside the streams, and Richard would get out his old portable typewriter and a card table. That's when he began to write Trout Fishing in America. He had to learn to write prose; everything he wrote turned into a poem."

This should have been the happiest moment in his life. He was in love; he was working well. What he was writing on the streamsides of Idaho was one of the most original, playful works of the American language, a work of eccentric brilliance—a book that broke apart ordinary notions of fiction and experience, then reconstructed both with such whimsy, and such startling metaphors, that critics would not know if it was genius or insanity.

"As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.
Summer of 1942.
The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
Silver is nor a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
I'd like to get it right.
Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
Imagine Pittsburgh.
A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!
The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:
I remember with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn."

His friends remembered when Richard became famous. It was the year the hippies came to San Francisco. Richard had published one novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, but it had sold miserably—743 copies—and his publisher, Grove Press, had dropped its option on Trout Fishing in America. Donald Allen was the West Coast representative of Grove and the editor of the Evergreen Review, which had introduced the Beat Generation. Allen had a small nonprofit press called the Four Seasons Foundation, and he decided to publish the book himself. Allen sold 29,000 copies of the book before Delacorte bought it. Eventually, 2 million copies were sold.

It was the kind of book that captured the spirit and sound of a generation. Soon there was a commune and an underground newspaper and even a school named after Trout Fishing in America. His short stories and poems appeared regularly in Rolling Stone, often beneath a photograph of him in his broad-brimmed hat. His face became a hippie icon. "For three or four years, he was like George Harrison walking down Haight Street," remembered Don Carpenter, a novelist and scriptwriter and a longtime friend of Richard's. His image infuriated what Richard called the East Coast literary mafia.

The old Beats looked at Richard with envy and surprise. The Beats were out of fashion, and Bunthorne was all the rage—and he was rich, too, thunderously rich by their standards. Ferlinghetti had been the first to publish parts of Trout Fishing in his City Lights Journal, but like most Beats, he had never taken Richard's writing seriously. "As an editor, I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer," he says now. "I never could stand cute writing. He could never be an important writer—like Hemingway—with that childish voice of his. Essentially he had a naïf style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a nonliterate age."

But it was an extraordinary time in every other respect. Cultural forms were exploding in the face of furious experimentation—with drugs, art, sex, music, religion, social roles. Richard's attitude toward all this, however, was ambivalent. He was widely credited with being the voice of the Summer of Love, but in fact he was contemptuous of most hippies, whom he saw as freeloaders and dizzy peaceniks. He had a horror of narcotics that seemed fanciful to his friends—everybody used dope in those days except Richard.

His passions were basketball, the Civil War, Frank Lloyd Wright, Southern women writers, soap operas, the National Enquirer, chicken-fried steak and talking on the telephone. Wherever he was in the world, he would phone up his friends and talk for hours, sometimes reading them an entire book manuscript on a transpacific call. Time meant nothing to him, for he was a hopeless insomniac. Most of his friends dreaded it when Richard started reading his latest work to them, because he could not abide criticism of any sort. He had a dead ear for music. Ianthe remembered that he used to buy record albums because of the girls on the covers. He loved to take walks, but he loathed exercise in any other form.

The fact that Richard couldn't drive allowed him to build up an entourage of chauffeurs wherever he went. For many of them, it was an honor, and they didn't mind that it was calculated dependency on Richard's part.

Richard had wild notions about money. Although he was absurdly parsimonious, sometimes demanding a receipt for a purchase of bubblegum, he was also a heavy tipper, handing out fifty-dollar tips for five-dollar cab fares. He liked to give the impression that money was meaningless to him. The floor of his apartment was littered with spare change, like the bottom of a wishing well, and he always kept his bills wadded up in his pants pockets, but he knew to the dime how much money he was carrying. He was famously openhanded, but when he had to borrow money from his friends, he was slow paying it back. He often tried to pay them in "trout money,"; little scraps of paper on which he had scrawled an image of a fish. He had the idea that they would be wildly valuable, because they had been signed by Richard Brautigan. At least, that's what he told his creditors.

Christmas was a special problem for him. His friends were horrified that Richard liked to spend his Christmases in porno theaters. They decided it must have something to do with his childhood. Richard was mum on the subject.

Ron Loewinsohn remembered when Richard came so read at Harvard. Yes, Richard was famous, a spokesman for his generation, but he was also a kind of bumpkin, half-educated, untraveled, a true provincial. He had never been East. He wanted to be taken seriously, of course, but he was suspicious and a little afraid of academicians—including Ron, who was in graduate school at Harvard when Richard arrived. Life magazine came along, and there was even a parade down Massachusetts Avenue, with a giant papier-maché trout in the lead. [NOTE: See John Stickney's "Gentle Poet of the Young: A Cult Grows around Richard Brautigan" and Jeffrey S. Golden's "Richard Brautigan On Saturday Night" for more about this reading.] After the reading, Ron and Richard went to Walden Pond, and as they walked along the littered banks of Thoreau's wilderness, the photographer walked backward in front of them, snapping away. It was strange to be linked in this media ceremony to the two American writers who had most influenced Richard—Thoreau, who was like Richard at least in his solitariness and his love of nature, and Hemingway who had also received the star treatment from Life.

In 1970, when Richard was still tremendously popular, he confided to Margot Patterson Doss, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, that he had never had a birthday party. She let him plan one for himself at her house. He decorated the house with fish drawings—"shoals of them" Margot said—and when she asked whom he wanted to cater the affair, he picked Kentucky Fried Chicken. Everyone came—Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Phil Whalen, many of the finest poets of the era—all honoring Richard. When it came time to blow out the candles on the cake, Richard refused. "This is the Age of Aquarius," he said. "The candles will blow themselves out." He was thirty-five.

A lot of Richard's male friends blamed women for his death, but they admitted that he was impossible to live with. "Richard's desire to be loved, when he expressed it, was so overpowering, it invariably drove his women away," said Don Carpenter. "I used to say to him, 'Richard, you can have an affair for as long as you like, but if you move in with a woman, it'll be over in two weeks.'"

"Richard was pretty promiscuous," Ron Loewinsohn agreed, "and he paid for it, with divorces and all the usual diseases. He seemed to need casual affairs at the same time that he wanted reasonably healthy relationships."

Ginny was the first to go. She took Ianthe, and Richard moved to a dark little apartment on Geary Street, near Sears, Roebuck—the windiest, bleakest part of San Francisco. Long after he could have lived anywhere he wanted to, he stayed in that cluttered apartment, a kind of museum to himself papering the walls with posters for his readings and keeping a display of his books on a stepladder in the hallway. On the floor of the living room was an old Japanese machine gun mounted on a tripod. He developed fussy bachelor habits and often neglected to bathe.

He had a difficult habit of testing his friends, but he was even more demanding of his lovers. He pushed them away, he was abominable, he wanted unconditional love and forgiveness. They put up with it, some of them, because he genuinely valued a woman's intelligence. "That appealed to women," one of his girlfriends recalled. "It was a trade-off. The kink thing just went with it."

It became a liability to be seen with Richard. Everybody had heard about his penchant for bondage. Girls in bars would warn each other about it in the restrooms. Margot Patterson Doss reproached Richard after three of his girlfriends complained to her. "Richard got a hurt tone in his voice and said, 'But, Margot, I always tie them loosely, and I never hurt them.'"

Although he hated feminists, Richard understood women's frailties and fears. He himself was frail and fearful. "I feel closer to women," be once admitted. "Often I can ask them questions it would be harder for me to ask a man. Women are more likely to humor my strange ideas." After two in the morning, when the bars closed in San Francisco, Richard would go looking for female consolation. He had no compunction about calling people in the middle of the night or appearing on their doorstep, a stuttering drunk, wanting another drink. It was another dependency he cultivated: the nightcap.

One person who was usually awake and available to talk was his friend Marcia Clay, an extraordinary and disconcertingly beautiful artist who painted at night. "We'd stay up till five in the morning, and then Richard would crash," Marcia recalled. "He liked to take charge. I was born with cerebral palsy, and Richard was very sympathetic to that. He saw this hand was cramped. I never wanted to call attention to it; I kept all my watches and rings on my right hand. One day he took both my hands very ceremoniously and said, 'This right hand is very beautiful; it doesn't need any jewelry. Put your jewelry on your other hand; it needs all the help it can get.'"

Richard was always spontaneous, and Marcia loved that. Once they were having dinner at a restaurant, and she got a morsel of food caught in her teeth. Richard leaped up and disappeared, and when he came back into the restaurant, he gave her a toothbrush. Another time they were walking down one of the steepest hills in San Francisco, on Kearny Street, right above Enrico's. Richard told her to climb onto his shoulders, and she did, and he went clambering down the hill—"So alive, so intense, so strange, so bright, and such a deviant."

"I was one of the people who hung around City Lights," remembers Thomas McGuane, who is now a novelist of considerable reputation but was then, in 1968, one of the million unknown writers who passed through Ferlinghetti's bookstore. "I bought Trout Fishing and was just knocked out by it."

Tom was living in Bolinas, which was at that point just a small Portuguese fishing village in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Russell Chatham, a painter, writer and world-class fisherman, was also living in Bolinas. Soon William Hjortsberg, whom everyone called Gatz, arrived, with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing. "We weren't a wave, we were unpublished writers," Tom McGuane says. But the wave did hit soon after that.

Bolinas became the new center—at one time there were twenty-six published poets and two Guggenheim Fellows in this little village, which made for quite a rarefied atmosphere. It was the sort of place, Richard complained, where people named their dogs Renaissance and Steppenwolf. He called it a "hippie Brigadoon."

Tom McGuane first met Richard at a party. All the usual crowd was there—"all vastly drunk," as Torn remembers it—when Richard appeared. He struck Tom as "a skinny hippie with beautiful manners. He had two or three Japanese affectations. If you complimented him, he would close his hands in front of him and bow. At that time, he was quickly becoming a superstar."

Richard was renting a house in Bolinas and writing his third novel, In Watermelon Sugar, about a little community of artisans called iDEATH, where the sun shines a different color every day. It was a parable of an idealized Bolinas, a perfect community of peers. But whatever Bolinas might have been in Richard's mind, it was becoming something else in reality. There was a hostile attitude toward the world beyond Marin County. Road signs directing traffic to Bolinas were routinely torn down. Although the flight to the country had begun as an exodus from the heavy drug scene that had taken over the city, Bolinas became a repository for Sixties-like dope taking and dope attitudes and dope paranoia.

Despite his own fear of drugs, Richard bought a house in Bolinas, upsetting many people in the community when he dispossessed poets David and Tina Meltzer and their children. People remember the house then as being cheerful, but after Richard moved in, he seemed to bring his own gloom. "I stayed in his house for a while," McGuane remembers. "After a day or two, I really wanted to rocket out of there." It was a dark house, deeply shaded by redwood trees, and haunted, at least according to Richard, who always conjured with the world of spirits.

Richard lived in Bolinas intermittently. He had become an alcoholic, and McGuane recognized the alcoholic's tendency to seek geographical solutions. Richard divided his time between California, Japan and Livingston, Montana, where McGuane, Hjortsberg and Chatham had retreated, all of them in a kind of flight from the precious intellects who governed Bolinas.

Tom first invited Richard to visit him in 1973. Richard rented a tourist cabin in Livingston and stayed there to write The Hawkline Monster, which he called "gothic western." It was during a period when Richard had vowed to write a novel a year, each representing a different genre. He liked Montana immediately, and he admired Tom. He bought a forty-acre ranch on Pine Creek, a lovely little stream that emptied into the Yellowstone River at the base of the property, near where Hemingway had hunted and fished—and written.

Livingston became a colony of rough-cut, highly competitive male artists. At the center of this scene were Tom and Becky McGuane, who were both sexual magnets: Tom was big and tough, a bar fighter, yet he was also insouciant in a way that drew both men and women to him; and Becky was blond, extremely petite but busty, with a native insight into men. People wanted to be around them. Sam Peckinpah, the film director, came there, and actors Warren Oates and Jeff Bridges and novelist Jim Harrison. Richard liked this crowd. He was still famous, and Tom was getting to be. Gatz Hjortsberg was beginning to sell his scripts. Russell Chatham's paintings were catching on, especially with the Hollywood set. "Everybody was hitting at the same time," Becky recalls. For a while, there were twenty-seven people living and writing at the McGuanes' ranch, including Jimmy Buffett, who was sleeping in the barn and composing songs that turned up on the radio, it seemed, only weeks later.

The early Seventies were, as the local bookstore owner John Fryer recalls, "a rude time, when nobody had any manners. And nobody cared." Livingston got a reputation for its wild parties and sexual openness. The McGuanes split up; Tom went on to marry Margot Kidder, the actress, and then Laurie Buffett, Jimmy's sister. Becky married Peter Fonda. "Then things began to settle down," says Fryer. "Maybe things did get a little quiet around here for Richard." The Fondas bought the ranch next to the McGuanes': Tom raised horses; Peter raised alfalfa; and they all raised children.

Still, the air was supercharged with mischief. One night everyone came to Richard's house for spaghetti, and the party wound up in such a terrific food fight that the house had to be repainted the next day. There was also a lot of gunplay, especially on Richard's part. He liked to shoot anything, beer cans, books, record albums, his television set. One month a telephone repairman came to Richard's house three times to replace his phones. The first two times they had been shot. The third time they had been burned. The repairman never said a word.

They were all competitive drinkers, but in that regard Richard invariably triumphed. "He drank harder than Dylan Thomas," says Tom. An ordinary day would involve two fifths of George Dickel or Calvados or tequila or aquavit or whatever liquor Richard was favoring. "When he took off his socks, it would smell like alcohol," one of his girlfriends says, "not feet, just pickled." Tom was drinking heavily himself, but he finally quit and briefly persuaded Richard to quit as well. Richard was training for a European speaking tour. He went on a carrot diet and ordered jeans two sizes too small for him, but he never got into them. When he was changing planes in New York, he called Becky from the airport. "He was fried," she says.

By then, Richard was well into the Hemingway curse. Book after book appeared, to be dismissed or ignored by the critics. They liked to dislike him. Richard had not flown nearly as high as his mentor, but he fell further, and faster, into almost complete anonymity, so that even girls he tried to pick up in bars had to be told that he was "a famous writer." Richard began to fantasize that he would someday win the Nobel Prize, which was, after all, Hemingway's revenge.

A year before Richard's death, he was invited to read at Stanford. By this time, Richard, who had been wealthy, was broke again and in debt to his friends. Publishers were turning down his books: his agent even suggested that Richard not submit his latest novel. Richard often liked to play a game at his readings, which was to appear at the lectern and after about thirty minutes jump off the dais and invite the audience to join in. In the old days, this strategem would flush out all the tattered, treasured paperbacks of the pimply undergraduates, but this time there were no books out there. In fact, they scarcely knew who he was. Only courtesy kept them in their seats. "He was clearly going beyond what they wanted," Ron Loewinsohn recalls. It was embarrassing and painful. He obviously wanted to be onstage as long as they'd let him."

He was still a star in Japan. He liked to call Tokyo "my New York," because he found in Japan a critical acceptance he had never received in his own country. The Japanese seemed to respond to Richard's fascination with minutiae and repetition and to the plotlessness of his novels. For his part, Richard discovered in himself an Oriental cast of mind. He claimed to like Tokyo because of the neon lights. "They remind me of my childhood, when neon meant magic, excitement, romance," Richard told a Japanese audience. "The neon lights of Tokyo give me back the eyes of a child."

The Japanese discovered Richard in the middle Seventies, at a time when his fame and fortune in America were rapidly waning. His Japanese royalties had made him once again a relatively wealthy man, at least briefly. When Curt Gentry, who wrote Helter Skelter, came to visit Richard in Japan, he was alarmed to find him staying in a $145-a-day room in the Keio Plaza hotel. He had been in the room for a year. Curt quickly found Richard a more luxurious room at another hotel for half the price, but three weeks later Richard was back in the Keio Plaza. Most of his economies were false. He had discovered, for instance, that it was cheaper to buy a bottle at a bar and leave his name on it, but he usually forgot about them. All over Tokyo there were bottles bearing Richard's name in Japanese.

Richard never bothered with the language: he enjoyed coasting above the mystery, reading own meanings into events. In the daytime, Curt and Richard would walk through the Shinjuku district, and people would stare at them. "Let's face it," says Curt, "Richard was strange looking. He had long hair and a huge mustache; he wore the same rough clothes year in and year out and always some big hat on his head; and he was huge. It was no wonder people were staring at him. Little kids would be snickering. And then Richard would say, 'See, Curt, everybody in Japan knows me. They recognize me from the covers of my books.'"

One afternoon Richard was in his room in the Keio Plaza watching a children's detective story on television when the telephone rang. It was a Japanese woman, defying custom by calling a man she didn't know. She was nervous. She was married. Her name was Akiko.

She had been riding on the bullet train to Osaka when she saw a clipping about Richard's book, The Abortion. She read it, then read everything she could find of his. She was surprised to find a Westerner who intuitively understood things in a Japanese way, especially about death. "For him, death was so nearby always," Akiko says now. "For the oriental philosophy, life and death are the same thing. They are equal."

There was a chapter in In Watermelon Sugar that particularly affected her, called "My Name". "I am one of those who do not have a regular name," said the narrator.

"My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long nine ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name."

Akiko read the passage with an extraordinary sense of identity. It was thrilling to her, this feeling that someone knew the world in a way that had been entirely private but unformed in her soul.

"Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name."

And so Akiko was in love with the mind of Richard Brautigan before she ever met him. All that remained was to call him.

"It was karma," says Aki.

"This new little wife is kind of mysterious," Richard used to say. His friends liked Akiko, but some feared Richard had miscalculated. "He thought he had gotten the archetypal geisha, who would walk three feet behind him," Ron Loewinsohn says. "But Aki was really very modern and very tough."

Her English was not good when they married and, in any case, Aki seldom displayed her true feelings. "The Oriental, we are good at killing our emotions," she says. That left Richard free to read into her whatever he wanted her to feel. He liked to imagine what she thought. "He had some dream of women," says Aki, "and he projected me to be the ideal type of woman. If you look at the picture of both of us—he gigantic, I like a dwarf—my height is like his waist. How odd a couple we are."

Aki was a big hit in Montana. Tom McGuane respected her wit, despite her unsteady English. When Richard would buy a bottle of Jack Daniel's, Aki would say, "Oh, we're flying to Tennessee tonight." Russell Chatham taught her to fly-cast. All the men were beguiled, for she was beautiful and delicate and clever. Richard loved to show her off.

"I like to play ping-pong," Aki remembers, "and Richard ordered a carpenter to make ping-pong table for me. We put it in the barn so I can play even in hard weather. We had a celebrity tournament of ping-pong. I very good at this. Richard Hodge [Richard's attorney] and I are last in the tournament. He beat me. Richard was so disappointed, he destroyed the ping-pong table that night. When I wake up, it is in little pieces. I laughed. I really laughed. I think he wanted me to be his hero."

But no one could live up to Richard's ideals. "I think she intended to make a real go of it, but Richard made it impossible for her," says Russell Chatham. "I've never seen anyone so destroyed and bitter over a divorce. He alienated a lot of his friends. We just couldn't stand to hear about it over and over again."

Tom McGuane chalked the divorce up to Richard's alcoholism. "He never arrested his progressive disease, and because of that he deprived himself of a wonderful girl."

For Aki, it was more complicated than that. Richard had created a persona for her, this female ideal, and when she betrayed his image of her, he became frighteningly violent. His depressions overwhelmed her. The longer she stayed with him, the more she realized that the persona he had created for her was not only that of a wife but also that of a friend, confidante, an agent and especially a mother.

Once Aki went on a trip with Richard and his friend Tony Dingman. Tony was a drinking companion who worked for Francis Coppola. He didn't mind driving Richard wherever he wanted to go. They drove up to Great Falls, Montana, where Richard's mother had abandoned him when he was about nine years old. She left him in a hotel room by himself—that was the story he often told. In the mornings, he would go down to the restaurant where his stepfather, Mr. Porterfield, was a fry cook. He would make Richard breakfast, then give him a dollar. For most of his life, Richard thought that Mr. Porterfield was his real father. Not until he graduated from high school did his mother tell him his real name was Brautigan, so that it would be right on his diploma. Perhaps, for that very private reason, he always claimed he hadn't graduated.

What Richard never told anyone, ever, is that he was not alone in Great Falls. His little sister, Barbara, was there. She was four years old. Their mother left them together, says Barbara, expecting Richard to take care of her. "Why she left us—we never knew the reason," Barbara. recalls. "What I remember is that we used to go down to the railroad yard and watch the trains go in and out. We would wave at the passengers, and the black stewards would toss us pieces of candy. And we'd go ice-skating on the pond in our shoes. We couldn't afford skates." She doesn't remember how long it was before their mother reclaimed them and took them home to Tacoma, Washington. They later moved to Eugene, Oregon.

Richard's childhood was actually a kind of parenthood, since he raised Barbara while their mother worked. The two of them used to wonder if they had been adopted. "I can never remember our mother giving Richard a hug or telling us she loved us," says Barbara. "We were just there. We never had a birthday party, not even a cake—it was just a day. Same with Christmas. Maybe we'd get one present."

There seemed to be some mystery about himself—some disgrace—hat Richard couldn't unravel. Once he had made a trip to Tacoma to discover who his father really was. His birth certificate said his father was Bernard Brautigan, described as "common laborer." Richard claimed that he once met his real father on the street, and the man gave him five dollars, saying, "That's all you'll ever get from me."

After Richard's death, the elderly Mr. Brautigan denied that he had ever met his son. In fact, he said, he had never known that he had a son. He said that when he asked his former wife who Richard was, she told him Richard was a baby she had found in the gutter.

Richard turned to writing in high school. "He wrote all night long," Barbara recalls, "then he'd sleep during the day. He would do odd jobs to support himself, like mow lawns. My folks rode him a lot. They never listened to what he was writing. They didn't understand his writing was important to him. I know they asked him to get out of the house several times."

When he was twenty years old, and developed his first crush on a girl, he finally got the nerve to show her his work. She dared to criticize. Richard was shattered. He was terrified. Because he didn't know where else to go, he turned himself into the police.

But we can't arrest you, they told him, you haven't done anything.

Richard walked outside and threw a rock through the station window. Now he'd done something. He spent a week in jail. When he got out, he was committed to the Oregon State Hospital and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. It was Christmas Eve 1955.

"I didn't know he was there until after they let him out," says Barbara. "I know he did have shock therapy. After that, he seemed real quiet. The only thing he told me about it was that he learned to dance in there. But he would never open up to me again." A few days later, Richard called and told her he was going away—forever. "When you live that close to someone, someone who has fed you and clothed you and been your nursemaid, and then to have him tell you that he's leaving and will never see you again—that was a real blow."

"I guess he hated us," his mother, Lulu Folston, says now. "Or maybe he had a disappointed love affair. Whatever. Richard practically abandoned the family when he left here. I haven't the slightest idea why."

The trip to Great Falls with Akiko was the only time in his life that Richard returned to one of the settings of his childhood. He was looking for something. One of his most frightening memories was the doorknob of the school in Great Falls. "But it was so cold," Aki recalls. "He put very great stress on the coldness of the doorknob. He was scared of it. He would touch the doorknob and go home again." He looked and looked, but he was never sure. There were so many doors.

Death was disappointing. One might have hoped that life's mysteries would be made clear, not just relived in this pallid fashion. On the other hand, Richard did not really have such high expectations. Death, he had once written, was like a parked car:

"You hotwire death, get in, and drive  
  away
like a flag made from a thousand
   burning funeral parlors.
You have stolen death because you're
   bored.
There's nothing good playing at the
   movies in San Francisco.
You joyride around for a while
   listening
to the radio, and then abandon death,
   walk away, and leave death for the police
   to find."

The police did find him, eventually, although they weren't sure it was him, for there was scarcely anything left after the .44 Magnum and five weeks of maggots had done their work.

Why this final indignity? Was there no one left who loved him? No one who missed him enough to mark his absence?

He had been threatening suicide for years. He used to torture Ianthe with the idea, going so far as to call and tell her he was going to kill himself, then hanging up. He once convinced a friend at Enrico's to drive him out to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, so he could jump off. His friend couldn't stop the car, because there was a big truck tailgating him. By the time they crossed the bridge, Richard was ready to go back to Enrico's for another drink.

And he was leaving clues. Actor Rip Torn went to visit him in Montana and couldn't get him to go fishing. He claimed he was working. He gave his rods to McGuane to store. (After Richard's death, Tom found them in his basement, wrapped in dried flowers, along with a Japanese funeral urn.) His handwriting was always very small, but it began to shrink alarmingly. Becky Fonda had to resort to a magnifying glass to read his last letters from Japan—Richard had just been to his first funeral. "I've examined a number of options," he wrote portentously,

"and will soon apply action to my life. I'm waiting for a little more information, and the beautiful warm green spring of Japan. Then . . . a forty-nine-year-old man rattles his bones forward into the future."

When he came back to the States, he gave many the impression of being euphoric. He was thrilled about the Olympics and even joined in a parade for the athletes. But he was also morbid and sought out dead things. In Montana, a pony died in Marian Hjortsberg's pasture, across the creek from Richard's house. Richard insisted she bury it. Marian refused. "I can't afford to have a back hoe come out here and dig a $150-dollar hole just to put a pony in. Besides, fall is coming, Richard. He'll be gone by spring."

Richard couldn't accept Marian's refusal. He wanted her to honor the dead pony. He told her he was leaving Montana and never coming back. "We parted not speaking," says Marian sadly. They had been lovers after her divorce from Gatz Hjortsberg.

Richard went back to his gloomy house in Bolinas. He was finding death everywhere. A hummingbird broke its neck when it tried to fly through Richard's windowpane. Richard buried it. He went to speak to his friend Bobbie Louise Hawkins, a novelist and actress, and told her he had been walking on the beach and had come upon a dead seal.

"Yeah" said Bobbie, "there's some virus in the seals."

"So I lay down next to the seal and stared into its eyes. They were covered with flies."

"God, Richard, didn't it stink?"

Bobbie was concerned. She had figured that he was broke when he started trying to barter for things, and she wondered if he were really working as well as he claimed. One morning he came over for breakfast, an hour late, drunk on port. He said he had already written fifteen pages that day, but when Bobbie took him home, she saw his typewriter covered with dust.

One day, when Richard was drinking with friends in Bolinas, a guy pointed out to his girlfriend a little frog that had hopped onto the window. Richard ran out of the house and caught the frog and ate it.

"He didn't have any place for the eccentricity to go," says Bobbie. "It circled back in on him like an ingrown toenail. I don't think he had the resources to be normal, especially when he got famous." Bobbie had been close to fame during her marriage to the poet Robert Creeley. "You can be saved by being either excessively normal or excessively egocentric. You've got to have some internal pressure to resist the outside forces. Richard didn't have the kind of creative ego that would have left him a healthy monster."

On September 14th, 1984, Richard went into San Francisco. It was a day of coincidences. His former wife Akiko was in town, setting up a session with Francis Coppola and George Lucas for a Japanese photographer. She and the photographer had reservations to Los Angeles on a midday flight, but they had a little time, so Aki took him to a coffee shop on Broadway. She hadn't seen him in four years.

She was coming out of a magazine shop when she saw Richard walking with another woman a hundred feet away from her. "I just followed him," Aki recalls. "I might have hesitated if he were alone and I were alone. I just wanted to say hello, I guess. I just wanted to smile to him and have a smile back from him.

"He went into Vanessi's restaurant. I pulled open the first door. I waited for Richard to turn around and look at me. He was inside the second door. I stood there five or ten seconds. Then he found me, and he closed his eyes as if he saw a ghost; I never saw that kind of expression on a human being's face. He liked the ghost stories so much, but the eye of his look as if he saw the real ghost. It was me. I was the ghost"

That day Marcia Clay decided to find Richard. He had broken off from her four years before, because he had defended Aki during the divorce. "It was a strange thing. I thought, I'm missing Richard. I'm going to look for him at Enrico's. There he was. He was shocked. He said he was planning to come to see me that day, and there I was, coincidentally looking for him.

"He had seen Aki an hour ago. He said to me, 'I feel like my whole life has happened to me in one day.'"

Marcia called him the next night in Bolinas. He asked if she liked his mind. "I said, Yes, Richard, I like your mind. You have the ability to jump in and out of spaces. It's not linear thinking; it's exciting, catalytic, random thinking.'"

Richard said, "Then I want to read you something."

She wrote in her diary at 11:07 p.m.:

"I'm calling Richard back in ten minutes. . . I called him now just because he might need that . . . no debts. Some curiosity on my part. He is out in Bolinas looking for a piece of writing he wants to read to me. He is—as he answered to my perfunctory 'How are you?'—'Fucked up.' When wasn't he? But I'll call back, because we are friends, and considering the many things that don't work and never will, something with us does work and always will—if even in an uneven, at times pathetic way."

When she called back, she got an answering machine, with Richard's voice asking for messages at the beep. But there was never a beep. 

Later, when his friends got concerned and began to call, that voice became eerie and rather spectral as the batteries ran down. It sounded like some drunken, otherworldly Richard.

Marcia called and called. "I wanted to tell him that I like his mind," she wrote in her diary,

"a mind that passes through raw, unconventional territory and reposes itself on unresting surfaces. It is nowhere any of us wants to live, but it is there—all the places we do not venture that themselves venture forth without us, living and dying, mysteriously part of this human race that we are part of but would like to believe ourselves immune to."

Anonymous,1984

"The Talk of the Town"
Anonymous
New Yorker, 3 Dec. 1984, p. 39.
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.

A man we know writes: My friend Richard Brautigan, the writer, who recently died, had a penchant for absurdity akin to the jolly-serious outrages cooked up by the young Dadaists of Paris in the early nineteen-twenties. He was a tall, baroquely mustachioed man with a strangely swanlike gait, whose celebrity, odd hats, and denim foppery kept him a focus of street attention in San Francisco's North Beach, his urban habitat.

At Enrico's sidewalk café there, after a long, vinous lunch, he was staring at something with such gravity that I thought it must be an extraordinary woman. When I checked, it was a chocolate cake on the dessert cart.

"Let's get out of here," said Richard, as if he smelled smoke.
"What's the matter?" I inquired as he rose into a loping stride.
He pointed an accusatory finger at the cake. "Thought you'd get me, didn't you!" he shouted at the pastry. His enunciation was very careful as he admonished the cake, as if he knew that cakes had no more intelligence than small children or beasts.

Another day, at my small digs in Pixley Alley, Richard, his handsome Japanese wife at the time, Akiko, and I were having a spaghetti dinner on big white plates that Akiko admired. Blaring and giggling from wine again, Richard fell into a bet with me. I was sure, and so was he. He pulled out a hundred dollars. I didn't have any money. What could I put up? He pointed to the plates. I lost. After dinner, Richard rose with Akiko and stacked the spaghetti-smirched dinner plates and left carrying them. Maybe it was that scalloping walk of his, or maybe his giraffelike height, compared with Akiko's, or maybe just the pair of them, he in his deer-hunting hat and denim, she in something from Paris, carrying stacks of dirty dishes through the throngs of pedestrians on a public street, that made me laugh so very hard.

Food figures in stories of people risen from poverty. Insecurity defies financial security. Fame scares selfhood. At a party in a mansion, Richard tapped me on the shoulder and gestured toward a back stairway. I walked over with him. Some kind of joke was up. He grabbed my arm, not allowing out the laughter welling in him, and pointed up the dark staircase.

"Hear it?" he asked.
"What?" I said.
"Hear it? Listen, it's just starting. It's for you this time. It's going to come down those stairs—Jesus, it's so big we better be careful we're not hurt."
"Hear what?"
"Money," he said, now unable to keep from laughing. "All the money in the world, and fame, and everything! It's coming down those stairs and it's going to bury you!"

Berger,1999

"The Secrets of Fiction: Where Have You Gone Richard Brautigan?"
Kevin Berger
San Francisco Magazine, Sept. 1999, p. 50.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Three years before my father died in 1994, he discovered Richard Brautigan. He was looking for family photographs in the attic and came across a box of worn paperbacks; Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America was lying on top. He started reading it because he thought it was about, well, trout fishing in America.

But Dad quickly discovered that the book was not about spinning rods and jigging lures. It was a picaresque novel about an oddly serene narrator drifting through San Francisco's bohemian bars and hotels in the early '60s, recalling his lonely Northwestern childhood, failed fishing trips around the country, and random encounters with an ageless sage named Trout Fishing in America.

Dad was so enchanted by the comic 1967 novel that he spent a week reading the rest of Brautigan's slim, wistful books, including In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion. He wasn't sure what drew him to the novels; he guessed they were about the commercialization of America. The "bastards and their malls" was how he put it. But above all, he said, they were "surreal, really weird. Like poems." Had I read them? Were they well known?

Yes, I had read them; yes, they were very well known. Initially released with little promotion, Brautigan's novels soared in popularity on a street buzz that American literature had seldom seen. In the late '60s and '70s, they were required reading not in classrooms but in the Haight, Greenwich Village, and every other epicenter of cultural electricity.

Often called the "last of the beats," Brautigan at his best transcended the self-righteousness of his forebears and penned scenes that were tender, funny, and sad at the same time. Dad's idea of great book was The World Rushed In, an epistolary history of the California gold rush, so I cherish the image of him in his den, reading about the poor kid in Trout Fishing who couldn't work on his family's farm because he was "ruptured," and so "stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino."

But Dad's Brautigan encounter was also a sad reminder that contemporary novels no longer seem like personal treasures, secrets that bind us to our friends and times. Regardless of how Brautigan's novels weather posterity—and some critics file them alongside albums by the Strawberry Alarm Clock—they represent the end of the line for certain ebullience in American fiction, days when it thrived at the heart of our culture. The past two decades have brought us countless novels that illuminate this century's waning days with exceptional grace and force. Yet they exist at the margins of culture, barely subsisting on a shrinking supply of avid readers. Even Thomas Pynchon's brilliant Mason & Dixon, released in 1997, raised little more than a cultural murmur—a far cry from the '70s, when the author of Gravity's Rainbow was widely revered as a titan of American letters.

The problem begins with today's sheer number of good writers. With so many fictional voices, literary culture has become what contemporary novelist Richard Powers calls "a bathtub with the faucet open. Eventually the tub has to overflow. And eventually the sense that literature is a centripetal force that holds culture together is going to be replaced by the notion that it's a force pulling culture into a diversity it will not survive."

Yet that force is fueled by more than a surfeit of writers. Fiction that requires time and thought is trampled in the Information Age, a multimedia marketplace of books, movies, and music designed to entertain us as quickly as wisecracks. Because a few cultural barons now own everything, they demand instant profits to keep their stock prices rising. They cram the shelves of popular culture with titillating products, taunting us to keep up with the output. And the scariest thing of all is that we are: Lord of the Rings, Six Feet Under, Outkast, The Da Vinci Code, Diane Arbus museum exhibits, Barry Bonds home-run displays—we consume them all without pause or discrimination. Nothing is special anymore.

Which only increases the need for novels to arrive on the words of our friends. Outside the entertainment machine, we can settle into the spaces of consciousness, the only place to make sense of the chaotic world. Brautigan, who committed suicide in 1984, seemed to reach out to my father from a different era. He granted Dad a week of solitary pleasure, a respite from the inescapable news that he had cancer. When Dad told me about Trout Fishing in America, how it had puzzled and pleased him, I knew I would always save a piece of this maddening life for the quiet, unending stream of fiction.

Buda,1985

"Richard Brautigan 1935-1984"
Janusz K. Buda
Otsuma Review, July 1985, pp. 20-26.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan, writer and poet, died in the autumn of 1984, the circumstances of his solitary suicide precluding any more precise dating of his demise.

The untimely death of a popular writer, whilst obviously an occasion for much sadness on the part of his readers, is often greeted with far less negative emotions by the academic establishment. For professional scholars seeking to stake out a literary claim to a plot of unexploited ground, or for Ph.D. candidates in search of a thesis, the undoubted advantages of choosing a relatively new and contemporary author have always been balanced by the occupational hazard of subsequent works or pronouncements rendering their researches obsolete or, worse still, irrelevant.

Throughout his literary life, Richard Brautigan received scant attention from such academic circles, and there is little reason to believe that his unfortunate death will in any way trigger a rush of posthumous critical studies.

Through no fault of his own, Brautigan suffered the indignity of being irrevocably categorized by two unwarranted labels.

Whereas most critics seem to concur in their choice of the adjective 'whimsical' to describe Brautigan's unique novels and poems, none of them have ever attempted either a definition or justification of the term. The reader sympathetic to Brautigan is left with the impression that this back-handed compliment is an expression of the frustration experienced by literary intellects unable to uncover deep levels of cabalistic symbolism and meaning in Brautigan's works.

The facile and wholly spurious sobriquet of "hippie" came about as a result of a myopic and uninformed identification of writer and reader, as irrelevant as labelling Shakespeare a 'children's writer' for no better reason than that he has been read by generations of English schoolchildren.

The hippie phenomenon of the mid-sixties lasted only a matter of months, and the promised cultural and spiritual revolution metamorphosed, depending upon one's point of view, into either the political excesses of the Yippies and Black Panthers, or the materialistic sterility of consumer culture.

Seen from a socio-political perspective, the brief flowering of the alternative culture in 1966 and 1967 was but a prelude of adolescent silliness to the subsequent world-wide radicalization of youth, and found its eventual consummation in the Kent University shootings, in the Democratic Convention riots in Chicago, and in similar police/student confrontations in Europe and virtually every country of the Free World.

From the viewpoint of aesthetic history, however, the same brief interlude was marked by an extraordinary eruption of artistic activity. Whether the use (or abuse) of hallucinogenic and other drugs was a symptom or a cause of this period of intense aesthetic experimentation is open to conjecture, but identification of the characteristic features of the artistic output of the time with the strange psychic effects of mind expanding drugs is unavoidable.

The hippies of Haight-Ashbury were by no means the first to discover the effects of hallucinogenic agents. Throughout history, the sages and shamans of almost all primitive cultures have had access to a rich pharmacopoeia of perception-modifying substances.

In medieval Europe, the periodic outbreaks of hysteria, gangrene, and violent death were likewise the result of hallucinogenic fungal infections of rye grain. The substance responsible for this ergot poisoning was finally isolated and synthesized by Swiss chemists in the years before the Second World War, but no practical application was foreseen for the peculiar and apparently unpredictable effects it produced.

In the early sixties, a number of academics began to experiment with this substance, and as its use spread among young intellectuals in first America, and then Europe, it was inevitable that artists would seek to give expression to the perceptions and insights afforded by LSD trips.

The aid of almost every conceivable medium was enlisted in this explosion of creative activity, but the subliminal and transcendental nature of the LSD experience tended to favour the immediacy of primary forms such as music and visual art, and the synaesthetic possibilities of multimedia presentations.

Significant literary works of this period are conspicuous by their absence, it clearly being felt that the written word and its heritage of social and cultural connotations was too indirect and unwieldy a medium to express perceptions the very uniqueness of which lay in their transcendence of mundane experience.

It is again significant that the writers and works most often associated with the hippie generation were not, in fact, either part or product of that generation. William S. Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien, Kahlil Gibran, Richard Brautigan, Carlos Castaneda, Mervyn Peake, Aldous Huxley, David Lindsay, and Leonard Cohen. The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the writings of Milarepa, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao-Te-Ching and the I-Ching. A motley assortment of the famous and the forgotten, the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, the only common factor being that they all, in some way or other, gave expression to feelings and sentiments that an idealistic and psychically disoriented generation could not articulate for itself.

Where exactly in this extraordinary gallery of strange bedfellows one should locate Brautigan, or what the precise appeal of this novels and poems was for the millions of young hippies that read and enjoyed his books, it is difficult to say.

If any attempt is to be made to define his early work in terms of his literary contemporaries, then Brautigan was clearly very much a part of the Beat generation of the fifties.

Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1935, Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1954, and was soon involved in the literary groups that were springing up in the area. A contemporary of Kerouac and Ginsberg, and a close friend of such poets as Ferlinghetti, McClure, and Whalen, perhaps the closest literary parallel to be drawn is that between Brautigan and Gary Snyder. Both writers hailed from the American Northwest, both were active contributors to the fifties Beat movement, both were adopted by the hippie counterculture, and both developed a profound and lasting interest in the religion and culture of Japan.

Brautigan's first three novels, written in 1961, 1963, and 1964, all predate the psychedelic watershed year of 1967, the year in which the earliest of the three, Trout Fishing in America, was published in San Francisco. After several local reprints, the rights to the book were acquired by a nationwide publishing house, and the subsequent success it enjoyed was responsible for establishing Brautigan as one of the most popular and talked-about writers of the time.

In the same year, Rolling Stone magazine, quondam mouthpiece of the hippie counterculture, ran a brief series of short original pieces by Brautigan, and it was through these that many readers outside America first became acquainted with his work. Many of these early pieces appeared in 1971 as part of the Revenge of the Lawn anthology.

Thus it was that a relatively unknown and unread Beat poet suddenly found himself lauded as the doyen of the hippie writers, reviewed in the literary pages of national newspapers, offered substantial art foundation grants, and invited to speak at endless lectures and symposia.

One of the most striking facts about Brautigan's misidentification with the counterculture of 1967 is that the very people responsible for this misidentification, the literary critics, the book reviewers, and the university academics, really should have known better.

When Brautigan's second novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, was published in 1964 (the second to be written, but the first to be published), the critics of the time seem to have had no trouble identifying Brautigan as one of the last survivors of the Beat movement, a rather lonely and forlorn remnant of the literary school of Jack Kerouac.

Why then, only three years later, the publication of Brautigan's first novel, Trout Fishing in America, should have resulted in an almost unanimous critical identification of his work with the hippie counterculture and its communalistic idealism is indeed a mystery, for if his early novels bear witness to anything, it is the anarchistic individualism so characteristic of the post-war Beat generation.

Perhaps the critics of the time, in their reckless and unseemly haste to categorize, failed to note that Trout Fishing in America had been written in 1961. Or perhaps, if one might be permitted a flight of fancy, those same critics, caught up in the euphoria of the period, had themselves experienced the mind-bending effects of LSD, and were now seeing Brautigan's works through the same aura-tinted spectacles as his legions of young admirers.

Thus it is that literary reputations are made and broken, and Brautigan was never able to shake off the 'hippie' label so gratuitously applied to him in 1967.

During most of the seventies, Brautigan deliberately shunned all contact with the literary establishment, turning down lecture invitations, and refusing all interviews. He continued to write novels at the rate of approximately one a year, but his output of the time consisted of a series of surrealistic pastiches of popular genres which confused and disappointed even the most sympathetic of his critics.

1980 marked a turning point in Brautigan's literary career. He began to accept lecture tour and other public appearance offers, and The Tokyo-Montana Express was universally welcomed as a return to the creative peak level of the sixties. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, published in 1982, confirmed the fact that Brautigan had emerged from his creative vacillation of the seventies, and was once again writing with superb power and conviction.

Although close on twenty years have now passed since the incense-laden Summer of '67, for those involved, however peripherally, with the brief flowering of hippie culture, the period stands out as a remarkable episode, the full significance of which remains to be realized.

If the calculations of the pyramidologists are to be believed, a deep pit in the Subterranean Chamber of the Great Pyramid defines 1967 A.D. as the year of mankind's great spiritual collapse. Conversely, Edgar Cayce, who through his seemingly omniscient alter persona confirmed the prophetic significance of Great Pyramid dimensions, himself prophesied that 1967 or 1968 would witness the rising up of the ancient continent of Atlantis. Apart from the reported discovery of strange submarine stone artifacts off the coast of Bermuda, the widely-awaited rising of Atlantis failed to materialize, and most commentators preferred to believe that Cayce's prophecy must have referred to an intangible spiritual event. This modified interpretation saw the souls of hundreds of thousands of former Atlanteans being reborn into the world of the mid-twentieth century, to work off part of their heavy karmic debt, and then to perish on the battlefields of Viet Nam and Cambodia.

To be sure, a most disturbing pattern has haunted the artistic vanguard of the counterculture generation. A pattern of brilliant and intense creative activity, of a period of equally intense psychic distress, and of tragic and premature death at the very moment this dark night of the soul is finally transcended.

Looking back on his life and death, perhaps Richard Brautigan was fated to be united in some strange alchemical marriage to the generation that loved and courted him. Stepping to the rhythms of different drums both seemed destined to walk a narrow and lonely road from sunrise into darkness at noon, and from the false promise of sunset into ultimate oblivion.

Japanese Translations of Richard Brautigan's Works
Trout Fishing in America (1975)
A Confederate General from Big Sur (1999)
In Watermelon Sugar (1979)
The Abortion (1975)
Revenge of the Lawn (1976)
The Hawkline Monster (1975)
Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1978)
Sombrero Fallout (1976)
Dreaming of Babylon (1978)
The Tokyo-Montana Express (1982)
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1985)

Copyright © 1985, Janusz BUDA. All rights reserved
Revised: May 2, 2001.

Cohen,nodate

"Sitting in North Beach Cafes"
Allen Cohen
Unpublished poem.
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.

Sitting in North Beach Cafes
it is hard to find anyone who remembers;
some have never even heard of him.

In the 60's in the Haight he was everywhere
in the streets, with the Diggers, at the Oracle office.
Everyone knew him lean and tall, long blond hair,

high pitched voice, strangely stooped and rounded shoulders
bent by a hidden childhood. There was always
something Olympian about him and far away.

"Trout Fishing" wasn't published yet—
held up on option by a New York publisher
for several years, while with the rest of us,

mostly lesser talents, he lived
on the nectar of that rare time and place.
He wrote poems on seed packages

and gave them out free at Digger's "Invisible Circus" event
When I told him I had moved to a country commune
he said, "I've earned my millionth cricket badge already."

But, after Trout Fishing finally came out,
he bought a farm in Montana and reappeared
in North Beach only during the winter.

I told him once that I had writer's block.
He said, "Before I even finish a book
a new idea comes to me for the next one.

I can hardly swat it away.
It's sort of natural to my mind."
The last time we spoke

I had with me a mock up of a book
on Laurie's natural childbirth
with many intimate photographs of childbirth

laid out in sequence with a long poem
that I was trying to self-publish
Richard and Steve Walzer, the photographer,

and I began looking through the mock up
at an outdoor table at Enrico's.
and I saw tears coming to Richard's eyes.

He asked to be excused and came back
a few minutes later, his eyes red,
and looked through the rest of the book, crying.

I asked him if he could spare any money
to help us print it. He said,
"It's a beautiful book, but please believe me

my money's all tied up. I can't."
The last time I saw him was on Kearny St.
a month before his body was found,

probably only a few days before he shot himself.
He was walking with his quick long stride
through Chinatown toward North Beach.

I was riding on the 15 bus to work.
He was keeping up with the bus for a few blocks.
It was warm and he took off his jacket

as he briskly, leaped forward and
turned up Jackson St. where the cheap Chinese restaurants are.
I wanted to get off the bus and talk to him,

but didn't bother. I wish I had followed that impulse.
Now Richard is even more distant
far away in the Montana of the spirit,

joining Lew Welch, also a simple, emotional,
troubled and alone poet with a tender love
of humanity and nature,

who had disappeared into the great Sierras.
Their spirits, perhaps, too immense for our age.

Creeley,1985

"The Gentle on the Mind Number"
Robert Creeley
Rolling Stock, no. 9, 1985, p. 4.
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 caveat that death makes adamant is significantly ignored by all who keep on breathing. In this case, it is no different nor would Brautigan presumably have wanted it to be if he was at that point in any sense concerned. Despite the meager industrial interests already at work on the bleak legend, i.e., those who will tell us the true story, of what deadened circumstances, etc., the fact is still that Richard took responsibility as ever, and killed himself as factually as he'd do anything, like turn out a light or write a novel. He was not sentimental in that respect, albeit he could cry like a baby if drunk enough and with sufficient drama in the occasion. But he could stop it on a dime, and I can't believe, drunk or sober, that he ever finally looked on the world with other than a cold eye not hostilely but specifically.

What's often forgotten is that he was a remarkably articulate writer, a determined one in its resources. His particular teacher was Jack Spicer and there is no one who more called for, literally demanded, that writing be intelligent, perceptive, conscious recognition and employment of words and the complex system of their event. Brautigan's writing seems so simple, "the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol."

"The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section. It is the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food."

It's like an ultimate dominoes, ultimate attachments, endless directions and digressions, but all a surface or a skin of unvarying attention, a wild, patient humor, an absolute case in point.

Trout Fishing in America is dedicated to Jack Spicer and Ron Loewinsohn. There's a great picture of Loewinsohn and Richard they used for the cover of a magazine they edited together in the sixties, Change. Brautigan was in his middle thirties before the big time hit him. He said once his average annual income had been about $950 up till then. His childhood was classically awful, dirt poor, mother, step-father to whom he's given when the two separate and his mother takes his sister. He told a story once of cooling himself in his sister's hair, locked in fever, in some bleak motel they were living in. He hauled himself up from nothing to be the most influential writer of his specific generation, prose or poetry, you name it. You could hear him and you didn't forget it. It was like, think of this, this trout, like this. He was a great pro.

He was a loner and that didn't seem to be easy except for the situation of writing. He loved his daughter very much and tried to be and was a careful, resourceful father. He was very proud of her.

This attempt to say something is a weird and lonely exercise. I hate it that no one was there to say goodbye, or hello—that he could be dead that length of time, almost a month, with no one's coming by. They thought he'd gone to Montana. The people there must have thought he was in Bolinas. I know that he didn't make it easy to get next to him, like they say. Still, that's a distance no one needs.

One time we were leaving some chaos of persons together, in the 60s it must have been, and just as we were at the door, Richard, looking back in at it all, smiles and says, let's leave them with the gentle on the mind number...

"Help Yourself
Sir Richard Comma
three dots for a dime

"drummed into my head
abstract pavement

"as opposed to dirt
no move from the end

"to the middle. Style's
a hug, a friend's

"true pleasure.
To be home

"is to have a friend.
Van Gogh in Amsterdam—

"streets an easy size,
the canal in harvest moon

"moonlight, walking with
David Gascoyne, with

"Michael Hamburger.
Richard's friendship—

"dear Richard met me,
you know what talk's like?
1/8/84"

Now he's dead. You figure it out, i.e., you got something to do you better do it now, friend. Onward.

Dawson,1984

"Appreciation Can Give A Meaning to Endings"
Patrick Dawson
Great Falls Tribune, 28 Oct. 1984, p. 3C.
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The last I heard, Richard Brautigan's place at Pine Creek was up for sale.

Last year, he started talking about selling it. He thought he should get a premium sum for the 30 or so acres and the old white house and the barn with the writer's studio. If no one around here wanted to pay for it, he said one night in a Livingston bar, "I'll sell it to Japs—they'll buy it!"

The Japanese, he knew, have certain reverence for the ground of heroes and great artists.

Why did he want to sell the Montana place? Taxes. Too much money to keep up this place and the house in Bolinas, Calif. There was another reason: "Too many ghosts. The ghosts of too many women out there."

A friend of his told me this summer that he was ready to get out of the Montana place because he discovered he could actually write elsewhere—as he did in Japan—and was now free to produce outside the old haven of Pine Creek.

Brautigan's work and Brautigan the man were appreciated far more in places like Japan and France than in his own United States. As the years rolled on, he became more of an ignored national resource.

It's too late, America. Richard Brautigan died in California last week. But the people who live around Pine Creek and Paradise Valley won't soon forget the loping gait of the tall man with the pot belly, longish blond hair, drooping moustache, flat-brimmed felt hat and long denim overall jacket.

Like Jack Kerouac, Brautigan did not drive automobiles. But like Kerouac, except at a different pace, he managed to get around just the same, picking up those special little favors of life that he served back to us in his writing.

His work was at times gentle, always incisive and often exuded an almost childlike expression of discoveries joyful, painful, magical and just plain real. Maybe he was indeed a Zen poet in a "Zenophobic" land.

Those of us who saw him in saloons late at night with the whiskey could not help but wonder and worry a little. Yet still, we bought him shots when he was short. The company was too good to pass up. The discourses, the antics, the mild ravings were rare performances, too precious to miss.

The older kids will remember those years when he had emerged from poet-in-residence at Cal Poly/Pamona to accidently become an international campus cult figure with the publication of Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General At Big Sur, and the many other books of poems, stories and novels that followed.

But, in America, in the later years, the fishing wasn't so good.

The new college kids with their (as Abbie Hoffman put it) "designer brains," weren't tuned into this literary treasure of the '60s.

Richard Brautigan, to be sure, was still writing, and he enjoyed an admirable following in Japan and Europe.

But America can be cruel to her best.

I'll never forge that one late winter night in a Bozeman bar. Richard had been drinking shots of Kentucky whiskey on the rocks and expounding like no one else on earth could do. I guess he had also been checking out a few of the coeds and younger women now and then, too.

A young woman, maybe in her very early twenties, leaned over to me and asked in a hushed, somewhat skeptical voice, "Is he REALLY a famous writer?"

If she had to ask, what good would it do to answer that one? But I did anyway.

Today, all we can say is thanks to Richard Brautigan, for giving us so much of himself, for helping us to laugh at ourselves and feel things a bit more keenly.

There are still a lot of his books left out there. They are alive—just open one and see.

Dijan,1989

"One Reason to Love Life"
Phillippe Dijan
Crocodile. ***, 1989.
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I was in Athens when I heard the news of Richard Brautigan's death. My first real holiday in ten years. The first treat my book writing had ever earned me. Why did this dreadful news have to hit me just then? I'd been roaming around for the last three days between museums and cafes. Nothing on my mind . . . My son was playing around a fountain. I had one eye on the paper, the other on my wife. She was tanned, magnificent. And that's without even starting on the light, the unbelievable warmth in the air and the miracle of still being alive in those last few days of October 1984. Only one thing was bothering me. I'd packed fifty pouches of tobacco in my suitcase, and no cigarette paper. Of course, tragedy always strikes when you least expect it.

When I came across the article, my wife was buying pistachios. The vendor had left a few on the table and was coming back with more. He was smiling at her. My wife is blonde, tall and well stacked. Athens is a city I adore. I had a smile on my face too 'til I found out that he'd died. In Bolinas, California. I haven't been the same since. I wake up at night. And you haven't been the same either, whether you know it or not.

"What's with you? What's wrong?" she asked me.

I stared at her and handed her the paper without a word. We've been living together for fourteen years. My son turned up as she disappeared behind the paper. He was lining up some unopened pistachios in front of me. The newspaper snapped shut with a frightening flap of wings. Most men whinge about the women in their lives, I didn't have that problem, thank God.

"Alright, she said, I'm going to buy the same sandals as John Lennon. Don't be too late, I'll be waiting for you."

I found myself alone. Me and Ouzo, the national drink. I hadn't had a drunken binge since last winter, so I had nothing to feel ashamed of. And for once, I had enough money in my pocket to bring all the bottles in the bar to their knees. But fate was, you have to admit, utterly ironic. Had anyone ever before had such a dry throat? Was there anything more tragic than this loss?

I would give ten thousand lives for the life of Richard Brautigan. And I don't mind telling you that while looking you right in the eye. Twenty thousand. Deep down, I'm not even disgusted with myself. Hundreds of thousands die everyday. Have we thought about his readers, about the tanks of life blood that were So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away or Revenge Of The Lawn? Would anyone dare take The Tokyo Montana Express out of my hands? Around one o'clock, I went back to the Akropolis Hotel. I'd spent the whole evening, just as anyone would have, trying to fathom what we had lost. I went up to Reception. The guy gave me a conspiratory wink. I turned on my heel, into the lounge and ordered a bottle. Never in my life had I felt so drunk and so lucid. I believe I could have stood on one leg, but I went for the armchair instead. The dazzling ceiling lamp seemed overcharged. It was just like that short story of his where he'd lit up his barn with 200 watt globes . . . Times Square, Montana. I invited the bloke to join. No, he'd never heard of Richard Brautigan but he took a small tin out of his pocket and put it in front of me, smiling. I was explaining that Brautigan was one good reason to love life, I was within an inch of releasing a torrent of tears across the room when he gave me a broad toothy grin, urging me to open his little gift. It was cigarette paper. Five new packets. He'd bartered for them in a bar in Pireus, had made the trip there especially for me. I rolled the first one with a trembling hand. A long, fragile and tender writer's hand. I did not know how to thank him. I did not know where to start.

"Richard Brautigan . . . I mumbled. His name was Richard Brautigan."

Donlon,1988

"Richard Brautigan: Shooting Up the Countryside"
Helen Donlon
Beat Scene, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 1-9.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington on the 30th January 1935. The American post-war years he grew up in were pervaded by a cultural and environmental regeneration where for many like himself, the future seemed somewhat empty of promise, although the new youth were growing up with a renewed optimism. The Great Outdoors flourished as the sons and daughters of the land of Hemingway and Thoreau exploited the fishing and hunting idyll, scouting forest and seeking freshwater stream. Richard Brautigan, raised only by his mother (his father allegedly left her when she was pregnant) was no exception to this rule. What he lacked in academic discipline, he more than made up for in his outdoor pursuits and adventures, early experiences which remained stamped upon the personality of his writing and lifestyle for the rest of his life. An outsider at school, he channeled his energies into the simple pleasures immediately surrounding him, later developing a special penchant for fishing and shooting.

In later years "when fame put its feathery crowbar under his rock", he was always reticent when it came to talking about his deprived childhood, but he retained an unceasing love towards and childhood nostalgia for nature, following closely in the footsteps of Papa Hemingway, not least of all in the way he decided to end his life.

In 1954, Brautigan left his home, his mother and younger sister, Barbara, and headed for the city—arriving in San Francisco. During the late fifties, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had opened the City Lights bookstore at Broadway and Columbus, and Allen Ginsberg was a baggage handler at the Greyhound bus station, although he had already read Howl in public. The poet Ron Loewinsohn recalled meeting Richard at the time, and remembered how Richard had walked up to him and handed him a handwritten poem which was called "A Correction" and it went "Cats walk on little cat feet and fogs walk on little fog feet, Carl". Brautigan was delighted when Loewinsohn found the poem funny and they immediately became friends.

Also around this time Brautigan met Virginia Adler, who became his first wife, and with whom he had a daughter, Ianthe, born in 1960. Within a year he was writing the book that brought him immediate recognition as a cult figure and made him spokesman for a new generation, caused an underground movement named after the book to be formed, brought Life magazine to his doorstep, and even had a college named after it. Trout Fishing in America was translated into 15 languages. It was first published in 1967, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, of nationwide demonstrations across the USA against the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky and Robert Lowell marched to the Pentagon to 'exorcise' it of the evil within. It was the year that the Haight-Ashbury was the centre of the universe, of love, peace and LSD.

Although Brautigan was in many ways the archetypal hippie, he never took drugs, preferring alcohol, mostly in wild binges. He was involved for a while with the San Francisco Diggers, a self-supporting group without obvious "leaders"... one of whom was Emmett Grogan, author of the cult autobiographical novel Ringolevio. The Diggers organised free events and "happenings", preparing free meals which they would dole out on the street to anyone in need. Peter Berg, one of the founding members of the Diggers remembered Brautigan, "Before he was rich, Richard hung out with The Diggers. But if you asked him about the class system he would reply 'there are no classes in a lake' his point being that nature is grander than classes."

Grove Press had published A Confederate General from Big Sur in 1964, and at the time it had only sold a meagre 743 copies. As a result of this they dropped Trout Fishing in America. Donald Allen first published Trout Fishing In America at the Four Seasons Press and sold 29,000 copies of it before it was bought by Delacorte. Eventually it sold way over 2,000,000 copies, and it was an almost immediate success overseas. That was the year Brautigan got rich. The irony was that he was in the middle of San Francisco, home of the Beat generation, yet suddenly he was more popular and a hell of a lot richer than his more literary peers. This surprised many of the Beat writers as Richard's style of writing had always been considered very naüve and simplistic by the Beats. Ferlinghetti had said that "as a writer I was always waiting for Richard to grow up". The peak moment must have been the day Life magazine did a six-page spread on Brautigan, on the day that students of the Trout Fishing in America college were parading down the streets carrying huge cardboard trout.

Fairly soon, Richard was immersed in writing, churning out novel after novel. During the 1966-67 semester he had been Poet In Residence at California Institute of Technology. In 1968 he was awarded the National Endowment For The Arts. He was living in Bolinas, an old area in Marin County, alongside other contemporary writers and poets, writing In Watermelon Sugar, a novel about a small community of peers living in a utopian landscape, existing day to day on small pleasures, but threatened by a gang of distopians from the neighbouring community of The Forgotten Works. Many have thought that the Watermelon Sugar community, called iDEATH was built on an idealised version of Bolinas—a recent trip to Bolinas made me see why—and The Forgotten Works represented the downtown San Francisco across the bay, which was fast becoming a refuge for disenchanted people who had come to the city with flowers in their hair looking for Scott McKenzie's idyll. The writer Keith Abbott remembered visiting Richard at the house in Bolinas on an evening when Joanne Kyger, Don Allen, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and her husband Robert Creeley had been invited up to dinner. "Just before dinner was served, Richard made a big show of putting on a Grateful Dead record. He said that he had been saving the record as a surprise for Creeley. Bob nodded his thanks. When the first cut started Creeley brought his head up abruptly "This is my favourite cut on that record" he announced. Richard beamed happily. As Creeley listened to the song Richard told a story of all the obstacles that he had encountered during the day in his attempt to find this particular record for Bob. Content that he had made Creeley happy, Richard went back to the kitchen to attend to dinner. When the song was over, Creeley got up, went over to the stereo and, trying to play the cut again, raked the needle across the record, ruining it. "Uh-oh" he said. Then he went back to the couch and resumed his discussion. At the sound of the record's being ruined, Richard came rushing out of the kitchen and stood there, watching the whole "uh-oh" performance by Creeley. Going over to the stereo he brought out a second copy of the album from the stack alongside it. In his own funny, precise way, Richard congratulated himself. "I'm, ready for Bob this time" he boasted. Then he went on to relate how Creeley had wrecked the very same album on a previous visit.

The same year, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster a small book of poems, was published; followed shortly by Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt. Many people will remember this as the year that Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died. It was also the year that the American National Guard killed four Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University. In this year Richard told his friend Margot Patterson Doss, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist that he had never had a birthday party, and she said he should throw one at her place. The whole place was decorated with shoals of fish, Kentucky Fried Chicken did the catering and at the time of blowing out the candles on his cake, Richard said "this is the Age of Aquarius. The candles will blow themselves out." It was his thirty-fifth birthday and he was in the presence of many of the prominent artists and poets of the moments including Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan. Richard's literary career was soaring as well. Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill Versus The Springhill Mining Disaster were published in one volume in 1970. The writer Tom McGuane said "He seems crazy with optimism. Like some widely gifted Rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

In 1971, The Abortion and The Revenge of the Lawn, a book of short stories were published. The latter was a mosaic of snapshot reminiscences, and included two chapters which had apparently been "lost' from Trout Fishing in America. It was around this time that Brautigan made his first trip to the McGuane ranch, later to be immortalised in McGuane's book and movie, Rancho Deluxe, Richard's drinking was becoming increasingly heavy and he would get desperate to be out of San Francisco when he felt he had had enough. He loved Montana, and he had great respect for McGuane with whom he regularly went shooting. McGuane's ranch was in Paradise Valley, and soon the ranch became a hive of social activity, as people were always visiting, often with the result that they would grow so enamoured of the place they would never leave, instead opting to buy land themselves in the area. Richard was one of these people. McGuane says "Although he wasn't the type to handle the practicalities of rugged ranch living, he saw himself as very much of a Westerner. He was always full of himself, mostly in a nice way, and his personal mythography of himself included a sense that west of the Mississippi was his terrain to raid for language and imagery. He had a quirky antiquarian air. He was, in some strange way, hell-bent on the image of himself as a sort of Mark Twain, funky-looking old-timer."

During this time Richard had ceased to deliver lectures or grant interviews, and his drinking got heavier. He had virtually stopped writing too, although he always told friends he was working on something which was nearly finished. The most remarkable book of those years was The Hawkline Monster, a gothic western which cameoed the contrastive adventures of Greer and Cameron as wild cowboys in a standard western setting and then in a Frankenstein-type, almost opium-glazed wilderness at the home of professor Hawkline where the predominant force is that of the "chemicals", a half-finished scientific experiment which comes to life and takes over the minds and perceptions of the characters, rendering them insensible. The next novel, Willard and His Bowling Trophies contained an odd erotic narrative. Like many of his later works, Willard is almost totally devoid of dramatic action, in contrast to his earlier work. There are many instances in the book where the characters suffer moments of iconic arrest and seem to be constantly flitting between being alive and dead. The irony and black humour phase in his writing career had truly arrived, seen even more vividly in Sombrero Fallout, a novel about internal conflict and dissension. The story supposedly takes place in an hour.

Sombrero Fallout and Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, a return to the poetic spirit of his early work, were written in the year that Richard was first making it big in Japan. During his stay there he was sinking into heavy depression, and alienating all his friends at home by telephoning them long distance during the early hours of the morning. It was during this time that he met a Japanese girl called Aki, who soon became his second wife. He was a great success in Tokyo as the Japanese literati was fascinated with his beautiful and innocent haiku poems. He loved Tokyo and its neon lights of which he said "They remind me of my childhood, when neon meant magic, excitement, romance. The neon lights of Tokyo give me back the eyes of a child."

Although in Japan he was read by intellectuals, avant-garde people who were priding themselves on this new discovery in American literature, at home his popularity as a writer was quickly fading. In 1978 he wrote The Tokyo-Montana Express and June 30th-June 30th. It seemed as though he was in some sort of personal and literary dilemma between the new found joys of the bright lights big city Tokyo scene, and his outdoor life in Livingstone, Montana. Subsequent trips home found him more and more miserable and devoid of friends. He was deserted by many of those close to him because of his drinking, and more, he was becoming financially unstable. His marriage to Aki had turned into a failure. Around the time of Sombrero Fallout, Helen Brann, his agent felt he should put the book aside and told him so. "The next day I received a letter saying "Goodbye". A two-line letter as if her were writing to the bank.

Sometime in October 1985, Richard put the barrel of a .44 magnum in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Later when friends called, worried that he hadn't been seen for some time, they got an answering machine with a message left by Richard, only eventually the batteries wore down and all they got was a warbled voice and the same message. That's when the panic set in.

Peter Fonda recalls "The boys had gotten together to go shooting. Everyone missed him and we began calling San Francisco. As it turned out, those freaks in Bolinas never went in to check what was happening. If it hadn't been for Becky, my wife, I think Richard would still be there. Checks had been returned and even his agent hadn't been able to get hold of him."

Richard is remembered for his sensitivity, generosity and joie de vivre, as well as his wit and surreal visions of life both in and out of his texts. He has been compared to Vonnegut and Pynchon for the way in which he hilariously characterises society and its misfits. And yet the torture of loneliness and desperation in Sombrero Fallout and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away are just as typical of his style.

"The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again, they wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads." (Trout Fishing In America)

Richard Brautigan was a veritable sixties figure and perhaps the definitive hippie writer. I think that was a matter of circumstance. Richard will always be an anachronistic figure to me, a writer who moved in Beat circles, yet wrote nothing like they did, did not believe in any of the real Beat ethics and never took drugs. He was as lost in the city sometimes as he was lonely and sad in the country. In his time he received far more criticism than praise, and was only truly accepted by the mass when he was rich, and giving it all away. There are still people out there who will love and remember him for the rest of their days.

Donovan,1985

"Brautigan & The Eagles"
Brad Donovan
Rolling Stock, no. 9, 1985, pp. 4, 6.
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.

He liked Bozeman, so returning from Japan in the spring of '83 he taught a writing class at the agriversity and drank at the Eagle's Club bar on Main Street. He was the only non-member allowed to run a tab, thanks to his friendship with the manager, an expert on guns. "The best bar in Montana" (but he was free with praise), the bar area is narrow, high-ceilinged with a false ceiling over the horseshoe bar proper where sit a stunning variety of drunks. The room is wider towards the alley, accommodates long wooden tables, folding chairs, cheap burgers on Friday nights, and a small frantic dance floor presided over by a band that can wring, bar-rag fashion, four songs from one tune. He drank with precision and enormous capacity, and was usually polite to the gaggle of students, reporters, rednecks, would-be bohemians and curious regulars. Drinks were purchased by the round until midnight or so, when they all stumbled out feeling flash burnt by a goofy UFO.

One evening, a college student came in wearing a baseball cap that sported a plastic Toucan's bill protruding over the visor.

"You're Richard Brautigan, aren't you?" the kid said and gave Richard the hat. A while later, Richard is in the can at the trough. In walks crew cut Lou, one of the regulars, boozily blinking in the fluorescent glare.

"I don't know about this place anymore," Lou says to me, meaning, Who let the college kids in?

Then Lou sidles up to the trough, looks up at the big guy next to him, dressed all in denim, with stringy blonde hair and a damned yellow and range beak growing out of his head. Lou is unshaken. "I don't believe you either."

Critical disbelief, and some jealousy, characterized Brautigan's reception over the past ten years. He once said, "San Francisco will forgive a writer anything, except success. You can screw the mayor's wife on the courthouse steps and nobody cares. But if you're successful, they get mad."

Placed in a hippified niche, then, he turned in his work to an investigation of genres, trying to recombine old forms into new ones. The Hawkline Monster combines gothic and western novels. Willard and His Bowling Trophies, a Sadean diary, depicts Violence overwhelming Love in our time. Dreaming of Babylon is a study in film noir. Sombrero Fallout, The Tokyo-Montana Express and his last, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, reflect his long interest in the Japanese "I novel" where the author's mind is admitted as a character in the text. The mind that was Trout Fishing in America grew wiser, more amused, and often sad. On the surface, the books became more clear, until in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away—his best, he said—narrative Time and Space blend with cinematic ease and sixty-word sentences are easy to read. The French, those dogged America-watchers, are treating his later work with critical respect. Last November, Richard went to Paris where Editions Chretiens was bringing out three novels and a "postmodern structuralist" accounting. Then to a poetry festival in Amsterdam, a radio drama and concurrent release of two books in Munich, back to Amsterdam until February when he flew east to Japan. Once again the promoters had given this "simple guy" a free ride around the world.

Signing books after a lecture in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard was approached by a young woman with a copy of the latest novel, and asked him to dedicate it to a friend.

"Sure. What's your friend's name?"

"Beef. It's his nickname."

"Let's hope so."

As the book-signing wore on, seven different people brought books belonging to Beef.

"Where's this Beef person?"

"He had to work."

A few months pass and a fan letter from Beef arrives at Richard's Pine Creek, Montana, home. Beef thanks Richard profusely for the autographed books, includes a phone number. It's a slow night on TV. Fantasy Island is over, so Richard calls. Turns out, literary folks in Lincoln are having a party at Beef's apartment. Beef thinks it's a practical joke but is finally convinced that Richard's voice is the genuine article, and asks Richard to talk to others at the party, which he does for an hour on his own dime, portraying Beef as an old friend, Genius, and all round Great Guy.

On another occasion, after the Livingston bars closed, Richard got a ride the fifteen miles back to his house from the local cabbie, who looks like a wino Santa Claus. It's three in the morning, so Richard fixes the old man breakfast.

"Whadya do for a living?"

"I write books," and Richard gives the driver a copy of Tokyo-Montana.

Next time they meet, the driver says, "Ya know, I showed that book to the fellas down at the shop. Ya gotta dozen more of em maybe? I think we can make some money."

The gunplay and whiskey served as recreation, after the work, the writing. One afternoon at the Livingston Bar and Grill following an intense session inventing dumb jokes for our screenplay, Trailer, the feeling was of giddy enthusiasm, like in a Tin Pan Alley movie. Richard was surrounded by eight people he'd just met, treating the table to drinks and stewed mussels. The tab came, written in imaginary numbers. One of us signed the check. The bartender was laughing too hard when he said, "Drive carefully."

Richard sipped from a "go cup" (carryout booze by the drink has a mysterious legal status here). I drove, puking over the door. Back at the ranch, Richard handed me a porcelain bowl the size of a football helmet, and I went to the upstairs bedroom and commenced filling it up. Meanwhile, Richard was on the back porch firing his 30-30 Winchester into the darkness and hoary trees. The bowl was nearly full when Richard ran out of bullets. Through a cold air return, a grill in the floor, I could look downstairs and see him pacing back and forth, like Godzilla reading the National Enquirer.

Haslam,1986

"A Last Letter to Richard Brautigan"
Gerald Haslam
Western American Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, May 1986, pp. 48-50
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.

Dear Richard;
They found your final message over on Bolinas Mesa the other day, a soft bag of bones that reviled the coroner's boys. Little lank was left, and that stolen mustache was beyond recognition. Maybe you and George Dickel and your swift lead friend planned it this way; we'll never know, but we should have heard the shot.

All I heard was the talk that followed; not your voice, of course, but all those others—some pained, some baffled, some just grateful for having known you. Seymour Lawrence said: "I think he is yet another artist who died of what I would call American loneliness."

Your loneliness was personal, not national; Lawrence's easy hyperbole would not have survived one of your second drafts. The mother who had on occasion denied you; the three stepfathers who used you for a punching bag; the father who came forward to acknowledge you only after your death; the two marriages that didn't endure: that's not American loneliness, that's personal tragedy.

Tom McGuane explained with real insight, that you were "very much a person who was self-enclosed, hard to break through. Everyone says if he had only reached out to someone. That's sort of the last thing Richard would do. . . . He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." You were certainly all those things, and you created a special literary would that was magical, that was humorous, that was telling.

Despite the stereotype your publishers seemed to encourage, you were something other than a hippie, too. Unique, yeah; unconventional, oh yeah; original, a yeah again. I mean, what do you call a guy who never had a driver's license, who shot up his kitchen and framed the bullet holes, and who wrote many a memorable line on cocktail napkins at a bar? "Richard was one of the truly eccentric individuals I have ever met," William Hjortsberg admitted. "He was a genuine Bohemian." That's more like it, don't you think? No flower in your hair, but you damn sure were an original.

But oddness and eccentricity don't develop automatically in each individual, any more than talent such as yours emerges reflexively from a rolled joint, as many of your doper friends speculated. The nagging question is how much the unhappy past that rendered you so vulnerable also contributed to your unique sensitivity, how much pain was part of your bargain? Few in our generation have produced more original pictures of inner America, but at what price? That muffled shot on Bolinas Mesa seems an answer.

In any case, Ron Loewinsohn was mighty close when he observed: "On the surface, Brautigan's America is all Ben Franklin; underneath, it's all Kafka." Don Carpenter said—and I'm sure you'd agree—that he didn't think your work had ever been adequately appreciated: "His ability to compress emotion into such a small space was second to none. He was a great artist." Loewinsohn and Carpenter were your friends, but it wasn't mere friendship talking because you when you were at your best—many of the stories in The Revenge of the Lawn, some of those crazy poems, and Trout Fishing in America—you ere without peer.

Even in those weaker later works flashes of the old magic broke through. That some of those less-than-successful works were the product of your willingness to try new ideas and techniques was to your credit. "Brautigan's integrity as a novelist is clear," Loewinsohn points out, "from his refusal to repeat a successful formula." No doubt you could have sold many rewrites of "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard."

Once Trout Fishing propelled you into the surreal world of American publishing, your hunger for approval converted you into an armless boxer. You didn't understand all the rules. "One minute you're the darling of the fleet," said Becky Fonda, "the next minute they go right over you. Richard was really undone by it."

Even your counter-cultural audience, the one that adopted you after the "hippie" photo appeared on Trout Fishing's cover and liked to pretend your wondrous vision was its own, began to drift away, so Europe and Japan became a focus for your need for approval. Curt Gentry told about walking with a stork like you in Tokyo: "Richard looked particularly strange, out of place. . . . The Japanese would turn and stare at him and kind of laugh as he went by. Richard would say, 'Everyone knows me in Japan. Can't you see that?'"

McGuane blamed the critics for your diminished popularity at home: "Richard became and internationally famous writer without any help from the American literary establishment. When the crest broke, I think they were eager to injure him. I think they tried all the time." While the particulars differ, the pattern is familiar; ask other western mavericks: Jack London, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck. But it's also true that even admiring critics considered much of your later work poor, and I suspect another reason has to be considered.

Once your books were selling well and your publisher was willing to allow you to publish anything, it seems that you did. Without realizing it, you were caught by the bookkeeper mentality of contemporary American publishing, that one that values dead cat books and racks of fake best-sellers in supermarkets rather than literary quality. You became a victim of the very popularity you so deeply needed. Face it, for a time your laundry list would have sold, and your publisher would certainly have marketed it—with a cute photo on the cover. Sometimes it seemed as though he was doing just that.

Ken Kelley has suggested another factor: your venture into the pseudo-macho celebrity set at Paradise Valley. Again, you weren't able to deal with it. "It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard. The books he wrote up there, like The Hawkline Monster, were full of violence—nothing like the earlier hippie novels.

"He would really get whacko up there."

But you were always a writer, a real one. Booze and babes and random beefs aside, you labored at your craft. Remember what you told that audience of freaks at San Francisco State back in the sixties when one kid asked if you just smoked dope and left it flow? "Are you crazy man? Writing's work!" Amen.

So it was and so it is, and for awhile the St. Vitus dance of your prose livened our own strolling lines by extending the possible. When the final assessment of our period is written, your name will not be blown away by the wind because you gave us a special and candid version of ourselves. Once you said, "I have no fear of it [death] at all. I'm interested in life. People wouldn't take life seriously if they didn't know it would it would turn dark on them." You took it seriously and helped us to accept its seriousness with your flashing, your unexpected words.

"I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails," you wrote in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. "They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore's edge, which I belong to with my imagination." I just glanced out the window, and the blackbirds have gone from my small pond, the cattails withered to the color of your scraggly mustache. You reached us, pard', more than you knew, and that is our burden. To the west it's darker, a Pacific storm blowing in toward Sonoma Mountain; the big willow genuflects again and again. There are troughs between gusts—foamy silences—and I am listening for a shot. We all are.

All the best,
Gerry

Heilig,2003

"BoHowl" / "Howlinas"
Steve Heilig
Bolinas Hearsay News, 13 Aug. 2003, p. 5.
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.

HOWLINAS
Steve Heilig
(with apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

I

I saw the best little village of my coastline
threatened by real estate markets, escalating
speculating greedy,

strolling up the lagoon shore from beach to bar and
back again ad infinitum,

sandyheaded hipsters still burning sunfried for the
ideal human-scale ecological alternative hideout
from madness materialistic warmongering
mainstream,

who suddenly lived in million-dollar homes but
became too poor to shop even at the Free Box,

who pulled down road sign after sign after sign until
Babylon finally admitted OK we give up,

who streaked stark naked all the way around the
Little Mesa at the stroke of midnite on a bet and
would do so again at noon for the right bribe,

who paid more for an invisible water hookup than
most pay elsewhere for a whole house,

who camped unpermitted all night out at Bass Lake
and howled all night at an invisible moon,

who awaited for and believed (some of) the words
in each edition of the Hearsay News more eagerly
than any copy of the overrated New York Times,

who knew the names of more downtown dogs than
downtown people but felt that was probably for the
best of all concerned,

who ate the best pizza on the planet on the beach at
sunset after walking with great anticipation just
steps from oven to sand,

who sat out on the porch at Smiley's with electricity
out everywhere else but generator humming behind
watching the lightning and seeing an octopus go by
in the flood of stormwater flowing down main
street,

who drank and peed enough cumulative chai
and soup from the People's Store to ensure that no
water shortage would ever threaten again,

who danced ecstatic at mysterious midnight rave
parties on the outer mesa looking down at the sea
but could never find those houses again even in
broad daylight,

who carried ashes of favorite pets out onto Duxbury
Reef at low tide to say goodbye and scatter amidst
tears and salt and wind,

who ate Cafe fish and chips on warm summer eves
and oatmeal on winter mornings so cold and damp
not a single dog was to be seen,

who naked in the nourishing sun tended flowers
vegetables weeds fruit trees and cooked it all
together in a big pot at harvest time, delicious,

who waited months for real surf and then caught
classic warm sunny overhead peaks at Palomarin
like on a tropical vacation,

who talked back to crows and/or ravens not
knowing the difference even after the local bird
expert explained it patiently and even drew them,

who did not know what to "do" about non-native
eucalypti but liked the way they looked and smelled
and creaked and dripped rain on Terrace in winter,

who imitated driftwood on the sand as often as
possible in the breezy fall Indian Summer
afternoons, pretending it was still "after school",

who played a beat-up piano most unprofessionally
in the bakery on a rainy winter afternoon to an
audience of one, whose painted face said "nice",

who dropped a big bag of new t-shirts at the Free
Box and happily saw people happily wearing them
for years thereafter,

who laughed until dawn on a warm summer night
under the mushroom painted on the beach wall of
the Airplane house when that was the only graffiti
there,

who looked longingly for their own long-lost VW
vans among the many retired into Mesa bushes,

who danced in the street on Labor Day costumed
with a garlic necklace to ward away vampires ex-
lovers tourists and self,

who saw and felt the ghosts of renowned writers
drowned in alcohol and fame and fickle fates,

who swam across the mouth of the Lagoon to run
down Stinson and back and emerge cleansed and at
home on the right side of the flowing water,

who walked the trail to Alamere Falls at dawn,
accompanied only by wind and hundreds of
unafraid baby bunny rabbits,

who set off from downtown on a long walk with
one dog and had seven trotting alongside before
reaching the beach,

who wanted nothing to do with any of all this sort
of thing and just wanted to be left alone to live as
they wished and did so;

who attended endless meetings of water school fire
etc etc boards to "keep it beautiful,"

who resisted the urge to retire to the life of a
perpetual downtown philosopher priest but instead
worked on in some small ways

to resist and protest war pollution corporate
consumerism materialism fascism fame fortune
television meat SUVs cellphones Moloch Maya
addictions development "progress", not to mention
tourism,

with the simple wondrous ever-striking reality of
the view from the edge of the Pacific with toes in
cool water reef whispering in gentle fog sun
Tamalpais Farallons and even the emerald city in
the misty close distance,

somehow reassuring in this gathering darkness....

II

(to be continued, perhaps,
with yet more apologies...)

Hogg,1988

"Boo, Forever: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan"
Brian Hogg
Strange Things Are Happening, vol. 1, no. 2, May-June 1988, pp. 9-12
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.

A bitter irony still hangs over the death of Richard Brautigan. Beset by doubt and stark lonliness, the once celebrated flower-power poet found the bitter twist of winter hard to reconcile. Never accepted by the New York literati, increasingly seen by the West Coast circle as a mere minor talent, several of Brautigan's obituaries unconsciously ran the cruellest cut—"He was a favourite of the Beatles"—as if his fleeting fame came by association rather than through his writing gifts. Those who loved his work mourned his passing and recalled the simple warmth of his fragile style.

Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington on January 30th 1935. Between then and the North Beach enclave days of San Francisco's 1950s, there's a gap the poet would usually refuse to fill. Obtuse about his childhood, only fragments can be pieced together, either through implicit glimpses seen in his writing or in the flippant biographical remarks reprinted on the dust jackets of his publications. A sister, Barbara, recalls Richard beginning to write in High School, but those early years of poverty and neglect were times Brautigan preferred to forget. When he was nine his mother abandoned both of her children in a hotel room in Great Falls, Montana, leaving then in the care of their stepfather, who worked there as a fry cook. Richard believed this man was his natural father until graduation, when his mother, who had since reclaimed her children, told him his surname was not "Porterfield" but "Brautigan." His real father would meanwhile refuse to acknowledge that he had a son, even after the poet's death.

Not surprisingly, the adolescent Richard was given to bouts of depression. Having plucked up the courage to show a girl-friend an early, fumbling effort at literature, her criticism crushed his confidence. A pathetic crack at vandalism was his muddied response, culminating in a week in jail and a spell at Oregon State Hospital. Days after his discharge, around Christmas 1955, Brautigan left the Pacific Northwest and headed south.

Although at first he failed to match the notoriety of contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg or Gary Snyder, Richard was active around several of the North Beach haunts. He read regularly at the weekly Blabbermouth nights, held at The Place, a haven for itinerant radicals and poets. But as with his days in Tacoma and Eugene, Brautigan also avoided comment on the Beats, or, if pressed would disclaim the period and argue he was never a part of it anyway. In a sense, he perhaps wasn't; Richard's work was somehow more tangible. Despite its eccentricity, his prose was warmer and seemed more a part of what would be rather that what was. Instead, he kept to the fringes, shy and uncertain, delivering telegrams around the San Francisco City district, but mostly staying broke.

By the early 1960s Richard had married Ginny Alder, but despite the birth of a child, Ianthe, the relationship would flounder. He wrote prolifically, some of his work was collected in limited mimeo editions and his early publications, The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, The Octopus Frontier, Lay the Marble Tea and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace remain impossibly rare. The [sic] Confederate General from Big Sur was more widely available but a commercial disaster, selling, it's said, a mere 743 copies. Grove Press would thus drop their option and by 1966, Richard had neither publishser nor agent.

He nonetheless held three completed manuscripts, one of which, Trout Fishing in America, brought the writer his momentary fame. Written while he and Ginny were still together, they'd packed a Plymouth and moved to Snake River in Idaho. Something of that rural upheaval comes through in this book's pastoral urgency and it remains the author's definitive work. Illusive, atmospheric, funny and sad, returning to it now brings new avenues and perspectives. It is a remarkable work.

Trout Fishing in America was initially published by Donald Allen, a Grove representative, who placed it with his non-profit house, the Four Seasons Foundation, after scores had turned it down. "I gather it was not about trout fishing," Viking Press had reported back in 1962, but Allen's faith was rewarded when, following his successful run, the rights were sold to Delacourt who would, in turn, sell two million copies. Richard was a star.

I missed most of these occurances. The name "Richard Brautigan" was one tacked to the small print of an album I'd discovered by Mad River. It had been dedicated to him and at a time when such remarks were scrupulously investigated, this was important. About the same time Rolling Stone was running Brautigan's short stories, and that characteristic stove-pipe hat was featured above a succession of wonderful, wistful glimpses into Richard's imagination. The third confirmation came on Paradise Bar and Grill, Mad River's second record, where Brautigan himself read one of his poems, "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend" while guitarist David Robinson constructed the perfect counterpoint.

Such counter-culture exploits embelished his role of hippie sage, however awkward Richard felt in such company. If the prose of Kerouac recalled the hard-bop of Dexter Gordon, then the simple impressions of Brautigan's work had an empathy with San Franciscan rock. Yet Ianthe has suggesed her father was tone deaf—this alternative society involvement came rather more through Richard's association with the Diggers.

The Diggers were guerillas; street radicals and activists, individuals who were the conscience of the movement, it not by choice, they by circumstance. Instrumental in countless projects, they are best recalled for the Free Food programme, which became the lone sustainance to droves of waifs drawn by the Bay Area promise of love, peace and happiness. Richard gave both the Diggers and Mad River his assistance, and was warmly remembered by Emmett Grogan (from the former) and Laurence Hammond (of the latter) for his involvement.

Perhaps Richard's time alongside the Diggers inspired Please Plant This Book, his last independent publication. It was the ultimate in flower-power poesy; a seed packet containing eight individual holders, each containing real seeds for plants such as squash, daisies, parsley and lettuce. Instructions for growth were on one side, poems on the other, but statements such as this, alongside the new-found fame, only bemused and bewildered several longtime Beats. Lawerence Ferlinghetti was particularly snide, describing him as having ". . . a naif style . . . a child-like voice . . . the novelist the hippies needed, it was a non-literate age." Brautigan remained sensitive to such criticism, but the eminant role he enjoyed at the time cushioned the more harrowing remarks.

This then was Richard Brautigan at the time of his first British publication. Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, completed in 1964, were simultaneously published by Jonathon Cape in the summer of 1970. Sugar, although charming, was somewhat lighter in tone to its two predecessors and dealt with a cascade of bizzare characters and locations: iDEATH, inBOIL, the Forgotten Works and Pauline. Of all Richard's novels, this comes closest to the emotional brevity of his poems, and as such carries an individual atmosphere. In many ways it reflected Brautigan's new environment, he'd taken a house in Bolinas, Marin County, across the bridge from San Francisco, although he still kept a city apartment. One of these, in Geary Street, friends best remember as a slum, but it nonetheless served as a kind of shrine to the poet's life and times; posters and handbills advertising his readings were pasted along the wall, galleys for his publications were similarly displayed, while shelves held several first editions set beside fragile fragments of a lost childhood. The floor was scattered with spare change; once when an overdue payment finally came through, Richard, in celebration, had strewn the floor with coins and then left them there. Over the years he'd simply add to them.

The success of Trout Fishing opened several floodgates. The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, a collection of poems written between '52 and '68 quickly followed it. Here's the place to find "Death Is A Parked Car Only", "The Day They Busted The Grateful Dead" or the aching "Boo, Forever" and to experience the essential Brautigan wit. Cape then gave us The Confederate General, but held back (until 1973) on Richard's latest American publication, The Abortion—An Historical Romance. A more orthodox work, but with its own gentle power, it was somewhat eclipsed by Revenge of the Lawn, one of the writer's most satisfying works. It consisted of short stories, such as those already run in Rolling Stone, and it showed this literary genre the perfect foil for Brautigan's impulsive ingenuity. Such was his current standing that parts of the collection were previewed in Playboy, while the title piece became the lynch pin to Richard's ultimate acclaimation, the release of his own LP record.

Listening to Richard Brautigan had begun life as a Zapple project, the subsiduary label to the Beatles' Apple company. Ambitious plans were laid for a complete spoken-word catalogue, but as John Paul George and Ringo bickered and fragmented, so such dreams were abandonned. US Harvest, however, resurrected the tapes in 1971 and released the album which, with its combination of poems, anecdotes and telephones, gave an alternative insight into the author. Try "Love Poem", which is read by eighteen other individuals including filmaker Bruce Conner and fellow-poet Michael McClure, to whom In Watermelon Sugar is dedicated.

A further collection of poetry, Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt, had already been published in America but there would not be a corresponding British version and in many ways, this unprecedented rush closed Brautigan's golden era. The critical gloss was now fading, to be replaced by a venom which Richard could neither understand nor cope with. "Slight" and "Inconsequential" were the usual comments, others were worse, but too often they ignored the impressionistic atmosphere of his work. Friends and supporters now gradually diminished.

Richard moved to Livingston, Montana around 1972/73, breaking away from his Geary St./Bolinas circuit. He latterly bought a ranch at Pine Creek, having completed his next novel, The Hawkline Monster, in a rented cabin. Subtitled "A Gothic Western", it was a weighter tome than might have been expected. Yet it seemed that Richard had sacrificed some of his own charm in order to placate more criticism, the plot is tight and rigid and although the moments of madness shine on, they are more defined and measured. It's been said that the novel was written with Hollywood in mind—a curious departure—and it thus sacrifices part of the writer's mischief in coming to terms with this different ambition

Fortunately, this was a temporary sidestep. Of the novels which followed, two have survived successfully, Sombrero Fallout and Willard and his Bowling Trophies. They still inhabit that special Brautigan world; the former where the torn-up opening to a novel "escapes" and begins a life of its own, is wonderfully inventive, while Willard cascades with offbeat characters, intertwining plots and shock at the end. Only Dreaming in Babylon—A Private Eye Mystery smacks of the selfsame compromise which bedeviled The Hawkline Monster. Yet it too had a warmth of its own, and if greeted by a critical nadir, it still proved that Richard, despite the opposition, continued to define and hone his individual voice. One glance at a further collection of poetry, Loading Mercury With A Pitchfork, would undoubtedly confirm this; its title alone best explains the gentle surrealism defining Richard's work. Indeed had it not come from an earlier work, it could have been taken as a metaphor for his current situation.

Brautigan increasingly spent more time in Montana, while his personal life began its tragic collapse. He battled through the 1970s; alcoholism, insomnia and a wild paranoia tore at the beat of his character. Older aquaintances found it alarming: to equate the unpredictable now with the less-tortured past proved almost impossible. Yet the slide was halted temporarily when Richard discovered Japan. He was a hero there; he'd regained an audience who loved and found affinity in his work, Brautigan met his second wife, Akiki, in Tokyo and their brief time together was a last light in Richard's madness. A prolific burst came with The Tokyo/Montana Express and June 30th June 30th; both of which were autobiographical. The first catches moods and diversions in his life, and in retrospect offers a telling insight into the writer's last condition. The latter is a set of poems, written on Richard's first trip to Japan, and if the specific subject matter denies the natural accustomed Brautigan catch-all, it remains a revealing collection.

Richard and Akiki split late in the 1970s, and he slid into a last despair. Readings on university campuses, once a rewarding past-time, confirmed him as a forgotten man when halls were left almost empty. A final novel, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, was published in 1982, and is a strange, almost clumsy piece, obviously Richard, yet written as if its very creation was painful. In real life he loved to shoot, but always did so alone, claiming he'd once had an accident. The interference is thus obvious, it would never be confirmed or denied, but it did explain the hesitancy over his childhood memories. Was this autobiogaphical, and a final confession before the end?

Little was heard of Richard Brautigan following its publication; when news did come it was of his suicide. Sometime around September 14th 1984 he shot himself with a .44 Magnum. It was six weeks before his body was found, by which time it was unrecognizable. It now seemed light years from those heady days on Telegraph Avenue, when a poet could be mobbed rather like a lead guitarist. Lost forever was the man who loved basketball, chicken and Frank Lloyd Wright, and who wrote like a dream. Like Hemingway before him it withered into despair.

'I don't see him anymore.'
'I guess he's gone.'
'Maybe he went home.'

> So ends the final novel, who's atmosphere of inevitable tragedy pastes it with a doom unlike any of Brautigan's other work. Perhaps, like Phil Ochs before him, the end of the 1960s left him with nowhere else to go. A wake was held at Enrico's, the writer's favourite San Francisco tavern. Figures from the North Beach days assembled, just as they had done in 1970 when Margot Patterson Doss, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, organised [sic] a surprise birthday party. "Its the Age of Aquarius," Richard reportedly said. How tragic that particular promise would become.

Keeler,1985

"Fishing the Tenses With Captain Richard"
Greg Keeler
Rolling Stock, no.9, 1985, pp. 5-6.
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.

For the Captain [Brautigan], fishing was usually past or future tense. The equipment, the flies, etc. were in the present. He had a glass rod, light as a weed, and he liked to hold it and shake it slightly then pass it to the person next to him to experience the proper awe. The flies he used were also next to nothing, size 16 to 20. Most of the time, this wonderful tackle sat unused in the washroom.

But there were rare occassions when we would actually put the equipment in the back of my Mazda station wagon, and go out to a local stream. One such excursion was to the Yellowstone, about a mile behind Richard's house. He was in a twinkling mood because he had just sold the options of Dreaming of Babylon to Kate Jackson. Maybe that and the cool, clear weather got him out from behind the Dickel, into my car, and down a dirt road to the river. Taking his stuff out of the back, he hit his head on the swing-up tailgate so that he bled a little. But it didn't seem to phase him. As we squeaked and wallowed down the bank in our huge, clown-like chest waders, we commented on what the Japanese must have intended when they built cars with tailgates like that and sold them to big lumbering Americans.

Richard waded upstream and fished the slower water inside a big riffle on a bend in the river with a tiny dark nymph. I waded downstream a ways where the water was straight and fast and lobbed a big spoon toward the deep blue-green near the undercut of the far bank. Richard looked down at me from where he was fishing. He never fished with anything but flies—at least as an adult. Once he told me that he used to fish salmon eggs to carp where the sewage came into a river in Tacoma. He said he could actually see flecks of toilet paper among the wallowing carp. But apparently he had left that kind of behaviour behind with his youth, or maybe that was the only part of his youth that had left behind. Actually, fishing salmon eggs to toilet paper carp still sounds pretty good to me. I've never got over my childish infatuation with bait and lures, though I'll fish with flies if they happen to be working better.

After a while, the Captain caught a couple of nice whitefish. Local fishermen usually throw whitefish up on the bank and let them rot, but not Richard. He had seen too many of them smoked and selling for five dollars a pound in the Bay area. He had also seen Japanese friends go ape-shit when they got their hands on a whitefish. No sir, these whitefish wee immediately cleaned and popped in my creel which I had left up on the bank near him. He called my creel "the death bag" since he knew how much meat had passed through it. Soon, I was fooling some cutthroat trout in the deep water with my big hunk of metal. Since I didn't have my creel, I just threw them up on the bank in a sort of frenzy. After a while, I turned to deal with the flopping fish, but the Captain was already there, clonking each fish very precisely on the head with a small rock. "You should kill them quickly," he said with a smile of mild accusation.

Later, I filleted the trout and Richard put the whitefish in for smoking. I have a smoker in my back yard made from a converted refrigerator. Richard called it Auschwitz. Smoked fish were always an integral part of our relationship. Sometimes he'd have me send boxes of smoked fish express mail to people like Shiina Takako, his Japanese sister in Tokyo or Terry Gardiner, the "wild legislator" in Ketchikan, Alaska. And sometimes that worked out pretty well for me. Once Shiina Takako sent me a box of ayu, a rare Japanese fish, preserved in a delicate oil. But Terry Gardiner never responded. I have a feeling that he might have come home from some political junkekt to find a package of smoked trout rotting in his mailbox.

Perhaps the most idyllic trip we ever took was to Bridger Canyon just outside the Bozeman city limits. The Captain really liked small streams, maybe because they seemed more magical, and the fish that came out of these streams are almost always harder, crisper, and brighter in color. We waded just upstream from a small irrigation dam and started flailing. This time Richard had shamed me into bringing my fly rod, so we were more or less on even footing. Richard was using about a size 18 white gnat-like fly and I was using some crude thing I'd made by tying frazzled chunks of nylon to small hooks, but the fish didn't seem to care what we threw at them. They were so hungry we probably would have done pretty well using Cracker Jacks. We must have caught and released ten or fifteen fish apiece (Yes, I said released; Richard shamed me into that too.) before the land owner came down and ran us off. Richard may have had his way on using flies and releasing fish, but I still had managed to drag him into one of my foul fishing practices. As we left, he said, "You see, Greggie, you're supposed to ask permission" in a tone quite similar to the previous, "You should kill them quickly."

But as I mentioned in starting, most of my fishing trips with the Captain had very little to do with fishing. They usually went something like this: Richard would call me around nine or ten in the morning and say, "Let's go fishing." Since he knew that I was always suspicious of his mid-morning suggestion, he would throw in something like "I know the perfect spot of Trail Creek" or "Go ahead and brings some sculpins too. I won't mind." And when he knew he had my interest, he would say, "Oh, and on your way, stop and buy some George Dickel. I'll pay you back." Of all these suggestions, usually the only one which transpired was my buying the Dickel. When I got to the ranch, the Dickel would be opened for "just a quick snort for the road." But soon the road would lead out to the Captain's back porch and into long painful discussions of his divorce, his water rights, the teen-agers who had "vandalized" his barn, the black hole where money-grubbing publishers live, the question of whether or not to marry Masako and have a hit-squad of Japanese-American kids, the doppleganger cat which had invaded his ranch, the deer that wandered near his barn. As we stared at the sky and mountains turning gold through our Dickel, his words drifted out in the air among the cottonwood seeds which always seemed to be there in warm weather as if his ranch were suspended in one of those shake-up plastic water balls. By dark fishing was usually somewhere on another planet, and I would wind up driving the mountain passes back to Bozeman at two or three in the morning, drunk and depressed. But by mid-morning, I would hear again the merry jingle of my telephone, and it would be the Captain. "Let's go fishing tomorrow. Really."

The fishing trips that Richard and I planned in detail but never went on were probably the most interesting. Because of his fascination with small streams, he always liked the creeks in the Bozeman city limits. One of them, Bozeman Creek, runs right under the Eagles Club (about two blocks from my house) where he spent most of drinking time here. Once while we were walking from the Eagles to my house, we saw a little girl pull a brook trout that weighed almost a pound out from under a tire store. That really got him going. He wondered how fishing was under the Eagles Bar, under Main Street, under the Bozeman Hotel or in Bogart Park next to my house. The only obstacle in our way to finding out was a law restricting fishing within the city limits to children under the age of twelve. Later over Dickel in the Eagles, our plan began to take shape. We would make plywood cutouts of barefoot boys with straw hats and weeds in their mouths and hide behind thm while we fished. We were so proud of our plan that we decided we should bring a photographer along and publish our expedidtion in some class magazine like Gray's Sporting Journal. Of course, the plan never materialized. Now, I guess, if I'm going to follow through with it, I will have to make plywood cutouts of both a kid and Richard.

The last, and now, under the circumstances, the saddest fishing trip the Captain and I ever planned was to take place in the Bay area last August. Since I still have his letters which set the plan in motion, I'll let Richard tell part of the story. I was teaching summer school at M.S.U. in Bozeman when I got a letter from Richard letting me know he was in Bolinas:

Bolinas
June 8, 1984

Dear Greg,
Fooled you! doubled back, returned to America, and I'm out here in my house at Bolinas where
I plan on spending the summer before returning to Montana in the fall. There's a lot of work I want
to do and I think this is a good place to do it.

It's interesting to be back in America, but you knew that all the time, anyway.

Love,
Richard

Glad to know he was back and hoping Montana wasn't too far in his future, I wrote him a letter pissing and moaning about my teaching and telling him that I would be playing songs at an anti-gold mining fundraiser in Nevada City, California in June. The people who were putting it on were paying to fly me down and back to Bozeman, so there was really no way I could visit the Captain. I had to get right back for classes. But anyway, he wrote me the following:

June 15, 1984

Dear Greg,
I just got your letter. You poor sack of shit!

I don't have a telephone and may not get one, but my neighbor
does and he'll come over and get me if somebody calls. His number
is 415-868-1568. I use his telephone sparingly, so don't spread
it all over the landscape in Montana. That's an interesting vision:
Greggie wandering all over Montana spreading 415-868-1568 on
everything he comes across: dogs, trees, rocks, etc.

Anyway, O unhappy one, I sure would like to see you.
We'll get together for certain when you come down in July.
Any chance in June? It's only a few more fucking hours
down from Nevada City. I know somebody out here who's got a
salmon boat docked a few hundred yards away. It's something to think about.

Let me know.

Don't be afraid of the telephone number.

Love,
Richard

Since I was going to the Bay area to visit my brother in late July and early August, I knew I would be seeing Richard, so I decided to get fiesty. I knew his M.O. He was trying to lure me over for Dickel drinking. Besides, one of my friends had told me that El Niño had wiped out most of the salmon fishing in Bay area for a long time. So I wrote him back saying he'd have to get up awfully early in the morning to fool a wiley Oklahoman; I knew that the salmon fishing was shot. I wound up my letter with a hypothetical "Ancient Mariner" story which ended something like "Niño Niñ everywhere and all the salmon shrank," and he responded as follows:

June 23, 1984

Dear Greg
The next time I pull a salmon out of the beautiful cold
waters of the Pacific Ocean, I'll say, "This one is for Greggie.
A loser in Montana."

Love from the deck,
Richard

After that letter, I made some feeble response knowning that I was fencing with a master of ridicule and said that we would solve the salmon question when I came down to visit my brother. Richard's next response was to the point:

July 2, 1984

Dear Loser, (formerly known as Greggie)
Dream on . . .
Losers tend to have loser friends.
"She says . . . El Nino . . . changed . . . currents . . . salmon . . .
moved . . . out."
That was last year.
It's nice to have good friends, loser.
Excuse me while I have this delightful young girl place another bite of freshly-caught
salmon in my jaws.
Thank you, dear.
No, we'll do that later again. You can rest for a while, honey.
Now, where was I? Oh, yea, writing to a loser.
Excuse me again—
No, honey, I don't have loser friends. this one is a special case. Don't worry
your pretty little head about it.
"She says . . . El Nino . . . changed . . . currents . . . salmon . . .
moved ... out."
Yes, yes, yes.
"Meester Keeler. Why not do you geeb me a salmon?!!!"
(Caused by another salmon being put in my mouth.)

Love
Richard

Of course, when I got to the Bay area, the number Richard had given me didn't work exactly like magic. I called the people at the number and they said they'd leave my message and number for Richard. But somehow after a week or so of back and forth message leaving, we still hadn't talked. In the meantime, my car had broken down and was in the most expensive garage in San Francisco (since they were the only ones who could find parts for it); my oldest son, Chris, had been picked up and released by the Moonies; and the salmon were biting like crazy. I sat down by the Berkeley pier and watched Japanese tourists come in from charter boats with huge bags of them.

Finally, I got through to the Captain, and he said, "Here's the plan. I have this friend, Bob, in Stinson Beach who has a hot rod salmon boat with a couple of great big motors in it. We'll come down from Bolinas to Fisherman's Wharf in it, pick you up there, go out and murder salmon, then bring them back to North Beach and have my friend who owns a Japanese restaurant prepare them especially for us." Of course, as it turned out Bob's boat wasn't working right, and the Japanese restaurant owner loaned Richard his 44.

Kinsella,1985

"Introduction." The Alligator Report
William P. Kinsella
Coffee House Press, 1985, pp. 5-8.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Three days after I signed the contract for this book Richard Brautigan's death was announced. I can't think of another writer who has influenced my life and career as much. If I could own only one book it would be Brautigan's mysterious parable In Watermelon Sugar. I think Dreaming of Babylon is the funniest novel I have ever read.

Many of the short, surreal pieces in this book owe a debt to Richard Brautigan. I publicly call these vignettes Brautigans and many have been published in groups of three or four as such. Brautigan's delicate, visual, whimsical, facetious writing appealed to a whole generation of us who were able to identify with the gentle, loving losers of his stories. He and director Robert Altman are the two famous people I would most like to shake hands with. Richard Brautigan was an extremely private person, one who apparently was unable to take joy from his accomplishments, but concentrated instead upon what he had not done or felt he was no longer able to do. A few years ago a friend and I decided to phone Richard Brautigan, an uncharacteristic gesture, for I too am a very private person. Unfortunately his home near Livingston, Montana had a silent listing.

The letter which follows I wrote to Richard Brautigan in 1980. Though he must have received thousands like it, I'm glad I wrote, I'm glad I let him know how he touched my life. I'm only sorry that it wasn't enough, that I couldn't have done more.

December, 1980

Dear Richard Brautigan:
I am just now reading The Tokyo-Montana Express, reading it slowly, a page or two at a time, like trying to make Christmas candy last until Easter. It is very hard to write a fan letter, for what do you say after you say, "I admire your books very much. They bring me a great deal of pleasure. I wish I could write like you." I don't know. I do write. In fact I am quite a well-known writer in Canada. But I am not very well known in the United States, except in Iowa, where I once brought a dead baseball player back to life. They buy my books there because one of them has 'Iowa' in the title. I think I should have put 'Iowa' in the title of all my books; there are four of them at the moment.

I have just read a story in your book where you talk about driving to Bozeman. I once drove from Edmonton to Bozeman in the dead of winter in a lumbering metallic-blue DeSoto that was old enough to be my father. I drove there to compete in a public speaking contest against people from Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia. Bozeman claimed to be the Convention Capital of Montana. The hotel was dark and poorly heated. Each bar that I visited had a few sodden cowboys in sheepskin-lined mackinaws, but no unattached women, which was what I was looking for.

The judges were all Montana men with square jaws and western suits. I gave a rousing speech, easily the best in my class but because I criticized Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, I did not even place. I learned that Montana men have nothing to do in the wintertime but impregnate their wives and look at the horizon waiting for the Red Tide they know is sweeping toward them across the frozen land.

I also teach writing, whatever that means. Many of my students have published, but I wonder if they would have eventually even if our paths had not crossed.

I have just written a novel about a man who drives from Iowa to New Hampshire, kidnaps J. D. Salinger and takes him to a baseball game at Fenway Park. Somehow it loses something being summarized like that. Perhaps I will write a novel about a man who kidnaps Richard Brautigan and keeps him locked in his rumpus room which has a trout stream and papermache model of Mt. Fujiyama. He makes you write a "Brautigan" every day, like laying a golden egg, and rushes out to his bookie and bets the Brautigan on a very slow horse running in the seventh race at Aqueduct. Then again I may not.

I suppose what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is thank you for writing what you have written. I'll close with a quote from a fan letter I received from an editor in Boston after he read my story about the dead baseball player. But if it is the way he feels about my work, it is also the way I feel about yours:

"You do something in your stories that few writers do well especially today—and that is to make the reader love your characters. They exude a warm glow. They are so real, so vulnerable, so good, that they remind us of that side of human nature which makes living and loving and striving after dreams worth the effort. I, for one, came away with a delicious smile on my face and a soft little tear in my eye and I felt pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day."

Very best regards,
Bill Kinsella

Moore,2004

"Enduring Works, Tortured Life of Author Richard Brautigan Recalled"
Michael Moore
Missoulian.com, 2 Oct. 2004
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 writer Richard Brautigan burst onto the nation's literary scene in 1967 with the quirky, utterly original novel, Trout Fishing in America.

A blurb on its cover said this: "Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing."

In the slender book, trout fishing was a metaphor, but it was also a character named Trout Fishing in America, who served as a common thread running through a strange tale that is uniquely the America of the 1960s.

In the book, a young man sees a waterfall and makes plans to fish in the creek that surely feeds the falls. With a piece of string, a pin he's curled into a hook and a slice of white bread, he heads for the creek:

"The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.

"The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. I stood there a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing. Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood.

"I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself."

Then the character named Trout Fishing in America weighs in:

"The same thing once happened to me. I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.

"'Excuse me,' I said. 'I thought you were a trout stream.'

"'I'm not,' she said."

Over the next two decades, Brautigan turned out poetry, short stories and more than a dozen novels, including The Abortion and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. But despite more than a decade of high-flying success, a distraught and alcoholic Brautigan took his own life at his house in Bolinas, Calif., in 1984.

On Thursday, two of Brautigan's friends talked about him as part of the Montana Festival of the Book. Greg Keeler, a songwriter, painter and professor of English at Montana State University, met Brautigan in 1978 in the Paradise Valley, where Brautigan lived on-and-off for part of the 1970s and '80s.

The day they met, Keeler was hoping to get Brautigan to lecture at MSU; Brautigan wanted to be a writer-in-residence at the school. Keeler and two MSU students met Brautigan at his house, and before the evening was done, whiskey had been served, spaghetti had been consumed and Brautigan had his residency.

And this: Brautigan, to make a point, had thrown his cat at Keeler's face.

That's just how things went when you hung out with Brautigan, whose aging-hippie look belied a man whose fits of rage sometimes ended up in gunplay.

But even the gunplay had its weirdly humorous side, said author William Hjortsberg, who lived across Pine Creek from Brautigan during his Montana years.

In his worst moments, Brautigan was fond of firing off a pistol in the house, shooting his clock and other household items. But he also had a fondness for labeling things, often with little brass plates like you might find on a trophy.

So once, after blowing a few holes in the kitchen wall, Brautigan went to town and bought a picture frame and had a brass label printed up and affixed to it. He then hung the empty frame around the bullet holes. The label said: "Shootout at the OK Kitchen."

One day, after shooting his clock, Brautigan informed Keeler that he'd done so because "time is not funny."

He also had a fondness for T-shirts: After film rights to his novel, The Hawkline Monster, were sold, he printed up some shirts that said, "Sold Out—Why Didn't I Think of it Sooner."

Friendship with Brautigan was something of an ordeal, his friends said. He could be cruel, drunk and rude, often at the same time.

He was preoccupied with death, Keeler said, although he pledged never to kill himself to make his work more valuable.

In retrospect, of course, that's exactly what happened. When Brautigan blew his brains out with a .44-caliber pistol in 1984, at the age of 49, his heyday was over. Although Hjortsberg, who is finishing a biography of the author, said Brautigan was still producing good work, his books weren't selling and he was increasingly despondent.

And yet Brautigan had a benevolent, kind side that mitigated his bouts of self-absorption and drunkenness. When he had money, he often gave it away to his friends, working on the premise that it's better to give than to loan. That way you can be surprised if you get paid back, Brautigan reasoned.

"When he did kind things, they were pretty classy," said Keeler, whose book, Waltzing With the Captain, recounts his friendship with Brautigan.

Perhaps the greatest testament to that friendship is that 20 years after he died, his friends are still sitting around and talking about him.

While some critics have dismissed Brautigan's work—Brautigan himself used to fume at his naysayers—Hjortsberg thinks his friend's work will endure.

"I think there's something magical about Richard," he said. "He really cared about language. He captured something essentially true about America."

Myers,2007

"The Out-of-Step Beat"
Ben Myers
Guardian Unlimited "TheBlogBooks," 14 Sep. 2007.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/09/the_outofstep_beat.html
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 eccentric genius of Richard Brautigan has never been in tune with the times—but that doesn't make it out of date.

Today marks the death in 1984 of author Richard Brautigan at the age of 49 from a self-administered shotgun wound to the head. At least, I think it does, as the writer's body was not discovered by a private investigator until nearly six weeks later in his remote cabin in Bolinas, California.

This haunting image of Brautigan's lonely corpse is very hard to reconcile with a body of prose and poetry which is beguilingly life-affirming. Like many fans I was introduced to his work through 1967's Trout Fishing In America, one of the wittiest and most original works of American literature of the 20th century. A collection of semi-abstract recollections and vignettes based around the loose theme of a search for the perfect fishing spot, Trout Fishing acted as a metaphor for the changing face of a country, and a gentle plea for a back-to-basics approach in the tradition of Thoreau. Naturally it found favour with the hippies and the post-Beats and swiftly sold a million copies, as ubiquitous in the pockets of Haight-Ashbury hipsters as beads and Thai sticks.

I quickly moved on to Brautigan's other work—novels such as 1964's evocative A Confederate General from Big Sur; his1970 short story collection Revenge of the Lawn, each page of which seemed to say more than many authors manage in entire novels; and the economical poetry of collections such as Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (which I bought for the titles alone). Other works such as Please Plant This Book, a collection of seed packets with poems printed on them, reflected his humour and wit.

Like Kurt Vonnegut, Brautigan (who bore more than a passing resemblance to David Crosby) had a surefire ability to make his readers laugh. Each sentence offers a lyrical epiphany and makes you feel a little bit better about being alive, while his eye for the minutiae of everyday existence is unparalleled. It was perhaps this dreamy style which, as the 60s gave way to the less trippy 70s and the hard-driven competition of the 80s, marked Brautigan's downfall. The world was changing, but—critics said—he was not.

Yet that's exactly why I love him: he was a writer out of step. Though a figurehead of the 60s he later claimed to hate hippies. Personally, I always thought he was just as much 1860s as 1960s. Besides, though slightly more pessimistic in tone, his later work is not to be written off. His final two novels, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) and So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away (1982), are strikingly original works, and his writings are now being reinterpreted more than ever, clearly an inspiration to writers such as Garrison Keillor and Tom Robbins as well as fans such as Jarvis Cocker, who recently read Brautigan for a podcast.

Far from being irrelevant or outmoded, Brautigan is instead the lone eccentric on the busy city intersection staring at the sky and finding patterns in the clouds, while everyone else shuffles along staring at the ground. With most of his major works being reprinted for a new generation, it's heartening to know that the world has caught up with his unique charms. For really, he was neither behind nor ahead of his time, but beside it, looking in and laughing quietly into his moustache.

Reynolds,2006

"Forever Watched Over By Loving Grace"
Sean Reynolds
Entertainment Today, 26 May 2006, p. 4.
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.

"Brautigan Death." AP News. Dateline: Bolinas, CA, 27 Oct. 1984. Richard Brautigan, the author laureate of the hippie generation whose apparent suicide was discovered last week, had been preparing for death for some time and was want to "get drunk and shoot things," friends said.

Richard Brautigan has been referred to as a counterculture poet flanking other talented American authors such as Jack Kerouac, Alan [sic] Ginsberg, J.D. Salinger and Ken Kesey. At his best he was a modern-day Mark Twain to an audience of readers grateful for his dark, jagged style of American landscape humor.

In 1967, during the summer of love, Brautigan's celebrated novel, Trout Fishing in America, jumped into the ragged civilization of love-ins, peace marches and Purple Haze. The eclectic, rambling summation of trout and society that would gain him national attention was preceded by other books including another cult favorite, A Confederate General From Big Sur and a collection of sublimely humorous poetry titled Lay the Marble Tea. An earlier poem, Moonlight on a Cemetery, printed in 1953 within a local Oregonian magazine, held a brief allusion of the minimalist sophistication that lay ahead.

Moonlight drifts from over
a hundred thousand miles
to fall upon a cemetery.

It reads a hundred epitaphs
and then smiles at a nest of
     baby owls.

In the early fifties, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye vividly communicated young America's detachment from the adult world of commitments and concessions during a post-war, emerging Beat culture. Jack Kerouac expanded the notion of nomadic recklessness in his 1957 novel On the Road. In this great post-modern tradition of wind-blown Steinbeck, Brautigan cast his words. He is a phantom icon that prowls the halls and libraries of college campuses, sleeps beside the beds of aspiring writers and infiltrates the thoughts of restless American dreamers. His originality and honesty lingers on each page filled with regret and dark laughter feeling like a fresh creation for each new reader.

Although some are obscure or out of print and others hard to track down, following the trail of Brautigan's anthology is rewarding. The journey may begin anywhere within his published works. There are no reoccurring characters or idiosyncratic destinations continued from one selection to the next. Just simple language, simple themes and simple radiance carried out from page to page. Perhaps a good place to start would be his third novel, published in 1970, The Abortion: A Historical Romance, written in his familiar minimalist style with unusual humor and severe introspection. Not unlike his other works, the book has a fantastic premise wrapped in Brautigan's slanted idea of reality. The "Kid" is the caretaker of a library in San Francisco that operates in the reverse. Instead of checking out books to read, ordinary people give their personal manuscripts to the library. All entries are accepted and the author may choose on which shelf to place his or her book.

This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American. The hour is midnight and the library is deep and carried like a dreaming child into the darkness of these pages.

The Kid's girlfriend, Vida, (who lives in the library with him) is awkwardly beautiful beyond description, however; she is personally appalled by her condition. They meet when she visits to make her contribution.

"What's it about?" I said.

"It's about this," she said and suddenly, almost hysterically, she unbuttoned her coat and flung it open as if it were a door to some horrible dungeon filled with torture instruments, pain and dynamic confession. She was so beautiful that the advertising people would have made her into a national park if they would have gotten their hands on her.

The library accepts offerings all hours of the day and night. Titles include, It's the Queen of Darkness, Pal, by a sewer worker wearing rubber boots, Your Clothes are Dead, by a Jewish tailor, Bacon Death, "a fantastically greasy book," and, like Alfred Hitchcock making a guest appearance, Moose, by Richard Brautigan.

The author was tall and blond and had a long yellow mustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he would be more at home in another era.

The climax of the story centers on Vida's abortion taking place in Tijuana three years before the decision of Roe vs. Wade.

It was hard for a minute and then we both smiled across the darkness at what we were doing. Though we could not see our smiles, we knew they were there and it comforted us as dark-night smiles have been doing for thousands of years for the problemed people of the earth.

His style dislodges the reader from the ordinary and usurps conservative dedication to detail. Many of the titles of his poems and novels are lyrical and poetic, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Clad in Garments Like a Silver Disease, Death is a Beautiful Car Parked Only and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, are a few examples. Many times his poems are quick and compact.

The Pill Verses the Springhill Mine Disaster
When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
     lost inside you.

Others share a surreptitious gift of language that demands reflection.

Have You Ever Had a Witch Bloom Like a Highway
Have you ever had a witch bloom like a highway
on your mouth? and turn your breathing to her
fancy? like a little car with blue headlights
     passing forever in a dream?

Brautigan was born January 30th 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. He seldom spoke of his childhood and little is known of his youth. His father, Bernard Brautigan, was described in the Detroit Free Press as "one surprised man," after hearing of the death of a son he literally did not know existed saying, "He's got the same last name, but why would they wait 45 to 50 years to tell me I've got a son?"

Richard Brautigan's work has dripped into the pool of American folk literature gradually gaining momentum, or at least remaining as a steady stream during the years following his death. Books have been published posthumously and others placed back in print. Perhaps some of his most engaging work is found in his anthologies of short, often single page, stories collections such as Revenge of the Lawn and The Tokyo-Montana Express. He strikes quick, linking his visions of raw, often rural landscape with ethereal ideas of freedom key to the American psyche. There are stories of snowflakes resembling Laurel and Hardy, others of werewolf raspberries and some so short they are poems in disguise.

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

"Damn it!"

Discovering or re-discovering an author is like a favorite song long forgotten floating up unexpectedly from the car radio surprising you with lost emotions and memories of bygone times. Brautigan is like that. He wrote a lot about graveyards, ordinary people, quixotic romances, innocence, San Francisco, America and trout. If you are preparing to begin the expedition, you might start with Trout Fishing In America and enjoy angling with the great American humorist.

I fished Graveyard Creek in the dusk when the hatch was on and worked some good trout out there. Only the poverty of the dead bothered me.

Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.

Seymore,1984

"Author Richard Brautigan Apparently Takes His Own Life, But He Leaves a Rich Legacy"
James Seymore
People Weekly, vol. 22, no. 20, 12 Nov 1984, pp. 40-41.
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.

He had spent much of his last year in Japan. In Japan they still treated him with respect. In Japan Richard Brautigan was still sensei, "great teacher," the poet-novelist-humorist who wrote Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur, Revenge of the Lawn and a score of other works that once had made him the mustachioed avatar of the '60s, that once had seemed to define a time. That time, in America, was unexpectedly short. But in Japan the bonsai grace of his prose, his patient cultivation of a world alive in miniature, was not to be tossesd lightly aside. And so he went there often.

Besides, he loved Asian women. The second of his two wives, Akiko, was Japanese, though the marriage had ended badly and he hadn't bounced back from the loss. In Japan his reputation also assured him cut-rate hotel rooms. He often stayed in hotels and for someone who had been poor so long, a discount was something to consider. He felt at peace there in a way that eluded him in Bolinas, his hideaway just north of San Francisco, or at his streamside home in Montana's Paradise Valley, where he loved to fish, even in the snow. His affinity for Japan show in his work, like 1980's The Tokyo-Montana Express, which capsulized the two poles of his wandering. His quintessentially American prose somehow brought a Far Eastern precision—haiku compression—to the vastness of his Wild West.

When he returned from Japan last spring, though, to some he seemed changed. He hung around Cho-Cho's, a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, talking with its erudite owner, his friend, James Sakata, 60. He had been drinking heavily. Then he decided to go up to Bolinas to his house near the Pacific. He was going to be alone, and he asked Sakata if he could borrow a gun. Nothing strange in that. Brautigan loved guns. He once shot up his house in Montana, then framed a few of the bullet holes and labeled the composition Shootout at the O.K. Kitchen. He blasted away in his backyard so often that friend, neighbor and fellow novelist Tom McGuane called his 40 acres "Lead Disneyland." Sakata lent him a .44-cal. Smith & Wesson.

Nobody heard from Brautigan for a long time. Nothing strange in that. He often just disappeared. Then he missed the opening of grouse-hunting season in Montana, an annual rite for pals like McGuane, actor Peter Fonda, artist Russell Chatham and writer William Hjortsberg, who had turned a small stretch of the Absaroka Mountains near Livingston into an unlikely outdoorsmen-artists' colony. When letters started coming back unopened, friends checked his place in Bolinas. They found his body, four months short of his 50th birthday and some five weeks dead of a single gunshot wound to the head. The writer who often worked obsessivley for 12-hour stints didn't leave a note.

So there was only speculation and memory. Friends talked about his openhanded generosity and his drunken boorishness, his gentleness and the violence that haunted him, his yin and his yang. "Richard was one of the most truly eccentric individuals I have ever met," says Hjortsberg. "He was a genuine Bohemian." His vision was unique, so humorous, so balanced-amid-tumult that at the ragged end of the 1960s, a rebellious generation thought they saw the world through his eyes. Trout Fishing sold two million copies. Becky Fonda, Peter's wife, remembers walking with him in San Francisco and being mobbed by fans after publication of that novel. "It was an onslaught," she says. "We had to run for cover." Brautigan loved it.

That high tide receded. In a 1980 reveiw of Express the New York Times said he was "a longhair in his mid 40s, and across his habitually wistful good humor there now creep shadows of ennui and dullness." His former agent, Helen Brann, said he cared more for his lost audience than the critics. "The fact that his readership was diminishing was what was breaking his heart," she says. His last book, 1982's So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, sold only about 15,000 copies.

So the Wind now becomes Brautigan's final return to his beginnings and the central traumas of his life. Born in Tacoma and desperately poor, he was shuttled from town to town throughout the Northwest. He once mentioned that one of this three stepfathers "would thrash him and thrash him," but Brautigan said little about his childhood. The protagonist of So the Wind is a troubled, neglected boy who accidentally shoots and kills his best friend. The novels opens with the boy's obsessive wish to grab the bullet out the air and push it back down the barrel and refasten it to the cartridge and put the shell back in the box with its "49 brother and sister bullets." Would that such could be done—and that another strange twist were not so Brautiganesque. After Richard's death his real father, who he had never known, said he learned for the first time that the writer was his son. Before, Brautigan's mother reportedly had denied his paternity. "I told him," she said by once account, "that I found Richrd in the gutter."

Does that explain things? Where did he find his outrageous humor? His friends warn against summing up Brautigan too easily. "It's not a case of 'hot in '60s, can't get arrested in the '70s, dead in the '80s,'" says novelist-pal Don Carpenter. "I think Richard was angry and out of money and goddamned if he was going to take a cut in pay. I think it was a coldly rational kind of act. I could hear him saying, 'Everyone thought I was going to go down begging for my crust, but ---- 'em. Now I don't have to answer my telephone.'" He was that way. And he was also the way his beloved daughter Ianthe, 24, remembers him. "He was so funny in the morning. He would do little tap dances and sing little songs. He would say, 'One of us has to be the adult around here and it's not going to be me.' We had a lot of fun." So long, sensei. Arigato, pardner.

Shorb,1984

"This Fisher of Words Had Many A Winning Catch"
Terril Shorb
Billings Gazette, 7 Dec. 1984, Sec. D, p. 4.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I sit on a narrow beach below Bolinas, facing the ocean. It is Sunday, nearly a week since they found the body of Richard Brautigan in his house on the yellow sandstone cliffs above me.

It is cold. Fog so thick and low it catches in my throat. It presses over this bowl of ocean like a flat Tupperware lid, raised up a little at a far corner where a thin wedge of blue sky leaks in above the low hills of San Francisco and its well-combed rows of houses. Somewhere, a sea gull cries. A sono-bouy moans invisibly offshore. Waves wrapped in white foam shawls throw themselves on the wet sand like distraught widows.

I came here, I guess, to see if I could salvage something of him: to find some vestige of him reflected in the purple eyes of ice plant blossoms or cradled in the muscular orange arms of Euclyptus trees. Perhaps I might discern trembling grey lips of sea mutely forming and reforming his name.

I have been sitting here for hours, but the day seems maddingly indifferent, like a sleeping grey cat dreaming on its own tail. What am I waiting for? For all the libraries to lower their poetry collections to half mast? For my native Montana and my adoptive California to start fighting over credit for his poetic inspirations?

What's all this rage inside, and who am I to speak about Richard Brautigan anyway?

The rage, I decide, is at myself. Poets seldom seek payment for the truths they extract, at such great peril, from the deep mines of the human soul. But we should thank them for being able to build engines of understanding from the ore of their pain. I should have put down these feelings years ago, before I left Montana. I should have written them down and pinned them to the skinny white bulletin board of an Aspen tree outside Richard Brautigan's Pine Creek ranch house. Who am I to speak of him? Who am I NOT to? I am one of the many who not only read Richard Brautigan, but learned to see with him as well.

For me, Richard Brautigan was Lewis and Clark, joyously navigating the wily waters of human experience to map the craggy continental countours of life. Along the way he did a lot of fishing. He could bait a hook with words that wriggled so enticingly with insight, it was irrestible. I don't think it was his aim to eat his catch, but merely to jerk it up into the bright surprising air so it could marvel at the beauty of the sunlit rainbow glowing on its own ribs.

Thanks to Richard Brautigan, this shy Montana ranch kid saw the shining rainbow of his own possibilities.

I still don't know how he did it. But he did it. He was a wizard of words. A Merlin of magical metaphor. He could take words as quiet as the neighbor next door and make them sing and dance, cajole and taunt. One poem might reach out for you sweet as a lover. The next might make you feel as if you had left the longjohns of your innocence hanging out on the line during a hailstorm of sawblades.

With his supple sentences and fragrant phrases, Richard Brautigan could tie his shoes with rainbows, comb his hair with the cold blue teeth of wind. He could stitch a cloud to a cliff with crowfeathers and spider spit. He could gargle stars, carry a faded river folded up in his wallet, invite you to picnic of insight on the dainty red tablecloth of a hummingbird's heartbeat.

No one made me fear words more, or love them more. He has given me a wild hope that equipped with the right meaningful words, we humans might yet talk ourselves out of annihilation. For giving me hope, I will always be glad I rose to his blessed bait.

Maybe if I would have told him this those long years ago in Montana when we were neighbors across the blue snowdrifts . . . maybe if all the others who loved his words would have told him . . . maybe, maybe, maybe . . . taken together, all the maybes are as useful now as trying to climb a cloud with a ladder made of rubber bands.

In his best-known book, Trout Fishing in America, there is one passage which read, "I've lost every trout I ever hooked. They either jump off, or twist off, or squirm off, or break my leader. I believe it was an interesting experiment in total loss, but next year somebody else will have to go trout fishing."

Well, Richard, you should know that it was by no means a total loss. You hooked a lot of us. And, wherever you are, I hope there's a fine stream running deep and clear and fast. And I hope they're biting.

Splake,1985

"Memoriam Richard Brautigan 1984"
T. K. Splake
Gypsy 3, 1985, pp. 61-63.
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.

Brautigan gone? He might have liked it that way. His book In Watermelon Sugar, described bricks that were made from black soundless sugar that would seal off forgotten things forever. There were too many writers like myself associated with the "little magazine" movement in America to let the spirit of Brautigan and the theme he initiated in Trout Fishing in America disappear.

The excellence of Brautigan's writing was demonstrated in the "Worsewick" chapter of Trout Fishing in America when he described the young couple making love at an old swimming hole.

" . . . She came back to the water, and the deerflies were at her, then it was my turn, . . . My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light and instantly it became a misty, string kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star. . . ."

It was through such passages that Richard Brautigan influenced my early writing. He finally convinced me that if I could create with the same style and impact, pretty girls like his Susan and Marcia would be possible.

Gee, You're So Beautiful That It's Starting To Rain
"Oh Marcia,
I want your long blond beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harsichord.
I want high school cards
     to look like this:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Marcia's Long Blond Beauty
     A+!"

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

Faithfully I devoured the hardbacks and paperback copies that brought him his Dell and Delacorte paydays. Until like the suggestion of his last book title, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, Brautigan chose to self destruct. Like many of his admiring readers I asked the question why?

Was it drink, the alcohol that Jim Harrison calls the black lung disease of writers?

January 17
"Drinking Wine this afternoon
I realized the days are getting
longer."

Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt

Did he find another "canning" experience impossible? No longer able to face total isolation in order to force himself to create?

April 7, 1969
"I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this poem."

Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt

Or like the caged wolf he described in The Tokyo-Montana Express, did he see himself an impossible prisoner of television crippled imaginations and victim of a franchise restaurant environment?

It seems that shadows and candles were very important symbols in the writing life of Richard Brautigan.

A Good Talking Candle
"I had a good-talking candle
last night in my bedroom.

"I was very tired but I wanted
somebody to be with me,
     so I lit a candle

"and listened to its comfortable
voice of light until I was asleep."

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

A Candlelion Poem
"Turn a candle inside out
and you've got the smallest
portion of a lion standing
there at the edge of the
     shadows."

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

Apparently his romantic disasaters and the attractiveness of madness finally became too strong for the shadows that had previously come to his rescue. In The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, he wrote:

"But the shadow struggled fiercly with the monster. The shadow had a burst of unbelievable physical fury and shadows are not known for their strength."

My brief Memoriam is only partial payment for the larger debt I owe Richard Brautigan. But let the reader note. The wolf's cage may grow with weeds, but both are now pure spirits free to roam, while the "hunchback trout" grows fatter, the beverage chills, and fresh fluffy clouds go scudding across the sky below.

Yates,2011

"People I Admire: Richard Brautigan"
Brett Yates
The Mountain Times, 1 Sep. 2011.
Retrieved from: www.mountaintimes.info/news/columns/2011/09/people-i-admire-richard-brautigan/
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 first chapter of Richard Brautigan's short novel "Trout Fishing in America" (1967), a book that people used to like a lot and now remains an interesting footnote in American literature, is a description of the cover of "Trout Fishing in America." The cover is a photograph of Washington Square in San Francisco, with its statue of Benjamin Franklin.

"All around the grass is wet from the rains of early February," Brautigan writes. "There is a tall church across the street from the statue with crosses, steeples, bells, and a vast door that looks like a huge mousehole, perhaps from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and written above the door is 'Per L'Universo.'" Eventually, inexplicably, the photograph comes alive: "Around five o'clock in the afternoon of my cover for 'Trout Fishing in America,' people gather in the park across the street from the church and they are hungry. It's sandwich time for the poor." The poor people "run across the street to the church and get their sandwiches that are wrapped in newspaper. They go back to the park and unwrap the newspaper and see what their sandwiches are all about."

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

"Trout Fishing in America" is one of those novels whose contents are pretty much impossible to describe. It doesn't have a plot, and it doesn't really have any proper characters, either. It's not about fishing, although fishing is one of its more important motifs. There are chapters entitled "Hunchback Trout," "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?," "Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter," and "The Mayonnaise Chapter," which form a series of whimsical, often fantastical, vaguely connected vignettes in which the phrase "Trout Fishing in America" appears again and again, attaining a sort of mystical significance extending beyond the act itself. There is a character named Trout Fishing in America, who writes letters to other characters in the book.

As I write about it, I know it sounds determinedly, overbearingly zany, and I'm not sure how to convince you that it's not, but I'll mention first that it's an amazingly funny book, a wonder of free-associative humor, whose outrageous imagination, conveyed in a zen-like calm, makes its own kind of sense. Nothing about it is realistic, yet I can't think of many books that feel more truthful; it's a novel without agenda, structure, or artifice. Its jokes, its visions, and its sadness all come direct.

Born in 1935, Brautigan grew up in poverty in the Pacific Northwest. He moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, fell in with its budding counterculture, and distributed his own poetry around the city. He's sometimes grouped with the older Beat Generation authors—who, like Brautigan, hung out at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore—but this always bothered me because, really, he had none of the petulant, self-regarding nonconformism of, say, Jack Kerouac, no genius-of-life-and-art pretense. There's a deep humility in all his work: his narrators, usually, are likable losers, who, barely scraping by, remain careful appreciators of the world's small pleasures; the coexisting phantasmagoria in his books comes unhyped, understated, confidential.

Of all the novelists I've read, Brautigan is probably the least interested in impressing his intelligence upon the reader. He was a weird guy who liked writing down his weird thoughts, not a man with a message or a serious-minded artist. His popularity reached its zenith in the late '60s, when the hippie movement embraced him and his trippy, unconventional literature, but Brautigan didn't want to be part of any movement: his eccentricity had no social or political impetus. Because he never moved beyond benign oddness, critics viewed his work as "anti-intellectual," but he wasn't an anti-intellectual; he was a very bright non-intellectual. He wasn't what they wanted a writer to be, but he refused to be anything other than what he was.

Filled as his sentences were with off-kilter similes (Brautigan once compared tree branches to "the intestines of an emerald"), his syntax was unwaveringly simple, and his deadpan style sometimes sounds a little like Vonnegut—who brought Brautigan's small-press work to the attention of a major publishing house, Delacorte—but Brautigan's tranquility, unlike Vonnegut's, conceals no dissident rage. Other authors of the '70s, like Tom Robbins, tried to lend a cerebral heft to Brautigan's brand of surrealism, but their work today seems arch and strained. Among contemporary writers, the most willing to indulge in the purposeless nuttiness of Brautigan's novels is Haruki Murakami, who has acknowledged the American writer as an influence, but Murakami, too, is more ambitious and therefore more conventionally literary.

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that Brautigan was an inimitable original. His was a minor voice in literature, but the purity of his work—everything in his books is fresh and unadorned—is sort of inspiring to me. It makes me want to write a little less turgidly, a little more openly.

Brautigan's most moving novel, the semiautobiographical "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away" (1982), was his last one, an attempt to preserve fragments of his troubled, indigent boyhood in Oregon. He committed suicide in 1984.

Nine novels by Brautigan were published during his lifetime, and for a writer so unique, maybe this was a kind of a miracle. One of his books, "The Abortion," describes a library designed to hold unpublished manuscripts, titles such as "Bacon Death" and "UFO vs. CBS," written by authors who sound like Brautigan's kindred spirits. At one point in the novel, Brautigan himself stops in to drop off a book called "Moose," and the librarian asks him what it's about. "Just another book," Brautigan replies.

Zangari,1979

"Author Brautigan Is Gilded As Counterculture Hero"
Michael Zangari
Daily Nebraskan, 17 Nov. 1979, 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.

The first wave of people crack back from the table like a whip. They cradle books in their arms to be signed. Not a book, mind you, but books—several of them. Nervous titters in the line. A man elbows his companion, "watch this," he says.

He steps up to the table and waits for the author to raise his eyes. "I've loved your work, MR ROBBINS..." he says. Richard Brautigan smiles up benignly at him like a punch-drunk buddha. It is the third time he has heard the Tom Robbins joke in less than an hour's worth of autographing his books.

He takes the books from the man's arms and repeats a phrase he has been writing over and over again like a bad boy after school. This book is for... He signs the books carefully in a painfully small scrawl and hands it back, the same patient smile resting on his lips.

Picture Richard Brautigan tired. After a brief rest, he stands at the window of his Hilton Hotel room and looks out on Lincoln's bowery. The corner is the point of an arrow. Jesus saves on one side. Cinema X on the other. Strange days.

He washes his underwear in the sink because he hasn't had time to do his laundry in his constant wave of trans-American travel. It's always too late, or the laundry is closed. Picture Richard Brautigan secure in clean underwear. Content. At least for the moment.

He swirls double shots of Jack Daniels around a brandy sniffer and begins to settle in. He eases tension by taking the lead, telling stories. He is a big man, over 6-4, half of his mustache has gone subtly gray. Aside from the curious creases in the lobe of his ears, he looks a full ten years younger than he is. Forty-five, he mentions several times.

It has been 25 years since he left Tacoma, Washington for the San Francisco bay. He wandered into the North Beach area while the genesis of the "beat generation" were hoffin' reefer and touchin' toes with eternity.

"I was not a member of the beat generation," he says matter of factly. Brautigan says he was on the periphery. He knew personalities, although no one was wearing "we're the beat generation" banners.

"When the 90-day beats started to show up in North Beach to be beatniks for a little while, I moved out of the area," he said.

How about the Ken Kesey craziness with the pranksters and the acid tests ten years later?

"I was not really part of that either,"" he says. Kesey and he are friends. They seem to pick conversations up exactly where they left off. He has just seen him again after three years, in Oregon, and remembers doing the same old thing after similar long stretches. Even when Kesey was in "very hot" water.

If not beat and not neo-beat, then where does Richard Brautigan fit in? He has been gilded as a sort of counterculture hero—largely he thinks because of the lifestyles indicated in his novels A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar.

He talks like he writes. Very spare and articulate. He seldom uses contractions. When he talks about his "craft," it is with a quiet intensity. When talking about influences on his writing style, he lists off a range of people. It is top heavy with French symbolists and includes Russians and Brazilian poets. Too many to write down. He says he has worked "very hard, very head," at making his prose read simply. Brautigan's airy prose and poetry is deceptively simple. He says he usually will rework a poem anywhere from 24 to 100 times before he lets it rest. There are many rewrites on the prose, too.

Here we have a weird sort of paradox. Ernest Hemingway used to claim that he did little or no rewriting of his work. Papa was almost militant on the point. When he died, a trunk load of his rewrites were found. He in fact had done extensive rewriting. Brautigan on the other hand, does extensive rewrites, and yet is often greeted by amazed stares when he says he does. His style has succeeded so well that he is not always taken seriously.

He says he writes about life and death, and pauses for a sudden wave of classical harp music to abate from an adjacent lounge. It is playing "Danny Boy". He has a sad sort of smile on his face. For a man who has over ten books still in print, he drives awfully hard for a legitimate niche in the writing community.

His latest novel, The Tokyo-Montana Express has just been released. He has ended a long isolation on his Montana ranch to do a lecture and autographing tour. These are the first autographic tours he's ever done. He is fresh from a divorce, and has been rocked out of the "protective cradle situation of marriage" and hit a killer schedule of travel. He is thinking about spending time in Hong Kong. Alone. Or maybe going to Haiti to finish his new novel (two years in the works now). Alone. He may go back to Japan?. He has had a long romance with Japan.

Aside from the gentle Zen elements in his writing, Brautigan has a genuine affinity for the Japanese. For a while he was reading about 60 Japanese novels a month. He is slowly learning the language—"as a child might" understanding about 25 percent of what he hears. He has many Japanese writer friends. He speaks with a great deal of affection for Japan.

There are many transitions over the course of the evening. He talks about Japanese publishing and tells many stories, at one point making some perceptive personal comments and offering gentle, encouraging advice. His eye for detail is harp, as sharp as his writing would indicate.

When we move on from the Hilton he dons a down-filled coat and his "bonnet", a blue hunting cap. He looks like a whimsical Elmer Fudd, motioning for silence, "be vewy, vewry qwuiet heh heh heh..."

We head out into the night, eventually landing in the Green Frog, listening to rock 'n' roll. He pounds the table in time to the music and has a good time. Tomorrow he is back with friends in San Francisco, a brief rest before skittering back across the country again.