Carpenter-Gold,1967

"A Book for Losers"
Herbert Gold and Don Carpenter
San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, 15 Oct. 1967, pp. 39, 42, 46.
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A strange very "in" little bauble by the San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan (A Confederate General from Big Sur) titled Trout Fishing in America appears from The Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco ($1.95). For some time this has had an underground reputation in and around the literary scene, but no two readers can agree what Trout Fishing in America is about.

We asked two Bay Area novelists to share their thoughts on the work. Herbert Gold's most recent novel is Fathers. Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling) is the author of the forthcoming Blade of Light, both published by Harcourt, Brace and World.
     —W.H.

The first published novel by Richard Brautigan A Confederate General from Big Sur, was brought out by Grove Press in 1964, nicely bound, properly priced ($3.95), well-advertised, and frequently reviewed. All but a handful of the reviews were favorable, and some of them nearly ecstatic. But never mind—the book did not sell. Apparently, this discouraged Grove Press from bringing out another Brautigan novel which they had purchased, Trout Fishing in America.

Now, see, Trout Fishing in America was Brautigan's first novel and Confederate General his second. They brought out the second one first and the first one not at all. Even though they had paid for it. They bought the first one first, but they must have done some thinking and decided that the second one would be a better indication of the direction of the wind. Anyway, they dropped Brautigan like a hot potato.

People (publishers are people) have been dropping him like a hot potato ever since. For example, a New York film producer came galloping out to San Francisco this summer to cash in on the hippies, and to make a great, wild, zany, comic, touching yet honest socially meaningful film. He called on Brautigan and hired him to write a screenplay, or at least a treatment of it, and mailed it to New York. The film producer dropped Brautigan like a hot potato.

I think I know why: There simply isn't a penny to made off the man. There is just no way in the world to get rich fooling around with Richard Brautigan. In fact, the opposite may be true: Mess around with him long enough and you'll end up in the poorhouse.

Poor old Brautigan. In an age when any idiot with a typewriter and a dictionary can make a fortune writing muck, he has to try to be honest, and report life the way he sees it. And life the way Brautigan sees it is comforting, funny and delightful only to people who haven't yet invested too heavily in what used to be called greed and hypocrisy. (Those words certainly have a quaint ring to them don't they?) And not only that, Brautigan seems not to appeal to people who have chosen sides. It doesn't matter what the issue is, Brautigan is on neither side of it.

But it would be pointless to feel sorry for Brautigan. He continues to write, without a trace of bitternesss or irony, and continues to find American life fascinating. He also continues to find publishers who are interested not in making money but in producing good books, such as Donald M. Allen of the Four Seasons Foundation and James Koller of Coyote Books. And, for that matter, Brautigan himself is a publisher, and has recently brought out his own volume of his poetry.

To give you an idea of the kind of person he is (and why the big people in New York are afraid of him), he raised the money for his book of poems all by himself, got the paper and press, printed it, and then gave the entire issue away. I'm not kidding. The book is called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and right in the front it says, "This book is printed in an edition of 1500 copies by the Communications Company. None of the copies are for sale, they are all free."

You can go up to the City Lights Book Store right now and take a copy off the shelves without paying for it. You can take two copies and give one to a friend. You can take the whole stack, if you're a hog, and throw them in the garbage can. Free means free.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Brautigan is a loser. Trout Fishing in America is a loser book. Most of the people who will buy it are probably losers. (I should mention that the first time I met Brautigan we got into a poker gamer with some people and everybody in the game lost.)

Montgomery,1967

"A Nature Book for Hippies"
John Montgomery
Los Angeles Free Press, 8 Dec. 1967, p. 23
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Portions of this book, which is hardly a novel, appeared in Evergreen Review, City Lights Journal, and The New Writing in the U.S.A.. This might give the impression that Brautigan is a fashionable writer. His photo makes up the cover and will give that the lie. Some years ago the Literary set in Frisco, which is made up of wives and friends of loafers who write, took up wearing the oldest finery available in Goodwills. A generation twenty-years younger, known as hippies, imitate them. I would not be surprised if they combined and decided to run the Salvation Army out of business by wearing S.A. officer's uniforms.

Now this seems lame to me, if what is wanted is a good time on the town. The Grant Avenue scene has been lame for a long time, dating to when some psychopathic remittance men began to gather there. Brautigan, whom I know and like, it seems to me, represents in his sense of humor, a sad, ineffectual grotesquerie which is peculiarily indigenous to North Beach in S.F.

There are a number of creek fishing sequences in this book which read as if Henry Miller had decided to learn about fishing from Hemingway, but which will not likely amuse fishermen. The style is simple and wooden which is well suited to the deadpan recitation of events. Each chapter, running from a couple of paragraphs to about four pages, is independent. The effect is more like that of a collection of newspaper columns. At times Brautigan waxes poetical. At one point he mentions a sheriff's notice on an abandoned shack in the northwest: NO TRESSPASSING. 4/17 OF A HAIKU. This is more concentrated than anything Gary Snyder has yet published.

At times Brautigan can achieve absurdity which is Homeric. His piece, "The Kool-Aid Wino," about a mildly disabled child, has calm dignity which equals Ginsberg and should be a model for Kerouac, who usually overdoes himself. One of his interludes treats of mutual friends to whom I sublet a former hiker's chapel on Mt. Tamalpais, a place garnished by its owner with ungeheuerlich sweetie pink Teutonic knick-knacks, and to which Embree (pseudonymized) brought in by trail (the only access) a motorcycle which he dismantled for repair. None of these facts are mentioned by Brautigan, whose eye focused on what was the ESSENTIALLY ridiculous.

How do you get this way? By having the luck to be raised in remote rural sections of the Northwest; learning to be unhurried; getting along without too many trappings of HAUTE MONDE: having a sense of neighborhood in the midst of the confusion of the younger middle-class rabbit drive that American sociologists have not discovered yet. I am sure that Brautigan and his friends gave tenement porch picnics in North Beach long before Mission District runaway kids across Market Street ever thought of using the Subterraneans as a handbook of apartment living.

Through his antics penetrates a stubborn backwoods conservatism that is straight. More power to him. This book ought to be required reading in hippe pads.

Schneck,1967

"Trout Fishing in America"
Stephen Schneck
Ramparts, Dec. 1967, pp. 80-87.
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"There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to the Spirit of St. Louis," writes the author of this slim volume of curious but unquestionably authentic Americana. I don't know exactly which particular seductions Mr. Brautigan has in mind, but I would include certain artifacts, certain literary seductions, certain shining examples of what used to be referred to with something like national pride as American ingenuity; an admirable trait in more innocent times, an ominous facility in America today.

All the more reason for Mr. Brautigan's second book (his first, A Confederate General From Big Sur, published two years ago by Grove Press, brought him the usual critical acclaim and public indifference) to secure him a small niche in the hearts of his literate countrymen, for Brautigan has written a book that qualifies as a 100 per cent all-American seduction, along with such ponderous seductions as Coca-Cola, the Ford-in-your-Future, and that wonderful American philosophical exercise, trout fishing, in all its natural and supernatural glory.

Neither this abstraction nor Mr. Brautigan's variations on the abstract theme lend themselves to summation. Probably the most incisive and lucid comment on this breath of fresh air was contained in the rejection slip that Brautigan's agent received from Viking Press, thoughtfully reprinted on the book's back cover. This brief note speaks volumes, which we gratefully lift and quote:
"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."

One wonders whether the reports mention the salient fact that Mr. Brautigan is a bona-fide American humorist, sure as God made little green apples and wooden Indians and publishers.

Previous to Brautigan, I was under the impression that our breed of home-grown humorists was exhausted, the comic vein played out in an America that isn't really very funny; or rather, in an America that is very, very funny. A real scream: black laughter, insane mirth, comic hysteria—these are the enemies of true humor, a national relic, almost always out of print.

American humor is essentially a sly, provincial (even when urban), epigrammatic cracker-barrel & campfire kind of comedy. The minstrel show and the tall tale are the heart and soul of this indigenous mirth which, like the Spirit of St. Louis, is one of the things in America that Americans need not be ashamed of. And I am not being facetious. There are many nations whose comic propensities are barbaric and infantile, and terribly offensive. Native wit has long been recognized as a key to a national character. By their laughter you shall know them, and know their secret hearts. . . .

Our comic talents depend less upon language and technique than upon the untutored rural tradition of the eccentric vision and the absurd juxtaposition of reason and extremism. Authentic American humor (as opposed to the commercial, prefabricated variety) has its roots in the rich American soil. Here we grow things bigger, faster, better than anyone, anywhere else. And our humor is, largely, derived from a major American vice, exaggeration. The Fish Story is probably the purest form of American wit: farce is our reality and our métier.

This license for the absurd has produced the paranoid-fantasists, the Terry Southerns, and the sophists like Albee and Pynchon (excellent writers, agonized pessimists) who play with words because the pavement is so hard and the terra so remote. Mr. Brautigan is funnier than these poor literates. these joke makers and gag writers; he is faster than Peter de Vries, he's faster than Congress, as wry as Ring Lardner, and as outrageous, though less bizarre than the last American humorist, Nathanael West.

As the inventor of a metaphorical hook constructed with American know-how to catch the slippery American hubris, Brautigan fishes in and out of context, casting his unassuming lure in the waters, in the parks, in the mystery of America, at a time when fish and fishermen alike are either crazed or comatose: frozen, frightened nearly out of their American wits.

Anyone who has tried can tell you that this American continent is not an easy place to locate, or state of mind to elucidate. There is no describing us, no explaining us: no one has such scope, no one is so perceptive.

It is no good being clever if you are not also tender. And there is no reason to make readers laugh unless you also bring tears to their eyes. Only a true patriot can successfully make fun of America. At a time when our most gifted authors are dedicated to outdoing each other in apocalyptic metaphors and horrific allegories, a visionary and enthusiast like Brautigan is especially welcome.

There is more to America than the blood on our hands and egg on our face; There is more to this continent than neon wilderness and city jungles and polluted rivers, bulldozed mountains, denuded forests. and dust bowls, and all the other abject failures that stand for decline, depression and the end of our red, white and star-spangled blue world.

There's something more, something that keeps one from completely disassociating himself from the tragedy that is brewing in teakettles and on college campuses, in cities, suburbias and other nightmares throughout the nation. We search for something more than the tight face, the fat belly, the beer can litter and plastic waste. We search for America under the cement and foam rubber. We search for those fruited plains beneath the parking lots and subdivided eyesores. We seem to have lost our country somewhere between the east coast and the west, and my appreciation of Mr. Brautigan stems from the fact that he has rediscovered America, if only for 112 pages.

To maintain that Trout Fishing in America is not about trout fishing is to deny reality. Because reality is precisely what Trout Fishing is about. One of Brautigan's most lucid characters, the Kool-Aid Wino, a kind of national holy Everyman whose poverty forces him to dilute his Kool-Aid with twice as much water, and prevents him from adding any sugar or lemon despite the directions on the package, has managed to "create his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it."

The Kool-Aid Wino is a parable in the shape of a shaggy dog story about the optical illusions and heartbreaking deceptions of American poverty. It is very funny and very eloquent. It is the song we must all learn to sing, while a jug band provides the cacophony:
"Lost my baby, last my honey
Lost my land and I lost my money
If I can't be happy, I'm gonna
be funny . . ."

I tell you, you never know how much you can take until you've had enough. I used to read most of what my contemporaries wrote and published under the misnomer of "humor." Since we all seem to be looking for the same country, I expected we'd have some community of interest. Since our depression stemmed from the same source, our laughter would also be shared. Not so. In fact, reading most American "humorists" is like being Alonso Hagen, whose Trout Fishing Diary revealed that "he went fishing 160 times and lost 2231 trout for a seven-year average of 13.9 trout lost every time he went fishing."

Reading most contemporary American humorous writers is like losing a little hope, giving up a little hard-won ground each time you turn the page.

There is a variety of laughter that is profound: real humor is a transcendental experience and any writer who tells jokes is just wasting my time and dissipating my salvation. For only laughter can save my soul. And only love, only reality, only the recovery of America will make me laugh again.

America today plays straight man to any pathetic would-be clown But it isn't enough. It doesn't help. No one is really amused. No one is really enlightened.

What's needed is a straight man who isn't afraid to let America into the act. One who understands America's monster comedy, and who knows that the joke is endless and that trout streams are hilarious, the source of subjective mirth, our only defense against ourselves.

Like all true humorists, Richard Brautigan eschews the label. Spies and humorists can only function under cover. So rather than thinking of Brautigan as a comic writer, imagine a six-foot country boy, with wire-rim glasses and a homemade haircut and a shaggy, Wild West moustache that doesn't quite hide a perpetual grin. The perfect farmboy, shambling along in strange cities with his apple-picking money in his pocket and the bemused air of a loner in the midst of a crowd. Inside this hulking innocent, this perfect bumpkin, is a special (very special) correspondent from a terribly literate sort of Field & Stream magazine whose contributors are outdoorsmen on the order of Turgenev, Hemingway, Bill Burroughs (expert on abnormal fauna and miraculous flora), Jack London, Robinson Jeffers and other high-class literary naturalists. In such exalted company, Mr. Brautigan is right at home.

His assignment is to cover the trout stream beat. He tramps along the shores of the hallucinatory trout stream that threads its way across the nation: a Broadway of the vanishing American wilderness. And from time to timelessness, he files reports of news, human interest and feature stories that take place along his visionary way. He writes of Trout Fishing activities in America with "a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper."

Trout Fishing is the collected dispatches of this extraordinary correspondent as he fishes in the national network of bloodstreams and secret creeks and dream rivers that trickle through the nation like a central nervous system. This America is like "the Klamath River that was high and murky and had the intelligence of a dinosaur," An America that is both hilarious and intolerable. Each area of the nation has its bigots who construct celestial roads that lead, like the one Brautigan found in Utah, to "Spirit Prison . . . where everybody who isn't a Mormon goes when they die. All Catholics, Buddhists, Moslems. Jews. Baptists, Methodists, and International Jewel Thieves." An America inhabited by the living and the dead, with certain immutable laws applying to both. An America where there "were no fancy headstones for the poor dead. Their markers were small boards that looked like heels of stale bread." (Ask what time is it in America, and Trout Fishing replies, "It's sandwich time for the poor.")

These dispatches, these outdoor brevities, whether filed from Graveyard Creek ("The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars") or from Washington Square Park in San Francisco ("a Walden Pond for Winos"), can help Americans understand how it is that we are all foreigners in our own country. This America, circa 1967, is not the same nation that Americans over 25 were born in. During the last two and a half decades the national sets have been changed, the laws of the land revised and an entirely different aura introduced. No wonder that those of us who feel anything, feel out of place and very strange, very alienated. It isn't really strange as all. If we felt right at home in America today, now that would be strange. And this is true for the dead as well as for the living.

If Meriwether Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark exploring team), who found the headwaters of the Missouri River at what is now Great Falls, Montana, returned today, he'd be lost, confused and out of place just like everyone else.

"'No, I don't think Lewis would have understood it if the Missouri River suddenly began to look like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college,' Trout Fishing in America said."

And I am not a bit surprised. After all, I was here when the change took place. Like Brautigan, I was raised on Deanna Durbin movies; and one summer when I was 16 years old I rode a horse along the eastern bank of the Missouri . . . and now I don't understand at all.

Perhaps it is not a matter of understanding anything. Perhaps it is a matter of empathy. Perhaps it is a matter or learning to love what's left of America. And like living with the dead, we have so learn to live with our loss. Our American childhood has vanished along with our frontier. In its place we have the phantasmagorical America of celluloid myths, our Brownie snapshots and our Woolworth memories and Army Surplus rivers, creeks and trout streams ("Six dollars and fifty cents a foot," for a used trout stream on sale at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard) and ghostly small towns, the fractured backbone of America; the places where national legends and hometown boys and gangster heroes were born. Billy the Kid, Hubert Humphrey, Pretty Boy Floyd, J. Edgar Hoover, John Dillinger, they all come from places like Mooresville, Indiana, "where there's always a single feature, a double feature, and an eternal feature at the Great Theatre in Mooresville, Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America."

It certainly is a mystery, and we are lucky to have a crack reporter like Mr. Brautigan to help us keep in touch with this star-spangled fantasia, where an old lady in Vermont is mistaken (regularly) for a trout stream; and where a creek can be made of "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."

We certainly are fortunate to have a writer like Mr. Brautigan, who isn't interested in shocking or terrifying or cursing America. but applies his talent to making us understand that "America is not an outhouse resting upon the imagination."

He writes of an America not unlike the humpback trout he claims to have caught, in prose that is as clean, as incisive, as graceful as anything being written in America today. About that humpback trout . . . "There was a fine thing about this trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel."

If there is any way of cutting through the nightmare obscurification and making America luminous and comprehensible again, it will be via the poetic vision mounted on words culled from the language of legends, and literal to such an extent that a publisher's reader will miss the point completely and report that Richard Brautigan has written a book that, despite the title, is not about trout fishing.

"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."

Obviously, Brautigan has more to say about trout than anyone since Isaac Walton. An author who can describe a pheasant ("too fat with summer to fly . . . he ran across the field like a feathered pig") is a natural; so much a part of nature, that whether he is writing a recipe for "Standing Crusts for Great Pies" (not bad, I tried it) or revising Lord Byron's autopsy ("As if Trout Fishing in America had been Lord Byron and had died . . . and afterward never saw the shores of Idaho again, never saw Carrie Creek, Worswick, Hot Springs, Paradise Creek, Salt Creek and Duck Lake again") is writing about trout fishing in all its exquisite subtleties.

Not that Brautigan is obtuse or easily misunderstood. He writes clearly, enunciating each phrase. He is not sloppy, he is not sentimental, he is close to the ground and without intellectual pretensions. He is never profound, but he is often a poet. A literary man of the people: which is to say, he's a gifted hick. It takes a sort of sincerity that is traditional among country folk to bypass all the rhetoric and solve one of the mysteries to the American dilemma.

Who else would search out the significance of a kitten named Room 208, who resided in Hotel Trout Fishing In America, not in Room 208, but in a room on the third floor?

Trivia? America is riddled with such minute enigmas; the Great Questions elude the most astute. And yet there is nothing but truth in everything, a major clue in every pine cone. There is hope in Hell, and there is still some evidence of humanity in America. There are still American writers like Richard Brautigan who are perceptive enough to see the forest in spite of the absence of trees, still innocent enough to learn the original meaning of Room 208, how it runs like melting snow all the way down the mountainside to a small cat living and playing in Hotel Trout Fishing in America, believing itself to be the last cat in the world. not having seen another cat in such a long time, totally unafraid, newspaper spread out all over the bathroom floor, and something good cooking on the hot plate.

Something good cooking on the American hot plate. Thank you, Mr. Brautigan, for a change it isn't a naked lunch.

Coleman,1970

"Finny Peculiar"
John Coleman
The Observer [London], 26 July 1970, p. 25.
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.

New readers start here. Mr. Brautigan is a 35-year-old American, living in San Francisco, and author of such mind-snapping titles as Lay the Marble Tea, A Confederate General from Big Sur, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and Please Plant This Book. The photographs on the binding of the two works under review show him to be whimsical, given to quaint clothes, richly moustached: a gentle, over-age hippie of sorts.

It is with some trepidation that one broaches the slim volumes. The blurbs have already warned us that his "revolutionary prose style . . . a cult among the young, has begun to win the awed admiration of Establishment critics." Evidently, all this is to be taken with pinch of salt or, at least, watermelon sugar.

Trout Fishing is a pleasant surprise, though probably not so for aspiring anglers. It's a little as if Hemingway had stopped worrying about his masculinity, being a simple anecdotal ramble around memories and rural America. I suppose the thing it most reminds one of is a kind of vividly coloured quilt or counterpane, the squares of different stuff confidently stitched together to an end that is entirely personal but more than random. You trust the teller, not the tale, as he sews in a recipe for Walnut Catsup or the story of a man overrun by cynical rats of the splendid Trout Fishing Dairy of Alonso Jagen, running from 1897-1897: Alonso never caught a trout, but recorded his annual losses religiously. Fantasy peeps unsettlingly in and out. There is a very persuasive account of the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, which sells used trout streams and old waterfalls. This is an excellent and pretty original comic compilation by the relaxed standards of our time, streets ahead of Burroughs or Kerouac: the man is seen to be doing his own thing without fuss or stress.

In Watermelon Sugar apparently preserves a similar cool, but is much more nervous and ambitious beneath its repetitive surface. Words like "fine," "nice," "good," "great" are made to do an unconscionable amount of work. Here we are out in the sort of visionary territory the French surrealist Henri Michaux delighted in: Mr. Brautigan must surely have stumbled across something like that melancholy little piece, "Je vous éris d'un pays lointaut". At any rate, there is an extraordinary affinity. A tender community live peacefully in a place called iDEATH (sic); once there were tigers who ate the narrator's parents and helped him with his sums. Now there is Margaret, who hangs herself, and Pauline, who makes great pancakes. Buddies, led by inBOIL, inhabit the Forgotten Works; they cut off their thumbs, ears and noses and bleed to death—iDEATH, for all I know.

There may be an idea lurking, and Mr. Brautigan has a genuine gift for imposing the unexpected, a loner's vision. But this myth, slackly sustained, dismisseth me.

Anonymous,1970

"Polluted Eden"
Anonymous
The Times Literary Supplement, 14 Aug. 1970, p. 893.
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Trout Fishing in America is playful and serious, hilarious and melancholy, profound and absurd. Its "characters" are scarcely less elusive and amorphous than its plot, which in traditional terms is nonexistent; and its emotional tone varies inconclusively from the poignant to the inconsequential. 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.

Implicitly assuming a lost American Eden, Brautigan builds his book around a number of contrasts: between a hopeful past and a distressed present; between rural beauty and urban squalor, between natural paradise and social purgatory; between lilting imagination and lumpish reality. "The cover for Trout Fishing in America is a photograph . . . of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square . . . Was it Kafka who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . . Kafka who said, 'I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic'?" In place of that earlier, self-assertive confidence, Brautigan's world is permeated by a plain, cussed will-to-survive or by a merely haphazard continuousness. (Any "systematic" pessimism, such as was flaunted by a Californian predecessor like Jeffers, would be almost as ponderously inappropriate here as optimism.) As for health, in the cities there are cripples and winos; in the country hepatitis and the graves of the derelict-dead. A century ago Thoreau had Walden Pond for idyllic retreat; now, "a Walden Pond for Winos" turns out to be an insane asylum.

"Trout fishing in America", the entity which gives its name to the book is many things—a person, a state of mind, places, objects. One time it is a pen-nib: "I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper." Such bright-eyed freshness characterizes Brautigan's writing about the natural world. It can have all the wondrous clarity of the best American writing in that mode. It appears, however, intermittently, for nature is on the way out, is no match for commerce, the wilderness is changing its dress from the natural to the industrial. Opening the book, we glance at Pittsburgh, where trout are made into steel, "used to make buildings, trains and tunnels"; we end up in the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, where wild animals, waterfalls, and stretches of a Colorado trout stream, stacked in piles outside the plumbing department, are being sold off at bargain prices.

Although a surgeon, a school principal, and even Maria Callas make fleeting appearances here, success and respectability are for the most part alien presences. This is a world of the failed and the disreputable; of shack-dwellers and dirt-farmers; of pimps. whores, and drunks; of the run-down, the left-over, the broken-up; of America's poor, tired, and hungry. It is a shabby world illuminated by rays of a marvellous compassion which would transform this reality of the poor and cast it "up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening Star." It is a violent world, too, haunted by the ghosts of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Billy the Kid. The "Supreme Executioner" poisons trout to a twitching death with port wine. A shepherd, looking like "Adolf Hitler, but friendly," leads his flock "lulled into senseless sleep" towards Stalingrad. And Jack-the-Ripper, disguised as the all-American pastoral dream, is reborn as "the Mayor of the Twentieth Century." Violence passes into political paranoia, as the surgeon inveighs against Socialized Medicine, and "the Red shadow of the Ghandian nonviolence Trojan Horse" falls across America. "You're better off dead, you Commie bastard," replies the storekeeper to a question about fishing in Cuba. "If you fish in this creek, we'll hit you in the head," says the sign. Two FBI agents keep permanent watch over a trout stream. The last chapter is "The Mayonnaise Chapter," sauce for a dead trout/

Brautigan tells his stories, his parables, his jokes, in a style of fine simplicity and economy. His sentences, whether soberly informative or wildly hallucinating, are seldom troubled by dependent clauses. He has a fondness for similes, both strikingly apt and superbly irrelevant. His heritage, in homage or parody, is completely American: there are echoes of Twain, Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, even of Erskine Caldwell and the Steinbeck of Cannery Row. And his flashing incongruities and rambling non sequiturs probably owe less to European surrealism than to Hollywood silent comedies and the general ethos of "psychedelic California." An American manner for American matter: a slender American classic.

In Watermelon Sugar adheres more closely to a narrative line than does Trout Fishing in America: it's easier to describe what happens in it, though perhaps no less easy to say quite what it's about. The narrator lives in the community of iDEATH, a "beautiful, gentle" place. It is an egoless world of vision and imagination, in which "our lives we have carefully constructed out of watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams." The last of the tigers, who had methodically eaten the narrator's parents before his eyes, have been destroyed. All is watermelon-sugar-sweet: "we work it into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives." The sun shines a different colour every day: the favourite day is black and soundless. The narrator is writing a book, "one word after another". His girlfriend is Margaret: he falls in love with Pauline.

The sweetness is soured only by inBOIL and his gang of drunks, foul and fierce and dirty. They live in the Forgotten Works and rummage around amongst the debris of forgotten times, making whiskey out of forgotten things, like books. Margaret, jealous of Pauline, and no longer peaceful-sweet and tranquil-high, feels some kind of affinity with inBOIL and spends more and more time in the Forgotten Works; everybody else in iDEATH is repelled by him. inBOIL's uncomprehending hatred of the iDEATH community wells up within him, until one day he and his gang march on iDEATH, insisting "this isn't iDEATH at all. This is a just a figment of your imagination . . . You're all at a masquerade party . . . The tigers were the true meaninig of iDEATH".

So saying, these anachronisms from the Forgotten Works proceed systematically to mutilate themselves to death. "We've proved iDEATH," says the dying inBOIL - which is to say, presumably, that there is no iDEATH but death, that the only way to lose one's ego is to lose one's bodily life. Pauline mops up the mess, the inhabitants of iDEATH cart off the bodies in wheelbarrows and burn them along with all the Forgotten Works. Margaret hangs herself from an apple tree. Her funeral takes place on "the black and soundless day". As the fable ends, everyone is waiting for sunset at the close of the soundless day, so that sound and music and dance can begin again. Whether the dancing starts and everyone lives happily ever after, we will never know for sure.

In Watermelon Sugarhas the charm of the fairy story it almost is. But it has neither the emotional complexity, nor the imaginative ingenuity, nor the implicit historical and cultural awareness, not the acute and tough critical-mindedness of Trout Fishing in America. In important respects it really is more sentimental, less radical. In fact, many of the insights of the one book undercut the sugary values of the other; for until the poor and the broken inherit trout-fishing-in-America, the community of iDEATH will be "a masquerade party". In Trout Fishing in America Brautigan writes of a hippie playing poor in the California bush: "This is all very funny to her. Her parents have money". That is the dimension that is absent from In Watermelon Sugar.

It is good that two works of so gifted a writer, with so unpredictably inventive an imagination, are now readily available in this country. Brautigan is thirty-five years old and has written over the past decade several other books of poetry and prose. Let us hope that more of them will soon appear here, especially A Confederate General from Big Sur, with its splendidly outrageous hero, Lee Mellon, and its multiplicity of endings, eventually "186,000 ending, per second."

Furbank,1970,

"Pacific Nursery"
P. N. Furbank
The Listener [London], vol. 84, no. 2158, 6 Aug. 1970, pp. 186-187.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

In New York City they have nightmares: on the West Coast they dream day-dreams. They also cultivate visions there, of course; but the extent to which West Coast culture has turned its back on Old Word values shows most in its childish and woolly-lamb side—its fancy lights and dressing-up, its cult of Tolkein and Pooh.

It is to this side that Richard Brautigan's two novels, now reaching us a few years late, belong: it is best to think of them as children's books. In Watermelon Sugar, at least is avowedly a tale for good children. It is about a race of good people who live in shacks made of watermelon sugar, in a place where the light changes colour every day. All round their dwellings there are rivers, some of them only a few inches wide. Theirs is a water-culture: they stand their statues in the rivers and bury their dead in luminous coffins on the river-bottom, and when the last talking tiger was killed, they built a trout-hatchery on the spot. Every day they meet for enourmous breakfasts in a place called iDEATH, which is both a house and a river-landscape; then they go off to gentle labour, carving statues and working in the Watermelon Works. The only threat to their contentment is inBOIL and his terrible gang, who drink whisky and lurk about, in a beastly manner, near the Forgotten Works (a vast ruinous complex, symbolising the Old World, piled mountain-high with things like books, whose use has been forgotten).

With Trout Fishing in America we return to the real United States, exploring its creeks and assorted matters by the way. The narrator's first experience with trout-fishing is abortive, what he has taken for a waterfall turning out, on closer inspection, to be a flight of white wooden steps. Still, he perseveres, on foot and in metaphor. There is much playing dumb with the reader:

"I bought a pair of tennis shoes and three pairs of socks at a store in McCall. The socks had a written guarantee. I was supposed to launder the old socks and send then in with the guarantee. Right off the bat, new socks would be on their way, traveling across America with my name on the package. Then all I would have to do would be to open the package, take those new socks out and put them on."

Also digressions, like the story of Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a legless wino whom the narrator and his friends plan to pack off to Nelson Algren in a shipping crate, with a couple of cases of sweet wine: the stickers would read: 'Handle this wino like he was an angel.' By the category-joke beloved of collage and the Goon Show, Trout Fishing in America becomes a character and joins the act. He writes letters addressed to 'Dear Ardent Admirer' and gives his reminiscences of Lewis and Clark discovering the great Missouri Falls. When a friend shows the narrator his new 30-dollar pen—the only pen to have, for its nib takes on the writer's personality—the latter reflects what an even better nib trout fishing in America would make, 'with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.'

It should not be nice, but is—I think because Richard Brautigan, odd progeny of Isaak Walton and Paterson, is really fond of his toys, and the virgin America they commemorate, and not just of himself. His is a most entrancing kind of pop writing, the prettiest of wallpapers for that great nursery by the Pacific.

Tanner,1970

"The Dream and the Pen"
Tony Tanner
The Times [London], 25 July 1970, 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.

Tony Tanner welcomes "one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade", the work of a West Coast writer who has constructed an exhilarating experience out of America's present taste for self-destruction.

American literature has a great tradition of realism, of a fiction which finds out the facts of the matter, or what is the matter with the facts. But increasingly American writers are using the liberations of fantasy to counteract the constrictions of the contemporary environment. No one does this with more economy and delicacy than Richard Brautigan.

He seems at first like a very local (San Franciscan) writer, but the implications of his work cover the whole of America, and his appeal should be instantly felt in England. Trout Fishing in America, which is both very funny and very poignant, seems to me to be one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade.

If there is any narrative line in the book it concerns indeed the author's various attempts to find good trout fishing: but Trout Fishing in America becomes a person, a place, a hotel, a cripple, a pen nib, and of course a book. Protean and amorphous, it is a dream to be pursued, a sense of something lost, a quality of life, a spirit that is present or absent in many forms. Because Brautigan exercises complete freedom with words he can sit Trout Fishing in America down with Maria Callas for a meal, produce a letter from him/it saying that he is leaving for Alaska, or start a chapter "This is the autopsy of Trout Fishing in America"—and leave us concluding that the book is an autopsy of the whole American dream.

Certainly the book is full of death. There are endless references to graveyards, mortuaries, cemeteries, wreaths, memorials, omens of the decline and passing of things. The feeling of fertility gone sour, of a once beautiful land given over to deadness, hangs over the book. Specific references to criminals like John Dillinger and "Pretty Boy" Floyd add to the sense of the destructive violence which has entered into America's heritage.

The narrator's quest for good Trout Fishing in America is a series of disappointments, It brings him finally to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, another version of that terminal dump of waste and used things which for so many American writers seems to loom up as a possible end to the American Dream. In the Yard a trout stream is being sold by the foot, stacked up in a room containing piles of toilets and dusty lumber. The touch of surrealism only deepens the muted sense of something precious lost.

One could call Brautigan's book an idyll, a satire, a quest, an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for America, or a joke, but it is a book which floats effortlessly free of all categories, and it is just this experience of floating free which is communicated while one is reading it. There is certainly a feeling for a pastoral America which has vanished or has been despoiled by mechanization, crime, accumulating garbage, and various kinds of poison and violence.

But the book is nothing like a polemic, and Brautigan, it is clear, would not engage in anything so recognizable as an established genre. The list of contents, the chapter divisions, the "characters", the narrative episodes, all mock the forms of conventional fiction by pretending to add up to a recognizable structure which is not there when you come to look for it. Among other things the book is a typographical playfield.

Clearly all this might add up to a recipe for whimsy and a style with such a light touch it cannot always avoid coyness, false naïveté and sentimentality. These can all be found in Brautigan's work, but not in this novel. The evanescent quality of the . . . elusive metamorphosis of sense and form (like clouds over the Pacific), nevertheless leave one in possession of ... extremely haunting, evocative and capable of making subtle solicitations to a whole range of authentic feelings.

Towards the end of the book the narrator dreams of a modern American Leonardo da Vinci who invents a new "lure" for trout fishing in America: it will take a great artist to entice back that idea, ideal or dream. . . . the narrator is given a golden nib with the following admonitions:

"Write with this, but don't write hard because this pen has a got a gold nib, and gold nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it . . . It's the only pen to have. But be careful."

To which the narrator adds:

"I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark trees pressed against the shore."

The dream will enter the writer's pen, with the characteristic instruction to write simply and individually, avoid other people's versions, and not leaning too heavily on his own. While Trout Fishing in America is foundering in the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, it is still flourishing in the writer's imagination. It is perhaps one of the most pervasive themes of contemporary American fiction that these two realms—Wrecking Yard and the imagination—are in a permanent struggle for possession of "America", but I doubt if any writer has posed the opposition so delicately as Brautigan.

The opposition appears again in In Watermelon Sugar. The narrator lives in a happy commune called, mysteriously, iDEATH. The prevailing material there is watermelon sugar, which may be food, furniture, fuel, or more generally the sweet secretion of the imagination. There has been a defection from iDEATH by a drunken foul-mouthed figure called inBOIL. He and his gang have gone back to live in an ugly place called the Forgotten Works. This is the ultimate Wrecking Yard, the realm of dead trash which the imagination insists on leaving behind. There is a confrontation between inBOIL's gang and the happy commune which leaves the latter finally undisturbed and well rid of the death-obsessed, trash-minded defectors.

In Watermelon Sugar is a charming and original work, perhaps a little too obvious in its parabolic form though the parable itself is extremely relevant. The main thing is to welcome the appearance of a refreshingly new, unhysterical, unegotistical, often magical American writer. In Trout Fishing in America Richard Brautigan has already added a minor classic to American literature.

Clayton,1971

"Richard Brautigan: The Politics of Woodstock"
John Clayton
New American Review, no. 11. Edited by Theodore Solotaroff. Simon and Schuster, 1971, pp. 56-68.
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.

I want to talk out my feelings about Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America—about Brautigan's sense of life and about his politics. Because his politics are those of lots of my own people, maybe sometimes of my own life—and they disturb me.

Brautigan is talking (over a bottle of cheap wine that gets passed around) to the WE of a subculture—a subculture I'm a part of. He is creating for us a mental space called Trout Fishing in America where we can all live in freedom. He's not preaching about it to us: he assumes we're already there, or just about there. But I'm also in an unfree America, not by mental choice but by condition. And the politics of imagination is finally not enough for me. It's not enough for us.

In a chapter called "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?" the narrator says,
"I let the baby play in the sandbox and I sat down on a bench and looked around. There was a beatnik sitting at the other end of the bench. He had his sleeping bag beside him and he was eating apple turnovers. He had a huge sack of apple turnovers and he was gobbling them down like a turkey. It was probably a more valid protest than picketing missile bases.

"The politics of a baby in a sandbox and a sack of apple turnovers. It makes me mad—what would the peasants of Vietnam say about this kind of protest?—except that I also feel so close to his gentle mind I go along with his pastoral, a pastoral in the midst of death and dirt, hospitals and warehouses.

"Until recently my knowledge about the Cleveland Wrecking Yard had come from a couple of friends who'd bought things there. One of them bought a huge window: the frame, glass and everything for just a few dollars. It was a fine-looking window.

"Then he chopped a hole in the side of his house up on Potero Hill and put the window in. Now he has a panoramic view of the San Francisco County hospital.

"He can practically look right down into the wards and see old magazines eroded like the Grand Canyon from endless readings. He can practically hear the patients thinking about breakfast: I hate milk, and thinking about dinner: I hate peas, and then he can watch the hospital slowly drown at night, hopelessly entangled in huge bunches of brick seaweed.

"He bought that window at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard."

The view I'm offered at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard's window is of bitterness and deadening brick. But Brautigan lets me out of dealing directly with that desperate reality (and I want to be let out); he snatches me up inside his process of imagination—the magazines eroding like the Grand Canyon, the magical perception of the patients' complaints. I am given imaginative magic as a liberation from decay.

Later in the same episode, the narrator goes himself to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard "to have a look at a used trout stream." He sees the sign:
"USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE. MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED."

Another writer might have produced an obvious satire on destruction and commercialization of the pastoral—a trout stream sold by the foot length. Of course the American trout stream has been sawed into pieces, animals extra. But this satire Brautigan soft-pedals: if the pastoral stream is no longer available, the pastoral of the imagination is available. I am seduced by his stoned imagination, which can conceive of a trout stream sold by the board foot; which can make a pastoral in a junkyard. What I am finally hooked by is the sensibility which can create a lyrical space in our heads by play, by metaphor.

Brautigan's sensibility is personally liberating. It makes me happy by letting me feel my freedom. To the weight of this world he does not counterpose the concept of the imagination; he allows us to join him in his process of imaginative re-creation. Imaginative re-creation is not a fanciful term in talking about Brautigan; it is precise: The narrator's childhood friend becomes a "Kool-Aid Wino," doubling the water and pretending that the sugar is there—"He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it"; the narrator fishes in a creek "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." Or he turns the debris of a pauper's graveyard into a fishing fly:
"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."

It is always a trout stream of the imagination that Brautigan fishes in. Like the stream the narrator as a boy creates out of a flight of stairs: "I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself." And even though Trout Fishing in America replies, "There was nothing I could do. I couldn't change a flight of stairs into a creek," we have already been part of exactly that magic transformation—and we are now presented with another: the transformation of a topic into a character Trout Fishing in America, a character who signs a letter to the narrator with a wobbly signature; and into a book cover; and into the nickname of another character, Trout Fishing in America Shorty; and into a hotel; and into a gourmet: "...as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet and Trout Fishing in America had Maria Callas for a girl friend and they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles."

Finally, it's a place: "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America, the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped." It's a place of rambling, of freedom, of closeness with a peaceful, natural world. It's a place of winos in a park as well as of actual fishermen. And if it's disappearing in a reality of institutionalized campgrounds with flush toilets, it remains alive in Brautigan's way of seeing. Salvation through perception: the politics of inner freedom.

The mental space we enter with Brautigan's narrator is shaped by attitude toward language, by tone, and by narrative structure as well as by metaphor. It is a political space in that it reinforces "our" values—the values of a subculture that sees itself as flipped outside of goal-oriented, psychically and socially repressive, exploitative, aggrandizing American technological society. It is political in that to go into that space is to decide not to confront that other society.

I want to define this mental space by talking about the beautiful chapter "Sea Sea Rider". The episode begins:
"The man who owned the bookstore was not magic. He was not a three-legged crow on the dandelion side of the mountain.

"He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson."

The man was not magic. Who said he was? What do you mean, magic? What is a three-legged crow and why would it find its way to the dandelion side of the mountain? Why of course a Jew? Why put into series facts that so obviously don't belong together? It is not just that Brautigan's narrator is illogical; surreal connections between images is part of his stance. He invites me to share these connections with him—assumes I am following completely. Of course you can buy a trout stream in pieces; of course Trout Fishing in America is a character who can remember "with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn."
"He [the bookstore owner] learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoyevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

"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 anymore 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.

"I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959."

What is important is not that Brautigan uses a wildly fanciful metaphor but that he expands it into an image and then blurs one metaphor (books: graveyards) into another (graveyard: cars) into another (books: virgins). The man may not be magic, but I am captured by a magical process in the writing.

Part of the magic is in the discontinuity itself. If Trout Fishing in America is in part a life-style of freedom and rambling, these qualities are present not only in the metaphorical transformations and illogical connections but in the apparent looseness, casualness, easy rambling of the narrator's talk. It isn't true that the parts of Trout Fishing in America could be shuffled at random—some, for instance, are necessary preconditions for others to make sense; but we are intended to feel that there is absolutely no ordering. And within a chapter Brautigan creates the stance of careless rambler just as Arlo Guthrie does in the record of Alice's Restaurant. In "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," for example, Brautigan begins with the experience of his friends, talks about the mansion of a dead actor, then about two Negro boys discussing a champion twister—all before he gets to the story of his adventure with the trout stream in the wrecking yard.

In "Sea Sea Rider" the narrator tells us that one day when he was sitting reading about Billy the Kid,
"The owner of the bookstore came up to me, and put his arm on my shoulder and said, 'Would you like to get laid?' His voice was very kind.

"'No,' I said.

"'You're wrong,' he said, and then without saying anything else, he went out in front of the bookstore, and stopped a pair of total strangers, a man and a woman. He talked to them for a few moments. I couldn't hear what he was saying. He pointed at me in the bookstore. The woman nodded her head and then the man nodded his head."

The narrator doesn't want to—but the girl convinces him:
"When I came out of the bathroom, the woman was lying naked on the couch, and the man was sitting in a chair with his hat on his lap.

"'Don't worry about him,' the girl said. 'These things make no difference to him. He's rich. He has 3,859 Rolls-Royces.' The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves.

"'Come to me,' she said. 'And come inside me for we are Aquarius and I love you.'

"I looked at the man sitting in the chair. He was not smiling and he did not look sad.

"I took off my shoes and all my clothes. The man did not say a word.

"The girl's body moved ever so slightly from side to side.

"There was nothing else I could do for my body was like birds sitting on a telephone wire strung out down the world, clouds tossing the wires carefully.

"I laid the girl.

"It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish.

"'Good,' the girl said, and kissed me on the face."

Afterwards the bookstore owner tells the narrator "what happened up there." And he tells two stories built on literary clichés. The first is about lovers in the Spanish Civil War; the second is about a wild Western hero who rides into Mexico, where the rurales are terrified by his gun and his sexual habits:
"You became the most powerful man in town.

"You were seduced by a thirteen-year-old girl, and you and she lived together in an adobe hut, and practically all you did was make love.

"She was slender and had long dark hair. You made love standing, sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls, the floor and even the roof of the hut were coated with your sperm and her come.

"You slept on the floor at night and used your sperm for a pillow and her come for a blanket.

"The people in the town were so afraid of you that they could do nothing.

"After awhile she started going around town without any clothes on, and the people of the town said that it was not a good thing, and when both of you began making love on the back of your horse in the middle of the zócalo, the people of the town became so afraid that they abandoned the town. It's been abandoned ever since.

"People won't live there.

"Neither of you lived to be twenty-one. It was not necessary.

"'See, I do know what happened upstairs,' he said. He smiled at me kindly. His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.

I thought about what happened upstairs.

"'You know what I say is the truth,' he said. 'For you saw it with your own eyes and traveled it with your own body. Finish the book you were reading before you were interrupted. I'm glad you got laid.'

"Once resumed, the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea."

The bookstore owner is a kind of guru, even if he's not magic. He teaches the life of the imagination to a strung-out, life-denying young man. To get laid is simple, as in "once upon a time." But it is also wildly fantastic: experience is maybe always literary, symbolic, metaphorical. Certainly it makes more sense to see events in terms of the fantasies implied in them than as "objective" facts (indeed isn't objectivity only one more, less adequate metaphorical perception?). The narrator has learned the bookstore owner's truth, and returns to his reading in a different manner—" . . . the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea."

This passage does wonderful things to my head. I feel the freedom, the openness, of the narrator's trip. He becomes a Sea Rider. I remember the song—sometimes called "See, See, Rider" or "Easy Rider"—from which the chapter title comes. It's a blues about rejection after love-making. But the problem of that blues is gone; getting laid is easy; the narrator becomes a Sea Rider, spinning his fantasies like wheels in the sea.

Early in the chapter the narrator explains, "I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959." The rich man has 3,859 Rolls-Royces. Making love was like the eternal 59th second. All incomplete, waiting numbers. But at the end of the episode, the pages spin. The anticipation of climax is over, somehow. Things just go on. They go on unexpectedly and are gifts, like the afternoon love-making.

What the bookstore-owner-teacher does for the narrator, Brautigan's style does for me: his simple narratives, his synapses of logic, his assumption that we will of course accept what he says without asking for explanations, his rambling structure, his metaphorical shifts, his gentle pastoral imagery. We are become as little children, just as the listeners to Jesus' parables must have been as much transformed by the simple diction and syntax and childlike transitions as by the stories themselves. Sometimes Brautigan actually describes a way of life:
"Pard and his girl friend sleep in the cabin and the baby sleeps in the basement, and we sleep outside, under the apple tree, waking at dawn to stare out across San Francisco Bay and then we go back to sleep again and wake once more, this time for a very strange thing to happen, and then we go back to sleep after it has happened, and wake at sunrise to stare out across the bay."

But it's not the description—it's my sharing, our sharing, in Brautigan's imaginative process that really does such beautiful things to us.
"Unit 4 had a big wooden table with benches attached to it like a pair of those old Benjamin Franklin glasses, the ones with those funny square lenses. I sat down on the left lens, facing the Sawtooth Mountains. Like astigmatism, I made myself at home."

The association with early America, the connection with the mountains, the simile becoming fantasy: I am also made to feel at home. Brautigan's style says I can discard categorized living, since his perceptions are free to bounce in and out of categories at will. It says I can discard consciousness of causality and rational connections. "But the thing that smelled the most like sheep was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee." The style says I can ignore moral dicta, says this by its acceptance of people and events without even asking whether they should be accepted. Things simply are. And underlying this sense of life are gentleness and mental freedom.

Brautigan's style undercuts the long tradition of realistic fiction. Trout Fishing in America is not an anti-novel; it is an un-novel. Brautigan has no interest in character—in introspection or psychological insight, in interpersonal dynamics; no interest in materiality; no interest in time or causality. The book runs profoundly counter to the bourgeois instincts of the novel. It runs counter to the bourgeois world view of practicality, functionality, rationality. But it isn't a rebellious, individualistic book. Not at all. There is no rebellion in it. It accepts everything, even the world that is destroying the pastoral possibilities it asserts. And even though the chapters are often solitary adventures, it is still the book of a subculture, of a WE who are so different from bourgeois expectations as not to need explanations about our way of life.

I am not arguing—not at all—that Brautigan denies death and suffering. They are very necessary parts of the book. The bookstore owner floated on the Atlantic till "death did not want him." Again and again death and suffering are connected with beauty. That is the point—that Brautigan transmutes ugliness and sadness. Like the ex-errand boy for an abortionist and the ex-hustler who live together in a room in Hotel Trout Fishing in America: the room is the same imaginative place that the narrator finds in the woods or in the cabin across San Francisco Bay. It is a human, kindly place. But it exists in relation to the past of illegal abortion and prostitution and in relation to death; her ex-pimp wants to kill the man, and so he sleeps with a .32 pistol by their bed. Their cat, 208, is named after the room number of the bail office—a remembrance of bad times. But they've made it; "They had a good world going for them."

Or look at the episode "Worsewick"; a playful pastoral which contains elements of death as matters of simple fact. Brautigan doesn't solemnize or moralize death; it is just there.

The narrator in "Worsewick" describes bathing with his woman in a not-too-fancy hot springs.
"There was a green slime growing around the edges of the tub and there were dozens of dead fish floating in our bath. Their bodies had been turned white by death, like frost on iron doors. Their eyes were large and stiff."

In the slimy water they make love:
"Then I came, and just cleared her in a split second like an airplane in the movies, pulling out of a nose dive and sailing over the roof of a school.

"My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. His eyes were stiff like iron."

The voice says that everything is cool. When a writer like Hemingway connects love and death it is to counter love with death and death with love. For Brautigan they are both okay.

The style of Trout Fishing in America sucks us into the politics of no politics—the politics of a subculture alive in another place. For Brautigan, America itself is "often only a place in the mind." Unfortunately, however, America is real. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed by the police. Their bullets did not become trout or sperm nor the guns surrealistic pillows. B-52s are every day dropping 3,000-pound bombs and CBU's—anti-personnel shrapnel bombs aimed at wiping out all Vietnamese not under concentration-camp control. Brautigan can get away with his freedom by living mentally in the interstices of the manipulative social structure and by ignoring both imperialism and racism. He is not alone there. Brautigan has been taken up as a tribal hero, along with the plain-folks Mister Dylan of "Country Pie" and the pastoral evocations of the uncomplicated South (The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival). He is part of what's been called the Woodstock Nation, living, as one friend said about herself yesterday, as if "our" revolution had already happened. All right. We simplify our lives and try to pass them in inner quiet and mutual respect. A week ago after a day of housebuilding, I went swimming with friends in a nearby pond. Three young people were already at the pond. We didn't know them, but from their faces and clothes we understood that they were our people. We talked about where we lived in the area, and discovered mutual friends. We were all in the Other Place. The Woodstock Nation, the tribes. Until the local police chief came to kick us out: "Around here we expect people to behave themselves," he said. The America of institutions has always known how to handle Indians: exterminate the rebels, herd the rest into reservations to live on organic foods and organic mescaline, commercialize then idealize their culture once it's no longer a threat.

I don't want to live on a reservation. I, and many of my friends and students, having been very excited by Richard Brautigan, have begun to see why he's been so much a cult hero: like the Beatles, he gives people the assurance that they can be free and part of a community of free people, now.

About a year ago, Ray Mungo published in a commune magazine an essay that spells out the politics of a major portion of the Woodstock Nation:
"You are an independent state. If you want peace find it in your heart. Form a domestic and foreign policy. Find clever ways to keep the Suez Canal open unless and until you can provide all your needs independently of anybody else . . . Don't exploit your brother 'cause it ain't nice and anyway Johnson & the USA have already proved it won't work . . .

"What your underdeveloped country needs is a little corner to be warm, some great books to read and write, good grains and fresh meat and whole milk to feed yourself, unlimited access to music and painting supplies (hey, did you know there is free music in the spheres, not to mention the public libraries?), and loads of love. And fresh air and room to roam."

Richard Brautigan's version of that country is called "iDEATH" and its chief raw material is Watermelon Sugar. So Brautigan is even further into another place than Ray Mungo. A place of the spirit. But I am suspicious of a revolution of the spirit that turns its back on a revolution against the institutions of death.

I wonder; is it possible to have both Brautigan's revolution and Che's? To change society requires some share of those same qualities that Brautigan's style denies: causality, goal orientation, and outrage. We have to look at the debris of American cities and be angry. We have to respond with reasonable fury to the attempts by the ruling class to manipulate us and to control the rest of the world. We must be organized and move toward the goal of a life-nourishing society, while Brautigan's style conveys a peaceful, humorous response which seems to transcend present evil.

The cover of Trout Fishing In America is important. It shows a young couple in front of the statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco's Washington Square. The girl is dressed in a long skirt, high boots, wire-rimmed glasses, and a lace hair band; the man is wearing a nineteenth century hat, a vest and black coat over his paisley shirt and beads. He too has wire-rimmed glasses. With his vest and glasses, with her boots and lace, they look like something out of an earlier America. They reflect the nostalgia which permeates the book: for a simpler, more human, pre-industrial America. Brautigan knows it's gone. But some of the values in this book are derived from this kind of nostalgia. Brautigan has created a pastoral locked in the past, a pastoral which cannot be a viable social future.

I want to live in the liberated mental space that Brautigan creates. I am aware, however, of the institutions that make it difficult for me to live there and that make it impossible for most people in the world. Brautigan's value is in giving us a pastoral vision which can water our spirits as we struggle—the happy knowledge that thereis another place to breathe in; his danger, and the danger of the style of youth culture generally, is that we will forget the struggle.

Seib,1971

"Trout Fishing in America: Brautigan's Funky Fishing Yarn"
Kenneth Seib
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1971, pp. 63-71.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan's several novels and books of poems, most of which have been praised by reviewers like Herbert Gold and John Ciardi, are now being widely read in the campuses across the United States. Brautigan probably deserves popularity, for he has a lot going for him. He writes a terse, readable prose that often seems the output ot an extremely hip computer that has been programmed with the styles of Hemingway, McGuffey's Reader, and the Berkeley Barb. His postage-stamp chapters allow for fast reading and a lot of skipping around—no mean virtues in the age of McLuhan. His unconventional wisdom distils many disparate things now in the heads of Woodstock generation: Brautigan "gets it all together" and is plugged in to the vibrations of the day.

But whether, as Ciardi claims, "Brautigan manages effects the English novel has never produced before" is another matter. His prose often slips into a primer flatness . . . and his philosophy is sometimes sophomoric and pretentious. In Watermelon Sugar, Brautigan's science fiction projection of the future, is overly "sweet" in most senses of the word, and the realms of iDEATH and inBOIL seem either too vague or too personal to take on genuine parabolic significance. Perhaps the most serious criticism that one can direct against Brautigan is that his novels lack structural design, that they are random observations and experiences strung together with cute chapter titles and little overall unity.

Of his best novel, Trout Fishing in America, this is not the case. A spokesman for the Viking Press admitted that "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." Actually, it was and it wasn't. Brautigan is admittedly no Isaak Walton, but the title functions in at least three different ways to give the book unified form, viewpoint, and meaning.

First of all, the narrator, presumably Brautigan himself) is Trout Fishing in America. The opening chapter, titled "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America," not only describes the front photograph, but suggests the author's disguise—his "cover." The most obvious objects in the photograph are Brautigan, looking like an unemployed buffalo hunter, and his lady companion—but nowhere are they mentioned in the description. Their "cover" is obviously successful. There are false identities, disguises, in several places in the novel: the waterfall that turns into a staircase, or the Mayor of the Twentieth Century who "wore trout fishing in America as a costume to hide his own appearance from the world." Moreover, there are letters written to Trout Fishing in America from his friend Pard and from "an ardent Admirer," plus some replies from Trout Fishing in America to the letters and to some of the early chapters.

Brautigan, then is identifying himself with the title. But what does it mean? Trout Fishing in America—the phrase suggests open spaces, cascading waterfalls and clear streams, the drama of the rugged individualist pitted against the raw forces of nature. One has visions of the Hemingway hero fishing the Big Two-Hearted Rivers of the world, finding solace from a lost generation in the crystal waters near Burguete:
"As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down."

Trout Fishing in America suggests the myth of America itself, a land of vast open spaces, of unlimited resources and opportunities, and of streams into which one only has to toss a bent pin in order to pull out fish of astonishing sizes. The opening chapter fittingly describes the statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco's Washington Square—Brautigan, like Franklin, is writing an "Autobiography." Brautigan's book is Franklin's "Autobiography" turned upside down. Not about the way to wealth, Trout Fishing in America is an account of the author's rejection of the Puritan ethic and his discovery of the way to Self. As a child, the narrator saw "with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn." The three-cornered hat, traditionally associated with the early American Puritans, reveals these fishermen as Puritan Americans angling for success and riches—and the narrator is taught to fish for the same things. In his disguise as Trout Fishing in America, therefore, Brautigan presents himself as the typical American, a believer in the doctrine of hard work, oriented toward success and money-making, and a staunch defender of the American dream, the myth of the Great Outdoors.

By the end of the novel, however, the narrator and Trout Fishing in America become two separate personae. Trout Fishing in America is seen for the last time, properly enough, near the Big Wood River, ten miles from Ketchum, Idaho—where Hemingway killed himself. The chapter is Brautigan's farewell to the Hemingway code of masculine endurance and romantic pantheism. Like the Fisher King, the narrator has been angling over a sterile waste land. In the California bush country, he takes up residence in a "strange cabin above Mill Valley" (92), sheds his illusions, discovers his own sexual and creative powers (as he started to in the fantasy sequence with the rich couple in the bookstore), and creates his own world—like the Kool-Aid Wino from his childhood who "created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himseslf by it" (10).

Trout Fishing in America, then, is first of all the autobiography of a societal drop-out, a contemporary hipster's progress from Jack Armstrong to Jerry Rubin. Trout fishing as a central metaphor becomes especially poignant in our current age of ecology, an age when America's fish and wildlife are rapidly being obliterated. Like the trout, the narrator is the victim of a technological world that cares little about him and his kind. Again like the trout, whose watery and insubstantial world creates the boundaries of its own reality, the narrator creates his own world in Mill Valley—"It took my whole life to get here" (92).

Second, the title Trout Fishing in America implies another dissection—and the subject is perhaps becoming tiresome—of the American Dream. The description of Ben Franklin's statue is comic, for everything—statue, grass, trees, weather—is described in detail except the people in the photograph. The implication is that Franklin's America, the America of today, concerns itself with everything but people. The novel, therefore, becomes a picaresque tale of a somewhat funky narrator, a modern Don Quixote, who is on the road searching for the romantic ideals of his childhood and for the genuinely human. What he discovers is a series of disenchantments. A waterfall turns out to be a wooden staircase. The woods are filled with NO TRESSPASSING signs ("4/17 of a Haiku") or similarly ominous warnings—"IF YOU FISH IN THIS CREEK, WE'LL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD" (60). There is Mooresville, Indiana, home of John Dillinger, where there is always "a single feature, a double feature and an eternal feature" (13)—violence, boredome [sic], and anxiety. There is the inaccessibility of the "good" fishing places like Grider Creek ("I don't have a car") and Tom Martin Creek ("You had to be a plumber to fish that creek"), and the crowded camping grounds of places like Big Redfish Lake. There are the sad dead of Graveyard Creek, and the dead fish or Worsewick Hot Springs, "their bodies turned white by death, like frost on iron doors" (43). There is the inhuman destruction of the coyotes at Salt Creek that makes the narrator think of the gas chamber at San Quentin, and of Caryl Chessman and Alexander Robillard Vistas:
"Then the witnesses and newspapermene and gas chamber flunkies would have to watch a king wearing a coyote crown die there in front of them, the gas rising in the chamber like a rain mist drifting down the mountain from Salt Creek. It had been raining here for two days, and through the trees, the heart stops beating." (54)

But most of all, there are the winos, the poor, and the disaffiliated. The poor who wait for sandwich time at the church near Washington Square find only a leaf of spinach in their bread; the bums who pick cherries for Rebel Smith wait like vultures for her discarded half-smoked cigarettes; the winos and impoverished artists talk of opening up a flea circus or committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter. "Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss" (18).

Nowhere is the distance between trout-fishing allurements and human neglect more evident than in Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a legless one-man riot who appears throughout the novel "staggering around in a magnificent chrome-plated steel wheelchair" (45). Shorty is in many ways the quintessential American. He is a rugged individualist; he is cheerful and energetic, a kind of nether-world Rotarian; he is a Whitman-like, boisterous democrat—he is, by God, as good as any man—and he drinks in public view "just like he was Winston Churchill." Moreover, he is a militant patriot, badgering the Italians in North Beach by shouting obscenities at them in fake Italian ("Tra-la-la-la-la-la- Spa-ghet-tii!"). Near the end of the novel, the narrator's daughter carries off one of Shorty's garlic sausages: "Just then the Benjamin Franklin statue turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox at the other end of the park" (97). Helpless, Shorty stares after her "as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger." The space between them is the gulf of possibility and failure, the orgiastic future and the impotent present. The child still has the opportunity of achieving success; meaningfully, Franklin's statue give her the green go-sign, the same "green light" that Nick sees at the end of the Buchanan's dock in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. For Shorty, the traffic light is red. His life has come to a stop, and he spends his days passed out in a wine-stupor in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. "Trout Fishing in America Shorty," the narrator accurately observes, "should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square" (47).

Trout Fishing in America, therefore, is a hipster's view of America's square-world ethics, societal goals founded on achievement, wealth, and success—the whole Ben Franklin syndrome. The central metaphor of the novel, trout fishing, implies through its associations the abundance, the richness, the good life that is every American's supposed birthright and the achievement of which is every American's dream. But Brautigan's view is from down under, from that of a societal freak who spends his days at San Francisco's Walden Pond for Winos and finds consolation in fantasy, art, and the pleasure of merely circulating. He has discovered what Alonso Hagen found almost seventy years before. Trout Fishing in America is a fraud, at best a chronicle of loss, frustration, and despair. Hagan's diary is a spiritual accounting of America's resources during the twentieth century: "Alonso Hagen went fishing 160 times and lost 2,231 trout for a seven-year average of 13.9 trout lost every time he went fishing" (85).

But the title functions in still a third way as a controlling center of the novel. In many ways, Brautigan remains Trout Fishing in America to the very end. The book promotes the precise agrarian myth that in part the author seeks to nullify. Throughout the novel is a sense of the purity of nature, of the individualism of those isolated few who have inherited America's pioneer spirit, and the untapped primal energies that lie beneath the surface of our eroded landscape. For example, the beautiful energy of the hunchback trout: "I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy" (57), and the lingering spirit of Charles Hayman that still permeates Hayman Creek. Brautigan's descriptions of natural wildlife and surroundings are done with a loving care that denies cynicism, and his use of American placenames suggests a delight in even the sounds that Americans attach to their rivers, lakes, and campsites. Nature is fiercely present throughout the book in a way that reveals Brautigan's fondness of her.

On the other hand, urban life presents the most evil appearance in the novel. Room 208 of a cheap hotel in San Francisco harbors potential violence and a prostitute trying to escape from her "spade pimp." The winos and the poor of Washington Square seem, for all of the author's sympathetic protrayal, sad and out of it. New York City is so hot that the narrator sleeps wrapped in a wet sheet ("I felt like a mental patient") and sees the apartment dwellers as "dead people." The alternative is rejection of urban life, of the business ethic, of technology—and Brautigan trudges in the footsteps of Thoreau to the strange cabin above Mill Valley.

Granting the enthusiasm for flora and fauna, wildlife and isolation, Trout Fishing in America seems a pessimistic book. No joyous hymns to the seasons, no genuine celebration of nature's wonders—only a sense of waste and unnatural death, as in the account of the trout that dies from a drink of port wine. The incidental characters give only negative impressions: the AMA surgeon, for example, who is on the run from socialized medicine, oblivious to the needs of the sick and poor; or Mr. Norris, who cannot remember the names of his own children and who finds (albeit in Brautigan's imagination) that the proximity of a dead body mars the beauty of his campsite. Like the sheep near Wells Summit that have "lulled themselves into senseless sleep, one following another like the banners of a lost army" (36), Americans have become in Brautigan's view the embodiment of Woodstock generation slogans. America has become "Amerika" (Brautigan mentions Kafka in the first chapter), a nation of sheep. Watching the sheep at Wells Summit after meeting a shepherd who appropriately looks like "a young Adolf Hitler," the narrator thinks of Stalingrad, that disastrous slaughter of World War II, the culmination of the Nazi sheep-like march to destruction. The Witness for Trout Fishing in America Peace Parade at the end of the novel is further indication of the author's wary view of America's future. "America needs no other proof," he states ironically. "The Red Shadow of Gandhian noviolence Trojan horse has fallen across America, and San Francisco is its stable" (99). The message is clear enough: America has deteriorated from a nation of rugged trout fishermen to a callous assembly of inhuman surgeons and witless Norrises who are fearful of the young, of genuine protest, of the future. Brautigan's is, of course, the almost platitudinous message of the Age of Aquarius.

The novel ends with chapters on garbage, wreckage, the selling and bartering of land and animals, and a meditation on Leonardo Da Vinci, now working as a designer of fishing lures for the South Bend Tackle Company. In one of the funniest sequences of the novel, at the Cleveland Wrecking Company, the narrator inquires about a used trout stream (plus all accessories) for sale at bargin prices:
"'We're selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left . . .'

"'We're selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we're also selling extra. The insects we're giving away free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of stream.'

"'How much are you selling the stream for?' I asked.

"'Six dollars and fifty-cents a foot,' he said. 'That's for the first hundred feet. After that it's five dollars a foot.'

"'How much are the birds?' I asked.

"'Thirty-five cents apiece,' he said. 'But of course they're used. We can't guarantee anything.'" (104)

The chapter is a surreal and miniaturized version of the Franklin business ethic and the modern consumer craze carried to a logical extreme—the sale of America itself. Having become another used commodity, landscape is portioned out by friendly, affable hustlers to those with a keen eye for bargains. Waterfalls are appropriately stored in the plumbing department with toilets and urinals, for our streams have become natural water closets. The Cleveland Wrecking Company has few animals for sale because few are left. But the many wild birds, the hundreds of mice, and the millions of insects are the natural inheritors of the future.

During this wasteland vision of apocalypse, Brautigan quotes from three authors— Ashley Montagu, Marston Bates, and Earnest Albert Hooton. The books quoted move in a general historical progression: Man: His First Million Years, Man in Nature, and Twilight of Man. With its insistence on the passing of man in nature, the novel places us in twilight. If we are all going to hell in a Trout Fishing in America canoe, how a writer ends his novel makes little difference—or whether he writes at all, for that matter, which accounts for Brautigan's somewhat careless style. Trout Fishing in America ends with the word mayonnaise—"Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" (111).

Trout Fishing in America is a solid achievement in structure, significance, and narrative technique. For all its surface peculiarity, moreover, the book is centrally located within a major tradition of the American novel—the romance—and is conditioned by Brautigan's concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past. Its seemingly loose and episodic narrative, its penchant for the marvelous and unusual, its pastoral nostalgia—all of these things give it that sense of "disconnected and uncontrolled experience" which Richard Chase finds essential to the romance-novel. Brautigan's offhand manner and sense of comic disproportion give to the narrative and extravgance and implausability more suited to the fishing yarn and tall-tale than to realistic fiction. Lying just below the comic exuberance of the book, furthermore, is the myth of the American Adam, the ideal of the New World Eden that haunts American fiction from Cooper to the present. The narrator of Trout Fishing in America is Leatherstocking perishing on the virgin land that once offered unbounded possibility, modern man longing for the restoration of the agrarian simplicity of pioneer America. That a life of frontier innocence is no longer possible adds to the desperate tone and comic absurdity of the narrator's frustrated excursions into the American wilderness.

Gillespie,1974

"Rats Reviews"
Bruce R. Gillespie
SF Commentary: The Independent Magazine about Science Fiction, 40 May 1974, pp. 52-54.
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.

Trout fishing in America is an activity. Trout fishing in America is a place. And somehow Richard Brautigan makes us believe that this magical phrase represents all the activities, people, and places that he discovers during his travels around America.

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA is a group of forty-seven short episodes, none of them longer than eight pages. The publishers say that this is a novel. It isn't, but is more than a collection of short stories. The book describes some events and observations that occurred to the narrator while he and his woman and child and friends wandered around rural America. The publishers say that Richard Brautigan become "a cult among the young." Well, he's over thirty (born in 1935), and he's not a cult with me, but like many of America's young people he and his friends are interested in living a free, non-urban, non-technological life close to nature.

The narrator of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA says that when he was a child his grandfather told him about trout fishing. "He had a way of describing trout as if they were precious and intelligent metal." When the narrator sets out on his travels, he spends much of his time looking for good trout streams. He investigates many other long-forgotten delights of rural America—although most of these bits of paradise are never quite what they seem.

"One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland," he writes, "at a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white I could almost feel its cold spray." Even as a child he was always looking for the perfect spot to go trout fishing. At that age he thought he had found it. Next morning he got up early, took slices of white bread to make into doughballs for bait and set off. As he approached the creek he saw that it did not look right. When he came close enough, he found that it wasn't the trout stream he had been looking for. It wasn't even a stream. "The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. . . . I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood."

In TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA most of the ideal trout streams seem to turn into pieces of wood. Brautigan writes about Cleveland Wrecking Yard, where, he says, anybody can buy cheaply a used trout stream—all divided into bits. "We're selling it by the foot length," says the salesman at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. "You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left. A man came in here this morning and bought 563 feet." The waterfalls sell for $19 a foot. The birds, fish, flowers, and insects come in separate lots.

Like many people today, the narrator tries to live a truly free life. Out to live off the land, he must fish for trout. But to eat the trout, he must kill them. So what's the difference between industrial polluters killing trout and fishermen killing trout?

Brautigan shows that he realises this paradox. The narrator and his friend catch trout and lay it on a rock. Instead of breaking its neck, the narrator's friend pours port wine down the trout's throat. "The trout went into a spasm. Its body shook very rapidly like a telescope during an earthquake. . . . Some of the wine trickled out of its mouth and made a stain on the rock. The trout was laying very still now. 'It died happy,' he said." The narrator says that it is all right for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman but "It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine." Why?

One of the best episodes in TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA makes a hero out of a man who had gone fishing for seven years and hadn't caught a single trout. The narrator admires this man just as much as he admires people with the ability to catch trout.

One of the most likable characters in the book is an old man whose name is Trout Fishing in America. But before the novel ends, he dies.

This book has page after page of brilliantly epigrammatic prose, witty observations, funny stories, and meanings that might or might not be wise or terrifying. Somehow, all the pieces do form an entire jigsaw puzzle. Americans seem to love trout fishing—"this land is your land," and all that. But soon they'll destroy all their trout streams, all their sources of life. Even the people who celebrate nature, like the hippies who live in independent rural communities, help to destroy life. In Brautigan's song to freedom, there are many sour, funny notes of disappointment and death. But he sings so well that the tune comes out right anyhow.

The tune of IN WATERMELON SUGAR, however, does not come out right. It just comes out—sugary.

IN WATERMELON SUGAR is the story of an ideal counter-culture community, somehow existing in peace and contentment after the rest of industrial society has disappeared. (Presumably it wiped itself out.) "No one ever wrote a true novel about happiness," wrote Joseph Hone, and Richard Brautigan does his best to prove this right. This little heaven, iDEATH, is a dull place where most of the people we meet don't do much, and where even the most complicated conversations read like this: "'That was a wonderful dinner,' Bill said. 'Yeah, that was really fine,' Charlie said. 'Good stew.' 'Thank you.' 'See you tomorrow,' I said." And so on.

IN WATERMELON SUGAR becomes slightly more interesting when a group of rebels tries to ruin the community. However, the rebels must have been wrong all along, for eventually they end their rebellion by committing suicide without anybody doing very much to oppose them.

This is a fable that is written very simply, but it's duller than a sermon. How could the man who wrote this also have written TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA? Will the real Richard Brautigan please stand up?

Hearron,1974

"Escape through Imagination in 'Trout Fishing in America'"
Thomas Hearron
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, pp. 25-31.
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.

As Richard Brautigan says, his first novel, Trout Fishing in America, is "a vision of America." The work is firmly rooted in the American tradition of Twain and Hemingway, of works whose theme is that man's only salvation lies in escaping from the complexities of city life into the tranquility of the country. While Huck Finn could "light out for the Territory" and Nick Adams could find peace in the Michigan woods, Brautigan's narrator discovers that escape to the wilderness is no longer so simple. Instead of virgin forests, he finds camp grounds so overcrowded that a campsite becomes available only when someone dies. The problem, of course, is that in an urbanized America the wilderness has become so diminished that the tiny vestiges of it which remain are overrun by crowds of people trying to escape, if only for a weekend, from the city. Yet, if literal, physical escape to the wilderness has become impossible in contemporary America, the imaginative escape is still possible: such a notion is the heart of Trout Fishing in America.

Brautigan presents the idea through a type of metaphor peculiar to him: although metaphor is certainly not his invention, his particular use of it seems unique. The essence of metaphor, of course, is an imagined similarity between two disparate ideas. For example, when Burns writes that his "luv is like a red, red rose," he is implying not that his love is literally a rose but that the two are similar, a similarity which exists only in the mind. In Brautigan's novel however, the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor become fused: the imagined likeness becomes a literal rather than metaphorical identity. For example, Brautigan describes some trout in a stream as being "like fallen leaves." Immediately afterward, however, he says, "I caught a mess of those leaves for dinner." The progression here is important: beginning with the simile "like fallen leaves," an image of how the trout look in the stream, Brautigan converts the simile to a pure metaphor, "I caught a mess of those leaves." The metaphor, then, dynamically moves from a statement of similarity to a statement of identity: the leaves can be caught and eaten for dinner.

Another example, providing a more graphic illustration of the technique, describes a camp ground as being like an urban hotel: "they charged fifty cents a day, three dollars a week like a skidrow hotel, and there were just too many people there. There were too many trailers and campers parked in the halls. We couldn't get to the elevator because there was a family from New York parked there in a ten-room trailer" (TFA, p. 61). In a third example he describes going into a narrow canyon with a creek running in it as being like entering a department store: "Then I went into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department... We ended up at a large pool that was formed by the creek crashing through the children's toy section" (TFA, p. 31). The important element in these passages is that a metaphorical description, initiated by "like" or "as if", moves to a statement of literal identity. Once the camp ground is described as being like a cheap hotel, it becomes a hotel; once the creek is described as being like a department store, it becomes one. The distinctive aspect of this process is that the two parts of the comparison retain their identity in a peculiar synthesis: the camp ground becomes a hotel where campers and trailers are parked in the halls, and the creek becomes a department store where one can catch fish. The two terms of the comparison coexist.

The technique has two implications. It suggests the city's incursion into the wilderness, as artifacts of the artificial world, a hotel and a department store, have invaded the natural one. A more interesting implication is that such a use of metaphor—"Brautigan metaphors"—suggests a particular connection between imagination and reality, that the manner in which one thinks of and describes reality can alter reality itself, that a trout stream can change into a department store if one thinks of it as a department store.

Perhaps the best example of the technique occurs in the chapter, "The Kool-Aid Wino," which, though not explicitly about fishing for trout, embodies a connection between salvation and the imagination. Unable to work because of a rupture, a friend of the narrator's stays home to drink Kool-Aid all day; the language in which his making the Kool-Aid is described suggests an analogy with the Eucharist. To the friend, making Kool-Aid is a "ceremony" which must be performed "in an exact manner and with dignity." The water faucet used to fill the jar emerges from the ground "like the finger of a saint," and when the jug is filled, "like the inspired priest of an exotic cult, he had performed the ceremony well" (TFA, p. 9). Thus, the language indicates a link between the making of the Kool-Aid (grape flavor, by no accident) and the transubstantiation of the wine in the Eucharist; that the friend is termed a wino suggests that the Kool-Aid magically turns into wine, an allusion to the miracle at the wedding in Cana.

Making the Kool-Aid is a religious rite for the purpose of salvation, yet Brautigan's noting how the friend turns off the water links it to the imagination: "When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination" (TFA, p. 9). The friend is, then, both priest and brain surgeon, but what is especially important is that he removes "a disordered portion of the imagination." Salvation requires that one have a healthy imagination, and by curing defects of the imagination the priest-surgeon opens the way to salvation. In this way, the friend can survive: "He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it" (TFA, p. 10). Magically, almost religiously, the healthy imagination can create a "Kool-Aid reality" which is more congenial than the urbanized reality of contemporary America.

The healthy imagination, then, can change even a "No Trespassing" sign, an indication that the wilderness has been bought, fenced off, and interdicted to the public, into "4/17 OF A HAIKU" (TFA, p. 6)—into a product of the artistic imagination. A further example that the imagination can transform reality occurs in "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?" Sitting in the hot sun in San Francisco's Washington Square, the narrator perceives that the only shade in the park comes from a statue and falls on a beatnik:
"The shade came down off the Little Hitchcock Coit statue of some metal fireman saving a metal broad from a mental fire. The beatnik now lay on the bench and the shade was two feet longer than he was.

"A friend of mine has written a poem about that statue. Goddamn, I wish he would write another poem about that statue so it would give me some shade two feet longer than my body" (TFA, p. 88)

Two ideas are crucial here: the fire from which the woman is rescued is a mental fire, with salvation again depicted as being mental rather than physical; an act of the imagination, writing a poem, can make the statue give more shade, with language, the intermediary through which the imagination acts, altering the reality that it describes.

In the same chapter the imagination shows itself capable of feats greater than changing a creek into a department store or making a statue give more shade when it literally has the power to raise the dead. Watching his daughter play, the narrator muses on her red dress: "Wasn't the woman who set John Dillinger up for the FBI wearing a red dress? They called her 'The Woman in Red.' It seemed to me that was right. It was a red dress, but so far, John Dillinger was nowhere in sight" (TFA, p. 87). Soon, however, the inevitable happens: John Dillinger is gunned down in the sandbox: "I was right about 'The Woman in Red,' because ten minutes later they blasted John Dillinger down in the sandbox" (TFA, p. 88). Merely thinking about John Dillinger is enough to cause him to appear. The idea that thought alone has the power to conjure up a physical presence is common in the early development both of the individual mind and of human culture in general, for it is basically a magical notion, and "magical" is an excellent description of Brautigan's view of the imaginative faculty, which through language can alter reality by providing a mental escape from its hardships.

Despite its episodic nature, Trout Fishing in America describes the development of the narrator's imaginative faculty, a progression which can best be seen by looking at two chapters, one from near the beginning of the novel and the other from near the end. In the third chapter, "Knock on Wood (Part Two)," the narrator goes down to a different street corner in Portland and sees what he thinks is a trout stream:
"There was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel the cold spray.

"There must he a creek there. I thought, and it probably has trout in it" (TFA, p. 4).

Having gone home to prepare some fishing gear, the narrator returns in the morning, only to discover that what he saw is not a stream at all:
"But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. 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 for 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" (TFA, p. 5).

Something interesting results when this passage is juxtaposed with one from "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard." Having heard that the yard has a used trout stream for sale, the narrator goes to look at it, first at the waterfalls stacked against the wall in the used plumbing department, then at the stream itself:
"I had never in in my life seen anything like that trout stream. It was stacked in piles of various lengths: ten, fifteen, twenty feet, etc. There was one pile of hundred-foot lengths. There was also a box of scraps. The scraps were in odd sizes ranging from six inches to a couple of feet . . .

"I went up close and looked at the lengths of stream. I could see some trout in them. I saw one good fish. I saw some crawdads crawling around the rocks at the bottom.

"It looked like a fine stream. I put my hand in the water. It was cold and felt good" (TFA, pp. 106-107).

The parallels between these two passages should not go unnoticed. They both concern trout streams inside cities, Portland and, presumably, San Francisco. Of the two, the first with its fields and trees seems a more likely place to find a trout stream, but paradoxically the stream is not there; it does exist, however, cut up into pieces in a wrecking yard. The most important parallel, though, is that the conclusion of each passage involves an act of touching. Touching the "stream in "Knock on Wood (Part Two)" clinches the fact that it is really a flight of stairs, whereas touching it in "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard" results in a shock of surprise when the stream is discovered to be, in fact, a trout stream.

In "Knock on Wood" the stream fails to be transformed by a "Brautigan metaphor": it must be either a stream or a flight of stairs, but not both. On the other hand, the stream in the wrecking yard is transmuted by the metaphor: it can be cut up into sections, yet retain its identity as a trout stream. That the two terms of the metaphor can coexist suggests that the theme of the novel is the narrator's development of an imaginative faculty which has the power to change reality. As a boy, the narrator cannot make a flight of stairs become a creek, but as a man he is able to: when he finally encounters the object of his quest, the character named Trout Fishing in America (the essence of the wilderness), the meeting takes place on the Big Wood River (TFA, p. 89), a "wooden" stream where he can catch fish. Brautigan names two of his chapters "Knock on Wood" and mentions the Big Wood River twice, a coincidence of names hardly fortuitous.

The novel's theme, much like that of Wordsworth's The Prelude, is the development of the power of the imagination; acquiring such power results in an ability, like that in "Tintern Abbey," to summon imagination to one's aid in times of distress: it provides a way of escaping to nature even in the midst of a city. If Brautigan's novel is "a vision of America," it also reminds us that America is "often only a place in the mind" (TFA, p. 72). Through imagination one can still achieve an escape to the wilderness and a salvation from the anxieties of the city—even a mechanized, urban America from which literal escape and salvation have become increasingly harder to attain.

Vanderwerken,1974

"Trout Fishing in America and the American Tradition"
David L. Vanderwerken
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, pp. 32-40.
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 all its seeming formal disparities and discontinuities, Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America explores a very traditional theme, the gap between ideal America and real America, between Trout Fishing in America and Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Continually, Brautigan contrasts temporal and geographic America with a timeless America that is "often only a place in the mind." When the narrator's daughter, who embodies the innocent and hopeful state of mind that is, in part, Trout Fishing in America, flees Shorty, he "stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger" (TFA, p. 158). In another version of this central contrast, Brautigan pits Franklin's Philadelphia, the birthplace of the promise of America, against Carnegie's Pittsburgh, today's industrial horror. The spiritual distance between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh seems insurmountable, even as the divergence between America's mythical past and the American present seems irreconcilable. Despite the disillusionment, the sense of failure and loss pervading the novel, Brautigan attempts to bridge the gap through the artist's power of imagining America otherwise. In so doing, Brautigan becomes a legatee of an uncompromisingly idealistic strain of American writing that wills to redeem America through formal achievement. As Tony Tanner has noted, Trout Fishing in America, or ideal America, is "flourishing in the writer's imagination." Trout Fishing in America, then, is traditional in theme and form. Formal experimentation is no stranger to a literature that contains Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, U.S.A., Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five.

The example of Moby Dick is instructive in dealing with the structure and style of Trout Fishing in America, since Melvillean echoes, resound throughout the novel. Indeed, Brautigan's admiration for Melville is already on record. The sheer quantity of short chapters, their apparently random arrangement, their digressive nature, with a number of chapters seemingly unrelated to the narrative—all reflect the "careful disorderliness" of Moby Dick. The characters whom the narrator crosses in his meanderings are the equivalents of Moby Dick's various gams, which illuminate central thematic concerns. Stylistically, Brautigan's verbal inventiveness approaches Melville's. Trout Fishing in America is loaded with put-ons, parodies. throwaway comments, whimsical irony, pseudo-logic, mock scholarship—for example, the list of fishing books that includes no accounts of "Trout Death by Port Wine" (TFA, pp. 44-5), hyperbole, incongruous juxtapositions, and red herrings too numerous to document. For the careful reader, surprises lurk on even page. Both Moby Dick and Trout Fishing in America convey a sense of the imagination run wild in their stylistic wit and ingenuity. At times, the tones and rhythms of Brautigan's sentences shrewdly approximate Melville's, as the following passages from "The Lee Shore" and "The Towel" illustrate:
"Take heart. take heart, 0 Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

"0 it's far away now in the mountains that a photograph guards the memory of a man. The photograph is all alone out there. The snow is falling eighteen years after his death. It covers up the door. It covers up the towel" (TFA, p. 139).

Both writers delight in the unlimited freedom of the imagination, and both exhibit boundless pleasure in exploring the resources and possibilities of language. Brautigan's homage to Melville's experimental structure and style is omnipresent in Trout Fishing in America.

Furthermore, just as Melville slips hints to the reader on how to read Moby Dick, Brautigan keys the reader as well. Melville's cry, "God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught, Oh, Time, Strength. Cash, and Patience!" (142), suggests that Moby Dick is an organic process, continually creative, never complete. Other significant hints which reinforce the idea of organic form are; "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" (358), and "Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters" (287). In the same way, Brautigan, at one point calls a bookstore "a parking lot for used graveyards" (TFA, p. 32), where most books go unread and are out of print. Yet in the same passage, Brautigan cryptically mentions that "through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again" (TFA, pp. 32-33), In his novel, like Melville, Brautigan seeks an "organic process," a unique form that will revitalize well-worn materials. An explicit representation of the nature of the process can be found in the narrator's fantasy that Leonardo da Vinci is inventing a "new spinning lure for trout fishing in America": "I saw him first of all working with his imagination, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then taking it away and then coming back again with a different motion, and in the end the lure was invented" (TFA, pp. 175-176). Hopefully, a book that darts and rolls with the illusory life-like action of a lure, "spinning like wheels in the sea" (TFA, p. 39), will result. Trying a little of this and a little of that, changing pace and rhythm, endlessly experimenting and inventing—all aimed at keeping the reader disoriented, off balance and wary—perfectly describe Brautigan's method.

Besides the structural and stylistic similarities between the two writers, Brautigan and Melville converge in their use of controlling symbols. Both Moby Dick and Trout Fishing in America are fluid symbols, metamorphic, and chameleon-like. Melville tells us directly that "Moby Dick was ubiquitous" (177); Brautigan's Trout Fishing, as well, undergoes a variety of transformations. Both entities remain mysterious, unknowable, capable of accruing projected associations and values, yet never revealing their essential meanings. In attempting to arrive at some understanding of such phantoms, Melville and Brautigan circle their subjects again and again, hoping that obliquity will succeed where directness fails. Ultimately, Moby Dick and Trout Fishing in America elude fixed meanings, exist inviolate and indefinable, and retain their freedom in the province of the human imagination. As they should, whale and trout finally resist human grasps and swim free. For both Melville and Brautigan, only the pursuit itself, the continuing quest for the ineffable, holds lasting value. As Brautigan's frustrated, but resigned, Alonso Hagen says: "Somebody else will have to go out there" (TFA, p. 137) to search for Trout Fishing in America.

The protean form of the novel allows Brautigan great range in exploring his main theme of ideal America versus real America. Trout fishing as a symbol is metamorphic, surely, but at the same time constant in representing an ideal—the continuing historical appeal that America has for the human imagination as a place where all good things are possible. As Kenneth Seib says: "Trout Fishing in America suggests the myth of America itself, a land of vast open spaces, of unlimited resources and opportunities, and of streams into which one only has to toss a bent pin in order to pull out fish of astonishing sizes." Essentially, Trout Fishing in America is like an ungraduated yardstick, by which Brautigan measures contemporary America—and the kinds of measurements made vary amazingly.

In the opening chapters, Brautigan introduces his theme and his perspective of his materials, as well as positing his major assumption that a mythical Golden Age, from which we have fallen, once indeed existed in America. Brautigan draws a stark contrast in the opening "Cover" chapter between the statue of Benjamin Franklin, significantly located in Washington Square Park, and the poor who gather for free sandwiches every afternoon. The statue, holding out a seemingly generous fourfold "WELCOME" to the poor, parodies the Statue of Liberty and its command to "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses." As we immediately learn, America promises much but delivers little. The paltry spinach-leaf sandwich given to the narrator's friend hollowly echoes the philanthropic tradition associated with Franklin. When the narrator mentions Kafka's knowledge of Franklin's autobiography at the end of the chapter, Brautigan casts a perspective on the foregoing scene that holds for the entire novel. The weird sandwich and the strange little scene prepare us for later bizarre, grotesque, and incongruous items and incidents—trout steel, a wooden staircase that appears to be a waterfall—all detailing the Kafkaesque metamorphosis of Trout Fishing in America into Trout Fishing in America Shorty.

When Trout Fishing fondly recalls in the second chapter "people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn" (TFA, p. 5), he obviously alludes to America's Founding Fathers and to the nexus of ideals, values, and beliefs associated with them or projected upon them. As so many American writers have done, Brautigan views our mythical past with the inward eye of the imagination, assuming that an age of innocence, hopefulness, and harmony existed during the nation's dawning, with everything downhill since then. Instead of fishing for a new promise for man, later Americans fish for natural resources to exploit—"Maybe trout steel" (TFA, p. 4). Franklin becomes Carnegie; the way to wealth becomes the gospel of wealth. The narrator returns to the statue of Franklin, that Colonial giant and archetypal American, at least six times in the novel, as if seeking to recover somehow the lost paradise through some communion with the statue. Indeed, the vast number of statues, monuments, gravestones, and inscriptions dwelt upon in the novel suggests that Brautigan's passion is to coerce these relics of Trout Fishing in America back to life. Yet Franklin remains mute, and the narrator encounters only winos, the defeated, the hopeless, the criminal, and, of course, Shorty. In rage, the narrator once says that Shorty should be buried next to the Franklin statue and a monument erected to him—a most explicit juxtaposition of ideal America with real American which measures the distance between them.

As Brautigan traces our downward historical journey through the contrasts and ironies of the various episodes, he reinforces his theme by carefully placing most episodes in specific time contexts: times of day, seasons of the year, ages of the narrator and characters. A consistent cyclical pattern emerges, the parts of which gather very traditional emotional and psychological associations. The framework, in turn, suggests a broader parallel, as times, seasons, and ages are linked to a spiritual record of America. Richard Brautigan, as well as his Alonso Hagen, keeps a diary of Trout Fishing in America.

For example, most of the moments of profound disillusionment in the novel occur on spring mornings during the narrator's childhood. The innocence and expectancy of childhood, the renewal of spring and the possibility and creativity of morning deepen the felt sense of loss. On one childhood morning in spring, the narrator discovers that an apparent waterfall is in reality a flight of wooden stairs, and his response conveys his pain: "I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing" (TFA, p. 8). On an April morning the narrator and his friends are inspired to chalk "Trout fishing in America" on the backs of the first graders. When the principal checks their spontaneous and exuberant prank, the joy of spring becomes the melancholy of autumn: "But after a few more days trout fishing in America disappeared altogether as it was destined to from its very beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade" (TFA, p. 62). Clearly, the narrator's comment here refers to more than what happened to the first grade; the episode is nothing less than a parable of America. Yet again, it is "one spring day" (TFA, p. 133) when, as "just a kid" (TFA, p. 129), the narrator happens across The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen, with its tedious and depressing chronicle of frustration and failure: "I have never even gotten my hands on a trout" (TFA, p. 137). With disastrous springs such as these, what can summer bring? Essentially, summer confirms the suspicions of spring.

The narrator's peripatetic search for trout over a long, moribund summer composes the bulk of the novel. Brautigan stresses summer's heat with its overtones of desert and hell. Every stream has some flaw: Grider Creek is inaccessible (TFA, p. 21); Tom Martin Creek "turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch" (TFA, p. 28); Graveyard Creek suggests its own limitations (TFA, p. 31); Hayman Creek seems cursed (TFA, p. 40); Salt Creek has cyanide capsules along its banks (TFA, p. 83). Even the good fishing at Lake Josephus sours when the baby gets sick (TFA, p. 126). Much like the streams, the people encountered prove equally obstinant: the shepherd who resembles a "young, skinny Adolf Hitler" (TFA, p. 52); "the original silent old farmer" (TFA, p. 88); the bitter surgeon fuming about "bad debts" (TFA, p. 114). When a hostile store clerk calls the narrator a "Commie bastard" (TFA, p. 96), he ruefully comments: "I didn't learn anything about fishing in that store" (TFA, p. 96). Nor, indeed, from any of these residents of the inferno. Finally, on a hot July day, the narrator learns of the death of a fellow angler, Hemingway, and sees Trout Fishing in America for the last time. Directly after this, the narrator ends his journey "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America" (TFA, p. 149).

With the waning of the year comes autumn, the season belonging to Trout Fishing in America Shorty: "He was the cold turning of the earth; the bad wind that blows off sugar" (TFA, p. 69). The autumn that "fell over the first grade" in the spring is made flesh in Shorty, the pathetic middle-aged drunkard and cripple with his garish "chrome-plated steel wheelchair" (TFA, p. 69). Although Shorty personifies contemporary American reality, he continually appeals to children as if wistfully yearning to recover vicariously a second chance. The children wisely avoid him: "After a while the children would run and hide when they saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty coming" (TFA, p. 70). Shorty's true children are the sordid occupants of "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America." In "The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty," the narrator's baby daughter must decide between real America and ideal America:
"'Come here, kid,' he said. 'Come over and see old Trout Fishing in America Shorty.'

"Just then the Benjamin Franklin statue turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox at the other end of the park.

"The sandbox suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty. She didn't care about his sausages any more either.

"She decided to take advantage of the green light, and she crossed over to the sandbox" (TFA, pp. 157-1588).

The child instinctively chooses Franklin's green light over Shorty's brown sausage, not so hopeful a choice as it appears. She is, after all, a child and will eventually experience the same disillusionment as her father; she is lured only by a sandbox—a miniature wasteland. Given the mood and tone of the novel, one cannot help thinking that autumn will ultimately fall over her, too.

The novel, which begins in February, ends with four chapters set in winter's atmosphere of depression, twilight gloom, and death. When Ishmael's soul is a "damp, drizzly November," he heads for the sea. When the "wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line," Nick Carraway goes back to the Midwest. What does Brautigan do when it is a "funky winter day in rainy San Francisco" (TFA, p. 175), after abandoning his quest for Trout Fishing in America? How can he bridge the widening river between real and ideal America? What response will be adequate? Brautigan, like Melville and Fitzgerald, responds in the only way possible for the artist—through a transformative and inventive act of his imagination, which will be an act of redemption and transcendence. The narrator's vision of da Vinci "inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America" (TFA, p. 175), thereby regenerating and revitalizing America, is a transparent expression of his own aim in the novel. Just as Leonardo's lure, "The Last Supper," redeems America—"thirty-four ex-presidents catch their limit" (TFA, p. 176)—Brautigan envisions an equivalent achievement for his book. Earlier, in the crucial chapter, "Trout Fishing on the Bevel," the narrator fishes Graveyard Creek, but he finds himself disturbed by the "poverty of the dead" (TFA, p. 31) in the poor cemetery. At this point, he has a similar vision, in which he himself transforms the poverty through the richness of his imagination:
"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" (TFA, p. 31).

Here, the narrator is a redeemer who orders disparate materials and who turns trash into transcendence. Yet, as a writer, Brautigan ties his flies with words. In receiving his legacy of a pen with a gold nib that "takes on the personality of the artist" (TFA, p. 179), the narrator expresses his hope of finding a unique style and voice for rendering his imaginative ideal—Trout Fishing in America—and of making an individual contribution to one great tradition of American fiction.

In choosing to write the kind of fiction that he does—symbolic, parabolic, fantastic—Brautigan clearly aligns himself with the tradition of American romancers, as opposed to that of the realists. The "actual and the imaginary" collide on every page of Trout Fishing in America. In his conviction that an imaginative ideal America is the only true America, Brautigan joins the tradition of Thoreau, who says: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains." Hints of the same kind of distant perspective appear in Brautigan's novel with references to time, death, and eternity—particularly in "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity" (TFA, p. 128). As with Thoreau, all ultimates are absorbed into and transcended by the imagination in an effort to create a universe that "answers to our conceptions." Although Brautigan would happily send that emissary from the actual—Shorty—to realistic writers, he intends to keep Trout Fishing in America for himself.

Bales,1975

"Fishing the Ambivalence, or, a Reading of 'Trout Fishing in America'"
Kent Bales
Western Humanities Review, vol. 29, Winter 1975, pp. 29-42.
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.

Reading Richard Brautigan often gives me the sensation of gazing in a mirror. He and I are nearly the same age, grew up in similar circumstances in small Western towns and cities, and moved to the Bay Area at about the same time. There is, then, a narcissist pleasure in seeing what feels like my own experience given a clarity of expression I have rarely been able to give it. But beyond this shared experience I sense a larger similarity. With a shift in focus I see, "behind" me in the mirror, my society, the social "nature" and its natural setting as they are now, including the social myths that at once unite and divide the society as they mediate its sense (and senses) of reality. Doubtless I assent to the "truth" of this reflection in part because I recognize myself in the foreground, but it is not merely self-love that validates Brautigan's image of society for me. Rather it is the truth of the self-image, the accurate picture it gives of my ambivalence toward the experience that is "mine" and helped make me "me." We have learned to recognize ambivalence in ourselves; Brautigan's mirror to society shows it at work there as well—and on a scale transcending individual ambivalences, and not merely their sum. Trout Fishing in America shows especially well the boundaries and common ground of these two related ambivalences, and here I will try, from my position near the mirror, to describe their topographies. Although the parallax will be a problem by moving closer for just a while. My reminiscences will be brief.

I was a trout fisherman once. It started in Kansas, where the only trout are behind glass at the fish-hatchery aquarium. Maybe there were some in western Kansas that had taken a wrong turn in the Rockies and were dying of heat and muddy water, but if so they were too far to be in my Kansas. Besides, who wants muddy trout? I began trout fishing as many do—maybe most—by reading. Outdoor Life wasn't The Compleat Angler, of course, but it did the job for a boy as well as Isaak Walton could, probably better. After I was hooked I found evidence in the public library that others had been caught in Kansas before me, for there were whole books on famous trout streams—Brautigan parodies their titles in Trout Fishing in America. Since I was their first reader in twenty-seven years (unless the librarian read them on the sly), Trout Fishing in America, that mythical presence Brautigan's book evokes, must not have fished much in Kansas in the 'thirties and 'forties. I probably hooked myself. Even trout do sometimes.

They fished for catfish there in central Kansas. The ambitious fished for big ones using liver chunks or blood-soaked dough on treble hooks, squidding line, and star-drag reels taped and tied on home-rigged cane poles. Lucky ones got their picture in the paper: "Bob Schutz and Ev Bumgartner of Great Bend are pictured here with their catch on the Little Smokey last Saturday. Bob's cat goes forty-six pounds, Ev's fifty-two. Congratulations boys." In days stolen from farming or railroading these men went after the best the land offered. But there were a few, like me, who didn't find that good enough. I apprenticed myself to one, a railroad engineer, who taught me to fly-cast. I practiced for hours with my father's old flyrod (for he too had once been caught, it seems), handicapped according to tradition by a rolled newspaper under the casting arm. When I was ready we fished sandpits, pretending the bluegill and occasional bass we caught were trout. Then, when I was twelve, I no longer had to pretend. We moved to Salt Lake City, where there are trout in the irrigation ditches as well as in the cold mountain streams that would dead-end in the desert if not diverted into those ditches. With just enough luck to keep me at it I fished where I could, going with friends to the mountains or by myself on the bus to the edge of town and hitching rides to good ditches. I won't memorialize the names here. Some readers will have their own to insert. The ditches, anyway, are nameless to me, by and large, but I remember the names of lakes, rivers, creeks, and sometimes say them to myself. Trout fishing does that to you.

One last reminiscence as part of my credentials for writing about Brautigan. I learned to swim in an alkali spring in the middle of a field in Kansas. It was easy to spot—nothing grew around it. We boys thought the alkali healed cuts and scratches but went there, not for medicine, but because the county lake was far away. Since alkali water was also free, we were able to take a quick swim and to deceive our parents about where we had been—or so we hoped as we brushed the dried alkali from our skin. (Who knows what parents know? I'm one myself now, know things about my children's lives they think are secret, yet I can't say if my parents knew about those trips. If they did I was permitted the pleasure of this deception, an act of love on their part I can now appreciate through not reciprocate.) It was fun sneaking off, swimming, and letting the sun dry us off as it already had the mud there in the gulley out of the wind. As a result of learning in alkali water, though, I couldn't put my face in the water while swimming until I was twenty. But I could swim. It makes a nice picture in my mind now, a little bit like the swimming holes Eakins painted except for that dry mud and the fact we never dived. Of course there was more green in his Pennsylvania than in my Kansas. There were trout streams too.

I don't live in Kansas now, I haven't lived in Utah for a long time, and I seldom fish—and then not for trout. Now that I've escaped those places I enjoy visiting them, though, and from time to time I have an itch to fish. Once in Berkeley, when things weren't going right, I gave the municipal pier a go. It worked, but not like trout fishing. Of course I was older and had other things to escape, and Berkeley's not Kansas—people in both places are glad of that. I wouldn't mind living in Berkeley again—it encouraged good ways of escaping.

Here I must qualify that word escape, for some of my readers may think it unfitting to evade, even temporarily, "reality" or "history." If they're Hegelians who hate any sniff of subjective idealism or Marxists feeling just as strongly about any idealism, Brautigan is unlikely to convince them otherwise, though he may be forced to serve their needs. But any sympathy with modern speculation about myth and its functions can show the way to where escape is both inevitable and possibly a critical act. For if myths govern all our ordering of reality, if all but the basic categories of intuition are set by them, then "to escape" is to live for a while through some myth other than the dominant one. As such its "reality" quotient will usually be low, it will be less likely to produce interpretations or actions that bring assent. But sometimes it will stir strong assent, for the dominant myth is itself a patchwork of those other and older myths, and under stress these patches balloon out into alternatives to the "reality" of the dominant. Grown men play at stalking the noble trout in Arcadia or Eden and return home and the eight-to-five refreshed as much by the crystal and ether in which they've moved as by the streams they've waded and the country air they've breathed. In this case they have not "merely" escaped. Myth and rural reality have interpenetrated, so that while the air may have reeked of sheep shit, as it does once in Trout Fishing in America, the smell is as real as the stench of smog and a reality not long sustained without a noble though temporary belief in the reality of crystal and ether. The taste of trout, likewise, is a reality that perpetuates the myth by validating it, for with such a reward who would not quest it again? Going trout fishing, then, keeps alive the myth of a pastoral world and is in turn given reality by the realities of "nature" it touches the fisherman with. Reading pastoral poetry or Outdoor Life brings the nearly forgotten world of the country idealized into the citizen's house and imagination; going trout fishing puts him literally back in nature, though his perceptions, his "nature," are determined in part by his reading in the poets or in Field and Stream. Myth and reality shape shape and revive each other in the fisherman's consciousness. But if "natural" reality is given new life, so too is urban reality and the myths that sustain it, though the new awareness can include a critical element that differentiates values and uncovers our contradictory allegiances. We see more easily, for example, how the myth of Moving to the Suburbs, or, A Piece of the Country of Your Own, mixes city and country values, and we are made to feel how contradictory they are. Yet we share them, with varying allegiances, in what becomes a web of ambivalent feelings. For under the circumstances—and they are the only ones obtaining—we are caught in a web of qualifying and contradictory allegiances, of mixed feelings, of ambivalence. The dominant myth, by unifying them in a pattern, tries at once to tame them and to draw on them for power. Brautigan, on the other hand, takes advantage of them for an art at once celebratory and critical.

Merely escapist artists exploit one of the patches as an escape route for their audience into an alternative world, but Brautigan inflates several patches, stretches them out so that we see the stitching holding them together. He places himself between the patches and invites us in. We can be at home there only if we can give assent to the myths we're among, yet we must see "the confinement of their discourse" (to quote Neil Schmitz, Brautigan's best critic) if we aren't to ignore the reality of those stitches. How obviously made! is one response, How true to life! is another, and they can co-exist, once we grant that our "reality" is always an interpreted thing. Of course people are really hungry and really die or are shut up in crazy houses for acting on a wrong perception of reality or because they're in somebody's way, but we see even this reality through myths that give often contradictory values to these facts. Dead revolutionaries in Chile or Indonesia seem quite different people according to the politics of your myth.

None of this is exactly news. Ambivalence is always with us. Nor is it news that ambivalence arises in part from gowing up, that the child learns it from moving through myth after myth away from the selfish to the social, giving up yet not renouncing real pleasures for other real, though perhaps deferred, ones. The need to escape plays its part too, for children, like adults, have a lot to escape from. We must escape responsibilities; usually they must escape from what they love—the parent whose demands infringe on their freedom, the world of adult purpose whose master they intend one day to become. They want to be free of growing up, they also want to grow up free—to be masters without paying the price. In escape as much as in growing up they learn ambivalence, learn how to love both the parent and the escape, both the goal and its substitute.

I wanted to Make It. I also wanted a larger stage than Kansas, for I felt confined by its reality. Emigrating or Westerning was an old expression of this desire, but by turning to trout fishing I added an ideal tinge to it. To Make It meant to escape, but until real escape came trout fishing had to do by transmuting bluegills and me into nobler species. But is also (or is this a trick of memory?) transmuted the real pleasures of childhood with its magic, making them part of a purposeful world. Play and reality joined as never before: fishing, swimming, hunting, reading gave idea as well as sheer physical pleasure, much as my playing at Deerslayher at an earlier age made decimating the trees in the neighbor's wood-lot mental and emotional as well as physical pleasure. The change to real trout fishing did not destroy the pleasure of indulging the idea, but it intensified the pleasure taken from the real. My sight became bifocal. It transmuted desert and brush-filled stream into their pastoral forms but also left them untouched, beautiful in their wild difference from the conventional. So as before pleasure was double, though the confinements of Utah made adjustments necessary and eventually made me exchange this myth for others closer to the goal of Making It.

Brautigan roots the myth of Trout Fishing in America where it belongs, in childhood longing to remain free yet master of the "real" world. In the substitute world of the trout stream one looks two ways: at oneself reflected in the mirror of a noble quest on Waltonian streams, and at the "reality" of the setting, which may be purling brook but which may also be brush-choked creek, open ditch, marsh, bog, anywhere the elusive trout has decided is home. Brautigan's narrator often comes on these realities while fishing, realities that can lead his thoughts back to the "civilized" world (as when sights warning of baited cyanide capsules set for coyotes lead him to Caryl Chessman in San Quentin's gas chamber) or to the pleasure of the myth even when denied (as when he has a map to where the trout are but no transportation. Throughout, this narrator testifies both to the power of myth and to the omnipresence of contradictory realities that are apprehended by us through other myths. In the second chapter he traces his awareness of Trout Fishing in America to where it is rooted, childhood memory. In less than a page he gives its source ("a stepfather of mine"), qualifies the claims to authority and love of that source (a stepfather who's an "old drunk"), and relates the attraction of the myth to the individual myth of Making It and to its nation-making equivalent, Building America: he envisions trout "as if they were precious and intelligent metal . . . used to make buildings, trains and tunnels. The Andrew Carnegie of trout!" To this Trout Fishing in America replies, "I remember with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn," thus directing us to the cover photograph and first chapter, "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America." For these root the book in collecive memory, in founding father Benjamin Franklin's myth of Making It by Making America, the model of which he bequeathed his son in the autobiography he wrote at the "dawn" of our history. Since the photograph shows a costumed Brautigan and woman before the statue of Franklin, and since the opening chapter ends with a reference to Kafka, maker of that myth bearing his name that contradicts so deeply Franklin's (though Brautigan would have us think Kafka naive as well), we are in a welter of cross purposes. There is Trout Fishing in America, Making It, Building America, or Conquering the Continent, Kafkaesque Modern Life, Hippie Anarchism and Eclecticism, or, Making Myself Anew, all set against each other yet qualifying each other as though together they have some corporate meaning. They have been stitched together, and the stitching clearly shows.

If this were only an ironic device we would have to choose, for when irony is dominant it forces a choice between alternatives. Is Franklin a natural father or a stepfather? Does the photograph dissociate Brautigan (or his narrator) from Franklin or associate them? In irony one must choose: to think they are associated is an irony against their dissociation, or vice versa. Its double talk must finally be resolved, the truth found out. But Brautigan does what he can to make resolution impossible, at least so definitely. Two narrative chapters, related in theme, makes the case more simply. They present Adam and Eve a long way from Eden.

In "Worsewick" the narrator and his "woman" and baby stop to bathe at a "huge bathtub" made by boarding up a creek where the hot water joins it. It is "nothing fancy," yet it is also "nice," despite the green slime and dozens of dead fish floating around. There's another minor inconvenience: the deerflies have at them until they're immersed in the water. There the narrator "gets ideas," his woman stashes the baby in the car for a nap, and like the flies outside he has at her there in the water of Worsewick Hot Springs. Since neither wants another baby the situation dictates coitus interruptus and provides a double climax for the chapter: "My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. His eyes were stiff like iron." How are we to take this chapter? this conclusion? They pose no problem if we read them as an irony against Arcadia. In that case "the profanation is complete" as Schmitz puts it. Granted, calling the story "Worsewick" punningly suggests that the lay wasn't the best ever, and the surroundings aren't at all "like the places the swells go," but unless one applies the biblical injunction against spilling seed or brings Norman Mailer's sexual ethic to bear on the act it's difficult to fault the act itself. Besides, it's "nice" there, and the ejaculated semen assumes a nebular shape. So it strikes me overly fastidious to assume that this is profanation of wildness or of sexual relations. One needs be prejudiced against dead fish. As a swimmer in alkali water I'm not, and I think Brautigan floats together sperm and iron-eyed fish to suggest that he isn't either. He's a realist, by which I mean he knows by now that trout aren't the "precious and intelligent metal" his stepfather made them seem. Besides, he knows if you don't dam the stream you can't use the hot springs for bathing, while if you dam it some fish will make the "mistake of going down the creek too far and ending up in the hot water, singing, 'When you lose your money, learn to lose."" That's the tone to take. The circumstances aren't Arcadian, but "real" Arcadians, if there ever were any, didn't bathe in trout streams either. They're too damn cold! The story, then, is not simply an irony against those who see only a stellar union in gloriously primordial conditions, but neither is it simply an irony against those who see only profanation. It's between the exclusionary alternatives, encompassing them but suggesting that both are extreme reactions. Brautigan's compromising term is "nice" rather than splendid or awful. Just because both man and flies "have at" the woman we needn't reduce man to the level of a fly. But we're sure warned not to make too much of him.

"Sea, Sea Rider" sets other ambivalences at play, as well as playing against "Worsewick." The title's a variant of "Easy Rider," now widely known as a result of Dennis Hopper's movie, only with "oceanic" overtones in this case that tune us into the ambivalences Brautigan wants. Not that the allusion isn't pretty ambivalent itself, since the easy rider of the blues gets his off other men's wives but is aced out by their returning husbands: "Made me love you, now your man done come." That tragi-comedy, however, plays ironically against Brautigan's version, in which the narrator's the easy rider and the woman's man sits stolidly watching, hat where you'd expect gun, knife, or erection. The narrator is reassured on this point: "'Don't worry about him,' the girl said. 'These things make difference to him. He's rich. He has 3,859 Rolls Royces.'" All this bizarrerie is arranged by a bookstore owner who then seizes the self-created occasion to indulge in his favorite fantasies: "'I'll tell you what happened up there,' he said in a beautiful anti-three-legged crow voice, in an anti-dandelion side of the mountain voice." But though the voice promises no nonsense, there's nonsense aplenty. His first fantasy's about love and art lubicrously twined and lost together with the Spanish Civil War; the other, a kind of blue western, develops a stock pornographic formula of pre-emptive violence and sexual suicide excess: "'Neither of you lived to be twenty-one. It was not necessary.'" At first glance this seems an irony constructed against the bookstore owner and his heart of clichés under no-nonsense skin, but the ending subverts that conclusion: as the narrator resumes reading, "the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea." Somehow this double-thinking bookman, who "learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans," has by the conjunction of a bizarre lay and his own threadbare fantasies transformed the narrator's experience into what Emerson, and a lot of others now, would call "transcendental." For before the bookstore owner clothes the experience with his rags of myth, the narrator's response has been at the most lyrical in expectation of the lay ("my body was like birds sitting on a telephone wire strung out down the world, clouds tossing the wires carefully"), while in the act and aftermath his response is carefully guarded ("It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish"; "The flesh about my body felt soft and relaxed like an experiment in functional background music"). Apparently even the most banal of fictions can, given the right circumstances, transform experience, for only after the owner tells "what happened" do the pages begin to spin.

In "Sea, Sea Rider" the right circumstances include at the outset one more element besides the gratuitous lay and subsequent commentary. The narrator is reading a book "in the shape of a chalice" about Billy the Kid, the very book that is transformed into a sea by the other circumstances. If we know about him (and who does not?), we should see Billy, gunned down still warm from his woman's arms, is both like and unlike the narrator, who is first relaxed, then exhilarated, but in the end still quite alive. Yet Billy as myth is very like the hero of the second fantasy, a killer and lover whose distance from our book-loving narrator, the actor playing his role, is obvious. As hired gun in a range war Billy is as far as he can be from the volunteer fighting fascism of the other fantasy, yet as a New Yorker turned western hero (Brautigan makes much of his place of birth), Billy has gone on his quest as far as has the bookstore owner's hero-of-the-left from Cleveland. Narrator and bookstore owner likewise have much in common. Both link sex and death in their fantasies, the narrator by imagining the bookstore to be a "a parking lot for used graveyards"—books, that is—which "through the organic process of music had become virgin again." In reading them, then, he assaults their "new maidenheads," which stand between his sexually charged imagination and their own renewed power to give ecstasy. And like the owner he seeks out myths to charge his fancy, myths equally banal—for the narrator is hot after the old tale of Billy the Kid, mythologized into a chalice and now ready to be taken by its new reader. That is the sexual union that finally brings ecstasy, the narrator's new easy ride on the paper bride of many before him and now metamorphosed by time into a hardly reluctant virgin called the Myth of Billy the Kid.

So again Brautigan gives us mutually cancelling ironies. "Sea, Sea Rider" both exposes banality and shows us banality transcending itself. Jack Spicer, to whom Trout Fishing is dedicated (along with Ron Loewinsohn, an ambivalence worth exploring for its own right), had exploited Billy the Kid in similar fashion, while Michael McClure, to whom In Watermelon Sugar is dedicated, exploited the same myth contemporaneously with Brautigan. But there's a difference. Both Spicer and McClure use the myth to demystify, to move beyond myth to visions of themselves or of other truth unaided by any spectacles. Brautigan, however, seems skeptical of this possibility. He poses himself and "his woman" with spectacles on their strong noses, bifocal-inventing Franklin in the background raising hand in benediction. In Brautigan's world the spectacles are on for keeps, there are always quotation marks, all is mediated—even if only by speech (and what an "if"!)

The glasses are not rose-colored. If any color they seem brown, to judge by the ever-present excrement and other wastes. Reality likewise makes itself known through pain, often intensified by the relations between the pain and the myths that Brautigan reminds us are ours. And mere escape is not virtue in Trout Fishing. The escapists are drunks or crazy, even "Trout Fishing in America," who is best of all at keeping his balance yet feels "like a mental patient" in the heat and noise of New York. (Amputee "Trout Fishing in America Shorty" needs the mechanical help of a wheelchair to keep his balance.) Yet escape is necessary and can be graded accordingly to the form it takes. Drink is worst, as Trout Fishing Shorty reminds us, madness next, and living through some myth best though some myths lead to drink or insanity. They flow together often, as in this example where Romantic Egoism is shown to have its relations to Trout Fishing: "This is the autopsy of Trout Fishing in America as if Trout Fishing in America had been Lord Byron and had died in Missolonghi, Greece, and afterward never saw the shores of Idaho again, never saw Carrie Creek, Worsewick Hot Springs, Paradise Creek, Salt Creek, and Duck Lake again." Like Byron, Trout Fishing in America comes pickled in alcohol, and Brautigan pursues this relationship between alcohol and the myth-making imagination at some length. Stepson of drunks and wino at times himself, the narrator knew in childhood a "Kool-Aid wino" who "created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it." Fine, but the child-wino's need for special illumination derives clearly from poverty and physical pain. It's not that he would be better off in "reality," out in the field with his brothers and sisters "picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going"—that is not a good alternative. But neither is life at home, for it is so empty as to make Kool-Aid escape a necessity. His wound frees him to imagine—for a hernia keeps him from joining his brothers and sisters in the field—his boredom forces him to imagine. The facts don't mock his achievement, but neither do they glorify it. Likewise the couple in "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America" are clearly escaping, have "a good world going for them" that they've created behind locked doors. Yet the woman needs her pint a day to keep the devils away, and only a mind determined to see happiness everywhere could overlook this omen. But what's outside, what reality are they escaping? Her old pimp with switchblade, acting out the myth of self-defining violence that carries the names of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Jack the Ripper, Billy the Kid—all caught up in Brautigan's "Mayor of the Twentieth Century." It really isn't safe out there; the crazy place might be safer, even saner. In the light of such reality Room 208 is less escape than an anticipatory bail bond. As this and other chapters remind us, you have to be agile to keep your balance in this world. Of course that's not news either.

Brautigan shows us people balancing, people falling, people long ago fallen. He doesn't lose balance, though, even when he temporarily sends his narrator sprawling. Throughout he makes us feel that balance is an aesthetic virtue as well as a key to survival. It can also be celebratory: Brautigan deftly weighs beginnings against conclusions, chapters against chapters, motifs against motifs, not so much to shore fragments against ruins in order to survive as to remind us that, while the play is in earnest, it is still play. If we can follow the line walked among report, reminiscence, and fantasy in "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity," say, catching the nuances of feeling that accompany these turns, we can learn to keep our balance elsewhere in the book and perhaps outside it too. The narrator, by putting himself always before us as the narrator, shows himself master of the contradictions as well as their embodiment, yet always behind him is the final fabricator, Brautigan himself, even more the master. He reminds us of this role by the artful juggling of chapters and motifs I mentioned just now, but at the close—like a good juggler—he twice calls attention to his role and person. An unnamed "he" makes a stake in absurb fashion to absurd language by cutting, then selling Christmas trees for some operators who can't or won't pay until the trees are sold. ("You say you want to bury your aunt with a Christmas tree in her coffin? . . . We have our coffin-sized Christmas trees right over here, sir.") Once the money's in his pocket, "he" blows it on sex, booze, food, and a thirty-dollar fountain pen with a gold nib, which "he" wants the narrator to try out. Yet he wants him to try it only briefly and lightly, for "a gold nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it." Clearly this half-assed bad-luck wants the nib to express him, not the narrator. The narrator, however, doesn't need this heroic weapon—his imagination already has a mythical ready and a lyrical voice, and without gold nib is able to write: "I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper." Yes, lovely! But Trout Fishing's hand will not hold the pen, while in its owner's hand the nib will shape itself to a frantic, despoiling imagination capable of playing a comic role but incapable of lyric speech. Yet both imaginations have already been "caught" and set side by side by the narrator, whose nib, whether gold or not, expresses a larger personality than either of these roles emcompasses. As the simple and obvious modulation of voice in "Trout Fishing in America Nib" reminds us, the narrator's nib can produce many different effects, express a variety of contradictory myths and facts. He is at home in contradiction, clear-eyed and firm of hand as he creates a fictional world that mirrors oddly but clearly the myth-mediated world of cross purposes that we inhabit waking and sleeping, the world that we inherit and the world that, "growing up," we have shaped in part for ourselves. As Brautigan has shaped him.

In conclusion the narrator writes "The Mayonnaise Chapter" because, "Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise." And so he does, the human need being clearly to shape the world through language as the quotations in "Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter" suggest. The artist stops where he chooses, he is sole maker of his world—or so it would seem. But the world he makes, even at its most playful, has its relations to "history," for the bland letter he whips up, the comic occasion for the arbitrary ending, is as rich in reference as mayonnaises is in egg, though again as with mayonnaise the matter has been transformed. The banal letter of consolation from Mother and Nancy to Florence and Harv on "the passing of Mr. Good" is dated Feb. 3, 1952—at which time Brautigan, age seventeen, was putting his childhood and adolesence behind him, shedding that "Mr. Good" as he moved into adult "reality" and responsibility, though not of the kind approved by Florence and Harv. Adult America, on the other hand, was preparing to elect Ike president and learning to button the middle button on its Ivy-League suit. The Brautigan who survived to write Trout Fishing in America clearly has not replaced the deceased Mr. Good, but he comprehends him. And comprehension, seeing and feeling things and persons as they are along with the myths by which they order and disorder their lives, means most to Brautigan. It permits him and us to recapture the simple while remaining aware of the complex, to fish for trout while aware of all that trout fishing ignores. Most of all, it evades pessimism by offering an escape into other ways of ordering reality into new myth. The method requires cunning as well as skill, and so too does trout fishing.

Postscript
Neil Schmitz's "Richard Brautigan and the Modern Pastoral," in Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Spring 1973), almost decided me against writing this, for besides being excellent, it covers A Confederate General front Big Sur, The Abortion, and In Watermelon Sugar as well as Trout Fishing. But while Schmitz calls attention to the power of myth in Brautigan, he seems to me mistaken about how to take it all—or how Brautigan takes it. Schmitz's Brautigan is moved by an "ironic pessimism" to deflate the "posturing rhetoric" of myth. "What exists in history, things as they are" possess for him the greatest power. Like Roland Barthes, whose definition of myth he adopts, Schmitz sees myth as essentially lies to be seen as such and overcome. In this view myth alienates signs or words from the reality they name. Since I don't think Brautigan shares this rationalism and know I do not, I have written this essay in qualified praise of myth's inevitable but limited power.

Lhamon,1975

"Break and Enter to Breakaway: Scotching Modernism in the Social Novel of the American Sixties"
W. T. Lhamon
Boundry 2, vol. 3, no. 2, Winter 1975, pp. 289-306.
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.

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. . . [A]ll reports to the contrary, much of the very best American fiction of the sixties is social and political. Just to tick off some of important examples is impressive: Heller's Catch 22; Pynchon's V, and The Crying of Lot 49; Roth's Portnoy's Complaint; Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America; Mailer's The Armies of the Night, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam?; Cleaver's near-novel, Soul on Ice. One might also add Baraka's (Jones's) Tales. Whatever else they do to the form of the novel, to language, to the sense of personal psychology projected by fiction, to the notion of what constitutes coherence in life and art—these reports all have very much at their centers a sense of the obscene presence of American institutions. Most often their authors do not put this presence directly, as they might have in the thirties, but rather indirectly, metaphorically, hysterically, as in Portnoy's problems with his mother, Yossarian's inability to get a straight answer, the way the FBI watches trout streams, or the way Mailer shows men visiting themselves upon women (namely, Ruta and Cherry) in his so-called and so often misunderstood sexual politics. Politics in these novels? It has come back into American literature much more pervasively than ever before, but not so dogmatically: felt but not seen. This is the difference between ideology and hegemony as it occurs in fiction: Portnoy screams in pain now; costumes and quick changes are important for Brautigan; Mailer talks of cancer, sex, and the drugs he takes (or took), and the clothes of his demonstrators are bizarre. The political pressure of the society is felt on the body in this new literature, has penetrated that far into what used to be called the private realm, but which is now not even private because it is indistinguishable from the public. Mailer, realizing this, tries to merge a kind of commercialized private self—a self which can be thought of as "private," since so seemingly personal and obsessed—with his public image.

Novels like Trout Fishing in America and Portnoy's Complaint, since they assume the currency of a repressive fact, render the result of that fact: the pain and the bizarre alternative. These novels, even the life of the whole decade, might be criticized for not answering that which is necessary to know. Meaning: we don't have the categories to recognize the society in these novels. The society is undifferentiated, with no attention to class. But that is only befitting the kind of perception that is instead very real here: that the official culture, not the middle-class per se, is the totalizing force. Seen hostilely from the old categories, the pressure which drives the characters is too complex, or too unspeakable, or too omnipresent and omnipotent, too much an undissociable burden to make clear. Seen sympathetically within their own terms, these novels recall the poster that has since popped up in book and gift shops: there is an only barely discernible, very fuzzy picture of the ex-President of the United States and the caption, in large letters, reads, "Let Me Make Myself Perfectly Clear." Those who buy that poster are far clearer, much more in focus than the picture to which they respond with a smirk or a smile. The novels are like that. The society is as present as the President was, and as indistinct.

See how this works in Trout Fishing in America. In fact, one might read this novel as a test case, for it would be hard to name another novel of the sixties that seems more ruthlessly to hide its social involvement; if Brautigan's fancies can be seen fruitfully as sociopolitical, then perhaps others can too. Recall the chapter, "In the California Bush," a title which sets the locale both physically in the hills over San Francisco, and psychologically in the realm of the dirty joke. For Brautigan, what happens is the dirtiest joke of all. Brautigan's narrator and a man named Pard are sharing a cabin in the hills with two women. Pard and his woman sleep inside, Brautigan with his mate outside under the apple tree. The scene comes toward the end of a book devoted to showing readers how to be free, how to create a warm place by living through fantasy and discriminating between harmless, harmful, and useful addictions (to Kool-Aid, to wine, to sex, to trout fishing). When all is working right, all sense of self fuses with the world: "my body was like birds sitting on a telephone wire strung out down the world, clouds tossing the wires carefully." And again, when all is going well, pure, fluid, beautiful stasis is present: "the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea." In these images, Brautigan's voice achieves a familiarity with all environs. He has said at one point, in a statement that could stand for his aesthetic, "I practically had to lay my vision like a drowned orange on the mud puddle." No ambition, no regrets; nothing oppresses because the voice is everything, or is in place with everything as it is supposed to be.

But Pard is different, and Pard's difference bespeaks a difficulty if the book is going to show how one acquires this ease in the world. Brautigan tells about hearing the sounds of Pard and his woman making love:
"One morning last week, part way through the dawn, I awoke under the apple tree, to hear a dog barking and the rapid sound of hoofs coming toward me. The millennium? An invasion of Russians all wearing deer feet?

"I opened my eyes and saw a deer running straight at me. It was a buck with large horns. There was a police dog chasing after it.

"Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpound poundpoundl POUND! POUND!

"The deer didn't swerve away. He just kept running straight at me, long after he had seen me, a second or two had passed.

"Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpound poundpoundl POUND! POUND!

"He ran around the house, circling the john, with the dog hot after him. They vanished over the hillside, leaving streamers of toilet paper behind them, flowing out and entangled through the bushes and vines.

"Then along came the doe. She started up the same way, but not moving as fast. Maybe she had strawberries in her head . . .

"The doe stopped in her tracks, twenty-five feet away and turned and went down around the eucalyptus tree.

"Well, that's how it's gone now for days and days. I wake up just before they come. I wake up for them in the same manner as I do for the dawn and the sunrise. Suddenly knowing they're on their way."

This passage illustrates how the escape, the free place, is accessible. Brautigan demonstrates how to be free with his language, disconnections, metaphors (Pard is "a buck with large horns"). But this availability of freedom causes the problem that anyone can pretend to be free; Russians can wear deer feet, can put on the disguise of Trout Fishing in America. Just so, in an earlier chapter, the Mayor of the Twentieth Century turns out to be Jack the Ripper wearing a costume of "mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt." This Jack the Ripper, although coming directly from the urban reality of the industrial revolution, London in 1887-89, plays a ukelele as one would in the rustic and playful world Brautigan constructs; but he pulls that ukelele "like a plow through the intestines." So, some people will come to the warm place to exploit it viciously.

Pard is not quite so bad. Evidently he wants really to be a part of the trout fishing scene, through and through. But the residue of the repressive world, his earlier Army experience, his macho relationship with women, is still unexpurgated; that police dog is still chasing him. His sex is noisy, fast, and violent. The dog, Pard's surprise that it is still after him, and Pard's sort of relations are all connected in one expletive—"Arfwowfuckl" The resulting union is a big deal: dog, buck, and doe running through the woods, chasing each other, leaving streamers of toilet paper behind them. Leaving their marks, they are not able to relax, spinning like wheels in the sea. Pard achieves a kind of infamous American male climax. The doe, Pard's woman, however, never rises to that reward, wandering "down around the eucalyptus tree." The problem is truly not all Pard's, for the girl's mind is elsewhere: "maybe she had strawberries in her head." In any case, there is little to be done about this predicament because Brautigan sees it as natural; he wakes up to the noise of their sex every morning as he would to the sunrise. But Brautigan veils the completeness of the way Pard has deeply absorbed the repressive relationships of the society. That is, the humor and a kind of imagery which is so overly particular that it is not specific at all serve to gentle the point.

The conclusions from this scene, then, are that though freedom from society is possible, the very accessibility of the freedom pollutes it. Further, even for those who genuinely want to escape the routines of city life (or just routines), the process of expurgation is virtually impossible. The society has affected everyone, will sneak into dreams, into fantasies, and into the most private, most loving moments, hounding them into wild violence; or, to women, society will deny the same qualitative mastery given men, and will leave its women trailing downhill. Society is not so much out there for all to see, but marked indelibly inside, not very often seen. For all of society's invisibility, therefore, it is perhaps all the more pervasively present.

Nevertheless, Brautigan refuses to allow this presence to be serious, even when it is—especially when it is. His style radically mollifies the events it discusses. Pard can't escape; but Brautigan, while describing how the man is filled up and dogged down by America, accepts that and makes it magic with his nonchalance. This poised level-headedness—recognition of fact and assertion of fancy—creates the striking mood of the book. The hounding presence of society here is thoroughly oppressive; that's what the content says. Yet the form, with deflecting metaphors and flippant tone, defuses the possible anger at such content. But defuses it how much? Brautigan just deflects enough of the anger, files away enough of the edge, so that society can saturate the book. The formal bending of the content is what allows it to soak in all the more. The actual veiledness and indistinctness of the society is what provides for its being so pervasive. There is an undeniable social context to the fornications of the sixties (295-299).

Hayden,1976

"Echoes of 'Walden' in 'Trout Fishing in America'"
Brad Hayden
Thoreau Quarterly Journal, July 1976, pp. 21-26.
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.

In Trout Fishing in America Richard Brautigan describes a visit to the "Cleveland Wrecking Yard." The narrator of the novel enters this establishment, located across the street from an abandoned "Time Gasoline" filling station and a deserted "fifty-cent self-service" car wash, and says:
"I'm curious about the trout stream you have for sale. Can you tell me something about it?

"We're selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left. A man came in here this morning and bought 563 feet. He's going to give it to his niece for a birthday present."

The fact of this sale, while not literally plausible, is real in a symbolic context: America sizing up its trout streams in a materialistic fashion; feverishly prostituting nature for cold, hard cash. In Brautigan's novel the trout stream is a central metaphor for the shrinking American wilderness and the social values which are associated with it. The narrator of Brautigan's novel seeks a pastoral life in nature but does not succeed; his search ends in frustration and disillusionment. Enroute he comments upon social and personal values in America with an equal sense of despair.

Brautigan's method, looking at society through nature, is not new. A number of literary artists and philosophers in various ages have done the same-the most notable of whom is probably Henry David Thoreau. Indeed, similarities between Thoreau's Walden and Brautigan's novel are very striking both in the form their arguments take, as well as in the arguments themselves.

Both works are written as first person narratives. Each reflects upon experiences in nature which conveniently span one year's time, and consequently, both have (in Charles B. Anderson's words on Walden) "sought an asymmetrical pattern that would satisfy the esthetic sense of form and still remain true to the nature of experience, art without the appearance of artifice." (MCW, p. 18).

On a surface level, Brautigan's work appears to be a series of disjunctured ramblings (interestingly enough, the same criticism was made of Thoreau by his early critics) with no apparent form. Yet like Walden various levels of structure do appear to serious readers. The most obvious is that structure of a year's quest. It begins with the narrator's search for an amiable trout stream and terminates with the last chapters commenting upon the disappearance of nature in America. The work ends with the narrator and his family having decided to live in a friend's cabin in California.

A similar structure is also found in Brautigan's treatment of the narrator's maturation into manhood and the loss of innocence through knowledge. The narrator's personal growth parallels the picture of nature he presents. The wilderness, which represents a kind of innocence, is fouled by society, while the narrator's boyhood idealism turns into disillusionment. By using flashbacks of past life in the one-year narrative, the two levels of experience complement one another. Thoreau, of course, does much the same in his "digressions" in Walden. He uses his discussions of his more metaphysical concerns to color his commentary on nature. Brautigan's method in handling nature is also similar to Hemingway's. Like Jake Barnes fishing the mountains of Spain in The Sun Also Rises, Brautigan's narrator seeks through nature a means of communing with the surrounding world. Neither of the characters is highly successful.

Again, Charles B. Anderson in his discussion of Thoreau's narrative writes: "To read [Walden] as a poem is to assume that its meaning resides not in its logic but in its language, its structure of images, its symbolism—and is inseparable from them" (MCW, p. 17). The same holds true for Brautigan. Trout Fishing in America conveys its thematic message through a series of short episodes concerned with the materialistic wasting away of the American wilderness and the decay of personal morality. Like Thoreau among the ponds surrounding Concord, Brautigan's narrator sojourns through the wilderness of Idaho hoping to find idyllic meaning in a primitive natural order, to be "part and particle" of the organic harmony between fish and stream, animal and forest. This then is related through episodes describing direct natural experience of nature: And within this naturalist order is intertwined, in a Walden-like manner seemingly at random, episodes which deal with society and the narrator's personal level of awareness of the world surrounding him. For example, in one of the beginning chapters, "Another Method for Making Walnut Catsup," the concept of trout fishing in America is personified as a rich gourmet. In this chapter this character "trout fishing in America" and his girlfriend, Maria Callas, prepare exotic, yet homemade, dishes together in the moonlight, "on a marble table with beautiful candles" (TFA, p. 16). At first a reader might be taken back. What does this chapter have to do with the book's structural order, why is it there? One reason is found in the chapter's ritualistic use of language—the language of recipes and of cause and effect. The primary connotations of such language concerns order: follow the prescribed steps and the desired result will always be attained. And, by introducing Maria Callas, a glamorous and famous woman, the scene takes on the added connotations of the American Dream: follow the prescribed steps and success will naturally follow. The concept of formula is stressed and a kind of ordering is presented; Maria Callas then smiles and the moonlight comes out. Thoreau does the same in Walden through his early presentation of the ordered life. He certainly does not have a character comparable to Maria Callas but from the recipe for financial living which is presented in Walden's opening chapter "Economy" to the final rebirth of spring in the work's latter stages, Thoreau too definitely stresses order and harmony. As James McIntosh points out in his study of Walden in Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist:
"Thoreau has taken pains to present this memory not only as a well-structured combination of the ideal and the natural, but also as a particular experience.

"The tendency for one who aspires to romantic illumination . . . is to neglect the natural and objective for the ideal and celestial . . . [But] Thoreau resists any impulse to move from "the nostalgia for the object" to the nostalgia for the beyond; he insists on feeling both, in equilibrium."

Brautigan's chapter on recipes structurally parallels another early chapter, "The Kool-Aid Wino," except in this chapter the ritualistic ceremony becomes a small boy's making of Kool-aid. Again the process may be interpreted as an attempt by the character to define a coherent lifestyle through the repetition of acts "When we got back to my friend's house," the narrator recollects, "the ceremony began. To him the making of Kool-aid was a romance and a ceremony. It had to be performed in an exact manner and with dignity" (TFA, p. 14). The boy compensates for the poverty of his surroundings (both in a materialistic as well as a spiritual sense) through an arbitrary, yet to him appealing, act. He then adds meaning to this act through the magic of repetition. In Walden Thoreau in a similar manner appoints himself the "inspector of snowstorms," (W, p. 18). Just as meaningfully this boy in Trout Fishing in America appoints himself the maker of Kool-aid.

The prescriptive language of a recipe is a central aspect of Thoreau's most famous work. From the practical details of baking bread without yeast, to anticipating "not [just] the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible nature herself" (W, p. 17), the author is concerned with order, repetition and ceremony. Thoreau makes the self in nature the cause and transcendence the effect. He is the metaphysical Baker of Transcendent bread. He uses his "self" for the meal and leaves out the yeast of society. Brautigan's youthful wino leaves out the sugar from his concoction; he too prefers his straight.

The basic structure of Walden leads to transcendence, from the climactic reflection of the heavens in the waters of Walden pond to nature's, and Henry David's, renewal and rebirth with the coming of spring. The structure of Brautigan's novel, however, leads to frustration. Instead of achieving his desired unity with nature, Brautigan's narrator finds disjunction. The major significant difference between Trout Fishing in America and Walden is that in Brautigan's story there is no personal transcendence. Yet, this brings out the logical question, if the methods are similar, why is the end result not the same?

The answer lies in the physical reality of Walden's nature in contrast to its theory of nature. That is, such critics as Anderson have noted the importance of the proximity of Concord to Walden pond. Thoreau in theory was able to merge himself in the wilderness despite the society which enveloped it. But the fact does remain that in his southwesterly walks Thoreau did face an essentially unexploited continent in America. A virgin wilderness may not have existed around Concord, but it did hypothetically exist for Thoreau in America's western regions.

For Brautigan's narrator no such conceptual nature exists. Indeed, the most significant aspect of the work is that for the narrator such nature does not in reality have substance. Even though the primary level of description concerns the narrator's direct experience with nature, time after time he journeys into the wilderness and is frustrated.

Two preliminary chapters, "Knock on Wood, Parts One and Two" establish this idea with the reader. Part One introduces the narrator's idealized nature when the personified trout fishing in America says: "I remember with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn" (TFA, p. 5). The connotation here is of a Ben Franklin America, a time in America's past which looked optimistically to the future in which nature and Yankee common sense were the order of the day. Brautigan alludes to this past throughout the novel: much of the action occurs in San Francisco's Washington Square Park under the gaze of a statue of Franklin, and when the narrator himself meets the personified trout fishing in America, the chapter concerns the travels of Lewis and Clark fishing in Montana in the early nineteenth century.

In Part Two the narrator describes his first boyish adventure into the natural world:
"At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray. There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it. Trout" (TFA, p. 6).

But upon approaching the envisioned trout stream the narrator as a boy has his first experience with frustration:
"But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was something about the 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" (TFA, p. 6).

The other episodes directly involving nature in the work parallel this same basic motif: as the narrator matures, he repeatedly attempts to commune with nature but is repeatedly thwarted. A somewhat overlapping example of the mature narrator's frustration occurs in the chapter "Trout Death by Port Wine." Here the narrator and a friend are fishing. The narrator succeeds in catching a small rainbow trout, but the experience is perverted when his companion destroys the fish by giving it a drink of port wine. The narrator is disturbed by the unnaturalness of the act. After cataloguing examples of the natural ways in which trout die (ranging from being eaten by birds to suffocating in a polluted stream) the narrator concludes: "All these things are in the natural order of death, but for a trout to die from a drink of port wine, that is another thing" (TFA, p. 44). The thematic point of the chapter then is similar to what Thoreau says in Walden: "We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected . . . He [the hunter or fisherman] goes thither [into nature] at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind" (W, p. 212). Brautigan's narrator is not disturbed by the killing of the fish per se; death is an inherent part of the organic process of nature. What is upsetting is the wanton manner in which the fish is killed. For a fish to die by drinking wine is not part of the organic process even though it might provide flavor. The reverence which the narrator holds for nature is interrupted by his companion's act and is turned into a burlesque.

Society itself occupies a greater role in Brautigan's narrative than in Thoreau's and is used as an essential manifestation of Brautigan's novel failing to achieve satisfaction in nature. The mentality and values of the society Brautigan describes accounts for the narrator's failure to find the pastoral life. Of course, the interpretations of experience which Thoreau and Brautigan employ are different. To Thoreau experience is seen on a cosmic and metaphysical level: man achieving a synthesis between himself and the natural world which in turn unifies him with what Ralph Waldo Emerson identified as the "over-soul." Brautigan is less concerned with man's position with the cosmos than he is with man's position in society itself. Trout Fishing in America is basically social criticism of our contemporary American society. And while Thoreau certainly criticizes society in Walden, his emphasis is upon the individual ascension of man into universality.

In his discussion of society without reference to wilderness, Brautigan creates two scenes that emphasize the social criticism. The first again deals with the narrator as a boy. In the chapter "Sea, Sea Rider" the narrator recounts a sexual experience he had with a woman previously unknown to him while her escort watched unconcerned. Later the old man who acts as go-between for the boy and the woman comments upon the event. Two important concepts are thus dramatized: the narrator's introduction at a youthful age to an experience which is ideally supposed to be an intimate interaction between two human beings but which in reality turns out to be cold and mechanical; and secondly, the old man's romantic interpretation of the happening as an almost transcendent experience. This scene presents once more the discrepancies the narrator encounters between the world he desires and the world as it in fact exists. In what should at least be some kind of emotional experience, an emotional exchange between the woman and boy is non-existent. And, when the bookstore owner fantasizes about the romantic nature of what had happened, the resultant irony takes on tragic dimensions. Brautigan's narrator again chases after idealized experience but never really finds it.

The other notable scene, or rather three scenes, involving society and the narrator's interpretation of it concerns the character Trout Fishing in America Shorty. This character represents the degeneration of the earlier personified trout fishing in America, who by this time in the novel has symbolically passed away. Trout Fishing in America Shorty is characterized as a "legless, screaming middle-aged wino" who staggers around San Francisco in a "chrome-plated steel wheelchair" (TFA, p. 69). Shorty, a panhandler, reaches success by commercializing upon his deformities in "new wave" cinema. He consequently represents the spirit of trout fishing in America capitalized upon and perverted for financial gain—the optimistic spirit of Franklinesque America having become corrupt. The narrator is all too familiar with Shorty and the life he represents.

Brautigan's final commentary on life in contemporary America is pessimistic to say the least; it's certainly not like Thoreau's commentary in the final stages of Walden, which ends optimistically. Thoreau is successful in achieving his dream, whereas Brautigan's narrator is not. Yet all is not hopeless in Brautigan's world, Mention is made periodically throughout the book of "Trout Fishing in America Terrorists;" persons who oppose the society and, like Thoreau, live according to the dictates of conscience rather than those of social law. Brautigan's narrator too is not crushed by the world he views. Like Thoreau, he moves on looking forward to live new lives in the future.

Thomas,1978

"Trout Fishing: The Central Metaphor of Trout Fishing in America"
Thomas, Mae
Towers, no. 50, Northern Illinois University, Spring 1978, pp. 14-17
https://www.niu.edu/clas/english/_pdf/towers-docs/Issue50-1978-Spring.pdf
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.

Trout Fishing in America, as Richard Brautigan himself has said, is "a vision of America." [1] If this is true, then Trout Fishing in America may be considered also to be Brautigan's formula for escaping from the ideal America to the real America. Some critics have pointed out that the work is firmly rooted in the American tradition of Twain and Hemingway, of works whose theme is that man's only salvation lies in escaping from the complexities of city life into the tranquility of the country. However, while Huck Finn could "light out for the Territory" and Nick Adams could find peace in the Michigan woods, Brautigan's narrator discovers that escape to the wilderness is no longer so simple. Instead of natural forests, he finds campgrounds so overcrowded that only the death of one of the campers makes the campsite available. The problem, of course, is that in an urbanized America the wilderness has become so diminished that the small traces of it which remain are overrun by crowds of people trying to escape from the city, if only for a while. Nevertheless, if literal, physical escape from the wilderness has become impossible in contemporary America, the imaginative escape is still possible. Hence, Brautigan explores the gap between ideal and real America as he continually contrasts temporal and geographic America with a timeless America that is "often only a place in the mind." [2]

The form of the novel alows Brautigan great range in exploring his main theme of ideal America versus real America. Trout Fishing as a symbol is metamorphic but at the same time constant in representing an ideal-the continuing historical appeal that America has for the human imagination as a place where all good things are possible. As Kenneth Seib says: "Trout Fishing in America suggests the myth of America itself, a land of vast open spaces, of unlimited resources and opportunities, and of streams into which one only has to toss a bent pin in order to pull out fish of astonishing sizes." [3] Essentially, Trout Fishing in America is a yardstick by which Brautigan measures contemporary America; and the kinds of measurements vary amazingly.

In the opening chapters, Brautigan introduces his theme and his perspective on his materials, as well as expressing his major assumption that a mythical Golden Age, from which we have fallen, once existed in America. Brautigan draws a contrast in the opening chapter, "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America," between the statue of Benjamin Franklin, significantly located in Washington Square, and the poor who gather for free sandwiches every afternoon. The statue, holding out a seemingly generous fourfold "WELCOME" to the poor, parodies the Statue of Liberty and its command to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." We immediately learn from this that America promises much but delivers little. The worthless spinach leaf sandwich given to the narrator's friend seems to echo the philanthropic tradition associated with Franklin. Kafka's knowledge of Franklin's autobiography casts a perspective ,, on the foregoing scene that holds for the entire novel. The weird sandwich and the strange little scene prepare us for later bizarre, grotesque and incongruous items and incidents-trout steel, a wooden staircase that appears to be a waterfall-all detailing the metamorphosis of Trout Fishing in America into Trout Fishing in America Shorty.

When Trout Fishing fondly recalls in the second chapter "people with three cornered hats fishing in the dawn" (5), he obviously alludes to America's Founding Fathers and to the link of. ideals, values and beliefs associated with them or projected upon them. Here Brautigan does as many American writers have done; he views the mystical past with the inward eye of the imagination, assuming that an age of innocence, hopefulness and harmony existed during the nation's beginning and everything since went downhill. Instead of fishing for a new promise for men, later Americans fish for natural resources to exploit-"Maybe trout steel" (4). Franklin becomes Carnegie; the way to wealth becomes the truth of wealth. The narrator returns to the statue of Franklin, who represents the Colonial giant and archetypal American, many times as if he is seeking to recover somehow the lost paradise through some communion with the statue. Indeed, it may be said that the vast number of statues, monuments, gravestones, and inscriptions dwelt upon suggest that Brautigan's passion is to coerce these relics of Trout Fishing in America back to life. However, Franklin remains mute, and the narrator encounters only winos, the defeated, the hopeless, the criminal, and of course, Shorty. At one point, the narrator even says that Shorty should be buried next to the Franklin statue and a monument erected to him which is an explicit juxtaposition of ideal America and real America which measures the distance between them.

As Brautigan uses trout fishing to trace the downward historical journey through the contrasts and ironies of the various episodes, he reinforces his theme by carefully placing most episodes in specific time contexts: times of day, seasons of the year, ages of the narrator and characters. As times, seasons, and ages are linked into the framework of Brautigan's record of America, he as well as Alonso Hagen keeps a diary of Trout Fishing in America.

To illustrate, most of the moments of profound disillusionment in the novel occur on spring mornings during the narrator's childhood. The innocence and expectancy of childhood, the renewal and hope of spring, and the possibilities and creativity of morning deepens the felt sense of loss. On one morning in spring, for example, the narrator discovers • that an apparent waterfall is in reality a flight of wooden stairs, and his response conveys his pain: "I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing" (8). On another April morning the narrator and his friends are inspired to take chalk and write "Trout Fishing in America" on the backs of the first graders. When the principal checks to see what they are doing, the joy of spring becomes the melancholy of autumn: "But after a few more days trout fishing in America disappeared altogether as it was destined to from its very beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade" (62). The narrator's comment here clearly refers to more than what happened to the first grade; the episode is a parable of America. Yet again, it is "one spring day" (133) when as "just a kid" (129), the narrator happens across "The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen," which was a tedious and depressing chronicle of frustration and failure: "I have never even gotten my hands on a trout" (137).

Furthermore, a great deal of the novel is composed of the narrator's search for trout over a long summer. Brautigan stresses the summer's heat with its overtones of desert and hell. Every stream has some flaw: Grider Creek is inaccessible (21 ); Tom Martin Creek "turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch" (28); Graveyard Creek suggests its own limitations (31 ); Hayman Creek seems cursed (40); Salt Creek has cyanide capsules along its banks (83). Even the good fishing in Lake Josephus goes bad when the baby gets sick (126). Much I ike the streams, the people encountered prove equally obstinate: the shepherd who resembles a "young, skinny Adolf Hitler" (52); "the original silent old farmer" (88); the bitter surgeon fuming about "bad debts" (114). When the store clerk calls the narrator a "Commie bastard," he ruefully comments: "I didn't learn anything about fishing in that store" (96). He, in fact, does not learn from any of these people. Finally, on a hot July day, the narrator learns of the death of a fellow angler, Hemingway, and sees Trout Fishing in America for the last time. Directly after that, the narrator ends his journey - "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America" (149).

With the waning of the year comes the autumn, the season belonging to Trout Fishing in America Shorty: "He was· the turning of the earth; the bad wind that blows off sugar" (69). The autumn that "fell over the first grade" in the spring is made flesh in the pathetic, middle-aged wino and cripple, Shorty, with his garish "chrome-plated steel wheelchair." Although Shorty personifies contemporary American reality, he continually appeals to children as if wishfully longing to recover vicariously a second chance. However, the children wisely avoid him: "After a while the children would run and hide when they saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty coming" (70). Then, in "The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty," the narrator's baby daughter decides between real America and ideal America:

"Come here, kid," he said. "Come over and see old Trout Fishing in America Shorty." Just then the Benjamin Franklin statue turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox at the other end of the park. The sandbox suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty. She didn't care about his sausages any more either. She decided to take advantage of the green light, and she crossed over to the sandbox (157-58).

The child instinctively chooses Franklin's green light over Shorty's brown sausage,not that the choice is so hopeful as it appears. After all, she is a child and a child will eventually experience the same disillusionment as her father; she is lured only by a sandbox-a miniature wasteland.

This same novel that begins in Februaryalso ends in a winter's atmosphere of depression, gloom, and death. But what does Brautigan do when it is a "funky winter day in rainy San Francisco" (175) after abandoning his quest for Trout Fishing in America? How can he bridge the widening river between real and ideal America? He respondsthe only way possible-through a transformative and inventive act of the imagination, which is an act of redemption and transcendence. The narrator's vision of da Vinci "inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America" (175), thereby regenerating and revitalizing America, is a vivid expression of Brautigan's "vision of America."

The central metaphor of the novel, trout fishing, implies through its associations and abundance, the richness, the good life that is every American's supposedbirthright, and the achievement of which is every American's dream. But Brautigan's view is from underneath; it is that of a person who spends his days at San Francisco's Walden Pond for Winos and finds consolation in fantasy, art, and the pleasureof mere circulating. He has discovered what Alonso Hagen found almost seventy years before. Trout Fishing in America is a fraud; at best it is a chronicle of loss, frustration, and despair. All in all Brautigan points out that through imagination one still can achieve an escape to the wilderness and a salvation from the anxieties of the city--¬ vena mechanized, urban America from which literal escapeand salvation have become increasingly harder to attain.

1 Richard Brautigan, "The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America," Esquire, 74 (October, 1970), 153.
2 Richard Brautigan. Trout Fishing in America (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1972), p. 116. All subsequent referencesare to this edition.
3 Kenneth Seib, "Trout Fishing in America: Brautigan's Funky Fishing Yarn," Critique, 13, 2 (1971), 64.

Mellard,1980

"Brautigan's 'Trout Fishing in America'"
James M. Mellard
The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America. University of Illinois Press, 1980. pp. 16, 21, 155-168, 173.
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.

[From page 16]
"The modernist novel in America, . . . culminates in the sophisticated-modernist innovations of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and many others."

[From page 21]
". . . in the modern period, the novel-as-genre fragments into constituent, elemental modes that, in the process, at the hands of Anderson, Faulkner, Bellow, Malamud, Heller, Updike, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and numerous others, begin to fuse with modes and themes outside the conventional genre of fiction."

[From pages 155-168, "Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America]
". . .for all of the astonishment he expresses at the wilderness of their own contriving in which Americans dwell, Mr. Brautigan's principal concern, one feels, is, in the midst of hell, to play . . ."
Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
History, Hope, and Literature (1973)

The pastoral/performative tradition to which Brautigan belongs has been extremely elastic, adaptable, and fluid: One can see in his work at some points strains of the lyrical novel, that sub-genre focusing upon the contents and shifting forms of consciousness and represented in works of Bellow, Coover, Hawkes, Heller, Exley, and others, and in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. At other points one can see the strain of authorially self-conscious metafictions—those fictions about the writing of fiction, represented currently in Nabokov's Pale Fire, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, and, again, in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. At yet other points one can see aspects of those fictions that convert the artistic process into a literary or metaphysical game of some sort, as in Ada and several other works of Nabokov, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Don DeLillo's End Zone, Roth's The Great American Novel and Updike's The Centaur. Brautigan touches this strain in Trout Fishing in America and in all his works that have their primary impulse in the parody or mimicking of popular, formulaic types: The Abortion and its parody of a "romance" such as A Farewell to Arms; The Hawkline Monster, a parody of the gothic and the western; and Willard and His Bowling Trophies, which parodies both pornography and the gangster genre of films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger. A Confederate General from Big Sur fits here, too, for it seems a parody of such bohemian or Beat works as Henry Miller's Tropic novels and Kerouac's On the Road, this latter especially. Brautigan does seem located at the very center of late modernist fiction, and he seems so not despite but because of his roots in the tradition of American naive or pastoral fiction that runs back through Malamud, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Stein, Crane, Twain, and, according to Tanner, even beyond. Like his older but temperamentally contemporary colleague Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Brautigan does what the best pastoral writers have always done: he treats topical themes (which, in the tradition, are always universal) in the language of simple people so that the extremes, the best and worst, of our culture become more clearly visible.

In Brautigan every study must begin with Trout Fishing in America (1967). All those naive quirks and pastoral preoccupations that make his work significant and reveal his indebtedness to the tradition appear here. Perhaps the first traditional aspect of Trout Fishing that strikes one is point of view, the pose of the author. Because, as Walt Whitman had before him, Brautigan actually includes a photograph of himself with his work, the term pose applies literally as well as figuratively; the old-fashioned openness, directness, and rusticity of the author in the photograph seem clearly embodied in the prose. When Brautigan's first chapter "explains" the cover, unless we notice that he makes no mention of himself and the woman who shares the picture's space, he would not seem to be anything but direct in his style:
"The cover for Trout Fishing in America is a photograph taken late in the afternoon, a photograph of the Benjamin Franklin Statue in San Francisco's Washington Square.

"Born 1706—Died 1790, Benjamin Franklin stands on a pedestal that looks like a house containing stone furniture. He holds some papers in one hand and his hat in the other" [See Note 32].

It seems a transparent prose, apparently interested only in the representation of the scene before us: at first glance here or in the next longish paragraph, wherein Brautigan explains the word "Welcome" appearing on the four sides of the statue and describes three almost leafless poplars and wet February grass, all the attention of the language appears to be directed toward the universe outside man, outside language, outside consciousness. All the interest seems horizontally directed toward depiction and narration.

But there is one disjunction in those two short paragraphs quoted above—the simile "like a house containing stone furniture." The simile here—and throughout Brautigan, as also in the whole tradition of colloquial/vernacular American literary style—introduces a movement away from the picture or the action and toward some vertex—a theme, idea, meaning. It raises all sorts of questions that we feel obliged to answer, but at this point there is virtually nothing upon which to base our answers, so we read on, having slowed down the pace and prepared to pause again if similar vertical disjunctions recur. They do. We must pause again at "a tall cypress tree, almost dark like a room," and again at the church's "vast door that looks like a huge mousehole, perhaps from a Tom and Jerry cartoon." If Brautigan's prose remained horizontal and continued to point at the universe outside the book or outside language and man's consciousness, Trout Fishing would be one of the fastest reads in the history of the novel (perhaps only The Old Man and the Sea might match it outside Brautigan's canon). The novel reads slow and long, however, and the reason lies in these vertical dispersals of style. They create disjunctive, reflexive, micro-rhythms that generate more interest than do the meta-rhythms of plot continuity and that development of character seen as "an unbroken series of successful gestures"—as Scott Fitzgerald defines personality in The Great Gatsby.

Trout Fishing in America is not naively naive, not a simple pastoral fiction; it is a subtle poetic novel by a lyrical poet, built upon the popular conventions of a widely shared tradition. As a lyrical novel, [See Note 33] Trout Fishing will reveal its secrets to us not by analysis of "story"—what happens and what happens next—but, if at all, by meditative casts into the individual chapters, each a small deep pool whose meaning might perhaps rise to our best lures. Like those trout pools, however, each section seems to conceal more meaning than any of our linear casts can catch. But we continue to cast, hoping no doubt to land the big one, a Moby Trout, a "great fish," like Santiago's marlin, that will draw everything together for us. Thus, the question about such a work always seems to be, do the vertical dispersions have a common center or offer a holistic meaning? In other words, how do we read such a book? One way is to begin with the genre conventions that seem to fit best. Trout Fishing seems most easily read through the conventions of the pastoral element of the oral/colloquial tradition.

One of the pastoral themes in the tradition is the concern with man's fate, his telos, or end—his death. Death appears as a theme even in the opening chapter. That the theme appears is not surprising, but that it appears in such a disarming prose style may well be surprising to many readers. The clues are in those vertical dispersals. But we as readers are forced to put them all together, by meditative casts, lateral drifts. We don't have a lot to go on: objectively, only the Franklin statue, Washington Square, Adlai Stevenson, and Kafka; and, ambiguously subjective and objective, the house with stone furniture, the tree dark like a room, and the door like a huge mousehole. A common reference point for the men whose names are here identified might lie in their identification with historic conceptualizations of America, but the common point of reference for the sequence of similes lies in the concept of domicile, and, though the salutation "welcome" on the statue points to the four axes of earth, not one place described seems finally comfortable or secure.

What we have so far, then, is a series of items and figures of speech that subtly associate America with something less than ideal places; this negative point may be validated in the vertices drawn by other details: the words of the statue, "saying in marble," Presented By / H. D. Cogswell / To Our / Boys And Girls / Who Will Soon / Take Our Places / And Pass On, and the inscription over the church door "Per l'Universo." All these details suggest that this could be a sacred place, a world center, a universal navel. It could be that from which man emanates and to which he returns. But as it is presented to us here, every connotation is negative: here, at the beginning of Trout Fishing, the once-sacred place is a tomb, offering only a bare hint of renewal and sustenance—in the newspaper-wrapped sandwiches, filled on one occasion with spinach, Popeye's rejuvenating elixir—but little else. What we are left with, finally, is the traditional pastoral theme of et in Arcadia ego: even in Arcady or Eden—or America—there is death. Welcome to it, the statue says, "facing the directions of this world." Never has simplicity seemed so duplicitous.

Two sets of related themes that thread their way through the whole book are sex and violence, death and excrement. Or are they sex and death, violence and excrement, sex and excrement, violence and death? The question seems always, where do we put the emphasis? Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, for each of the book's forty-seven sections interweaves these motifs. The book is one of the most mortifying experiences one could imagine, and yet it manifests a remarkably subtle wit and humor, both so pervasive that only two chapters ("The Salt Creek Coyotes" and "The Surgeon") have almost nothing humorous. What Brautigan has recognized is the way that sex and violence energize the conventions of humor, turn scatology into eschatology. They appear together everywhere in the American naive tradition that he continues.

The combination of humor and grotesquerie that make the book so intensely ambiguous is well illustrated in the chapter "Worsewick." "Worsewick Hot Springs was nothing fancy," writes Brautigan. Persons unknown had put boards across the creek to dam it up at a point where hot springs fed into it. The narrator, his "woman," and the baby go there one day and bathe in the tub so created: "There was a green slime growing around the edges of the tub and there were dozens of dead fish floating in our bath. Their bodies had been turned white by death, like frost on iron doors. Their eyes were large and stiff" (p. 43). Playing there among the dead fish and shine, the narrator says he began "to get ideas," so his woman takes the baby back to the car for her nap: "It really was time," he insists, "for her to take a nap." He and his woman make love there in the water, but because she didn't have her diaphragm and he doesn't want to have more children, they decide upon coitus interruptus, so that when he ejaculates his "sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and," he says, "I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. His eyes were stiff like iron" (p. 44).

This is all incredibly grotesque and at least one critic, Neil Schmitz, has suggested that its demonic image of procreative sex is a complete "profanation." Such an unambiguously moral interpretation seems firmly based in a reading of other parts of this chapter. Focusing upon the image of the narrator having at his woman as the deerflies had had at her while getting from the car to the water and also upon the flat statement that he wanted no "more kids for a long time," Schmitz can turn the chapter into a bitter, Swiftian satire upon death-loving man. But Brautigan's tone just will not let it remain so, and if we turn to the crucial simile he employs to describe the "precipitous orgasm" (Schmitz's words) we can see how Brautigan's language gives another direction to argument: "Then I came, and just cleared her in a split second like an airplane in the movies, pulling out of a nosedive and sailing over the roof of a school" (p. 44). Agreeing not to bring children into an overcrowded world is not quite a profanation these days, and it is sex as recreation, not procreation, that Brautigan celebrates here (and in many of his poems, despite the apparently contrary theme of "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster"), at the same time he shows graphically that much of the world has become a garbage dump or a toilet reaching "down like an accordion into the abyss" (p. 101). It is not a pretty world, but, Brautigan suggests, it's all we've got. So we must make do with it. [See Note 34]

Because Trout Fishing is a popular traditional/lyrical novel, we can drop a line into any of its pools and might come up with a clear sense of the book's total meaning, a dominant theme drawing all the vertices together. At any given point in the book its main theme will be visible either in the text itself or in the activity that, implicitly, always lies behind it. In other words, we can often take the text at face value, or we can retreat to the transforming, metamorphic, metaphoric process of imaginative creation that underlies it. Individual chapters will often be about the disjunction between "reality and the world," with specific images concretely manifesting the grotesqueness of the world and other images illustrating the impact of mind, imagination, and creativity upon it. In the "Worsewick" episode, for example, the "bathtub" pool with all the dead trout, slime, and deerflies "says" one thing about the world, but Brautigan's language and the narrative structure his art imposes on the experience transform it into something different and not entirely repellent. The sheer playfulness of language conveys a rather cheerful message ("the medium is the message"), and the whole structure of the episode leads us from the most repellent-seeming of mundane activities to an act (ironically, it is coitus interruptus that achieves climactic revelation) that takes on cosmological significance, as Brautigan's similes take us from the age of the dinosaurs ("I did this by going deeper and deeper in the water, like a dinosaur, and letting the green slime and dead fish cover me over" he says of hiding his "hard on"), to the age of aeronautical technology ("like an airplane"), to the cosmic reaches of intergalactic space ("like a falling star"). Consequently, one would suggest that the book is not about reality, or that manifestation of it called "America," but about our knowledge of it, how we can cope with it and finally must make do with it. The process is at best tragi-comic, as the most profound pastoral art always is in its formulae of elegy, ubi sunt, or et in Arcadia ego.

The meta-narrative component of Trout Fishing, in contrast to most works in the tradition, we must extrapolate for ourselves from the discontinuous sections, but in doing so we see clearly how tragi-comic becomes the whole structure. While the book has frequently been called a "quest," a search for the "real" America to replace all the sham dreams, all the corrupted visions, an America for Amerika, it seems less to provide a quest than images manifesting the development of the artist. In other words, it seems not the Bildungsroman, but the Künstlerroman. In a general way the book's meta-narrative (reconstructed) moves, like the simpler Bildungsroman, from childhood to youth to maturity. "The Cover of Trout Fishing in America," of course, is the invitational prologue to the book, so the fact of the narrator's mature presence there does not interfere with the development that actually begins in the next two chapters, "Knock on Wood (Part One)" and "Knock on Wood (Part Two)," both of which concern the narrator's childhood initiation to "trout fishing in America." Initiation is disillusioning in a particularly modernist way for him, since the first trout stream and the magnificent waterfalls he sees turn out to be nothing more than a perceptual error, a "flight of wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees." Modernist, too, is the way the ritual charm that he enacts—knocking on wood—has the effect not of confirming "reality" or protecting his fantasy or desire, but of revealing their unreality and impossibility. So the boy does the only thing that any modernist youth can do: he internalizes his dream and his reality: "I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself" (p. 5). He becomes, in a word, the artist, and Bildungsroman metamorphoses into Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young (fisher) man.

"The Hunchback Trout" climaxes the series of episodes that includes the "Knock on Wood" sections, as well as "Grider Creek" and "Tom Martin Creek." These episodes show the various typal frustrations the young angler goes through before the glorious success of landing the hunchback trout. His success, however, is as much imaginative as sporting. Indeed, Brautigan's style intimates that the success is mainly literary, for the episode, more than most, is indicative of the role of style and language in Trout Fishing. The entire episode is controlled by a single metaphor—of the creek "like 12,845 telephone booths in a row" and the "kid covered with fishing tackle," "just like a telephone repairman," "going in there and catching a few trout" and keeping "the telephones in service," "an asset to society" (p. 55). Narrating the day the "kid" "punched in" for work at the creek and landed the hunchback, he is able to match the incredible physical energy of the trout with the verbal, imaginative energy of the artist: "The fish ran deep again and I could feel its life energy screaming back up the line to my hand. The line felt like sound. It was like an ambulance siren coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air-raid siren" (p. 57). In the book, one has the impression that this episode marks not an end of innocence but a discovery of the one effective potency man has in an otherwise impermeable world. That potency, again sacramentally ingested, is the artist's: "There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel. / Later in the afternoon when the telephone booths began to grow dark at the edges, I punched out of the creek and went home. I had the hunchback trout for dinner. Wrapped in cornmeal and fried in butter, its hump tasted sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda" (p. 57). Brautigan's Moby Trout, his great fish, turns out to be a hunchback in the Bell System.

In a lyrical novel such as this we might infer that "the kid's" actions contain all the message we—or the narrator—require, for eventually we do surmise that his sacraments are also incarnations. They are attainments of the dream in the only way possible, whether for artist or for man in general. Indeed, this is enough to go on in Trout Fishing, but we are impelled to read on, both because of the tremendous vitality of Brautigan's imagination and because we want to check our trout lines. Are there other manifestations of the theme, other avatars of the artist? There are. In "The Kool-Aid Wino" (a child who creates a "Kool-Aid reality"); the wine winos of "A Walden Pond for Winos"; the bookstore manager of "Sea, Sea Rider" (who introduces an adolescent narrator not just to sex, but to sex-with imagination); old Charles Hayman, who lives his art, crotchety as he is (he's an aged, illiterate, child-loathing W. C. Fields of 1876), in "The Last Year the Trout Came Up Hayman Creek"; Lord Byron, memorialized in "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America"; and, finally, in the narrator himself in "The Hunchback Trout" (pp. 5-57).

There is a somewhat more extended "plot" structure than this suggests, however, for there appear to be three "transforms" of the basic narrative unit. The "Knock on Wood" and "The Hunchback Trout" chapters bracket the first of three overlapping narrative sequences. The earlier chapters portray the narrator as a real fisherman before they spiral into fantastic verbal displays. Some of these chapters are as socially critical as anything elsewhere in the book, and so serve as a foundation for the shift that comes in the second of the three narrative sequences. In a general way, the second sequence focuses upon "the kid's" mature life. It shows more fully than the first his relationship with "his woman" and his friends, who are usually young couples, a pattern of socialization often following the period of male bonding, intimated in the first section, for example, in "A Walden Pond for Winos." The sequence also focuses upon the imposition of mundane reality upon the kid's trout-fishing mythopocic vision.

One sort of episode in this middle sequence continues the more specifically social themes treated in the first sequence in, for example, "Prologue to Grider Creek" (on John Dillinger's home town), "The Message" (a young Hitler shepherd whose message is "Stalingrad"), "The Mayor of the Twentieth Century" (Jack the Ripper), "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" (on duplex realities), and "The Salt Creek Coyotes" (coyote poisoning associated with the execution of Caryl Chessman). In the middle section, these corruptions of the kid's trout-fishing vision are recreated in more humble figures. The obverse of the heroic criminals, these figures are avatars of the failed imagination, not the corrupted one. The terrified couple of "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America," fugitives from a murderous black pimp, are trapped in a bleak hotel room, drinking their lives away behind innumerable locks upon their door, and perpetually out in the world "on bail," The arch-conservative doctor of "The Surgeon," willing to give up practicing in any meaningful way the profession for which he is trained because people won't or can't pay their doctor bills, loads up his wife and kids in a camper and goes in search of an America the narrator confesses is "often only a place in the mind" (p. 72). Everything about the trout fishing mythos has gone awry in "A Note on the Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America," an America aglow with the "unholy white light" of the Coleman lantern and so overcrowded with campers that one must wait for death among them in order to find a place to pitch a tent. And, finally, there are the narrator's friends in New York City—an unemployed burglar for whom he "fears the worst" and his cocktail-waitress wife—whose life he finds so depressing he feels he must strike out for Fairbanks, Alaska, as soon as possible: this in "A Return to the Cover of This Book."

What these episodes suggest, in contrast to the rather general themes of the earlier episodes, is the very personal dimensions of the failure of the imagination in the face of reality. These people are the narrator's friends or they are people whom he has actually met and talked to, and their lives make direct contact with his. Their problems—how to cope with the world—are his problems as well. These people have clung to the dream into their mature lives, too, but they have not made what Brautigan would consider adequate responses. Consequently, the narrator, with his woman and child, continues to seek streams beyond those where the uninitiated and the unaware have trekked.

Another sort of episode in this middle sequence describes some of these ventures; they involve the whole family now, and the roles of the woman and the child begin to take on increased thematic significance. In "The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader'," Brautigan recounts the efforts of the three of them to find a decent, undesecrated camping spot in Challis National Forest, at Big Redfish Lake, which had become "the Forest Lawn of camping in Idaho" or a "skidrow hotel" with "too many trailers and campers parked in the halls" (p. 61), and, finally, at Little Redfish Lake, almost empty of campers, clean and uncluttered. This episode, occurring earlier, is on the theme of "Camping Craze," but here involves the narrator himself. "The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin" introduces the woman and child as heroines. The woman finds a successful and humane way to catch minnows for the baby, and the baby, "too young" to kill, adapts her "furry" sound, which she makes for animals, to a "silver" sound and learns from the parents how to play with and take care of the minnows at the same time: "The children's game and the banker's game, she picked up those silver things one at a time, and put them back in the pan. There was still a little water in it. The fish like this. You could tell" (p. 65). In "The Lake Josephus Days" the narrator momentarily distracts himself with thoughts of the Andrews Sisters, the 'forties and zoot suits, but must admit that his main concern is the well-being of the baby, who, though ill from too much sun, soon recovers. The full significance of the baby becomes a bit clearer in "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?" Though the narrator's own imagination may be corrupted to the extent that he can dream his daughter into the myth's violence as "the woman in red," the child herself is free, so the answer to the title's question, then, is a sandbox—or an imagination—without John Dillinger.

In the last sequence of sections, the child-as-hero appears—or reappears. In Trout Fishing, as in pastoral generally, the positive, beneficent potentialities of the unfettered, phenomenologically uncluttered imagination belong to the child (or rustic or naif elsewhere in the tradition). Her anti-type here appears to be Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Shorty seems to be the emblematic, imaginative construct in the book who symbolizes all those other cripples—emotional, creative, psychopathic—who populate the book: "He was a legless, screaming middle-aged wino. / He descended upon North Beach like a chapter from the Old Testament. He was the reason birds migrate in the autumn. They have to. He was the cold turning of the earth; the bad wind that blows off sugar" (p. 45). The embodiment of universal negation, Trout Fishing in America Shorty belongs to the unimaginative "naturalism" of writers such as Nelson Algren, so the narrator and a friend decide to ship him to Chicago to Algren, or, failing that, "if he comes back to San Francisco someday and dies," the narrator says, Shorty "should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square" (p. 47). In "Footnote Chapter to 'The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren,'" Brautigan says that Shorty has been taken up by the French "New Wave" film makers, who may be starring him in "Trout Fishing in America Shorty, Mon Amour," letting him in a dubbed voice denounce man's inhumanity to man (p. 63). "They'll milk it for all it's worth," he says, "and make cream and butter from a pair of empty pants legs and a low budget. But I may be all wrong. What was being shot may have been just a scene from a new science-fiction movie 'Trout Fishing in America Shorty from Outer Space.' One of those cheap thrillers with the theme: Scientists, mad or otherwise, should never play God, that ends with the castle on fire and a lot of people walking home through the dark woods" (p. 63).

The impotency of Shorty and the strength of the child in the book are both shown in the interesting episode in which they appear together. "The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty" suggests that hope does exist for Brautigan's creatures, for the chapter shows the baby escaping Shorty's clutches, not by hiding behind garbage cans (as in the "first mention" chapter), but by scampering off to the very symbol of imaginative creation—a sandbox, one at the other end of the self-same park in which the book begins. When the Franklin statue "turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox," she decided it "suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty" and the sausages he would give to her to eat: "Trout Fishing in America Shorty stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger" (p. 97).

The child brings a fresh imagination to the world of Trout Fishing in America. That world is about as worn out as it can possibly be, but not merely because the landscapes are so depleted or trampled down or garbage-filled. It is worn out because the frame the angling Horatio Algering mythos has provided is now so inadequate. In its broadest configuration showing how the mythos can be replaced, the novel shows the narrator's becoming the creative, artistic imagination, not by denying the nugatory in our American existence but by transforming it. The always present and insistent dark vision accounts for much of the novel's length, for if the accounts of death and the epitaphs of one sort or another are eliminated, not much is left in Trout Fishing. The narrator here, as in any other pastoral work, especially one dealing with the theme of et in Arcadia ego, must simply adapt to the fact of decay and death even in Arcady, Eden, America—life itself.

Much of this adaptation appears in the plenitude of epitaphs, but much of it, too, appears in those "monuments" to man's physical being, scatology becoming eschatology in "Red Lip," "On Paradise," and "Footnote Chapter to 'Red Lip.'" Only a wryly mature imagination could present the abandoned outhouse of "Red Lip as "a monument . . . to a good ass gone under," one announcing, "The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he's dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy" (p. 7). Only an adjusted, comic imagination could create the statue in "On Paradise" that attests to man's physical transience; "It was a twelve-foot high marble statue of a young man walking out on a cold morning to a crapper that had the classic half-moon cut above the door. / The 1930's will never come again, but his shoes were wet with dew. They'll stay that way in marble" (p. 49).

It is a literary imagination, as well as a healthy one, for there seems little doubt that the image of dew echoes the lines from Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," ones that associate dew upon the feet with man's autochthonous origin and earthly telos. That origin—in earth—is powerfully, sadly attested to once again in "Footnote Chapter to 'Red Lip,'" for there the narrator, having, like Fitzgerald's Carraway, come home from searching for the dream America, retreats to the California bush and then sees it, too, become a refuse dump. They left the California bush, he says, when the toilet into which they had been dropping their garbage had become so full that it almost "became necessary to stand on the toilet seat and step into that hole, crushing the garbage down like an accordion into the abyss" (p. 101).

Everything in Trout Fishing in America deserves its memorial, even when it has passed its usefulness (as in the Byronic and the Hemingway heroes) or was never of any use to begin with (Trout Fishing in America Shorty) or was genuinely antithetical to use (Jack the Ripper, John Dillinger, etc.). Trout Fishing in America—the old pastoral, Walden, Algerian, Gatsbean, Nick Adams dream—deserves its memorial, too, and receives it in what most critics have acknowledged as the purest, most extravagant expression of imagination in the book: "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard" (pp. 102-107). This chapter brings us full circle back to the opening chapters, for the two parts of "Knock on Wood" have foreshadowed the transformation of trout fishing in America into the artifacts of industrial, technological America. The boy's waterfall staircase now shows up in the "used plumbing department, surrounded by hundreds of toilets" (p. 106). One can no longer market the myth as a fresh new product, but as an artist—a writer—Brautigan suggests that one can still find a way to use it: it can become the writer's medium and refresh his art: "I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper" (p. 110). It may be gone now, but it was good in its time. Requiescat in pace. Rest in Peace, Trout Fishing in America Peace. Trout Fishing is a book filled with memorials and epitaphs, and their insistent presences suggest just how thoroughly it is permeated with the spirit of the elegy, the ubi sunt, and the et in Arcadia ego themes of pastoral art. The big question seems constantly to be how to cope—with the fact of death, with the passing of a cherished dream, with the ambiguities that surround one always. The myth upon which trout fishing rests as a real activity begins to seem inadequate in a social structure shot through with violence, fear, cruelty, overpopulation, and ecological disaster.

Brautigan seems very much to be working a stream of American literature represented by many novelists, but in some ways his themes seem best represented by the poetry and philosophy of Wallace Stevens. Stevens worked in the world—in that most mundane of professions, the insurance industry; still, he wrote poetry that illustrated the potency of the imagination in transforming the world, not by denying it but by using it. In The Comedian as the Letter C, Stevens begins with a pale, unimaginative hero voyaging into a new world, "a world without imagination." The tension in Stevens and Brautigan is always between the external reality and the faculty of imagination, but the result in both writers is that the best art comes from the combination of a phenomenological reality and an idealistic imagination: "Nota: Man is the intelligence of his soil" becomes "Nota: his soil is man's intelligence." Both must interact if human beings are to bring order to chaos. Brautigan feels just as strongly as Stevens that reality must constantly be reinterpreted, the old myths replaced, revitalized, or stripped of their husks in order to lay bare the live core. But the job takes an artist's imagination, and we must all be artists. What Trout Fishing in America does, then, is to represent both the need and the expression of imagination, and Brautigan's portrait of a young trout fisherman thus becomes a portrait of the artist as well.

Notes:
32. Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America, bound with The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar (New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1972), p. 1. All further quotations from Trout Fishing are from this edition, which is a photographic reprint of three first editions. . . .

33. See Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963) for a study of this concept in early modernist fiction.

34. Schmitz's excellent essay is cited above. One reason I cannot rely upon it more than I have is the conservative orientation Schmitz displays in his analysis of this episode in Trout Fishing and the whole of The Abortion. This latter novel is considered as a bitter, exceedingly ironic attack on the new sexual morality. I cannot finally accept such an interpretation of the novel, though I can see—in Brautigan's pervasive, traditional, perhaps "stoical" (Empson's usage here) ambiguity—a feeling that the world was indeed better in those old days before the need for Zero Population Growth. Obviously, either Schmitz or the flower children are misreading Brautigan, but the possibility for such misreading is typically an aspect of pastoral/performative art, where the very coolness permits a high level of audience participation and, thus, projection into the text/performance.

Skau,1981

"American Ethos: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America"
Michael Skau
Portland Review, vol. 27, no. 1, Fall/Winter 1981, pp. 17-19.
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 epigraph to Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America asserts, "There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to the Spirit of St. Louis." The particular seductions with which Brautigan concerns himself are the escapist use of imagination and determined non-involvement. While recognizing and demonstrating the attractiveness of these seductions, Brautigan assumes an ironic stance and criticizes his narrator's refusal to actively participate in the development of social change. The narrator recounts his search for an ideal America, encountering frustration throughout his quest; he perceives that contemporary America differs from his ideals, but evades the problems besetting America. Several critics have noted the weaknesses of the narrator but suggest that he embodies Brautigan's own values. However, the novel demonstrates that Brautigan disapproves of his narrator's behavior and that the author indicates both the need for constructive action and the danger in failing to act.

Trout Fishing in America portrays the adventures of a young man (who is never named and achieves conventional Everyman status) pursuing the America that got away. His quest for the vital American experience begins in childhood, and the idealistic naiveté of youth is characteristic of his attitude throughout much of the novel. The vast expanse of the United States is treated imaginatively as an immense playground, the contours of which have been undergoing discovery for several centuries. Francois Truffaut has observed that "Americans always seem to be ready to start their lives anew." Brautigan's narrator goes further: he is ready to begin the life of America anew. Thus, the novel and its characters are trans-historical, ranging from Lewis and Clark and the pioneers in their three-cornered hats to the contemporary phenomena of movie stars and Ban-the-Bomb demonstrators. The use of temporal expanse is not simply a surrealistic time-leveling device: instead, the narrator is desperately attempting to capture a quality which he sees as characteristically American throughout the history of this country. That quality is best represented by the hunchback trout which the narrator catches: "There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy." The narrator finds himself in an America whose "body" has changed dramatically since the early years of its exploration. The contemporary America of Trout Fishing in America parallels the diluted beverage prepared by the Kool-Aid wino, "a mere shadow of its desired potency." This America is weakened by poverty, violence, and the manipulations of crass commercial interests and fraudulent politicians.

The first chapter of the novel introduces the theme of poverty in the form of destitute people who receive sandwiches in the park. In addition, Brautigan provides a sketch of the Kool-Aid wino's family, picking beans for two-and-one half cents a pound, and an episode where the narrator goes fishing between a graveyard for the rich and a graveyard for the poor: the narrator has graphic evidence of economic inequity in America. He also recognizes the essential violence of American life, from the man in Mooresville, Indiana, murdering "child-eyed rats," through the brutally sadistic Mayor of the Twentieth Century, to the state's use of capital punishment. The narrator finds violence in America so commonplace that he is astonished to come across a campground stovepipe which has not been riddled with bullet holes. Commercial interests and politicians are also blamed for the impoverished American spirit. The celebration of trout in the second chapter of Trout Fishing in America projects the fish in industrial terms:
"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!"

Subsequent examples of the commercialization of America, including the John Dillinger Museum in Mooresvilie, Indiana, and the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, with its stacks of used trout streams, serve to comment on an amoebic tendency of American commercialism toward co-optation. The narrator suggests that the products of civilization have violated the natural world which he craves: "As much as anything else, the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America." (TFA, 117). Mr. Norris embodies the estrangement of modern man from the natural world, when he decides to go camping and charges an arsenal of equipment at a sporting goods store (TFA, p. 119), thus, in effect, bringing the encumbrances of civilization with him. Faced with his modernized America, the narrator desires to establish a more elemental relationship with his environment. For example, in "Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup" (TFA, 16-18), he offers a number of recipes which provide an alternative to commercially prepared foods. His recipes are natural: they do not contain artificial coloring, sweeteners, preservatives, cyclamates etc. However, even the narrator himself is a victim of the forces of material progress. A child of the twentieth century, he naturally thinks of rivers and streams in terms of telephone booths, department stores, and movies: "I'd had a childhood fancy that I would walk down to the Missouri River and it would look just like a Deanna Durbin movie—a chorus girl who wanted to go to college or she was a rich girl or they needed money for something or she did something" (TFA, 146). The character named Trout Fishing in America corroborates the fact that the modern perception of the "body" of America differs from that of the past: "No, I don't think [Meriwether] Lewis would have understood it if the Missouri River had suddenly begun to look like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college" (TFA, 148). Finally, the narrator also recognizes the malevolent deceptions of American politics. In "The Ballet for Trout Fishing in America," the narrator describes a dead Cobra Lily plant mounted by an "I'm for Nixon" button (evidently from Nixon's campaign for the 1960 presidential election). His explanation of the habits of the Cobra Lily has obvious political parallels: "Nature has endowed the Cobra Lily with the means of catching its own food. The forked tongue is covered with honey glands which attract the insects upon which it feeds. Once inside the hood, downward pointing hairs prevent the insect from crawling out" (TFA, 23). The suggestion that politicians attract voters with honeyed promises, only to feed upon the people.

The narrator is clearly aware of the problems of contemporary American society, but his usual approach to these, as to everything else, is willful misperception. At one point in the novel, he comments, "Like astigmatism, I made myself at home" (TFA, 99). Throughout the novel he makes himself at home in America by indulging a faulty vision of reality. His evasion essentially involves imaginative escapism which finally leads him to surrender and passive acceptance. He frequently employs digression to shift the focus of his attention away from anything which threatens his equanimity. Thus, he recalls a cat he saw when he was young:
"The cat had fallen or been thrown off a high wooden sidewalk that went along the side of a hill in Tacoma, Washington. The cat was lying in a parking lot below.

"The fall had not appreciably helped the thickness of the cat, and then a few people had parked their cars on the cat. Of course, that was a long time ago and the cars looked different from the way they look now.

"You hardly see those cars any more. They are the old cars. They have to get off the highway because they can't keep up" (TFA, 89).

Unpleasantness is not disarmed here; it is simply evaded. The narrator uses a comparable diversionary tactic when he recounts his infant daughter's illness:
"I gave her a small drink of water, not too much, and rinsed the vomit taste out of her mouth. Then I wiped the puke off my clothes and for some strange reason suddenly it was a perfect time, there at Mushroom Springs, to wonder whatever happened to the Zoot suit.

"Along with World War II and the Andrews Sisters, the Zoot suit had been very popular in the early 40s. I guess they were all just passing fads" (TFA, 126).

Similarly the narrator evades social problems: instead of deploring the situation of the poor who receive sandwiches in the park, he tells an amusing anecdote about a friend whose sandwich contained only a leaf of spinach; instead of lamenting the poverty of the Kool-Aid wino's family, he focuses on the wino's antic ritual. He uses imagination as a means of distorting reality into a problem to be smiled at rather than corrected.

Trout Fishing in America provides an examination of the imaginative capacity as a means of confronting what the narrator sees as an impoverished modern American reality. He frequently creates images which are preposterous according to conventional logical standards, but which possess or establish an appropriateness peculiar to the internal logic of the novel. Time after time an image is suggested and then adopted as though it were literal, thus enabling the narrator to participate in the creation of an imaginary world. In "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America," Brautigan demonstrates the complexity of this process of imagination supplanting reality through willful misperception. The narrator visits several acquaintances, finds himself confused about their cat named "208," and tries to invent an explanation for its name: "I pretended that the cat, 208, was named after their room number, though I knew that their number was in the three hundreds" (TFA, 111). He explains that "it was easier for me to establish order in my mind by pretending that the cat was named after their room number. It seemed like a good idea and the logical reason for a cat to have the name 208" (TFA, 111). However, logic is seldom comfortable in Brautigan's novels. Never very satisfied with his pretended explanation, the narrator later finds what he calls "the true significance of 208's name" (TFA, 112). In effect, coincidence provides him with an explanation which is much more plausible than ridiculously pretending the cat was named after an inaccurate hotel room number: bailing a friend out of jail, he discovers that the bail office is room 208 in the Hall of Justice. At this point, his prose waxes poetic to reflect his enthusiasm over his discovery: "I paid ten dollars for my friend's life and found the original meaning of 208, how it runs like melting snow all the way down the mountainside to a small cat living and playing in Hotel Trout Fishing in America, believing itself to be the last cat in the world, not having seen another cat in such a long time, totally unafraid, newspaper spread out all over the bathroom floor, and something good cooking on the hot plate" (TFA, 112). However, his explanation is only barely more satisfying to the reader than the earlier one: it stems simply from coincidence. The novel offers no specific connection between the cat or its owners and the bail office of the San Francisco Hall of Justice. The narrator has found an explanation which is more convenient than believing that the room of the couple on the third floor has the number 208. The earlier fiction has been replaced by one which does not require that he overlook the reality obviating his explanation. He has employed imagination to establish a rather tenuous and circumstantial order in his mind. In another episode the narrator responds similarly: he finds himself disturbed by economic inequities and creates an imaginary solution for the impoverished who are now dead: "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" (TFA, 31). Once again, extended prose structure signals fanciful invention, this time producing a pretty sentiment, to be sure, but one which remains absurd as a constructive social measure. The novel repeatedly demonstrates the human tendency to replace reality with the creations of the imagination. In "Sea, Sea Rider," the controlling force of this propensity depends upon the saturation of the modern mind with the literature of popular American culture, ranging from Hemingway novels to macho pulp westerns. The chapter's title arises from the final image of episode: the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea" (TFA, 39). The narrator finds himself riding the sea of his own reading experiences (which the bookstore owner conveniently articulates for him), adapting reality into terms commensurate with those experiences. As a result, the narrator's search for America becomes a quest for an imagined America, the virginal America of popular fiction and elementary school history classes: America, he assures us, is "often only a place in the mind" (TFA, 116). Brautigan's narrator finds it easier to indulge in fantasy and non-involvement than to dare to challenge the social order: at one point, he admits, "I was going to say that a sick person should never under any conditions be a bad debt, but I decided to forget it" (TFA, 114). The enervating apathy of his escapist visions finally deprives him of the impetus for the quest: "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America (TFA, 149). At this stage, his surrender of the potential fruition of his quest is so thorough that he engages in bitter, reactionary ridicule of nonviolent peace marchers.

In a sensitive and engaged examination of Trout Fishing in America, John Clayton has complained that in the midst of a commercialized and unwholesome America, Brautigan offers only "the politics of imagination." Clayton continues, "And the politics of imagination is finally not enough for me. It's not enough for us." However, while it may be enough for the narrator of Trout Fishing in America, it is not enough for Brautigan himself. Neil Schmitz has perceptively observed that "because his fiction is told in the first person by an I whose discourse has remained relatively consistent in manner, Brautigan is often read as though he were this speaker, this voice idling in lyrical reverie." Yet Schmitz is reluctant to apply this insight to the narrator of Trout Fishing in America: "Unlike the writers who narrate The Abortion and In Watermelon Sugar, this writer is very close to Brautigan's voice." However, unlike his narrator, Brautigan sees the ultimate failure of imagination and escapism as programs for life. He is critical of his narrator's evasion of the economic and social inequities of America and his inaction in the face of the violence, commercialism, and political greed of the country. Throughout the novel. Brautigan portrays as defective vision the narrator's use of imagination as a mode of perception. The narrator takes no corrective measures to improve his world, despite his recognition of its deficiencies. In the light of another Brautigan novel, In Watermelon Sugar, this passivity varies from the attitude of the author: the tigers must be slain before the Edenic world can be entertained.

Brautigan recognizes the attractiveness of the imaginative retreat, but portrays the culpability of this approach. The poverty of the unfortunates who receive sandwiches in the park or who pick beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound cannot be laughed or wished away. Like the flight of stairs which the narrator mistakes for a creek, the seductions by imagination are self-imposed and should not long survive the piercing glare of reality. While the narrator purposefully evades that glare, Brautigan demonstrates the impossibility of even achieving self-satisfaction by that stratagem. In "Red Lip," the narrator is trying to get a ride to Steelhead, but with no success. While waiting, he invents a game to pass the time: "I had nothing else to do, so I caught salmon flies in my landing net. I made up my own game. It went like this: I couldn't chase after them. I had to let them fly to me. It was something to do with my mind. I caught six" (TFA, 10). While his passive method provides him with flies here, he does not gain a ride. Brautigan seems to offer no hope that Americans can easily return to an idealized state: his narrator finds himself repeatedly thwarted in his simple quest. Encountering continuous frustration, he doesn't even succeed in actually fishing until the eleventh chapter, and even then he is in a creek that "turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch (TFA, 28). Subsequently, he goes fishing literally in the midst of death, with a graveyard on either side, in "a slow-moving, funeral-procession-on-a-hot-day creek" (TFA, 29). This is soon followed by an account of the fish which die in Hayman Creek (TFA, 42). the trout killed by port wine (TFA, pp. 43-49), and "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" (TFA, 50-51). The elegiac atmosphere generated by these episodes epitomizes the frustration which the narrator experiences throughout his search. Brautigan also uses "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" to reflect his criticism of the narrator by focusing on Lord Byron, the romantic rebel who died while working for Greek independence. Byron is equated with Trout Fishing in America, the ideal, and provides an effective foil to Brautigan's noncommittal narrator. Conclusive evidence of the narrator's failure appears at the end of Trout Fishing in America. The penultimate chapter of the novel provides three quotations concerning the nature of language, the medium being employed for the creation of imaginative reality. After citing these passages, the narrator comments, "expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" (TFA, 181). At first glance, it would, appear that he is successful in this desire. However, the concluding word of the novel is "mayonaise," a misspelling of the word "mayonnaise." It is Brautigan, not the narrator, who has the last word: the frustration of the narrator's "human need" on an elemental level of language is the capstone of Brautigan's criticism of his attempt to divorce himself, through imagination and evasion, from the problems he finds prevalent in America.

Imagination is not, of course, wholly to be despised: Brautigan indicates that it can serve fruitfully by providing a goal and a sense of direction, but it must be accompanied by creative action. Thus, the narrator fantasizes Leonardo da Vinci: "I saw him inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America. I saw him first of all working with his imagination, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then taking it away and then coming back again with a different motion, and in the end the lure was invented" (TFA, 175-176). However, the narrator does not recognize any need for implementation in his own situation. He fails to realize that the correction of social problems is the only guarantee of personal freedom and justice. The preservation of these values, like the pair of socks he buys, is jeopardized by his passive, evasive role: "I wish I hadn't lost that guarantee. That was a shame. I've had to face the fact that new socks are not going to be a family heirloom. Losing the guarantee took care of that. All future generations are on their own" (TFA, 95). Unless one actively participates in the refurbishment of American society, all future generations are truly on their own. The historical ideals upon which America was founded become like the photographs which the narrator has taken, but which he cannot afford to have developed: "They are in suspension now like seeds in a package" (TFA, 125). Brautigan suggests that only firm commitment and persistence, even in the face of failure as repeated as that of Alonso Hagen, can provide the hope of fulfillment.

Imagination by itself cannot guarantee the clarity of perception required for the development of social change. The values which the narrator idealizes as Trout Fishing in America, if misperceived, can also be seductions. In fact, on the title page of the novel, the words, "Trout Fishing in America" graphically take the shape of a hook. The danger Brautigan discovers in his narrator's approach is that it reduces the Trout Fishing in America ideals from social goals to private goals. Brautigan shows that, like astigmatism, imagination can distort what it sees. Even when imagination offers something of value, it must be accompanied by action; the evasive comfort it provides is too often both illusory and incapacitating.

Cooley,1981

"The Garden in the Machine: Three Postmodern Pastorals"
John Cooley
Michigan Academician, vol. 13, no. 4, Spring 1981, pp. 405-420.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

One of the literary fascinations of our time is the ongoing debate as to whether we have come to the end of "modern literature" and begun, without quite realizing it, another literary era, or whether contemporary writing is but a curious continuation of modernism. Many postmodernists and structuralists claim we are witnessing a literature which is developing sharply contrasting ideas about literary form and function. . . . Without directly entering this debate, this article will argue that the tone and theme of contemporary pastoral writing is, much of it, in stark contrast to that of the transcendental and modern traditions. The tree writers receiving attention here, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Richard Brautigan, have each written pastorals with certain common features, and with a feeling about nature and the earth which does not exist in earlier pastoral fiction. The discussion will focus on "Morris in Chains" from Coover's book of fictions, Pricksongs and Descants; Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle; and Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America.

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Trout Fishing in America is already something of a minor American classic, comparable, in both its stylistic achievement and intricate layering of themes, with works like Miss Lonelyhearts, Winesburg, Ohio and "The Bear." More than a decade old now, it survived the peculiarities of the 1960s that it doubtless grew out of and spoke most directly to. It continues to grow in depth and meaning and to draw critical interest. It is a novel in the American tradition of stylistic innovation, presenting us with a voice both compelling and beguilingly original. Trout Fishing is a collection of tiny fictions or perhaps even prose poems, each highly wrought, like exquisitely handcrafted trout flies or lures, most of them with enough interest and hooking power to "work" by themselves. Yet the book, despite its very contemporary antiscale and antistory effects, also makes good narrative and thematic sense once rearranged for readings of plot, character, and theme. Along with these trendy, postmodernist techniques and themes which Brautigan incorporates so handily, there are many connections with the pastoral tradition. Rather like Vonnegut, he seems caught between twin impulses, to show the absurdity of life, and to pose suggestions for survival. One of his greatest achievements is the artful disguise of his ideas through a style and surface texture so imaginative that complex issues are handled deftly and lightly.

Also of interest has been the changing critical opinion of Brautigan's novel. Early criticism, such as Jack Clayton's essay (North American Review 11, 1971) said that Trout Fishing expressed the voice of an American subculture, "giving people the assurance they can be free and part of a community of free people, now" (p. 66). Terrance Malley, in his book on Brautigan, has provided the most thoroughgoing discussion of Trout Fishing available (and imaginable), emphasizing the narrative and thematic order that underlies the apparent aimlessness of the novel. Tony Tanner devotes a few pages of his City of Words to Brautigan, emphasizing the richness of the imagination at work in Trout Fishing. He argues, quite convincingly, that Brautigan creates a pastoral fantasy, a verbal world not unlike a city (or country) of words—a way of maintaining one's sanity in modern America. Neil Schmitz, taking Tanner to task, emphasizes the ironic voice with which Brautigan invests his narrator, declaring that like Hawthorne, Brautigan "does not write within the pastoral mode as an advocate of its vision." Both are spokesmen for an ironic pastoral pessimism. Schmitz sees Brautigan as essentially "an ironist critically examining the myths and language of the pastoral sensibility that reappeared in the sixties" (p. 125). Each of these essays illuminates aspects of Brautigan's pastoral, and, while seemingly disputatious, their varying interpretations are probably justifiable within the possibilities of this richly textured novel. To them I shall add a further hypothesis regarding Brautigan's use of the pastoral form.

"Trout Fishing in America" is, as others have suggested, a person, a place, an outdoor sport, a cripple, a pen nib, and a book by Richard Brautigan. To these I will add that it is also a religion and a state of mind. In his highly stylized kaleidoscope of little fictions, Brautigan gives us disconcerting glimpses of a badly diseased American wilderness. The narrator, his woman friend, and their baby travel about from trout stream to trout stream, having the most unsettling experiences imaginable. In fact, Trout Fishing is filled with images of violence, environmental disintegration, and futility. It is a novel littered with both human and natural wreckage, the fallout of the twentieth century. There are trout streams for sale by the foot in a wrecking yard, trout killed with port wine, and coyotes killed with cyanide capsules. Brautigan gives hauntingly truthful images of an America in which one can buy and sell absolutely anything, not just the streams and trout, but even the waterfalls and the accompanying birds and insects. We see a country obsessed with commerce, with fishing equipment and camping paraphernalia, a cruel and dangerous parody of real outdoor experience. Through Brautigan's tough clarity we see a society so obsessed with commerce and profit that even the most resistant submit to the lure of "fast bucks." Were he living today, Leonardo da Vinci would probably be turning out trout lures called "the last supper," Brautigan fantasizes. He also hints at the extensive pseudo-naturalism that is another plague of our times. "Jack the Ripper" appears disguised as "Trout Fishing in America," wearing "mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt" (TFA, p.48). "The Ripper" is clearly, in Brautigan's opinion, not the only embodiment of senseless violence and destruction posing as wholesome, rugged naturalness. From one point of view, Trout Fishing is so crammed with the details of a pastoral tragedy that one comes to feel that Brautigan is not writing a pastoral novel, but, as Malley puts it, "an analysis of why the old pastoral myth of an America of freedom and tranquility is no longer viable" (pp. 151-52).

As we have seen in "Morris in Chains" and Cat's Cradle, it is entirely likely that contemporary pastorals will be laden with images of the death of woods and stream, of the heart and spirit of wildness in America. What remains, for Brautigan and others, is more like a diseased garden contained within a machine. Unlike traditional pastorals, the tone of Brautigan's novel is hardly eulogistic or sentimental over wild America; it is a book that seems verbally high with puns, silliness, deadpan humor, clever turns of phrase, and amusing anecdotes. There are good single liners such as that of the talking outhouse that observes: "I'm a monument to a good ass gone under." And there are sharp, cutting metaphors that linger on, such as the narrator's description of a fishing hole that worked like a pencil sharpener: "I put my reflexes in and they came back out with a good point on them" (TFA, p.56). If this were a book principally about the drawing, quartering, and selling of wild America, there would be a radical disjunction between its language and its theme. The reason one does not feel a grave inconsistency is that we unconsciously sense the two forces—the positive, inventive force of Brautigan's language, and the language of pastoral disintegration—merge with the unity of counterpoint to melody.

Brautigan slowly spins about his narrator and his mysterious "Trout Fishing in America" a mythology and a theology, but so lightly, so subtly does he cast for his readers that we either miss the hook or do not much mind being caught. He has put together a book of individual but related fictions so artful, so irresistibly alluring as to resemble the art of fly-tying, a barbed hook set carefully within the feathers and verbiage of each attractive lure. Fishermen call it a "fly book," a little waterproof volume containing artificial trout flies. Thus we find ourselves in the stream of Brautigan's dazzling or sometimes deadpan language. Some of his lures float on by, looking more like aberrations in a hat shop. But somewhere in his fly book there is a lure or two for most readers. This is the functional element of the novel. The lures must attract, the reader must swallow, and the hook must set. Then slowly this gentle fisherman pulls his readers through polluted and troutless waters into a reality they may not ordinarily inhabit.

In contrast to Hemingway, Brautigan offers his readers no pastoral paradise. Thoreau argued that we can never get enough wilderness, but in Trout Fishing we can't get any. Nor have Brautigan or his narrator any solution to environmental deterioration. What Brautigan does offer is a state of mind, a state of the imagination so highly refined, so sharply pointed that it can transform experience. More than mere tonic or "kool aid," his book offers a way of imagining and experiencing so altered from the common paths of the mind that it may seem like a religious conversion. This is a fair way of describing the theological references that one finds in Trout Fishing. Brautigan is no more proposing a new religion here than Vonnegut is with Bokononism. He wishes to suggest that with an awakened imagination and an environmental consciousness one might feel like a religious convert.

The influence of Henry Thoreau hovers significantly behind this novel. This may seem unlikely, since Thoreau's argument for the virtues of wildness was made convincing by the directness of his statements and his unflinching integrity to principle. Brautigan proceeds mainly through indirection, fragmentation, hyperbole, and understatement, Of course Thoreau uses such techniques, but the two books provide a strikingly different reading experience. The great affinity between them lies in their turn inward. Both writers suggest that, as Thoreau puts it, we become "expert in home-cosmography." Despite the loving, painstaking detail devoted to making Walden real, foot by foot, season by season, it is for Thoreau a state of mind and thus a way of life rather than a specific place. Consequently, Thoreau could declare that he had other lives to live and urge each reader to create his or her own Walden. Thoreau wanted us to see that, like the "beautiful bug" trapped many years within an apple tree and then in a table plank, we too can emerge to a new and stunning life. In his own modestly unassuming way Brautigan seems "merely" to be demonstrating that stunning proposition.

Brautigan ties his fishing lures around the appropriately elusive figure of "Trout Fishing in America," perhaps an American expression of Eliot's "Fisher King." And that is one of the cantankerous pleasures of this slippery text; like slick jokes, allusions to Byron, Franklin, Thoreau, even Hemingway come slipping by and are frequently best ignored. TFA (as he will hereafter be called here) was probably a minor deity, a fish-man perhaps, who possessed super-human powers but was also vulnerable to human pollution. He had an Achilles tail, one might say. In "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" (and on page 33, incidentally) we learn that our native god-spirit died of asphyxiation, as if "he had been Lord Byron." The reference is presumably to Byron's death while aiding Greeks in their fight for freedom. We also learn that to thousands of young Americans TFA has become synonymous with their opposition to nuclear testing and weapons proliferation. They carry posters which declare:
"DON'T DROP AN H-BOMB ON THE OLD SWIMMING HOLE!"
"ISAAC WALTON WOULD'VE HATED THE BOMB!"
"ROYAL COACHMAN, SI! ICBM, NO!" (TFA, p.98)

Thus the spirit of TFA lives on as an inspiration toward non violence.

"Trout Fishing in America Terrorists" are a small group of sixth graders who hold TFA as inspiration in their battle for freedom of expression and freedom just to be sixth graders. The episode seems to take place in the narrator's childhood, when he has presumably introduced his classmates to the mysterious conspiracy which is TFA. The sixth graders scrawl "Trout Fishing in America" in chalk on the backs of some of the first graders. Their inevitable confrontation with the principal is classic. The principal interrogates, "What do you boys make of it . . . this 'Trout Fishing in America' business?" Their silence and fidelity to their conspiracy is the proof of their guilt. Their confessions obtained, he declares that "Trout Fishing in America has come to an end." Within a few days all signs of the magic slogan "disappeared altogether as it was destined to from the very beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade" (TFA, p.40).

Like the elusive Tristero in Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine, the presence of TFA is sensed throughout this book. Exactly what it means is uncertain. It appears in public briefly, but soon is forced underground again. One gathers that, as with Tristero and Bokononism, many more people swear allegiance to TFA than one would ever imagine.

This theme of pastoral conspiracy is stated another way by Neil Schmitz, when he speculates that "the setting of the modern pastoral is irrevocably the city it seeks to deny" (p. 125). Metaphorically, this speculation rings true. One feels, in reading contemporary pastorals, that the garden is within the machine, or, as John Barth describes it in Giles Goat Boy, within the computer. In such an environment, conspiracies, gothic configurations, and clandestined meetings of armies in green, will be the necessary stock-in-trade of pastoral writing.

But Brautigan and his narrator offer more than the vague possibility of conspiracy. Brautigan gives ample evidence that he has been chosen by TFA as a disciple who has been given encouragement and guidance before the master's death. The most striking revelation of this relationship occurs in "Trout Fishing in America Nib." Here the narrator makes clear that his inspiration as writer comes not from Diana or any other mythological presence, but from TFA. He is allowed to use his mentor's gold nib pen. TFA warns, "Write with this but don't write hard because this pen has got a gold nib and is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer" (TFA, p. 110). We can speculate that Brautigan has inherited this pen and has followed the advice to write lightly. He has received through it the style of TFA himself. He writes with lightness and levity to protect the impressionable nib and preserve the line of inspiration.

This metaphor is carried a step further in a fascinating little episode called "Knock on Wood," which occurs when the narrator, still a youngster, goes fishing for the first time. His tackle consists of string a bent pin, and doughballs from a slice of bread. But as he approaches the stream with bated breath and his "vaudevillian hook" baited with a doughball, he realizes something is very wrong. His waterfall is no more than a "flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees" (TFA, p.5). This appears to be both a parody on the seemingly blind enthusiasm of trout fishermen as well as an indication of the narrator's commitment to TFA at an early age. Undaunted by his mistake, he says, "I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself" (TFA, p. 5). How much this sounds like Thoreau's observation, "It's not the berries that count, it's the experience." It also suggests that the pastoral virtues Brautigan gives expression to reside in the imagination rather than in the trout. Of course the reference to a "vaudevillian hook" charmingly suggests the technique Brautigan uses, the short, exquisitely tied little fictions, each capable of catching readers. "Knock on Wood" may thus be seen as a trial run for the narrator's craft and technique. Unable to catch fish, he hooks himself, (Thoreau puts it this way: "It would be nobler game to shoot oneself.") and in a stylized self-communion, Brautigan's narrator eats the bread himself. TFA has not missed a moment of this experience and recalls with amusement a similar incident of his own. ("I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.")

So much is revealed in this little episode: the relationship of TFA to the narrator, the narrator's comically transforming experience, the implications of religious ritual, and the suggestion of a vaudevillian technique. Soon afterward, in "The Kool-Aid Wino," Brautigan gives further hints regarding his technique. One of the narrator's friends is kept from working by a rupture. Our young narrator brings his friend a nickel, and they set off to buy a package of kool-aid. Carefully they mix it in jars, but without sugar and at half-strength. The ceremony of mixing and drinking is exacting. His friend even turns off the water "with a sudden and delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination" (TFA, p.9). The two youngsters sit in the chicken house drinking the diluted and grape-flavored kool-aid, eating homemade bread covered with Karo syrup and peanut butter. It is another of Brautigan's little rituals; the "kool-aid wino" even resembles "the inspired priest of an exotic cult." It is here that Brautigan delivers what may be the most delightful and telling line of his novel. About the wino he says this: "He created his own kool-aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it" (TFA p.10). The young wino compensates for his injury, emblematic of all the injuries and sickness contained in the novel, by becoming addicted to kool-aid. It is merely the vehicle for creating a private reality through which one can illuminate and thus transform life.

As suggested above, Brautigan's "kool-aid reality" is reminiscent of Thoreau's "beautiful bug." Both are reminders of our powers locked within, of the spirit lives with which we can learn to illuminate ourselves. Like the ruptured child-priest, Brautigan also is a surgeon for diseased imaginations, providing the cool and therapeutic tonic of his imaginative fictions. Thus Brautigan invokes not so much the power of nature but of the imagination, under the influence of nature, to heal and transform.

Despite the differences between these three pastorals by Coover, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, their common strands are indeed interesting. As I have suggested, there is in each a pervasive self consciousness, a deliberate, even cliched use of figures and themes from the pastoral tradition. The tone of each is light, the most despairing images of pastoral death being offset by humor and giddy flights of imagination. Never before has pastoralism produced such devastating pictures of the death of Nature, and of the agrarian and wilderness ideals. Yet the tone, in each case, is almost cheerfully gothic.

No longer do images of the machine's sudden violation of natural solitude seem a sufficient metaphor to express our dilemma. Instead, the garden now lies within the machine, or so it seems, in these acute, perhaps paranoid, expressions of the pastoral imagination. Thus is dashed the pastoral hope of a balance, and rich interpenetration between the two great kingdoms: the city and the country. If the "pastoral hope" survives at all in these fictions, it is only through secrecy and conspiracy.

Brautigan more fully articulates the possibilities for pastoral conspiracy than the others. He seems to affirm ancient belief in the power of the word and of the imagination to transform lives, even nations. The "pastoral hope" resides in the power of a "green language." Thus one of the traditional functions of the poet is invoked anew: to warn against violations of natural law, and to create images, metaphors, and myths both ecologically harmonious and sufficiently compelling to protect the natural world. As Octavio Paz expresses this belief, "If art mirrors the world, then the mirror is magical; it changes the world."

Kolin,1981

"Food for Thought in Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America"
Phillip Kolin
Studies in Contemporary Satire: A Creative and Critical Journal, vol. 8, (Spring) 1981, pp. 9-20.
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.

In the introductory chapter of his Plot of Satire, Alvin Kernan details some of the activities about which the satirist makes moral pronouncements. Satire, Kernan observes,
". . . always contains either an implicit or explicit set of values, which frequently take specific form in judgments on such matters as what kind of food to eat, how to manage your wife and household, how to dress, how to choose your friends and treat your guests, what kind of plays to frequent and what kind of books to read, how to conduct political life."

In Trout Fishing in America (1967), Richard Brautigan singles out most of these choices for satiric treatment. Of special concern to Brautigan, however, is what America's food supply and eating habits say about contemporary American values. Much of the action in Trout Fishing in America, therefore, is occupied with food—its description, preparation, consumption, and spoilage. Whether through literal statement or metaphoric vision, Brautigan uses food to praise America's lost virtues or satirize its present vices. From the first chapter where the poor are deceived with a spinach leaf sandwich to the last word of the novel ("mayonnaise") food is a symbolic staple in Brautigan's satiric inventory of American values. As a modern-day Melvillean, Brautigan even includes a recipe chapter on how to prepare compote of apples and ketchup.

The location and preparation of food play an integral part in his picaro narrator's odyssey through the Northwest and California, and the characters he meets or describes are often morally defined by their eating and drinking habits, especially in their thirst for liquor. For as Kent Bales observes, "Brautigan pursues the relationship between alcohol and the myth-making imagination at some length." Appropriately enough, one of Brautigan's creeks is "like a beer belly." That landscape and others persistently ask the reader to think of food through place-names such as Mushroom Springs or Salt Creek. The vanishing trout are, of course, the most significant food supply in this landscape. But these references to food do not display a bountiful America overflowing with the blessings of a rich harvest. Rather, they too often add to the reader's "feeling of fertility gone sour." Food in Trout Fishing In America often points to both the causes and effects of a cachexic society, a land suffering from a moral and physical blight. In this paper, I shall study the references to food in Brautigan's satiric novel in order to explore their artistic and thematic functions.

1

In his expose of American values gone awry, Brautigan has produced a novel of the absurd. But that absurdity has its own internal coherence and cohesion, for it imaginatively and faithfully presents American values turned upside down and inside out. That the mechanical challenges and slowly conquers the living is one sign of America's dislocated values, as expressed in Brautigan's seemingly outlandish similes and other comparisons. For Tony Tanner, Brautigan's "sentences are continually turning off into unexpectedness in ways which pleasantly dissolve our habitual semantic expectations." But I question if all the effects are indeed pleasant, since Brautigan presents so many terrifying transformations the implications of which spell disaster for traditional American values. For example, as Neil Schmitz has shown, the reader perceives the "jarring effect of the urban image affixed to the bucolic object" when the city's flop houses metaphorically intrude on the country landscape.

In many of his references to food, Brautigan shows the same topsy-turvy world. Many objects are metaphorically transformed into food, reminding Brautigan's narrator of the kinds of sustenance available and palatable in American society. These associations reveal the frozen being encrusted on the fruitful, rigidity and death encroaching on a source of man's health, veneral trademarks of a satiric plot. Flour trucks collide with cemeteries in Trout Fishing in America to prove this point (60). In the chicken house that the Kool-Aid Wino uses as a church, there are "half-rotten comic books . . . like fruit under a tree" (10). This comparison chronicles the sour experience of American childhood. The comics, always in demand by children, provide a commentary on the Kool-Aid Wino's neglected and injured youth. The fruit of his youth would rot like them if it were not for his "wine." A light fixture in the principal's office in the chapter on the Terrorists "looked like a boiled potato" (138). Brautigan is saying here that the light of education is neither clear nor creative but as bland and unexciting as the potato, which seems like an appropriate symbol for a shriveled society that propigates conformity. The furniture in Hotel Trout Fishing in America is, says the narrator, "the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food" (66); and the candle burning in the narrator's new and crowded apartment when his daughter is conceived "seems like milk on a saucer" (96). These two similes, both alluding to American infants, inauspiciously show again the mechanical embracing the living, the second example indicating this ab ovo. Lysol on the furniture (baby food) and milk like burning wax provide strange nourishment; they are appropriate satiric signs ushering in a new, emotionally sterile generation.

But Brautigan reverses the terms of his comparisons only to show that they convey the same meaning, the same implications. If food is compared to inedible objects, many of these objects are fashioned metaphorically from food. In this absurd world of contemporary America, trout become everything but edible. They turn into steel or airplane tickets; their habitat is a telephone book of the mind. Cynanide capsules become food for unsuspecting coyotes. I shall discuss this aspect of the trout in greater detail later.

Brautigan pushes the motif of the transformation of food to its extreme when man himself is reduced to food through sardonic simile. In America man is churned up, consumed, digested, and discarded. With sick humor, the narrator observes "We read Krafft-Ebing aloud all the time as if he were "Kraft dinner" (93). This is a serious fooling that probes the mind, questioning what worth man has and wondering why he has become a commodity in American culture. Similarly, Brautigan denies any romantic interpretation of John Dillinger's life. Through a reincarnation by the narrator's imagination "He was leaking blood like those capsules we used to use with oleomargarine, in those good old days when oleo was white like lard" (88). The title of the chapter in Trout Fishing in America poses this question: "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?" The answer, suggested by Brautigan's food simile, is that it never held the historical man at all but only an image of him that demystifies and turns into contemporary bathos what was once terrifying. Blood is scary; oleomargarine capsules are not. In a more playful vein, though still seeing man as something to be consumed, the narrator says his thumb is like a "bunch of bananas" (6) as he hitchhikes on the West Coast.

The full force of Brautigan's use of this transformation theme emerges in his presentation of Trout Fishing in America Shorty who is exemplary of the upside down values America possesses. His name is symbolic; he falls short of any ideal. He is literally and figuratively an incomplete man, whose grotesque shape and strange appetites become targets for Brautigan's satire. Of him the narrator says: "There were some garlic sausages and some bread sitting in his wheelchair as if it were a display counter in a grocery store" (96). Confined to his wheelchair, Shorty epitomizes the living caught in the mechanical. Moreover, the transformation of his wheelchair into a display counter further humanizes him. Garlic sausages are a proper emblem for Shorty, for he is the bad wind that blows off sugar" (45), again suggesting Shorty's destructive qualities in terms of food. Sugar has a positive symbolic function in the Brautigan cannon. For example, In Watermelon Sugar, a Brautigan novel written two years after Trout Fishing in America, shows that sugar represents life, love, and warmth, all traits Shorty lacks. Sardonically, Shorty's success in the movies is compared to his producing food. The movie tycoons "will milk it for all it's worth and make cream and butter from a pair of empty pants legs and a low budget" (63). Brautigan literalizes an idiom ("to milk it") to show how depraved the industry is in making profits from Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Through synecdoche, Shorty becomes his pants; and they give milk, a strange and perverted food for the masses who see this coward as an idol on the silver screen.

2

Quite obviously, trout are the most important symbol in the novel. They dramatize both the nostalgia, and incestive in Brautigan's satire. Fishing for Trout can stand for freedom, innocence, and beauty—all now lamentably on the wane or lost. This multifarious symbol also points to the trout as food, nutrition and sustenance for the fisherman who catch them. Kenneth Seib has noted that trout fishing "implies through its associations the abundance, the richness, and the good life that is every American's birthright . . ." But showing satiric rage, Brautigan' narrator repeatedly is frustrated in his quest to capture that necessary abundance for the good life. Denied trout, the narrator faces the privation that affects stomach and soul. A sign posting this warning stands in his way: "IF YOU FISH IN THIS CREEK, WE'LL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD" (60). Trout are dispersed by the slime and garbage in the water, driven away by hoards of urban invaders, or sold into oblivion at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. Alonso Hagen's diary recording years of losing trout becomes a blank menu for today and tomorrow.

Trout are fast becoming an endangered species, and perhaps by implication so are the kind of men who fish for them. Dead fish float everywhere in the novel. it They are poisoned at Hayman's Creek where "no sooner had the trout touched the water, than they turned their white bellies up and floated down the creek" (28). The fifteenth chapter of the novel, "Trout Death by Port Wine," contains a Swiftian litany on the ways trout can be murdered Brautigan ironically concedes that it is legitimate for them to have their necks broken, for pools to dry up under them, or to have a trout "die from a fungus hat crawls like sugar-colored ants over its body until the trout is in death's sugarbowl" (28). But the narrator satirically concludes that it is unnatural for an alcoholic executioner to poison them with port wine. Brautigan's is the bitter contempt of a fisherman/moralist who sees destruction of life's energy symbolized by the trout "Like the Fisher King, the narrator has been angling over a sterile wasteland." Ironically, the campers who refuse to house a dead man's body in their tent decide to go to a Fish Konk Lake the next day. The place-name represents a piscatorial golgotha all too familiar to the well-traveled narrator. Everywhere the fish seem to be konked (murdered) out.

Like an autopsy report, Brautigan's novel again and again reminds readers of the causes for the demise of the trout. They have become the soiled fish of America's inland seas—the victims of mechanization, industrialization, indifference. In a country where Carnegie is king, trout are transformed into steel. They are like a "precious and intelligent metal" (3); their "eyes were stiff like iron" (44). They have been transformed with an angry imagination into lifeless objects, the opposite of food. Fishing for them one has to be a plumber (p. 19), the implication being that trout are going down a sewer. They are in fact dying "in a river of suffocating human excrement" (29) and becoming part of it. Man's once fecund source of food is now transformed into fecal waste. The fact that the trout streams at the Cleveland Wrecking ard are kept in a room next to a place housing "hundreds of toilets" (100) further strengthens Brautigan's painful satire on the transmutation and death of the trout. It is no wonder then that the fisherman's journey for food ends too often with dead lines, hooks alive with slime, and an empty creel and soul.

Of course, Brautigan's narrator snatches some fish in his travels, but too many of his catches are overshadowed by ominous circumstances. At Tom Martin Creek, the narrator catches a nine-inch trout but surrounding the creek is "a steep bushy canyon filled with poison oak" (19). Moreover, there are "hardly any good places to fish." The next fish he catches are, ironically, at Graveyard Creek at hatching time. In the chapter titled "The Message," he sees the trout that "stared back at us like leaves" and a little later he records "I caught a mess of those leaves for dinner. They were small and cold. The autumn was good to us" (25). Rather than solely revealing the transforming power of the imagination, this description, apprehensively comparing live trout to dead autumn leaves, suggests a decline in this life-giving species and an approaching end to the American fisherman's pleasure in catching it. That the trout are small and dark" likewise bodes no great future for the fish. Finally, these fish are not hooked in the vital, glorious spring but in a season traditionally associated with declining life and approaching death. At another time, the narrator lured a hunchback trout which "grew tired and sloppy in the catch" he then proceeded to have it for dinner. This deformed fish ("the first I'd ever seen") comments on what the plagued American landscape offers to both angler and his catch. The fate befalling this mutant fish, and more inclusively its mother, is described in terms that almost force a reader to see it as human. "The hump was probably due to an injury when the trout was young. Maybe a horse stepped on it or a tree fell over in a storm or its mother spawned where they were building a bridge" (57). Savoring the taste of this fish, the narrator introduces a sour comparison. "Wrapped in cornmeal and fried in butter, its hump tasted sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda." The trout's deformity here reminds him of the Hunchback of Notre Dame who loved the ill-fated Esmeralda who was, alas, gibbeted. The tragedy of this human couple provides the backdrop for the trout's own troubles. The taste of Esmeralda's kiss and the taste of the sweet trout are both doomed. Perhaps the death knell for the trout is nowhere more piercing than at the beginning of the novel when the narrator cannot find a single fish and concludes that "I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself" (5). Commenting on the failure of the American myth, Schmitz rightfully claims of the narrator that "He discovers the emptiness of the signifier, the sentence shriveled into a fossilized phrase." Brautigan is not having his narrator retreat into solipsism but, rather, has him express a truth about the vanishing trout. The destruction of the trout is satirically transformed into the destruction of the American dream.

3

Besides those to trout, other references to blithed food or plants provide a condemnation of America's tortured land and withering environment. Food figures in Brautigan's description of Pard's sense of loss: "his wife and kids are gone now, blown away like apples by the fickle wind of the Twentieth Century" (92). In another, even more caustic reference to apples, the narrator rhapsodizes "about fruit floating outside on the water, about apples and pears in rivers and lakes" (51). But rather than finding these luscious reminders of fertility, the narrator spies black, predatory water bugs instead: "The water bugs were so small I practically had to lay my vision like a drowned orange on the mud puddle." That one metaphor—" drowned orange"—conjures up a sinking nature horribly personified through a bloated and doomed fruit.

Even more dangerous for the fisherman/woodsman is a particular plant he finds in the California bush. Again, apples are ominously present.
"Behind the place was an old outhouse and to get down to it, you had to follow the path down past some apple trees and path of strange plants that we thought were either a good spice that would certainly enhance our cooking or the plants were deadly nightshades that would cause our cooking to be less" (p. 100).

The humor in the understatement of the last clause should not obscure the danger involved. Nature's bountiful gifts can be transformed into deadly delicacies in a game of gastronomical Russian roulette. Trout Fishing in America participates in this same criticism of America. Of the underdeveloped pictures in his camera, the narrator says they are "in suspension now like seeds in a package" (78). The reader wonders if the seeds, like the narrator's future will be sealed in a disappointing embryonic permanence. Further, the seed that the old couple receive with their gas purchase, in the chapter "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity," turn into indestructible Canadian thistles which refused to be uprooted by chemicals and grew on curses. The conclusion is simple; delicate or edible fruits and seeds are destroyed—either directly or in Brautigan's. metaphors—whereas suspicious plants or noxious thistles germinate and prosper. In Brautigan's satire, the American landscape becomes a briar patch, a wasteland.

4

Throughout Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan attempts to locate the perpetrators of the crimes against America. Once again, his satire employs food imagery, showing how America is corrupt and corrupted by the food it serves. Appropriately enough, people in the woods shoot stoves, stoves being a symbol of cooking in rural America. The narrator concludes: "Almost all the camp stoves we had seen in Idaho had been full of bullet holes. I guess it's only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some old stove sitting in the woods" (62). But shooting them is not a gratuitous act; it represents real frustration and bitterness, a disgust with America's woods. The food available in those woods—steel trout, drowned fruit, poisoned seeds—is not fit to be cooked. Hence, the stove is useless for the woodsman who sees in it an opportunity to register his complaint. The empty Metrecal can housing the dead Cobra Lily plant in "The Ballet of Trout Fishing in America" also comments on the American system through food. The Cobra Lily dies during the presidential elections of 1960 and wears an "I'm for Nixon" button as a wreath. Surely Brautigan is saying, if with bitter hyperbole, that a flesh eating plant symbolizes a defeated Richard Nixon. But the Metrecal can and the Cobra Lily also express a frequent incongruity characterizing politicians' promises. Metrecal is used to lose flesh and the Cobra Lily to eat flesh; like politicians' promises, the plant and the can cancel each other out.

Brautigan often uses food to criticize an indifferent establishment seeking to control or deceive the people. The most obvious example is the spinach leaf sandwich given as a dole to the poor. Like Pavlovian dogs, the impoverished masses in America are taught to cross the street on a signal to receive the free sandwich. But what they find is not America's plenty but its niggardline. Food is the bait on the hook, always deceiving those who of necessity must take it. Send me your starving masses, and I shall keep them that way, says Brautigan's America. In another chapter, the narrator launches a poignant attack in behalf of the dead poor, and food again plays a crucial role. Angered by their poverty which condemns them to have ephemeral tombstones "that looked like heels of stale bread" (20), the narrator offers this comparison:
"Eventually the seasons would take care of their wooden names like a sleepy short-order cook cracking eggs over a grill next to a railroad station. Whereas the well-to-do would have their names for a long time written on the marble hors-d'oeuvres like horses trotting up the fancy paths to the sky" (p. 21).

Food becomes a major satiric weapon when Brautigan discusses social agencies, especially hospitals. When his two artist friends contemplate spending the winter in an insane asylum, they talk about the clean environment, the social benefits, and also about "hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes" (p. 18), the kind of institutional food that may warm their bodies but not fire their spirits. The conventional "hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes" replaces the wine at the new Walden (the asylum) for these artists. Once inside a hospital a man finds his freedom of choice is denied, appropriately dramatized at meals. Describing the panoramic view his friend has of the San Francisco County Hospital, the narrator says that this friend "can practically hear the patients thinking about breakfast: I hate milk, and thinking about dinner: I hate peas, and then he can watch the hospital slowly drown at night, hopelessly entangled in huge bunches of brick seaweed" (102). Meals are the one event patients look forward to in a hospital, and here their regimens are proscibed with alarming banality.

Another object of Brautigan's satire is the F.B.I., which is seemingly omni-present in America's trout streams and very definitely and grotesquely involved with food. In the John Dillinger chapter, the narrator describes a big black car that stops in "front of the ice-cream parlor at Filbert and Stockton" (88). From it emerges an agent who "went in and bought two hundred double-decker ice-cream cones. He needed a wheelbarrow to get them back to the car." This ludicrous act may have sinister overtones, especially if the F.B.I. intends either to use those cones to bribe an unsuspecting populace or to satisfy its own gluttonous cravings for satiety. It is no wonder that individuals use food to protest their government's action. For example, when a beatnik gobbles down a huge sack of apple turnovers as if he were a turkey, the narrator observes that this action "was probably a more valid protest than picketing missile bases (87). The narrator himself expresses his disgust with a conservative and complacent America when he demands a receipt for a ten-cent candy bar he has purchased from a store owner who calls him a "Commie bastard." Alluding to tax write-offs, he justifies his decision as "the old ten-cent deduction. Insightfully, the narrator recalls "I didn't learn any thing about fishing in that store," a statement revealing how those who dispense food in America have values conflicting with the freedom and honestly associated with trout fishing.

5

Characters in Trout Fishing in America are frequently judged by the kinds of food and drink they consume. What Americans eat (or their opinions of what they eat) reflect their moral choices. They are, therefore, satirized or praised for their type of diet. It is entirely appropriate that Mr. Norris, who cannot even remember the names of his children, eats a "dehydrated beef Stroganoff dinner" (74). Like his food, Mr. Norris is drained and dry—emotionally. So, too, is Mr. Hayman, through whom Brautigan satirizes the figure of the loner who banishes all necessary human kindnesses from his life. "During all that time that was his life, Mr. Hayman never had a cup of coffee, a smoke, a drink, or a woman and thought he'd be a fool if he did" (26). He despised children; "the last thing in the world he had any use for were children." His spartan diet consisted of cold, harsh food—stoneground wheat, kale, and an occasional raw trout. Hayman (whose name suggests the straw man that he is) "got the notion that he would die, and did so" (28), ending his life as bleakly as he had lived it. The mortar and pestle he used to grind the wheat "fell off the shelf and broke" and "weeds grew into the kale" as if the components of his diet crumble and decay to show Hayman's lack of strong ties with the world or any roots with those who live in it. When Hayman died, the trout stayed away from his creek. But twenty years later, the trout dumped there no sooner had touched the water "than they turned their white bellies up and floated dead down the creek" (28). Hayman may have poisoned the waters by his very presence there, for he was a man who had no sense of humor or love of humanity, and in his eating habits Brautigan pointed this out satirically. Another mean and selfish individual is the "three-hundred pound Indian squaw" (109) who is infamous for her sexual gluttony (she prevents the narrator's friend from making love to her daugihers) and she is significantly enough associated with the bad food the friend cooks—"they were on a tight budget"

In contrast to these cold individuals, other characters in Trout Fishing in America relish and respect food, and thereby escape censure. They have a kind of joie de manger, even if their diets are sometimes bizarre. These individuals have reputations for hearty food which reflects their healthy, enviable outlook on life. The narrator's friend who runs the bookstore and arranges for an immediate assignation for him is famous for his Turkish coffee. Art and his black wife express a deep love for each other and for food as they valiantly strive to overpower the black pimp who keeps them in debt and threatens them nightly. Amid the confusion at Hotel Trout Fishing in America, Art's wife is renowned for her culinary skill, symbolic of the happy life she and her husband want to share together. The narrator reports: "My friend told me that she was a very fine cook. That she could really cook up a good meal, fancy dishes, on that single hot plate, next to the peach tree" (69). In the California bush the narrator and his friends celebrate a joyous communal existence with strange paen to food itself: "What we eat is funny and what we drink is even more hilarious: turkeys, Gallo port, hot dogs, watermelons, Popeyes, salmon, croquettes, frappes, Christian Brothers port, orange rye bread, canteloupe, Popeyes, salads, cheese—booze, grub and Popeyes" (93). Their colorful menu is an expression of their dietary freedom contrasting with the cruel grub of a Mr. Hayman or the absurdity of the two hundred ice-cream cones of the F.B.I.

Food has a religious aura in some places in the novel, and in these instances helps to redeem not reproach characters. In Hotel Trout Fishing in America, "an old Italian pensioner . . . listens to the heavy ticking of the clock and dreams of eternity's golden pasta, sweet basil and Jesus Christ" (66). The golden pasta quite likely is a symbol of the Eucharist. The narrator himself playfully speaks of his lunch in religious terms, calling it the Holy Trinity—me a piece of pie, and a stone-cold pork sandwich" (91). "Fortunately," he says it stopped one day without my having to do anything serious like grow up. Much more serious and important, though, are the views of the Kool-Aid Wino, a young boy who is injured (he must wear a truss) and lives in a chaotic world of tattered old blankets, wet diapers, and feathered pigs. He daily prepares his potion of Kool-Aid in an act that Thomas Hearron has called "a religious rite forthe purpose of salvation." The ceremony itself is imbued with obviousreligious symbolism. The Kool Aid Wino is like "the inspired priest of an exotic cult," the spigot from which he receives his water is likened to "the finger of a saint" (9), and his preparation of the Kool-Aid is reminiscent of the consecration of the Eucharist and may be even suggestive of the miracle at the wedding feast at Cana. Placed early in the novel (it is the fifth chapter), the episode involving the Kool-Aid Wino demonstrates the transcending power of food that enables the boy to escape the harsh reality of a tattered and sick world, to "illuminate" himself, and, finally, to purify his imagination and soul.

6

After trout, the most significant food mentioned by the narrator is mayonnaise. Needless to say, why Brautigan chose to end his satiric novel with this word has elicited critical commentary. Seib bitterly observes that, judging from the quotations in the penultimate chapter of the book, man is in his twilight in America and that "If we are all going to hell in a trout fishing in America canoe, how a writer ends his novel makes little difference or whether he writes at all, for that matter . . ." But most answers to the question have pointed to the victory of the imagination over the wrecking yard. Schmitz suggests that it is Brautigan's own sign, an antonym to the one prohibiting trout fishing that the narrator encounters. Similarly, Bales argues that with mayonnaise Brautigan expresses the "need to shape the world through language." Tanner offers perhaps the most detailed but still incomplete explanation. Claiming that the last two chapters are about language, Tanner sees a connection between the mayonnaise jar holding flowers for the dead poor in "Trout Fishing on the Bevel" and the last word of the novel:
"The mayonnaise jar rests on one of the graves of the American dream; similarly Brautigan's lexical games rest lightly, but distinctly, on the panorama of violence, decay and death which is recognized as the real world. A gift for play and a sense of annihilation come together in the placing of the last word of his book, just as they do in his work as a whole."

Obviously, mayonnaise is an important symbol in the novel. It defines the narrator's (and Brautigan's as well) sense of self and expresses his reaction to American society. A more complete answer to its significance in the novel can be found in the chapter titled "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity" where mayonnaise figures importantly. There the narrator introduces Alonso Hagen's sister, an old woman in her nineties in whose attic he finds the diary: "Everything that's old in the world was up there" (83). He Is proud to work for her, chopping wood, weeding her garden, and freeing her yard from snakes, if only to displace them in a yard across the way. She calls him every spring; he does not see her in the winter. The symbolism thus far suggests a boyhood quest against evil and a renewal of childhood obligations. The old woman represents a kind of maternal America—solicitious, protective, and venerable—now vanished. She fixes the narrator lunches—"little egg sandwiches with crusts cut off as by a surgeon, and she'd give me slices of banana dunked in mayonnaise" (80). Like the Kool-Aid Wino, the old lady is favorably compared to a doctor and thus contrasts with the real surgeon who slits the chub's throat in chapter thirty-one. Also, the eggs, from which mayonnaise is made, are associated with the glorious but poor dead whose wooden tombstones are at the mercy of a short-order cook cracking eggs, as we have seen. It is the narrator's job to replenish her stock. "I went to the store and bought some stuffing for the old lady. Maybe a pound of coffee or a quart of mayonnaise. Unlike Hayman but like the bookstore owner, the old lady likes coffee; and the mayonnaise—soft and white—represents familial security and the loving care for the young narrator who buys it for her. Mayonnaise, therefore, is a symbol of personal though nationally unattainable hope at the end of an otherwise bleak study of America. It evokes fond memories of a generally disappointing childhood across the flotsam of time; mayonnaise thus contrasts with the dying trout and other blithed food in the novel. The "Mother" who signs the insipid sympathy letter on the passing of Mr. Good "forgot to give [them] the mayommaise" (122). Unlike Alonso Hagen's sister, this woman uses hackneyed phrases that declare her insincerity. Her mayonnaise—caring, love, truthfulness—can never be sent because it never existed.

7

America may be described as "often only a place in the mind" (72), but Brautigan has paid much attention to its physical need for food. Through numerous references to food, he has expressed his criticisms of contemporary America. In metaphorically transforming inedible objects into food and trout into waste, Brautigan shows the extent to which America has perverted traditional values. Trout should be a source of sustenance for man's body and soul, but instead it is being debased or destroyed. Nor is trout alone on America's endangered species list; America's fertility is in jeopardy judging by references to fruits and seeds becoming sour and growing dangerous. This decay is the result of industrialization, bureaucracy, and the loss of emotional ties, satirically exemplified in the eating habits of many of the characters in the novel. Opposing such figures as Mr. Norris, Hayman, or Trout Fishing in America Shorty are the narrator's friends who enjoy and entertain with food. The narrator's own emotional attachment to mayonnaise captures an America now lost—a country where care, trust, and love flourished. There is no dodoubt that Trout Fishing in America offers readers much food for thought about the problems plaguing America.

Siegel,1979

"Trout Fishing in America"
Mark Siegel
Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature. 5 vols. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1983. Vol. 4, p. 1979.
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 young man describes his fantastic adventures fishing in the continental United States, as well as many other things he feels are thematically connected.

Principal characters:
THE NARRATOR, an unnamed trout fisherman
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, a friend of the narrator, a cultural concept, and a multifaceted activity
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA SHORTY, a perversion of his namesake

While Richard Brautigan's popularity, especially among young people, is considerable, the intellectual quality of his work has been consistently under-rated. Most probably, it is the easy readability, wild imagination, and bizarre humor of Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), The Hawkline Monster (1974), and his many other novels and collections of poems that account for both his popularity and the assumption that he has nothing "serious" to say. Ironically, Brautigan is not merely one of the more serious chroniclers of contemporary American society, but may also be one of the more pessimistic. Often Brautigan's narrators seem perversely upbeat—because they rarely offer criticism or blunt commentary—until the sheer weight of the perversity crushes that perspective for the reader. In A Confederate General from Big Sur, for example, the Civil War is called "the last good time this country ever had." Eventually, however, the horror of the war, the emptiness of the values on both sides, and the fraud of the heroic Confederate General—really a cowardly recruit—leak like oil onto the pond of the narrative, discoloring the pastoral reflection and suggesting the failure of both contemporary middle-American culture and its countercultures.

Trout Fishing in America is a collage of excerpts and images bound together by the presence of an anonymous narrator, peculiar references to trout fishing, and a unique, hypnotic literary voice. The narrator begins his story with an ironic juxtaposition of a statue of Benjamin Franklin welcoming new Americans and starving people walking to a pathetic soup kitchen. He digresses about how, as a child, he once imagined that he saw a beautiful trout stream in the woods, only to discover that it was merely a flight of stairs leading up to a house. He returns to adulthood and describes his frustration at being unable to hitch a ride on a highway. He regresses to childhood to describe a friend, "The Kool-Aid Wino," who salvages a miserable life by creating a potent religious ritual around badly diluted Kool-Aid, who creates his own "Kool-Aid reality" and is able to "illuminate" himself with it, The narrator discusses recipes for walnut catsup, apple compote, and pie crust. Mostly, however, he discusses various fishing trips and his generally unsuccessful attempts to catch trout. He annotates The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen, a record of trout lost between 1891 and 1897 by a fisherman who never caught a single fish. Brautigan describes his own encounters with a character / thing / idea named Trout Fishing in America, who is his frequent companion, and with Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a nasty, distorted little wino. He recalls a recent visit to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, where used trout stream is sold by the foot—trees and birds cost extra, of course.

While this incomplete summary of events suggests that Brautigan is savagely demythifying the legend of pastoral America—the notion that Americans have been purified and revitalized by their contacts with an abundant nature—Brautigan's point is not really so simple. For example, when the narrator reports catching a peculiarly deformed hunchback trout, he notes: "There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body, though, but of his energy." Throughout Trout Fishing in America, energy, and especially the energy of the imagination, seems to the saving grace in the usually clumsy lies by which people live. Structurally, the novel is more or less symmetrical, and the tale of the Kool-Aid wino at the start is balanced by homage to Leonardo da Vinci near the end. Da Vinci invents a fantastic fishing lure called "The Last Supper," which sells millions in America and does very well overseas in places such as the Vatican, where there are not any trout. Thirty-four ex-presidents of the United States claim they caught their limit on "The Last Supper." Moments like this, some readers conclude, show that Brautigan, while announcing the demise of real pastoral opportunities in America, is yet optimistic about the potential of American energy and imagination to revitalize its values and dreams. Again, however, this is an ersimplification. The Kool-Aid wino is an impoverished diabetic whose fantasies at best enable him only partially to escape his daily misery. Da Vinci's lure is "the sensation of the twentieth century, far outstripping such shallow accomplishments as Hiroshima or Mahatma Gandhi," Brautigan says, as usual without authorial clarification.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," the obvious literary antecedents of Trout Fishing in America—to which Brautigan makes overt references—suggest what his point may be. Moby Dick begins not with the famous phrase "Call me Ishmael," but with an etymology of whales. Brautigan ends Trout Fishing in America not with his homage to Leonardo da Vinci, but with a brief allusion to the human need to create words for things, and he says that his own need is to end his book with the word "mayonnaise." He does so in an apparently extraneous letter of condolence for the "passing of Mr. Good." "Gods [sic] will be done. He has lived a good long life and has gone to a better place." The author of the sympathy note adds a postscript: "Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise." Perhaps the literary mayonnaise is the novel's humor, the otherwise "irrelevant" ingredient that helps readers swallow the bad news about the world. In Moby Dick, lshmael goes to sea to rediscover his own humanity—and finally does so at the cost of the lives of all his friends. Perhaps Brautigan's narrator, pondering the death of a cultural tradition he has known and loved, finally achieves a rebirth; by confronting—and by forcing readers to confront—the possibility that the old gods may be dead, perhaps he will be ready to rejoin the important human struggle epitomized in the novel's opening scene of poverty in the land of promise. If Melville is seeking to define the ambiguous and ambivalent experience of his characters through the etymology of "whale," perhaps Brautigan is trying to tell his readers that, while he has not been able to define the American experience in so many words, he has tried to capture its ambiguities in his tale.

The simplicity of Brautigan's sentence structure, loaded with bizarre associations and startling juxtapositions, is virtually a parody of Hemingway's prose style, and this novel seems in part to be a parody of his short story "Big Two-Hearted River." While Hemingway's hero Nick Adams found in his pastoral retreat and mind-soothing pursuit of trout some measure of psychological sanctuary, Brautigan's narrator implies that this pastoralism - if it was ever more than a myth—is dead. (In fact, the last time Trout Fishing in America sees the narrator is on the Big Wood River, ten miles from Ketchum, Idaho, soon after Hemingway had killed himself there.) Hemingway's evasion of particularly American problems can only end in suicide, but his dream—in many ways the dream of trout fishing, of peace, plenty, and pastoral simplicity—has made an indelible impression on the American mind, has made Americans to some extent what they are, and cannot merely be cut out of their cultural selves. Like Mr. Good, Trout Fishing in America lived a good long life, his death was to be expected, and "it was nice you could see him yesterday even if he did not know you." Insisting that he is still alive is self-delusion; the imagination that strives to catch him may yet create new weapons or new peace; but like "The Last Supper," it is a betrayal and a masquerade. The staircase that the narrator imagined was a trout stream remained a staircase, and, as Trout Fishing in America tells him, "there was nothing I could do." Perhaps from living too long on imagination alone, the Kool-Aid wino eventually became as bitter as the novel's other wino, Trout Fishing in America Shorty. America desperately needs to cope with its present, unsettled reality. Imagination is a potent force, but it must be used to construct rather than merely to escape.

Stull,1984

"Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America: Notes of a Native Son"
William L. Stull
American Literature, vol. 56, no. 1, March 1984, pp. 68-80.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Despite its crystal-clear surface, placid babble, and meandering course, Richard Brautigan's novel Trout Fishing in America (1967) offers the critical angler some tricky crosscurrents, deep holes, and big fish. Though the cool waters of Brautigan's book flow the main currents of American thought—individualism, progress, love, death, and escape. Like Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, Frost's West-Running Brook, and Eliot's strong brown god, Brautigan's trout streams carry the flotsam and jetsam of American dreams, the hopes and fears of innocents, explorers, and vagrants. "Tree, snow and rock beginnings, the mountain in back of the lake promised us eternity," the nameless narrator tells us in a chapter titled "The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin"; "but the lake itself was filled with thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time" (p. 64). Again and again, Brautigan's characters cast into the waters only to come up with the detritus of America's past.

Brautigan's slim, unprepossessing book is, thus, far deeper and darker than early reviewers imagined it to be. Trout Fishing offers, to borrow terms from Roland Barthes, a network of references, ruses, and enigmas, the traces of a culture and its writing. During the 1970s, scholars steadily revealed the book to be a Sargasso Sea of American literature, filled with direct and indirect references to classic and contemporary writers. As Neil Schmitz observes, "To fish for trout, Brautigan knows, is to cast a lure like Thoreau (up into the pale) and handle the strike like Hemingway." Indeed, one of Brautigan's characters puts the matter succinctly when he quips, "Longfellow was the Henry Miller of my childhood" (p. 31). The author has carefully stocked the streams of his book with fry scooped from Walden Pond, from Twain's Mississippi—even from Melville's ocean. For these reasons, Schmitz and other anglers have concluded, "One steps into the stream and inescapably enters the current of American literature."

The allusiveness of Trout Fishing in America is apparent even before one reaches the first page. On the cover of the book the author and a smiling lady friend pose before the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square. His get-up of striped vest, high-crowned felt hat, and droopy mustache recalls Mark Twain stepping off the stagecoach in Roughing It. Hers—boots, brass-buttoned jacket, lace headband—evokes Betsy Ross fallen on hard times. With these American icons, Brautigan opens a fish story that mentions not only Franklin's Autobiography (p. 2) but also an eclectic range of American writing from Walden (p. 17) and the Journals of Lewis and Clark (pp. 89-91) to Algren's Neon Wilderness (p. 46), Styron's Set This House on Fire, and Burroughs' Naked Lunch (both p. 93).

Brautigan cites these and other titles openly, making no effort to cover his tracks. Indeed, in sections like "Trout Death by Port Wine" and "Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter," he deliberately freights his slender hook with heavy cargo. The former chapter opens with a comical survey of twenty-one books on fishing, not one of which mentions a trout killed by a slug of port wine. The latter chapter. a prelude to the final section, is a pastiche of three weighty observations on culture—Ashley Montagu's Man: His First Million Years, Marston Bates's Man in Nature, and Earnest Albert Hooton's Twilight of Man. In each case, the allusions seem laughably at odds with their contexts, further evidence of Brautigan's fabled whimsicality. Superficially, this is true. But the allusions serve a second purpose, one more serious and more disturbing. The fishing books date from the years 1496-1960, the full period of New World history (Brautigan completed a draft of the book in 1962). The anthropology texts likewise span the entire life of humankind, from the prehistoric dawn to the gloaming Götterdämmerung.

Brautigan's references to classic American literature, specifically to the works of Melville, Thoreau, Twain, and Hemingway, serve similar purposes. As Barthes writes, literary references, like all the "codes" that constitute literature, "create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes . . . Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard." Thus, while Brautigan's parallels, parodies, and pastiches are often comic, they also expand the structure of the fable at large, giving Trout Fishing considerable depth, breadth, and cultural resonance. Over the past decade, a score of scholars have gone fishing in Brautigan's waters, and few have come back without a catch. But because the evidence of the author's borrowing has appeared piecemeal, never comprehensively, it requires assessment. Moreover, a glance into the anglers' creels shows that, good as the fishing has been, a big one still lurks near the bottom of Brautigan's "trout stream of consciousness."

It was an Englishman, Tony Tanner, who first cast into Trout Fishing in America and pulled in a whale. He called attention to Brautigan's parody of John Talbot's epitaph in the seventh chapter of Moby-Dick. Where Melville's Talbot "at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,/Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,/November 1st, 1836," Brautigan's "at the Age of Eighteen/Had His Ass Shot Off/In a Honky-Tonk/November 1, 1936" (p. 21). Like the direct allusions to American history and the history of humankind, this indirect reference to Moby-Dick immensely broadens the scope of the episode and gives the comical epitaph a dying fall. Moreover, as Tanner writes, "Brautigan's echo is typically quiet and unobtrusive, yet indicative of how carefully his deceptively slight book is put together." Working the same hole, David L. Vanderwerken revealed larger structural parallels between Brautigan's book and Melville's, as well as debts to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.

Writing of Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler were struck by its indebtedness to two American classics: "What intrigues us most about Richard Brautigan's novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is its strong resemblance to The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby." Parallels with Gatsby, beyond Brautigan's nostalgia for "a fresh, green breast of the new world," have yet to be demonstrated in Trout Fishing in America. But in Richard Brautigan, the only full-length study to date, Terence Malley calls Brautigan's relationship to Hemingway "almost obsessive," and hints at "at least a dozen conscious or unconscious specific echoes of Hemingway" in Trout Fishing. As Malley points out, "Trout Death by Port Wine" owes its theme to The Old Man and the Sea, where the great marlin, like the trout killed by port, suffers an ignoble, "unnatural" death.

Similarly, Thomas Hearron has argued that Brautigan's work "is firmly rooted in the tradition of Twain and Hemingway." Like Malley, Hearron concentrates on major thematic links among Trout Fishing, The Sun Also Rises, and the Nick Adams stories. But the stylistic connection between Brautigan and Hemingway is, if anything more striking. Again and again, sometimes in deferential imitation, sometimes in wry parody, Brautigan echoes Hemingway's crisp, laconic voice. This ambivalence is clear in "Trout Death by Port Wine," where the nameless narrator and a fishing buddy enjoy a day of fishing on Owl Snuff Creek. In plot characterization, and style, the episode exactly parallels the twelfth chapter of The Sun Also Rises, where Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton fish, drink, and banter in the Irati valley above Burguete. Brautigan's setting is the Pacific Northwest, but each of the streams in Trout Fishing has its source in the Michigan woods and carries the same waters as Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River.

From the cover photograph of the Benjamin Franklin statue ("PRESENTED BY/H. D. COGSWELL/TO OUR/BOYS AND GIRLS/WHO WILL SOON/TAKE OUR PLACES/AND PASS ON."), to the final notice of "the passing of Mr. Good" (p. 112), Trout Fishing in America is a haunted book, filled with graves and ghosts of America's past. Hemingway's long shadow falls across nearly every page, symbolizing a lost literary promise that parallels the lost grandeur of virgin forests and clear streams. In "The Last Time I Saw Trout Fishing in America," Brautigan explicitly links the passing of the American genius loci with the suicide of the country's foremost writer: "The last time we met was in July on the Big Wood River, ten miles away from Ketchum. It was just after Hemingway had killed himself there, but I didn't know about his death at the time . . . Trout Fishing in America forgot to tell me about it. I'm certain he knew. It must have slipped his mind" (p. 89). Thanks to the work of Malley and Hearron, few readers of Trout Fishing in America will suffer such lapses of memory in the future. It is surprising, however, that in his discussion of "Sea, Sea Rider", a chapter dealing with the Spanish Civil War, Kent Bales fails to catch Brautigan's parody of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Hearron and Malley alike argue for Mark Twain's influence on Brautigan. But while one senses that Twain's matter and manner are ubiquitous in Trout Fishing, pointing to specific borrowings is no easy matter. Malley suggests that Brautigan derives his "rambling, yarn-spinning narrative energy" from Twain, a generalization too true to be much good. Hearron traces a major thematic link between Huckleberry Finn and Trout Fishing: an obsession with ways of escape from bourgeois society. Like Huckleberry Finn, the narrator attempts to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest," as does Trout Fishing in America himself. For Huck, the West offers at least a semblance of escape from Aunt Sally and the Widow Douglas. For Brautigan's protagonist, however, even in the wilderness there is the inevitable Coleman lantern, "with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America" (p. 73). As the narrator ends his journey and comes home to Mill Valley, he ruefully admits that America is "often only a place in the mind" (p. 72). Hearron shows that for Brautigan's narrator, the only escape left is inward, into the literary imagination. By taking up his golden "Trout Fishing in America Nib" and closing his book with a deliberately misspelled word, the narrator clenches his freedom. Except for imagination, however, all frontiers have been closed.

Like Hemingway's characteristic voice, the many voices of Mark Twain reecho throughout Trout Fishing. Indeed, the cool, deadpan humor of Brautigan's book surely owes as much to Huckleberry Finn as it does to hip sang-froid. Like Huck himself, the narrator has an innocent's capacity for wonder. Just as Twain's hero leaves the judgment on Emmeline Grangerford's poetry and the antics of the Duke and the King largely to the reader, so Brautigan's protagonist describes the surreal landscape without critical comment. In "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," where a "used trout stream" is on sale, he duly reports that waterfalls were going for $19.00 a foot. Like Huck marveling at the Grangerfords' decor, the narrator exclaims, "0 I had never in my life seen anything like that trout stream (p. 106). Even more than his Mark Twain disguise on the book's cover, Brautigan's deadpan humor and keen ear for American speech align him with the author of Huckleberry Finn.

Another scholar, Brad Hayden, has noted striking parallels between Trout Fishing in America and Walden. Like Walden, Trout Fishing is episodic and ritualistic, following the protagonist's maturation over a single year. But Hayden rightly concludes that the differences between the books greatly outweigh the similarities. In particular, he contrasts the largely asocial world of Walden, centered on the individual, with the crowded landscape of Trout Fishing, a book bristling with social satire. Oddly, Hayden neglects to consider Brautigan's one direct reference to Walden. The chapter "A Walden Pond for Winos" confirms Hayden's thesis and reveals the depth of Brautigan's pessimism. The winos' Walden is, of course, Washington Square park, forested with "three poplar trees, almost leafless except for the top branches" (p. 1) and dominated by the Benjamin Franklin statue. There, the narrator chats with two friends, "both broken-down artists from New Orleans," who have fallen into a dead-end dilemma: "They were either going to open up a flea circus or commit themselves to an insane asylum" (p. 17). While the latter has its amenities, including "a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes, a locked razor and lovely young student nurses" (p. 18), it is hardly the kind of refuge Thoreau envisioned. Deforested and filled with the dregs of society, Brautigan's Walden Pond for winos is among his darkest parodies.

Direct and indirect references to earlier American literature thus make Trout Fishing in America a far richer book than reviewers initially supposed. Where in 1971 John Clayton saw only flower-powered utopianism, subsequent readers have found a Spenglerian account of the decline of the West. Considering the angling, seining, and dredging scholars have done in Brautigan's waters, one might expect Trout Fishing in America to be as fished out as Tom Martin Creek (p. 19). But like the Grand Old Trout in Brautigan's third novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), one big fish has so far resisted the scholarly lures. Moreover, this last Trout Fishing in America allusion illuminates an episode that two of Brautigan's critics have singled out for special attention.

The novel's thirtieth chapter is titled "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America": "Half a block from Broadway and Columbus is Hotel Trout Fishing in America, a cheap hotel. It is very old and run by some Chinese. They are young and ambitious Chinese and the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol" (p. 66). Its primer syntax notwithstanding, this description is dense with irony, symbolism, and allusion. Trout fishing in America—the rivers that Jefferson cataloged in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1782) and the fisheries St. John de Crèvecoeur extolled in Letters from an American Farmer (5782)—has dried up. It has become a skid-row tenement, managed by immigrants intent on covering the stench of its decay with a commercial disinfectant. But instead of cleansing the Augean lobby, "The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section." So much for the American dream of endless resources and infinite perfectibility.

The narrator and a friend go to the hotel to meet a couple: Art, formerly "an errand boy for an abortion mill in Los Angeles," now "a private nurse for rich mental patients," and his lover, a nameless black woman, "an ex-hustler who works for the telephone company." The other tenant in their third-floor room is a cat named 208. Despite the heavy locks on the door and the gun on the bedside table, the narrator concludes that the little family is cozy and safe: "They had a good world going for them." One detail troubles him, however: "Where did the name 208 come from? What did it mean?" For a time, he deliberately avoids the issue: "I pretended that the cat, 208, was named after their room number, though I knew that their number was in the three hundreds." But gradually curiosity gives way to indifference: "I thought about it for a while, hiding it from the rest of my mind. But I didn't ruin my birthday by secretly thinking about it too hard" (p. 69).

Brautigan thus piques the narrator's curiosity—and the reader's—with the cryptic number 208. Having seemingly dismissed the issue, however, he suddenly returns to it. "A year later I found out the true significance of 208's name, purely by accident," the narrator explains. A friend, locked up in the drunk tank, calls him for help: "I went down to the Hall of Justice to bail my friend out, and discovered that 208 is the number of the bail office. It was very simple" (p. 70). This "simple" explanation rounds out the episode by answering the questions Brautigan so carefully raises: "Where did the name 208 come from? What did it mean ?" Thanks to this strong sense of an ending, the chapter is among the most self-contained in the book. For this reason, while Malley gives the "indoor pastoral" high marks as a vignette, he nonetheless fears that "Room 208" is one of those episodes that don't quite fit" into the book at large. Brautigan, he concludes, is "just sticking things in."

The richly allusive structure and texture of Trout Fishing make this judgment premature, however. As Brautigan's indirect references to Melville, Hemingway, Twain, and Thoreau suggest, he is most whimsical and disarming when most cryptic. As it turns out, the "true significance" of Room 208 is neither pure nor accidental. The number is yet another exponent of the reference code, one that points toward a major influence on Brautigan's work.

Students of modern American literature will recall room 208 as a familiar address at another apartment hotel, a "nondescript affair" named the San Bernardino Arms. The San Bernardino, better known as the San Berdoo, is the home of Tod Hackett, the protagonist in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939): "It was an oblong three stories high, the back and sides of which were of plain, unpainted stucco, broken by even rows of unadorned windows. The façade was the color of diluted mustard and its windows, all double, were framed by pink Moorish columns which supported turnip-shaped lintels." Like the couple in Hotel Trout Fishing in America, Tod rents a third-floor room. But his thoughts and steps invariably linger on the second story, for "It was on that floor that Faye Greener lived, in 208" (p. 4). Thus, just as the headstone in "Trout Fishing on the Bevel" marks the grave of Melville's John Talbot, so the door of "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America" opens into the apartment of West's lubricious femme fatale. In effect, Brautigan's and West's characters share rooms at the same cheap hotel, a stopping place, West points out, for "the people who come to California to die" (p. 165). Like Brautigan's other allusions to earlier American fiction, "Room 208" thus has a dark undercurrent beneath its light surface.

Indeed, once we catch the reference, Brautigan's indebtedness to West becomes increasingly apparent. In The Day of the Locust it is "Honest Abe Kusich," a lusty, pugnacious dwarf, who points Tod toward the San Berdoo. The characters' first encounter reveals a further parallel between "Room 208" and the second chapter of West's novel: "He had first met Abe when he was living on Ivar Street, in a hotel called the Chateau Mirabella. Another name for Ivar Street was 'Lysol Alley,' and the Chateau was mainly inhabited by hustlers, their managers, trainers and advance agents" (p. 5). Such a hostelry would surely welcome Brautigan's Art and his "ex-hustler" paramour. Moreover, like the lobby of Hotel Trout Fishing in America, the halls of the Chateau "reeked of antiseptic." Brautigan thus follows West in satirizing the management's efforts to mask the odor of decay with the all-American disinfectant.

West's influence on Brautigan reaches well beyond matters of atmosphere and setting, however. In the same chapter of The Day of the Locust, sandwiched between the sketches of the San Berdoo and the Chateau, lies what may be the source of Brautigan's leitmotif in Trout Fishing at large. The passage describes one of Tod's artworks, a precursor of his apocalyptic painting The Burning of Los Angeles:
"Abe was an important figure in a set of lithographs called "The Dancers" on which Tod was working. He was one of the dancers. Faye Greener was another and her father, Harry, still another. They changed with each plate, but the group of uneasy people who formed their audience remained the same. They stood staring at the performers in just the way that they stared at the masqueraders on Vine Street. It was their stare that drove Abe and the others to spin crazily and leap into the air with twisted backs like hooked trout" (p. 5).

West's closing simile, the dancers gyrating "like hooked trout," anticipates the controlling metaphor in Brautigan's book. With their collocations of room number, Lysol bottle, and trout imagery, the parallel chapters in West's and Brautigan's novels mark yet another spot where Trout Fishing in America runs with recycled waters.

Moreover, Brautigan draws indirectly on West's novel for matters of character. In "The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren" (pp. 45-47), Brautigan suggests that his "legless, screaming middle-aged wino" is based on Algren's Railroad Shorty, "a hero of the Neon Wilderness (the reason for 'The Face on the Barroom Floor') and the destroyer of Dove Linkhorn in A Walk on the Wild Side" (p. 46). Like the "very simple" explanation of "Room 208," this is true—to a degree. But as Brautigan makes clear a later "Footnote Chapter" (p. 63), his Shorty is a composite of parodies and parallels. Where Algren's Railroad Shorty is "a person of endless versatility and unfailing resources," able to avenge the slightest insult, Brautigan's is an ineffectual old drunkard. He is also the nightmare double of Benjamin Franklin and "should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square" (p. 47). Above all, as Malley points out, he is "quite literally a chopped-off version" of the eponymous Trout Fishing in America. Finally, in both stature and comportment, he is a descendant of West's "Honest Abe Kusich," the foul-mouthed and feisty dwarf who guides Tod Hackett through West's infernal Hollywood. Abe is a creature of "grotesque depravity" (p. 5), a "homunculus" (p. 139) who plays Virgil to Tod's Dante. Likewise, Trout Fishing in America Shorty comes into Brautigan's novel "like a chapter from the Old Testament. He was the reason birds migrate in the autumn" (p. 45). Each of these manikins is a prophet of doom in a blighted land. At once individualistic and ineffectual, each embodies the American dream cut short and turned to nightmare.

It is at this point, however, that the parallels between Trout Fishing in America and The Day of the Locust begin to diverge. While Brautigan's book draws heavily on West's for matters of setting, character, and imagery, it is very different in its final voice and vision. Where West's voice grows increasingly apocalyptic and hysterical, Brautigan's remains unflappably cool and detached. The Day of the Locust ends with a bang—Homer Simpson's abrupt assault on Adore Loomis and the bloody riot that follows. Trout Fishing in America ends with "The Mayonnaise Chapter," neither a bang nor a whimper but instead a wry obituary on "the passing of Mr. Good" (p. 112). As Tod Hackett's artwork reveals, his mentors (like his creator's) are European: "He had lately begun to think not only of Goya and Daumier but also of certain Italian artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of Salvator Rosa, Francesco Guardi and Monsu Desiderio, the painters of Decay and Mystery" (p. 96). Even in "A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci," Brautigan and his narrator remain steadfastly American, using their imaginations to transform The Last Supper into "a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America" (p. 108). As his references to Melville, Hemingway, Twain, Thoreau and Nathanael West reveal, Brautigan works in the American grain.

In genre, both Trout Fishing in America and The Day of the Locust are finally, to use Northrop Frye's taxonomy, not so much novels as "anatomies." Brautigan and West alike deal "less with people as such than with mental attitudes," and each presents "a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern." As its title suggests, The Day of the Locust is apocalyptic in its vision of "the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers—all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence" (p. 165). In The Burning of Los Angeles Tod Hackett sets forth this vision of the fire next time, while West uses the intellectual pattern of apocalypse to structure his book at large. With the righteous indignation of Joel and Saint John the Divine, he calls down plagues and pestilences.

Brautigan, while no less a visionary writer, is never so strident. The intellectual pattern of Trout Fishing is not the prophecy but the pastoral, the intellectual pattern of Walden, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and the Nick Adams stories. "Are the green fields gone? What do they here?" the narrator asks with Ishmael. Brautigan's answer, while far from sanguine, is not wholly pessimistic. Whereas West calls down the locusts of torment "like unto horses prepared unto battle" (Rev. 9:7), Brautigan suggests that, while the American Eden may be forever gone from the earth, the new kingdom remains within the writer's imagination. Like the speaker in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "I Am Waiting," he transfers his faith from the Old West to "a new symbolic western frontier" accessible only through art. In "Trout Fishing in America Nib," he thus envisions the green fields restored: "I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper" (p. 110).

The pervasive reference code in Brautigan's novel is likely to render any talk of a "last" Trout Fishing in America allusion premature, if not presumptuous. Like the big one that nearly got away in "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America," further allusions to American literature likely float in the depths of the text. As Brautigan's burned-out fisherman Alonso Hagen concludes in "a little Trout Fishing in America epitaph," "Somebody else will have to go/out there" (p. 85). What finally matters is not the single catch but the fishing at large, and Trout Fishing in America proves to be well stocked—in Barthes's terms, "replete." There, as in those two classics of modernism, The Waste Land and Ulysses, each reference to earlier literature proves to be an exponent of a larger cultural code: a history, a style, or an ideology. Dark, deep, and teeming with remembrances of things past, Brautigan's "trout stream of consciousness" branches off the mainstream of American literature.

Cleary,1984

"Richard Brautigan's Gold Nib: Artistic Independence in 'Trout Fishing in America'"
Michael Cleary
English Record, vol. 35, [Second Quarter], 1984, 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.

As his works attract a new generation of young readers, Richard Brautigan continues to receive serious critical attention. In analyzing his fiction and poetry, a number of scholars have found that there is substance and structure to his work, that it is not like loading mercury with a pitchfork. From a perspective of sixteen years, it seems likely that Brautigan will escape his undeserved association with "pop" writers—such relentlessly popular writers as McKuen, Rand, and Gibran. And none of Brautigan's works have attracted more vigorous analysis that his lyrical novel, Trout Fishing in America. It is his most enduring work, and one which reflects light on the style and scope of his contributions to contemporary literature.

Kenneth Seib has attempted to probe beneath the novel's convoluted structure and quicksilver philosophy; he discovered a "solid achievement . . . conditioned by Brautigan's concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past" [71]. This assessment remains the most comprehensive description of Brautigan's central theme, but it is only a starting point. Others have explored related aspects. Arlen J. Hansen has noted that although Brautigan is sometimes so highly personal as to be obscure, he nonetheless illustrates the transforming power of creative solipsism [14]. Terence Malley, after remarking on the lack of organization in the novel, goes on to declare that it is "ultimately a very ambitious book . . . [a] combination of satire and nostalgia, of elegy and humor, of realistic description and fantasy" [181]. Thomas Hearron has examined the novel's magical transformation of reality through the deliberate use of progressively more literal applications of metaphors, substituting the imaginative world for the world of reality [26]. Daniel L. Vanderwerken has shown how Brautigan addresses the essential opposition of an ideal and real America [32]. He also suggests a sub-theme which underlies the various interpretations of the book, but his focus does not allow for a close examination of its implications. Vanderwerken states that the narrator "expresses his hope of finding a unique style and voice for rendering his imaginative ideal . . . and of making an individual contribution to one great tradition of American fiction" [40]. In Vanderwerken's view (and to some extent, Seib's), Brautigan's escape into imagination constitutes a perpetuation of the romantic literary tradition of Melville and Thoreau, and an implicit rejection of realistic fiction. In a similar vein, Malley suggests that the novel is a refutation of the American pastoral myth of freedom and tranquility.

It is this line which I will try to untangle. I believe that Trout Fishing in America can be read not as a rejection of a single literary tradition (realism or pastoral) and the rejuvenation of another (romanticism), but as an insistence that every artist must free himself from all literary shackles, and discover his unique artistic consciousness, one most compatible with his vision. This search for creative technique is an important allegorical dimension of the novel, as I hope to illustrate by a textual examination. It will be seen that at first the narrator (Brautigan makes no attempt to isolate himself from this persona) is attracted to traditional literary forms and tries to emulate them. However, this period of imitation later gives way to an intense search for his own creative mode, a search which culminates in the realization of the artist's responsibility to invent, not imitate.

The controlling metaphor for this manifesto of artistic independence is, of course, Trout Fishing in America. The metaphor is well chosen, for the book is a "fishing story" in the tradition of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653). Like Walton, Brautigan's leisurely narration moves beyond the mere lore of catching fish to consider the nature of man in a time of literary, moral, and social change; both books evidence a writing style that appears graceful, almost effortless. Trout Fishing in America also follows the tradition of Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea, two other novels which express their authors' stylistic independence from the mainstream of literary traditions. The association with Hemingway is made both explicitly and implicitly in Brautigan's novel. Brautigan's use of natural settings, the descriptions of ritualistic behavior, the narrator's determined attempts to find a private peace are all clearly suggestive of Hemingway, most notably in his "Big Two-Heated River."

The first section of the novel describes the narrator's pursuit of a Trout Fishing in America with roots anchored to the mythic past. The association with a literary style is suggested in his stepfather's "way of describing trout as if they were a precious metal." His stepfather's narratives are so compelling that the narrator is inspired to launch his own angling expeditions, armed with the ancient means of catching trout: a pin and a piece of white string. There is a sense of mission and ritual in his search which ties him to the revered past. The discovery of Alonso Hagan's diary, with its meticulously recorded failures, convinces the narrator that he is the "somebody else" who "will have to go out there" and continue the quest for the trout.

Despite repeated frustrations, seventeen years later the narrator continues his search. It is difficult to find a trace of the trout, and he admits that "sometimes it was so bad that it just left me standing there, not knowing which way to jump." In trying to resurrect the past, he finds no assistance from artifacts. A decrepit outhouse seems to suggest some esoteric key, but the message it conveys speaks only of the estrangement of past and present: "The old guy who built me . . . [is] dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He built me with loving care. Leave me along . . . There's no mystery here."

Metaphorically, the narrator's search for Trout Fishing in America is the writer's attempt to imitate the accomplishments of literary predecessors. His efforts to draw present relevance from past forms is again echoed in the chapter, "The Year the Trout Came Up Hayman Creek." The obviously admiring narrator introduces us to a recluse independent of the demands of both past (books) and future (children). His penchant for living in the present, on his own terms, reflects the self-sufficiency of the artist and his art. The futility of universal solutions is shown when the fish and game workers stock Hayman Creek with trout from another location, only to have the fish turn belly up and die. The message seems clear: each species—and each artist's style—thrives only in its native environment; it cannot be imposed forcibly on others, no matter how well intentioned.

"The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" illustrates the narrator's growing awareness of the hopelessness of stylistic imagination. The corpse (Byron, we are told) is dead, but it is "a long way from Idaho, a long way from Stanley Basin, Little Redfish Lake, the Big Lost River and from Lake Josephus and the Big Wood River." The narrator has scouted these locales before concluding that the trout fishing of the past is dead, out of his reach. Significantly, the last location mentioned here—the Big Wood River—is where he "Last . . . Saw Trout Fishing in America." The narrator informs us that Hemingway (whose style Brautigan parodies in the section on the Kool-Aid Wino) died at the same time that the narrator spoke with Trout Fishing in America. However, the narrator is unaware of the death until later, when he has finally abandoned his attempts to imitate earlier artists. Only then can he "bury" the ghosts of Byron, Hemingway, and others.

It is the character of Trout Fishing in America who ultimately advises the narrator of the challenge and difficulties of gaining artistic freedom. In their last meeting, the narrator is told that the past is a tantalizing prey, but forever elusive. The symbol once more is the trout: "I know that fish who just struck. You'll never catch him . . . Go on ahead and try for him. He'll hit a couple of times more, but you won't catch him." It is immediately after this exchange that the narrator begins to accept the futility of chasing the traditions of the past. In the next chapter, "In the California Bush," he has abandoned his pursuit, and has begun to make a place for himself—and his art—in the present: "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America, the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. Now I live in this place. It took my whole life to get here." The highway's anchor symbolically links him to his time: "I live in this place." The colonial three-cornered hats and old-fashioned recipes and string fishing lines of earlier chapters are gone, replaced by the more contemporary hot dogs, Popeyes, and Goodwill stores of the present. "I live in this place." Like his predecessors in the westering movement, he has escaped from the East (New York) through the West and is stopped on the west coast (San Francisco) with no more reason to venture. He can no longer follow the inroads of those who came before; he can only learn from them. Inevitably, though, he must turn away from the triumphs of others and discover a contemporary frontier of the imagination. It is the same break with the past which Trout Fishing in America Shorty experiences with the narrator's daughter in the park. Amused by Shorty for a time, the child soon turns away to other things, escaping his immobile presence, widening the space between them like a river growing larger and larger. Such distinctions between past and present become increasingly frequent in the novel, and each occurrence moves the narrator closer to accepting the separation of the two. However, his awareness of the basic discrepancy does not conclude in a dramatic revelation. Rather, his understanding comes slowly, like the slow-moving creeks and rivers which flow through the book. The water appears to be the same, but is inexorably changing.

The narrator's sojourns to the Trout Fishing in America Hotel (he is still a transient, still looking for some artistic base) also illustrate the tendency of the past to blur our image of the present. In this section, the metaphor is the different types of wallpaper which the narrator attempts to distinguish and categorize in order to define his own perspective:
"No matter how many times you pass that part of the third floor, you cannot remember the color of the wallpaper or what the design is. All you know is that part of the wallpaper is new. It is different from the old wallpaper. But you cannot remember what that looks like either."

Like Henry James' "Figure in the Carpet," the special dimensions of an artist's work are unique to his time and temperament; they are as difficult to define as they are impossible to ignore.

The latter portion of the novel is concerned with the narrator's attempts to discover his individual attempts to discover his individual mode of expression. He rejects the too-popular art of the cinema which is quickly digested by the mass audience and taken as its own. The chapter on the Trout Fishing in America Parade, replete with clever bumper stickers, indicates the narrator's contempt for the fleeting popularity of mass culture's whims. Even Trout Fishing in America Shorty is destroyed by the acclaim afforded him by the movies: "Those good old days are over because Trout Fishing in America Shorty is famous. The movies have discarded him . . . They'll milk it for all it's worth and make cream and butter from a pair of empty pants legs and a low budget."

Gradually, the narrator accepts the need for a private solution, one independent of the staid traditions of the past and the ephemeral popularity of the present. This acceptance of the legitimacy of an eccentric integrity is a recurring idea in the novel, one which broadens the theme and, to some extent, explains its popularity. The book is full of memorable characters, all moving to the silent beat of their private drummers. This is evident in the park scene when the beatnik eats a bag of apple turnovers, "gobbling them down like a turkey. It was probably a more valid protest than picketing missile bases." To encourage anything more than purely individual expression, Brautigan seems to be saying, is to accept a manufactured version of Trout Fishing in America sold by the foot for $6.50 a copy. It is the inauthentic adoption of someone else's view of reality.

Somewhere between the poetry of Byron and the cinema of the twentieth century, Brautigan must find a version of reality by which he can illuminate himself. The narrator's search for Trout Fishing in America has taught him that he cannot manufacture replicas of past artists and pass them off as his own. New eras, new artists, new audiences demand forms as current as the newspapers which swirl continually throughout the book.

Brautigan provides a clue to this thematic concern in "The Towel" chapter where he describes the photograph of the bush pilot and his wife (in high laced boots, like Brautigan's wife in the cover photograph). The man in the photo "had the same Spirit of St. Louis nobility and purpose of expression, except that his North Atlantic was the forests of Idaho." It is this "nobility and purpose" of daring the unknown creative regions that Brautigan pursues in his fiction. Like a writer's work, the "photograph guards the memory of a man. The photograph is all alone out there." Earlier, the narrator lacked confidence in his own instincts, dedicating himself to discovering the secrets of others. This was shown most effectively in the "Trout Death by Port Wine" chapter. Before his realization, he was dependent on the models of the past. For this reason, he criticized the drowning of trout in port wine on the grounds that such a mode of death had never been documented in twenty-two previous books on trout fishing, dating back to 1496. He did not consider (or did not have the conviction to follow) his impulse to "soothe its approach into death" as fitting and valid in its own right.

That the individual imagination is man's only lasting achievement is shown in the penultimate chapter, "Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter." An artist's legacy is the work he leaves behind: "language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written." The cornerstone of the writer's work is the form he creates. It shapes his truths. He must not attempt to breathe life into old forms and fit them to his needs. His method is successful only so far as it interprets his vision. Popular acceptance does not reflect success, but indicates a too-familiar vehicle, a counterfeit version of reality. A "Walden Pond for Winos" is as valid a solution in the form of an asylum as it is a pastoral retreat in Massachusetts; the difference is in the singular conception of the writer devising it. (Incidentally, much can be made of the surface simplicity and underlying complexity in the works of Thoreau and Brautigan. Both writers rely on natural symbols and demand multi-leveled interpretation. Both insist that the validity of their "experiments" are relevant only to themselves; they do not seek converts, but encourage others to experiment on their own.)

Ultimately, Brautigan's understanding of artistic autonomy satisfies only himself; we must all discover our own trout. Future artists must not imitate his forms, but create their own. This is once more expressed in the chapter, "The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader." The artist's dependence on his singular imagination is symbolized by a guarantee for a pair of socks he has bought. Like so much of Brautigan's imagery, the symbol is whimsical and delightful: "I wish I hadn't lost that guarantee. That was a shame. I've had to face the fact that new socks are not going to be a family heirloom. Losing the guarantee took care of that. All future generations arre on their own."

It is apparent that Trout Fishing in America has a structural design and a number of controlling ideas. The search for artistic technique is one of the themes which circles out and back beneath the opaque surface of the novel. Such a reading offers another level of understanding to a work which operates on many levels. In a very real way (and I would have shuddered to hear myself say it a couple of years ago), it is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Angler. It is significant that the last Trout Fishing metaphor is "The Trout Fishing in America Nib," the narrator's gold-tipped fountain pen which clearly represents his coming to terms with his artistic purpose: "A good nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it. This pen becomes just like a person's shadow. It's the only pen to have."

Fiene,1986

"Trout Fishing in America"
Donald M. Fiene
Masterplots II. American Fiction Series. 4 vols. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1986. Vol. 4, pp. 1702-1706.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Author: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)
Type of plot: Surrealistic romance
Time of plot: Fall, 1960, through fall, 1961, with flashbacks to the 1940's Locale: San Francisco, various trout streams in northern California and Idaho, and the recalled cities of the narrator's childhood: Tacoma, Portland, and Great Falls
First published: 1967

Principal characters:
THE NARRATOR, who may be identified with the author, as he is a writer and has had similar life experiences

THE NARRATOR'S WIFE, usually referred to as "my woman" or "the woman I live with"; she corresponds to author's wife of this period, Virginia (Ginny) Adler

THE NARRATOR'S DAUGHTER, called "the baby"; she corresponds to author's daughter Ianthe, born in 1960

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, a symbolic, surrealistic personification who talks and writes but has no corporeal existence

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA SHORTY, a legless wino, a parody of a Nelson Algren character

STATUE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in Washington Square, San Francisco, a kind of symbolic character by virtue of repeated references to it

The Novel
Trout Fishing in America consists of forty-seven chapters which, except for the continuity provided by a few characters, might better be called short stories, or, as most are but two pages long, sketches. These sketches, usually presented from a single narrator's point of view, describe fishing trips, meetings with interesting people, and recollections from childhood. The author and publisher chose to label this collection a "novel"; there is no pressing need to contradict them.

Probably the most important unifying characteristic of this unconventional work is its poetic style, sometimes fey and precious, usually strikingly inventive. Its imagery is often so compelling, so "magical" perhaps, that it transforms ordinary settings into surrealistic settings: "I was sitting on a stool . . . reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book had clear pages like gin . . ." Or: "I always felt good walking down the street, holding the lilacs high and proud like glasses of that famous children's drink: the good flower wine." With such delicate, romantic, and "unstable" imagery, Brautigan anticipated and perhaps in some sense created the American hippies and flower children.

The author's sense of "America" is another unifying element in the novel. Just as the poetic style creates continuous tension between the real and the surreal, so do the author's descriptions of certain natural settings such as trout streams create a sense of tension between nature and the city and between past and present America. The names of Brautigan's real fishing places establish a mosaic image of contemporary rural America: Grider Creek, Tom Martin Creek, Graveyard Creek, Owl Snuff Creek, Paradise Creek, Salt Creek, Payette River, Little Redfish Lake, Lake Josephus, Hell-Diver Lake. The America of the past is evoked through literary and historical references to Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Lewis and Clark, Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries, and even Franklin's "granny" glasses. One senses a powerful myth that has perhaps already been destroyed (for example, by pollution of the trout streams), yet Brautigan does not quite make a final choice between a supposedly ideal past and the imperfect present.

If there is development in this novel, it lies not in any changes in the fortunes of the narrator, or in his values, or in his relationships with others (one is told virtually nothing of such relationships), but rather in his visionary sense. For example, in chapter 3 the narrator recalls that once as a boy he caught the gleam of a waterfall on a distant hillside and walked there with the aim of fishing for trout; but as he drew closer he suddenly perceived that the "waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees." This poignant disillusionment is perhaps balanced by the surreal vision of the "Cleveland Wrecking Yard" chapter near the end of the novel. Here the narrator discovers that "used trout streams" are for sale in various lengths. He goes into the back and sees the "faint glow of pearl-colored light"; he passes great stacks of shimmering toilets and finally comes to the waterfalls, piled over against the wall: "There were about a dozen of them, ranging from a drop of a few feet, to a drop of ten or fifteen feet."

The reader is left to judge for himself whether the vision of the little boy has been fulfilled or whether the surreal trout streams stacked among toilets signify the ruin of nature by corrupt urban America. (Critics have seen it both ways.)

The Characters
Although nothing in this novel is completely "real," one may distinguish between real characters that occasionally find themselves in surreal situations and "characters" that are surreal at the outset. In the first group are the narrator and his family. His "woman" appears in seven chapters but rates only a few lines in each. The reader learns almost nothing of her personality. She really has only a background role: to cook, have intercourse, conceive and bear a child, tend it as it grows. As the conception and pregnancy are pointedly referred to, however, a sense of continuity is established. Perhaps there is even something mildly symbolic in this, as there may also be in the scene where the narrator and his wife have intercourse in the warm water of Worsewick Hot Springs while the baby sleeps in the car—and the "green slime and dead fish were all about our bodies."

Such images of death, corruption, and pollution are not infrequent in Trout Fishing in America. Perhaps they were less obvious when the novel first appeared, but to the reader aware of the author's suicide (a bullet through the brain), the reminders of death leap out. How one perceives such imagery (as opposed to images of hope) is crucial to one's appreciation of the narrator—whom one may identify only with the author. One is struck first by Brautigan's poverty-stricken and largely unhappy childhood, with recollections of alcoholic stepfathers and the like. Trout fishing in the present partly serves to bring about the happiness missed in childhood (and many fine trout are indeed caught, in idyllic settings). The reader is made to care about the narrator's state of mind.

At one point, Brautigan mentions having been fishing near Ketchum, Idaho, on the Bog Wood River, just after Ernest Hemingway shot himself (July 2, 1961). "But I didn't know about it till I got back to San Francisco." Brautigan mentions Hemingway elsewhere in the book and even, in chapter 13, parodies his style in an admiring way, one cannot escape noticing similarities in the lives as well as the deaths of the two authors. An obvious influence on Brautigan is Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River."

The last one-paragraph "chapter" in Brautigan's novel does not offer the hope that the reader has perhaps been led to seek. It consists of a letter of condolence written by a simple woman of average education to relatives who have had a death in the family. The deceased "Mr. Good" is said to have gone to a better place, but such symbolic "hope" offers little comfort in a novel largely indifferent to conventional religion.

Perhaps more hope is to be gained from the strangely surrealistic personage called Trout Fishing in America. He may partly stand for both the author and his book; beyond that, he symbolizes the idea of the book. Yet he is more than merely a symbol, for he talks and writes. In chapter 2 he says, "I remember with particular amusement, people with three cornered hats fishing in the dawn." Near the end of the novel, he says he remembers the day "Lewis discovered the falls" (what is now Great Falls, Montana; it was dawn; they could see the "distant column of spray rising and disappearing"). In some appearances, Trout Fishing in America seems to act as a source of inspiration to the narrator, a kind of muse; in others, as a protector. Occasionally he is silly or whimsical; once he is described as having been Lord Byron and suffered the latter's fate; once he goes to Alaska to fish for grayling. All things considered, he seems elusively Zen-like in his high spirits and freedom from time, while also embodying something good about America. The novel makes a number of statements against American power politics, the establishment, and pollution—but Trout Fishing in America reminds the reader that there is much in the culture that should be preserved. This persona contributes much to the romantic character of the novel.

Themes and Meanings
Two of the more obvious themes in the novel may be stated as follows: First, despite one's yearning to embrace only what is beautiful in nature, one cannot avoid seeing in it death and corruption. Second, while the pollution of nature is chiefly the result of urban encroachment, city life itself still may be charming, as when the narrator and two buddies get drunk in Washington Park: "We went and bought another fifth of port wine and returned to the trees and Benjamin Franklin." The title of this chapter, "A Walden Pond for Winos," illustrates well Brautigan's predominantly ironic tone. The motif of winos and wine drinking is strong and occasionally takes on a religious character. Religious references are sometimes heavily ironic, as when Leonardo da Vinci comes to America and invents a fishing lure called "The Last Supper" or when the narrator recalls walking to school as a kid: "I mean the three of us, the Holy Trinity: me, a piece of pie, and a stone-cold pork sandwich."

Somewhat less ironic is the chapter titled "The Kool-Aid Wino," the narrator's recollection of a friend from childhood—the pitiful, sickly offspring of farm laborers whose greatest pleasure in life is to make up a gallon of half-strength grape Kool-Aid without sugar (because he had no sugar) and take an entire day to drink it. The outdoor water spigot he uses "thrust[s] itself out of the ground like the finger of a saint." His preparation of the drink becomes "a ceremony" and he himself an "inspired priest of an exotic cult." Suddenly the reader realizes that the young "wino," with his bland grape beverage, is an evocation of Jesus, serving his friend (Brautigan) Holy Communion. Moreover, the ritual "wine" had been created from water—the miracle of Cana. This revelation of the miraculous, though undoubtedly the most subtle (hence the most striking) in the book, is not the only example one might cite.

The deepest significance of the novel lies in its ability to create for its readers such "epiphanies," enabling one to transcend ordinary reality and glimpse a magical world beyond.

Critical Context
Although Trout Fishing in America was published as Brautigan's second novel, after A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965), it was in fact written first—in the early 1960's. When it was finally published in 1967 in San Francisco, it was taken up immediately by the new "hippie" generation. When Delacorte published the book two years later, it became a national best-seller and a focal point for the countercultural revolution. Brautigan had published eight small books of poetry and was to publish eleven more novels similar to Trout Fishing in America in length and format, and a book of stories. Some of the earlier novels received respectful critical attention, especially by young academic critics, but most of the works were dismissed by established critics as trivial, embarrassing, crazy, or simply too cute.

Measured against all of Brautigan's writings, one sees that Trout Fishing in America is the author's best work—an inspired first novel. Even those critics who do not admire his later works would allow that Trout Fishing in America was and will be the true and abiding voice of the flower children, who bloomed for a few short years and then disappeared.

Whissen,1992

"Trout Fishing in America"
Thomas Reed Whissen
Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature. Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 274-279.
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 wrote Trout Fishing in America in 1961, but it was not published until 1967, the year of the "summer of love," and by then it was seized upon by an audience that brought to it all the political, cultural, and emotional baggage that we associate with the term "hippie." In fact, to some it is the cult book of the sixties, possibly because it seems to require an "altered state of consciousness" to understand what it is all about. Reading it today gives meaning to the joke, "If you remember the sixties, you weren't there." Trout Fishing in America comes closer to being a literary high than any other book of its time with the possible exception of the novels of William S. Burroughs.

Written as early in the decade as it was, it also has much in common with the novels of the beat generation in its emotional and intellectual detachment, an attitude closer to the existential aloofness of the hipsters than to the idealistic involvement of the hippies. "Hippie" has an inescapably quaint sound to it now, like "dandy" or "flapper," but it meant something specific in the sixties; and it was as a "hippie writer" that Brautigan was received.

When we refer to the sixties, we usually mean the last half of the decade, not the first, for the two halves are as different as day and night. The first five years were the years of beehive hairdos and rhinestone glasses, button-down shirts and narrow ties, Audrey Hepburn movies and Henry Mancini music. Then came the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the start of the Vietnam War, and from 1964 on everything got turned upside down. It is from the latter half of the decade, then, that we get the image of the sixties as an era of long hair and granny glasses, headbands and serapes, bellbottoms and muumuus; of strung-out flower children clustered in communes, strumming dulcimers against a psychedelic backdrop of dope, sex, and hard rock. And it was into this milieu that Richard Brautigan was wildly received.

The secret of the book's success is quite simple. Trout Fishing in America was the literary equivalent of the Grateful Dead—something instantly gratifying when one was high, something requiring no context, no frame of reference other than what one supplied at the moment. Trout Fishing was unlike anything these cult readers had ever seen before, totally unlike the structured, boring novels they had been forced to study and analyze in high school or college. Here was a novel that seemed to be—and for the most part was—totally without plot or narrative or sustained characterization. It was, rather, a series of psychedelic moments—like the succession of frissons so dear to Oscar Wilde and the decadents—that could only be indulged in fleetingly but that yielded an elusive kind of thrill that depended on nothing but the confluence of language, music, and dope.

Thus, Trout Fishing was blissfully immune to the claptrap of literary criticism. There was no analytical apparatus available to deliver this unique creation into the hands of pompous critics or patronizing professors. The book might seem disorganized and meaningless to them, but to the stoned it was an added high just to be able to open the book to any page and find something "mind blowing," something "far out," something silly you could get a kick out of without getting "heavy" about it. The only other book that even came close to it was William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, about which it was rumored that the chapters had been shuffled like a deck of cards and then published in whatever order resulted. The fact that these two books looked utterly chaotic was quite to the taste of a generation that condemned authority, reason, and order as enemies of all that was good.

But there was a curious contradiction in this high handed condemnation of authority, for it was precisely authority, albeit of a different nature, that the counterculturists worshiped. One has only to think of the pantheon of counterculture gods and gurus, now mostly gone—Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Benjamin Spock, Daniel Berrigan, Mark Rudd—to realize how hungry the hippies were for someone to order them around, to tell them how to dress, what to listen to, what to smoke, when to make love and, of course, what to think. Books like Do It and Steal This Book do not begin to indicate how eager these so-called rebels were to follow some charismatic leader. (The word "charisma" came into common usage in 1960 with John F. Kennedy.) Both Hunter S. Thompson and Christopher Lasch have drawn attention to this clear and curious desire for authority that they claim reached into every corner of life and left little room for individual initiative.

Thus, Brautigan's first readers tended to let the immediacy of their reading experience blind them to his essential individualism. Here again one can see how much closer Brautigan was to the hipsters and the beats of the fifties, who cultivated a fierce individuality, than to the hippies, who cultivated communes. And in a commune there is little room for individual conviction when the good of all comes first.

One reason Brautigan went undetected for so long is that he did not assert his personality into this book the way [Jack] Kerouac did. In Brautigan's prose, American people and things are seen as they are, observed and documented, as it were. Brautigan acts as witness, not judge. And like the "true witnesses" of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, he makes neither more nor less of whatever he sees. He uses no conventional techniques to achieve a comic or a dramatic effect. He sees everything with cool, neutral detachment.

Because Brautigan does not intrude upon his story or impose on it any particular slang, the book lacks any sense of the didactic, any intimation that, regardless of how satiric and political it seems, it is supposed to instruct its readers in how to think or behave. Brautigan allows the satire to emerge from his unadorned reporting of America's own internal contradictions rather than from an implied criticism of its ability to measure up to the standards of some arbitrary ideological presumption. With Trout Fishing in America, the reader brings politics to the book. For cult readers, this was no problem. Finding what they wanted to find in the book made reading it all the more enjoyable, in the same way a mystic might find religious reinforcement in working out the numerological references in the Bible to prove some arcane hypothesis.

Brautigan's disengaged, thoroughly nonpolitical narrative voice is the subtle hook by which this book takes hold of its readers, for nothing is more convincing than the report of the disinterested journalist who just happens to uncover something about some governmental cover-up. Another hook, this one much more subtle and much more insidious, is the use of the disinterested voice that indiscriminately accepts evil as well as good. By documenting without judging, Brautigan sends the message that it is pointless to try to change anything, that decisive change is impossible, because the evil inevitably returns.

The acceptance of the immutability of a world divided between good and evil carries with it the tainted thrill of heresy. Emil Sinclair arrives at the same point in Hermann Hesse's Demian, and there is a longing for it that runs through Albert Camus's The Stranger. It is ultimately a deeply cynical attitude that only adds to the moral confusion in which good and evil are merely interchangeable options, menu items, equal choices. Evil is accepted, even condoned, as being as valuable a part of experience as good, and perhaps even preferable to it. This dispassionate, disembodied, impersonal narrator invites belief precisely because he seems so objective. A man with no score to settle has no reason not to tell the truth. Because Brautigan apparently has nothing to gain by portraying America one way and not another, we trust him implicitly.

Several things contributed to the phenomenal success of this extraordinary book. For one thing. the book is not at all about what it says it is about: trout fishing. Any angler who picked it up would be in for a shock. This kind of zaniness appealed to the age. Another attraction was the apparent absence of a traditional hero. Instead, in his place there is the absurd substitution of "trout fishing in America" used in every conceivable metaphorical sense. So ultimately, it becomes the center of attention, both message and messenger combined, and Brautigan can make the title mean anything or anyone he wants it to mean—or the reader wants it to mean.

Another explanation for the phenomenal popularity of Trout Fishing in America is that it is so unapologetically self-indulgent. By claiming no right to exist, it seems to earn that right. This is an impregnable, unimpeachable, nonassailable book. It seems to belong by itself and to itself, to have nothing to do with anything but itself. And within itself, all is delightful disorganization. It provides a fine escape from a world where everything is perceived as being altogether too regimented and logical.

Brautigan had no ax to grind. No ramparts are breached or causes advanced in this slim volume. Brautigan, like Meursault in The Stranger, is simply too passive to get involved—not because he agrees with the world as he finds it, but because he does not seem to feel that there are social revolutions worth fighting. It is no surprise, then, that this book has been called The Great Gatsby of its time. All wars fought. All Gods dead.

Naturally, the book had its detractors. Those who were mixed up in movements, involved in crusades, concerned about solving the problem instead of being part of the problem, tended to think that books without some obvious agenda were like people who stood on the sidelines and minded their own business: just taking up space. They found the book carelessly gross and its author/narrator preoccupied with a phony detached self, playing the role of this droll, poker-faced, seemingly disinterested third party, detachedly observing something that he never makes quite clear. How can you describe what you are observing, they asked, without having a basic opinion? If you talk about observing the follies or the inanities or even the peculiarities of Americans, aren't you already making a judgment?

What is probably closer to the truth—and closer to the book's central appeal—is the presence of a situation in which the observer is observing himself observing. This interpretation is congruent with the extreme self-consciousness of the age, the passion for keeping one's finger forever on one's own pulse, the obsessive preoccupation with how one was perceived and what image one projected. Brautigan, then, is looking in the mirror, watching himself showing off, pulling his tricks and performing his stunts with a "Who, me?" look on his face. But there was no way that a sixties cult figure could remain neutral, certainly not in the eyes of those who put the spin on what they read, regardless of what the author might have intended. Nobody straddled the fence, least of all Richard Brautigan—certainly not as far as his followers were concerned. And where cult books are concerned, it is the readers who have the last word.

One thing they glimpsed in Brautigan's vision was the bleakly pessimistic view that America, sooner or later, transforms even its finest things into salable commodities. This was the America of mindless restrictions and prohibitions, of broken promises and shattered dreams, the America the beats had rebelled against in the fifties. However true or false this image of America was historically, it fueled the disenchantment, anger, restlessness, and rebellion that found its way into all counterculture writing in the sixties, including Brautigan.

Brautigan's deceptive passivity is pure beat. Unlike the Marxists of the thirties or the New Left of the sixties, the beats did not set out to change the world but to change themselves, to reach beyond the limits and repressions of America and find a heightened personal awareness through whatever means promised fulfillment—mysticism, drugs, sex, "relentless motion." They were continually reaching out for something beyond America's metaphysical boundaries. It mattered little how vocal you were or how dedicated to changing the world, the truth was that the only person you could ultimately reform was yourself.

There is something sweet about such a gentle philosophy, and some of its acceptance had to do with the respect with which the flower children of the sixties welcomed their forerunners, the beats, into their midst. Brautigan came to be known as the "honorary kid" and "the last hippie in America." He was a little older than the rest, and so it was easy to look upon his books as charming but dated, as old-fashioned reminders of the way things were, the way the students of the fifties read F. Scott Fitzgerald, less as literature than as an excuse to wax nostalgic about a time they never knew. It is, in fact, the way today's students read Kurt Vonnegut and Burroughs and even Brautigan.

Brautigan's picture of America as oppressive and morally weak was commonplace among the beats, but unlike most beats, he displayed neither rage nor horror but almost a kind of contentment, neither smug nor approving, with America as it was. Anger and rational solutions were both irrelevant at this point, for America, as understood by the narrator, was dying. The book is filled with references to death, and the report on Trout Fishing in America's autopsy is not entirely a joke. There was nothing to do now but sit back and watch.

Brautigan's deepest appeal, then, is to an almost Oriental passivity that some consider the ultimate wisdom: the true ability to "let go and let God." It is possible that he was the most deeply spiritual of all the writers of that period, for at the core of Trout Fishing in America is the legendary serenity of the fisherman at rest in the middle of the glassy-surfaced lake, a fine mist rising about him, the frost of his own breath before him, and a palpable peace surrounding and protecting him.

Tom Robbins once said that no matter how fervently a romantic might support a political movement, he must eventually withdraw from active participation in the movement because it means the supremacy of the organization over the individual and is, as such, an affront to intimacy, the principal ingredient with which this life is sweetened. Romantics do not want to limit themselves, to surrender their freedom to anyone or any group.

It is possible that if the generation of the sixties had read this book (the one they claimed to love so much) a lot more carefully, they would have realized that dreams such as theirs never have a chance. Brautigan's real message to them, one that has only later emerged with striking clarity, is that the man who does not go along with the dominant culture must, if he wants to survive, stand alone.

Or it may be that Brautigan is asking the ultimate question of the age, the one Hunter S. Thompson put this way: "Is there anyone tending the

White,2006

"Jack Spicer's Best Seller, Trout Fishing in America"
Lawrence La Riviere White
The Valve, 3 Sep. 2006
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/jack_spicers_best_seller_trout_fishing_in_america/
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.

Another day, another example of my ignorance. On the recommendation of a student, I picked up Trout Fishing in America. That someone eighteen years old would even know about the book was my first surprise. Even though I'd never read any of his stuff, Richard Brautigan was a low-level iconic figure for me, one of those symbols floating around from my pre-adolescence, like macramé or communes. To put it bluntly, I thought he was a hippy.

The bigger surprise came when I read the dedication page: "To Jack Spicer and Ron Loewinsohn." Loewinsohn wasn't the surprise. I'd known of him at Berkeley, that he'd been a teenaged San Francisco scene poet, but had gone on to get a Ph.D. (what must it be like to have your collected poems published while in graduate school?) and get a grown-up job, joined the tweed jacket and silk tie crew. Though I'd only read his novel Magnetic Field(s), which compared favorably to the Kundera that was so popular when I was in college, I had no idea about his poetry. I just assumed he was a Beatnik. And I'm a sloppy enough thinker to accommodate hippies and Beatniks within the same prejudice.

But Spicer? Why was he there, the anti-Beatnik, anti-Ferlinghetti? How could the acidic Spicer be associated with any noodly, wet hippy stuff?

If I had been paying better attention, none of this would have been a surpise.

If I had known of John F. Barber's worthy web site, I would have already known that Brautigan, despite the long hair, walrus moustache, and funny hats, resisted being identified as a hippy.

If I had read Poet Be Like God more carefully, I would have already known about this relation to Brautigan. He makes many references in the biography, and there is a good account of Spicer's importance for the book:
"Spicer admired Brautigan's poetry and had published it in J [the mimeographed poetry journal Spicer edited] . . . Brautigan was wrestling through the writing of his first 'novel,' which became Trout Fishing in America. He brought it to Spicer page by page, and the two men revised it as though it were a long serial poem . . . Loewinsohn speculated on the reasons for the double dedication. 'Me, I think it was just friendship; and Jack, editing, help, whatever he did. Jack was absolutely fascinated with Trout Fishing, and spent a lot of time with Richard talking about it . . . Anytime you get [could] get Richard to accept criticism [was] an unbelievable accomplishment. He [was] so defensive, and so guarded; and Jack was able to get him to make changes. Whatever he did he deserved some sort of Henry Kissinger award.'"

Trout Fishing, with its disjointed episodes (short chapters of one to six pages that change location and time sequence haphazardly), fits well with Spicer's project of the serial poem. And calling it a poem helps get around the oddness of calling it a novel. And it is poetic. For example, the chapter "Sea, Sea Rider" (the brazen pun would have appealed to Spicer's broad humor) begins,
"The man who owned the bookstore was not magic. He was not a three-legged crow on the dandelion side of the mountain.

"He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson.

"He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

"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.

"I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959."

In addition to the free use of metaphor and the wild fancies, there is a lyric fluidity to the best sentences in Trout Fishing, but in contrast to the surrealist flourishes, the lyricism is sober, restrained ("They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads"), in the way Spicer's diction and syntax is restrained, matter-of-fact, even severe.

The combination of the fanciful and the actual (most of the material in the book is directly autobiographical, drawing on Brautigan's childhood in Tacoma, Eugene, and Great Falls, his travels in the back country of Idaho, and his boulevardiering around San Francisco, and especially Washington Square Park) is an appealing feature of Trout Fishing, especially when compared a more abstract, simpler work like In Watermelon Sugar.

In a similar way, Spicer's poetry often brings concrete narrative details into his highly imaginative constructs, such as how the "Fake Novel of Arthur Rimbaud" (from Heads of the Town Down to the Aether) yokes bits of Rimbaud's life to metaphoric constructions such as the "dead letter office" that collects all poems never written.

Now the backcountry topos of Trout Fishing would be alien to Spicer. Car camping and fishing are some of the last things one could imagine Jack doing. He was through and through a city boy. But it's possible that Brautigan's tales of life in the poverty of the Pacific Northwest would have topical appeal to Spicer. There could be a connection to what could be called the culture of the Anthology of American Folk Music, a nostalgia for the pre-technological past, but a nostalgia thoroughly mediated by technology and mass culture. Some examples of the latter in Trout Fishing would be Kool-Aid, Deanna Durbin (at one point a young Brautigan mistakes the partially frozen Missouri River for her) and of course the cars that he is either hitch-hiking in or driving up logging roads to get to the creeks.

Spicer had a show on Berkeley's KPFA for a spell in 1949-1950. He played what they called old-timey music, ad-libbing alternative lyrics (whose colorfulness eventually got him fired). One of his recurrent guests was Harry Smith, who would go on to compile the Anthology.

In contrast to the seeming authenticity of poverty and bait fishing, there is also a sophisticated, playful self-consciousness to the book, a post-modern meta-level, as it were. Trout Fishing in America appears as a character within its own chapters, for example, writing and receiving correspondence that is transcribed in the novel. The cover of the book, a photograph of the Ben Franklin statue in North Beach's Washington Square Park, is topic within the book. The book cover and the park become interchangeable within the story, so that Brautigan can take his daughter to play in the book cover's sandbox, where she meets Trout Fishing in America Shorty, an avatar from Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side.

This kind of self-consciousness, the working through the project of the poem as a theme of the poem, is a hallmark of Spicer's later writing. (And a post-modern cliché as well? It's only a cliché if it's done lamely.) One imagines that part of the book would have had a great appeal to Jack, that he would have, as its editor, encouraged Brautigan in that direction.

But the biggest shock I felt, upon reading Spicer's name on the dedication page, came from thinking how many other people had read it there as well. Trout Fishing has sold lots and lots and has been translated often and sold around the world. How many tens of thousands of people, people how have no idea who Spicer is, have no idea of his poetry, have read his name, if only once. To little avail, as far as Spicer's popularity is concerned.

P.S. Do not allow my maladroit rhetorical gestures to leave you with the impression that I am not very much pro-hippy. I revere much of the wet, noodly stuff.

Pendel,2010

"Book Cover: Trout Fishing in America"
George Pendle
FT.com. [Financial Times London], 30 Aug. 2010.
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.

Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan, Four Seasons Foundation, 1967, cover by Erik Weber

Author photos are usually tucked away on a book's inside sleeve, or found propping up the text on the back.

It's rare to have the author's face staring out from a book's front cover, and it's pretty much unique to have that same cover discussed at length in the first chapter.

Then again Trout Fishing in America is an atypical book.

Richard Brautigan, the book's author, bestrides the cover wearing a mix of 19th-century pioneer and 1960s hippie garb: a waistcoat with beads, a navy jacket with a paisley shirt, and a well-worn western hat. At his feet sits Michaela Le Grand, his "muse".

The photograph, taken by Erik Weber, seems effortlessly to sum up the San Francisco experience in 1967, the "summer of love".

The book itself is a teasing collection of fragments without plot or chronology. The title appears variously as the name of a person, a place and an idea.

As the first chapter suggests, it's a weirdly self-aware book infused with a bucolic surrealism and mournful psychedelia that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America.

Brautigan, part beat poet, part hippie, part visionary naif, was well suited to this since, like his clothes, he seemed to span the ages. His writing defies categorisation.

Obscure it may have been but upon its publication it became an instant cult classic quickly selling more than 2m copies, and its influence spread into the strangest of places. A crater on the moon was named after one of the book's characters, a folk-rock band goes by the same name as the book's title, and at least one American has legally changed his name to "Trout Fishing in America".

It's 26 years since Brautigan committed suicide, but he still peers out from the cover of his strange and unclassifiable book, daring readers to see what Trout Fishing in America means to them.