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Steve Chapple's article on Brautigan in Montana
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Brautigan in Montana: Whimsy and Middle-Age Along the River

by Steve Chapple?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do.

Nothing happens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Trout Death By Port Wine," finishes Brautigan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has living in Montana influenced his writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kitchen caucus continues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


San Francisco Examiner Review?
November 2, 1980



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