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Bruce Cook talks to Brautigan
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They Sure Weren't Dancing on the Way Back to the Fairmont Hotel

by Bruce Cook?

At the top of this list of younger writers was Richard Brautigan. Born in 1935, he came down to San Francisco from his native Oregon in 1958, the big year of the Beat movement, and he has stayed there since except for brief interruptions for fishing trips, readings, and a stand or two as poet-in-residence. His poems are charming, often witty, sometimes successful - but rather slight. He gets his best effects from those brief, spontaneous bits of word play in which a single idea is twisted into the shape of a poem, almost in the manner of a haiku. For example, the title piece of his first collection, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster:

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

And even more simply put, this little opus titled "Critical Can Opener":

There is something wrong
with this poem. Can you
find it?

Anyone who can put the New Critics in their collective place in just three lines surely deserves to be called a poet.

Nevertheless, I'll call him a novelist because it is for his novels, A Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America, that he is best known. There are no books quite like them and no writer around quite like him - no contemporary, at any rate. The one who is closest is Mark Twain?. The two have in common an approach to humor that is founded on the old frontier tradition of the tall story. In Brautigan's work, however, events are given an extra twist so that they come out in respectable literary shape, looking like surrealism. A Confederate General from Big Sur is a kind of Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer adventure played out in those beautiful boondocks of coastal California where Jack Kerouac flipped out in the summer of 1960. But it is with Trout Fishing in America that Brautigan manages to remind us of Mark Twain and at the same time seem most himself. As you may have heard, this one is not really about trout fishing, but it is really about America. In the book — call it a novel if you will — whopper is piled on dream vision with such relentless repetition that the ultimate effect is a little like science fiction. The narrator's visit to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard?, for instance, is at once quite funny and a sadly serious comment on the awful junkyard America is fast becoming. This one, like every other episode in the book, is delivered in Brautigan's distinctively oblique, understated, and offhand manner.

And make no mistake: the style is the man. For Richard Brautigan — quiet and somewhat withdrawn — is a little like the man on the old television commercial who taps thin air and says, "Just as I was protected by this invisible shield..."

I tracked him down in his apartment in an old stucco building above North Beach. Could he talk to me? I asked. He obviously wasn't much excited by the prospect but said to check back later on. In the meantime, a third party put in a good word for me, and Brautigan agreed to meet me the next morning at a coffee shop nearby.

At the appointed hour he showed up with a pretty girl whom he introduced by her first name only, sat down and drank coffee, and submitted to a few questions. But only a few.

After discovering where he was from and when he had come to San Francisco, I remember asking why. What had he heard about the city that attracted him? And Brautigan explained patiently that he had come to San Francisco just to come to San Francisco. He had no ambitions to be a Beat writer or anything. No ambitions at all, he said. Just got to know some of the people around town after a while, that was all. "But my involvement with that was only on the very edge and only after the Beat thing had died down."

And whom had he known? "Oh," he shrugged, "most of them. Ferlinghetti, Duncan, Phil Whalen - used to live with him in a place south of Market Street — and Michael McClure?. McClure's a good friend. You ought to talk to him about this stuff. Not me."

We talked around the edges of his books then - when he had written what and how little he had made from that. It seems that between 1965 and 1968 he made less than $7,OOO from his writing. Nothing much happened, in fact, until the little Four Seasons Foundations in San Francisco published Trout Fishing in America. That not only sold pretty well around the country, it got a New York publisher interested in his work. Eventually, all of Brautigan's Four Seasons books — and by then there were three — were issued by that publisher who now keeps him pretty well sustained on advances and royalties.

Then there were the readings. They helped, too. Even though Brautigan himself never attended college, he is much in demand on campuses all over the country. He even put in a stretch of a few weeks during the year before as poet-in-residence. Where? "Cal Tech," he says with a rather pained look. "I can't explain it. Maybe they brought me there thinking of me as some kind of exotic influence or something."

He also gave an account of just how he works that was strangely reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's old Spontaneous Prose technique: "I get it down as fast as possible," he said, "and on an electric typewriter, 100 words per minute. I can't spend time on character delineation and situation. I just let it come out. And when it doesn't want to come, I don't sit around and stare at the typewriter or anything. I just go down and see about two or three movies - the worse they are the better. And for some reason that loosens me up and gets things going again. That's what I do when I'm stuck."

He went over that a time or two more to explain it, just so I would be sure to understand that this wasn't some big literary point he was making. "It's what I do when I'm stuck," he repeated, suddenly spooked, uneasy, perhaps afraid that he had said too much already. And then he left in such a hurry that he almost forgot the girl.

He did, however, remember to repeat, "See McClure. He's really the guy you should talk to."

Bruce Cook
The Beat Generation: The Tumultous '50s Movement and its Impact on Today
Charles Scribner's Sons



Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.