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Stephen Cook's Brautigan memoir
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A Weekend of Memories of Brautigan

by Stephen Cook?

This was a weekend for the friends of Richard Brautigan, literary darling of the flower generation, to gather and remember and talk about endings.

Brautigan, who so disliked neat endings that he took three pages of his 1967 novel, "Trout Fishing in America," to finish with the word mayonnaise, finished his own life with a bullet to the brain.

His death was discovered Thursday, and in the homes of friends in California, Montana, New York and elsewhere, discussions began. To make sense of the ending, it was important, said friends, to realize that Brautigan was:

A bookish boy whose commitment to writing was a thousand miles deep.
A trout fisherman and hunter.
A good-bad boy.
An alcoholic gunslinger who, on his way through two bottles of George Dickel bourbon a day, might well be found shooting at the stove, the walls, the clock in the kitchen of this Big Sky Country getaway ranch.
A 20th century man who never owned a car, never learned to drive.
A writer who cared most about appreciation of his work and the fact that readers had gone away.
A victim of the East Coast literary establishment.
A lonely man.
A man still disturbed by his second divorce a few years back.
The victim of an alcoholic accident.
A suicide.

Tom McGuane?, the novelist and screenwriter, remembered his first encounter with Brautigan. It was in Bolinas, during the '60s.

Brautigan was still only a San Francisco phenomenon but, with publication of "Trout Fishing...", on his way to stardom and 2 million in sales.

Brautigan entered the room, "a funny, soprano, gawky, hippie-looking guy," McGuane recalled.

McGuane told him how much he'd liked the book and Brautigan, the 6-foot 4-inch blond and quiet writer with Mark Twain? moustache, just beamed.

He was so happy that people liked the book, McGuane said. He wondered yesterday if this hadn't been an early indication of the vulnerability that eventually betrayed Brautigan, four months shy of his 50th birthday.

It's so unfair, said Becky Fonda?, but "something every artist should be brainwashed with — that this is going to be part of the deal."

It's the fickleness of fame, said Becky, who was married to McGuane when she first met Brautigan. She is now married to Peter Fonda?.

McGuane was the leader of the Montana gang — the Fondas, Brautigan, other writers, artists, movie people — who settled in the 1970s in a valley near Livingston, just outside Yellowstone National Park.

It was Becky Fonda, concerned that Brautigan had not made good his promise to come back this fall for the annual grouse hunt, who prompted Bay Area friends to break into the writer's Bolinas house Thursday. There they found the body, the large caliber revolver, the open bottle.

"One minute you're the darling of the fleet; the next minute they go right over you," Becky said.

"Richard was really undone by it. He couldn't believe what was happening to him. Less than 10 years ago, walking with him in San Francisco, we had to run for cover into Peggy's Used Clothing Store because he was being mobbed."

In San Francisco, writer Curt Gentry said that what seemed to hurt Brautigan most "was the thought that he had lost contact with his readers."

That was true in the United States, but not the world. Brautigan was still very popular in Europe and Japan. That popularity was so important to him that he exaggerated it, said Gentry.

"He was popular in Japan, but he had some over-inflated idea of his own importance," Gentry said.

"We'd be walking down the street in Tokyo. Richard looked particularly strange, out of place — tall, blond, with that mustache, a Levi jacket. The Japanese would turn and stare at him and kind of laugh as he went by.

"Richard would say, 'Everyone knows me in Japan. Can't you see that?'"

McGuane was bothered yesterday by the knowledge that Brautigan was so much more than a writer who committed suicide. He worried about the American public's appetite for "the hook of the soap opera ending, as though how it ends is the story."

Still, he found himself talking about the ending, and the events that foreshadowed it.

When Brautigan left on his latest visit to Japan a year ago, McGuane recalled, "he brought me his trout rod — this seems sort of spooky now — and a Japanese burial urn to keep until it was needed. And he brought me his typewriter."

This was after some very serious conversations about drinking, death, about behavior that was slowly shutting Brautigan off from his circle of friends.

"He was behaving in ways that seemed to show less and less regard for the idea of surviving," said McGuane.

"He was a good-bad boy, irascible," said Becky Fonda. "He was good-hearted, kind and sensitive, but he could be just an impossible boy. He'd drink too much ... Tom McGuane told him he had to stop drinking."

What had happened to the funny, soprano, hippie young writer of San Francisco? McGuane says he believes part of the problem was in the writer, part in the critics.

"Richard became an internationally famous writer without any help from the American literary establishment. When the crest broke, I think they were eager to injure them. I think they tried all the time.

"Everybody from some pork-and-beans book reviewer in New Jersey to Garrison Keillor? (sardonic host of National Public Radio's Prairie Home Companion and writer for the New Yorker) took a shot at him. They hurt his feelings."

"He was very much a person who was self-enclosed, hard to break through. Everyone says if he had only reached out to someone. That's sort of the last thing Richard would do. He was a lonely person. That loneliness goes back to an early time in his life, to when he was a kid.

"I think loneliness was the theme of Richard's life and also the thing that threw brilliant light over Richard's literature. It was a big price to pay."

Brautigan didn't share fully the details of his childhood, McGuane said, but "I gather he was a child somewhere between abandoned and left frequently alone."

Yesterday, in Tacoma, Wash., Bernard Brautigan, 76, said he was the writer's father and that he had not know he had a son until he learned of his death.

A drunken suicide is not what is to be remembered of Richard Brautigan, says McGuane.

"The Richard I knew was the Richard who was the bookish boy, who was the magician whose dedication to writing was a thousands miles deep, who lived and breathed writing," McGuane said.

"The main way to know Richard Brautigan is through his writing. In that writing you don't see a miserable person. You see a person with a mercurially humane view of the world."

Brautigan's is "probably the most significant literary death since Jack Kerouac," said his friend and novelist Don Carpenter? of Mill Valley.

But the suicide, he said, "is irrelevant to his life and work."

"It think it was an alcoholic accident. He might just as well have gotten drunk and driven into a telephone pole," Carpenter said.

What is important, Carpenter said, is Brautigan's "example to writers, everywhere."

"He wrote everyday. Writing was everything to him. His prose looks easy and it looks quiet, but I can testify... The man worked 12 hours a day every day of his life," Carpenter said.

"He always had an office in his house, but he'd be just as likely to be sitting at a table at Enrico's? writing. He'd write on napkins, save them up for two or three years, then work them in his office, over and over."

He said that in Montana, the office was built in the attic of Brautigan's barn, and he would walk to the barn every day to write.

"As for sitting and drinking alone," said Carpenter, "we all do that. Writers are loners mostly anyway.

"Richard was a hunter and fisherman. Like a lot of those guys he has a lot of guns. There were episodes of sitting in the kitchen, getting drunk, picking up one of the new firearms and just start firing at the stove, the walls."

The last day many of Brautigan's San Francisco friends saw the writer was Sept. 13.

He was seen quarreling with his ex-wife. It was the first time he'd seen her in years. He borrowed a pistol from a friend, a downtown restaurateur, telling him he was worried about living alone out in West Marin.

Gentry saw him that night in Gino and Carlo's?, a North Beach bar. They didn't really talk.

"He was blind," recalled Gentry.

No one in the Montana Gang used guns the way Brautigan did, said McGuane. He used to call Brautigan's back yard "lead Disneyland."

Bottles were set up on stumps in the yard and Brautigan liked to take his friends out on the back porch for target practice.

"He was fascinated with guns as machines," said McGuane.

"I thought I took the last one he had away from him. I thought he'd hurt himself with it. I guess he got another one."

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle?
October 28, 1984



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