Loading...
 
Andrew Gumbel's review of 'You Can't Catch Death'
Print
English
Flash player not available.


Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability.
If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player(external link)

Trip of a Lifetime with the Ghost of a Dead Father

Richard Brautigan's Books — Once Described as 'Mark Twain on Acid' — Were Cult Classics for the Hippie generation. Then in the Eighties, Overwhelmed by Alcohol Abuse and Disillusionment, He Put a Gun To His Head and Shot Himself. Now His Daughter Has Written a Memoir of the Man who Haunts Her Life

by Andrew Gumbel?

For many of her formative years, Ianthe Brautigan shuttled to and fro across the western United States to catch up with her elusive, nomadic father. He was Richard Brautigan, a literary star of the Sixties counterculture, author of Trout Fishing In America. Having divorced Ianthe's mother when she was still a baby, he flitted from San Francisco to a house on the Pacific coast, from a ranch in Montana to Tokyo and back.

And she followed. As a girl, she waited patiently in copy shops while he duplicated his latest manuscript page by painfully slow page. As a teenager, she watched him tell stories with his writer pals in Montana, bumped into film stars who roundly ignored her, and stood by as her father drowned his growing existential despair in alcohol.

By early adulthood, she was regularly on the phone begging him not to carry out his threats to kill himself. His literary star, which once burned so bright, fizzled out with the passing of the hippie era, and his ever more audacious literary experiments ran against an increasingly indifferent and uncomprehending public. When he finally did take his own life, in 1984, Ianthe was devastated, not only by the loss itself but also by the creeping feeling that the cataclysm was somehow her fault.

And now she has turned those memories and feelings — sometimes warm, occasionally dark, often painful — into a book of her own. Her memoir, You Can't Catch Death, is an attempt to resurrect the image of a writer generally dismissed these days as a relic of a bygone generation, and also a narrative of her own experience as a child in search of the "enormous, magical father" brutally taken away from her.

Who was Richard Brautigan, this writer at once so playful and so deceptively complex, described by a character in a recent novel by the American writer Wally Lamb as "a kind of Mark Twain on acid"? Was he a Beat poet who arrived crucially too late, or one of those passing Sixties things, or simply an artist misunderstood because he neither came from nor was embraced by the academic mainstream? And what, above all, moved him to commit suicide?

Ianthe's book offers nothing so simple as a straightforward explanation. "I started writing about my father because I needed a safe place to explore my feelings about him without having to explain anything to anyone," she says in her prefatory chapter. If anything, her text is a direct rebuff to what she sees as the journalistic cliches and half-snatched memories of self-serving fellow writers that have abounded since her father's suicide. "My father had money problems, family problems and drinking problems," she retorts, simply and devastatingly, "but his biggest problem was that he didn't want to live."

The strands of Richard Brautigan's life are all there — the dirt-poor upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, the idyllic hunting and fishing trips that informed much of his literary work, his early experience of a mental asylum, his first successes in San Francisco, his brush with celebrity, and finally his long, slow decline.

But Ianthe does not piece these together in a straightforward, linear way. Rather, she borrows something of her father's fragmentary writing technique, in which dreams, abstract emotions, scraps of memory and odd juxtapositions become the driving narrative force. Because she is clearly an accomplished writer, and because her story is so forceful in and of itself, the result is both moving and complex without ever once giving in to mawkishness or self-pity.

Indeed, she has succeeded in building the monument to her father that she desired — through sheer force of style as much as her descriptions of him. She wasn't consciously imitating him, she says, but the freewheeling literary style he developed "gave me the freedom not to write the book in a standard format... I simply asked myself, how do I tell this story, and this was the only way I could make it work".

At the beginning of the book, she hears about the suicide of a family friend and catches herself guiltily wondering what his children did wrong. By the end, she has not only confronted the trauma of her own experience, but has revived parts of her father's life that he had long suppressed. Her last section is an account of how she tracked down and befriended her grandmother, Richard's mother Mary Lou, who became estranged from her son when he was 21 and never saw him again. As she acknowledges, it was writing the book that gave her the strength to undertake that particularly fraught journey into her father's past, a process of self-discovery through literature.

The experience has clearly been a liberation. Ianthe Brautigan is an almost improbably chatty, humorous, buoyant conversation partner, happy to address just about any issue as she talks in the comfortable surroundings of her middle-class home in Santa Rosa, 60 miles north of San Francisco. "I'm really happy I did it. It's kind of like being gay and coming out of the closet," she says, giggling at the outrageousness of her own imagery. "Suicide is so shameful, this enormous weight that brings with it so much blame and self-blame. For me, it's a tremendous relief that the book is out. I didn't know it would be such a lovely feeling."

For a long time, in fact, she resisted publishing the book at all for fear that she wasn't ready to present her innermost feelings to the world. "It was very important that I be emotionally ready to go into public life," she explained. "It had to be the right time. I knew I would feel an obligation to explain things, and artists are very hard to explain. How would you go about explaining Virginia Woolf, for example?"

Having been haunted by her father for so long, Ianthe has written a book that often feels like a ghost story. Richard Brautigan appears several times in dream form, egging his daughter on, joshing with her, upbraiding her or just talking. These apparitions are in keeping with the portrait she paints of him, a man of images and stories more than tangible substance. He once said: "We all have our roles in history. Mine is clouds."

Rather than chronicle the high points of his literary career — the publication of books like Trout Fishing In America, In Watermelon Sugar and his poetry collection 'The Pill versus the Springhill Mining Disaster'', all of which were once required reading among hip young students on college campuses — she catches glimpses of him in odd, unexpected moments that are both telling and frustratingly incomplete.

She shows him in his flat on Geary Street in San Francisco, with its high-piled stacks of old newspapers and sprinkling of Digger dollars, a barter currency that some liberal idealists in the city hoped could replace real money. She describes his incongruously smooth, clean hands, the neatness of his workplace surrounded by the chaos of the rest of his life, the strange mystery of his typewriter. "Most people were all on the outside, while he existed mostly in his imagination," she writes. "Instead of going to an office and working, he went for long walks inside himself using his body as a map. His books became comforting to me."

Later, as a teenager, she describes meeting Peter Fonda? and Margot Kidder? at the Montana ranch, quotes extensively from his daily journal to indicate both how much he was drinking and how pathetically he wished he could make himself stop, and dwells briefly on bizarre moments like the night he burned every telephone in the place.

The suicide itself is recounted in a ghostly manner, in fragments that briefly encapsulate the horror of his shooting himself, and in eerie descriptions of the house in Bolinas, on a coastal lagoon just north of San Francisco, which appears to have been haunted.

Talking to Ianthe, it is apparent that she has come to terms with these ghosts, even come to embrace them as part of her daily life. Many of her father's papers and other possessions were brought to her house after his death, and although she plans to donate them to the University of California library she has not parted with them yet. Richard's old Royal manual typewriter sits on a desk in her 14-year-old daughter's room.

And his ashes, deposited inside a Japanese urn, sit near the ceiling at the top of a tall chest of drawers. She has bought a plot of land on the northern Californian coast where she intends to bury the remains, but the very thought — even now — "gives me knots in my stomach".

In the last dream described in her book, Richard invites Ianthe to see his new place in San Francisco and the garden which he is now cultivating. It is an idyllic image, and also the last one that ever came to her: "When I stopped writing the book, I stopped dreaming about him." Sixteen years after his death, she has found some kind of peace at last.

You Can't Catch Death by Ianthe Brautigan (Cannongate Books, pounds 14.99) is published on 27 July. Ianthe Brautigan is in conversation with Paul Morley at the Clerkenwell Literary Festival, EC1 (020 7692 1581), at 4pm today


The Independent
July 16, 2000: 1

online source(external link)



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.