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
by Jack Hicks
28. He retired when he was sixty-five and became a very careful sweet wine alcoholic. He liked to drink whiskey but they couldn't afford to keep him in it. He stayed in the house most of the time and started drinking about ten o'clock, a few hours after his wife had gone off to work at the grocery store.
29. He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day. He always kept his wine bottles hidden in a kitchen cabinet and would drink secretly from them, though he was alone.
He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren't drunk.
30. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use. - Richard Brautigan
29. He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day. He always kept his wine bottles hidden in a kitchen cabinet and would drink secretly from them, though he was alone.
He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren't drunk.
30. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use. - Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan's literary fortunes have been directly connected to the discovery of underground youth culture by private business and later by the American public. One of the few figures to make the transition from the West Coast "beat" culture of the late 1950s to the "hip" of the 1960s, Brautigan was a familiar figure in San Francisco in the late 1950s. His earliest work was poetry, privately printed by small presses in volumes like Please Plant This Book (no date, poems printed in packages of flower seeds) - given away to friends and acquaintances or proffered for whatever gifts or donations might be offered.
Thereafter, Brautigan's work appeared in a series of small poetry and prose works published by Donald Allen under the Four Seasons Foundation imprint. In 1969, Brautigan's underground reputation was made official as Delacorte Press acquired national rights to Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. The three works were bound in a single facsimile edition, and Brautigan quickly joined Kurt Vonnegut?, Hermann Hesse, and Rod McKuen as a popular cult literary figure. Since that time, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1970), Revenge of the Lawn (1971), and five poetry books (most recently, June 30th, June 30th) have sold very strongly.
It has become a popular critical pastime to dismiss Richard Brautigan's writing as merely faddish, a more hip, barely weightier version of Rod McKuen's maunderings. Brautigan's poetry does little to discourage this sort of overreaction. It seems uniformly slight; arch, almost unbearably naive, it is consciously unself-conscious (picture a moronic adolescent friend waving hello from a televised bowling show).
As in the case of Leonard Cohen's? poetry, the figure behind the poems is taken with the notion that his every single gesture is an act of art. Consider Brautigan's "Albion Breakfast":
^Last night (here) a long pretty girl
asked me to write a poem about Albion,
so she could put it in a black folder
that has albion printed nicely
in white on the cover.
I said yes. She's at the store now
getting something for breakfast.
I'll surprise her with this poem
when she gets back.^
The problem is that there are two Richard Brautigans. One is commercial property and a created cultural hero; the other, a unique writer of narrow but very distinctive talents. In his worst moments, Brautigan the spokesman is offered to us as a creature of the new consciousness, Mr. Gentleness and Soft Drugs himself, the antigeneral commanding the Green Brigade, a guy nonfighting the un-war against mean Mr. Alcohol Suburbia - as in In Watermelon Sugar, where the villainous inBOIL (inwardly burning perhaps?) and his gang of "trash" threaten the pastoral allegory of the sugar works: "InBOIL came out to greet us. His clothes were all wrinkled and dirty and so was he. He looked like a mess and he was drunk... A couple of other guys came out of the shacks and stared at us. They all looked like inBOIL. They had made the same mess out of themselves by being evil and drinking that whiskey made from forgotten things. One of them, a yellow-haired one, sat down on a pile of disgusting objects and just stared at us like he was an animal" (IWS, p.70). This is the Brautigan who lounges on the covers of his records and books (with successively prettier girls accompanying him), who peers from book advertisements and reviews in underground newspapers and popular magazines: commercial, promoted, annoying. The conversion of whatever extant counter-culture there has been to a series of products and images has long been a reality in the world of the youth culture market. Like Kurt Vonnegut and Leonard Cohen, the first Brautigan has been a prime commodity on the "revolution and evolution" market. Mercifully, a second, rather talented Brautigan lingers behind that carefully hustled facade. This second Brautigan, the writer, concerns me here.
Brautigan, Cohen, Vonnegut: the appeal of their works stems from the fact that each offers an imaginative recreation of a hostile world. And like Kurt Vonnegut in particular, Brautigan's appeal results from the sensibility he creates and sustains in his writing. "So it goes" of Slaughterhouse Five contains a lingering tone, a distinct way of reporting the world, a personal, original voice that suggests to us that, in the face of unspeakable horrors like Dresden and Vietnam, one must resign oneself to laughter and fantasy: one must touch, however briefly, another troubled human being. Similarly, another Richard Brautigan appears in The Revenge of the Lawn, where the style is less whimsical and the voice less infantile; he is a writer of more controlled prose in these pages and often approaches the surreal, constantly attended by a sense of the primacy of loss and death.
From the start, Richard Brautigan's characters have been children, recluses, various orders of naïfs, or mildly demented innocents - how they can, and indeed must, imaginatively reconceive the world. In Trout Fishing in America his "Kool-Aid wino" mimics a peculiar adult game, creating "his own Kool-Aid reality and... illuminat[ing] himself by it": "When I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as a result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn't because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn't even enough money to buy him a truss. So be stayed home in bed and became a Kool-Aid wino" (TFA, p.8).
This sort of imaginative play - an awareness of the necessity and force of mental leaping that can transform a base external world - suffuses Brautigan's fiction. "Attrition" is the first word of his first prose book, A Confederate General from Big Sur; although attrition, the gradual death of the substantial world, is inevitable, it must constantly be resisted. Loss, death, and the destruction of dreams wait at every corner but can be held off by the imagination. An exemplary tale from Trout Fishing in America makes the point:
^One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock. Then 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 its cold spray... The next day I would go trout fishing for the first time. I would get up early and eat my breakfast and go.
The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillean hook.
I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill.
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 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.
I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself. (TFA, p.5)
Attrition is a constant menace to Brautigan's various imagined worlds, and it moves gradually to the center stage of his works. By In Watermelon Sugar, for example, it is a major concern, but even here Brautigan proceeds indirectly through strained allegory, as the forces of death are aligned with inBOIL's whiskey-guzzling bandit gang. They constitute a first of physical violence, impinging on the misted dreamy world of iDEATH:
Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.
I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be.
There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us.
The shack is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from pine, watermelon sugar and stones as just about everything here is.
Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then traveled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones.
I have a bed, a chair, a table and a large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelontrout oil at night.
That is something else. I'll tell you about it later. I have a gentle life. (IWS, p.1)^
With The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Brautigan seems at once more relaxed and more controlled. The allegorical stiffness that flaws In Watermelon Sugar is gone, and Brautigan seems more willing to give his talent the rein it needs. His strengths are in no sense analytical or political, and the allegory of old versus new culture pervading In Watermelon Sugar has a forced, puppet-show quality. He also shifts to a more serious tone when death, wasting away, and the impermanence of the physical world occupy his attention. This is a sparer book than his others, more metaphorical and more controlled. The poetic quality of his prose tends to be less indulgent and less filled with strained naiveté; he evokes the surreal with a new authority. Consider the "talisman" the narrator notices on the wing of a plane taking Vida and him to Mexico for her abortion: "I looked down on my wing and saw what looked like a coffee stain as if somebody had put a cup of coffee down on the wing. You could see the ring stain of the cup and then a big splashy sound stain to show that the cup had fallen over... I looked down beyond my coffee stain to see that we were flying now above a half-desolate valley that showed the agricultural designs of man in yellow and in green. But the mountains had no trees in them and were barren and sloped like ancient surgical instruments" (TA, pp.136-39).
In his most recent book of stories, Revenge of the Lawn, the second Brautigan emerges more clearly than ever. The book contains sixty-two freshly conceived fictions, in which the main theme is how imagination, especially in children, can directly reconceive and recreate the world. Innocence runs like a stream through this book and is almost always deflected off some modern discomfort or horror. The horrors take many forms. They may appear as the tedium and ennui in the life of Mr. Henly, "a simple American man" who "works in an insurance office keeping the dead separated from the living. They were in filing cabinets. Everybody at the office said that he had a great future" ("The Wild Birds of Heaven?," RL, p.51). They may emerge as pure senselessness, as in "A Short History of Oregon?," which closes on an unexplained gothic country scene and the cryptic notation. "I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this" (RL, p.107). But whatever forms appear, a note of death and loss pervades. Brautigan's humor is, as always, abundant, but the tone here is bittersweet and elegiac - yearning for the ghosts and pasts of Tacoma and Portland childhoods - or nostalgic - evoking memories of dead friends, lost lovers, tainted innocence. Death: old people are rightly terrified of it, as when the young narrator causes discomfort in "The Old Bus?":
^I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?
I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.
I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight. (RL, p.72)^
Death: children bumble happily by it; some creatures, like the dog in "The Rug." would welcome it, should it present itself: "He was so senile that death had become a way of life and he was lost from the act of dying" (RL, p.58). The skull grins more and more, even through the beautiful faces of ladies that grace the covers of his books. Strangely, Brautigan's fiction has increasingly yielded the taste of more tragic cases: Ambrose Bierce and Ernest Hemingway?. This is particularly true if one sees in his style, with its lucid, intentionally simplified landscapes dotted by occasional metaphors, a strategy for filtering insanity and chaos out of the world.
Like many recent writers, Brautigan has moved increasingly toward truncated, highly impressionistic forms. Donald Barthelme expresses amazement that anyone can sustain fiction for longer than twenty-five pages. The reputation of an acknowledged prose master, Jorge Luis Borges, rests on three books of short ficciones. Like that of his more prestigious fellows, Brautigan's best work denies a fixed form or genre, as if closed forms (short story, novel, sustained discourse) were rigid cultural projections of totalitarian minds. His work has increasingly abandoned the few pivots of realistic fiction evident in, say, A Conferderate General from Big Sur. John Clayton's? appraisal strikes me as accurate:
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. 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.
It becomes apparent that the attraction of a Brautigan or a Vonnegut results from the overall tone of the work, from an entire attitude toward the eccentric worlds laid out in their fictions. More than anything else, what unifies Richard Brautigan's work and gives it appeal is his sensibility. With Revenge of the Lawn, his sensibility suggests that life is brief and bittersweet, happiness is ephemeral, and fiction, therefore, should bear witness to this condition. Furthermore, fiction should go beyond incorporating this condition; it should strive to resist it and attempt to arrest entropy and the forces of attrition. Thus his fictions become brief capsules in which one, two, or three instants of perception, mental metaphorical leaps, can permit beauty to hold the forces of death temporarily at bay. One of his briefer fictions, "Lint." contents itself simply with offering metaphor as a means of transforming lost bits of innocence:
^I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint. (RL, p.121)
It is exactly this tone and sensibility that make Brautigan a unique writer and one of special attractions for younger readers. His particular contribution to the incipient counterculture is to offer instances of evasion, examples of how a harsh world can be held at a distance or transformed. Unlike Marge Piercy, he shows increasingly less interest in politics as a mode of transformation. Indeed, John Clayton's phrase, "the politics of imagination," is apt. Gurney Norman's comment on the "stoned" quality of his perception seems similarly accurate: "I think your phrase 'yield to it' is important, because Brautigan is not a hard-sell kind of writer. It's not his style to overload the senses. He very softly invites you into his fictional world. But once inside, indeed, your heart may well be broken, because within these apparently delicate pieces are people up against the ultimate issues of love, loneliness, and death."
As already suggested, Revenge of the Lawn does demonstrate the wry, antic humor that flavors Brautigan's early prose. But these fictions turn less to humor as a means of masking pain than as an alternative to ugliness; they have much to do with nostalgia, memory, and loss. Such humor is particularly true of the three most effective pieces in the collection: "Revenge of the Lawn," "Blackberry Motorist," and "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane."
The title story, the first of the collection, is also the most humorous. "Revenge of the Lawn?" is an amusing remembrance of the narrator's grandmother and her second husband Jack. The actions resemble slapstick as Jack is haunted and later revenged by the front lawn and its conspiratorial fellows. However, the comedy draws up short at the close of the fiction, as Brautigan leaves us with a stark, suggestive scene:
It looked strange, even for a first memory of life, to watch a man pour gallons and gallons of kerosene all over a tree lying stretched out thirty feet or so on the ground, and then to set fire to it while the fruit was still green on the branches. (RL, p.141)
"Blackberry Motorist?" seems thoroughly innocent, refreshing, a simple account of adolescent berry-picking. On second glance, it also bears a richly evocative, almost Biercian image of darkness and waste at the center of things. Climbing under a bridge, the narrator spies the hulk of an old Model A sedan tangled deep in the vines:
"The World War I Los Angeles Airplane?" is the final piece in Revenge of the Lawn. It is also a recollection: the narrator tells a lover that her father has died. "I tried to think of the best way to tell her," the narrator relates, "with the least amount of pain, but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead" (RL, p.170). He offers a fictional cenotaph, thirty-three numbered statements about the father: "He has been dead for almost ten years," he tells us, "and I've done a lot of thinking about what his death meant to us" (RL, p.171). The statements provide a skeletal summary of loss, disappointment, and disillusionment in the forms of overbearing immigrant parents, ruined marriages, automobile accidents, repeated job failures (banks, sheep ranches, bookkeeping, custodial work). But in spite of his long decline in fortune, the father remains a decent man, and his last five years are paid out decorously:
^28. He retired when he was sixty-five and became a very careful sweet wine alcoholic. He liked to drink whiskey but they couldn't afford to keep him in it. He stayed in the house most of the time and started drinking about ten o'clock, a few hours after his wife had gone off to work at the grocery store.
29. He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day. He always kept his wine bottles hidden in a kitchen cabinet and would drink secretly from them, though he was alone.
He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren't drunk. (RL, p.174)^
Like one of Brautigan's earliest characters, the Kool-Aid wino in Trout Fishing in America, the father chooses to gently ignore an unpleasant existence. Although the ruptured boy has his watery, unsweetened Kool-Aid, he has mainly the dreams it releases for him. This is certainly true of the father in his own way, for Brautigan tells us: "30. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use" (RL, p.174). Kool Aid and sweet wine, each is a way into dreaming, a way of reconceiving human existence. Brautigan's dreams take shape in words, but he knows finally through the boy and through the father, and we know too, that "always at the end of the words somebody is dead" (RL, p.170).
In the Singer's Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 12, 140, 151-161
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.
![[toggle]](javascript:icntoggle('mod-Brautigan_Resourcesl2','module.png'); "[toggle]"){kind=small}