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Doubt Fishing in America: Beat Author's Daughter on A Quest To Understand Richard Brautigan's Death

by Bob Keefer?

Ianthe Brautigan was in Eugene this month, still looking for ghosts. After breakfasting downtown, she headed to South Eugene High School, where she sat in the car in the parking lot amid oblivious teenagers and looked long and hard at the purple building.

There wasn't much for her to see. The old Eugene High School -— where her father, writer Richard Brautigan, graduated in 1953 -— was located blocks away and had been torn down years ago. However, you can still find Richard's senior photo in the yearbook in the new school's library.

Continuing her quest, she discovered that the boarding house on 17th Avenue where her father once wrote poems late into the night, before leaving for San Francisco and national fame, is now a single family home. She had found the address on a postcard her father wrote.

The owner wasn't in. Brautigan sat on a bench on the front porch, enjoying spring sunshine and an affable cat.

"I went to the post office downtown, where I know he mailed off manuscripts," she laughed. "So I know he was there, anyway."

Tall like her father, but dark haired and rounder of face, Ianthe Brauigan, who has just turned 40, was in town to promote two new books: You Can't Catch Death, her memoir of coming to terms with her father's alcohol driven suicide in 1984; and An Unfortunate Woman, her father's last and -— until now -— unpublished novel.

They have both just been brought out by St. Martin's Press. You Can't Catch Death is $21.95 hardcover; An Unfortunate Woman is $17.95.

Ianthe Brautigan also was here on a continuing quest to make sense out of her father's life and death. Richard Brautigan, best known for Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, rarely spoke of life in Oregon after leaving here shortly after high school, though his mother -— Ianthe's grandmother -— still lives here today.

Ianthe Brautigan discovered the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman after her father's death in California. She read it and put it away for more than 10 years.

"There was a portion of the book that was very painful for me," she says. "I wasn't ready to deal with it."

Written in typical rambling Richard Brautigan style, An Unfortunate Woman is a reflection on death and suicide, written from the point of view of the friend of a woman who has hanged herself.

The passage in question was this:

One of the letters I got today was from my daughter. It was a Father's Day card. She is 21 and lives in the East. She got married last year and I disapproved of the marriage and things have been strained ever since between us.

Perhaps I should bend a little.

I don't know.

I still disapprove of the marriage.

Although Ianthe Brautigan refers to the narrator in her father's last book as a fictional character, the writing came close enough to the truth to hurt.

What hurt most, of course, was her father's suicide. She had grown up with him as a distant but charming figure in her life; she was 24 when he shot and killed himself in Bolinas, Calif. His body wasn't found for weeks.

In You Can't Catch Death, she explores her father's death in a long memoir -— seeking, but never quite finding, the kind of explanation that would let a daughter say, yes, that's why he did it. And seeking, as well, absolution for the fact that she knew her father was dying in those last years, when he would call her in drunken rages, but she had found her own life, with a family of her own.

Her story is painfully detailed.

"I have a lot of paper with blood on it, because when my father killed himself he bled on some of the pages he'd been working on," she wrote. "In the beginning I washed my hands a lot when handling his papers, as if that would somehow help.

"But even the scent of soap can't cover up a suicide."

Ianthe Brautigan now lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., with her husband, a film director, and 14 year old daughter. Five years ago she came to Eugene for the first time in search of her father's memory, a trip that's detailed in her book, in which she finds her grandmother and becomes acquainted for the first time.

"We had a map of Eugene and I had the street address of my grandmother that I had copied off a rejection letter of my father's from 1956. In the old days of writing people actually took the time to drop you a line when they rejected you."

The two women have become friends; Brautigan visited her grandmother again during this visit to Eugene.

In a plush room at the University of Oregon's Knight Library, Brautigan read aloud later that evening from her and her father's books to a friendly crowd that numbered perhaps 30.

The owner of the former boarding house was there; she and Brautigan promised to get better acquainted and to try to figure out which room Richard had lived in.

Afterward, Brautigan signed copies her book next to a set of color snapshots that sit on the table: one of her daughter, Elizabeth, who like Richard is tall and blond; and three more of her father.

He is reading from his work in the early 1980s, in the same UO library room in Eugene.


The Register-Guard?
May 28, 2000: 5G, 6G

Online source: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=11NWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=tesDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4009%2C8264621(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.