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by Gordon Legge
Most nights we played football over in Inchyra Park, round the back of Borg Warner. Come final whistle, the younger ones would head off home, while the older ones - myself included - would head for the pub, the Avondhu. The Avondhu was an edge of town hotel, set in its own grounds with a gravel drive and car park. It was owned by our local pools winner. The staff were young and wore uniforms.
It was all very civilised.
Being civilised was pretty big when I was seventeen, eighteen. My football pals were all apprentices. Most were engaged. All dreamt of driving lessons.
At school, my fellow fifth and sixth years were pretty much the same. They knew what they wanted from life. Girls were the worst. Careers. Marriages. Kids. All figured out.
Almost as bad as the girls were two guys from school called Mab and Don. Mab was called Mab cause his surname was Ritchie, hence Mabossa Ritchie, hence Mab. Don was called Don cause his surname was Hardy, hence hard-on, hence Don. Funny blokes. Good at football, but not into football, more into their careers.
When I wasn't playing football of an evening I was down the library. I love libraries. Libraries and record shops, my second homes, my cathedrals of romance.
I'd seen Mab and Don there a few times, down the library, studiously browsing in the aisles. I never went out of my way to speak to them though. Libraries are like supermarkets. You don't really want to bump into people.
One night, they caught me on my way out, just as I was getting the date stamped on my book.
'Hey,' says Mab, 'it's The Fog. Fancy a pint?'
'Aye,' I says, somewhat taken aback, 'whereabouts, like?' (You can figure The Fog out for yourselves.)
'The Imperial.'
The Imperial!
The Imperial was a bikers' pub, right bang in the centre of La Porte Precinct, our main shopping thoroughfare, where you found Boots and the like. Nobody went to The Imperial. It didn't have a gravel drive and car park. An old woman served you. She didn't wear a uniform.
'Eh,' I says. 'Aye, suppose so.'
We headed off round The Imperial.
The bikers, all three of them, were sitting upstairs, all two of them, at the back. They were accompanied by girls from our year at school, dressed up in their best hanging-about-with-bikers gear.
It was all very civilised.
Mab and Don got the drinks in. We sat at a table.
'What you reading, anyway?' says Mab.
'Eh...' I showed him my book. It was a slim volume. I'd never read anything by this guy before. I'd noticed the books, sure enough, been attracted to them cause they were published by Picador, and I read Penguin Modern Classics and books that were published by Picador. But something put me off. It was the word zany. This guy was supposed to be zany. More than anything, I hated zany. Zany meant squeaky voices, rich folk arsing about. Monty Python. Spike Milligan. Kenny Everett. That kind of stuff. I didn't like his photos either, this guy's photos. He always had his picture on the front of his books. He looked like David Crosby. You can choose not to look like David Crosby.
But that night, don't ask me why, I'd selected a book by this zany David Crosby lookalike.
Mab and Don weren't impressed. As a preparation for uni, Mab was into technical books, text books. Don meanwhile, favoured a tower block of chunky, espionage thrillers.
Mab started one of his books, started reading. Right from the beginning. Page 1. Don sipped his pint. A few seconds later he said, 'Ah, well,' and started reading and all. Page 1.
I looked around.
There was the bikers. One of the girls in their company was from our year at school. I really fancied her. She was wearing a yellow t-shirt with a thin collar. She never wore that to Modern Studies.
There was the old woman behind the bar. Maybe she used to wear a uniform. Maybe this was what she always wanted to do.
And there was Mab and Don. They were on pages 4 and 2 respectively.
I sipped my pint. Mab and Don turned their pages.
This was doing my head in.
It was all so bloody civilised. I was seventeen, eighteen. Life was so bloody civilised. Parents. Friends. Parties. Telly. Politics. Everything save my precious records and the odd decent book.
There was nothing else for it.
If you can't beat them...
I started my book. Page 1.
And, you know, to this very day, I'm awfy glad that I did.
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (originally published in America in 1974) was my first Brautigan. With tabloid clarity, it rapidly told the story of two professional killers, Greer and Cameron, two identical sisters, the Miss Hawklines, and a somewhat less than three-dimensional monster. Unusually for me, I seemed to get every joke. This wasn't zany, this was just funny. Funny dialogue, funny characters, funny stories.
I investigated further.
Brautigan's debut was A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964). Set in 1957, it still seems more like ten years later; but this was the Summer of Love as lived by the marvellous Lee Mellon, his pal Jesse, a lakeful of frogs and a very low ceiling. A truly marvellous book. It's like watching one of the great American sit-coms of the past few years: you know what's funny, you set it in context, and you present it to the best possible effect.
Following a book about hippies came two hippy books: the two million selling Trout Fishing in America (1967) and the frankly puzzling In Watermelon Sugar (1968). As much about the joy of writing as anything to do with hooking freshwater gill-breathers, TFI America is episodic with at least 763 place names and similes to die for. It reads like a labour of love. By contrast, In Watermelon Sugar was completed in around a month. It concerns a bunch of humourless arty types living in a community called iDEATH (death of identity?), where everything is made from watermelon sugar, meals are communal, and carrots form a pretty large part of the diet. Not the best of Brautigan's months methinks.
In the dedication to The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) a friend is advised to read the book in under two hours. As with nearly all Brautigans, you can. And, as with nearly all Brautigans, there's two very distinct aspects to the tale. Here, a library where unsuccessful authors leave their unpublished manuscripts, leads on to a trip down south to have an abortion. There's a lot of good humour, there's a lot of fairly puerile sexism (Brautigan's depictions of women are always fairly puerile) - and there's an abortion. It's not emotive though, more a celebration of the contraceptive pill. Very much of its time, (a male book on the subject of abortion?) you can't help but wonder how certain folk would, in this day and age, view the somewhat simplistic nature of the politics. Ah, the sixties, eh. Where the answers were great - it was just the questions that were crap. Nevertheless, taken for what it is, a mighty fine read.
From here on in, things get darker.
In Willard and his Bowling Trophies (1974) the three Logan brothers have their bowling trophies stolen. They set out to recover them. In tandem with this, we are told the whereabouts of the trophies, and learn as much as we need to know of the lives as lived by the current owners and their downstairs neighbours. A daft classic.
There's a telling moment - a tiny moment - about halfway through Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976) where a 'not-too-bright' policeman decides talking is a waste of time: 'If people didn't talk then he wouldn't be nervous trying to figure out things to answer them with'. The story concerns an American humorist who is struggling to come to terms with the break-up of a relationship. He tries to write. He can't. A failed attempt ends up in the waste-paper basket. At the same time as we are told of the American humorist's break-up, the story in the waste-paper basket - through some elaborate origami - forms a life of its own. I always used to say this was my favourite book. On the one hand you have what is effectively civil war because a cold sombrero falls out of the sky, while on the other hand you have an author who likens his insomnia to 'having a brain full of barbed wire'. Awesome stuff.
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977) is crammed with moments that, by turns, make you smile, make you giggle and make you laugh out loud. A minor character is called Smith Smith. A mortuary attendant finds it necessary to be in permanent possession of a loaded gun. An impoverished tenant's tyrannical landlady dies. (Imagine the joy as he realises it will take months before her affairs are fully sorted out.)
The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) is a somewhat patchy collection of very short pieces, akin to TFI America and Revenge of the Lawn, the best of which - like'Fantasy Ownership' and 'What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?' - are very good indeed. Throughout, the writing is beautiful: 'a perfect little mouth that looks as if it's been built by roses working overtime...'
Brautigan's last published novel was So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982). Here, a young boy collects beer bottles from a nightwatchman. To get there and back, he goes one way round the pond, comes back the other. On the way, we learn of the young boy's life, the tragedies and the comedies that have befallen him in his tender years. In its depiction of poverty (a recurring theme throughout Brautigan's work) and evocation of childhood, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away is comparable to the best of Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. This isn't typical Brautigan. There are no short chapters to race through. The paragraphs frequently go beyond fifty words. The characters are still odd, but this time round they're the sort of oddballs you wouldn't feel quite so uncomfortable about meeting. It has to be said, a mature book, a civilised book. Criminally underrated.
'The ground is covered with snow so heavy that it looks as if it has just received its government pension and is looking forward to a long and cheerful retirement.'
In the sixty-odd stories of Revenge of the Lawn (1971) there's nobody Brautigan brings to mind more than the truly great Ivor Cutler?. I like to think of Brautigan as an American Ivor. Both children of the sixties, both with tenuous Beatles connections (Cutler featured in Magical Mystery Tour, and, at one point, I believe, Brautigan was pencilled in to make an LP for Apple), they share an obvious love of brevity, but there's also the sense of amazed observation (see 'A High Building in Singapore'), the love of a good word ('Lint?') and the childhood memories of Tacoma, Washington ('Corporal?', 'The Armoured Car?', 'The Auction?', 'The Ghost Children of Tacoma?') can be every bit as cruel and harsh as the blessed Ivor's 'Scotch Sitting Room'.
Brautigan, too, was a much published poet, and contained herein are love stories which - barring the line breaks — are basically poetry; beautiful poetry such as 'Women When They Put Their Clothes on in the Morning?', 'An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film?', 'I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone?' and 'Pale Marble Movie?'.
For the most part, the stories in Revenge of the Lawn are 'Christ-powered photographs' of California in the sixties. Brautigan may have been the last of the Beats — the first of the hippies? — but 'Partners?', 'The Old Bus?' and 'Crazy old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today?' could just as well have been written anywhere at any time. While those pieces which deal with fame and with being Richard Brautigan ('April in God-damn?'; 'Fame in California?'; 'The Literary Life in California?') are gratifyingly free of anything remotely resembling a shadow of pretension.
Allowing for a couple of afternoon walk observations that would maybe have been better served by a good, long blink, Revenge of the Lawn is a rich and varied collection. There's a great first story ('Revenge of the Lawn?'), a story with a great opening line ('Memory of a Girl?'), the daftest of daft stories ('Ernest Hemingway's Typist?'), the now obligatory great hunting stories ('The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon?', 'A Short History of Oregon?', 'Elmira?'), memorable characters ('44:40?', 'The Betrayed Kingdom?'), classic stories about the way money's dished out ('1/3, 1/3, 1/3?', 'The Wild Birds of Heaven?'), and to end with three corkers about fear, reassurance and passion.
And, oh, about forty others.
It's always lazy — and potentially inflammatory - to exalt someone in terms of their lasting influence. You wouldn't do it with Hendrix or with Joy Division. Yet Brautigan probably mentioned more writers in his books than any other author before or since (see 'Homage to the San Francisco YMCA?'). Clearly, he wanted to share and acknowledge his influences and contemporaries. I must admit, I first learned of a lot of writers through these books.
I like to think that if the great man had an influence then you'd find traces of it in such diverse attractions as the wonderfully written short stories of Raymond Carver, the anarchic splendour of The Simpsons (strangely, when I was younger, I always visualised Brautigan's novels as cartoons - granted, this may have had to do with my hormones and his descriptions of the female characters) and in the language-loving, laid-back sonic discords of Pavement.
There you go. Including points in between, I think that just about covers everything.
From time to time I'm called upon to talk about writing. Usually I just go on about the holy trinity of Carver, Kelman and Irvine. Through lack of confidence, I never mention crime writers, female writers or humorous writers. I never mention Brautigan. I used to think the way I came across him was so daft nobody else would have heard of him. Not true. everybody's heard of him. Everybody loves him. And I'm going to get endless rows for not mentioning such and such a story.
And, oh, 'The Scarlatti Tilt?'? How could I forget 'The Scarlatti Tilt'. It's okay. Don't worry. It's still the best short story ever written.
Enjoy.
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