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Richard Brautigan: A Millennium Paper Airplane

by Eric Lorberer?

It has been nearly two decades since Richard Brautigan died. When I heard the news I immediately recalled his statement that "You cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of words somebody is dead." It appears in a short story called "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane," in which the narrator, trying to tell his wife that her father has died and thinking about "what his death means to all of us," makes a list of 33 thoughts. I think that is a good idea:

1. Richard Brautigan was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington, and drifted to San Francisco in the mid-'50s on the winds kicked up by the Beat generation. Legend has it that upon meeting the poet Ron Loewinsohn? on a street in North Beach, Brautigan handed him this poem ["A Correction," addressed to Carl Sandburg, saying cats, not fog, walked on cat feet].

The poem adumbrates Brautigan's minimalist attack, quirky humor, concern for detail, and obsession with American letters and values, which even in 1956 he knew needed correcting.

2. Little is known about Brautigan's childhood—he refused to talk about it, though allusions to the poverty he endured are strewn throughout his work—but a glimpse of Brautigan's youth can be gleaned from his recently published juvenalia, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Mariner Books). That Brautigan gave everything he wrote to Webster (the mother of a girlfriend) before moving to California, scrawling a note that "they are now her property, and she may do what she wishes with them," is itself a lovely Brautiganesque stroke. Though some of the writing here is typically adolescent, a few of the pieces shed some light on Brautigan's experience in an insane asylum (a stay he earned by throwing rocks at a police station so they would arrest him). One can also see him experimenting, developing his voice. "I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye" tells the story of his incarceration in one-line "chapters"; there are "Three Experimental Dramas"; imitations of his literary heroes from Hemingway? to Kenneth Patchen appear frequently; and poems [asking whether it is against the law to eat ice cream in hell] show his peculiar humor and playful sense of form in the crucible.

3. After nearly a decade of handing out poems and publishing a novel that would not make waves until later, Brautigan found an audience with Trout Fishing in America. A book with no identifiable plot, it became one of the era's biggest bestsellers, making Brautigan a counter-culture icon. This immense popularity, however, made serious critical approaches to his work increasingly scarce, and when the '60s ended—around 1973—Brautigan's heroic status ended with them. It probably did not surprise him; like many of his modernist role models, he had prophesied the ephemerality of the national consciousness, telling actor Dennis Hopper?, "America would only be remembered for maybe another hundred years and then the idea would be a dream, a word people would repeat like a fantasy, as if it all had been an idealized moment in the past."

4. Trout Fishing in America is a quintessential postmodern text. It rejects linear narrative, providing instead a picaresque of pastoral themes and signifiers that change their referents constantly. The flagrant polysemy of "Trout Fishing in America" — the phrase refers to sport, book, main character, criminal, wino, hotel, and more—encourages the reader to reflect on how "America" is "often only a place in the mind."

5. Neil Schmitz calls the Brautigan of Trout Fishing "an ironist critically examining the myths and language of the pastoral sensibility that reappeared in the sixties." Brooke Horvath calls the book "a witty, dispassionate jeremiad to criticize his country's passionless capitulation to death." John Ciardi? wrote that "Brautigan manages effects the English novel has never produced before." As far as I can tell, they are all right.

6. "There are thousands of stories with original beginnings," Brautigan begins a story?; "This is not one of them." His disclaimer turns that opening line into what philosophers call a transcendental statement, one that paradoxically corrects itself. This is a typical Brautigan strategy—to use a lie, question, or naive pretense in order to tease some truth from the fiction.

7. Transforming "Trout Fishing in America" into a pen nib, Brautigan writes the novel's conclusion with a defiant gesture of non-closure. In the penultimate chapter, "Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter?," Brautigan follows heady quotations from anthropological texts with this coda: "Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" — but "The Mayonnaise Chapter?" ends "Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise." This willful misspelling may frustrate the "human need" for linguistic stability, but it also reaffirms what Roland Barthes has called "the pleasure of the text."

8. In Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, the protagonist Lee Mellon ("a Lee-of-another-color") gets rid of his southern accent by reading the German philosophers as he searches for his mythical military ancestor Augustus, whose story creeps into the text dragging the imagery of death with it: "He ran barefoot through a spring with a shattered branch lying in it, and he saw a horse smoldering in the brush, and a crow covered with spider webs, and his dead soldiers lying next to each other, and he could almost hear his own name, Augustus Mellon, searching for himself." Brautigan's view of military discourse and conventional narrative is so disparaging that the reader of A Confederate General from Big Sur is forced to play a game that admits the futility and circularity of the current text: "Where"s Augustus Mellon? . . . Turn to page 17 for Robert E. Lee. Turn to page 100 for an interesting story about alligators." The structure of the novel emphasizes structure as a narrative principal, as the narrator's reading of Ecclesiastes confirms; counting the punctuation marks as "a kind of study in engineering," he reasons: "Certainly before they build a ship they know how many rivets it takes to hold the ship together, and the various sizes of the rivets. I was curious about the number of rivets and the sizes of those rivets in Ecclesiastes, a dark and beautiful ship sailing on our waters."

9. As with Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan concludes A Confederate General from Big Sur with a powerful gesture of non-closure; the book ends with several different endings, then "more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second." Opposing narrative's conventional imperative for one "correct" ending, the book offers a plurality of endings whose only limit is set by physics.

10. Trout Fishing in America remains in print in an omnibus edition, along with the poetry volume The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar, an extraordinary fantasy in which Brautigan describes a surreal utopia. In 1970 Guy Davenport wrote, "These works show Mr. Brautigan is one of the most gifted innovators in our literature." Right again!

11. A word must be said about Brautigan's book covers, which often featured posed photographs that interacted with the text to great and sometimes crucial effect. (Walter Abish? has used the same device; at a reading, I heard him acknowledge the debt to Brautigan.) Sometimes a Brautigan cover provides ironic counterpoint to the subject matter of the text; Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt, for instance, depicts a woman playing in a sandbox, an image that should be measured against Rommel's desert exploits. The cover of Revenge of the Lawn, with a grinning woman sitting before a chocolate cake, more specifically plays into the fiction, for Brautigan effectively offers here the picture of a metaphor: in the volume's title story, he describes his delusional grandfather's imaginary chocolate cake, thus inviting the reader to contrast it with his cover photograph of an actual cake that is only fictional within the fiction. And the cover of Trout Fishing in America is so fully exploited by Brautigan's metafictional techniques that it would take me pages to explain — so I will move on.

12. According to an article in a fashionable literary magazine, "Minimalists are the slaves of Derrida," a statement which puzzles me, since minimalism has been around a lot longer than the French philosopher. Even if one amended the comment to include only recent minimalists, it would still ring false; although Brautigan's writings are as postmodern as they come, he was simply not an intellectual.

13. Though Italo Calvino? was an intellectual, he had, as Gore Vidal points out, a way of writing that made both schoolchildren and theoreticians flock to his funeral. The same should have been true for Brautigan. Like Calvino's justly loved If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, Brautigan's novel Sombrero Fallout (which predates Calvino's book) contains two separate tracks. As the novel opens, a writer is writing a novel, gets discouraged, and throws the opening lines in the trash. While one track of the novel chronicles the next hour in the writer's life, the other follows the discarded lines, which "decided to go on without him." The two stories run concurrently and, as in Calvino's novel, are linked only by themes.

14. Brautigan's late masterpiece So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is also erected on the unstable ground of time's relationship to the act of narration. The opening sentence, reminiscent of the famous beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, encapsulates this idea: "I didn't know that afternoon that the ground was waiting to become another grave in just a few short days." In a complicated weave, Brautigan skips through time to piece together his tale, including scenes from 1979, 1947, memories of events before 1947, and what could be called "no-time" — i.e., fictional events within the fiction. The portal into these different time zones is the novel's title; during the course of the narrative the book shifts chronology by means of the interpolation

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust . . . American . . . Dust

The repetition of the title reaffirms as well as reorients the narrative act, and the structure of temporal dislocation allows Brautigan to surround his narrator — not so much a character as the embodiment of death anxiety — with an environment of stories, subtexts which illuminate and eventually resolve the narrator's traumatic memory of a shooting death.

15. Richard Brautigan died in 1984 at his home in California; like Hemingway and Kurt Cobain?, he took his life in one of the most violent ways possible.

16. In a sense there are two Richard Brautigans: the one critics adored, who between 1964 and 1971 published works of "comic genius" (Gilbert Sorrentino), "structurally innovative books" (Jerome Klinkowitz?) like The Abortion, a work that while "making fun of the conventional novel" (Clarence Major) is also "a testimony to the enduring truth of literary forms" (Charles Hackenberry?); and the one critics despised, who between 1974 and 1982, published, if you believe them, mindless drivel — though this period includes the genre-benders Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster (the latter a "gothic western" which fuses the two into a grotesque hybrid), and the anecdotal meditation The Toyko-Montana Express. The problem may have been that pop culture was out (and would not be in again until after Brautigan's suicide). Barry Yourgrau's comment? about Brautigan in a 1980 New York Times Book Review, "He is now a longhair in his mid-40's," seems indicative of how subject to the tides of fashion criticism can be.

17. In one of my favorite blurbs of all time, Robert Creeley wrote that the poems in Brautigan's Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork are "weirdly delicious bullets of ineffable wisdom" and instructed readers to "pop a few!"

18. Brautigan is a minimalist in his poetry as well as his prose. Some poems are exceedingly brief; the title "1891-1914" is followed by a blank page, which is somewhat akin to Buddy Glass's idea of a gift letter: "A blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of explanation." But while Salinger was uttering Zen precepts (as any critic will tell you), Brautigan made them into art. "1891-1914" encourages the reader's contemplation of historical events occurring within that time period; in the context of the rest of the collection Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, the dates are also invested with military significance; and surely, for a writer obsessed with the death and denial of American values, his authorial silence about these decades carries a blatantly recognizable "message."

19. The longer [poem] "Critical Can Opener" is equally open to play, {asking readers whether they can find what is wrong with the poem.

20. Poets are not spared criticism, as in "Haiku Ambulance" [where Brautigan asks the significance of a single piece of green pepper falling from a salad bowl].

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21. Brautigan always tries to make short extracts do large work — the very essence of minimalism — and fragments are often employed to this end. Unclosed parentheses recur in his novels and poems; unfinished sentences appear as titles; mistakes are left standing and then corrected in the text. The novel Willard and His Bowling Trophies is even thematically constructed around fragments of the Greek Anthology, a volume beloved by Brautigan. Nearly everything that "occurs" in this "perverse mystery" generates thematic rather than narrative activity; for example, the ghost of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady takes a picture of the title figures "because it is very important for Willard and his bowling trophies to be a part of everything that has ever happened to this land of America." As in Sombrero Fallout and Trout Fishing, static objects such as statues are precursors to violence, a dominant theme of the novel. Plot questions remain unresolved in this paean to fragments, as reaffirmed by the epilogue: "Q: What about the Logan sisters? A: Forget them."

22. Brautigan's June 30th, June 30th is a volume of poetry with an autobiographical essay?; together they form "a kind of diary" detailing the author's love for Japan. Brautigan writes that as a young man he "read Basho and Issa. I liked the way they used language concentrating emotion, detail and image until they arrived at a form of dew-like steel."

23. Roland Barthes has spoken of an art form in which "codes of expression are detached from one another, pulled free from the sticky organicism in which they are held by Western [culture]."

24. Richard Brautigan is read by intellectuals in Japan. Perhaps they are confusing him with Roland Barthes?

25. What most critics seem to hate about Brautigan is his whimsy. As Tony Tanner put it: "A light touch cannot always hope to avoid coyness, false naivety, and sentimentality." True enough, although I want to point out that a light touch does not always give rise to those artistic blunders either. I think of Nietzsche's observation: "A man's maturity consists of having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play."

26. Apparently Brautigan is also read by intellectuals in France: critic Marc Chénetier? postulates, quite correctly I think, that all Brautigan's books "are motivated by one central concern and activated by one central dialectic: they are driven by an obsessive interrogation of the fossilization and fixture of language, and by a counter-desire to free it from stultification and paralysis."

27. There have been excellent reminiscences of Brautigan by those who knew him (including Ed Dorn?, Michael McClure?, and Keith Abbott), and a full-length biography by William Hjortsberg? is in the works, but his daughter has recently published what should be the most intimate of the lot. Ianthe Brautigan's You Can't Catch Death (St. Martin's Press) is a memoir which, like her father's work, wanders imagistically in short passages; occasionally this structure leads her to take on his voice, as when she notes, "Instead of going to an office and working, he went for long walks inside himself using his body as a map." Yet the book is as much about Ianthe's experience as a suicide survivor (her conjectures, self-blame, and attempts to communicate the rocky history to her own daughter) as about her father. Though some readers might wish for more details about Brautigan, her approach also yields beneficial insights, such as "My father had money problems, family problems, and drinking problems, but his biggest problem was that he didn't want to live."

28. Ianthe Brautigan was estranged from her father at the time of his suicide, because he disapproved of her marriage. This topic is aired at some length in An Unfortunate Woman (St. Martin's Press), a work the author completed in notebook form before his suicide and that has now been published. "I don't know what's going to happen between my daughter and me," he writes. "I've searched through the possibilities like an archeologist. These ruins puzzle and haunt me. But I haven't the slightest idea how to catalog them and what museum they will end up in." In typical Brautigan fashion, the unfortunate woman of the title is not necessarily a single character but a theme repeated in the figures of a friend dead from cancer, another from hanging, the sad image of "a brand new woman's shoe lying in the middle of a quiet Honolulu intersection," or — most tellingly concerning the strained father-daughter relations — the book's references to Euripides' Iphigenia.

29. Though billed as a novel, An Unfortunate Women is more journal-like than any of Brautigan's other fiction, and as with any posthumously published book, it's hard to know whether the author considered it ready or not. Where once Brautigan could command prose at 186,000 endings per second, the writing here is slowed to a glacial pace. There are, to be sure, brilliant passages that are vintage Brautigan — "I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them" — and suites of fantasia appear throughout, as when birthday ruminations lead to him imagining the headline "TRAIN HELD HOSTAGE BY MAN CELEBRATING BIRTHDAY." Brautigan's endless fascination with time in narrative is also present; "one of the doomed purposes of this book," he writes, "is an attempt to keep the past and the present functioning simultaneously." Yet An Unfortunate Woman is accurately described by Brautigan himself, late in the book and with a hint of some disappointment, as "an unfinished labyrinth of half-asked questions fastened to partial answers."

30. Brautigan's work continues to inspire young poets around the world. The latest example of this is Canadian Rob McLennan's The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talon Books), a book of verse and prose poems that pays homage to Brautigan through its metapoetic flourishes, contemporary cultural engagement, humor-filled observation, and a warm first-person speaker. This is street-poetry with flair, probably better heard than read, but a clear indication that Brautigan is gone but not forgotten.

31. Though Brautigan is perennially ignored by the literati, there are occasionally signs that the tide might turn. The latest is Brautigan's presence in the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction, which includes him in the list of the first wave of innovators we can credit with "breaking the frame" of narrative form. He is grouped in the book with Pynchon, Burroughs, and Barthelme.

32. I have been trying to show that Richard Brautigan was a postmodernist of incredible invention, deploying sophisticated rhetorical tropes with innate mastery. Like his "Kool-Aid Wino," who "created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it," Brautigan created unique worlds in his deceptively simple writings.

33. "Richard Brautigan died." I made this millennium paper airplane and am tossing it into the air, hoping when it lands it will find someone to unfold it.


Rain Taxi? 5(3)
Fall 2000 (19): 16-18



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