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by Robert Novak?
Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, on 30 January 1935, the oldest child of Bernard F. Brautigan and Lula Mary Keho Brautigan; his father was a "common laborer," his mother a housewife. On 8 June, 1957, he married Virginia Dionne Adler in Reno, Nevada; their daughter, Ianthe, was born on 25 March 1960; the Brautigans were divorced on 28 July 1970 in San Francisco. In 1967 he was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, though he had never gone to college himself. In 1968 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brautigan does not volunteer biographical information, and though his stories often seem to have, along with their fantasy, many autobiographical details, he obviously invents freely. In an interview he states that he wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because he wanted to write novels and figured that he could not write a novel until he could write a sentence: "I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady."
The popularity of his books spread from California in the 1960s to a larger American audience in the wake of the popular movement often called "The Greening of America." In 1969 Kurt Vonnegut? reported to Delacorte Press the West Coast popularity of Brautigan's paperbacks published by a small San Francisco press, Four Seasons Foundation (1967-1968). Delacorte successfully bargained for rights to Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (the last, a book of poetry), and they appeared in 1969. Three hundred thousand copies of these three books sold that first year, and 1,390,000 copies have sold as of 1977. His new novels have been appearing yearly and now total eight.
A controversial writer because he seems to encourage the self-adoring anti-intellectualism of the young, Brautigan is commonly seen as the bridge between the Beat Movement of the 1950s and the youth revolution of the late 1960s. In the only full-length study of Brautigan's work, Terence Malley identifies the common theme of Brautigan's first four novels as "the shy loner trying to find a 'good world' in the inhospitable America of the 1960s." Josephine Hendin has noted that Brautigan's characters are marked by their lack of a passionate attachment to anyone and to any place; they never permit themselves to feel. Perhaps an even better case can be made that Brautigan's major theme is borrowed from the Romantic poets - that of the transforming power of the imagination, that both the comedy and beauty of art lie in the power of the artist's imagination.
Trout Fishing in America (written in 1961, but not published until 1967) seems like a collage. Terence Malley, however, has explained its thematic structure and, like John Clayton?, calls it an "unnovel." It has a traditional theme of American novels: the influence of the American frontier and wilderness on the American imagination, its lifestyle, its economics, its ethics, its therapies, its religion, its politics. The narrator as a child and, later, as a husband and father searches for the mythical Eden of the perfect trout stream that America has promised. He finds that the spirit of such a vision of America has become perverted into a legless man in a chrome-plated wheel chair, a Hollywood hero called Trout Fishing in America Shorty, and that the Cleveland Wrecking Yard? has used trout streams stacked and for sale at $6.50 per foot. Trout Fishing in America is Brautigan's Hemingway book, a kind of "Big Two-Hearted River" as seen through the disillusioned eyes of a flower child. Its pervading tone of melancholy arises from the sense that the American child, indoctrinated by our literature, movies, and commerce to believe in the American myth of the Edenic wilderness, has been betrayed. The melancholy is saved from sentimentality by unconventional plots, exaggerated figures of speech which have become Brautigan's trademark, and a style uncomplicated by difficult syntax or logical relationships. Speaking of one trout creek, the narrator says its canyon was sometimes so narrow that the creek poured out "like water from a faucet. You had to be a plumber to fish that creek." And the Missouri River at Great Falls, Montana, "looks like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college." The real heroes in the book are probably the sixth-graders who terrorize first-graders by chalking "Trout Fishing in America" on their backs. John Clayton praised the book's imagination but complained of its political stance of disengagement a la Woodstock. Others noted the latency of violence and death" in the book, along with its "humor and zaniness," its pessimism about the search for the pastoral myth, and the ambivalence in Brautigan's relation to the American myths and symbols.
Based on the proposition that one can combine at the same time stories about hippies at Big Sur and San Francisco in the 1960s and a putative Confederate general in the Battle of the Wilderness of the Civil War, Brautigan's first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965), humorously portrays the life styles of Jessie, the narrator, Lee Mellon, the man who thinks he is a Confederate general, and their hippie women. It is Brautigan's Stephen Crane Civil War book. In it, Brautigan's playful vision of America satirizes the hippie lifestyle.
The twenty-nine-year-old narrator "without a regular name" of In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is an ex-sculptor who has recently taken up writing. He describes three days in his commune at a small town oddly called iDeath [sic], population 375. A flashback describes how the town's hoodlum gang committed mass ritual suicide to restore the town. There is also an accompanying story of how the narrator grows bored with his mistress, who he feels has gone bad by consorting with the hoodlum gang, and how she commits suicide because she is displaced by a new mistress. This tragic love triangle is underplayed, and the death seems merely a sad annoyance to everybody. The real hero is the environment and the multipurpose watermelon sugar. The sun is a different color for each day of the week; there are streams everywhere, even in the living room; and houses, lighting oil, and clothes, as well as life-style, are made from processed watermelon sugar.
To Malley, this commune is a group of traumatized survivors of a holocaust, trying to cope; they are ritualized and deprogrammed from their egoism and previous ideology. He noted, however, that some people read the book as "an acid allegory of altered consciousness and 'watermelon sugar' as a euphemism for LSD or some other hallucinogen." He recognized the "curious lack of emotion" in the town and the condemnation of whiskey drinking, which is treated favorably in other Brautigan books. Such detail has led Patricia Hernlund? to argue that Brautigan sees the utopian commune as an unsuccessful counterculture, without pity and joy.
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) is a "love" story. It begins as if it were to tell the amusing but touching incidents in the life of a thirty-one-year-old librarian of an unusual library but ends with a trip to Tijuana for an abortion for his mistress. The mistress is the beautiful twenty-year-old Vida, who has always disliked her fabulously attractive body until she meets the hippie librarian. She is the archetypal Brautigan woman, who stirs the metaphorical imagination of the hero and is obviously the perfect companion for a gentle flower child. Their relationship liberates both of them: he can go back into the real world again, out of the library for losers; she accepts her body enough to work in a topless bar and go back to college. The library is the most impressive invention of the book, the best artifact of the days of the San Francisco flower children. It takes and stores original manuscripts from anybody, usually the naive and childlike who need to write for private reasons. If the book is about love in 1966, then such love includes the embarrassment of the abortion trip and a relaxed, fulfilling, monogamous, unmarried sexual life. But it also includes a life-style that allows one to feel useful to his society.
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1971) contains sixty-two vignettes and short stories which are unified by the theme of the stoicism necessary for healthy survival after one loses the easy life of a child. Many of the sketches seem to detail Brautigan's own childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in the Pacific Northwest as a lonely poor boy addicted to fishing, an enthusiasm for World War II, and writing. The humor of the title story, arising from the story's digressive structure and deadpan tone, is reminiscent of Mark Twain?. Hemingway's influence on these stories is also clear in Brautigan's feeling for nature, his subdued tone, and the frequent use of the point of view of an adolescent. Those stories set in California are ambivalent about its kinky inhabitants (the man who rebuilt his house with poetry, the woman who buried her dog in an expensive Chinese rug, the Christians having outdoor services in Yosemite). The title story? humorously tells about the narrator's bootlegging grandmother, her handyman who hated the lawn, and his comic troubles with drunken geese and bees which feed on rotting pears.
Perhaps the prototypal Brautigan image occurs at the end of this story: the narrator's earliest memory is of a man cutting down a pear tree, soaking it with gasoline, and setting fire to it while the pears are still green on the branches. It combines both the Brautigan surrealistic image (burning the green pears) and the uneasy relationships the Brautigan characters have with nature. Again, Brautigan's theme of the imagination's ability to reshape reality comes out in these stories in the figures of speech and the imaginative incidents, such as the geese with hangovers, the witch's bedroom filled with flowers, the child who wants to become a deer, and the customer whom the narrator sees in City Lights Bookstore debating with himself whether to buy a Brautigan book.
The Hawkline Monster (1974), set mostly in eastern Oregon in 1902, tells how two professional killers are hired to rid an isolated mansion of its monster, accidentally created by a great scientist. The humans are all amoral; only the "shadow" of the monster is moral. The book purports to be the history of an unpopular manmade recreational lake. It has fewer of the Brautigan figures of speech, and gains its power from the parody of gothic trappings and from its comic disdain for the Western life-style of the early 1900s.
Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975) ties together three sets of people: the Logan Brothers, who are out to kill whoever stole their bowling trophies; Pat and John, a junior high school teacher of Spanish and her filmmaker husband, who accidentally found the trophies in an abandoned car in Marin County, California; and, upstairs in the same building as the teacher and filmmaker, a married couple, Bob and Constance, who in sexual desperation practice sado-masochism while they read poetry from the Greek Anthology. The sex is obviously meant to appear unattractive and embarrassing, though obsessive, and perhaps justifies the word "perverse" in the subtitle. Willard is a large papier-mache bird that sits in Pat and John's living room. They pretend that the bird likes to be surrounded by the trophies, and the wife arouses her tired husband by voicing her sexual fantasies with the artificial bird. Perhaps the book's mystery is how these three sets of characters will finally interact. Brautigan sees it as amusing that the Logan brothers, all-American, ideal boys, become murderers - of the wrong couple - when their bowling trophies are stolen, and he symbolizes American culture with bowling, kinky sex, Greta Garbo, Johnny Carson, and kitsch such as the papier-mache bird - all of this is the decline of the West, as one chapter labels it. The all-American Logan father understands only car transmissions, and the all-American Logan mother can only continuously bake cookies and pies for her sons, who are not even at home any longer. The theme of this novel seems to be less the celebration of the writer's imagination than it is an attack on the confusion and desperation of our culture.
Sombrero Fallout (1976) uses the omniscient point of view as it juxtaposes, chapter by chapter, the story of a ruptured love affair with events which occur when a sombrero with a temperature of minus twenty-four degrees falls out of the sky into the center of a small American town. After the writer tears up the beginning pages of the story and throws them into the wastebasket, the story continues to develop by itself. The sombrero causes strange changes in the town. the citizens break into riot among themselves, and the National Guard has to he called in. Norman Mailer flies in as a reporter, and the President of the United States gives a Gettysburg-like address when the bloodshed is over. The protagonist of the frame story is a famous American comic novelist who personally has no sense of humor. Full of eccentric quirks, he is suffering because he has broken up with his beautiful Japanese-American mistress, a psychiatrist in San Francisco. The details of the writer's ludicrous despair cover exactly one hour of a November evening, but the flashbacks covering his affair with the woman from both his and her point of view, as well as the story of her own life, constitute five stories being told at one time. The book satirizes the media, writer's vanity, political authority, and police power. The obscene epithets in the central character's stream of consciousness and the dialogue of the President of the United States are amusing and appropriate. The heroine's beauty is romanticized by copious figures of speech. The love story has echoes of a Kurt Vonnegut? novel in its simple sentence structure and its ironic motto: "There's more to life than meets the eye"; unlike Vonnegut, Brautigan in this novel tends to judge human relationships by sexual hedonism, by how good the lovers are in bed. Some of the charm and humor of the book lies in the figures of speech: the protagonist's worries follow him around "like millions of trained white mice"; two lovers undressing are described: "She took her clothes off like a kite takes gently to a warm April wind. He fumbled his clothes off like a football game being played in November mud." But Brautigan's imagination works best in this book structurally, by tying together the fantasy science fiction plot with the real love affair.
In Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977), dedicated to his literary agent Helen Brann?, Brautigan combines a parody of the hard-boiled detective novel having a 1942 San Francisco setting with subplots set in ancient Babylon. The narrator, Private Eye C. Card, twenty-eight years old, broke and in debt, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, usually messes up his job because he begins daydreaming about being a hero in Babylon. On the single day covered by this novel, 2 January 1942, he has been hired by a rich, beautiful young woman to steal from the morgue the corpse of a murdered whore. She secretly hires two other groups also to steal the same body, and C. Card never finds out how the situation all fits together. The New York Times Book Review disliked the book because it seemed to be merely a 1960s cartooning of hard-boiled detective fiction. Kirkus called it a "cart-wheeling fantasy... sentimental comic book without the pictures."
The narrator is an amiable loser. Jokes are made about the early days of America's involvement in World War II and about how people relate to a young man who is broke and inept at his job. Brautigan's imagination works on the improbable events in the detective's day and his extravagant fantasies about Babylon. The theme of the San Francisco adventure is that people relate to each other only in terms of money or sex; the theme of the Babylon fantasy is prestige.
C. Card is robbed by pay telephones and hoodlums, and beaten up by bus drivers. His mother disowns him for being a detective and makes him feel guilty for the death of his father. In the Spanish Civil War, he was shot accidentally in the buttocks with his own gun. His legs were broken when a car ran over him (insurance made this his only recent luck). He has been knocked unconscious by a baseball in a practice baseball game, and he has flunked the police academy examination. But he escapes his seedy reality by fantasizing that in ancient Babylon he is a great baseball player, a distinguished detective idolized by his beautiful secretary, Nina-dirat. Or he dreams he is the Babylonian big bandleader Baby, with his own radio station.
Brautigan's novels are best appreciated by the principles of the New Fiction ("Post-Modern"), spelled out in an article in TriQuarterly by Philip Stevick?, especially their deliberately chosen, limited audience and the joy the observer finds in the mere texture of the data of the fiction. Thomas Hearron explains how Brautigan's imagination works in his metaphors. Brautigan's theme is usually the power of the imagination to give zest, poetry, and humaneness to life as well as to literature. The youth audience reads him expecting either affirmation (unfulfilled) of the 1960s counterculture or titillation from his style and a literary equivalent of the drug experience. Professionals read him expecting enlightenment on the youth culture. He is aware of several currents of American tradition, especially that of the new American Eden as created by Thoreau in Walden, by Twain in Huckleberry Finn's escape to the Mississippi River, and by the Californian myth since the Gold Rush days; and Brautigan tends to condemn the new America because it has betrayed the promises of the new American Eden.
Dictionary of Literary Biography?: American Novelists Since World War II
Detroit MI: Gale Research Co, 1978
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