The Reception of Postmodern American Fiction in the Netherlands
6. Richard Brautigan

by Frans Ruiter

The reception of Richard Brautigan’s work in The Netherlands shows certain similarities to that in West Germany. The introduction of this writer in West Germany was due to the personal effort of Gunther Ohnemus, who (partly together with his wife) translated and published Brautigan’s work. Although to a lesser extent, it appears that personal efforts on the part of several enthusiasts in The Netherlands (among others Jos Knipscheer and Graa Boomsma) also played an important role in the translation into Dutch of a large part of Brautigan’s work. The first novels that were translated in quick succession (The Abortion, 1970, Trout Fishing in America, 1971, In Watermelon Sugar, 1973, A Confederate General from Big Sur, 1974) did not meet with great commercial success. Whenever a systematic attempt to launch an author fails – and one can speak of a well-considered attempt with regard to these four novels – this usually results in the author being scrapped from the publisher’s list. This would even be the fate of more illustrious authors than Brautigan. But in spite of the modest response the publishing house Agathon translated three more titles at the end of the seventies. Which factors were responsible for the lack of public interest in Brautigan is not completely clear. Critics offer various explanations, which all seem plausible, up to a point. Peter van Lieshout calls Brautigan a typical example of a cult-writer for which there is, by definition, only a small group of fans. His comments that for some time there already have been many Brautigan fans in The Netherlands ‘who know every letter that Brautigan has written by heart’ is interesting.

But when the books were translated the fans had long before read the original version; they didn’t need a translation and their circle appeared to be too small and too English-oriented to get word-of-mouth advertising going. (Van Lieshout, 1976)

From the beginning, G. Waller had great sympathy for the work of Brautigan. Nevertheless he is well aware that not everybody enjoys Brautigan as he does.

I gladly play with Brautigan’s elliptical balloons, but I can understand that others get goose-pimples from them. Each to their own! (Waller 1972)

Other critics are also aware that their enthusiasm for Brautigan’s work is not shared by all readers: the writer Hans Vervoort (1972) confesses to be very charmed by Brautigan’s humor, but can well imagine that others do not think very much of it. In 1977 Waller reviews Willard and His Bowling Trophies, the author of which ‘has been a promising talent for almost twenty years, and could become a very great writer,’ although Waller also says that he seriously doubts whether this will ever happen. He emphasizes the playful character of Brautigan’s work:

Brautigan and I like his games with words: we like the chapters, very short, half a page or one or two pages; the triangular relationship between sex, eros and intellect; the brutality with which he repeatedly and in both directions crosses the demarcation line between absurdism and nonsense; the cautiousness with which he allows sadness to change into pity and vice versa; his nonchalant use of very beautiful, always original poetical images. (Waller 1977)

But not everyone is so taken with Brautigan: J. Brockway is of the opinion that the author of Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar and A Confederate General from Big Sur is overestimated in a ‘ridiculous way.’

Brautigan’s writing stands out by its exploitation of inanity and makes me immediately think of those disposable goods which we, by a fundamental mistake, have adopted from America. Brautigan is a product from a country this is in an extreme state of mental decay. Without this decay Brautigan would not exist. (Brockway 1972)

Jacques de Haen (1973) laments that he has no feeling for Brautigan’s works. After this a facetious discussion of A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar follows. Jan Eyking, who reviews three of Brautigan’s translation together with Barthelme’s Snow White (see above), hates the non-committal social uneasiness expressed in these novels:

What possibilities there are for Trout Fishing in America to become a more fundamental form of social criticism are charmingly neutralized by the anecdotal and anti-social context. (Eyeking 1973)

But generally speaking it is remarkable how enthusiastically Brautigan is referred to. Jan Donkers – one of the first to pay attention to Brautigan and the translator of Brautigan’s stories for the literary magazine Barbarber – remarks that Brautigan’s is easily the first name to come up when America’s meager crop of young writers is discussed (Donkers 1971) . He says the following about In Watermelon Sugar:

It really is a fascinating book that is especially recommended to everyone who thinks that nothing new is written nowadays, (Donkers 1970)

Helen Knopper, who also translated Brautigan, discusses the lack of direct social engagement in his work:

Although I tend to say that Brautigan should be more profound in his prose, that he should take a clearer psychological standpoint and display a better ‘point of reference,’ I believe that he will be like a breath of fresh air for many. Brautigan is too dignified to speak about Vietnam from a safe distance. He doesn’t do this in his work either. He remains largely literary and, to let the word out, original. (Knopper 1972)

Jos Knipscheer is enthusiastic but at the same time somewhat apologetic with regard to the lack of social commitment in Brautigan’s work:

At a time when political and social-economic engagement is almost obligatory Brautigan writes about the little things of everyday life from a most unusual, but totally logical perspective. Those who find this attitude escapist and a little too easy, should still recognize that Brautigan is one of the most genial and original language innovators of the post-war period. (Knipscheer)

In 1977, Aad Nuis reviews Brautigan. He sets his early work in the ambiance of the sixties:

His criticism of society is mild and playful. For Brautigan’s characters the shadows of violence, drugs, madness and repression have barely been cast over the rough landscape. In short: a young cultural season, comparable to Provo in its prime here, and gone just as quickly and permanently. (Nuis 1977)

And yet in Nuis’ eyes Brautigan in his later work makes a successful attempt to be more than the ‘seismograph of the time’ that he was in his earlier work.

His style, at first so capricious, developed itself in three books to a simplicity which reminds on of Dick and Jane; short chapters, simple sentences, many repetitions. There will always be enthusiasts for his books. The exuberance of his writing has condensed itself to a sophisticated thriftiness and a precision of language which are the signs of the true craftsman. If you like it, Brautigan is always an experience, even if you have to admit that the problems he touches upon have been dealt with more profoundly and more captivatingly by others. (ibid)

In the eighties it is the ‘postmodernist’ Dutch writer and promoter of contemporary American fiction Graa Boomsma who devoted regular attention to Brautigan. Interestingly enough he placed Brautigan in the modernist tradition:

The essence of Brautigan’s literary work is the resistance to rusty images and identities that have remained the same for centuries. Brautigan is modernist because in his style of writing works take on the shape of their surroundings. His characters are foremost linguistic in nature and are undergoing constant change. (Boomsma 1985:72)

This quote clearly shows that Boomsma does not see a split between the (pre-war) modernists and the contemporary American postmodernists – for him, they keep the modernist tradition going. I shall return to this point later. Like Knipscheer, Boomsma sees an ideologically critical component in Brautigan’s work (he also mentions Donald Barthelme’s work in the same breath):

In Brautigan’s work the same words continually take on different meanings. In this way he avoids social (language) agreements which reproduce the official conservative state ideology. Brautigan partly destroys the fundaments of traditional narrative: the plot, the well-defined character, the chronology, the logical structure. (Boomsma 1985:72-73)

The interview that Boomsma had with Brautigan in 1984 is the last one Brautigan gave: In September 1984 he put an end to his life (Boomsma 1985) . In 1988 a translation by Boomsma of one of Richard Brautigan’s last novels, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, appeared. To conclude, one can say that the extremely marginal, but unmistakable, presence of Brautigan on the Dutch literary scene over a period of twenty years was mainly due to the tenacity of a small group of enthusiasts who dedicated themselves to this author as translator or critic.

In ‘Closing the Gap’: American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands (Postmodern Studies 20) 1997
Edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens pp 239-243

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