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Friends Say Stories Sensationalize Brautigan's Life after His Death

by Barb Smith?

Did Montana's Big Sky country kill Richard Brautigan, the vagabond poet and off-beat novelist?

One California writer friend has claimed it did, that Brautigan killed himself because he couldn't "out-macho" the cowboys in Montana.

Brautigan's Montana friends say the idea is absurd.

"It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard," Ken Kelley, a writer and Playboy interviewer, is quoted as saying in a recent San Francisco Chronicle story by columnist Warren Hinckle.

Brautigan was caught up in a better-than-thou syndrome that manifested itself at its violent worst in the jet-set enclave of the Paradise Valley, Kelley said. One way Brautigan competed was by getting into "kinky" sex he claimed.

Kelley told Hinckle in the article that he had visited Brautigan's Montana home as was shocked at the "madness."

"The house was full of bullet holes. There were bullet holes in the clock, in the kitchen and bullets in the living room floor and bullets in the ceiling," Kelley was quoted as saying. "Richard used to get drunk and shoot things."

In the article, Kelley blamed it on the "bunch of artistic weirdos living in rancher country," he said. "Every night seemed to be boys' night out. You had to get drunk and get your gun and shoot off more bullets than the other guy."

"That's absolute hogwash," said Marian Hjortsberg?, a close friend of Brautigan's and neighbor in the Paradise Valley near Livingston. "It is just definitely not true."

Hjortsberg said guns held a fascination for Brautigan but beyond that, "that article was pure sensationalism."

Who knows what killed him, she said. "It certainly wasn't Montana."

Another long-time friend and Paradise Valley neighbor, novelist Tom McGuane?, said, "The people in Montana were the only people who seemed to care about Richard after San Francisco had used him up."

"I personally made a great effort, in fact, I have the last revolver he had around here," he said.

McGuane said Brautigan's friends in Montana worked hard to keep him from being self-destructive.

"It was a major occupation for his friends. His friends who lived around here spent the last five years in concern and terror."

Richard was a troubled man, McGuane said, "but he really never did any harm to anyone."

He said Brautigan lived increasingly in solitude, that he often started his work days at 3 in the morning and that he did a lot of drinking.

Before Brautigan left Montana, he brought his fishing tackle, guns and a box to McGuane's home to store. McGuane said it wasn't until after Brautigan's death that he opened the box and found a Japanese burial urn.

McGuane said the San Francisco Chronicle column suits California stereotypes of what goes on in Montana.

"All that article was was a failed writer talking to another failed writer, and publishing it in the newspaper," he said. "It was so untrue and so cruel, it had a shattering effect on his (Brautigan's) own daughter."

Brautigan's decomposed body was found with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Bolinas?, California, home on Oct. 25. A positive identification of the body was made by the Marin County Sheriff's Department this week.

"We are 95 percent certain it was a suicide," said Sgt. Tony Russo of the Marin County Sheriff's Department. Russo said they should know definitely whether it was a suicide by the end of the week.

Brautigan, 49, was a literary cult figure in the 1960s. With the 1967 publication of "Trout Fishing in America," which sold 2 million copies, Brautigan suddenly found himself famous and in demand as a speaker for "new fiction" on college campuses throughout the nation.

In recent years, though, Brautigan was frustrated by the reaction of American critics to his work, friends said. He also had trouble collecting his royalties.

He divided his life between California, Japan and his home in Paradise Valley near Livingston.

Another long-time friend, Paradise Valley artist Russ Chatham?, questioned whether Brautigan might still be alive had he been in Montana instead of California.

Even if he had killed himself here, "I can guarantee you it wouldn't have taken four weeks afterwards to find him," Chatham said.

The novelist had friends here, whom he would be more apt to see every day, Chatham said.

"In Bolinas, he was dealing with bar acquaintances."

Chatham said he suspects there are circumstances surrounding Brautigan's death which friends don't know and may never known.

People aren't macho because they have guns, Chatham said. "Richard owned a lot of guns. I own 40 to 50 guns."

Chatham denied Brautigan's Paradise Valley house was full of bullet holes.

"There was one incident years ago where Richard and a friend in a gay mood one afternoon did in fact shoot the clock," he said. "I think it was a prankishness. It was not an ominous occurrence."

"Richard was a wonderful artist," Chatham said. "He was also a very gentle, fun-loving and generous person. The idea that he was violent or wrote books filled with violence is simply not true./"He was deeply saddened and grieved by his divorce and I felt that he never really quite recovered from the effects of it, for whatever reason," Chatham said.

"Something happened to Richard in the last couple of years that made him attempt to alienate his friends and acquaintances," he said. "He succeeded in doing that pretty much."

Chatham said Brautigan was left with a "pretty hard-core set of (Montana) friends who just wouldn't accept that."

Bozeman was Richard's safety net—a place for him to fall into when things got rough, said friend Greg Keeler?, an associate professor of English at Montana State University.

Keeler said Kelley didn't know Richard at all. "He wanted to make it sound Hollywood," he said.

"If people liked Richard because of his fame, he'd make sure they suffered for it," Keeler said. "The only thing left was to like him for a friend."

Keeler said it was obvious Kelley hadn't read the books Brautigan wrote while in Montana.

Richard dedicated his book, "So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away," to Becky Fonda? and Marian Hjortsberg, because he liked them as friends, Keeler said.

"Richard had borrowed money from everyone all his life," Keeler said. "He borrowed money from anyone who would lend it to him."

Keller said he still isn't willing to believe Brautigan killed himself on purpose, but if he did, it wasn't because he was broke.

"He could have paid off his debts if he had to," Keeler said. Brautigan owned homes in California and Montana and had royalties from his books, even though "he practically had to beg publishers to pay him."

But while Brautigan borrowed money, he also paid it back and loaned money to his friends, Keeler said. "Loaning and borrowing money were part of friendship to Richard."

McGuane questioned why journalists are taking such a morbid interest in Brautigan's lifestyle now that he's dead. It's too bad they didn't do something on his work when he was alive, he said.

"He was a wonderful man who made a lasting contribution to world literature," McGuane said. "It's not an accident that he was translated into every important language in the world.

"In the month of his death, people have taken pen and paper to insult him," he said. "I just think it is very sad.

"Why is he widely known and liked around the world?" McGuane said. "He has influenced writers in every country in the world."

Now everyone wants to know what was wrong with him, he said. No one asks what was good about Richard Brautigan.

"History, I think, will be fairly kind of [sic] Richard," McGuane said. "He just has to survive press this year. He'll be fine."


Bozeman Daily Chronicle?
November 7, 1984



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