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by Lawrence La Riviere White
Another day, another example of my ignorance. On the recommendation of a student, I picked up Trout Fishing in America. That someone eighteen years old would even know about the book was my first surprise. Even though I’d never read any of his stuff, Richard Brautigan was a low-level iconic figure for me, one of those symbols floating around from my pre-adolescence, like macramé or communes. To put it bluntly, I thought he was a hippy.
The bigger surprise came when I read the dedication page: "To Jack Spicer? and Ron Loewinsohn?." Loewinsohn wasn't the surprise. I'd known of him at Berkeley, that he'd been a teenaged San Francisco scene poet, but had gone on to get a Ph.D. (what must it be like to have your collected poems published while in graduate school?) and get a grown-up job, joined the tweed jacket and silk tie crew. Though I’d only read his novel Magnetic Field(s), which compared favorably to the Kundera that was so popular when I was in college, I had no idea about his poetry. I just assumed he was a Beatnik. And I'm a sloppy enough thinker to accommodate hippies and Beatniks within the same prejudice.
But Spicer? Why was he there, the anti-Beatnik, anti-Ferlinghetti? How could the acidic Spicer be associated w/any noodly, wet hippy stuff?
If I had been paying better attention, none of this would have been a surprise.
If I had known of John F. Barber's? worthy web site
, I would have already known that Brautigan, despite the long hair, walrus moustache, and funny hats, resisted being identified as a hippy.If I had read Poet Be Like God more carefully, I would have already known about this relation to Brautigan. He makes many references in the biography, and there is a good account of Spicer's importance for the book:
Spicer admired Brautigan's poetry and had published it in J [the mimeographed poetry journal Spicer edited]... Brautigan was wrestling through the writing of his first "novel," which became Trout Fishing in America. He brought it to Spicer page by page, and the two men revised it as though it were a long serial poem... Loewinsohn speculated on the reasons for the double dedication. "Me, I think it was just friendship; and Jack, editing, help, whatever he did. Jack was absolutely fascinated with Trout Fishing, and spent a lot of time with Richard talking about it... Anytime you get [could] get Richard to accept criticism [was] an unbelievable accomplishment. He [was] so defensive, and so guarded; and Jack was able to get him to make changes. Whatever he did he deserved some sort of Henry Kissinger award."
Trout Fishing, with its disjointed episodes (short chapters of one to six pages that change location & time sequence haphazardly), fits well with Spicer's project of the serial poem. & calling it a poem helps get around the oddness of calling it a novel. & it is poetic. For example, the chapter "Sea, Sea Rider?" (the brazen pun would have appealed to Spicer's broad humor) begins,
The man who owned the bookstore was not magic. He was not a three-legged crow on the dandelion side of the mountain.
He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson.
He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again. They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads.
I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959.
He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson.
He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again. They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads.
I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959.
In addition to the free use of metaphor and the wild fancies, there is a lyric fluidity to the best sentences in Trout Fishing, but in contrast to the surrealist flourishes, the lyricism is sober, restrained ("They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads"), in the way Spicer's diction and syntax is restrained, matter-of-fact, even severe.
The combination of the fanciful and the actual (most of the material in the book is directly autobiographical, drawing on Brautigan's childhood in Tacoma, Eugene, and Great Falls, his travels in the back country of Idaho, and his boulevardiering around San Francisco, and especially Washington Square Park) is an appealing feature of Trout Fishing, especially when compared a more abstract, simpler work like In Watermelon Sugar.
In a similar way, Spicer's poetry often brings concrete narrative details into his highly imaginative constructs, such as how the "Fake Novel of Arthur Rimbaud" (from Heads of the Town Down to the Aether) yokes bits of Rimbaud's life to metaphoric constructions such as the "dead letter office" that collects all poems never written.
Now the backcountry topos of Trout Fishing would be alien to Spicer. Car camping and fishing are some of the last things one could imagine Jack doing. He was through & through a city boy. But it's possible that Brautigan's tales of life in the poverty of the Pacific Northwest would have topical appeal to Spicer. There could be a connection to what could be called the culture of the Anthology of American Folk Music, a nostalgia for the pre-technological past, but a nostalgia thoroughly mediated by technology and mass culture. Some examples of the latter in Trout Fishing would be Kool-Aid, Deanna Durbin (at one point a young Brautigan mistakes the partially frozen Missouri River for her) & of course the cars that he is either hitch-hiking in or driving up logging roads to get to the creeks.
Spicer had a show on Berkeley's KPFA for a spell in 1949-1950. He played what they called old-timey music, ad-libbing alternative lyrics (whose colorfulness eventually got him fired). One of his recurrent guests was Harry Smith, who would go on to compile the Anthology.
In contrast to the seeming authenticity of poverty and bait fishing, there is also a sophisticated, playful self-consciousness to the book, a post-modern meta-level, as it were. Trout Fishing in America appears as a character within its own chapters, for example, writing and receiving correspondence that is transcribed in the novel. The cover of the book, a photograph of the Ben Franklin statue in North Beach's Washington Square Park, is topic within the book. The book cover and the park become interchangeable within the story, so that Brautigan can take his daughter to play in the book cover's sandbox, where she meets Trout Fishing in America Shorty, an avatar from Nelson Algren's? Walk on the Wild Side.
This kind of self-consciousness, the working through the project of the poem as a theme of the poem, is a hallmark of Spicer's later writing. (And a post-modern cliché as well? It's only a cliché if it's done lamely.) One imagines that part of the book would have had a great appeal to Jack, that he would have, as its editor, encouraged Brautigan in that direction.
But the biggest shock I felt, upon reading Spicer's name on the dedication page, came from thinking how many other people had read it there as well. Trout Fishing has sold lots & lots and has been translated often and sold around the world. How many tens of thousands of people, people how have no idea who Spicer is, have no idea of his poetry, have read his name, if only once. To little avail, as far as Spicer's popularity is concerned.
P.S. Do not allow my maladroit rhetorical gestures to leave you with the impression that I am not very much pro-hippy. I revere much of the wet, noodly stuff.
The Valve?
September 3, 2006
online source: www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/jack_spicers_best_seller_trout_fishing_in_america
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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