by Christine Chapman?
Every unappreciated writer in the world has a friend in Vermont at The Brautigan Library.
Inspired by the counterculture writer Richard Brautigan, and founded by the former flower child Todd Lockwood?, The Brautigan is the last resort — and sometimes the first — for writers who want to see their unpublished manuscripts bound, shelved, and read by people who travel long distances to find them.
From Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Russia and most of the United States, readers have been making literary pilgrimages since 1990 to this northeastern city at the top of the American map, to discover for themselves a library that's "a little on the whacky side." So Brautigan described it in his comic novel "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966," published by Simon & Schuster in 1971, a story about a librarian and his girlfriend who meet in an imaginary San Francisco library for unpublished books.
"Our role is to give the unpublished writing hidden in attics, drawers, and closets a public hearing," said Lockwood, 42, the library's founder. "We had seven books on opening day, April 21, 1990, and now we have about 300 and room for 3,000. We accept English-language books as they come in. There's no judging, no editing, no standards, whether aesthetic, ethical, erotic, geographic, or comic. We accept everything except books that have already been published. If it's published after it's in The Brautigan, it can still remain. We don't want commercial writing. We want writing from the heart."
Lockwood, a tall, blue-eyed man like Brautigan, without the handlebar mustache or the wire-rimmed glasses, has a mission and a sense of humor. The idea of bringing Brautigan's library to life haunted him for almost 20 years: "I've reread 'The Abortion' every year," said Lockwood. "It redefined the male in our society. We were in the middle of the shoot-'em-up macho era and I was not one of the guys out on the football field. I was a photographer, a piano-player, and I identified with the hippie librarian. In 1990, with some time on my hands as my recording studio neared its 10th anniversary, I decided to cross the line and start the library."
THE no longer calls the collection "literature" but "folk history." He does not even claim that Brautigan, who was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935 and died a suicide in 1984, despondent over his work's waning appeal, was a great writer.
"His writing is fun stuff, accessible, unpretentious. No intellectual computation is necessary to get to him. He predated the hippies, really belonged to the Beat Generation, a compatriot of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg?, who taught him about Zen Buddhism. But the hippies latched on to him in the '60s and '70s and made him an icon."
A would-be novelist, Lockwood, who will place his book in The Brautigan if he finishes it, tried to round up an advisory board of writers when he started. Kurt Vonnegut's? agent laughed at him and Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury," wrote a blunt refusal. Hanging framed in the library is his crabby letter: "Why would anyone spend hours poking through unpublished materials in the hopes of finding something actually worth reading?" He advised Lockwood: "Don't give up your day job."
Lockwood, who runs a recording studio and software business, didn't. The library is a nonprofit, soul-satisfying venture. A glance at a few Brautigan titles tantalizes: "Einstein Doesn't Throw Dice," "Camp Terror," "Reflections of a Quiet Man," "Oedipus in America," "Hormones: If I Don't Have a Lover I Make One Up," "A Great Big Ugly Man Tied His Horse To Me."
"Writers range in age from 92 down to 13, with men and women equally represented, although women write more poetry," Lockwood said. "Half of them have tried to get published, others have no intention of bothering. What appeals is that The Brautigan flies in the face of the success-and-money idea of the last decade. Of course there's also the catharsis of getting the book off your back. We have a Canadian writer, Laura Borealis, whose motive for writing was as 'a celebration of the end of her writing career.' "
The 10-member board of library trustees, made up of creative citizens of Burlington, is backed by such writers as the poet Robert Creeley? and the novelist Thomas McGuane?.
Good humor literally oozes out of The Brautigan, but not the books. They are one-of-a-kind, and it's not a lending library. Open for readers only on weekends from 11 to 5, it draws tourists, the library's own writers and would-be writers like the French woman who flew from Paris to Burlington in August to consider placing her book there.
Because Brautigan liked the word mayonnaise, the library uses the Mayonnaise System of shelving books between jars of mayo in 13 classifications: Love, War and Peace, Humor, Family, Adventure, Street Life, Natural World, Spirituality, The Future, Social/Political/Cultural, Poetry, The Meaning of Life, and All the Rest.
There are diamonds in the rough to be found in The Brautigan's simple setting, a neat and narrow former used bookstore on College Street not far from the University of Vermont. At least one bigtime publisher is angling to bring out "A Brautigan Library Sampler," but Lockwood can only say that "it's looking better all the time." If he does, some names to look for are:
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Donald McNowski, author of "The McNowski Papers," a satire about an ultra right-wing fanatic who wrote ill-natured letters to the editor of the local Burlington paper. Irate citizens responded hotly to the redneck point of view and McNowski, a pen name, brought out his book with the subtitle "Letters from a Small Mind."
Etherley Murray of Pitman, New Jersey, and her "Autobiography About a Nobody," dedicated to "all the Nobodies in the United States and Canada. You are out there, and you know who you are." Murray tried 40 publishers who "liked it" but didn't publish autobiographies of nobodies. Ten chapters take her from Depression-era Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she ate onion sandwiches and worked in beauty shops, to postwar New Jersey where she began "wearing fur coats that belonged to women who had just departed this life."
Albert E. Helzner of Marblehead, Massachusetts, a prolific philosopher whose 20 books are in The Brautigan. His popular "365 Bits of Wisdom to Enrich Your Daily Life" shows a Ben Franklinesque pithiness. As in "the requirement for survival is to be superior." Or "the people of Dnepropetrovsk do not know that I think of them from time to time." And the sad "I was once a soft and gentle person. I became hard as nails as a result of living through the reality of life."
Lockwood wants unsung writers worldwide to write to The Brautigan Library, P.O. Box 521, Burlington, Vermont, 05402, USA, for a $2 application and instructions on submitting a typed manuscript. Binding 300 pages costs $50, which helps pay the rent on the library. If the writer doesn't have $50, there's a supporting-member program that helps finance bookbinding and operating costs. Three hundred members in the United States and Canada donate $25 or more to belong to The Brautigan.
International Herald Tribune?
September 25, 1992
Online Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/1992/09/25/libr.php
Christine Chapman is a journalist who specializes in the arts.
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