RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Born: January 30, 1935

Birthplace: Tacoma, Washington

Died: September 1, 1984

Place of death: Bolinas, California

Other literary forms

The fragmented prose style of Richard Brautigan (BROWT-ih-guhn) makes any effort to classify his work into long and short fiction difficult and somewhat arbitrary. Brautigan himself called all of his prose works novels, with the single exception of Revenge of the Lawn, but critics have understandably referred to his books as “un-novels” or “Brautigans,” works that seem approachable only on their own terms because they deliberately confront the realistic tradition of the novel by disregarding causality and character development.

Nevertheless, Trout Fishing in America and The Tokyo-Montana Express can be grouped with Revenge of the Lawn as examples of Brautigan’s short fiction. Although arguably unified by point of view, setting, theme, and recurrent characters, Trout Fishing in America and The Tokyo-Montana Express lack any semblance of coherent plot, and many of the individual selections that compose each book possess an integrity independent of context. Brautigan’s other novels are distinguished by at least a thin strand of continuous narrative. The most important of these longer fictions are A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), and The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971). The best known of his poetry collections are The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt (1970), and June 30th, June 30th (1978).

Achievements

When Don Allen’s Four Season Foundation published Trout Fishing in America in 1967, it became a favorite of the counterculture movement that was peaking that year during the “summer of love.” In the following year, Richard Brautigan was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Trout Fishing in America became a best seller, eventually selling more than two million copies in twelve languages.

Trout Fishing in America was Brautigan’s first fictional work and established his success and reputation. In a sense, it became the standard against which his later works would be judged. Unfortunately, it associated him closely with the counterculture movement, giving rise to popular and even critical misconceptions. Brautigan was not, as some supposed, a spokesman for the hippie movement; rather, the counterculture simply became his first sizable audience. In actuality, Brautigan’s roots were more in the Beat poetry movement, which influenced his prose style, and he has even been considered a precursor to the metafictionalists of the 1970’s.

In any case, Brautigan brought a special quality to his fiction, a style of expression that, although deceptively simple and direct, teems with figures of speech that often seem to defy the bounds of language. Early critics seemed to miss, ignore, or disparage exactly these distinctive formal qualities. Often, Brautigan’s subject matter—the dead-end fixity of materialism, outworn myths, or the decay of the American dream—places him at home in the tradition of twentieth century American writers. What made Brautigan’s fiction attractive to his early psychedelic audience, however, was something new: Implicit in his nontraditional structure and distended metaphors was the suggestion that experience could be transformed by imagination. The pursuit of shimmering, elusive instances of imaginative insight might possibly offer a personal alternative to the stultification of culture amid the grotesque remnants of American myth. Many postmodern writers have read Brautigan; W. P. Kinsella has referred to some of his own short works as “Brautigans.” At the very least, these writers have been alerted to the possibilities suggested by Brautigan’s work. His influence may be greater than anyone could have guessed.

Biography

Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, in the midst of the Great Depression. Very little is known about his early life. Although Brautigan apparently drew on his childhood experiences in his fiction, his idiosyncratic attitude toward his past made him reluctant to discuss actual details with anyone. From anecdotal fragments confided to a few persons close to him, a far less than idyllic picture emerges that includes a pattern of abandonment and mistreatment at the hands of stepfathers. Deprivation seems to have been a part of his heritage, and Brautigan would claim throughout his life that he never graduated from high school.

In 1956, Brautigan moved to San Francisco and became peripherally aligned with the Beat poets. He wrote and published several volumes of poetry, but none sold well. He also met an educated young woman, Virginia Adler, who became his first wife and the mother of Ianthe, their daughter. Adler supported the family by doing secretarial work. Problems arose when Brautigan continued his bachelor habits of haunting bars and bringing his friends home for further revels. In time, Virginia became involved with one of Brautigan’s drinking friends and ran away with him to live in Salt Lake City in 1963. Although he was devastated, Brautigan wrote one of his best novels, In Watermelon Sugar, in 1964.

Success showered on Brautigan with the publication of Trout Fishing in America in 1967. Fame and money afforded him opportunity for a period of more or less unbridled hedonism. After purchasing a ranch in Montana, Brautigan spent portions of the year entertaining friends, and, perhaps, cultivating a lifestyle that quickly became an unfortunate blend of egoism and dissipation. Although his friends would fondly recall their early days with Brautigan, heavy drinking and a mordant sense of paranoia began to estrange most of them. Brautigan’s later work was beginning to suffer at the hands of critics, his counterculture audience was dispersing, and sales in the United States were down. In Japan, however, his translated work was creating a wave of interest. In 1977, he married one of his Japanese admirers, Akiko. There was a brief period of happiness while they lived together in San Francisco, and Brautigan began to write The Tokyo-Montana Express in 1978. Unfortunately, Akiko, like so many others, was unable to cope with the peculiar stresses of a relationship with Brautigan; she left him. Brautigan tried the lecture circuit in 1980, but it was an unhappy venture. Sometime near the end of September, 1984, Richard Brautigan shut himself up in his house in Bolinas, California, and took his own life with a handgun. His body was discovered on October 25, 1984.

Analysis

Richard Brautigan’s short fiction explores the imagination’s power to transform reality. In some stories, this means contrasting a gritty, naturalistic portrait of cheap materialism, personal defeat, and latent violence with a vision of the lost American Eden or a nostalgic remembrance of childhood’s innocence. Collectively, the stories describe a search for good in contemporary America, but because they sympathize with the defeated, they suggest that such a search is futile. Brautigan’s stories stoically accept the conditions of existence, withholding judgment while suggesting that the imagination holds the only possible hope for transcendence.

The stories are self-consciously artificial, continually calling attention to the process of their creation. The typographical experimentation, outrageous figures of speech, extreme compression, and deceptively simplistic syntax work through a disengaged narrative voice to create prose that has been compared to skywriting. The conscious artificiality of Brautigan’s stylistic mannerisms has led some critics to dismiss his work as whimsical, coy, naïve, and self-indulgent.

Trout Fishing in America

Although Trout Fishing in America became popular as a counterculture book during the late 1960’s, it was written in 1961 as a late expression of the San Francisco Beat movement. Brautigan, like other Beats, had been conditioned by the experience of the Great Depression and World War II, historical examples of deprivation and violence, and he saw in these experiences deep truths that belied America’s complacent prosperity. In contrast to the radicals of the 1930’s and the New Left of the 1960’s, Brautigan and other Beats sought social change not through collective action but through personal transformation.

Thus, Trout Fishing in America is an antididactic book, an effort to document America from a disengaged, thoroughly nonpolitical point of view. Although the America it documents is spiritually decayed, the forty-seven stories that compose Trout Fishing in America do not promote a program of social reform. Instead, the book’s underlying philosophy, derived from Zen Buddhist belief, assumes that life is essentially determined and that social progress is an illusion. Brautigan espouses a politics of the imagination in which social activism is supplanted by the individual imagination’s ability to create a vision of freedom, a vision of an America that is “often only a place in the mind.” To this extent, the explicit theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which was published in 1961, as Trout Fishing in America was being written, suits Brautigan’s book: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Brautigan’s unnamed narrator uses his imagination to “fish” for something of value in the stream of contemporary America, but like his comically failed fisherman Alonso Hagen in “Fishing on the Streets of Eternity,” his effort becomes “an interesting experiment in total loss.”

Stylistically, Trout Fishing in America seems without literary precedent, a documentary collage of prose poems and cultural references (like Henry David Thoreau) are juxtaposed with references to historical figures (Richard Nixon, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Andrew Carnegie, Caryl Chessman, Deanna Durbin) and the signatures of popular culture (bumper stickers, diaries, tombstone engravings, recipes, warning signs). Woven through this cultural stew is the protean phrase “Trout Fishing in America,” which is applied to people, places, a hotel, a pen nib, a state of mind, and the book itself.

“The Cover for Trout Fishing in America,” the opening piece, exemplifies the book’s self-consciousness and introduces Brautigan’s ironic view of America. By describing the book’s cover photograph, Brautigan reminds his reader that Trout Fishing in America is itself an artifact, a component of the society he is documenting. He then juxtaposes a statue of Benjamin Franklin, the prototypical American optimist, to the derelicts who sadly wait in the park hoping for a handout. Although the concluding quotation from Franz Kafka, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic,” is ironic, Brautigan’s matter-of-fact presentation prevents the piece from being read as social protest. Instead, the book implies that optimism, no matter how ill-founded, is a part of the American condition.

“The Kool-Aid Wino”

In a complementary way, “The Kool-Aid Wino” demonstrates the imagination’s power to overcome the limitations of existence. The Kool-Aid Wino is a child who is restricted from picking beans or engaging in active play by a hernia. His family is too poor to afford an operation or even a truss, so the Kool-Aid Wino spends his days lovingly preparing a watered-down, sugarless version of Kool-Aid “like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination.” Through his ceremonious preparation and consumption he creates “his own Kool-Aid reality” and is “able to illuminate himself by it.” The story celebrates the human capacity to transcend reality while simultaneously portraying the sad deprivations that make such imaginative escape necessary.

In “Trout Fishing on the Bevel,” Brautigan’s narrator describes fishing a stream that runs past two graveyards, one for the rich and one for the poor. Like many of Brautigan’s short fictions, “Trout Fishing on the Bevel” meditates on loneliness, poverty, death, and the desire to transcend them. The narrator describes the weathered boards, “like heels of stale bread,” that mark the graves of the poor and imagines darkly humorous inscriptions (“Beloved Worked-to-Death Mother Of”) that disclose the painful reality usually disguised by euphemisms. In contrast, the graves of the rich are marked with “marble hors d’oeuvres like horses trotting up the fancy paths to the sky.” Admittedly “bothered” by “the poverty of the dead,” the narrator has “a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.” It is one of Brautigan’s clearest statements of his artistic purpose, expressing his desire to construct from the forgotten or overlooked bits of life an art that can imaginatively free his narrator and his reader from the particular loneliness of existence.

“The Cleveland Wrecking Yard”

“The Cleveland Wrecking Yard” is placed near the end of Trout Fishing in America, and it provides a caricature of America’s obsessive materialism. At the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, a microcosm of America, the narrator finds a trout stream for sale, stacked up in lengths beside toilets and other used plumbing supplies, but he does not condemn this outrageous “commodification” of nature; instead, he sees the Cleveland Wrecking Yard as a repository for tarnished dreams that can only be revitalized with imagination. Indeed, the process by which discarded items can be recycled parallels the way in which Brautigan salvages the scraps of American culture to construct Trout Fishing in America.

“Revenge of the Lawn”

Many of the stories collected in Revenge of the Lawn deal with childhood, portraying it as a fragile refuge, a time when people are more open to the transforming power of imagination. The stories contrast this freedom with the crippling disillusionments that accompany maturation and the sadder ways adults use imagination to escape reality.

The title story, however, shows Brautigan at his most playful, demonstrating an ability to use comic misdirection and a deadpan narrative voice in the manner of Mark Twain. This rambling, autobiographical remembrance focuses on his grandmother, his grandfather, and a man named Jack. The grandfather, “a minor Washington mystic,” went mad after he correctly “prophesied the exact date when World War I would start.” In his madness he returns to an eternal childhood in which he is six years old. He is replaced by Jack, an itinerant salesman of lots in Florida, who hawks “a vision of eternal oranges and sunshine.” These contrasting visionaries are set against the grandmother, a bootlegger, who sells a utilitarian sort of bottled vision. The action of the story revolves around Jack’s relationship to nature—specifically the lawn that he has destroyed by driving on it, a pear tree that grows in the yard, the bees that are attracted to the pears, and the grandmother’s geese. The geese eat some fermenting mash and pass out in the yard. The grandmother, comically assuming that the geese are dead, plucks them. They recover and are standing about “like some helpless, primitive American advertisement for aspirin,” when Jack, distracted by the sight, drives into the house. In a concluding note, the narrator writes that his earliest memory is an image of Jack setting fire to the tree “while the fruit was still green on the branches.” “Revenge of the Lawn” demonstrates Brautigan’s ability to write comic narrative while satirizing man’s foolish attempts to manage nature.

“Corporal”

“Corporal” is a bittersweet inverted Horatio Alger story in which the narrator recounts his wartime involvement in a paper drive. The young patriots were to earn military ranks according to the amount of paper they collected. The narrator’s initial eagerness was thwarted, however, when he realized that “the kids who wore the best clothes and had lots of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day” had an unfair advantage, for these kids “were already generals,” and “they strutted their military airs around the playground.” Like so many of Brautigan’s characters, the narrator admitted defeat and entered “the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.” “Corporal” evokes the opposing worlds of good and bad paper, the childlike creative dream and the stifling economic and social reality. The story painfully portrays the disappointments that constitute so much of life, and emphasizes, in a manner that is particularly relevant for an author who places imaginative creation at the center of life, the precariousness of a life lived in the mind.

“The World War I Los Angeles Airplane”

The last piece in Revenge of the Lawn is one of the most openly autobiographical. “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane” is Brautigan’s response to the death of his father-in-law, but this piece, despite its specificity, effectively communicates Brautigan’s general sense of life as a process of attrition. “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane” exemplifies Brautigan’s disregard for traditional narrative method and his love of lists, for after a brief introduction, the story presents a numbered catalog of thirty-three separate thoughts. In an elliptical manner, these distinct statements chronicle the life of a defeated man. Most suggestive is the contrast between his father-in-law’s experience as a pilot in World War I, when “he had been followed by a rainbow across the skies of France,” and the quiet alcoholism of his final years of inactivity, when he watched daytime television and “used sweet wine in place of life because he didn’t have any more life to use.” The father-in-law’s retreat from life parallels the Kool-Aid Wino’s, except that in “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane” there is no intimation that the escape is illuminating.

The Tokyo-Montana Express

During the 1970’s, Brautigan announced his intention to write a novel parodying a popular genre each year. The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975), Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), and Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942 (1977) were critical disasters for Brautigan. By the time he published The Tokyo-Montana Express in 1980, his literary reputation had been ruined, and he had been deserted by most of his readers. His status as a counterculture hero, which was always based on a misunderstanding of his work, had become irrelevant, except as another barrier standing between him and the readers of the 1980’s. Although Brautigan resumed lecturing to promote The Tokyo-Montana Express, he was unable to recapture the broad acceptance that had made him a best-selling author a decade before. Nevertheless, The Tokyo-Montana Express, for all of its unevenness, marked a healthy return to the effective short fiction evident in Trout Fishing in America and Revenge of the Lawn.

The Tokyo-Montana Express contains 131 individual prose pieces. A few of these approximate the traditional form of the short story, but most would more accurately be called anecdotes, vignettes, or prose poems. Overall, Brautigan’s tendency toward compression is more evident in The Tokyo-Montana Express than in his earlier work. He is also more restrained in his use of bizarre figures of speech, and the disengaged flatness of his prose is more consistent.

As in all of his short fiction, Brautigan’s primary concern in The Tokyo-Montana Express is the imagination. In Trout Fishing in America, he figuratively “fishes” for a vision of America; in The Tokyo-Montana Express, he travels an imaginary trans-Pacific railroad, a vehicle for the metaphysical commutation of ideas between East and West. Written after a period during which he spent most of his time either in Japan or on his farm in Montana, Brautigan’s collection examines the cultures of East and West, repeatedly showing the ironic similarities and in the end suggesting that Montana’s big sky country may be a geographically appropriate setting for the philosophy of Japan.

In The Tokyo-Montana Express, Brautigan’s involvement with Zen Buddhist thought is more explicit than in his earlier work, expressing itself in the stoic attitude of the narrative voice he employs. One paradox expressed in the collection is that while all experiences are equally worthy of examination, all experiences are also ultimately insignificant. The narrator’s emotional disengagement cannot disguise a sadness that is much more prevalent here than in Brautigan’s earlier work. Indeed, the narrator in The Tokyo-Montana Express expects very little of life, accepts the inevitable process of attrition, assumes that any meaning must originate in the individual imagination, and exhibits great faith in the integrity of that imagination.

“Another Texas Ghost Story”

“Another Texas Ghost Story” recounts the life of a man who, while growing up on a remote Texas ranch, is visited at night by a ghost. Forty years later at a family reunion, he accidentally admits his childhood experience to his brother and two sisters only to discover that they too had seen the apparition when they were children. They were all afraid to mention it at the time because they were afraid they would be thought crazy. In “Another Texas Ghost Story,” Brautigan connects childhood and imagination and implies that societal pressure makes people less receptive to the wonder around them.

“Werewolf Raspberries” is an example of the extreme compression of many pieces in The Tokyo-Montana Express. Its seventy-nine words, interrupted by ellipses, seem like the fragmented remains of a more complete narrative, yet this abbreviated prose poem manages to communicate a complex story. Set in the spring of 1940 with a Glenn Miller recording playing in the background, the narrative voice in “Werewolf Raspberries” addresses a young man whose single-minded romantic desire to give his girl “a great big kiss” has been inexplicably thwarted by the raspberries’ “little teeth shining in the moonlight.” The piece concludes with the ironic remonstrance that “If you had played your cards right, you could have been killed at Pearl Harbor instead.” On one level, this brief prose poem expresses a nostalgic feel for dreams lost to the inevitable imperfections and accidents of existence, but the final comment ironically compares the harmless adolescent dream of romance with the lethal, but equally adolescent, dream of glory.

“The Menu/1965”

“The Menu/1965” is the longest piece in The Tokyo-Montana Express, and it shows Brautigan extracting significance from a strange but mundane object, in this case the monthly menu prepared for residents of San Quentin’s Death Row. The narrator resists judging the significance of this artifact; instead, he reports several other people’s reactions to this strange juxtaposition of dining and death. At the end, the narrator and the intellectual father of a friend become entranced in “a long conversation where the menu became a kind of thought diving bell going deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper until we were at the cold flat bottom of the sea, staring fish-like at the colored Easter eggs that were going to be served next Sunday on Death Row.” The allusion to Easter portrays the condemned prisoners as Christlike sacrifices, but the primary focus of the story is the fascination of the object and the manner in which it triggers the imagination.

All of Brautigan’s short fictions are meant to become “thought diving bells” for the reader, and often, as in “The Menu/1965,” the process of mental exploration begins with the contemplation of a simple object or event. In the end, Brautigan’s creative process stands as an exemplum of a method for confronting life’s attrition.

Bibliography

Abbott, Keith. Downstream from “Trout Fishing in America.” Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1989. Abbott recounts his memories of Brautigan from their first meeting in San Francisco in 1966, through the Montana years, and back to 1982 in San Francisco. Abbott’s last chapter, “Shadows and Marble,” is a critical essay devoted to Brautigan’s language and strategy of fiction.

Barber, John F., ed. Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990. A good source of materials for students of Brautigan.

_______. Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007. The thirty-two essays in this book are written by friends and colleagues of Brautigan who knew and respected the author and his work. Many of the pieces here are previously unpublished, while others have appeared in literary journals. Altogether, they serve as a loving tribute to Brautigan, who was greatly admired by the essayists on both a personal and a literary level. Includes previously unpublished photographs and artwork.

Brautigan, Ianthe. You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Brautigan’s daughter recalls her childhood spent bouncing between her two bohemian parents’ homes. She describes her father, who committed suicide when she was twenty-four years old, as a “dignified, brilliant, hysterically funny, and sometimes difficult” man.

Chénetier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. New York: Methuen, 1983. A semiotic examination of Brautigan’s approach to structure and elements of style that generate meaning. This slender volume touches on several works, with particular attention to Trout Fishing in America.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Richard Brautigan. Boston: Twayne, 1983. This blend of biography and criticism deals primarily with Brautigan’s work within his own cultural ambience, referring to other contemporary fiction, the Beat movement, and Zen Buddhism as an overall influence. Not always flattering, Foster discusses most of Brautigan’s short fiction and novels.

Horvath, Brooke. “Richard Brautigan’s Search for Control Over Death.” American Literature 57 (October, 1985): 435-455. Horvath explores possible limits to Brautigan’s response of imagination as a strategy for countering the basic issue of death in his four early novels and one of the stories in The Tokyo-Montana Express.

Hume, Kathryn. “Brautigan’s Psychomachia.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 34, no. 1 (March, 2001): 75. Describes Brautigan as a “narrative aesthetician,” examining the Zen-based strategies that allow him to balance extreme emotional tension with simple form. Analyzes the nature of Brautigan’s narrative technique and his solicitation of an unusual reader response modeled upon Zen observation.

Iftekharuddin, Farhat. “The New Aesthetics in Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970.” In Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story, edited by Noel Harold Kaylor. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Iftekharuddin examines Brautigan’s literary innovation and other literary critics’ analyses of Brautigan’s work.

Palo, Brenda M. “Melancholia and the Death Motif in Richard Brautigan’s Short Fiction.” In The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues, edited by Farhat Iftekharrudin, et al., under the auspices of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Analyzes some of Brautigan’s short stories in Revenge of the Lawn, focusing on his use of death as both an image and a theme.

Stull, William L. “Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America: Notes of a Native Son.” American Literature 56 (March, 1984): 69-80. Stull approaches general themes in Trout Fishing in America by examining some of the book’s many allusions to other literature and Americana. A good introduction to Brautigan’s work.

Wright, Lawrence. “The Life and Death of Richard Brautigan.” Rolling Stone, April 11, 1985, p. 29. A biographical sketch, noting Brautigan’s early fame and cult following, the decline of his reputation, and his suicide. Notes that when friends describe him, he seems to be two different people; at one point he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Carl Brucker

Mary Rohrberger