In early May 1974, I was in 12th grade in northeastern Pennsylvania. It was almost summer, and the sun was palpable through the windows of the physics class. The teacher was a bald-headed older man we called the Admiral. He was droning on about the periodic table of elements. It all seemed like lead, and I was about to drop off. At about that point, a pretty hippie girl who sat behind me in the class passed me a green book with a photo of a gorgeous woman on the cover sitting before a chocolate cake. I opened the book at random, and read this:
The Scarlatti Tilt
"It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin." That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.
Those two sentences constituted an entire story. I read it six times. Accustomed to loquacious Poe and Henry James, I was amazed at the precision: San Jose, the violin, the empty revolver, Scarlatti. Pure gold. I kept the book, and I still have it forty years later. I have all of Brautigan's books, in fact, but hadn't read him for years when I heard that a massive biography had appeared. The book is by a friend of Brautigan's, William Hjortsberg. Jubilee Hitchhiker is close to 900 pages in length, in small type. I read the first hundred pages with a magnifying glass, then switched to Kindle.
I had read previous criticism on Brautigan's work (not much of the early criticism is very good, as it partakes of the attempt to spread the hippie gospel, though there was a brilliant appreciation by Guy Davenport in the Spring 1970 issue of The Hudson Review). Since that time there have been less sanguine accounts: his friend Keith Abbott's Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, which reveals what a rat Brautigan could be to friends, and his daughter Ianthe's depressing but beautifully written You Can't Catch Death. Brautigan, to put it mildly, did not put his daughter high on his list of priorities. He left her in Montana for a year with friends while he traveled the world. She was in her mid-teens and had no family. Ianthe's harrowing narrative is lightened by her endless love for her dad. There are a few spritely bits of mischief. Once he dressed up in a kimono and cowboy boots and danced and sang songs for Ianthe and her friend. A memoir by Montana writer Greg Keeler is called Dancing with the Captain. It offers an unappealing look at the writer's booze-crazed last years in Livingston.
Hjortsberg's book is in another class. As a novelist and screenwriter who lived next door to Brautigan in Montana for many years, he saw his subject up close—sometimes too close. (Brautigan slept with Hjortsberg's wife.) The mix of frustrated affection, curiosity, and sharp perception that comes through in these pages makes the book the most important publication on Brautigan's life yet, and it will likely remain the standard.
That Brautigan slept with hundreds of women and that this was important to him is the spine of the book's narrative, but Hjortsberg also recounts other major friendships and documents the publishing and writing life, too. And he documents the minutiae of Brautigan's life, from miserable origins in Oregon to a lonely death, interviewing relatives, friends, even attending a high school reunion. (Hundreds of interviews are logged in an appendix.) Even a tiny moment as Brautigan stood with a woman in a rainstorm in Tokyo is recuperated, and the publication of poems in ephemeral journals is noted.
For fun, let's work backward from his last to first moments, since part of the joy of Brautigan's texts is how he played with time. In 1984, Brautigan placed a .44 Magnum in his mouth while living at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas, California. He was discovered by a detective a month later with insects flying out of his splattered skull. How did Brautigan arrive at this? He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars on his books, but they were no longer selling. His first novel, A Confederate General at Big Sur, hadn't sold a single copy in six months. Brautigan had a big house in Montana, a house in Bolinas, and a writing studio in San Francisco. He was paying support to a Japanese ex-wife who had cleaned him out in a divorce settlement. There were other women, back-up singers in a rodeo of affection. A Korean American woman in Seattle wanted him back. A Japanese woman in Tokyo named Masako wanted to have his children. He went home with a different woman every other night. He spent months every year living in a hotel in Tokyo picking up women almost every time he stepped out his door. If his Japanese girlfriend was late, he didn't want to see her for two weeks, as there were others. Brautigan was punctual. Masako wasn't. He made her suffer.
Like many humorists (think of Woody Allen), Brautigan attempted to write a serious book late in his short career, An Unfortunate Woman. Brautigan's agent, Helen Brann, told him she didn't think it was his best book. Brautigan sent her a two-line letter telling her their professional relationship was terminated (after 16 years). He never placed another book in his lifetime. Brautigan closed off friendships, telling old friends in a single sentence they were done. His one enduring relationship, with his daughter Ianthe (from his first marriage), was largely dependent on her resolve, but he sometimes went out for a drink rather than wait for her to arrive at his house if she was five minutes late (after a two-hour drive). When she married, he told her she would have to wait and that he would attend her second wedding.
Brautigan's own first marriage ended when he began to visit barrooms with his friends and bring home women. His first wife took off with a friend, plunging Brautigan into a serious depression. Online interviews with Virginia Brautigan reveal he was cheating with other men as well. His drinking was so intense he could drink every bottle in a well-stocked home bar. Hjortsberg writes of one such binge, "After Richard drank all the whisky, he went to work on the vodka and gin. Once the hard stuff was gone, he demolished the liqueurs, polishing off remnant bottles of crÈme de menthe and Kahlua. All the while, Brautigan remained relatively coherent, but his stutter grew more pronounced." In the midst of these drunken flights, or in the mornings while nursing his hangovers, he could write marvelous haiku. For his last girlfriend, Masako, a woman thirty years his junior, he wrote:
Strawberry Gratitude
The strawberry
Gently shows its gratitude
When in the company
Of the soup
There was something great in Brautigan. He claimed that drinking fueled it. But left alone, and without liquor, he was shy, a hard and precise worker who preferred his own company. A craftsman, he worried about commas, and was familiar with French and Japanese literature. He knew the work of writers as various as William Saroyan, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, and was familiar with the critical and biographical work as well. He knew hundreds of important writers in Japan, America, and France, and could liven up parties with raucous wit. But underneath his humor was a swamp into which he was slowly sinking. He had never known his dad. His mother was a flibbertigibbet. She had had almost as many lovers as her son. She would store Richard with one ex-lover while going off with a new man, then retrieve her son after her passions cooled. Brautigan told his second wife, "I never thought I was loveable. I was abandoned by my mother."
Brautigan's second wife was a Japanese woman named Akiko. The sped-up romance that brought them together didn't allow either one to know what they were getting into. Brautigan suffered from enormous outbreaks of herpes that blotched his private areas and crawled up his belly and chest for months at a time. His new wife had to get used to this. When Brautigan introduced Akiko to his friends in Livingston, Montana, she formally grasped each of twenty separate hands, and said, wearing a kimono, "How the fuck are you?" Brautigan tried not to laugh. He had taught her English. For her part, Akiko was a lot tougher than she looked. Friends of the family said she was smart. She left her first husband after getting together with Brautigan. Brautigan's friend Don Carpenter warned Richard, "If she'll leave him, she'll leave you." She did, first sleeping with two of his friends when he left her in Montana for several months shortly after the wedding. Brautigan went to Tokyo and wrote 59 stories but returned to find a broken marriage.
While growing up in Eugene, Oregon, Brautigan had to fish for his supper. He took his little sister to the river to watch her. He sometimes caught enough to make dinner for the whole neighborhood. Once Brautigan left Eugene, he never looked back. His sister wrote to him when Brautigan was world-famous for help to get out of a loveless marriage. Her husband drank and punched her. Brautigan never responded. A girlfriend he loved in Eugene looked him up after he had gotten famous, but he gave her only a cursory glance outside City Lights Books. She was just one more face in a carousel of women. Brautigan compartmentalized friendships, but when he wanted to get rid of someone, he could do so with the dispatch of the woman with the revolver in San Jose.
So, you may be thinking, another writer who was a jerk. Why should I give him even a moment of thought? Apart from a reminder that there but for the grace of God go I, the answer has to start with his books, which—in their heyday—enjoyed worldwide success. Novels such as Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General at Big Sur, and In Watermelon Sugar had a fey charm that seemed to many readers to capture the Zeitgeist. They were right, but not in the way they supposed. Yes, the narrator of In Watermelon Sugar contrasts the groovy watermelon people with a barbaric people who live next door. But when the narrator's girlfriend, Margaret, visits the deathly industrial landscapes of neighboring inBOIL, the narrator abandons her, and she hangs herself from an apple tree. The narrator's new girlfriend feels remorse, but the narrator tells her not to worry. "It happens."
In Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life, edited by John Barber (McFarland, 2007), critic Steven Moore writes of the Seventies, "The Summer of Love had turned into a winter of discontent as Flower Children wilted into hustlers and junkies." The poet Michael McClure recalls that while many readers thought of Brautigan as a Flower Child, Brautigan saw himself as a hardworking writer, the son of blue-collar itinerant workers. By the early 1980s, Brautigan had come out of the closet as a conservative. In a drunken argument with Dennis Hopper related by the actor to McClure, Hopper was scathing about "how right wing Brautigan's politics had become." Like Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac, also working-class kids, Brautigan retained a small-town perspective. In Livingston, Montana, Brautigan told one hardscrabble laborer who wanted to punch him, "I am not a hippy, sir. I work for my living." In fact, Brautigan hated hippies, and never thought of himself as a New Age male. Finding this out infuriated many of his old cronies, who dropped him. McClure writes, "In large part, Richard's 'politics' had much to do with my ceasing to speak with him. His feelings about women, other artists, and the growing lack of sympathy for the Digger ideals he had helped build were clearly growing into right wingism." Oddly, Brautigan's politics are left out of the compendious Hjortsberg biography, with the exception of a single sentence. As with Kerouac, it is difficult to decipher where Brautigan's commitments led him in his later years, and most of his close friends hushed up. Kerouac's published letters stop in 1960, when he took his right-wing turn. Brautigan's letters have never been published, but in the intense discussions in Livingston and San Francisco and elsewhere, he must have let slip where he stood. In Hjortsberg, we have only this: "Brautigan's politics always lay just beneath the surface. He sympathized with the little guy and the oppressed but was a conservative at heart."
As the times changed, Brautigan kept writing, but his books no longer resonated with large audiences. He was a serious alcoholic, and many of his friends stopped speaking to him. He had disowned his family, and many of his former partners had gotten married. A bloated wreck, he lurched about, irritating French publishers in Paris when he showed up drunk at interviews, angering friends in Montana when he shot his guns at night into the trees. Near the end, a friend tried to find him a job teaching at a small college in Montana. Brautigan never wrote the letter of application.
Born in January of 1935, Brautigan had been baptized Catholic. His first published poems appeared in local Oregon journals. Brautigan's first poem was this:
The Light
Into the sorrow of the night
Through the valley of dark despair
Across the black sea of iniquity
Where the wind is the cry of suffering
There came a glorious saving light
The light of eternal peace
Jesus Christ, the King of Kings.
Brautigan became an atheist, then began to play with the Christian tradition, and wrote, "I saw Jesus coming out of a pay toilet." But in 1955, barely twenty years old, he wrote to a friend, "I believe that God is going to help me become a literary sensation by summer. God has made me know something about myself. I know that I am a genius with creative power beyond description. And I am very humble about it."
From this strange beginning (it is always hard to determine if Brautigan is playing around), he made his way, convinced of his fate, so that by his mid-thirties his books did sell millions of copies. By his late forties, he was a has-been, as the Flower Generation gave way to the Me Generation. Brautigan's mother said that Richard was a religious boy and read the Bible every night before bed. Brautigan attended church in Eugene—Lutheran, Baptist, and Catholic. Many of the Beats looked to the East to Zen or Hinduism for an alternative tradition. Brautigan, on the contrary, appeared to be homeless in spite of his many homes. Did any of his childhood come back to him as he lay on the floor in the seconds before the fatal gunshot? Did he reach for the hand of Jesus?
No one knows. We still have the books. Critics differ on what's good. Some say Trout Fishing in America is his best. It features a scene in which a river is sold in a shop. It's funny and crazy, like the best of George Carlin, but is also poetic and can reach for a Proustian melancholy. The poems are uneven; at his worst, one critic said, Brautigan is a "whimsical Rod McKuen." For my taste his best work is the poetic prose in Revenge of the Lawn, followed by some of the bits in a later collection of shorts called The Tokyo-Montana Express. I particularly like these sentences from a prose poem, "The Beautiful Oranges of Osaka": "I could see the city almost possessed by oranges. Everybody eating oranges, talking about oranges and oranges on every tongue. Oranges and more oranges, and the babies of Osaka smelled like oranges." Pure gold.
Kirby Olson teaches philosophy, literature, and creative writing at SUNY-Delhi.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
