i'm not coming back

Richard Brautigan drank a lot. And so it was probably a good thing he never learned to drive. He liked women, particularly Asian women. His second wife was from Japan. He knew how to title his books: The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster; The Galilee Hitchhiker; Revenge of the Lawn; In Watermelon Sugar; and his most commercially successful (though not his best, in my opinon), Trout Fishing in America. (And good luck finding most of these, if I like you I might loan you one of mine briefly, but even I don't have half of the above ...). While not my favorite of his novels, what I do love about Trout Fishing is the blurb (on the front, back, or inside, depending on which edition you own) that reads:

"Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called Trout Fishing in America. I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing." -- An editor at The Viking Press

As an editor, the perplexed tone of that quote is truly laugh out loud funny, because you know what it's like to get reader reports from 21-year-old Editorial Assistants. Half the time you don't know whether they've actually bothered to read the manuscript (and I can only imagine the terror of the poor EA that had to type up that report) or if they were simply at their wits' end trying to impress the boss.

Sometime in early October, 1984, Richard Brautigan put a shotgun to his head. He was found three weeks later by a friend. I believe it was author Thomas McGuane, but I might be wrong about that. He left his ranch in Livingston and said, "I'm not coming back" and took his life in his other home in Bolinas, California.

I've read a number of reviews of Brautigan's books, and I'm always impressed at how the reviewers are able to interpret him. While some categorize him as a beat (mistakenly so, in my opinion, as they do Bukowski), they also recognize his deft ability to experiment and construct narratives that manage to balance "extreme emotional tension" with simple prose poem form, and many have (rightly so) attributed this to his zen beliefs and personal neurosis. Brautigan, simply put, elicits (for good or naught) what I like to describe as an itchy response. It's because he is so deceptively simple, a chapter may run two lines, maybe even one. Heck, sometimes his short stories are only two sentences long ... for example, "The Scarlatti Tilt" from Revenge of the Lawn:

"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."

That's it. That's the whole story. What else do you need to be told? It's brilliant. Perfect. My god.

You can read an RB novel in a lunch hour, but it is impossible really, to finish one in that time.

Brautigan was funny. His books are I-am-not-embarrassed-to-laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway funny. His sentences and his eye toward the world are razor sharp and he resurrects metaphor with his inventive style. But more than anything else, he is fragile. Achingly fragile. Take for instance these last few paragraphs of a chapter in my personal favorite Brautigan title (and it was difficult to choose an example, I'm certain I've not chosen the best) Sombrero Fallout, as the main character thinks about his (now) ex-girlfriend:

While they made love he was constantly cradling and stroking her hair and he felt that her hair was really caressing him back ...

Once he bit her very gently but just enough for her to make a noise like two branches of a cherry tree rubbing together at night in a spring storm with a heavy warm wind blowing all around. [break my heart, where, oh, where could this sentence come from but someone so utterly, completely fragile? -- vod]

Two years later, he sat there holding a strand of her hair, staring at it like a madman.

As I've noted (rather incoherently in previous posts) authors like Pynchon and DeLillo, et al. are dangerous because they discard narrative structure with self-congratulatory shifts in points of reference. They toy with the meaning of words and phrases, rendering them meaningless. It's an arrogant, masturbatory way to manipulate language; and it obscures rather than reveal. Brautigan does nothing if not reveal. If the language can't communicate, why is the author writing for publication and why, frankly, should we care? My favorite thought on this as a note on Brautigan's clarity and sense of language pulls from a discussion (written by someone way more eloquent than I could ever be on the topic) about Samuel Beckett and his response to what he felt was the "exhausted form" of the novel (in Beckett's case he was responding to Richardson & Joyce):

Beckett turned around and attempted to exhaust the form in its 'negative' image, as it were--the novel of incompetence. By incompetence Beckett does not mean novels written by incompetent authors. He means that, unlike Joyce, he cannot assume the possibility of communication among human beings, much less between human beings and the collective unconscious. For Beckett words don't work. They are an imposition, given us by others after our births; they really can't describe our own particular experiences in our own individual terms. Also, when we speak words, we need somebody else to hear and acknowledge them. A witness. In other words, we can't say us in our own terms for anybody's ears but our own. And if we were to try, say, by speaking out all the words of the Others once and for all, we would find that there's nothing to say, since Western civilization assumes that we are no more than what we were when we were born--a tabula rasa, a void, un neant, a nothing. And nothing can only be described by silence.

Silence, in contrast to wordy incoherence as mentioned above, however powerful, doesn't communicate enough either (but it doesn't communicate nothing). To bring this back around, what I wanted to come to is Brautigan's innate ability to paddle happily in between, always communicating. His humor, his frailty, his sense of the world around him. His ability to communicate through brevity without ever straining at being clever and always managing to keep his sense of humor. In Trout Fishing in America (another pause in sympathy for that underpaid EA) the two final chapters involve him first explaining to his reader that he's always wanted to "write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" and finally ending the book with a one page chapter in the form of a note from his mother that ends with a P.S. and the word "mayonaise." ([sic] on purpose ... but I hope I didn't have to explain that.)