Richard Brautigan

Richard Gary Brautigan
Occupation	Novelist, Poet
Genre	Beat, Black Comedy, Satire, Zen Buddhism
Literary movement	Counterculture
Notable works	Trout Fishing in America

Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 – ca. September 14, 1984) was an American writer, best known for the novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan wrote ten novels and over 500 poems. Most of his novels dealt with satire, black comedy, and Zen Buddhism. After years of depression and heavy alcoholism, he committed suicide in his home in Bolinas, California. His exact date of death is unknown but it is presumed that he ended his life on September 14, 1984.

Biography

Richard Gary Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington to Bernard Frederick Brautigan Jr. (July 29, 1908 - May 27, 1994) a factory worker, laborer, and World War II veteran and Lulu Mary Keho "Mary Lou" Brautigan (April 7, 1911 - January 31, 1998) who was a waitress. Brautigan was baptized as a Roman Catholic and was raised in the Pacific northwest and lived with his mother, step-fathers and siblings. He had two half-sisters named Barbara Titland (born May 1, 1939) and Sandra Jean Porterfield (born April 1, 1945) and a half-brother named William David Folston Jr, born on December 19, 1950. His parents were divorced before he was born and his mother Mary Lou would remarry three times. Brautigan would never meet his biological father and would suffer physical abuse at the hands of his stepfathers, whom he always witnessed abusing his mother. Brautigan was also abused by his alcoholic mother. Many of Brautigan's childhood experiences were included in the poems and novels that he wrote from as early as the age of 13 through his high school years. Brautigan grew up in poverty and moved to various homes in the Pacific Northwest before settling in Eugene, Oregon in 1944. He lived with his stepfather Robert Porterfield for three years after Brautigan's mother and Porterfield separated, but eventually reunited with his mother and half-sisters when he was 14. Brautigan attended Lincoln Elementary School, and South Eugene High School and attended Woodrow Wilson High School for a year. On December 19, 1952, Brautigan's first poem The Light was published in the Eugene High School Newspaper. Brautigan graduated from South Eugene High School on June 9, 1953. Following graduation, he moved in with his best friend Peter Webster, whose mother became Brautigan's surrogate mother. According to several accounts, Brautigan stayed with Webster for about a year before leaving for San Francisco for the first time in August of 1954, returning to Oregon several times, apparently for lack of money.

On December 14, 1955 Brautigan was arrested for throwing a rock through a police-station window, supposedly in order to be sent to prison and fed. Instead he was sent to Oregon State Hospital on December 24, 1955 where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and treated with electroconvulsive therapy. On February 19, 1956, Brautigan was released from the Oregon State Hospital and left for San Francisco, where he would spend most of the rest of his life (save for periods of time spent in Tokyo and Montana.) In San Francisco, Brautigan met writers like Michael McClure, Jack Spicer, and Allen Ginsberg. In San Francisco, Brautigan sought to establish himself as a writer and was known for handing out his poetry on the streets and performing at poetry clubs.

Brautigan married Virginia Dionne Adler on June 8, 1957 in Reno, Nevada. They had one daughter together, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan born on March 25, 1960. Due to Brautigan's alcoholism Adler separated from him in December 1962 and were divorced in 1970 after thirteen years of marriage.

Brautigan's first published "book" was The Return of the Rivers (1958), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958), and Lay the Marble Tea (1959). During the 1960s Brautigan became involved in the burgeoning San Francisco counterculture scene, often appearing as a performance-poet at concerts and participating in the various activities of The Diggers.

In the summer of 1961, Brautigan went camping with his wife and his daughter in the Idaho Stanley Basin. While camping he completed the novels A Confederate General From Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America. A Confederate General from Big Sur was his first published novel and met with little critical or commercial success. But when his novel Trout Fishing in America was published in 1967, Brautigan was catapulted to international fame and labeled by literary critics as the writer most representative of the emerging countercultural youth-movement of the late 1960s, even though he was said to be contemptuous of hippies (as noted in Lawrence Wright's article in the April 11, 1985 issue of Rolling Stone.)

Brautigan published four collections of poetry as well as another novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968) during the decade of the sixties. Also, in the spring of 1967, Brautigan was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. One Brautigan novel The God of The Martians remains unpublished. The 600 page, 20 chapter manuscript was sent to at least two editors but was rejected by both. A copy of the manuscript was discovered with the papers of the last of these editors, Harry Hooton.

During the 1970s Brautigan experimented with different literary genres, publishing several novels throughout the decade and a collection of short stories called Revenge of the Lawn in 1971. "When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water," said his friend and fellow writer, Tom McGuane. "He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." Generally dismissed by literary critics and increasingly abandoned by his readers, Brautigan's popularity waned throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s. His work remained popular in Europe, however, as well as in Japan, and Brautigan visited there several times. To his critics, Brautigan was willfully naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of him, "As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people."

File:Listening to Richard Brautigan.jpg

Listening to Richard Brautigan

From late 1968 to February 1969, Brautigan recorded a spoken-word album for The Beatles' short-lived record-label, Zapple. The label was shut down by Allen Klein before the recording could be released, but it was eventually released in 1970 on Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan. Brautigan's writings are characterized by a remarkable and humorous imagination. The permeation of inventive metaphors lent even his prose-works the feeling of poetry. Evident also are themes of Zen Buddhism like the duality of the past and the future and the impermanence of the present. Zen Buddhism and elements of the Japanese culture can be found in his novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel.

In 1976, Brautigan met Akiko Yoshimura in Tokyo, Japan. They left for Montana early in 1977 and were married on December 1, 1977. However, the marriage broke up on December 4, 1979, though the divorce was not finalized until November 7, 1980.

In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot-wound to the head in Bolinas, California. The exact date of his death is unknown, but it is speculated that Brautigan ended his life on September 14, 1984 after talking to Marcia Clay, a former girlfriend, on the telephone. Robert Yench, a private investigator, found Richard Brautigan's heavily decomposed body on the living-room floor of his house on October 25, 1984.

Brautigan once wrote, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds."

Legacy

Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, describes her memories of her father in her book You Can't Catch Death (2000).

Also in a 1980 letter to Brautigan from W.P. Kinsella, Kinsella states that Brautigan is his greatest influence for writing and his favorite book is In Watermelon Sugar.

In March 1994, a teenager named Peter Eastman Jr. from Carpinteria, California legally changed his name to "Trout Fishing in America", and now teaches English in Japan. At around the same time, National Public Radio reported on a young couple who had named their baby "Trout Fishing in America".

There is a folk rock band called Trout Fishing in America., and another called Watermelon Sugar, which quotes the opening paragraph of that book on their home page. The Machines originally called themselves Machines of Loving Grace, from one of Brautigan's best-known poems.

Twin Rocks, Oregon, a song appearing on singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins' 1998 platinum record Soul's Core, seems to tell the story of a fictitious meeting with Brautigan on bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Another lyrical interpretation might be that the encounter was with Brautigan's ghost.

In the UK The Library of Unwritten Books is a project in which ideas for novels are collected and stored. The venture is inspired by Brautigan's novel 'The Abortion.'

The library for unpublished works envisioned by Brautigan in his novel The Abortion now exists as The Brautigan Library in Burlington, Vermont.

There are two stores named "In Watermelon Sugar" after Brautigan's novella, one in Baltimore, Maryland and one in Traverse City, Michigan.

The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

In 1999, fifteen years after Brautigan's death, his childhood friend Peter Webster published The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings which were stories and poems Brautigan had given to his surrogate mother Edna Webster to get published or to keep. This includes poems from Brautigan's teenage years and three short stories Brautigan had written as teenager. The short stories were a visit from Jake, Would you like to saddle up a couple of goldfish and swim to Alaska?, and Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes. These stories were originally published by themselves in 1995 and 1996 but were later added to The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings in 1999.

Bibliography

For a more comprehensive list, see Bibliography of Richard Brautigan.

Novels

A 1974 paperback edition of Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan's most famous work.

• A Confederate General From Big Sur, (1965 ISBN 0-224-61923-3)
• The God of the Martians, (1967, unpublished)
• Trout Fishing in America, (1967 ISBN 0-395-50076-1) Omnibus edition
• In Watermelon Sugar, (1968 ISBN 0-440-34026-8)
• The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, (1971 ISBN 0-671-20872-1)
• The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, (1974 ISBN 0-671-21809-3)
• Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery, (1975 ISBN 0-671-22065-9)
• Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel, (1976 ISBN 0-671-22331-3)
• Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942, (1977 ISBN 0-440-02146-4)
• So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, (1982 ISBN 0-395-70674-2)
• An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, (1982, but first published in 1994 ISBN 0-312-27710-5)

Poetry Collections

• The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, 1958
• Lay the Marble Tea, 1959
• The Octopus Frontier, 1960
• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, 1963
• Please Plant This Book, 1968
• The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, 1968
• Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt, 1970
• Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, (1971 ISBN 0-671-22263-5. ISBN 0-671-22271-6 pbk)
• June 30th, June 30th, (1978 ISBN 0-440-04295-X)
• The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, (1999 ISBN 0-395-97469-0)

Short Story Collections

• Revenge of the Lawn, (1971 ISBN 0-671-20960-4)
• The Tokyo-Montana Express, (1980 ISBN 0-440-08770-8)

External links

• The Brautigan Pages
• Selected poems and directory of Richard Brautigan
• The Brautigan Archives
• Brief critique on the life and legacy of Richard Brautigan
• Richard Brautigan entry on Findagrave.com
• Poem of Richard Brautigan in the pavement of San Francisco
• Library of Unwritten Books, UK arts project inspired by Brautigan novel; The Abortion.
• An interview with the memoirist Ianthe Brautigan on the creative process as well as memories of her father -- about-creativity.com March 31, 2008