on richard brautigan

cw: suicide

i've loved richard brautigan as a writer for a long, long time.  i think i first heard about him from a subgenius lady named annna who was a big fan.  there are a few people from those old days i genuinely miss, and she's one of them.

he's not well-reputed as an author, never has been.  he gets dismissed as this superficial, hippy-dippy flake.  my feeling is that much of his reputation was based on his association with the hippies, and particularly on those first three novels.  i can see why someone might not take a poem like "all watched over by machines of loving grace" particularly seriously in these times.  or all the poems about the pretty girls and how much he wants to fuck them.

the first book of brautigan's i read was not one of those first three novels - trout fishing in america, a confederate general from big sur, in watermelon sugar - but his fourth, a novel called "the abortion".

this was more of a transitional work.  part argument in favor of legalizing abortion (rare, as far as i know, from a male writer in 1970), part meditation on failure, it also features a female protagonist who suffers from what, thinking about it now, i can now clearly recognize as dysphoria.  this fascinated me, the character of a beautiful girl who hates the way she looks, hates the way men look at her, thinks of her body as _wrong_.

and brautigan i guess casts the male lead as the "hero", the person who is able to see her for who she really is, oh yes he doesn't care that she happens to be drop-dead fucking gorgeous

i don't believe you richard, i've read your poems about the pretty girls, but it's fiction, and you're dead, and we'll give it a pass

and anyway the story is about an abortion.  she gets pregnant and they go to mexico and get an abortion and that's the plot.  i get the feeling that brautigan had done this in real life.  i have a biography of brautigan somewhere that i should read and haven't gotten around to that might mention it.

mind you, i didn't come to it because i had a burning desire to know more about abortion pre-roe-v-wade.  that was a fringe benefit.  the book starts out by talking about a library, and it's sort of a borgesian library, and sort of a zine library, and sort of a kook library, and i love libraries, spent a long time shelving books at a bunch of them while i was trying and failing to graduate college.  richard brautigan makes a cameo and drops by some of the books he didn't write.  he is very sad.

i mean, brautigan was a novelist, he drank too much, he was depressed, he shot himself and nobody found his body for weeks.  there's a long-running urban legend about his suicide note that isn't true, so i won't repeat it.  i'm not sure he actually left a note.  a lot of suicides don't.  most of my favorite writers did wind up killing themselves.  it's one of the things that dissuaded me from a writer.  it was a stupid calculation, of course - not writing didn't spare me from depression - but that's how i thought, and anyway i have a better career that i like more.

even by the standards of 20th century white male writers, though, brautigan was uncommonly miserable.  this isn't as evident in the early books, but the later ones, christ, they're some of the most depressing books i have ever read.  "dreaming of babylon" in particular.  but not just that one, "willard and his bowling trophies", about a dysfunctional bdsm relationship, "so the wind won't blow it all away", which could just as easily be a novel-length suicide note... yeah, i could relate.

it's not just that he was miserable, though, it was that he was innovative.  he wasn't particularly "clever", i don't think, didn't try to be "clever".  he had some nice poetic words of phrase.  wrote novels like a poet.  lots of space.  came at ideas from strange angles.  his mid-career novels he had this thing where he was doing a lot of genre mashups, novels that combined aspects of two not-particularly-literary genres.  so "willard and his bowling trophies", for instance, was labelled "a perverse mystery" and combined smut and the mystery novel.

this was what did wind up attracting me about his earlier novels, his interest in form and structure and the absurd.  one of my favorite chapters from "a confederate general from big sur" is called "the rivets in ecclesiastes".  i don't know if it was on his record, but i can hear him in his gentle, halting voice reading it when i think about it.  in this chapter, he writes about reading ecclesiastes (of course it would be Ecclesiastes, the most fatalistic and depressing book of the Bible), but not for the words.  instead he reads it over and over again and just counts the punctuation.  it's hard for me to really state what that means to me.  give me a couple more years and i might be able to try.  it's the same sort of thing that draws me to weird fancruft like ARST ARWS, but done with such genuine humanity and compassion!

i will get back to that hatefic, i promise.  i'm just apparently uncommonly distracted today and evidently in a discursive mood.