By Theresa Williams
Why I Love Richard Brautigan
I have three copies of Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America in my library: the original 1967 paperback; a 1989 anthology that also includes The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar; and a Kindle version. (I’m happy to report that the Kindle version has maintained the typewriterly format of the original, using underlining instead of italics.)
There’s a new edition I’m thinking of buying, too.
I may be just a little obsessed.
Trout Fishing in America is called a novel on its cover, but some have argued that it’s more of a collection of prose poems in the manner of Baudelaire. I think it’s a collage, scraps of Richard Brautigan’s fertile imagination, put together just so during a fit of intuitive genius. Like this, from the chapter "In the California Bush":
"There's the warm sweet smell of blackberry bushes along the path and in the late afternoon, quail gather around a dead unrequited tree that has fallen bridelike across the path. Sometimes I go down there and jump the quail. I just go down there to get them up off their butts. They're such beautiful birds. They set their wings and sail on down the hill.
"O he was the one who was born to be king! That one, turning down through the Scotch broom and going over an upside-down car abandoned in the yellow grass. That one, his gray wings."
Brautigan's scraps are about ordinary things: fishing, birds, children, books, outhouses, winos, poverty, and graveyards. Indeed, in Trout Fishing in America, graveyards are everywhere. Everything is dying or already dead. Even nature finds itself on the autopsy table.
But lest you think that’s all there is to Trout Fishing in America, let me emphatically put that notion to rest. As soon as you think you understand Brautigan's gloomy meditation on mortality, the whole construct evaporates, turns into marshmallow clouds, which is just as it should be.
Brautigan loved clouds. He once wrote they were his life’s purpose. He was tipping his hat to Baudelaire, of course, who had his own intimate relationship with clouds. Indeed, Baudelaire’s head was so much in the clouds that his lover Jeanne Duval had to knock sense into him just to get him to eat his soup.
Brautigan immortalizes the moment in a poem called “Salvador Dali Part 6," which appears in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster:
"‘Are you
or aren’t you
going to eat
your soup,
you bloody old
cloud merchant?’
Jeanne Duval
shouted,
hitting Baudelaire
on the back
as he sat
daydreaming
out the window.”
Here, Baudelaire takes it all in stride. He waves his spoon like a magic wand, changing the room into a painting by Dali. Such is the power of the imagination, which for Brautigan is not only the engine of creativity but also of survival.
Over and over in his works, Brautigan calls the imagination holy. He says this especially well in my favorite chapter in Trout Fishing in America: “The Kool-Aid Wino.”
A poor and deformed little boy ritualizes the making of Kool-Aid. He draws water from a spigot that looks like the “finger of a saint.” Although one package makes just two quarts, the boy makes a gallon. As a result, “his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency.” Brautigan writes:
"He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”
The Kool-Aid wino survives his squalid circumstances by an act of the imagination. He's Jesus, turning water into wine.
Like the haiku masters Basho and Issa whom he revered, Brautigan knew there was no such thing as ordinariness. Every last thing is holy, and it’s all the more precious because it doesn’t last.
Read More About the Extraordinary World of Richard Brautigan
Born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington, Richard Brautigan survived what was by all accounts a rotten childhood to become a counterculture icon. In the 1960s and ’70s, he published ten poetry books, ten novels, and a collection of short stories. He wrote with a humor and freewheeling imagination that epitomized the social revolution of the time. Brautigan died by his own hand in 1984, leaving behind a daughter, Ianthe, who is also a writer.
Here’s a sampling of online Brautigania, including interviews with his daughter and first wife, who appear as characters (“the baby” and “my woman”) in Trout Fishing in America, and a news story about a high-school senior who changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. Life mimics art—a Brautigan theme—or is it the other way around?
— Elizabeth Langosy
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Unusual Library at Clark County Historical Museum Honors Ideas of Late Author Richard Brautigan” by Kelly Adams, The Oregonian, October 15, 2010.
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BRAUTIGAN.net: Bibliography and archive for Richard Brautigan.
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“Freedom?”: Richard Brautigan’s First Wife, Virginia Aste, Speaks in a New Interview by Susan Kay Anderson, edited with introduction by Mike Daily, biographical information contributed by John F. Barber, Arthur Magazine, December 25, 2009.
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“Gone Fishing: Writer Ianthe Brautigan Comes to Terms with Her Famous Father’s Legacy” by Yosha Bourgea, Sonoma County Independent, September 14-20, 2000.
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“Trout Fishing In America, Carpinteria High School Class of 1994” by Lea Boyd, Coastal View News: A boy who legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America.
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“Cover Lover—Poor Old Richard Brautigan, Begin Again” by Beth Staples, Hayden’s Ferry Review, August 1, 2008.
Publishing Information
- Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, originally published by Delta in 1967 (new edition by Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
- Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar, an anthology originally published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence in 1969 (reprinted by Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
Theresa Williams is a regular contributor to Talking Writing.
When asked what she plans to do this summer, Theresa said, "This is my writing summer. I'm working on a long essay about Richard Brautigan's poetry, a long prose poem, and a comic story."
