Trout Fishing on the Web

The Official Richard Brautigan facebook page is spreading the news. The late author's daughter, Ianthe Brautigan, is working on a long-overdue biography of the Great American Humorist and author of, "Trout Fishing in America."

In February she wrote, "We decided to start the filming of a documentary about my father's writing and life, tonight, at Vesuvio's. We thought it would be the perfect way to begin. John Barber, a Brautigan scholar is flying down from Washington State and I am so curious to see who else comes."

Professor Barber has devoted his life's work to maintaining the Brautigan archives. At http://www.brautigan.net/ Barber has compiled an enormous amount of articles, stories, personal accounts and criticisms about the infamous author.

For those not familiar with the author, here is a short tribute published by, Entertainment Today in May of 2006.

In the coming days we'll post a review of Brautigan's last novel, "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away."

TMD

Forever Watched Over By Loving Grace
by Sean Reynolds
“Brautigan Death.” AP News.
Dateline: Bolinas, CA, 27 Oct. 1984.
Richard Brautigan, the author laureate of
the hippie generation whose apparent suicide
was discovered last week, had been preparing
for death for some time and was want to “get
drunk and shoot things,” friends said.
Richard Brautigan has been
referred to as a counterculture poet
flanking other talented American
authors such as Jack Kerouac, Alan
Ginsberg, J.D. Salinger and Ken
Kesey. At his best he was a modernday
Mark Twain to an audience of
readers grateful for his dark, jagged
style of American landscape humor.
In 1967, during the summer of love,
Brautigan’s celebrated novel Trout Fishing
in America jumped into the ragged civilization
of love-ins, peace marches and
Purple Haze. The eclectic, rambling
summation of trout and society that
would gain him national attention was
preceded by other books including
another cult favorite, A Confederate
General From Big Sur, and a collection of
sublimely humorous poetry titled Lay the
Marble Tea. An earlier poem, Moonlight on
a Cemetery, printed in 1953 within a local
Oregonian magazine, held a brief allusion
of the minimalist sophistication
that lay ahead.
Moonlight drifts from over
a hundred thousand miles
to fall upon a cemetery.
It reads a hundred epitaphs
and then smiles at a nest of
baby owls.
In the early fifties, Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye vividly communicated
young America’s detachment from the
adult world of commitments and concessions
during a post-war, emerging
Beat culture. Jack Kerouac expanded the
notion of nomadic recklessness in his
1957 novel On the Road. In this great
post-modern tradition of wind-blown
Steinbeck, Brautigan cast his words. He
is a phantom icon that prowls the halls
and libraries of college campuses, sleeps
beside the beds of aspiring writers and
infiltrates the thoughts of restless
American dreamers. His originality and
honesty lingers on each page, filled with
regret and dark laughter feeling like a
fresh creation for each new reader.
Although some are obscure or
out of print and others hard to track
down, following the trail of
Brautigan’s anthology is rewarding.
The journey may begin anywhere
within his published works. There are
no reoccurring characters or idiosyncratic
destinations continued from
one selection to the next. Just simple
language, simple themes and simple
radiance carried out from page to
page. Perhaps a good place to start
would be his third novel, published
in 1970, The Abortion: A Historical
Romance, written in his familiar minimalist
style with unusual humor and
severe introspection. Not unlike his
other works, the book has a fantastic
premise wrapped in Brautigan’s slanted
idea of reality. “The Kid” is the
caretaker of a library in San
Francisco that operates in the
reverse. Instead of checking out
books to read, ordinary people give
their personal manuscripts to the
library. All entries are accepted, and
the author may choose on which
shelf to place his or her book.
This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly,
lush and American. The hour is midnight
and the library is deep and carried like a
dreaming child into the darkness of these
pages.
The Kid’s girlfriend, Vida (who
lives in the library with him), is awkwardly
beautiful beyond description;
however, she is personally appalled by
her condition. They meet when she visits
to make her contribution.
“What’s it about?” I said.
“It’s about this,” she said and suddenly,
almost hysterically, she unbuttoned her coat
and flung it open as if it were a door to some
horrible dungeon filled with torture instruments,
pain and dynamic confession. She was
so beautiful that the advertising people would
have made her into a national park if they
would have gotten their hands on her.
The library accepts offerings all
hours of the day and night. Titles
include It’s the Queen of Darkness, Pal, by
a sewer worker wearing rubber boots;
Your Clothes are Dead, by a Jewish tailor;
Bacon Death, “a fantastically greasy
book;” and, like Alfred Hitchcock
making a guest appearance, Moose, by
Richard Brautigan.
The author was tall and blond and had a
long yellow mustache that gave him an
anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he
would be more at home in another era.
The climax of the story centers on
Vida’s abortion taking place in Tijuana
three years before the decision of Roe
vs. Wade.
It was hard for a minute, and then we
both smiled across the darkness at what we
were doing. Though we could not see our
smiles, we knew they were there and it comforted
us as dark-night smiles have been doing for
thousands of years for the problemed people of
the earth.
His style dislodges the reader from
the ordinary and usurps conservative
dedication to detail. Many of the titles of
his poems and novels are lyrical and
poetic: All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace, Clad in Garments Like a Silver
Disease, Death is a Beautiful Car Parked
Only, and So The Wind Won’t Blow It All
Away are a few examples. Many times his
poems are quick and compact.
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine
Disaster
When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside you.
Others share a surreptitious gift of
language that demands reflection.
Have You Ever Had a Witch Bloom Like a
Highway
Have you ever had a witch bloom like a highway
on your mouth? and turn your breathing to her
fancy? like a little car with blue headlights
passing forever in a dream?
Brautigan was born January 30th
1935 in Tacoma, Washington. He seldom
spoke of his childhood and little
is known of his youth. His father,
Bernard Brautigan, was described in
the Detroit Free Press as “one surprised
man” after hearing of the death of a
son he literally did not know existed,
saying, “He’s got the same last name,
but why would they wait 45 to 50 years
to tell me I’ve got a son?”
Richard Brautigan’s work has
dripped into the pool of American
folk literature gradually gaining
momentum, or at least remaining as a
steady stream during the years following
his death. Books have been published
posthumously and others
placed back in print. Perhaps some of
his most engaging work is found in
his anthologies of short, often single
page story collections such as Revenge
of the Lawn and The Tokyo-Montana
Express. He strikes quick, linking his
visions of raw, often rural landscapes
with ethereal ideas of freedom key to
the American psyche. There are stories
of snowflakes resembling Laurel
and Hardy, others of werewolf raspberries,
and some so short they are
poems in disguise.
All the People That I Didn’t Meet and
the Places That I Didn’t Go
“I have a short lifeline,” she says.
“Damn it.” We’re lying together under the
sheets. It’s morning. She’s looking at her hand.
She’s twenty-three: dark hair. She’s very carefully
looking at her hand.
“Damn it!”
Discovering or re-discovering an
author is like a favorite song long forgotten
floating up unexpectedly from
the car radio surprising you with lost
emotions and memories of bygone
times. Brautigan is like that. He wrote a
lot about graveyards, ordinary people,
quixotic romances, innocence, San
Francisco, America and trout. If you
are preparing to begin the expedition,
you might start with Trout Fishing In
America and enjoy angling with the
great American humorist.
I fished Graveyard Creek in the dusk
when the hatch was on and worked some good
trout out there. Only the poverty of the dead
bothered me.
Once, while cleaning the trout before I
went home in the almost night, I had a vision
of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering
up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and
markers and wilted flowers and bugs and
weeds and clods and going home and putting a
hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that
stuff and then going outside and casting it up
into the sky, watching it float over clouds and
then into the evening star.