[In the following essay, Abbott discusses the critical neglect of Brautigan's work and attempts a reevaluation of his skill at dialogue and narrative.]

“What I desired to do in marble, I can poke my shadow through.”

—Richard Brautigan, from an unpublished short story “The F. Scott Fitzgerald Ahhhhhhhhhhh, Pt. 2”

Since Richard Brautigan's death, his reputation has hardly been cast in marble. His writing has been relegated to the shadowland of popular flashes, that peculiar American graveyard of overnight sensations. When a writer dies, appreciation of his work seldom reverses field, but continues in the direction that it was headed at the moment of death, and this has been true for Brautigan. Even during Brautigan's best-seller years in the United States, critical studies of his work were few in number. What there were never exerted a strong influence on the big chiefs of the American critical establishment.

Since he was both a popular and a West-Coast writer, his work has been easy to ignore. There are no critical journals on the West Coast which can sustain a writer's career, as there are on the East Coast. His popularity among the young dumped his work with literary lightweights, such as Richard Bach or Eric Segal, and counterculture fads as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, or Charles Reich.

Curiously, a critical climate of open hostility to Brautigan's work prevailed on the eastern seaboard and his work was perceived as a threat. From the first, it was an object of ridicule, receiving much the same treatment as Jack Kerouac's novels did in the 1950s. Brautigan's literary position for his generation also was similar to the one Kerouac provided for the Beats: Brautigan became the most famous novelist for a social movement whose literary constituency was almost solely poets. Speaking politically, most poets have little recourse to effective literary power, lacking steady income, steady publication and/or reviewing positions. Brautigan did not have the safety of a group of novelists or a regular circle of reviewers friendly to his aesthetics; consequently, he had few defenders. Brautigan did not write reviews himself, or even issue manifestos. He was perceived as the stray, and so to attack his work risked no reply. In the Vanity Fair article published after Brautigan's death, the playwright and poet Michael McClure acknowledged this hostility and offered this reevaluation: “His wasn't a dangerous voice so much as a voice of diversity, potentially liberating in that it showed the possibilities of dreaming, of beauty and the playfulness of the imagination.”

With the burden of a ridiculed sociological movement attached to his work, positive literary criticism was sparse. Often what commentary there was tried to talk about both the hippie community and Brautigan's fiction, and failed at both. Ironically, his first four novels were written before the hippie phenomenon, and the relationship between the two was an accident of chronology at first, and then a media cliché.

While his prolific output generated plentiful newspaper reviews, these usually functioned as simple indicators of his perceived fame. Most echoed previous prejudice that he was a whimsical writer for cultural dropouts, and neither his writing nor his supposed subjects were to be considered important. What has to be remembered about criticism is that even serious critics seldom create much lasting literature themselves, and most newspaper reviewers are inevitably trafficking in fishwrap.

The true test of a creative writer is whether the literature is remembered by good writers and begets more excellent work. Other authors have acknowledged Brautigan's influence. Ishmael Reed applauded Brautigan's courage in experimenting with genres in his later novels and claimed this had an effect on his own experimental and highly acclaimed novels of the 1970s. In 1985, the popular and respected novelist W. P. Kinsella published The Alligator Report, containing short stories which he dubbed “Brautigans.” In his foreword he spoke of how this work arose directly from Brautigan's fictional strategies, stating, “I can't think of another writer who has influenced my life and career as much.”

The spare early stories of Raymond Carver have always seemed to me to show a strong connection, stylistically and culturally, to Brautigan's first two novels and short stories. Both writers create a similar West-Coast landscape of unemployed men, dreaming women, or failed artists trapped in domestic and economic limbos while attempting to maintain their distinctly Western myths of self-sufficient individuality.

Implicit in most negative criticism of Brautigan is the charge that he wrote fantasies about cultural aberrations, such as the hippies, with little connection to important levels of American life. I think this is mistaken. A strong cultural reality can be found in his work, that of people on the bottom rungs of American society, living out their unnoticed and idiosyncratic existences. Traditionally this class has been one of the resources for American literature. While discussing Huckleberry Finn, V. S. Pritchett writes that one of America's cultural heroes is “a natural anarchist and bum” and called the book “the first of those typical American portraits of the underdog, which have culminated in the poor white literature. …” Many of Brautigan's works are rooted in this underclass and his people are, in Pritchett's words, the “underdog who gets along on horse sense.”

It is often the fate for writers of American popular culture that their work is not taken seriously here, and they find an audience in foreign countries. During his lifetime, Brautigan's writing was translated into seventeen languages. Internationally, Brautigan's work commands respect and continues to generate comment. In Japan, where twelve of his books have been translated, he is considered an important American writer. (And it is of interest that Carver's fiction now enjoys an equally high level of popularity in Japan.) In Europe, West Germany continues to publish his work and a television documentary on him is under way. In France, Marc Chénetier's excellent book-length study was published with accompanying translations of three Brautigan novels. This critical work was later translated into English as part of Methuen's excellent Contemporary Writers series.

In the America of the 1980s, Brautigan's work is treated only as an object for nostalgia, and confined to rehashes of the love generation. When roll calls of fictional innovators are published in critical articles, his name has been dropped off the list of Ishmael Reed, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and others.

Brautigan's work remains the best way we have to regard him, other than as an historical figure. As a writer, I have to think the work is what really matters. Whatever follies, sins or beauties a writer might be said to possess, they are secondary considerations to the complete body of writing.

In a useful observation on Brautigan's poetry, Robert Creeley commented, “I don't think Richard is interested in so-called melopoeia, he said he wants to say things using the simplest possible unit of statement as the module.” Simple sentences and minimal rhythms occur in Brautigan's fiction, too, but they work with his metaphors to obtain a more complex effect than in his poetry. By controlling the colloquial sound of his prose. Brautigan developed a strategy for releasing emotion while utilizing the anarchic and comical responses of his imagination.

“The Kool-Aid Wino” chapter in Trout Fishing in America provides an example of this strategy:

When I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as the result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn't because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn't even enough money to buy him a truss. So he stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino.

What can be said about this? First, except for the fanciful notion of a Kool-Aid wino, this paragraph has the sound of the English plain style. Brautigan wrote in a colloquial voice, but sometimes it had a curiously unmelodic and muted quality. The voice sounded as if the speaker were talking, but not always consciously aware of being heard. This might account for what other people have dubbed the naive quality of Brautigan's fiction: the tone of a child talking to himself. And for all his colloquial rhythms, slang or common nursery-rhyme devices, such as alliteration and internal rhyme, are carefully rationed, because both require that the reader hear them. In the paragraph, two incongruous states, being ruptured and being a wino, are joined, but the last has a rider attached, modifying it with a fairy-tale quality of special powers derived from common objects:

One morning in August I went over to his house. He was still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a tattered revolution of old blankets. He had never slept under a sheet in his life.

“Did you bring the nickel you promised?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It's here in my pocket.”

“Good.”

While the scene is being set, Brautigan slips in the metaphor of the blankets, but in a sentence that has the same declarative rhythm as the sentences just before and after it. This blanket metaphor sounds rhythmically no more important or remarkable than the lack of an operation or the absence of a truss, but the metaphor is, in this context, spectacularly surreal.

He also used very little rhythmic speech in his dialogue. Often his dialogue is even more uninflected than his narrative passages. As Tom McGuane writes, “His dialogue is supernaturally exact.” Muting rhythm in dialogue and in narrative passages dampens down the emotional content. This has an interesting effect because hearing a voice calls for a much more emotional reaction than silent narrative passages. This is why “dialect” novels are so exhausting to read. They require much more concentration and emotional response. First-person narrative calls for more effort from the reader than third-person because we are listening and responding to one person. Brautigan often got a third-person objectivity while writing in first person.

Brautigan's strategy was to control and minimize the reader's responses until he was ready to tap into them. For both his dialogue and narrative, Brautigan habitually tried for emotionally neutral sentences. While still maintaining a colloquial tone, the narrative sentences sound normal, the dialogue sounds minimally conversational, so they may slide by unchallenged by a reader's emotional response. What is crucial to Brautigan's style is that both dialogue and narrative strike a similar sound and that a neutral equality be created between them.

Once Brautigan establishes this pattern in a work, then simple statements of fact could be followed by a simple sentence bearing a fantastic and imaginative statement. The strategy is, accept A, accept B, therefore accept off-the-wall C. The poet Philip Whalen explains the effect of Brautigan's style this way, finding “in Brautigan for example complete clarity and complete exact use of words and at the same time this lunatic imagination and excitement all going 100 miles an hour.”

To change to a biological metaphor, what happens in Brautigan's prose is that the parasitical imagination invades and occupies the host of precise, orderly prose, subverting, disrupting and eventually usurping the factual prose's function.

He was careful to see that the jar did not overflow and the precious Kool-Aid spill out onto the ground. When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination. Then he screwed the lid tightly onto the top of the jar and gave it a good shake.

To give a realistic base for his fiction, Brautigan often started with mundane social situations and built from there, carefully placing one rhythmically neutral sentence on top of another. This lulls the reader into a false sense of security, and a false sense of security is a good first step for comic writing. By doing this, Brautigan sensed the emotional vibrations that are inevitable in the simplest sentences, so he could then upset these and introduce that lovely sense of comic panic.

Of course, there is a problem with this strategy. No matter how short, factual, or laconic sentences may be, writing always carries some shade of voice. The human voice resonates feeling and Brautigan knew this. By creating a kind of equal neutrality between the factual sound and fanciful content through the use of similar sentence structures, Brautigan tried to solve the problem of how to return to a realistic narrative once he had disrupted it with his metaphors. At times he simply alternated between the two, giving the fantastic equal time with the mundane.

“Hello,” said the grocer. He was bald with a red birthmark on his head. The birthmark looked just like an old car parked on his head. He automatically reached for a package of grape Kool-Aid and put it on the counter.

“Five cents.”

“He's got it,” my friend said.

I reached into my pocket and gave the nickel to the grocer. He nodded and the old red car wobbled back and forth on the road as if the driver were having an epileptic seizure.

Or, at times, he would let the metaphor grow from a single sentence about a commonplace until it took over the paragraph. In this example from Confederate General, the rhythm speeds up as the metaphor expands.

Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.

Fiction must have drama, however minimal, but given this strategy in Brautigan's prose, often the drama is on the surface of the writing itself. The tension between the two poles of Brautigan's style, the plain and the metaphorical, creates the conflict in his fiction. In the passage quoted above, the first-person character/narrator is so hyped up about visiting his eccentric Kool-Aid wino friend and witnessing his rituals that his imagination runs wild. But no one in the story notices this, so this potential conflict is confined to the prose itself. Just as the “I” character remains undercover in the mundane tale of buying Kool-Aid, the fantasy remains undercover in a plain prose.

Brautigan's writing has been called undramatic, because in a conventional sense it is. His style provides what drama there is more often than his characters. His metaphors function as dramatic resolutions, if subversion of common reality with imaginative thought can be called a resolution. (One of Brautigan's themes is that ultimately this strategy subverts and disrupts the very act of writing fiction.) The fanciful notion of a Kool-Aid wino provides the impetus to continue reading, not any drama between the characters. The Kool-Aid wino will nowhere insist on the strangeness of his behavior while the narrator will provide the tension with his perceptions of that behavior as being very special in a magical world. Often the rhythms do not insist that this is a special occasion any more than does the Kool-Aid wino. The sentences chart a rather unremarkable exchange between the two characters but this exchange is seen by a quite metaphorical intelligence, and so the prose itself enacts the eventual theme of the piece, that illumination comes from within: “He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”

Besides a plain, slightly colloquial style, Brautigan also favored the structure of facts to give a neutral tone to his sentences. Facts are meant to be understood, not heard and savored on their own. Brautigan loved to infiltrate and sabotage them. Here's an example from the opening chapter of A Confederate General From Big Sur.

I've heard that the population of Big Sur in those Civil War days was mostly just some Digger Indians. I've heard that the Digger Indians down there didn't wear any clothes. They didn't have any fire or shelter or culture. They didn't grow anything. They didn't hunt and they didn't fish. They didn't bury their dead or give birth to their children. They lived on roots and limpets and sat pleasantly out in the rain.

During this masquerade of historical prose, the manipulation of a catalog style develops a strange emotional equivalency between the sentences which their content quietly disrupts. One source of this technique comes from the Western tall-tale, where a narrator, disguised as an expert, mixes the fantastic with the normal in equal portions. This passage somewhat reminds me of Twain in his role as the seasoned traveler in A Tramp Abroad:

The table d'hote was served by waitresses dressed in the quaint and comely costume of the Swiss peasant. This consists of a simple gros de laine trimmed with ashes of roses with overskirt of sacre blue ventre saint gris, cut bias on the off-side, with facings of petit polanaise and narrow insertions of pate de foie gras backstitched to the mise en scene in the form of a jeu d'espirit. It gives the wearer a singularly piquant and alluring aspect.

In both Twain and Brautigan's paragraphs, an anarchy is hatched inside the standardized English. Twain's prose has the trotting rhythm of standard fill-in-the-blanks travel or fashion writing. Brautigan's prose creates his bland rhythms through the careful alternation of “and”s and “or”s in factual sentences designed to be read and forgotten. Twain's intent is burlesque, while Brautigan's opts for a quieter anarchy. But the strategies for both seem similar.

A more complicated example of Brautigan's technique with this factual sound can be found in his short story “Pacific Radio Fire.” The opening paragraph begins: “The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California.” There's no sense of who is saying this. Since the story title has a radio in it, the voice could be someone on the radio, but it doesn't have to be, it could be anybody. Then Brautigan adds the next fact: “It depends on what language you are speaking.” These two statements are acceptable, reasonable, and dispassionate. Nothing in their rhythm seems emotional or unusual. Put them together and they enact only a slightly different way of viewing the universe: “The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking.” However, one thing has changed. With the use of you, the reader is now addressed, and his presence is acknowledged, giving a slightly more colloquial edge to the second sentence than the first, an intimacy. Then the third sentence plunges us into an emotional, very intimate situation—but without any corresponding passionate rhythm: “The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend's wife had just left him.” Now, these three sentences present a fact followed by another fact followed by a third fact, but the last one is wildly removed from the reality of the first two. More importantly, the third sentence is colloquially factual. The first two have the tone of the mundane media facts that wash over us daily, while the third sentence belongs to the everyday world of emotional distress. The third sentence is something that any private person could say, just as any public commentator could say the first two.

This sequence establishes what I call an equal neutrality between the three sentences. The shift cracks the emotionless facade that the paragraph starts with and abruptly releases humor. While the language remains low-key, its arrangement yields the drama.

This linguistic shift is also curiously realistic, and I mean realistic in the manner that these verbal traumas occur. To my ear, this shift mimes the kind of dislocations that result when someone is trying to tell you how something bad happened, but doesn't know how to start. Instead they talk about the weather, the scenery, and then suddenly blurt out their distress without any rhythmic or emotional buildup. A familiar “out-of-the-blue” quality to the rapid shift from impersonal to personal occurs. Here, it works as comic timing:

The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend's wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn't even say goodbye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.

What makes this more than a mere joke is that there is a vibration set off by the word “language” in the second sentence and the fact that the wife left without using any language. Brautigan at his best discovers a taut, underground humor in his prose by suppressing connections that other writers might make obvious. Someone else might have written, “and didn't even use language to say goodbye.” One of the strengths of Brautigan's style is that he leaves the right things unsaid and trusts the placement of his language to supply the emotions.

When Brautigan tries to reverse this progression, going from the colloquial emotional truth to the dry facts, from the fantastic to the mundane, the humor sometimes is less natural, a tad more bizarre. Here are the opening paragraphs from a chapter in A Confederate General From Big Sur, “The Tide Teeth of Lee Mellon”:

It is important before I go any further in this military narrative to talk about the teeth of Lee Mellon. They need talking about. During these five years that I have known Lee Mellon, he has probably had 175 teeth in his mouth.

This is due to a truly gifted faculty for getting his teeth knocked out. It almost approaches genius. They say that John Stuart Mill could read Greek when he was three years old and had written a history of Rome at the age of six and a half.

The reverse doesn't work as humor quite as well as the previous example because the neutral sentences are not part of the set-up, but are used to finish the joke. There's a deadpan humor to this strategy, of the bizarre masquerading as the everyday, but the implied connection between the historical fact of John Stuart Mill's genius and the asserted “genius” of Lee Mellon's losing his teeth either seems funny or it doesn't. At his best, Brautigan doesn't allow that much leeway for the reader's responses.

Timing was an essential ingredient in Brautigan's finest writing, and he understood the virtues of the simple buildup. According to his first wife, and Brautigan's own account of his early apprenticeship as a writer, he worked for years on writing the simple sentences of his prose. In a notebook located in Brautigan's archive at UC Berkeley, an early draft of the chapter “Sea-Sea Rider” in Trout Fishing showed how he divided the prose into lines of verse, carefully trying to isolate each of the phrases by rhythm, by their cadence, revising for the simplest sound possible. Accompanying this draft is an aborted journal, written in 1960 and titled “August.” In a rare moment of self-analysis, Brautigan wrote: “The idea of this journal is I want to make something other than a poem. … One of the frustrations of my work is my own failure to establish adequate movement. … I want the reality in my work to move less obviously, and it [is] very difficult for me.” What Brautigan means by movement is, I would guess, the switch from his metaphorical intelligence in and out of his mundane situations. In order to be less obvious, the transition between the fantastic and quotidian had to be eased by giving both the same rhythms.

His poetry sometimes forced the connection between the mundane and his imaginative fancies by combining them in one sentence. The effect was artificial and clever, and so it lacked the careful, timed setups of his prose. What made his prose remarkable was his ability to sense those moments when his imagination could occupy the larger factual rhythms of his paragraphs. This might be what he meant by “adequate movement.” When he strayed too far from the mundane and/or factual setups, the cleverness had only itself to sustain, and his fiction suffered from the same defects as his poetry.

His fiction has its own peculiar vision and a sometimes satori-like sharpness. There's a humanity to Brautigan's discoveries that sets them apart from mere humorous writing. The opening paragraphs of the chapter “Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America” serve as a final example of Brautigan's skills as a writer, how in a few words he could blend a prosaic vision of the world and at the same time infiltrate it with his own imagination and turn the mundane into something quicksilver, moving and alive:

Half a block from Broadway and Columbus is Hotel Trout Fishing in America, a cheap hotel. It is very old and run by some Chinese. They are young and ambitious Chinese and the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol.

The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section. It is the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food.

And the Lysol sits asleep next to an old Italian pensioner who listens to the heavy ticking of the clock and dreams of eternity's golden pasta, sweet basil and Jesus Christ.