On a different track ... Richard Brautigan pictured on the cover of In Watermelon Sugar
Today marks the death in 1984 of author Richard Brautigan at the age of 49 from a self-administered shotgun wound to the head. At least, I think it does, as the writer's body was not discovered by a private investigator until nearly six weeks later in his remote cabin in Bolinas, California.
This haunting image of Brautigan's lonely corpse is very hard to reconcile with a body of prose and poetry which is beguilingly life-affirming. Like many fans I was introduced to his work through 1967's Trout Fishing In America, one of the wittiest and most original works of American literature of the 20th century. A collection of semi-abstract recollections and vignettes based around the loose theme of a search for the perfect fishing spot, Trout Fishing acted as a metaphor for the changing face of a country, and a gentle plea for a back-to-basics approach in the tradition of Thoreau. Naturally it found favour with the hippies and the post-Beats and swiftly sold a million copies, as ubiquitous in the pockets of Haight-Ashbury hipsters as beads and Thai sticks.
I quickly moved on to Brautigan's other work - novels such as 1964's evocative A Confederate General from Big Sur; his1970 short story collection Revenge of the Lawn, each page of which seemed to say more than many authors manage in entire novels; and the economical poetry of collections such as Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (which I bought for the titles alone). Other works such as Please Plant This Book, a collection of seed packets with poems printed on them, reflected his humour and wit.
Like Kurt Vonnegut, Brautigan (who bore more than a passing resemblance to David Crosby) had a surefire ability to make his readers laugh. Each sentence offers a lyrical epiphany and makes you feel a little bit better about being alive, while his eye for the minutiae of everyday existence is unparalleled. It was perhaps this dreamy style which, as the 60s gave way to the less trippy 70s and the hard-driven competition of the 80s, marked Brautigan's downfall. The world was changing, but - critics said - he was not.
Yet that's exactly why I love him: he was a writer out of step. Though a figurehead of the 60s he later claimed to hate hippies. Personally, I always thought he was just as much 1860s as 1960s. Besides, though slightly more pessimistic in tone, his later work is not to be written off. His final two novels, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) and So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away (1982), are strikingly original works, and his writings are now being reinterpreted more than ever, clearly an inspiration to writers such as Garrison Keillor and Tom Robbins as well as fans such as Jarvis Cocker, who recently read Brautigan for a podcast.
Far from being irrelevant or outmoded, Brautigan is instead the lone eccentric on the busy city intersection staring at the sky and finding patterns in the clouds, while everyone else shuffles along staring at the ground. With most of his major works being reprinted for a new generation, it's heartening to know that the world has caught up with his unique charms. For really, he was neither behind nor ahead of his time, but beside it, looking in and laughing quietly into his moustache.
