The Democratic Fiction of Richard Brautigan

tile, like an Italian restaurant’s, and the main room doubles as a gallery for MAN UNDERWATER the Clark County Historical Museum, which, on the day of my visit, featured The democratic !ction of Richard Brautigan an exhibit of Vancouver’s newspapers. The shop sells such dreary volumes as By Wes Enzinna For the Love of Farming and Weather of the Paci!c Northwest. The library is situated in a corner of Discussed in this essay: the museum and looks like a living room, with two stuffed chairs and an Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, by William end table facing a set of bookshelves. Hjortsberg. Counterpoint. 880 pages. $42.50. counterpointpress.com. A whitewashed sign announces that this is #$% &'()#*+(, -*&'('.: ( /%'. 0)&-*1 -*&'('., though there’s no one around except a tall man standing behind one of the chairs, who turns out to be a life-size card- board cutout of the late author Rich- ard Brautigan. Patrons from across the United States have paid twenty-!ve dollars apiece to house their unpublished novels here, books with titles like “Autobiography About a Nobody” and “Sterling Silver Cockroaches.” The shelves hold 291 of these cheap vinyl-bound volumes, which are orga- nized into categories according to a schema called the Mayonnaise System: Adventure, Natural World, Street Life, Family, Future, Humor, Love, War and Peace, Meaning of Life, Poetry, Spiri- tuality, Social/Political/Cultural, and All the Rest. Bylines and titles don’t appear on the covers. “The only way to browse the stacks is to choose a category and pick at random,” Barber explains. “Are you in the mood for Adventure or the Meaning of Life?” The Mayonnaise System was never intended for use. It’s based on an idea very year, countless people sub- Beckett that he “wouldn’t touch in Brautigan’s novel The Abortion: An mit their !ction and non-!ction [Beckett’s novels] with a barge-pole”; Historical Romance 1966, in which an Eto magazines and book publish- another advised Harry Crews to burn earnest, overworked man in his thirties ers and are rejected. At the places I’ve his work, explaining that “fire is a presides over a library whose sole pur- worked as an editor—not the most se- great re!ner.” A publisher sent John pose is to collect and store the world’s lective magazines in the country, but Barth a note saying that his stories unpublished manuscripts. Patrons drop not the least, either—we’ve typically sounded “like a penny-whistle out of a by day and night (mostly night) to de- accepted about one of every thousand wind-bag full of bad odors.” posit their works. When the narrator’s stories. Naturally, most of these sub- The Brautigan Library for unpub- girlfriend, Vida, gets pregnant and the missions are dreck—the preferred term lished manuscripts is a sanctuary for couple travels to Tijuana for an abor- in the industry for unsolicited manu- the world’s literary rejects. “People tion, a clever metaphor is spun about scripts, “slush,” comes from an early- think the library might be a trolling unwanted children and unwanted twentieth-century colloquialism for spot for publishers and talent scouts,” books. “You have to be friendly,” the rotten fruit—but accidents inevitably John Barber, the librarian, told me last librarian explains to the man !lling in happen. Philip Roth and John Ash- May when I visited him at the brick for him. “To make the person and the bery were both rescued from slush building on a leafy corner lot in Van- book feel wanted . and to gather piles. One editor wrote of Samuel couver, Washington. The space be- pleasantly together the unwanted, the yond the arched double doors is mod- lyrical and haunted volumes of Ameri- Wes Enzinna is news editor at Vice magazine. est: the "oor is black and red checkered can writing.” 76 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2012 Illustration by André Carrilho December Reviews Final CX2.indd_1023 76 10/23/12 10:03 AM “If you rummaged through the sock tigan’s death—among them Greg Kee- and stories to be rejected by The Atlan- drawers of every person in America,” ler’s Waltzing with the Captain: tic, The New Yorker, and Playboy. Barber tells me as I pluck a manuscript Remembering Richard Brautigan (2004), Then, one day in December 1955, at called “Stalin’s Chicken and Other Keith Abbot’s Downstream from Trout the age of twenty, Brautigan walked Abominations” from the shelf, “you Fishing in America (2009), and Brauti- through the sleet-covered streets of could !ll this building with thousands gan’s daughter’s memoir, You Can’t Eugene to the local police station. “I of failed dreams.” Though Barber looks Catch Death (2000)—goes like this: want to go to jail,” he told the of!cer like a stereotypical academic—wild hair after an abusive and impoverished on duty, explaining that he was hungry and combed white mustache—he has youth, Brautigan found sudden fame and depressed. When the cop told him had a restless past: a tour guide for eight and wealth with his 1967 novel Trout he had to be a criminal to go to jail, years in Yellowstone, Barber spent years Fishing in America and experimental Brautigan came back with a rock. “I am writing and failing to publish his own works like The Pill Versus the Springhill a criminal,” he said, hurling it through !ction before getting his Ph.D. in lin- Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar. the glass of the station’s front door. A guistics and becoming a professor of These books made him an icon of the judge sentenced him to ten days in jail, creative media and digital culture at West Coast counterculture in which his during which time he was sent to Washington State University stories were often set, but later in life he Oregon State Hospital (One Flew over Vancouver. He’s also compiled the published a slew of terribly received the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed there world’s most exhaustive bibliography of novels. Depressed, twice divorced, he- twenty years later), where he would Brautigan’s work. “This is a place Brau- roically alcoholic, newly impoverished, remain for the next three months. His tigan dreamed of his entire life,” Barber and unable to publish his work, he used commitment papers quoted friends and said before leaving me alone in the li- that bullet as his final punctuation teachers as saying that his writings brary to read. “It’s a place where rejec- mark. This champion of the rejected “were without question some of the tion doesn’t exist.” killed himself, in other words, because most weird and lewd material they had his writing had failed him, because his ever read,” and he was treated with n September 16, 1984, Rich- books were no longer selling. twelve sessions of electroshock therapy. ard Brautigan awoke—he was Jubilee Hitchhiker, the !rst serious Brautigan left Oregon soon after his Othen forty-nine years old, his biography written about Brautigan, has, release in 1956 and moved to San Fran- hairline retreating and his belly !ttingly, had its own mazy path to pub- cisco; he did not return home or speak advancing—and did the two things lication. When, after twenty years of to family members for another twenty he did nearly every morning: nursed a research, Hjortsberg submitted his years. The twenty-two-year-old traded hangover and wrote. It’s likely he was manuscript to Knopf, his editor told his denim overalls for a black leather writing in one of the eight notebooks him it was far too long. In 2010, Hjorts- jacket, ingratiated himself at parties with of unpublished work that he kept berg arranged to publish the book, un- Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlin- stacked beside his bed—possibly in expurgated at 880 pages, with the small ghetti (along with members of the anar- “An Unfortunate Woman,” a manu- California-based press Counterpoint. chist street-theater group the Diggers), script that, though millions of copies “The size of the book itself was one of and fell under the tutelage of a locally of his books were then in print, his its statements,” Hjortsberg, a novelist notorious drunk, homosexual, linguist, agent had recently told him was un- who knew Brautigan in the Seventies, and renegade poet named Jack Spicer. publishable. Later that morning, recently told an interviewer. “He’s Brautigan later referred to these years as Brautigan put down his notebook and worth a book as big as the ones that his “apprenticeship,” and like many pol- picked up a Smith & Wesson .44 presidents get, or as big as Elvis got.” ished stylists, he worked very, very hard Magnum. He placed it in his mouth, to make the work look easy, writing as beneath his blond insurance- ichard Brautigan was born in many as twenty poems a day and pub- salesman’s mustache, and pulled the 1935 to a waitress and raised in lishing them in small journals, vigilant- trigger. Blood spangled “nearly every Rthe drizzly environs of Tacoma. ly avoiding paid work and accepting page” of the stack of stories and po- He was for most of his youth called poverty as the poet’s natural condition. ems, William Hjortsberg informs us Dick Porter!eld; his mother had left His poems were dark and ambiguous. in his biography of the author, Jubilee his biological father, Bernard Brauti- Take, for example, “The Pill Versus the Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Rich- gan, without even mentioning she was Springhill Mine Disaster,” a riff on the ard Brautigan.

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