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 unpub- lished 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pose is to collect and store the world’s lective magazines in the country, but Barth a note saying that his stories unpublished manuscripts.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, . 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 (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. The scene was a “gory pregnant. After high school, Brautigan emergence of birth-control pills: pile of manuscripts.” worked off and on at a cannery and Like most suicide narratives, Hjorts- lived with his mother and her new When you take your pill berg’s book—beneath its forays into husband in a tar-paper shack on the it’s like a mine disaster. I think of all the people literary criticism and chest-thumping pastoral outskirts of Eugene, Oregon. lost inside of you. historical analysis—is a psychological Determined to become a writer in the whodunit, an attempt to assemble the mold of his idols Ernest Hemingway In 1967, Brautigan published his clues of a man’s life into an explanation and William Saroyan, and prevented best-known novel, Trout Fishing in for why he would pull the trigger on by scoliosis from joining World War II, America, which he’d been working on himself. The easy answer, given in nu- Brautigan spent his nights hunched for close to six years. It’s a poet’s novel: merous memoirs published since Brau- over his typewriter, sending off poems in it, Brautigan turns one conceit over

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December Reviews Final CX2.indd_1023 77 10/23/12 10:03 AM and over with inventive variations. he’s been trying to publish since he was “make one million dollars” every year “Trout Fishing” is by turns a character, seventeen and has had rejected a by writing a new novel satirizing a dif- the novel, the narrator, and a “hotel record-breaking 459 times. And then a ferent genre every year. Brautigan had half a block from Broadway and Co- tall man with a long blond mustache always hated money. He delighted at lumbus.” It is also, the narrator discov- comes in with a manuscript entitled how the Diggers made a spectacle of ers, for sale. In one chapter, he sees an “Moose.” His name is Richard Brauti- burning dollar bills, and he often said ad for a “used trout stream” at a scrap gan, and he’s a failed writer like all the his favorite work of his own was a shop. “We’re selling it by the foot rest. “This was the third or fourth book homemade project called “Please Plant length,” a salesman explains. “You can [Brautigan] had brought to the library,” This Book,” a series of seed packets and buy as little as you want or you can buy the narrator explains. poems he put together in 1968 to in- all we’ve got left. A man came in here spire amateur writers and distributed, this morning and bought 563 feet.... Every time he brought in a new book he for free, on the streets of San Francisco. The waterfalls are upstairs in the used looked a little older, a little more tired. Yet Brautigan had also developed a mi- plumbing department.” He looked quite young when he brought ser’s knack for accounting and saving Reviewers heralded Brautigan as an in his "rst book. I can’t remember the ti- his receipts. Hjortsberg suggests that unwitting spokesman for the tle of it, but it seems to me the book had Brautigan’s decline originated from his something to do with America. then !ooding into San Francisco, and “What’s this one about?” I asked, inability to handle the internal schism the novel would go on to sell 2 million because he looked as if he wanted me precipitated by wealth and fame. copies. Guy Davenport, in an essay for to ask him something. Hjortsberg tells of a late-night meal at a The Hudson Review, described Brauti- “Just another book,” he said. diner in 1973 during which Brautigan, gan as one of the era’s greatest young viciously drunk, got up, left his table, writers, “a kind of Thoreau who cannot Back at the real Brautigan Library, I and jammed his "nger into every single keep a straight face,” and Newsweek had found a memoir in the Family sec- other customer’s plate of food. When gushed that “he combines the surface tion entitled “Strive for Mediocrity he had "nished, he went to the cashier "nality of Hemingway, the straightfor- Even If It Is Beyond You: The Memoirs and paid each person’s tab. “Two dozen wardness of Sherwood Anderson, and of Leo Witz.” It tells the life story of its free breakfasts anointed by the touch of the synesthetic guile of Baudelaire.” author, a seventy-"ve-year-old grandfa- a poet,” Hjortsberg writes. Soon he was playing basketball with ther whose “single, "fty-eight-year love The previous year, fed up with San Jack Nicholson and partying with affair” with his wife, a “most wonderful Francisco and in search of a new muse, Andy Warhol, staying in the Chelsea lady,” made, in the author’s opinion, Brautigan had taken a "shing trip to Hotel alongside Patti Smith and Leon- “the involvements of Tristan and Isolde the mountain town of Pine Creek, ard Cohen, and being photographed for or Romeo and Juliet come off as rather , where he met a group of Life and People. He received enormous bland friendships,” and who, if asked, macho writers and artists, including quantities of fan mail, little of which he “If you had your life to live over, what the novelists Thomas McGuane and answered, but most of which he "led would you do differently?” could truth- Jim Harrison and the singer Jimmy under either “Unrequited Publishers” fully answer, “All I’d want is to do it all Buffett. The crew lived in farmhouses or “Pests.” “Richard Brautigan’s sperm,” over again.” It’s dreadfully boring stuff, in the shadow of the Rocky Moun- one woman exclaimed after she’d fel- though it does have a certain resonance tains, where they partied and "shed lated him, spitting the poet’s semen with the average man’s experience: and "red guns. Brautigan, burned out into her hand and examining it, Hjorts- from months of book tours and sick of berg tells us, as if it were “some precious Barbara and I have now been members his reputation in San Francisco, of Green Acres Country Club, in treasure, bright pearls from the crown Northbrook, Illinois, for forty years. soon bought land and joined them. jewels of an emperor.” When I was a kid I couldn’t wait for “Montana has re-established my prox- When Brautigan published The Abor- school to let out. Now that I have re- imity to heroic nature,” he said. tion several years later, he seemed to be tired, I can be out to play every day, If there’s a love story in Brautigan’s making a sly joke of it all. Completed in and I don’t even have to go to school. life, it’s a brief one, and it began around San Francisco in 1963, the novel had Playing consists of tennis on Tuesday, this time—on a visit to Japan Brautigan been rejected by a dozen publishers; now Thursday, and Saturday mornings, took after moving to Montana—when Brautigan received a $100,000 advance with golf "lling out Wednesdays, Fri- a married Japanese fan cold-called the from Simon & Schuster. In one chapter days, and Sundays. Barb plays golf with author in his hotel room and he asked of the novel, the narrator describes the girls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, her on a date. Hjortsberg describes this and we play together on Sundays. twenty-three people who deliver their woman, Akiko Yoshimura, as a “daugh- manuscripts to the library for unpub- The book proves that Witz was, in ter in a box,” the Japanese term for an lished writers. A middle-aged man his own words, “better than average at obedient woman, and it’s not hard to see dressed in leather brings in a 290-page just about everything he tried but not Brautigan’s attraction to submissive book about bikers and bondage that is, all that good at anything.” types. He had a bondage fetish, and, in appropriately, printed on cowhide. An an April 1985 Rolling Stone pro"le, Law- old man with the dull name of Charles y the 1970s Brautigan had be- rence Wright reported that women in Green brings in an equally dull novel come more ambitious, and in San Francisco bars would warn one called “Love Always Beautiful,” which B1976 he came up with a plan to another of his predilection for tying lov-

78 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2012

December Reviews Final CX2.indd_1023 78 10/23/12 10:03 AM ers up. It was perhaps no surprise when was the fact that his “million-dollar” versity. Brautigan, by then, had a lot of Brautigan and Yoshimura, after a novels, of which he wrote four before lessons to offer by way of negative ex- monthlong romance, got engaged—but abandoning the project in 1977, gar- ample. Unwilling to acclimate himself when the couple returned to Montana, nered vicious criticism. “This is a terrible to an impoverished lifestyle, he had their life together quickly fell apart. book,” wrote Roger Sale in The Hudson taken out a suicide loan, the kind he At this time, in 1976, William Hjorts- Review of The Hawkline Monster, Brau- knew he’d never be able to pay back, berg was a thirty-!ve-year-old novelist, tigan’s 1974 mash-up of gothic and West- from the First Security Bank of Liv- and, in addition to being part of the ern genres that devolves into orgiastic ingston, and used the money for ex- Montana crowd, he was also Brautigan’s sex and whimsical violence. “[It is] travagant alcohol binges and stays at nearest neighbor. “Had I even guessed ... deeply unfunny, in no need of having !ve-star hotels. He was so desperate for that someday I’d be his biographer,” been written.” affection that, when a fawning study of Hjortsberg writes forty years later, “I’d But for Brautigan, perhaps, it did his oeuvre was published by the have been a proper little Boswell, jotting need to be written. Brautigan had French critic Marc Chénetier, he had a down every overheard witticism.” He’s always resented his association with the woman he’d once dated read him the being falsely modest; Jubilee Hitchhiker is California counterculture, and by 1976 book as a bedtime story. a book of Boswellian completeness. he talked about the need for the At school, Brautigan was a mess, and Nearly every dinner, drinking bout, “dewhimsicalizing of his literary reputa- he made jokes about checking out of the !ght, and one-night stand—and there tion,” saying he would not “write Son of “Big Hotel.” He’d broken his leg and were a lot of all four—is recounted in Trout Fishing in America or Grandson of could be seen tottering across campus minute detail. In the scenes where Trout Fishing in America.” Biographers on a cane, overweight and bloated. To Hjortsberg reconstructs events from in- and critics—Hjortsberg among them— soothe a herpes outbreak, he swaddled terviews and journals, he uses the third have emphasized Brautigan’s !nancial his genitals in toilet paper, which fac- person, going so far as to refer to himself ambitions with these novels, but they’ve ulty reported seeing falling out of the as “Gatz,” his nickname; but when he tended to ignore that he wrote them in cuffs of his jeans. “Whatever magic recalls his personal experiences with dialogue with the meta!ctional critical Montana once possessed had vanished,” Brautigan—drinking in Palo Alto or arguments of the day, most notably John Hjortsberg writes. With his borrowed !shing in Montana—he uses the !rst Barth’s battle cry against literary realism, money, Brautigan left to travel Europe. person. The result is a book that is rigor- his !ght against the “used up–ness” of When he read to a crowd of punks in ous yet warm, one that smudges the traditional forms. Brautigan wanted to Amsterdam and they demanded an en- distinction between biography and make money, but he also wanted to be core, he demurred, saying that he didn’t memoir. But it’s Hjortsberg’s ability to taken seriously as an experimentalist. have any more. He visited friends in work like a novelist—to shape his Perseverance in the face of critical Munich and told them that “a com- mountain of material, the enormous scorn, however, soon became a key ele- puter at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo chaos of Brautigan’s life, into a ment of Brautigan’s career and legacy, an now handled all his future literary busi- narrative—that makes Jubilee Hitch- important part of what aligned him with ness.” When he met a Spanish woman hiker most remarkable. Here, for exam- West Coast literature; he saw himself as who was in Amsterdam to have an abor- ple, is what Hjortsberg sees on a July the underdog, panned by what he called tion, the two began a romance so bleak morning at the Brautigan ranch, when the “eastern critical ma!a.” In the 1970s, and blackly humorous it could have he stumbles unannounced into Brauti- as his novels increasingly were rejected, come straight from one of his own sto- gan and Yoshimura’s kitchen: the writer and his characters merged ries. He returned to the island of Majorca into one snubbed identity—a !gure like with her, where, one night, he got so Brautigan knelt on the linoleum #oor. the archetypal Constance, who, in drunk that he passed out in an alley with He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing Brautigan’s 1975 play on porno paper- a stray dog. “American millionaire writer only a faded pair of blue jeans. Shock- backs, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, found drunk in the gutter sleeping with ingly pink and bristling with curling blond hairs, he appeared almost larval, was once a promising novelist but by her a dog,” reported the local paper. an enormous golden caterpillar. His late twenties has been forgotten. Critics With about $10,000 left, Brautigan potbelly pillowed over the waistband of called Trophies “vile,” and Michael Rog- #ew to Bolinas, California, where he his jeans. He clutched a serrated bread ers, in the New York Times, suggested owned a home. He began carrying a knife in both hands, pressing the tip that “perhaps Richard Brautigan should gun everywhere. He published a !nal against his navel, staring pleadingly up make a retreat from the novel form.” Not novel, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All at Akiko. His wife seemed to tower long after, Brautigan gave up on his Away, a lyrical story about a welfare above him in spite of her slight stature. genre project. kid in rural 1940s Washington who She wore [a] kimono, the obi belted !shes in his sneakers, collects beer tightly about a narrow waist. Her hair arber himself knew Brautigan at bottles in a baby buggy, and hangs out sprang in a wild Medusa- like disarray around a pale oval face contorted with the end of his life. “He was with a corpulent couple who bring rage. “You no commit seppuku,” she Bprobably the most unusual their living-room set to a pond, casting shrieked. “You got no guts!” teacher I’ve ever had,” he told me in their lines from the sofa. “I didn’t the library, explaining how, in 1982, know that afternoon that the ground The couple divorced two years later. he’d taken a creative-writing course was waiting to become another grave,” Compounding Brautigan’s troubles with Brautigan at Montana State Uni- says the narrator in the opening line

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December Reviews Final CX2.indd_1023 79 10/23/12 10:03 AM of the novel; by its end, he has acci- “Failed writers might be the most writers like the watchman; he sees his dentally killed his friend with a ri!e. bitter people in the world,” Barber told tragicomic trio “all sitting there in that He hides in the grass, watching the me over lunch, “because there are few rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of couple fish, gradually disappearing places left for democratic voices to be American literature,” their literary fates into the landscape himself: heard in America.” The Brautigan entangled. This is one of the paradoxes Library—which Barber took over in of Brautigan’s life and work: even at his I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was bare- 2010 from Todd Lockwood, who had most popular, he never stopped identify- ly noticeable, hardly there. I think they founded his own version in Vermont in ing with the rejected. His antiheroes are had forgotten all about me. I sat there 1990 but who had let the collection of sexual failures, rebuffed and murdered watching their living room shining out manuscripts molder in a basement after novelists, abortionists, and hermetic li- of the dark beside the pond. It looked the project ran out of money—was brarians, and though many today would like a fairy tale functioning happily in meant to provide just such a place: one agree with Thomas McGuane’s angry the post– World War II gothic of Ameri- where “you didn’t have to be talented 1973 assessment of Brautigan as an ca before television crippled the imagi- to be part of a literary community.” anachronism of the Sixties—“nothing nation of America and turned people “We don’t judge,” reads a solicitation but a pet rock! A fucking hula hoop!”— indoors and away from living out their letter to would-be contributors to the his library shows that he has left a quiet own fantasies with dignity. library. “We let the author decide if his legacy as an advocate for the mediocre The novel is a small masterpiece of or her work is worthy of being ‘in the or failed, as a symbol of the vagaries of autobiographical "ction. But in relation public.’” But in recent years the library success and the capriciousness of com- to its era—it was written in 1982, as has had to turn authors away—there’s mercial publishing, and as a cult hero for contemporaries like Don DeLillo and room for no more than the 291 manu- a certain kind of writer—a writer like Thomas Pynchon were tracking late scripts currently held there. Next year, Leo Witz or Jack Saunders. capitalism’s information overload and however, it plans to switch to digital Brautigan himself suffered one "nal deconstructing postwar narratives of submissions and start accepting manu- rejection: in a poignant coda to his American power—the themes of So the scripts again, all of which it will make story, his body wasn’t discovered until Wind Won’t Blow It All Away seem available online. six weeks after his death. Hjortsberg quaint. If, in the 1960s, Brautigan offered This is an auspicious moment for the explains how maggots were “writhing in a kaleidoscopic vision of America—its library to go digital. In 2008, for the his decaying !esh,” and says that there dropouts, its environmental degradation, first time in history, the number of were “many, many flies, a nightmare its swelling aspirations—now he offered books self-published surpassed the population of blow!ies, house!ies, blue- simply a parable of a lost world and a lost number of books published commer- tails, and greenbottles swarming every- writer. Reviews of the novel were tepid cially; even such high-pro"le writers as where in the melancholy twilight of the or downright frigid, and Brautigan wrote J. K. Rowling and Deepak Chopra are shaded main room.” When friends be- to his agent: “Book sales are not paying passing up the insights of editors and gan to call and get Brautigan’s answering the rent. It’s sort of sad to publish a book publishers in order to sell their books machine, “the batteries ... began wear- that ... looks like a piece of shit and is on their personal websites, directly to ing down and the recorded message doomed from the beginning.” readers. It’s the kind of democratic grew distorted, the words slurred, like a revolution Brautigan envisioned, one man underwater.” Hjortsberg completes fter reading about forty man- that has led to a renegotiation of which this disturbing picture with a description uscripts at the Brautigan Li- voices are heard in the public sphere. It of Brautigan’s “death shadow,” which the Abrary, I discovered that not is, of course, also a dubious victory. On poet Michael McClure saw when, weeks all the authors were as chipper as Mr. my last day at the library, Barber and I after the police discovered Brautigan’s Witz about being considered “medio- got to talking about Brautigan’s great body and hauled it away, he drove to cre.” Jack Saunders, for example, pref- story “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” about a mill watch- Brautigan’s house to see the scene of his aces his book “Jism Noir”—a clunky, man who wants to write a novel. He friend’s suicide. unbelievable detective novel—with bands together with his girlfriend, who [McClure] climbed up onto the second- this note, signed in pen: will edit the story, and the narrator, a !oor deck and had a look in through [“Jism Noir” is] about a writer’s struggle local teenager, who will type it up; a the window. [He] clearly saw the death to be grateful for what he has and live model of self-publishing, they plan to shadow of Richard Brautigan’s body in the moment he is in, even though he “divide the royalties three ways.” The etched into the !oorboards where his can’t sell what he writes and he keeps irony of the tale—not lost on me after corpse had lain undiscovered for many losing jobs for writing several books a days at the Brautigan Library—is that long weeks. Brautigan’s body fat had liq- year. He’s been at it 20 years now, pub- the watchman turns out to be semi- ue"ed, what coroners call a “lipid break- lishing what he can himself, and giving illiterate. (A characteristic line: “May- down,” and had seeped into the wood, it away. He considers himself in the bell shifard wen she saw him standing leaving behind a phantom image. . . . mainstream of American writing, in the The new owners [would later try] scrub- tradition of Thoreau and Whitman. . . . ther in his blac macinaw smild at her bing it free, but no solvents or detergent And Richard Brautigan except more and Carl felt his blod run hot lik scalld- would do the trick. . . . Like a photo- so. . . . His work is anti- commercial. ing coffee and "ting mad.”) graphic ghost, Richard Brautigan’s im- Who’s going to bring out a book called But Brautigan’s work maintains a pression might have remained forever to “Jism Noir”? Then don’t! striking sympathy for even untalented haunt the old shingled house.

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