The Dreamer

by EDWARD DORN

The sensationalism surrounding the death of Richard Brautigan has been odd. It has met all the qualifications of National Enquirer prurience - calculation, decay, disease, drek sexuality, and a fate conveniently beyond explanation. Richard would have enjoyed that part of it because he was drawn to such style of coverage, and, in fact, might have had it in mind, since he arranged for his body to rot for several weeks before the likelihood of discovery.

The first thing to understand about Richard's mind was that he idealized the common intelligence. That's why he was abruptly popular, and why, in the end, he was systematically forgotten: the people who were surprised by him never abandoned their hatred of him, and the ones who loved him, never a large number, never abandoned him. Even toward the end you could meet people who thought So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away was the truest account of growing up ever written. The only trouble with his admiration of the National Enquirer audience was that they never heard of him. He was condemned, and he knew it, to be one of us.

Last fall, when the news of his suicide came through the wire, there was a blizzard of speculation. A lot of the turbulent guesswork was simply the confusion of the strange man's friends. They felt the triumph of an adversary's death. And, in fact, it was a strong coup. Literary personalities overwhelmingly die in the presence of at least one other person. To die as he did, with calculation, with everything working - lights, radio, telephone machine on in a house with a Do Not Disturb sign - was a disturbing afterthought to a public not yet accustomed to free-market euthanasia.

The comparisons with Hemingway are quite erroneous: Brautigan was not a shotgun man. The pronouncements that women drove him to it are equally off the mark. He mostly got along with women better than men: He was more confidential with them and more friendly toward them. The fact that he was disappointed in marriage had to do with his alienation from humanity in general on a constant basis.

He looked to men for the kind of respect that the exclusiveness of marriage denied. The aesthetic which led him to prefer Japanese women was at the heart of his essential lack of interest in domestic routines. His views on these matters are very eloquently expressed and recorded in Sombrero Fallout, a deeply lyrical presentation of the contrast of American and Japanese traits.

He was a roamer, always looking for the odd sign and the direct encounter, and he was naturally dubious of explanation and analysis, because he felt the phenomenon itself was complete. And so did his readers, during the early years of his success. He didn't write fiction so much as observation, honed and elevated so as to catch the light emanating from the most presumably insignificant of details.

The only respect in which he was a Christian was the interest he shared with Christ in professional women.

He was a true macho in that his challenges were thrown at men. He loved sharp argument, the nastier the better. He craved for verbal content to reach a point where he was compelled to say, "Watch it! You're going too far." Those who knew him well, and who played that game with him, took it as a compliment if that theater of combat was reached. Although his writing is not violent, there was no end to his search for the bounds of violence. To Richard Brautigan, the idea of fate itself was comic. That attitude has always made as many enemies as friends.

He has no history of morbidity. All his writing - the lonely, wry, preoccupied, lapidary miniatures he published as poetry, or the space boldness of his micro-prose - was devoted to coaxing life to live up to its obvious possibilities. Death was a fact to him, not just another attraction. Richard could be vicious, but he was not sour. He had too much pride for that.

Brautigan saw himself and often referred to himself as a humorist. That's a designation not much used about anyone anymore, since everybody in the whole nation has become a comic. But it has been a rare thing when an artist has identified with any tradition in this century. There is a distant similarity between Brautigan and Twain. It consists almost solely in a natural innocence in regarding the evil disposition of mankind.

But whereas Twain's treatment of the condition is streaked with acid intelligence, Brautigan's is amazingly tolerant, if not gleeful, and resembles an anthropologist's understanding more than that of a literary man.

Contrary to what is often claimed, Richard spoke easily of his childhood and its tribulations. He was without recrimination, so his stories were saucy versions of the School of Hard Knocks. His work appealed to those who had decided not to mock their chains but to pick them up and carry them out of the hippie slums of the West Coast back to the Rocky Mountains, much as the disappointed seekers of '49 gradually made their way following silver rather than Gold to the East again.

One night in August 1980, Richard delivered a little talk and read from his work in Boulder. There were about a thousand old-timey people from the hills to hear him. He was very impressed that forerunners like Billy Sunday and William Jennings Bryan had spoken there. He liked those old echoes. The audience of freckled, ginghamed children and their homespun fathers obviously loved him, and he openly returned their regard. It was a touching reunion filled with gentle, reflective laughter.

That summer in boulder was special in a number of ways for Brautigan, and he was fascinated with the town itself. It represented many elements of the new life, the untested but already discernible motion of the '80s at the brink. He was impressed with the liberal sprinkling of beautiful women in the crowds. He stayed at the Boulderado for about a month and felt at home in the ornate, turn-of-the-century ambience. In 1980 the hotel was still a little rough-edged, although some of the present amenities were in place then. The heyday of the hotel in Richard's terms would have been slightly earlier, in the '70s, when the clientele was a loose traffic of waywardly successful odd-balls with specific intentions if they could ever "get it together."

Boulder became even more absurdly intruiging in his estimation. He glowed with possibilities and talked about new writing projects. Fishermen came and went. There was a fair amount of talk about fishing the in-town course of Boulder Creek. And then, eventually, he took Masako off to Montana. They didn't live happily ever after, but they were very happy for a while.

Brautigan and Michael McClure, circa 1966-1967, in San Francisco.His second wife, Akiko, related how she saw him inadvertently in North Beach very shortly before his suicide. The sight of him was so affecting she following him along the street and into Vanessi's, an old and still classy Italian restaurant on Broadway, near the crossroads with Columbus Avenue of San Francisco's bohemian quarter, and haunt of sailors and internationalists, and except for the Mission and Presidio, the oldest inhabited part of the city.

She stood there by the door, she said, until Richard saw her. He closed his eyes. In this sign she thinks he saw her as a ghost. But as everyone knows, if you're lucky enough to see a ghost, you open your eyes. What Richard actually saw, from the testimony of his own record, was yet another instance of the distortion of the dream he had had. It was the final judgment of the truly poor that everything be perfect.

Edward Dorn died in 1999. The essay is taken from Dorn's collection of stories, essays, and verse, Way West.

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