Most mornings I begin the day before dawn with the Writer’s Almanac in my inbox. The email contains a poem, along with some biographical sketches of writers, familiar or obscure. The other morning the name Richard Brautigan appeared, with a few lines about his life and a link to a website with more information. When I followed the link, I felt like I was tumbling through the looking glass into a different dimension, a world where forest creatures wander through a cybernetic forest watched over by kindly machines, as he recounted in one of his more memorable poems. In fact, I had tumbled backward in time.
I first saw the San Francisco Bay sometime in the early 1970s on a bus crossing the Bay Bridge from
Oakland into the city. Far off there was the Golden Gate and the white city on hills, the water turning dark in the twilight. A year later I was living in an apartment on 12th Avenue and Lake Street, and not far away the reclusive author was sitting at a table in his Geary Street apartment writing about a mythic place where everything is made out of watermelon sugar.
I only knew Richard Brautigan from his photographs on the covers of the thin paperback books with names like “Revenge of the Lawn” and “Rommel Drives on Deep into Africa,” and of course, his one great success, “Trout Fishing in America,” which a blurb on the back cover pointed out was not actually about trout fishing. If you have seen those photographs, then you will remember that he looked like something out of the Old West, long straggly blond mustache and a beat up slouch hat, tall with round glasses, looking almost vague, uncomfortably leaning next to a dark-haired woman who was likely the subject of his poems or stories.
His was the voice of the counterculture as I remember it — gentle, naïve, hopeful. His poems are so unassuming as to almost fade into the paper of his books. They might have been written on napkins and left on a table in North Beach as a tip for the waitress. But the America of the ’60s and early ’70s was not anything like the way he wrote. Outside, in the world, bombers were dropping napalm on the jungles of a small Asian country, the cities of America burned, and assassins struck down our best hopes. In Brautigan’s world, a library stays open late at night to check in the books written by shy people in lonely rooms who write about, for instance, growing flowers by candlelight.
America changed very quickly with the end of the war, and the counterculture faded into the caricature that is all we remember. Brautigan lost his audience, the portal to his alternate universe closed, we moved on to a decade of polyester and disco, trying to forget the decade of rage and flowers. In 1984, I heard the news he had shot himself with a borrowed pistol in a house north of San Francisco. I hope he is somewhere now in that alternate universe, in a cybernetic forest watched over by machines of loving grace.
Walt Mills can be reached at awmills@verizon.net or at P.O. Box 174, Spring Mills, PA 16875.
