In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan

 IN WATERMELON SUGAR - RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Back to Idiosyncrasy Central with Richard Brautigan and his third novel, In Watermelon Sugar, written in 1964 and published four years later in 1968. Firstly, is there any point in even trying to understand what it's about? The answer is 'no' because it's either far too complicated or it's not actually about anything at all. What should be said about it, however, is that it's set in a place called iDEATH which may or may not be some kind of idyllic hippy commune.

The significance of the name iDEATH is that it pre-dates the use of the letter 'i' as a prefix for Apple products such as the iPod, the iMac and the iPhone, etc. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once famously stated that taking LSD was one of the most important things he did in his life. Raised in California, Jobs was very much involved with the counterculture of the early 1970s and without any doubt would have been aware of Richard Brautigan. So might this be the germ of the seed of the idea for the name of your favourite product?

Would smoking a copious amount of hashish whilst reading In Watermelon Sugar make it easier to understand, I wonder? Probably. Smoking hash certainly helps to decipher a lot of other things that don't make sense such as David Bowie song lyrics, for example. And therein lies the clue as to what In Watermelon Sugar is actually about. It's a hashish pipe dream. A reverie. It's a float down the river. It's a daydream where your mind wanders and for a moment you're suspended eight miles high above the earth and you don't even know it.

It's that moment when you step out in front of an approaching car because you're not thinking. It's that moment when you're looking out the train window and suddenly you're at your station without realising it. It's that moment when time has gone and you're suddenly late. It's where - according to Richard Brautigan - the sun is a different colour every day, where tigers can talk, where rivers are two inches wide, and where girls float across summer lawns at midnight.

Does anybody know why at the age of forty-nine Richard Brautigan took a .44 Magnum and blew his brains out? Does In Watermelon Sugar hold any clues? Again, it probably does. Particularly in regard to a character in the book by the name of inBOIL who taunts the inhabitants of iDEATH by accusing them of not knowing what iDEATH is really about.

'You people think you know about iDEATH. You don't know anything about iDEATH.' he says 'Not a damn thing. You're all at a masquerade party.'

The inhabitants take up his challenge. 'Come, then' they say 'Tell us. We're curious about what you've been saying for years about us not knowing about iDEATH, about you knowing all the answers. Let's hear some of those answers.' Whereupon inBOIL and his gang begin lopping off bits of their own bodies with jack-knives so that they literally bleed to death in front of the inhabitants.

Does it make any sense? Probably not. It must have all made sense to at least one person though, even if that was only Richard Brautigan himself. And tragically so.

John Serpico

A Confederate General From Big Sur - Richard Brautigan

A CONFEDERATE GENERAL FROM BIG SUR -

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Having recently been sexually assaulted by Nick Cave, I was in need of some love, tenderness and understanding so who better to turn to than Richard Brautigan?

A Confederate General From Big Sur was Brautigan's first published novel though it only came to the attention of a significant readership on the coat-tails of Trout Fishing In America, his second and much more successful novel. Brautigan is the narrator going under the name of 'Jesse' and he relates the story of a summer spent with his friend Lee Mellon (the Confederate General of the title) in a rudimentary shack on the cliffs at Big Sur, on the Californian Coast. He records various episodes of their time spent there, forming an almost straightforward narrative which for a Brautigan book is quite unusual.

The two of them live in abject poverty, existing on a diet of sea snails and dough. At night they're kept awake by the sound of croaking frogs and the only people who seem to pass by are thieves in the night trying to steal what little gasoline they have in their truck.

In a way they're like children playing in the dirt and all that keeps them going are their eccentricities and their imaginations. They're eventually joined by two girls, one a prostitute (with a heart of gold) and the other a college drop-out; then finally by another friend of Lee Mellon's who's carrying a briefcase containing $100,000 but who's also going through a mental breakdown.

It's all very amusing and entertaining in a light-hearted way, without too much fuss made about such things as 'likelihood' and 'probability'. For example, what might be the chances of them finding a bag of marijuana stuffed behind a rock in the fireplace? Pretty slim, you might imagine, but that's what they do which is alright because it leads to them all getting massively stoned, which makes for another episode for Brautigan to write about.

When Jesse (or Brautigan) first meets the college drop-out girl she asks him 'What do you do?' and he replies 'I live in Big Sur'. She asks him the same question a couple of times more to which he replies 'I'm unemployed' and jokingly 'I'm a minister'. What's interesting is that he never once says that he's a writer.

A little later on as they're driving back to Big Sur, Henry Miller makes a cameo appearance: 'We drove by Henry Miller's mailbox. He was waiting for his mail in that old Cadillac he had in those days. "There's Henry Miller," I said. "Oh," she said. With every passing moment my liking for her flowered another time. Not that I had anything against Henry Miller, but like a storm of flowers remembered during a revolution I grew to like her more and more.'

A Confederate General From Big Sur contains all the ingredients for what makes Richard Brautigan books so likeable: idiosyncrasy, innocence, imagination, unconventionality, surrealism, oddness, etc, etc. It also contains a very good ending or rather, it contains a very good infinite number of endings. 186,000 endings per second to be precise. And if you know anything about Brautigan as a writer you'd know this is the kind of thing that makes perfect sense when reading him.

Richard Brautigan is no longer with us so after sponging down with one of his books I fear it's going to be back to being sexually (and psychologically) assaulted by Nick Cave and his ilk again from now on...

John Serpico

Revenge Of The Lawn - Richard Brautigan

REVENGE OF THE LAWN - 
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Idiosyncrasy Central with Richard Brautigan. Was a time when his flame burned brightly and he was showered with critical acclaim, particularly with the publication of his short story collection Trout Fishing In America. It didn't last for long, however, and he soon fell out of favour and from grace. Published in 1971, Revenge Of The Lawn offers clues as to why this might have been.

Of the 62 short stories collected here, just a few of them are actually worthy of publication. I mean, they're alright but they read as though they're really ideas for short stories taken from a notebook rather than fully developed pieces. Written over a period of about 7 years, there's little to suggest (unlike in Trout Fishing) any sort of theme or focus. They even come across as almost a cash-in on the success of Trout Fishing, as though his publisher was keen to get another book out to Brautigan's newly established readership and so asked him what else he had? "Well, I've got these," Brautigan possibly replied "But they're really just my notebooks." His publisher took them anyway: "It's cool, man. Your readers will dig 'em," so his notebooks were published under the title Revenge Of The Lawn without taking into consideration what it was that made Trout Fishing In America so endearing.

Of all the stories and observations presented here, only two really stand out and perhaps it's no coincidence that they're also two of the longest?

Post Offices Of Eastern Oregon concerns itself with the news of the death of Marilyn Monroe and the memory it evokes in Brautigan. It takes him back to the time when he was a child and going on a hunting trip with his uncle. They arrive at a small town in Oregon and see two dead bear cubs being lifted from the back of a pickup truck and laid onto a porch of a house.

He and his uncle go to a post office to send a postcard and in there on a wall he sees a large nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, which seems to him to be a strange thing to have on a wall of such a place. When they go back outside, the bears have gone and none of the town folk seem to know where. They're finally discovered on a side street sitting in the front seat of a car. One is now wearing a checked shirt, a red hunting hat and has a pipe in its mouth; the other is wearing a white silk negligee, felt slippers and a pink bonnet - and there's a purse in its lap:

'Somebody opened up the purse, but there wasn't anything inside. I don't know what they expected to find, but they were disappointed. What would a dead bear carry in its purse, anyway?'

The other story that stands out, entitled A Short History Of Oregon, is a snapshot of a memory of a time when aged sixteen Brautigan went out hunting by himself. It's pouring down with rain and he believes himself to be alone in the woods until he comes across a house at the end of a logging road. As he'd been enjoying the solitude, the discovery disappoints him.

From out of the house four children suddenly emerge and in silence watch him as he walks by, his gun cradled in his arms. The children don't say a word, and instead just stand there getting soaked from the rain:

'I didn't say a word in my passing. The kids were soaking wet now. They huddled together in silence on the porch. I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this.'

It's when writing like this that Brautigan is at his best as he conjures up both child-like innocence and the surreal, with one always bleeding into the other. He evokes a stoned-like ambience and imbues his stories with a sense of wonderment and hidden meaning. Ideal reading for hippies, in a way, contemplating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Brautigan's appeal, however, was a double-edged sword and he struggled to retain the attention and interest of his readership; not helped by his publisher putting out books of lesser quality such as Revenge Of The Lawn. Inevitably, obscurity beckoned.

Having said that, I would still suggest that Richard Brautigan deserves to be remembered and not just left consigned to the past as a relic of the Sixties, if only for no other reason than for him and his writing being and remaining ever so slightly odd.

                                                                                                                                                                              John Serpico

Trout Fishing In America - Richard Brautigan

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA -
 RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

He flew his freak flag high did Richard Brautigan and for a moment the world noticed and waved back. It didn't last, however, and the world moved on leaving him sitting alone on his cloud of daydreams; scribbling away, recording his thoughts and observations. Just doing what he'd always done.

He was born into poverty and that's where he pretty much remained all his life apart from when in 1967 his novel, Trout Fishing In America, catapulted him to international fame.

At the age of 20, weary with hunger he threw rocks at a police station in a bid to be arrested, figuring this would at least be a way of getting fed. His wish was duly granted but this was America in the 1950s and the police brought in a doctor to look at him who pronounced Brautigan to be not only clinically depressed but also a paranoid schizophrenic so they committed him to a mental hospital where he was administered electro-convulsive therapy. Coincidentally, this was the same hospital where One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest would later be filmed.

On his release, Brautigan headed for San Francisco where the nascent Beat Generation scene was dawning, subsequently falling in with the company of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, et al. With the flowering of the hippy counter-culture in the 1960s, particularly around the Haight-Ashbury area, Brautigan seemed to have found his spiritual home and would often be seen handing out his poems on street corners and for a while was heavily involved with Emmett Grogan and The Diggers, handing out free food to the needy.

And then came recognition and critical acclaim with Trout Fishing In America, a collection of idiosyncratic thoughts and observations using the title as an idiom running through the whole book. Written in a gentle, innocent and amusingly off-kilter manner, to this day it defies description and is more akin to a fluttering butterfly that cannot be pinned down than to anything approaching conventionality. Like a literary equivalent of a collection of songs by Daniel Johnston.

With the recognition and acclaim, the offers started rolling in and as well as becoming a regular contributor to Rolling Stone magazine, he was offered the opportunity to record a spoken-word album for The Beatles' Apple label.

All was good but Brautigan was inextricably associated with hippydom California style and when that particular dream started to die in the 1970s, so too did the plaudits and the offers of work. Very soon after he started falling back into poverty.

Though he still continued to write and further books of his were published, by 1984 he seemed finally to have had enough and in September of that year he blew his brains out with a .44 Magnum.

Some decades later, who now remembers Richard Brautigan? Well, the fact that his books have now turned up in a charity shop in Exmouth means that someone does.

Even if it's only me.

John Serpico