Trout Fishing in America (1967)

I have always thought of this slender Richard Brautigan volume as a novel proper, but Wikipedia calls it a novella, which is fair. It’s not even 200 pages in mass market size. It was written in 1961 but it has a decided summer of love twang—strange, funny, absurdist, deceptively light-hearted. I loved this stuff when I was 18 but sadly it has lost a lot of its charm. It's still a lively little read, remarkable for something with virtually no narrative thread. I liked Brautigan’s native confidence that he could write anything that entered his head and I loved his loopy indulgent metaphors and various flights. I’m still OK with them, but his biography does cast some pall over it now. He committed suicide at the age of 49 and by all reports was a miserable man. A lot of his attitudes toward women are already notably antiquated, not so much toxic as wince-worthy but sometimes toxic. Ultimately he is still daffy and gentle enough that I’m willing to give him a pass, being dead and all. I have some sense that In Watermelon Sugar may presently be his best-liked novel (and/or story collection and/or poetry collection), but Trout Fishing was always up there. In fact, insofar as Brautigan was ever taken seriously, Trout Fishing in America usually went to the head of the class. “Trout fishing in America” means many different things here, including places and people’s names, but one of them is trout fishing in America. Brautigan is plainly aware and enamored of Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain too, and he is working consciously in their traditions—combining the humor of Twain with Hemingway’s nouns-and-verbs rhythms and stoic low-energy depression. Brautigan also knows trout fishing the sporting activity, injecting it with veracity as needed into the ongoing surreal twists. Trout Fishing is dreamy and weird, sometimes petty and foolish, more often making things work on their own terms. I still like the spirit but rereading it all these years later did not do much for me. It’s just not as inspired as Brautigan seemed to think it was and many of his recurring poetic devices—such as a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco—are evocative but a little lame and underdeveloped. But he may be winning over new readers and that’s good to hear. I see him discussed on booktube. He lives on for Harry Styles who wrote a song about watermelon sugar and he lives on for the kid in 1994 who legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. For me, Brautigan is a sad figure with an elfin side that can win you over if you have a big enough heart, not that I always do. His humor can be sharp and precise. Worth a look.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

In Watermelon Sugar (1968)

Richard Brautigan was one of my literary infatuations in the '70s out of high school. By the time he died in 1984, taking his own life, I was sad to hear it but already had misgivings about reading him again and didn't. I'm not surprised to find, all these years later, that In Watermelon Sugar seems meager now. Maybe I should have tried his more famous Trout Fishing in America first, but In Watermelon Sugar was my favorite when I was reading all his stories and poems. It has bobbed up and down in vogue due to a Harry Styles hit song last year, "Watermelon Sugar," which was indeed inspired by this novel. There's also a 2006 Neko Case song inspired by it, "Margaret vs. Pauline." Brautigan, like Neko Case but not Harry Styles, was a native of Tacoma, Washington. He was born in 1935 and his folks fought a lot and roamed the Pacific Northwest with him growing up in impoverished and unstable circumstances. In the '60s he showed up in the Bay Area and created a literary niche for himself as a winsome elfin bard inside the hippie ecosystem. His stuff is marked by surreal not to say nonsensical whimsy, which is gentle as a general rule but sometimes it's off and often there's decidedly a dated sexual politics. His girlfriends and his kinda-sorta girlfriends were often on the covers of his books. The novel is easy and quick to read because everything is short, with lots of white space on the pages. It barely breaks 100 pages. The far future depicted is closer to fantasy than science fiction but even closer to daffy hippie undulations that too often verge on insipid. His metaphors and analogies seem more trite now where they once seemed inspired. Everything in this world is made of watermelon sugar, pine boards, stone, and trout oil. I know for certain what two of those things are. The sun shines a different color every day, and the watermelon sugar reflects the color of the day it was harvested, or planted, or something. One day of the week the sun is black and there is no sound; ditto the products made with those watermelon sugars. I don't know what watermelon sugar is but the place sounds pleasant anyway. The narrator has two girlfriends: Pauline and Margaret. The scene is either polyamory or the narrator is a creep or both. Pauline is basically wonderful and Margaret is not, though it's not clear why for either. It looks a lot like stark old-fashioned midcentury male chauvinism and this narrator now looks dunderheaded at best, sadly. There are some silly villains as well but the novel is hamstrung by the fatuous narrator, who never gets better. The whimsy never says die, I will say that for it. The whimsy never says die.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"1/3, 1/3, 1/3" (1971)

Read story by Richard Brautigan online.

Richard Brautigan was once an infatuation for me, around the time this story appeared in a 1971 collection, or shortly after. I think the appeal was his kind of gentle tone of hippie insouciance, which served his verbal absurdities reasonably well. It hasn't aged that well though, since even before his suicide in 1984. This very short story helps me remember the reasons for both liking him and abandoning him. The first-person narrator describes an invitation he has received to collaborate on a literary work. He will do the typing, the young woman inviting him on board will do the editing, and a middle-aged man living in a trailer nearby will write it. The proceeds will be split equally—"1/3, 1/3, 1/3," per title. The narrator is invited because he has a typewriter. Toward the end of the story a sample of the work is reproduced, and it is hardly even literate. Which is not surprising, given these characters. What surprises me is finding it in an anthology edited by Raymond Carver for an ambitious anthology in the '80s (American Short Story Masterpieces), intended as a response or addendum to another ambitious anthology, edited by Robert Penn Warren and released in 1954 (Short Story Masterpieces), which set out to chronicle the short story in the first half of the century. I do believe I detect some bias toward West Coast writers in the Carver collection, but I'm mostly OK with it. I'm even OK seeing Brautigan included, although I think his work does best isolated to its own whimsical contexts. Excerpts as poems, stories, and/or passages often suffer alone and in the open. The characters here read to me first as willful ignoramuses, and then finally as just ignoramuses. I have no idea what they think they are doing, even less what Brautigan intended by it. An incident reminiscent of the scenario actually happened to me once. An apartment building manager where I lived knew I was a writer and approached me one day, wanting to know if I was interested in reading a novel he had been working on, inspired by reading Stephen King's The Stand. A couple of weeks later he knocked on my door and presented me with two pages of single-spaced typewritten copy. It was a scene from the rooftop of our building, to which only he had access, overlooking downtown Seattle, ravaged by a plague. The narrator was a little disturbingly gleeful about the scene, and there was lots of random violence, as much as you could get into 900 words. I told him it was a good start and he should keep at it. It looked like a big story. He told me it was going to be even bigger than The Stand. It was not as illiterate as the manuscript in Brautigan's story, but close. If enough people have stories like mine, then "1/3, 1/3, 1/3" is really going to resonate.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks