Biography stays too detached
By John Leland |
May 25, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
RICHARD Brautigan burned through his short career like a rock star. Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935, he handed out poems on the streets of pre-hippie San Francisco, then caught an updraft in the zeitgeist with his 1967 novel, "Trout Fishing in America," that even he couldn't have seen coming. Playfully elliptical, without plot or conventional characters, the book sold 2 million copies and transformed Brautigan into a libidinous Mark Twain for the new counterculture: a distinctly American voice that was so of its moment that it had nowhere to go but into a time capsule. By the time he ended his life in 1984, buffeted by drink and debt, he could not get an acceptable offer to publish his last novel. Thomas McGuane, a friend and sometime rival, summed up Brautigan's arc succinctly: "When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water." In life and death he was a moral fable for an era that invites easy moralizing.
Life is rarely this tidy, and William Hjortsberg's herculean biography sets out to excavate Brautigan from this pat storyline, revealing an ambitious perfectionist who knew what he wanted and labored as methodically at his image as at his sentences. Brautigan worked hard to make it look easy. Hjortsberg, a novelist and screenwriter, was part of the Montana literary circle that included McGuane and Brautigan, along with Jim Harrison and drinking buddies like Peter Fonda and Jeff Bridges.
Begun in 1991, the book consumed nearly as many years as Brautigan's literary career. Brautigan wrote stories as short as one sentence; Hjortsberg dedicates paragraph after paragraph to the sights he showed Brautigan during a trip to New York. It is a measure of his discipline that he waits until page 664 to mention that one of Brautigan's lovers was the biographer's wife, Marian, at a time when the Hjortsbergs' marriage was falling apart.
Richard Brautigan grew up nomadic and poor in Washington and Oregon, where he was Dick Porterfield, son of an absent father and a mother who left him and his younger sister with another family when he was about 10. His mother didn't tell him his name was Brautigan until he was 17. He never got over the sense of abandonment.
"As an editor, I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published parts of "Trout Fishing" in City Lights Journal, said after Brautigan's death. "Essentially he had a naif style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a non-literate age."
Details abound, some telling, some trivial. But for long stretches Brautigan seems absent from the action, as if the book were a first-person video game, recording the places its protagonist entered while leaving the protagonist off-screen. We learn what he drank, whom he slept with, where he gave readings, what parts of the house he shot up with his guns, how much he owed; but not what he thought about his writing, his ascent, his decline or his life's quest.
By the end Hjortsberg seems to be toying with us, withholding anything that might be revealing.
There's a stoic integrity to this approach but it introduces its own distortions; facts don't contain a life any more than moral fables do. And sometimes more is less. At the end of this long, mostly well-written book, the work of finding Richard Brautigan remains to be done. Life may lie in the details, but biography lies in managing them.
Life is rarely this tidy, and William Hjortsberg's herculean biography sets out to excavate Brautigan from this pat storyline, revealing an ambitious perfectionist who knew what he wanted and labored as methodically at his image as at his sentences. Brautigan worked hard to make it look easy. Hjortsberg, a novelist and screenwriter, was part of the Montana literary circle that included McGuane and Brautigan, along with Jim Harrison and drinking buddies like Peter Fonda and Jeff Bridges.
Begun in 1991, the book consumed nearly as many years as Brautigan's literary career. Brautigan wrote stories as short as one sentence; Hjortsberg dedicates paragraph after paragraph to the sights he showed Brautigan during a trip to New York. It is a measure of his discipline that he waits until page 664 to mention that one of Brautigan's lovers was the biographer's wife, Marian, at a time when the Hjortsbergs' marriage was falling apart.
Richard Brautigan grew up nomadic and poor in Washington and Oregon, where he was Dick Porterfield, son of an absent father and a mother who left him and his younger sister with another family when he was about 10. His mother didn't tell him his name was Brautigan until he was 17. He never got over the sense of abandonment.
"As an editor, I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published parts of "Trout Fishing" in City Lights Journal, said after Brautigan's death. "Essentially he had a naif style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a non-literate age."
Details abound, some telling, some trivial. But for long stretches Brautigan seems absent from the action, as if the book were a first-person video game, recording the places its protagonist entered while leaving the protagonist off-screen. We learn what he drank, whom he slept with, where he gave readings, what parts of the house he shot up with his guns, how much he owed; but not what he thought about his writing, his ascent, his decline or his life's quest.
By the end Hjortsberg seems to be toying with us, withholding anything that might be revealing.
There's a stoic integrity to this approach but it introduces its own distortions; facts don't contain a life any more than moral fables do. And sometimes more is less. At the end of this long, mostly well-written book, the work of finding Richard Brautigan remains to be done. Life may lie in the details, but biography lies in managing them.
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