Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

“Always at the end of the words someone is dead,” Brautigan wrote in one of his short stories, hitting the dark note of fear that haunts all his writing. But the obituaries for Richard Brautigan eulogized an era more than a man or his work. It’s hard to go on admiring, and as a literary mode, the panegyric, drained of praise, is very common today. The web in particular is full of mock elegies that ridicule and are creepy in the way they so blithely break a fundamental promise, that we will take care of our dead. I suppose they are easy to pull off because the position of superiority is built in: there are the living, and then there are the dead, who are somehow at fault for dying, for letting time take them away. The right tone and rhetorical distance are lazily arrived at and almost second nature for someone raised in media culture. For example: Before he shot himself, Brautigan set the lights in his house to run on timers so that it would appear to the outside world as though he were still alive. One imagines him in those numb last hours plugging in lamps and, in a final fiction, re-creating the habits of the living, trying as he set the dials to remember what those rhythms were like. He was a depressive and something of a recluse and apparently his little gimmick worked. His neighbors left him alone. When he was found, weeks later, the manuscript he’d been editing, his last, penciled in blue, was partly eaten by maggots.

So much for his career.

Now only the prose remains, the cracked and cloddy prose with its black sad mood and shrugging whatever attitude, its pleonasms and curious grammatical lapses, its loopy metaphors that either strike home or fall so wide of the mark they read as an extremely flat deadpan. He read Faulkner all his life, obsessed with a past that would not pass, but the simple and often clunky sound of Brautigan’s sentences is musically closer to Hemingway. Raymond Carver and Richard Brautigan shared the influences of time and place, as well as alcoholic fathers, rootlessness and poverty, and a love of fishing. They were contemporaries, born several years apart, both from the Northwest, and looking at old pictures of the men it would be easy to mistake them for brothers. In writing, the influences they shared show up most noticeably when you set Brautigan’s work beside the stories Carver wrote in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . Even the title of that collection borrows a crudeness from Brautigan, an inarticulate sloppiness, and the stories themselves, in their short inflected sentences, in their often surreal imagery, in their brevity and density and episodic plotting, in their characterizations and settings and dialogue, suggest a close affinity with Revenge of the Lawn , Brautigan’s book of stories. Both books are quite voicey, they share a diction, and, even more noticeably, I think, the sentences find their sound and rhythm in speech that is, to my ear, regional.

Brautigan never wrote elegant prose. The sentences sound broken, physically broken, as if scrawled by a child with a stub of pencil and jabbed through the paper — they sound just slightly illegible, just slightly as though they hadn’t earned a rightful place in the pages of a real book. They aren’t fully enunciated. There’s a loneliness in the sentences, they feel so untutored, so helpless — all of his work has the mood of a solitary child trying to amuse himself. I remember reading years ago a comment by Wallace Stegner, who claimed that Brautigan was illiterate, at least in the cultural sense. I rather doubt it, but a recurring figure in his work is the writer who should not be writing, the writer whose past is unusable and whose gifts are inadequate. “I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary. I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.”

By far the best of the stories on this theme is “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” which Carver included in American Short Story Masterpieces , an anthology, edited with Tom Jenks, that in some ways marks a high point for the flexible practice of realism in short fiction. In that story, three people are “going in” on the writing of a novel, and the narrator, who lives “in a cardboard-lined shack of [his] own building,” has been included in the project because he owns a typewriter. A woman on welfare will do the editing because she’s “read a lot of pocketbooks and the Reader’s Digest .” And the novelist is “writing the novel because he wanted to tell a story that had happened to him years before when he was working in the woods.”

“You’ll type it. I’ll edit it. He’ll write it,” the woman says. They’ll share the royalties, they agree.

None of the characters are given names, but the region is, acting as a sort of fourth character.

“I was about seventeen,” the narrator says, “and made lonely and strange by that Pacific Northwest of so many years ago, that dark, rainy land of 1952. I’m thirty-one now and I still can’t figure out what I meant by living the way I did in those days.”

Really the antagonist in this story is the region. Brautigan always said he was from the Pacific Northwest, but it was rarely a place on a map. It was something ominous and waiting, a past that would not die off, that followed him everywhere. It was huge, it was vague. It was a weather, it was a sawmill and a pond and unpaved streets and puddles, it was a “ragged toothache sky” and a sad trailer “with a cemetery-like chimney” and children who sit in gutters like “slum sparrows.” There’s a sense throughout Brautigan’s work that his metaphors and similes are reaching, that they’re trying too hard, grasping after an effect in desperation. Often they succeed, but just as often they fail. What interests me is their staunch physicality, the yoking of terms, one abstract, the other concrete, that won’t quite yield a just or decorous relation; they’re like a landscape that won’t give in to writing. Just breezing through some thoughts on the nature of metaphor provides a good way to understand Brautigan. If metaphor is meant to evoke new meanings — meanings not predetermined by either language or experience — then Brautigan’s frequent attempts and failures are a stab at liberation in an already decided world. If metaphor depends on an eye for resemblances, then Brautigan’s failures become fearful, a fear that nothing he knows resembles anything in the outside world, that everything is estranged and forever and obdurately strange. If metaphor is a transaction between words and things, then in Brautigan the deal is often torn up, the transaction called off.

Sometimes it seems as if his metaphors are trying to renew perception in a world that’s overbearingly familiar. This is why his metaphors are so often either sly or ham-fisted, either timid or rudely “pounding at the gates of American literature.” The place — as something physical, concrete — is resistant to new hopes. One of the terms in a typical Brautigan metaphor is always out of order; the human substance doesn’t connect with the inhuman material. The closest I can come to understanding this is that somehow time is removed from the idea of place so that everything is eternally the same. The place doesn’t change in either historical or seasonal time and gathers an oppressive weight because of it, always present, always an obstacle. The failed metaphors become a sign for this stern and inflexible relation. That people live in the region — unable to connect with it — is the real curiosity, the strange and baffling thing, and I think it’s fair to say of Brautigan and his work that the place, this haunting Pacific Northwest, is like a father, and the broken little sentences are a spurned child afraid to speak up. Many of his characters never grow up; time is taken away from them, just as it is removed from the landscape. In “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” the woman is “so fragile and firmly indebted. that she often looked like a child twelve years old.” Even the narrator is still seventeen, still slogging through the same wet streets, still living in the shack, unable to move forward in time — he can’t figure it out. It’s as if the land takes hold of the characters and won’t let go. And if metaphor is partly meant to resist paraphrasis and reduction, pitting itself against the death of language, then Brautigan’s failures make sense. I would say they are the soul of his writing, its chief draw. Failure is where his writing lives.