Gorgo's Stories about Richard Brautagan
Copyright © 2002 Greg Keeler
 

XXXII Right Up to My Ears

      I guess I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t avoid talking about Richard’s work any longer. I’ve been dreading this, and I would probably skip it completely if I hadn’t made him sort of a half-assed promise that I would. We had just finished rearranging the Harry Dean Stanton coffee table (the rotted side of an old wooden wagon box that Harry Dean Stanton had seen in the creek near Richard’s house and had made the mistake of saying it would make a good antique, so the Captain dredged it up, put a shiny brass label on it saying The Harry Dean Stanton Coffee Table and propped it in his front yard) and were sitting on the hood of a 1956 Ford Victoria (which two “boys from Texas” had abandoned to rot between his house and barn), examining the stars when Richard said,
      “I hope some young English professor will write a book about my work some day.”
     I leaned back on the hood of the Ford Victoria, which was still warm even though the sun had set almost an hour before, looked up at a particularly thick clump of stars, and said, “Me too.”
     If that’s not a half-assed promise, then what is. And this isn’t even a book, it’s just a chapter in a small book, lending even more to the half-assticity of the attempt. Anyway, here goes:
     To Richard, writing was like mining gold from the air or, yes, “loading mercury with a pitch fork.” Whether the ink was from the tip of his pen or from the ribbon of his typewriter, it came slowly, deliberately and miraculously, as if he couldn’t get over the fact that he could make letters, words and sentences out of practically nothing except what was in his head. For him, even writing a check was like some arduous process where his squiggly little signature was squeezed out through a deeply mysterious alchemy. And he would clean his typewriter and replace its ribbon as if it were a delicate tool which facilitated the flow of information between parallel universes.
     That’s not to say he wasn’t practical about it. Once over smoked whitefish in my T.V. room, he told me that if it weren’t for his excellent high school English teacher, he never would have known how important grammar and punctuation are. He said he still had his high school writing text book and he always wrote with a copy of Strunk and White beside him.
He spoke in horror of a time when a small press published an expensive hand-made book of his poetry and left an it’s where an its should have been.
     When I knew him, Richard trusted some of his friends more than he trusted professional agents and editors when it came to revising his manuscripts. He made some major textual changes and even changed the title of his posthumous novel, An Unfortunate Woman, after Becky Fonda read it and made appropriate suggestions. I’m glad he let her have her way; otherwise, the novel might have been called Investigating Moods. To express his gratefulness to Becky and Marion for their help on So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, he dedicated the novel to them under their maiden names.
     To me, Richard’s work is defenseless. I told him this shortly after we met and he looked at me over his spectacles as if he were examining a dead bug. I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, so I proceeded to compare his work to a big bunny. The bunny just sits or hops around as bunnies do, but it is a perfect bunny. It doesn’t try to be a tiger or a kangaroo or a swan because it knows what it is: a bunny--not Just a bunny, but Especially a bunny.
     Sometimes a critic will come along and say something like, “Hey, this is just a bunny!” or “What the hell is a bunny doing HERE!” or “What the fuck kind of cutting horse is THIS!” and give the bunny a good, hard kick. The interesting thing is that the bunny doesn’t change because of this. It just goes right on hopping miraculously across the page, reinventing its bunniness every step of the way.
     After I said something like this, Richard removed his spectacles and suggested that it might be a good time for a drink, during which he told me that one reader had been so offended by “The Pill Versus the Spring Hill Mining Disaster” that he mailed it to the Captain with a turd squashed in it. “How,” asked Richard, “does that fit into your bunny comparison?”
Back then, when I’d travel to professional conferences like the Modern Language Association, I’d bring up the Captain’s work just to test the waters. Responses ranged from huffy dismissals to incensed rants. The latter frequently came from Southern scholars, I guess because they had some kind of allegiance to Formalism. I think, to a certain extent, Richard depended on this reaction because, without it, his parody would have existed in a vacuum.
     Assume that I am talking out my ass, but now, in the days of Minimalism, Feminism, Post-Formalism, Post-Modernism, Post-Humanism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Etc., scholars don’t seem nearly so put off by his work. Even while he was alive, Mark Chenier, the French Deconstructionist critic, saw his work worthy of a lengthy, esoteric discourse, (to which Richard responded, “The Frog’s got it right.”)
     I’d attribute this reevaluation to a tendency toward calling everything into question, especially the dwems (dead white European males) of the literary canon, where, to be good, in T.S. Eliot’s words, an “individual talent” has to have his (and I do mean HIS) roots in the “tradition” of Western Civilization. Though Richard knew a hell of a lot about this tradition, he also loathed any tendency of a writer to parade his knowledge of it before the reader. And, though fiction is necessarily based on pretending, he hated pretentiousness. You can see this in his prose. Whenever he catches himself being overtly symbolic or profound, the language turns back and beats itself over the head. Or, as he says in his poem, “Taking No Chances,” in June 30th, June 30th:

     Because it’s out of print and, to me, one of Richard’s more defenseless (therefore more representative) novels , I’ll use some examples from Willard and His Bowling Trophies.
     Richard loved Hemingway’s life and works and took up his model’s brief, stoic declarative sentences with no qualms. But as soon as that cadence started establishing a macho tone, Richard made sure the “grace under pressure” turned clumsy and inept. In the following, the Captain takes on Henry Miller’s sexual taboos and Hemingway’s masculine prowess with Bob, a man who feels compelled to gently bind and gag his wife, Constance, because he has warts up the end of his penis and can’t have normal sex. (Bob got the warts from Constance who got them from a one night stand with a lawyer during a bout of depression when her well-reviewed novel sold poorly.)

     So much for noble language. So much for manly, assertive sentences. So much for alluring perversity. So much for grace under pressure. So much for the formalist edict that the author remain separate from the work since the author himself had herpes, was concerned about book sales and was into bondage. No wonder the neo-feminists let this big bunny go limping away. No wonder the minimalists glom onto him like frayed adhesive tape. Every word here says “I surrender.”
     A few pages later, Bob reads Constance two fragments from The Greek Anthology while she lies before him, carefully and considerately (though clumsily) bound and gagged.

     So much for Classicism. So much for Romanticism. So much for tradition. So much for the individual talent. So much for Western Civilization.
     I sometimes think Richard would write books and, for that matter, hold conversations, just so he could repeat words that he liked, and these words were usually strategically placed to parody pomposity. Once he got on a favorite word, he would return to it much like he would return to his door to make sure it was locked.
     The Captain always liked the word beer, and, when we were at a bar, he delighted in talking about the beer I was drinking, especially if it was in a can.
     “Like that can of beer, big boy?
     “Sure do.”
     “You certainly seem to have command of that beer can. How much beer do you have left in that can?”
     “Not much.”
     “I think we’d better get the big boy another can of beer. I’d certainly hate to see that commanding beer grip without a can of beer in it.”
     In Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Richard describes one of the Logan brothers (three guys who are pursuing their stolen bowling trophies) totally in terms of his beer drinking.

     I could try to come up with a profound reason why Richard liked to say and write the word beer, but I’d really rather go find me a can of beer. 
      I think he wrote Willard and His Bowling Trophies so he could repeat those title words over and over. The combination is so dead-pan, so anti-Romantic.

     So much for the sacred and the profane.
     Richard also liked to use the word bowling in conversation whenever the opportunity presented itself--and sometimes when it didn’t. Once I took him fishing on the East Gallatin River near Bozeman and he dubbed it The Little Bowling Ball because it seems so proletarian with its smell of creosote and its rip rap of old car bodies and probably because it’s such a shabby (but trout-rich) excuse for a river among the mythic blue-ribbon streams of Montana. As we tried to drift our flies through sunken car windows, Richard went on and on about underwater bowling, bowling for trophy trout, bowling ball baptisms, etc., until, in his usual non-sequitur way, he spotted an abandoned log cabin across a field and clomped toward it shrieking, “Tara! I’ll never go hungry again!”
     Deflation and parody seemed to be in Richard’s blood. He took on many of the Great American Novel’s serious genres by turning quests and conflicts into absurd dilemmas. In Dreaming of Babylon, an archetypal gum-shoe detective spends most of his time trying to find bullets for his pistol. In The Hawkline Monster, two cowboys ride out of their Western and find themselves in a Gothic romance, replete with a basement full of chemicals and a couple of sinister sisters itching for a fuckfest. So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, a rendition of the great American Tragedy, sends the young protagonist to buy ammo for his .22 rifle rather than a hamburger, resulting in the death of his best friend and digressions on hamburgers that bear comparison to the discourse on whales and cetology in Moby Dick.
     Jesus, I’m starting to use words like replete, rendition, protagonist and discourse, and I haven’t even arrived at his poetry yet. Before you know it, I’ll be using words like indeed and foregrounding. I think I’ll get the hell out of this chapter while the gettin’s good.
 

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