Keith K. Abbott - Downstream from Trout Fishing in America

A Memoir of

Richard Brautigan

Keith Abbott

Text copyright 1989, 2009 by Keith Abbott.

Photo Credits: Front cover courtesy The Bancroft Library, Berkeley.

Design and Typography: duncan b. barlow

Cover Design: Monika Edgar

Photo Credits: Front cover courtesy of The Bancroft Library. Back cover Brautigan photo copyright by Erik Weber. All photographs pp. 154167 are copyright Erik Weber.

Author Photo: Lani Abbott

Photo Editing: Debra Messenger

Astrophil Press

2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abbott, Keith, 1944

Downstream from Trout Fishing in America:

a memoir of Richard Brautigan / by Keith Abbott

ISBN 978-0-9822252-2-6 : $15.95

Ebook ISBN 978-0-9822252-6-4

1. Brautigan, Richard-Biography 2. Abbott, Keith, 1944 Friends and associates.

3. Authors, American20th centuryBiography

1. Title. II. Title: Downstream from Trout Fishing in America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009931593

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

http://www.astrophilpress.com

This book is dedicated to all those things that disappear in their becoming.

Its strange how the simple things in life go on, while we become difficult.

Richard Brautigan, The Abortion

Fame falls like a dead hand on an authors shoulder and it is well for him when it falls only in later life.

Graham Greene, The Young Dickens

October 26, 1984, I was moving furniture in a San Francisco loft in preparation for rehearsals of a play of mine that evening when my wife Lani telephoned. She told me Richard Brautigan had been found in his house in Bolinas, apparently dead for many days. Jack Shoemaker, a North Point Press editor, called to alert me that a local reporter was breaking the news of Brautigans death to his friends and then harvesting quotes. He warned that she was asking rather nasty and personal questions and several people had been badgered. Brautigans death was considered sensational. Shoemaker didnt know why, only that Brautigan had died alone.

While I waited for the cast members, I called friends of Brautigan but I couldnt contact anyone. When the director arrived I turned over the rehearsal to him and drove to North Beach hoping to find someone who knew more about what happened. My first thought was that Richard had died in an accident, probably due to his drinking. In North Beach, I ran into Tony Dingman. A close friend of Brautigan over the years, Tony was in shock and had little information to add. As we went around North Beach, those who had seen Brautigan recently could only repeat that he had been holed up in Bolinas for most of the summer, seeing few visitors. My sense of Richards recent isolation increased as his acquaintances seemed incapable of saying what he was doing in Bolinas, what his state of mind was, or even if he had been in town. Almost everyone was drinking, and my sense was that they had been fried even before the news of Brautigans death. Sad as his fate was, this aura of alcoholic oblivion surrounding his recent past depressed me.

When I got home, the late news on television spoke of a gunshot wound. I had a bad time with that. Only after Lani talked to me for a few hours was I able to face that Richard had committed suicide.

In the following days, the local newspapers ran a string of sensational items on Brautigan, calling him the literary celebrity of the hippie era. Almost all of the people quoted were not in San Francisco, but in Montana, Los Angeles or New York. A strange, shadowy sense crept over me that the local memory of Brautigan had been wiped clean. His reputation as a loner was repeated. A feeling was reinforced that if this man ever had friends, they had deserted him and let him die alone. In the public press, his past as a California literary figure seemed to have been swept downstream and smashed, in the same deadly manner as his recent months had been fragged in the minds of his North Beach drinking buddies.

On the 31st of October, a wake for Brautigan was held at Enricos cafe in North Beach. For me, the gathering pulled together a sense of his life. The range of people was wide and various, from movie directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Phil Kaufman, to other writers and artists, among them Jeremy Larner, Curt Gentry, Bruce Conner and Don Carpenter, and to his friends including some of his old Haight-Ashbury cronies, such as ecologist Peter Berg. I kept having a thought, one that others voiced, too, Wouldnt it be great if Richard were here. Hed really love this.

With this collective idea came the undercurrent of guilt we all shared. Brautigans good friend, the painter Marcia Clay, articulated it so well. What everybody keeps saying is why didnt we do something? But what people forget is that they did make attempts. Plenty tried to help him, and none of us could.

Early in 1985, when the national magazines Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair published their accounts of Brautigans life, the sensational aspects were trumpeted. In the Rolling Stone piece, bold headlines spoke of a youthful stay in a mental hospital and alleged S&M bondage. The ghastly story of his body lying for weeks in his Bolinas house was punched up along with his last ugly days playing the alcoholic geek in California bars. What made Brautigans writing unique, and for a time so amazingly popular, was glossed over. His early persona of the trendy California author also took the focus, but this time around the flowerchild image was cut with a heavy dose of 80s cynicism, as if personal eccentricity were always perversely nasty and created from the pressure of something inevitably sordid.

Those accounts shortchanged the Richard Brautigan I knew, who was generous to a fault at times and a man who liked to be kind to people. I missed the dedicated author of his best novels, too, the man who worked to get the simplicity and clarity he loved.

Shortly after these lurid reports, a much more positive picture emerged when a celebration of his writing was broadcast on National Public Radio. This was devoted to reviews with his readers, not Brautigans critics or ex-friends. One fan told how, as a student, he and his friends used phrases from Trout Fishing In America , such as Kool-Aid Wino, for passwords into private worlds not acknowledged in their public life. Richards best writing radiated that joyous sense of being in on a secret, and this was strongly present in his life, too. It is with this notionof recovering a secret pastwhich I wrote this memoir of Brautigan during the eighteen years we knew each other.

Keith Abbott

O NE

In 1965, I came from Seattle to live in Monterey. There I made friends with Price Dunn, the model for Lee Mellon, free-spirited hero of Richards first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur. Price never talked about his role in the novel, but spoke of Richard from time to time, usually in general terms, vaguely hinting about his eccentric life. Prices comments provoked my interest. The last time Richard dropped in on Price in Monterey, Id been in town, but missed his visit. Their freefall through the New Monterey bars still had the locals talking. As much as Brautigans poetry and novel had interested me, what really intrigued me was if Price regarded someone as an eccentric, then he must be odd, because Price was the most charming, erratic, poetic, haphazard and generous person Id ever met.