Hooked

In 1971, I was living in a road in North London that doesn’t exist now and remember spending a huge part of my student grant on two pairs of hand-made red leather boots, one for each of my children, then aged 4 and 5, and a pair of sky-blue clogs for myself, believing that, if nothing else, you had to take care of your feet. My neighbours referred to me as ‘that hippy’ but they were wrong. Hippies travelled, and lay under the stars in distant lands, smoking dope. I had no money for travel and, in any case, dope didn’t agree with me. Instead, while the children slept, I read or painted miniature Rothkoesque watercolours and wallpapered my rooms with squares of coloured sugar paper so that we seemed to be living inside a huge quilt.

There was an anarchist bookshop on the corner with a printing press in the back room. The bookshop guys ran a food co-op and everyone in the road belonged. Those who could drive took it in turns to go to Covent Garden once a week, and those who couldn’t took it in turns to weigh out and bag up the produce, but one night the police, who’d been watching the bookshop from a café on the other side of the road, pounced. It turned out that the books were stolen from a warehouse on the North Circular Road. Just hours before the raid, the owner of the bookshop had left his passport hidden under my mattress and fled to Blackburn. I carried on reading, only now selecting books from the library on the High Road. Then a parcel arrived from San Francisco. It contained a paperback with a strange title – Trout Fishing in America – plus a brief note from my brother: ‘Thought you might like this.’ My brother was a hippy. He’d written to me once, describing a trip from New York to San Francisco riding on top of a van, clinging on all the way, stoned and without luggage. I looked at the photo on the cover of the book and it was as if my brother had stepped down off the van roof and into my hallway, a tall man in blue jeans, cowboy boots, waistcoat, paisley shirt, drooping moustache, shoulder-length blond hair and a big soft felt hat. Sitting elegantly beside him on a little stool was a bucktoothed woman with granny glasses, a headband and a navy surplus jacket buttoned up to the neck (brass buttons). Behind them loomed a statue of Benjamin Franklin, the one in San Francisco’s Washington Square. Richard Brautigan liked to put a photo of himself on his book jackets. In this one, he looked as if he was pleased to be who he was and I assumed that the seated woman was his wife, referred to in the book as ‘the woman I traveled with’. This was a mistake. The woman is Michaela Clarke Legrand, his ‘muse’ at the time of publication in 1967. The book was actually written in 1961 when Brautigan spent the summer camping with his wife Virginia and baby daughter Ianthe in Idaho’s Stanley basin. There really were trout streams and Richard Brautigan really did go fishing, but when I opened the book, not at the beginning, but at random, which seemed the only way to tackle such a book, this is what I read:

The next morning I got up early and made my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillean hook. I left the place and walked down to a different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill. But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was. The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing. Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself.

I had entered a place of imaginative collisions, of surreal wordplay and free association, where Trout Fishing in America is not just an activity and the title of a book, but also the name of a country, a person and a hotel. Brautigan uses it as a metaphor for creativity and as a symbol of the American pastoral ideal, while the real countryside is being trampled over by capitalist conglomerates, a place of degradation and social decay. The book provides a space where the ideal still breathes, a space where the surreal and the whimsical rise up like midges along the banks and dance together. I sat down in my armchair and began to read. I went on reading all day until I had finished the book and then, if I hadn’t needed to collect my children from school, I would certainly have read it again. My brother had sent me a world that I longed to inhabit and Brautigan showed me that I could. Perhaps I already did. After all if America was a state of mind then why not London? Fishing, which I had previously associated with old men hunched by the stultifying reaches of the River Lea while the bones of countless drowned cats floated quietly by, was now both real and unreal, and literature, as I understood it, was well and truly shaken up. The authors I favoured then – Alain-Fournier, Olive Schreiner, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Camus – seemed suddenly staid. Brautigan’s book contains recipes for making walnut catsup ‘as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet and Trout Fishing in America had Maria Callas for a girlfriend and they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles’. There are descriptions of water bugs playing cards near a window, the smell of non-existent sheep, lists of fishing trips undertaken and trout lost, with dates and numbers. There are epitaphs, inscriptions, poems, letters, references to other texts, for example a book called The Naked Communist written by an ex-police chief of Salt Lake City. And the last word in the book is mayonaise, misspelt, appearing in a postscript to a letter of condolence, as in: ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise.’ In the penultimate chapter he writes, ‘Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.’ Brautigan was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington, and brought up in poverty by his mother. Around 1955, after (allegedly) throwing a rock through the window of a police station, he was committed to Oregon State Hospital – the very same hospital that Ken Kesey used as a setting for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He explained that he wanted to go to jail because he needed to eat but he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and given electric shock therapy. After release from hospital, he moved to San Francisco and became a well-known figure on the beat scene, publishing poems, giving readings at psychedelic rock concerts, helping to produce underground newspapers, a tall spidery figure with an odd stooping pose due to an abnormal curvature of the spine. ‘I love writing poetry,’ he wrote, ‘but it’s taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other. I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn’t write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady.’ And what sentences he wrote, sentences that fell into short paragraph-style chapters that grew into books that resisted labels, never quite novels as we knew them then, or even short-story collections. Perhaps the phrase ‘short prose fiction’ should have been coined for Brautigan. His was the voice of the counter-culture, neither beat nor hippy, but somewhere in between, dispensing with plot, character development and conflict, sticking instead to an off-beat colloquial style sprinkled with ‘facts’ and a comic sensibility that allowed him to build his meandering metaphors into dazzling structures. Trout Fishing made him rich and famous, and was translated into twenty languages. I love the sound of these other titles – Forellenfischen in Amerika (German), La pescuit de pastravi in America (Romanian), Amerika no masu tsuri (Japanese); the sound of his words swimming in new streams ‘as if they were a precious and intelligent metal . . . Maybe trout steel.’ As the Seventies passed and the Eighties arrived, he fell out of favour with critics and the public. He began to drink more and more heavily, mostly whiskey, and developed an obsession with guns, reportedly shooting a hole through a book of conceptual criticism called In the Singer’s Temple by Jack Hicks, a book in which Brautigan is described as ‘slight, arch and almost unbearably naïve’. ‘I don’t use drugs,’ Brautigan said. ‘They’re illegal. I use alcohol because I know where it’s coming from.’ In 1984, he committed suicide, shooting himself with a .44 magnum in a house he owned in Bolinas, California. Brautigan may have been a womanizing drunk who played with guns and who once fished ‘for carp with salmon eggs among flecks of toilet paper where the sewer went into the river in Tacoma’, but he also fished with words. Here he is describing one of his characters, a child whose description has stayed with me from the moment I first came across him, the Kool-Aid Wino.

You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it. He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

As I read this, curled up on my chair while the children were at school, I had no idea what Kool-Aid was, but it didn’t matter. I imagined a lemony sherbet drink. Rereading the words recently, I thought: purple, tasting of blackcurrant. Maybe Kool-Aid comes in different flavours. Maybe it’s no longer available. Maybe there never was such a drink. So, if anyone wants to know about the Sixties and counter-culture America, or wants to relive those times, when magic was still surprising, intimate, understated and not the empty Hollywood spectacle it is today, then Brautigan is your man, iconoclastic, perverse, joyful, with an altogether contemporary feeling for the environment, for treating nature with respect and more than that, with love.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2006