Before the Trout

In his 27-year career as a poet and novelist, Richard Brautigan would write, in his spare, hallucinatory way, about trout fishing and abortions, men who go criminal after losing their bowling trophies, and monsters that get turned into blue diamonds. But in 1955, at the age of 21, Brautigan mused relentlessly, almost exclusively, about love. He wrote about its joys (”Igallopedlikeanenchanted horseinto love“); he fashioned brutal metaphors for its discontents (”Love is cruelerthan the knifeof a manwho slitthe throatsof four children“). He wrote melodramatic laments to love gone bad and quirky odes to desirable women (”A nightmare came to me . . . wearing a bikinibathing suit.Dig thatsexy horror!“). But even in love, Brautigan tempered his sentiments with self-mockery -- he may have been young, but he was no love’s fool: Ever present in his yearnings is an awareness that the flutterings of the heart, while irresistible poet-fodder, make trivial stuff for the serious writer: ”Love is a white lambstanding in soft spring rain and eating baby grass,“ he opined in ”Love is . . .“ ”Love is a god-damn poet writing‘Love is . . .’“

This glimpse into Brautigan‘s beginnings comes from The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, a recently published sampling of the pages Brautigan left with the mother of his first girlfriend before ditching Eugene, Oregon, for the Beat life of San Francisco. Edna Webster waited 35 years before alerting rare-book collector James P. Musser to the manuscripts, which gave Brautigan’s work just enough time to settle into a cyclical rhythm of cultish rediscovery, and deserve the literary going-over a collection like this inspires. Grown-ups tend to forget him, but college students continually unearth the epigrammatic prose of In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fishing in America and claim the author as their own -- a dead poet cooler than Kerouac and less famous than Ginsberg who embodies both the absurdity and melancholy that defines life as one segues into adulthood. Trout Fishing has sold 3 million copies since its 1967 publication, and Brautigan‘s collected works are now available in trilogy from by Houghton Mifflin. The Edna Webster Collection arrived right on schedule.

These early poems reveal the young Brautigan-in-formation tinkering with metaphor and trying on styles -- a Beat knockoff here, a stab at Hemingway there. But they also reveal that Brautigan’s peculiar comic collision of literary allusion, morbid drama and colloquial speech was already his own. He resorted to melodrama often, but rarely without a tinge of silliness: ”I cannot say to the one I love, ‘Besides being the world’s greatest unknown writer, I play a fair game of kick the can,‘“ he writes in a prose poem dedicated to Webster. ”I cannot say to the one I love, ’Want to go to a cave and eat some popcorn, or would you like to saddle up a couple of goldfish and swim to Alaska?‘ . . . Because Grace is full of embalming fluid.“ It’s hard to think of another poet, Beat or otherwise, who would have described such fantastical heartbreak and, within the same year, penned a nine-line paean to a beautiful woman‘s fart (”incongruity“).

Like so much work by young writers who later became famous, this collection sometimes reads exactly like what it is: writing practice. Subject matter sketched out here would resurface in more polished form: In ”maybe this is the way the world will end,“ for instance, a woman kills her husband with an ax because ”he made me so mad“; a decade later, in a single-paragraph story titled ”The Scarlatti Tilt“ included in Revenge of the Lawn, a woman shoots her boyfriend for playing the violin badly in a studio apartment. There is foreshadowing of Brautigan’s style here, too: A conscientious and determined poet, he played tirelessly at painting with words, numbering and labeling small poems as ”photographs,“ ”still lifes“ or ”family portraits.“ The imagery is often forced (”photograph 8: Eternitypicking itsteethwith the crossthat Jesuswas crucified on“), but occasionally he hit upon a giddily dreamlike, Dali-esque combination of the mundane and ridiculous, as in ”still life 1: A setof miniature falseteethsittingon the seatof a redtricycle,“ or ”photograph 6: A butterflytakinga shit.“ It‘s possible, here, to observe the inner workings of a young writer struggling to translate the visual and aural worlds into a written one without any trace of cliche or artifice. At the same time, Brautigan was figuring out how to elevate, in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, everyday observations to poetic heights:

Cats

I love cats.

Why do I love cats?

I don’t know exactly,

but I think it is for the same reason

that I love the dawn,

and the sunrise,

and

the coming down of rain. continued a

Brautigan‘s work became more varied and complex over the years, but it always centered on surreal renderings of ordinary things, and it always retained a wide-eyed bewilderment at both the beauty and sadness of life. He managed to break with his vignette style long enough to turn out whole narratives, including two endearing mysteries, Willard and His Bowling Trophies and The Hawkline Monster, shape-shifting dream stories of lovable outlaws. His most inspired lines, however, are the snippets of imagery and noise that grew out of his early experiments: semen collecting on a dead fish in Trout Fishing; a Hawkline monster that sounds like ”the combination of water being poured into a glass, a dog barking and the muttering of a drunk parrot.“ Brautigan cultivated an ability to invoke visions that would resonate with nothing but their own comic weirdness and confusion of senses: ”A seagull flew over us,“ he wrote in a vignette near the end of his 1964 novel A Confederate General From Big Sur, ”its voice running with the light, its voice passing historically through songs of gentle color. We closed our eyes and the bird’s shadow was in our ears.“