Before the Trout

What fed his imagination is anyone‘s guess: Not even Brautigan’s close friends knew much about his childhood. In the introduction to The Edna Webster Collection, Keith Abbott, a fellow poet and Brautigan‘s friend for 19 years, claims that ”I never heard him refer to any Northwest people by name -- not his sister, mother, father or stepfathers, not his girlfriends or teachers . . . All these were left without identification, existing as phantoms of a previous life.“ Abbott does recall Brautigan claiming to have met his father only twice, and he notes that references to Brautigan’s mother in his poetry are not kind. Brautigan‘s forgetting, Abbott recognized, was essential to his survival: ”His willpower, which was ferocious and constant (and which he probably considered his only true friend, along with his imagination), banished any memories in order for him to continue as an artist.“ That faith in the power of the mind to slay all dragons was probably the closest he ever came to a philosophy of life: The whimsical dramas of both Willard and The Hawkline Monster hinge not on tangible evils, but imaginings or perceptions of evil. Demons are demolished not by violence, but by acts of will. They prevail only because humans become resigned to let them.

This battle is, in many ways, typical of the one against mental illness, which Brautigan fought most of his life, and succumbed to at least twice. As a young man, according to Keith Abbott, he showed his poems to a girlfriend who criticized them, and got himself committed to the Oregon state asylum. (The Edna Webster Collection contains two prose pieces Brautigan wrote about his asylum stay, ”A Love Letter From State Insane Asylum“ and ”I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye,“ which consists of 83 chapters of one line each.) Then, in 1984, after his literary career had risen to extraordinary heights and fallen -- a natural course of events that might have seemed to him precipitous -- Brautigan confined himself to his house in Bolinas, got drunk and shot himself with a .44-caliber revolver. He was 49, and he had ceased writing much about romance. His last book, So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, marked the first time in 10 novels, nine volumes of poetry and one collection of short stories that he broke through the safe carapace of amnesia to write about what his life was like in Oregon. Having given up on love, he was probably killed by the remembering.