Richard Brautigan
Richard Gary Brautigan nació en Tacoma, Estados Unidos, el 30 de enero de 1935. Su padre nunca lo reconoció y, cuando tenía nueve años, su madre los abandonó a él y a su hermana en la habitación de un hotel en Great Falls, Montana. Pasaron muchas horas esperando a que volviese, hasta que el cocinero del establecimiento decidió acogerlos. Alguien ha dicho que su cerebro fue el único juguete que tuvo. A los veinte años fue recluido en un hospital para enfermos mentales por arrojar una piedra contra una comisaría. Lo había hecho para que lo arrestasen y le diesen de comer, pero en el hospital acabaron diagnosticándole paranoia, esquizofrenia y depresión. En sus propias palabras, allí recibió «suficientes electroshocks para iluminar un pueblo». En ese mismo hospital se filmaría más adelante Alguien voló sobre el nido del cuco.
Decidió partir a San Francisco y dedicarse a escribir poesía. Completó diez novelas, nueve poemarios y numerosos cuentos, que para algunos estaban entre lo mejor de su tiempo. Al comienzo, sin embargo, le resultó difícil publicar. (La Richard Brautigan Library honra su memoria en Vermont. En los noventa, ésta aceptaba manuscritos rechazados por las editoriales siempre y cuando los autores pagasen la encuadernación. La idea se tomó de su novela The Abortion, que en gran parte transcurre en una biblioteca de obras inéditas.) En 1964 se publicó A Confederate General from Big Sur. Fue un clamoroso fracaso. En el otoño de 1966, Brautigan se divertía con la idea de ser un autor de culto en Berkeley, donde el libro funcionó bien en la sección de saldos de una librería emblemática. A pesar de los fracasos y reveses, perseveró con sus manuscritos. Y finalmente alcanzó: en 1967 se publica La pesca de la trucha en América, éxito instantáneo de crítica y público. Había escrito el libro en 1961, durante un viaje de acampada que realizó en compañía de su mujer y su hija, y en el que llevaba una máquina de escribir y una mesita plegable. Era, pues, su primera novela, aunque fue la segunda en publicarse.
Con ella obtuvo gran fama internacional y, cómo no, abonó el terreno para su caída. Brautigan viajó mucho, compró propiedades, se dio la vida que no había tenido hasta entonces. Pero no supo llevar bien el peso de la fama. Las borracheras, la seducción de sus seguidores incondicionales y las mujeres, de repente tan disponibles (posó con algunas de ellas para las cubiertas de sus libros, e hizo que se incluyera su número de teléfono en algunas de las ediciones), se cobraron un precio alto.
Aunque ciertos escritores aplaudieron el éxito del patito feo convertido en estrella y los medios lo ubicaron en el firmamento de la contracultura al lado de Dylan, Ginsberg o Timothy Leary, la crítica valoró negativamente sus libros posteriores, y debido a su escritura cada vez más literaria, sus lectores empezaron a dejar de leerlo. Los sesenta dieron paso a los setenta. Jerry Rubin llegó a Wall Street, Abbie Hoffman se convirtió en un fugitivo, muchos de los chicos del flower power se pasaron al yuppismo y Brautigan se hundió en el declive, transformándose en el símbolo triste de una época convulsa. Y pasada. La visión condescendiente lo convierte en víctima de la contracultura.
Para otros, sin embargo, sencillamente fue un héroe. Desde el punto de vista de la escritura, hay quienes siguen considerándolo inclasificable. Estados Unidos lo había olvidado ya cuando, el 24 de octubre de 1984, se halló su cuerpo cubierto de gusanos. Varias semanas antes, no se sabe con exactitud cuándo, se había pegado un tiro. Junto a su cuerpo, el arma y una botella de licor.
Paradójicamente, los lectores del mundo entero que siguen descubriéndolo son legión. No ha hecho falta que siguiera escribiendo, aunque al recordarlo, al leerlo, se le eche tanto en falta. Sólo que, en palabras de Vonnegut, «como ha ocurrido con tantos otros buenos escritores, finalmente pudo con él ese desequilibrio químico que llamamos depresión, y que cumple su labor mortal sin que importe lo que esté ocurriendo en la vida amorosa del que lo padece, sin que importen sus aventuras, buenas o malas, en el Mercado sin corazón».
(http://www.blackiebooks.org/autor/richard-brautigan/9)
Richard Gary Brautigan (1935-1984) was an American writer popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s and is often noted for using humor and emotion to propel a unique vision of hope and imagination throughout his body of work which includes ten books of poetry, eleven novels, one collection of shortstories, and miscellaneous non-fiction pieces. His easy-to-read yet idiosyncratic prose style is seen as the best characterization of the cultural electricity prevalent in San Francisco, Brautigan's home, during the ebbing of the Beat Generation and the emergence of the counterculture movement. Brautigan's best-known works include his novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967), his collection of poetry, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), and his collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn (1971).
Born in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan grew up in Washington and Oregon during the bleakness of the Great Depression and World War II. He moved to San Francisco in 1956, determined to be a writer, and indeed rose to international prominence. Brautigan died by suicide in late September 1984.
Brautigan's work includes eleven novels, ten poetry collections, and one collection of short stories, as well as four volumes of collected work, several nonfiction works, and a record album of spoken voice recordings.
Throughout all is work, Brautigan is noted for his detached, anonymous first person point of view, his idiosyncratic, autobiographical, quirky, yet easy-to-read prose style and episodic narrative structure full of unconventional but vivid images powered by imagination, strange and detailed observational metaphors, humor, and satire, all presented in a seemingly simplistic, childlike manner.
Today, writers, readers, artists, and musicians find inspiration in the works of Richard Brautigan. This interest is international, with his works translated into more than twenty languages. There is also a large collector and rare book market for Brautigan's long out-of-print books, as well as specialty publications of his work.
Richard Brautigan grew up in the Pacific Northwest, the same richly wooded territory that later produced the talents of David Lynch, Matt Groening and Kurt Cobain. Brautigan, who fits like a glove into the region's pantheon of weird brilliance, was born on January 30, 1935 in Tacoma, Washington.
His mother moved the family to a shack in Eugene, Oregon, where Brautigan spent his childhood. The utter poverty of his "white-trash" upbringing seems to have affected him deeply. Many who knew him later in life noticed that he he never spoke the names of any family members or anybody else he knew as a child.
Hunger was a constant presence as he grew up. At the age of 20 he was arrested for throwing a rock through a window inside a police station. He explained that he wanted to go to jail so he could eat. Instead he was sent to Oregon State Hospital, coincidentally the same hospital where the movie version of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest would later be filmed. Brautigan was treated with electroshock therapy in this hospital.
He moved to San Francisco, married a woman named Virginia Adler in 1957, and managed to publish a slim book of poetry, Lay The Marble Tea, in 1959. Their daughter, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, was born in 1960. The marriage broke up soon after. Brautigan wrote intensely during these years, cultivating friendships with Beat writers and other San Francisco-based poets. His first novel, A Confederate General in Big Sur, was published in 1965.
He became famous for his 1967 classic, "Trout Fishing In America", a deeply odd book that is guaranteed to surprise anybody who reads it today. (For some thoughts on the significance of trout in Brautigan's work, click here).
He become an integral part of the mid-60's San Francisco scene, reading poetry at psychedelic rock concerts and helping to produce underground newspapers with activist groups like the Diggers. He had a great hippie look, with long blond hair and thoughtful granny glasses. His back was oddly bent due to the back condition known as scoliosis.
Some writers evolve their voices over time, but Brautigan established one signature style that barely wavered at any point during his career. His books usually featured stark black and white cover photos of hippies in victorian clothing (usually Brautigan with one or more of his girlfriends) gazing ironically back at the camera. His writing was as minimalistic as these photos.
His prose would sometimes lurch fowards in wacky, surreal anecdotes, or in wide-ranging observations and similes that crashed into each other with jarring incongruity. Other times, his prose was simple and country-plain. He liked to stitch novels together out of short, paragraph-length chapters that slipped back and forth between sudden expressions of emotional complexity and remarkably plain depictions of everyday life. Here is a sentence from a later Brautigan book showing how he would typically introduce a character:
When I first met Vida she had been born inside the wrong body and was barely able to look at people, wanting to crawl off and hide from the thing that she was contained within.
Certain types of objects -- planks, trouts, rivers -- popped up repeatedly in his writings. His stories were also full of strange transformations: nouns would become verbs, people would become ideas, book titles would become characters.(...)
(http://www.litkicks.com/RichardBrautigan)
The Galilee Hitchhiker, Part I
Baudelaire was
driving a Model A
across Galilee.
He picked up a
hitch-hiker named
Jesus who had
been standing among
a school of fish
feeding them
pieces of bread.
"Where are you
going?" asked
Jesus, getting
into the front
seat.
"Anywhere, anywhere
out of this world!"
shouted
Baudelaire.
"I'll go with you
as far as
Golgotha,"
said Jesus.
"I have a
concession
at the carnival
there, and
I must be
late."
The 12.000.000
I’m depressed,
haunted by melancholy
that does not have a reflection
aaaanor cast a shadow.
12,000,000 people live here in Tokyo.
I know I’m not alone.
Others must feel the way I do.
TOKIO / 11 de Junio de 1976
Tengo los cinco poemas
que he escrito esta mañana
en un cuaderno
en el mismo bolsillo donde
llevo mi pasaporte. Son
la misma cosa.
Brautigan Fishing In The Last Best Place
The poet and writer Richard Brautigan first came to Paradise Valley in the year 1973.
He came here to eat hotcakes, and dream his dreams about Japanese women’s feet, and ended-up buying himself a 40-acre ranch close to where Hemingway once liked to fish.
The ranch consisted of a large 2-story house, a log-cabin built shortly after the Civil War and a big ole red barn where Brautigan kept his typewriter.
There was an empty chicken coop, and lots of thistles.
Not to mention several abandoned automobiles, which often served him as makeshift day-beds.
Brautigan lost himself a lot of friends whilst in Paradise Valley.
For those were the years which he spent hanging-out with the movie-stars.
The years in which he began to drink a little too much a little too often.
But his was not a rapid freefall into bitter alcoholism and abject paranoia.
And this is not the home in which he eventually killed himself.
Brautigan lived a looney-tune life of self-imposed semi-isolation out on the ranch.
When he was depressed, he liked to read a biography of William Faulkner.
When he got bored, he liked to sit at the kitchen table with his point-22 calibre rifle, and shoot-up telephones, televisions, bath-tubs, pinball-machines, kitchen clocks and any other inanimate objects that he could find.
The poet Aeschylus died when an eagle accidentally dropped a tortoise upon his head. Brautigan was not so lucky.
He had to take matters into his own hands. Much like Sylvia Plath.
Though his choice of weapon was Smith & Wesson handgun borrowed from a Chinaman, rather than a kitchen oven.
On the day Brautigan left Paradise Valley for the last time, he presented his good friend, the author Thomas McGuane with a Japanese funeral urn wrapped-up in a blanket.
He told McGuane that he’d send instructions about exactly when the item would be needed.
If The Big Goof had lived, he would’ve been 75 years old this year.
As it was, his long-legged corpse was discovered in California on the evening of October the 26th, 1984.
It is speculated that his body may have lain undiscovered for as long as 6 weeks.
Legend has it, that the note he left behind contained the following three handwritten words; “Messy, isn't it".
(http://timplester.blogspot.com.es/search/label/Travel)
Now i live in this place:
it took my whole life to get here,
to get to this strange cabin.
(Ahora vivo en este lugar:
que tomó toda mi vida para llegar hasta aquí,
para llegar a esta extraña cabaña.)
richard brautigan
http://timplester.blogspot.com.es/search/label/Travel
http://www.blackiebooks.org/autor/richard-brautigan/9
http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com.es/2008_11_01_archive.html
http://mediafunhouse.blogspot.com.es/2010_07_01_archive.html
http://bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com/richard-brautigan-in-memoriam/richard-brautigan/haiku/
http://www.elplacerdelalectura.com/2010/05/la-pesca-de-la-trucha-en-america-richard-gary-brautigan.html
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