Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. A Memoir of Richard Brautigan by Keith Abbott

Abstract

Reviews 287 In a first-rate literary biography based on extensive research and thirtyseven interviews, Voss tells how Inge’s childhood, his years as a teacher, and his experiences as a drama critic formed the donnée from which he created his successes. “All of his work,” Voss says, “is about loss . . .” (272) ; and Inge wrote so knowingly about loss because he had experienced it himself. A closet homosexual and an alcoholic, he sought help in psychoanalysis; but although therapy helped him to continue writing, it apparently did not enable him to accept himself. Not only does Voss sensitively detail Inge’s friendships with notables such as Tennessee Williams, but he also perceptively discusses Inge’s plays, novels, and films and convincingly refutes Inge’s harshest critics. Only one of Voss’s contentions (and that a minor one) seems dubious: that “. . . William Inge will always be legitimately known as America’s first authentic midwestern playwright...” (274). Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) preceded Inge (1913-1973) ; and their hometowns lie within a hundred miles ofeach other. Although Riggs did not achieve repeated Broadway success, his life resembles Inge’s in many other respects; and both Inge and Riggs were primarily playwrights of family conflict. Such conflict is, of course, universal; but in the American West its causes are often the land and the dreams inspired by the land. Voss’s study of Inge’s life and work should prove to be an indispensable aid to understanding an important playwright who dramatized family conflict in the West. JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. A Memoir of Richard Brautigan. By Keith Abbott. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1989. 174 pages, $18.95.) Downstream from Troutfshing in America is a moving book about an extraordinary guy whose fame became his cross. A little slow at the beginning when Abbott tries to capture the light-hearted Brautigan of the years just before fame hit, Downstream begins to catch the reader’s interest with the story of Richard’s life as an artist following publication and holds it through the recounting of his suicide in October, 1984. At the end of the book, Abbott critiques Brautigan’s work, arguing that imagination worked against reality in his style and therefore created the tension of the work. I take exception to this view. The vitality in Brautigan’s books comes from an author-narrator who makes believe and uses his imagina­ tion to transform reality in the action of the books, and this iswhat ischarming. The language, though a perfect medium for the vision, is secondary to the vision, which is that of cast-off drifters who don’t fit into society and have a wonderful time rebelling. These are comic characters who throw the whole game of surviving up, have a good time and even win in the end, with the tools of their active imaginations. That is why Brautigan’s characters, who include the narrator, appealed to the mainly non-intellectual, rebellious hippy 288 Western American Literature social movement, the love generation, which did not believe in evil. His char­ acters were personifications of their ideals. When the conservative Republican administration took over in 1968, the young and everybody else had to worry about earning a living and the days of idealism were soon over. Then Brautigan lost his audience, which he would have lost anyway as they matured. He didn’t appeal to the new young of the seventies, the get-ahead me generation in the way he had to the idealistic young of the sixties. In his own life, Brautigan lost the ability to love by wanting to remain the personification of his own fictional characters, madcap adolescents who never grew up, wanting always to remain the center of attention like children —a philosophy which worked fine on the pages ofhis books but not in real life. Money spoiled Richard Brautigan by giving him the chance to pretend he could live without really giving, really being part of the economic structure. Showing how a gifted young poet is destroyed when he is cut off from real life by the very success he had sought, Downstream is an important book for...