Richard Brautigan's Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork and Criticism (Contemporary with its Publication)

I found this interesting.

The shift had already begun with regard to Brautigan, and with these reviews (scroll down to the end of the collection) you can see the tide turning from indulgence towards condescension and slight disgust.

The last novel, the rather prophetically/apotropaically-titled So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away, would go mostly unnoticed (or be summarily dismissed) by reviewers.

It's sad that even the back cover biographical copy on the repackaged editions of the novels (in three book value editions) alludes to Brautigan's ultimate literary eclipse: "Richard Brautigan was the author of ten novels, including a contemporary classic, Trout Fishing in America, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories. A literary idol of the 1960s and early 1970s, he committed suicide in 1984 at the age of forty-nine."

Granted, I suppose the "romance of suicide," and the evocation of fallen idols was too schmaltzy for the copy writer to resist. We're all making movies in our heads all the time, I guess.

And of course, there's the fact that when he did kill himself, nobody came calling for like a month or so.

But I guess he'd sent out the recluse vibes sufficiently by then, and people just naturally stayed away.

My octagenarian mother and her sister would edit all this down to simply: "Sad."

I think I'd agree with their editing.

Maybe the back cover copy should have just said: "Sad."

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away was actually a very good novel. It was quasi-autobiographical, and focused mainly on Brautigan's childhood, and how his life was shaped by the peripatetic whims of a depressed, single parent. He lived with his mother and siblings in severely straitened circumstances for most of his early life. He was an imaginative child more in tune with adults (especially quirky adults and loners) and this late book goes a long way towards explaining the sensibility of the mature Brautigan.

I think he was trying to write a book for young people, as much as for people trying to understand where the distinctly odd sensibility came from. It almost reads like a very well written novel that you'd find shelved in the Young Adult section of your local bookstore.

Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork is a much weaker poetry collection than his earlier books, which tended to have many goofy, charming poems (often love poems) and very few portentous poems. This collection is pretty much the inverse of that thematically.

It's still fun to read, and you can read the whole collection in about fifteen minutes. I never fail to time-trip when I read Brautigan. I wonder how people who weren't there in the seventies receive his poetry, if at all...


http://www.brautigan.net/mercury.html