Novelist Richard Brautigan's Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure!

by Stephen J. Gertz

The Bancroft Library.

The papers of 'Sixties Counterculture novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, who, in 1984, committed suicide at his desk with a gunshot to the head, rest in the The Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley.

Poet J.J. Phillips, while working in the manuscript division at the Bancroft, rough-sorted Brautigan's papers when the library acquired them. She had no idea that latex gloves and surgical mask would be appropriate to the task.

"I know you know that Brautigan blew his brains out, literally blew his mind," she wrote to poet, novelist and essayist Andrei Codrescu at Exquisite Corpse.  "What you might not be aware of is that he blew his brains out all over pages of his last manuscript... I handled them, archived them, ran my hands over his desiccated brain matter on numerous occasions, though at first I had no idea what I was touching because the Library said nothing and even denied what became all too apparent after I eliminated the other possibilities of what this strange stuff could be (I’m not unfamiliar with such things, and my eyes didn’t deceive me).

"The coroner’s report confirmed my suspicions. I see what’s on these pages as something of a completely different order than coffee stains, cigarette burns, the tomato seeds that Josephine Miles idly spat onto her mss., even drops of spittle, blood, semen, and the like.  With Brautigan, these are the actual physical remnants of brain tissue, blood splatters, and cerebral fluid of the very brain that gave birth to the ideas he had and the words he wrote, now creating its own narrative on top of those words; and of course that act insured he’d never think or write another word."

Thus inspired - or, more properly, driven - she wrote a poem about it. 

Brautigan's Brains
 
Brains blasted there
upon the page
gray matter gobbed
blood of the poet congealed
this grotesque palimpsest
last words concealed
beneath the blood
shattered neurons
glial cells unglued
glopped, splattered

A text of rage coagulated
there upon the page.

Axons impel thought to take
that fatal fiery leap
across synapse into act
fiction into fact.

Atoms smash against the skull
the neural net tattered warp and woof
the brain that strings the words extruded
globbed, fragmented, spattered
last words occluded by the final proof

The text of rage coagulated
there upon the page.

It will come as no surprise to those who knew him that the late Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA was in the middle of all this.

"Peter sold the papers to TBL, and even he was a bit dodgy when I asked him about it." she wrote to Booktryst. "When Peter sold the typescript, he said he was going to make TBL buy one whether they wanted to or not." (Pure Peter).

He may have been dodgy then but it didn't prevent Peter Howard from later validating the story by literally putting his imprimatur on it.

"Some years ago," Phillips told me, "Peter sold a limited edition signed typescript of this poem [ten copies], printed over a photo of Brautigan’s face, with the title Apoptosis: or Brautigan’s Brains" [2002]. He later published her poem Nigga in the Woodpile (2008).

And what does the Bancroft Library think about the situation?

"I get the sense," she continued,  "that even now they don’t want people to know what’s on those mss. pages (to my knowledge, the catalog description doesn’t mention this, or didn’t when I last saw it a long time ago) because their attitude was so squirrely and obfuscatory when I began asking questions, which is why I was driven to call the coroner, then send for the coroner’s report (ghastly, a tragic death).

"TBL was (is?) bent on denying the fact of what is undeniably there.  I honestly don’t understand why they wouldn’t either encase those specific pages in mylar or remove them for safekeeping and substitute photocopies.  This for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I don’t think your average literary researcher accessing the ms. would be thrilled to learn that he or she had been unknowingly fingering somebody’s brain matter...What about possible pathogens?  What if he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?"

Anyone wishing to go trout fishing in the Brautigan papers at the Bancroft Library may first wish to don waders and elbow-length surgical gloves. Or a Hazmat suit.
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Mille grazie to J.J. Phillips.

Brautigan's Brains reprinted with the kind permission of the author.

A tip o' the hat to Andrei Codrescu.
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Of related interest:

Novelist Richard Brautigan's Unrecorded One Day Marriage Certificate Surfaces.
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Novelist Richard Brautigan's Unrecorded One Day Marriage Certificate Surfaces

By Stephen J. Gertz

If you were an American Boomer breathing during the 'Sixites and a part of or a close observer of the Counterculture you likely read  Trout Fishing in America, the novella by Richard Brautigan published in 1967 (though written in 1961). It has sold 2,000,000 copies.

And it is just as likely that, forty-five years later, you, as I, can't remember much  about it if anything at all. Beyond its non-linear narrative - it is a series of loosely connected anecdotes, an admix of playful and gently satiric musings not without childlike charm - there is no story, however abstract, to hold on to. Brautigan demands nothing from the reader except, perhaps, suspension of critical judgment. Ultimately, his work is guilty of one of the worst sins in literature: it is utterly innocuous,  all gums no teeth. It was baby food for a segment of readers not yet weaned onto solids and reluctant to graduate to  literature that needed to be, at least, moderately chewed.

Trout Fishing in America was, as all of Brautigan's prose and poetry, very much of its time and place, possessing all the simplicity, innocence and naivety we associate with the peace and love aspect of hippie-dom with whimsical insights passing for wisdom that evaporate within ten minutes of reading them. "There is no there there," as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California. And when the Age of Aquarius died from lack of guile and a head-on collision with reality so did Brautigan's audience and career.

But for a few precious years Brautigan was it, a cult writer with a following of avid fans who consumed his every word, and he deserves  a solid place in modern American literature for capturing the Peter Pan aspect of 'Sixties counterculture.

In 1968, at the height of his popularity, he published an obscure broadside dated February 29 that soon became even more so.

The One Day Marriage Certificate is not found in John F. Barber's annotated bibliography of Brautigan (1990) nor in the Brautigan section of Gary Lepper's A Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-Five Modern American Authors, published by the late Peter Howard's Berkeley-based Serendipity Books in 1976. How many copies were printed remains unknown. No copies are located by OCLC.  It's as if it never existed.

Yet a copy has surfaced and is currently being offered by Between The Covers.

Here, Brautigan channels Al Capp's Marryin' Sam, from the comic strip Li'l Abner, who presides over Sadie Hawkins Day, February 29th, that leap year ritual when the single girls of Dogpatch are let loose to lasso a husband.

The text, wrapped by a bevy of pre-Raphaelite/Art Nouveau beauties, reads: "This beautiful one day marriage is ours for February 29, 1968 because we feel this way toward each other and want forever to be a single day,"  followed by blank lines to be filled in. It is signed "Marryin' Sam in and for Golden Gate Park," San Francisco, and the credit at the bottom reads: "Words - Richard Brautigan. Pictures - The San Andreas Fault. Printing - Rapid Reproductions."

After the wedding you could truck on down to Winterland to see Cream perform Sunshine of Your Love on that night of February 29, 1968, the group's We're Going Wrong, presumably, not heard until the day after the One Day Marriage when the good vibes withered on the vine, the acid finally wore off, and the honeymoon was over. Sort of like the 'Sixties.

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