Trout Fishing in America

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Frontispiece

Introduction

Dedication

Epigraph

The Cover For Trout Fishing In America

Knock On Wood (Part One)

Knock On Wood (Part Two)

Red Lip

The Kool-Aid Wino

Another Method Of Making Walnut Catsup

Prologue To Grider Creek

Grider Creek

The Ballet For Trout Fishing In America

A Walden Pond For Winos

Tom Martin Creek

Trout Fishing On The Bevel

Sea, Sea Rider

The Last Year The Trout Came Up Hayman Creek

Trout Death By Port Wine

The Autopsy of Trout Fishing In America

The Message

Trout Fishing In America Terrorists

Trout Fishing In America With The FBI

Worsewick

The Shipping Of Trout Fishing In America Shorty To Nelson Algren

The Mayor Of The Twentieth Century

On Paradise

The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari

The Salt Creek Coyotes

The Hunchback Trout

The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader’

Footnote Chapter To The Shipping Of Trout Fishing In America Shorty To Nelson Algren

The Pudding Master Of Stanley Basin

Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing In America

The Surgeon

A Note On The Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America

A Return To The Cover Of This Book

The Lake Josephus Days

Trout Fishing On The Street Of Eternity

The Towel

Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?

The Last Time I Saw Trout Fishing In America

In The California Bush

The Last Mention Of Trout Fishing In America Shorty

Witness For Trout Fishing In America Peace

Footnote Chapter To Red Lip

The Cleveland Wrecking Yard

A Half-Sunday Homage To A Whole Leonardo Da Vinci

Trout Fishing In America NIB

Prelude To The Mayonnaise Chapter

The Mayonnaise Chapter

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner Books edition 2010

Copyright © 1967 by Richard Brautigan

Introduction © 2010 by Billy Collins

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Brautigan, Richard.

Trout fishing in America / Richard Brautigan.

—1st Mariner Books ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-25527-9

I. Title.

PS3503.R2736T76 2010

813'.52—dc22 2009043963

Original cover photograph by Erik Weber

eISBN 978-0-547-48870-7

v2.0917

Original cover photograph for Trout Fishing in America

Introduction

The first time I heard about Trout Fishing in America was in 1965, two years before its publication in the year of the short-lived Summer of Love. I had caught wind of a rumor going around San Francisco that a manuscript copy of a very odd work of fiction by Richard Brautigan, who was already a presence on the literary scene there, was making the rounds among some artists and writers. My curiosity was piqued. I was a regular visitor to San Francisco, and North Beach in particular, where I sought relief from my Ph.D. studies in English at the University of California’s remote, rather desert-like Riverside campus to the south. San Francisco offered the allure of excitement and literary buzz, plus there were some friends I could stay with. Back then I was driving a Sunbeam Alpine, a now-extinct British sports car, which I had brought over with me from England on the Queen Mary then driven to Southern California, where I would spend the next few years with my head buried in the literary canon. And because I was twenty-four years old, I thought nothing of firing up the car at pretty much any time of the day or night in Riverside to head up the coast with a pack of Marlboros and an FM radio for company.

At the time, I was loosely associated with a small group of young writers (aspiring does not express the combination of desperation and pretentiousness that was ours) whom Jack Spicer dubbed the Jesuits because we all had come out of Catholic backgrounds in New York, mostly Brooklyn. We would sometimes sit with Spicer (who, by the way, closely edited Trout Fishing in America) in Washington Park and drink quarts of Rainier Ale, his afternoon favorite. But more often we would see him and other poets—Larry Fagin, George Stanley, rarely Robin Blaser, and the painter Nemi Frost—at a bar on Green Street called Gino and Carlo, which was both a working-class hangout—a favorite with Italian sanitation workers—and a place where writers, painters, and other representatives of the unemployed would congregate. One table near the jukebox was known as Spicer’s office, and there was even a submissions box on the wall for a couple of local poetry magazines. Run by two brothers, Aldino and Donado, it was a kind of Cedar Tavern West or Les Deux Magots even farther West, only a lot funkier than either. Untouched by publication, my friends and I passed the time with our noses pressed against the glass of authorship. If we weren’t writers yet, we were determined at least to behave the way we thought writers behaved. One day, Tom Wallace, another Jesuit, and I spent roughly fourteen hours in that bar, leaving only once to get a shave and a hot-towel treatment at the barbershop down the street. Thus refreshed, we returned to our stools.

Brautigan would show up at the bar, too, though he preferred a nearby painters’ hangout called The Place; and there were frequent sightings of him in the neighborhood. He was easy to spot: a very tall fellow who combined hippie dress—colorful shirts and beads—with nineteenth-century pioneer clothes, including a waistcoat and boots, all topped by an enormous, beat-up Western hat. He looked like a man who had just stepped out of the same pre-industrial America whose passing he lamented in his fiction. Post-beatnik and pre-hippie, he was thought of as a rather mysterious figure, a man who didn’t say much but was doing something very peculiar in his writing. Sometimes accompanying him was the girl with whom he shares the cover of Trout Fishing in America, Michaela le Grand, known as Micky. It was said that she had made a vow not to speak for an entire year. One afternoon, I lingered in an apartment with her and a few others and got to witness a paltry few hours of her deep commitment to silence.

It was in that same apartment that the circulated copy of Trout Fishing in America fell into my hands. The manuscript was temporarily in the possession of the hippie couple who were renting there. When I showed interest, they produced the thing and told me that they could not allow me to leave the apartment with it, but if I wished, I could read it then and there. So I took the stack of pages from their hands, sat down on the floor, and began reading. A few hours later I looked up, blinking like someone emerging from a strange cavern. I had never read anything like it. This book, I was convinced, was our very own Alice in Wonderland. And Brautigan was our Lewis Carroll, behind the best drugs in town.

Perhaps the first feature of Trout Fishing in America that struck me as I slid down that rabbit hole was the book’s odd self-awareness. The sober, misleading title, which ran the risk of confusing librarians and bookstore shelvers, was a tip-off to the ironic play at the heart of the book’s sensibility. The author’s photograph, usually displayed, if displayed at all, inside on the back flap, appeared on the book’s cover, and it was hardly the kind of authorial image one was used to. Instead of a hand-on-chin, studio-lit Graham Greene headshot, here is a tall, almost defiant-looking Brautigan in tight jeans, leg cocked, hands behind his back, appearing as a kind of hippie prospector with his flowered shirt, walrus mustache, and signature unblocked hat. No title either, just the photograph in full bleed. Later, readers are to learn more about the statue of Ben Franklin in the background, who presides over the book as a kind of symbol of the original idea of America; but there is no mention of the girl with the crocheted headband and lace-up boots who is sitting on what appears to be a milking stool. Many wondered Is that his old lady? The photograph is so striking that the book itself is moved to comment on it, in the opening chapter, "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America. Later on in the book, the narrator and his baby daughter pay a visit to the book’s cover as it is being inexplicably watered by big revolutionary sprinklers."

Brautigan continues to toy with the conventional notion of how a book should behave when the title of his book refuses to remain just a title. Trout Fishing in America is a catchphrase that morphs throughout the book into a variety of conceptual and dramatic shapes. At one point it has a physical body that bears such a resemblance to that of Lord Byron that it is brought by ship from Missolonghi to England, in 1824, where it is autopsied. Trout Fishing in America is also a slogan that sixth-graders enjoy writing on the backs of first-graders. It is a voice in the book that narrates its own metafictional progress. And it is a friend who answers a letter concerning the FBI and who decides to escape the heat of New York City by moving to Alaska, where its address will be Trout Fishing in America, c/o General Delivery, Fairbanks, Alaska. It is also a costume serving as a disguise for a Jack the Ripper figure, and there is a Hotel Trout Fishing in America, plus a recurrent hobo-like character named Trout Fishing in America Shorty. In one notable exhibition of the title’s variability, Trout Fishing in America turns into a gourmet with a taste for walnut catsup and has Maria Callas for a girlfriend.

Through such ironic play, Brautigan destabilizes any conventional idea of a book as he begins to create a world where things seem unwilling to stay in their customary places. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the extravagant comparisons—surprising metaphors and joyously off-the-wall similes—that pepper every chapter. For its earliest devotees, the book provided an introduction to a nutty brand of American surrealism—Apollinaire with a piece of apple pie, André Breton way out West. Brautigan’s tropes run the gamut from the outré to sheer nonsense, yet some of them are imaginative bull’s-eyes. Readers are left to sort them out for