By the time the bad reviews came out, Richard was hard at work on his next novel. Brautigan planned to write his own take on the contemporary Japanese novel, compressing the story’s timespan into a single hour. The emotional compression used by Japanese writers also attracted Richard. A deliberate shattering of an antique teacup provided the dramatic high point in Kawabata’s novel Thousand Cranes.
The “I-novel,” a particularly elusive form of twentieth-century Japanese literature, possessed great appeal for Brautigan. The term first came into use in the 1920s, when critics used it to describe the intensely personal autobiographical sketches written “for a closed circle of fellow writers” in the early years of the new century. Toward the end of the Meiji period, works such as Tayama Katai’s “The Quilt,” published in 1907, and the comic satire “I Am a Cat” (1905), with its supercilious feline narrator, the first fiction by Sōseki Natsume, “the Charles Dickens of Japan,” came to define this “new” form.
In the 1950s, following Japan’s traumatic World War II defeat, a revival of the I-novel saw a restructuring of the form. This reflected an introspective examination of the old historical ideologies and the inevitable downfall of the quest for Empire.
Brautigan’s first four works of fiction might be regarded as American I-novels. The anonymous first-person narrators in Trout Fishing and In Watermelon Sugar, assumed by the readers to be Brautigan himself, fit the parameters set down by Tomi Suzuki in Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity: “a mode of reading that assumes that the I-novel is a single-voiced, direct expression of the author’s self, and its written language is transparent.” Suzuki further explains, “the reader’s belief in a single identity of the protagonist, the narrator, and the author of a text makes a text an I-novel.”
Brautigan had been familiar with Japanese poetry since high school. It is not known when he first encountered the I-novel. Sombrero Fallout lacks a first-person narrator and cannot be considered an Americanization of the I-novel, yet one of the “characters” in the book is a black cat, Richard’s sly homage to Natsume’s fictional feline. Along with its compressed single-hour span, the book’s curious structure sets it apart from Richard Brautigan’s other long fiction. There are only two characters in Sombrero Fallout (three, including the cat). The two are an unnamed “very well-known American humorist” (coincidentally born one year before Richard), a man “so complicated that he could make a labyrinth seem like a straight line,” and Yukiko, his beautiful Japanese ex-girlfriend, who owns the cat, black as “a suburb of her hair.” The novel deals with the aftermath of their two-year affair and the writer’s torment over the breakup.
The book’s main action is purely imaginary and takes place in a wastebasket, where one of the American humorist’s failures, a torn-up first draft about a frozen sombrero fallen from the sky, reassembles itself and continues on its own. The blackly comic political satire evolving within the wastebasket provides the book’s title, but the manic slapstick violence is a diversion from the emotional heart of the novel. Nothing truly dramatic occurs during that hour (“slightly after ten” until eleven fifteen) on a rainy night in San Francisco, but Brautigan’s evocative rendering of the American humorist’s anguish carries the reader deep into the lonely catacombs of heartbreak.
In describing the humorist (“It was difficult to find a bookstore that did not carry at least one of his titles”), Richard reached deep inside for details almost autobiographical in their intimacy: “He was often very bored and he did not think twice about telling other people about his boredom.” “He was a very shy person when he was sober. He had to be drunk before he could make a pass at a woman.” “He had an attractive but very erratic personality. He allowed his moods to dominate him and they were very changeable. Sometimes he would talk too much and at other times he wouldn’t talk at all. He always talked too much when he drank [. . .] Some people thought that he was very charming and others thought that he was a total asshole.” “He never lacked things to worry about.” “He had been suffering from insomnia [. . .]” “There was only one person in the world who would call her that late at night.” “His basic approach to life [. . .] was to have it as confusing, labyrinth-laden and fucked up as possible.”
Taken together, these small telling touches form an accurate psychological profile of the author. Michael McClure noted the resemblance between Richard and his nameless character. In an essay on Brautigan, McClure found this interesting “because Richard is presenting a highly and carefully doctored self-portrait. I wonder when he is presenting himself and when he is deliberately not doing so. I wonder when he is presenting himself and thinks he is not—and vice versa.” When Gatz Hjortsberg read Sombrero Fallout, he told Brautigan he thought it was very courageous for him to write so honestly about himself.
“That wasn’t me!” Richard snapped without a moment’s hesitation.
Internal evidence indicates the character of Yukiko was based on Anne Kuniyuki. Aside from the obvious connection that both are Japanese, there is the musical near-anagram-like similarity of their names. More telling, Brautigan’s description of the first meeting of Yukiko and the American humorist mirrors his own initial encounter with Kuniyuki. “When he turned around on his bar stool, very drunk, which was a condition not unknown to him, he saw her sitting at a table with two other women. They were all wearing white uniforms. They looked as if they had just gotten off work.” The fictional Yukiko had a job as a psychiatrist in the emergency room of a San Francisco hospital. Anne was a nurse. They both wore white uniforms and worked the night shift.
The city of Seattle provides another connection. Anne Kuniyuki moved from San Francisco to Seattle not long after her mother’s death. She kept in touch with Brautigan, writing him tales of her night-shift nursing adventures. Three pieces of her pottery had been accepted for exhibition at the San Francisco Art Festival in the first week of August 1974. Kuniyuki planned to fly down for the event. She and Richard broke up soon afterward. By that fall Brautigan was keeping company with Siew-Hwa Beh.
Toward the end of Sombrero Fallout, Richard introduced Norman Mailer as a character in the wastebasket insurrection plot. The famed American novelist arrives by airplane as a war correspondent and is annoyed to discover the other reporters are more interested in interviewing him than covering the actual story. Brautigan portrayed Mailer in the novel as heroic. “The soldiers were amazed by Norman Mailer’s courage [. . .] Again and again he exposed himself to tremendous concentrations of townspeople firepower.”
Sombrero Fallout was nearly done by summer’s end, and Brautigan worked only sporadically on the novel. The journal he kept between August 30 and November 3, 1975, maintained an accurate tally of his writing life. On the first of September (Labor Day), Richard wrote eight pages in the morning and fished on Mission Creek and the Yellowstone all afternoon. In the evening, he read the galleys of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and wrote a blurb for his friend’s book-length poem. Brautigan did not work on Sombrero again until September 22. His journal records only four writing days during the month and lists an equal number of hangovers, including a “hideous” one (Thursday, September 25), which “ruined the whole goddamned day. I didn’t get any work done. Bad Richard!”
At the beginning of October, John Hartnett, Helen Brann’s assistant, mailed Brautigan five copies of his long-awaited Dell contract for The Beatle Lyrics Illustrated. Payment had been held up for a year due to a permissions disagreement straight out of Kafka. The book’s British publishers objected to a quote from “Eleanor Rigby” Richard had used in his short essay. They felt he should pay for the privilege of including this copyrighted material. After much legal wrangling, the bizarre situation got straightened out. The Brits agreed that “since they have sold all book rights in the lyrics to Seymour Lawrence/Dell,” Brautigan’s publisher had the right to give him permission to include the excerpt from “Eleanor Rigby” in his introduction. Once signed copies of the contract were received, Richard could at last be pa
id $750 for the introduction.
Brautigan worked hard on the final stretch of his novel in October, taking time out to copyedit the manuscript for the book of poetry Simon & Schuster agreed to publish two years earlier, now titled Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork. Richard finished the edit on October 10 and mailed it to his publisher, working on his novel in the afternoon. That evening, he and Tony Dingman picked up Siew-Hwa, Curt Gentry, and his girlfriend/research assistant, Gail Stevens, at the Bozeman airport. They stayed up late, drinking and talking. Brautigan got very drunk, ending up in a bitter fight with Siew-Hwa. He didn’t work on his novel again for another eight days.
In the home stretch at last, Richard started back on his book in earnest and worked hard for the next four days, finishing the draft in the last week of October. Brautigan spent the next day proofreading the manuscript. He felt the novel was “in beautiful shape,” but planned to make “minor corrections” before mailing it to his agent the following Monday.
Again, episodes of heavy drinking and hangovers intervened. Brautigan “basically just suffered [. . .] There are so many things to do and I went to bed with a feeling of not having done anything.” Richard pulled it together the next day and finished his corrections for Sombrero Fallout. Tony Dingman drove him into Livingston. He Xeroxed the manuscript, mailing a copy to Helen Brann. Two days later, he closed up his “ranch” for the winter and flew to San Francisco. Negotiations with Simon & Schuster began as soon as Brann delivered the novel to the publisher. Contracts were drawn up by mid-December. S&S once again paid Brautigan a $50,000 advance, guaranteeing a straight 15 percent hardback royalty. Richard wanted the money before the end of the year. Helen made it just under the wire, mailing him a check on the thirty-first.
Simon & Schuster delayed publication of Brautigan’s new book of poetry in 1974 because they feared conflicting with the sales of Hawkline. They took another pass the following year, exercising the same caution regarding Willard. In 1976, they abandoned this strategy, releasing both Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork and Sombrero Fallout within six months of each other. The hardback edition of Loading Mercury came out first, early in the spring, followed by a trade paperback released in June.
Richard wrote his own one-paragraph dust jacket flap copy for Loading Mercury: “written in the inimitable Brautigan style: delicate, full of insight and the ability to see and describe the possibilities and complications of the world in a lucid and totally original way.” Such self-promotion might seem underhanded but was a common practice in the publishing industry. Sam Lawrence later asked Richard to perform the same service, writing: “This is a trade secret but our best catalogue and jacket copy are written by the authors (Donleavy, Vonnegut, Wakefield, Berger).”
For Mercury’s dust jacket photo, Brautigan chose one of Erik Weber’s pictures from the batch he had previously rejected for the cover of Willard. Superimposed over a silver background, the two-year-old photograph showed a bearded Richard kneeling, gazing straight into the camera, his denim shirt untucked. It was printed on both the front and back covers of the dust jacket, die-cut out of the previous background of bowling balls. Mercury was dedicated to Jim Harrison and Guy de la Valdène.
Robert Creeley supplied an enthusiastic blurb (“Weirdly delicious bullets of ineffable wisdom. Pop a few.”), but these were almost the only words of praise the book received. Michael McClure considered it “dry and trashy.” Kirkus Reviews called Mercury “a fey little volume” and wondered if Brautigan might be “a surrealist Rod McKuen.” Joseph McLellan, writing in the Washington Post Book World, said that the collection “shows no growth, a lot of cuteness and just enough substance to keep you reading.” Jonathan Cape declined to reissue the book in the United Kingdom. Even the devoted Japanese failed to bring out a translation. The only foreign edition was a Danish translation (not published until 1978).
The galleys for Sombrero Fallout arrived in Pine Creek around the Fourth of July, shortly after Brautigan returned from Japan. A day or so later, Richard was working hard on the final revisions in spite of recurring insomnia aggravated by jet lag. Keith Abbott came out to Montana for a month or so to help Brautigan with much-needed ranch work. He observed, “being such a perfectionist, [Richard] was usually a basket case after reading proofs.”
When the bound page proofs for Sombrero Fallout arrived near the end of July, along with the dust jacket copy, Richard enlisted Keith’s help in rewriting his publisher’s clumsy work. Abbott remembered Brautigan as being “scornful” of what Simon & Schuster sent to him. According to Keith, Richard tried to find “a way of talking about his work that avoided the 1960 hippie buzz words.” Brautigan called this “the dewhimsicalizing of his literary reputation.” He was not altogether successful. The flap copy he rewrote contained such observations as: “The lover dreams cat purr dreams of her dead father while the hero agonizes over tuna fish sandwiches and the possibilities of a simple seven-digit phone call.”
Simon & Schuster published Sombrero Fallout in September 1976, releasing a first printing of thirty-five thousand copies. The dust jacket featured a striking painting by John Ansado of a beautiful reclining Japanese woman staring with candor at the reader. A photograph of Brautigan seated outdoors on a boulder in his high-crowned black hat (one of a batch John Fryer took for Hawkline two years earlier) filled the back cover.
Away in Japan all spring, Richard hadn’t had time before his deadline to arrange for new photographs to be taken. John Fryer dreamed Brautigan’s novel was titled “That Bat You Took.” Richard was greatly amused and convinced Fryer his dream title remained a serious contender. John wrote Jonathan Dolger at S&S in July requesting a $175 photo payment. He got his money, but the publisher printed his name incorrectly as “John Freyer” on the copyright byline.
A Japanese edition, translated by Kazuko Fujimoto, was published simultaneously by Shobun-sha in Tokyo. Richard felt proud of the international popularity this mutual venture celebrated, although the reviews for Sombrero Fallout were mixed. Barbara A. Bannon in Publishers Weekly called the book “an amusing trifle for Brautigan fans,” while a writer in the Bookletter said, “Sombrero Fallout may be the best novel Richard Brautigan has written [. . .]” Robert Christgau, writing in the New York Times Book Review, claimed, “One senses yet another artist who feels defeated by his audience and longs for simpler times,” but Charles Casey, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , stated, “it’s [sic] touchingly funny moments and it’s [sic] interesting experimentation make it one of Brautigan’s best.”
A letter from Philip Whalen, sent from the Zen Mountain Center in the Carmel Valley and dated “7:IX:76,” offset any residual bad feeling occasioned by the negative reviews. Whalen “enjoyed SOMBRERO FALLOUT. The tone & colors are exactly Japanese [. . .] the mixture of hysteria, violence, sentimental feeling and hair get it down exactly.” Phil had also read Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork and said the poems “maintain your unique sound. I can think of only two other poets whose work is inimitable—Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley—I am swamped with jealousy and shame.”
By the time the first reviews of Sombrero Fallout appeared, Brautigan was close to putting the finishing touches on the fourth of his five-year-plan genre novels. Early in 1976, Richard began jotting ideas on a series of four-by-six note cards. “Dreaming of Babylon,” he wrote on one, along with “A Private eye novel 1942–1976.” Below that, enclosed in a penciled circle, he added, “1924–1946–1951–1967–1976.” Whatever the other dates meant at the time, Brautigan decided to set his new book in 1942. He planned to write a detective story. Along with his title, he had already worked most of it out in his imagination.
Richard hired Loie Weber to research the project. He had been paying her $5 per hour to work for him, but agreed to raise her salary “retroactively.” Having narrowed the time period to “a couple weeks in 1942,” Brautigan needed a day-by-day compilation of long-gone San Francisco events and weather. Knowing his subplot involved the Babylonian daydreams of his dim-witted
gumshoe hero, he also asked Loie to research ancient Babylon. For planned scenes in the morgue, Richard demanded what he called “specific information.” Loie Weber spent a couple weeks at the Civic Center library looking “at all the newspapers during that particular time period.” She took careful notes in a Velvatone notebook.
Loie spent forty-two hours on research, not including a quick “follow-up” to the California Historical Society for copies of period restaurant menus. She spent $45 on supplies, saving all the receipts, as Brautigan was a stickler for such details. Loie also took a trip to the San Francisco morgue, where she interviewed the coroner, who showed her around the autopsy room and gave her an odd souvenir, a coroner’s office toe tag used to ID the corpses. She passed it on to Richard. Loie recorded her observations in clinical detail.
Brautigan “didn’t use this information at all,” Loie recalled. She never typed up her notes, giving Richard her legible and meticulously rewritten notebook. He selected the items of interest to him and ignored the rest. Brautigan wanted to know everything in advance, all the details in place, so there would be no surprises. Asked why Richard avoided taking literary risks, Loie replied, “That’s not the way his mind worked.”
A curious coincidence occurred while Loie Weber worked on Dreaming of Babylon. She was an avid gardener and did some indoor cultivation for a woman whose live-in lover happened to be a private detective. Loie found this interesting. They started chatting. Loie told him she was researching a detective novel for Richard Brautigan. The detective was David Fechheimer. He pretended he didn’t know Brautigan but said he really admired his writing.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 94