Richard Brautigan's "The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western"

A deliberate perversion; wicked, boyish, joyful.

(It's come to my notice that I've been giving a lot more of my time to British and specially English writers than they probably deserve. This is an attempt to partially correct this.)

Brautigan didn't have much time for what other people thought, nor for what they wrote or might expect him to write, as the other two books of his that I've read--The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt (a book of poems)--demonstrate. Here is the opening verse (I might better say "salvo") of that latter volume:

Rommel is dead.

His army has joined the quicksand legions

of history where battle is always

a metal echo saluting a rusty shadow.

His tanks are gone.

How's your ass?

Almost a little like something out of Robert Lowell, until the last line of course.

Actually, Brautigan didn't have much time, period, for caring what people thought or anything else in the grand scheme of things: alone, 49 years old in a big old house in Bolinas, CA, Brautigan blew his cranium open with a .44 Magnum revolver just like Dirty Harry's--(probably) 10 years to the day after Hawkline was published, but we can't be sure because although that was the last time anybody heard from him (a bad conversation with an ex-girlfriend a long way away) his body wasn't found until a month and a half later, by a private investigator. He was survived by both parents, both ex-wives, and a daughter.

Actually, I don't know very much about Brautigan; he seems like a literary character who also wrote stuff, a character of the mischievous and "deliberately enigmatic" sort. Then again, it has to be said in his defense that he seems to have made literature fun--at least for a while, and at least for him. One thing that  I think I can fairly say from having read these books and looked at their original covers (Hawkline a notable exception to this rule) is that Brautigan loved beautiful women, or at least pretty ones (tastes do vary, and each year seems to have it's own paradigm). I'd like to think that he also got along (to put it one way) with them: such a fact would, esp. given his gangly and generally unbecoming appearance, give some encouragement to those wondering if literature is a worthwhile pursuit and credence to those immortal words spoken by Sean Connery in Finding Forrester.

It strikes me that, so far, I haven't written anything at all about the book whose title appears above this post. That is, perhaps, unfortunate, but at the same time it's symptomatic of reading Brautigan. I can honestly say that I enjoyed this book: I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed holding it, I enjoyed putting it down and finally placing it back on my shelf. I even laughed, once, which is unusual for me or maybe anybody to do when reading a book, alone. I can't say, however, that my life was substantially enriched by reading it, nor that I learned anything except what kind of stuff people were reading and writing in the late 60s and early 70s.

Part of the reason that I feel reluctant to go into detail about the novel (is it one?) is that there's some stuff in there that I'm just not comfortable with. The way women are depicted in this book is both incorrect and idiotic, but to a certain, much more flattering extent, so is that of the men. The women that Brautigan writes about, here and elsewhere, seem to have two things in common: they're all beautiful without knowing or caring, and they're all rutting and looking ready to copulate with the next male (regardless of personal endowments) that they come across. I don't think of myself as altogether one of the "new men" which used to be talked about, but all the same I just feel kind of uncomfortable about this stuff. Or am I just a prude?

That would surprise me: I think Brautigan is, in a very pleasant and likeable way, a depraved chauvinist. And one who very clearly demonstrates this fact. But if we held every writer accountable for that or similar crimes, where we would we be? Without Hemingway, Roth (Philip and Joseph), Bellow (probably), Nabokov (almost certainly), Stendhal, Waugh (maybe we'd be better off here, guilty pleasures aside?), Burroughs (for sure), Patricia Highsmith (the worst of them all) and the list could go on, and on, and on. I for one am not willing to put all these against the wall at the expense of not being able to read them because of "ideological" or "moral" concerns.

Hawkline--and perhaps Brautigan's ouevre in general--is purposefully picayune, even frivolous. Maybe Brautigan thought this was exactly the sort of book that people needed at the time; maybe he felt these things reflected the "spirit of the age"; maybe Brautigan was just some kind of solipsistic comedian, an existential jester who confused himself with a protagonist. From what I've read about his other books and the way he's regarded (and who he is regarded by) I have to tend towards the last explanation, but clearly the 60s and the resulting come-down are to blame as well, perhaps even for Brautigan's death a decade and a half after the Summer of '69.