Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on March 13, 2018.

My favorite line in John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is, “Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” The same could be said of writer Richard Brautigan. He is what I think Beat writers like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs try to be but never really achieve.

Brautigan is one of a kind: an island, no a continent unto himself. In the 1960s and 70s he was experimenting with the limits of genre. Even before Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was perfecting his hippy-kind of Magical Realism. Where the Beats seemed always to careen toward pessimism and death, Brautigan has a Grateful Dead kind of optimism.

That Brautigan goes largely unread today is a shame. He has much I think to offer us in these dark and confusing times when reality has become even stranger than his strangest of books.

Admittedly reading Brautigan requires a letting go. Not just a willing suspension of disbelief, but also a willing suspension of linearity (if that is a word). If you can, than you find yourself carried away to someplace magical and strange and ultimately redemptive.

Confederate General from Big Sur is

It is good to be reading Brautigan again.

Favorite Lines from A Confederate General from Big Sur

“Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.”

* * * * * * * * * *

“Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, ‘Near Asheville,’ he said. ‘That’s Thomas Wolfe country.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

Lee Mellon didn’t have any Southern accent. ‘You don’t have much of a Southern accent,’ I said.

‘That’s right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,’ Lee Mellon said.

I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn’t argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.”

* * * * * * * * * *

“We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco.
“Promise me till your dying day, you’ll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It’s the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!”
“I promise,” I said and it was a promise that was kept.”

* * * * * * * * * *

The whiskey went well. I wish I could have offered the stars a drink. Looking down upon mortals, they probably need a drink from time to time, certainly on a night like this.”

 

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