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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Does even the most devoted fan really want to scrape the bottom of Dashiell Hammett's desk drawer?
Oct 21, 1999 | I wasn't too interested in the recently published novels by the late Ernest Hemingway ("True at First Light") and Ralph Ellison ("Juneteenth"). I was too busy waiting for another pair of posthumously published works by Richard Brautigan and Dashiell Hammett.
Some criticized the literary executors of Hemingway and Ellison for dredging up substandard works by writers who were no longer around to protect their reputations. Of course, if it weren't for executors willing to defy a dead author's wishes we wouldn't have, for example, more than a handful of Franz Kafka's stories. Posthumously published books include manuscripts left unfinished when the writer kicked ("Juneteenth" and Herman Melville's "Billy Budd"); miscellaneous documents (F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up"); failed work abandoned years before the writer's death ("True at First Light"); juvenilia, like Brautigan's just-published "The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings"; and previously uncollected writings, like the new "Nightmare Town: Stories" by Hammett.
In 1992, eight years after Brautigan pulled a Hemingway and shot himself in the head, the "Edna" poems were discovered in Eugene, Ore. Brautigan wrote them when he was 21 and gave the collection of verse to the mother of his first girlfriend, telling her, "When I am rich and famous, Edna, this will be your Social Security." Brautigan did get rich and famous, but he died a literary has-been. These poems are a windfall only for those readers still interested in Brautigan, or for those who have just discovered his finest work, which includes "Trout Fishing in America" (a novel, not a field guide).
Reading a writer's juvenilia -- posthumously or otherwise -- appeals most to younger readers. Remember when you discovered Jack Kerouac or Doris Lessing or whoever first made you realize the power and magic of books, and you devoured everything you could by the magician, good or bad? A devoted reader -- and hopeful writer -- who absorbs a great author's oeuvre learns that the creation of a masterpiece can be as tricky as shooting an apple off someone else's head (as opposed to shooting your own head, the plan Hemingway and Brautigan eventually opted for). Sometimes you miss. Oops.
I first discovered Brautigan as a kid in the early '70s when his novels and stories were being reprinted in mass-market paperback. I still own my flesh-colored copy of "Trout Fishing in America," with its cover photo of Brautigan in jeans, vest and a 10-gallon hat, standing beside a seated woman with buck teeth and granny glasses. The blue cover of "Watermelon Sugar" shows the writer shirtless and standing behind a pubescent girl. At that time, other male novelists were always photographed wearing suits and trying to look dignified. But Brautigan showed me that a great novelist dressed like a hippie and always had a girl.
Brautigan's pal Keith Abbott wrote in a 1985 article for California magazine, "Once, when we were on Clement Street [in San Francisco, Brautigan] stopped at a record store and pointed at the album cover. 'Another rock star posing on the front of his record -- I'm so tired of that.'" Abbott observed that Brautigan was "completely oblivious" to the fact that much the same could have been said of himself, posing for the covers of his own books with "his various girlfriends."
But the implied message of all Brautigan's covers was not "This is a stud who gets chicks," but rather, "This is a writer who 'gets' (as in 'understands') chicks." Brautigan's love stories perfectly suited the unmacho tenor of the 1970s. In the novel "In Watermelon Sugar," Brautigan populates the world with men who do the dishes. Men who cook the meals. Men who then get to make love with lovely women at all hours of the day. And when they are done they talk "about the tigers." Later they talk about "a lamb going for walk." Then they make love again.
