Pierre Delattre

Brautigan Done For

by Pierre Delattre

I never knew as great a fisherman as Richard. One time we parked along a little stream. I opened the back for the station wagon and got to work preparing my gear. By the time I had finished selecting a fly and tying it on, Richard was already trudging back with his limit in the creel. He gave half to me and we waded upstream until we came to an encampment of picnickers. A mother and three kids were splashing in the water. Brautigan bet me he could cast his fly right into the middle of those people and pull out a trout. He did, and so deftly they didn't even notice. Brautigan had another talent. He could get drunk on anything. In our tent that night, he got drunk on water. He began to lament about his trout fishing book. He just couldn't get the magic down on paper. He read me some of the stories and asked for a frank opinion. "Boring", I confessed. Then one afternoon back in North Beach we went into a hardware store so that he could buy some chicken wire for his bird cage. Suddenly he seized the pen from my pocket, the notebook from my shoulder bag, ran out and over to a park bench, and started to scribble a story about a man who finds a used trout stream in the back of a hardware store. The next day, we stopped to chat with a legless-armless man on a rollerboard who sold pencils. Brautigan called him "Trout Fishing in America Shorty" and wrote a story about him. From then on, trout fishing ceased to be a memory of the past, but the theme of immediate experience and Brautigan's book made him a rich and famous writer. He didn't handle this well and finally blew his brains out while working on a novel in his Bolinas cabin. I don't know what was bothering him, but here's a possible clue: The last time I saw him, we were walking past the middle room of his house. There was a table in there with a typewriter on it. "Quiet", he whispered, pushing me ahead of him into the kitchen. "My new novel's in there. I kind of stroll in occasionally, write a few quick paragraphs, and get out before the novel knows what I'm doing. If novels ever find out you're writing them, you're done for."
- Pierre Delattre, Episodes, Graywolf Press, pages 53-54.