It was my friend Tim from photography duo Tim & Barry who introduced me to the writing of Richard Brautigan.
He figured I'd like it. He was right.
There's a simplicity and clarity about his writing which I love. His detracting publishing editor would eventually label him a naif for that very reason.
People would like to label him a hippie writer, part of the counterculture generation of the late sixties, a star of the San Francisco poetry scene.
While he may have been in that scene, I don't think his work was a product of it. Certainly not Trout Fishing In America, which was written in 1961.
A cult hero in Japan, some people would say Brautigan led a colourful life; I suspect he would have replied something like - yeah, most of it black or at best desperate shades of grey.
His childhood was spent in abject poverty. He didn't know his real father. His father claims not to have been aware of his existence until after sons death. His mother fell into a series of destructive or disastrous relationships giving the young Richard a number of half brothers and sisters along the way and never moving too far from starvation.
At one point, after he'd graduated from college, left home and moved to San Francisco he was so hungry he threw a rock through a police station window - hoping to get arrested and fed. Instead he got fined $25. Then, when the police clocked his behaviour as erratic, he got taken to a mental hospital and given electric shock treatment.
Maybe the naivety in some of the books is a kind of survival mechanism, a multi-layered reality alternate to the one experienced in his own dark and depression-ridden life.
But it's easy to speculate, right?
Brautigan was born on this day in 1935. He committed suicide - shot himself in his own home, looking out at the Ocean in September 84.
Here's an extract from Trout Fishing In America. It's from the chapter titled The Kool-Aid Wino.
