Trout Fishing in America

When I first moved to Lexington 11 years ago, occasionally someone would call and ask for Richard. The first two times this happened, I asked “Richard who?” “Richard Brautigan,” came the answer. I thought it was a prank played by one of my friends. “Brautigan’s dead, dude.” The voice on the other line was taken aback, and I got to wondering if it was a serious call. Sometime later, I got to talking to someone else asking for Richard Brautigan, and I said a little more gently, “He’s dead.”

I was telling the truth, knowingly and not-so-knowingly. On the one hand, the writer Richard Brautigan, who I thought my prank-playing friends were asking for, is dead (they know I don’t really care much for him, and I wondered if his work was the subject of one of my rants… thus the prank calls to egg me on… sad, I know). On the other hand, the Richard Brautigan the callers were really wanting to talk to was dead as well, recently deceased.

Richard Brauitigan, the beat writer, has caught up with me. I don’t know that I like him any better after re-reading him this spring. But I can’t get his book Trout Fishing in America out of my head. It’s not that it’s any good, because empirically, it’s not. But there is something poignant in the writer that begins to invade my experience of the book.

Brautigan’s biography intrigues me because those who knew him best recall that he never spoke of his mother, any brothers or sisters or his childhood in poverty (he threw a brick through a police station window so they would take him to jail and he might get something to eat), . It’s like he just showed up in Haight-Ashbury one day. His last book, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away was a reminiscence of his life, including his childhood. He committed suicide a few years after it was published. Some say when he broke his silence, that’s what killed him. Who knows.

The question it makes me ask, the question the nervous bungling of the trout fisherman (esp as a child) in the story makes me ask, is how does the church reach into such people’s lives? I mean, there are millions of little Richard Brautigans. Whatever we can say of the success of his literary career, he was never happy. There was never enough money, booze, women, or adulation of fans to fill the emptiness of a loveless childhood. That’s the way it is. The things we try to fill life up with kill us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell us about Melissa. But that’s what I’m trying to do. While we were still in Louisville, we were sitting around thinking about things like this. About people like Richard Brautigan. People not as famous who had difficult childhoods, and no one protected them. It got back to me and Melissa remembering how much the Kingdom of God was our first love, and how a million things crowd it out. And then bam, you’re sick, maybe dying, and all those things that crowded out the Kingdom are looking pretty stupid.

Melissa said, “Whether we have 1 year or sixty, we have to keep laughing.” And we went on. Praying. Loving. Believing. Living abnormally. Trout Fishing in America is a strange metaphor for… life? Something that never was but you still lament its passing?

I used to fly fish. That is, I had a fly rod and would practice catching blue gills at the pond on USM’s campus. I was hoping one day to go out West, specifically to Bishop, CA, where my great grandfather used to fish. He was from France, the mountains, where the trout are abundant. I thought I might forge some connection. Never happened, because I am a wretched fisherman (as Dane Conrad can attest). And because ultimately, trying to attach some significance to a past you never had doesn’t go anywhere. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to figure anything out about Trout Fishing in America-- it’s a character, a place, an idea, something you can’t quite hold on to.

Perhaps things aren’t as weird as an early 60s novel, but we are using something, searching for something to fill up our lives, and if it’s not Jesus, I don’t fancy your chances of making it out alive.

p/g