I go to the ‘B’ section whenever I’m in a bookshop, compulsively scanning the shelves murmuring ‘Bradbury . . . Brontë . . . Burroughs . . .’ I am, of course, looking for the name ‘Richard Brautigan’. I seldom find it. It’s a nervous habit that dates back to the time when all his writing was out of print and the only places to find his novels and poetry were second-hand booksellers and charity shops. A battered Picador edition of one of his works was a real find and a cause for celebration in the shared house I was living in at the time. My friend Steve had brought a Brautigan book home and started the fixation – it was The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and we all waited patiently for our turn to read it. After that we were hooked.

I had heard of Brautigan before but had him filed under ‘hippy writer’ in my long list of unfounded prejudices. The blurbs on the book jackets didn’t help: the one for The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (my second Brautigan, a hardback, ex-library copy discovered at a jumble sale in Camberwell) reads ‘Magic Child, a fifteen-year-old Indian girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men to kill the monster that lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline’s yellow house.’ It sounded ‘wacky’ or ‘zany’ – something that dope-smoking students would be into, okay for the sixties when everyone was high but unacceptable in the grim eighties of Thatcher’s Britain. I was very wrong. The beauty of Brautigan’s writing is its dryness – the way absurd or fantastical events are described in a completely deadpan manner. The subject matter might be a little unusual but it is always presented very precisely and economically. He’s the sixties’ Hemingway.

The day Sombrero Fallout entered my life still shines in my memory. I found it along with a copy of Dreaming of Babylon in a Sue Ryder shop just off Sloane Square – halcyon days. We were now in the early nineties. I had found out a little more about Brautigan in the interim: how his star had waned in the seventies and that he’d ended up killing himself in 1984 when no one was buying his books anymore. Sombrero Fallout was from his ‘later

Скачать книгу