Waltzing With The Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan

Rating:
Summary: THANK YOU FOR THIS PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
Review: Any one who loves Richard Brautigan's novels and far out poetry will appreciate the personal perspective share by the author. The book is easy to read and is a wonderful tribute to an unusual man who, for reasons unknown, took his own life 20 years ago. If only others of us who write would be so remembered.

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Summary: An inside view of friendship with Brautigan
Review: Greg Keeler today is an accomplished musician, poet, writer, and teacher of English at Montana State University. But he was a still-wet-behind-the-ears transplant from Oklahoma when he first met Richard Brautigan in 1978. Brautigan was a best selling author, world traveler, and counter culture legend-who counted among his friends John Lennon, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jimmy Buffet, Rip Torn, and Francis Ford Coppola. For reasons Keeler can't explain, Brautigan took a liking to him and thereby hangs the tale.

Despite rubbing elbows with icons of the film and popular music culture, Brautigan was a common man, salt of the earth. He circulated with the rich and famous, or fished and bent an elbow with locals in and around Bozeman with equal enthusiasm. Keeler's recollection of their friendship is at times hilarious or poignant, but just as often disturbing and sad. That they were friends in the truest sense is evident in every line.

Brautigan was larger than life, like his hero Hemingway before him. He was a man of "wonderful, scary, craziness", a big, funny, quicksilver man given to zany pranks and heavy drinking. He loved a hearty joke or play on words, but was prone to paranoia once he'd reached a certain stage of inebriation. It wasn't always easy maintaining a friendship with Brautigan. He was often deliberately cruel, especially to his friends. But those who might think Keeler stuck with Brautigan for money or favors would be far off the mark.

With priceless chapter titles, such as my favorite, "Night of the Living Borscht", Keeler shares his memories of Brautigan. The result is a complete picture of this flawed and complicated man who salved insecurity, loneliness and sorrow with rage, humor, and massive doses of alcohol. Keeler painted his friend as a man who lived with "a huge hole in his chest" after his wife divorced him. That huge hole was replaced with a smaller hole in his head in 1984 when Brautigan committed suicide.

To Keeler, his friend Brautigan represented an unpredictable, idiosyncratic and charming addition to his otherwise normal life. Brautigan considered the art of writing as mining gold from the air or loading mercury with a pitchfork. He would be proud of what his friend Greg Keeler has written because he has, indeed, mined gold and loaded mercury to perfection.

There may be other books out there about Brautigan and his life, but I suggest you start with this one. There can be no truer portrait of the man than one written by a friend who loved him, warts and all.



Rating:
Summary: Loving Study Of A Maniac
Review: What's "waltzing" got to do with it? The memoir's title will remind some readers of Theodore Roethke's poem about the son "waltzing" with his father, but Keeler, a long time friend of Richard Brautigan, means it metaphorically, although the two men were so close that sometimes Keeler wondered whether Brautigan was perhaps coming on to him sexually, for some of his pranks were sexually ambiguous, to the point of joining Keeler on a bed and asking him, what should we do next? There were some stolen kisses, that could be seen as outrageous public goofs. And there's a photo of Brautigan pulling his slacks down and baring his ass to the camera, which Brautigan handed to Keeler, again to Keeler's puzzlement.

But in general Brautigan was a horndog or so it sounds like from this loving, rollicking memoir, some of which I had read already and relished in Kevin Ring's remarkable UK fanzine BEAT SCENE, and so I was looking forward to reading the whole of Keeler's memoir, and now it is here, replete with the lyrics to many amusing Keeler pop songs, and some enchanting line drawings in every chapter, executed by Keeler himself.

Brautigan fans have hitherto been able to discover a bit of him in his daughter Ianthe's memoir of a really bad Dad, and in Keith Abbott's memoir of a somewhat earlier portion of Brautigan's life. The novelist William Hjortsberg has been writing a full-scale Brautigan biography for many years, and I look forward to that book when it is completed. Until then, Greg Keeler has given us a warts and all picture of Richard Brautigan in decline. The full facts of his herpes condition are here exposed in way too much detail. And within the pages of this book he scams a university into giving him many thousands of dollars in exchange for a few appearances. He spends 100s of dollars at a time in a Montana bar where shots of Scotch are 50 cents apiece. He makes fun of his famous friends like Jimmy Buffett, walking around the dining room table shaking everyone's hand and greeting them warmly by saying, "Hi--I'm Jimmy." In some ways Brautigan seems terribly insecure, in other ways, he was a balls out maniac! Well, good for him, it seems he had a good life all things considered.