If imitation is the best form of flattery, what does that make parody? A bit tired of reading seriously delivered, straightfaced crime fiction, I recently decided to go the parodic route and picked up a book I've been meaning to read for ages. I'm talking about Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon, his novel from 1977. I read a few Brautigans years and years ago (A Confederate General at Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, The Hawkline Monster), and had not returned to him since. He's a quintessentially 1960s to mid-1970s writer, a writer who had a lot of success early in his career but who by the end of the 1970s was out of fashion and not selling well. As his friend Thomas McGuane said, "When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water. He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." Brautigan married and divorced twice and had a daughter, but by 1981 he was living alone in Bolinas, California, in Marin County, in a large house he had bought with his earlier earnings. An alcoholic who had talked many times of committing suicide, he died by self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984. He had published 9 novels and 10 collections of poetry.
I guess one of the reasons
that I've never been
a very good private detective
is that I spend too much time
dreaming of Babylon.
At least he has self-awareness. Dreaming while awake, while engaged in work, while out on a case, is his Achilles Heel, and he does everything he can to fight his weakness. He can't always though, and he winds up dreaming of Babylon wherever he may be, whether on the bus, on the street, or on a stakeout. What is Babylon exactly? I guess you could call it a mental space, a realm inside his head where narratives of his own peculiar devising unfold. It's a place he's been going to for years, since just after high school, and his visits began just after the time when he, C. Card, a fair baseball player in high school, was hit in the head by a fastball. The ball had been thrown by a pitcher when Card was trying out for a semi-pro team. As he says he found out that day, "It was really beautiful in Babylon. I went for a walk beside the Euphrates River. There was a girl with me. She was very beautiful and wearing a gown that I could see through. She had on an emerald necklace.
We talked about President Roosevelt. She was a Democrat, too. The fact that she had large firm breasts and was a Democrat made her the perfect woman for me."
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