THEATER
INTRODUCTION
by Jarvis Cocker
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 period’ – when things were starting to get a bit chilly. You can sense that from the book: a writer is trying to get a story started but becomes obsessed with searching his apartment for one of his Japanese ex-lover’s hairs instead. The aborted story is thrown in the bin, where it writes itself whilst the writer works himself up into a jealous rage over whom his ex-girlfriend might be sleeping with. The bits we have been shown read like self-parody, but left to its own devices the abandoned story develops into an action-packed blockbuster. ‘Look,’ Brautigan seems to be saying, ‘the writing gets on better without my interference.’
Meanwhile, the imagination that seems to have deserted him – as far as his writing is concerned – proceeds to torture him with images of his ex-lover’s supposed infidelities. (She is, in fact, sleeping alone at home with her cat.) Sombrero Fallout is about an imagination in crisis. It is a ‘what am I doing with my life?’ book. It is full of doubt and self-loathing – and it is also incredibly funny. Yes, I am talking about that dread phrase laugh-out-loud funny. Brautigan describes himself as a ‘humourist without a sense of humour’ but somehow the fact that he’s not laughing at his own jokes just makes them funnier for us. I don’t want to spoil your impending enjoyment by quoting examples but look out for the stuff about the ghost – it’s a killer.
When I was invited on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2005, I chose Sombrero Fallout as the only book I was allowed to take along with me (the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare are provided as standard). A 187-page novel with very short chapters and lots of blank spaces, which can be read in a single sitting, may seem a strange choice, but I would probably stick with my decision if asked again today. It is Brautigan’s best book – precisely because of the way it allows glimpses of the writer in all his doubt and anxiety and then mixes them with moments of high comedy. It is simultaneously his silliest and most profound piece of work.
I imagine that the worst thing about being on a desert island is thinking about everything you’re missing out on, the whole world continuing without you. Sombrero Fallout – a treatise on the pitfalls of the imagination, on the ridiculous situations you can sometimes think yourself into – might be a very useful antidote to have around in your hour of need. To remind you that it’s all in your head: the good and the bad.
And, most of all, to remind you to laugh.
SOMBRERO
‘A Sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the Main Street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday.’
The first tear formed itself in his right eye. That was the eye that always started crying first. Then the left followed. He would have found it interesting if he had known that the right eye started crying first. The left eye started crying so close after the right eye that he didn’t know which eye started crying first, but it was always the right one.
He was very perceptive but he wasn’t perceptive enough to know which eye started crying first. That is, if one can use such a small piece of information as any kind of definition of perception.
‘Is that a sombrero?’ the mayor said. Mayors always speak first, especially if it is impossible for them to rise to any other political position than mayor of a small town.
‘Yes,’ said his cousin, who wanted to be mayor himself.
The man who had no job said nothing. He waited to see which way the wind was blowing. He didn’t want to rock the boat. Being out of work in America is no laughing matter.
‘It fell from the sky,’ said the mayor, looking up into the absolutely clear blue sky.
‘Yes,’ said his cousin.
The man who had no job said nothing because he wanted a job. He did not want to jeopardize whatever faint possibility he had of getting one. It was better for everybody if the big shots did all the talking.
The three men looked around for a reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky but they couldn’t find one, including the man who had no job.
The sombrero looked brand-new.
It was lying in the street with its crown pointed toward the sky.
Size: 7¼.
‘Why are hats falling from the sky?’ said the mayor.
‘I don’t know,’ said his cousin.
The man who was without a job wondered if the hat would fit his head.
Now both eyes were crying.
Oh, God . . .
He reached into the typewriter as if he were an undertaker zipping up the fly of a dead man in his coffin and removed a piece of paper with everything that has been written here except for his crying, which he didn’t know he was doing because he had done it so often recently
