Easy Writer

By R.Z. Sheppard

REVENGE OF THE LAWN by Richard Brautigan. 174 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

Escape literature is the term generally used to designate a chickenhearted conspiracy of writers and readers who do not want to face up to real life. But as Playwright Tom Stoppard noted in his existential comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an exit is always an entrance some place else. One of the most original, whimsical escape artists in contemporary American writing is Richard Brautigan, who is definitely some place else.

His best work, an effortless and lovely cloud of confetti about the decline of the sweet, the good and the pure, was called Trout Fishing in America. The main character was Trout Fishing itself--among the cleanest and most refreshing combinations of words in English. Unfortunately, this personification of a peerless gerund suffered a surrealistic metamorphosis that included its becoming a pen point, a legless alcoholic and a dinner companion of Maria Callas. At the end, Trout Fishing wound up in a junkyard as a used stream, for sale by the foot.

Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan explains, contains two chapters that were meant for Trout Fishing but somehow got misplaced just before the book was published. The first is "Rembrandt Creek," which "looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets." The second, "Carthage Sink," is about "a Goddamn bombastic river" that suddenly dried up in mid-boast.

It is unlikely that readers of Trout Fishing noticed their absence. The two chapters are just as much at home in this collection of 62 stories as they would have been in their intended novel. In fact, it is not even necessary to separate Brautigan's prose into short stories or novels. All of his images, longings and humor eventually float free of their structural moorings and are kept aloft by the only thing in Brautigan that really counts--his special voice.

Loneliness, aloneness and loss are his particular loves. There are occasional notes of tinny sentimentality and studied coyness. But there are also funny fantasies casually conjured out of sad realities. For example, a depositor, fated always to select the slowest line at the bank, finds himself behind Siamese twins: "One of them is putting eighty-two dollars in his savings account anc the other one is closing his savings account. The teller counts out 3,574 dollars for him and he puts it away in the pocket on his side of the pants."

Brautigan, a self-confessed minor poet, exploits his limitations to the fullest. Another original, Poet Gary Snyder, has said that Brautigan's work consists of "flowers for the void." Lawn offers plenty of rosemary for remembrance and, if Brautigan harbors any bitterness for a world that now sells used trout streams by the foot, he certainly wears his rue with a difference.

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