Keit Abbott Interview
Trout Fishing in Colorado : A Conversation with Keith Abbott
by Ben Wheelon and Kathy Conde
Ben Wheelon: A noteworthy current of respect for both Richard Brautigan the man and the writer runs through Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. What of Brautigan, the man, inspires you? And what of his writing does likewise?
Keith Abbott: I was 22 when I met Brautigan. No role models for working writers were in my youth or university years. Brautigan’s total dedication to writing—desperate, foolhardy and yet incandescent—inspired me greatly. It’s hard to describe his determination and drive at this point in his life. He had to be a writer, that was his only skill, and he harnessed that willfulness and his imagination to that end in ways that supported my ambitions, too. So a running buddy for San Francisco, first, and second, an entry into some levels of the local writing and artistic life. Richard was generous and he loved good stories. Everyday we walked around San Francisco together was an adventure. Plus I greatly admired A Confederate General From Big Sur, his only novel published at that time, 1966. I had majored in Philosophy at the University of Washington with a concentration in Logic so I was fascinated with Brautigan’s use of a metaphor from physics—the speed of light—to end his book. (At the UW I was reading the South American novelists, too, so I loved the magic realism of Brautigan.) I was also studying Quantum theories and found their thought and logic inspiring.
What I admired then and now was Brautigan’s ability sky up out of daily life into flashes of sweet wild imagination and then re-enter without a splash. Beguiling and tempting and marvelous for a young writer. I had a similar imagination and endured some of the same Northwest social issues that Brautigan experienced as a child. I was a dreamer, big time. How much of a dreamer? Once, in a candid moment, my mother told me that she thought I was unconscious until I was 21. Still fascinates me what my mind brews up and what I see with my imagination almost everyday. But I also related to Brautigan’s work because it connected me to the favorite books of my teenage years.
When I was around 14 years old, my sister’s first husband Roger was a mathematical genius but also a well-read misanthrope. Tall, slightly stooped over much like Brautigan, he was an enthusiastic fan of literature. He noticed my pile of reading materials , as I remember, and we talked books. When he returned, he brought me a huge box of paperback books. The Russians, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Gogol—Dead Souls has remained one of my most reread books. The French, Rabelais, Maupassant, Flaubert, Latin authors like Petronius The Satyricon and Apulius The Golden Ass, and plenty of fresh American authors like Vonnegut, Nelson Algren, Nabokov and others who I didn’t know. This was a great gift! Especially to a kid on a 3-acre “stump ranch” on a dead end street south of Tacoma. No British, as I remember, except for Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, so I discovered their picaresque novels later via an English teacher. But to get such a huge box of books was thrilling, plus Roger talked to me about them and he confirmed what I was feeling.
So from those books I knew Brautigan’s General grew out a rich picaresque tradition—but first and foremost Twain, of course. Bob Lynd, my best buddy, his family owned a complete set of Twain. The Lynd’s had a swimming pool, too, rare for that working class neighborhood, so lots of sleepovers happened there and that’s when I read almost all of Twain. I was nine years old or so and I think I finished that set when I was twelve or thirteen. Whole scenes of Twain were engraved in my memory forever: the cub pilot on the huge paddle wheeler getting cussed out by the skipper for not memorizing all the details of the Mississippi that really stuck in my mind. Holding the world in your mind and working with it, really deeply sensing it. That seemed a great ideal.
BW: Brautigan’s writing has a popular sensibility that feels specific to the time in which it was written, not dissimilar to certain popular music which you can place in time after hearing just a few notes. But despite being of its time, Brautigan’s writing also, again like certain popular music, transcends its own constraints and is able to maintain its relevance thirty, forty years on. What about Brautigan’s work still feels relevant to you? What are some of the elements of Brautigan’s work that allow it to transcend, the time in which it was written? Is it that Brautigan’s work, like Yasunari Kawabata’s—as you note in Downstream—is ahistorical, or at least attempts to be so?
KA: My friend Peter Howard, a bookseller, once said “Richard’s work is always being discovered by the young.” And the young occupy different time zones and culture zones necessarily. The way Brautigan finds life ridiculously marvelous and baffling attracts young people. He has some of his best scenes devoted to contrary experiences. His straightforward acknowledgement of fear, ecstasy and wonder also mark Brautigan’s work: there’s a vulnerability to it that’s attractive to young people. Also how our imaginative urges sabotage our life as much as they enrich it. Over and over this happens in his works and I think everyone must remember at least one great idea they acted on and then found that this was not a great idea at all. This reversal is present in our greatest literature. King Lear has a ripping good idea to divide up his kingdom among his daughters, even before the curtain raises—Lear’s on fire with that notion.
The twilight feeling found in Brautigan’s work when his stories move into an ahistorical mode, where loss and estrangement, and feelings of being out of time and out of place, that’s something unique about his writing. He portrays a melancholy about a mis-alignment of the stars that puts his people in no-man’s land. Often through no agency of their own. We Americans are coming back through this feeling now, the bleak mood experienced during the Depression and other funks in our history and Americans do not like it. That interferes with our optimism, and in Trout Fishing in America Brautigan was careful to tie American optimism to Franz Kafka, who represents the shadow side of our worlds.
Kathy Conde: In Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, there is a lot of insight into the writing life—the dangers, the bounty, the risks, the freedoms—that comes from your close look at Brautigan’s experience. Was this part of your initial motivation or intention in writing the book? What else motivated you to write it?
KA: Set some things straight. His life at its end was horrible and alcoholic and painful and when you love someone, that degradation is not good for you, either. I knew those endgame days would be stressed in print perhaps without an understanding Brautigan’s generous nature and benevolent influences. A lot of long bad memories were ready to surface in San Francisco and the long knives drawn out after his success alienated the local literary scene. So when California magazine and Tom Bates the editor came calling, I agreed to write a memoir very quickly. I believe that Tom had been told about my 1983 memoir of Brautigan in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, so he knew I had published material already.
Luckily Tom turned out to be the best journalism editor I ever had. His work with me was very, very fine. I learned so much from him in a marvelously short time. I followed him to other mags until he went to ABC network and then wrote his own book, Rads. And so I was very happy with that coverage for my Brautigan memoir, and later Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair all followed with their more thorough interviews gathered from multiple perspectives, Those told me some things about Richard that I had no way of knowing otherwise.
BW: Why did you write a memoir rather than a straightforward biography?
KA: Time. Lack of research capabilities. Lack of money. Lack of talent for creation of an historical record. After I labored on the memoir, my admiration grew large for those biographers who make it look easy. Richard Ellman, his bios of Joyce and Oscar Wilde, for example. The techniques needed for a biography were far beyond me. And I also wanted to lay Richard’s ghost to rest. Even though I wrote it mostly in a colloquial voice, I still went through ten major drafts of the memoir before I let it go to the publisher.
KC: What was the need for Downstream from Trout Fishing in America when it was first published in 1989, and for this Astrophil edition now in 2009?
KA: This story is a good one and Brautigan’s work is still read around the world. Everyone needs some good stories, especially ones that show an unlikely soul triumphing over a truly raw and brutal childhood. Such tales always intrigue if not sell. Also the Capra edition suffered from a botched typesetting job at first, fouling their production schedules. Its publishing date dictated a hurried editing for the first proof. I called in two editor friends to help me; that was how rushed it was. However, no final proof ever made it to me for those 10% corrections that polish prose. For understandable reasons Capra printed it fast to get it to market. I never begrudged them that. Unfortunate, but that’s the breaks.
Rewriting Downstream for the Astrophil edition showed me so many new places where some oatmeal sentences were lurking. And other stylistic irritations. Astrophil editor Duncan B. Barlow did a great job with smoothing out some areas that needed rewriting. While the subject of celebrity being very bad state for human beings remains a drag on the present market, probably, Brautigan as a doomed celebrity figure doesn’t occupy that much of Downstream. This Astrophil edition has two upbeat additions that were written after the Capra edition where Brautigan’s charming or idiosyncratic aspects are on show. Plus other amplifications and revisions were inserted, some goodly chunks of prose. The Astrophil book radiates a much more complete feel to it for me. The critical appreciation of Brautigan’s work is completely rewritten and expanded. Plus at the end of the book Erik Weber’s marvelous photographic album of Brautigan’s life and times puts the story into clear focus for readers—they can see the changes in Brautigan’s life—and the depth and brilliance of Weber’s portraits helps the book immeasurably. I owe a great debt to Erik for his art.
BW: You mention in Downstream…that “[Brautigan] became well aware of his own peculiar gifts.” Is that something you feel is usual—perhaps essential on some level—with accomplished writers?
KA: Yes, if the writer has the talent for self-observation and reflection. What you do well you should judge, cultivate and do better. In his early writing, when Brautigan arrived at the right blend of mundane and insane, antic Pan and deadpan Clown, then he trained himself to find other opportunities for this skill and to not ignore those moments. Due to a prolonged adolescence his self-censor was switched on during his early writing found in The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. He was a weird kid in the provinces. He feared and craved discovery as all writers do under those circumstances. But the metaphors and narrative patterns for his mature talent are found there. He needed to get around people who regarded him and his imagination as great good fun. Once he found them in San Francisco, he valued himself more and he had a literate audience. And with more confidence he studied writing and writers who helped give him permission to write out at the ends of his nerves. And he knew that he was good.
KC: What were some of the problems or issues with the memoir? Would you write a biography or memoir again?
KA: To answer the last part first, no. I don’t think so. There was some talk of my writing a biography of my late teacher, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, but that was impossible. His early life in Japan was beyond my skills. I no longer had the luxury of time, as I did with Downstream. I knew him for a small amount of time compared to Richard. So I wrote a short memoir and I doubt any more needs to be written by me.
Memoirs present several issues for a writer. One task is creating historical overviews with adequate research and insight. Another is fashioning various transitions from the personal experiences to the other public areas of that subject’s life: family life, social class issues, historical place, education, personal and group psychological aspects and social and cultural history. This necessity creates serious stylistic problems about how to bridge the shifts from one area to another. Brautigan’s rise in the Haight-Ashbury Hippie culture is one example. I was not living in San Francisco in early 1967 when his fame took off. Much of what I know of that time comes from Brautigan’s own versions and Charles Perry’s book, The Haight-Ashbury, augmented by the Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair interviews. From Monterey I visited him in San Francisco often, but those were glimpses, really. I didn’t get the fabric of Richard’s life in large doses. So I left what I didn’t know alone, basically. Yet I had to address the changes in the Haight scene and Brautigan’s life as best I could. If what I knew had relevant evidence elsewhere, I used a quote. The book needed to shift in and out of what was happening to Brautigan on his social and cultural fronts and then, the narration needed to slide out of those situations or segue back into events that I witnessed or was reasonably sure happened. Many times such shifts feel awkward and read as forced or weak. Endless issues, really.
The Bancroft Brautigan Archive held a few revealing details about his writing practices. But large early manuscripts and proofs were missing. Because his correspondence from others was not there, more personal details were lacking. A large number of letters to Brautigan were held by others, but not available. I had seen them in storage so I knew from the return addresses a little about who wrote to him, mostly other writers, but never read the letters to him. So the social fabric of his days was difficult to reconstruct to provide helpful bridges in and out of different aspects of his life. Brautigan only left a few erratic journals and few musings on his art or life. He was not easy with self-analysis in print or confessional narratives.
Brautigan also compartmentalized his friends and his life. He was secretive. Until his wake at Enrico’s in North Beach I didn’t know how much he did this partition job on his private and emotional lives, until I interviewed his friends. That was a fantastic San Francisco event, by the way, with such a wide range of people that came to honor Brautigan. He really affected a lot of very skilled and talented people. But talking to them, I realized that he defined these people very precisely and valued them for very particular needs and social uses. A proper biographer would need to research these worlds within worlds for an accurate life story. Since that realization I always admire the writers who can manage such skills. My skills improved each time I worked on the memoir, I believe, though I could be wrong and often am. But I am not a professional biographer.
BW: When the first edition of Downstream was released in 1989 what was the response? Did you find that Brautigan had begun to be overlooked? Or was his literary presence still palpable at that time?
KA: His presence was still strong among readers, and still worldwide. John and Dene Barber at the Brautigan website continue to feature more and more commentary and works from global sources. The bibliography and web site action has become quite extensive. I started teaching at Naropa University in 1989 and then most students knew his work. Slowly that changed. So I feel privileged to bring his work to their attention now. Among contemporary creative writing students Brautigan’s early work arouses an awe over its sheer velocity and bravura. Not much can match it. An all or nothing assault at times, pushing not only the envelope but the weird postman who brings it. There’s no one quite like Brautigan at his best. And only an American, raised on the West Coast, could write that way.
BW: One gets the impression in Downstream that Brautigan would say any experience—mundane or great adventure—is helpful to writing; anything is fuel for the imagination. Do you tend to look to one more than the other (the mundane versus the adventurous moments in your own life) for inspiration?
KA: That’s a good question. What do you start with when you wake up? Unless you’ve fallen asleep on a river raft and wake up in a rapids, you regard what you see for some time before the brain engages.
My life has been full of extraordinary experiences. I have the Aquarian trait of tolerating all kinds of bizarre or sketchy people because I’m interested in what will happen next. I stayed out of academe for as long as possible so I met many people from all the layers of life while they are inside those different tiers. Just harder to build on a daily life to more daily life without boring your reader, unless you find an extraordinary sensitivity to the little dramas of those leadings lives of quiet desperation. Not my skill, though when I find those moments, I do try to use them if I can. I tuck them away for further use. A few short stories in my collections, The First Thing Coming, Harum Scarum and The French Girl, have some mundane situations running all the way through them. When the details glow and get radioactive in those stories, irradiating all the details and moods and mutating behavior, then you ride that energy as long as you are able.
Ray Carver has a story where a vicious and long-running domestic dispute actually circles around what the wife calls an ashtray. The husband calls it a stoneware dish because it was his gift to her and this proves his husbandly love and care for their marriage. And well, her name for the thing demeans him somehow. Domestic violence arises out of just such delusions.
What you learn from Zen Buddhism is a marvelous and spectacular transformation is a breath away, always. Some of those guys enter satori upon hearing the caw of a crow—something I heard every day of my life on the family stump ranch. And then they come back out of satori, ready to roll with the punches.
That’s the miracle.
THE WRITING LIFE
KC: you agree that writers should be prolific readers. Why or why not?
KA: Yes! If they have the yen. I’m prejudiced, as I am a prolific reader. I read acres of books, have ever since I was very young. In school I was sick a lot with lung problems. At sixteen a doctor discovered that I was allergic to tobacco, jute, burlap and steer hide. My parents smoked; we raised beef and used jute ropes and burlap feed bags. Forty-five sick days a year was my average. My mother used to bundle me to the Fern Hill Library in South Tacoma. I read my way completely around its walls. At age thirteen I was hung up on World War II prisoner of war camp histories, how the soldiers in Europe escaped in from the slammers, when I drifted over to the last large wall of fiction and found The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.
My Freshman Home Room teacher, Mr. Robert Alexander, saw me reading one of these, drifted over and we struck up a dialogue about our reading. He suggested other books, mostly English authors. When Tom Jones, the film, came out, I remember telling him that a local Lutheran professor had forbidden his daughters to see the movie with all its lusts and feasts and farces. Mr. Alexander exploded, “If you don’t want to live, then die!” He recommended Smollett and others, much to my joy. I love the writers of that era. So we maintained a friendship outside of school, a rare event for our high school. I used to drop by his house, where he had an office in a building separate from his family manse, and it was filled with books. And I’d pull them off his shelves and he’d talk with me about them. Invaluable early literary friendship.
Another reason why I’m a prolific reader is my writing habit. When I’m writing on a serious project, a longer ms., I get a ferocious reading habit, because I often reread daily, over and over, what I’ve written up to that point. As the book grows, so do my pages per day. So I’m hooked on reading from my writing. Badly hooked. A barn-burner jones. When the project is done, I often experience varieties of panic and withdrawal. My own shelves of To-Read Books get ransacked. I go to our very good public library in Longmont and read all manner of Hollywood bios, art history, scientific books and histories that feed my reading habit but also this feeds my need for new materials. Not so much fiction, although last summer I did motor through most of Graham Greene’s books while dipping and out of the Sherry three-volume biography for background on these books. I’m always on the lookout for new materials. With computer checkout prints, I now can paste my library booklists into my written journals, so if I need one of those books later, I can find it easily.
Many of my friends are the same. We trade hot books. Also I return to reading the unread piles of The New York Review of Books and other trade journals, checking the Internet, etc. I trade excerpts from my reading to friends, quotes. Recently I read most of the first thick volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters. A deep joy and happiness: what a marvelous fellow he was. Funny, wicked, a lovely Irish wit. And what with his multi-cultural scope, I learned a great deal about aspects of European artistic life in the 1930s that seems unique and hence gratifying. But it’s mainly Beckett’s kindness, too, his manners, that impresses me, between moments of laughing a lot. For example, in speaking of some Irish poets in Dublin he envisioned them with “their pockets full of calm precious poems.” Bless his little heart, as the writer Lucia Berlin used to say.
KC: How do you manage your projects, or do they manage you?
KA: I try to have some small projects waiting after a big one. Essays, collaborative renku writing with friends, short stories. I love writing short stories, but they take a lot of revision and timing drills. Just when something is mentioned and where determines its power for the short story. Fiction is the timed flow of information, that’s a mantra of mine. McGuane said something about a short story burning as much material as a novel and I agree. But I am fairly adept at avoiding post-partum blues. I’m lucky in that I believe that gardening or Tai Chi practice or being a husband and being a friend or an adequate teacher are just as important as writing and deserve the same effort.
KC: What starts a project? Where do you get inspiration for starting and how do you see it through to the end?
KA: I usually see or hear something in my imagination. A 1957 Ford riding through a Western American high plains landscape, with an older man and a teenager in front and in the back seat a dismantled glass telephone booth, that was one such picture. Sound, too, a comment or exchange of dialogue that becomes a Velcro Moment and all kinds of other scenes and chatter stick to it. Usually though my inspiration is visual. Often I get the last sentence or scene, too, rather quickly and I try to write to that place. My story, “Spanish Castle”, in the collection The First Thing Coming, started as a slow panning shot taken in a cool gray Northwest evening as a hot rod circled the ravaged rock and roll dance hall called Spanish Castle. At its end I saw the clouds of putrid reddish fat-colored smoke from Tacoma’s pulp mills and smelter and I wrote to that image. I heard a character ask a high school dropout friend who turned into a tortured Army vet, “My old man’s in the Army, and they sure as hell aren’t in Vietnam” challenging his story of war in Vietnam, because in 1959 it was not in the news, a secret war of “advisors.” And poor hapless Ray was dubbed an advisor after some training. This created another story, “Ray’s First Visit to the A&W”. At its end I saw Ray’s father lying dead across his corner grocery store counter, a suicide. My mystery novel Rhino Ritz started with an image of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald living their afterlife as immortals in San Francisco. I imagined them forming a detective agency called Rhino Ritz.
For Downstream I ended the memoir part with a story about Richard and I rescuing another writer’s nearly finished novel from a hotel room. The room was about to be seized by the hotel staff in lieu of payment for a front door the writer had kicked in. That story I withheld from the other sections just for that purpose. Richard paid for a new door and a carpenter so this writer could reclaim his life’s work. This showed Brautigan’s generous and kind nature perfectly. When he was on his best game, that’s who he was.
KC: Are there any writers you read for style or technique?
KA: Yes, there are. Elmore Leonard’s sleight of hand POV techniques and innovative transitions in fiction still intrigue me. He has very sharp visual sense for physical interactions between people. Perhaps an offshoot of screenwriting or maybe just westerns where people don’t talk they act. A recent addition for my courses this year is Julie Otsuka’s When The Emperor Was Divine. Her abilities for displaying and employing emotional states of mind are exciting. Her use of names and things in constantly evolving combinations ranks up there with some Basho or Buson renku, those intricate linked-verse compositions. She’s just so fine. Alice Munro’s use of perceptions to build her stories seems brave and courageous to me, risking tedium sometimes to the max. But what she gets is those moments when her character’s patterns of perceptions build a worldview for that particular person that tells you things you can’t get from dialogue or scenes. And we feel very close to that person. How they see a cornfield. How they sense danger in another person. I studied Raymond Carver’s work closely and profitably for years and lately am devoting myself to Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins. Raymond Chandler, Bobbie Ann Mason, Dashiell Hammett, Amy Hempel, Patricia Highsmith, Will Christopher Baer, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth Hyde, I can learn from and teach all those writers because they inspire me to write in ways that are explicable. I’ve never read a new book of Tom McGuane’s without learning something new about prose technique. He’s got some textbook examples I use. On the other hand, lots of writers who thrill and enchant me turn out to be those I can’t use directly in my courses, but I get inspiration from them. Austen, Twain, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Gogol, Marquez, Nabokov, Paley, Waugh, Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Sterne, Jorge Amado, Hunter Thompson, that’s a big list that could go on. Usually the English wits are bad for me. I love that use of English and sometimes fantasize that I can do that style but I really, really can’t. It’s fatal. One Noel Coward play and it seems so easy and then my letters start to decay, showing that no, I can’t.
KC: Were there specific things from areas like education, sports, family, inherited traits that have helped in your writing life?
Wandering in the woods. Fishing. Camping. Hiking. Contemplative skills were sharpened while watching my over-worked father relax into calm black Irish happiness, watching the water flow, letting things go. We spent hours together where neither of us said anything. Just watching the lake change in the morning sun. Catching rainbows and silvers.
Sports. I played all three major high school sports: football, basketball and baseball. When my sister Judy received a 100 dollar college scholarship for her years of straight A work, I decided that I could not go to college without an athletic scholarship. No money in my family for it. That spring I dropped baseball and took up tennis, so I could work on my balance and footwork. I was in ninth grade. I was a big kid for that time, 6 feet tall and 190 pounds, without sprint speed, but knew that with practice I could be more nimble. My two older brothers were high school athletes. Len the oldest was a competitive diver and the only person I ever saw get up on water skis on his first try and stay there. Jim was an avid skier. So an innate sense of balance was in the Abbott genes. Tennis helped a lot, and when I went out for varsity football as a sophomore, playing offensive guard, my quickness to get out and lead an end run improved. So with good balance and footwork, knocking over linebackers became my first good steady skill in football. Mental and physical preparation then became a habit—one I later applied to writing and also my brush calligraphy practice.
What I learned from sports was visualization. I don’t remember exactly how I first arrived at that. But one Sunday in 1959, when I was watching pro football, I saw a guy named Floyd Peters, an All Pro defensive tackle for the Browns, do some spin maneuvers and other very innovative moves. So I memorized those, and after the game then I went out to our driveway to practice them on a smooth surface. I found it was better to do them with my eyes closed at first. Just by feel getting the footwork right and then the balance for a spin to the left or right, dropping the lead shoulder lower in a shrug to loose my blocker. Since I had my eyes closed, I found that I needed to imagine it all the way through, then do it with my eyes still closed. Feel it. So as a sophomore I played more defense than offense and became my head coach’s favorite project. Eldon Kyllo had been a blocking college tight end and learned very classic techniques that he passed on to me. Then it seemed natural on offense to look at where the linebackers were and imagine how I’d get out there and what I would do if that linebacker were to my left or right shoulder. Run that movie over and over in my head and then go do it. I also learned quickly that there was no need to hit the linebacker, just tie them up with handwork or get in their way, so the running back behind me could cut and run to daylight. Only takes a second or two, and then I was free to pick off any safeties or cornerbacks rushing over. Unlike linebackers, defensive backs tended to be more delicate and more susceptible to training.
I wanted to go to college, but I knew that my need was more serious than merely a desire, I had to go to survive as a writer and as a man. I did not want to work at “the plant” or serve in an army in an unjust war or marry and get buried alive in family-maintenance jobs. For that artistic future I needed a scholarship. So I approached that task as a job, in some ways.
In basketball our coach Mr. Bob Ross, a former college forward, told me as a sophomore that I would never be a scorer. All I needed was a turnaround jump shot if I got a pass when I was coming across the foul line to set a pick. He taught me rebounding skills, a job that had fueled his college scholarship. He was good and I learned how to rebound. With my lateral quickness I was a modest defender, even able to defense some larger high school guards. I became the guy they put on the opposing team’s hot high scorers to muscle up on them, impede their movements, tire them out, frustrate them with my quickness by drawing a few offensive charging fouls on them, and collect three fouls on myself in a short period of time. Ross taught me how to get an opposing player up on my hip and help them achieve air space unexpectedly. All perfectly legal, good sportsmanship and all that.
However, one game while we were playing our arch rival, Clover Park High School, I performed too well. And under the home team’s basket, while I was going up for a rebound, I put the guy I was guarding into the bleachers. The Clover Park fans rose up en masse in runaway rage. For a moment I thought all of them were coming after me. Touch and go, there for a long second or two. When I ran away to play offense at the other end of the gym, I grabbed my leg, faking a hamstring pull. Our grateful coach pulled me out with an injury time-out. I hid out under a towel for the rest of the game. That crowd’s roar remains a vivid memory. So be effective, but don’t show up any opponent.
Local high school politics also educated me. I announced in my junior year that I would not take any honors or positions for the next year because I wanted to concentrate on sports. I held office in student organizations previously but refused to continue. This was laudable in our jock mad culture. But when after football season I declined to play either basketball or baseball and spent my time reading or entertaining my girlfriend Cheryl and our friends, I became a traitor.
The basketball coach was a high administrator and he felt betrayed. He needed me to soften up successful opponents. So in the spring when the scandal broke about counterfeit away basketball game tickets—packing other team’s home court with our fans—I was called in and threatened with loss of my college football scholarship if I didn’t admit my involvement or rat out someone. And he waited for my answer. He acted confident, as if he had secret info and that panicked me for a moment.
Luckily, a crystal clear memory of my future college football coach slash Athletic Director’s pep talk returned to me, all about my scholarship funding. He had given me a 3x5 card with what my freshman year would cost me without a towel-folding job—800 dollars max. And what I would get after four years with a towel-folding job and “some perks”—upon graduation somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000 dollars in a bank savings account.
And when I held up the penciled card and said, “Yeah, but how do I know this will happen? All I have is this card.”
The coach looked amazed. “It’s the student body’s money! Keith, they do what we tell them. We really want you out on the field for us, son.”
So at this point in time I sensed that nothing short of an armed robbery and kidnapping beef might negatively affect my college scholarship.
So I smiled. And in the ease of that smile I recalled one of our guys, a good buddy, a Lutheran church official’s son, who had been kicked out last fall. He was currently finishing his high school career hundreds of miles away in North Dakota. He sent us guys a snapshot of himself amongst his sour relatives. And his pleas for runaway money. I allowed that one rumor was that he might be involved in the ticket scam. Before he was cashiered out of our school. And someone a while back had found a lot of stuff in his abandoned locker. And the locker was rumored to be left unlocked. Fleabags was a stand-up guy and he adored local fame. When he returned that summer he would savor the luster this alleged crime would bestow upon his reputation. He’d never deny it. Even describe the wheel of yellow tickets accurately.
And of course whatever the solution, the school would want zero publicity.
About the Interviewers:
Kathy Conde won the Hemingway Festival Short Story Contest 2008 and was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s May 2008 Short Story Award for New Writers and CutThroat’s 2008 Rick De Marinis Short Fiction Competitions. Her short story collection, More Than One Way to Break, was a semifinalist for the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in CutThroat, Orbis, Pearl, and others. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and is past fiction editor for Bombay Gin, Naropa’s literary magazine. She lives in Colorado with her husband and son.
Ben Wheelon has an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in English from Lewis and Clark College. He is concurrently working on a collection of short stories—Just Enough Beauty, and an episodic novel—The Gospel Singer. His long poem, A Tao of Waiting, inspired by his twenty-five plus years as a waiter, is finished, again, and looking for a home, as is his collection of poetry—Is there a cure for being human? He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and daughter, and Arizona Red, the dog.
by Ben Wheelon and Kathy Conde
Ben Wheelon: A noteworthy current of respect for both Richard Brautigan the man and the writer runs through Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. What of Brautigan, the man, inspires you? And what of his writing does likewise?
Keith Abbott: I was 22 when I met Brautigan. No role models for working writers were in my youth or university years. Brautigan’s total dedication to writing—desperate, foolhardy and yet incandescent—inspired me greatly. It’s hard to describe his determination and drive at this point in his life. He had to be a writer, that was his only skill, and he harnessed that willfulness and his imagination to that end in ways that supported my ambitions, too. So a running buddy for San Francisco, first, and second, an entry into some levels of the local writing and artistic life. Richard was generous and he loved good stories. Everyday we walked around San Francisco together was an adventure. Plus I greatly admired A Confederate General From Big Sur, his only novel published at that time, 1966. I had majored in Philosophy at the University of Washington with a concentration in Logic so I was fascinated with Brautigan’s use of a metaphor from physics—the speed of light—to end his book. (At the UW I was reading the South American novelists, too, so I loved the magic realism of Brautigan.) I was also studying Quantum theories and found their thought and logic inspiring.
What I admired then and now was Brautigan’s ability sky up out of daily life into flashes of sweet wild imagination and then re-enter without a splash. Beguiling and tempting and marvelous for a young writer. I had a similar imagination and endured some of the same Northwest social issues that Brautigan experienced as a child. I was a dreamer, big time. How much of a dreamer? Once, in a candid moment, my mother told me that she thought I was unconscious until I was 21. Still fascinates me what my mind brews up and what I see with my imagination almost everyday. But I also related to Brautigan’s work because it connected me to the favorite books of my teenage years.
When I was around 14 years old, my sister’s first husband Roger was a mathematical genius but also a well-read misanthrope. Tall, slightly stooped over much like Brautigan, he was an enthusiastic fan of literature. He noticed my pile of reading materials , as I remember, and we talked books. When he returned, he brought me a huge box of paperback books. The Russians, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Gogol—Dead Souls has remained one of my most reread books. The French, Rabelais, Maupassant, Flaubert, Latin authors like Petronius The Satyricon and Apulius The Golden Ass, and plenty of fresh American authors like Vonnegut, Nelson Algren, Nabokov and others who I didn’t know. This was a great gift! Especially to a kid on a 3-acre “stump ranch” on a dead end street south of Tacoma. No British, as I remember, except for Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, so I discovered their picaresque novels later via an English teacher. But to get such a huge box of books was thrilling, plus Roger talked to me about them and he confirmed what I was feeling.
So from those books I knew Brautigan’s General grew out a rich picaresque tradition—but first and foremost Twain, of course. Bob Lynd, my best buddy, his family owned a complete set of Twain. The Lynd’s had a swimming pool, too, rare for that working class neighborhood, so lots of sleepovers happened there and that’s when I read almost all of Twain. I was nine years old or so and I think I finished that set when I was twelve or thirteen. Whole scenes of Twain were engraved in my memory forever: the cub pilot on the huge paddle wheeler getting cussed out by the skipper for not memorizing all the details of the Mississippi that really stuck in my mind. Holding the world in your mind and working with it, really deeply sensing it. That seemed a great ideal.
BW: Brautigan’s writing has a popular sensibility that feels specific to the time in which it was written, not dissimilar to certain popular music which you can place in time after hearing just a few notes. But despite being of its time, Brautigan’s writing also, again like certain popular music, transcends its own constraints and is able to maintain its relevance thirty, forty years on. What about Brautigan’s work still feels relevant to you? What are some of the elements of Brautigan’s work that allow it to transcend, the time in which it was written? Is it that Brautigan’s work, like Yasunari Kawabata’s—as you note in Downstream—is ahistorical, or at least attempts to be so?
KA: My friend Peter Howard, a bookseller, once said “Richard’s work is always being discovered by the young.” And the young occupy different time zones and culture zones necessarily. The way Brautigan finds life ridiculously marvelous and baffling attracts young people. He has some of his best scenes devoted to contrary experiences. His straightforward acknowledgement of fear, ecstasy and wonder also mark Brautigan’s work: there’s a vulnerability to it that’s attractive to young people. Also how our imaginative urges sabotage our life as much as they enrich it. Over and over this happens in his works and I think everyone must remember at least one great idea they acted on and then found that this was not a great idea at all. This reversal is present in our greatest literature. King Lear has a ripping good idea to divide up his kingdom among his daughters, even before the curtain raises—Lear’s on fire with that notion.
The twilight feeling found in Brautigan’s work when his stories move into an ahistorical mode, where loss and estrangement, and feelings of being out of time and out of place, that’s something unique about his writing. He portrays a melancholy about a mis-alignment of the stars that puts his people in no-man’s land. Often through no agency of their own. We Americans are coming back through this feeling now, the bleak mood experienced during the Depression and other funks in our history and Americans do not like it. That interferes with our optimism, and in Trout Fishing in America Brautigan was careful to tie American optimism to Franz Kafka, who represents the shadow side of our worlds.
Kathy Conde: In Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, there is a lot of insight into the writing life—the dangers, the bounty, the risks, the freedoms—that comes from your close look at Brautigan’s experience. Was this part of your initial motivation or intention in writing the book? What else motivated you to write it?
KA: Set some things straight. His life at its end was horrible and alcoholic and painful and when you love someone, that degradation is not good for you, either. I knew those endgame days would be stressed in print perhaps without an understanding Brautigan’s generous nature and benevolent influences. A lot of long bad memories were ready to surface in San Francisco and the long knives drawn out after his success alienated the local literary scene. So when California magazine and Tom Bates the editor came calling, I agreed to write a memoir very quickly. I believe that Tom had been told about my 1983 memoir of Brautigan in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, so he knew I had published material already.
Luckily Tom turned out to be the best journalism editor I ever had. His work with me was very, very fine. I learned so much from him in a marvelously short time. I followed him to other mags until he went to ABC network and then wrote his own book, Rads. And so I was very happy with that coverage for my Brautigan memoir, and later Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair all followed with their more thorough interviews gathered from multiple perspectives, Those told me some things about Richard that I had no way of knowing otherwise.
BW: Why did you write a memoir rather than a straightforward biography?
KA: Time. Lack of research capabilities. Lack of money. Lack of talent for creation of an historical record. After I labored on the memoir, my admiration grew large for those biographers who make it look easy. Richard Ellman, his bios of Joyce and Oscar Wilde, for example. The techniques needed for a biography were far beyond me. And I also wanted to lay Richard’s ghost to rest. Even though I wrote it mostly in a colloquial voice, I still went through ten major drafts of the memoir before I let it go to the publisher.
KC: What was the need for Downstream from Trout Fishing in America when it was first published in 1989, and for this Astrophil edition now in 2009?
KA: This story is a good one and Brautigan’s work is still read around the world. Everyone needs some good stories, especially ones that show an unlikely soul triumphing over a truly raw and brutal childhood. Such tales always intrigue if not sell. Also the Capra edition suffered from a botched typesetting job at first, fouling their production schedules. Its publishing date dictated a hurried editing for the first proof. I called in two editor friends to help me; that was how rushed it was. However, no final proof ever made it to me for those 10% corrections that polish prose. For understandable reasons Capra printed it fast to get it to market. I never begrudged them that. Unfortunate, but that’s the breaks.
Rewriting Downstream for the Astrophil edition showed me so many new places where some oatmeal sentences were lurking. And other stylistic irritations. Astrophil editor Duncan B. Barlow did a great job with smoothing out some areas that needed rewriting. While the subject of celebrity being very bad state for human beings remains a drag on the present market, probably, Brautigan as a doomed celebrity figure doesn’t occupy that much of Downstream. This Astrophil edition has two upbeat additions that were written after the Capra edition where Brautigan’s charming or idiosyncratic aspects are on show. Plus other amplifications and revisions were inserted, some goodly chunks of prose. The Astrophil book radiates a much more complete feel to it for me. The critical appreciation of Brautigan’s work is completely rewritten and expanded. Plus at the end of the book Erik Weber’s marvelous photographic album of Brautigan’s life and times puts the story into clear focus for readers—they can see the changes in Brautigan’s life—and the depth and brilliance of Weber’s portraits helps the book immeasurably. I owe a great debt to Erik for his art.
BW: You mention in Downstream…that “[Brautigan] became well aware of his own peculiar gifts.” Is that something you feel is usual—perhaps essential on some level—with accomplished writers?
KA: Yes, if the writer has the talent for self-observation and reflection. What you do well you should judge, cultivate and do better. In his early writing, when Brautigan arrived at the right blend of mundane and insane, antic Pan and deadpan Clown, then he trained himself to find other opportunities for this skill and to not ignore those moments. Due to a prolonged adolescence his self-censor was switched on during his early writing found in The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. He was a weird kid in the provinces. He feared and craved discovery as all writers do under those circumstances. But the metaphors and narrative patterns for his mature talent are found there. He needed to get around people who regarded him and his imagination as great good fun. Once he found them in San Francisco, he valued himself more and he had a literate audience. And with more confidence he studied writing and writers who helped give him permission to write out at the ends of his nerves. And he knew that he was good.
KC: What were some of the problems or issues with the memoir? Would you write a biography or memoir again?
KA: To answer the last part first, no. I don’t think so. There was some talk of my writing a biography of my late teacher, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, but that was impossible. His early life in Japan was beyond my skills. I no longer had the luxury of time, as I did with Downstream. I knew him for a small amount of time compared to Richard. So I wrote a short memoir and I doubt any more needs to be written by me.
Memoirs present several issues for a writer. One task is creating historical overviews with adequate research and insight. Another is fashioning various transitions from the personal experiences to the other public areas of that subject’s life: family life, social class issues, historical place, education, personal and group psychological aspects and social and cultural history. This necessity creates serious stylistic problems about how to bridge the shifts from one area to another. Brautigan’s rise in the Haight-Ashbury Hippie culture is one example. I was not living in San Francisco in early 1967 when his fame took off. Much of what I know of that time comes from Brautigan’s own versions and Charles Perry’s book, The Haight-Ashbury, augmented by the Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair interviews. From Monterey I visited him in San Francisco often, but those were glimpses, really. I didn’t get the fabric of Richard’s life in large doses. So I left what I didn’t know alone, basically. Yet I had to address the changes in the Haight scene and Brautigan’s life as best I could. If what I knew had relevant evidence elsewhere, I used a quote. The book needed to shift in and out of what was happening to Brautigan on his social and cultural fronts and then, the narration needed to slide out of those situations or segue back into events that I witnessed or was reasonably sure happened. Many times such shifts feel awkward and read as forced or weak. Endless issues, really.
The Bancroft Brautigan Archive held a few revealing details about his writing practices. But large early manuscripts and proofs were missing. Because his correspondence from others was not there, more personal details were lacking. A large number of letters to Brautigan were held by others, but not available. I had seen them in storage so I knew from the return addresses a little about who wrote to him, mostly other writers, but never read the letters to him. So the social fabric of his days was difficult to reconstruct to provide helpful bridges in and out of different aspects of his life. Brautigan only left a few erratic journals and few musings on his art or life. He was not easy with self-analysis in print or confessional narratives.
Brautigan also compartmentalized his friends and his life. He was secretive. Until his wake at Enrico’s in North Beach I didn’t know how much he did this partition job on his private and emotional lives, until I interviewed his friends. That was a fantastic San Francisco event, by the way, with such a wide range of people that came to honor Brautigan. He really affected a lot of very skilled and talented people. But talking to them, I realized that he defined these people very precisely and valued them for very particular needs and social uses. A proper biographer would need to research these worlds within worlds for an accurate life story. Since that realization I always admire the writers who can manage such skills. My skills improved each time I worked on the memoir, I believe, though I could be wrong and often am. But I am not a professional biographer.
BW: When the first edition of Downstream was released in 1989 what was the response? Did you find that Brautigan had begun to be overlooked? Or was his literary presence still palpable at that time?
KA: His presence was still strong among readers, and still worldwide. John and Dene Barber at the Brautigan website continue to feature more and more commentary and works from global sources. The bibliography and web site action has become quite extensive. I started teaching at Naropa University in 1989 and then most students knew his work. Slowly that changed. So I feel privileged to bring his work to their attention now. Among contemporary creative writing students Brautigan’s early work arouses an awe over its sheer velocity and bravura. Not much can match it. An all or nothing assault at times, pushing not only the envelope but the weird postman who brings it. There’s no one quite like Brautigan at his best. And only an American, raised on the West Coast, could write that way.
BW: One gets the impression in Downstream that Brautigan would say any experience—mundane or great adventure—is helpful to writing; anything is fuel for the imagination. Do you tend to look to one more than the other (the mundane versus the adventurous moments in your own life) for inspiration?
KA: That’s a good question. What do you start with when you wake up? Unless you’ve fallen asleep on a river raft and wake up in a rapids, you regard what you see for some time before the brain engages.
My life has been full of extraordinary experiences. I have the Aquarian trait of tolerating all kinds of bizarre or sketchy people because I’m interested in what will happen next. I stayed out of academe for as long as possible so I met many people from all the layers of life while they are inside those different tiers. Just harder to build on a daily life to more daily life without boring your reader, unless you find an extraordinary sensitivity to the little dramas of those leadings lives of quiet desperation. Not my skill, though when I find those moments, I do try to use them if I can. I tuck them away for further use. A few short stories in my collections, The First Thing Coming, Harum Scarum and The French Girl, have some mundane situations running all the way through them. When the details glow and get radioactive in those stories, irradiating all the details and moods and mutating behavior, then you ride that energy as long as you are able.
Ray Carver has a story where a vicious and long-running domestic dispute actually circles around what the wife calls an ashtray. The husband calls it a stoneware dish because it was his gift to her and this proves his husbandly love and care for their marriage. And well, her name for the thing demeans him somehow. Domestic violence arises out of just such delusions.
What you learn from Zen Buddhism is a marvelous and spectacular transformation is a breath away, always. Some of those guys enter satori upon hearing the caw of a crow—something I heard every day of my life on the family stump ranch. And then they come back out of satori, ready to roll with the punches.
That’s the miracle.
THE WRITING LIFE
KC: you agree that writers should be prolific readers. Why or why not?
KA: Yes! If they have the yen. I’m prejudiced, as I am a prolific reader. I read acres of books, have ever since I was very young. In school I was sick a lot with lung problems. At sixteen a doctor discovered that I was allergic to tobacco, jute, burlap and steer hide. My parents smoked; we raised beef and used jute ropes and burlap feed bags. Forty-five sick days a year was my average. My mother used to bundle me to the Fern Hill Library in South Tacoma. I read my way completely around its walls. At age thirteen I was hung up on World War II prisoner of war camp histories, how the soldiers in Europe escaped in from the slammers, when I drifted over to the last large wall of fiction and found The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.
My Freshman Home Room teacher, Mr. Robert Alexander, saw me reading one of these, drifted over and we struck up a dialogue about our reading. He suggested other books, mostly English authors. When Tom Jones, the film, came out, I remember telling him that a local Lutheran professor had forbidden his daughters to see the movie with all its lusts and feasts and farces. Mr. Alexander exploded, “If you don’t want to live, then die!” He recommended Smollett and others, much to my joy. I love the writers of that era. So we maintained a friendship outside of school, a rare event for our high school. I used to drop by his house, where he had an office in a building separate from his family manse, and it was filled with books. And I’d pull them off his shelves and he’d talk with me about them. Invaluable early literary friendship.
Another reason why I’m a prolific reader is my writing habit. When I’m writing on a serious project, a longer ms., I get a ferocious reading habit, because I often reread daily, over and over, what I’ve written up to that point. As the book grows, so do my pages per day. So I’m hooked on reading from my writing. Badly hooked. A barn-burner jones. When the project is done, I often experience varieties of panic and withdrawal. My own shelves of To-Read Books get ransacked. I go to our very good public library in Longmont and read all manner of Hollywood bios, art history, scientific books and histories that feed my reading habit but also this feeds my need for new materials. Not so much fiction, although last summer I did motor through most of Graham Greene’s books while dipping and out of the Sherry three-volume biography for background on these books. I’m always on the lookout for new materials. With computer checkout prints, I now can paste my library booklists into my written journals, so if I need one of those books later, I can find it easily.
Many of my friends are the same. We trade hot books. Also I return to reading the unread piles of The New York Review of Books and other trade journals, checking the Internet, etc. I trade excerpts from my reading to friends, quotes. Recently I read most of the first thick volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters. A deep joy and happiness: what a marvelous fellow he was. Funny, wicked, a lovely Irish wit. And what with his multi-cultural scope, I learned a great deal about aspects of European artistic life in the 1930s that seems unique and hence gratifying. But it’s mainly Beckett’s kindness, too, his manners, that impresses me, between moments of laughing a lot. For example, in speaking of some Irish poets in Dublin he envisioned them with “their pockets full of calm precious poems.” Bless his little heart, as the writer Lucia Berlin used to say.
KC: How do you manage your projects, or do they manage you?
KA: I try to have some small projects waiting after a big one. Essays, collaborative renku writing with friends, short stories. I love writing short stories, but they take a lot of revision and timing drills. Just when something is mentioned and where determines its power for the short story. Fiction is the timed flow of information, that’s a mantra of mine. McGuane said something about a short story burning as much material as a novel and I agree. But I am fairly adept at avoiding post-partum blues. I’m lucky in that I believe that gardening or Tai Chi practice or being a husband and being a friend or an adequate teacher are just as important as writing and deserve the same effort.
KC: What starts a project? Where do you get inspiration for starting and how do you see it through to the end?
KA: I usually see or hear something in my imagination. A 1957 Ford riding through a Western American high plains landscape, with an older man and a teenager in front and in the back seat a dismantled glass telephone booth, that was one such picture. Sound, too, a comment or exchange of dialogue that becomes a Velcro Moment and all kinds of other scenes and chatter stick to it. Usually though my inspiration is visual. Often I get the last sentence or scene, too, rather quickly and I try to write to that place. My story, “Spanish Castle”, in the collection The First Thing Coming, started as a slow panning shot taken in a cool gray Northwest evening as a hot rod circled the ravaged rock and roll dance hall called Spanish Castle. At its end I saw the clouds of putrid reddish fat-colored smoke from Tacoma’s pulp mills and smelter and I wrote to that image. I heard a character ask a high school dropout friend who turned into a tortured Army vet, “My old man’s in the Army, and they sure as hell aren’t in Vietnam” challenging his story of war in Vietnam, because in 1959 it was not in the news, a secret war of “advisors.” And poor hapless Ray was dubbed an advisor after some training. This created another story, “Ray’s First Visit to the A&W”. At its end I saw Ray’s father lying dead across his corner grocery store counter, a suicide. My mystery novel Rhino Ritz started with an image of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald living their afterlife as immortals in San Francisco. I imagined them forming a detective agency called Rhino Ritz.
For Downstream I ended the memoir part with a story about Richard and I rescuing another writer’s nearly finished novel from a hotel room. The room was about to be seized by the hotel staff in lieu of payment for a front door the writer had kicked in. That story I withheld from the other sections just for that purpose. Richard paid for a new door and a carpenter so this writer could reclaim his life’s work. This showed Brautigan’s generous and kind nature perfectly. When he was on his best game, that’s who he was.
KC: Are there any writers you read for style or technique?
KA: Yes, there are. Elmore Leonard’s sleight of hand POV techniques and innovative transitions in fiction still intrigue me. He has very sharp visual sense for physical interactions between people. Perhaps an offshoot of screenwriting or maybe just westerns where people don’t talk they act. A recent addition for my courses this year is Julie Otsuka’s When The Emperor Was Divine. Her abilities for displaying and employing emotional states of mind are exciting. Her use of names and things in constantly evolving combinations ranks up there with some Basho or Buson renku, those intricate linked-verse compositions. She’s just so fine. Alice Munro’s use of perceptions to build her stories seems brave and courageous to me, risking tedium sometimes to the max. But what she gets is those moments when her character’s patterns of perceptions build a worldview for that particular person that tells you things you can’t get from dialogue or scenes. And we feel very close to that person. How they see a cornfield. How they sense danger in another person. I studied Raymond Carver’s work closely and profitably for years and lately am devoting myself to Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins. Raymond Chandler, Bobbie Ann Mason, Dashiell Hammett, Amy Hempel, Patricia Highsmith, Will Christopher Baer, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth Hyde, I can learn from and teach all those writers because they inspire me to write in ways that are explicable. I’ve never read a new book of Tom McGuane’s without learning something new about prose technique. He’s got some textbook examples I use. On the other hand, lots of writers who thrill and enchant me turn out to be those I can’t use directly in my courses, but I get inspiration from them. Austen, Twain, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Gogol, Marquez, Nabokov, Paley, Waugh, Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Sterne, Jorge Amado, Hunter Thompson, that’s a big list that could go on. Usually the English wits are bad for me. I love that use of English and sometimes fantasize that I can do that style but I really, really can’t. It’s fatal. One Noel Coward play and it seems so easy and then my letters start to decay, showing that no, I can’t.
KC: Were there specific things from areas like education, sports, family, inherited traits that have helped in your writing life?
Wandering in the woods. Fishing. Camping. Hiking. Contemplative skills were sharpened while watching my over-worked father relax into calm black Irish happiness, watching the water flow, letting things go. We spent hours together where neither of us said anything. Just watching the lake change in the morning sun. Catching rainbows and silvers.
Sports. I played all three major high school sports: football, basketball and baseball. When my sister Judy received a 100 dollar college scholarship for her years of straight A work, I decided that I could not go to college without an athletic scholarship. No money in my family for it. That spring I dropped baseball and took up tennis, so I could work on my balance and footwork. I was in ninth grade. I was a big kid for that time, 6 feet tall and 190 pounds, without sprint speed, but knew that with practice I could be more nimble. My two older brothers were high school athletes. Len the oldest was a competitive diver and the only person I ever saw get up on water skis on his first try and stay there. Jim was an avid skier. So an innate sense of balance was in the Abbott genes. Tennis helped a lot, and when I went out for varsity football as a sophomore, playing offensive guard, my quickness to get out and lead an end run improved. So with good balance and footwork, knocking over linebackers became my first good steady skill in football. Mental and physical preparation then became a habit—one I later applied to writing and also my brush calligraphy practice.
What I learned from sports was visualization. I don’t remember exactly how I first arrived at that. But one Sunday in 1959, when I was watching pro football, I saw a guy named Floyd Peters, an All Pro defensive tackle for the Browns, do some spin maneuvers and other very innovative moves. So I memorized those, and after the game then I went out to our driveway to practice them on a smooth surface. I found it was better to do them with my eyes closed at first. Just by feel getting the footwork right and then the balance for a spin to the left or right, dropping the lead shoulder lower in a shrug to loose my blocker. Since I had my eyes closed, I found that I needed to imagine it all the way through, then do it with my eyes still closed. Feel it. So as a sophomore I played more defense than offense and became my head coach’s favorite project. Eldon Kyllo had been a blocking college tight end and learned very classic techniques that he passed on to me. Then it seemed natural on offense to look at where the linebackers were and imagine how I’d get out there and what I would do if that linebacker were to my left or right shoulder. Run that movie over and over in my head and then go do it. I also learned quickly that there was no need to hit the linebacker, just tie them up with handwork or get in their way, so the running back behind me could cut and run to daylight. Only takes a second or two, and then I was free to pick off any safeties or cornerbacks rushing over. Unlike linebackers, defensive backs tended to be more delicate and more susceptible to training.
I wanted to go to college, but I knew that my need was more serious than merely a desire, I had to go to survive as a writer and as a man. I did not want to work at “the plant” or serve in an army in an unjust war or marry and get buried alive in family-maintenance jobs. For that artistic future I needed a scholarship. So I approached that task as a job, in some ways.
In basketball our coach Mr. Bob Ross, a former college forward, told me as a sophomore that I would never be a scorer. All I needed was a turnaround jump shot if I got a pass when I was coming across the foul line to set a pick. He taught me rebounding skills, a job that had fueled his college scholarship. He was good and I learned how to rebound. With my lateral quickness I was a modest defender, even able to defense some larger high school guards. I became the guy they put on the opposing team’s hot high scorers to muscle up on them, impede their movements, tire them out, frustrate them with my quickness by drawing a few offensive charging fouls on them, and collect three fouls on myself in a short period of time. Ross taught me how to get an opposing player up on my hip and help them achieve air space unexpectedly. All perfectly legal, good sportsmanship and all that.
However, one game while we were playing our arch rival, Clover Park High School, I performed too well. And under the home team’s basket, while I was going up for a rebound, I put the guy I was guarding into the bleachers. The Clover Park fans rose up en masse in runaway rage. For a moment I thought all of them were coming after me. Touch and go, there for a long second or two. When I ran away to play offense at the other end of the gym, I grabbed my leg, faking a hamstring pull. Our grateful coach pulled me out with an injury time-out. I hid out under a towel for the rest of the game. That crowd’s roar remains a vivid memory. So be effective, but don’t show up any opponent.
Local high school politics also educated me. I announced in my junior year that I would not take any honors or positions for the next year because I wanted to concentrate on sports. I held office in student organizations previously but refused to continue. This was laudable in our jock mad culture. But when after football season I declined to play either basketball or baseball and spent my time reading or entertaining my girlfriend Cheryl and our friends, I became a traitor.
The basketball coach was a high administrator and he felt betrayed. He needed me to soften up successful opponents. So in the spring when the scandal broke about counterfeit away basketball game tickets—packing other team’s home court with our fans—I was called in and threatened with loss of my college football scholarship if I didn’t admit my involvement or rat out someone. And he waited for my answer. He acted confident, as if he had secret info and that panicked me for a moment.
Luckily, a crystal clear memory of my future college football coach slash Athletic Director’s pep talk returned to me, all about my scholarship funding. He had given me a 3x5 card with what my freshman year would cost me without a towel-folding job—800 dollars max. And what I would get after four years with a towel-folding job and “some perks”—upon graduation somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000 dollars in a bank savings account.
And when I held up the penciled card and said, “Yeah, but how do I know this will happen? All I have is this card.”
The coach looked amazed. “It’s the student body’s money! Keith, they do what we tell them. We really want you out on the field for us, son.”
So at this point in time I sensed that nothing short of an armed robbery and kidnapping beef might negatively affect my college scholarship.
So I smiled. And in the ease of that smile I recalled one of our guys, a good buddy, a Lutheran church official’s son, who had been kicked out last fall. He was currently finishing his high school career hundreds of miles away in North Dakota. He sent us guys a snapshot of himself amongst his sour relatives. And his pleas for runaway money. I allowed that one rumor was that he might be involved in the ticket scam. Before he was cashiered out of our school. And someone a while back had found a lot of stuff in his abandoned locker. And the locker was rumored to be left unlocked. Fleabags was a stand-up guy and he adored local fame. When he returned that summer he would savor the luster this alleged crime would bestow upon his reputation. He’d never deny it. Even describe the wheel of yellow tickets accurately.
And of course whatever the solution, the school would want zero publicity.
About the Interviewers:
Kathy Conde won the Hemingway Festival Short Story Contest 2008 and was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s May 2008 Short Story Award for New Writers and CutThroat’s 2008 Rick De Marinis Short Fiction Competitions. Her short story collection, More Than One Way to Break, was a semifinalist for the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in CutThroat, Orbis, Pearl, and others. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and is past fiction editor for Bombay Gin, Naropa’s literary magazine. She lives in Colorado with her husband and son.
Ben Wheelon has an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in English from Lewis and Clark College. He is concurrently working on a collection of short stories—Just Enough Beauty, and an episodic novel—The Gospel Singer. His long poem, A Tao of Waiting, inspired by his twenty-five plus years as a waiter, is finished, again, and looking for a home, as is his collection of poetry—Is there a cure for being human? He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and daughter, and Arizona Red, the dog.
