Ba Thesis - Watermelon Sixties

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Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of Englishand American Studies

English Language and Literature

Magdalena edrlov

WATERMELON SIXTIES:Analysis of Richard BrautigansIn

Watermelon Sugar on the Background of the

1960s Counterculture in the United States

Bachelors Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tom Pospil, Dr.

2008


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I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,

using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

..Authors signature


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AcknowledgementI would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tom Pospil, Dr., for his pertinent remarks, useful

hints, patience and support.


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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION..6

PART ONE:

A CULTURE COUNTER MAINSTREAM: Explaining the Counterculture 8

Chapter I: Origins10

Chapter II: The Sixties.17

1. Philosophy and Style20

A) Peace...20

B) East..21

C) Non-consumerism...22

D) Love23

E) Turn on, tune in, drop out the drug culture...24

PART TWO:

WELCOME IN WATERMELON SUGAR27

Chapter I: Richard Brautigan A West Coast writer..27

Chapter II: The Story ofIn Watermelon Sugar...29

Chapter III: Thematic and Symbolic Analysis........34

1.In Watermelon Sugar as a mirror of the contemporary society...34

A) iDEATH a model of a utopian community 34

B) The Forgotten Works cemetery of the technocracy.39

2.In Watermelon Sugar as an LSD vision..... .41


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3. Once upon a time there was -In Watermelon Sugar as a fairy tale.44

A) Genre clichs. .44

B) Style 45

4. Undermining elements.46

A) The Tigers...46

B) Emotional vacuum at iDEATH...49

CONCLUSION...52

APPENDICES.53

WORKS CITED.............63


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INTRODUCTION

It is incontestable today that the 1960s were one of the most significant decades

in American history. The ten years between 1960 and 1970 meant radical changes in

many spheres of life of all Americans. The scope of these changes, which include new

political developments, the rise of the black movement and the fight for the rights of

black Americans, the American involvement in the Vietnam war, and also many new

trends in culture and social behavior, is of course too wide to be covered in this thesis

and so is the work of Richard Brautigan. That is why I decided to focus the thesis solely

on one of Brautigans best known novels, In Watermelon Sugar, and on its relation to

the rising youth counterculture.

In fact, Richard Brautigan constitutes a linking element between the 1950s

emerging counterculture, represented by the beat generation, and the boom of the hippie

movement, which flowered fully in the mid-1960s. While the beats can be regarded as a

relatively small group, the hippie life-style was embraced by millions of young people,

almost by a whole generation, as John Phillips put it in his song San Francisco. The

age difference is quite important when speaking of the contrasts between the beats and

the hippies, because, by the time the beats had moved from New York to the jazz cafs

of San Franciscos North Beach, most of them were already in their early thirties;

whereas the hippie crowds of San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury were mostly teenagers or

young people under twenty-five. Nevertheless, the terms hipster and hippie show a

clear link of continuity between each other. Hipster was used to designate at first jazz

musicians, and then jazz fans, drug dealers and other sorts of half-criminals whose lives

were miles off the daily routine of the regular citizens. Hippie came into usage in


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its todays sense in the early 1960s and referred to a beatnik who moved to Haight-

Asbury.

Although Richard Brautigan settled in San Francisco as early as in the mid-

1950s, he was never a real part of the beat movement, though he knew the beat authors

and some of them were also his good friends. However, it is hard to decide whether he

was or was not a beat, because even literary critics are not sure about where to put him.

The facts are that: he is certainly mentioned in some beat anthologies, his early poems

were published in beat magazines, and Larry Keenan included him in his 1965

photograph called The Last Gathering of the Beats, which was taken in front of the

City Lights bookshop (see appendices 1 and 2, pp. 53-54 ). His ties to the beats are

therefore not negligible, but it is also true that, as a twenty-year old poet (he was born in

1935) giving out his poems in the streets, he was not taken much seriously by the ten

years older beat stars. In addition, he did not gain literary prominence until the 1960s

and he is best known as a hippie writer.

In the afterword to the bilingual English-Czech edition of In Watermelon Sugar

Martin Hilsk claims that this novel is as closely connected with the second half of the

1960s as Fitzgeralds Great Gatsby is with the 1920s or Kerouacs On the Road with

the 1950s (184). Although this may appear an exaggerated statement, it certainly has

some factual basis. Why is that so? That is what I will try to explain in this thesis, which

will include a description of the hippie counterculture, an in-depth analysis of In

Watermelon Sugar and parallel relations between the two, and thus will answer the

question why the novel became so popular with the young generation and what were the

features which the hippies found the most appealing.


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PART ONE: A CULTURE COUNTER MAINSTREAM:

Explaining the counterculture

Before I start accounting the story of whatever one understands under the term

counterculture, I would like to make a distinction between acounterculture and the

counterculture.

For the former, I will use the definition from The Making of a Counter Culture

by Theodore Roszak, for whom a counterculture means a culture so radically

disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to

many as a culture at all (42), which is a general explanation that fits any time and any

place. Throughout the history there have been many instances of smaller or larger social

or cultural movements that were in opposition to the prevailing values established by

the ruling classes, and that either lead to a kind of social revolution or at least

introduced some new trends in arts, or they did not achieve much and ended up

forgotten. However, we can be sure that these undercurrents hidden under the surfaceof

the mainstream society are essential for any kind of development, and that they are very

often the first impulses for a change. Development and change are just other synonyms

for evolution, and thus, without what goes counter to the official culture, no society

could move further from a dead-point towards novelty.

By the word the counterculture, I mean, in terms of time, the 1960s

counterculture and, in terms of space, the American counterculture. Furthermore, I have

to point out that neither does this time and space narrowing bring any clear

specification, because the counterculture is a puzzle with many pieces, as Roszak

suggests:


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To one side, there is the mind-blown bohemianism of the beats

and hippies; to the other, the hard-headed political activism of the student

New Left. []

The tension one senses between these two movements is real

enough. But [] there exists, at a deeper level, a theme that unites these

variations and which accounts for the fact that hippy and student activist

continue to recognize each other as allies. (56)

Roszak thus divides the counterculture into two big groups, the idle hippies and the

politically active New Left. But there were also other groupings that could be labeled

with the term counterculture, such as the Black Panthers, who were involved in the fight

for the rights of black Americans, or even the motorcycle gang The Hells Angels.

Although the range is therefore quite wide, it is only the hippie who became one of the

most glittering icons of the sixties, it is the icon of a counterculture that eventually

became mass culture. The hippies were a subculture with specific values, goals and

style; and that is what will be the subject of the first part of this thesis, where I will use

the term counterculture as a synonym forhippie subculture.


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Chapter I: Origins

If we are looking for the roots of the sixties counterculture, we have to examine

closely the previous decades and their social evolution. As the making of a culture is not

a matter of a single year, we cannot say that the counterculture was born exactly in the

year XY or that on 1 January 1960 we entered the sixties, and so suddenly the hippie-

boom began and thousands of barefoot children crowded the United States. It is rather a

series of, at first invisible, developments and events that cumulate onto each other until

they become strong enough to produce what we call a counterculture.

Naturally, whenever there is a debate about the sixties and their importance, one

cannot forget to mention the fifties, and any time anybody talks about the hippies they

do not omit the beats and their stays in San Francisco during the fifties. Some people

even provide dates all that pre-hippie thing started in 1955 when the famous reading at

the Six Gallery took place, or it was in 1956 when Ginsbergs Howl was published, or

it could also have been in 1957 when On the Road was released. But I say No. Of

course, in no way do I mean to deny these facts which are true, I only want to stress that

these were all merely the individual and very specific events that made the public notice

what had been happening long time before.

If I say we must look back in time, it is not to the fifties, it is to the forties.

Moreover, we must also leave San Francisco and move eastwards, to New York. Does it

seem a bit too much? It may. But what the hippies read and what you read about in On

the Roadhappened ten years prior to the publication. And so the beat decade is rather

the forties, the time during which the four main members of the beat movement, by

some critics, such as Kenneth Rexroth in his essay The Second Post-War, the Second

Interbellum, the Permanent War Generation, considered the only members, Jack


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Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs met, contemplated

jazz, experimented with drugs, traveled across the country, became friends with Neal

Cassady and at the same time were producing a great deal of literature.

These figures challenged the traditional values of American society on many

fronts. First of all, they represented a strict opposition to the puritan morals of the

majority of Americans. This opposition was manifested in their sexual and semi-

criminal behavior. Ginsberg and Burroughs being overtly homosexual, and Kerouac

being undoubtedly bisexual, and all of them highly promiscuous, the rest of the society

could only despise them. However, the beats, and Ginsberg a dedicated follower of

Blake and Whitman especially, set to fight for a sexual liberation of the individual.

What is concerning their unlawful activities, it is a well-known fact that both

Corso and Cassady spent some of their teenage years in correction houses/reform

schools for stealing cars, Ginsberg received stolen goods in his flat, all of them were

good friends with various dubious individuals, and Burroughs even killed his wife

(although unintentionally).

Secondly, they also refused traditional notions of family and protestant work. In

fact, they only worked when they needed some source of finance, and these were for the

most part just odd jobs. This is due not only to their individualism and unwillingness to

conform to any kind of authority, but also to the fact that it is not usually in a bohemian

writers nature to have a regular eight-hour-a-day job.

Another important beat feature is their penchant for the blacks and for black

music the bebop. In fact, the beats were among the first to consider the blacks equal

and very often their culture even superior to the white. It was Kerouac who once wrote

that he was wishing he were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered

was not enough ecstasy for me [him], not enough life, joy, kicks (163) and it was


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Norman Mailer who called the hipster the white negro, because they indeed, in many

respects, copied some patterns of the black life-style. They were hanging around black

neighborhoods, they were going to black cafs, they loved black jazzmen, they slept

with black girls/boys and they talked black slang the word hipster itself is a proof.

The term comes from the word hip, which started to be used by black jazz

musicians to describe someone who was in the know about the emerging jazz culture,

and hipster was an expression that originally designated a jazz fan, rather than the

performer. Later on, in the forties, it became a label for white youths who tended to

adopt black style (l.bosh).

Now, what is the hipsters philosophy? What does he represent? In Gates of

Eden Morris Dickstein provides an apt explanation: The hipster cuts through and

exploits the hypocrisy of the period, the rampant cynicism about honor and social role-

playing that lies just beneath the surface of its official pieties [and he is] the figure of a

Nietzschean adventurer seeking experience beyond good and evil (53).

To end this listing of the beats/hipsters infractions of unwritten or even written

laws, we should mention their religious practice. Kerouac once said that the beat

generation was very much a religious generation and it was him who enriched the word

beat with another possible meaning, as a shortcut for beatific (which he talked

about also in his 1967 interview for Radio Canada). In a sense, it was really a

religious generation, but again not of the kind which the mainstream Americans could

appreciate. Kerouac was a Catholic, Ginsberg was a Jew and both of them ended up as

Buddhists. It was Gary Snyder, a poet and student of Zen-Buddhism (he had even spent

some time in a Japanese monastery), whom they met in San Francisco, who introduced

them to the basic principles of that oriental teaching. Kerouac, at the beginning very

keen on becoming a good Buddhist, even wrote several theoretical treatises on this


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topic, but this passion of his did not last long and by the end of the fifties he had already

returned back to his Catholicism. On the other hand, Ginsberg did stick to Buddhism

very firmly, became its life-long advocate, and was certainly one of those who helped

popularize it among the young of the sixties.

With the advent of the fifties, there comes a certain change, which does not

consist in a change of the beat/hipster behavior, but is manifested by the fact that it only

became more visible. Gradually, there arose a sort of interest in the beats and other

discontented youths who thus became subjects of serious scholarly works, mainly of

Mailer and Goodman, as well as topics for articles of popular magazines. In The White

Negro Mailer examines the features of the hipster figure and stresses his macho and

violent side (Dickstein 81). On the other hand, Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd,

which is a work about a society which gives its youth no word to grow up in, [and]

fails to provide satisfying roles and models. Hence the young do not simply drop out;

rather, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense

agrees with, (Dickstein 77) highlights the anxiety and displacements [and] the lack of

any experience that felt real (Dickstein 81). In a sharp contrast to these works were

articles published in magazines such as TimeorEsquire. These tended to show only the

sensational side of the beat/dissent movement, because, after the publication of On the

Road, the public was suddenly very eager to discover more about the beat life-style, and

the press had to respond very quickly to this demand. It did not matter that the picture it

provided was somewhat distorted, the main thing was, as usual, the sales. Roszak sums

it up in this way: Whatever these things called beatniks [] originally were, or still

are, may have nothing to do with what Time, Esquire, Cheeta, CBSNBCABC,

Broadway comedy, and Hollywood have decided to make of them. Dissent, the press

has clearly decided, is hot copy (37).


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The fifties were thus important from several points of view. First, in the late

fifties, a number of books, creative as well as analytical, that were deeply hostile to the

dominant spirit of the age were published, a good deal of which became canonical

works of the sixties (Dickstein 54). What is concerning the analytical works; we have

named Goodman and Mailer, whose contribution was essential for the formation of the

counterculture of the sixties, which proved that their interest in, at that time relatively

minor social developments, was not futile. This is sustained also by Dickstein when he

claims that:

It was prophetic for Mailer and Goodman to draw serious attention to the

new bohemian subculture of the late fifties, in tandem with the upsurge

of youthful delinquency and rebelliousness. In retrospect, those

developments foreshadowed a great deal of the communal utopianism,

urban restlessness, and street violence of the sixties, but at that time they

were treated with no such seriousness. The media played up both the

beats and the juvenile hoodlums as isolated spectacles of inarticulate

exhibitionism. Mailer and Goodman undertook to become spokesmen for

this discontent, interpreters of all the acting out, who could read in

withdrawal and youthful anomie a complex critique of the system and its

values. (80)

As for the creative books, the fifties are of course the decade of publication of

most beat works, among which Howl stands out as a founding document of the

counter culture (Roszak 67). The gathering of poets at the Six Gallery, where Howl

was read for the first time in public, was thus a declaration of independence from the

rigid, authoritarian order the beats believed was throttling the nation (Isserman and


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which partly support the religious looking at the beat generation and also show his

rhetorical means that made him a prophet for the new generation.

Secondly, it is during the fifties that the beats moved to San Francisco and joined

its local bohemian atmosphere and literary circles, which had been thriving in the area

even before they even saw the city, to give rise to the grounds of the hippie movement.

At that time, also Richard Brautigan chose this city for the place of his residence.

During the fifties, the centre of the San Francisco bohemia was located in the North

Beach, a neighborhood that became a great pole of attraction thanks to its numerous

jazz cafs, galleries and events such as live poetry readings accompanied with jazz

music. There was also the City Lights bookstore and publishing house that released

many beat authors, and which was sued for publishing Ginsbergs Howl, considered

by countless critics as obscene. All in all, the whole city seemed to be irradiating a

certain bohemian glow that allured many young people to come and settle down in San

Francisco.


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become hippies (44), or by Roszaks observation that The FBI reports the arrest of

over ninety thousand juvenile runaways in 1966; most of those who flee well-off

middle-class homes get picked up by thousands each current year in the big-city

bohemias (33).With no money and no intention to work they were looked after by the

Diggers one of the first San Franciscos hippie communities who cooked cheap

meals and set up a free store where used second-hand clothes could be got for free.

Many commentators claim that the climax of San Francisco hippie movement

came in 1967, when there was, on 14 January, a huge event called A Gathering of the

Tribes for a Human Be-In. This was a sort of happening that included performances of

prominent rock groups, such as Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and

Jefferson Airplane, and speeches delivered by various poets, political activists and other

gurus of the young generation. In fact, it was a display of who is who in the

counterculture, the list of guests included old-time beats like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence

Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder as well as brand new figures like

Timothy Leary and Jerry Rubin (see appendices 3 and 4, pp. 55-56).

After the Human Be-In, another huge wave of runaway teenagers reached the

city. By that time, the whole nation had already been paralyzed by the flower power

mist that was effusing from San Francisco, and nationwide magazines proliferated

numerous articles about the hippies. Only Time magazine, according to Time online

archives, brought, during the decade 1960 1970, 395 articles, from which 31 cover

stories, that in one way or another concerned the hippies. Therefore, Time being a

weekly, it means that more than every other issue featured a mention about them. As

there are countless periodicals in the United States, for which the figures may be

similar, it shows that the interest that the media took into the counterculture was

enormous.


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As a result, being a hippie became soon a matter of fashion, all of a sudden,

everyone wanted to be or at least to look like one, everyone wanted to go to San

Francisco and wear flowers in their hair. There were even travel agencies that organized

special trips, the Hippie Hop Tours, around the Haight-Ashbury. Simply, the

counterculture was a good business. However, the original inhabitants of the Haight,

such as members of rock bands Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding

Company, claimed that by the time that the whole world learned about San Franciscos

hippies and the movement started to spread internationally, the original spirit of the

place had vanished away. This is also well illustrated by Lawrence Frelinghettis

recollections of that time, which appeared in San Francisco Chronicle:

Before, up through the Human Be-In, the Haight was really sort of

innocent, clean. [] During the Summer of Love, I got the impression

kids from all over the country were descending on the Haight Ashbury.

Word had gotten around the country, and they all came to San Francisco,

just out of high school, still in high school, college kids. It was about that

time that things began to fall apart. Really heavy drugs came in. []

Things just degenerated more and more. [] All the main aspects of the

hippie counterculture were ingested into the middle class: The music, the

clothes, the colors, the psychedelic colors, the anti-war movement.

Herbert Marcuse spoke of the enormous capacity of the dominant society

to ingest its own most dissonant elements. That's just what happened.


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1. Philosophy and style:

So far, I have presented the time development of the hippie subculture, that is its

origins and heyday, and I have also emphasized the importance of the role that the city

of San Francisco had for the birth of the movement. In this part, I will comment on the

specific goals that the hippies were trying to achieve, what means they chose and why

they chose them.

A) Peace

It has already been said that the hippies shared many objectives with other

groups of the young dissenters and the universal enemy that almost everyone fought

against was the Vietnam War. The American involvement in Vietnam dates back to the

1950s, when, first of all, American troops were only helping France to keep its colony

(after the World War II the French colonial empire was crashing down and France was

doing its best to maintain its position at least in this region, and the United States, as an

ally of France, felt obliged to intervene). However, the war became gradually a matter

of fight against the communist regime in North Vietnam. Although the United States

did not want to invest large sums into a war somewhere in Asia, they believed that,

according to the so called domino theory (first put into words by Dwight D.

Eisenhower in 1954), if they let the communists win over the South, soon after other

countries in the area would come under the communist regime too. And that was a

threat for the entire non-communist world. Nonetheless, during the 1960s the number of

American soldiers sent off to war was still growing, but with no remarkable results. In


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which were Buddhist rosary beads. Many hippies, eager to find out more about the

Eastern life-style, even set off to travel to Asia or to the Middle East, and thus cities like

Katmandu or Marrakech became another hippie centers.

C) Non-consumerism

Another aspect of Eastern religions is that they promote a simple life without

unnecessary luxury. This also attracted the young generation, who, having been raised

in Levittowns (see appendix 6, p 57) where their parents competed with the neighbors in

who will have a bigger swimming pool, a bigger car, a better washing-machine or

whatever one can think of, began to feel uneasy about all that hunt for fortune and

status. Thus, with no aspirations for a well-paid job and therefore no real need or

willingness to work at all, the hippies traded the comfort for personal freedom. Their

reluctance to work was of course criticized by many people and along with their sexual

mores was the biggest eyesore for the good citizens. For instance Hans Toch, author of

The Social Psychology of Social Movementsand professor at State University of New

York, reproaches to the hippies their consuming but noncontributing way of living

and insists that they are parasitic, because they accept and even request social services

without contributing to the economy (qtd. in Roszak 36). Nonetheless, Theodore

Roszak is on the hippies side and he argues that the economy does not even need their

participation at all:

We have an economy of cybernated abundance that [] can do []

without all this labor. How better, then, to spend our affluence than on

those minimal goods and services that will support leisure for as many of

us as possible? Or are these hippies reprehensible because they seem to


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enjoy their mendicant idleness, rather than feeling, as the poor apparently

should, indignant and fighting mad to get a good respectable forty-hour-

week job? There are criticisms to be made of the beat-hip bohemian

fringe of our youth culture but this is surely not one of them. (36)

All in all, it is certainly true that the hippies refused to work, while demanding some

services, but on the other hand, they also lead a rather simple life: they lived in shared

households; they wore self-made or second-hand clothes; and so they did not actually

need to work at all, because, first, their expenses were minimal, and second, many of

them were financially supported by their family.

D) Love

Make love, not war goes the famous hippie slogan. The not war part has

already been discussed, now it is time to have a look at the make love. First, love

can be taken as a term meaning harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust

abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, just to

quote from some of Hair lyrics. Indeed, most hippies endorsed a philosophy of

tolerance and peaceful attitude towards all human beings and actually towards the

planet as a whole. This meant, in practice, ecological behavior, living in harmony with

nature, helping out to each other and so forth, but also drug consumption, because the

drugs were taken as means of widening of perception and gaining knowledge and

understanding of the world around.

Second, love obviously refers to physical love, that is sex. The hippies were

infamous for their sexual practices free of any kind of prejudices. This promiscuity can

be seen by some people as a love without love, but if we return to the previous, wider


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definition of love, we must agree that for the hippies sex was just another means of

reaching a) harmony of souls and b) personal pleasure and a kind of nirvana also in the

religious sense of the word.

E) Turn on, Tune in, Drop out the drug culture

The two most popular drugs with the hippie counterculture were marijuana and

LSD, (lysergic acid diethylamide # 25). Marijuana had already been known and widely

used in bohemian circles for decades, and although it had been illegal since 1937, it was

largely widespread in the hippie communities and almost as common as beer or

cigarettes. Its illegalization represented another hot issue that divided the children and

the parental generation, because the young considered the ban utterly absurd, as the

parents drugs alcohol and tobacco, despite their obvious harmfulness to the public

health, were available without any restrictions (Isserman and Kazin 155). In the sixties,

smoking pot became a matter of sharing common goals, philosophy, being a part of a

peer group and an act of rejection of parental viewpoints.

When you sucked on a joint, you inhaled not simply some smoke, but

you inhaled this whole complex of cultural attitudes, not only opposition

to the war, but a liking for madras bedspreads, an inclination to taste new

and interesting foods, to feel less guilty about cutting class, to disrespect

authority more because they were trying to make you a criminal for

having these experiences and changes of perspective. (Michael Rossman,

one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, for San Francisco

Chronicle)


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LSD was discovered accidentally in 1943 by a Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann,

and after the World War II it became an object of scientific research. In the United

States, the first experimenters with the substance were the CIA and bohemian artists,

such jazz musicians like Thelonius Monk or Dizzy Gillespie. The CIA believed that the

acid could bring enormous benefits to the espionage and tested it even on unwitting

subjects (such as prisoners or mental patients), which lead to a few suicides and a great

deal of psychoses (Isserman and Kazin 156). On the other hand, for the artists LSD was

a means of broadening of the mind and arriving at a higher level of artistic creativity.

In the early sixties, a junior professor at Harvards Department of Psychology,

Timothy Leary, started a research on the chemical and its effects on the human mind

and consciousness. After he was expelled from the university, he became its devoted

promoter and, as Roszak puts it, a high priest of psychedelia nonpareil (164) because

he managed to embed the younger generations psychedelic fascination solidly in a

religious context (165).

Undeniably, the drug action is powerful. If you are on a good trip, it opens

your doors of perception (just to quote the famous Blakes phrase, which was later

used by Aldous Huxley for the title of his account of his own experience with

hallucinogenic drugs), which can range from kaleidoscopic hallucinations that show you

the surrounding world in new extraordinary shapes and colors, to an overwhelming

feeling of a sudden awakening and understanding of the sense of life (like in Buddhist

satori). However, the psychedelic experience can also turn the other way round and the

tripper can go through a hell of anxiety, fear, madness or suicidal thoughts.

Roszak makes a distinction between a culturally experienced consumer of LSD,

such as Huxley, for whom it is indeed a way of moving sophisticatedly toward cultural

synthesis, and a young teenager who cannot really fully appreciate the potential the


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drug could have on his consciousness, because he only blow[s] his mind and [is]

bemused to see all the pretty balloons go up. But when all the balloons have gone up

and gone pop, what is there left behind but the yearning to see more pretty balloons?

(159-160).

LSD was officially banned in 1966, which only added to its spreading

popularity. Nevertheless, it never achieved such a wide acceptance as marijuana,

although it became an indispensable rite of initiation and belonging (Isserman and

Kazin 158) because, first, it opened a portal to the extraordinary, [and] it also screened

out the rational (ibid.), and second, as critic Geoffrey OBrien remembers, drugs were

the fundamental text. If you had not read the book, you couldnt participate in the

discussion that followed (qtd. in Isserman and Kazin 155).


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PART TWO: WELCOME IN WATERMELON SUGAR

Chapter I: Richard Brautigan - A West Coast Writer

Richard Brautigans literary career started in the mid-fifties in San Francisco

when he became a part of the local bohemian literary circles. According to his

biography at Brautigan Bibliography and Archive web pages, he settled in the city in

1954, being only 19 years old, and soon he became associated with the beats, for a time

he even shared an apartment with Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At the beginning, he

was known rather as a poet, who very often gave his poems away on the streets for free.

Although Brautigan always maintained he was not a member of the beat movement and

neither did the beats appreciate him very much, many of them were good friends of his.

He also participated in numerous poetry readings at popular beat gathering spots around

the city, such as The Place or Vesuvio. In addition, his early poetry was published in

beat publications such as City Lights Journal. His first poetry collections were

published in the late fifties.

During the sixties, he became involved in many Diggers activities, including

their Communication Company, which was a community publication business that

printed the Diggers poetry and also various advertising leaflets for their events, such as

street theatre performances and others (see appendix 6, p 58). In fact, at that time,

Brautigan was one of the core members of the Diggers community, he enthusiastically

handed out their little posters on the streets and they also printed some of his poetry. He

continued to write free poems, some of which were even printed on packets of seeds

(which have become objects much valued by collectors, see appendix 7, pp 59-61).

Furthermore, this decade saw the publication of his first prosaic works - A Confederate


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General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon

Sugar (1968, written in 1964, for the cover see appendix 8, p 62) that catapulted him

into national fame, because of the following features that all of them, according to

Jaroslav Kunr, share:

1. the main protagonists rejection or neglect of the contemporary societysmaterialistic values

2. their alienation, separation and escape from this society3. their establishment of an alternative way of existence and its certain

idealization representing different approach to and vision of the world

than the official and institutionalized (Exiled Worlds)

Brautigan started to be invited to poetry readings around the country, and during the

Summer of Love he was taken for the one writer who represented best the sentiments of

the countercultural movement centered in San Francisco.

During the next decade, he continued to write and publish other prosaic as well

as poetry works, but his fame started to decline. This was also due to the fact that many

critics regarded him as an ephemeral phenomenon of the American literature associated

solely with the hippie movement and thus no longer of any interest.

By the eighties, he had already become seriously troubled by alcoholism,

insomnia, and paranoia, which eventually lead to his suicide in 1984.


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Chapter II: The Story ofIn Watermelon Sugar

In Watermelon Sugar is a novel about a village, a small town, or one could call it

also a fantastic land, world simply a place, called Watermelon Sugar, and the life of

its inhabitants. In Watermelon Sugar, everything is made mainly of watermelon sugar,

but there are also other materials used for making things, such as pine wood or stones.

Nevertheless, the watermelon sugar is the predominant substance of everything there is;

as the narrator explains at the beginning of the book: Our lives we have carefully

constructed of watermelon sugar (Brautigan 8). Just to provide a few examples: there

can be watermelon sugar dresses, watermelon sugar window panes or even watermelon

sugar ink, and all that smells of a sweet watermelon sugar scent.

In the land of Watermelon Sugar most inhabitants live in modest shacks and lead

a contended and gentle life. Except of countless watermelon sugar objects, there are also

numerous statues of vegetables and animals scattered about the landscape; there are

hundreds of rivers and streams of various widths with many bridges over them and

many trout swimming and jumping in them, including the Grand Old Trout; and on the

riverbeds there lie glass coffins with foxfire that glow at nights. The life in Watermelon

Sugar is very particular also because the sun there shines each day a different color and

so there are different colors of watermelons too.

In Watermelon Sugar, there are two special places, iDEATH and the Forgotten

Works, which represent two opposite tendencies. Although I will analyze them

separately in the following parts of the thesis, it is necessary to comment on them at

least briefly, as they are crucial for the understanding of the work. iDEATH is again,

like Watermelon Sugar itself, a place which is hard to specify because of its fantastic

surrealistic shape and ever-changing nature. Just before I arrived at iDEATH, it


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changed. iDEATHs like that: always changing. Its for the best (Brautigan 28) says

the narrator. The easiest definition of iDEATH would probably be that it is a gathering

place for the members of the Watermelon Sugar community, maybe also a kind of pub

or canteen, because they take their meals there (but some of them live there

permanently), which has physical characteristics of both indoor and outdoor space,

because there are, for instance, trees and rivers in the living room. The people at

iDEATH are good, satisfied, gentle, working for the profit of the community and happy

as they are.

On the contrary, the Forgotten Works are a place that most of them avoid, as it is

a sort of junkyard of remnants of a previous civilization, where a villain inBOIL and his

gang live and make whiskey out of the heaps of forgotten things that are there. The

Forgotten Works stand out as a negation of all that is represented by iDEATH. While

iDEATH is a place of a gentle and happy life, the Forgotten Works constitute a source

of evil.

So far, I have concentrated on what the Watermelon Sugar looks like, now I will

focus on the characters and the storyline.

First of all, it is important to point out that the main character and narrator at the

same time is nameless. In the chapter entitled My Name, he gives the reader many

possibilities of how to define his name:

My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.

If you are thinking about something that happened a long time

ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.

That is my name.

Perhaps it was raining very hard.

That is my name. []


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Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.

That is my name.

Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near you

who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before

it happened. Then it happened.

That is my name. (Brautigan 12)

This section is followed by a list of other six that-is-my-names and establishes the

narrators anonymity, and at the same time gives the reader an enormous freedom of

interpretation not only of the narrators identity, but also of the whole meaning of the

novel. Because actually these that is my name instructions can be applied also to

iDEATH or to Watermelon Sugar as a whole, you can have thousands of that is

iDEATH (as it is constantly changing) or that is Watermelon Sugar. As Kunr

concludes, this narrator emphasizes reading as a creative process in which the meaning

is never given [and] celebrates the power of imagination (Diversity).

So we have a main hero with no name, who lives in a shack near iDEATH, and

is writing a book about iDEATH, which is actually the book the reader is holding in

hands and reading. In truth, this is a very strange activity in Watermelon Sugar, because

it is the first book to be written there in the narrators life time; there had been a few

others written before, one about owls and one about the Forgotten Works, but most

books are found in the Forgotten Works and most of them are used as fuel.

The main hero used to go out with Margaret, but she was the only inhabitant of

Watermelon Sugar who manifested a certain curiosity about the Forgotten Works; she

visited inBOIL and the area increasingly more often and she even started collecting

forgotten things, and that is why she fell into disfavor and the main hero broke up with

her. She eventually hanged herself, but it is not very clear what was the reason that


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pushed her to do it, whether the end of her year-long relationship with the main hero or

inBOILs death.

At present, the main hero is going out with Pauline, a nice and beautiful young

girl who cooks at iDEATH. She is an ideal of all virtues, she even cares for Margarets

psychic condition after the break-up, and what is more she hates inBOIL as everyone

else.

As far as inBOIL is concerned, he once lived at iDEATH too, but then he

turned bad. [] He kept getting mad at things that were of no importance and []

began spending a lot of time at the Forgotten Works (Brautigan 86). Soon after, several

other men joined him to form the gang.

InBOILs brother Charley lives still at iDEATH and is a well-respected member

of the community. In fact, Charley and inBOIL are true opposites. Charley is the

unspoken leader of iDEATH and the guard of iDEATHs peace, order and delicate

balance. On the other hand, inBOIL represents an act of rebellion against the latter.

The prevailing nature of In Watermelon Sugar as a book is descriptive. The

narrator writes about the simple life the inhabitants lead, about what iDEATH looks

like, about food, about the times of tigers (once there were tigers, which could speak

and ate adults but not children, living in Watermelon Sugar, but they were killed off)

and about the trout hatchery that was built at the place where the last tiger was burnt.

There are chapters devoted to the bridges, to the statues of vegetables and so forth.

Chapters when talking about In Watermelon Sugar are not the usual chapters one

imagines, that is pieces of text several pages long, Brautigans chapters can comprise

only a few lines.

Since the narration in In Watermelon Sugar is quite fragmented the reader

learns about most of the events that happened in the past from memories and dreams


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that are intertwined with descriptions of present, quite banal, events and conversations

it is relatively difficult to establish a plot that would have an exciting dramatic action.

However, the one action point, and the climax that the story is centered on, is the

moment when inBOIL and his gang come to iDEATH and demonstratively kill

themselves by cutting off their thumbs, noses and ears to show their version of the real

sense of iDEATH. Nonetheless, this act lacks an explicit logical explanation and seems

to be quite useless as no one can really understand it. After that, Pauline immediately

starts to mop up the mess, the dead bodies are carried away on a wheelbarrow and

burnt, and everyone is happy and relieved, except Margaret, who later on commits

suicide too. What follows next, is the description of her funeral and the book closes at

the point of a kind of funeral afterparty with dance and musicians, because that is the

way all funerals are done in Watermelon Sugar.


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socialistic commune, it does in some sense represent a collective, if only

in its shared vision of its difference from contemporary life in the United

States. In any event, the town sheds a bucolic ambiance and the people

who live in it: artists, academicians, dropouts, the aboriginal

townspeople, zealously guard that ambiance.

iDEATH, as a portrayal of an exemplary utopian community, has the following

features: self-reliance, self-contained existence with no bounds to the exterior,

interdependency of the members on each other, simplicity, respect of the nature, and

non-violent and harmonious behavior of its members.

The self-reliance is manifested in the fact that the community lives only from

what the inhabitants grow themselves or what is found in there. The main crop in

Watermelon Sugar is of course watermelons, which are used for making almost

everything, as I have already explained. Besides them, there are also trout, which, on

one hand, are truly respected and admired as living creatures, especially the oldest of

them, the Grand Old Trout, which is expressed by the narrator in the chapter entitled

The Grand Old Trout, in which he tells: The Grand Old Trout [was] raised as a

fingerling in the trout hatchery at iDEATH. I knew this because he had the little

iDEATH bell fastened to his jaw. He is many years old and weighs many pounds and

moves slowly with wisdom. [] The Grand Old Trout looked over at me. I believe he

recognized me, for he stared at me for a couple of minutes (Brautigan 76, 78). On the

other hand, the trout are used as a source of trout oil, which is later mixed with

watermelon sugar to burn in lanterns. Other important natural resources in Watermelon

Sugar are vegetables and pine wood. There is no evidence that the community buys or

sells anything to anybody else.


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This leads to the claim that the people in Watermelon Sugar live closed from and

with no contacts with any other communities, except probably the Forgotten Works,

because that is where Charleys brother inBOIL lives and he appears from time to time

at iDEATH, and also Margaret likes to make trips in there. However, the rest of the

inhabitants show no interest in that area, which can be seen also from the following

quote: Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are, reaching as they do into

distances that we cannot travel nor want to (Brautigan 96, italics mine). All this proves

that, with no need to communicate in any way with the exterior and with a great ability

to live on its own resources, Watermelon Sugar is a highly successful community.

What is also helpful to its success is the division of labor, which makes each

member of the community useful and important for the others: Old Chuck says that

everybody should have something to do and lighting the bridges is his thing to do.

Charley agrees with him (Brautigan 26). Hence we have Old Chuck whose task is to

light the lanterns on the bridges, Pauline and Al who cook meals at iDEATH, Fred who

makes planks out of watermelon sugar at the Watermelon Works, Carl the window

maker, Charley the leader, and the narrator who used to make statues and now is writing

the book. As a result, each one is necessary and does a job that the others appreciate.

As for the simplicity, the life in Watermelon Sugar is indeed very modest. Most

people live in shacks furnished in a quite austere manner and do not overwhelm their

homes with unnecessary things, although sometimes the few things they do have may

seem totally useless. This is well demonstrated by the narrators description of his own

possessions: [In] the chest that I keep my things in [] I have nine things, more or

less: a childs ball (I cant remember which child), a present given me nine years ago by

Fred, my essay on weather, some numbers (1-24), an extra pair of overalls, a piece of


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2.In Watermelon Sugar as an LSD vision:

Richard Brautigan and his California prose poetry is an eminently greasy brand

of verbal psychedelicatessen, wrote Michael Feld (italics mine). And indeed, this quote

is a very pertinent epithet to characterizeIn Watermelon Sugar, which will be shown in

the following lines.

As we already know, Watermelon Sugar is a strange place where the sun shines

every day a different color. To be precise, Mondays are red, Tuesdays are golden,

Wednesdays are gray, Thursdays black, Fridays white, Saturdays blue and Sundays

brown. As a result, the watermelons grow in corresponding colors on corresponding

days and the things that are made of them keep their color. The air and the sunbeams

are, too, of that same color. The following passage will serve as an illustration: A crack

of gray sun shone through the window and lay quietly on the floor. I went over and put

my foot in it, and then my foot was grey. [] Everything was touched with grey: Cattle

grazing in the fields and the roofs of the shacks and the big Piles in the Forgotten Works

all looked like dust. The very air itself was grey (Brautigan 58, 60). Consequently, the

final picture the reader gets looks like a scenery watched through a stained glass.

To this regularly changing color spectrum of Watermelon Sugar, we must also

add the lay-out of the landscape, where it is not always sure whether you are indoors or

outdoors, and where it is not a wonder to see people sitting in the trees. The

combination of these elements therefore creates an impression not unlike Lucy in the

Sky with Diamonds and fits perfectly into the times visual esthetics, which in many

respects reflected the psychedelic experience.

In Watermelon Sugar, there is also another peculiar thing the Statue of Mirrors

where, if you concentrate enough, you can see the entire world. According to the


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Martin Hilsk does not deny this connection, as he says that we can do almost anything

with Brautigans prose, we can even eat it, as it is made of watermelon sugar, a

substance that can provoke certain hallucinatory states of mind and liberate us for a

while from rational perception of the world (183).

What might also be of some interest is the name itself watermelonsugar that

is something sweet in contrast, or as a parallel, to the acid as something sour, which

would make a nice name for a drug. In fact, the very first sentences of In Watermelon

Sugar read in this way:In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as

my life is done in watermelon sugar. Ill tell you about it because I am here and you are

distant. Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have

nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out (Brautigan 8).

This passage clearly suggests that watermelon sugar must be, if not a drug like LSD, at

least a magical potion, which allows the consumer to see and experience things that are,

under normal conditions, too far to reach. If the narrators life is done again and again in

watermelon sugar, it only shows that he is a regular user of this substance, let us say a

regular tripper, who visits the land of watermelon sugar quite often. The land is so far

to travel, because it does not really exist, it is just imaginary, and how can you get there

but with the means of watermelon sugar the drug? The last bit that is to be

incorporated to this drug reading of the novel is the I hope this works out, which

evidently expresses the lack of confidence about the result of the trip, because you never

know beforehand how it will end up, whether you will get a good trip or a bad one, all

you can do is hope. And so the narrator just hopes that his taking you to his imaginary

acid (or rather sugar) paradise will work out fine.


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3. Once upon a time there was -In Watermelon Sugar as a fairy tale:

In Watermelon Sugarhas the charm of the fairy story it almost is, wrote the

author of Polluted Eden: A Review of Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon

Sugar in Times Literary Supplementand in many respects he or she was right, because

the novel indeed has some features that allow a certain fairy tale reading.

A) Genre clichs

The first thing that links In Watermelon Sugar with the fairy tale genre is the

black and white stylization of the characters. The reader knows immediately who is

good and who is bad, and the heroes keep their qualities until the end, they do not

undergo any change. What is more, each character has a role that can more or less

correspond to a fairy tale concept.

As a result, we have Charley, the leader of the community, who performs the

role of the good and wise king. The chief antagonist of the novel and the villain is

inBOIL, who is not only an alleged source of all evil, but he is also the only initiator of

dramatic action. The princess of In Watermelon Sugar is without any doubt Pauline,

beautiful and admired by all, the girlfriend of the protagonist.

Besides that, we can find also other fairy tale elements inIn Watermelon Sugar,

such as animals (tigers) that talk and sing and, as I have already mentioned, the whole

Watermelon Sugars landscape, the interpretation of which lies in the eye of the reader.

An adult and experienced person will attribute all those fantastic watermelon sugar curls

to an effect of a drug, as he or she cannot conceive of a possibility that a world like that

could normally exist, and will naturally search for a rational explanation. On the


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contrary, the innocent mind of a child, that is still able to accept this imaginary realm

without reservations, will be able to read the story as any other fairy tale.

B) Style

When talking about children, it is important to point out that they could easily

read In Watermelon Sugar also thanks to its very simple, some could say primitive,

prose style. Indeed, when you first glance at the sentences, you might think that even an

average ten-year-old pupil could come up with a more sophisticated text. Just for a brief

illustration, I will provide the following example: I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can

see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. [] I have a bed, a chair, a table and a

large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelontrout oil at

night. [] The rivers are cold and clear and there are trout in the rivers (Brautigan 8).

The rest of the book is written in a very similar way.

For his specific style, some critics even refuse to admit that Brautigans works

are novels. For example, Robert Adams claims, one cant call them novels or even

fictions they may well go down in literary history as Brautigans. This statement

might look at first denigrating, but Lew Welch turns it into a compliment:

Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write Brautigans just as we

now write novels. Let us hope so. For this man has invented a genre, a

whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful, and right. At the same time

and this is very important, Brautigan's style, strange as it is, is as easy to

read as the plainest prose of say, science fiction or detective stories. You

start in, and within three pages you are trapped until the book ends.


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Were sorry, one of the tigers said. []

We wouldnt do this if we didnt have to, if we werent

absolutely forced to. But this is the only way we can keep alive.

(Brautigan 52, 54)

While the tigers were eating the narrators parents, they also helped him with his

arithmetic.

The question that arises is how it is possible for such an ideal community as that

of Watermelon Sugar to include such a destructive element as the tigers. Sure, the tigers

belong to the past, and for that reason, they might represent a certain precedent stage of

the communitys evolution, which had not been so perfect. Eventually, they were killed

off anyway, although, surprisingly, the community did not feel totally happy about it,

which is proved also in the following passage: The tigers are so nice. Why do they

have to go and do things like that? I said. They cant help themselves, Charley said. I

like the tigers, too. Ive had a lot of good conversations with them. Theyre very nice

and have a good way of stating things, but were going to have to get rid of them.

Soon (Brautigan 56).

Dan Williams makes an analogy between Brautigans tigers and those of

William Blake. Blakes tigers can be symbols of innocence as well as experience,

depending on who is watching them. They will not be dangerous for an innocent child

who cannot really understand that they may kill him/her, but an experienced mind of an

adult will inevitably fear them. Similarly, Brautigans tigers, by killing only adults,

provided a valuable service to the community, because they preserved its innocence.

Thus, the narrators father, who wanted to defend himself with a gun, had to be killed

just because of this simple reason: he was experienced, whereas the narrator, at that

time still innocent, was saved.


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Consequently, by killing the tigers, the members of the community lost the

natural way of keeping their innocent state of mind, and thus individuals like inBOIL,

whose evil reposes, according to Williams, in the fact that he became too experienced,

have no other possibility but leave the community and live in the Forgotten Works. It is

highly probable, that, were there still the tigers, they would be killed by them.

Interestingly, it is inBOIL who seems to sense it the first, as he claims during a quarrel

at iDEATH:

You dont know whats really going on with iDEATH. The tigers

knew more about iDEATH than you know. You killed all the tigers and

burned the last one in here.

That was all wrong. The tigers should never have been killed. The

tigers were the true meaning of iDEATH. Without the tigers there could

be no iDEATH, and you killed the tigers and so iDEATH went away.

(Brautigan 126, 128)

As we can see, it is rather complicated to find out what role the tigers have in In

Watermelon Sugar. On one hand, they can be regarded as a mere source of violence and

death that had been troubling the community for a long time, and by killing the tigers

the people in Watermelon Sugar reached a more peaceful and less anxious existence.

However, to be attributed only this purely negative part, they are depicted too nicely:

they talk in beautiful voices, they help children with arithmetic, they are intelligent and

you can have a pleasant conversation with them. So, on the other hand, there must be

something positive about them, too. The contribution they bring to the community

might be manifested in the fact that they preserve its natural order and innocence,

which, presumably, also inBOIL agrees with.


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B) Emotional vacuum at iDEATH

Some critics argue that iDEATH is a place without emotions. They criticize the

narrators lack of pity when he is exposed to the death of his parents and the cold

reaction of the inhabitants of iDEATH to inBOILs and Margarets suicides. When the

narrator watches the tigers devour his parents, he only sits there and continues eating his

breakfast, he does not even cry or manifest any other sort of feeling. He behaves in a

similar way when he discovers Margarets body hanging from the apple tree. Charley,

after inBOILs suicide, says only I hope you think youve proved something, I dont

think youve proved anything (Brautigan 130) and Pauline is only angry because of the

mess they (inBOIL and his gang) have made. The critics believe, and Patricia Hernlund

is one of the most stubborn advocates of this theory, that this is the great flaw of the

watermelon society which shows its imperfection. She claims that due to this apparently

overt absence of any kind of emotions, and partially also to the seemingly repetitive and

boring style of writing, the life in watermelon sugar may be literally the same as

dying.

I must, however, disagree with such interpretations, and for this, I have several

reasons. As for inBOILs death, we know that he is the prime antagonist of the novel, he

only drinks whiskey, never does anything useful, rejects the peaceful life at iDEATH

and bawls about its real sense; he is clearly the villain, everyone hates him. So why

should be anybody bothered about his suicide? Jeffrey M. Foster holds a similar

opinion: Just what should our feelings be, then, no matter how bloody the end, when

the enemy of a peaceful community gets whats coming to him, especially when it is at

his own hand? The answers may vary from reader to reader, but I daresay that at least


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some of them would contain words like indifference or relief rather than

mourning or grief.

Nevertheless, it is true indeed that the inhabitants of iDEATH could be

somewhat more emotional than they actually are, but it is right in this emotional

detachment where lies the key to their happy existence. Foster explains:

Life, for the men and women of iDEATH, cannot revolve around a

persons thoughts, emotions, and desires because these can only lead to

deception, betrayal, and disappointment. Therefore, the denizens of the

commune turn away from the temporal, illusory, and transitory world,

looking instead to nature as the higher authority that will lead them into

the perfect order and peace found only within the natural process.

It is evident from this extract that the inhabitants of iDEATH deliberately rejected any

forms of strong emotions whatsoever, because these would only keep them in a vicious

circle of desire and frustration. This also corresponds to the Buddhist, and Brautigans,

vision of the world, where people should not be influenced by any intensive emotions

such as passion, hatred, envy and so forth. The only people at iDEATH who did not

accept this philosophy are inBOIL and Margaret, and this finally leads to their self-

destruction.

According to Foster, there is a kind of emotion, though, and this is the

gentleness, which is the underlying principle of iDEATH, because it is a pure

expression of love towards the whole world.

The conclusion that springs out of this discussion is thus simple: in order to live

a gentle life in a delicate balance, the residents of iDEATH have opted for a

rejection of all emotional ties to the world, because it protects them from

disappointment and corruption. They seek a higher guidance in nature. Margaret breaks


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CONCLUSION

The aim of this thesis was to shed some light at one of the less appreciated

figures of American literature, Richard Brautigan, and his novel In Watermelon Sugar.

The reason why he is often an overlooked author is presumably his close connection to

the hippie culture, which prevents certain critics to acknowledge his work in a wider

context. Nevertheless, I believe that this connection should not be regarded as a

negative one; on the contrary, it should be stressed that, in his works, he managed to

portray perfectly the atmosphere of the times. As John Marshall put it, Richard

Brautigan was the writer who captured the tangerine dream flavor of the 1960s better

than almost anyone.

If we now look again at the statement of Martin Hilsk, which I used in the

introduction to this thesis, we have to conclude that his claim about In Watermelon

Sugarbeing as closely connected to the second half of the sixties as for example On the

Road is with the fifties, is not at all a blown-up bubble. Although I am not saying that

Brautigan is another Fitzgerald or Kerouac, it should be clear by now that In

Watermelonis at least a perfect document that illustrates the features that were, at that

time, crucial for the hippies, such as communal living, philosophy of non-violence and

peace, as well as drugs.In Watermelon Sugar is therefore a book that brings excellent

evidence about the time of its creation, and this even without being realistic. In fact,

realism and rational perception of the world was what the hippies wanted to escape

from, and so what other kind of book should have become their bible if not such a

fantastic-surrealistic-psychedelic-imaginary fairy-tale asIn Watermelon Sugar?


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APPENDICES

Appendix 1:

THE LAST GATHERING OF BEATS, POETS & ARTISTS, CITY LIGHTS BOOKSNorth Beach, San Francisco 1965, taken by Larry Keenan

This photo was taken out of the initiative of Lawrence Ferlinghetti who wanted todocument the 1965 beat scene in San Francisco in the spirit of the early 20th centuryclassic photographs of the bohemian artists and writers in Paris.

Front row L to R: Robert LaVigne, Shig Murao, Larry Fagin, Leland Meyezove(lying down), Lew Welch, Peter Orlovsky.

Second row: David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, DanielLangton, Steve (friend of Ginsberg), Richard Brautigan, Gary

Goodrow, Nemi Frost.Back row: Stella Levy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Because this is a vertical image, about half of the Beats attending are not shown. (seeapp. 2)

National Portrait Gallery: www.npg.si.edu/img2/rebels/keenan.jpg


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Apendix 2:

THE LAST GATHERING OF BEATS POETS & ARTISTS, CITY LIGHTS BOOKSNorth Beach, San Francisco 1965, taken by Dale Smith

This is another picture of the same event, this time it is vertical and so some more

people attending can be seen.

Julie Baker Fine Art Gallery: www.juliebakerfineart.com


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Appendix 3:

THE COVER OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE announcingthe GATHERING OF THE TRIBES FOR A HUMAN BE-INDesigned by Rick Griffin

www.hippy.com/article-303.html


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Appendix 4:Another promotional poster for the HUMAN BE-IN

www.allposters.com/-sp/The-Human-Be-In-A-Gathering-Of-The-Tribes-Posters_i2076865_.htm


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Appendix 5:

LEVITTOWN PICTUREScas.buffalo.edu/classes/eng/willbern/BestSellers/Lectures/levittown.jpg

INTERIOR of a Levittown housecontent.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/3/3d/400px-Levittownhome.jpg


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Appendix 6:THE VERY FIRST COMMUNICATION COMAPANY LEAFLET stating its policiesand goals

www.diggers.org/comco/cc001_opt_m.jpg


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Appendix 7:

BRAUTIGANS SEEDS POEMS, published as a collection named PLEASE PLANTTHIS BOOK, Santa Barbara, California: Graham Mackintosh, 1968.

It was a limited edition of 6 000 copies all for free distribution.

The folder (cover photographs of Caledonia Jahrmarkt by Bill Brock, a Haight-Ashburyphotographer) contained eight seed packets (four of flowers, four of vegetables).The front of each packet was printed with a poem titled for the type of seeds containedin that packet. Planting instructions were printed on the back, the same for all eight

packets. Any particular order for the seed packets is unknown.Folder front Back cover provided publication information.

www.diggers.org/plant_this_book.htm


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Appendix 8:REGULAR FIRST EDITION COVER ofIN WATERMELON SUGARSan Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1968Front cover photograph of Brautigan and Hilda Hoffman by Edmund Shea

Novels opening sentence used in lieu of title and author's name

inwatermelonsugar.com/www.brautigan.net/watermelon.html


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Occident Spring 1974. 20 March 2007 .

Schmitz, Neil. Richard Brautigan and the Modern Pastoral. Modern Fiction Studies

19 (1973): 20 March 2007 .

Internet sources - books:

Dante.Inferno. The Divine Comedy. Trans. H. W. Longfellow. Christian Classics

Ethereal Library. 10 Apr. 2008

.

Internet sources - periodicals:

Adams, Robert. Brautigan Was Here. New York Review of Books. 22 Apr. 1971. 20

March 2007 .

Feld, Michael. A Double with Christina. London Magazine. August/September 1971:

150-152. 20 March 2007 .

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Interview with Jesse Hamlin. Summer of Love: 40 Years

Later. San Francisco Chronicle. 20 May 2007. 15 Oct. 2007

.

Polluted Eden: A Review of Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar.

Times Litterary Supplement. August 14, 1970: 893. 20 March 2007


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.

Marshall, John. New on the Bookshelves for Brautigans Fans. Seattle Post-

Intelligencer. 12 May 2000. 20 March 2007

.

Rossman, Michael. Interview with Joel Selvin. Summer of Love: 40 Years Later. San

Francisco Chronicle. 20 May 2007. 15 Oct. 2007 .

Welch, Lew. Brautigans Moth Balanced on an Apple. Rev. of In Watermelon Sugar,

by Richard Brautigan. San Francisco Chronicle. 15 Dec. 1968: This World 53,

59. 20 March 2007 .

Internet sources video:

Kerouac, Jack. Interview. De Jack Kerouac Ti-Jean Kerouac. With Fernard Seguin.

Le Sel de la Semaine. Radio Canada. Montreal. 1967. 19 Apr. 2008

.

Internet sources - visual appendices:

A Human Be-In. Allposters.com. 13 Apr. 2008 .

Brock, Bill. Cover. Please Plant This Book. By Richard Brautigan. Santa Barbara:

Graham Mackintosh, 1968. 13 Apr. 2008

.

Griffin, Rick. Pow Wow: A Gathering of the Tribes for the Human Be-In.

Hippy.com. 13 Apr. .


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Interior of a Levittown house. 13 Apr. 2008

.

Keenan, Larry. The Last Gathering of the Beats. 1965. National Portrait Gallery. 13

Apr. 2008 .

Shea, Edmund. Cover. In Watermelon Sugar. By Richard Brautigan. San Francisco:

Four Seasons Foundation, 1968. 13 Apr. 2008 .

Scherschel, Joe. Levittown picture. 13 Apr. 2008

.

Smith, Dale. The Last Gathering of the Beats. 1965. Julie Baker Fine Art Gallery 13

Apr. 2008 .

The Communication Company. Diggers.com. 13 Apr. 2008

.

Other internet sources:

Biography. Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. 20 March 2007

.

Kunr, Jaroslav. Diversity of Postmodern Fantasy: Richard Brautigan'sIn Watermelon

Sugarand Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father. Brautigan Bibliography and

Archive. 20 March 2007

.

l.bosh. Hippies. Encyklopedie anglo-americkch autor. 12 Apr. 2008

< http://www.volny.cz/yettinka/hippies.html>.

Tanner, Tony. Fragments and Fantasies (Donald Barthelme and Richard


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Brautigan). Conclusion. City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New

York: Harper & Row, 1971. 20 March 2007

.

Timemagazine homepage.10 March 2008. .

Williams, Dan.A World Within: Solipsism and Richard Brautigan'sIn Watermelon

Sugar. Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. 20 March 2007

.

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