The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writing

In 1955 Brautigan was a lovelorn, 20-year-old literary hopeful who left his hometown of Eugene, Ore., for San Francisco's burgeoning Beat scene. He also left a sheaf of unpublished writings, along with a handwritten note (reproduced in the book) granting Edna Webster, the mother of Brautigan's first love and his best friend, all rights to the manuscripts, which, more than four decades later, have now emerged to make up this fragmentary collection of never-published poems and short prose. The signature themes and zany, melancholy sensibility that dominate Brautigan's most well-known works (Trout Fishing in America; In Watermelon Sugar) are prefigured here. The author inscribes himself as a thwarted lover enchanted to distraction by beautiful women, and as a man who endeavors to escape his social disillusion, depression and preoccupation with death by inventing endearing, childlike and frequently overstretched metaphors. The many short poems run the gamut from innocence to cruelty, often in record time: ""For Christmas/ I/ will give my mother/ a/ time bomb."" Short pieces (""Question 1"": ""Is it/ against/ the law/ to eat/ ice cream/ in hell?"") may seem slight, but other sad fragments reveal glimpses of the writer's wretched childhood and stint in a mental institution. The short prose pieces are more polished, like the abbreviated scene of alcoholic domesticity in ""A Glass of Beer"" or ""The Flower Burner,"" in which a boy hopes to spy on a skinny-dipping girl and instead witnesses his sordid neighbors. Brautigan fans will delight in the raw egotism, mixed metaphors and flawed melodrama that were later stylized to subtler effect, and critics may opine that Brautigan never outgrew his hormonal urgencies and puerile self-aggrandizement. The appearance of these early writings 15 years after Brautigan's death reaffirm his prismatic literary place as not only a tragic literary icon but as a na ve insomniac, bitter depressive and whimsical wordsmith. (Sept.) FYI: The volume contains a note by Brautigan collector Burton Weiss and an introductory essay by Keith Abbott.