Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 70

8 Section 5 Chicago Tribune. Monday November 12. 1984 Tribute to what might have been Continued from first Tempo page complete by 1964, years before Haight-Ashbury and flower power. Some of the reports of his death implied Brautigan killed himself because he felt washed up. Though he could lose his temper with the critics, I never saw him lose faith in his talent.

Like his hero Hemingway, he spent part of every day writing, and he produced lean works in which every word fit and not a single word was wasted. To do tne seemingly impossible and to make it appear easy "to load mercury with a pitchfork is the writer's job, Brautigan's work tells us, and he was a master of that art. What Brautigan was unable to master was his personal life. He ran away from hone in his mid-teens and never returned; both of his marriages ended in divorce; and his only child lived thousands of miles away. Though his acquaintances were legion including! movie directors Francis Ford Coppola and Sam Peckin- Eah, actor Clint Eastwood and singer Jimmy Buffet-is close friends were few.

He suffered from a profound loneliness and kept trying to bridge the gulf separating him from others. HIS EFFORTS were erratic. It was not uncommon for months to pass without a word from Brautigan; and then he would call six times in a week, or three times To suggest that Brautigan died of a broken career or a broken heart is to oversimplify the motivations of an extremely complex man. A work resists Just as Richard Brautigan's pigeonholing, so will his death. JJ Jvlu3JLXn jprl Nobody gets' your dishes ftfT' i cleaner! 3-levelJetwash Sys- sL I' Vv Jll tenr Micro-Mesh'" Filter cleans SSUri itself continuously Un- Vnj I j1 surpassed capacity Porcelain 3 i ll) enamel tub and door Ti REBATE: Buy a Maytag Jetclean Dish- washer (built-in models WU202, WU502, I I WU902, or portableconvertible model IV II I I WC302).

Receive your official refund certlfl- II I I us 9et "our a A 1 1 1 C8Sh rebate "rectl' called "a general goofiness." He loved to poke fun at himself and to play practical jokes on others. After a wild Fourth of July celebration at his Rancho Rauncho several years ago, I woke up the next morning to discover myself covered with and surrounded by miniature sombreros, perhaps Brautigan's playful allusion to his novel "Sombrero Fallout." Like most artists, he was also deeply affected by things, and he wasn't afraid to show his emotions. His life and his work were filled with vivid expressions of deeply felt experience. In life, he sometimes lost control of those emotions: A television documentary on kamikaze pilots once caused him to cry for nearly an hour. Perhaps because the world was often too much with him Brautigan sometimes went incommunicado for long periods.

He would simply unplug his phone or turn on his answering machine, and that would be the last his friends would hear from him for weeks. Usually he would work during those periods of solitude. He called it "canning himself in," and he explained it by saying "The Japanese have this wonderful system called canning. When a writer's deadline is near, he will lock himself in his room, often with his editor, and he will not leave the room, even if it takes weeks, until the manuscript is finished. He will eat in the room, sleep there, and he will write, write, write." BRAUTIGAN ALSO liked to be alone even when he wasn't working full-tilt.

Much of the time he stayed on his secluded ranch in Pine Creek, where he had an almost compulsive fear of trespassers. "I'm a mountain troll, he described himself, "and trolls don't like intruders." I saw one pair of teenagers on his property flee when this 6-foot-5-inch, 230-pound, shaggy haired troll lumbered their way with an ax. Even though his ranchhouse was large enough to sleep eight or nine people, Brautigan often preferred to stay in his "troll hole, a small snack next to the main house, where he felt more secure. In early September, Brautigan must have been drinking and dialing because in turning on my answering machine one day I heard his familiar wry voice say, "Even trolls gotta reach out and touch someone sometime, pal." I wasn't too concerned when in the ensuing weeks I could not reach him. And that is why I am not surprised that it took Don Carpenter and Curt Gentry five weeks of silence from Brautigan before they had to disturb his privacy.

His friends knew he needed time alone. in a night. He loved to "drink and dial," as he called and anytime my phone would ring after 3 a.m., it was sure to be Brautigan on the line with a bottle of Jack Daniel's, calling from Montana or San Francisco or Japan, unable to sleep. Related to his loneliness were the difficulties of his love life. "The dice of love are madness and melees," reads the epigraph to "Willard and his Bowling Trophies." Like Margaret, the character of "In Watermelon Sugar" who committed suicide, Brautigan suffered from a broken heart.

His second divorce a couple of years ago was especially bitter; mere mention of his ex-wife was enough to enrage him. But to suggest that Brautigan died of a broken career or a broken heart is to oversimplify the motivations of an extremely complex man. Just as Brautigan's work resists pigeonholing, so will his death. Brautigan lived a life of fantastic contradictions; for him the extremes were the norm. He could spend about $20 a year on clothes, but $1,000 a month on phone calls.

He counted among his friends not only distinguished Japanese poets out members of the Hell's Angels. He prided himself on being a Civil War buff, but the author of "A Confederate General from Big Sur" once lost $300 betting that Lee and Grant graduated from the same class at West Point. He claimed to love technology, but he never drove a car in his life. THE QUALITIES I'll remember most about Brautigan are his humor and his gentle sensitivity. Like Mark Twain, he had a bleak view of humanity he was convinced the '80s will end with race riots and global war, but his pessimism was leavened with what he Stockholm shows power By John von Rhein Music critic NUMBER 1 in: length of life 'fewest repairs 'lowest service costs nationwide preference (Based on a national survey asking consumers which HE STOCKHOLM Philhar- brand of washer they like to own.) i Orchestra, perform- pa CIS LOAD GHYEO0 Commercially proven in self-service laundries Gentle, energy efficient drying Electronic, Auto-Dry or Time Control Big Load drum Porcelain enamel top iW.Swlett.

it he ce ratt VV ing at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall Saturday night, paid signal honor both to one of its most individual native composers, Allan Pettersson, and to Northwestern University professor Frederick Hemke. A capacity audience heard the local premiere of Pettersson's Symphony No. 16 for alto saxophone and orchestra, with Hemke its dedicatee assuming the obbligato part. Yuri Ahronovitch conducted. Pettersson, who died in 1980, continues to resist stylistic labels, and so does his final known large-scale work, which had its premiere by the above-named forces in Stockholm on Feb.

24 of last year. The one-movement symphony is scored for big orchestra. It is tough and uncompromising, compressing a great deal of musical information, most of it densely chromatic. Conspicuously absent from this valedictory is the bitter despair that characterizes so many Pettersson works. Its complex rhythmic layering suggests a defiant, Beethoven-ian struggle against fate.

Over this strife is neard, almost continuously, the mellow cantabile of the saxophonehere an ironic observer rather than a protagonist, oddly detached from the conflict, though ready to lend a certain calm resignation to the quiet final measures. THIS IS NOT easy music to listen to, and its peculiarly Nordic remoteness makes it the kind of piece one could listen to a hundred times and not fully comprehend. But its impact as sound and symphonic argument is undeniably powerful, and the visiting Swedes are to be commended for bringing this significant new score to our attention. For Hemke, who had played the work six times during the Stockholm tour, this was a very special musical homecoming. His reading spoke eloquently of nis own skills as well as of the deeply personal artistic vision of Allan Pettersson.

As for the Stockholm, this final concert of its three-week North American tour found it a versatile and disciplined body of musicians, technically solid in all departments. The orchestra produces a sound that is clean and true from top to bottom, particularly warm in the strings. Ahronovitch, the orchestra's chief conductor, directed in a recognizably Russian manner, with plenty of sound, emotion and rhythmic freedom. This yielded a swaggering "Don Juan" that lacked the long line of Straussian continuity, even with an evocative oboe solo. Dvorak's Symphony No.

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