Safe Return Doubtful

American Literature – First Published 1971

This is a collection of 62 very short stories or really, just anecdotes; few are longer than three pages, and some just a few sentences. Some are set in Tacoma where Brautigan grew up, and some in California where he wrote as an adult.
His short stories are observations; his novels more along the lines of what he actually wanted to say.

Brautigan’s world is populated by people who have lost faith in the American dream, and react to stress not by anger and violence but by retreating and observing what others do. It’s a passive resistance typical of the hippie sixties. With hindsight the stories seem so much more important now than they were then.

These are easy to read and entertaining to dip into, but can be too much to take in when read in bunches of more than a few. I read a reviewer comment that they go down particularly well when Brautigan reads them to you, as in album he released Listening to Richard Brautigan, and more of his audio recordings are available now.

Perhaps the most memorable is The Ghost Children of Tacoma. It’s 3 pages long, as a guy recalls his childhood games of fighter planes, naval battles and faceless enemies as he tries to come to terms with the shock attack of Pearl Harbour and the subsequent entry of the United States into the Second World War…

During World War II I personally killed 352,892 enemy soldiers without wounding one. Children need a lot less hospitals in war than grown-ups do. Children pretty much look at it from the all-death side. I also sank 987 battleships, 532 aircraft carriers, 799 cruisers, 2,007 destroyers and 161 transport ships. Transports were not too interesting a target: very little sport. I also sank 5,465 enemy PT boats. I have no idea why I sank so many of them. It was just one of those things. Every time I turned around for four years, I was sinking a PT boat. I still wonder about that. 5,465 are a lot of PT boats.

Brautigan was an alcoholic who killed himself before he reached fifty. It’s particularly sad when contemplating today’s world and thinking how much we could do with him right now.

Concealed within the short sentences told with that childlike voice, within the prose poetry of metaphorical language, there lies a layer of subtle wisdom which stresses the value of laughter and fantasy.

It’s difficult to review this as one would usually, so I’ll just leave a few quotes I gathered..

Whenever I see watercress, which isn’t very often, I think of the rich. I think they are the only people who can afford it and they use watercress in exotic recipes that they keep hidden in vaults from the poor.

This might have been a funny story if it weren’t for the fact that people need a little loving and, God, sometimes it’s sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.

I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wrong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.

One day he decided that his liking for poetry could not be fully expressed in just reading poetry or listening to poets reading on phonograph records. He decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry, and so he did.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5