Richard Brautigan / Theodore Roethke

I want to compare works by Richard Brautigan (b. 1935) and Theodore Roethke (b. 1908): “The Kool-Aid Wino” from Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and “Meditation at Oyster River” from Roethke's The Far Field. Brautigan was a poet, short story writer, and novelist. Roethke was a poet. Both writers lived part of their lives in the Northwest, had absent fathers, had mental illness, touched on aspects nature, and sought transcendence through their writing. Although their styles are very different, both men had a knack for making the ordinary sacred.

In “The Kool-Aid Wino,” Brautigan tells the story of a disabled boy in a poor German family. The narrator goes to the boy’s house in order to help the boy buy a pack of Kool-Aid. The story is about the process of making a jar of Kool-Aid and how this process transforms the boy. Brautigan describes how the boy draws water for the Kool-Aid: “First he got a gallon jar and we went around to the side of the house where the water spigot thrust itself out of the ground like the finger of a saint, surrounded by a mud puddle.” The juxtaposition of “saint” and “mud puddle” keeps Brautigan’s imagery grounded in external reality, yet the process of making the Kool-Aid is clearly a transformative act for the boy. Brautigan says the boy is “Like the inspired priest of an exotic cult.” And when the boy’s mother returns and tells him to do the dishes, the boy says to the narrator, “The dishes can wait.” The boy has made a choice to pursue the life of the spirit. Around the boy is evidence of decay, “half-rotten comic books,” perhaps suggesting how the boy’s poverty threatens to impact his childhood or suggesting death. Brautigan writes often of childhood, perhaps searching for the happiness that wasn’t available to him when he was child but that he created for himself, through his imagination. The Kool-Aid wino has found a way to cope with life’s disappointments. Although the boy uses twice the amount of water he is supposed to in order to make his elixir last longer and although he has no sugar to put in his Kool-Aid, the boy is happy. Brautigan writes: “He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.” The boy is like Christ, turning water into wine, but in a world of diminished possibilities.

Theodore Roethke writes also of illumination in “Meditation at Oyster River.” He says: “Water’s my will, and my way, / And the spirit runs, intermittently, / In and out of the small waves, / Runs with the intrepid shorebirds-- / How graceful the small before danger!” Both Brautigan’s “Kool-Aid Wino” and the speaker of this poem are involved in meditations on life. We might say of the boy in Brautigan’s story as Roethke says of the shorebirds: “How graceful the small before danger.” For the boy, poverty threatens to invade the world of his imagination. Brautigan says that the comic books are “like fruit under a tree.” This fruit, which will neither be eaten nor become trees, simply dies.

In Roethke’s poem, the speaker becomes transformed through meditation. Like the boy in Brautigan’s story, the speaker in Roethke’s poem will not succumb to life’s drudgery and the prospect of endings. Early in the poem, Roethke writes, “The self persists like a dying star, / In sleep, afraid. Death’s face rises afresh.” These lines suggest the dilemma of our recognition that someday we will die. Roethke finds the answer to the dilemma in nature itself. The speaker observes: “Now, in this waning light, / I rock with the motion of morning, / In the cradle of all that is, / I’m lulled into half-sleep / By the lapping of water.” This is perhaps the “sleep” of the unconscious, where we make our own reality or connect to the truths of the ages. The light is waning, yes, we shall die, but “in the cradle of all that is,” we can never die. Roethke ends the poem by saying: “In the first of the moon, / All’s a scattering, A shining.”

Both the Kool-Aid wino and the speaker in Roethke’s poem have found the sacred in ordinary things: A package of Kool-Aid and shorebirds that are so ordinary they are not even named. In both cases, water is the sacred, the transformative, element. In both works, the prospect of death as an ending is evident but rejected. A way has been found of transcending everyday reality, disappointment and the fear of death. The imagination, too, is seen as a vehicle for transformation.

What a beautiful comparison! Yes, water is an amazing symbol. So plain and ordinary, so essential to life, so magical in the way it flows, sparkles in sunlight, turns to ice in the cold - and therefore not plain or ordinary at all.

I remember when reading Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent how struck I was by all the water imagery in her novel - not what I had expected of a novel set partly in the Middle East. And then I reflected how rare and precious water would be to desert peoples.

Thanks for this gorgeous comparison. I hadn't read Brautigan's story, but Roethke is one of my favorite poets and I love to see him discussed! I think the theme of finding the transcendent (or sometimes, the flip side of that: the frightening and eerily significant) in ordinary life or objects is a theme that runs throughout his work, and one of the reasons I value him so much.

"making the ordinary sacred"

I wonder if this is not what all writers do, or at least all literary writers. Brautigan and Roethke seem to have written specifically in order to make this point, that the ordinary is or can be sacred. Maybe all good writers make the ordinary sacred by adding one ordinary detail to the next ordinary detail and the next in order to build a true story that reflects a greater (a sacred) truth about life. Many works of literature deal with tragic, extreme, or shocking events - but in order to give such events meaning to readers, they must also connect with the ordinary details of life common to both the readers and the characters.

I was just looking at the recent posts in the thread on The Sound of Waves/Their Eyes Were Watching God, and when I came back to this one, I thought that Mishima and Hurston were both making the ordinary sacred in these novels - Mishima with his idealizing of the lost world of rural Japan, and Hurston by treating the underclass world of the black community in Florida that she wrote about as an appropriate setting for serious literature. But while I was writing the previous paragraph, I also began thinking about Crime and Punishment. To most of us, murder is hardly ordinary, but Dostoyevsky made a special point of writing about the murder of the most ordinary possible character - a poor old woman - done in the most ordinary possible way by a person who was ordinary in every way except for his unusual degree of self-awareness, as though he was able to look at himself the way he might look at a bug under a microscope and perform a cruel experiment on himself by committing a murder to see how he would react. Almost nothing "happens" in the novel except the murder. And yet the story was mesmerizing because of Dostoyevsky's insight and his recognition of the importance of every detail of his character's experience. Ultimately, Raskolnikov realizes - perhaps because of the ordinariness of his intense suffering - that every life is sacred, even that of an ordinary old woman.

Thank you, margad, for your thoughts. My students so often want to write about exotic things, fantasy, science fiction, ghost stories. I tell them that no matter what kind of story they write, they will need to find a way of making ordinary things extraordinary. To make these "ordinary" things sacred is the next step, and it is the step I've been trying to make. As a human being, I want to see the sacred in everything. I think everything is connected and it's exciting to discover those connections through writing. Brautigan brought the idea of the sacred into my life in a fun, funny, and touching way. He helped me to see what it was all about years before I was truly ready to read Roethke.

I definitely need to step up my reading. This group is reading so many things I haven't touched. I like the point you make about the ordinary character.

What do your students read, Theresa?

I guess everyone is reading Harry Potter except me - not because I don't want to, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet). I have seen the movies, though. HP is another example of making the outrageously exotic seem ordinary and familiar.

But there are mountains of books in the bookstores besides Harry Potter, and I'm very curious to know what else young people are reading these days.

Many of them read a lot of fantasy. I have not read Harry Potter, either, and I don't plan to. (I am hearing cheers and jeers at that statement--smile). Many of them have been reading for pleasure all their lives but have very little knowledge of what literary fiction is about. They don't know writers like Lorrie Moore, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Monroe, Louise Erdrich. A few will have read Slaughterhouse-Five. There are a rare few who are into the classics. One young man last year loved Dostoevsky and at least a couple were into the Beats. In the Spring, I asked students to bring photographs of their favorite authors for a video I was making. Some of their choices were rather surprising. You can see it if you go to my profile and click on the link to my YouTube videos.

Couple questions, Theresa: Are you from/in Michigan...you know Roethke (long my favorite poet), Brautigan, and Baxter?
And have you thought about using Roethke's fine lyrics alongside Frost's lyrics?
Frost: Acquainted with the Night, Desert Places, Spring Pools, To Earthward, Once by the Pacific, plus 1 or 2 of these: Fire & Ice, Come In, Reluctance, or Mowing.
Roethke: My Papa's Waltz, In a Dark Time, Once More the Round, Wish for a Young Wife, The Moment,The Meadow Mouse, Her Time, The Geranium
Naturally, there are other poems by each poet that would/have proved highly useful with students.
Roethke is highly under valued as a poet, and the wrong pieces of Frost are over valued in my opinion.
I've had great success with these poems of each.
Fred

Hello Fred, I am very near Michigan. I am in NW Ohio. I had not thought of looking at Roethke alongside Frost, but now that you mention it, "Acquinted with the Night" would go along nicely with "In a Dark Time." I will be teaching Frost a little later in the semester, so I have have some time to meditate on him. I agree with you completely about Roethke being undervalued: what a shame. And, yes, the same pieces by Frost are anthologized with nauseating frequency when so many other poems of his need to be read.