richard_brautigan_willard

Richard Brautigan's Parody of Arthur Miller
by Andrew Gordon
University of Florida

Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975) is another in Richard Brautigan's series of whimsical experiments taking off on popular genres of American fiction (he spoofs the Western in The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974) and the detective novel in Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977)). This sardonic black comedy concerns, among other things, the search of the Logan brothers for their stolen bowling trophies, a quest which takes on the character of an obsession and ends in senseless slaughter. Behind Brautigan's whimsy is a serious sense of despair about the inevitable decay caused by the misguided American worship of money and success; thus he mixes farce and violence in a blend of comedy and tragedy. As the title suggests, it is a perverse "mystery" story in which the solution to the mystery (who stole the bowling trophies and why?) is deliberately withheld in order to make the reader ponder Brautigan's deeper moral concerns.

The story of the Logan brothers contains a deliberate spoof of elements of another work about the tragic effects of the American cult of success, Arthur Miller's play,
Death of a Salesman. Brautigan's simple-minded, apple-pie American Logan family parodies Miller's Loman family. The Logan father is a mechanic with "a Midas touch when it came to transmissions": the double entendre suggests both the automotive repair company and the legend of King Midas, who was cursed by his golden touch. Unfortunately, Mr. Logan had a lot of trouble talking to people. Sometimes he wished that people were transmissions (WBT, p.82). He is a stripped-down version of Miller's salesman, Willy Loman, defining himself completely by his job and unable really to communicate with people. Mother Logan is similarly a reductio ad absurdum of Linda Loman: "a pleasant woman who minded her own business and did a lot of baking" (WBT, p. 48).

Most significantly, however, the three Logan brothers actually live out the childish fantasies of Miller's perpetual adolescents, Biff and Happy Loman. As Happy tells his brother in the play, "We form two basketball teams, see? Two water-polo teams. We play each other. It's a million dollars' worth of publicity. Two brothers, see? The Loman brothers." In Willard, the Logan brothers "had formed a very good, actually a championship bowling team that they played on for years" (WBT, p.26). The Logan brothers like the Lomans, are vacuous, all-American boys indoctrinated in a naive faith in financial success and salesmanship. At one point, one of the Logans reads an ad in a comic book offering a great opportunity for kids to sell salve door-to-door. "He wondered why he had never sold salve when he was a kid. It looked like a real interesting way to make money" (WBT, p.90). Later, he decides he "would have preferred to be a child, selling salve to his neighbors and earning lots of money selling something that made people feel better when they used it and afterwards thought kindly of him for selling the salve to them" (WBT, p.122). Thus Brautigan shows how the American gospel of winning friends and influencing people is yoked to the cult of salesmanship and economic success. For Brautigan, it is a comic-book idea presented ironically in deliberately simple, comic-book language.

The Logan brothers at first lead a placid existence bowling and worshipping their gold-plated bowling trophies. Nevertheless, as the story proceeds, these caricatures of all-American puerility reveal the potential for psychopathic violence beneath that bland exterior. Once their golden trophies are stolen, the brothers lose their "all-American innocence" (WBT, p. 31). In their obsessive search for the missing prizes, they deteriorate into a gang of vicious criminals: Their future was America and three long years of gradual character disintegration and a slow retreat from respectability and self-pride. In three years they would become what they had always despised" (WBT, p. 82).

Like Death of a Salesman, Willard and His Bowling Trophies concerns in part the human waste created by the American worship of financial success, but unlike Miller, Brautigan sees America as betrayed by comic-book ideas and irredeemably corrupt. Mr. Logan has his "Midas touch" and his sons have their golden trophies, but aside from that they are empty. Brautigan's satire is both an homage to Miller's play and a despairing commentary on Miller's message from the vantage point of an additional quarter century of American history. Brautigan's black comedy dehumanizes his characters and allows us no sympathy with them, and his violent finale deliberately omits the redemptive overtones of the "Requiem" in Miller's play. Willard is a bleak farce that sees America as a trap with no escape: "'It doesn't make much difference where we look,' his stern brother answered, surrounded by America in every direction" (WBT, p. 114).

Notes on Modern American Literature, 6 (1), Item 8 Spring/Summer 1982

Courtesy of Andrew Gordon, Ph. D.
Professor Andrew M. Gordon teaches at the
University of Florida and is author of An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer; Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg; co-editor with Peter Rudnytsky of the anthology Psychoanalyses/Feminisms; and co-author with Hernan Vera of Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness.