Ernest Shulman is a Canadian who has lived in New York City for many years. He is a suicide researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York. His specialty is why famous people do or do not kill themselves. He is now at work on a book on the causes of suicide, titled “Thirty Famous Suicides.”

I have been deeply affected by the counterculture novelist, author of Trout fishing in America (1968), Richard Brautigan (1935-1984). He shot himself to death at age 49; he was twice divorced, an alcoholic and disconsolate after the collapse of his literary reputation. He exhibited paranoid behavior that alienated old friends and also his adult daughter whom he greatly loved. Brautigan was a fascinating San Francisco character, very tall and dressed in Western outfits to be noticed, friend to hippies and beats, writer of poetry volumes and ten novels that never lost their popularity in Japan even as American readers stopped buying his books. His literary appeal involved the straightforward, whimsical, fun-loving, and humorous qualities of his writing, qualities that also characterized him as a person when at his best.

I am a suicide researcher specializing in the study of suicidal celebrities, mainly writers. Brautigan intrigues me, perhaps because I can identify with aspects of his history, his irreverence and individuality, and his efforts to maximize his talents and thus be successful.

His happiest times came during his early days in San Francisco when he was in his twenties and early thirties. He blossomed in that atmosphere so conducive to creativity. He worked hard at his writing and also made many friends. Born in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan had an unhappy, lonely childhood growing up in the Pacific Northwest. He never knew his father because his teenage mother divorced him before Brautigan was born. He suffered through a series of violent step-fathers who beat him. He lived with his mother and younger sister, Barbara, on welfare, moving often from town to town.

Perhaps his greatest trauma occurred when he went out one day at age thirteen to shoot birds with his only friend, but shot the friend to death accidentally. In his 1982 autobiographical novel, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, Brautigan described the situation. He was put on trial and acquitted, but the community ostracized his whole family. So they moved to another town. Brautigan: “A lot of bad things happen to people in this life that they just don’t want to be reminded of, so they move away and try living someplace else where they can forget unpleasant things . . . and start all over again, and build up some good memories.” This was Brautigan’s chief coping method.

Another important coping way was to ignore the negative, and as he once put it, “life was horrible and cruel and that people often suffered and lamented. But that didn’t have to happen because all that mattered was having fun.” Thus he never wrote about incidents of being abandoned as a child, including one time at age nine in a Montana hotel room with his sister that he told San Francisco friends about. Apparently the hotel staff took care of the children, but Brautigan claimed he spent two weeks staring at the door, waiting for his mother to enter. He did, however, write that his mother’s usual attitude was to barely tolerate him. The family’s poverty was such that wherever they lived, they went on welfare. They didn’t even have the money to repair the family radio, and so Brautigan couldn’t listen to his favorite radio programs. He responded creatively: he sat by the broken radio and invented new episodes of his own for the characters. At age twenty-one he left home and never returned, even for a visit. He arrived in San Francisco, made friends among the “beats,” immersed himself in Zen, published two books of poetry, and never again contacted his mother or sister. Nor would he ever talk about his family of origin.

Brautigan focused totally on becoming a famous writer, expecting fame to compensate him for his deprivations. He believed implicitly in his literary talent, and after turning to novel-writing, he became rich and famous with Trout Fishing in America, which sold two million copies worldwide. None of his other books came close to being best-sellers, and after several years with the counterculture falling out of fashion, Brautigan had trouble even getting published; his novels now received bad reviews if they received any reviews at all.

Success didn’t make Brautigan happy, though it enabled him to buy houses in Bolinas (near San Francisco) and Montana. His later loss of literary acceptance turned him from dependency on alcohol into a self-centered, raging, paranoid alcoholic. Disillusionment with women contributed to his decline: his first wife divorced him because he badly neglected her; his second wife, who followed him to the U.S. from Japan, divorced him because by this time (1979) he had turned abusive. Also, he blamed the critics for his loss of American popularity. He continued to do well in Japan because his Zen attitude stressed the present. His earlier literary success had allowed him to indulge his penchant for womanizing — he lost his usual shyness around any woman if she had read any of his books.