And then there are the stories where reality bends and warps, stories that seem to explode off the page. It’s also true that in my early twenties I was looking for prose with big personality – vivification and invention. Brautigan is a high stylist; his lines can be astonishing and have neon-grade memorability . . . ‘I sounded as if I had stepped in a wheelbarrow-sized pile of steaming dragon shit’ . . . ‘she opened her purse which was like a small autumn field and near the fallen branches of an old apple tree, she found her keys’ . . . ‘The way he lit a cigar was like an act of history’. But it’s very hard to label his work. Fairytale meets Beat meets Counterculture? Surrealism meets Folk meets Scat? The writing is bursting with colour, humour and imagery, mental flights of fancy, crazed and lurid details. There are wild inaccuracies and fever-dream occurrences. Bees living in hives made of liver. Bears dressed in nightgowns. Whisky-drinking geese. Heart-broken friends set fire to radios and the love-songs being played melt into each other. People pay 237 cheques into the bank at once while the narrator waits, thinking of the skeleton buried in his garden holding a can of ‘rustdust’ money. Men in debt have the shadows of giant birds attached to them.

The more you read, the less there seem to be regulations and governing forces, ways of qualifying Brautigan. The mind of the author is simply too unbound, too child-like in its enormous, regenerative capacity to imagine. I often give one of his short stories, like ‘Homage to the San Francisco YMCA’, to a creative writing student on the first day of a course. Suspecting I want them to write like Balzac or Woolf, the relief on their face is palpable. Not just relief, but sheer delight. Plumbing replaced by poetry! A man forced out of his own home by John Donne’s sonnets, Emily Dickenson, Mayakovsky, et al! Many creative writing lessons are pointless, but this one is not. Even in adulthood, and no matter our circumstances, the imagination is a phenomenally powerful device, perhaps the most powerful. Brautigan knew it; he was a master-practitioner, a high-wire act.