Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Longer works of fiction are never created in a single moment. They must be labored over, built like a house, brick by brick, board by board, line by line. Richard conceived his work in a photographic manner. Poems arrived as mental Polaroid snapshots, complete and instantly developed. Ginny felt his problem had to do with the difference in form, with having to write “in paragraphs with dialogue.” Richard had already written several short stories in Eugene, each with a distinctive voice. He’d disavowed these initial efforts, erasing them from memory, wiping the slate clean, along with his family, his first love, and his hometown boyhood friends.

  Brautigan asked Jack Spicer how to go about writing prose. His mentor’s advice was oblique. “Throw away the good lines,” Spicer said. “Keep the bad lines.” He wanted Richard to come up with something new. Ginny remembered the long silent hours of work. “He didn’t talk much about it. He and Spicer talked. We talked about it together. He’d say, ‘I’ve got a short story.’

  “We’d say, ‘No, you don’t. You’ve got a poem.’”

  This is where things stood when Richard pinned the Mexican Independence memorandum to the wall by his desk. Hemingway approved of such tactics “to keep yourself honest.” Ginny summed up the breakthrough. “He really created a new form,” she said. “Which was a prose poem.” Often, the titles of Richard’s poems came first, an initial spark igniting the creative detonation. Liking “Trout Fishing in America,” his title for the rough, experimental short story scrawled in his notebook, Brautigan decided that’s what he’d call the novel he didn’t yet know how to write. On the sixteenth, he rolled a sheet of paper into the Royal and wrote straight from the wellsprings of his heart, “As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine. Summer of 1942.” Richard continued typing, the words coming in a poetic flow. He tapped into a lifelong love of fishing, the only part of his childhood he cared to remember.

  Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when

  he told me about trout fishing.

  I’d like to get it right.

  Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear

  snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

  Imagine Pittsburgh.

  A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings,

  trains and tunnels.

  The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

  Brautigan ended his initial effort by introducing an interlocutory character named Trout Fishing in America, a sort of ghost of trout fishing past, present, and future, who remembered “people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn.” Reading it over, Richard knew he had a perfect page-long prose poem. Although he had set down a wonderful opening chapter, Richard Brautigan had no idea what he was going to write next. The chapters concerning Brautigan’s Oregon upbringing led the charge as the Mexican Army of Independence liberated his mind. He wrote of his Tacoma childhood memories and of hitchhiking to fish the Klamath and of picking cherries “for two-and-a-half cents a pound.” Recalling rainy afternoons on the McKenzie and wading the shallow runs of Gate Creek, Brautigan flavored his reminiscences with fern-lined wicker creels and salmon eggs, “using a size 14 single egg hook on a pound and a quarter test tippet,” precisely rendered details breathing life into his most abstract fictional notions.

  Richard Brautigan continued writing poetry while he wrestled with his novel. In January (1961), Ginny got mad at him for not submitting a chapter from the book for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and Richard wrote a droll poem about his inactivity. When Ianthe was seven or eight months old, Ginny stopped breast-feeding and went back to work. Richard became the stay-at-home dad, changing diapers and feeding baby food. Fall and winter are often pleasantly mild and sunny in San Francisco. Not wanting to stay cooped up in the apartment, Brautigan carried his daughter over to nearby Washington Square, where she played in the grass while he watched from a nearby bench, notebook in hand.

  Sometime early in February (after celebrating his twenty-sixth birthday reading Civil War history, making love with Ginny that night, and writing it all down as a poem the next day), Brautigan sketched out a rough draft in his spiral-bound notebook for a chapter called “The Cover of Trout Fishing in America.” In what was essentially the same as the version he later published as the novel’s opening chapter, Richard described the cover as a photograph of the Benjamin Franklin statue standing in Washington Square “taken in the late afternoon.”

  The statue was erected at Kearny and Market in 1879 by Henry D. Cogswell, a teetotaling dentist. The marble base supporting the life-sized pot metal statue originally had spigots on all four sides serving mineral water allegedly from as far off as Vichy, France. The earliest existing monument in the city, the statue was moved to Washington Square in 1904. Brautigan’s opening chapter described the Ben Franklin monument in detail and told how poor people assembled at five in the afternoon to receive free sandwiches from the Saints Peter and Paul Church bordering on the park. Richard ended the passage by wondering if it was Kafka “who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . .”

  Free sandwiches appealed to Richard Brautigan, as he was always short of cash. To supplement pocket change provided by his part-time job at Pacific Chemical Laboratories, Richard relied upon his old standby, the blood bank. When Brautigan returned the previous October, it had been over two years since he last sold a pint of type A at Irwin Memorial. He paid his final visit to the San Francisco Medical Society in late February 1961. Richard brought his baby daughter along and wrote an unpublished poem, “The Belle of the Blood Bank,” about Ianthe watching him with a catheter in his arm.

  Work on the novel progressed. Richard Brautigan chronicled his memories of Johnnie Hiebert, the ruptured little brother of the Hiebert twins. He called this early chapter “The Kool-Aid Wino.” The original longhand draft differed from the published version only in the ending. In the notebook, Richard wrote that the “Wino” said “To hell with the dishes,” and the two kids climbed up onto the roof of the chicken house to drink Kool-Aid from a quart jar “in the shade of a willow tree, its long green branches reaching out over us.” The boys held the unsweetened beverage “in our mouths a long time before we swallowed it.” Brautigan later cut this final passage.

  Three other chapters began as handwritten entries in Brautigan’s notebook. The first, originally called “Dostoevsky,” became “Sea, Sea Rider.” The notebook draft is nearly identical to the published chapter but is half as long, comprising only the final story-within-a-story told to the narrator by the Jewish bookstore owner. The chapter called “The Last Year the Trout Came Up Hayman Creek” went through two rough drafts in Brautigan’s notebook with only slight differences between them and the final version in the novel. Of the chapter “Trout Death by Port Wine” (so like a headline in the tabloids Richard adored), only the title remained unaltered when Trout Fishing in America finally went to print. In its earlier notebook incarnation, the chapter was completely different, beginning with a memorable line, “Old Roller Skate Wheels was the first dead man I ever saw in my life.”

  It was Ginny’s task to decipher Richard’s cramped handwriting and type his notebook entries into legible chapters. There were times when her day job and caring for the baby made this impossible, so Brautigan prepared preliminary typescripts on his own. When he didn’t feel like working at home on the big pink Royal standard, he carried a Smith-Corona portable to the cool dim recesses of Gino & Carlo’s or some other North Beach hangout. A gift from Price Dunn, who paid $8.60 for the machine after it was impounded in the Monterey Greyhound depot, the Smith-Corona was one of five different typewriters Brautigan used in creating Trout Fishing in America.

  Anna Halprin’s open invitation to Richard Brautigan, asking him to create original works for the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, found its own oblique way into his novel in progress. He started a chapter he called “The Ballet for Trout Fishing in America” on th
e back porch of 557 A Greenwich Street, inspired by the desiccated, Nixon-campaign-pin-pierced cobra lily plant sitting beside his worktable, he typed, “How the Cobra Lily traps insects is a ballet [. . .] a ballet to be performed at the University of California in Los Angeles.”

  The previous summer, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser agreed to start “White Rabbit College,” an experimental school modeled on Black Mountain, featuring a curriculum taught only by artists for other writers and painters. The plan involved using Ebbe Borregaard’s Museum as the location for their “college.” Borregaard insisted on formal contracts, and in the end a seven-week course taught by Robert Duncan on “The History of Poetry” was all that came of it. Duncan’s lectures ran on Thursday nights from December 15, 1960, to January 26, 1961.

  Duncan also spoke on the next two Thursdays. Borregaard’s Museum featured concerts of Baroque music Sunday afternoons at four. Admission was $1.50. Duncan charged a buck. When Richard Brautigan read at the museum at eight thirty on Friday evening, March 17, 1961, a ticket cost seventy-five cents. It was the first public exposure of Trout Fishing in America, still a work in progress. During the six months Richard had been writing the book, he showed each new chapter to Jack Spicer, who reacted enthusiastically, offering editorial advice and encouraging the reading at Ebbe Borregaard’s place. Brautigan read some of the early chapters set in his boyhood on the creeks around Eugene. He also read a forgotten poem entitled “Alas, In Carrion Umpire.”

  Richard Brautigan’s novel grew by bits and pieces. He had already transformed many childhood fishing memories into poetic fiction, and he included a short story written in the fall of 1959 as a chapter in his expanding manuscript. “A Walden Pond for Winos” is one of the very few chapters in the book not referring to either trout fishing or Trout Fishing in America. It is set in Washington Square Park and mentions the Benjamin Franklin statue. A reference to “the cold autumn wind” and the line “At home my wife was pregnant” establish the time frame and indicate the story was written well before Brautigan began work on his novel. In the piece, the narrator and two artist friends share a bottle of cheap port in the park. They talk about committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter: “Television, clean sheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes [. . .] Ah yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss.”

  Richard Brautigan felt the need for library research. The Mechanics’ Institute at 57 Post Street fit the bill. Founded in 1855 in the wake of the gold rush, the Institute had a fine three-story building and a library of over 200,000 books when the 1906 earthquake and fire reduced it all to rubble. The Mechanics’ Institute erected a new nine-story building on the site, moving in on July 15, 1910. Two years later, the library collection totaled 40,000 volumes. By 1961, there were close to 160,000 books in the stacks.

  Richard Brautigan found his way to the second floor on Post Street to work on Trout Fishing in America. As a rule, the Mechanics’ Institute Library admitted only subscribers. Richard wasn’t a member, not having money to spare for dues, and so couldn’t check out any of their books. This presented no problem, as the stacks were open to the patrons. Once Brautigan gained entrance, he wandered along the crowded shelves, conducting his private research without being disturbed.

  After finishing work downtown at the chemical laboratory, Brautigan headed to the high-ceilinged main reading room at the Institute. Ginny remembered meeting him there frequently during her lunch hour. Richard also brought Kenn Davis over to the Mechanics’ Institute, delighting in showing his friend a place in San Francisco that he “knew nothing about.” Kenn sketched Brautigan working in the library, a place looking very much like a private turn-of-the-century club. The flooring of the narrow aisles between the stacks consisted of two-foot-square opaque glass plates. Walking on them made Ginny Brautigan feel “really eerie.”

  At the Mechanics’ Institute library, Richard Brautigan compiled of a list of twenty-two classic books about fishing (with publication dates ranging from 1496 to 1957), which he included in his reworking of the “Trout Death by Port Wine” chapter. Angling writers as diverse as Roderick L. Haig-Brown, Zane Grey, Ray Bergman, and Ernest G. Schwiebert Jr. are mentioned. Another early chapter had its origins in an unlikely source volume, a nineteenth-century cookbook Brautigan came across one day while browsing in the stacks. Intrigued by the antique language, Richard jotted down four odd recipes that struck his fancy. Together they compose almost the entire text of the brief chapter titled “Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup.” Incorporating “found art” into his work was a technique Brautigan utilized throughout his career. He first published these accidental discoveries in Trout Fishing in America. “We were inveterate billboard readers,” Ginny recalled. “We were Dadaist. The best art was chance.”

  In a chapter called “Trout Fishing in America with the FBI,” Richard described a wanted poster for Richard Lawrence Marquette he came across in the window of a store on lower Market Street. The suspect was “an avid trout fisherman.” Brautigan jotted down the information in his notebook. He described the “dodger” exactly as it appeared, both sides folded under. The arbitrarily truncated description of the fugitive is reminiscent of William Burroughs’s “cut-up” experiments, begun in Paris at the same time that Brautigan started on his novel. The facsimile signature of Trout Fishing in America ending this chapter is in Richard Brautigan’s hand.

  “The Mayonnaise Chapter,” last in the novel, provides the best-known example of “found art” in Trout Fishing in America. Consisting in its entirety of a single letter of condolence that Ron Loewinsohn reported “the author actually found in a secondhand bookstore and reproduced verbatim—including the misspelling in the postscript: ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise [sic],’” the chapter is essential Richard Brautigan. Although he didn’t write a word of it, Mother and Nancy’s letter to Florence and Harv reflects Brautigan’s easy offhand voice, his concern for average working-class people, his matter-of-fact treatment of death, and his often startling juxtaposition of wildly disparate images. When the nine-year-old letter, intended as a bookmark, fluttered from the pages of a dusty volume, Richard Brautigan made it his own.

  Meandering around North Beach and hanging out in Washington Square Park, Brautigan encountered an exotic variety of eccentric individuals. A confirmed “people-watcher,” he delighted in these discoveries. Among the more curious neighborhood specimens was a legless tramp who sold pencils on Columbus Avenue near Washington Square. He propelled himself along the city sidewalks on roller-skate wheels mounted beneath a crude handmade board. Everyone on the street called him Shorty. He was a foul-mouthed unpleasant man, frequently drunk and shouting obscenities at passing schoolchildren. This abusive behavior endeared him to the local bohemians.

  Ginny Brautigan and Shirley Lipsett often took their new babies to the park, “the only green spot around.” They saw Shorty there all the time, waiting for his free sandwich in front of the church. Richard “talked to him a lot,” she recalled. Ginny never spoke to Shorty. “Richard almost always found things to say to people.” Ron Loewinsohn remembered Shorty. “He was a regular character, and there were a couple of guys from New Orleans, from Pirate’s Alley, who were part of that contingent who used to hang around the Benjamin Franklin statue in the afternoon drinking muscatel.”

  Brautigan made ample use of the offbeat characters he observed in the park. The two “broken-down artists from New Orleans” became part of the chapter “A Walden Pond for Winos.” Richard also recognized the comic literary possibilities of connecting Shorty, the unpleasant derelict double-amputee, with a brawling fictional character Nelson Algren named “Railroad Shorty” in “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” a short story in his collection The Neon Wilderness. Later, Algren recycled the story into a violent episode concluding his novel A Walk on the Wild Side, this time calling the truncated strong man “Legless Schmidt.” In Brautigan’s recollection both characters were n
amed “Railroad Shorty,” and he titled a chapter for his own novel in progress “The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren.” Richard renamed the neighborhood wino and proposed packing him in a crate and sending him to Algren in Chicago, where the old bum might become a museum exhibit.

  Something essential was missing from Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan had written numerous chapters: nostalgic reminiscences of his boyhood in the Pacific Northwest, oddball recollections of bohemian life in North Beach, offbeat “found art” observations, all possessing an original style and a certain evocative energy, yet taken as a whole, they didn’t quite add up to a book. He wasn’t writing a conventional novel, but Richard still needed something to tie it all together. He needed to go on a trout fishing trip.

  More than a weekend in the Sierras, Brautigan wanted an expedition lasting through most of the summer. Richard and Ginny picked Idaho as their final destination. She’d been born there and had never seen the Snake River, a favorite spot of her father’s. Idaho also had the advantage of being closer to San Francisco than either Montana or Wyoming, two other remote Rocky Mountain angling citadels they briefly considered. Ginny had relatives living in Idaho, which provided another advantage. The couple suspected the roads might get worse the further they ventured northeast from California. They could visit her family and take occasional breaks from the rustic joys of camping.

  Almost overnight, Richard Brautigan became an amateur cartographer, studying atlases and road maps, following the enticing blue lines flowing between remote mountain ranges with faraway-sounding names: Sawtooth, Lost River, Pioneer, Bitterroot. So many great names. Richard fell in love with the names. He began a list of streams as yet unseen, picking those that sounded the most poetic: Lost Creek, Little Word River, Big Smoky Creek, Silver Creek. Brautigan’s projected journey took shape like a poem in his imagination.