Brautigan told von Auw he wrote novels “as a kind of thing to do, never to be of any commercial value, but as a part of learning. I wanted to learn about myself: others: earth and the universe [. . .] I am of course very pleased that the books are of some value, whatever value is, to others. If I am going to have a literary agent, I need someone who will have sympathy with my work. This is an important thing to me at this delicate period in my life.” Richard ended by repeating his request that the agent tell him something about himself and his company, “then let’s see what we can do.”
The last time he saw Richard Brautigan in the sixties, Pierre Delattre paid a visit to the apartment on Francisco Street with the colorful aviary in the kitchen. The front room had been set up like a Buddhist temple with a large statue of the Gautama. “A shrine-thing,” according to Erik Weber, who doubted Brautigan ever spent much time there. When Delattre came to visit, the writer guided the priest right on by. Passing the middle room, where Richard had a table with a typewriter and a little lamp set up, Pierre spotted a fresh manuscript copy of A Confederate General from Big Sur. “What’s in there?” he asked.
“Shhhh! Quiet,” Richard whispered, pushing Delattre on ahead toward the bird-chatter filling the kitchen. “My new novel’s in there. I kind of stroll in occasionally, write a few quick paragraphs, and get out before the novel knows what I’m doing. If novels ever find out you’re writing them, you’re done for.”
twenty: o, tannenbob
FOR RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, the first week of January 1964 “was a strange time in America.” The assassination of President Kennedy cast a dark shadow across the holiday season, seeping sorrow into the hearts of the nation like a poisonous stain. Christmas had never been a jolly time when Richard was a kid. His marriage broke up on Christmas Eve the year before, and he had just spent his most recent Yuletide alone in an apartment full of birds, an occasion he described as “lonesome.”
Sometime before Epiphany, walking home to Francisco Street around midnight after a visit drinking coffee with friends up on Nob Hill, Brautigan noticed numbers of newly discarded Christmas trees scattered about everywhere. Stripped of their bright ornaments and twinkling lights, they lay abandoned at the curb and in vacant lots, each one “like a dead soldier after a losing battle.” Looking at them made Richard feel sad. “They had provided what they could for that assassinated Christmas, and now they were being tossed out to lie there in the street like bums.”
Back at apartment C, Brautigan placed a call to Erik Weber, waking him from a deep sleep. “All he said to me was ‘Christmas trees,’” Erik recalled. “Only Richard would call you at two or three in the morning and say something like ‘Christmas trees.’” Brautigan remembered phoning around one, but always had a cavalier attitude about late-night conversations. When Erik wanted to know why Richard seemed so interested in Christmas trees, he replied, “Christmas is only skin-deep.” Brautigan wanted Erik to take hundreds of pictures of the naked trees discarded everywhere throughout the city. He felt it would “show the despair and abandonment of Christmas.”
At the time, Erik Weber had a job at Macy’s in the photo-advertising department. He snapped pictures and worked in the darkroom. During his lunch hour the next day, he “just took off and started photographing Christmas trees,” wandering up from Union Square, through Chinatown and onto the slope of Nob Hill, aiming his camera at the forlorn trees. Richard had instructed him to shoot them “just like dead soldiers. Don’t touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way they fell.” Erik did as instructed. Brautigan had no interest in documenting the exact location of each tree. As Weber recalled, “It was just a matter of an accumulation of many, many, many, many discarded Christmas trees.”
A sense of secrecy surrounded the entire enterprise. Brautigan often invested his projects with near-paranoid undercover tactics. “We thought we really had something good going,” he wrote, “and needed the right amount of discretion before it was completed.” Erik spent another lunch hour shooting film and by the weekend had almost 150 pictures of Christmas trees. To speed things up and cover more territory, Richard lined up a friend “who had a truck and used to help him do stuff” to drive them around on Saturday. The friend’s only condition was remaining anonymous. He was afraid of losing his job if word got out about his being involved in this weird enterprise.
The three of them drove all over the city, with Erik photographing abandoned Christmas trees in every neighborhood. Up on Potrero Hill after a Chinese lunch, they ran into Lawrence Ferlinghetti, setting out to walk his dog from his small Victorian house at 706 Wisconsin Street. They had just shot a picture of a fallen tree near his place. Erik couldn’t remember what Ferlinghetti said to them but thought Richard ad-libbed a reply along the lines of, “Oh, we’re just out for a walk.” Writing about the incident later, Brautigan reported that he mumbled, “Sort of,” as an evasive responsive to Ferlinghetti’s query: “Taking pictures of Christmas trees?” According to Erik, Richard said, “We don’t want anyone else getting the idea.”
The original notion was to produce a small illustrated book. Richard planned a story about a family going to a Christmas tree lot, the poignant moment of choosing the fullest and best-shaped tree to be counterpointed by Erik’s photos of all the discards after the holidays were over. Brautigan never wrote that story. Things didn’t work out that way. In the end, Brautigan wrote it all down pretty much exactly as it happened. He called the piece “What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?”
The story languished unpublished for the next four years, in part because Brautigan made no effort to place it with a magazine. It finally appeared in December of 1968, in Evergreen Review no. 61. A full-page collage of Erik Weber’s Christmas tree photographs accompanied Richard’s text, nine pictures overlapping as if casually dropped on a tabletop, disposable as the discarded trees they captured. Twelve years after its initial appearance, Brautigan included the story as a chapter in The Tokyo–Montana Express.
Richard made one small change in the story for book publication. In the original version, everyone was correctly identified by name (with the exception of the anonymous truck driver). Richard appeared as Richard; Lawrence Ferlinghetti as himself; Erik was called Erik. It was Brautigan’s version of photo-realism. By the time The Tokyo–Montana Express was published in 1980, Richard and Erik had fallen out of friendship and were no longer speaking. Keith Abbott called the photographer to tell him about the change in the story. Erik went over to Abbott’s place to see for himself. Reading the change “kind of pissed” him off, especially after all the work he had done for Richard over the years. In his book, Richard Brautigan changed Erik’s name to “Bob.”
twenty-one: moosemelon
PHILIP WHALEN LIVED at 123 Beaver Street, a lovely Victorian house built in 1879. Tommy Sales, the landlady, was the ex-wife of critic Grover Sales. She occupied the upstairs and rented out the rooms below. “The rent was very reasonable,” Whalen recalled. “The house belonged to a friend of mine, and he very generously gave me this room to live in because I didn’t have any money.” In an unpublished short story, Richard Brautigan wrote that Philip Whalen “was living his life for poetry and the rest of it could all go to hell.”
Set well back off a steep street, number 123 had the look and feel of a country place, fronted by fruit trees and a flower garden. David Kherdian, who wrote Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, had a room on the first floor for a while, and Whalen’s friend John Armstrong, who became a boatbuilder and moved to Bolinas, was also a resident. “There was a little room off the kitchen where I was,” Whalen remembered, “and then there was a larger room past the bathroom and then the big front room.” The rooms were arranged in a shotgun row along a long corridor with the kitchen at the rear. Don Carpenter, a frequent visitor, called the place “a poetry household.”
At the beginning of 1964, Richard Brautigan lived far from Beaver Street over on the edge of North Beach in his sublet apartme
nt mad with birdsong. After telling Don Allen he was considering Grove’s offer for his two novels, Richard wrote to Ivan von Auw on January 6: “You probably have a very good agency, but it does not seem geared to my specific needs as a writer.” He asked that Harold Ober Associates return his manuscripts by Railway Express, “collect.”
Not having an agent placed Brautigan in a quandary. Donald Allen, his chief adviser, was also the West Coast editor for Grove Press, and a certain conflict of interest remained inherent in their relationship. Richard researched sample publishing contracts, coming to favor one drawn up by the Society of Authors’ Representatives, and proposed a single change to Don Allen. Should the author place the book with a movie company, the publisher’s 10 percent share of the film rights would instead provide half the advertising budget. The proposal seemed “rather weird” to Allen, but he passed it on to Dick Seaver along with a list of the terms Brautigan expected and conveyed a deal-sweetening tidbit back to Richard. The publishers wanted to submit A Confederate General from Big Sur for the Prix Formentor, an international award for unpublished fiction.
The Formentor Novel Prize was established in 1960 in Formentor on the Spanish island of Majorca by publishers (including Grove) from six nations. First awarded in 1961, the prize came with a check for $10,000 (an advance against future royalties) and simultaneous publication in all the participating countries. Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett shared the honors and the honorarium that first year.
Richard Seaver had no objection to the Society of Authors’ Representatives contract. Grove already used it, happy with the boilerplate terms. Seaver offered an advance of $1,000 for each of Brautigan’s novels, payable $500 on signing, with the balance coming in quarterly installments. “We would plan to publish A Confederate General in the fall of 1964 and Trout Fishing approximately a year later.” Seaver dismissed Brautigan’s suggested contractual amendment as “unnecessarily complicated.” He stressed the urgency of the matter, putting a subtle squeeze on Richard. Contracts had to be drawn up before Grove could submit the manuscript for Formentor consideration. The prize deadline was at the end of January. Richard Brautigan promptly signed with Grove. He desperately needed the money, and the chance of winning an international literary award proved irresistible.
Richard Brautigan often visited Bill Brown, who had married, had a baby named Maggie, and moved across the Bay to Point Richmond. Brautigan started going over on weekends with Ianthe, renewing what Brown said had become “a kind of aloof, pretty detached relationship.” They sat on a pier looking west toward the city, lubricating their literary discourse with quarts of ale. Brown had recently completed a short novel, about his life in a German POW camp, called The Way to the Uncle Sam Hotel. Richard read the manuscript and found the book “a damn good piece of work.” He wrote to Leroi Jones in New York, enquiring if Corinth Press might be interested in it.
Bill Brown had a landscape gardening business and occasionally hired Richard on a part-time basis. A woman from Utah owned a place in Belvedere fronting the lagoon. “I’d been going there for years and years,” Brown recalled. One time, he brought Richard. “I said, ‘Okay, kiddo. You cut the lawn. I’ve got to go to the nursery. I’ll come back with some posies.’” Bill Brown left Brautigan pushing a mower and a little while later “came humming back with some flats of posies in my hands.” He rang the bell, and the Utah woman opened the door. “Who’s your helper?” she asked. “You better go wake him up. He’s asleep on the lawn with one shoe in the lagoon.”
Joanne Kyger returned from Japan in February 1964. Her husband, Gary Snyder, followed a month later, his marriage to Joanne more or less at an end. “The move back to the United States kind of precipitated that,” Kyger recalled, “there seemed to be all this wonderful freedom.” A few days after she got back, Joanne Kyger sent a note to Richard Brautigan through Donald Allen, telling him how much she had enjoyed reading the excerpts from Trout Fishing in America that had appeared in the Evergreen Review. “And I thought, ‘Oh, Richard has really jumped a lot from Galilee Hitch-Hiker, and I was delighted by it. And reading it in Japan was fantastic, this incredible, deranged, wonderful little book.”
Richard promptly sought her out. Kyger sublet a small apartment in North Beach right behind where her friend Nemi Frost lived. “Richard came by a lot. He was totally hilarious during this period,” Joanne Kyger remembered. One evening, loving samurai movies, he acted them all out. “All the way through several of them. Toshiro Mifune. And he was just great. I remember he was lunging around in back of Nemi Frost’s storage room. He had a lovely free-floating kind of fantasy that you could get inside of.”
Early in February, the Beatles began their first American tour, headlining twice on the Ed Sullivan Show. Neither Richard nor Joanne knew very much about the Fab Four at the time. Beatlemania had yet to penetrate Japan, so Kyger had a valid excuse for being oblivious. “It seemed like at that point the Beatles had just stepped from one place to a whole other theater of the world,” she said. Richard and Joanne began collecting Beatles cards in order to learn their names and tell them apart. Which one was John? Who was George? “It was an obsession with us because we’d go back over and over the names.”
Sitting at a table at Vesuvio on Columbus with Jack Spicer, the three poets wrote a collaborative letter to Ringo Starr, inviting the Beatles to come to San Francisco. Spicer detested popular music, but somehow Joanne and Richard persuaded him to put aside his hostility and behave like any other adoring fan. (A year later, Spicer began a poem with the line “The Beatles, devoid of form and color, but full of images [. . .]”) Kyger doesn’t know if they ever mailed the letter, certainly no reply came, but for her the entire event “was part of the fascination of being part of this subculture.” She likewise believed Brautigan’s interest stemmed from a firm conviction that he was also soon destined for worldwide recognition and fame.
Joanne Kyger remembered 1964 as “a very social occasion” involving Richard and Donald Allen. Don had a beautiful apartment at 1815 Jones Street up on Russian Hill and loved to entertain, serving up “endless martinis.” His place was a natural gathering place for visiting artists and writers, while his “old-fashioned manners” made even the surliest rebel feel right at home. Often, after an afternoon cocktail-hour visit, Allen took Brautigan and Kyger out for dinner, an offer the impoverished poets never refused. Joanne sensed at the time that “Richard had already gotten some kind of real confidence in himself. He was playful.”
Separated from her husband and not yet involved with anyone new, Joanne Kyger delighted in Brautigan’s company. “We used to get into these trips together,” she recalled. “It would be some kind of fantasy game where you would actually start acting out. You walk along and your characters would evolve and you’d report back the next day to see how the character was doing.” These games involved Richard’s lively imagination, yet Kyger intuited an alternative motive. “I remember his spinning out some hypothetical endings to something, one of which seemed kind of like a proposal.” She adroitly avoided unwanted complications by “looking at it and taking it on its fictional level,” and bypassed uncomfortable difficulties. “I never felt romantically interested in Richard, although he was always a wonderful friend.”
In March, sitting in front of his typewriter in the middle room of the apartment on Francisco Street, Brautigan started a brief short story (really more of a prose poem) expressing his disjointed mood. “Drunk laid and drunk unlaid and drunk laid again, it makes no difference,” he began, singing aloud with the birds in the kitchen. The brief bit of fiction he composed explored the total lack of attachment in his life without a hint of self-pity. Brautigan called the piece “Banners of My Own Choosing.”
Michael McClure can’t remember when he first met Richard Brautigan. They knew of one another in the claustrophobic Frisco literary scene but didn’t become close friends until late 1963 or early in 1964. Michael’s former wife, Joanna, has no memory of Richard when the McClures lived o
n Scott Street in the late fifties, although she thought he might have come around, as Price Dunn was a resident in their basement. She also doesn’t remember knowing Richard during the period when they held court at 2324 Fillmore Street, another art center between 1957 and 1959. “Michael might have seen him,” Joanna recollected, “but he was not part of the artists that hung out and showed at the Batman Gallery and did things.”
It wasn’t until sometime around the end of 1961, when the McClures returned from New York and moved to a house at 264 Downey Street, a two-block-long stretch in the Haight, where they were to stay for the next twenty years, that Joanna began to fit Brautigan into the picture. “I don’t think it was right away in 1961 that he was coming to visit.” Two years later, Richard became a regular. “He’d come over and sit in front of the fire, and he and Michael would talk books and drink together. I never had feelings of dislike or warmth or liking particularly toward Richard. He was just one of the people that came around, and he was sort of like family.”
In Lighting the Corners, Michael McClure stated, “For a long period I was probably Richard’s closest friend and he was probably mine.” Brautigan dropped by Downey Street several nights a week, and they sat on the floor because the McClures were still too poor to buy furniture. They drank Gallo white port, thirty-seven cents a pint at Benedetti’s Liquors on Haight Street. “I liked Richard because of his angelic schitzy wit and warmth,” McClure wrote in 1985.
Brautigan felt at home with the McClures. “He loved that household,” Bobbie Louise Hawkins observed. “Johanna [sic] took care of everybody that came in, and Michael was this thoroughly beautiful person with a great sense of style. It always makes you feel good to be around Michael because he has such panache.” Brautigan distilled his affection for the McClures’ home life into a single poem, “Abalone Curry,” where he described their traditional Christmas dinner when Michael prepared his famous abalone curry “in his kitchen that is halfway / between India and Atlantis.”
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