Brautigan made a folded poster paper mock-up of the book he had in mind, drawing the cover in crayon. His childlike sketch showed a black horse surrounded by carrots and flowers, happy bursts of red, yellow, and green. Richard crayoned his name and the title on the cover and typed the eight poems on slips of three-by-five paper. He typed planting instructions on eight similar-sized slips and created dummy seed packets by taping them together. On the back cover, using a thin-tipped Magic Marker, Brautigan wrote, “This Book is FREE.”
Richard kept busy raising funds for his giveaway seed-packet poetry project with the actual production still months in the future. Bruce Conner’s campaign for San Francisco city supervisor existed in a similar state of flux. While supporting himself as a janitor and a salesman in a knickknack shop, Conner made time for politics, giving speeches that consisted entirely of long lists of deserts, his run for office partly an art project. A serious side to his electioneering included intense opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Edmund Shea had originally filed for the position but had to drop out of politics after he was busted. Bruce took over in his place. Edmund assisted the campaign by handling the photography for two political posters. One depicted Conner as a baby. The other showed the artist painting an elephant. Bruce Conner also enlisted Richard Brautigan and the Diggers to help. Conner and Peter Berg had been talking about peace and how to achieve that impossible goal. “We were discussing this about the end of the war,” Conner recalled, “and the thing to do to end the war was to end it and tell everybody it’s ended and to celebrate its end and put into people’s minds the concept of the war is over.”
Peter Berg “and some of the other people who liked to organize such things” focused on “interior theater” and enlisted the Straight Theater for the event. Brautigan wrote a speech for the occasion. The text no longer survives, but Conner remembered it to be, “like many of Richard’s things,” no more than twenty-five words in length. Brautigan had another publicity idea for Conner’s campaign. In 1964, the artist exhibited a group of thirteen canvases, the Touch/Do Not Touch series, at the Batman Gallery. Twelve of the uniform black-framed artworks (which Conner was careful never to touch) contained the information do not touch in “museum-sized lettering.” On the thirteenth, the same size as the others, Conner applied transfer letters spelling out touch and covered the work with a sheet of glass. Three years later, Richard Brautigan’s brainstorm was to photograph the words “Do Not Touch” and reproduce them on sheets of paper.
Bruce Conner took a picture of the center of his work. “We printed them on hundreds of little file cards.” At the Straight Theater before Conner spoke, Richard handed out the “Do Not Touch” cards like political flyers. “I’m going up to the balcony,” he told the artist, “and after your speech I’m going to disperse them to everyone. It’s a grand gesture.” True to his word, Brautigan stood at the balcony rail and, when Bruce Conner finished speaking, tossed the remaining cards into the air, and they showered down, fluttering onto the crowd like a pasteboard snowstorm. “They were all over the floor, and virtually nobody picked them up,” Conner recalled. “It was sort of a mystery to me why he had chosen to do that.” Bruce Conner did not win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but his artist’s antiwar campaign possessed a certain oddball appeal, enough to garner him over five thousand votes.
Copies of the first edition of Trout Fishing in America (two thousand copies) came back from the printer at the end of September before the official publication date of October 31. Richard inscribed one of the first books out of the box to Don Allen, writing “thank you” and adding two little fish sketches. A week later, Brautigan mailed a copy to Bob Mills, asking his agent to see if “something might be done to interest a New York publisher in the novel.” With the book priced at $1.95, at his straight 10 percent royalty, Richard stood to earn under $400 if the first printing sold out, and he was anxious to investigate more-lucrative venues.
Trout Fishing was a slim handsome volume, its dedication (“For Jack Spicer and Ron Loewinsohn”) enclosed within one of Brautigan’s whimsical grinning fish doodles. The title page, designed by Brautigan, had the words “Trout Fishing in America” arching upward in a tight parabola, “like a bent fishing pole.” Erik Weber’s photo appeared on the front cover without margins, bled to the edges like the Life magazine covers Richard greatly admired. Due to an oversight, Weber’s photo credit was omitted.
The back cover contained three “comments” on Confederate General from John Ciardi, Thomas Parkinson, and the Kansas City Star. A spark of Brautigan’s wit glittered below them. Under the heading “Incidental intelligence” he included a quote from an editor at The Viking Press that Bob Mills had forwarded to him after the publishing house rejected The Abortion: “Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing.”
A final Haight-Ashbury street ceremony early in October made manifest what had long been evident to anyone not totally stoned out of his mind. Peter Berg, always attuned to effective life theater, organized an event he called the Death of Hippie. A candlelight funeral procession began at sunrise on Buena Vista Hill. “Taps” was played and various hippie insignia tossed onto a fire. The parade, several hundred strong, marched down Haight Street carrying a black cardboard coffin draped in black crepe paper with the words “Hippie, Son of Media” painted on the side. The coffin contained flowers and beads, shorn hanks of long hair, all manner of “hippie paraphernalia.” Richard Brautigan brought Joanne Kyger to witness the historic event.
The parade stopped in front of the Psychedelic Shop, where the coffin was placed on a pyre and set ablaze while dozens of veiled mourners knelt in mock prayer. A banner across Haight Street read death of hippie freebie, i.e., birth of the free man. Peter Berg contended that by shedding the outmoded hippie media image everyone would be reborn as a “Freeman.” At the end of the ceremony, the Thelin brothers gave away all the merchandise in the Psych Shop. “Everything went,” Ron Thelin laughed after it was over. “Even the stuff on consignment.” Last to go was the store’s sign, carried off and given an anonymous burial. Thelin left a notice in the window of his abandoned store summing it all up: nebraska needs you more.
The funeral was over, but the dirge lingered on. Dramatic obsequies notwithstanding, long-haired hippie drug culture still had a lot of life left in it. Richard Brautigan was among those resurrecting the corpse. In October, he published a final poem with the Communication Company. Although Richard called the first draft of “Boo, Forever,” part of “Three Poems to Celebrate the History of Marcia.” He initially issued it as a broadside without a title as one of ten different anonymous contributions, all gathered in illustrated wrappers. Brautigan’s offering to Free City News was typewritten, surrounded by a list of eighty-seven sexual positions and enclosed within the reproduction of an ancient Egyptian drawing. Like all com/co productions, this collection was given away for free.
In the middle of October, a new upstart publication attempted to breathe fresh life into the hippie ethos of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Bankrolled with $7,500 provided mainly by his family and Ralph J. Gleason, the magazine’s consulting editor, Jann Wenner launched Rolling Stone as a monthly. It was an inauspicious beginning. Out of forty thousand copies printed of the first issue, thirty-four thousand came back unsold.
The next day after this nonevent (eventually regarded as a publishing landmark), Richard Brautigan appeared at the Unicorn Book Shop in Isla Vista (Santa Barbara) and read the first half of Trout Fishing in America. The following evening, he read the second half. The book was nearly two weeks shy of its official publication date. Richard read the whole thing in public, selling quite a few copies while he was at it. A handsome silkscreen poster was produced for the occasion by Chuck Miller, Jack Shoemaker’s oldest friend.
By the time of its official Halloween publication date, Trout Fishing in America was already off and ru
nning. Two favorable reviews of the book had appeared in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, one written by Herb Gold, the other by Don Carpenter, who penned his without reading the book. “He begged me to,” Carpenter recalled. “He gave me a copy of the manuscript. I was a smart asshole. If you read [the review] carefully you’ll notice that I haven’t read the book.”
City Lights handled distribution for the Four Seasons Foundation publications, and the slim volume sold well in Ferlinghetti’s bookstore. Brautigan wrote an ad, worrying the copy through five drafts in his notebook: “Have you gone Trout Fishing in America yet? Fish strange and beautiful waters with Richard Brautigan as your guide. $1.95 City Lights Books, 1562 Grant Avenue, San Francisco.” Don Carpenter claimed the first printing sold out in a week, thanks largely to his rave review.
Brautigan mailed both book reviews to his agent before heading down to his back-to-back readings at the Unicorn in Santa Barbara. Bob Mills promptly sent them on to Rose Marie Grgich, the editor at McGraw-Hill who was considering The Abortion. They came in too late. She rejected Richard’s novel, saying, “I’m afraid that his book is much too thin and unimportant to be a hard cover book.” Her letter marked the twelfth rejection from a major publishing house for The Abortion. Mills wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. He wrote to Brautigan asking him if he had “any ideas about what might be tried next.”
Richard did indeed have a few ideas of his own. While praising Mills for his “zeal,” he asked his agent not to submit The Abortion anywhere else “for at least a month.” Brautigan mentioned “some interesting developments toward my work that might make your job a little easier” and promised to keep Mills informed as they occurred. Through Luther Nichols, Richard had resubmitted Trout Fishing (which Nichols called his “magical book”) to Doubleday.
It was being offered as a paperback similar to the Four Seasons Foundation edition. Brautigan insisted that the same cover photo be used should the book be accepted. At the same time, Richard sent In Watermelon Sugar to Macdonald & Co. in London and to Peter Collier at Ramparts. Collier rejected Watermelon because he thought it too long and didn’t want to cut. He offered instead to “take a look at the short stories you said you were getting together.”
The vigorous local sales of Trout Fishing greatly increased Richard’s visibility on the Frisco literary scene. The December issue of Ramparts (vol. 6, no. 5) released in mid-November with a picture of four handheld burning draft cards on the cover, contained Brautigan’s wonderful short story “⅓, ⅓, ⅓” (for which he was paid $300) together with Baron Wolman’s clever tripartite photo of the author. The same issue contained a “glowing” review of Trout Fishing in America by the Formentor Prize–winning novelist Stephen Schneck, who concluded with the observation that something good “was cooking on the American hot plate. Thank you Mr. Brautigan, for a change it isn’t naked lunch.”
Blair Fuller, a San Francisco–based editor at the Paris Review, wrote to Richard in November, saying how much he’d enjoyed Trout Fishing. Fuller asked if Brautigan had something to submit to the magazine. This was sweet news indeed, considering the offhand manner in which the magazine had dismissed Richard’s work the year before. Another indication of Brautigan’s growing local fame appeared in the second issue of Rolling Stone (11/23/67). A small ad for the Minimum Daily Requirement included an endorsement by Richard: “A nice place to eat where it’s green and beautiful and open until three in the morning.” Kendrick Rand had been out on a date the night after the monthly periodical hit the stands, and when he “swung by” his coffeehouse to take a look in the window he couldn’t believe his eyes. “The place was mobbed. I had to excuse myself and go in and work. From that point on, from the [time] before we opened until we closed at night, it was full.”
The good news Brautigan hinted at to his agent came to pass early in December. Encouraged by the vigorous sales figures for Trout Fishing in America, Donald Allen ordered a second printing of the book. This gave Richard a chance to amend the unintentional omissions of the first edition. Erik Weber got his cover photo credit, and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was added to the list of Richard’s books on the catalog page. The best news of all was Allen’s decision to have the Four Seasons Foundation publish In Watermelon Sugar the following spring, along with a volume of Richard’s selected poetry.
The second printing of Trout Fishing was scheduled for three thousand copies. Eventually, there would be five printings. The Four Seasons Foundation sold between thirty thousand and thirty-five thousand copies of the book. That was only the beginning. Richard Brautigan stood on the threshold of the enormous fame he had dreamed of since high school. In all its various editions, his first novel, many chapters written in the summer of 1961 along the trout streams of Idaho, sold over two million copies. This was the big one that didn’t get away.
The future appeared bright and shining, and all of his ambitions were about to bear golden fruit, yet Brautigan’s inbred pessimism continued to hold him in its unhappy grip. Two weeks shy of his thirty-third birthday in January 1968, Richard typed out a poem he called “The Privacy of My Dreams Is Like Death.” It began, “I’m so fucking tired of negative / excitement that always leads to boredom / and poor magic.” The poet went on to plead for “some nice thing / to happen to my life [. . .]” Commenting on his upcoming birthday, he concluded with “and everything looks like shit / from down here.”
It’s hard to reconcile these despairing lines with the good fortune smiling on Richard Brautigan when he wrote them. Such behavior might be termed bipolar or manic-depressive. Whatever the label, the inability to forget the bleakness of his early childhood remained a curse from which Richard could never escape. It was a dark shadow shrouding all the rest of his life. Even on the threshold of great success, the seeds of Brautigan’s eventual suicide had already been sown. Neither wealth nor fame would ever be enough to prevent the final bloom of that dark poisonous flower already germinating deep within his psyche.
part two:
bushido gunslinger
thirty-two: hitching a ride
IN 1967, I was awarded a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University and returned to the United States after two years of expatriate life in Europe and the Caribbean. Even in those carefree, long-gone, strong-dollar days, the grant money wasn’t sufficient for a family of three to afford Palo Alto rents.
The countercultural revolution was global in aspect: Diggers in San Francisco, Provos in Amsterdam. We were curious to investigate the possibilities of life in the Haight. Living among derelict junkies and spare-change artists was not what we had in mind. Al Young, a fellow writer and former Stegner Fellow, tipped us off to Bolinas. One sunny September afternoon, Tom McGuane and I drove up the coast in his rattletrap Land Rover to investigate. By the end of the day, we’d each rented a place in the little seaside town.
I found a furnished house on Brighton Avenue for $75 a month. It was a long commute out of Marin County, across the Golden Gate, and down the peninsula to Stanford, but the Advanced Fiction Writing class the Stegner Fellows were requested to attend met only each Wednesday evening, so the weekly round-trip wasn’t much of an ordeal.
In the spring of 1968, Charlotte Painter, a novelist who taught fiction writing part-time at Stanford, arranged for Richard Brautigan to give a reading at the university. Aqua-colored posters went up around the campus, featuring a caricature of Brautigan (“the greatest American comic novelist in three decades”) holding a large grinning fish on his lap. He was scheduled to read to the undergraduates in the afternoon (Thursday, May 9, 1968) and again that same evening at the Advanced Fiction Writing class, which changed the date of its regularly scheduled meeting for the occasion. Having enjoyed Trout Fishing in America, I determined to attend both events and set out early from Bolinas in “Bitter Lemon,” my battered VW microbus.
I barely made it, arriving at the Tresidder Student Union just as the afternoon reading was about to start. The mai
n lounge was packed. A couple hundred students slouched on couches and armchairs, many crowding cross-legged around the podium at the far end of the room. A number of faculty members, identifiable by neckties and ill-fitting tweed jackets, stood in the back. I edged among them, no other space being available. After an introduction, Brautigan appeared to a smattering of applause. He looked like the photo on the cover of Trout Fishing, tall, stooped, wearing jeans, his trademark misshapen felt hat, and wire-rimmed glasses. A shy smile announced he was pleased to be there.
Richard Brautigan told the attentive audience about his recent publishing project, Please Plant This Book, the entire edition given away on the streets of San Francisco. One of the anonymous recipients had been a Sausalito grade school teacher who brought the book to class and had her students plant the seeds it contained. When they sprouted, she asked all the kids to write poems about their gardening experience and mailed the results to Brautigan.
With a giggle, gleeful, Richard proceeded to read the work of these fifth graders, one after another. He declaimed their untutored, innocent verse about flowers and springtime and the miracle of growth in mock solemnity. It was an inspired piece of performance art: zany, unexpected, purely in the spirit of the times. The Stanford undergraduates seemed completely into it, laughing and attentive, treated to a welcome bit of guerrilla theater instead of the usual stuffy academic presentation. Back among the restive faculty, I detected angry murmurings and disdainful grumbles. Who did this bozo think he was? Did he really mean to come to venerable Stanford University and read children’s poetry?
Indeed he did, and to the apparent delight of the majority of his audience. Several disgusted assistant professors left early. Others stuck around to see if these kiddie poems might just be a warm-up. Perhaps Brautigan would read from his own work soon. Carried away by the students’ laughter after each brief fifth-grade poem, Richard howled with mirth, slapping his knee in sheer delight. Altogether, he read perhaps two hundred words. The whole thing, including his introduction and the applause, lasted barely twenty-five minutes.
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