Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  In spite of consistently strong sales figures for the four Brautigan titles they had published, Simon & Schuster treated their contractual obligations to the author with cavalier indifference. In April, S&S failed to run a full-page ad in the book/movie section of the New York Times upon the publication of Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork as stipulated in clause 27 of Brautigan’s contract. A half-page ad advertising Sombrero Fallout appeared in the June 28 issue of Publishers Weekly, sandwiched between full-page ads for new novels by Rona Jaffe and Lois Gould and sharing its space with a book called The International Book of Wood. Simon & Schuster had always announced Brautigan novels with full-page ads in PW. This time, the publisher failed to show Richard the ad copy first, another contractual breach.

  Helen Brann knew Richard, away in Japan, would react with “complete dismay” upon seeing the ad. She wrote Jonathan Dolger to complain, “If someone at Simon & Schuster had intentionally set out to wound and upset a major American author, he or she could not have done a better job.” On the phone with Brann that same morning, Dolger (whom Brann believed had “done a thoughtful and excellent job for Richard over the past few years”) told her, “we feel Brautigan is so well-known that he doesn’t need a full-page ad.” This attitude elicited a “wave of shock” in Richard’s agent.

  The shockwave’s reverberations resonated deep within Helen Brann’s negotiating strategy for Dreaming of Babylon. In November, she flew out to San Francisco to meet with Brautigan and several other clients who lived in the Bay Area. Helen found Richard in an “up” mood but thought “he was drinking too much.” Brann “had this gang of writers sitting around” in her suite at the Stanford Court Hotel, among them Keith Abbott, whom she signed up a month earlier on Brautigan’s recommendation. Keith thought Richard seemed much the same as he had in Montana in the summer, “drunk, morose and harried [. . .] that night he looked like a corpse.” Helen and a friend “had to sort of bundle [Richard] up and get him home somehow. Get him into a cab.” Richard managed to give his agent a manuscript copy of Dreaming of Babylon, which Brann promptly read. She “loved” the novel and brought it back with her to New York.

  Knowing Seymour Lawrence had been patiently waiting in the wings for the return of an author he referred to as “the prodigal son” in Dell Publishing internal memos, Helen Brann submitted a bid to Simon & Schuster more than doubling Brautigan’s previous advances. S&S countered with an offer of $100,000, twice what they’d paid before. Helen immediately rejected it. When Simon & Schuster held firm, she wasted no time getting back in touch with Sam Lawrence.

  Brann sent Lawrence manuscript copies of Brautigan’s new novel along with June 30th, June 30th, a book of poems written in Japan earlier that year. She offered Sam the hardcover, quality paperback, and mass-market paperback rights for the United States and Canada, asking for an advance of $200,000 for Babylon and an additional $50,000 for the poetry. She wanted a straight 15 percent royalty on both trade editions with an increase to 17 percent after twenty-five thousand copies were sold.

  This generated a flurry of interoffice memoranda at Dell, examining Richard’s prior sales figures and the details of the S&S offer. Lawrence expressed his enthusiasm without any equivocation. “This is an opportunity to restore a genuine and original talent to our list,” he wrote to the top Dell executives on New Year’s Day 1977. “It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for.”

  Two weeks later, Helen and Sam hammered out a deal. Lawrence would pay Brautigan an advance of $125,000 for Dreaming of Babylon and an additional $25,000 in advance for June 30th, June 30th. These amounts were for the hardback and quality paperback editions only. The mass-market paperback rights were reserved for the author, along with “all the usual subsidiary rights,” dramatic, first serial, subsidiary, and translation. Unlike Brautigan’s previous Simon & Schuster deals, the royalty for the trade edition started at 12 percent, rising to 15 percent only after sales totaled fifteen thousand copies. Helen gave Sam an option on “Richard’s next full-length work,” insisting on Brautigan’s right to final design approval of all dust jacket and advertising art and copy.

  Simon & Schuster had a contractual right to top any offer from another publishing house by 10 percent. If they exercised this clause, Brautigan would remain an S&S author. They had previously offered an advance of a hundred grand, but Simon & Schuster bean counters refused to cough up an additional thirty-seven-five, and the deal with Dell went through. In mid-February 1977, Helen Brann delivered signed contracts for Dreaming of Babylon and June 30th, June 30th to Sam Lawrence. After an absence of seven years, the prodigal had returned.

  Richard contacted Erik Weber and arranged for a dust jacket photographic session at his Bolinas house. Brautigan bought a new hat for the occasion, a wide-brimmed tan fedora with a two-inch silk band to evoke the sort of headgear a hard-boiled shamus might wear. Weber shot three rolls of film, mostly of Richard wearing the hat, either talking on the phone or staring sternly at the camera. There were shots of Brautigan writing in his notebook and the fedora alone, perched on a chair and sitting on a dresser. Another dozen showed the hat sitting on Richard’s bed in obvious defiance of the old superstition.

  Much later, a friend looked at Erik Weber’s contact sheets and said, “Do you know it’s bad luck to have your hat on the bed?” Erik immediately thought, “Richard must have known that. He knew stuff like that.” Eight years later, Brautigan died standing in front of this same bed in Bolinas. He never wore the fedora again after the afternoon photo session with Weber.

  In the end, Richard decided to have no photograph on the Babylon dust jacket. He approved one of Erik’s pictures (a straightforward portrait of Brautigan wearing the unfortunate hat) for use in the advertising campaign. Richard felt one of the reasons the eastern critics had been so unkind to him had a lot to do with the “overuse” of his image on earlier book covers. Sam Lawrence objected to not having an author photo on the novel (“I for one am always curious to see what an author looks like”) but relented in the end. “If Richard is adamant and wants no photograph at all, so be it.”

  Brautigan wrote his own flap copy in the past, but this time around he enlisted the help of Don Carpenter in early February 1977, asking him to take on the task. Don agreed and composed every word of the wry dust jacket notes. Sam Lawrence, thinking they were by Richard, pronounced them “beautiful.”

  It was Carpenter’s contention that Brautigan wrote all of his “genre” novels as “attempts at movies. Richard, without ever admitting it to anybody, wanted very badly to make movies, very, very badly. He was extremely interested in the movie business, and he was all over me about movies and about getting movies made.” Carpenter was Brautigan’s conduit to the film industry, a friend who had actually written and produced a movie. “He loved, and I loved, to talk movie lingo,” Don said, “because as a linguistic phenomena I love it, and he loves linguistic phenomena, and so we would talk movie language.”

  Back in late January, before enlisting Carpenter’s copy writing assistance, even as the final details of the Dell contract were still being negotiated, Richard and Helen Brann had a long phone conversation about the Babylon dust jacket art. They decided Wendell Minor, who had designed the covers for both Hawkline and Willard, was the perfect man for the job. In talking it over, they also agreed they preferred the Hawkline art. Brann wrote to Sam Lawrence, who passed on their suggestion to the art director at Delacorte Press.

  Soon after, Brautigan left on another trip to Japan. By mid-February, Wendell Minor finished a preliminary pencil sketch for the front cover of Babylon. Because Richard had been hard to locate in Tokyo, Sam Lawrence sent a copy of the drawing to Helen Brann to forward to him. Brautigan never saw a copy of Minor’s work.

  Early in March, Richard phoned Helen Brann from Tokyo with his own brainstorm for the Babylon cover art. Brautigan proposed either a drawing or a photograph in the style of Diane Arbus, showing an old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind with a drum-shaped cooling fan perched o
n top, situated against a seedy, murky background. The fridge door hung partway open with a woman’s naked foot dangling out from inside. Helen liked the idea and passed it along to Sam Lawrence.

  Brautigan’s suggestion was not used. An artist named Craig Nelson provided a circular painting portraying a disheveled private eye with a pencil-thin mustache, staring down at the sheet-covered corpse of a lovely blond, like an illustration from a pulp crime magazine. Richard formally approved the design and dedicated Babylon to his agent: “This one is for Helen Brann with love from Richard.”

  Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 was published on September 27, 1977, in a first hardcover edition of thirty thousand copies. Seymour Lawrence had suggested a first printing of twenty-five thousand, but Helen Brann strenuously objected, pointing out that Simon & Schuster had never printed fewer than forty thousand copies of any of their hardcover Brautigan editions and had gone back for second printings every time. According to Richard’s wishes, no photograph appeared on the dust jacket.

  The back cover featured five quotes from magazine articles praising Brautigan (none dealt specifically with Babylon). It was an odd mix, from Newsweek and the National Geographic to the London Times Literary Supplement and a translation from Le Monde in Paris. The final quote, from the National Observer, had to be cut down to only two brief lines because Richard objected to being called “a kind of cracker barrel surrealist” and actively hated having his work referred to as “the kind of thing Mark Twain might have written had he wandered into a field of ripe cannabis with a pack of Zig-Zag papers in his pocket.”

  Delacorte Press launched Babylon in the beginning of October, with a full-page ad in the New York Times Book Review, as stipulated in Brautigan’s contract. Richard wrote the copy and provided a wry heading: “America’s favorite avant-garde novelist is now 35 years behind the times.” He sent Seymour Lawrence a gift-wrapped bottle of the publisher’s “favorite drinking material,” Black Label Jack Daniel’s, to celebrate the book’s publication. “Big Jack,” Sam called it, quoting Frank Sinatra, “to distinguish it from Little Jack, the Green label.” At Brautigan’s urging, Lawrence sent a copy of the novel to Norman Mailer.

  Dreaming of Babylon was not a critical success. Joe Flaherty, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said “Brautigan delivers a litany of screwups and lame jokes. It’s the ice age seen through Fred Flintstone.” Rob Swigart, in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, called the novel “a cotton candy souffle, pretty to look at but not very wholesome.” The Chicago Sun-Times panned the book as “a sleek but sophomoric parody.” Even Brautigan’s hometown paper, the San Francisco Examiner, sneered that his genre writing “is like doing the crossword: it might be kind of fun, but it isn’t writing.”

  Worse was yet to come. The New Yorker in its “Briefly Noted” section went for the jugular: “Richard Brautigan has mastered all the forms of children’s fiction [. . .] and children’s fiction for adults is what this pretty skimpy book is all about.” When the novel appeared in England the reviewers were even more unkind. Thomas M. Disch howled at the head of the pack, in the Times Literary Supplement, “Mini-chapter by mini-chapter the mindless tale advances with resolute pointlessness and a total mastery of anticlimax [. . .] The book is a vacuous daydream.” In the Spectator, Mary Hope joined in, “There is not much point in parodying a style unless there is a valid alternative statement to be made; this is just a thin idea, made thinner by the disparity between the master’s theme and the pupil’s variations.”

  Michael McClure found Dreaming of Babylon to be “awful, pathetic.” After reading a third of the book, he felt “stuck [. . .] there’s barely any coherence of a story.” McClure found it hard to concentrate on the novel. “This little universe was hardly worth creating,” he wrote, “and barely has enough energy in it to sustain the fact of the ink on the page.”

  Seymour Krim, an early supporter of Brautigan’s work, felt just the opposite. “Reading him is effortless,” he wrote. “His books seem to write themselves without the usual sweat and pain we associate with serious writing [. . .] it is brother writers who are always taught a lesson when they pick up the latest Brautigan.” Krim gave Babylon a favorable review, perhaps the only serious writer and critic to do so. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Book World, Krim stated that Richard “sees things for what they are with a cool but merciful eye [. . .] People who have regarded Brautigan as a novelty who would sooner or later deflate never reckoned with the iron in his charm. A successful vision is not manufactured overnight. Years of an earlier alienation [. . .] produce muscle in the imagination even when it is most lightly handled without an ounce of literary self-consciousness.”

  Sales figures were disappointing. Dreaming of Babylon sold only eighteen thousand copies, hardbound, leaving twelve thousand of the first edition to languish on remainder tables. (In contrast, Hawkline eventually totaled forty-nine thousand hardcover sales and even the perverse Willard reached thirty-nine thousand.) Babylon was reissued as a Delta trade paperback in September 1978 and was published in the United Kingdom the same year by Jonathan Cape Ltd., with translations in Japan, Germany, France, and Spain.

  Dreaming of Babylon became the last of Richard Brautigan’s “genre” novels. Although he fell short of his five-year-plan goal, writing a book in a different style for each of four straight years was a proud achievement. Brautigan never mentioned why he decided not to go for book number 5. Spending more time in Japan became a priority. Richard had found an intriguing new world to engage his imagination.

  forty-two: stockholm

  ONE BRIGHT SUMMER morning in the early seventies, the sort of cloudless azure day that gave A. B. Guthrie the title for his best-known novel and Montana a catchy logo for her license plates, Richard and I bounced along graveled Pine Creek Road, heading for town in my green 1949 three-quarter-ton Chevrolet pickup. As we rattled over the thick wooden planks of the old iron bridge spanning the Yellowstone, Richard appraised me with his penetrating owlish stare. “You know, Gatz,” he said, his voice assuming a solemn tone. “I’ve been thinking recently that I’ve got a good shot at the Nobel Prize.”

  I didn’t know quite how to react. Was he kidding me? Richard was a wry practical joker, and I instinctively sensed him luring me into some elaborate comic hoax.

  “How do you figure that?” I replied. Not wanting to play the dupe, I endeavored to keep my voice neutral.

  Richard spoke slowly, his manner at once scholarly and judicious. He explained that his work was the bane of the “eastern critical mafia,” his commercial popularity ensuring perpetual bad reviews from the literary establishment. In Europe, the opposite was true. There, he was taken seriously as an artist, especially so in the Scandinavian nations.

  As Richard continued his deadpan brief, point by pedantic point, a slow numbing realization crept over me. The man was serious. I wondered how to react to something that on face value struck me as utterly preposterous. By disposition, I fell naturally into a subordinate role. Being six years older and having the distinction of fame and financial success gave Richard a dialectic advantage. Although there existed between us the unspoken notion of all artists equal together in the crucible of creation, he nevertheless assumed the position of elder statesman, emphasizing the predilection of the Nobel judges to choose work disdained in its home country, yet acclaimed and much appreciated by a superior European culture. “I fit the bill perfectly,” he smirked.

  “Don’t you think you’re a little young for the Nobel Prize?” I observed. Convinced my thrust had skewered the inflated balloon of his ego, I experimented with a superior grin. Richard never missed a stroke. “Kipling had it at forty-one,” he parried. Touché! I said nothing more on the subject, steering the conversation toward fishing as we drove the rest of the way into Livingston.

  forty-three: throwing a hoolihan

  IN THE EARLY 1970s, when Richard Brautigan moved to Montana, it was still possible to regard the state as the Last Best Place. Wide-scale
subdivision had yet to drive property values into the stratosphere, and there was nary a sign of the dot-com billionaires whose extravagant hilltop McMansions and designer-fringe Rodeo Drive faux-Western fashions forever altered the hometown character of the area. Even after the cataclysmic social changes rending the fabric of American life in the sixties, Livingston retained the innocence of an earlier time. It was still Leave It to Beaver and John Wayne in Big Sky Country.

  One freedom enjoyed in Montana was the right to bear arms. A resident can buy a handgun without any waiting period, just lay his money down on the counter and walk out of the shop with a brand-new six-shooter. Unconcealed weapons may be carried or worn openly in public places, as evidenced by the ubiquitous gun racks visible through pickup truck rear windows in every town in the state. Having grown up hunting and owning firearms, Brautigan understood the gun culture of Montana and soon acquired a small arsenal of his own.

  When Richard flew back to Montana in June of 1974, he brought his old pal Price Dunn along with him. They took a cab over the hill from the Bozeman airport. Brautigan gave the Confederate General an immediate tour of his newly renovated ranchette. Richard brought Price out to the barn for a tour of his rafter-high tree house studio painted a vivid robin’s egg blue on the inside.

  Back at the house, Richard wasted no time before showing off his Winchester gallery gun, recently acquired from Harmon Henkin. “He asked me if I wanted to do some plinking with the .22,” Price said. Dunn took the antique pump-action and a box of shorts, heading off alone through the cottonwoods behind the house. Hundreds of years before, this had been the Pine Creek streambed, and the flow of water carved a steep embankment along the northern edge of what was now subdivided hayfields.