Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard seemed anxious to see Masako again, his regimen of exercise and diet an effort to spruce up his image. He also consulted Becky Fonda about wardrobe improvements. She took him shopping over in Bozeman. Becky bought Brautigan a new sweater and a formal Western jacket, telling him, “You have to dress up sometimes.”

  A thin paperback copy of Richard Brautigan by Marc Chénetier, part of the Contemporary Writers series published by Methuen & Co. of London and New York, arrived in Montana before the end of the month. Richard expected to be disappointed, as he had been with Terence Malley’s similarly titled book back in 1972. Chénetier lauded Brautigan with praise, maintaining that critics dismissed him unfairly because Richard’s work fell outside the boundaries of traditional American literary criticism. “Mapping out a territory is as important as settling it,” Chénetier wrote, “and one may prefer census-taking to sense-making: the actual weighing of the nuggets will be left to others.”

  “The frog got it right,” Richard told all his friends.

  Lorca Hjortsberg had an accident driving home from school one afternoon early in April. She totaled the old Chevy Brautigan had given her, ending up in the hospital. Richard went with Marian to visit her. “We’re so glad you’re all right,” he said, holding her hand. He never said a single word about the wrecked car.

  Brautigan left for Paris in the middle of the second week of April 1983. He flew first to San Francisco for a farewell night at Enrico’s. Christian Bourgois arranged for his ticket to originate at SFO. The next day Richard was en route to New York. According to Helen Brann, he checked into “a perfectly god-awful place, some fleabag over in the Times Square area.” His days at the Plaza and the Waldorf on his own dime were over. While economizing, Brautigan still found the means to take Ianthe, who was living in Brooklyn with Paul, out for a big Friday night lobster dinner at The Palm. His daughter’s husband had to work and couldn’t come.

  Ianthe worked nights at the Roundabout Theater, so her days were free to spend with her father. For a couple years, she thought he only came to New York to see his agent, realizing now “that he wanted to see me as well.” Richard spent much of his time in the city with his daughter. They went together to various museum shows and to “movies that weren’t playing in San Francisco.” Ianthe’s half sister, Ellen, was also living in the Big Apple and often joined them on their afternoon excursions.

  On Saturday morning, April 9, Richard phoned Helen Brann, asking her to join him for breakfast. She pulled on a pair of jeans and headed over from Sutton Place to a side street in the West Forties, where she met Brautigan in his shabby hotel coffee shop. They talked “about everything for about three hours.” It was just like old times, as if nothing had changed between them. “He was in terrific shape,” Brann recalled. “He hadn’t been drinking for a couple months. He’d lost weight. Had a haircut.”

  This final breakfast felt important for Helen. She feared Richard harbored hurt feelings. “But he was so sweet to me,” she said. “We were as close as we’d ever been.” Brautigan told her about Chénetier’s recent study of his work, saying he was “fed up” with the American critics. Brann recalled how articulate Brautigan sounded as he “put his entire writing career into focus.”

  “Helen,” he said, “in another two or three years, the whole thing is going to turn around and they’ll rediscover me. I’m just not going to do any new writing. If I publish anything, I’ll publish it in Europe.” This didn’t seem off-the-wall to Brann. She thought Brautigan “sounded so bright and so acute about the way things work in this country.”

  Before they parted, Richard invited Helen up to his “horrible” room. “Eight by twelve, including the john,” she remembered. “A little cot-like bed. A window that looked out on nothing. Had a dirty sort of curtain across it.” Brautigan wanted to give her some documents. “Not a manuscript, but papers.” Helen noted that he was traveling with only a duffle bag. “And that was it.” They said goodbye and she left his tiny room. It was the last time Helen Brann ever saw Richard Brautigan.

  That same evening Brautigan departed one hour late from JFK to Paris on TWA flight 806. On the long transatlantic passage, Richard read from a pocket copy of the Guinness Book of World Records. Christian Bourgois and his second wife, Dominique, awaited their author’s arrival at Roissy Airport the next morning, along with Marc Chénetier and a reporter and photographer from L’Express. Not knowing Richard’s plane had been delayed, they played a guessing game, trying to pick their mysterious author out of the swarm of arriving passengers. After a while, they wondered if Brautigan hadn’t “poser un lapin.” In French, “arranging a rabbit” was the colloquialism for standing someone up.

  At last they spotted Richard approaching. Long-limbed, awkward, wearing bell-bottom jeans, hair in disorder, the distinctive mustache—the group recognized Brautigan right away and introduced themselves. He greeted them kindly, displaying “the exquisite politeness of a schizo.” Something about Richard, at once “anonymous” and a “famous figurehead,” reminded the reporter, Gérard Lefort, of a “posthumous” Boris Vian, a French bohemian poet, novelist, and jazz musician who died in 1959. Waiting by the baggage carousel, Brautigan reinforced this perception, pulling a small alarm clock from his pocket and telling his new companions it was set on Montana time.

  After passing through customs, Richard bought a bottle of whiskey at the duty-free store and they set off for Paris along l’autoroute du Nord in the Bourgoises’ car. Brautigan frowned out the window, sizing up the nondescript suburbs on the horizon. “So, then, this is France!’ he said scornfully. Caught in a traffic jam in the Faubourg Saint-Denis, Richard’s superior attitude relaxed a bit. Now everything looked just like in the movies, he thought. As they moved closer to the center of the city, Brautigan studied the shop signs and the names painted on the windows of the boutiques they passed. Hot Dog. Pressing. Restaurant. Café. Flashing back to his early childhood studying the labels on canned goods, Richard announced that he’d discovered a fast way to learn French.

  Christian Bourgois drove Brautigan to the Hôtel d’Isly at 49 Rue Jacob in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Left Bank. Two things waited at the front desk. A letter from Michelle Lapautre, his French literary agent, welcomed him to Paris. She hoped to meet Richard soon, suggesting he phone her Tuesday morning once his schedule had been arranged. The other item was a copy of Livres-Hebdo, a weekly magazine about books published mainly for librarians and booksellers. A feature article, “Richard Brautigan à Paris” by Christine Ferrand, was illustrated with John Fryer’s photo of Brautigan leaning against his Pine Creek mailbox.

  Richard asked Marc Chénetier for a quick translation. The subhead, “Cousin de Boris Vian et d’Émile Ajar cet ecrivan californien rencontre pour la premier fois son editeur et ses lecteurs francois,” said it all. (Cousin to Boris Vian and Émile Ajar, this California writer meets his publisher and his French readers for the first time.) Ferrand explicated this thesis in her piece. “Il manifeste tantôt de côté doux et rêveur du hippy californien,” she wrote, “tantôt un goût du canular et du loufoque à la Boris Vian.” Chénetier read this to Brautigan in English: “Sometimes he manifests the sweet and dreamy side of a hippie Californian, sometimes the taste of the practical joke and the crackpot in the manner of Boris Vian.”

  The reference to Ajar came after Ferrand called Brautigan a “mysterious person” who “refused interviews on principle,” quoting Jean-François Fogel, a journalist and essayist who referred to Richard as “a sort of Émile Ajar who wrote his books himself.” Richard had never heard of Vian and Ajar. Marc explained the connection had to do with pseudonyms. Polymath Boris Vian, who played the trumpet, sang, acted, and also worked as an engineer and inventor, had written five hard-boiled noir novels under the pen name Vernon Sullivan. (Vian died of sudden cardiac arrest at a screening of the film version of J’irai Cracher sur vos Tombes (I Shall Spit on Your Graves) after shouting, “These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!�
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  Émile Ajar had been the pseudonym of Romain Gary, a name Brautigan recognized. Gary, who had died a suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound two years before, had been an internationally famous war hero, diplomat, novelist, and film director. He’d been married to the American actress Jean Seberg. Winning the Prix Goncourt twice immortalized him in France. The prestigious prize for French language literature was supposed to be awarded to a living author only once in his life. Gary won it the first time in 1956 for his novel Les Racines du Ciel (The Roots of Heaven). The second time around, he took the prize in 1975 as Émile Ajar for the pseudonymous La vie devant soi. The hoax was not revealed until after Gary’s death.

  Brautigan didn’t get it. He’d never written under a pseudonym. Richard was unfamiliar with the French intellectuals’ love for labyrinthine word play and symbolic gesture. Failing to understand that Gary and Vian had been self-invented men much like himself, Brautigan looked bemused by it all as J. M. Bartel, the photographer from L’Express took several pictures. The published photo portrayed a healthy, exhausted man.

  After Richard dropped off his duffel and deposited his traveler’s checks for safekeeping with the management, they left the small hotel and drove to the restaurant “mode,” close by the Bourgois house. They were joined by a celebrated actress and a former television director, gathering about a round table decorated with a vase of tulips. During their luncheon, the group resembled a small salon, everyone trying to outdo each other in a play of wits. Brautigan’s conversation jumped randomly from topic to topic, what the French called toujour du coq à l’âne, (always from the rooster to the lamb). When Richard was asked where he wanted to go in Paris, he replied, “To where there is energy!”

  Groaning inwardly, the distinguished group cast panicked looks at one another. Could the visiting author be just another loutish American wanting to take in the same old boring sights. Christian Bourgois suggested the Eiffel Tower. Marc Chénetier offered Versailles. The reporter Gérard Lefort came up with the Folies Bergères. Brautigan was not interested in any of these places. Richard wanted to visit “cemeteries and supermarkets.”

  At the end of the meal, after several glasses of plum eaux de vie, the group left the restaurant and dispersed. The reporter shook Brautigan’s hand, departing to write his story. Richard veered off with Christian and Dominique Bourgois for more drinks at their home. A little more than a year older than his author, Christian had worked in publishing since 1959, setting up his own eponymous company in 1966. Noted for publishing translations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the first book of short stories by Gabriel Garciá Márquez in France, Bourgois also introduced the American Beat writers (Ginsberg in 1967; Burroughs in 1968) to French readers.

  Bourgois spoke only French fluently but knew enough English to communicate with Brautigan, who had zero knowledge of the Gallic tongue. Christian asked Richard if there was anyone he’d like to meet in Paris. “Jean-Jacques Beineix,” Brautigan replied. The director’s film Diva had received a lukewarm reception when it opened in France in 1981. It had been an art house success the next year in the United States. Richard was a big fan of the movie and had arranged through Marc Chénetier to have the Bourgois publishing house send three copies of Mémoirs sauvés du vent (So the Wind) to Beineix. Brautigan thought Diva “a wonderful film.” Christian Bourgois said he’d try and arrange a meeting.

  Jet lag and alcohol took their toll on the exhausted traveler. Before Richard left, Dominique Bourgois jotted a quick itinerary with her fountain pen on a personalized beige slip from her desk notepad. She wrote with Parisian flair in purple ink. Five appointments were scheduled—two the next day, three on Wednesday. After writing “Thursday,” Dominique left the space beside it blank. Michelle Lapautre had been working to arrange for interviews on that day. The Paris Book Fair was set to open on the fifteenth. Brautigan was expected to put in an appearance at the Bourgois booth. He had a reading scheduled for Friday night, so she also left that day open, asking him to come on Saturday. Richard folded the paper and stuck it in the pocket of his denim work shirt.

  Christian Bourgois brought Richard back to the Hôtel d’Isly, where he collapsed onto a luxurious bed in room H6. When Brautigan awoke the next morning, he looked at the handwritten schedule Dominique had given him. His first appointment was lunch with Jean-Baptiste Baronian, a French-language Belgian writer of Armenian descent. Born in Antwerp, thirty-nine-year-old Baronian was known as a novelist, critic, essayist, and author of children’s books. At present he was on assignment for Le Magazine Littéraire, a monthly literary publication founded in 1966.

  When Brautigan and Baronian sat down to lunch at a Left Bank restaurant, their conversation soon turned into an interview. The initial question concerned Richard’s career as a poet. “My first book was a collection of poems,” Brautigan answered. “I published it at the age of twenty-three. I was then very influenced by the French poets, principally Baudelaire. And there’s no denying I owe a great debt to Rimbaud, Laforgue, Breton, and Michaux. They also gave me the urge to read French prose. I have been hit hard by Gide’s The Immoralist and Sartre’s Nausea. Then there’s Night Flight by Saint-Exupéry, which I consider one of the most perfect novels ever written.”

  Richard went on to mention those American writers who’d influenced him: Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson. He gave no nod to Hemingway but said Gatsby and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying were among the novels that really knocked him out. When Baronian noted that he cited only classic authors, Brautigan retorted, “But I am a classic!”

  “In spite of your taste for parody?” countered Baronian.

  “There is no parody in my books,” Richard said. “I don’t believe in parody. On the other hand, I love games. I love to play. What I write is playful and when one is playful, one is inevitably attracted by humor. Besides, I love life, all of life. I love to drink, I love to eat, I love to fish, I love to make love and all of this I say in my books. Why would you speak of parody?”

  Baronian replied that the passage in So the Wind where Brautigan comically described hamburgers struck him as parody.

  “You found?” Richard retorted. “There is no such thing in my books: fiction. All is fiction. It’s in the fiction—and only in the fiction—that one realizes and accomplishes the greatest human experiences. Yes, my fictions are sometimes minimalist, but they always remain fiction.”

  “Even when you take on the American myth?”

  “That’s your vision, it’s not mine. Me, I don’t understand your expression. We also, when we look at France, we think of and find myths, but I am persuaded it is a question of a view of the spirit. Myth, if it exists, is part of language, of literature, of the history of literature.”

  Brautigan had had enough of Gallic intellectual nitpicking. Baronian pressed on, insisting it was not possible to understand Dreaming of Babylon other than through the myths that drive the narrative.

  Richard dodged the issue, telling the Belgian journalist, “It is a book I wrote after seeing numerous film noir. But, for me, it is not a black novel. I prefer to call it a gothic novel. The gothic is my passion because it is a domain where the fiction is total.” Brautigan digressed into a discussion of gothic fiction, mentioning Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the short stories of Poe, declaring Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles “a novel that I adore.”

  Richard said he tried to work every day. When Baronian asked if he ever thought of his future readers, Brautigan answered emphatically, “Never.” He ended the interview by declaring, “A writer is an agent of emotion. In my work, I give them emotion.”

  After lunch, Richard had a couple free hours before a 5:00 pm meeting with Gabrielle Rollin. He had been mostly indoors since arriving in Paris and had seen nothing of the city, so he went for a walk. Brautigan wandered through the narrow streets of the Sixth Arrondissement. Within a few blocks, he found himself on the quay along the Seine. Richard encountered two things
close to his heart, fishing and books. Numbers of pêcheurs stood along the concrete bank, patiently holding their rods, waiting for a strike. On the street above them, les bouquinistes were open for business, the fronts of the wooden book stalls unfolded to reveal shelves of used books.

  As Brautigan strolled along, enjoying himself, he came to a bend in the river. There, looming before him, a distinctive iron skeleton tapered into the sky. Richard stared up at it as a young man approached along the quai. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” Brautigan said, stopping the Parisian pedestrian. “Is that the Eiffel Tower?”

  “I guarantee it,” the fellow said, continuing on his way. This became Richard’s favorite story about his first trip to Paris.

  That evening, Brautigan got together with Marc Chénetier for a nightcap. All Brautigan’s good intentions declared in Montana were drowning in an ocean of French alcohol. Marc wanted to confirm a dinner invitation that he’d extended to Richard by letter in March. He also needed to establish a schedule for Friday. Brautigan dug the folded itinerary written by Dominique Bourgois out of his pocket and slid it across to Chénetier. Marc quickly filled in the blanks with his ballpoint.

  “19:30. Dinner Marc,” he wrote in the last open space for Wednesday. Leaving Thursday’s space blank, Chénetier penned “Friday” below it, adding three appointments (“10. TV in room. 12. Lunch? - Marc. 17. Lecture”), shorthand for a busy day. Chénetier planned to bring a television crew to Brautigan’s hotel room at 10:00 am on Friday morning to tape an interview. The “lecture” at 5:00 pm was a scheduled reading previously arranged by mail.

  Richard’s Wednesday in Paris began with a hangover. If he had a bottle in his room, he probably took a couple quick palliative drinks. He’d most likely emptied the last one the night before. At 10:30 am, Brautigan met with Michel Braudeau, a novelist and literary critic who had published his first novel, The Amazon, at the age of twenty. Braudeau covered film and literature for L’Express. He got only an hour of Richard’s time. Near brain-dead, the grouchy author behaved rudely, responding to his inquiries in a curt manner.