The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard: Library of America Special Edition

by Ron Padgett

  INTRODUCTION BY PAUL AUSTER

  RON PADGETT, EDITOR

  A Special Publication of

  The Library of America

  Copyright © 2012 The Estate of Joe Brainard.

  Volume compilation, editor’s preface, and glossary

  copyright © 2012 by Ron Padgett.

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Paul Auster.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011928610

  Print ISBN: 978-1-59853-149-7

  eISBN 978-1-59853-178-7

  First eBook Edition: April 2012

  No part of the book may be reproduced commercially

  by offset-lithographic or equivalent copying devices

  without the permission of the publisher.

  Book design by David Bullen.

  THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by America's foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.

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  The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard

  is published with support from

  Anne Dunn

  Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

  A Friend

  Contents

  Editor’s Preface by Ron Padgett

  Introduction by Paul Auster

  I Remember

  Self-Portrait

  Self-Portrait on Christmas Night

  Back in Tulsa Again

  Saturday July 21st 1962

  Diary Aug. 4th-15th

  The China Sea

  Picnic or Yonder Comes the Blue

  A True Story

  I Like [“A happy glory to sky!”]

  I Like [“I Joe”]

  The People

  Andy Warhol: Andy Do It

  The Man

  Marge

  Johnny

  Nancy [“It was coffee time”]

  Nancy [“Nancy was always handing me”]

  May Dye

  Colgate Dental Cream

  Brunswick Stew

  Sick Art

  Sunday, July the 30th, 1964

  Saturday, December the 11th, 1965

  Van Gogh

  People of the World: Relax!

  Ron Padgett

  January 26th, 1967

  Pat

  August 29th, 1967

  Jamaica 1968

  What Is Money?

  Little-Known Facts about People

  Diary 1969

  Diary 1969 (Continued)

  Sex

  A Special Diary

  Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself

  Death

  Autobiography

  Some Train Notes

  Diary 1970–71

  December 22, 1970

  1970

  Queer Bars

  Art

  Short Story

  Life [“When I stop and think”]

  Rim of the Desert

  How to Be Alone Again

  Bolinas Journal

  Wednesday, July 7th, 1971

  Selections from “Vermont Journal: 1971”

  Fear

  White Spots

  My Favorite Quotations

  Selections from “Self-Portrait: 1971”

  from N.Y.C. Journals: 1971–1972

  Friday, June 16th, 1972

  Tuesday, July 11th, 1972

  What I Did This Summer

  Washington D.C. Journal 1972

  The Gay Way

  Matches

  Self-Portrait (As a Writer) If I Was Old and Fat and Wore Hats

  Dirty Prose

  Fantastic Dream I Had Last Night!

  If

  The Friendly Way

  The Friendly Way (Continued)

  If I Was God

  Ponder This

  Grandmother

  Night

  Neck

  30 One-Liners

  The Cigarette Book

  Poem [“Sometimes”]

  No Story

  Journals

  Before I Die

  Right Now

  Life [“The life of a human being is”]

  Stoned Again

  A Depressing Thought

  Thirty

  Ten Imaginary Still Lifes

  from 29 Mini-Essays

  The Outer Banks

  Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises)

  Twenty-three Mini-Essays

  Religion

  Out in the Hamptons

  Nothing to Write Home About

  A State of the Flowers Report

  Jimmy Schuyler: A Portrait

  January 13th

  Interviews

  The Joe Brainard Interview

  by Tim Dlugos

  An Interview with Joe Brainard

  by Anne Waldman

  Chronology

  Note on the Texts

  Glossary of Names

  Editor’s Preface

  This book evolved from an idea that its author had as far back as 1965, when he created a handmade booklet entitled Self-Portrait. It consisted of ten drawings of individual hairs from ten different parts of his body, with captions identifying the parts. Actually that was just volume 1. Volume 2 had but a single page, at the top of which he glued a tiny square photograph of a nose, to the right of which he drew an arrow pointing to it, with the words “I have a big nose.” Although as a painter Joe had done visual self-portraits, this was the first time he used self-portraiture in the creation of a book.

  In late 1969 Joe began to assemble the manuscript for a much larger book to be called Self-Portrait, but which he published as Selected Writings (1971). A year later he and Anne Waldman brought out a collaborative book called Self-Portrait. Most of Joe’s writings in it were republished in other volumes of his, including the current one.

  Joe would eventually write many other pieces in which the primary subject was himself, but the work was created mainly for his friends. It was a way of giving himself to them.

  Who was that self? Over the years, in an attempt to answer this question, Joe peeled away the layers of his personality and character. Gradually he realized how complex he was—just like everybody!—and the various forms of his writings reflect that complexity, which I have tried to mirror in the structuring of the Self-Portrait section of this book. In it are works that could be divided into two categories: comic, whimsical, even fantastical writings on the one hand, diaristic pieces on the other. My original thought had been to edit a separate volume for each of these categories, until I came to see that some pieces veer back and forth between them. That these hybrids could have fit into either category led me to the realization that Joe’s non-diaristic writings are as self-revelatory as the diaristic ones, albeit in a more oblique manner. As Joe himself put it, in a journal entry for June 2, 1969, “Almost everything I write is about me. Even funny fiction stories.” Although separating the two types of writing would not be unreasonable—and one can easily make that separation for oneself by using the table of contents—th
e intertwining of these two strands gives us a richer, more complex, more realistic, and ultimately more satisfying view of the man who strongly preferred that people not think they had him all figured out, compartmentalized, “in their pocket,” as he put it.

  The plan for this book expanded when the editors at the Library of America suggested that we include Joe’s enduring classic, I Remember, which deserved a section of its own. To round out the collection, Paul Auster urged us to add several of Joe’s interviews.

  In the Self-Portrait section, I have arranged the writings chronologically, according to the approximate date of composition. In some cases the date is the result of educated guesswork, but the sequencing doesn’t stray far from the truth. An advantage of the chronological arrangement is that it gives the reader the opportunity to follow the evolution of Joe’s spirit.

  When I found different versions of a piece, I usually selected the latest, out of respect for (and agreement with) Joe’s revisions. For the same reason, I have not included several pieces that Joe eventually decided were not strong enough (after rushing one piece into print, he said ruefully, “What was I thinking?”); in these instances I agree, the lone exception being the final piece in the book. (At the top of its manuscript, he scribbled an afterthought: “Slow!” It is slow, but what he missed is that its measured, tranquil pace is at the heart of its beauty.) Also exceptional is its being out of chronological order in the current volume; putting it last felt right.

  I have corrected Joe’s occasionally phonetic spelling—at first embarrassed by it, later he saw spelling as not all that important—and his uncertain grasp of standard punctuation. However, it would be wrong to regularize all of his punctuation according to strict copyediting rules, since he sometimes used it as a kind of scoring to indicate tone and tempo, notably in his parentheses that indicate an afterthought or his extra-long dashes that suggest a pregnant silence.

  For a list of Joe’s published pieces not included here, I refer the reader to the Note on the Texts. The excluded unpublished manuscript pages amount to relatively few.

  * * *

  For generous and invaluable help, I thank Bill Berkson, Maxine Chernoff, Michael Davis, Larry Fagin, Richard Friedman, Anne Garner (the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection), Nathan Kernan, Allan Kornblum, Cinda Kornblum, Ann Lauterbach, Chip Livingston, Maureen Owen, Arlo Quint (The Poetry Project), Stacey Szymacek (The Poetry Project), David Trinidad, Anne Waldman, Nicole Wallace, Edmund White, Trevor Winkfield, Christopher Wiss, Larry Zirlin, and the librarians of the New York Public Library microform collection.

  My thanks also go to the extraordinary staff of the Library of America and to Paul Auster for his enthusiasm for this book and for his introduction.

  Much credit is due Robert Butts, whose large donation of Joe’s manuscripts and art formed the Joe Brainard Archive of the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, and who painstakingly catalogued the donation. I also appreciate the help I have received over the years from Lynda Claassen, director of the Mandeville Special Collections Library.

  A special thanks is reserved for John Brainard for his devotion to his brother’s work.

  Finally, I thank Joe’s companion, Kenward Elmslie, and my wife, Patricia, for help beyond words.

  —Ron Padgett

  Introduction

  I can’t remember how many times I have read I Remember. I discovered the book soon after it was published in 1975, and in the intervening three and a half decades I have gone back to it once every few years, perhaps seven or eight times in all. The text is not long (just 138 pages in the original edition), but remarkably enough, in spite of these numerous rereadings, whenever I open Joe Brainard’s little masterwork again, I have the curious sensation that I am encountering it for the first time. Except for a few indelible passages, nearly all of the memories recorded in the pages of I Remember have vanished from my own memory. There are simply too many details to hold onto over an extended period of time, too much life is packed into Brainard’s shifting, swirling collage of recollections for any one person to remember it in its entirety, and therefore, even if I recognize many of the entries the instant I start to reread them, there are many others that I don’t. The book remains new and strange and surprising—for, small as it is, I Remember is inexhaustible, one of those rare books that can never be used up.

  A prolific visual artist and occasional writer, Brainard stumbled upon the simple but ingenious composition method of I Remember in the summer of 1969. He was just twenty-seven, but a highly developed and accomplished twenty-seven, a precocious boy artist who had started exhibiting his work and winning prizes as a grade school student in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had landed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side before he turned twenty. By 1969, he was a veteran of the New York art scene, with several one-man shows to his credit, participation in numerous group shows, cover designs for dozens of small literary magazines and books of poetry, stage decors for theater pieces by LeRoi Jones and Frank O’Hara, as well as comic strip collaborations (most of them hilarious) with a long list of poet friends. Collages, large and small assemblages, drawings, and oil paintings—his output was varied and incessant—and on top of that, he also found time to write. Before the miraculous breakthrough of 1969, Brainard had published poems, diaries, and short prose pieces in a number of downtown literary magazines associated with the New York School, and he had already developed a distinctive style of his own—charming, whimsical, unpretentious, frequently ungrammatical, and transparent. Those qualities are all present in I Remember, but now, almost by accident, he had hit upon an organizing principle, and the writing takes off and soars into an altogether different register.

  With typical nonchalance and acumen, Brainard described the exhilaration he felt while working on his new project in a letter written that summer to poet Anne Waldman: “I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.”

  I remember... It seems so obvious now, so self-evident, so fundamental and even ancient—as if the magic formula had been known ever since the invention of written language. Write the words I remember, pause for a moment or two, give your mind a chance to open up, and inevitably you will remember, and remember with a clarity and a specificity that will astonish you. This exercise is now used wherever writing courses are taught, whether for children, college students, or the very old, and the results never fail to summon up long-forgotten particulars of lived experience. As Siri Hustvedt wrote in her recent book, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves: “Joe Brainard discovered a memory machine.” *

  But once you discover the machine, how do you use it? How do you harness the memories that come flooding through you into a work of art, into a book that can speak to someone other than yourself? Many people have written their own versions of I Remember since 1975, but no one has come close to duplicating the spark of Brainard’s original, of transcending the purely private and personal into a work that is about everybody—in the same way that all great novels are about everybody. It strikes me that Brainard’s achievement is the product of several forces that operate simultaneously throughout the book: the hypnotic power of incantation; the economy of the prose; the author’s courage in revealing things about himself (often sexual) that most of us would be too embarrassed to include; the painter’s eye for detail; the gift for story-telling; the reluctance to judge other people; the sense of inner alertness; the lack of self-pity; the modulations of tone, ranging from blunt assertion to elaborate flights of fancy; and then, most of all (most pleasing of all), the complex musical structure of the book as a whole.

  By music, I mean counterpoint, fugue, and
repetition, the interweaving of several different voices throughout the nearly fifteen hundred entries of the book. A theme is picked up for a while, then dropped, then picked up again, in the same way that a horn might sound for a few moments in an orchestral piece, then give way to a violin, which in turn will give way to a cello, and then, all but forgotten now, the horn will suddenly return. I Remember is a concerto for multiple instruments, and among the various strings and woodwinds Brainard employs in his free-floating, ever-changing composition are the following:

  —Family (more than seventy entries), such as “I remember my father in a tutu. As a ballerina dancer in a variety show at church;” “I remember when father seemed too formal, and daddy was out of the question, and dad too fake-casual. But, seeming the lesser of three evils, I chose fake-casual;” “I remember the only time I saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.”

  —Food (a hundred entries), including butter and sugar sandwiches, salt on watermelon, chewy candy in movie theaters, and repeated allusions to ice cream, as in “I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.”

  —Clothes (roughly ninety entries), including pink dress shirts, pillbox hats, and fat ties with fish on them. (Brainard’s earliest ambition was to become a fashion designer.)

  —Movies, Movie Stars, T.V., and Pop Music (more than a hundred entries), including references to Perry Como, Liberace, Hopalong Cassidy, Dinah Shore, Tab Hunter, Marilyn Monroe (several times), Montgomery Clift, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Jane Russell, Lana Turner, the Lone Ranger, and umpteen others. “I remember that Betty Grable’s legs were insured for a million dollars;” “I remember rumors about what Marlon Brando had to do to get his first acting job;” “I remember Gina Lollobrigida’s very tiny waist in Trapeze.”

  —School and Church (roughly a hundred entries), such as “I remember how much, in high school, I wanted to be handsome and popular;” “I remember an American history teacher who was always threatening to jump out of the window if we didn’t quiet down. (Second floor.);” “I remember the clock from three to three-thirty;” “I remember two years of cheating in Spanish class by lightly penciling in the translations of words.”