All the while, Brautigan stewed in utter despair. He called his sister Barbara every night and read her what he’d written that day. “I spent hours writing this poem,” he’d said. “What do you think?”
Her standard answer was “I think it’s great. That’s the best you’ve written so far.”
“Well, she didn’t understand it,” he complained. “She didn’t like it.”
“I’m not surprised,” Barbara told her brother. “She’s just real young. You have to give her time. I’m sure it’s not that she doesn’t care for you. She’s just probably not into poetry.”
Barbara thought Dick was satisfied with these answers, but he’d always call again the next evening to read her another new poem. “You’re a girl,” he insisted, “and you know how girls think.”
In truth, B.J. had no idea what Linda Webster was thinking. Dick grew more and more desperate as she continued avoiding him. “He didn’t know why,” Barbara remembered. “And it really bothered him.” She noticed that his writing seemed different, too. “Kind of on the dark side. You could definitely tell he was depressed.”
Gary Stewart also detected the change in his friend. Gary owned a car, and “every once in a while,” Dick asked him drive them by the house on Madison Street, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive Linda. In spite of such obsessive behavior, Gary believed Dick’s condition was caused more by “intense poverty” than the pangs of love. The Folstons paid the rent for Dick’s room, but he had to take care of his food and subsisted mainly on canned beans. He spent only $3 a week on food. His weight dropped to 145 pounds. “He was just skin and bones,” Gary remembered. “Looked like something that came out of a Nazi war camp.” Gary worked full-time during the days that summer. In the evenings, he frequently invited Dick over to his family home for a decent meal, “to fatten him up.”
Brautigan had written several new stories. Gary Stewart remembered one in particular. Dick pointed out the short, crisp Hemingway-inspired sentences. The story started with a man in a serious automobile accident. The ER team arrived and loaded the victim into an ambulance. When he got to the hospital, the doctors noticed their patient’s eyes were open and had a glimmer of hope. Then, a fly landed on the blank gleaming cornea. Dead men don’t blink.
As a devout Mormon, Gary Stewart was required to embark upon a two-and-a-half-year mission once he turned twenty. In September 1955, the Stewart family gathered to bid their departing son farewell. Before leaving, he asked them to continue having Dick Brautigan over for home-cooked meals. “Look after him when I’m gone.” There were no planes out of Eugene in those days, nor did the trains go in the direction Gary was headed. Later in the evening, the young missionary, not wanting his mom standing around weeping, said goodbye to the folks and found himself waiting in the art deco Greyhound/Trailways bus depot on Olive Street in the company of Dick and another buddy.
Because the narrow roads did not permit full-sized buses to travel west from Eugene, Gary Stewart took an old three-seat Chrysler limo over the mountains to Bend, where he caught the Greyhound bound for Salt Lake City. Whatever transpired that night so impressed Dick Brautigan that he went home to his furnished room and wrote what he called “the funniest and saddest story that has ever crawled out of my brain.”
In a letter to Gary a few days later, he asked his friend’s permission to include him by name in his fiction (“i don’t believe a writer should write about peoples he knows without tellin em foist”) and, knowing the young Mormon would soon be heading to Europe on his long mission, cautioned him, “when you get to holland [sic] and wonder [sic] around speechless for a while, remember the language of love.” (Brautigan was wrong about Stewart’s destination. He was bound for Belgium.) Dick closed with “this here letter dieth like what dies tomorrow?” The mood of the letter was playful and ebullient. The young writer signed himself “richard broodigan.”
On October 2, 1955, Brautigan published a new poem, “Butterfly’s Breath,” in the Sunday Oregonian Northwest Roto Magazine. Wistful and evanescent, with just a tinge of melancholy (“The shadow is as silent / As the birth of a rose”), the poem captured Dick’s fragile mood at the time, a young man helplessly lost in the bathos of unrequited love. It was his final work to appear in the Oregonian. Feeling he had “goofed completely” with Linda Webster, Dick focused his talents over the next couple weeks on writing a sequence of letters, some long, others very brief, he hoped would catch the attention of his fourteen-year-old dream girl.
Brautigan wrote a short jocular note to Linda on October 3, announcing, “Gee, I’m a schemer,” and asking if she’d “ever been kidnaped to a show?” He signed himself “Hitchard Black Jack” and appended a postscript telling Linda he was going to buy “a roll of adhesive tape and four hundred feet of rope and then, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha . . .” A few days later, on the seventh and the eighth, Dick continued in this vein, penning two more brief missives, both unsigned. The first asked Linda not to open the letter until she went to bed and concluded “Good Night.” The second requested that she not open it until she was “halfway through eating dinner,” ending with “Please pass the salt.”
On October 8, Brautigan wrote a more serious and lyrical letter, a prose poem describing Linda’s beauty. It began “I think you are more beautiful than white pigeons cooing in a soft spring rain and the laughter of little children [. . .]” Dick told Linda she was “more beautiful than the dawn gently kissing and hugging the hills of eastern Oregon [. . .] more beautiful than old men lovingly telling about people and days gone forever.” Then, mocking his own sensitivity, he signed the letter “Yours, Itchard Brat Again.” His PS acknowledged Linda’s wish that he not write or bother her, explaining, “I’ve already made a damn fool out of myself, I might as well try to break the world’s record.”
True to his word, Dick Brautigan spent the next week or so writing two long letters created for an audience of one, a girl barely in her teens who was not the least interested. “I hope that you understand some of this. by the time i was 14, i understood things no one should ever understand. what things does a genius remember about a girl? what things burn in the forest of his mind?”
Dick remembered the first time he saw Linda wearing a gray sweatshirt and red pedal-pushers and mentioned the song “That Old Black Magic.” (“‘It really kills me,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch.’”) Linda laughed and asked Dick to repeat his remark, but he was too shy. His heart beat rapidly when she made a second request. “I said something shy and did not do it,” Brautigan wrote. Another time Edna nursed her baby in the kitchen, and Dick felt embarrassed, staring at the stove while Linda kept her eyes fixed on him. “Every time i looked up her eyes were on me. i shall never forget that look as long as i live. linda staring at me.” Recalling their afternoon poetry-writing sessions on the back porch: “I wanted very much to take linda in my arms and show her love so gentle that it would turn her into a piece of softness. love so gentle that it would turn her into the first light of dawn. but i didn’t do that. i wrote a god damn poem instead.”
Sharing a bag of potato chips on their way home from fishing one evening, Bill Brown suggested to Dick that Linda thought of him only as a “big brother.” Dick choked on his chip. “Do you think I goofed completely?” he asked.
“Man,” Brown replied, “the ways you didn’t goof with her haven’t been invented yet. I’d give it up if I were you. It’s hopeless, man.”
Dick typed a final letter to Linda soon afterward. He admitted he wrote “because I wanted very much to show you something about me. I wanted to show you that I’m awfully clever and amusing and nice, but I guess you are too young to appreciate the things which are me.” He promised he wouldn’t write or try to call her anymore. “It’s like trying to catch a bird with my hands.” His postscript said, “Life is a very short visit. When you’re dead, you’re dead for a long time [. . .] I believe in quality over quantity. I believe an inch of truth is more than a mile of lies.”
Dick
Brautigan never mailed these letters. He typed “For Linda” on the envelopes and brought them over to 41 Madison Street, leaving them with Edna Webster to give to her daughter. For reasons of her own, Edna never did. She hid the letters away, and they remained out of sight for forty years. Eventually, they were sold to the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley, where curious scholars probed them long before Linda Webster, now a woman in her seventies, read the words a lovesick young poet had written to her so many years ago.
In late October (1955), not long after his desperate letter-writing campaign, Dick asked Edna Webster’s permission to take Linda fishing. “I trusted him,” Edna said and consented to the angling expedition. Linda recollected that things had more or less been prearranged without consulting her: “I think my mother told me that I was going fishing with Richard.” Dick asked Bill Brown, providing the transportation, if it would be okay if Linda went along. “Sure,” Brown said. “No problem.”
Early on a spectacular fall day, the three headed up the McKenzie under a crystalline blue sky, fall colors tinting the cottonwoods along the river and air crisp as biting into an apple. They drove to Vida, a little town named for Vida Pepiot, a pioneer woman, not much more than a grade school and a post office/general store on the side of the road. Pronounced “V-(eye)-da” (a distinction Brautigan retained a decade later in The Abortion when he called his heroine Vida), the town stood close to Gate Creek.
Bill Brown rigged his rod and waded upstream. Dick had no intention of going fishing. He and Linda walked downriver to the Goodpasture Bridge, one of about 140 covered bridges still in daily use in Oregon in 1955. Built by Lane County in 1938, its 165-foot span remained the longest of any surviving covered bridge in the state. A graceful white structure with a peaked shingled roof and ten slatted, Gothic-arched windows along either side, the Goodpasture Bridge seemed to float above the reflected autumnal dazzle of the McKenzie like some improbable airborne sailing ship.
Dick Brautigan led Linda Webster under the curved portal into the dim interior of the bridge. The cathedral windows provided illumination for big logging trucks, and the crepuscular light inside felt cool and inviting, a magical moment of midday twilight. This was a special place for Dick, and he wanted to share it with Linda. Her own feelings were confused, a jumble of apprehension, anger, and a strange joy occasioned by such an unbelievable fall day.
Goodpasture Bridge was hushed and quiet, like being in church. The thick foot-wide wooden planks muffled Dick and Linda’s footsteps. The bridge struck Brautigan as a holy temple. He explained to Linda how their presence constituted a form of worship. “The way he told me was very beautiful,” she remembered. Dick pointed into the rafters, telling Linda that angels lived up there, spreading their golden wings among the shadows masking the king posts and triangular trusses. He gathered his courage and attempted a kiss, fighting an inherent shyness.
Linda wasn’t interested. Slipping away, she ran to one of the Gothic windows, staring through the slanted horizontal slats dividing her view of the river. Linda recalled, “I’d go and look out one window, and he’d come over and stand real close to me, and I’d run clear over to the other side and look out that one. I probably wasn’t very nice.”
Dick struggled to maintain his composure, keeping cool while bleak darkness closed around him. Years later, in his short story “Forgiven,” Brautigan wrote of fishing downstream from a bridge “into a fast shallow run covered over closely with trees like a shadowy knitted tunnel.” Fishing there, surrounded by “nothing but darkness,” a nameless, uncontrollable fear took hold of him. Panic-stricken, he ran. “Every horror in the world was at my back [. . .] they were all without names and had no shape but perception itself.” He ran on and saw “the dim white outline of the bridge standing out against the night, my soul was born again through a vision of rescue and sanctuary [. . .] the bridge bloomed like a white wooden angel in my eyes [. . .]”
For as long as Richard Brautigan lived, Goodpasture Bridge, the graceful covered structure where angels nested, remained a symbol of hope, salvation, and enduring love. On that sad, beautiful October afternoon in 1955, he wasn’t feeling quite so poetic. “He was very upset,” Linda Webster remembered. Riding home to Eugene, instead of sitting in back with Linda, Dick slouched on the front seat, not saying much, as Bill Brown talked about his time on the stream.
When the boys dropped Linda off, Edna asked her daughter how the day went with Dick. “Linda said that he was boring.” She never went “fishing” with Dick Brautigan again. As far as he knew, aside from an accidental meeting at the front door of her home, he never saw her again. It wasn’t from want of trying. Soon after, Dick brought a small bowl of goldfish over to the Webster house, accompanied by a poem, as a gift for Linda. The long-lost poem spoke of being happy to know that the fish were swimming around in her room. Although she didn’t want to see him, Linda remembered how very sad she felt when the goldfish died.
Discussing the fishing trip later with Edna, Dick said, “I was so embarrassed. I couldn’t talk to her. I can’t understand why she doesn’t want me. I prayed about it. She doesn’t respond.”
A complimentary copy of the Autumn issue of Flame (vol. II, no. 3) arrived in the mail about the same time, the names of contributors printed on the cover beneath an arching red logo blazing like the fiery lettering painted on the hood of a hot rod. Richard Brautigan’s short poem was the final piece in the issue, crouching at the bottom of the page on the inside of the back cover.
Another pleasant surprise arrived that fall from Epos, an established poetry quarterly located in Lake Como, Florida. Edited by poet Evelyn Thorne, Epos championed the work of young unknown poets, Charles Bukowski among them. Thorne published her own work as Will Inman, adopting a masculine pseudonym because she felt the deck was stacked against women. Acceptance came as welcome news. “The Second Kingdom” was a love poem inspired by Linda Webster (“The sound of / your eyes: snow / coming down / the stairs / of the wind). Not even a modest payment was forthcoming. Epos sent poets two copies of the quarterly containing their work.
Around this same time, Brautigan submitted a short story to Playboy magazine. The first paragraph of “My Name Is Richard Brautigan,” consisted of two short sentences announcing the author’s name and age (“I’m twenty-years-old.”) The second paragraph speculated on “how nice it would be if my name were Ernest Hemingway.” That name in the title would grab the editor’s attention. He’d want to read the rest of the story instead of tossing it aside because he’d never heard of a writer named Richard Brautigan.
The story came back with a personal letter from the editor. “If this piece was as fresh and clear as its opening, you might have something,” the letter began. “As it stands, the opening has no connection with the story, is a gimmick-for-the-sake-of-a-gimmick only, and the story itself is over before it starts, has no discernable point. Thanks, though.” Encouraged, Brautigan “hunted up a discernable point lickity-split” and immediately rewrote the story. On a dreary rain-soaked day close to the end of October, suffering from his second bad head cold of the month, Brautigan sat on his bed in the furnished room, handwriting a letter to Gary Stewart while Bill Brown retyped the revised Playboy story. Bill volunteered for this task as a mental distraction because he was “having girl trouble” and feeling blue.
Dick had the blues pretty bad himself and for similar reasons. “Linda Webster broke my heart,” he wrote. “I’ve been feeling like hell for over two months. Memories of her haunt the castles of my brain. I never knew I could be hurt so much. I never knew that much hurt existed in the world.” Brautigan told about going to visit Gary’s folks a couple Sundays before, eating cake, watching TV, and thinking “about killing your little brother.” He also mentioned that he had started writing poetry again and included a recent example. “Hi,” a brief bit of trivia, exuded a surprising amount of good cheer considering his bleak mood.
Lack of money continued to trouble Dick Brautiga
n. Bill Brown tried to get him work at the post office. Such regimented employment ran contrary to his nature. “He wasn’t really too enthused,” Brown remembered. Instead, Dick sold his typewriter for $100. Bill Brown witnessed the transaction. “I was there when the guy paid him for it,” he said. “Packed it out the door, guy and his wife.” Afterward, the two boys went downtown and Brautigan bought some flannel shirts at Eugene Surplus. Having tended to his limited sartorial needs, Dick went shopping for food.
Without a typewriter, Brautigan began using a pencil, writing longhand in a number of inexpensive spiral-bound notebooks. He joked that he favored this method because “you can write in the most comfortable positions.” He had started on a book of short stories he called These Few Precious Days. The Folstons had cut off his rent payments, and the typewriter money was soon exhausted. Always desperately short of cash, Dick took a job for a few days picking walnuts, earning over $2 an hour. The work injured his hands, and his fingers grew too sore to hold a pencil. He came home from the job so exhausted he had only enough energy to open a can of cold beans for dinner before collapsing into bed.
On the night of October 28, Dick telephoned Edna Webster. Her mother, Alice Smith, picked up the receiver.
“May I speak to Edna?” Dick asked.
“She isn’t here.”
Standing in the kitchen, Linda Webster thought the call was for her. “I’m here,” she yelled at her grandmother. Dick Brautigan hung up without another word and wept.
Two days later, on another bleak rainy afternoon, Dick sat in a rocking chair in his furnished room and wrote another letter to Gary Stewart. A sore finger pained him enough that he joked about gangrene setting in. “I’m so poor that I’ll have to amputate it myself.” Hungry but unsure what he’d have for dinner, Dick quipped, “I’ll probably eat the big rat who has been staring at me while I’ve been writing this letter.” The overall tone of the letter was bleak. Dick told Gary about the book of stories he had started, adding that he would never try to publish it.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 14