Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Crying outside the hearing room, Mary Lou approached her son, her lips soundlessly forming his name as if in a dream. His stepfather tried reassuring him that things would work out fine. “Everything is going to be OK.” Dick was not so optimistic. He didn’t see much hope in being shipped had to the madhouse on Christmas Eve. The bleakness building inside over the past several months had now become manifest, a demon wrapping its black, cold tentacles about his soul.

  After the hearing, the officials loaded Dick into a government car for the trip up to Salem. He sat in the front seat between the driver and a guard. Another prisoner, wearing handcuffs, sat in back beside a second guard. A gentle rain fell from the pewter-colored winter sky. Dick stared out the window as the guards made small talk. Above the windshield wipers’ steady swish, he heard the jingle of handcuffs behind him. He thought about Linda Webster, picturing her face, remembering the sound of her voice. He imagined what she would think of him when she learned he’d been sent to the insane asylum and “tried very hard not to cry.”

  Ten years before, Dick Brautigan had had his appendix removed at Salem General and had left a rose blossom on the front steps every night after his mother gave birth to his sister Sandra. Feelings of dread erased these memories when the government car transporting him arrived at the state mental hospital. Public health facilities are never designed with aesthetics as a primary concern, and the first grim appearance of the asylum through the drizzle looked as welcoming as a glimpse of Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle in a flash of midnight lightning. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman’s motion picture version of Ken Kesey’s novel, was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital, an institution as much a prison as a medical facility.

  Dick Brautigan walked into the hospital accompanied by a guard who brought along the police report. Dick offered no resistance, cooperative throughout the bureaucratic admissions procedure. “Do I have to spend thirty days here?” he asked. “I’ll be driven crazy, or else I’ll be bored to death.” Referring to the report, Dick told the officials, “You have it all in there, haven’t you? There were two psychiatrists and a doctor at the hearing, and they took notes. You’ll get them in time.” He was not deemed dangerous, posing no threat to himself or the other patients, and was allowed the run of Ward J. The holiday season had never been a big deal for Brautigan, but spending his twentieth Christmas in a mental hospital, provisionally diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (“chronic, severe”) expanded the boundaries of the bleak.

  Mary Lou Folston remembered driving up to celebrate Christmas with her son in Salem, bringing presents and clothing. They visited in a huge recreation room furnished with benches, windows barred, institutional green walls sporting a few stray decorations. “We’d sit and talk and walk around the room,” Mary Lou recollected. She and her husband, Bill, tried to visit every Sunday. Unable to fully comprehend what was happening to her son, Mary Lou resorted to desperate measures and phoned Edna Webster, a woman she actively disliked, in hopes of finding out some answers. Dick told her Mrs. Webster had complimented his fine blond hair and ethereal blue eyes. She suspected the older woman might have been her son’s lover.

  “She used to call me on the phone and talk to me a lot,” Edna recalled. “Oh, she was frantic about him. Couldn’t understand what made Richard the way he was.”

  Edna went up to visit Dick “several times; three times, I guess it was.” Once, she and her son Pete made the trip with the Folstons. “Father let Pete drive in our car,” Mary Lou remembered. Dick was allowed out of the hospital for this unsupervised visit, and they all went to a nearby restaurant. Mrs. Webster recalled how the Folstons “insisted Pete sit in a booth with them and I sit in a booth with Richard. And Richard was embarrassed, and so was I. She treated us as if I were his girlfriend.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Edna reassured Dick in the booth. “You’re okay. Just make other people see that. Conform to their way of acting, because then they will think that you are okay. When you don’t say anything, people will think you agree with them. Don’t tell them what you feel. Don’t tell them anything.”

  Edna’s sage advice came too late. Dick had already told the doctors plenty, and they filled their report with harsh clinical observations. Brautigan said he was a genius, which the interviewing physicians interpreted as evidence of pompous self-deception. They viewed him as sarcastic, hostile, and suspicious, “a petty and would-be intellectual.” Listening to his “long rambling and wordy description of his difficulties,” the medical staff at Salem felt he deliberately used all the big words he could muster, “although most of them are poorly selected and out of context.” Brautigan showed the psychiatrist an outline “of what he calls a novel” that he had written the day before. “Is there censorship here?” he asked. “Am I deprived of my constitutional rights? Am I a menace to society? Does that work seem to be the product of a mentally ill mind?”

  When Dick Brautigan spoke of his writing as being “great literature,” the doctors referred to the police report describing his work as “obscene” and having “very little literary merit.” Brautigan’s commitment papers stated that the patient “had the delusion that he was a writer of great ability. He had various former teachers and other people read some of his writings, and they were without question some of the most weird and lewd material they had ever read.” Brautigan himself admitted that much of his work “was variations on sexual themes that would make Erskine Caldwell look like Elsie Dinsmore.”

  Uncomfortable in an unfamiliar menacing environment, Dick Brautigan attempted to impress his interviewers, not realizing he was under such dispassionate scrutiny. The doctors thought he talked with “an effeminate voice” and noted his “use of gesture” and how he gazed up at the ceiling “a good deal of the time,” taking off his glasses, sighing, and posturing “in a very dramatic fashion.” They noted “considerable giggling, grimacing and laughing.”

  Dick told the doctors that he had considered suicide at times although he never attempted it. Talking about sex, he said, “I’m a Platonic animal, I don’t bask in carnality. I have never masturbated, it seems a rather vulgar practice to me.” He also said, “My mind conjures up many weird things,” and “I’m obsessed with good and evil.”

  Brautigan’s claim to be “a genius in the literary line” sealed his fate in the mental hospital. How could a lowly cannery worker with only a high school education presume so much? “There is considerable delusory ideation, most of it of a grandiose nature,” reasoned the psychobabblers. “The patient appears to be moderately mentally ill,” they stated, issuing an ultimate diagnosis of “schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type.”

  The medical men recommended a severe therapy. On January 3, 1956, Dick Brautigan was transferred to Ward M, where Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was administered. By January 9, the authorities at the Oregon State Hospital had given him four electroshock treatments. “I didn’t sign any papers, and didn’t give them any permission,” Mary Lou Folston said, “and when I called again he had had six of those things . . . Boom, boom, boom, boom!”

  On January 26, Brautigan received his twelfth and final electroshock, completing his course of treatment. The doctors felt they had been successful. Patient number 22877 was now properly socialized. His problematic intellectual pretensions were subdued. Dick Brautigan appeared much more normal to the authorities. He was judged to be in remission from his psychosis.

  After decades of snake-pit bad rep shock therapy has regained a certain measure of medical respectability as a treatment for acute depression. Back in the middle 1950s, the procedure was administered without anesthesia or muscle relaxants and often used as a punishment for unruly patients. Today, written consent must first be obtained from either the patient or a court-appointed guardian. No such approval was needed when the electrodes were attached to the head of Richard Gary Brautigan.

  The avowed purpose of electroshock was to induce a seizure within the brain of a depressed patien
t in hope of obtaining a calming effect. Early on, before the procedure was fully understood, shock treatment was more or less experimental, with wide variables in dosage and duration, often inducing painful grand mal seizures, which, in turn, occasionally produced such serious injuries as bone fractures and dislocations.

  Dick told his mother he had assisted the staff in administering shock treatment to other patients. “His job was to put them on this gurney and wheel them in there when they put the gizmo on them,” Mary Lou remembered. “He was holding them down while they put the thing in the mouth before they turn the juice on. And how they’d spit up foam and stuff like that. He didn’t like to hold the men down when they were getting their shocks, see.”

  Perhaps Dick told his mother these made-up war stories to distance her from his own suffering, his abstract way of describing how he himself bucked against the straps, gnawing the mouth guard that kept him from biting off his tongue when the lightning bolts crashed through his brain. At some point, he informed Edna Webster that shock treatments “were a vicious thing to do to a person.” Pete Webster remembered Dick telling him they were “very painful” and that they “blocked out his memory.” At first, he maintained a daily journal of ward life during the therapy, trying to measure potential memory loss. In his sister Barbara’s recollection, “it was two or three days before he was functioning again after these treatments.” Mary Lou maintained a no-nonsense logic, believing Dick’s odd story to be true. “See, it was a nuthouse,” she said. “They don’t care.”

  Institutional life was not without positive side effects. Three squares a day packed twenty-one pounds on Dick’s skeletal frame in a month. Having enough to eat does wonders to improve a man’s spirit. Dancing provided another beneficial result. Barbara reported that Dick made a friend in the hospital, a young woman who taught him how to dance during the institution’s social hours. “He was very proud of the fact that he had learned to dance.”

  Mary Lou remembered the second month of her son’s stay at the mental hospital as an agreeable time for him. “He acted pleasant and happier than he’d ever been,” she said. In her opinion, none of the attendants knew that Richard had been sent to Salem by the court. “They thought he self-committed himself. Here he had the freedom of the grounds and the buildings and everything. Come and went as he pleased, except for bedtime and mealtime.” Dick had also resumed his writing, always effective therapy for depression.

  Welcome news came in January when Mary Lou sent along Dick’s mail. Lilith Lorraine, editor of Flame, forwarded a letter (dated December 29, 1955) that had come from her “good friend and fellow-editor, Mr. D. Vincent Smith.” Smith was an SP3 in the Seventh Cavalry Regiment (Custer’s old outfit) with an APO address in San Francisco. He was also “editor & publisher” of Olivant House, which distributed its publications out of Fitzgerald, Georgia, although the “editorial office” was stationed in Japan along with SP3 Smith. In his letter, Smith informed Brautigan that he had chosen to reprint the poem from Flame (“Someplace in the World a Man Is Screaming in Pain”) in issue no. 1 of Olivant, a revival of Olivant Quarterly, scheduled for release in March.

  Smith also enclosed an advertisement that he hoped Brautigan might post in a public place. “I look forward to seeing more of your work,” he wrote, asking for a “selection” of Brautigan’s poetry, proposing to publish the poems in a monthly supplement to Olivant. “I hope to pay at least $100.00 for each group of poems selected.” Brautigan mailed off a batch of his poetry to D. Vincent Smith in Japan. He suggested the title “Tiger in the Telephone Booth” for the collection. Dick also wrote to Evelyn Thorne in Lake Como, Florida, requesting a revision for his biographical note in the upcoming issue of Epos. Stating his age as twenty-one and referring obliquely to his hospital confinement, Dick declared, “I have been writing poetry since I was 17. Olivant will publish my first book of poems, Tiger in the Telephone Booth. Making paper flowers out of love and death is a disease, but how beautiful it is.”

  Another intriguing piece of mail came separately from Lilith Lorraine, a brief handwritten note in response to a new poem Brautigan had submitted to Flame: “Excellent but anybody who can write satire like you should be prohibited from writing anything else. So—Give: L. L.” Dick approached his poetry with near-religious sincerity. He desired to make the world a better place through his writing with no satirical intentions. The editor mistook fervor for irony.

  There was nothing ironic about a collection of poetry (Linda) that Brautigan mailed to The Macmillan Company in New York City. Only three pages long, the manuscript consisted of fourteen short poems and a dedication page “for Linda.” All but two of the tortured little poems were untitled. Some of their first lines (“when I was a piece of death,” “desire in a bowl of potatoes,” “love is where you find it,” “I knew a gal who was cold as death”) provided a glimpse inside Dick’s tormented soul and a sneak preview of the poet he was soon to become.

  At some point during his stay in the mental hospital, Dick wrote a longhand letter to Linda. “I hope that you do not think that I am crazy,” he began. “I am not crazy. Why did I break that window and make a fool out of myself? I did it because I was too tired and mixed-up inside that my nerves broke and I had a breakdown. Life is such a strange place.” He next recounted a night he walked in the beautiful warm spring rain with a friend and commented that “‘I will go so high that I will be able to look down on the bottom.’ I was right. I went so low that I had to look up with a pair of binoculars to see the bottom.” Brautigan had not abandoned hope. “I am going to write and write this coming year,” he confided to Linda. “I must know something and I will find it out this coming year. I will find a place in the sun.”

  With nothing left to lose, Dick laid bare his soul to the girl he loved. “I hope that I can live,” he wrote. “I am so sensitive and can put my sensitivity down on paper. I think that I can give the world some new thing if I live. If I live. If I live. Do you wonder why I am telling you all of this? I guess I am telling it to you because I like you. I hope that you are not too embarrassed too much or do not feel too awful knowing that a jailbird likes you.” Dick concluded by enclosing three of the poems he wrote while locked in the Eugene jail. Linda Webster never received this letter. Like all the others, it remained in her mother’s possession, hidden from view for almost forty years.

  By the time he wrote to Linda, Dick Brautigan badly wanted out of Salem. He had turned twenty-one in the insane asylum. His future did not look at all bright, and his past was being erased, shock by shock, memory by memory. The madhouse was no place for poets. “People will listen to what they want to hear.” Edna Webster’s advice echoed in his tattered subconscious. “You’re ingenious enough,” she had told him. “You can figure out what they want to hear and tell them that and they’ll let you go.”

  And that’s just what he did. He played the part, and the authorities ruled him fit enough for a supervised discharge. On February 19, 1956, Hal Barton drove up to Salem to sign Dick Brautigan out of the loony bin. The hospital designated his release a parole. Once again, Edna played a role in encouraging this move. “She figured this was a nice out of the way place where he wouldn’t get into trouble,” Lois Barton recalled, “and would we take him on for a little while?” The Bartons’ faith as members of the Society of Friends involved being the best of Samaritans. Hal made the trip to the state capital and came home with a very grateful young poet. Not that Dick gushed with gratitude. He was too reticent for that.

  The Bartons lived outside Eugene, on a small farm on Harry Taylor Road, up along the ridge above Spencer Butte. Harry Taylor had pioneered the area in the early 1930s, buying land there for fifty cents an acre. Out back behind the Bartons’ house stood a one-room unpainted tin-roofed shack Taylor had built for himself when he first settled the area. Over time, the exterior board walls weathered to a driftwood gray, giving the little place a melancholy look, like some faded memento from the distant past. This was where Dick Brauti
gan lived during his stay with the Bartons. “We were a little leery about having him upstairs with all our kids,” Lois Barton recalled.

  Neither of the Bartons remembered him ever leaving the place, as he had no means of transportation, but Brautigan was an experienced hitchhiker, and he frequently slipped away and thumbed a ride down to town. He visited with Edna Webster when Linda was off in school, so there’d be no danger of a painful unexpected encounter. Dick helped Edna with the dishes, drying as she washed. A friend stopped by, and Edna quipped, “We’ve been standing here trying to figure out if Richard’s a poetic dish-dryer or a dish-drying poet.”

  A letter for Brautigan from Lilith Lorraine in Alpine, Texas, postmarked February 29, 1956, had just arrived. In it were four of his poems rejected by Flame. While this new work employed his “usual striking imagery,” they struck Lorraine as “a little light in thought content” compared with the poem she’d previously accepted, “which contained such exquisite satire and which elicited so many favorable comments.” She asked to see more “work of that type.”

  It snowed that day in Eugene. Sometime after midnight, Dick was snug in the little woodstove-heated cabin on Harry Taylor Road, lying on his bed, starting a letter to Gary Stewart. Brautigan always enjoyed writing late at night. This was the first time he’d written his old friend since before the arrest in December. “So many things have happened upon me since last I wrote to you,” the letter began. “So many things covered with nightmare and tears.” Dick wrote of returning to Eugene. “Back to the place where all the horror started growing [. . .]” He was trying for a fresh start and told his friend he prayed to God every night, sometimes on his knees. Still searching for something to give the world, Dick was most emphatic in assessing his immediate future: “I do not want anymore trouble.”