Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Early on, Ron Loewinsohn and Dick Brautigan overcame their inherent homophobia and sat down at Spicer’s table at the Place. The experience provided an education neither had ever received. “Jack was not only a brilliant critic, he was a brilliant teacher,” Loewinsohn recalled. “He could give criticism in a way that allowed you to accept it, even when the criticism was painful.”

  Spicer felt immediately drawn to Brautigan. Both men affected an air of mystery, neither ever revealing intimate secrets. Brautigan, much like Spicer, didn’t talk of his past or the family he had left behind for good. Ten years older, Jack Spicer reinvented himself when he first arrived in Berkeley from Los Angeles, a metamorphosis Dick had only just begun. As Ron Loewinsohn observed, “Jack also had a kind of perverse streak in him. He was never predictable. He would make friends with people who the group thought impossible.”

  Jack Spicer and Richard Brautigan shared the same birthday. Discovering this cosmic connection appealed to the older poet’s love of magic and the tarot. Spicer introduced Brautigan to astrology, initiating a lifelong interest. Jack Spicer believed in a poetry at once communal and impersonal, like language itself. Whitman, godfather to the Beats, was not his cup of tea. He wanted poetry to be free of politics and personal voice, liberated from language itself. Dick Brautigan, privately shaping one of the century’s most distinctive American literary voices with each rewritten poem, listened hard to Spicer’s pronouncements, sifting what he needed, panning gold from the onrushing brilliance.

  In November, Brautigan moved away from North Beach to a $6-a-week room in the Hotel Jessie, a flophouse on a little alley south of Market off Third Street behind the Hearst Building and around the corner from Breen’s, where William Saroyan used to drink in the late twenties. A parking garage has obliterated the site of the cheap hotel. Jessie is one of a number of tiny streets in the district (Minna, Clara, Annie, Harriet, Mary) named, with a twinkle in the municipal eye, for favorite nineteenth-century prostitutes. The city fathers knew how to celebrate a good time way back when, in marked contrast to the insipid civic spirit now renaming obscure back alleys and dead-end cul-de-sacs for famed local literary gents like Kerouac, London, and Saroyan. Thus far, Frisco lacks a Brautigan Street, although the city recently funded a bronze casting of Richard’s poem “30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love,” setting it into the pavement at a light rail stop near the corner of Folsom and the Embarcadero.

  At the Hotel Jessie, Brautigan wrote continuously, often completing between ten and twenty poems a day. At the end of November 29 seeking a public reading, he sent a batch to Robert Duncan at the Poetry Center, along with a brief cover letter. Spicer encouraged Dick in this endeavor, having credited “three solid years of Duncan” for his ability “to write poetry seriously.”

  Duncan wrote back early in December 6 fearing his criticism might “seem harsh.” He felt Brautigan’s poetry “lacks character, signature. They are curiously uninvolved.” Although Duncan praised “Titles for Unwritten Poems about America,” finding “a certain lively wit at play,” he dismissed the others as inadequate. “We must be ignorant of too much in the originals to be amused.” Thanks to a private grant, the Poetry Center had scheduled a free workshop in the spring of 1957. Instead of offering a reading, Duncan suggested Brautigan test himself in “the open Forum of your contemporaries.” According to Michael McClure, Robert Duncan despised Richard’s poetry and even after Brautigan became successful considered him only “a talented stand-up entertainer.”

  The workshop in question was to be conducted by Jack Spicer. When Spicer returned from Boston “with no job and in a funk,” Duncan pulled strings and juggled the bookkeeping at the Poetry Center, coming up with the funds for Jack’s “Poetry as Magic” workshop. The prospectus read, “This is not a course in technique or ‘how to write.’ It will be a group exploration of the practices of the new magical school of poetry which is best represented in the work of Lorca, Artaud, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan.” Dick Brautigan did not sign up. He’d had enough of classrooms. In any case, every night at The Place became a Spicer seminar.

  Survival remained uppermost on Brautigan’s mind. Departing Grant Avenue for 179 Jessie Street was a move motivated by extreme financial necessity. So broke he could barely pay the rent, Brautigan often didn’t have enough money to eat. He cadged drinks and looked for money on barroom floors and in the gutters of Frisco. He checked the coin returns of pay telephones in hopes of finding stray nickels. At least an hour every day was spent searching the streets for lost change. More than a quarter century later, Richard wrote of that time while staying in another cheap hotel room in Bozeman, Montana. “I walked a lot,” he scrawled in his ever-present notebook. “I walked all over because I didn’t have anything else to do and walking around aimlessly is the cheapest thing in the world to do. I applied for jobs, but nobody wanted to hire me.”

  The squalid room at the Hotel Jessie, where a skinny bar of soap and threadbare sheets and towels were supplied once each week, provided “the entrance to the sleep world” for Richard Brautigan. He washed his shorts and socks in the sink and hung them to dry on a coat hanger suspended in the sliver of sunlight angling in through the dingy window. Richard struggled to come up with the weekly rent. He did not want to lose this last tenuous sanctuary, “a container for my nightmares.” Once, utterly without funds, sitting in the bleakness of his room, watching the neon sign flash outside the window, wondering where he might come up with some cash, his eye fell upon an old alarm clock, which he promptly took to a pawn shop, using the pitiful proceeds to buy himself breakfast.

  Brautigan’s only other liquid asset flowed through his body. He was type A positive, and the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank of the San Francisco Medical Society paid twenty bucks a pint. Richard made his first sale in April when he was issued a Blood Bank Book at the Society’s offices at 270 Masonic. Soon after this, he got lucky and found a job as a bicycle messenger delivering telegrams for Western Union in the Financial District. Well-schooled in the art of frugal living, Dick made do on a minimum wage, eating in local cafeterias, writing in his room late at night, enjoying an occasional two-bit triple feature on Market Street. North Beach was a short bus ride away. Liking to walk, Brautigan often saved the fare.

  Richard continued mailing out his poetry to little magazines around the country from the Hotel Jessie. The winter issue of The Caxton Poetry Review (vol. 1, no. 2) arrived from Ohio, announcing their prizes for the winter quarter. Richard Brautigan had been awarded $1 for “A Correction.” Vera Dickerson won $5 for a poem entitled “San Joaquin Spring.” All in all, winning a buck felt fine. He could eat for a day on six bits and have change left over for a couple drinks at The Place.

  Around this time, Richard paid a visit to the offices of Inferno Press, located in the Hearst Building, just around the corner from his hotel. The editor, Leslie Woolf Hedley, worked for the Hearst Foundation and the Hearst Printing Company. His little San Francisco literary magazine, Inferno (declaring itself “the only independent press functioning in California”) had published its final issue in 1956 after a six-year run. “In those years we have found ourselves censored, libeled & threatened by mccarthyite fascists,” the editor declared as his magazine ceased publication. Hedley thought Brautigan “looked pretty much underfed and lost. He was a very innocent guy. An unhappy kid. We felt sorry for him, of course. And he didn’t talk too much about writing. He was going to write poetry, or something of that nature. I asked him if he wanted to show me some.”

  Richard took to dropping by Leslie Woolf Hedley’s office whenever he had a spare moment. The editor was only a few years older but infinitely wiser and more experienced. “After four years in the Army, I can tell you I did not want to see any more tragedies,” was how he summed it up. Both men were blond. “You know, you look like me,” Richard said to the editor, even though he was seven inches taller than Hedley. He also said he was an orphan, another step in re-creating himself in his new environment. “He kind of th
ought maybe he was an anarchist,” Hedley recalled, “but I think the word was more appealing than the philosophy.” Richard also mentioned having a sister, and Hedley guessed that “he must have felt deeply about her because he said he missed her.”

  When Hedley asked Brautigan how he was getting by, Richard mentioned working as a messenger boy and said he “enjoyed it somewhat.” The editor considered being a bicycle messenger “perhaps the second most dangerous job in San Francisco.” Leslie Woolf Hedley was sympathetic to young Brautigan. He felt sorry for him “because he seemed pitiful. He seemed very innocent at that time.” Richard sat there, talking to the older man, and Hedley listened patiently. “I didn’t ask too many questions because I didn’t think I wanted to interfere with his life.”

  When the editor attempted to turn their conversation to the subject of literature, asking Brautigan what he was reading, Richard came back to the Inferno Press office with a bunch of paperbacks. “And it was cowboy stories. Western stuff.” Richard, the faux naif, never mentioned Hemingway, Cummings, Saroyan, or any of several other literary writers who were important to him. He did eventually show Leslie Woolf Hedley something he had written. The editor’s reply was, “You know, what you’re doing, you’re writing like a sixteen-year-old.”

  “Oh, really,” Richard smiled. “That’s good.”

  Brautigan also spent a lot of time with Ron Loewinsohn. “They were sparkling friends,” Bill Brown remembered. It was, once again, a mismatched Mutt and Jeff pairing, with Ron, like Gary Stewart, standing a head shorter than Dick. Together, they made a curious and distinctive impression on all who met them.

  “Two bright young guys,” thought Joanne Kyger when she first laid eyes on the pair in the spring of 1957 at an art opening in the East/West Gallery. Twenty-three and brimming with vitality and flair, Kyger had arrived in Frisco the previous February, right around the time Mademoiselle ran an article on the San Francisco Renaissance and initiated the uneasy alliance between popular culture and the Beat underground. She came up from UC Santa Barbara, one unit shy of graduation, with her childhood friend the painter Nemi (Emily) Frost, and rented an apartment on Columbus above LaRocca’s Bar. She soon found a job at a Brentano’s in the City of Paris department store.

  The bookstore was something of a crossroads for poets. Joanne had already been introduced to Spicer there. She wanted to join his workshop but was too late. Fifty San Francisco poets had already applied. Spicer winnowed the list to fifteen, through a peculiar “questionnaire” requiring the applicants to answer such odd queries as “What insect do you most resemble?” and “Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet,” and “If you had a chance to eliminate three political figures in the world, which would you choose?” The Poetry as Magic Workshop met every Tuesday night that spring from 7:00 to 10:00 PM in a room on the third floor of the San Francisco Public Library. The group sat around a circular wooden table with Jack Spicer always sitting at the eastern compass point, facing toward west.

  Spicer assigned a poem topic each week (second assignment: How would you cook a baby?). The anointed fifteen never all showed up together on any given evening. The chosen included John Allen Ryan; Robert Duncan (“sitting in”); George Stanley, who worked as a clerk in the Police Department; Joe Dunn, a member of Duncan’s writing class at Black Mountain; Helen Adam; Jack Gilbert; and the “Viking,” Ebbe Borregaard, “an imposing and somewhat frightening creature,” who had served in Korea after becoming locally famous as a teen runaway when his picture appeared on all the front pages of the San Francisco newspapers.

  When Ron and Dick introduced themselves as writers to Joanne Kyger at the East/West Helen Frankenthaler show, she regarded these two younger guys with a jaundiced eye. She had a smile bright as a Pepsodent ad, and her pert good looks deflected attention from her poet’s heart and soul. Loewinsohn declared Wordsworth to be his favorite poet. Joanne’s knee-jerk reaction (“I had studied with Hugh Kenner and I was from T. S. Eliot”) mirrored Ron’s when he learned e. e. cummings (“very much passé”) had been important to Richard.

  Shy Dick Brautigan slyly began a whimsical flirtation with Kyger. “We had this exchange,” she remembered. In a bohemian version of boy meets girl, Richard invited Joanne to take him out to dinner. She was the one with a good job. The next night, they went to Chinatown, ending up at “The Hole,” Woey Loy Goey Café on Jackson Street, an inexpensive basement restaurant much beloved by the Beats. Kyger, “living on a very tight budget,” recalled the place as “the absolute cheapest restaurant you could go to. You could get a bowl of greens and things, with rice, for thirty-five cents. We had this meal together. It was his kind of conversation. I don’t know what kind of conversation it was. It certainly wasn’t literary.”

  After dinner, Dick suggested they walk over to the Beach. “And I hadn’t really been to North Beach,” Joanne Kyger remembered. “I hadn’t found North Beach yet, even though I was living close to it.” Brautigan showed her around upper Grant Avenue, where he was already known on the street. They quickly ran into Mike Nathan, a young teenage painter. An acquaintance of Richard’s, Nathan had a painting displayed in the window of City Lights that portrayed a cop and a priest in the style of Ben Shahn. People thought it a political comment on the March 25 seizure by the Customs Office of the second printing of Howl, printed for City Lights in England by Villiers Publications, Ltd. Richard introduced Nathan to Joanne. “Mike Nathan was immediately charming,” she recalled. “Totally delightful.” Brautigan looked on in dismay while “precocious, lively” Mike commandeered the conversation.

  “Richard was so doltish in his behavior.” Joanne remembered going off with Nathan soon after when he “offered to take me to the Anxious Asp. Then, for the rest of the evening, I was shown up and down Grant Avenue by Mike Nathan, there was Richard hulking and skulking down the other side of the street, looking balefully across at us. It’s not like he was going to come along.”

  “One thing about him,” Bill Brown said of Dick Brautigan upon hearing Joanne Kyger’s story, “he never knew how to cope. He didn’t have the machinery to handle disappointment.”

  Loners don’t often risk close emotional contact. Too much at stake. Brautigan found safety in solitude, having learned the hard way how much unrequited love really hurts. Reborn in the world of his dreams, Dick Brautigan didn’t moon over Joanne Kyger for long. Spinning through downtown Frisco traffic on his messenger’s bike, daydreaming of literary fame and fortune, lost in a private paradise only he could enter, he never noticed the zaftig girl with long brown hair who saw him passing on the street from time to time. She’d wave and say hello. Dick didn’t even glance at her, pedaling erratically away in complete oblivion. The girl, who wore basic bohemian black, decided the strange boy must be a foreigner unable to speak English, some “misplaced count,” possibly Austrian because of his white-blond hair.

  fourteen: ginger

  HER NAME WAS Virginia Dionne Alder, though everybody called her Ginger or Ginny. Dubbed Ginger as a child, she got her new nickname at seventeen from Lester Rosenthal, her college boyfriend. At UCLA, Les had introduced her to “all the counterculture groups. The anarchists. The Trotskyites. The socialists.” A skilled typist, Ginger/Ginny worked for Landelf, Weigel, Ripley and Diamond, a law firm in the Financial District. She shared a cheap apartment on Filbert Street near the top of Telegraph Hill with a roommate, Lenore Yanoff, and with Les Rosenthal, who recently moved back into her life.

  Ginny Alder was born in Rexburg, Idaho, in 1934, but her family moved when she was a year old and she grew up in Southern California, in Reseda, in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. She majored in political science at UCLA, also studying journalism and writing for the Bruin, the university newspaper. Les Rosenthal brought her to readings in Santa Monica, where she met the poet Stan Persky. It was the first time she had ever heard anyone read poetry aloud. Sue Goya, married at the time to actor/screenwriter Zekial Marko, herself a poet and an habitué of The Place, remembered Ginny
as “a great big sexy lady.” Donald Allen, coeditor of the Evergreen Review and an early champion of Brautigan’s work, recalled a “tall, slow-moving, wide-hipped girl.” Ron Loewinsohn knew Ginny (as he always called her) through her roommate. Lenore had once been his girlfriend but now was just a pal. He thought Ginny “very articulate and sharp; a delightful person, witty, charming, faithful.”

  One day, Ron and Dick sat in a North Beach Laundromat watching the dryers spin when Ginny arrived with a load of washing. Ron provided the introduction, but some other magic lit the spark. Ginny invited them both to a party up at her place later that night. In “Gone Since Then,” an unpublished short story written in the late 1950s, Richard recalled heading up Telegraph Hill with “R.” They climbed the rickety, unpainted wooden Greenwich Street stairway leading steeply up from Sansome Street.

  The stairs, landscaped on either side by banks of fuchsia, ivy, lilies, and roses, intersected private paths and country lanes where bohemians once lived among flocks of feral parrots after the’06 quake, building shacks of salvaged lumber in sloping pastures thick with nasturtium, wild mustard, and dog fennel. Dick and Ron soon encountered someone they both knew, a two-hundred-pound brawler called “Big T,” coming down the steps with a bunch of his friends. Big T had just backhanded a junkie across the face for “acting like an asshole.” The junkie’s girlfriend fainted, and it was time to leave the festivities. “Where’s the party,” Dick wanted to know.