Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  “There.” Big T pointed to a house by the stair-turning, every window ablaze with light. “He didn’t sound too happy,” Brautigan observed.

  Dick and Ron “swirled through the party like water through the cooling systems of a car.” Tatami mats from Chinatown covered the crooked floors. The place resonated with the discordant vibes of the recent Big T incident. The two young poets were both quickly drunk.

  According to Brautigan, Loewinsohn “was on a big Rimbaud kick. He was writing his season in hell and sleeping in the back seats of strange cars.” Ginny’s apartment had a fabulous view overlooking the Bay. In the nineteenth century, quarries gouged away the eastern side of Telegraph Hill, leaving blasted cliffs in exchange for landfill and ballast. The old wooden building looked down a hundred feet through vines and bushes and treetops to the rusting factories and abandoned brick warehouses clustered among unused train tracks in a “bleak industrial neighborhood” below. Ron climbed out through a window and sat on the roof to enjoy the view, “saying weird things at the stars.” The Rimbaud thing shifted into high gear. Dick wandered off looking for a girl to kiss, “and that’s how I met my wife, as they say in Rome.”

  Ginny remembered being struck by Richard’s personality. She found him “very naive,” an attractive attribute in the world of North Beach cool. She took the tall shy blond boy by the hand, led him to her room, and discovered a total innocent. Ginny had never guessed he was still a virgin. The two became a couple right from the start. Les Rosenthal bowed out gracefully. “They were just absolutely starry-eyed,” Ron Loewinsohn recalled. “They were really in love, and it was delightful. They were a delightful couple to be around.” Ginny called him Richard, at a time when he was still “Dick” to most of his friends. She had a brother named Richard, so it seemed natural.

  Richard had recently vacated the Hotel Jessie and was living in the apartment of a young single mother in exchange for babysitting services. They spoke to each other in a “secret Venusian language” of their own improvised invention. Richard moved in with Ginny after she broke things off with Les. In keeping with the relaxed attitude of the time, all three remained fast friends. Richard quickly became familiar with the wooden steps outside, walking to buy milk and bread at the corner market over on Union and Montgomery. Ginny noticed he could not pass his reflection in a mirror or shop window without looking at himself. She thought Richard wanted reassurance that he was really there.

  On his next visit to the apartment after Richard moved in with Ginny, Ron Loewinsohn saw that she had “set up a kind of shrine” to the new poet in her life. Ginny placed a photograph of Richard along with handwritten copies of his poems mounted on cardboard display stands on an orange crate in the company of several “small candles and terra-cotta Buddhas.”

  During this period, Brautigan continued reading his poetry regularly at The Place. Carol Lind, an artist from Minnesota who lived downstairs from Ginny, painted a large canvas featuring all the regulars that she titled Which Poet? Richard was featured prominently in the painting, distinguishable by his long blond bangs. He took a liking to the picture and brought it over to The Place, where he hung it on the back wall directly behind him when he read.

  Brautigan was reading a lot of William Saroyan when he first met Virginia Alder. Saroyan’s deft early stories spun the straw of life’s commonplace moments into magical gold, creating a distinctly personal world in an easy offhand manner. Richard recognized familiar territory. Lean. Minimal. The wise comic voice. Ginny remembered his fondness for Saroyan and others. “He loved Jack London, and he loved Hemingway, and he loved e. e. cummings in the same way. Eudora Welty. But if you asked him if Hemingway was an influence, he would have said no. He said that ‘all poetry simply goes into the air and then you breathe.’”

  Richard Brautigan felt inclined toward poets who practiced a sinuous stripped-down art. Sappho and Bashō were particular favorites. Robert Briggs, a fellow writer who first met Richard in North Beach in 1957, remembered Brautigan’s high regard for the work of Kenneth Patchen and their discussions of Patchen’s famous poem “The Lute in the Attic.” According to Virginia, Patchen’s poetry “was one of the first things we talked about.”

  Brautigan also admired the Patchen novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight, a book whose evanescent charms presaged many of the attributes of his own later work. Briggs recalled Richard’s deep concern about Patchen’s health. The older poet suffered from a degenerative spinal disease and endured continuous pain. He needed a cane to get around in North Beach and had recently moved to Sierra Court, a dead-end street just off the freeway in Palo Alto, where he was confined to the house under the care of his wife, Miriam.

  Always eager for literary conversation, Brautigan never talked about his past. For entertainment, he and Ginny hung out at The Place and other joints along upper Grant. One Sunday afternoon, while visiting Mike Nathan’s new storefront studio in North Beach, they encountered a hefty mustachioed painter who took classes with Mike at the Art Institute. Born in Salinas and a veteran of the Korean War, Kenn Davis was the brother of Zekial Marko. Nathan had invited him to have a look at his newfound space, having promised to “break open a bottle of red and celebrate.” Davis enjoyed Nathan’s company because they both “had the same kind of goofy sense of humor.”

  Humor later provided a close connection to Richard Brautigan, but when Kenn first encountered “this tall blond guy,” Dick “seemed a little off-put by the fact that I was even there.”

  Mike Nathan quickly made the introductions, calling Brautigan “a wonderful poet.” The young painter sounded enthusiastic. “You’ve got to read his stuff,” he insisted. As they shook hands, Davis’s name “struck a bell,” and Richard turned to Ginny, saying, “Remember that guy? The painting we saw at the Artist’s Cooperative last week and I said I really liked it? It had some nice magical provocative kind of qualities.” Ginny remembered, and because Mike Nathan had things to do, the three new friends left the gallery together. Kenn Davis, a self-described “sucker for flattery,” responded to their enthusiasm for his work. They ended up spending the remainder of the day “just talking—sitting on park benches and stuff.”

  This first meeting took place a couple months after Kenn’s twenty-fifth birthday. “I remember we got into a bit of comic interlude about people who are pushing thirty,” Davis said. “Anybody past twenty-five as far as [Brautigan] was concerned was pushing thirty, and that was me.” Kenn recollected that not too long after he met Richard, Mike Nathan’s “brains got scrambled. The state got their hands on him and sent him off to some sanitarium and gave him shock treatments for about three months. My God, I could barely even talk to him. Mike could have turned out to be one hell of a painter. But after he came out of the hospital, I’d see him on the street and he’d be talking to himself and moving his hands around in the air like he’s touching angels.” Davis knew nothing at the time about Brautigan’s similar ordeal but remembered that “Richard was much more sympathetic with Mike about this.”

  Dick and Ginny frequently went to the cheap rerun movies at the Times Theater with a group of friends. Along with Ron Loewinsohn and Les Rosenthal, this diverse gang also included Kenn Davis and another artist, Frank Curtin, whose father was an editor at the Call-Bulletin. The films they enjoyed were mostly B-movie trash. Frank Curtin and Richard soon became regular drinking buddies, vodka being Curtin’s beverage of choice, while Brautigan favored sweet red port at a dime a glass or cheap Cribari jug wine. Ron Loewinsohn remained much impressed with Richard’s capacity as a drinker. “He was incredibly able to hold his liquor,” he recalled. “He really was astonishing.”

  A printed form letter, dated April 10, 1957, arrived from Inferno Press soliciting contributions for Five New Poets, a softcover collection in preparation and scheduled for release before Christmas. Leslie Woolf Hedley asked for “at least” twelve published or unpublished poems, a brief biography, and a stamped self-addressed envelope. Payment for acceptance would be ten co
pies of the book. Hedley himself did no editing on this book. Someone else involved with the press suggested the idea, and Hedley said, “Okay. You pick out your own.” Dick Brautigan brought a dozen poems to the Inferno Press office.

  At the same time, Richard entertained his own publishing notions. One of his poems, “The Return of the Rivers,” struck him as worthy of appearing om its own as a broadside. Leslie Woolf Hedley agreed to print a hundred copies at no charge as a favor to the young poet. Inferno Press expected no percentage of any eventual sales. Hedley just wanted to give “orphan” Dick a helping hand.

  Sometime in May, Richard picked up the finished sheets of The Return of the Rivers and bought a pack of black construction paper. With Ron Loewinsohn joining in, they sat in Ginny’s living room folding and gluing the folio pages into improvised black covers. They pasted white two-by-three-inch labels onto the center of the front covers. Richard signed his name in ink above the printed colophon of Inferno Press, a final step in the production of his first “book.” Ron thought his new friend “a pretty enterprising young man, always on the lookout to publish, occasions to read, even though he always wanted to make an appearance of being above that.”

  Many copies of The Return of the Rivers were given away to friends. Richard peddled a few in North Beach bars for a buck a copy. The rest went to City Lights and other “obscure” local bookstores. Kenn Davis held a day job at an insurance company and was the only one in the group with a car. He transported copies to Berkeley bookstores in his old Chevy. Ginny remembered “a big argument” over how much to charge. The profits were quickly spent on wine and a couple cheap Chinatown dinners. A surviving copy of The Return of the Rivers sold recently on the rare book market for $7,500.

  In June, Richard proposed. “Why don’t we go to Reno and get married?” he asked in a matter-of-fact way. Ginny agreed. For a wedding present, she gave him a used pink electric Royal typewriter. They rode a bus together to Nevada to tie the knot. Methodist minister Rev. Stephen C. Thomas pronounced them man and wife on Saturday, June 8, with Ace W. Williams (a stranger, who just happened to be in the wedding chapel) and Agnes Thomas, the minister’s wife, standing up as witnesses.

  After returning from a brief Reno honeymoon, Richard and Ginny moved into a two-room attic apartment with a shared kitchen at 1565 Washington Street, above Chinatown on the slope of Nob Hill right on the corner across from the cable car barn. There was a small struggling theater downstairs, no more than ten or twenty seats. Performances competed with the continuous grinding noise of the cable under the street outside. Late at night, when the Powell–Mason Line shut down for a few hours, Richard and Ginny were startled awake by the sudden silence.

  The newlyweds were quite happy in their new apartment, in spite of various inconveniences. The bathroom was off the hall. When it rained, the roof leaked by the door. Love always helps in such circumstances. Ron Loewinsohn remembered how Ginny and Dick “just fell madly in love.” He also observed that Ginny was “madly in love with [Brautigan’s] work,” an asset for an aspiring young writer. Ginny typed his manuscripts, edited his copy, organized his business affairs, encouraged him to keep in touch with editors and publishers. She also paid the rent.

  Wanting to do his share, Brautigan came up with an amusing contribution to the family’s monthly expense needs. He organized a rent party. Such affairs had been commonplace in New York’s Harlem and Greenwich Village during the twenties, when a hot piano player and a bathtub full of rotgut booze provided the come-on. Richard had no live entertainment to offer and invented an ingenious promotional device. He posted handbills all over North Beach advertising the event as a fund-raiser to buy the host a gorilla suit.

  Kenn Davis remembered Brautigan’s rent party on Washington Street with much amusement. “And we actually had total strangers. Total strangers! Like tourists wandered in and said, ‘Where’s the guy that wants to buy the gorilla suit?’ And here are these guys from like Tuscaloosa or Tampa or San Jose. And Dick was, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to wear a gorilla suit. Don’t you think I’d look great in a gorilla suit?’”

  Richard Brautigan wasn’t unemployed yet, but his paycheck remained marginal at best. In mid-July he made another trip to the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank. He had quit work as a bike messenger and had a new part-time job “folding pieces of green paper” at an office on Clay Street, down from the Federal Reserve Bank. Brautigan described this experience in Part 3 of “A Couple Novels,” an unpublished story from the sixties that survives only in fragments. He had no idea what the green paper was for or why he was folding it. “Nobody ever told me and I never asked.”

  Part-time employment allowed ample time for writing and provided the luxury of leisure. Richard Brautigan loved to wander the city and people-watch. “He did a lot of hanging out,” Ron Loewinsohn said. “He walked a great deal, all around the Financial District, Chinatown, North Beach, that whole area in San Francisco. I don’t know that he ever took notes so much, but certainly he was taking mental notes. He would hang out in bookstores, not just City Lights, but any bookstore. He would hang out in parks, sit on a park bench and watch people go along.”

  Two significant San Francisco literary events occurred during the summer of 1957. Most noteworthy was the Howl obscenity trial. On May 29, after federal prosecutors declined to initiate condemnation proceedings, U.S. Customs released 520 copies of the second printing it had been holding since March. Three days later, two plainclothes San Francisco police officers, acting under orders from Captain William Hanrahan of the juvenile division, arrested bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao at City Lights on charges of selling obscene literature after purchasing a copy of Howl from him. An arrest warrant was also issued for publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  The trial began in mid-August with Judge Clayton Horn, one of four city police magistrates, presiding over a 150-seat courtroom crowded to capacity with reporters and other onlookers. Jack Spicer became a regular spectator. More than legal matters interested him. He was “cruised” at the trial by a young redheaded aspiring painter named Russell FitzGerald, who later became his lover. Counsel for the defense was famed trial lawyer Jake (“Never Plead Guilty”) Ehrlich. Nine distinguished expert witnesses (including Mark Schorer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Luther Nichols, and Kenneth Rexroth) testified in person supporting Ginsberg’s poem.

  On the third of October, Judge Horn delivered his decision. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was not guilty of publishing and selling obscene material. (Charges against Shig Murao had been dropped a week after the start of the trial.) The case provided excellent business for Ferlinghetti, ensuring the future success of his City Lights Books publishing venture. “Big Day for Bards at Bay,” declared a September Life magazine photo essay that made Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti famous almost overnight. By the time the media circus came to an end, more than ten thousand copies of Howl were in print.

  Richard Brautigan talked about the trial with his friends, Ferlinghetti’s legal troubles being a hot topic in North Beach that summer. Howl had been prominently displayed in the front window of City Lights all during the legal proceedings. Allen Ginsberg was off in Europe with Peter Orlovsky but remained the man of the moment on the Frisco poetry scene.

  When Evergreen Review, no. 2, appeared in local bookstores in June, it became the other talked-about event of the summer. Published in New York City, the new periodical devoted its entire second issue to the “San Francisco Scene.” Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Kerouac were among the contributors, along with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Josephine Miles, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Henry Miller. The fledgling Evergreen Review was a vibrant publication, focusing national attention on the remarkable literary talent flowering in San Francisco. For a relative newcomer like Brautigan, reading the second issue vindicated his decision to move to the city. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had Paris in the twenties; this time around, Frisco in the fifties was the place to be.

  Spicer’s contribution to the
new quarterly suited Richard’s lean aesthetics. Unlike the improvised excesses of Kerouac (“That’s not writing; that’s typing,” waspish Truman Capote hissed on a TV talk show), Spicer’s measured, minimal work chose each word with lapidary precision. A remarkable short story, “The Scroll-work on the Casket,” presented profound object lessons in his precise (yet curiously oblique) use of language, at once straightforward yet utterly unafraid of the unexpected. To achieve just such a mysterious economy with words became Brautigan’s goal.

  The freewheeling salon centered on Jack Spicer at The Place found less boisterous surroundings once he began spending every afternoon at Aquatic Park, a convenient cove on San Francisco Bay where the great curving arm of the Municipal Pier embraced the Maritime Museum’s collection of nineteenth-century sailing ships. The park fronted the Maritime Museum, a 1939 WPA art deco building, originally a public bathhouse designed to resemble an ocean liner. Rows of concrete bleachers overlooking the tiny strip of beach provided a favorite sunbathing spot. Here, or on the grassy slope above, joined by his friends and disciples, Spicer listened to baseball games on his inexpensive leather-covered portable radio, read books and newspapers, and held forth on the magic nature of poetry, always sitting with his back to the water.

  When Spicer’s workshop at the public library came to an end that summer, remnants of the group continued to meet informally on Sunday afternoons in the ground-floor Jackson Street apartment of Joe and Carolyn Dunn, where the shades were drawn to ensure privacy and provide the appropriate ambiance. Duncan and Spicer continued as resident sages, with the former enthroned in a plush easy chair, the latter hulking cross-legged on the wine-stained rug. Among the devotees occupying the Salvation Army furniture were George Stanley, Ebbe Borregaard, and James Broughton. Joanne Kyger, having missed out on the Magic Workshop, began attending regularly along with her friend Nemi Frost and another painter, Jerome Mallman.