Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  September 1959 saw the first appearance of Foot, a new magazine edited by San Francisco–born poet Richard Duerden, in his spacious two-story Haight-Ashbury apartment on Rivoli Street. A handsome production, Foot boasted clean-set type, sewn signatures, and orange wrappers with a cover design of paired feet by Robert Duncan. The first issue contained five poems by Richard Brautigan, as well as work by Duerden, Philip Whalen, Ebbe Borregaard, and Robert Duncan.

  Richard Duerden’s artistic philosophy struck a sympathetic chord with Brautigan. “I never look back,” Duerden said. “I find it distasteful. The art of my life is like driving on the freeway. I go from place to place, never revise.” Duerden was three years older than Brautigan, who wrote “A Poem for Richard Duerden” about the gap in their ages. Still unpublished, the poem imagines “the difference / in years between us, is like a long line of salmon / stacking up in the pools, waiting to / go up the rapids.”

  Sitting with Brautigan in a North Beach bar, Duerden said, “Richard, I’ll tell you what. You write a poem for me, and I’ll write a poem for you.” Brautigan immediately jotted a few lines down on a slip of paper and passed them over to Duerden.

  Richard, I’ll tell you what:

  Richard, I’ll tell you what:

  You write a poem for me and

  I’ll write a poem for you.

  “Done.”

  Duerden read what his friend had written and added a penciled footnote to the right-hand margin: “Well all right.” Brautigan told Duerden he was quitting poetry for prose. Duerden asked why. “I don’t want to sit at the children’s table anymore,” Richard Brautigan said.

  Jack Spicer’s mimeograph publication J was another new magazine born that same September. Inspired by the launch of Beatitude and “made envious, scornful, and competitive” by Bob Kaufman’s editorial participation in a successful venture, he envisioned a deliberately “amateur” magazine at the opposite end of the spectrum from the inbred university journals he detested. Spicer selected all the material for J himself, soliciting work from friends and leaving a box for random contributions on the bar at The Place. The first issue, sixteen pages long with a print run of three hundred copies, contained poetry by Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Joe Dunn, and Richard Brautigan (“The Fever Monument”), among others. It sold for a quarter.

  J made a point to appear homemade. Spicer was influenced by the growing “funk/assemblage” art movement blossoming in San Francisco. Artists such as Bruce Conner (who had moved to Frisco the previous September), George Herms, Jess (pasting up fanciful collages and reimagined comic strips), and Wallace Berman (whose 1957 show at the Ferus Gallery in L.A. was credited with starting the entire trend) were all working with discarded objects (nylon stockings, scraps of fur and feathers, all manner of assorted junk), the throwaway detritus of an overindulgent society.

  Wallace Berman’s beautiful and singular publication, Semina, lasting for only nine “issues” from 1955 to 1964, had a distinctive handmade look, no two numbers being alike either in size or format and each taking up to six months to produce. Semina was not for sale. Berman gave the copies away to friends, just as he solicited friends for material and help in the assemblage. It was produced in limited editions, its impact felt throughout the Frisco literary and artistic communities. “Semina’s a real outlaw act,” Michael McClure observed, “as complex as outlaws in the Old West, as sexy and cool and hip and pop—and at the same time religious.” The erudite Jack Spicer was well aware of Semina. Richard Brautigan’s later seed-packet self-publication, Please Plant This Book, paid unspoken tribute to Wallace Berman’s visionary creation.

  Spicer soon tired of the effort involved in putting out a magazine, even with Fran Herndon assisting with the typing and layout and writing rejection letters. (“‘Stick this poetry up your ass!’ I had to say. I can’t believe I did it. But I did.”) J quietly folded after five issues. Spicer’s attention seemed more focused on his new book of poetry, Billy the Kid, which appeared in October with illustrations by Jess. The fifth and final issue (December 1959) ran “1942,” Richard’s moving elegy on the death of his uncle Edward.

  From the start, Brautigan set his sights on broader literary horizons than the small in-group audience delineated by the limited circulation of little poetry magazines. Just as he had submitted short stories to Playboy after graduating from high school, Richard mailed many of his new poems to establishment publications back east. His wife handled all the office work, typing the poetry, keeping up with correspondence, making sure the envelopes had enough postage. “I sent dozens of short poems to The New Yorker,” Ginny remembered, “to The Nation, to The Atlantic. It was long before he started getting popular.”

  The fall of 1959 brought Richard Brautigan his first published critical notices. Gene Frumkin, editor of Coastline 13, reviewed Lay the Marble Tea in vol. 4, no. 1. In “A Step Toward Perception,” he praised Brautigan’s “crisp, lucid commentary.” The autumn issue of The Galley Sail Review ran a two-page review by Robert Brotherson, “A Poet and his World.” Brotherson praised the opening line of “Sonnet” before proceeding to quote the rest of the poem to demonstrate that “Mr. Brautigan has turned cute on us.”

  All that fall, Beat-mania turned its mercenary gaze on North Beach. Fueled by intense media attention and the many “beatnik” characters channeled into the American subconscious by the Hollywood dream machine, legions of ordinary Americans descended on bohemia. Daily tour buses cruised by City Lights and Bread and Wine. Pierre Delattre began to feel as if he “was putting on some kind of show.” He didn’t like the feeling. “When the tour bus passed, the man with the megaphone would point me out in my sweatshirt and cross. I was another monkey in the zoo.” In retribution, before quitting Bread and Wine, Delattre and a bunch of North Beach regulars rented their own bus and toured the downtown business district, dressed in outrageous costumes, harassing the “squares” and commenting through loudspeakers on the lifestyles of the men in gray flannel suits.

  As the epicenter of hipness moved away from North Beach, the diaspora did not settle in any particular neighborhood. Small bohemian homesteads sprang up in odd corners of the city. Ebbe Borregaard rented two floors of a Victorian house at 1713 Buchanan Street in Japantown and set about converting the space into a gallery. Ginny Brautigan remembered going over during the fall of 1959 to help Ebbe and his wife, Joy, paint the walls white and hang curtains. The place opened as Ebbe Borregaard’s Museum. Soon after, in mid-April of 1960, Jack Spicer read the thirty pieces in his new work, “Homage to Creeley,” at Borregaard’s. The Brautigans were among the enthusiastic gathering of poets (including Philip Whalen, Ron Loewinsohn, George Stanley, and Robin Blaser) crowding into the small rooms to hear him read the poem through three times, with a break for intermission before the last go-round.

  Sometime in January (1960), Richard and Ginny traveled down south to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley to visit her folks. Richard’s father-in-law, Grover Cleveland Alder, was seventy and about to become a grandfather for the second time. Everyone called the old man “G.C.”

  Richard liked listening to tales of his youth on a farm in Nebraska and of teaching school and later working as a car salesman in the early adventurous days of the automobile industry, when dozens of different brands competed in the marketplace.

  Always a military buff, Richard enjoyed hearing G.C.’s aerial adventures in the First World War. Grover Cleveland Alder flew a de Havilland bomber in the flak-filled skies over France, chasing glory and rainbows in the innocent belief that he would live forever. He joined the Army at twenty-seven and had almost been turned down for pilot training because of his age. He was demobilized in 1919 with the rank of captain. Ginny left Idaho with her parents while she was still an infant and didn’t know anything of her history there, so Richard asked G.C. about what he did after the war.

  His father-in-law told him about moving up to the area around Rexburg, where he went into banking and ranching, married a pretty schoolteacher a
lmost half his age, and prospered for a time before getting wiped out in the stock market crash of 1929. Four small-town banks and a grocery store gone forever, his ranch mortgaged to the hilt, G.C. began raising sheep, hanging on until 1934, when disease wiped out his flocks. After selling the land to pay off their debts, the family moved to California, where Ginny’s father worked parking cars in Hollywood and later as a construction company bookkeeper and real estate salesman. Richard listened to the old man chronicle his rise and fall, observing his not-so-secret drinking. Having a taste for sweet wine himself, Richard shared a glass or two with G.C. He certainly knew where the bottles were hidden in the kitchen. Ginny’s father could no longer afford the whiskey he preferred.

  After their return to San Francisco, on the evening of Richard’s twenty-fifth birthday, Joanne Kyger sailed for Japan aboard the Nachiharu-maru, planning to marry Gary Snyder and study Zen. Brautigan had not had much contact with her since their aborted “date” in North Beach three years before and did not attend Kyger’s boisterous farewell party at the East-West House. Fed up with other raucous late-night drunken misbehavior, Ginny took off, heading south again to her parents’ place. Richard was desperate to get her back. Flat broke as usual, he lacked the funds to go after her and plead his case in person.

  Stan Fullerton came to the rescue. At the time he lived on lower Columbus Avenue above a pizza and beer joint, a place Brautigan called “the green shelf.” Although Stan was sympathetic to his friend, he believed him to be at fault. “Richard’s selfishness always drove people away from him,” Fullerton said. The painter understood Virginia’s plight. He saw her as “mother earth caring for her dippy genius. Ginny carried the whole ball with dismal office jobs. Richard was her first child. He was not financially responsible, or emotionally able, to handle a whole family.” Nevertheless, Stan agreed to help. Always a frugal man (he stored a large canister of Japanese rice along with canned fish and Asian vegetables under his bed), Fullerton saved all his pennies in a large jar. It came to $57 worth of copper. He gave this money to Richard, who used it to travel down to Reseda and bring his wife home.

  Sometime early in March (“feeling the spring about me”), Richard Brautigan began a journal. Impending fatherhood enhanced his introspection. Springtime brought him down. Richard called it “the half-assed San Francisco spring” and felt the season went “against the development of myself.” It had been over a month since he’d had sex with his wife. This also depressed him. “I felt my body growing away from me like an old man taking out his teeth in the middle of the night.”

  Try as he might, Richard could not envision the fast-approaching birth of his child. “Skim milk” and a “dirty sock” seemed more real to him.

  Ginny went into labor on the morning of March 25, 1960. Richard brought her to the University of California Medical Center at 505 Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco. He stayed by her side until she was taken into the delivery room. Around 7:00 PM, Ginny gave birth to a seven-pound, eleven-ounce baby girl. A photograph of Richard holding his newborn child cradled in his arms with his red beard and bangs cut unevenly across his forehead shows him unsmiling and oddly haunted.

  Twenty-five days earlier, Tom and Shirley, their friends at the top of Potrero Hill, also had a daughter. The Lipsetts named their little girl Cadence. Ginny remembered “lots and lots” of discussion on what to call their own new baby. The Brautigans’ second choice was Selena, but in the end they settled on Ianthe, the name Percy Bysshe Shelley picked in 1813 for his daughter by his first wife, Harriet. In Greek mythology, Ianthe married Iphis, who lived an intriguing transsexual life. Born a Cretan maiden, Iphis was disguised as a boy by her mother because her father had commanded that all of his daughters be slain. When Iphis fell in love with beautiful Ianthe, the goddess Io (who had herself once been changed into a white heifer by Zeus) transformed her into the man she pretended to be. Taking the edge off the mythological, Richard and Ginny gave their new daughter a middle name: Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan.

  Stanley Fullerton thought Ianthe’s nursery room on Mississippi Street “small and ugly,” so he bought a few gallons of white acrylic paint and primed the walls, sticking canvas to the still-wet paint. After work the next day, Stan drew life-sized animals on the canvas, colorful long-necked giraffes, droll fat frogs, and various other gaudy amphibians, cavorting about the walls like illustrations from a giant children’s book. Fullerton worked “in about four colors.” He remembered the paint costing a lot but remained philosophical about the expense. Stan obviously cared for Richard, “who when the mood was upon him could have made the Mona Lisa giggle and beg to be screwed then and there. He had a carnival, perhaps a whole circus, of faces that seemed to turn on and off like the tides controlled by a remote planet none of us had ever heard of.”

  Richard Brautigan, who had never known his own father, instinctively became a devoted parent. When Ginny returned to work at a new job, Richard stayed home with the baby. Being a modern dad didn’t foreclose on Brautigan’s freewheeling lifestyle. On the Saturday night before Easter, 1960, ten days after his daughter’s birth, Richard decided to take off and see three bad movies on Market Street. “A Western, a film about alligator people, and a crime flick.”

  Ginny couldn’t understand why he wanted “to go downtown and see those shitty films.” She wondered why he didn’t just stay home and write.

  “To hell with it,” Richard replied. He was in the mood for B movies. Ginny relented. As long as he was going all the way downtown, why not stop off at a drugstore and buy Ianthe her first Easter bunny?

  Richard said he’d “think about it,” and caught a bus to Market Street. Once downtown, he made a beeline for Merrill’s Drugstore. His destination was not the toy aisle. He headed straight for “the cheap booze section,” to pick up a pint of something to take with him into the movies. As he scanned the labels, trying to decide between cheap gin, whiskey, or brandy, his attention was drawn to something odd. Brautigan recorded the moment in a rough-draft typescript he called “Poet’s Easter.” It was an example of found art, a creative element he came to use with increasing frequency in his writing. “The dishonety [sic] of the lables [sic] on one of the bottles of brandy catches my eye IDeath supreamd [sic] California Brandy.”

  April 1960 saw the publication of Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, which placed the Beat poets firmly on the critical landscape for the first time. Because of this book, Don Carpenter referred to Allen as “the man who invented the Beat generation.” There was much consternation among the Frisco poetry world over who was “in” and who was “out.” Among the included were Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Edward Dorn, and Jack Spicer (along with the predictable in-crowd: Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky).

  The anointed younger poets were Lew Welch, Richard Duerden, Michael McClure, Ebbe Borregaard, John Wieners, Ron Loewinsohn, and David Meltzer. Richard Brautigan was left out in the cold, along with Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, Jory Sherman, and many others. Much jealousy and a sense of betrayal infected several of those omitted. Brautigan displayed no reaction at not being grouped with his contemporaries in this groundbreaking volume.

  Life as a new father kept Richard Brautigan “very busy.” He mentioned this in a letter to Sam Broder, a new friend from L.A., who he’d met only briefly. Brautigan wrote that he was trying to find the time to write and that some of his poems were being “used by a dance group for a production at UCLA.” This also took up a lot of his time. “Telephone rings, a voice says, ‘Would you please come to such and such a place and watch us dance to your poems? And let us know what you think of it and we are all dying to meet you.’”

  The telephone voice belonged to dancer Ann Halprin, an early Brautigan reader who later resumed her birth name, Anna. Originally from Winnetka, Illinois, and married to noted Bay Area landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, she founded the avant-
garde San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1955. Anna Halprin always kept on the alert for experimental material that might translate into movement. She had been working with poet/filmmaker James Broughton and came across a copy of Brautigan’s The Galilee Hitch-Hiker at City Lights several months after its publication. Intrigued by the fanciful imagery, she immediately saw the possibilities of using “The Flowerburgers” as a dance. “In those days, all of us that were working to create new art were very interrelated,” Halprin recalled. “We all knew each other. There was a lot of cross-fertilization going on.”

  Anna Halprin contacted Richard, suggesting her idea for a “Flowerburger” piece. “It never occurred to him that his poetry could be used in performance art.” Richard was delighted with the notion and gave immediate approval. John Graham, a member of Dancers’ Workshop Company, had been an actor first, and Anna Halprin felt influenced by his “ability to be comfortable with words.” No one before had thought to combine voice and movement. “It was the first time dancers had ever used the spoken word,” Halprin said. “Now you can’t get dancers to shut up.”

  Watching his own work interpreted in another medium awakened new worlds for Brautigan. Although he never went to any of their rehearsals, Richard was in attendance at the first public performance of The Flowerburger by the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop at The Interplayers Theater. This small performance space was founded in 1946 by Kermit Sheets and Adrian Wilson, conscientious objectors who’d met during the war at camp 56 (the “Fine Art Camp”) at Waldport on the Oregon coast.

  The Flowerburger featured three dancers from the company, Anna Halprin, John Graham, and A. A. Leath. Their costumes came from a thrift shop on McAllister Street. Graham wore tails. Leath had on a black suit. By way of contrast, Anna Halprin was in white, “kind of a funny lacy dress.” They worked with three chairs in a line on a bare stage. There was no music. The three dancers took turns reciting The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. Instead of doing it straight, they juxtaposed the lines, intermixing words from one poem with those of another, creating an entirely new poem in the process. The dancers declaimed Brautigan’s poetry, standing or sitting, sometimes falling to the floor, each performer’s movement contrasting with the others. “We were doing a lot of experimenting,” Halprin said.