Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Allen was the coeditor of the Evergreen Review and West Coast editor for Grove Press. Don finished Trout Fishing in America not knowing when he’d “enjoyed reading a first work so much.” He’d been primed by Jack Spicer’s passion for Brautigan’s book, yet nothing had prepared him for the pleasure and surprise arising from every page. Allen conveyed his excitement to Richard, wanting both Grove and the Evergreen Review to have a look.

  In mid-December, Allen wrote to Richard Seaver (managing editor of Grove Press) to express his enthusiasm in detail. He praised the novel’s “wonderful tone: Western laconic, yet alert both to sound and to play of surrealistic image; when it is really working it’s rather like an expert tall tale teller holding you spellbound [. . .] entertained, and yet left with a definite moral point of view.” Allen found “many of the sections [. . .] stunningly successful,” at the same time emphasizing his belief that the book also worked as a whole.

  Following his success with The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, Donald Allen, along with Robert Creeley, was coediting a companion anthology of new prose for Black Cat Books. He wanted to use several sections from Trout Fishing in America in that volume and suggested to Seaver that “a group of them would be fine for ER.” Allen listed thirteen sections from the novel that he “particularly liked.” These included “The Kool-Aid Wino,” “The Salt Creek Coyotes,” and “Lake Josephus Days.” He marked two favorites with a triple asterisk (***): “Trout Death by Port Wine” and “The Hunchback Trout,” but said it was up to “whoever chooses for ER” to assemble a selection that worked well together.

  Donald Allen admitted Brautigan was “far out as they say,” but felt “he has much promise [. . .] for one thing he is not satisfied with repeating himself. After this he’ll be trying something considerably different.” He asked for an “early decision” from Seaver, stressing that “it deserves serious consideration as an Evergreen.” Don passed all of this information on to Richard, brightening his holiday prospects. It was indeed the season to be jolly, and Richard Brautigan had every reason to celebrate. Ianthe was two and a half, exactly the right age for Christmas. Her parents gave her a little tree just her size, decorated with plastic toy dinosaurs, and she dragged it around with her from room to room. The future glowed with promise.

  The Saturday night before Christmas, Richard and Ginny threw a big party in their Union Street apartment. Their friends considered Yuletide a dreary holiday. The Brautigans “wanted to break the spell of the Christmas gloom.” A parade of poets and artists trooped up the long flight of stairs. The crowded rooms rang loud with laughter and an intense rumble of overlapping conversations. All of Brautigan’s dreams were coming true.

  The nightmare started the following Tuesday, shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve. Richard and Ginny had just had sex. In their ensuing conversation, Ginny revealed she had fallen in love with Tony Aste. Richard asked if they were having an affair. Ginny said yes. Stunned, Brautigan phoned Ron Loewinsohn and told him that he and his wife were separating. “Richard was absolutely devastated,” Loewinsohn remembered. He agreed to give Brautigan a place to stay and said he’d be right over to pick him up.

  Richard stuffed all his clothes and papers into two suitcases. He gathered his notebooks and manuscripts, stray poems, the beginning chapters of his novel in progress. When Ron arrived, Ginny was in the bedroom trying to sleep. He waited for fifteen minutes while Richard looked high and low for odd bits of his writing. “I spent the time searching for pieces of paper,” Brautigan wrote later, “finding pieces of paper, searching and finding, looking among the obvious and the lost for pieces of paper [. . .]” Richard felt “as they must in times of war when an Army Headquarters has to abandon itself before the enemy.” At last, they sped off into the night in Ron’s car, heading for Loewinsohn’s apartment ( number 4) at 1056 Fourteenth Street above Market near Castro. It was late, and there seemed no need for further conversation. Richard curled up in a sleeping bag on the couch and fell into a fitful sleep.

  He awoke at eight. The small apartment was very quiet. Ron and his second wife, Joan Gatten, slept in the other room. It was a cold clear day, the sun rising over Oakland red as a Japanese battle flag. Richard stared at it, feeling nothing. “The sun is colder than I am” stuck in his head. Not wanting to disturb the Loewinsohns, he went out for a long walk, heading west along Fourteenth Street to Buena Vista Park, a steep wooded hillside rising in an improbable tangle above the urban grid. As the name implies, the park provided splendid views, although Brautigan was in no mood for enjoying the scenery as he wandered among the wild overgrown cypress trees.

  Richard stopped off for coffee at the home of friends who lived beside the park. They wanted him to stay for breakfast, but he told them he wasn’t hungry and soon left. Instead of eating, Richard Brautigan transformed his feelings into words. On the first page of a spiral-bound notebook, he wrote the title, “The 20th Century Marriage in Flight.” Below that, he added a quote from a mournful song originally written in Slovakian in the early 1900s by Andrew Kovaly, a steelworker at a Bessamer mill in Pennsylvania: “Tell Them I Lie Here in the American Land.” The song dealt with a tragic accident, a young man killed under an ingot buggy even as his wife and children traveled from Europe to join him for a new life in America. Kovaly had to break the sad news when he met the family at the railroad station. Richard believed he knew just how they felt.

  The work took the form of a journal, beginning with the events of the previous night (“A Hell-of-time”) In the manner of Kafka, Brautigan referred to those involved only by initial. Ron Loewinsohn became “R,” while Richard called his wife “G.” Later, Brautigan went back and erased all the “Gs,” replacing them with the letter “Y.” He had no idea where the manuscript would lead him. Emotional pain made each moment vivid, and it seemed damned important to get it all down on paper.

  On Christmas Day, Richard returned to his Union Street apartment. He watched Ianthe unwrap her presents, his daughter’s happy laughter a time-warp from another dimension. Afterward, Ginny went for a walk with them. Anyone passing on the sidewalk might have thought they were still a real family. When they got back, Richard busied himself about the place, rearranging furniture. The garbage from their party still stood bagged in the kitchen. Brautigan took it down, cutting his hand on a broken cup when he stuffed it into the can. Richard thought this “strange game” of playing the man of the house seemed “almost like chess.” After a while, he ran out of moves. Ianthe cried when he left. “I go get drunk,” he wrote in his notebook.

  Wednesday dawned cold and clear. After breakfast, Richard and Ron drove Joan to work at the library at San Francisco State and continued for a spin along the ocean before heading home. In the afternoon, Richard walked downtown to his job mixing barium swallows formula. It was several miles from Ron’s Upper Market neighborhood to Drumm Street. Along the way, Brautigan passed the Hibernia Bank, where a robber had just been apprehended. Another day in the city.

  After work, Richard visited several art galleries. Realizing they were on the same street as Ianthe’s nursery school made him sad. He remembered how he used to pick her up at the end of the day. Richard couldn’t escape the past. He went to a friend’s place for dinner, next to where he lived with Ginny in 1957. After the meal, he fell asleep on the couch, oblivious to his friend’s kid loudly playing with his new Christmas toys. The next thing Brautigan knew it was midnight and he was all alone.

  Bit by bit, Richard started picking up the pieces of his life, finding solace in his daily routine. Some afternoons, Ron drove him to work, other times he walked. Art galleries provided a constant refuge. Brautigan spent a lot of time looking at paintings. A morning trip to his dentist led to an hour’s conversation about hunting and fishing before having a “petite” (the dentist’s term) cavity filled. There were dinners with friends, evenings in North Beach bars, conversations with strangers, anything to provide a distraction.

  On New Year’s Eve, Richard went out with
his friends Arthur and Marsha in their new Volkswagen. The young couple, “very much in love,” were concerned about him. “After you’ve been betrayed in the cruelest possible manner, there is little else one can do except to attend a party.” Around eleven o’ clock, they drove to a large gathering of college students, where Brautigan felt out of place, not knowing anyone. Almost twenty-eight, he was older than the other guests. The apartment’s many rooms glowed with colored lightbulbs, yet the lurid ambiance did little to liven things up. It turned out to be a fairly sedate affair.

  The host got Brautigan a drink of Canadian Club. (“It’s nice to taste whiskey that’s got character.”) Curiously, he towered over Richard, who stood six foot four. Everyone at the party wore “goofy” comic name tags taped to his or her chest. Names like King Herod, Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Dylan Thomas. Richard Brautigan decided to call himself “Night Flight,” although he didn’t bother to write it on a name tag. A pretty young blond approached through the noisy gathering. She came on to him with the shopworn line, “Haven’t I met you someplace before?” Richard was stunned, not knowing how to reply. His friend Art watched approvingly. He and Marsha both thought it a good idea for Richard to get a girl to take his mind off his problems.

  The blond wasn’t Brautigan’s type. Picking up on his indifference, she drifted back into the crowd. A bit later, he met another woman, tall and slender with straight dark hair. He liked the way she smiled. They started a conversation and sometime after midnight found themselves together on a couch. “She curled up with her head upon my lap.” Richard tenderly stroked her hair. It was soft and smelled freshly washed. When she asked questions about his life, he told her he had a wife and a child. He didn’t tell her, “I still love my wife though she is an adulteress and has seduced a good friend and they live together now” (he wrote this later in his notebook), “while my daughter, not quite three, plays at their feet like a toy and wakes in the morning to find them in bed together where last week her father slept.”

  It was suddenly 1963, a new year already ripe with promise and pain. Richard “Night Flight” Brautigan sat stroking a stranger’s hair, surrounded by college students. Perhaps not the most auspicious of beginnings, yet one not altogether without hope. He was drinking good whiskey, and women found him attractive. Life remained full of possibilities. Richard devoted eleven pages to the party in his notebook. Together with his earlier entries, they summed up all he had to say about the disintegration of his marriage. He wrote “Finis” midway down the final page. Nine days after his separation from Ginny, the breakup was already ancient history.

  The news of Richard and Ginny’s split resonated on the bohemian gossip telegraph throughout the bars of North Beach. Jack Spicer saw Ginny and Tony Aste together, a new couple in love, and it struck a powerful chord. The lovers didn’t remain under public scrutiny for long. Packing up their few belongings and bundling Ianthe into yet another Aste jalopy (this one without heat), they set off early in the year for Salt Lake City, a trip across a desert so frigid that Tony wrapped his hands in old clothes as protection against the cold. The Rexroth/Creeley/Marthe Larsen triangle, which formed the basis for “Homage to Creeley,” had fascinated Spicer when he first heard of the affair in Boston. Now, this new drama already played itself out in his imagination even before the actual events transpired. “Tony” was the first word and the first line in the first poem in the “Book of Gawain,” the first of seven “books” in The Holy Grail, a poem cycle Spicer had completed four months earlier.

  At the end of August 1962, Jack Spicer had been invited to give a preliminary reading of the poem, then still in progress, at Robin Blaser’s art-filled apartment during a dinner party attended by Robert Duncan and Jess, among others. The occasion later became something of a scandal. Blaser hoped to reconcile Spicer and Duncan, who’d had a falling-out, but Spicer arrived drunk with his uninvited gang (Stan Persky, George Stanley, and Ron Primack) in tow and attacked Duncan for his poetic affiliations, all the while heaping ridicule on Robin Blaser’s luxurious tastes. “Nasty boys,” in Duncan’s opinion. He remembered the evening as “gruesome” and terminated his long friendship with Jack Spicer that night (“the idea of Spicer is preferable to the actual presence”).

  “Poetry and magic see the world from opposite ends,” Jack Spicer wrote in The Holy Grail. His differences with Robert Duncan arose in part from their separate approaches to the occult. Duncan remained “a magician behind the scenes” while Spicer wanted to work his magic in the world at large. For Jack, watching the Lancelot/Arthur/Guinevere drama reenacted before his eyes, months after having written his Grail book, was a reaffirmation of certain deep prophetic magical connections.

  For Richard Brautigan there was no magic. Work provided his only distraction. The Loewinsohns set him up with a makeshift office out on the back porch of their apartment, placing a plank over the laundry tubs as a typewriter platform. Brautigan was back in business. “Richard wanted to work on a book because he was so devastated,” Ron Loewinsohn surmised. “Writing was one of the ways that he kept himself together.” Unhappiness seemed to have concentrated his attention. The pace of his novel in progress picked up considerably. While he wrote, Brautigan played a recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony continuously. “Maybe four hundred times,” he later claimed.

  “He was totally into what he was writing,” Loewinsohn recalled. “I would hear, tappity-tap, tappity-tap, tappity-tap—peals of laughter—tappity-tap, tappity-tap, tappity-tap—another outburst of laughter—tappity-tap, tappity-tap.” Richard Brautigan clearly enjoyed himself, remembering the wild, wacky times spent down in Big Sur with his unpredictable buddy, Price Dunn. Typing at break-knuckle speed, Richard put everything into the mix: counting biblical punctuation, alligators in the frog pond, a beautiful part-time prostitute, smoking marijuana, the crazed businessman with a suitcase full of money, Price tapping into the PG&E gas line in Oakland, even the “Freezer King of Sepulveda Boulevard.”

  Brautigan brewed a rich fictional stew, stirring up the adventures of Lee Mellon and Roy Earle, Jesse, Elaine, and Elizabeth, flavoring it with a sprinkling of Civil War anecdotes. Writers often have a difficult time with second novels, trying not to repeat themselves. Richard Brautigan blazed ahead into new territory, never looking back. In A Confederate General from Big Sur he accomplished something very special, writing a book rivaling the unique vision of Trout Fishing in America while remaining utterly fresh and new.

  Listening to all the rapid-fire typing and maniacal laughter, Ron Loewinsohn felt a natural curiosity about what was happening out on his laundry porch. When Richard knocked off for the day, Ron asked, “All right, so I’m going to see some of this stuff? It sounds great, you in there laughing your head off.”

  “Nope,” Brautigan said, smiling slyly and slipping his day’s work into a manila envelope. He placed each chapter in a separate envelope, not showing Ron a single word. Loewinsohn had no idea how many drafts Richard went through, nor could he gauge the amount of polishing each page required. “I never got to see it until it was all done.”

  Ron Loewinsohn’s perceptions of his friend’s writing methods might have been slightly off the mark. Don Carpenter remembered Brautigan as “an extremely careful writer. He worried a lot about being thought of as a careless writer.” Carpenter knew speed was not Richard’s main concern. He was interested in the precision of language and worried that his lack of formal education made him vulnerable to misspellings and grammatical errors. “He would conceal the childishness of the way he worked, which was to write each chapter on a piece of paper and then fold it up and put it inside an envelope and write the name of the chapter on the envelope, and then when he had enough envelopes he would stack them in different orders, and when he had the book the way he wanted it he would type it up on his IBM Selectric.”

  As work on the new novel progressed, the push to get Trout Fishing in America into print continued gaining momentum. Donald Allen had shown the manuscript to Lawr
ence Ferlinghetti, who shared his enthusiasm and agreed to publish several excerpts in City Lights Journal, a new editorial project conceived as an annual. For the premier issue, Ferlinghetti hoped to have Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder write of their adventurous travels together in India the previous year. Gary and Joanne told Don Allen some of it when he visited them in Kyoto. Ginsberg corresponded often with Ferlinghetti. Richard kept busy running all over town, conferring with Don and Lawrence about the excerpts they wanted to publish. Allen urged Brautigan to send out more copies of his manuscript. “I’m beat,” Richard complained in a letter.

  At the same time, Brautigan and Loewinsohn began planning a magazine of their own. The past several years had seen a proliferation of small (mostly mimeographed) publications started by poets in San Francisco. Local wits dubbed the era “the magazine wars.” After the appearance of Beatitude and Jack Spicer’s J, Richard Duerden started both Foot and the Rivoli Review. Tony Sherrod put out the one and only issue of Mythrander. George Stanley edited the Capitalist Bloodsucker-N and Larry Fagin, Horus (actually the creation of Stan Persky, who placed Fagin’s name on the masthead as a joke). Persky, Lew Ellingham, and Gail Chugg put together the first copy of M in the spring of 1962. Most of the same names appeared as contributors in all these ephemeral publications.

  Early in 1963, Ron and Richard took a walk in Buena Vista Park, “talking about magazines and how bad they were and how little they did that was worthwhile.” Loewinsohn can’t remember which of them first said, “Why don’t we do one?” Their initial enthusiasm very quickly escalated to “talking seriously about how we were going to do it.” Richard had many ideas concerning the form of the project. He suggested they call their new magazine Change.