Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Brautigan also had a vision for the cover. The clean, efficient look of Life magazine came to mind. He had seen the tattered remnants of an old billboard transformed into a giant collage by overlapping layers of ancient outdoor advertising. At one time, the three-sheet had heralded a drag strip auto race. All that remained, in foot-high letters, were the words SEE THE FASTEST CAR ON EARTH. Richard enlisted Ron’s wife, Joan, as their photographer and posed himself and Loewinsohn in front of the fragmentary poster.

  With their cover shot in the can, the editorial team of Brautigan and Loewinsohn settled down to the more mundane details of magazine production: soliciting contributors, planning a budget, establishing a production schedule. While Richard concerned himself with design concepts, Ron took on the more onerous chore of keeping the company books. He did a meticulous job, detailing the cash outlay. Richard shelled out five bucks for stencils and ink while they both shared the $30 cost of a batch of “20 R” paper. They also bought photo paper ($3.07), correcting fluid ($1.25), and a stylus (fifty-four cents).

  Like the fastest car on earth, the little magazine zoomed off the starting line. Ron and Richard decided on May Day as their publication date, and deadlines were tight. They paid $6.40 to a lithographer to print up a batch of covers with “Change” boldly above their curious photo like a banner headline. Half of the print run was used for flyers. Ron rented a hand-crank mimeograph machine for $52.50, and the first stencil they cut and ran off was printed on the verso of the covers. Some of these they used for promotion. “CHANGE: THE FASTEST CAR ON EARTH,” it read, “For 25¢ these two gentlemen can be brought into the privacy of your living room—Think what can be done for a dollar!”

  Soliciting for subscriptions, Brautigan and Loewinsohn met Don Carpenter at a coffee shop on the corner of Columbus and Pacific. “The place was full of poets,” Don recalled, “all glowering at each other.” Carpenter paid for the coffee. As a part-time teacher, he was the most prosperous of the three. Richard and Ron described their plans for the first issue. Don said it sounded good to him.

  “That’s just it,” Brautigan said. “We would like to offer you the position of first subscriber.”

  “Thank you,” Don said, somewhat flattered. He gave them a buck.

  Brautigan and Loewinsohn’s ad copy promised Change would be a monthly publication out of San Francisco. The first issue offered poetry by Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Richard Duerden, and Ron Loewinsohn; a piece called “Execution Day on the Big Yard,” by former San Quentin inmate Bob Miller; and Richard Brautigan’s short story “Coffee.” Future issues would feature Fielding Dawson, Lew Welch, Jim St. Jim, Edward Dorn, Gilbert Sorrentino, Michael McClure, “& the fastest car on earth.” The fledgling promoters concluded, “four months of CHANGE for a dollar, 17 years of CHANGE (204 issues) for $51.00, 85 years of CHANGE (1,020 issues) for $255.00.—What better bargain? Subscribe now! Make cheque or money order payable to the editors.”

  February and March were busy months for Richard, and there wasn’t time for much correspondence. Aside from writing Philip Whalen and Stan Fullerton about Change, most of his letters were to Ginny. He still called her Ginny then. By April the salutations had formalized to “Dear Virginia.” He told her of the magazine he and Ron were working on and complained about “this income tax business.” Ginny had always prepared their returns in the past. “You have done all the other income tax business before and I am quite confident you can handle it this last time.” He shipped all his tax records off to Salt Lake City a few days later.

  On the twenty-first of March, Richard Seaver wrote to Brautigan at his old Union Street address. He mentioned how much the editors at Grove Press liked Trout Fishing in America and selected nine chapters from the novel, suggesting that they publish them in the Evergreen Review in “a group of at least three or four at a time.” Seaver wanted an option on the book as part of the deal and asked Richard to drop him a note if this sounded agreeable. Grove would then “draw up some fairly simple form of agreement” covering both the book publication and the separate magazine excerpts.

  This news greatly improved Brautigan’s mood. He wrote a happy letter to Ianthe on her third birthday, sending a little dress he hoped was the right size as a present. No one had ever celebrated his birthday when he was a kid, and the occasion meant a lot to him. Brautigan missed his daughter profoundly. He wrote Ginny, “Perhaps along with the present you might tell her how much I love her and how much her birthday pleases me.”

  In April, the first issue of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Journal made its appearance. A photo of a blanket-wrapped Allen Ginsberg graced the cover and an account of his travels in India were featured. In addition to work by Snyder, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ed Dorn, and Harold Norse, the magazine contained three chapters from Trout Fishing in America (“Worsewick,” “The Salt Creek Coyotes,” and “A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci”) along with a grainy snapshot of Richard Brautigan standing by a wrought-iron gate.

  Seeing excerpts from his novel in print helped take Richard’s mind off his sorrows, while work remained his main distraction. He was going hell bent for leather on A Confederate General from Big Sur and wrote to Thomas Parkinson on the seventeenth to tell him about the new novel in progress and of the Evergreen Review’s plans to publish chapters from Trout Fishing in America. After this, Brautigan embarked on a flurry of self-promotional correspondence, writing to Malcolm Cowley, L. Rust Hills, and Seymour Krim, among others.

  Earlier in the month, a large envelope from the Ford Foundation arrived for Brautigan in care of City Lights Books. Richard had been nominated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (not mentioned by name) for consideration in a recently announced “one-year program designed to enable a limited number of poets, novelists and short story writers to spend a year with professional resident theater companies.” In 1959, the Ford Foundation had sponsored a similar program and twelve fellowships were awarded, with Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Richard Wilbur, and Herbert Gold among the recipients. A chronology, a bibliography of published works, and a “general description” of how a residence in a professional theater would relate to “the plans you are currently seeking to fulfill as a writer” were requested. Replies postmarked after May 5, 1963, could not be considered. The final awards would be announced in July.

  By the middle of April, Change raced toward the finish line. “The magazine was doing extremely well,” Ron Loewinsohn recalled. “People were eager to buy, eager to subscribe; people were eager to contribute.” To date, they had amassed $152.46 in production costs. On the positive side of the balance sheet, they had twenty-four paid subscribers, including Don Carpenter, Frank Curtin, Diane Wakoski, James Broughton, and a library at Harvard (which bought two) and had arranged with several booksellers, from City Lights on the West Coast to Eighth Street Books on the East, to carry the magazine for a 30 percent discount.

  Loewinsohn and Brautigan assembled their mimeographed sheets, stapling the copies together, running the many last-minute errands all such enterprise entails. Pressure took its toll. Richard and Ron had another falling-out. “We had stuff to do on the magazine,” Ron remembered, “printers to see, paper to pick up, and Richard had said, ‘I’ll meet you at nine o’clock,’ or whatever. So, he wasn’t there, hours later, and we’re still trying to catch up, and Richard is complaining that he had gotten all drunked up the night before and was in no shape to do anything. And I just blew up. You know, who the hell told you to get loaded?”

  Richard and Ron were no longer talking. This did not bode well for the future of Change. Copies had been mailed and subscriptions sold. Freebies had been given to Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Charles Olson, LeRoi Jones, and William Hogan, book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Reality put the brakes on the fastest car on earth. The magazine screeched to a screaming halt. “I did not want to continue by myself,” Ron said. “It was a joint project, and we had this blow-up.”

  Ron did his best to repair the damage.
He returned paid subscriptions and collected money from the five bookstores that had placed orders for single copies. In the end, Change took in only small change. All told, the magazine earned a total of $8.20. In spite of their differences, the two feuding poets somehow managed to tie up the loose ends left dangling when Change crashed and burned. After a final tally on the second of June, Richard paid Ron $45.44, “for expenses incurred in publishing CHANGE, a magazine.” Brautigan demanded and received a handwritten receipt from Loewinsohn.

  Don Carpenter didn’t receive an initial refund and never expected to see his money again. One day, Brautigan approached him on the street. “Ah,” said Richard. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been keeping yourself?

  Somewhat sarcastically, Don explained that he had a wife and family over in Noe Valley, and that “domesticity” kept him “out of the Beach, often for days at a time.”

  Brautigan pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Carpenter. “This is yours,” Richard said. “Your refund from Change.”

  The envelope was stuffed with three-cent stamps. Don didn’t mind. “People can always use stamps,” he said.

  Although he and Ron were no longer speaking, Richard Brautigan stayed on at the Loewinsohns’ until he found another place to live. His new quarters, a Spartan room at 1482 Washington Street, on the western slope of Nob Hill, had a tree growing up from the sidewalk outside the window, and leaves drifted in when it was windy. Richard thought this was “nice.” In a letter to Virginia shortly after the move, he asked her to write him about Ianthe and hoped his daughter would have “a nice summer.”

  Brautigan used Washington Street as his return address when he finally got his paperwork off to the Ford Foundation in the nick of time, mailing the required material on Cinco de Mayo, the deadline date. Other mail continued to arrive for Brautigan at the Loewinsohns’. Ron passed along all the letters. Tom Parkinson wrote early in May. He had seen City Lights Journal and thought it a shame that no publisher was willing to print all of Trout Fishing in America. (Grove Press had turned down the novel, agreeing to publish nine excerpted sections in the Evergreen Review and requesting an option on Richard’s next work of fiction.) “My own belief is that it would be a smashing commercial success,” he wrote. Parkinson asked to see Brautigan’s second novel when it was done. He thought it had “an even more engaging title” and invited Richard to read his poetry at the university “in the series of readings that we have each semester.” He proposed a payment of $100.

  Around this time, Richard met Anna Savoca, a student at San Francisco State, “a very small, intense, highly expressive” young Italian woman from Brooklyn. A mutual friend remembered her as an “anarchic creative kind of person.” Fred Hill found her “simian.” Brautigan’s courtship of Anna began with poetry. Several drafts of eight poems composed during the first two weeks of June, 1963, survive in his notebooks. The earliest, dated June 5, is entitled “Another Poem for Anna,” suggesting at least one predecessor (“the impossible / is what we want. / We long for it / like a highway desires an automobile accident / to break the monotony of speed. / Of course nothing is that simple”). Instinctively, Brautigan knew he was in for a wild ride with Anna Savoca.

  All along, from the moment she first met Richard, Anna was in love with another guy, named Wally, son of a noted Potrero Hill dowager, whom she eventually married. He was away and unavailable, so she amused herself with the ardent poet. Anna made no secret of her love for the other man. In fact, she mentioned him so often that Brautigan complained to his friends that Anna “Wally-ed him to death.” Everything was “Wally this” and “Wally that.” Richard had no proper reply, except in his poetry. “Because we leave a lot in names,” he wrote for Anna, “more than we intended to. We can’t help it, but it’s always been this way [. . .]”

  These were unsettling times for Richard Brautigan. His novel had been praised by many important literary figures, yet he still couldn’t find a publisher. He had become involved with an unpredictable woman who toyed with him like someone teasing an eager puppy. He had almost no money, his only income coming from the part-time job at Pacific Chemical. (Richard wrote a poem for Anna about weighing out the ingredients for barium swallows.) He continued working on his new book even as his writing schedule was interrupted by frequent moves. Starting in mid-July, Brautigan became something of a gypsy, changing his address four more times before the end of the year.

  It was frustrating for a control freak like Richard Brautigan to watch his fate being decided by strangers. Trout Fishing in America was passed from James Laughlin at New Directions (who thought Brautigan “a writer who shows great promise of becoming a leading literary figure”) on to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which forwarded the book to Dell for consideration in the Delta Prize Novel Award. Delta Books decided against Brautigan’s novel and sent the manuscript back to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which wrote to Richard, saying “we would be happy to consider it for our list.” Brautigan answered on the twelfth, agreeing to their proposal. On the sixteenth, he moved to 1565 Washington Street, where he rented apartment number 3 for $65 a month.

  Mail for Richard kept arriving at Ron Loewinsohn’s as well at his previous Washington Street address. In time, it all caught up with him. Donald Allen continued acting as his unpaid agent (a service he also provided Lew Welch, squirreled away like a hermit in his remote northern California CCC cabin), so Brautigan didn’t have to worry about missed connections in the publishing world.

  On July 22 a letter from the Ford Foundation to 1482 Washington Street informed Brautigan that he was not among the applicants recommended for an award by the judging panel. The bad news probably meant less to Richard than a form rejection notice on August 13 from G. P. Putnam’s Sons turning down Trout Fishing in America. Donald Allen immediately had the manuscript forwarded to Coward-McCann for their consideration. Brautigan happily let Allen lead the charge. Nearing the end of A Confederate General from Big Sur, Richard paid more attention to the work at hand than to East Coast editorial politics.

  Finances were extremely tight. On the sixteenth, Brautigan paid just half a month’s rent, extending his stay in apartment number 3 until the end of August. On the first of September, he moved to much cheaper lodgings at 1327 Leavenworth Street, paying a Mr. Brockson $40 for a month’s rent. Here Richard finished writing A Confederate General from Big Sur. Alone and missing his little child desperately, he rolled a final sheet of paper into the platen and typed out a dedication: “to my daughter / Ianthe.”

  Brautigan gave Don Allen a copy of his new manuscript. Allen read it straightaway and was quite impressed. It made him “very optimistic about Brautigan’s development as a novelist.” Allen wrote that the new book “marks a considerable advance in novel technique” over Richard’s initial effort, which he called “in many ways a very original first novel.” Although Allen noted that “much of the action is richly comic,” he observed that “one soon sees that the author is up to much more than telling funny stories: there is an authentic critical estimate of beatism (for lack of a better word) here.”

  As Donald Allen had done so much to foster the work of Beat writers, his judgment on the matter carried serious weight. He was not unappreciative of the commercial prospects of A Confederate General from Big Sur. “It is very possible that it would get considerable attention from reviewers because of the way it plays off against Kerouac’s Big Sur (not closely), for example, as well as other beat books.” Allen shipped a copy of the manuscript to Dick Seaver. Grove Press enjoyed a certain cachet as an avant-garde publisher, their backlist including Beckett, Borges, Kerouac, and Charles Olson, as well as most of the European theater-of-the-absurd playwrights. Seaver quickly responded by asking for a two-month option.

  Not long after starting what hopefully would become his third novel, a work he called “Contemporary Life in California,” Richard went with Anna Sovoca to a birthday party for a friend of hers, a fellow student at San Francisco State. Lois (Loie
) Weber was just turning twenty-two on September 28. Anna brought her a wooden bird bowl from Yugoslavia as a gift. Loie’s first impression of Brautigan “was of this large hulking strange character with a timid but brooding quality.” Anna had told Loie that she was bringing a guy who’s “into trout fishing.” Loie’s husband, Erik, a photographer interested in fishing, struck up a conversation with Richard.

  Erik Weber was born in Chicago in 1940 to Communist parents kicked out of Canada by the Mounties. The family moved to Sacramento, California, in 1943 and on to San Francisco a year later. Richard and Erik didn’t talk long about personal history or fishing. As soon as Brautigan learned Weber was a photographer, he said, “I need a photographer,” believing himself poised on the brink of success, ready for publicity stills and dust jacket pictures. Richard took down Erik’s phone number, and they made a tentative agreement to get together for a photo session.

  On October 11, Richard Brautigan moved into room number 3 in the Mitchel Art Hotel at 444 Columbus Avenue, paying $9 a week. Quite likely, he was behind on his rent to Mr. Brockton. These were trying times for Richard. He wrote no letters during September and October.

  A week later, Brautigan was without a known address until the beginning of December. A year or so later, he told Jack Thibeau that all his books and papers (including the manuscripts for both his novels) were “locked in a cheap hotel room in North Beach. He couldn’t pay the rent, and his landlord had put a lock on the door.” According to Thibeau, “he had to come up with $27 to get his books out of hock.”

  Brautigan moved in with his friend Andy Cole, a young Catholic poet from Brooklyn. Jack Spicer referred to Cole, together with Tom Wallace and Larry Kearney, two other Catholic émigrés from Brooklyn, as “the Jesuits.” Kearney’s first book, Fifteen Poems, would soon be published by Graham Mackintosh, who had taken over management of White Rabbit Press after Joe Dunn became addicted to methedrine. Tom Wallace was Nemi Frost’s boyfriend. He and Andy Cole had lived for a time at her apartment a couple years earlier.