twenty-two: aborted dreams
THE NEW YEAR of 1965 blew into San Francisco on a torrent of cold wind and rain. About to turn thirty and with his first novel only weeks away from publication, Richard Brautigan sat down at the typewriter to ponder why he had become a novelist “in a world that I can barely understand.” He called his thoughts on the matter “The Why Questions,” harkening back to “a creepy childhood in [the] Pacific Northwest.” Although Brautigan admitted he’d “never had a very clear picture” of himself, he discussed the origins of his first novel and stated, “all I want to do is to please those I love.” Richard was hard on himself when discussing his education. It “was rather slow while being divided into four stages: Timberwolf, [sic] loser, hellgramtie [sic], kook. Gorky wrote a very beautiful book about his education called My University... [sic]. If I were to try the same task I would have to call the book my kindergarten. It would be a shameless confession of failure.”
Priced at $3.95, A Confederate General from Big Sur was published in hardback by Grove Press on Friday, January the twenty-second. Erik Weber’s unattributed photograph, taken more than a year before in the aviary on Francisco Street, occupied the entire back cover of the dust jacket. “The novel is changing,” Brautigan stated earlier in an interview for “The Book Corner” in the Examiner. The jacket flap copy said that he was “now at work on a new novel called “Contemporary Life in California.”
In a brief paragraph he wrote for the publisher’s press release, Brautigan described himself: “I am twenty-nine years old and was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. I never cared for school, but lived close to the mountains and listened to people talk. I moved to San Francisco a few years ago, and it’s like living on an island. I’ve left the island a few times to live in Idaho, Mexico and Big Sur [. . .] I just finished a novel, In Watermelon Sugar, and am working on my fourth . . . When I was in my early 20’s I wrote poems and published three little books of poetry.”
At eight thirty on the evening of the twenty-second, Richard Brautigan read selections from A Confederate General from Big Sur at the California Club (1750 Clay Street) a private organization for women that often rented its 1907 auditorium for outside events. An author’s reception with an open bar from ten until midnight at the San Francisco Tape Music Center (321 Divisadero Street) followed the reading. Donald Allen mailed out the invitations. Richard and Don each compiled individual lists of the Frisco literary people they wished to come. Brautigan did not include Jack Spicer’s name on his list. Allen made sure he got an invitation and wrote personally to William Hogan and Stanleigh Arnold at the Chronicle. He mailed Arnold a copy of the Evergreen Review containing the Trout Fishing in America excerpts. The newspaper published “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard” in their Sunday edition and sent Brautigan a check for $25.
Joanne Kyger and her boyfriend, Jack Boyce; Dr. John and Margot Patterson Doss; Tommy Sales; Gary Snyder and his current girlfriend (who later married Andrew Hoyem); and Ariel Parkinson were among those in attendance at the Tape Music Center. Ariel’s husband, Tom, wrote a review of Confederate General for the Chronicle. Parkinson compared Brautigan’s prose to Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson: “fact and fraud and wild whimsey are all reported with an air of detachment [. . .] An absorbing, irritating and terribly amusing book [. . .] An author with the potentiality of Saroyan, its own tone of bewilderment and amusement that brings American humor a new and disturbing voice.”
Earlier in January, Richard had called Erik Weber to arrange another photo session. Anticipating that Grove would publish Trout Fishing in the fall, Brautigan wanted a dust jacket photo for the book, perhaps one to grace the front cover in accordance with chapter 1. On a fair mild afternoon, they headed over to Washington Square in North Beach. Richard wore pale faded jeans and a plaid wool parka. He was hatless. Erik shot a roll of film, stalking around the Benjamin Franklin monument, taking pictures of Brautigan and the statue from various angles.
By the end of February, Richard and Janice moved to a new apartment just off Divisadero at 2830 California Street, upstairs above Boegershausen Hardware, which owned the building. It was a spacious place with an elegant brick fireplace and a hanging Deco milk-glass ceiling fixture in the main room. The rent was $100 a month, payable to their ironmonger landlords. Such scant furnishings as the couple possessed belonged to Janice. There was a graceful side table and a few wooden chairs, an antique mirror above the mantel, brightly covered futons to sprawl upon, and a long low table they used for entertaining.
Richard’s notebook became a tangible repository of their intertwined lives. Along with many magazine addresses, references to “Janice, my blond” appear among the drafts of poems. On another page, Janice wrote out recipes for “honey puffs” and cherry sauce. Still later, she penned notes on silent film stars Theda Bara and Clara Bow. Brautigan later wrote an unpublished poem about Miss Bow. In the same notebook, he also wrote “Seven Poems for Mike Nathan” (four drafts of the same never-published poem, “I changed color into glass, and I drank water from your painting [. . .]”), addressing their shared mental asylum electroshock bond.
Erik Weber came over in March to photograph the young lovers at home. They posed formally, Richard wearing a crew neck sweater and brand-new blue sneakers, Janice looking glamorous in a fur hat and sleeveless dress. Informal shots showed them necking on the futon. Erik thought Janice “seemed to be a real flirt with other people” and later observed that it “drove Richard crazy,” but that March they were crazy in love. Brautigan wanted Erik to take pictures of them naked together. “Fucking pictures,” Weber recalled, “but it never worked out.”
In the last week of March, ten rugrats and assorted parents turned up for Ianthe’s fifth birthday party. Soda pop was served in paper cups with a rectangular chocolate cake, five candles burning in a straight line down the middle. The kids were well behaved, almost reticent. Ianthe shyly sucked her thumb and needed some gentle prompting from her dad before blowing out the candles. Both Richard and Janice took a hand in cutting the cake.
Charles Newman returned Richard’s manuscripts in mid-February, along with a letter. TriQuarterly anticipated a substantial budget increase starting in June, and Newman asked to see more of Brautigan’s fiction then (“We are quite interested in your work [. . .]”). Richard replied that he “had written a short novel called In Watermelon Sugar. I would like to find a magazine that would serialize the entire novel or part of it.” He said he would send Newman a copy “sometime in June.” Three days later, Brautigan mailed the fiction editor of the Partisan Review six chapters from Trout Fishing. (“A prompt decision would be very much appreciated.”) At Donald Allen’s suggestion, Richard wrote to Edward Keating at Ramparts, sending along a copy of In Watermelon Sugar. Again, he asked for a “prompt decision.”
Brautigan’s most recent publication had been in the April issue of the San Francisco Keeper’s Voice (vol. 1, no. 4), “an unofficial, informal newsletter that attempts to provide for the animal keepers of the San Francisco Zoo and other interested parties.” Richard’s poem “October 2, 1960” (about Ianthe, age six months, attempting to eat the phone book) appeared on the “permanent page of particular poetry.” Subscribers included such offbeat characters as Anton Szandor LaVey, a consulting hypnotist and “Psychic Investigator” who later founded the Church of Satan.
The reviews for A Confederate General from Big Sur began trickling in over the first three months after the novel’s publication. Along with Thomas Parkinson’s rave in the Chronicle, William Hogan praised the novel in the Saturday Review, and writing for Esquire, Malcolm Muggeridge said that it “provides as good an account as has come my way of Beat life and humor [. . .]” Favorable notices also appeared in Book Week, the Kansas City Star, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Toledo Blade, and McCall’s, among others.
Unfortunately, the word was not so good in several of the more important critical venues. Two days after the book’s publication, Martin Levin panned it in
his column, “A Reader’s Report” in The New York Times Book Review. Philip Rahv was even more unkind in The New York Review of Books, dismissing the novel as “pop writing of the worst kind, full of vapid jokes and equally vapid sex-scenes which are also a joke, though scarcely in the sense intended by the author.” An anonymous critic in Playboy so savaged the book, Brautigan felt the reviewer “recommended that I try finger painting.”
Brautigan became the beneficiary of Malcolm Muggeridge’s kind words in Esquire when Robert Sherrill, one of the magazine’s editors, got in touch with him to suggest a writing assignment. Sherrill wanted a story about death row. He contacted Richard in March to propose the idea, planting the seed and saying he’d write soon with more details. When Brautigan didn’t hear back from Esquire right away, he phoned San Quentin on the first of April, speaking with Associate Warden James Park, in charge of press relations, to ask if he might visit death row. Richard jotted notes as they talked.
James Park had “a friendly, relaxed voice.” He explained that the prison discouraged visits due to security and said “it would have to be cleared by Sacramento.” He also said that the condemned men had “a closed community. They get upset when strangers come around looking at them like critters in the zoo.” Being an official reporter for Esquire magazine carried the day. Brautigan made an appointment to visit the prison. Associate Warden Park even offered to show him the gas chamber.
Bob Sherrill wrote at length in early April, suggesting, “the tone of the piece will be the key to it—looking at death’s [sic] row as if it were a funny scene, 50 or so inmates revising their appeals, watching TV, working jigsaw puzzles, taking correspondence courses or God know’s [sic] what.” The editor wanted a story featuring the facts but using “fictional techniques” told from Brautigan’s point of view “so as to add up to absurdity rather than the usual horror that grabs by empathy.” Esquire offered a fee of $600, plus expenses, with a $200 guarantee in case they turned the story down.
Early on a Monday morning, Richard rode the bus from the city over to San Quentin in Marin County. Brautigan was met by Warden Lawrence Wilson, who complained about the overpopulation problem on California’s death row. Forty-eight men were currently awaiting execution. Wilson turned Brautigan over to Associate Warden Park, a clinical psychologist with a degree from UCLA who served the writer tea in his office and provided him with a lengthy information sheet from the California Department of Corrections. The last man executed had been James Abner Bentley (1/23/63 for murder 1 & robbery 1). The total number put to death at San Quentin since 1893 (prior to this date California executions were carried out by the county sheriffs) was 408, of which 214 had been hanged.
Richard Brautigan took copious notes, filling fourteen pages in his notebook with detailed minihistories of various condemned men. (“Raymond Forrest Treloar, 31, a painter, was sentenced to death for the mad dog slaying of a restaurant patron during a hold-up. His partner got life. Treloar said he killed the restaurant patron ‘because the guy bumped my elbow.’ They also pistol-whipped seven people in the café.”) He listed many arcane facts (“Execution usually at 10 in the morning [. . .] 10 to 15 minutes to die [. . .] one ounce pellet of cyanide into solution of dilute sulphuric acid [. . .]”) and noted a death row aphorism, “A rich man never goes to the gas chamber,” along with the last words of twenty-year-old Alexander Robillard (“I’m not legally a man, but I’m going to die like one. Goodbye and good luck”) and of Bernard Gilliam, a Fresno cotton picker, who carried a photograph of President Eisenhower to the entrance of the execution chamber on November 1, 1952, but handed it to a guard at the last minute, saying, “I won’t take Ike in there.”
Brautigan was curious about what the prisoners ate. “I was not interested in last meals,” he wrote, “but in the food they were eating today.” Associate Warden Park obliged him by getting a copy of the week’s menu from a filing cabinet. It covered every item (breakfast, dinner, supper), from Stewed Prunes to Hungarian Goulash w/ Noodles to Chocolate Cake, that the men in the death house would be served between 4/12/65 and 4/18/65. Brautigan got “a strange feeling” when he saw “Weekly Menu for CONDEMNED ROW” written at the top of the sheet.
There was so much food. Grilled halibut and chicken fried steak featured on the same dinner; “Roast Leg O Pork” and ground round steak were served together on another; short ribs, wieners, and spaghetti constituted a one-meal buffet. The prisoners were to get “Colored Easter Eggs” for breakfast on Easter Sunday. When Richard asked about the caloric content, the associate warden made a phone call and came up with an astonishing figure: “4,500 calories.” It seemed odd that caged men should be fed like hogs bound for slaughter. Brautigan asked to keep a copy of the menu, and James Park said OK.
The prison officials wanted to see the article before it was published. Brautigan told them the decision was up to the editors of Esquire and headed back to San Francisco on the bus, his precious menu “cradled [. . .] gently” on his lap. That same evening, a friend, “an aspiring Hollywood scriptwriter,” stopped by. This was Zekial Marko, whose script, Once a Thief, based on his own paperback novel (Scratch a Thief ), was currently being filmed in San Francisco, starring Alain Delon, Van Heflin, Jack Palance, Ann-Margret, and Marko himself (in the role of Luke, the proprietor of a hip nightspot). They drank bock beer. Brautigan showed Marko the menu. The screenwriter thought it was sick: “Pop Art that hurts. You know the kind that has drawers full of dead babies.”
The next day, Brautigan hauled his prison bill of fare over to 123 Beaver Street asking for Phil Whalen’s and Lew Welch’s opinions. One poet thought the menu “frightening, obscene, and disgusting.” The other couldn’t believe the vast quantity of food being served. He loved crisp bacon and hadn’t had any in a year. Crisp bacon was on the San Quentin menu every day but one during the coming week. “Look at all that food,” he marveled. “Why don’t they give this food to a poet?” Richard spent the rest of the day showing his curious trophy to various friends, and the reaction was always the same, shock and disgust.
When Brautigan sat down at his typewriter, “The Menu” came quickly, pretty much as it happened, the conversations with his friends and the wardens out at San Quentin. In the middle he placed—as a piece of found art—the original prison-printed menu. Richard mailed the story to Bob Sherrill in New York. In an accompanying letter, Brautigan admitted his story “may be far-out, but that’s the way it happened. I had to tiptoe between gallows humor and nausea.” He mentioned that the prison officials “seemed pretty nervous” about his article. “They want a gentle anonymous Death Row.” Richard asked to be paid soon. “I need the money because it’s spring.” His expenses for the story totaled $7.59. Sherrill found the piece “fascinating [. . .] everyone on the staff liked it,” but warned “it may be a couple of weeks before you will have a decision on whether we’ll buy it.” Pleased that Richard had worked so quickly, Sherrill hoped “that it will still be spring when you get your money.”
Having observed certain malign aspects of the zodiac in May, astrologer Gavin Arthur predicted a huge tidal wave would devastate the coast of Northern California. On the designated weekend, Richard Brautigan recruited Erik and Loie Weber to drive him and Janice south to safety. They left before dawn, arriving quite early in the morning at Price Dunn’s current abode along the Carmel River. Erik had no idea who they were visiting. “We’d ask these questions, and Richard wouldn’t say anything—noncommittal. We drove in and woke Price up and that huge woman he was with.”
The woman’s name was Katherine (aka Baby Katherine). “She was quite a character,” Loie recalled. She had recently been in a motorcycle accident, and her natural girth was enlarged by the full-body cast she wore under her voluminous housedress. Loie thought Katherine and Price made “such an odd couple.” Her left leg also was encased in plaster, causing her to “sort of hobble around. She was crazy about Price, and he used to tease her a lot, and she would act the fool, which she wasn’t, she was actually
quite intelligent.” Only after they all sat down to a big breakfast of fried pork chops did Erik make the connection between Price Dunn and Lee Mellon. Brautigan delighted in keeping everyone in the dark. “Richard never told us, and he never said anything afterwards.”
The tidal wave never materialized. They spent the week hanging out and drinking. “I remember Richard a couple of times telling me that Price Dunn was the only person he would trust with his life,” Erik recalled. Weber took a couple rolls of film on the trip, mostly posed shots of Richard, Janice, and Loie. The three men went fishing in the Carmel River. The stretch of creek alongside Price’s place was “very, very narrow,” the banks dense with overgrowth. Richard and Price waded in and managed to catch “a couple of fish.” Loie and Erik went down with Richard and Janice to visit in Carmel “a number of times.” Loie liked Katherine but thought Janice seemed odd. “I never knew who Janice was,” she said. “To me, she was shifting sands.”
The first week in June, Form 17 from the IRS arrived at California Street. Brautigan had failed to include a tax payment on his 1964 return and owed the government $261.93. Starting in 1963, before he received even a modest book advance, Richard began itemizing the modest deductions he incurred as a writer. In 1964, these proved insufficient to offset the taxes he owed. On June 28, Brautigan signed an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service, twelve bucks every two weeks until he wiped the red ink off the government books. If Richard earned more than $180 a month, all the surplus income would be applied toward his back taxes.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 43