Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Indeed he did, and to the apparent delight of the majority of his audience. Several disgusted assistant professors left early. Others stuck around to see if these kiddie poems might just be a warm-up. Perhaps Brautigan would read from his own work soon. Carried away by the students’ laughter after each brief fifth-grade poem, Richard howled with mirth, slapping his knee in sheer delight. Altogether, he read perhaps two hundred words. The whole thing, including his introduction and the applause, lasted barely twenty-five minutes.

  After the reading, there was a reception and buffet dinner for the visiting poet at the home of Ed McClanahan, then a lecturer in the writing program at Stanford and Wallace Stegner’s “aide-de-camp.” At the time, McClanahan was by his own description “The Most Famous Unpublished Author in America.” This designation came his way courtesy of a 1963 issue of Esquire devoted to “The Literary Situation,” which featured a centerfold map detailing all the noted writers in the land. On the basis of a handsome advance for an unfinished novel, Ed’s name appeared, prominent among the titans, in the bull’s-eye of an area called “The Red-Hot Center.” His exquisite book, The Natural Man, was finally published to much acclaim twenty years later, but in 1968, the literary center had already cooled considerably for McClanahan.

  Ed later expressed surprise that I missed his Brautigan fete. Blame it on the isolation of Bolinas. I can’t remember how I spent the intervening hours, but at seven thirty that night, I climbed the stairs in the Stanford University Library to the book-lined Jones Room, the inner sanctum of the writing program, on a floor high above the stacks. The five other writing fellows had gathered, along with the graduate students in the advanced fiction class. Wallace Stegner presided over this disparate mélange with gracious forbearance. Gray-haired and handsome as a matinee idol, Stegner possessed an infinite capacity for tolerance, managing to find constructive things to say about work, even such as mine, which he hated.

  McLanahan arrived with Brautigan in tow, sober as promised. The party had been timed precisely so Richard would be “in and out quickly,” with no time to get drunk. An immediate coolness was detectable from Wallace Stegner. John Daniel, one of the Fellows, remembered “an instant conflict: playful provocation on B’s part (‘I don’t know about you, but I get up, I shit, I write,’) met by polite ice on S’s (‘Well, I suppose you could say that I do all of those things, but . . .’).”

  Stegner’s attitude had absolutely nothing to do with intolerance for alternate lifestyles, as he was a remarkably fair-minded man and amicably shared an office with Ed “Captain Kentucky” McClanahan, whose mode of dress ran to skintight trousers, mod boots, and the occasional red velvet cape. More likely, Stegner had heard of the afternoon’s shenanigans and was gravely displeased. Also, he had little fondness for any writing he perceived as fey. He later described Brautigan’s work to the class as being “like the carvings on peach pits.”

  In studied contrast to his performance in the student union, Richard settled down to give a remarkable reading. Maybe it was the intimate surroundings of the Jones Room, or perhaps he intuited that he was now among peers, serious fellow writers, whereas the business with the children’s poems had just been a vaudeville turn. He read a number of short stories he’d been working on over the past decade. They were spare and lyrical, full of surprise and imbued with that quirky melancholy humor that is the hallmark of Brautigan’s style. I recall the enormous pleasure I felt on first hearing “Revenge of the Lawn” and “The Ghost Children of Tacoma.”

  Many of Brautigan’s bittersweet stories dealt with episodes from his early childhood during the Great Depression. At one point, Wallace Stegner made a comment that he had come of age in the Depression and had found it an invigorating time, “because when you’re down on the bottom, you have no place to look but up.”

  Richard’s smile remained wistful. “I was born in the Depression,” he replied, “and all I had to look forward to was World War II.”

  In retrospect, it seems Brautigan anticipated hostility from Stegner. He came prepared with a short story, unpublished to this day. “Key to the Frogs of South-Western Australia” was less than two pages long and took only a minute or so to read. The title referred to a little twenty-five-cent book the author bought five years earlier because he admired the prose in the opening paragraph. The brief tale ended with the narrator attempting a spontaneous novel, thinking to use “Key to the Frogs of South-Western Australia” as his arbitrary title. Every time he started, he remembered Wallace Stegner’s famous short story “Field Guide to the Western Birds” and promptly abandoned his project. The story received only a mild laugh from the listeners, but a subtle point had been made. His simple fiction reminded us we’re all writers here, searching for the words to record our secret histories.

  I’ve often wondered if Brautigan wrote the story specially for this particular evening. There’s an element of haste in the composition. Not that it really mattered. Reading the story was exactly the sort of wry joke Richard most enjoyed. Afterward, following a brief period of mingling conversation, Brautigan asked if anyone could give him a lift into the city. I quickly volunteered. I was driving back to Bolinas and had to pass through San Francisco on my way. Soon, we were chugging north on 101 in “Bitter Lemon.” I felt Brautigan’s appraising stare from out of the darkness on the seat beside me. “So,” he asked, “how much does this Stegner thing pay you?”

  I told him $3,500. Because Stanford gave credits for the advanced fiction writing course, the university required a $300 kickback.

  Richard Brautigan drily observed that the modest amount I quoted was more money than he had earned in the past year. After the briefest moment of stunned silence, I laughed and said, “You mean, when I get to be a famous writer like you, I can look forward to a salary cut?” A Wallace Stegner comment from a couple weeks earlier came to mind. He had been asked how many former fellows, after twenty years of the program’s history, were now making a living as writers. “Young man,” Stegner replied, “you don’t understand. You’ve chosen a profession that doesn’t exist.” I repeated this to Brautigan, but he didn’t laugh. It probably hit too close to home.

  When Richard spoke again, his voice assumed a didactic precision I hadn’t heard before, a tone that would become very familiar in years to come. His usual gleeful stammer, an eager rush of words on the verge of erupting into bursts of high-pitched laughter, had been replaced by something entirely more formal, each careful phrase intoned like he were reading from a prepared text. He gravely told me of the time, shortly after Confederate General had been published four years earlier, when he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  This was a tedious process. Writing samples had to be gathered, forms completed, twelve copies of a “career narrative” submitted, along with letters of recommendation from four distinguished references. Literary heavyweights recommended him. Richard thought he was a shoo-in. Committees work in mysterious ways. In the end, Richard Brautigan’s grant application was rejected. “They turned me down with a form letter,” Richard said.

  I didn’t quite know how to reply. It sounded patently unfair, yet an air of slapstick pie-in-the-face absurdity attended the entire episode. Brautigan chortled with wild, unrestrained joy. “Standard rejection slip,” he howled.

  His infectious laughter had me responding in kind to the cosmic nature of the joke. In telling his story almost as a parable, he forged an undeclared conspiratorial bond. We both shared the sweet taste of freedom, two artists living by our wits. Years later, on a moonlit summer walk, Richard reiterated this heroic belief. “The world is divided into two separate camps,” he told me, “sheep and timber wolves. We are the wolves.”

  Richard delighted in this credo. He knew it was warm and comfortable down in the woolly sheep-fold but preferred the wolf’s cool lonely independence, loping unseen at the edges of civilization. It was only natural when we rattled to a stop outside the narrow decrepit wooden building on Geary Boulevard that the old wolf invite his
younger lupine comrade in for a “nightcap.” Much later, I came to dread all that Richard’s late night invitations implied.

  A ghostly derelict brooding in lurid mercury-vapor street light, the ancient building was bordered on one side by a debris-strewn lot where twin pylons supporting a vast billboard towered above the squalor. We climbed the stairs under the arched entrance into a dim, damp interior. The glass panes framed in the upper panel of the front door were decorated with Xeroxed Digger Dollars, handwritten poems, peacock feathers, and an El Capitan sardine can label salvaged from an abandoned Cannery Row warehouse, all Scotch-taped in a haphazard collage.

  Richard ushered me down a long, narrow hallway. Billowing war-surplus parachutes hung from the ceiling, an interior decorating touch endemic to the period. Richard explained that their purpose was not ornamental but rather to prevent bits of peeling paint and falling plaster from dropping onto the heads of his visitors. I followed his hunched frame past numerous posters (advertising concerts at the Fillmore; coffeehouse poetry readings; Michael McClure’s controversial play, The Beard; and benefits for the Hells Angels at the Longshoreman’s Hall) along a trail of primitively painted red, white, and blue fish outlines (like the early Christian symbol seen mounted on automobiles).

  The hall opened into a central room where the dominant decorative feature was a rusted World War II machine gun propped in the middle of the floor, enclosed by a larger version of the happy trout outlines fish-printing the hallway. A small bookcase held a few dozen slender volumes, presumably the work of friends. They were the only books I saw in the apartment. I didn’t get a guided tour. Richard led me straight into his surprisingly homey kitchen, very neat and clean with a quaint rocking chair sitting to one side. He sat me down at a round oak table ringed with the ghostly stains of innumerable coffee cups and placed a whiskey bottle between us. Glancing about, I noted an ancient Philco refrigerator dominating the room. On the wall behind it hung a large hand-painted brown butcher paper poster for a reading of Trout Fishing in America.

  Richard pulled up a chair and filled two large tumblers with bourbon as casually as if pouring tea. There was no ice. Serious talk demanded a serious drink. Our conversation had almost nothing to do with writing or literature. We talked about fishing. When Richard learned I was also a fly fisherman, he beamed with pure undisguised pleasure. We reminisced about the trout streams of our childhoods: his in Oregon’s McKenzie River Valley, mine in the Catskills of upstate New York. He told me of secret places in the High Sierra, and we agreed to get together and go fishing. He gave me his telephone number. At the time, I didn’t realize Brautigan could not operate an automobile and was simply enlisting a new designated driver. Close to dawn, when the whiskey bottle was a dead soldier, I lurched out into the street and drove cautiously home, thankful for the deserted suburban highways of sleeping Marin County.

  I never called Richard’s number. Self-conscious about my lowly status as a virtually unpublished writer, I feared being perceived as another hanger-on. My bourbon-drenched night with Richard Brautigan receded into the realm of memory. I had no idea our paths would cross again in four years, in Montana, of all places, at the time a state where I’d never been.

  thirty-three: ten-day barons

  BY 1968, RICHARD Brautigan’s local literary accomplishments and eccentric public art gestures had gained the attention of Herb Caen, Frisco’s gossip maven, and he found himself mentioned frequently in Caen’s daily Chronicle column. Michael McClure had also been in the public eye since the controversy surrounding The Beard and was himself often a subject of Herb Caen’s three-dot journalism. The two friends turned their newspaper notices into an amiable competition. Whenever either found his name in print he became a self-anointed “Ten Day Baron of Café Society.”

  “We proclaimed that we were famous for ten days,” McClure recalled, “and we rushed off to drink at the sidewalk tables of Enrico’s Café, where we could be admired by mortals.” Jack Shoemaker recalled that both barons kept scrapbooks of their press clippings and once had “a huge falling-out” over who was more famous, not speaking to each other for a considerable time.

  Richard and Michael drank “stemmed glasses of cold white wine” at Enrico’s, watching the world pass by on Broadway, fully confident they were being stared at in return. Both Brautigan and McClure possessed a profound vanity and greatly enjoyed showcasing their mutual “baronhoods.” Jack Spicer’s bitchy behind-his-back nickname for Michael McClure had been “Shameless Hussy.” “Michael was a good deal more vain than Richard,” Jack Shoemaker said, “but Richard was a great deal more ambitious than Michael.”

  Brautigan guarded his carefully honed image. He allowed no one but his chosen photographer to take his picture. “Richard only liked to be photographed when he wanted to be,” Edmund Shea recalled. Two years later, when Brautigan gained worldwide fame, McClure resented seeing him preening on the terrace at Enrico’s. “He seemed to like being there by himself,” Michael wrote. “He managed a look that was at once wistful, self-intent, and intriguing.” What began as an innocent game of “boyish show-off macho” turned sour once the stakes grew higher than a passing mention in Herb Caen’s column.

  Brautigan told Robert Mills, his agent in New York, of Doubleday’s interest in Trout Fishing in America, making no mention of Luther Nichols, their West Coast editor. Doubleday, uninterested in The Abortion, offered a two-book contract for Trout Fishing and another novel yet to be written. Richard wanted a $5,000 advance. Robert Mills wrote Brautigan in late April, with Doubleday’s final proposal, an advance of $2,000 for Trout Fishing, payable on signing. They wanted to publish in October, before Four Seasons printed another edition. Mills liked the offer and urged Richard to take it. Brautigan ignored his advice, and the Doubleday deal evaporated.

  The appearance of Please Plant This Book early in 1968, soon after the publication of Trout Fishing in America, gained Richard Brautigan much local attention. Herb Caen remembered first seeing him handing out the seed packet poems on Powell Street. Richard made sure the journalist got a copy in the mail. Brautigan also sent copies to Art Hoppe, John Ciardi, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, and Harry S. Truman, among others, using The Glide Foundation (Glide Memorial Church) as his return address. Everyone wrote to say thanks. Humphrey thought it “A most unusual ‘book.’” Richard thumbtacked his letter to the wall of his writing room. Truman’s secretary thanked Brautigan “for the little booklet of garden seeds.”

  Brautigan claimed five thousand covers were printed (others think no more than twenty-five hundred), yet it is not known how many copies of Please Plant This Book were actually assembled. Some were put together at Jack Shoemaker’s place in Santa Barbara, others at Kendrick Rand’s apartment in San Francisco, and more done at Graham Mackintosh’s printing shop. “When Richard would need some, he’d put together a little crew,” Jack said, remembering evenings spent folding cardboard covers.

  Dave Robinson of Mad River recalled helping Brautigan glue the folders together in his kitchen as payback for him assisting the band to assemble the sleeves for their first EP recording. “We would sit there and lick these things and the glue tasted horrible!” According to Jim Harrison, even Robert Duncan, who professed to despise Brautigan’s poetry, lent a hand in the manufacture of the give-away book.

  Please Plant This Book’s piecemeal production makes the final number open to conjecture. Some estimated fifteen hundred copies. Possibly there were far less. Mad River joined the team of volunteers distributing the free book in public places. Rick Bockner stood on a corner in Sausalito handing out copies. Lawrence Hammond was given several copies, keeping a couple for himself.

  The eight colored seed packets in Please Plant This Book were carrots, calendula, Shasta daisy, squash, lettuce, parsley, sweet alyssum royal carpet, and a mixture of California native flowers. The prose poems printed upon them constituted an homage to springtime and children. Not one had a direct reference to the seeds inside or the plants they would
germinate.

  Brautigan made a brief appearance in Nowsreal, a Digger film shot between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes of 1968. Spade in hand, he buried a book in a backyard garden. Richard read from “California Native Flowers” in a voice-over, sounding reedy and insistent: “In this spring of 1968 with the last third of the Twentieth Century travelling like a dream toward its end, it is time to plant books and pass them into the ground, so that flowers and vegetables may grow from these pages.”

  Filmed by Kelly Hart on sixteen-millimeter “roll ends” with Peter Berg in charge of the audio, Nowsreal provided an intimate glimpse into daily underground life in the Haight-Ashbury. Beginning with a poetry reading on City Hall steps, the short film featured “Sweet Willie Tumbleweed” Fritsch wearing a red beret, radical young lawyer Terrence “Kayo” Hallinan (years later Frisco’s district attorney), and a gay poet named Ama clad in an American flag shirt, a member of the world’s most exclusive club, having jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. Brautigan appeared briefly in one other scene, a tribute to his role as a Digger. Noted Hollywood cinematographer /director Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, Bound for Glory, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) paid for the final print of Nowsreal.

  Richard produced one final giveaway broadside along with the Please Plant This Book extravaganza. The Communication Company had ceased to function. Brautigan turned again to the skills of Graham Mackintosh, who operated a flatbed printing press. The San Francisco Weather Report possessed far greater production values than any of its Gestetner stenciled predecessors. The broadside showcased “Gee, You’re so Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain,” a poem about Marcia Pacaud’s “long blond beauty.” It appeared later in issue no. 45 of the Paris Review (Winter 1968). Poetry editor Tom Clark had recently moved from England to Bolinas about the same time that Richard’s relationship with his Canadian girlfriend ended in the spring of 1968.