Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  On Sunday, Richard prepared a spaghetti dinner for fifteen, while he and Curt “talked about fame.” Brautigan went to bed very late. Once again, he drank too much “and disappointed myself by doing so.” It snowed that night, the first serious storm after a languid Indian summer. The surprise splendor of more than a foot of new snow on the ground brightened Richard’s morning hangover.

  Everyone reveled in the early winter. Ianthe built a snowman. Wild snowball fights spontaneously erupted. “We were like children,” Brautigan wrote in his journal. After the morning’s frolic, when Richard took what Curt Gentry called “his weekly bath,” Curt, Siew-Hwa, Ianthe, and Gail filled a washtub with snow, carrying it to the bathroom window. They raised the window in whispered silence and dumped the whole freezing load in on top of the placid bather. Whooping, Richard ran from the bathroom “stark naked out into the blizzard,” grabbed a shovel, and decapitated Ianthe’s snowman.

  According to the improvised kitchen schedule, it wasn’t Brautigan’s night to cook. He was pissed when he had to do it anyway. Harmon Henkin and a girlfriend had been invited to dinner. Siew-Hwa didn’t like Harmon and refused to cook for him. After a big fight, Beh locked herself in a spare bedroom. Brautigan “wouldn’t speak to her.” He prepared rabbit he’d bought from Gatz. After dinner, Richard and Harmon “got into some trading.” Brautigan traded Henkin “a .22 caliber Ithaca carbine for a very good fly reel, a winter vest, a waterproof jacket and a dozen muddler minnow flies.”

  A late night of drinking and trading followed by a bout of insomnia left Richard feeling “like shit” the next day. He and Siew-Hwa were barely speaking in the morning. Richard used his exhaustion as an excuse to stay home and not go with Curt, Gail, and Siew-Hwa when Tony drove them all to the airport. A nap didn’t help. Neither did lunch at Martin’s Café, where the food was “terrible.” Another nap in the afternoon “didn’t help either.” Brautigan solved the problem by getting very drunk during and after dinner “with a bunch of people” at Becky Fonda’s place. They got into a snowball fight out front, and Richard lost his eyeglasses.

  Waking up the next morning with another hangover, Brautigan wrote “What’s new?” in his makeshift journal. Tony drove him up to Becky’s, and they found his glasses in the snow. Hangover therapy included a long afternoon nap, watching “very bad television,” soaking in a hot tub, and reading Helter Skelter. Richard wrote “What a horrible story” about Curt’s book, intending it as praise. His day ended with a long nonargumentative telephone call to Siew-Hwa lasting until 3:00 am.

  The morning’s hangover marked the beginning of a ten-day stretch of relative sobriety and consistent hard work. Brautigan received word from Helen Brann on October 16 that Willard had sold 35,500 copies as of the tenth. “I was immensely happy,” he wrote in his daybook. Richard allowed only three hangovers to disrupt his industrious progress toward the conclusion of Sombrero Fallout. He finished on the twenty-second. “Hooray!”

  The next day remained very cold. Richard spent most of the morning and afternoon proofreading his manuscript. A letter from Siew-Hwa arrived with the day’s mail. Beh bared her heart in two handwritten pages. “I feel unconsolable, spiraling in unspeakable grief,” she wrote. “I can no longer feel your care only your violence, aggression, denials, and self centeredness.” They had lived together for just eight months, yet Siew-Hwa observed, “I wake up every morning house sitting with a ghost lover [. . .] I am lost to the world and can speak only to/from my loneliness. I’m waning fast becoming an apparition. Our love was too young and fragile to weather the constant premature pummelling of your many years of historical grievances.”

  Richard brooded on the contents of Beh’s letter for the rest of the day. He cooked dinner for David Dill and Judy and Stuart Bergsma, who lived nearby on the Deep Creek bench, getting very drunk as the evening wore on. Once the Bergsmas departed, Brautigan and Dill, whose wife had recently left him, sat up drinking and talking about love until 2:00 am. After Dave went home, Richard called Siew-Hwa in San Francisco. Discussing the contents of her letter precipitated a big fight. “I got mad at her and hung up,” Brautigan wrote later. After slamming down the receiver in a fury, Richard gathered all the telephones in his house and burned them in his cast-iron Franklin stove. “They burn with a strange blue flame,” he observed.

  Ianthe slept through the whole thing. When she awoke the next morning, she smelled gas. “I could tell by a peculiar silence in the house that people had been drinking all night,” she wrote in her memoir. Ianthe found “a nest of odd wires” coiled among the ashes in the fireplace, all that remained of the phones. Gatz Hjortsberg remembered seeing a two-inch piece of coiled blue wire lying like a cartoon pig’s tail on the fender. A hangover didn’t help Richard deal with the problem when he finally woke up. He was at a loss on how to handle the telephone company. “They want to know what happened with my phones. I can’t tell them I burned them, can I?” Brautigan asked his daughter.

  Richard wanted Tony Dingman to take care of the problem. Tony just laughed at him, so he walked next door to Gatz’s place and called Mountain Bell himself. “They sort of disappeared,” he stammered, answering the dread question. Dingman drove Brautigan into town, where Richard personally collected his replacement phones from the front office. Brautigan made no mention of any of this in his daily compendium. The fifth and last entry for the day had him using his new instruments: “A total, total stranger called me up on the telephone. They told me that they heard I was dead. I told them I wasn’t and that made them happy.”

  The cold weather held through the next day, a Saturday, and not much got accomplished. Richard took Ianthe into town to shop for daffodil bulbs. He wanted to see flowers in the springtime, he said. Deep inside, Brautigan wasn’t really sure about what to do next. With his novel finished, he had no current work on hand. Tony would be leaving soon. A chinook blew up in the evening, and the temperature rose, but Richard felt winter creep inexorably closer. The prospect of spending several frozen months housebound with his daughter seemed less and less like something he wanted in his immediate future.

  Brautigan had dinner that night at the Hjortsbergs’ and drank only three glasses of red wine. “I was a good boy.” Back at home, he puttered about in his sleeping cabin for a while before going to bed. Vanessi’s and Enrico’s seemed a million miles away. Tossing and turning, struggling with his persistent insomnia through the night, Richard restlessly decided to close his Montana place for the winter and return to San Francisco.

  Ianthe got the news on Sunday without “any advance warning” after she’d planted the daffodils. She was devastated. “Another part of my world collapsed,” she wrote in her memoir. “I knew the truth: [My father] couldn’t take care of me. The ranch was an illusion. My bedroom was false. Anything he gave me would be taken away [. . . ]He just couldn’t manage it.” Ianthe found herself in a quandary. Her mother had just moved to Hawaii and she didn’t want to uproot and move halfway around the world. She felt exhausted and “couldn’t imagine” having to start again at yet another new school (the eleventh she had thus far attended). Lexi Cowan and her older married sister, Deane, came to Ianthe’s rescue, offering to take her in and look after her for the rest of the school year.

  Both Cowan sisters lived on Mill Creek, where their parents had ranched, about ten miles south of Brautigan’s place. Deane shared a double-wide with her husband, Ralph Bischer, a Vietnam vet, and her son by her first husband who had died in the war. Lexi had a house across the creek. Ianthe left with only a suitcase and her little cat, Mittens, originally smuggled into the household over her father’s objections. Richard opened a bank account for his daughter, promising to send money every month. He also established charge accounts at several clothing stores and at Sax & Fryer’s. A week or so later, Ianthe returned with Lexi and rode her horse through the snow to Deane’s Mill Creek pasture. She had no memory of saying goodbye to her father. For his part, Richard made no mention of his daughter’s departure in h
is daily record.

  Brautigan’s little “journal” avoided emotional issues but detailed the trivial issues that preoccupied him. An entry three days before taking off from Pine Creek was typical:

  Sunday, October 26, 1975, Pine Creek.

  1. I did a lot of things today getting ready to leave Montana on Thursday.

  2. Lou Erickson, the fencer, came over and we spent a couple hours talking about things that I wanted done concerning fencing and cleaning up the place.

  3. I felt bad all day because Siew-Hwa and I had a huge argument over the telephone again and I also had trouble sleeping last night.

  4. I went over to Gatz’s and got very drunk. I was melancholy and talked about my writing. I probably sounded like an asshole.

  Hjorstberg remembered this evening vividly. It became one of those nights, causing Marian to remark, “For once, I was glad I was the wife, so I could go upstairs to bed, while you had to stay down in the kitchen and be the host.” After Richard drank all the whiskey, he went to work on the vodka and the gin. Once the hard stuff was gone, he demolished the liqueurs, polishing off remnant bottles of crème de menthe and Kahlua. All the while, Brautigan remained relatively coherent, but his stutter grew more pronounced. He focused on a single thought, repeating it over and over and over like some insane mantra. Gatz listened to Richard’s rambling rant, a smile frozen on his face, mentally repeating a silent prayer, “Please, God, make him go home. Please, make him go home.” It was past four when Richard finally departed.

  A hangover wasted the next day, and Brautigan went to bed “with a feeling of not having done anything.” On Tuesday, Richard finished correcting Sombrero Fallout, took the manuscript into town to make Xerox copies, and mailed one off to Helen Brann in New York. During the afternoon, he and Tony washed White Acre, keeping the promise they’d made to the car at the start of summer. The rest of the day was devoted to packing, after which Brautigan and Dingman went up to the Bergsmas’ for a fine roast lamb dinner.

  Wednesday, October 29, was Richard’s last day at Pine Creek for 1975. He and Tony stayed busy preparing the house for the winter. They drained the pipes, unloaded the fridge, and shut off the gas to the stove. Brautigan organized all of his business papers up in his tree house office in the barn. That afternoon, he brought his chainsaw, his television set, his fishing rods and tackle, along with an arsenal of assorted firearms, over to Gatz and Marian’s for safekeeping. On learning Margot Kidder had given birth to a baby girl earlier in the day, Richard wrote a short poem to celebrate the occasion. Because the child had not yet been named, he left a blank space in the title when he typed the poem. Later, although she was called Maggie from the start, he wrote the baby’s given name by hand: “Margeret [sic] in October.”

  Richard and Tony spent the night at the Holiday Inn in Bozeman, flying out to San Francisco the next morning. Siew-Hwa failed to meet them at the airport, which precipitated “a horrible argument later on.” Brautigan started drinking and “didn’t stop,” heading out in the evening for a drinking tour covering half a dozen bars. “No good came of it,” he observed later. Brautigan had nothing to eat until one in the morning, when he wolfed down a hot dog. “Some dinner.” A “hideous hangover” followed the next morning, accompanied by fighting with Siew-Hwa.

  Over the next couple days, their ongoing argument continued, interrupted only by eating out in restaurants and going to the movies. Brautigan ended his daily record-keeping experiment on November 3. He breakfasted with Don Carpenter and had lunch with Curt Gentry. The day was warm and pleasant. Richard’s penultimate entry read, “I’m trying to get my shit together here in San Francisco, i.e. the rest of my life.” Much of the “shit” Brautigan needed to deal with stemmed from his turbulent relationship with Siew-Hwa. He took the path of least resistance by getting out of town six days later.

  Richard flew to New York on American Airlines. He spent a lot of time with Helen Brann, dropping by her apartment so often that she felt compelled to write him after he left town, explaining that because her office was located in her apartment building, she could not “see clients except by appointment [. . .] If you have manuscripts to leave off or pick up they must be left with the doorman. We are always happy to see clients, but you must call us and make an appointment first.”

  Helen Brann was a tough cookie, hard to get along with and often disagreeable, but she and Brautigan enjoyed a special relationship that went beyond the usual agent/client arrangement, verging into an improbable friendship. Richard had recently brought her two new clients. One was Don Carpenter. Brautigan thought Brann might find a new home for his out-of-print books. The other was Peter Najarian, a young writer who had been a Stegner Fellow at the time Richard read at Stanford in 1968. Gatz Hjortsberg reintroduced them when Peter came out to visit that fall. Peter had published Voyages, a well-received but poorly selling novel, with Pantheon in 1971. Helen called Richard “a great scout!” Brautigan contemplated spending the winter in Key West and invited Brann to come down and enjoy some time in the sun.

  Richard changed his mind and his plans once he got back to San Francisco. He would travel to Tokyo instead. Brautigan had several reasons for wanting to visit Japan. Four of his books had been published there that year. Kazuko returned to America that summer for a vacation. She was working on the translation of Confederate General. Earlier in August, still in Tokyo, she received a disturbing phone call from the firm planning to publish The Pill versus the Springhill Disaster in Japanese. Brautigan’s contracts all stipulated Fujimoto was to be his official translator, but this outfit had another idea. They asked her not to do the translation.

  Natsuki Ikezawa, a thirty-year-old poet, novelist, and essayist, had requested the assignment, and the publishers wanted Kazuko to step aside. She found this “quite odd,” replying she “was not in a position to alter the terms of a contract between them and [Brautigan].” Early in September, Fujimoto wrote Brautigan from Racine, Wisconsin, reminding him that item 17 in his publishing contract stipulated that she was the designated translator. By coincidence, Helen Brann also wrote to Richard on the same day addressing this very problem. Brann speculated if they “stuck to our guns,” they could force the Japanese publishing firm to drop the Ikezawa translation, but said she “didn’t see that we can do too much about this at this point.”

  Richard and Siew-Hwa had dinner at the Washbag with Kazuko and her husband, David, in mid-September. Fujimoto planned on taking a short trip down to Big Sur to ensure the “accuracy” of her Confederate General translation before returning to Tokyo. Kazuko told Richard that she wanted to work next on either Revenge of the Lawn or Willard and His Bowling Trophies. Brautigan’s journal entry for the day included this observation: “I was pleased to know my work is popular in Japan.”

  Ianthe flew to Hawaii from Montana over Christmas break to spend time with her mother and half siblings. She had not seen her father since just before Halloween. On her return, she stopped off in San Francisco for a brief visit. Ianthe stayed a week longer than she expected, coming down with a bad case of bronchitis. She ran a fever of 102. Brautigan walked his daughter down Telegraph Hill and across Columbus Avenue to see a doctor but was too preoccupied with other concerns to stay and learn what was wrong with her. He didn’t leave Ianthe enough money to both buy antibiotics and take a cab home. After she filled her prescription she walked back to Union Street, “too tired and sick to cry.” She was only fifteen but “felt like an old, old woman whose life was coming to an end.”

  Preoccupied with applying for a Japanese visa, breaking up with Siew-Hwa, planning his trip, and “drinking nonstop,” Brautigan paid scant attention to his daughter’s illness, although he handed her money “by the fistful.” Ianthe ordered takeout food and somehow “managed to keep things together,” with the help of Siew-Hwa’s nursing. After Richard also came down sick, Siew-Hwa took over all the cooking chores despite being “mad as hell” at him. When Ianthe asked what was going to become of her, Richard said she
could either accompany him to Japan and attend a boarding school there, or go back to Hawaii and live with her mother. Neither option sounded very attractive. Ianthe planned on returning to the loving circle formed by Deane and Lexi Cowan in Montana, and as soon as she was well enough to travel, she did.

  In an interview years later, Siew-Hwa Beh declared, “Richard destroyed the relationship. He started initiating a lot of destructive things that would cause rifts, like staying away until all hours of the night.” Brautigan never brought anyone home to the apartment but started seeing a “Latino [sic] woman who he had no feelings for.” Siew-Hwa didn’t understand why he started cheating. “Now there are three of us,” Richard told her after he returned from one of his assignations. When the Latina woman called the apartment and Siew-Hwa answered the phone, she wasn’t jealous. “I felt so much compassion for the situation,” she said. “He was troubled, and the darkness started to descend, and I didn’t know what to do.”

  Brautigan never brought other women home while Beh was in residence, but when they were apart it was another story. Sherry Vetter remembered spending time with him in North Beach during this period. She recalled the Union Street apartment in detail. The back room Richard used as a writing studio was bright with sunlight, something Brautigan, with his pale sensitive skin, couldn’t tolerate. Richard seemed unable to make up his mind whether to have curtains installed or get wooden blinds instead. “It was the problem of making the decisions of what to buy and what was right or what was stupid,” Sherry said. “So he did nothing.” Brautigan left in place the cheap pull-down roller shades that came with the apartment for the duration of his tenancy.

  One afternoon, Richard sadly told Sherry about Siew-Hwa Beh, “his Chinese girlfriend,” and how she had called him a male chauvinist pig and told him he would have to reform. At this point in their relationship, Brautigan and Vetter had become close friends and were quite comfortable discussing other partners. Sherry found this particular moment “so poignant and so sad.” Richard looked over at her and asked, “Do you think I’m a male chauvinist pig?”