Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  Sherry Vetter remembered going over to the McClures’ place with Richard in 1970, the first Christmas they were together as a couple. Brautigan brought a bottle of wine. Since he was flush with his new success, the vintage was a cut above the cheap white port from Benedetti’s. Sherry recalled the Spartan apartment: “There was one room like a sunroom where McClure worked, and that was the only place that had any furniture in it.” The “funny almost kitchen” had only a sink, a hot plate, and “a little tiny refrigerator.”

  The big living room contained nothing but colorful pillows on the floor. They sprawled there “Indian style” for the simple repast, which Sherry remembered as “oysters boiled in milk with dollops of butter and salt and pepper and French bread.” She considered Michael to be “a prima donna. He thought he was a really handsome knockout dude—lying there with his tight blue jeans on and this little sort of open-collared shirt and this long hair.” Sherry thought more highly of Joanna, “a real sweetheart. She was like the sole support.”

  Bobbie Louise Hawkins agreed that Joanna McClure, who had started her own little kindergarten school, provided the firm foundation for her family by creating “a sense of well-being. Joanna would come back home from the job, come in, be delighted at whoever was there, get her own glass of wine, and be chatty and bright about it. Completely unneurotic. She had a largesse and luxury.”

  Hawkins believed Brautigan’s new fame drove him away from his former friends to his own detriment. “Suddenly Richard made a hit with Trout Fishing, and all that was lost for him,” she said. “As soon as the fame occurred, all those people sucking up felt real to him. He couldn’t distinguish. There would have been some hope for him if he had managed to keep holding on to what had actually given him a home base and anchor. But as soon as that other wash of stuff came in, he went with it. There was nobody there to take care of him.”

  The artist Bruce Conner had been friends with Michael McClure since their earliest school days together in Wichita and remembered meeting Brautigan for the first time at Downey Street. “Richard arrived looking all thin and pale and gangly and awkward and obviously shy and not very communicative. Words weren’t coming out.” Conner viewed the new friendship between Brautigan and McClure with a jaundiced eye. “Michael and I were sitting around talking, and Richard came in, and he said, ‘Richard, go in the kitchen and wash the dishes.’”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” Brautigan replied, heading dutifully to the kitchen.

  Bruce Conner didn’t know what to make of this. “Michael, what are you telling him to wash the dishes for?” he asked. “Did he come over here to do the dishes?”

  “No. He likes to do things like that,” McClure answered. “He likes me to tell him what to do.”

  Conner remembered Brautigan’s “tremulous respect” for Michael McClure. Looking back on those times, he observed, “Michael would push him around, order him around like a little slave. This didn’t do much for establishing Richard’s value as an independent creature. Maybe Richard did like washing the dishes. I have no idea. Washing the dishes was probably one of the few things he did very well.”

  Soon after this, Joanna McClure acquired a Russian wolfhound puppy. “Skinny and angular, long-faced and long-nosed,” Michael wrote, “and he looked like he had loose threads on his elbows.” Bruce Conner remembered the dog as a “tall, gangly, awkward, shy creature.” The McClures named him Brautigan. Conner found the situation a bit strange. “Here we were,” he recalled. “Richard would come by, and he’d find us over there, and there would be Brautigan the dog. How much more demeaning does Michael want to be?”

  Brautigan never mentioned being put out at having a dog for a namesake. He greatly admired Michael McClure, captured in part by his dramatic appearance. “He looks kind of like a dark lion the way he carries himself,” Richard wrote in his notebook. “The style of him. But sometimes there is distance in him. A lion floating in space.” Wallace Berman took a striking set of four photographs of McClure in 1963, posed frontally nude, his face made up to resemble a lion with a full mane and whiskers. McClure used it on a flyer to advertise a poetry reading, and Brautigan was undoubtedly influenced by it. In Ghost Tantras, written in the early sixties, McClure began experimenting with an invented Beast Language, mixing animal sounds (“AHH GRHHROOOR! AHH ROOOOH. GAR.”) with his own biospheric metaphysical lexicon. Celebrating this leonine behavior, Richard Brautigan wrote “A CandleLion Poem” and dedicated it to Michael McClure.

  Early in 1964, Brautigan still struggled to get his new novel about contemporary life in California off the ground. One evening, eating chicken with the McClures in their kitchen, unable to focus on the dinner table conversation, Richard listened to Jane, the McClures’ blond, seven-year-old daughter watching television in the other room, a program about parachuting with the sounds of men bailing out of aircraft, as he pondered the names of the characters in his planned novel. He wanted names with the enduring quality of Echo O’Brien, Flem Snopes, Holden Caulfield, Studs Lonigan, Huckleberry Finn, Dr. Jekyll, Leopold Bloom, Jocko DeParis, Horatio Hornblower, or Hopalong Cassidy. Names with clout. Names a reader would never forget.

  Michael and Joanna felt Richard’s distance but made no comment. When Joanna smiled at something witty Michael said, Richard mirrored her reaction without hearing a word. Brautigan got up and looked out the kitchen door at the rapt little girl sitting on the couch. He couldn’t see the TV screen she stared at, thinking about naming his characters, assailed all the while by the sounds of someone being thrown out of a plane. Returning to the table, Richard requested a favor from the McClures. “Would you please ask your little girl to write a list of words that she can spell and then give the list to me?” he said. “I need it. Would you have her write them in Crayola, please. Somewhere between six and ten words on a sheet of paper. That will be enough.”

  Michael and Joanna agreed without asking any questions, as Richard knew they would. That was the nature of poets, he reasoned. Brautigan couldn’t say why he didn’t ask Jane directly. He figured asking her parents “was the best way to do it.” The next day, Richard called Michael to remind him. McClure said he’d try to have the list tomorrow. Richard imagined names written in color in “the rough beautiful hand of a child.”

  The following evening, Brautigan attended a poetry reading in a bar. He drank vodka washed down with a beer chaser and paid particular attention to an attractive young woman in a tight sweater whose response to the work seemed somewhat exaggerated. “She was too excited and laughed too loudly, sometimes even at the wrong places.” Michael McClure came in while the featured poet was reading a love poem. He sat down, not seeing Richard, who sat behind him. McClure had a roll of paper and put it up to his eye “like a sea captain,” scanning the audience for his friend. Richard attempted a loud whisper. It was no use. He didn’t want to disturb the reading. Michael didn’t hear him, but the pretty girl turned and stared back at Richard.

  During the intermission, McClure found Brautigan and gave him the roll of paper. He said that he and his daughter were very curious about what was going on. Richard assured him they would know all about it soon. Michael wasn’t feeling well and had to go. He had only come to deliver his daughter’s list. After McClure left, Brautigan began a conversation with the pretty girl in the sweater. She said she was also a poet and had been writing for two years but had never shown her work to anyone. It was a personal thing with her.

  When the intermission ended they continued their whispered conversation. People started looking at them, so she said, “Let’s go.” They left the reading, walking out into the warm sweet rain. The girl wore a raincoat. They ambled along, talking about their lives and about poetry, “her hidden passion.” She was twenty-three years old and had a child out of wedlock. She kept her hands in her raincoat pockets. Richard slipped his hand into one of her pockets, and she pulled away. “Oh, now,” she said. “I just want to talk about poetry.” They continued their conversation about Robert Desnos, the French
surrealist Price Dunn had recommended. Brautigan was surprised the girl had heard of him. Neither of them spoke French, and very little of his work had been translated into English.

  When Richard tried a second time to put his hand in her pocket, she gently said, “Please.”

  “I’d like to go to bed with you,” Brautigan replied. “Let’s talk about poetry while we fuck.”

  The young woman wasn’t interested, and said she’d like to correspond with Brautigan about his poetry. Richard asked her where she lived.

  “Here, in San Francisco,” she said.

  “I live here, too. Why write letters to each other. We live in the same city.”

  When the girl replied that she’d like writing better, Richard turned and walked away, leaving her standing in the rain. “What about Robert Desnos?” she called after him.

  “What about him?” Brautigan answered. “He died in a German concentration camp in 1945.”

  When Richard got home, he unrolled the papers Michael had given to him. There in brightly colored child printing were the names Jane McClure had chosen for the characters in his novel: “ON CHILDREN . . . LOOG . . . OFF SO . . . HHOG . . . RAN RUN.”

  Brautigan transformed this episode into a six-page story he called “The Names of the Characters in This Novel.” He intended it as a chapter in his new book, but things overall were not going well. Richard wrote only one letter in March, to Ron Loewinsohn, concentrating on his fiction. After several months’ work, he had finished just nine short chapters for “Contemporary Life in California.” When he finally set the novel aside sometime in April, only twenty-nine pages had been completed.

  Other matters remained uppermost in Brautigan’s mind. Anxious to place portions of his two completed novels in magazines, a potential source of immediate additional income, he wrote only business-related letters in April. At Donald Allen’s suggestion, Richard mailed “Headquarters,” a chapter from Confederate General, to Madeline Tracy Brigden, fiction editor of Mademoiselle, requesting a prompt decision. Brautigan sent another section to the fiction editor of Esquire.

  In mid-April Richard received a letter from Susan Stanwood, fiction editor of the Saturday Evening Post, inquiring about first serial rights for the novel about to be published by Grove Press. Richard mailed her a copy of the manuscript. On the same day, he wrote to Charles Newman, editor of a new literary magazine called TriQuarterly published out of Northwestern University. Newman had written to Grove, expressing interest in Brautigan’s work for possible inclusion in the first issue. Richard promised to send him something, “within the next few weeks.”

  Richard Brautigan first encountered Dr. John Doss and his wife at Don Allen’s festive 1963 Christmas party. “He seemed like a shy deer,” Margot recalled. The Dosses were well-known in San Francisco art and literary circles, both as patrons and participants. Their elegant four-story townhouse at 1331 Greenwich Street on the summit of Russian Hill was long celebrated for the jovial parties they hosted, functioning as what Grover Sales called “the only true salon on the West Coast.” A noted local photographer, John was better known as the head of pediatrics at Kaiser Foundation Hospital. Margot started writing a column on walking tours in San Francisco for the Chronicle in 1961. William Hogan, literary critic at the newspaper, suggested that she call Donald Allen and show him examples of her work. One thing led to another, and in 1962, Grove Press published San Francisco at Your Feet, a collection of her columns, edited by Allen.

  Donald Allen’s Christmas party guest list also included Robert Duncan, Helen Adam (the Scottish-born balladeer and coauthor of the play San Francisco’s Burning), Richard Baker (later Baker Roshi of the Zen Center), and Lew Welch, recently returned from his northern hermit’s lair to read at David Haselwood and Andrew Hoyem’s Auerhahn Press, which had published his first book of poetry, Wobbly Rock, in 1960. John Doss also remembered “another guy there who had just written a book on how to fuck.”

  The Dosses and Richard “hit it off immediately.” They invited him to dinner at their place soon after. A cold rain saturated the night, and Richard arrived shivering at Greenwich Street in a torn T-shirt, so chilled and miserable and thin that Margot “immediately went and got a black turtleneck sweater that I had knitted for John when he was in medical school and which he didn’t wear much anymore.” The cabled sweater became a favorite, and photographs over the years frequently showed Brautigan wearing it.

  Margot and John had long been interested in Bolinas (in 1968 they bought a house at 9 Brighton Avenue) in part because it was a magnet for poets and artists. Brautigan had known of the place beforehand, but his new friendship with the Dosses encouraged the notion of relocating to the little coastal town. Early in May, about the same time Kulchur (vol. 4, no. 13) published his short story “The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon,” Richard quit his job at Pacific Chemical and made the move out to Bolinas. All told, he earned $332 mixing barium swallows formula in 1964.

  A letter mailed at the end of April to Francisco Street from Madeline Tracy Brigden at Mademoiselle followed Richard out to Bolinas. She said she was sorry to decide against using “Headquarters” in the magazine. Not all his work was being rejected. In May, “September California,” a poem, appeared in Sum (no. 3), a little magazine in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Ron Loewinsohn was a contributing editor), but small press publication didn’t compensate for being turned down in New York.

  Richard Brautigan took up residence, rent-free, in an unfinished house located on Dogwood Street up on the Bolinas Mesa. The place was being built by a friend of Bill Brown’s, a local contractor named Bob Callagy (later Callagy-Jones, after an affiliation with a Gurdjieff group and the discovery of his true father’s name). Eventually, the completed house became the residence of Bay Area TV commentator Mel Wax.

  Brautigan worked part-time for Bill Brown during this period. Once, out on a job, Brown gave Richard a shovel and asked him to dig a trench for a septic line. “It’s supposed to go between here and here,” Bill told him and left. At the end of the day when Brown returned, Richard had dug a trench that was exactly wide enough to fit the pipe but narrower than his shovel. “How in the hell did you do that?” Bill Brown wanted to know.

  Joanne Kyger remembered riding the Greyhound out to Bolinas a couple times to visit Richard. They wandered the Mesa and along Agate Beach together, endlessly talking. There was no romance. Joanne spent the night in a separate room and took the bus back to the city in the morning. At the time, the house on Dogwood had no running water and Richard had to use the toilet at a place down the street. “Things are a little crude,” he wrote to Don Allen.

  Because he didn’t drive, transportation into the city was by bus or hitchhiking. Brautigan remained woefully short of funds. While in San Francisco picking up essentials necessary for his rustic life, Richard phoned Michael McClure and found him sick in bed. “My body weighs four hundred pounds,” Michael moaned. A month before, they’d had a phone conversation “about the sketch as a literary form and could anything be done with it.”

  After talking it over, Brautigan suggested they swap sketches. “I’ll write one and then you write one in return,” Richard said. “How does that sound?” McClure agreed. Isolated in fogbound Bolinas, Richard struggled for weeks “but there wasn’t a sketch in me.” Instead, he polished his novels and “wrote a lot of letters to strangers. The letters did not work out the way I wanted them to.” After sending a chapter of Confederate General to Charles Newman at TriQuarterly in May, he wrote the fiction editor of Playboy, trying to place sections of his novel. At Don Allen’s suggestion, Brautigan contacted Seymour Krim, from 1961 to 1965 the editor of Nugget, a girlie rag where he published the work of Gregory Corso, John Rechy, Kenneth Rexroth, John Clellon Holmes, Jack Gelber, and others. Dense fog, heavy as rain, enclosed the unfinished house and limited Brautigan’s universe. Sending endless letters to editors made as much sense as staring out the window at the impenetrable gray.

  One morning after returning from th
e city, Richard found a dead rabbit lying outside his bedroom. He didn’t like the idea of sleeping so near to death and tossed the corpse into a field about a hundred yards away from his house. Brautigan wrote a couple pages about this nonevent and titled his effort “Railroading: A Sketch for Michael McClure.” In a postscript, he stated that “Michael never wrote his sketch, but since then his life has been perfect.” When McClure finally got around to responding five years later, he had something much more ambitious than a simple sketch in mind.

  Early in May, discouraged by letter-writing and unhappy with the lack of progress on “Contemporary Life in California,” Brautigan started work on a new novel. Among his papers, he came across a water-stained three-by-five-inch Velvatone memo book. He had paid nineteen cents for it years before, intending to take it with him when he went on fishing trips up to the Klamath River. “I was going to use it for jotting down little descriptions of nature and my own reactions to those descriptions.” Richard noted his original purpose on the front leaf, turned the page, and wrote, “My family was killed by tigers in the act of making love.”

  Dissatisfied, Brautigan started again: “My family was killed by the tigers before this shack was built. They were killed in the act of making love. When I came home they were lying there. The mark of the tiger was against their (dead) bodies [. . .]” He went on to describe killing the last tigers, “shot full of arrows and then brought to the temple of iDEATH.” There they were soaked in “watermelon oil” and set on fire. Writing rapidly, many of his scrawled words all but illegible, Richard sketched out the ideas he’d toyed with in his imagination over the past four years.