Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Dick Brautigan always sat by the window in Miss Gibson’s classroom, slouching at his desk with his feet propped on the nearest empty chair. When reprimanded about his posture, he straightened up for a time, gradually sliding back into a lanky sprawl. The view out the window comprised an ivy-covered wall, the leaves a vivid scarlet in autumn. Brautigan never participated in class discussion, preferring to daydream. When Juliette Gibson held forth on poetry (she was fond of quoting from Vagabond’s House, a book of sentimental Hawaiian-themed rhymes by Don Blanding, a friend she met during visits to the islands in the thirties and forties), young Dick appeared not to be listening, engrossed instead sketching outrageous cartoons: grotesque birds, dragons, caricatures. “Fiddle-faddle” was Miss Gibson’s dismissive term for such flights of fancy.

  Eileen Dawson, a junior enrolled in the creative writing class, remembered Miss Gibson chiding Brautigan for “wasting his time” with these drawings, encouraging him to concentrate on his writing. She recalled the teacher “praising him for his writing, whether it was short stories or poetry. She told him he could become a very good writer.” Juliette Gibson had her students stand in front of the class to read their work, but Dick Brautigan was too self-conscious. Eileen Dawson had no memory of him ever reading aloud. “He sat back and didn’t comment one way or the other. He did the work. She commented often about the quality of it.”

  A selection of student writing from Juliette Gibson’s fall term was showcased in “Poet’s Nook” (“Creative Writers Express Christmas Spirit”), a section of the December 19, 1952, edition of the EHS News. Compared with the clumsy rhymed doggerel of the other young writers, the short, sensitive poem signed “Richard Brautigan” deserved its premier position. It was his first published work.

  The Light

  Into the sorrow of the night

  Through the valley of dark dispair [sic]

  Across the black sea of iniquity

  Where the wind is the cry of the suffering

  There came a glorious saving light

  The light of eternal peace

  Jesus Christ, the King of Kings.

  The creative writing class worked on various forms of short fiction as well as poetry. “We wrote plays and skits and everything,” Eileen Dawson recalled, remembering many of Brautigan’s early stories “tended toward science fiction.” E. William Laing, a fellow senior studying with Miss Gibson, had very few memories of his famous classmate (“a tall slender young man with blond hair and a very fair complexion”) outside the writing group. The budding writer remained so anonymous in high school that Laing didn’t realize Dick Porterfield had changed his name until decades later, when he read Trout Fishing in America.

  One of Brautigan’s earliest tales stayed in Laing’s memory throughout the years. “I remember a story Richard wrote about a fly-fishing trip to a remote stream,” Bill Laing recollected. “He was all alone several miles from the nearest community and was not having very good luck when he met an old fisherman.” Brautigan described the old man in detail, relating how he told him how to fish the stream and gave him several special flies. The old man’s advice and flies did the trick. Richard caught lots of fish. On the way home, he stopped at the local community store for a soda. Richard described his encounter with the old fisherman. The owner knew the old man’s name and recognized the flies as a special pattern only he had tied. “Then, he informed Richard the old man had died several years ago while fishing his favorite pool on his favorite trout stream, the one Richard had just described to him.”

  Juliette Gibson’s experience and sophistication set her apart from the 1950s provincialism of the Pacific Northwest, and she made it a goal to expose her students to a world larger than the one encompassed by the Willamette Valley. Literature provided the map charting a course to wider horizons. Miss Gibson submitted the best work produced in her class to a competition sponsored by the National High School Poetry Association. The winners were to be published nationally, an award more valuable than prize money for the aspiring young poets.

  “Ten Creative Writers Rate in National Anthology Book” headed a brief story in the EHS News (1/30/53). All the writers were from Juliette Gibson’s class. Richard Brautigan was not mentioned. A follow-up piece (“Poets’ Prize Poems Published”) on April 10, 1953, listed “Dick Braudigan [sic]” as one of ten Eugene High students to be featured in the anthology. Bill Laing and Eileen Dawson also had poetry included.

  Young America Sings: 1953 Anthology of Northwest States High School Poetry (a cheaply produced volume in wraps bound with twine tied through twin punched holes), came out in the late spring with fifteen young writers from Eugene among the contributors. It was Richard Brautigan’s first appearance in a book-length publication. His poem, “The Ochoco,” shines like a polished gemstone among a mountain of dross, its virtues magnified by proximity to lines like “Our kitchen lab in home ec / While we’re cooking is a wreck.” Brautigan’s poem celebrated the mountain landscape of the Ochoco Range near the Folston family ranch in Eastern Oregon. Dick told Eileen Dawson that it was written after spending a summer vacation there. She remembered “it was a place he especially liked.”

  Juliette Gibson retired from teaching in 1958. She stayed on in Eugene, remaining active in the American Legion and little theater productions. By the time she died at age eighty-one in 1971, Richard Brautigan had achieved international fame. Dick Brautigan never gave his mentor a second thought once he left Eugene. After the gates of American Literature swung open, he walked through and never looked back. Aside from a brief stopover on a reading tour, he avoided his home town, returning only in imagination to capture the Pacific Northwest within the pages of his enduring art.

  eight: white wooden angel of love

  DURING HARVEST SEASON the summer after graduation, Dick Brautigan worked out at the packing plant for a buck forty an hour. He also continued his part-time odd jobs for Mrs. Manerude, living at home in his add-on writer’s shack. Dick and Stan Oswald worked on the Eugene Fruit Growers Association beet line. Pete Webster’s job was on the bean line. Although classmates and intramural basketball opponents, Dick and Peter had not been close friends in school.

  Pete Webster played end on the varsity football team, earning the nickname “Moose.” The longest time he and Dick ever spent together was during the college entrance exams held over at the U of O. After the tests, Stan, Dick, and Pete headed for the student union building to shoot pool. “The two of them weren’t concerned about the tests at all, although they passed them with flying colors. They had no intention of going on to college.”

  Pete worked the night shift at the cannery, eleven and a half hours, from 6:30 PM to 6:30 AM, with a half hour off for “lunch.” Putting in a six-night week, he cleared $100 in his pay envelope. Dick and Stan worked days. Ten-and-a-half-hour shifts, carrying fresh produce in from the carts for cleaning and grading, or at the other end, toting loads of steaming cans as they came sealed from the cooker. Sometimes, the schedules overlapped. One hot afternoon, the line shut down and the three young men decided to go fishing. Pete owned a ’37 Ford, so he provided transportation. “It was my first time fishing with Richard and my first time on the McKenzie River.”

  The two became fast friends after that, fishing together “at every opportunity.” Absent stepfathers provided another bond. Having used the name “Webster” all his life, Pete also found out abruptly his senior year that his blood father bore a different last name. Just as school officials asked Dick Porterfield about “Brautigan,” they inquired if Peter Webster wanted “McGuire” on his diploma. The two boys made opposing decisions. Pete stuck with Webster.

  Many of the Pacific Northwest streams mentioned in Trout Fishing in America (“Hayman Creek, Graveyard Creek”) were fictitious. Grider Creek and Tom Martin Creek (chapter titles in the novel) actually exist. Both are tributaries of the Klamath, bracketing the tiny streamside town of Seiad Valley in Siskiyou County, California, south of the Oregon line two hundred miles from
Eugene. Much too far for a day trip. Brautigan camped several days there when he fished the area.

  Richard Brautigan recalled the Long Tom River in two Revenge of the Lawn short stories. In “Forgiven,” he fished alone: “The Long Tom River was forty miles away. I usually hitch-hiked there late in the afternoon and would leave in the twilight to hitch-hike the forty miles back home.” The Long Tom flowed out of Fern Ridge Reservoir. Peter Webster cherished a memory of fishing a quarter-mile stretch with Dick. “It was called a river, but the part we fished was about twelve feet wide and eighteen inches deep.” Pete and Dick caught eight little six- to ten-inch cutthroat trout that morning. Dick brought along a frying pan and some spuds, and they fried the fish over a wood fire. Brautigan wrote that the flesh of the humpbacked trout “tasted sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda.”

  Peter recalled another fishing trip east toward Bend. “If you blinked you would miss Indian Creek.” This beautiful little stream boasted numbers of small trout. They fished wet in their Levi’s and sneakers, casting Royal Coachmen with eight-and-a-half-foot fiberglass fly rods. Dick wore a fishing vest with a sheepskin pad on which he hooked his extra flies. “We hiked and waded upstream for about two miles and discovered some gorgeous waterfalls. One was fifty feet high. We climbed around it and fished the upper stream. We caught no fish that day but had the time of our lives.”

  All summer long, Dick Brautigan maintained a cavalier attitude toward his Eugene Fruit Growers Association paychecks. Mrs. Manerude provided his spending money, and he did not foresee a long career in the canning industry. “He’d throw his paycheck,” Mary Lou remembered, “wrap it up in a ball and throw it up there.” She gestured toward the top of the fridge. “Never cash them. And one day I was sick, and this woman come in to clean the house, and she got up there, and she found a whole sack full of those checks.” When the sack was brought to Dick’s attention, he took it downtown and opened a bank account.

  That summer after graduation, the young writer started sending his stories and poems out to magazines and newspapers. Rejection slips began appearing in the Folston mailbox. “He was trying to sell some of his writings, and they all came back,” Barbara remembered. “And how bad he felt when they came back.” From time to time, good news arrived. On Monday, August 24, 1953, “A Cigarette Butt,” a poem by Richard Brautigan, appeared below the political cartoon on the editorial page of the Eugene Register-Guard. No paycheck was involved.

  Acceptance by the Oregonian, a statewide daily published in Portland, meant climbing a higher rung up the ladder. The newspaper’s poetry editor, Ethel Romig Fuller, was a tiny woman weighing under one hundred pounds. Her 1927 poem “Proof” was included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and read by Arthur Godfrey on his national radio program. Godfrey said the author was unknown. In fact, Mrs. Fuller had published three books of verse and was one of only three Oregonians belonging to the Poetry Society of America.

  Governor Paul Paterson declared October 15, 1953, to be Oregon Poetry Day. As part of the program, the Sunday Oregonian Magazine (10/11) devoted an entire page to local poetry: (“State Recognizes Oregon Poets.”) Nineteen poets appeared, including Richard Brautigan of Eugene. His six-line poem, “Moonlight on a Cemetery,” contained images and themes he would return to again and again throughout his long career. The familiar elements (brevity, sentiment, melancholy, mordant wit) of a typical “Brautigan” poem were already in place. It was his first publication to reach an audience wider than the boundaries of his hometown.

  A month and a half later, his “Winter Sunset” appeared in the Sunday Oregonian Magazine, (11/29/53) in “Oregonian Verse,” Ethel Romig Fuller’s regular column of “1st Publication Poetry.” Brautigan’s three-line haiku remained spiritually true to its model and revealed the poet understood the seasonal nuances of this antique Japanese form. “I was seventeen and then eighteen and began to read Japanese haiku poetry from the Seventeenth century,” Brautigan wrote two decades later. “I read Bashō and Issa. I liked the way they used language concentrating emotion, detail and image until they arrived at a form of dew-like steel.”

  In the fall of 1953, Peter Webster, a deeply religious young man, enrolled as a freshman at Northwest Christian College, whose campus stands adjacent to the University of Oregon. As part of Pete’s financial arrangement, NCC assigned him to maintain their grounds during the summer. He mowed the grass and ran the college sprinkler system. Between jobs, he’d head over to the Folston place and hang out. “I remember Pete used to stay until we about run out of groceries,” Mary Lou Folston said. “Three weeks at a stretch, you know. It wasn’t just potatoes and a piece of meat. I would spend hours and hours cooking, making cakes, pastry, fancy salads, and everything.”

  Peter Webster remembered things differently. Once, when he was staying with Dick over on Hayes Street, his friend offered him something to eat. “He went to the refrigerator, and the only thing that was there was a half a loaf of bread. So, we each took a piece of bread, no butter, and then he had a little packet of Kool-Aid, and no sugar, and he mixed up the Kool-Aid and served the bread on a plate. And it was like having communion. Here was bread and Kool-Aid representing the wine. And there couldn’t have been any more sacred moment than when he offered me everything he had. That was the only thing there was. The refrigerator was bare.”

  Dick Brautigan didn’t regard this simple meal in the same religious light. “He was in love with nature and with all the out of doors,” Peter admitted, “but as far as knowing a Christian faith, he claimed to be an atheist.”

  When he stayed over, Pete camped out in Dick’s lean-to bedroom. He had his old jalopy and he and Dick and Barbara drove around together a lot that summer, looking for fun. B.J. never mentioned having a secret crush on Pete. The wet lawns over on campus suggested night crawler hunting. Dick Brautigan was back in the worm business, this time with Pete Webster. All summer long and well into the fall, the two young men gathered night crawlers on the vast combined grounds of NCC and the U of O. They carried one- or two-quart glass jars, dropping in the worms after they pounced on them. One night, working until dawn, Dick and Pete caught over fifteen hundred worms.

  They sold the night crawlers for a penny apiece to the Cedar Flats Grocery Store, a little crossroads place about twelve miles up the McKenzie out of Eugene. Brautigan wrote of selling night crawlers in So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, at “the Crossroads Filling Station . . . small, tired, run by an old man who wasn’t much interested in selling gas. He sold worms to passing fishermen and pop to thirsty kids during the summer.”

  Once the school year started, Pete’s days were taken up with class work. In the evenings, often long after midnight, he’d drive over to Dick’s place with his portable typewriter. Knowing his friend to be a night owl, he counted on finding him awake at any hour. The outside entrance to Dick’s add-on bedroom gave his pals easy anonymous access. Pete typed term papers there, while Dick worked on poetry or short stories. Peter Webster remembered often leaving at six in the morning after these all-night sessions.

  Other nights, Dick Brautigan wandered the streets of Eugene alone. During the summer, he went to the movies every day off from the packing plant when he wasn’t fishing or out catching worms with Pete. Afterward, he might roam about until dawn. Two early stories written during this period deal with voyeurism. A year or so later, Brautigan’s nocturnal wanderings caused him to be suspected as a Peeping Tom. “He loved going downtown at night,” his sister recalled, “because he was a loner, I guess. The darkness didn’t bother him. I was always afraid to go with him when it was that dark.”

  Recovering from a spinal virus infection all that year, Barbara spent less and less time with her brother, and he roamed the nighttime streets alone. Dick was still a virgin at twenty, yet a Brautigan story from this period (“in god’s arms”) describes making love in a graveyard. The Peeping Tom stories might also have sprung from fantasy. Some thought otherwise. Donald Hiebert claimed Brautigan used to “spy” o
n his mother and stepfather while they engaged in sex.

  “The Egg Hunter,” a first-person narrative written in a faux-naive colloquial style, a dimwit’s account of snooping on a young couple making love. “He did somethin I couldnt hardly believe at all I mean they was just like sheep and dogs and cows and things. I watched them do it. It sure made me feel pretty funny all over.” Adding a professional touch, Brautigan typed a thirty-dash—journalism’s symbol marking the end of a piece of copy—at the conclusion of his seven-hundred-word story.

  The other early tale, “The Flower Burner,” was submitted to (and rejected by) Margarita G. Smith at Mademoiselle. It is an odd faux-Western featuring an eccentric cast of characters who might seamlessly step into any of Brautigan’s later fictions. The story begins, “I sure like to hide in the bushes and watch Penny swim naked, because she’s just about the prettiest Indian in the whole county.” The narrator prefers reading Mickey Spillane to the Bible, throws stones at a rattlesnake, talks to a man who thinks he’s a bird, and watches Mrs. Dragoo burn irises in her backyard. At twenty, young Dick Brautigan had found his métier.

  A new poem, “The Ageless Ones,” appeared in Ethel Romig Fuller’s poetry column on February 7, 1954, in what The Sunday Oregonian now called the Northwest Magazine. He would not publish again until June 22, when another poem ran on the editorial page of the Register-Guard. All through that winter and spring, Dick devoted his nights to writing and peregrination. Daylight hours were for sleeping. The add-on bedroom provided a certain measure of illusory independence. Dick had his own typewriter and telephone but was still living at home under his parents’ supervision, and his bohemian habits soon began to irritate the Folstons.