Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  “I saw the best minds of my generation

  generation destroyed by madness

  starving, mystical, naked,

  who dragged themselves thru the angry streets

  at dawn looking for a negro fix [. . .]”

  The next day, he shipped a copy of the first six pages of “Howl” to Jack Kerouac in Mexico City. In this draft, Allen titled the poem “Howl (for Carl Solomon).” Seeking to complete an MA in English, Ginsberg had enrolled in the graduate program at the University of California, moving across the Bay at the start of the semester to a one-room “rose-covered cottage” in Berkeley. Peter Orlovsky and his teenage brother, Lafcadio, inherited the apartment at 1010 Montgomery.

  A peyote trip celebrating Orlovsky’s return to Frisco provided the hallucinatory image of Moloch perched atop the St. Francis Hotel and gave Ginsberg the opening stanzas for “Howl” Part II. By the time he ran into McClure in late September, Ginsberg had already read the poem twice in public. The first time was to a small gathering at The Place, a hip bohemian bar on Grant Avenue, opened two years before by two alumni of Black Mountain College, the legendary avant-garde school in North Carolina.

  The second reading (September 16, 1955), part of the Arts Festival held at the Nourse Auditorium on Franklin and Hayes Streets, attracted a much larger audience. The other poets on the bill that night were Jack Nugent, Jack Gilbert, and Guy Wernham, a skinny fifty-year-old Englishman whose mother had once been the mistress of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Jack Goodwin, a San Francisco composer whose opera The Pizza Pusher was to be performed at the festival on the next evening, remembered the event: “The balloon really went up when the ‘Howl’ thing happened.”

  Zekial Marko, a flamboyant actor (later, a Hollywood screenwriter) from Salinas, stage-managed Goodwin’s opera. According to Goodwin, Marko “horned in and coached the poets while they rehearsed.” It was a hot night, and everyone sweated backstage waiting for the curtain to go up. “In Ginsberg we had a genuine Old Testament prophet straight out of DeMille, and Marko made suggestions about tone, volume, tempo, and gesture. The result was electrifying. Ginsberg shouted, wept, chanted, and mopped his brow with a telling little Marko gesture across his forehead on the word ‘lobotomy.’ The message was drearily familiar, but the presentation was hair-raising.” Rumor had it that Marko switched off the microphone when Ginsberg stepped up to read, forcing him to shout out his lines dramatically.

  McClure’s offer to let him take charge of the Six Gallery reading presented Allen Ginsberg with a perfect showcase for “Howl.” He would be the headliner this time and surround himself with poets he admired. Originally guided to Kenneth Rexroth (then a reader for New Directions) through a letter from William Carlos Williams (who had written an introduction to Allen’s unpublished poetry collection Empty Mirror), Ginsberg sought the older poet’s advice in planning the Six Gallery reading. Knowing Ginsberg lived over in Berkeley, Rexroth suggested Gary Snyder, another young poet, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in Japanese and Chinese, raised among lumberjacks, who had labored on a forest service trail crew and was a regular blue-collar guy, a working-stiff Buddhist, much as Rexroth viewed himself.

  Ginsberg found Snyder on Hillegass Avenue, repairing his bicycle in a “Zen garden” backyard. A small, wiry man, browned and hard from the mountains, with slanted cat-green eyes (Robert Creeley called them “wise old-young eyes”), Snyder lived a scholar’s life of monastic simplicity in a twelve-by-twelve-foot cottage with straw tatami mats on the floor. Orange crates served as bookcases and writing tables, the only furnishings aside from scattered paisley cushions. Ice axes and coiled climbing ropes hung on the walls; a rucksack neatly packed with nested cookware stood in one corner. Bohemians had flirted with Buddhism since the days of Madame Blavatsky (“In the summer, I’m a nudist, / In the winter, I’m a Buddhist,” rhymed Maxwell Bodenheim decades before), but Gary Snyder practiced what he preached, meditating at the Berkeley Young Buddhist Association and publishing his work in their magazine, Berkeley Bussei.

  The two poets hit it off immediately. William Carlos Williams provided a common meeting ground. Three years before, Ginsberg sent his poetry to the Bard of Paterson, finding at last a sage teacher whose encouragement and advice shaped his voice. In November of 1950, Gary Snyder, then an undergraduate at Reed College in Oregon, had also been profoundly impressed by Dr. Williams during a weeklong campus visit. At the time, Snyder shared a basement flat in a Portland rooming house with two other young poets, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen. They dubbed themselves the Adelaide Crapsey–Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration Poetasters Society after a reading by Williams rocked them with the power of a hard-blowing jam session.

  Snyder agreed to be part of the upcoming “charming event” at the Six Gallery, suggesting that Phil Whalen, due to arrive in Berkeley the next day from a fire-watching job on Sourdough Mountain in the High Cascades of Washington, would happily participate. Ginsberg said Jack Kerouac, his “great poet” friend from Columbia University, was heading into town from south of the border any day now. In fact, Jack had already arrived, jumping freights and hitchhiking, and was high on bennies in Allen’s Milvia Street “Shakespearean” cottage, playing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion full-blast on the Webcore three-speed.

  Malcolm Cowley anointed Jack Kerouac “the greatest unpublished writer in America.” At thirty-three, Kerouac had just finished Mexico City Blues, a long jazz-inspired poem with 242 stanzas, and in the five years since The Town and the City (his first novel) failed to earn out its advance, added On the Road and ten other books in manuscript to the unfinished epic Wolfeian vision he called The Duluoz Legend. He disagreed with Ginsberg on “Howl,” urging him not to revise a word, “spontaneity or nothing.” He admired the long wailing saxophonelike choruses, so like his own improvisational experiments. Kerouac declined to be part of the proceedings at the Six Gallery, citing shyness, but enthusiastically supported the project.

  Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia became the last of the six poets invited to read. Carl Solomon introduced Ginsberg to Lamantia in 1948 at the San Remo bar, a hipster hangout on the northwest corner of McDougal and Bleecker in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. When Gary Snyder suggested they include Rexroth as master of ceremonies, Allen passed the word along, delighting the elder statesman of the Frisco scene, who promptly bought a secondhand pinstripe cutaway for the occasion. Ginsberg mimeographed over a hundred postcard copies of a “goofy” invitation (“6 Poets at the 6 Gallery [. . .] wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori”). He mailed out some, posting the others around North Beach in the usual locations: City Lights, Miss Smith’s Tea Room, The Place, Vesuvio, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop.

  On the afternoon of Friday, October 7, Kerouac and Ginsberg took a bus across the Bay. By coincidence, they bumped into Phil Whalen and Gary Snyder (who also came over from Berkeley together) on the corner of First and Mission outside the Key System Terminal. The group joined Philip Lamantia for dinner at the New Pisa restaurant on Grant Avenue across the Broadway intersection from City Lights. Afterward, they all found separate transportation to the Six.

  Ferlinghetti owned a tiny “beat-up” old Austin. He and his wife, Kirby, already had a passenger, and there was only room enough to give Kerouac and Ginsberg a lift. Allen and Jack crammed into the backseat with Gregory Corso (“Wild mad eastside funny Gregory”), their back-alley poet buddy from New York, a gutter sparrow born across the street from the San Remo and drawn to literature at sixteen while serving a three-year bit for armed robbery upstate in Dannemora. At twenty-five, Corso was younger than the other poets packed into the little car.

  When they arrived at the Six shortly before eight, the five-hundred-square-foot former garage was already crowded. From varying reports, between a hundred and a hundred and fifty cogno-centi eventually showed up, a first-time gathering of all the diverse Frisco art and poetry circles. College professors, longshoremen, bohemian poets, journalists, the social set, all crammed together
on folding chairs crowding the dirt floor of the two adjoining rooms. Mink coats mingled with blue denim, suits-and-ties rubbed elbows with turtleneck sweaters.

  Neal Cassady leaned against the wall in his blue serge brakeman’s uniform, bobbing and nodding maniacally to those all around, although most were strangers. Shy Peter Orlovsky stood at his side. Jazz trombonist Charles Richards came in with his wife. Ruth Witt-Diamant, grand doyenne of the Poetry Center, sat primly among the throng. Latecomers lined the back wall or perched on the low platform stage. A festive street fair gaiety prevailed.

  Some were present only in spirit. Poet and pianist Weldon Kees was reported to have been in attendance, although he had disappeared on June 20, his empty car discovered on the Golden Gate Bridge. Most conspicuous in their absence were Jack Spicer (looking for a day job on the East Coast) and Robert Duncan (off in Europe with Jess), the spiritual progenitors of the event.

  Jack Kerouac mythologized the proceedings in The Dharma Bums, describing the audience as “rather stiff” before he “got things jumping” by taking up a collection of dimes and quarters and rushing out to buy three gallons of cheap California burgundy. The jugs circulated from hand to mouth. Kerouac sprawled on the floor close to the stage. Fred Martin’s sculpture (fragments of orange crate draped in plaster-of-paris-soaked muslin) stood behind the podium, “like pieces of surrealistic furniture,” according to Michael McClure. Of the six poets gathered on the platform in a semicircle of folding chairs only Lamantia and Ginsberg had read in public before.

  Kerouac called Rexroth “Reinhold Cacoethes” (“bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fud . . .”) in The Dharma Bums. He dismissed Rexroth’s thrift shop tails as his “shabby old coat,” yet the emcee’s wacky costume perfectly captured the carnival spirit of the evening. In “his snide funny voice,” Rexroth introduced Philip Lamantia (“Delicate Francis DaPavia”), the first poet of the night. Lamantia read a group of prose poems by John Hoffman (a friend of his, as well as Ginsberg’s and Carl Solomon’s), who had died recently of a heroin overdose in Mexico City.

  Michael McClure was next in line. (Kerouac called him “Ike O’Shay.”) At twenty-three, the youngest of the six, McClure wore a suit for the occasion and read a letter from Jack Spicer, who had departed Frisco in July after being fired from the CSFA. Spicer moved to Boston, where his friend Robin Blaser got him “a low-level job” in the rare book room of the public library. Jack longed to return to the Bay Area. Spicer’s letter “got applause from his friends and fans,” McClure recalled thirty-seven years later. “It was a practical matter. ‘Could anyone help Jack?’”

  Michael McClure went on to his own ecologically concerned poetry, reading “Point Lobos: Animism” and “For the Death of 100 Whales.” He met both Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder for the first time on the stage at the Six, little realizing how soon they all would be lumped together as reluctant standard-bearers for the “Beat Generation.” Spicer and Duncan, founders of the Six (King Ubu) Gallery, would shortly be replaced as the dominant icons in the local cultural pantheon by these unknown young upstarts.

  The third reader was Philip Whalen (“booboo big old goodhearted Warren Coughlin a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat”), whose humorous poem “Plus ca Change” concerned “confronting metamorphic change.” Whalen’s reading ended around ten thirty, and a short intermission was called. Half an hour later, wearing jeans and a navy sweater, Allen Ginsberg (“hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbook”) made his way through the crowd to the stage, nodding amiably to his many friends. Fortified by cheap red wine, the poet began reading what would become his best-known work, its title now truncated to “Howl.” The burgundy overcame his nervousness, adding timbre to “a small intense voice.” Ginsberg spread his arms wide, swaying from side to side at the lectern as he intoned each long line “like a Jewish cantor.”

  Jack Kerouac beat out time on his wine jug, singing along “(like a jam session)” and cheering his friend with shouts of “Go! Go! Go!” at the end of every line. The novelist was almost completely unknown at the time. Jack Goodwin referred to him as “This Carrowac person” in a letter detailing the event to John Allen Ryan, one of the founders of the Six Gallery, who was away in Mexico. Goodwin described Kerouac “singing snatches of scat in between the lines; he kept a kind of chanted, revival-meeting rhythm going.” Soon, most of the audience joined in, enthusiastically shouting, stomping their feet, and snapping their fingers in time with the poem’s insistent beat. As Goodwin reported in his letter, “the people gasped and laughed and swayed, they were psychologically had, it was an orgiastic occasion.”

  Not everyone was equally enthusiastic. Ruth Witt-Diamant, offended by the wine-drinking and general rowdiness, gestured at Rexroth to tone things down. He ignored her, removing his eyeglasses, wiping away tears of joy. According to other witnesses, he was “visibly annoyed” by the proceedings. Kerouac reported the tears. What has incorrectly come down in literary history as Ginsberg’s first public reading of “Howl” lasted twelve minutes. When it ended, the room exploded into a wild roaring ovation. “It was like bringing two ends of an electric wire together,” Philip Lamantia remembered. For Michael McClure, “a line had been drawn, and either we had to stand at that line or else we had to step back from it.”

  Kerouac jumped up to congratulate his friend. “Ginsberg,” he shouted, “this poem will make you famous in San Francisco.”

  Kenneth Rexroth anticipated wider horizons. “This poem will make you famous from bridge to bridge,” he said, moist eyes glistening.

  Gary Snyder wisely waited for the commotion to die down before approaching the lectern. (“Japhy Ryder [. . .] in rough workingman’s clothes he’d bought secondhand in Goodwill stores”) The final poet on the evening’s program, Snyder read “A Berry Feast” in rich sonorous tones and recaptured the attention of the excited audience. Kerouac found the sound of Snyder’s voice “somehow brave, like the voices of oldtime American heros and orators.” This last poem, prophetic in its embrace of traditional Native American ways and the natural world, provided a fitting conclusion to the electric evening.

  After the reading, the poets, along with their friends and lovers, piled into a rattletrap fleet of secondhand junkers and drove to Sam Wo’s on Washington Street, Gary Snyder’s favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Ferlinghetti and his wife, not feeling “part of the scene,” went home instead. Open until 3:00 AM, the narrow, three-story noodle parlor was better known for the glib rudeness of its impatient waiters than for the quality of the cheap greasy food it served. Snyder taught Kerouac how to eat with chopsticks while the group noisily reviewed the highlights of their triumph at the Six Gallery. No one could quite articulate what it all meant. In retrospect, Gary Snyder judged the evening as “a curious kind of turning point in American poetry.” Typically, Jack Kerouac, always the myth-maker, described a more heroic vision. For him, the reading marked “the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.”

  thirteen: on the beach

  WHEN RICHARD BRAUTIGAN arrived in Frisco in August of 1956, he headed straight for North Beach and made City Lights one of his first stops. The bookstore served as the hub of the bohemian community, with thumbtacked notices on the bulletin board advertising rides, cheap rooms and apartments, lost pets, used vehicles, astrological charts, and sundry other arcane offerings. For a time, Dick Brautigan used “General Delivery” as a mailing address but soon got a room on upper Grant Avenue. His earliest recorded San Francisco domicile was apartment number 38 at 1648 Grant. A letter from D. Vincent Smith written in July arrived about this time from Japan. Smith had decided to use all the Brautigan poems he had on hand for Tiger in a Telephone Booth and planned to print copies of the little book soon. Smith promised Dick he’d keep him informed.

  On August 27, again through the auspices of D. Vincent Smith, Brautigan mailed a copy of “The God of the Martians,” the latest of his minimalist notebook novels, to Harry Hooton in Sydney, A
ustralia. An anarchist poet born in Yorkshire, England, and known as “that flaming archpriest of Neo-Bomboism,” Hooton once served eighteen months in Maitland Jail for “unarmed robbery.” He had been a fixture in the Sydney bohemian scene since 1942 and published a small literary periodical there called 21st Century, The Magazine of a Creative Civilization. The first and only issue to date appeared the previous September. Dick used general delivery for his return address but never heard back from Down Under. Hooton died five years later. Brautigan’s manuscript did not resurface until after his own death.

  By mid-October 1956, when he typed a short postcard note to Edna Webster in Eugene, Brautigan felt sufficiently settled to ask that she send his manuscripts to Grant Ave. “I really need them,” he wrote, typing his name (“dick”) in lowercase at the bottom. Dick eventually received a return package from Edna. She sent him “The Shortest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World,” recently rejected by New Directions, along with the same brief postcard he had just written to her. Edna did not return the manuscript of “Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown” (which had come back from Random House early in September with a polite rejection letter signed by editor Albert Erskine) or any of the several notebook “novels.” These went into a safe deposit box in Eugene and remained out of sight for the next thirty-five years.

  Bill Brown was one of the first Frisco writers Dick Brautigan met, and they remained friends for the rest of his life. Brown, a rugged, powerfully built man with the no-nonsense features of Sergeant Rock, drove a cab in the city at the time and was largely unpublished (Coyote’s Journal and his novel, The Way to the Uncle Sam Hotel, still years in the future). “He’d just blown into town,” Bill said, recalling his first meeting with greenhorn Dick. “He heard I knew Bill Williams and selling pot.