In the spring of 1961, Robert Duncan and Jess moved back to the city from their retreat in Stinson Beach, taking an apartment in the Mission District. Duncan began hosting a weekly “salon.” Richard Brautigan met fellow poet Jory Sherman in North Beach (usually at Vesuvio) and they walked downtown every week across Market Street to Duncan’s apartment. At his salon, Robert Duncan sat in the corner of the main room on a raised platform, reading and talking about literature. “Richard was always quiet at these things,” Sherman remembered, “but from our walks together I knew he was brilliant and did not think along ordinary lines.”
A more informal poetry group gathered every week at the home of Daniel Langton, “a popular writer” who lived close to Golden Gate Park. Brautigan rode out there with Jory Sherman, who still drove a car in spite of his plethora of unpaid parking tickets. “Danny and his wife were great hosts,” Sherman wrote, recalling afternoons of beer and wine and sprightly conversation. Jory Sherman remembered Langton as a “bright, personable type of fellow that you thought was really going to go somewhere. I’ve never heard from him since.”
Brautigan and Sherman spent a lot of time together taking long aimless walks around the city. Fascinated with San Francisco’s ornate Victorian architecture, Richard often stopped and studied the fanciful turreted “painted ladies.” On one such ramble, they were accompanied by the photographer who took the picture on the cover of Sherman’s first book. While he focused his camera on the poets, Richard talked about Victorian houses, expressing a familiarity with them “that went beyond mere architecture.”
“I think I am the reincarnation of Mark Twain,” Brautigan announced. Jory Sherman believed his friend might have had a point. Richard possessed a “mystic quality.” The way he stood with a slight backward slouch, “that brushy mustache, the kind of clothes he wore, the hat. He had a certain otherworldly air about him.” Brautigan strongly identified with Twain. Watching him gaze up at the gaudy nineteenth-century buildings with such complete familiarity, Jory Sherman felt Richard Brautigan had stepped out of another time.
In August 1962, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy published Jack Kerouac’s new novel, Big Sur. Written in ten days at breakneck Benzedrine speed, the book recounted a short period in the summer of 1960 when Kerouac lived in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s rustic Big Sur cabin. The stay was meant to be a solitary writer’s retreat, but after three monastic weeks, Kerouac grew restless, returned to Frisco, and launched on an extended binge drunk. Back in Bixby Canyon with a group of friends, including Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Neal and Carolyn Cassady, Michael McClure, his wife, Joanna, and their daughter, Jane, the party continued full blast the following week.
Lew Welch soon arrived with his lover, the poet Lenore Kandel, a Buddhist since the age of twelve, whom he’d recently met at the East-West House. (Kerouac described Kandel in Big Sur as “a big Rumanian monster beauty”). All the drinking took its toll on Jack Kerouac. He cracked up, going mad with the DTs. His friends got him sober and shipped the bad boy King of the Beats home to his momma.
By the summer of 1962, Richard Brautigan needed to start a new novel, “The Island Café” having hit a dead end. All around North Beach, the artistic community buzzed with talk of Kerouac’s forthcoming book chronicling the recent misadventures at Ferlinghetti’s Big Sur cabin. Richard had read Henry Miller’s 1957 memoir, Big Sur, and saw the literary possibilities of doing his own take on the area. He’d already written a short story about Price Dunn’s missing teeth. In July, Brautigan began sketching a sample chapter in the notebook he’d carried in Idaho. He wrote of Lee Mellon, describing his great grandfather, General Augustus Mellon, CSA. “He died in 1906 [sic]. The same year Mark Twain died. That was the year of Halley’s comet.” Richard hoped this odd material would somehow become a novel.
Along with attending poetry salons and Sunday family outings, Richard Brautigan spent more and more time hanging out in bars. David Fechheimer recalled running into him for the first time at the San Gotardo on Columbus. Fechheimer had been living in Europe after hitchhiking penniless across Central Africa “for the better part of a year. I’d picked up a rumor about things going on at San Francisco State, and so I came back.” Sick with cholera and bilharzia from his African adventure, Fechheimer thumbed his way to California and enrolled in the English Department out at State.
The San Gotardo (now a Chinese restaurant named Brandy Ho’s) was an Italian workingman’s bar across the avenue from Tosca. Mixed drinks cost thirty-five cents. “Whiskey and soda, I don’t think they had ice,” David remembered. “A place where people got seriously drunk, but it was always clean and rather barren.” Fresh cut flowers brightened the lackluster interior. Fechheimer had very little money, so he’d buy a glass of soda for twenty cents and go into the bathroom with his own smuggled bottle.
“One night, I threw open the door to a stall and there was this tall, skinny geek, with his half-pint. Sitting on the toilet. Cheapest bar in town. Two guys who were ripping it off.” After meeting cute in the San Gotardo men’s room, Richard and David became casual acquaintances, although they didn’t get to know one another well until the seventies. “We used to see each other and drink a bit,” Fechheimer recollected.
Another occasional drinking buddy from this period was a sometime journalist and aspiring writer from the Midwest named Fred Hill. Like Richard, Hill remained perpetually broke, a situation he remedied from time to time by hocking “old trusty,” his typewriter. Hill was friendly with Ron Loewinsohn and the Lipsetts, but all Ginny remembered about him was a dramatic propensity for taking drunken bites out of his glass. Hill lived in a succession of low-rent North Beach hotels, notably the New Rex and the Swiss American, where rooms rented for under $10 a week. He and Richard talked about literary matters over cheap drinks, the conversations always returning to Fred’s musings about a fantasy woman he called “Miss Delaware.”
Price Dunn saw Richard more frequently. “I hitchhiked in and out of town,” he said. “There’s a wine shop. We’d go over in North Beach and buy a jug and go up on Telegraph Hill and wander around different places drinking.” During these rambles, they talked and talked but the conversation tended not to be literary. Richard questioned Price about his sex life. “He always wanted to know about my amorous adventures—the girls!” Brautigan felt the marital bridle chafing. A secret part of him wanted free rein. “I could see their marriage was going down the tubes,” Price Dunn observed.
Ron Loewinsohn recalled Richard from that time, “hanging out at bars, not coming home, not paying attention to Ginny, not paying attention to Ianthe, coming home loaded, chasing women.” North Beach bar life provided a moveable wino feast. Brautigan sought out thirsty fellow poets at Vesuvio, the Coffee Gallery, 12 Adler Place, Gino & Carlo’s, Katie’s; any of a dozen different spots. “He wouldn’t want the party to break up,” Loewinsohn reminisced, “so he would bring everybody home, and then Ginny would be expected to cook and clean up.”
One night, he brought home young Tony Aste, a newcomer to town. It turned out Ginny already knew him. Tony had just gotten off a merchant ship a few weeks earlier and had been involved in an automobile accident in North Beach. Bleeding badly from a big gash in his forehead, he needed help in hurry. Ginny and a friend took him to the nearest hospital, “to get his head stitched, and when we got there they wouldn’t work on him because he wasn’t twenty-one and we weren’t his parents—and so, he had a scar.”
Tony Aste was an attractive charismatic character. “A charming man,” Lew Ellingham recalled. Like Richard Brautigan, he remained a natural loner. Ron Loewinsohn remembered him as “a clever, witty guy—a good-looking guy who had a lot of energy.” To David Meltzer, Tony Aste was “a rogue. He could roll a joint in one hand.”
Always a wanderer, Aste hailed from Salt Lake City, where he’d spent a troubled youth. He bragged about blowing the doors off the Mormon Temple with a Native American accomplice. While a teenager, he was sentenced to reform school. On his first day of incarcer
ation, he was beaten senseless three times and subjected to eight brutal rapes. “I was so busted up they put me to bed for three weeks,” Tony Aste said. “I swore that when I got out I was gonna do the beating and I was gonna do the fucking or they were going to have to kill me.”
His toughness offset by an easygoing charm, he quickly make friends. Aste hung out in North Beach with a group of other newly arrived young men who took odd jobs washing dishes, parking cars, bussing tables: the usual minimum-wage, bottom-rung-on-the-ladder employment. Jack Spicer felt an immediate attraction for the lanky picaresque stranger and, according to Lew Ellingham, “treated him like a peer.” Spicer nicknamed Tony and his group of friends “the Jets,” a sly reference to the rumbling street gang in Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical West Side Story.
Tony Aste, much like Neal Cassady and Price Dunn, was a rugged tale-teller whose stories inspired the poets with whom he associated. Spicer was fascinated by Aste’s anecdotes of his rough-and-tumble upbringing. Richard Brautigan first encountered Tony Aste during his nocturnal roaming, most likely at Gino & Carlo’s among Jack Spicer’s voluble circle. He was drawn to the young maverick and his tall tales, much as he had been attracted earlier to Price Dunn’s extravagant misbehavior. For Spicer, the attraction went well beyond adolescent hero-worship. “Jack was chasing Tony Aste’s ass all over North Beach,” according to Dora Geissler, a close friend of the poet.
Aste shared a Union Street apartment with Lew Ellingham and Stan Persky, a young poet recently returned to San Francisco after a European tour of duty with the U.S. Navy. Right from the start, Persky, engaged in a halfhearted affair with Robin Blaser, fell hard for the inaccessible and impossibly heterosexual Tony. Like the rest of Spicer’s circle, he was attracted by the young man’s physical beauty and adventuresome charm. “Everybody was in love with Tony Aste,” Persky confessed.
Lew Ellingham remembered an afternoon he went over to the Brautigans’ to pick up some manuscripts Ginny had typed for him. He thought her smart and literate, impressed that she corrected his spelling without consulting a dictionary. Tony Aste and Richard sat on the couch “playing with this deer rifle.” There was no conversation, just the mechanical sound of the two men working the bolt action. Ellingham thought that Richard “seemed to be content to communicate on the level of birdsongs. He understood the role of silence and also the role of atmosphere and interconnections.” On another occasion, Lew spent an evening with Richard, and their entire exchange consisted of bouncing a large beach ball back and forth across the room. “An hour may have passed with nothing said—no language.”
Late on a fall night, Tony Aste drove Jack Spicer home from the Green Street bars in one of a succession of rattletraps he owned. Jack lived near Polk Gulch on California Street, and they took the Broadway Tunnel shortcut through Russian Hill. Emerging from the tunnel, they were broadsided by a motorist running a red light. Spicer was badly hurt, his ribs crushed. Soon after his release from the emergency room, he moved in with Jim Herndon (later the author of The Way It Spozed to Be and How to Survive in Your Native Land) and his wife, Fran, for a period of recovery. Tony Aste walked away from the crash without a scratch.
Luck was also on Richard Brautigan’s side. A letter arrived from Malcolm Cowley, and Richard’s dreams started coming true. By 1962, Cowley had attained legendary status as a critic. Literary editor of The New Republic from 1929 to 1944 (where he published John Cheever for the first time); author of Exile’s Return, an important history of American “Lost Generation” expatriates in Paris in the 1920s; and editor of The Portable Faulkner, the book that rescued William Faulkner from obscurity in 1945. Malcolm Cowley recently ushered On the Road from a 120-foot-long scroll manuscript to a best seller at Viking.
Cowley explained it had taken him a long time to read Trout Fishing in America because he was engaged with “some writing of my own [a collection of his correspondence with Faulkner] but when I did read it, my, how I did enjoy it.” He went on to list what he liked best: “the used trout stream for sale in a junkyard, and the doctor who was giving up his practice in Great Falls, and bathing in Warm Springs, and the general active fancy and good writing. And ending on the word mayonnaise.” Cowley feared that the book was “probably too far out for Viking to publish,” but promised to bring Brautigan’s manuscript to the office for additional readings and editorial comment.
He inquired if Richard had ever considered “trying your hand at a book that was a little more square and salable?” What Cowley had in mind was an inside look at bohemian life in North Beach, Sausalito, and Mill Valley, something along the lines of John Steinbeck’s comic take on the denizens of Monterey and Carmel. “More characters, grotesques, coming into the story? And more dialogue? And more humor of situation to relieve the verbal wit? It’s something to think about.”
Richard sat down that same morning, drafting a reply to Malcolm Cowley for Ginny to type later. Brautigan’s letter took a formal, respectful tone. He thanked Cowley twice (“I know how valuable your time is”) for reading his novel and called the promised exposure at Viking “welcomed and appreciated.” Richard acknowledged Cowley’s work. “I read your fine book, Exile’s Return when I was in my late teens and it has stayed with me ever since. I have a copy of the November 1926 issue of Poetry that contains ‘Blue Juniata.’ I like the poems, especially ‘Laurel Mountain.’”
Brautigan concluded by mentioning Cowley’s suggestions, “interesting, but at present I am writing another novel.” He told him he’d been at it for three months and felt the work was “going well,” hoping to be done “within a year.” Brautigan assured Cowley that the new book had “a more conventional narrative continuity” than his previous effort, but was coy about giving too much away. “It has a Civil War theme with extensive contemporary flashbacks to life in San Francisco and Big Sur.” Richard had in fact not yet done very much work on his “Civil War” novel. He had the Price Dunn stories and some lists of Confederate statistics and a few jottings in his notebook. Aside from these sketchy beginnings, his letter to Cowley suggested Brautigan envisioned a different sort of book, one jumping back and forth between past and present.
If Cowley’s letter had Richard dancing on air, another from Luther Nichols several days later sent him crashing back to earth. Nichols was the West Coast editor for Doubleday. He wrote informing Brautigan that “after much wrestling and soul-searching back in New York,” the publisher had decided to pass on Trout Fishing in America. No rejection slip was ever more sugar-coated. “I honestly feel that you’re as original and interesting a writer as we have in this area, and humbly suggest that you next try Dial, Grove, New Directions, Angel Island Publications [. . .] houses that are more receptive to unusual works.” Nichols offered to write letters of recommendation to “top people” at all the companies he suggested.
Not long after, Brautigan had drinks with Luther Nichols, who suggested sending the manuscript on to his friend James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions. Richard gave his approval. Ten days later, early in October, Malcolm Cowley wrote to say that (as he’d predicted) the Viking editors felt Brautigan’s book “was too far out for commercial publication, although they were impressed with your writing.” Cowley’s second letter possessed the more formal remove of business. He regretted Richard was not interested in “a Vie de Boheme of North Beach,” but said “we’d be delighted to see your Civil War novel.”
On October 10, Brautigan began keeping a list of his correspondence, starting with a letter to Gui de Angulo. Jack Spicer had initiated the first ripples of interest in Richard’s work, and this new compilation provided a measure of the wave’s growing swell. On the thirtieth, Brautigan wrote to Thomas Parkinson, a poet and professor of English at Berkeley, whom Spicer urged to read Trout Fishing in America. Spicer had worked as Parkinson’s teaching assistant while studying for his PhD but had known the professor’s aristocratic wife, Ariel, before their marriage. They had been introduced in 1946 on the Berkeley campus by the po
et Leonard Wolf, who said simply, “This is Ariel,” to which Spicer quipped, “And I’m Caliban.”
Tom Parkinson read Brautigan’s novel, and he was so “taken up with it and absorbed all the way” that he wrote to Brautigan immediately. He found the book “a continual pleasure and surprise, with nothing false or forced in it.” As Parkinson had been Richard Duerden’s teacher and had recommended Spicer in 1953 for his job as the head of the newly created Humanities Department at the California School of Fine Arts, Brautigan understood that his opinion carried considerable weight. Richard savored the distinguished professor’s final assessment: “It is a work of rare quality, full of radiance and fun and wisdom, and I’ve never read any other book like it.”
By late fall, Donald Allen’s voice was the only one not yet heard. Even this omission had an explanation. Allen had embarked on an extended trans-Pacific journey in May and had been living in Japan through the summer. He took an apartment in Kyoto and spent time with Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. They discussed Gary’s old college roommate Lew Welch, who had been working as a commercial fisherman. After that enterprise failed and his relationship with Lenore Kandel came to an end, Welch moved to a remote spot called Forks of Salmon in Northern California, taking refuge in an abandoned cabin built by an old Wobbly.
When Allen returned from Asia in September of ’62, among the pile of unopened correspondence awaiting him was the manuscript for Trout Fishing in America and a letter from Lew, who remarked on the rumor of Allen Ginsberg making the cover of Time next year, lamenting that somehow the intense media hype had not translated into significant sales. Howl had sold sixty thousand copies, not bad for small press poetry but fewer than ten copies per college campus across all of America. Welch speculated on the latent underlying energy of the nation’s youth. “We have to hit the young so hard, they will never be the same again.” With Lew’s letter in mind, Don Allen at last sat down to read Trout Fishing in America.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 35
