He wrote of the “trout chamber” in the “temple of iDEATH” and jotted down the first mention of inBOIL and the atrocities he inspired. (“Cut off their noses with baby knife of iDEATH [. . .] they cut their blood [. . .] fingers, eyes, ears, noses [. . .] But one alone and inBOIL who disemboweled himself.”) And at the bottom of the page, Brautigan wrote the name “inBOIL” over again twice, as if to fix it forever in memory.
It wasn’t really a beginning, just a few random rough ideas to get the juices flowing. Brautigan made five separate attempts to start his novel, all more or less alike: “I live in an old shack on the top of a small hill, and the walls of the shack are blue wood, and the roof is made from shingles of watermelon sugar.” He stored these fragments in a large manila envelope from Flowline Facts—“Chemical Industry Issue,” something gleaned from the wastebasket of his former place of employment. On it, Richard wrote “‘In Watermelon Sugar’—The Rough.”
On May 13, Richard sat down with a sheaf of lined three-hole notebook paper and began in earnest, working with a ballpoint pen. “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again in watermelon sugar,” he wrote. “I’ll tell you about it.” Starting a new paragraph, Brautigan continued,
I live in a cabin near the temple of iDEATH. The cabin is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from watermelon sugar as just about every thing here is. We have many fields of watermelon here, carried to the end of the imagination. We use them for our life. It’s from them we get everything we need and then take our souls to iDEATH.
Brautigan reworked this paragraph twice, starting over from the first line, making deft surgical changes. Almost as an afterthought, in the white space above the lined portion of his first page, Richard wrote: “My name is moveable. Just call me whatever is in your mind. What you’re thinking that is my name.” Brautigan made many revisions as the work progressed but all the magical elements of his new novel were in place right from the start: the narrator without a name (a notion developed into a beautiful poetic third chapter called “My Name”), the talking tigers, iDEATH (which evolved from a temple into a sort of mutable social center), the mutilations of inBOIL “and that gang of his,” the Forgotten Works, a sun that changed color every day. Brautigan had worked all of this out in advance in his imagination.
To achieve the innocent voice he wanted for the book, Brautigan reduced his vocabulary to child’s primer simplicity. At twenty-nine, Richard was the same age as his nameless narrator. In one of those happy accidents by which art is so often made, he started writing In Watermelon Sugar in Bolinas, allowing the casual easygoing bucolic spirit of the place to inform every page. Once again he created something utterly unique. Michael McClure thought it “his most perfect book,” one that “might have been written by an American Lorca.”
At first, the flow of the work moved slowly, matching the pace of life in Bolinas. Business matters continued to provide a distraction. Susan Stanwood from the Saturday Evening Post wrote in mid-May, returning the copy of A Confederate General from Big Sur. “I very much enjoyed its wonderful zany humor [. . .] but two things make it pretty impossible for us.” She found the comedy “too far-out for the mass magazine readership” and thought the various sections not “sufficiently sustained” for successful excerpting.
A more welcome letter from Charles Newman asked to see three or four chapters of Confederate General, “to give a better idea of what you are doing.” He offered to pay $75 on acceptance. Richard replied, asking for information about TriQuarterly’s first issue. He also wrote back to Susan Stanwood, enclosing two chapters from Trout Fishing, along with his story “Two Armored Cars” for her consideration.
Charles Newman answered, saying he looked forward to reading additional chapters from Brautigan’s forthcoming novel. Among other contributors, the new magazine would contain essays by Stephen Spender, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter; poetry by William Stafford, W. D. Snodgrass, and Kenneth Patchen (along with his artwork); and fiction by James T. Farrell. Newman estimated the circulation of the first issue to be around three thousand in the Chicago area with another thousand destined for universities. Brautigan sent two more chapters from Confederate General, asking to have a look at the galley proofs should his material be accepted.
For $75, Don Carpenter rented Longshoreman’s Hall, down near the waterfront on North Point, for a poetry reading billed as “Freeway,” held on the night of June 12, 1964, to celebrate Gary Snyder’s return from Japan. The three participants were former Reed College roommates Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch. The location seemed appropriate, as Welch had worked as a longshoreman and Snyder was a merchant seaman. With the admission set at $1, Carpenter expected to lose his shirt. Lew Welch described the ambience in a letter to Henry Rago, editor of Poetry Magazine, “The hall is the funky old place where Harry Bridges won the coast & has a monstrous mural (very well done) showing policemen beating women and children to death—the fuzz mounted on horses with hooves like Percherons, which hooves are crushing the heads of brave men, etc.”
An estimated eight hundred people showed up, the largest crowd ever to turn out for a poetry reading in San Francisco. Richard Brautigan hitchhiked in from Bolinas. Jack Spicer maintained “a nonstop, fairly quiet patter poking fun at the readers.” Because he forgot to post a ticket taker at the door and hundreds of people squeezed in for free, Don Carpenter nearly did go broke. “I never worked so hard or sweated so much or cursed so hopelessly,” he wrote later. In the end, Carpenter made enough to cover expenses, pay the poets a hundred bucks each, and throw a big bash afterward at Tosca, the venerable North Beach café where the jukebox featured opera arias and decades of cigarette smoke mellowed the Tuscan wall murals to an amber hue.
The isolation of country living and preoccupation with his Grove Press publishing deal slowed progress on In Watermelon Sugar. By the end of June, Brautigan had completed only seventeen short chapters, several less than a page long. The last chapter he wrote in Bolinas was “Arithmetic,” a tale about the talking tigers eating the narrator’s parents. A room had opened up at 123 Beaver Street, and Phil Whalen invited Richard to move in, a tempting offer, especially in light of a young woman Brautigan had recently met. Janice Meissner was a pert, petite blond with a devil-may-care attitude. “Glorious-looking woman,” Don Carpenter remembered. “Absolutely magnificent. Big tits, nice ass, great legs, great face, lovely hair, good mind. The works!”
In addition to being beautiful, Janice had a well-paying job and a nice apartment at 533 Divisadero Street. She was everything Brautigan had ever hoped for in a woman, but being stuck out in Bolinas did not bode well for his romantic ambitions. Early in July, he took up residence with the other poets on Beaver Street. “My room was in the front,” Richard wrote about his new home, “with a small marble fireplace and an old rug on the floor that told an ancient story about flowers [. . .] there was a light pouring in like a waterfall through the tall Victorian windows that I never dammed up with any curtains.” Plum and avocado trees grew outside the window, and on windy days their branches clawed at the panes. Brautigan thought of it as “having a friendly wildcat hanging on the glass.” When Richard wrote Fred Hill of the wonders of his new abode, Hill replied: “Beaver Street? You’re loping my mule. Nobody lives on Beaver Street. There isn’t any Beaver Street. Come off it, sir.”
Early in July, Brautigan started back to work on In Watermelon Sugar. He wrote two chapters the first day and three on the following day and three more again on the day after. Richard was on a roll. He began recording the date on each new chapter as he finished it. Don Carpenter remembered that time. He had a family and a day job and owned a car. Don was a close friend of Philip Whalen’s, and after he finished his workday, he drove over to Beaver Street to pick up his pal, “and we would go all over rock-hunting or hiking or whatever the hell. I would go past Richard’s room and hear him typing. I became attracted to him as a writer hearing him type. It was every day, and it was regu
lar steady typing. Any writer who works every day has got me. ’Cause that’s the way it’s done. That’s the difference between the talkers and the writers. The writers write and the talkers talk.”
Shortly after Brautigan’s arrival, Lew Welch moved into the middle room on the first floor at Beaver Street. Don Carpenter described him as “tall, thin, handsome, always wearing a crooked smile. Welch liked to think of himself as a hip con-man. He liked to drink and sit in the Jazz Workshop and listen to good music. He loved Sausalito and the No Name Bar, and he loved to play pool and skulk about the Tenderloin.” In June, Lew met a new love at the No Name: Maria Magdalena Cregg, a beautiful free-spirited woman born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1924.
Arriving in New York by way of Romania at age sixteen “after being ‘squeezed out’” by the invading German and Russian armies, Magda studied art in Boston before relocating to the Bay Area in 1948. She was married to a Marin County radiologist and had two sons at the time she met Welch. Hugh, the older, later appropriated Lew’s name in tribute, becoming the rock star Huey Lewis. “She kept him busy guessing,” Richard wrote of Lew and Magda’s affair, “and going from heaven to hell in the matter of an hour or two.”
Phil Whalen remembered that Welch and Brautigan “got along very well, and so it was very nice. No problem. Lewie, of course, was always putting himself down all of the time. He would show you some piece of writing and say, ‘Here’s that thing that I started.’ And you’d say, ‘Well, terrific, Lewie.’ Mumble, groan, grumble. ‘No good, no fucking good.’ It’s just that he was always very persnickety. He wanted everything to be absolutely perfect. He had this facility for working in his head which was really remarkable. It would take months before he would commit anything to paper, and then he wouldn’t like that.” Meanwhile, up in the front room at the end of the hall, Richard was “just hammering away at a great rate and having a great time.”
When the three poets weren’t working they hung out together in the back kitchen. “Gabbled, giggled, and carried on, and eat together sometimes,” Whalen said. Don Carpenter remembered, “one day walking into the kitchen, where Phil was sitting and Richard was standing at the stove with a cast-iron frying pan. And he took a can of beans, and he opened them. Van Camp’s. And he just put it into the frying pan and was standing there stirring with a fork while Philip and I were talking, I thinking: ‘That’s the way to eat. There’s a direct way.’ I was a married man. At dinnertime, I ate a huge meal, all that stuff. But I thought to myself, ‘Well, there is how poets eat.’”
The conversation in the kitchen at Beaver Street rivaled that of any North Beach coffeehouse. As Phil Whalen recalled, “Lewie knew wonderful stories and would tell wonderful stories and he had a great fund of anecdotes and tales and whatnot. Very much like Richard.” Whalen’s memories of Brautigan as a kitchen companion accentuated the positive. “He was always very easy to get along with and very happy and very funny. Whatever he told you, he told you in his own goofy way, and it was always a delight to listen to him.”
Price Dunn, who dropped by to see Richard several times when he lived on Beaver Street, remembered the place as “an interesting little commune. There was a poet haven, and they were all living on a pittance, and brilliant, busy working away.” Price thought highly of Philip Whalen, considering him “a delightful person,” with “a great sense of humor.” Dunn recalled the wonderful gab-fests back in the kitchen. “I’d come over there and somebody would be having a pot of soup on, or they’d be making some rice. It was a cheerful, vivacious place. Richard and Philip were just continuous fun; I’m talking about laughing your ass off.”
Richard captured the joyful mood in an unfinished piece of fiction he titled “Moose, an American Pastoral.” In it, the house on Beaver Street became 321 Moose Street. Philip was called Charles, “a kind and gentle poet in his early forties,” and Lew was “a young existentialist named Sam [. . .] prone to excess of joy and depression.” He wrote of their poverty and the happy meals back in the kitchen. “Sam did most of the cooking [. . .] but had a liking for fish that could not be satisfied.” Richard also mentioned his current project. “I was writing a novel that was very important to me. Occasionally, I drank a little port and I did not have any girlfriends. I met a girl one night and she drove me home on her motorcycle but we didn’t do anything more than kiss. We sat on the bed and kissed. She left shortly after that.”
Despite his celibate state, Brautigan remained euphoric, his high spirits enhanced by the steady progress of his new novel. Every day, Richard pounded out several more chapters. Some days the tally came to five or six. He steamed along at a great rate, and sixteen days after resuming work on the project, Brautigan finished the first draft of In Watermelon Sugar. On July 19, 1964, he typed the dedication on the final page of his manuscript: “This novel is for Don Allen, Joanne Kyger and Michael McClure.”
Richard had only written Joanne Kyger one letter from Bolinas, but their friendship picked up without missing a beat after he returned to the city. Being poor together remained a consistent theme. “We would go to the Safeway and fight over who would get the marked-down pork chops,” Kyger recalled. During his two-week writing marathon finishing the first draft of the novel he partly dedicated to her, Brautigan called Joanne every day and read her long passages from his work in progress. “He’d always talk about himself and what he was reading,” she said. “He was not really very interested in anybody else, particularly. I was there as a listener.”
The possibility of winning the Formentor Prize remained uppermost on Brautigan’s mind. Ten thousand dollars bought a lot of pork chops. The energy derived from working so well and hard on his new novel bolstered his self-confidence, and he became convinced that the prize would soon be his. In daily phone conversations with Joanne Kyger, he’d say, “Well, I guess I’ll hear today, and this might be the last time we’ll talk to each other like this anymore because when this thing happens, you’re going to be in another world from where I am.”
As Kyger recalled, Richard expected to become an overnight sensation, swept up in the whirlwind, much like Jack Kerouac or the Beatles. He talked of going to New York. “He’d just be off the map,” she said. “He’d be out there somewhere.” Joanne and her new partner, the painter Jack Boyce, “just cracked up” over the whole conceit. “Yeah, Richard, this might be the last day I’ll see you,” she said to him, tongue in cheek.
In the end, Richard Brautigan did not win the Formentor Prize. The award for 1964 went to Gisela Elsner, a German writer, whose novel, Die Riesenzwerge, was published in America by Grove Press as The Giant Dwarfs. The news came as a blow for Brautigan. “His whole soufflé deflated,” Joanne Kyger remembered, “and Richard went on with his life.”
Another disappointment followed soon after. Don Allen sent a manuscript copy of Trout Fishing in America to Robert Creeley for his consideration. They were editing a collection of “new American” fiction for Grove together, and Don wanted to include something by Brautigan. For various reasons, Creeley didn’t take to the material. “I was in a weirdly funky state of mind,” he recalled, “and I decided it was too much a shaggy dog story.” At the time, Creeley favored the work of John Hawkes, his friend from Harvard, several of whose nightmarish experimental novels (The Cannibal, The Goose on the Grave, The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig) had already been published by New Directions. “I was trying to get [him] in,” Creeley said, “and Don felt, I think reasonably, that for our interests in that book that Jack Hawkes was too European.” Maybe it was a trade-off, no Hawkes, no Brautigan. “I just didn’t get Richard the first time,” Creeley admitted. He stuck to his position and rejected this most American of writers from the New American Story anthology. In retrospect, Creeley remembered that essayist and critic Warren Tallman, who wrote the introduction to the story collection, said to him, “It’s wonderful stuff, Bob. What’s with you?”
Not all news was bad news. Early in July, Brautigan received a handwritten letter from Charles Newman at TriQuar
terly saying they planned to publish an excerpt from A Confederate General from Big Sur in their fall issue. Newman asked for a biographical statement and promised to send a check and the galley proofs “shortly.” Richard wrote back the next day with the requested information. TriQuarterly’s acceptance offset Susan Stanwood’s letter turning down “Two Armored Cars” and the chapters from Trout Fishing. “Although they are grand exercises in the ludicrous, they are simply too fragmentary for us. Sorry.” She asked to see “more sustained pieces, in which there is some real character or plot development.”
A month later, Brautigan wrote again to Charles Newman, wondering “what’s happening?” The promised check and proofs had yet to arrive. Grove was releasing his novel in October. Time seemed to be running out. Newman answered that there had been a screwup. TriQuarterly had three addresses for Richard in its files and somehow their envelope containing the proofs and a $75 check had gone astray. Nothing could be done about the proofs. They’d run out of time. Newman promised to send another check. He also asked to see more work. The first issue of the magazine was scheduled for September 15.
A check from TriQuarterly was mailed to 123 Beaver Street at the beginning of September. On the tenth, Brautigan sent Charles Newman two more chapters from Trout Fishing in America, adding, “If you decide to use them, payment on acceptance would be very much appreciated.” Always generous with his friends, Richard suggested that Newman contact Philip Whalen and Michael McClure. The editor wrote back immediately, saying he’d get in touch with them both and asking to see “a large hunk” of Trout Fishing. “We think very highly of your work here.”
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 41
