Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan

by William Hjortsberg

  Richard took the manuscript of In Watermelon Sugar to Jack Spicer, hoping for the sort of dynamic input his mentor had provided for his first novel. Spicer’s alcoholism and paranoia had intensified during the three years since the writing of Trout Fishing. It was a period in which Spicer produced some of his most powerful work. The Heads of the Town up to the Aether, his first copyrighted book (Spicer was opposed to copyright protection on the principle that a writer did not “own” his material) had been published by Dave Haselwood and Andrew Hoyem at Auerhahn Press in 1962. In 1964, Spicer returned to White Rabbit Press, now under the direction of Graham Mackintosh, who designed and printed The Holy Grail, the poet’s seven-part reworking of Arthurian myth. “In the context of the ‘power’ that led to such writing,” Robin Blaser observed, “I think Richard wanted his place in it, so to speak, beside Spicer—an admirable desire in a young writer.”

  Jack Spicer turned Brautigan down without a word of explanation. Spicer tended “to let go” of any writer in his circle once he achieved any measure of success. Richard had a book contract with Grove Press, had published in the Evergreen Review, City Lights Journal, and elsewhere. The new issue of Evergreen (no. 33) had just appeared, containing five further chapters from Trout Fishing in America (“Witness for Trout Fishing in America Peace,” “A Note on the Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America,” “The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin,” “In the California Bush,” and “Trout Death by Port Wine”). Brautigan was on his way.

  Stung by Spicer’s refusal, Brautigan turned to Robin Blaser, who liked him and “cared about his writing.” Blaser considered Trout Fishing “a masterpiece.” Jack Spicer and Blaser had been friends since their time together in Berkeley in the late forties and had exchanged new poems with each other, sometimes weekly, over the years. “Richard would have known that,” Robin Blaser observed, many decades later. “There was a kind of magic—North Beach magic—between Jack and Richard. That was not the case between Richard and me.” Brautigan had formed “a kind of dependence” on Spicer and “took it hard” when the older poet terminated their working relationship. Needing someone to play the role of mentor, Richard consulted Robin Blaser, a talented poet Jack Spicer treated as an equal.

  The resulting connection between Brautigan and Blaser gave rise over the years to the false assertion that Robin Blaser had “edited” In Watermelon Sugar. A biography of Jack Spicer recorded this as fact. Not long ago, Robin Blaser set the record straight: “Richard came to me and asked if I would go over his unfinished manuscript. We met, as I remember, two or three times in a bar. Richard read to me, and we talked about the wonderful, strange imagery. If revision resulted, I never knew about it, and I certainly did not assist him in editing In Watermelon Sugar, a book I like very much.”

  Early in September, Richard Brautigan began submitting In Watermelon Sugar to magazines. He sent it first to Susan Stanwood at the Saturday Evening Post and, on the same day, mailed three more chapters from Trout Fishing to TriQuarterly. Although the new novel was under contractual option to Grove Press, he held off sending them a copy of the manuscript. They had not yet accepted Trout Fishing in America for publication. Richard decided to hedge his bets.

  Small irritations kept Brautigan from enjoying the sweet smell of his own success. Topping the grievance list was the dust jacket Grove Press had designed for A Confederate General from Big Sur, incorporating a four-color reproduction of a 1959 painting by Larry Rivers entitled The Next-to-Last Confederate Soldier. Richard didn’t care for it. He also didn’t like the dust jacket copy, which stated that one of the “purposes” of the novel was “to give a serious portrait of a ‘beat’ character and a critique of the beat way of life.” Brautigan had no interest in being identified with the Beat Generation and didn’t consider himself to be a beatnik. Larry Rivers’s painting was tainted by the artist’s Beat connections. Rivers was a noted Greenwich Village bohemian and had acted the part of Milo in Pull My Daisy. The jacket copy also referred for the first time to Brautigan’s “soft and thoughtful whimsy,” a description he detested.

  Richard Seaver sent Richard Brautigan an advance copy of A Confederate General from Big Sur and his accompanying letter informed him of Grove’s decision to postpone the book’s publication until January of 1965. Seaver feared a first novel published in October or November “might get lost in the shuffle” during the Christmas season. He also took issue with Brautigan’s objections to the dust jacket.

  Grove had asked Donald Allen to write the copy, but he declined, and the work was done in-house. “I very frankly think it is good jacket copy,” Seaver wrote, “and faithfully presents the book. Maybe it does not coincide exactly with your own ideas of presentation, but in my experience authors must at some point let the book go from them and accept others’ vision and evaluation of it.” In any case, nothing more could be done, as the dust jacket had already been printed. If by chance there should be a second printing, perhaps then the jacket might be modified. Brautigan would never forget this slight. He had very strong ideas about typography, layout, and graphic art. In his future dealings with book publishers, Richard made certain to retain complete design control over his titles.

  Luther Nichols wrote to Grove that “Richard is certainly one of the most inventive literary talents we have out here.” In November, a letter came from John Ciardi, poetry editor of the Saturday Review. “I enjoyed reading Brautigan,” he stated. “I don’t know what it’s about, but one of the nice things about the book is that the reader doesn’t need to know. The man’s a writer and the writing takes over in its own way, which is what writing should do. Brautigan manages effects the English novel has never produced before.” The editors at Grove Press were in blurb heaven, but the book had already been printed, and it was too late to include the quotes on the dust jacket.

  By the time Charles Newman wrote again to Brautigan early in October, saying he liked Trout Fishing and hoped to see more of it, typographic errors foreclosed on Richard’s enjoyment of the moment. A copy of TriQuarterly had arrived at Beaver Street. Brautigan thought the first issue “a handsome magazine,” but the chapter titled “The Rivets of Ecclesiastes” was printed incorrectly, with several paragraphs out of sequence. Had Richard seen the galleys, he would easily have spotted the error. He remained calm and polite when he contacted Newman about the matter. He requested TriQuarterly “print something in your next issue, pointing out that the chapter was not printed correctly.” Another disappointment came later in October, when the Saturday Evening Post rejected In Watermelon Sugar. Susan Stanwood explained, “it was simply too vague and fragmentary for our purposes.”

  Newman answered Brautigan before the end of October. An editor’s “near sightedness” caused the mix-up in Richard’s copy. Newman had hoped for “that rarity or rarities, a first issue without typos,” but thought that the story “made sense” in its reformatted version. He claimed, “I like it better the way it is printed,” while admitting this sounded “ridiculously defensive.” TriQuarterly offered to print a “rectification” along with the correct version of the final paragraph in their winter issue.

  Newman’s letter was mailed to 123 Beaver Street. By the time it arrived, Richard Brautigan had moved out. Since returning to the city in July, Richard wrote to Janice Meissner several times. The letters stopped in September, when their romance began to build up steam. Brautigan was primed for a new relationship. In “Beowulf Umbrella,” an unfinished short story scrawled in one of his notebooks during the summer, he observed, “My name is Richard Brautigan [. . .] I have not been laid in weeks. I’ve grown steadily nervous. I’ve wandered from bar to bar and found nothing, but at the same time I was looking for nothing. I’m 29 years old. I ended up at a place that Philip Whalen says nice people just don’t go to. Gino and Carlo’s [. . .]” Finding no action there, Richard wrote a poem called “Marriage,” reducing wedlock to a simple basic formula: “C sleeps with C. C sleeps with C. C sleeps with C,” until enough time passes an
d “C decides to sleep with D. Then who does C sleep with? Beowulf umbrella.”

  Janice Meissner had been charmed by Richard Brautigan’s wit. She worked for the Schlage Lock Company, an old San Francisco firm founded by Walter Schlage, whose first invention, patented in 1909, was for a door lock that automatically turned the interior lights off and on. To Brautigan, the company name sounded like “Schlock Lock.” “Richard thought that was very funny,” Joanne Kyger recalled. Janice detested her job. Any man who could make her laugh at her employment woes was worth considering. By the beginning of November, Richard had taken up residence with her in apartment number 4 at 533 Divisadero Street.

  From the start, they made a delightful couple. He called her “Candy Pie,” and contemporary photographs reveal an affectionate physical chemistry between them. They were pictured holding hands, hugging and kissing, Janice sprawled like a playful kitten across Richard’s lap. She stood a head shorter, barely coming up to his shoulder, yet their blond good looks went well together, her happy full-lipped pout the perfect complement to the frowning down-sweep of his Victorian mustache; her dark-lidded sultry eyes exchanging secret glances with his bemused owlish stare.

  On November 30, 1964, Brautigan began what he hoped would become a new novel. On a clean page in his notebook, he wrote: “The American Experience by Richard Brautigan.” On the next page, headed by the Roman numeral I, he set down a brief opening chapter. “The American experience is an operation illegal in this country: abortion. This is our story. There are thousands like us in America [. . .] in every state, in every city.”

  Richard began chapter II on a new page. It was also only three sentences long and dealt with his precarious finances. Combining what was left from a publisher’s advance, “after paying off certain debts,” with the profit from selling thirty-five books of his poetry and sixty borrowed dollars, added to another $120.00 “my woman” had from her job, brought the total to $311. The brief chapter ended here. It was obvious the couple was bankrolling an abortion. Brautigan set his notebook aside at this point, resuming work on his typewriter later.

  The second time around, he called the piece “In the Talisman, Looking Out.” He typed rapidly, beginning again with the same opening sentence, “The American experience is an operation illeagal [sic] in this country: abortion. This is how we got there, Alvinia and I, how sweet and spinning kisses one night in San Francisco led us step by step, smooth as a highway almost with beginning—I’ll kiss you—then to the abortions [sic] table in Tueians [sic]. Mexico.” Brautigan then digressed to “invoke a talisman for this book.” The narrator felt a story about abortion “must be guided by some kind of gentleness.”

  The talisman Richard chose was a house. Not just any house, but the old Victorian at 123 Beaver Street. He described it as “a simple two-story white house,” with a front yard “divided in half by a stone walk.” He left out the fruit trees, but the walk transversed a garden where rhubarb grows “like flowers” and rosemary “pours over the edge of the brinks, in a downward flight of blossoms.” Brautigan placed the house “on a hill in San Francisco.” He recalled a room with “a table by the window.” It was a place where he had been happy. “The room is nice and it makes me feel at home.”

  Richard described Alvinia (he spelled her name three different ways as if trying to bring the character into focus) in terms he might easily have applied to Janice, “very pretty in a warm black sweater, in her blond body, hair and face.” At the end of the second typewritten page (where the narrator imagines himself in the talisman house, watching the girl walk down the hill to meet him through “a high drift of rabipidly [sic] moving fogg” [sic]), Brautigan set the manuscript aside. No documentation survives suggesting Richard Brautigan ever arranged an abortion for any of his partners. Whatever the circumstances, the project stalled, stillborn. Richard had other things on his mind. In early November, he still stewed over the enormous typo in TriQuarterly and Charles Newman’s presumed failure to respond to his complaint. He dashed off a terse note to the editor: “I would appreciate a reply to my letter of October 6. Thank you.”

  A few days later, another publishing error provoked Brautigan’s ire. That fall, Anna Halprin and the Dancers’ Workshop Company revived The Flowerburger, performing the piece in November, first at San Francisco State and later as part of the Improvisation Festival at the UCLA Concerts. Open City Press printed a review of the first performance (“A Halprin Happening”) by John Byrem and published the three poems on which the dance was based (“The Flowerburger,” “The Chinese Checker Players,” and “In a Café”) attributing them to the dancers.

  Richard voiced his strong opinions regarding false attribution in a letter. “You did not get my permission to publish these poems and you published these poems without acknowledging my authorship. I do not think this is the way to run a publication and I believe the copyright laws in this country back me up on this point.” Richard Brautigan signed his unsent letter, “Yours sincerely, The Flowerburger.”

  Charles Newman’s “nice letter” finally caught up with Brautigan at his new address around the end of the month, and he wrote back immediately, enclosing two more chapters from Trout Fishing in America. TriQuarterly now had seven chapters from the novel. Richard asked for a payment of $100 should they be accepted. The editor replied, doubting the additional chapters would be included in the upcoming winter number, “since we hesitate to publish the same author in successive issues.” Newman agreed to the $100 honorarium, asking to “keep the manuscript for a few more months until February,” when they would consider it for inclusion in the spring issue.

  Richard Brautigan found Newman’s request outrageous. He got back in touch with TriQuarterly immediately. “I am trying to make some kind of living from writing, and I just cannot afford to have the work I’ve sent to you tied up any longer without a definite decision.” Since sending the first two chapters in September, Brautigan had sent another five. “Unfortunately, the art of living in America depends on a little money to pay the rent and the only money I get is from writing.” Richard asked Charles Newman to either accept his work “and pay me for it” or else return the manuscript, “so I can send it some place else.”

  Not making any headway with his tale about abortion, Brautigan turned his thoughts toward other fiction as Christmas fast approached. The words to an old Appalachian folk song kept echoing around in his brain, and he jotted them down in his notebook: “I’d rather live in some dark holler / where the sun refused to shine [. . .]” Folksingers call such a lyric a “floater verse” because it is easily transposed into any number of songs. “Little Maggie” and “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” are among the better-known folk melodies using the verse Richard recalled. Here Brautigan’s runaway imagination took over. In the true spirit of folk music, he improvised two off-kilter new lines snatched from out of the blue: “where the wild birds of heaven / can’t hear me when I whine.” Combining the plaintive traditional lyric with his own inspired invention triggered an idea for a short story.

  Richard labored over his opening paragraph, writing two rough versions before starting again on a separate page. He quoted the folk song above his text, appending his final improvised couplet to complete the verse. Folk music continually evolves through the ages, and Brautigan’s variant must be seen as a contribution to a long-standing tradition. The last draft in Richard’s notebook was almost identical to the first paragraph of the published story.

  “The Wild Birds of Heaven,” in Revenge of the Lawn, is a surreal fantasy about a man named Mr. Henly whose children want a new television set. He buys “a video pacifier that had a 42-inch screen with built-in umbilical ducts,” at the “Frederick Crow Department Store.” The credit arrangements might have been devised by Franz Kafka. Mr. Henly has his shadow removed by a blacksmith, who nails “the shadow of an immense bird” to his feet in its place. In twenty-four months, when he pays off the TV set, Mr. Henly will get his own shadow back.

  The differences be
tween the published version and what Brautigan wrote in his notebook show him wrestling with the imagery of death. The original draft read, “The picture tube was going out and a band of death shadow crept over the edges of what-ever was playing that night and then the static lines that danced like drunken pencils on the picture.” In the published version it became, “The picture was going out and that death John Donne spoke so fondly about was advancing rapidly down over the edge of whatever was playing that night, and there were also static lines that danced now and then like drunken cemeteries on that picture.”

  Another Christmas. Richard was in love and living happily with a new woman. His domestic situation prompted Brautigan to consult Dr. Alex L. Finkle, a San Francisco urologist, in mid-December. He paid four subsequent visits to the doctor, the last in January 1965, paying a total of $55 for his treatment. The nature of his ailment remains unknown, but it was likely a venereal infection. Whether Janice was involved in these medical visits or if she even knew of Richard’s problem remains a mystery.

  Brautigan’s concern for his partner was expressed a year or so later in Flowers for Those You Love, a little poem about VD that he gave away for free on the city streets as a printed broadside. “Please see a doctor / if you think you’ve got it,” he wrote. “You’ll feel better afterwards / and so will those you love.”

  Like an ecstatic child waiting for Santa, Richard expressed the joy of his new relationship in a “card” he composed and sent to friends. At the top, he wrote a poem: “All the flowers /that Christmas bring /grow again . . . /grow again . . . /in the houses /where we live.” Below the poem, Brautigan drew a childlike schematic of a house with a wavy line of smoke trailing out of the rectangular chimney. He wrote “Merry Christmas!” inside the house and the date, 1964, riding above the smoke. The little house stood like a blossom atop a tall thin stalk, the way a child might draw a flower with curving leaves pointing like arrows at the two names written across the bottom of the page: Richard and Janice.