An interlocutory judgment of dissolution of his marriage to Virginia Alder arrived at Richard Hodge’s Kearny Street office during the first week in March, and Richard breathed a little easier. Single again, he was off the financial hook. Brautigan no longer had to fear losing a big chunk of the good fortune coming his way in a divorce settlement. Wanting to meet Helen Brann and have a look at the famous Sterling Lord agency, Richard planned his first trip back east.
An upcoming visit to New Mexico was on Brautigan’s mind when he ran into Gary Snyder at a party after a reading at California State College. Feeling expansive with a $125 paycheck in his pocket, Richard picked up the tab and got drunk with Snyder. Recalling Gary’s studies in Japanese Buddhism, Brautigan improvised a brief “Zen” poem for his inebriated fellow poet: “There is a motorcycle / in New Mexico.” Richard called it “Third Eye.”
Six days later, he and Valerie embarked on an eccentric cross-country sojourn. They flew first to Albuquerque and journeyed up into the mountains to Santa Fe, where they stayed in a house and studio on Canyon Road rented by Bunny Conlon and her artist brother, Al Eylar. Bunny had been born in New Mexico and, after her husband’s death, came home to live with her young son, John.
The next day, Richard and Valerie visited Professor Charles G. Bell, a Southerner and close friend of the novelist Walker Percy. Bell ran the poetry reading program at the Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College. Trained in physics, Bell, himself a poet and novelist, studied English literature as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He spent a summer at Black Mountain, meeting Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, who first suggested meeting Brautigan. Bell found Brautigan “a boisterous sort of man,” but arranged for him to give a reading at St. John’s the following Monday.
Richard and Valerie borrowed Al Eylar’s car, setting off on what she described as “the Brautigan Hegira.” They traveled west, first to Los Alamos, not knowing their plates had long expired. For years, Eyler painted over the date sticker with the appropriate color to avoid paying the registration fee. It was snowing when Richard and Valerie rattled into the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Stopping at the local Safeway for a sack of groceries, Richard felt “there was a clinical feeling to the town” and wrote a poem about the experience, “The Sister Cities of Los Alamos, New Mexico and Hiroshima, Japan.”
Outside Los Alamos, Richard and Valerie visited Bandelier National Monument, wandering around in a world of flat-topped mesas and sheer-walled canyons, investigating ancient Pueblo dwelling places nestled among the junipers and piñon pines. Next, it was west to Grants, where Richard wanted to see the huge radiation lab. The following morning, they backtracked east and south to the Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America. Coronado’s army arrived in 1540. The Spaniards were the first white men to see the pueblo. Until 1929, when a Hollywood film company built a dirt road along the side of the 367-foot sandstone mesa to shoot Redskin, the only way up was a precarious series of ancient footholds carved into the living rock. The road was still unpaved when Richard and Valerie visited forty years later.
Saturday afternoon, they drove north, heading to the Chaco Canyon in the San Juan Basin, for a thousand years the center of the Anasazi culture. In 1969, the place remained remote. Brautigan and his lady explored the area without the supervision of uniformed park rangers. At Pueblo Bonito, built against the cliff face of the canyon wall, they climbed rickety wooden ladders into the archaeological ruins of what had once been the largest apartment building in North America.
While Richard stared at the ruins of an ancient civilization, Helen Brann sat in her East Side apartment at 14 Sutton Place South, surrounded by the glittering towers of Midtown Manhattan, worrying about how to welcome her eccentric new client when he arrived the following week. Helen had overnight guests that weekend. Seymour Lawrence and his wife, Merloyd, were in town from Boston, his home since college days. Lawrence attended Harvard and had been friends there with Robert Creeley when both were undergraduates. Together, they had started a small magazine called Wake, serving as its coeditors.
Sam Lawrence had long known Helen Brann, having used her as a reader when he was at the Atlantic Monthly Press. He had started there in his midtwenties as special assistant to the editor. Within three years he was the director and editor in chief. He was afflicted with lifelong stuttering, but his impediment did little to slow him down. At twenty-eight, Lawrence was the youngest publisher at the firm. During his twelve-year tenure, he brought in Richard Yates, Sean O’Faolain, Kenneth Muir, and Katherine Anne Porter. Lawrence missed a couple, having rejected both On the Road and The Subterraneans. Kerouac derided Sam as “that little queen,” dubbing him “Little shit S.”
After the Atlantic Monthly Press, and a stint as vice president of Alfred A. Knopf, Sam discovered he didn’t care for corporate life and walked out, starting Seymour Lawrence, Inc., in Boston. He made an arrangement with Dell to copublish his books as the Delacorte Press. The first novel Lawrence published under his own imprint in 1965 was a reissue, the first “completely unexpurgated” edition of The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy. Four years later, Lawrence brought out Slaughterhouse Five, elevating Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from an obscure “science fiction” writer into a best-selling author and firmly establishing himself as a literary publishing powerhouse.
“Do you know a restaurant where I can take a very tall hippie writer to lunch?” Helen asked Sam, while getting him coffee and orange juice in the morning.
“Who’s the author?” Sam said.
“You’ve never heard of him; his name is Richard Brautigan.”
In fact, Sam Lawrence had heard of him, earlier in the month, from Kurt Vonnegut, who “mentioned that he had heard of a hippie writer on the West Coast that he had never met, who is creating a cult of his own.” His name was Brautigan.
Sam could barely control his excitement. “My god, Vonnegut was just talking to me about this guy,” he blurted.
Helen told him she was running an auction on the three Brautigan books. “I should have him,” Sam said. “How much have you got?”
“I’ve got fifteen thousand so far.”
“You’ve got twenty,” Sam replied, making an offer that soon became the deal. Lawrence also recommended Pete’s Tavern down by Gramercy Park for Helen’s lunch with Richard. (O. Henry had been a steady customer fifty years earlier.) From that point on, Lawrence became a great champion of Brautigan’s work. Where Don Allen considered Jack Kerouac to be “a greater writer” than Richard, Sam thought that Brautigan was “a much better poet and writer than all the beats together, including prose writers like Kerouac.”
Saturday night, while Helen Brann entertained the Lawrences, Richard and Valerie pushed on to the tiny town of Cuba at the edge of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, where William Eastlake owned a ranch. Most of the roads along this leg of the trip were gravel, and somewhere en route they lost the muffler on Al’s car. “Don’t know if we paid for it or not,” Valerie reminisced. “Probably not. Many of us were less reliable then.”
After a breakfast of ham and eggs in Cuba, Richard and Valerie drove to William Eastlake’s ranch for lunch. The noted author had also invited Lucia Berlin, a young short story writer. Born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, Berlin spent most of her youth living in mining camps across Montana, Idaho, Arizona, and Chile, wherever her itinerant mining engineer father found work. A dark-haired beauty, she had modeled for Sears in the 1950s. Berlin suffered from scoliosis, a form of spinal curvature Brautigan also endured. She had published her early stories in the Atlantic and the Noble Savage. Eastlake told Lucia he wanted her to meet “this brilliant new writer.” When she read Trout Fishing, Berlin remembered “being dazzled by that book.”
Later in the day, Brautigan and Estes headed on to Taos, where the spirit of D. H. Lawrence haunted the quiet adobe streets. Richard wrote a poem here that he dedicated to Valerie. “All Girls Should Have a Poem” is a single sentence broken into four lines expressing the poet’s desire “to
turn this God-damn world upside down” to please the woman he loved.
After returning to Santa Fe, Richard gave a reading on the evening of the seventeenth at St. John’s College. Charles Bell remembered the poet as “a showman, a spectacular character and quite a reader. He paced around the room, and then he jumped up on the table.” Afterward, a collection was taken among the student audience, netting Brautigan $25. The money covered gas expenses for the past few days. Charles Bell promised he would endeavor to have the college pay the poet an additional fee.
Early the next morning, Richard and Valerie left with Bunny on a trip up to the tiny village of Abiquiú. The noted eighty-one-year-old painter Georgia O’Keeffe had made her home there ever since buying and restoring an abandoned hacienda in 1945. A noted recluse, O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico on a trip to Taos in 1929. In spite of her reputation as a hermit, Brautigan kept saying he “wanted to meet Georgia.”
“Well, nobody meets Georgia,” Bunny told him. “People that live in her village don’t even know she’s famous, and she doesn’t want anybody to know she is.” Richard was persistent. He wanted to give O’Keeffe a copy of Please Plant This Book and kept saying, “Tell me where she lives. Take me there and let me try to get her to talk to me.” Valerie remembered Richard giving away copies of this rare publication “very selectively to people.” She considered him “the world’s greatest PR man.”
Bunny directed them to O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiú. Richard got out of the car, holding a copy of his seed-package book, and approached a large front gate. He rang the big bell hanging there. Nothing happened. He rang again. Still no reply. An elderly Spanish-looking woman dressed in black hobbled out the hacienda door. She limped to the gate and asked, “Que quieres?”
“I’m Richard Brautigan,” the poet replied, “and I’d like to give my book to Georgia O’Keeffe.”
“Dame,” the tiny old woman said. She put her arm up and Richard handed her the book. “Gracias,” she said, turning without another word. Richard watched, speechless, as the taciturn crone walked back to the house and closed the door.
Frustrated and upset, Richard returned to the car. Bunny and Valerie sat silently watching him. “I don’t know why she couldn’t have let me see Georgia,” he complained.
“You just did,” Bunny told him.
The following day, Richard and Valerie said goodbye to Bunny Conlon, who was returning home to Washington, D.C. shortly. They agreed to visit her there when then they got to the East Coast in three days’ time. The couple traveled next to Placitas, a small settlement north of Albuquerque, where they stayed with Robert Creeley and his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Creeley had settled in the area in 1956, after a four-year stay in Europe, followed by another two years teaching at Black Mountain College. Creeley had received an MA from the University of New Mexico in 1960, capping an academic career interrupted when he dropped out of Harvard in 1946. Publishing five books of poetry between 1952 and 1956 was an accomplishment far more distinguished than any mere college degree.
The Creeleys lived in a beautiful century-old adobe house with earthen floors soaked in the blood of slaughtered oxen and buffed for a hundred years or more to a polished cordovan sheen. “A wonderfully romantic touch,” Creeley observed. Renewing his acquaintance with Bob Creeley meant a lot to Brautigan, who considered himself “a minor poet.” Not only was Creeley a major poet, at this time almost unheralded, enhancing his appeal to Richard, but the older man had lived a life of far-flung adventuring that made Brautigan’s own provincial high jinks pale by comparison.
All the next day the wine and conversation flowed. At one point, Brautigan told the Creeleys that when he and Valerie first “were thinking about trying to live together,” he took some of her furnishings and moved them over to his apartment “to see how the furniture would get along.” Richard had always invested mystic importance in inanimate objects. “That was an incredible business,” Creeley recollected with a laugh.
The next morning, Richard and Valerie flew from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. While Valerie visited with friends, Richard headed over to the Apple office in the Capitol Records Building on Vine Street just north of Hollywood Boulevard. The thirteen-story circular tower, designed to resemble vinyl forty-fives stacked on a turntable, was built in 1956 and housed the recording company founded by songwriter Johnny Mercer. A red light on a rooftop spire blinked out the word “Hollywood” in Morse code at night.
After a hamburger lunch in the cafeteria, Brautigan met with George Osaki in Apple’s art department to discuss the layout for his record album sleeve. They hit it off. Richard felt Osaki understood what he had in mind. Brautigan asked if the prints Edmund Shea had supplied would suffice for mass reproduction. Osaki said they’d work just fine. Apple held an additional five pictures of Brautigan in their files, but Richard preferred the cover photographs be used for all publicity, “as it will establish a visual image of the record.” He also agreed to write a publicity release and send it from New York the following week. Brautigan insisted on being informed of all changes and demanded “final approval on any publicity, advertising, artwork, and on the master.” Richard Hodge put the finishing touches on the contract, stipulating these points.
The following morning, Richard and Valerie flew to New York. They stayed in a room at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street, a red brick Victorian with ornate wrought-iron balconies. Built originally as the city’s first cooperative apartment house in 1884, it was the tallest structure in New York at the time. Since converting to a hotel in 1905, the Chelsea provided sanctuary to writers, artists, and musicians, including Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, O. Henry, Edgar Lee Masters, Virgil Thomson, Tennessee Williams, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, Christo, Arthur Miller, and George Kleinsinger, composer of Shinbone Alley and Tubby the Tuba. Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward, Angel in a room at the Chelsea. Dylan Thomas died while a resident. His namesake, Bob Dylan, composed the song “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there. William Burroughs once had a room, as did pop artists Larry Rivers, Claes Oldenberg, and Jim Dine. Andy Warhol celebrated the hotel in his film Chelsea Girls. Richard Brautigan was happy to add his name to the illustrious guest register.
That evening, Valerie and Richard had dinner with poets Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant on Park Avenue South made trendy by the patronage of the Warhol circle. Waldman and Warsh, both twenty-four, had been a couple ever since they met in San Francisco the summer of 1965, when Anne came out to the Bay Area to attend the Berkeley Poetry Festival and Lewis lived in a spare sublet apartment on Nob Hill. The next year, they founded and edited Angel Hair, a literary magazine lasting (for six issues) until 1969.
A native New Yorker, raised in Greenwich Village and educated at Bennington College, Waldman went to work for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery after she and Warsh returned to the city. In 1968, Anne became the program’s director, and over dinner with Brautigan (Richard feasted on steak and lobster tail) she asked him if he would like to read there the following week while he was in town. The honorarium would be $50. Richard agreed on the spot.
The next morning, Richard and Valerie took a train from Pennsylvania Station to Washington, D.C. They stayed with Bunny Conlon in her house close to Capitol Hill. Bunny remembered Brautigan’s kindness to her four-year-old son, John, who was sick and wouldn’t take his medicine. “Richard said, ‘Go outside and don’t come back for half an hour and he will have taken his medicine.” She obeyed his instructions. Brautigan worked the special magic he had always had with children. The medicine went down without further complaint. John “was really happy and I was just amazed that [Richard] could get him to do it. He was wonderful with kids.”
On a morning in the last week of March, Bunny drove Richard and Valerie on a tour of nearby Civil War battlefields. Richard wanted to see Manassas, now a suburb of the greater District of Columbia metropolitan area. A century before it had been the site of the
two battles of Bull Run, military engagements so close to the capital that curious civilians rode out in their carriages with picnic baskets “to see the Rebels run.” Instead, they witnessed a complete rout of the Union forces.
From Manassas, the trio drove on to the Wilderness, a wooded area in northern Virginia ten miles west of Fredericksburg, where the forces of the North and South engaged in two bloody battles nearly a year apart, in 1863 and 1864. In the first, now known as the Battle of Chancellorsville, General “Stonewall” Jackson was mortally wounded by his own troops after the Confederates had flanked and nearly annihilated the Union army under the command of General “Fighting Joe” Hooker. The second Wilderness campaign comprised a number of engagements in May and June, with Lee and his army facing off against the Federals, now commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. After a horrible slaughter at Cold Springs, Grant withdrew, having lost sixty thousand men.
At one of these historic places, Richard got out of the car “and started running around and marking, taking big steps, measuring the battlefield.” Bunny and Valerie remained in the car, watching him with amusement. Valerie commented that Richard ran “like a wounded antelope,” because “he had one leg shorter than the other.” When Brautigan rejoined them he said, “I wish I had come here before I wrote The Confederate General. I would have written it completely different.” According to Bunny, she and Valerie “just about died laughing. But he was serious. He was very serious.”
That night, Richard and Valerie had dinner with Conlon in Old Town Alexandria, where Brautigan ate cherrystone clams for the first time in his life. The next day, they were back on the train, heading north to Boston. They stayed in Cambridge with Ron Loewinsohn and his future wife, Kitty. Loewinsohn was attending Harvard, working toward a PhD in English literature, and had arranged for his old North Beach pal to give a reading the following evening at Quincy House.
Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan Page 67
