Jubilee Hitchhiker (185 page)

Richard understood the root of his problem. He also knew the only path to salvation meant staying sober. He worked at it, day by day, a one-man twelve-step program. Sobriety did little to alleviate his irascible peckishness, and he brooded on the unfavorable reactions to
An Unfortunate Woman
from trusted professional advisers. Early in March, Brautigan had a long phone conversation with Helen Brann about his most recent novel. The matter had simmered between them, ticking away like a time bomb ever since Brautigan had sent his agent the manuscript back in September.

Brann read it immediately but waited “three or four days” before calling Richard. Priding herself “on being honest with her clients,” she broke the bad news to Brautigan as gently as she could. Helen felt the new book was “very much related to that god-awful time with Akiko.” It struck her as more “autobiographical” than fiction. She had offered it to Sam Lawrence. Richard had declined both his identical lowball offers. After that, the issue lay dormant for almost six months, a winter snake, venomous and waiting to strike.

“I had to tell him it simply was not going to work,” Helen Brann recalled. “There was no revising it. There was nothing to do with it in my opinion except put it to one side and go on with the next work.” This was not what Brautigan wanted to hear. Always loyal to his friends, Richard demanded unflinching loyalty in return and severed all contact with anyone (such as Gatz Hjortsberg) he perceived as having crossed him. Brann skated on extremely thin ice. “I knew if I told him that he would probably leave me,” she said.

Hoping to forestall this possibility, Helen sent Brautigan a telegram the next morning. “I want you to know that whatever you decide to do in sending the new novel, I will follow through despite my misgivings about this work,” she wired. “Believe me I am very unhappy at having this reaction to the novel and hope you know that I continue to think of you as one of the best and most important writers writing today.” Brann's message came too late. Richard's “irascible nature” took control. He had already mailed her his final word on the matter, ending their thirteen-year business relationship in two terse sentences.

“Dear Helen Brann,” Brautigan began (instead of the usual “Dear Helen”). “After our last conversation about my new novel
An Unfortunate Woman
, I realized that our views on this work are so vastly different that it would be very difficult to continue our working relationship because this novel is one of the main directions of my future writing.

“So I am terminating my relationship with the Helen Brann Agency effective as of March 11, 1983.” He signed off with his full name (not his customary “Love, Richard”), “Regretfully, Richard Brautigan.” A carbon copy was mailed to Joel Shawn.

Even as he severed one long-standing connection, Richard reestablished another troubled friendship. At Marian Hjortsberg's house one night, Brautigan expressed regret over the schism between him and Tom McGuane. He decided to make amends and phoned McGuane. “I want you to come over here,” he said. “I think it's time we let bygones be bygones.”

“Tom came racing over,” Marian recalled.

Brautigan asked her to stay. “I want you to be the arbiter,” he said.

Marian hung around downstairs, ready “to ameliorate in case anything went wrong.” In short order, “they had sort of a pas de deux around each other” in Hjortsberg's living room, “hugging and kissing and weeping.” Marian remembered it as “a very special moment,” recalling the two men “both professing undying love and telling me I was the most wonderful woman in the world and quack, quack, quack, and it was very touching.”

To cement their renewed friendship, McGuane invited Brautigan to dinner a week later at his new ranch on Barney Creek. Barry Hannah, a forty-year-old Mississippi novelist, currently writer-in-residence at the University of Montana, was a houseguest. Tom thought he and Richard should meet. Hannah's first novel,
Geronimo Rex,
had won the William Faulkner Prize in 1972. In the following decade he published two more novels and
Airships
, a book of short stories (1978) that McGuane liked very much. A new novel,
The Tennis Handsome
, was about to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. Brautigan greatly enjoyed his conversation with the younger writer. They exchanged addresses. Upon parting, Hannah gave Richard an advance copy of his new book.

Brautigan's travel plans ran into an unexpected snag. His cultural visa to Japan, issued on January 19, had been stamped “VOID” when he departed the country on February 18. Applying for another visa after such a short time presented problems. Richard needed to jump through various diplomatic hoops. The Japanese Consul in Seattle demanded signed letters from his Tokyo publisher. In a panic, he phoned Takako Shiina, and she agreed to help. It would be easy, he told her. Only four lines, he said.

A control-freak nitpicker, Brautigan proved overly demanding in his detailed instructions. Their conversations grew heated. Richard hung up on Takako twice. She thought he was “just impossible.” Brautigan “upset [her] terribly,” making her “so angry,” but Shiina went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the necessary information. Afterward she “spent all [her] precious evening” writing two long documents: an “affidavit of support” and a letter of invitation from Shobun-sha, detailing Richard's relationship with the Japanese publisher and how his visit would “contribute to Japanese culture.”

The next afternoon, after Mr. Zuno of Shobun-sha said he had no time to see her, Takako tracked him down at a Shinjuku coffee shop, interrupting a meeting. She begged him to type the two letters and affix the Shobun-sha seal. The publishing company didn't have a typewriter, further complicating matters. Shiina still managed to get everything done. She sent the signed, typed letters and copies of Shobun-sha's company registration and corporate history off to Brautigan by registered express mail.

Takako posted a separate indignant letter to “My nasty brother, Richard.” She signed off, “Your mad, mad, mad, sister.” Brautigan received the documents and sent them, along with his passport, to the Japanese Consul in Seattle. Shiina's dogged hard work paid off. Richard was approved for a stay of six months. The consulate stamped the visa (valid entry for ninety days) in his passport on March, 24, 1983.

Aside from letters, Brautigan did no writing in March. He wrote Masako Kano four times, emphasizing how busy he was (“Work! Work! Work!”), but what exactly occupied his time remained a mystery. Richard revised the typescript of
An Unfortunate Woman
in a minimal fashion. He changed the gender of the shoe in the opening sentence. Aside from a couple other minor adjustments, his biggest alteration involved erasing the words “short novel” throughout his text
and penning “journey” in their place. Brautigan finished these slight modifications in the first week of April.

Richard seemed anxious to see Masako again, his regimen of exercise and diet an effort to spruce up his image. He also consulted Becky Fonda about wardrobe improvements. She took him shopping over in Bozeman. Becky bought Brautigan a new sweater and a formal Western jacket, telling him, “You have to dress up sometimes.”

A thin paperback copy of
Richard Brautigan
by Marc Chénetier, part of the Contemporary Writers series published by Methuen & Co. of London and New York, arrived in Montana before the end of the month. Richard expected to be disappointed, as he had been with Terence Malley's similarly titled book back in 1972. Chénetier lauded Brautigan with praise, maintaining that critics dismissed him unfairly because Richard's work fell outside the boundaries of traditional American literary criticism. “Mapping out a territory is as important as settling it,” Chénetier wrote, “and one may prefer census-taking to sense-making: the actual weighing of the nuggets will be left to others.”

“The frog got it right,” Richard told all his friends.

Lorca Hjortsberg had an accident driving home from school one afternoon early in April. She totaled the old Chevy Brautigan had given her, ending up in the hospital. Richard went with Marian to visit her. “We're so glad you're all right,” he said, holding her hand. He never said a single word about the wrecked car.

Brautigan left for Paris in the middle of the second week of April 1983. He flew first to San Francisco for a farewell night at Enrico's. Christian Bourgois arranged for his ticket to originate at SFO. The next day Richard was en route to New York. According to Helen Brann, he checked into “a perfectly god-awful place, some fleabag over in the Times Square area.” His days at the Plaza and the Waldorf on his own dime were over. While economizing, Brautigan still found the means to take Ianthe, who was living in Brooklyn with Paul, out for a big Friday night lobster dinner at The Palm. His daughter's husband had to work and couldn't come.

Ianthe worked nights at the Roundabout Theater, so her days were free to spend with her father. For a couple years, she thought he only came to New York to see his agent, realizing now “that he wanted to see me as well.” Richard spent much of his time in the city with his daughter. They went together to various museum shows and to “movies that weren't playing in San Francisco.” Ianthe's half sister, Ellen, was also living in the Big Apple and often joined them on their afternoon excursions.

On Saturday morning, April 9, Richard phoned Helen Brann, asking her to join him for breakfast. She pulled on a pair of jeans and headed over from Sutton Place to a side street in the West Forties, where she met Brautigan in his shabby hotel coffee shop. They talked “about everything for about three hours.” It was just like old times, as if nothing had changed between them. “He was in terrific shape,” Brann recalled. “He hadn't been drinking for a couple months. He'd lost weight. Had a haircut.”

This final breakfast felt important for Helen. She feared Richard harbored hurt feelings. “But he was so sweet to me,” she said. “We were as close as we'd ever been.” Brautigan told her about Chénetier's recent study of his work, saying he was “fed up” with the American critics. Brann recalled how articulate Brautigan sounded as he “put his entire writing career into focus.”

“Helen,” he said, “in another two or three years, the whole thing is going to turn around and they'll rediscover me. I'm just not going to do any new writing. If I publish anything, I'll publish it in Europe.” This didn't seem off-the-wall to Brann. She thought Brautigan “sounded so bright and so acute about the way things work in this country.”

Before they parted, Richard invited Helen up to his “horrible” room. “Eight by twelve, including the john,” she remembered. “A little cot-like bed. A window that looked out on nothing. Had a dirty sort of curtain across it.” Brautigan wanted to give her some documents. “Not a manuscript, but papers.” Helen noted that he was traveling with only a duffle bag. “And that was it.” They said goodbye and she left his tiny room. It was the last time Helen Brann ever saw Richard Brautigan.

That same evening Brautigan departed one hour late from JFK to Paris on TWA flight 806. On the long transatlantic passage, Richard read from a pocket copy of the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Christian Bourgois and his second wife, Dominique, awaited their author's arrival at Roissy Airport the next morning, along with Marc Chénetier and a reporter and photographer from
L'Express
. Not knowing Richard's plane had been delayed, they played a guessing game, trying to pick their mysterious author out of the swarm of arriving passengers. After a while, they wondered if Brautigan hadn't “poser un lapin
.
” In French, “arranging a rabbit” was the colloquialism for standing someone up.

At last they spotted Richard approaching. Long-limbed, awkward, wearing bell-bottom jeans, hair in disorder, the distinctive mustache—the group recognized Brautigan right away and introduced themselves. He greeted them kindly, displaying “the exquisite politeness of a schizo.” Something about Richard, at once “anonymous” and a “famous figurehead,” reminded the reporter, Gérard Lefort, of a “posthumous” Boris Vian, a French bohemian poet, novelist, and jazz musician who died in 1959. Waiting by the baggage carousel, Brautigan reinforced this perception, pulling a small alarm clock from his pocket and telling his new companions it was set on Montana time.

After passing through customs, Richard bought a bottle of whiskey at the duty-free store and they set off for Paris along l'autoroute du Nord in the Bourgoises' car. Brautigan frowned out the window, sizing up the nondescript suburbs on the horizon. “So, then, this is France!' he said scornfully. Caught in a traffic jam in the Faubourg Saint-Denis, Richard's superior attitude relaxed a bit. Now everything looked just like in the movies, he thought. As they moved closer to the center of the city, Brautigan studied the shop signs and the names painted on the windows of the boutiques they passed.
Hot Dog. Pressing. Restaurant. Café.
Flashing back to his early childhood studying the labels on canned goods, Richard announced that he'd discovered a fast way to learn French.

Christian Bourgois drove Brautigan to the Hôtel d'Isly at 49 Rue Jacob in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Left Bank. Two things waited at the front desk. A letter from Michelle Lapautre, his French literary agent, welcomed him to Paris. She hoped to meet Richard soon, suggesting he phone her Tuesday morning once his schedule had been arranged. The other item was a copy of
Livres-Hebdo
, a weekly magazine about books published mainly for librarians and booksellers. A feature article, “Richard Brautigan à Paris” by Christine Ferrand, was illustrated with John Fryer's photo of Brautigan leaning against his Pine Creek mailbox.