Jubilee Hitchhiker (31 page)

Two significant San Francisco literary events occurred during the summer of 1957. Most noteworthy was the
Howl
obscenity trial. On May 29, after federal prosecutors declined to initiate condemnation proceedings, U.S. Customs released 520 copies of the second printing it had been holding since March. Three days later, two plainclothes San Francisco police officers, acting under orders from Captain William Hanrahan of the juvenile division, arrested bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao at City Lights on charges of selling obscene literature after purchasing a copy of
Howl
from him. An arrest warrant was also issued for publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The trial began in mid-August with Judge Clayton Horn, one of four city police magistrates, presiding over a 150-seat courtroom crowded to capacity with reporters and other onlookers. Jack Spicer became a regular spectator. More than legal matters interested him. He was “cruised” at the trial by a young redheaded aspiring painter named Russell FitzGerald, who later became his lover. Counsel for the defense was famed trial lawyer Jake (“Never Plead Guilty”) Ehrlich. Nine distinguished expert witnesses (including Mark Schorer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Luther Nichols, and Kenneth Rexroth) testified in person supporting Ginsberg's poem.

On the third of October, Judge Horn delivered his decision. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was not guilty of publishing and selling obscene material. (Charges against Shig Murao had been dropped a
week after the start of the trial.) The case provided excellent business for Ferlinghetti, ensuring the future success of his City Lights Books publishing venture. “Big Day for Bards at Bay,” declared a September
Life
magazine photo essay that made Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti famous almost overnight. By the time the media circus came to an end, more than ten thousand copies of
Howl
were in print.

Richard Brautigan talked about the trial with his friends, Ferlinghetti's legal troubles being a hot topic in North Beach that summer.
Howl
had been prominently displayed in the front window of City Lights all during the legal proceedings. Allen Ginsberg was off in Europe with Peter Orlovsky but remained the man of the moment on the Frisco poetry scene.

When
Evergreen Review
, no. 2, appeared in local bookstores in June, it became the other talked-about event of the summer. Published in New York City, the new periodical devoted its entire second issue to the “San Francisco Scene.” Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Kerouac were among the contributors, along with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Josephine Miles, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Henry Miller. The fledgling
Evergreen Review
was a vibrant publication, focusing national attention on the remarkable literary talent flowering in San Francisco. For a relative newcomer like Brautigan, reading the second issue vindicated his decision to move to the city. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had Paris in the twenties; this time around, Frisco in the fifties was the place to be.

Spicer's contribution to the new quarterly suited Richard's lean aesthetics. Unlike the improvised excesses of Kerouac (“That's not writing; that's typing,” waspish Truman Capote hissed on a TV talk show), Spicer's measured, minimal work chose each word with lapidary precision. A remarkable short story, “The Scroll-work on the Casket,” presented profound object lessons in his precise (yet curiously oblique) use of language, at once straightforward yet utterly unafraid of the unexpected. To achieve just such a mysterious economy with words became Brautigan's goal.

The freewheeling salon centered on Jack Spicer at The Place found less boisterous surroundings once he began spending every afternoon at Aquatic Park, a convenient cove on San Francisco Bay where the great curving arm of the Municipal Pier embraced the Maritime Museum's collection of nineteenth-century sailing ships. The park fronted the Maritime Museum, a 1939 WPA art deco building, originally a public bathhouse designed to resemble an ocean liner. Rows of concrete bleachers overlooking the tiny strip of beach provided a favorite sunbathing spot. Here, or on the grassy slope above, joined by his friends and disciples, Spicer listened to baseball games on his inexpensive leather-covered portable radio, read books and newspapers, and held forth on the magic nature of poetry, always sitting with his back to the water.

When Spicer's workshop at the public library came to an end that summer, remnants of the group continued to meet informally on Sunday afternoons in the ground-floor Jackson Street apartment of Joe and Carolyn Dunn, where the shades were drawn to ensure privacy and provide the appropriate ambiance. Duncan and Spicer continued as resident sages, with the former enthroned in a plush easy chair, the latter hulking cross-legged on the wine-stained rug. Among the devotees occupying the Salvation Army furniture were George Stanley, Ebbe Borregaard, and James Broughton. Joanne Kyger, having missed out on the Magic Workshop, began attending regularly along with her friend Nemi Frost and another painter, Jerome Mallman.

Later newcomers included two poets barely into their twenties: David Meltzer, up from L.A., where he had befriended Edward Kienholz and Wallace Berman, artists he called the “lumberjacks” because of their beards and rugged shirts, and John Wieners, a former student of Charles Olson's
at Black Mountain College, who had moved in October from Boston, where he'd published most of the Black Mountain gang in his magazine,
Measure
. Kyger and Wieners soon became intense friends. He dubbed her “Miss Kids,” a nickname springing from her exuberant way of announcing “Kids! I've got a great idea!” in the hey-let's-put-on-a-show manner of the Andy Hardy films. Kyger's late-night cartwheeling in Washington Square was another manifestation of her spontaneous enthusiasms.

Ron Loewinsohn and Dick Brautigan started trooping on Sundays through the Broadway Tunnel under Russian Hill to the Dunns' dimly lit apartment where the ninety-cent jug wine circulated in jelly jars. Ron remembered the positive response to Richard's work right from the first. “I thought it was extremely worthwhile. People got very excited about his stuff. It was unique. None of us had ever seen anything like it before. Part of what made him so bizarre was because he was coming from a direction that really wasn't hip. It was for us totally unexplored.”

Spicer soared at a creative peak that summer, writing the poems that formed his book
After Lorca
. Donald Allen, in town for a couple months, remembered Jack showing him a new poem every day at Vesuvio or The Place. Spicer had come to believe “there is no single poem.” Poems were serial. They belonged in groups, lived in books. “Poems should echo and re-echo against each other,” Spicer wrote to Robin Blaser. “They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.”

Everyone read to the group, including Duncan and Spicer, with Jack often reading a new poem three times before allowing any comment. When the younger poets presented their work, “Duncan and Spicer were the judges.” George Stanley remembered Spicer as the harder of the two. “Duncan was much more willing to allow the possibility of there being something there, and Spicer was much more willing to allow the possibility of there being nothing there, just ‘shit!'” Duncan rarely disagreed with Spicer, and the mood stayed genial in spite of the severity of the criticism. “There weren't any grudges,” Stanley recalled. “If Spicer thought your poem was shit, that didn't mean he thought you were shit.”

David Meltzer called Duncan and Spicer “mentor gurus” and found them an “interesting combination because Robert was this very expansive poet, and Jack was this very reductive poet.” Duncan had praised and admired
Howl
, but Spicer had only scorn for the Beats. Ron Loewinsohn said, “Jack would have nothing to do with Ferlinghetti, would not allow his [Spicer's] books to be sold in the store, did not take Kerouac or Ginsberg seriously, dealt with all of the Beat Generation people with a kind of contempt.”

Loewinsohn recalled an afternoon when Brautigan read “The Nature Poem” at the Dunns'. Later published in
The Octopus Frontier
and reprinted in
The Pill
, the poem began, “The moon / is Hamlet / on a motorcycle / coming down / a dark road.” According to Ron, “Spicer's reaction was to laugh—the deliberate ‘ha-ha-ha-ha. That's not funny, that was stupid.' It was pretty intense.” Somehow Brautigan, wary and sensitive by nature, took it all in stride. David Meltzer thought this was because Richard “was very much an unacknowledged disciple of Jack.” He also remembered how deeply Brautigan craved his mentor's approval. “Richard was very self-conscious, like a lot of writers and artists, even performers, essentially very introverted and shy.”

Meltzer recalled the “rigor around the right word” that Richard had reinforced through his contact with Spicer. “I remember we had this long drunken discussion at Vesuvio about James Jones's recent book,
Some Came Running
, his big pulpy thing, which I enjoyed. I was comfortable
with both the kind of Whitmanesque expansiveness American style and the reductive.” Although he “gruesomely loathed to talk critically,” Brautigan thought the Jones book was “terrible. ‘Everything is in there,' he just kept on saying. ‘Nothing is left out.'”

Early in June of 1957, following a reading by the members of Spicer's Magic Workshop, Jack suggested to Joe Dunn that he was just the man to start a new press and publish the work of his fellow poets. Spicer was certainly aware that his own growing book-length manuscript would soon need to find a publisher. Dunn got a job in the Print Department of the Greyhound Bus Company on Seventh Street. Jack Sutherland, the head of the department, had studied at the Art Institute with Jess and John Allen Ryan. Joe asked if he could come in nights and on Saturdays and use the equipment for his own projects. Sutherland gave his OK, introducing Dunn to the paper salesmen (he had to buy his own stock), and White Rabbit Press was born.

In many ways, the press became a community operation. Robert Duncan drew the original colophon. Jess designed many of the covers. Workshop members sewed the signatures of smaller print runs and assembled the sheaves for
After Lorca
in the Dunns' apartment during their weekly Sunday meetings. Joe Dunn's frenzied methedrine-fueled energy drove the project. He published ten chapbooks under the White Rabbit imprint between November 1957 to September 1958. All were uniform in format, a compact five and a half by eight and a half inches. The first was
Love, the Poem, the Sea and Other Pieces Examined
, by Steve Jonas, a black friend from Boston. The edition of two hundred sold for twenty-five cents a copy.

Richard Brautigan published several new poems in 1957. The “Special San Francisco Issue” (Summer–Autumn, vol. 2, no. 2) of
Mainstream
, out of Palatine, Illinois, featured poetry by Robert Stock, Daniel J. Langton, and other Frisco bards, along with Richard's poem “The Final Ride.” The
Berkeley Review
(vol. 1, no. 3) ran two Brautigan poems, “The Return of the Rivers” and “The Horse That Had a Flat Tire.” He was also featured in the September–October issue (no. 7) of
Existaria
, “a journal of existant [
sic
] hysteria,” published in Hermosa Beach, California. Charles Bukowski, Clarence Major, and Judson Crews were among the other contributors. “The Daring Little Guy on the Burma Shave Sign” and “The World Will Never End” were never collected in Richard's later works.

Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
came out on September 5 and got a rave review in the
New York Times
. It jumped to number 7 on the best seller list. The fall of 1957 also saw Richard Brautigan's work appear in book form, although under more modest circumstances.
Four New Poets
, the little anthology published by Inferno Press, contained four pieces by Brautigan. A slim paperback priced at $1, it featured white wrappers decorated with black handprints.

Along with Brautigan, the other poets were Martin Hoberman, Carl Larsen (editor of
Existaria
), and James M. Singer, all under twenty-five. (“Here are poets representing an articulate segment of a sometime-called ‘silent generation.'”) Richard's bio identified him as “a young poet born January 30, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington. He now lives in San Francisco, where he is working on a book of poems, The Horse That Had a Flat Tire.” Fond of this title, Brautigan used it many times since it first came to him in the mental hospital.

By the fall of 1957, a little over a year after first arriving in the city, Dick Brautigan had become a distinctive member of the Frisco literary scene. In September (his broadside folio “book” for sale in local stores and the Inferno Press anthology about to be published), he was invited to participate in the weeklong 11th Annual Arts Festival in North Beach. As part of the festivities, the
Poetry Center sponsored a number of readings at Fugazi Hall on Green Street. (This theater later became the permanent home of
Beach Blanket Babylon
, a hit of such long-running duration the city renamed the street outside in its honor.) Saturday night was devoted to a “reading from recent works and poems written for the ‘Poetry as Magic' Workshop, conducted by Jack Spicer.” The daytime hours featured readings by younger poets, most of them Spicer's gang. Richard Brautigan, Ron Loewinsohn, and Ebbe Borregaard all read that same afternoon.

Life looked good for Dick Brautigan. The year after leaving his home base for the uncertainties of life in a distant unfamiliar city found him happily married, published, and an active member of the North Beach community, invited to read his poetry at their annual arts festival. What did it matter if he was mostly unemployed and sold his blood for bar money? His wife had a job, and the rent got paid. Ginny also typed his manuscripts and correspondence. She remembered her new husband pacing in the other room, endlessly muttering, “Oh, the irony. Oh, the pity,” dreaming his Hemingway dreams and ironically quoting
The Sun Also Rises
like a stuck record.