Jubilee Hitchhiker (52 page)

The Formentor Novel Prize was established in 1960 in Formentor on the Spanish island of Majorca by publishers (including Grove) from six nations. First awarded in 1961, the prize came with a check for $10,000 (an advance against future royalties) and simultaneous publication in all the participating countries. Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett shared the honors and the honorarium that first year.

Richard Seaver had no objection to the Society of Authors' Representatives contract. Grove already used it, happy with the boilerplate terms. Seaver offered an advance of $1,000 for each of Brautigan's novels, payable $500 on signing, with the balance coming in quarterly installments. “We would plan to publish A Confederate General in the fall of 1964 and Trout Fishing approximately a year later.” Seaver dismissed Brautigan's suggested contractual amendment as “unnecessarily complicated.” He stressed the urgency of the matter, putting a subtle squeeze on Richard. Contracts had to be drawn up before Grove could submit the manuscript for Formentor consideration. The prize deadline was at the end of January. Richard Brautigan promptly signed with Grove. He desperately needed the money, and the chance of winning an international literary award proved irresistible.

Richard Brautigan often visited Bill Brown, who had married, had a baby named Maggie, and moved across the Bay to Point Richmond. Brautigan started going over on weekends with Ianthe, renewing what Brown said had become “a kind of aloof, pretty detached relationship.” They sat on a pier looking west toward the city, lubricating their literary discourse with quarts of ale. Brown had recently completed a short novel, about his life in a German POW camp, called
The Way to the Uncle Sam Hotel.
Richard read the manuscript and found the book “a damn good piece of work.” He wrote to Leroi Jones in New York, enquiring if Corinth Press might be interested in it.

Bill Brown had a landscape gardening business and occasionally hired Richard on a part-time basis. A woman from Utah owned a place in Belvedere fronting the lagoon. “I'd been going there for years and years,” Brown recalled. One time, he brought Richard. “I said, ‘Okay, kiddo. You cut the lawn. I've got to go to the nursery. I'll come back with some posies.'” Bill Brown left Brautigan pushing a mower and a little while later “came humming back with some flats of posies in my hands.” He rang the bell, and the Utah woman opened the door. “Who's your helper?” she asked. “You better go wake him up. He's asleep on the lawn with one shoe in the lagoon.”

Joanne Kyger returned from Japan in February 1964. Her husband, Gary Snyder, followed a month later, his marriage to Joanne more or less at an end. “The move back to the United States kind of precipitated that,” Kyger recalled, “there seemed to be all this wonderful freedom.” A few days after she got back, Joanne Kyger sent a note to Richard Brautigan through Donald Allen, telling him how much she had enjoyed reading the excerpts from
Trout Fishing in America
that had appeared in the
Evergreen Review
. “And I thought, ‘Oh, Richard has really jumped a lot from
Galilee Hitch-Hiker
, and I was delighted by it. And reading it in Japan was fantastic, this incredible, deranged, wonderful little book.”

Richard promptly sought her out. Kyger sublet a small apartment in North Beach right behind where her friend Nemi Frost lived. “Richard came by a lot. He was totally hilarious during this period,” Joanne Kyger remembered. One evening, loving samurai movies, he acted them all out. “All the way through several of them. Toshiro Mifune. And he was just great. I remember he was lunging around in back of Nemi Frost's storage room. He had a lovely free-floating kind of fantasy that you could get inside of.”

Early in February, the Beatles began their first American tour, headlining twice on the
Ed Sullivan Show
. Neither Richard nor Joanne knew very much about the Fab Four at the time. Beatlemania had yet to penetrate Japan, so Kyger had a valid excuse for being oblivious. “It seemed like at that point the Beatles had just stepped from one place to a whole other theater of the world,” she said. Richard and Joanne began collecting Beatles cards in order to learn their names and tell
them apart. Which one was John? Who was George? “It was an obsession with us because we'd go back over and over the names.”

Sitting at a table at Vesuvio on Columbus with Jack Spicer, the three poets wrote a collaborative letter to Ringo Starr, inviting the Beatles to come to San Francisco. Spicer detested popular music, but somehow Joanne and Richard persuaded him to put aside his hostility and behave like any other adoring fan. (A year later, Spicer began a poem with the line “The Beatles, devoid of form and color, but full of images [. . .]”) Kyger doesn't know if they ever mailed the letter, certainly no reply came, but for her the entire event “was part of the fascination of being part of this subculture.” She likewise believed Brautigan's interest stemmed from a firm conviction that he was also soon destined for worldwide recognition and fame.

Joanne Kyger remembered 1964 as “a very social occasion” involving Richard and Donald Allen. Don had a beautiful apartment at 1815 Jones Street up on Russian Hill and loved to entertain, serving up “endless martinis.” His place was a natural gathering place for visiting artists and writers, while his “old-fashioned manners” made even the surliest rebel feel right at home. Often, after an afternoon cocktail-hour visit, Allen took Brautigan and Kyger out for dinner, an offer the impoverished poets never refused. Joanne sensed at the time that “Richard had already gotten some kind of real confidence in himself. He was playful.”

Separated from her husband and not yet involved with anyone new, Joanne Kyger delighted in Brautigan's company. “We used to get into these trips together,” she recalled. “It would be some kind of fantasy game where you would actually start acting out. You walk along and your characters would evolve and you'd report back the next day to see how the character was doing.” These games involved Richard's lively imagination, yet Kyger intuited an alternative motive. “I remember his spinning out some hypothetical endings to something, one of which seemed kind of like a proposal.” She adroitly avoided unwanted complications by “looking at it and taking it on its fictional level,” and bypassed uncomfortable difficulties. “I never felt romantically interested in Richard, although he was always a wonderful friend.”

In March, sitting in front of his typewriter in the middle room of the apartment on Francisco Street, Brautigan started a brief short story (really more of a prose poem) expressing his disjointed mood. “Drunk laid and drunk unlaid and drunk laid again, it makes no difference,” he began, singing aloud with the birds in the kitchen. The brief bit of fiction he composed explored the total lack of attachment in his life without a hint of self-pity. Brautigan called the piece “Banners of My Own Choosing.”

Michael McClure can't remember when he first met Richard Brautigan. They knew of one another in the claustrophobic Frisco literary scene but didn't become close friends until late 1963 or early in 1964. Michael's former wife, Joanna, has no memory of Richard when the McClures lived on Scott Street in the late fifties, although she thought he might have come around, as Price Dunn was a resident in their basement. She also doesn't remember knowing Richard during the period when they held court at 2324 Fillmore Street, another art center between 1957 and 1959. “Michael might have seen him,” Joanna recollected, “but he was not part of the artists that hung out and showed at the Batman Gallery and did things.”

It wasn't until sometime around the end of 1961, when the McClures returned from New York and moved to a house at 264 Downey Street, a two-block-long stretch in the Haight, where they were to stay for the next twenty years, that Joanna began to fit Brautigan into the picture. “I don't
think it was right away in 1961 that he was coming to visit.” Two years later, Richard became a regular. “He'd come over and sit in front of the fire, and he and Michael would talk books and drink together. I never had feelings of dislike or warmth or liking particularly toward Richard. He was just one of the people that came around, and he was sort of like family.”

In
Lighting the Corners
, Michael McClure stated, “For a long period I was probably Richard's closest friend and he was probably mine.” Brautigan dropped by Downey Street several nights a week, and they sat on the floor because the McClures were still too poor to buy furniture. They drank Gallo white port, thirty-seven cents a pint at Benedetti's Liquors on Haight Street. “I liked Richard because of his angelic schitzy wit and warmth,” McClure wrote in 1985.

Brautigan felt at home with the McClures. “He loved that household,” Bobbie Louise Hawkins observed. “Johanna [
sic
] took care of everybody that came in, and Michael was this thoroughly beautiful person with a great sense of style. It always makes you feel good to be around Michael because he has such panache.” Brautigan distilled his affection for the McClures' home life into a single poem, “Abalone Curry,” where he described their traditional Christmas dinner when Michael prepared his famous abalone curry “in his kitchen that is halfway / between India and Atlantis.”

Sherry Vetter remembered going over to the McClures' place with Richard in 1970, the first Christmas they were together as a couple. Brautigan brought a bottle of wine. Since he was flush with his new success, the vintage was a cut above the cheap white port from Benedetti's. Sherry recalled the Spartan apartment: “There was one room like a sunroom where McClure worked, and that was the only place that had any furniture in it.” The “funny almost kitchen” had only a sink, a hot plate, and “a little tiny refrigerator.”

The big living room contained nothing but colorful pillows on the floor. They sprawled there “Indian style” for the simple repast, which Sherry remembered as “oysters boiled in milk with dollops of butter and salt and pepper and French bread.” She considered Michael to be “a prima donna. He thought he was a really handsome knockout dude—lying there with his tight blue jeans on and this little sort of open-collared shirt and this long hair.” Sherry thought more highly of Joanna, “a real sweetheart. She was like the sole support.”

Bobbie Louise Hawkins agreed that Joanna McClure, who had started her own little kindergarten school, provided the firm foundation for her family by creating “a sense of well-being. Joanna would come back home from the job, come in, be delighted at whoever was there, get her own glass of wine, and be chatty and bright about it. Completely unneurotic. She had a largesse and luxury.”

Hawkins believed Brautigan's new fame drove him away from his former friends to his own detriment. “Suddenly Richard made a hit with
Trout Fishing
, and all that was lost for him,” she said. “As soon as the fame occurred, all those people sucking up felt real to him. He couldn't distinguish. There would have been some hope for him if he had managed to keep holding on to what had actually given him a home base and anchor. But as soon as that other wash of stuff came in, he went with it. There was nobody there to take care of him.”

The artist Bruce Conner had been friends with Michael McClure since their earliest school days together in Wichita and remembered meeting Brautigan for the first time at Downey Street. “Richard arrived looking all thin and pale and gangly and awkward and obviously shy and not very communicative. Words weren't coming out.” Conner viewed the new friendship between
Brautigan and McClure with a jaundiced eye. “Michael and I were sitting around talking, and Richard came in, and he said, ‘Richard, go in the kitchen and wash the dishes.'”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Brautigan replied, heading dutifully to the kitchen.

Bruce Conner didn't know what to make of this. “Michael, what are you telling him to wash the dishes for?” he asked. “Did he come over here to do the dishes?”

“No. He likes to do things like that,” McClure answered. “He likes me to tell him what to do.”

Conner remembered Brautigan's “tremulous respect” for Michael McClure. Looking back on those times, he observed, “Michael would push him around, order him around like a little slave. This didn't do much for establishing Richard's value as an independent creature. Maybe Richard did like washing the dishes. I have no idea. Washing the dishes was probably one of the few things he did very well.”

Soon after this, Joanna McClure acquired a Russian wolfhound puppy. “Skinny and angular, long-faced and long-nosed,” Michael wrote, “and he looked like he had loose threads on his elbows.” Bruce Conner remembered the dog as a “tall, gangly, awkward, shy creature.” The McClures named him Brautigan. Conner found the situation a bit strange. “Here we were,” he recalled. “Richard would come by, and he'd find us over there, and there would be Brautigan the dog. How much more demeaning does Michael want to be?”

Brautigan never mentioned being put out at having a dog for a namesake. He greatly admired Michael McClure, captured in part by his dramatic appearance. “He looks kind of like a dark lion the way he carries himself,” Richard wrote in his notebook. “The style of him. But sometimes there is distance in him. A lion floating in space.” Wallace Berman took a striking set of four photographs of McClure in 1963, posed frontally nude, his face made up to resemble a lion with a full mane and whiskers. McClure used it on a flyer to advertise a poetry reading, and Brautigan was undoubtedly influenced by it. In
Ghost Tantras
, written in the early sixties, McClure began experimenting with an invented Beast Language, mixing animal sounds (“AHH GRHHROOOR! AHH ROOOOH. GAR.”) with his own biospheric metaphysical lexicon. Celebrating this leonine behavior, Richard Brautigan wrote “A CandleLion Poem” and dedicated it to Michael McClure.