Jubilee Hitchhiker (56 page)

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 between 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.

twenty-two: aborted dreams

T
HE NEW YEAR of 1965 blew into San Francisco on a torrent of cold wind and rain. About to turn thirty and with his first novel only weeks away from publication, Richard Brautigan sat down at the typewriter to ponder why he had become a novelist “in a world that I can barely understand.” He called his thoughts on the matter “The Why Questions,” harkening back to “a creepy childhood in [the] Pacific Northwest.” Although Brautigan admitted he'd “never had a very clear picture” of himself, he discussed the origins of his first novel and stated, “all I want to do is to please those I love.” Richard was hard on himself when discussing his education. It “was rather slow while being divided into four stages: Timberwolf, [
sic
] loser, hellgramtie [
sic
], kook. Gorky wrote a very beautiful book about his education called My University... [
sic
]. If I were to try the same task I would have to call the book my kindergarten. It would be a shameless confession of failure.”

Priced at $3.95,
A Confederate General from Big Sur
was published in hardback by Grove Press on Friday, January the twenty-second. Erik Weber's unattributed photograph, taken more than a year before in the aviary on Francisco Street, occupied the entire back cover of the dust jacket. “The novel is changing,” Brautigan stated earlier in an interview for “The Book Corner” in the
Examiner
. The jacket flap copy said that he was “now at work on a new novel called “Contemporary Life in California.”

In a brief paragraph he wrote for the publisher's press release, Brautigan described himself: “I am twenty-nine years old and was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. I never cared for school, but lived close to the mountains and listened to people talk. I moved to San Francisco a few years ago, and it's like living on an island. I've left the island a few times to live in Idaho, Mexico and Big Sur [. . .] I just finished a novel, In Watermelon Sugar, and am working on my fourth . . . When I was in my early 20's I wrote poems and published three little books of poetry.”

At eight thirty on the evening of the twenty-second, Richard Brautigan read selections from
A Confederate General from Big Sur
at the California Club (1750 Clay Street) a private organization for women that often rented its 1907 auditorium for outside events. An author's reception with an open bar from ten until midnight at the San Francisco Tape Music Center (321 Divisadero Street) followed the reading. Donald Allen mailed out the invitations. Richard and Don each compiled individual lists of the Frisco literary people they wished to come. Brautigan did not include Jack Spicer's name on his list. Allen made sure he got an invitation and wrote personally to William Hogan and Stanleigh Arnold at the
Chronicle
. He mailed Arnold a copy of the
Evergreen Review
containing the
Trout Fishing in America
excerpts. The newspaper published “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard” in their Sunday edition and sent Brautigan a check for $25.

Joanne Kyger and her boyfriend, Jack Boyce; Dr. John and Margot Patterson Doss; Tommy Sales; Gary Snyder and his current girlfriend (who later married Andrew Hoyem); and Ariel Parkinson were among those in attendance at the Tape Music Center. Ariel's husband, Tom, wrote a review of
Confederate General
for the
Chronicle
. Parkinson compared Brautigan's prose to Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson: “fact and fraud and wild whimsey are all reported with an air of detachment [. . .] An absorbing, irritating and terribly amusing book [. . .] An author with the potentiality of Saroyan, its own tone of bewilderment and amusement that brings American humor a new and disturbing voice.”

Earlier in January, Richard had called Erik Weber to arrange another photo session. Anticipating that Grove would publish
Trout Fishing
in the fall, Brautigan wanted a dust jacket photo for the book, perhaps one to grace the front cover in accordance with chapter 1. On a fair mild afternoon, they headed over to Washington Square in North Beach. Richard wore pale faded jeans and a plaid wool parka. He was hatless. Erik shot a roll of film, stalking around the Benjamin Franklin monument, taking pictures of Brautigan and the statue from various angles.

By the end of February, Richard and Janice moved to a new apartment just off Divisadero at 2830 California Street, upstairs above Boegershausen Hardware, which owned the building. It was a spacious place with an elegant brick fireplace and a hanging Deco milk-glass ceiling fixture in the main room. The rent was $100 a month, payable to their ironmonger landlords. Such scant furnishings as the couple possessed belonged to Janice. There was a graceful side table and a few wooden chairs, an antique mirror above the mantel, brightly covered futons to sprawl upon, and a long low table they used for entertaining.