Jubilee Hitchhiker (128 page)

Back in late January, before enlisting Carpenter's copy writing assistance, even as the final details of the Dell contract were still being negotiated, Richard and Helen Brann had a long phone conversation about the
Babylon
dust jacket art. They decided Wendell Minor, who had designed the covers for both
Hawkline
and
Willard
, was the perfect man for the job. In talking it over, they also agreed they preferred the
Hawkline
art. Brann wrote to Sam Lawrence, who passed on their suggestion to the art director at Delacorte Press.

Soon after, Brautigan left on another trip to Japan. By mid-February, Wendell Minor finished a preliminary pencil sketch for the front cover of
Babylon
. Because Richard had been hard to locate in Tokyo, Sam Lawrence sent a copy of the drawing to Helen Brann to forward to him. Brautigan never saw a copy of Minor's work.

Early in March, Richard phoned Helen Brann from Tokyo with his own brainstorm for the
Babylon
cover art. Brautigan proposed either a drawing or a photograph in the style of Diane Arbus, showing an old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind with a drum-shaped cooling fan perched on top, situated against a seedy, murky background. The fridge door hung partway open with a woman's naked foot dangling out from inside. Helen liked the idea and passed it along to Sam Lawrence.

Brautigan's suggestion was not used. An artist named Craig Nelson provided a circular painting portraying a disheveled private eye with a pencil-thin mustache, staring down at the sheet-covered corpse of a lovely blond, like an illustration from a pulp crime magazine. Richard formally approved the design and dedicated
Babylon
to his agent: “This one is for Helen Brann with love from Richard.”

Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942
was published on September 27, 1977, in a first hardcover edition of thirty thousand copies. Seymour Lawrence had suggested a first printing of twenty-five thousand, but Helen Brann strenuously objected, pointing out that Simon & Schuster had never printed fewer than forty thousand copies of any of their hardcover Brautigan
editions and had gone back for second printings every time. According to Richard's wishes, no photograph appeared on the dust jacket.

The back cover featured five quotes from magazine articles praising Brautigan (none dealt specifically with
Babylon
). It was an odd mix, from
Newsweek
and the
National Geographic
to the London
Times Literary Supplement
and a translation from
Le Monde
in Paris. The final quote, from the
National Observer
, had to be cut down to only two brief lines because Richard objected to being called “a kind of cracker barrel surrealist” and actively hated having his work referred to as “the kind of thing Mark Twain might have written had he wandered into a field of ripe cannabis with a pack of Zig-Zag papers in his pocket.”

Delacorte Press launched
Babylon
in the beginning of October, with a full-page ad in the
New York Times Book Review
, as stipulated in Brautigan's contract. Richard wrote the copy and provided a wry heading: “America's favorite avant-garde novelist is now 35 years behind the times.” He sent Seymour Lawrence a gift-wrapped bottle of the publisher's “favorite drinking material,” Black Label Jack Daniel's, to celebrate the book's publication. “Big Jack,” Sam called it, quoting Frank Sinatra, “to distinguish it from Little Jack, the Green label.” At Brautigan's urging, Lawrence sent a copy of the novel to Norman Mailer.

Dreaming of Babylon
was not a critical success. Joe Flaherty, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, said “Brautigan delivers a litany of screwups and lame jokes. It's the ice age seen through Fred Flintstone.” Rob Swigart, in the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
, called the novel “a cotton candy souffle, pretty to look at but not very wholesome.” The Chicago
Sun-Times
panned the book as “a sleek but sophomoric parody.” Even Brautigan's hometown paper, the
San Francisco Examiner
, sneered that his genre writing “is like doing the crossword: it might be kind of fun, but it isn't writing.”

Worse was yet to come. The
New Yorker
in its “Briefly Noted” section went for the jugular: “Richard Brautigan has mastered all the forms of children's fiction [. . .] and children's fiction for adults is what this pretty skimpy book is all about.” When the novel appeared in England the reviewers were even more unkind. Thomas M. Disch howled at the head of the pack, in the
Times Literary Supplement
, “Mini-chapter by mini-chapter the mindless tale advances with resolute pointlessness and a total mastery of anticlimax [. . .] The book is a vacuous daydream.” In the
Spectator
, Mary Hope joined in, “There is not much point in parodying a style unless there is a valid alternative statement to be made; this is just a thin idea, made thinner by the disparity between the master's theme and the pupil's variations.”

Michael McClure found
Dreaming of Babylon
to be “awful, pathetic.” After reading a third of the book, he felt “stuck [. . .] there's barely any coherence of a story.” McClure found it hard to concentrate on the novel. “This little universe was hardly worth creating,” he wrote, “and barely has enough energy in it to sustain the fact of the ink on the page.”

Seymour Krim, an early supporter of Brautigan's work, felt just the opposite. “Reading him is effortless,” he wrote. “His books seem to write themselves without the usual sweat and pain we associate with serious writing [. . .] it is brother writers who are always taught a lesson when they pick up the latest Brautigan.” Krim gave
Babylon
a favorable review, perhaps the only serious writer and critic to do so. Writing in the
Chicago Tribune Book World
, Krim stated that Richard “sees things for what they are with a cool but merciful eye [. . .] People who have regarded Brautigan as a novelty who would sooner or later deflate never reckoned with the iron in his
charm. A successful vision is not manufactured overnight. Years of an earlier alienation [. . .] produce muscle in the imagination even when it is most lightly handled without an ounce of literary self-consciousness.”

Sales figures were disappointing.
Dreaming of Babylon
sold only eighteen thousand copies, hardbound, leaving twelve thousand of the first edition to languish on remainder tables. (In contrast,
Hawkline
eventually totaled forty-nine thousand hardcover sales and even the perverse
Willard
reached thirty-nine thousand.)
Babylon
was reissued as a Delta trade paperback in September 1978 and was published in the United Kingdom the same year by Jonathan Cape Ltd., with translations in Japan, Germany, France, and Spain.

Dreaming of Babylon
became the last of Richard Brautigan's “genre” novels. Although he fell short of his five-year-plan goal, writing a book in a different style for each of four straight years was a proud achievement. Brautigan never mentioned why he decided not to go for book number 5. Spending more time in Japan became a priority. Richard had found an intriguing new world to engage his imagination.

forty-two: stockholm

O
NE BRIGHT SUMMER morning in the early seventies, the sort of cloudless azure day that gave A. B. Guthrie the title for his best-known novel and Montana a catchy logo for her license plates, Richard and I bounced along graveled Pine Creek Road, heading for town in my green 1949 three-quarter-ton Chevrolet pickup. As we rattled over the thick wooden planks of the old iron bridge spanning the Yellowstone, Richard appraised me with his penetrating owlish stare. “You know, Gatz,” he said, his voice assuming a solemn tone. “I've been thinking recently that I've got a good shot at the Nobel Prize.”

I didn't know quite how to react. Was he kidding me? Richard was a wry practical joker, and I instinctively sensed him luring me into some elaborate comic hoax.

“How do you figure that?” I replied. Not wanting to play the dupe, I endeavored to keep my voice neutral.

Richard spoke slowly, his manner at once scholarly and judicious. He explained that his work was the bane of the “eastern critical mafia,” his commercial popularity ensuring perpetual bad reviews from the literary establishment. In Europe, the opposite was true. There, he was taken seriously as an artist, especially so in the Scandinavian nations.

As Richard continued his deadpan brief, point by pedantic point, a slow numbing realization crept over me. The man was serious. I wondered how to react to something that on face value struck me as utterly preposterous. By disposition, I fell naturally into a subordinate role. Being six years older and having the distinction of fame and financial success gave Richard a dialectic advantage. Although there existed between us the unspoken notion of all artists equal together in the crucible of creation, he nevertheless assumed the position of elder statesman, emphasizing the predilection of the Nobel judges to choose work disdained in its home country, yet acclaimed and much appreciated by a superior European culture. “I fit the bill perfectly,” he smirked.

“Don't you think you're a little young for the Nobel Prize?” I observed. Convinced my thrust had skewered the inflated balloon of his ego, I experimented with a superior grin. Richard never missed a stroke. “Kipling had it at forty-one,” he parried.
Touché!
I said nothing more on the subject, steering the conversation toward fishing as we drove the rest of the way into Livingston.

forty-three: throwing a hoolihan

I
N THE EARLY 1970s, when Richard Brautigan moved to Montana, it was still possible to regard the state as the Last Best Place. Wide-scale subdivision had yet to drive property values into the stratosphere, and there was nary a sign of the dot-com billionaires whose extravagant hilltop McMansions and designer-fringe Rodeo Drive faux-Western fashions forever altered the hometown character of the area. Even after the cataclysmic social changes rending the fabric of American life in the sixties, Livingston retained the innocence of an earlier time. It was still
Leave It to Beaver
and John Wayne in Big Sky Country.

One freedom enjoyed in Montana was the right to bear arms. A resident can buy a handgun without any waiting period, just lay his money down on the counter and walk out of the shop with a brand-new six-shooter. Unconcealed weapons may be carried or worn openly in public places, as evidenced by the ubiquitous gun racks visible through pickup truck rear windows in every town in the state. Having grown up hunting and owning firearms, Brautigan understood the gun culture of Montana and soon acquired a small arsenal of his own.

When Richard flew back to Montana in June of 1974, he brought his old pal Price Dunn along with him. They took a cab over the hill from the Bozeman airport. Brautigan gave the Confederate General an immediate tour of his newly renovated ranchette. Richard brought Price out to the barn for a tour of his rafter-high tree house studio painted a vivid robin's egg blue on the inside.

Back at the house, Richard wasted no time before showing off his Winchester gallery gun, recently acquired from Harmon Henkin. “He asked me if I wanted to do some plinking with the .22,” Price said. Dunn took the antique pump-action and a box of shorts, heading off alone through the cottonwoods behind the house. Hundreds of years before, this had been the Pine Creek streambed, and the flow of water carved a steep embankment along the northern edge of what was now subdivided hayfields.

Below Brautigan's towering barn, the old ranch dump sprawled down a cut bank hillside, with decrepit washing machines and kerosene stoves, coils of baling wire, fifty-gallon drums, and archaic farm implements, all swept up in an avalanche of broken bottles and rusted tin cans. It provided an excellent site for shooting as the steep slope afforded a safe backstop. It grew dark by the time Price fired the last of his shells and headed back to the house. He had found the shooting “boring.” A far more interesting exercise in marksmanship awaited him.

Richard had started drinking early. “He was soused,” Price recalled, “and I just joined him.” They had a few together. Around midnight, Richard suggested it might be fun to go out on the back porch and blast a cap or two.

Price attempted dissuasion, knowing the danger of shooting in the dark. He turned the conversation toward other topics. Richard mentioned “maybe” learning to drive. He proposed a Model A Ford as his training vehicle. Price thought this absurd. “Time must have a stop,” he quipped.

Brautigan agreed. To emphasize the point, he picked up his Winchester rifle and took a shot at the electric clock hanging above the refrigerator. Richard's aim was off by about three inches. “You missed it,” Dunn observed.

“No. No,” Richard insisted. “The point is you aim as close to the edge as possible without hitting the clock.”

And so began a bizarre night of drinking and indoor marksmanship. After a number of near misses, Brautigan attempted a long shot from the adjoining bathroom and hit the clock dead center. The rules of the game immediately reversed. “We sat there and drank the rest of that bottle of whiskey,” Dunn recalled, “and shot the shit out of that clock. Richard was really far more juiced than I.” By the time they called it a night, the two sharpshooters had blasted at least fifty rounds through the kitchen wall, blowing the unfortunate clock asunder.

The next morning, surveying the results of their nocturnal shenanigans, Richard and Price made a disturbing discovery. While the bullets they'd fired penetrated the Sheetrock kitchen wall with small neat holes clustered close together like a shotgun's pattern, the mushrooming slugs splintered through Brautigan's brand-new redwood siding when they emerged out the other side on the back porch. Much expensive craftsmanship had been utterly destroyed, a problem that required a swift application of the checkbook. Richard immediately phoned for help. When the carpenter surveyed the bullet holes in the kitchen, Brautigan shrugged and said, “I had some friends over last night, and they got a little frisky.” In Montana, this passed for a reasonable explanation. A couple days later, the exterior of Richard's house looked as good as new.