Jubilee Hitchhiker (47 page)

Brautigan concluded by mentioning Cowley's suggestions, “interesting, but at present I am writing another novel.” He told him he'd been at it for three months and felt the work was “going well,” hoping to be done “within a year.” Brautigan assured Cowley that the new book had “a more conventional narrative continuity” than his previous effort, but was coy about giving too much away. “It has a Civil War theme with extensive contemporary flashbacks to life in San Francisco and Big Sur.” Richard had in fact not yet done very much work on his “Civil War” novel. He had the Price Dunn stories and some lists of Confederate statistics and a few jottings in his notebook. Aside from these sketchy beginnings, his letter to Cowley suggested Brautigan envisioned a different sort of book, one jumping back and forth between past and present.

If Cowley's letter had Richard dancing on air, another from Luther Nichols several days later sent him crashing back to earth. Nichols was the West Coast editor for Doubleday. He wrote informing Brautigan that “after much wrestling and soul-searching back in New York,” the publisher had decided to pass on
Trout Fishing in America
. No rejection slip was ever more sugar-coated. “I honestly feel that you're as original and interesting a writer as we have in this area, and
humbly suggest that you next try Dial, Grove, New Directions, Angel Island Publications [. . .] houses that are more receptive to unusual works.” Nichols offered to write letters of recommendation to “top people” at all the companies he suggested.

Not long after, Brautigan had drinks with Luther Nichols, who suggested sending the manuscript on to his friend James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions. Richard gave his approval. Ten days later, early in October, Malcolm Cowley wrote to say that (as he'd predicted) the Viking editors felt Brautigan's book “was too far out for commercial publication, although they were impressed with your writing.” Cowley's second letter possessed the more formal remove of business. He regretted Richard was not interested in “a Vie de Boheme of North Beach,” but said “we'd be delighted to see your Civil War novel.”

On October 10, Brautigan began keeping a list of his correspondence, starting with a letter to Gui de Angulo. Jack Spicer had initiated the first ripples of interest in Richard's work, and this new compilation provided a measure of the wave's growing swell. On the thirtieth, Brautigan wrote to Thomas Parkinson, a poet and professor of English at Berkeley, whom Spicer urged to read
Trout Fishing in America
. Spicer had worked as Parkinson's teaching assistant while studying for his PhD but had known the professor's aristocratic wife, Ariel, before their marriage. They had been introduced in 1946 on the Berkeley campus by the poet Leonard Wolf, who said simply, “This is Ariel,” to which Spicer quipped, “And I'm Caliban.”

Tom Parkinson read Brautigan's novel, and he was so “taken up with it and absorbed all the way” that he wrote to Brautigan immediately. He found the book “a continual pleasure and surprise, with nothing false or forced in it.” As Parkinson had been Richard Duerden's teacher and had recommended Spicer in 1953 for his job as the head of the newly created Humanities Department at the California School of Fine Arts, Brautigan understood that his opinion carried considerable weight. Richard savored the distinguished professor's final assessment: “It is a work of rare quality, full of radiance and fun and wisdom, and I've never read any other book like it.”

By late fall, Donald Allen's voice was the only one not yet heard. Even this omission had an explanation. Allen had embarked on an extended trans-Pacific journey in May and had been living in Japan through the summer. He took an apartment in Kyoto and spent time with Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. They discussed Gary's old college roommate Lew Welch, who had been working as a commercial fisherman. After that enterprise failed and his relationship with Lenore Kandel came to an end, Welch moved to a remote spot called Forks of Salmon in Northern California, taking refuge in an abandoned cabin built by an old Wobbly.

When Allen returned from Asia in September of '62, among the pile of unopened correspondence awaiting him was the manuscript for
Trout Fishing in America
and a letter from Lew, who remarked on the rumor of Allen Ginsberg making the cover of
Time
next year, lamenting that somehow the intense media hype had not translated into significant sales.
Howl
had sold sixty thousand copies, not bad for small press poetry but fewer than ten copies per college campus across all of America. Welch speculated on the latent underlying energy of the nation's youth. “We have to hit the young so hard, they will never be the same again.” With Lew's letter in mind, Don Allen at last sat down to read
Trout Fishing in America
.

Allen was the coeditor of the
Evergreen Review
and West Coast editor for Grove Press. Don finished
Trout Fishing in America
not knowing when he'd “enjoyed reading a first work so much.” He'd been primed by Jack Spicer's passion for Brautigan's book, yet nothing had prepared him for
the pleasure and surprise arising from every page. Allen conveyed his excitement to Richard, wanting both Grove and the
Evergreen Review
to have a look.

In mid-December, Allen wrote to Richard Seaver (managing editor of Grove Press) to express his enthusiasm in detail. He praised the novel's “wonderful tone: Western laconic, yet alert both to sound and to play of surrealistic image; when it is really working it's rather like an expert tall tale teller holding you spellbound [. . .] entertained, and yet left with a definite moral point of view.” Allen found “many of the sections [. . .] stunningly successful,” at the same time emphasizing his belief that the book also worked as a whole.

Following his success with
The New American Poetry, 1945–1960
, Donald Allen, along with Robert Creeley, was coediting a companion anthology of new prose for Black Cat Books. He wanted to use several sections from
Trout Fishing in America
in that volume and suggested to Seaver that “a group of them would be fine for ER.” Allen listed thirteen sections from the novel that he “particularly liked.” These included “The Kool-Aid Wino,” “The Salt Creek Coyotes,” and “Lake Josephus Days.” He marked two favorites with a triple asterisk (***): “Trout Death by Port Wine” and “The Hunchback Trout,” but said it was up to “whoever chooses for ER” to assemble a selection that worked well together.

Donald Allen admitted Brautigan was “far out as they say,” but felt “he has much promise [. . .] for one thing he is not satisfied with repeating himself. After this he'll be trying something considerably different.” He asked for an “early decision” from Seaver, stressing that “it deserves serious consideration as an Evergreen.” Don passed all of this information on to Richard, brightening his holiday prospects. It was indeed the season to be jolly, and Richard Brautigan had every reason to celebrate. Ianthe was two and a half, exactly the right age for Christmas. Her parents gave her a little tree just her size, decorated with plastic toy dinosaurs, and she dragged it around with her from room to room. The future glowed with promise.

The Saturday night before Christmas, Richard and Ginny threw a big party in their Union Street apartment. Their friends considered Yuletide a dreary holiday. The Brautigans “wanted to break the spell of the Christmas gloom.” A parade of poets and artists trooped up the long flight of stairs. The crowded rooms rang loud with laughter and an intense rumble of overlapping conversations. All of Brautigan's dreams were coming true.

The nightmare started the following Tuesday, shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve. Richard and Ginny had just had sex. In their ensuing conversation, Ginny revealed she had fallen in love with Tony Aste. Richard asked if they were having an affair. Ginny said yes. Stunned, Brautigan phoned Ron Loewinsohn and told him that he and his wife were separating. “Richard was absolutely devastated,” Loewinsohn remembered. He agreed to give Brautigan a place to stay and said he'd be right over to pick him up.

Richard stuffed all his clothes and papers into two suitcases. He gathered his notebooks and manuscripts, stray poems, the beginning chapters of his novel in progress. When Ron arrived, Ginny was in the bedroom trying to sleep. He waited for fifteen minutes while Richard looked high and low for odd bits of his writing. “I spent the time searching for pieces of paper,” Brautigan wrote later, “finding pieces of paper, searching and finding, looking among the obvious and the lost for pieces of paper [. . .]” Richard felt “as they must in times of war when an Army Headquarters has to abandon itself before the enemy.” At last, they sped off into the night in Ron's car, heading for Loewinsohn's apartment ( number 4) at 1056 Fourteenth Street above Market near Castro. It
was late, and there seemed no need for further conversation. Richard curled up in a sleeping bag on the couch and fell into a fitful sleep.

He awoke at eight. The small apartment was very quiet. Ron and his second wife, Joan Gatten, slept in the other room. It was a cold clear day, the sun rising over Oakland red as a Japanese battle flag. Richard stared at it, feeling nothing. “The sun is colder than I am” stuck in his head. Not wanting to disturb the Loewinsohns, he went out for a long walk, heading west along Fourteenth Street to Buena Vista Park, a steep wooded hillside rising in an improbable tangle above the urban grid. As the name implies, the park provided splendid views, although Brautigan was in no mood for enjoying the scenery as he wandered among the wild overgrown cypress trees.

Richard stopped off for coffee at the home of friends who lived beside the park. They wanted him to stay for breakfast, but he told them he wasn't hungry and soon left. Instead of eating, Richard Brautigan transformed his feelings into words. On the first page of a spiral-bound notebook, he wrote the title, “The 20th Century Marriage in Flight.” Below that, he added a quote from a mournful song originally written in Slovakian in the early 1900s by Andrew Kovaly, a steelworker at a Bessamer mill in Pennsylvania: “Tell Them I Lie Here in the American Land.” The song dealt with a tragic accident, a young man killed under an ingot buggy even as his wife and children traveled from Europe to join him for a new life in America. Kovaly had to break the sad news when he met the family at the railroad station. Richard believed he knew just how they felt.

The work took the form of a journal, beginning with the events of the previous night (“A Hell-of-time”) In the manner of Kafka, Brautigan referred to those involved only by initial. Ron Loewinsohn became “R,” while Richard called his wife “G.” Later, Brautigan went back and erased all the “Gs,” replacing them with the letter “Y.” He had no idea where the manuscript would lead him. Emotional pain made each moment vivid, and it seemed damned important to get it all down on paper.

On Christmas Day, Richard returned to his Union Street apartment. He watched Ianthe unwrap her presents, his daughter's happy laughter a time-warp from another dimension. Afterward, Ginny went for a walk with them. Anyone passing on the sidewalk might have thought they were still a real family. When they got back, Richard busied himself about the place, rearranging furniture. The garbage from their party still stood bagged in the kitchen. Brautigan took it down, cutting his hand on a broken cup when he stuffed it into the can. Richard thought this “strange game” of playing the man of the house seemed “almost like chess.” After a while, he ran out of moves. Ianthe cried when he left. “I go get drunk,” he wrote in his notebook.

Wednesday dawned cold and clear. After breakfast, Richard and Ron drove Joan to work at the library at San Francisco State and continued for a spin along the ocean before heading home. In the afternoon, Richard walked downtown to his job mixing barium swallows formula. It was several miles from Ron's Upper Market neighborhood to Drumm Street. Along the way, Brautigan passed the Hibernia Bank, where a robber had just been apprehended. Another day in the city.

After work, Richard visited several art galleries. Realizing they were on the same street as Ianthe's nursery school made him sad. He remembered how he used to pick her up at the end of the day. Richard couldn't escape the past. He went to a friend's place for dinner, next to where he lived with Ginny in 1957. After the meal, he fell asleep on the couch, oblivious to his friend's kid loudly playing with his new Christmas toys. The next thing Brautigan knew it was midnight and he was all alone.

Bit by bit, Richard started picking up the pieces of his life, finding solace in his daily routine. Some afternoons, Ron drove him to work, other times he walked. Art galleries provided a constant refuge. Brautigan spent a lot of time looking at paintings. A morning trip to his dentist led to an hour's conversation about hunting and fishing before having a “petite” (the dentist's term) cavity filled. There were dinners with friends, evenings in North Beach bars, conversations with strangers, anything to provide a distraction.

On New Year's Eve, Richard went out with his friends Arthur and Marsha in their new Volkswagen. The young couple, “very much in love,” were concerned about him. “After you've been betrayed in the cruelest possible manner, there is little else one can do except to attend a party.” Around eleven o' clock, they drove to a large gathering of college students, where Brautigan felt out of place, not knowing anyone. Almost twenty-eight, he was older than the other guests. The apartment's many rooms glowed with colored lightbulbs, yet the lurid ambiance did little to liven things up. It turned out to be a fairly sedate affair.

The host got Brautigan a drink of Canadian Club. (“It's nice to taste whiskey that's got character.”) Curiously, he towered over Richard, who stood six foot four. Everyone at the party wore “goofy” comic name tags taped to his or her chest. Names like King Herod, Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Dylan Thomas. Richard Brautigan decided to call himself “Night Flight,” although he didn't bother to write it on a name tag. A pretty young blond approached through the noisy gathering. She came on to him with the shopworn line, “Haven't I met you someplace before?” Richard was stunned, not knowing how to reply. His friend Art watched approvingly. He and Marsha both thought it a good idea for Richard to get a girl to take his mind off his problems.