Jubilee Hitchhiker (48 page)

The blond wasn't Brautigan's type. Picking up on his indifference, she drifted back into the crowd. A bit later, he met another woman, tall and slender with straight dark hair. He liked the way she smiled. They started a conversation and sometime after midnight found themselves together on a couch. “She curled up with her head upon my lap.” Richard tenderly stroked her hair. It was soft and smelled freshly washed. When she asked questions about his life, he told her he had a wife and a child. He didn't tell her, “I still love my wife though she is an adulteress and has seduced a good friend and they live together now” (he wrote this later in his notebook), “while my daughter, not quite three, plays at their feet like a toy and wakes in the morning to find them in bed together where last week her father slept.”

It was suddenly 1963, a new year already ripe with promise and pain. Richard “Night Flight” Brautigan sat stroking a stranger's hair, surrounded by college students. Perhaps not the most auspicious of beginnings, yet one not altogether without hope. He was drinking good whiskey, and women found him attractive. Life remained full of possibilities. Richard devoted eleven pages to the party in his notebook. Together with his earlier entries, they summed up all he had to say about the disintegration of his marriage. He wrote “Finis” midway down the final page. Nine days after his separation from Ginny, the breakup was already ancient history.

The news of Richard and Ginny's split resonated on the bohemian gossip telegraph throughout the bars of North Beach. Jack Spicer saw Ginny and Tony Aste together, a new couple in love, and it struck a powerful chord. The lovers didn't remain under public scrutiny for long. Packing up their few belongings and bundling Ianthe into yet another Aste jalopy (this one without heat), they set off early in the year for Salt Lake City, a trip across a desert so frigid that Tony wrapped his hands in old clothes as protection against the cold. The Rexroth/Creeley/Marthe Larsen triangle, which formed
the basis for “Homage to Creeley,” had fascinated Spicer when he first heard of the affair in Boston. Now, this new drama already played itself out in his imagination even before the actual events transpired. “Tony” was the first word and the first line in the first poem in the “Book of Gawain,” the first of seven “books” in
The Holy Grail
, a poem cycle Spicer had completed four months earlier.

At the end of August 1962, Jack Spicer had been invited to give a preliminary reading of the poem, then still in progress, at Robin Blaser's art-filled apartment during a dinner party attended by Robert Duncan and Jess, among others. The occasion later became something of a scandal. Blaser hoped to reconcile Spicer and Duncan, who'd had a falling-out, but Spicer arrived drunk with his uninvited gang (Stan Persky, George Stanley, and Ron Primack) in tow and attacked Duncan for his poetic affiliations, all the while heaping ridicule on Robin Blaser's luxurious tastes. “Nasty boys,” in Duncan's opinion. He remembered the evening as “gruesome” and terminated his long friendship with Jack Spicer that night (“the idea of Spicer is preferable to the actual presence”).

“Poetry and magic see the world from opposite ends,” Jack Spicer wrote in
The Holy Grail
. His differences with Robert Duncan arose in part from their separate approaches to the occult. Duncan remained “a magician behind the scenes” while Spicer wanted to work his magic in the world at large. For Jack, watching the Lancelot/Arthur/Guinevere drama reenacted before his eyes, months after having written his Grail book, was a reaffirmation of certain deep prophetic magical connections.

For Richard Brautigan there was no magic. Work provided his only distraction. The Loewinsohns set him up with a makeshift office out on the back porch of their apartment, placing a plank over the laundry tubs as a typewriter platform. Brautigan was back in business. “Richard wanted to work on a book because he was so devastated,” Ron Loewinsohn surmised. “Writing was one of the ways that he kept himself together.” Unhappiness seemed to have concentrated his attention. The pace of his novel in progress picked up considerably. While he wrote, Brautigan played a recording of Shostakovich's
Fifth Symphony
continuously. “Maybe four hundred times,” he later claimed.

“He was totally into what he was writing,” Loewinsohn recalled. “I would hear,
tappity-tap, tappity-tap, tappity-tap
—peals of laughter—
tappity-tap, tappity-tap, tappity-tap
—another outburst of laughter—
tappity-tap, tappity-tap
.” Richard Brautigan clearly enjoyed himself, remembering the wild, wacky times spent down in Big Sur with his unpredictable buddy, Price Dunn. Typing at break-knuckle speed, Richard put everything into the mix: counting biblical punctuation, alligators in the frog pond, a beautiful part-time prostitute, smoking marijuana, the crazed businessman with a suitcase full of money, Price tapping into the PG&E gas line in Oakland, even the “Freezer King of Sepulveda Boulevard.”

Brautigan brewed a rich fictional stew, stirring up the adventures of Lee Mellon and Roy Earle, Jesse, Elaine, and Elizabeth, flavoring it with a sprinkling of Civil War anecdotes. Writers often have a difficult time with second novels, trying not to repeat themselves. Richard Brautigan blazed ahead into new territory, never looking back. In
A Confederate General from Big Sur
he accomplished something very special, writing a book rivaling the unique vision of
Trout Fishing in America
while remaining utterly fresh and new.

Listening to all the rapid-fire typing and maniacal laughter, Ron Loewinsohn felt a natural curiosity about what was happening out on his laundry porch. When Richard knocked off for the day, Ron asked, “All right, so I'm going to see some of this stuff? It sounds great, you in there laughing your head off.”

“Nope,” Brautigan said, smiling slyly and slipping his day's work into a manila envelope. He placed each chapter in a separate envelope, not showing Ron a single word. Loewinsohn had no idea how many drafts Richard went through, nor could he gauge the amount of polishing each page required. “I never got to see it until it was all done.”

Ron Loewinsohn's perceptions of his friend's writing methods might have been slightly off the mark. Don Carpenter remembered Brautigan as “an extremely careful writer. He worried a lot about being thought of as a careless writer.” Carpenter knew speed was not Richard's main concern. He was interested in the precision of language and worried that his lack of formal education made him vulnerable to misspellings and grammatical errors. “He would conceal the childishness of the way he worked, which was to write each chapter on a piece of paper and then fold it up and put it inside an envelope and write the name of the chapter on the envelope, and then when he had enough envelopes he would stack them in different orders, and when he had the book the way he wanted it he would type it up on his IBM Selectric.”

As work on the new novel progressed, the push to get
Trout Fishing in America
into print continued gaining momentum. Donald Allen had shown the manuscript to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who shared his enthusiasm and agreed to publish several excerpts in
City Lights Journal
, a new editorial project conceived as an annual. For the premier issue, Ferlinghetti hoped to have Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder write of their adventurous travels together in India the previous year. Gary and Joanne told Don Allen some of it when he visited them in Kyoto. Ginsberg corresponded often with Ferlinghetti. Richard kept busy running all over town, conferring with Don and Lawrence about the excerpts they wanted to publish. Allen urged Brautigan to send out more copies of his manuscript. “I'm beat,” Richard complained in a letter.

At the same time, Brautigan and Loewinsohn began planning a magazine of their own. The past several years had seen a proliferation of small (mostly mimeographed) publications started by poets in San Francisco. Local wits dubbed the era “the magazine wars.” After the appearance of
Beatitude
and Jack Spicer's
J
, Richard Duerden started both
Foot
and the
Rivoli Review
. Tony Sherrod put out the one and only issue of
Mythrander
. George Stanley edited the
Capitalist Bloodsucker-N
and Larry Fagin,
Horus
(actually the creation of Stan Persky, who placed Fagin's name on the masthead as a joke). Persky, Lew Ellingham, and Gail Chugg put together the first copy of
M
in the spring of 1962. Most of the same names appeared as contributors in all these ephemeral publications.

Early in 1963, Ron and Richard took a walk in Buena Vista Park, “talking about magazines and how bad they were and how little they did that was worthwhile.” Loewinsohn can't remember which of them first said, “Why don't we do one?” Their initial enthusiasm very quickly escalated to “talking seriously about how we were going to do it.” Richard had many ideas concerning the form of the project. He suggested they call their new magazine
Change
.

Brautigan also had a vision for the cover. The clean, efficient look of
Life
magazine came to mind. He had seen the tattered remnants of an old billboard transformed into a giant collage by overlapping layers of ancient outdoor advertising. At one time, the three-sheet had heralded a drag strip auto race. All that remained, in foot-high letters, were the words SEE THE FASTEST CAR ON EARTH. Richard enlisted Ron's wife, Joan, as their photographer and posed himself and Loewinsohn in front of the fragmentary poster.

With their cover shot in the can, the editorial team of Brautigan and Loewinsohn settled down to the more mundane details of magazine production: soliciting contributors, planning a budget,
establishing a production schedule. While Richard concerned himself with design concepts, Ron took on the more onerous chore of keeping the company books. He did a meticulous job, detailing the cash outlay. Richard shelled out five bucks for stencils and ink while they both shared the $30 cost of a batch of “20 R” paper. They also bought photo paper ($3.07), correcting fluid ($1.25), and a stylus (fifty-four cents).

Like the fastest car on earth, the little magazine zoomed off the starting line. Ron and Richard decided on May Day as their publication date, and deadlines were tight. They paid $6.40 to a lithographer to print up a batch of covers with “Change” boldly above their curious photo like a banner headline. Half of the print run was used for flyers. Ron rented a hand-crank mimeograph machine for $52.50, and the first stencil they cut and ran off was printed on the verso of the covers. Some of these they used for promotion. “CHANGE: THE FASTEST CAR ON EARTH,” it read, “For 25¢ these two gentlemen can be brought into the privacy of your living room—Think what can be done for a dollar!”

Soliciting for subscriptions, Brautigan and Loewinsohn met Don Carpenter at a coffee shop on the corner of Columbus and Pacific. “The place was full of poets,” Don recalled, “all glowering at each other.” Carpenter paid for the coffee. As a part-time teacher, he was the most prosperous of the three. Richard and Ron described their plans for the first issue. Don said it sounded good to him.

“That's just it,” Brautigan said. “We would like to offer you the position of first subscriber.”

“Thank you,” Don said, somewhat flattered. He gave them a buck.

Brautigan and Loewinsohn's ad copy promised
Change
would be a monthly publication out of San Francisco. The first issue offered poetry by Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Richard Duerden, and Ron Loewinsohn; a piece called “Execution Day on the Big Yard,” by former San Quentin inmate Bob Miller; and Richard Brautigan's short story “Coffee.” Future issues would feature Fielding Dawson, Lew Welch, Jim St. Jim, Edward Dorn, Gilbert Sorrentino, Michael McClure, “& the fastest car on earth.” The fledgling promoters concluded, “four months of CHANGE for a dollar, 17 years of CHANGE (204 issues) for $51.00, 85 years of CHANGE (1,020 issues) for $255.00.—What better bargain? Subscribe now! Make cheque or money order payable to the editors.”

February and March were busy months for Richard, and there wasn't time for much correspondence. Aside from writing Philip Whalen and Stan Fullerton about
Change
, most of his letters were to Ginny. He still called her Ginny then. By April the salutations had formalized to “Dear Virginia.” He told her of the magazine he and Ron were working on and complained about “this income tax business.” Ginny had always prepared their returns in the past. “You have done all the other income tax business before and I am quite confident you can handle it this last time.” He shipped all his tax records off to Salt Lake City a few days later.

On the twenty-first of March, Richard Seaver wrote to Brautigan at his old Union Street address. He mentioned how much the editors at Grove Press liked
Trout Fishing in America
and selected nine chapters from the novel, suggesting that they publish them in the
Evergreen Review
in “a group of at least three or four at a time.” Seaver wanted an option on the book as part of the deal and asked Richard to drop him a note if this sounded agreeable. Grove would then “draw up some fairly simple form of agreement” covering both the book publication and the separate magazine excerpts.

This news greatly improved Brautigan's mood. He wrote a happy letter to Ianthe on her third birthday, sending a little dress he hoped was the right size as a present. No one had ever celebrated his birthday when he was a kid, and the occasion meant a lot to him. Brautigan missed his daughter profoundly. He wrote Ginny, “Perhaps along with the present you might tell her how much I love her and how much her birthday pleases me.”

In April, the first issue of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's
City Lights Journal
made its appearance. A photo of a blanket-wrapped Allen Ginsberg graced the cover and an account of his travels in India were featured. In addition to work by Snyder, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ed Dorn, and Harold Norse, the magazine contained three chapters from
Trout Fishing in America
(“Worsewick,” “The Salt Creek Coyotes,” and “A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci”) along with a grainy snapshot of Richard Brautigan standing by a wrought-iron gate.