Jubilee Hitchhiker (51 page)

Four days later, having learned of the Francisco Street address, Seaver wrote Richard Brautigan with the good news. Grove Press offered him $1,000 as an advance for
A Confederate General in Big Sur
, at the standard royalty rates. In addition, they wanted an option on
Trout Fishing in America
(with a $1,000 advance payable within three months of the publication of his first novel) as well as an option on his third novel, the terms to be mutually agreed upon after delivery of the manuscript.

Seaver said Don Allen had told him that Ivan von Auw was now acting as Brautigan's agent and would officially transmit the news soon, “if he has not already.” Acting in his position of managing editor, Seaver expressed the pleasure of Grove Press to have him as one of their authors. “I think you have done some fine writing, and on the basis of what we have read, am confident you are going to do a great deal more.”

Von Auw wrote to Brautigan on the same day, saying Harold Ober Associates wished to represent him. He included the news that Barney Rosset (Grove Press) wanted to become his publisher.
This letter was sent to 1482 Washington Street, and Richard didn't receive it right away. The next day, von Auw wrote again, this time care of Donald Allen, conveying the same information in greater detail. He asked Don to read the letter to Brautigan and then forward it on to him.

After years and years of privation and struggle, Richard Brautigan could not have asked for a better Christmas present. He finally found a New York publisher and had landed a three-book deal in the bargain. By any measure other than his own native Teutonic pessimism, he should have been overjoyed, yet several things about the arrangement troubled him. He spent the holidays brooding over the details and ate his Christmas dinner alone. Hot dogs and beans (beanie-wienie, his old standby) washed down by a bottle of rum mixed with Coca-Cola.

A day or so later, he attempted to delineate his concerns to Ivan von Auw in two letters he never mailed. The first, Brautigan dictated to a friend who took it down in longhand; the second, he typed himself. Grove's recent offer was “disappointing.” Richard did not find it “reasonable.” Brautigan's unhappiness had nothing to do with money. He was upset by the proposed sequence of his books' publication. I wrote Trout Fishing in America first and
A Confederate General from Big Sur
second. They were written as the result of an exploratory esthetic. I will not allow the order of this esthetic to be distorted. I believe it should continue to develop in a natural way and be published in the order of its development. I plan on writing a lot of books.” For Brautigan, this was a “crucial” issue. He thought of “Contemporary Life in California” as the next in “a whole series of novels based on this conception.”

Donald Hutter's continued interest in
Trout Fishing in America
also gnawed at Richard. If Scribner's published his first novel first, his aesthetic order would remain intact. And what about Donald Barthelme at
Location
? Shouldn't he get to see some of the requested material? In addition, Brautigan wanted to know what terms or agency agreement Harold Ober Associates proposed. “I hope that we can work out a mutually satisfactory relationship. It is vital to me, particularly at this stage of my writing career, that I have close contact with and careful guidance from a representative in New York.”

In spite of his many concerns, Richard remained unable to conceal his glee when he bumped into Don Carpenter in North Beach around this time. “He was really smug and smirking and full of himself,” Don recalled, still irritated decades later. “He was on his way,
on his way
.” Brautigan boasted of getting $1,000 apiece for his books from Barney Rosset. Don Carpenter felt sick listening to him. “I never had a more uncomfortable interview with a poet in my life as standing on the corner of Broadway and Columbus hearing him rant about having sold two novels with that incredibly superior bullshit.”

On December 28, Richard wrote to Ivan von Auw in New York. He said nothing about his displeasure at having his two novels published out of sequence by Grove. Brautigan also didn't bring up another concern. In the letter he typed but never mailed, he'd been careful to mention he hadn't signed an agency agreement before being informed Grove Press wanted to publish
A Confederate General from Big Sur
. It bothered him to think of paying a commission to Harold Ober Associates when no work had been done by them on his behalf. Donald Allen, as an editor of the
Evergreen Review
, deserved all the credit for setting the wheels in motion with Dick Seaver. Richard skirted the issue, playing his cards close to his vest. “If you will tell me something about your agency and something about yourself,” he wrote, “I will tell you something about myself, and why I write novels.”

Brautigan told von Auw he wrote novels “as a kind of thing to do, never to be of any commercial value, but as a part of learning. I wanted to learn about myself: others: earth and the universe [. . .] I am of course very pleased that the books are of some value, whatever value is, to others. If I am going to have a literary agent, I need someone who will have sympathy with my work. This is an important thing to me at this delicate period in my life.” Richard ended by repeating his request that the agent tell him something about himself and his company, “then let's see what we can do.”

The last time he saw Richard Brautigan in the sixties, Pierre Delattre paid a visit to the apartment on Francisco Street with the colorful aviary in the kitchen. The front room had been set up like a Buddhist temple with a large statue of the Gautama. “A shrine-thing,” according to Erik Weber, who doubted Brautigan ever spent much time there. When Delattre came to visit, the writer guided the priest right on by. Passing the middle room, where Richard had a table with a typewriter and a little lamp set up, Pierre spotted a fresh manuscript copy of
A Confederate General from Big Sur
. “What's in there?” he asked.

“Shhhh! Quiet,” Richard whispered, pushing Delattre on ahead toward the bird-chatter filling the kitchen. “My new novel's in there. I kind of stroll in occasionally, write a few quick paragraphs, and get out before the novel knows what I'm doing. If novels ever find out you're writing them, you're done for.”

twenty: o, tannenbob

F
OR RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, the first week of January 1964 “was a strange time in America.” The assassination of President Kennedy cast a dark shadow across the holiday season, seeping sorrow into the hearts of the nation like a poisonous stain. Christmas had never been a jolly time when Richard was a kid. His marriage broke up on Christmas Eve the year before, and he had just spent his most recent Yuletide alone in an apartment full of birds, an occasion he described as “lonesome.”

Sometime before Epiphany, walking home to Francisco Street around midnight after a visit drinking coffee with friends up on Nob Hill, Brautigan noticed numbers of newly discarded Christmas trees scattered about everywhere. Stripped of their bright ornaments and twinkling lights, they lay abandoned at the curb and in vacant lots, each one “like a dead soldier after a losing battle.” Looking at them made Richard feel sad. “They had provided what they could for that assassinated Christmas, and now they were being tossed out to lie there in the street like bums.”

Back at apartment C, Brautigan placed a call to Erik Weber, waking him from a deep sleep. “All he said to me was ‘Christmas trees,'” Erik recalled. “Only Richard would call you at two or three in the morning and say something like ‘Christmas trees.'” Brautigan remembered phoning around one, but always had a cavalier attitude about late-night conversations. When Erik wanted to know why Richard seemed so interested in Christmas trees, he replied, “Christmas is only skin-deep.” Brautigan wanted Erik to take hundreds of pictures of the naked trees discarded everywhere throughout the city. He felt it would “show the despair and abandonment of Christmas.”

At the time, Erik Weber had a job at Macy's in the photo-advertising department. He snapped pictures and worked in the darkroom. During his lunch hour the next day, he “just took off and started photographing Christmas trees,” wandering up from Union Square, through Chinatown and onto the slope of Nob Hill, aiming his camera at the forlorn trees. Richard had instructed him to shoot them “just like dead soldiers. Don't touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way they fell.” Erik did as instructed. Brautigan had no interest in documenting the exact location of each tree. As Weber recalled, “It was just a matter of an accumulation of many, many, many, many discarded Christmas trees.”

A sense of secrecy surrounded the entire enterprise. Brautigan often invested his projects with near-paranoid undercover tactics. “We thought we really had something good going,” he wrote, “and needed the right amount of discretion before it was completed.” Erik spent another lunch hour shooting film and by the weekend had almost 150 pictures of Christmas trees. To speed things up and cover more territory, Richard lined up a friend “who had a truck and used to help him do
stuff” to drive them around on Saturday. The friend's only condition was remaining anonymous. He was afraid of losing his job if word got out about his being involved in this weird enterprise.

The three of them drove all over the city, with Erik photographing abandoned Christmas trees in every neighborhood. Up on Potrero Hill after a Chinese lunch, they ran into Lawrence Ferlinghetti, setting out to walk his dog from his small Victorian house at 706 Wisconsin Street. They had just shot a picture of a fallen tree near his place. Erik couldn't remember what Ferlinghetti said to them but thought Richard ad-libbed a reply along the lines of, “Oh, we're just out for a walk.” Writing about the incident later, Brautigan reported that he mumbled, “Sort of,” as an evasive responsive to Ferlinghetti's query: “Taking pictures of Christmas trees?” According to Erik, Richard said, “We don't want anyone else getting the idea.”

The original notion was to produce a small illustrated book. Richard planned a story about a family going to a Christmas tree lot, the poignant moment of choosing the fullest and best-shaped tree to be counterpointed by Erik's photos of all the discards after the holidays were over. Brautigan never wrote that story. Things didn't work out that way. In the end, Brautigan wrote it all down pretty much exactly as it happened. He called the piece “What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?”

The story languished unpublished for the next four years, in part because Brautigan made no effort to place it with a magazine. It finally appeared in December of 1968, in
Evergreen Review
no. 61. A full-page collage of Erik Weber's Christmas tree photographs accompanied Richard's text, nine pictures overlapping as if casually dropped on a tabletop, disposable as the discarded trees they captured. Twelve years after its initial appearance, Brautigan included the story as a chapter in
The Tokyo–Montana Express
.

Richard made one small change in the story for book publication. In the original version, everyone was correctly identified by name (with the exception of the anonymous truck driver). Richard appeared as Richard; Lawrence Ferlinghetti as himself; Erik was called Erik. It was Brautigan's version of photo-realism. By the time
The Tokyo–Montana Express
was published in 1980, Richard and Erik had fallen out of friendship and were no longer speaking. Keith Abbott called the photographer to tell him about the change in the story. Erik went over to Abbott's place to see for himself. Reading the change “kind of pissed” him off, especially after all the work he had done for Richard over the years. In his book, Richard Brautigan changed Erik's name to “Bob.”

twenty-one: moosemelon

P
HILIP WHALEN LIVED at 123 Beaver Street, a lovely Victorian house built in 1879. Tommy Sales, the landlady, was the ex-wife of critic Grover Sales. She occupied the upstairs and rented out the rooms below. “The rent was very reasonable,” Whalen recalled. “The house belonged to a friend of mine, and he very generously gave me this room to live in because I didn't have any money.” In an unpublished short story, Richard Brautigan wrote that Philip Whalen “was living his life for poetry and the rest of it could all go to hell.”

Set well back off a steep street, number 123 had the look and feel of a country place, fronted by fruit trees and a flower garden. David Kherdian, who wrote
Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance
, had a room on the first floor for a while, and Whalen's friend John Armstrong, who became a boatbuilder and moved to Bolinas, was also a resident. “There was a little room off the kitchen where I was,” Whalen remembered, “and then there was a larger room past the bathroom and then the big front room.” The rooms were arranged in a shotgun row along a long corridor with the kitchen at the rear. Don Carpenter, a frequent visitor, called the place “a poetry household.”

At the beginning of 1964, Richard Brautigan lived far from Beaver Street over on the edge of North Beach in his sublet apartment mad with birdsong. After telling Don Allen he was considering Grove's offer for his two novels, Richard wrote to Ivan von Auw on January 6: “You probably have a very good agency, but it does not seem geared to my specific needs as a writer.” He asked that Harold Ober Associates return his manuscripts by Railway Express, “collect.”

Not having an agent placed Brautigan in a quandary. Donald Allen, his chief adviser, was also the West Coast editor for Grove Press, and a certain conflict of interest remained inherent in their relationship. Richard researched sample publishing contracts, coming to favor one drawn up by the Society of Authors' Representatives, and proposed a single change to Don Allen. Should the author place the book with a movie company, the publisher's 10 percent share of the film rights would instead provide half the advertising budget. The proposal seemed “rather weird” to Allen, but he passed it on to Dick Seaver along with a list of the terms Brautigan expected and conveyed a deal-sweetening tidbit back to Richard. The publishers wanted to submit
A Confederate General from Big Sur
for the Prix Formentor, an international award for unpublished fiction.