Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard
Brautigan
By William Hjortsberg
(Counterpoint, 852 pages, $42.50)
The 1960s certainly produced writers, though they were writers
of the moment, that moment being a decade of “social change,”
political turmoil and war following the Kennedy assassination.
Despite its turbulent milieu, the literature of the time curiously
lacks substance. Some great novels were written, but they only
chronicle the time in indirect ways: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) is a book about rebellion, but not
about the zeitgeist, per se; as is Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), an anti-war novel parts of which
are set in World War II and record the massive bombing of Dresden.
Even Norman Mailer — a darling of the New York literary
establishment — despite such achievements as An American
Dream (1965) and The Armies of the Night (1968),
spent most of the hedonistic decade playing the fool in the public
eye: running for mayor of New York City, getting arrested for
stabbing his second wife, and helping to found the Village
Voice, among other distracting pursuits. In the end, the
ephemeral '60s American literary moment drifted off like marijuana
smoke on a breeze. Such was the fate accorded the work of Richard
Brautigan, who as the 1960s ended was, to quote his friend Thomas
McGuane, “the baby thrown out with the bathwater.”
Brautigan (1935-1984) is the subject of William Hjortsberg’s
Jubilee Hitchhiker, at 852 pages a bit overblown as it
outlines the life of a minor American writer. Yet the book is a
well researched testament to “how much living you can do in
forty-nine years.” Hjortsberg, a novelist and screenwriter, was a
close friend of Brautigan’s and toiled upon this labor of love for
twenty years.
Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington. By the age of
ten he and a younger sister named Barbara Ann had been abandoned by
their father Bernard Brautigan, and then left by their mother Mary
Lou to be raised by neighbors. A reuniting with Mary Lou led to a
nomadic life in the Pacific Northwest with haphazard schooling
(though Brautigan graduated from high school with good grades in
Eugene, Oregon, after seeing his first publication — a poem — in
the school paper), and brushes with the law culminating in a
month-long stay at Oregon State Hospital at age twenty.
Considering his circumstances, Brautigan was a well-read youth,
who particularly admired the work of Ernest Hemingway. His literary
aspirations in the late 1950s found him living in sometimes
homeless poverty in San Francisco and on the periphery of the
city’s Beat culture. Brautigan read his poetry on the street and at
local bohemian gatherings, and wrote novels through the city’s
uproarious 1960s: A Confederate General From Big Sur
(1964), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), and Trout Fishing
in America. The latter book was published in 1967 (an early
manuscript dated to 1960) and has sold four million copies to date.
At the time this solved Brautigan’s financial problems and
instantly made him a literary countercultural icon — the hippie
Mark Twain.
Brautigan is simultaneously easy and difficult to read. Serious
critics have long dismissed him as an obscurantist lightweight. A
review of Trout Fishing in America in the New
Yorker offered the insight that the writer wrote “children’s
books for adults.” His fans are delighted by his sense of humorous
satirical wordplay and almost poetic prose, though his novels are
plotless, lacking serious characters and coherent narratives, as if
literary convention would spoil the fun. The poetry, such as found
in The Galilee Hitchhiker (1958) was inspired by the Beats
and is insubstantial parody. The haiku is a favorite form. The
author appears on the cover of many of his books, usually in the
company of women (and sometimes children) dressed in anachronistic
garb, with the longhaired writer sporting a high-crowned cowboy
hat. This eccentricity only added to Brautigan’s legend as a
literary hustler.
Hjortsberg met Brautigan after a California reading, and this
led to the latter’s association with the 1970s Livingston, Montana
literary scene as Hjortsberg counted as friends McGuane, Jim
Harrison, and the painter Russell Chatham. Brautigan was a half
dozen years older and the relationship was initially that of a
teacher to a student. Hjortsberg was at the time a Stegner Fellow,
enrolled in Wallace Stegner’s prestigious writing program at
Stanford University. At their first meeting, the two writers stayed
up all night talking over a bottle of bourbon. Brautigan moved to
Livingston in 1972 and would eventually have an affair with
Hjortsberg’s wife Marian as the Hjortsbergs marriage came apart
amidst the crazy times of “the Montana Gang.”
Brautigan married twice. He wed Virginia Alder in Reno in 1957.
The union produced a daughter, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, born in
San Francisco in 1960. The author eventually divorced Virginia in
1970. In 1977, Brautigan married Akiko Yoshimura, a woman he met on
a visit to Japan. They settled in his house on Pine Creek near
Livingston, but divorced in 1979. Thanks to the times and his fame,
though, the writer never lacked for female companionship.
The bucolic Big Sky country was Brautigan’s undoing as a writer.
He lacked the financial hardship that had plagued him in his San
Francisco years, yet a penchant for self-destruction got worse.
Brautigan was an alcoholic who had a hard time dealing with
literary fame and attendant personal relations. Trout Fishing
in America had made him famous, and all his books were in
print and selling briskly, yet the writer was an unhappy man. His
work suffered, and he devoted himself to drinking, fishing, random
sexual encounters, and a fascination with firearms.
Brautigan published a novel, The Hawkline Monster: Gothic
Western (1974) among other books during his Montana years,
following his same modus operandi of ironic wordplay, but the books
were inferior to his 1960s work, thus anticipating Lawrence
Ferlinghetti’s (who had published some of Brautigan’s early work in
City Lights Journal) quote about the writer: “As an editor
I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems
to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don’t think he cultivated
that childishness, I think it came naturally.”
He occasionally shot-up his Livingston home (television sets,
clocks, books by authors he despised) during drunken binges:
McGuane called it “The lead Disneyland.” Brautigan didn’t drive,
and employed the writer Greg Keeler as a chauffeur to take him to
bars in the Livingston-Bozeman area. Brautigan kept a ramshackle
trailer in Bozeman where he entertained female Montana State
University literary groupies after bibulous nights at the bar of
the Elks Club.
Being at loose ends, Brautigan also traveled extensively. He was
in and out of San Francisco and Bolinas, California, where he owned
a home; there was an extended New York trip with Hjortsberg; and
multiple trips to Japan, an oddly favorite destination where his
books sold well in translation. But he produced no important
writing in his last years, his alcoholism and depression caught up
with him, and he was a suicide in Bolinas in October 1984, shooting
himself in the manner of his hero Ernest Hemingway, though with a
.44 Magnum rather than a shotgun. His decomposing body wasn’t
discovered for a month.
His ambiguous suicide note read, “Messy, isn’t it.” That seemed
to describe his life, his work, his end.
William Hjortsberg’s Jubilee Hitchhiker, though well
written, tells us more than we need to know about this sad —
though inherently American — life.
