1934

"Lulu and Benj F. Brautigan [sic]" reported living at 2830 South L Street, Tacoma, Washington (Tacoma City Directory).

1935

Highlights: Brautigan born . . . Early childhood in Tacoma, Washington.

Brautigan born. Early childhood in Tacoma, Washington.
No listing for Lulu Mary or Bernard Brautigan in the 1935 Tacoma City Directory.

1938

"Mrs. Lulu Brautigan" reported living at 1346 Fawcette [sic] Avenue, Tacoma, Washington (Tacoma City Directory). Assumably, her son, Richard, was with her.

1939

"Bernard F. Brautigan" reported living at 1513 1/2 South Tacoma Avenue (Tacoma City Directory).

"Lulu and Arth M. Titland" [sic] reported living at 1004 1/2 South 11th, Apartment 3, Tacoma, Washington (Tacoma City Directory).

1941-1943

"Lulu and Arth M. Titland" [sic] reported living at 721 Fawcett, Tacoma, Washington (Tacoma City Directory). This is the last listing for Lulu Mary Brautigan (Titland) (Porterfield) (Folston) in the Tacoma City Directory.

Brautigan receives a tonsillectomy. He contracts mumps, whooping cough, and chicken pox.

Mary Lou moved herself and her children around Tacoma frequently, from one low-rent accommodation to another. Barbara Jo said, "It seemed like whenever things got difficult, my mother would move, rather than deal with the problem" (Interview with John F. Barber, 17 March 2012 and William Hjortsberg 33; See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg). Once the family lived in an apartment below the Lynn Mortuary, a point Brautigan incorporated in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, the last novel published in his lifetime.

Wednesday, 20 January 1943

Lulu Mary married Robert Geoffrey "Tex" Porterfield (1904-1969) in a Lutheran ceremony conducted by Pastor Barton W. Smith in Tacoma, Washington. See Biography > Family.

Porterfield, born in Deadwood, South Dakota, was a cook at Laughlin's Cafe, on Pacific Avenue, Tacoma, Washington. Mary Lou worked there also, as a cashier (William Hjortsberg 36; See References Biographies). Both Brautigan and his sister, Barbara, neither of whom knew their real fathers, used Porterfield's surname. Brautigan changed his surname to "Brautigan" just before his high school graduation in 1953. This marriage marked the beginning of a difficult and unpleasant childhood period for Brautigan. Robert Creeley described some details in his obituary, "The Gentle on the Mind Number" written for Brautigan. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Tributes > Creeley.

1944

Mary Lou and Porterfield separated. He traveled to Great Falls, Montana, for a job as a fry cook. She, and her children, remained in Tacoma, Washington, but were persuaded by Porterfield to visit him in Montana.

Spring-Summer 1944

Porterfield returned, with Brautigan and sister, Barbara, to Tacoma. Their reunion did not last. In the summer, Mary Lou and the children moved to Salem, Oregon, allegedly without Porterfield (William Hjortsberg 37). They lived in Salem for fourteen months, changing addresses three or four times. Both Brautigan and Barbara were boarded out with other families as their mother, Mary Lou, prepared for the birth of her child by Porterfield. See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

1945

Sunday, 1 April 1945

Stepsister Sandra Jean Porterfield was born at Salem General Hospital, Salem, Oregon. Her birth certificate notes Robert Porterfield as her father.

Fall 1945

"Robert G. Porterfield and Lulu," apparently reunited again, are reported living at 2235 Hazel Avenue, Salem, Oregon. Porterfield noted as a cook at The Quelle (Salem City Directory. Mary Lou's obituary notes that prior to moving to Eugene, the family lived in Salem, Oregon.

This was the last attempt at reconciliation between Mary Lou and Porterfield, following in the national euphoria from the end of World War II, 14 August 1945. It did not work. Mary Lou left with her children and moved to Eugene, Oregon (William Hjortsberg 38). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Brautigan attended Grade 5 at Lincoln Elementary School in Eugene, Oregon.

1949

Attended Grade 9 at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Eugene, Oregon, 12th and Madison. His courses there included Speech and Language, General Mathematics, Science, Physical Education, Health, and Fine Arts, school year 1949-1950.

1950

Highlights: Mother married William Folston.

Times were hard after World War II, and Brautigan fished and hunted frequently, bringing home his catch for the family table. Brautigan and his sister Barbara pushed an old baby buggy along the roads looking for glass bottles to recycle for money, an experience he described in the poem "The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth's Beer Bottles" (See Poetry Uncollected > 1957 > poem title) and recounted in So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away. Brautigan did yard work and odd chores for a Mrs. Manerrude, widow of a wealthy Eugene lumber and fuel family. She lived in a large house near the University of Oregon campus, and Brautigan included her in the "Trout Fishing in the Street of Eternity" chapter of his novel Trout Fishing in America when he described an eighty-two-pound woman living in a mansion of at least thirty rooms. With money earned picking string beans he bought a used bicycle so he could have a paper route. When he was old enough he started working in a Eugene Fruit Growers Association cannery, and continued every season until he graduated from Eugene High School, 17th and Charnelton (Ianthe Brautigan 193, 199, 202). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe.

June 1950

Brautigan's mother, Mary Lou, married William Folston, Jr., 12 June 1950, at the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, Nevada, in a brief ceremony performed by District Judge A. J. Maestretti. Folston worked as a tire changer at Wyatt's Tire Company. The family lived together at 1287 Hayes Street, Eugene, Oregon (Eugene City Directory).

Their marriage application stated "Mary Lou Porterfield" as previously married and her husband deceased. All Mary Lou's husbands by previous marriages were still very much alive, however: Bernard F. Brautigan died in 1994, Robert Geoffrey Porterfield died in 1969, as did Arthur Martin Titland whom Mary Lou apparently never officially married. When she married Folston Mary Lou's divorce from Porterfield was not final; that came a full month later. Furthermore, she was already pregnant by Folston.

1951

Highlights: Met Peter Webster.

Brautigan, over six feet tall, continued to play basketball at the First Baptist Church in Eugene. He began playing with this team in 1947. Because of his height, Brautigan played center. During one of the league games, Brautigan first met Peter Webster, who played for First Christian. Brautigan and Webster met again in 1953 when both worked for the Eugene Fruit Growers Association and became best friends. Peter Webster and his family, especially Edna Webster, his mother and Linda, his sister, would, within two years, become central to Brautigan's life.

Brautigan's picture, in his high school annual, noted his name as "R. Porterfield."

School year 1951-1952

Grade 11 at Eugene High School (17th and Charnelton). Courses included English, United States History, Algebra 1, Physics, Health, Physical Education, and Radio and Speech.

1952

Highlights: Established "Brautigan" surname . . . Earliest publication.

Fall 1952

Brautigan learned that his real last name was "Brautigan" and not "Porterfield," the surname of his mother's second husband Robert Porterfield. See Biography > Family. Brautigan may have asked his mother for information about his real father, or she felt his high school diploma should bear the correct name (Ianthe Brautigan 197). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Memoirs > Ianthe. William Hjortsberg suggests the later (William Hjortsberg 56). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg. Either way, nearing the end of high school, Brautigan changed his last name from "Porterfield" to "Brautigan."

1953

Highlights: Graduated high school . . . first publication in a book-length collection.

Grade 12 at Eugene High School (17th and Charnelton). Courses included English, Speech, Chemistry, Bookkeeping, Creative Writing, and Typing.

Overall, Brautigan was remembered by his classmates as being tall, blond, quiet, and a loner. His mother said Brautigan read a lot and often helped school mates with their homework (Ianthe Brautigan 198). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe.

An influential person may have been one of Brautigan's English teachers, Juliet Claire Gibson (Don Bishoff 1B; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Bishoff). Possibly through Gibson, Brautigan discovered the poetry of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. Both influenced his own writing: Dickinson with her persona of the poet as an eccentric outsider writing telegrams from a parallel universe and Williams with his insistence on forgoing outdated poetic forms to write in vernacular about subjects that had an immediate impact on readers. Brautigan wrote throughout high school, and according to his half-sister, Barbara, often wrote all night (Lawrence Wright 40; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Wright) in his unheated bedroom (Ianthe Brautigan 201; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe).

His parents did not support Brautigan's writing efforts. "My folks rode him a lot," said Barbara. "They never listened to what he was writing. They didn't understand his writing was important to him. I know they asked him to get out of the house several times" (Lawrence Wright 59). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Wright

10 April 1953

An article in the Eugene High School News (10 April 1953), titled "Poets' Prize Poems Published," noted Brautigan as one of ten Eugene High students whose work would be included in a forthcoming anthology. Published later in the spring, the book, Young America Sings: 1953 Anthology of Northwest States High School Poetry, included Brautigan's poem, "The Ochoco." (Los Angeles, CA: National High School Poetry Association. 1953, p. 120). This was Brautigan's first appearance in a book-length publication. This poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry Uncollected > 1953 > Ochoco.

July-December 1953

After graduation, Brautigan worked for the Eugene Fruit Growers Association.

Ianthe Brautigan says her father worked in a pickle factory run by the Association and at other odd jobs (Ianthe Brautigan 161). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe.

Lorna Webster, sister of Linda and Peter, does not recall the pickle factory. Instead,
As I recall [the Eugene Fruit Growers Association] produced "Diamond A" brand green beans, and other fruits and vegetables which were grown locally. Beans were a big product from the farms in the area. My brother Pete worked with Brautigan there.
— Lorna Webster. Email to John F. Barber, 19 March 2006.

Deanna Hershiser, daughter of Peter Webster, writes that Webster worked on the green bean canning line, while Brautigan worked canning beets. Webster and Brautigan met again while working this summer. Their friendship was sealed when Brautigan invited Webster to join him for a day of fishing on the South Fork of the McKenzie River (Deanna Hershiser 76). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Hershiser.

Brautigan and Webster became best friends and Brautigan often visited with Peter and his family, sisters Linda, and Lorna, and mother Edna Webster at their 41 Madison Street residence. Edna became Brautigan's surrogate mother. Peter and Brautigan fished the lakes and streams around Eugene. To earn money, they sold earthworms and Christmas trees (Bob Keefer and Quail Dawning 2H; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Memoirs > Dawning) and Deanna Hershiser 76; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Hershiser). Edna's youngest daughter, Linda, is often cited as Brautigan's first girlfriend.

Sunday, 11 October 1953

Brautigan's poem "Moonlight on a Cemetery" was first published in The Northwest's Own Magazine, Oct. 11, 1953, p. 10. The poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry Uncollected > 1953 > Moonlight.

1954

Highlights: Worked for Eugene Fruit Growers Association . . . In San Francisco?

Brautigan was determined to be a writer of poetry, short stories, and novels. He felt attending a university would not help his career goals, and money for tuition was not available. Edward Foster said Brautigan concentrated on writing poetry—"as inevitable perhaps for anyone caught up in the Beat generation as learning to play guitar would be for the generation a decade later" (Foster 7). See References > Studies > Foster.

With a desire to be a writer, it is natural that Brautigan would consider going to the center of writing on the West Coast: San Francisco. Jennifer Foote says, "Brautigan had tried to leave home and live in San Francisco's North Beach four times before he actually had enough money to stay there. He circulated among the Beats and wrote constantly" (Foote D8). Foote provides no evidence of these four attempts by Brautigan to leave Oregon and establish residency in San Francisco.

Several writers claim that Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1954. For example, Jay Acton, Alan le Mond, and Parker Hodges say Brautigan "moved to San Francisco in 1954" (Acton, et. al. 26). See References > Literary > Jay Acton.

Helen Donlon also said, "In 1954, Brautigan left his home, his mother and younger sister, Barbara, and headed for the city—arriving in San Francisco" (Helen Donlon 1). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Tributes > Donlon.

Janusz K. Buda said "Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1954, and was soon involved in the literary groups that were springing up in the area" (Buda 23). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Tributes > Buda.

Warren French said Brautigan moved to San Francisco, "from the state of Washington [actually, Oregon] in 1954, when he was nineteen and the Beats were just gathering. He quickly became associated with them and lived for a time with Philip Whalen (French 84).

French also said "In 1955, he [Brautigan] was included in the book Four New Poets from a local press" but that book was not published until the fall of 1957. This was Brautigan's first inclusion in a poetry anthology. See Contributions Four New Poets.

Craig Thompson said Brautigan moved to San Francisco in 1954 and "at one time, shared an apartment with Philip Whalen" (Thompson 286). See References > Literary > Thompson.

Ingrid Sterner said, "Brautigan, in 1954 moved to San Francisco, the destination of many of the disaffected youth of his generation, and became involved in the Beat literary movement (Sterner 97). See References > Literary > Sterner.

Finally, Edward Halsey Foster said "In 1954, he [Brautigan] moved to San Francisco, then on the verge of becoming the literary center of the Beat generation. . . . Brautigan had not been drawn to San Francisco by the Beat movement, but we was soon involved with it. He became friendly with Lawrence Ferlinghetti poet, publisher, and owner of City Lights Books, poet Michael McClure, and Beat poet Philip Whalen, a fellow Northwesterner with whom he shared an apartment, reportedly south of Market Street" (Foster 7). See References > Studies > Foster.

While many of the details in these accounts can be verified, the date in each, 1954, is unsubstantiated. Possibly one author got the date wrong, and others quoted it as fact. If not in San Francisco in 1954, Brautigan was apparently thinking about leaving Eugene, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. According to Deanna Hershiser, daughter of Peter Webster, Brautigan's boyhood friend, Webster recalls Brautigan asking him to come to San Francisco.

Feedback from Deanna Hershiser
"I asked my dad about his memory of Richard's trip(s) to San Francisco. He recalls the last time the two of them had a face-to-face conversation. It was in 1954, and Richard urged Dad to come with him to the Bay Area. Dad was fully involved then with college and dating my mom (they may have just become engaged). So he told Richard no thanks. He doesn't know whether or not Richard made it soon after that to San Francisco. The next time Dad spoke to him was in 1970, when they had a long phone conversation."
— Deanna Hershiser. Email to John F. Barber, 26 December 2009.

July-August 1954

Brautigan worked for the Eugene Fruit Growers Association.

There is more evidence that Brautigan was not living in San Francisco in 1954, but rather remained in the Eugene, Oregon, area, throughout 1955. See below.

1955

Highlights: Leaves family home; takes up residence in a rooming house . . . More poetry published . . . Oregon State Hospital.

Summer 1955

Brautigan left his family home at 1287 Hayes Street, Eugene, Oregon, and established his residence in a boarding house run by Hal Barton, a Quaker, at 467 West 17th Avenue, near Lawrence Street, where he lived alone and worked at his writing.

Brautigan's move was predicated by disfunction, and alleged threats at home. By his own accounts, Mary Lou was an alcoholic, whose abuse and abandonment ruined any opportunity for a healthy connection between she and Brautigan.

"My mother left me in Great Falls alone with one of my stepfathers [Robert Porterfield], who was a fry cook. I would eat meals at his place and lived in a hotel room by myself. I was seven years old" (Ianthe Brautigan 89). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe.

Brautigan wrote a short story, called trite story, later included in The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, about spending a winter in Butte, Montana, after his mother "had run off with a man named Frank, or Jack." Brautigan described his father, Robert Porterfield, as a cook whom he seldom saw "except when I ate my meals, because he was living with a whore named Virginia." Virginia did not like Brautigan, and so he had his own hotel room (68). See Collections > Edna. Of note, the winter was actually spent in Great Falls, Montana, but in the original manuscript, Brautigan scratched out Great Falls and replaced it with Butte.

Brautigan also wrote poems about his mother. One, titled dear old mommie, compares her to a mole (The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings 10). In another poem, farewell to my oedipus complex, Brautigan wrote about giving his mother "a time bomb" for Christmas (The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings 94). See Collections > Edna.

Neither Mary Lou nor William F. Folston, Jr. (her third husband) understood Brautigan's bohemian lifestyle, his refusal to seek gainful employment, or his insistence on becoming a writer and suggested he seek psychiatric help, or leave the family home. Brautigan choose the latter, moving into a rooming house at 467 West 17th, in Eugene, operated by Harold Barton, a Quaker and member of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization committed to social justice and humanitarian service. Both Harold and his wife Lois were friends and supporters of Brautigan and sought to help him establish a stable living environment. Brautigan used the room as a place to continue his writing.

Peter Webster remembers sitting in Brautigan's rented room, listening to him read his writing. "He was a good poet even then and I loved the sound of his voice," said Webster (Bob Keefer and Quail Dawning 2H; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Dawning). Webster, a college sophomore, often visited Brautigan in his rented room. Webster typed his college papers there, and while listening to Brautigan read his poems and stories, thought he would one day be a famous writer (Deanna Hershiser 76). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Hershiser.

Sometime during the summer, Brautigan fell in love with Peter's sister, Linda Webster. Linda was fourteen, just beginning high school. Brautigan was twenty, with some publication success, but struggling to become a writer. Brautigan wrote poems for Linda (and Edna) and other writings in which she is clearly a character. He shared his writing with Linda and sent stories to magazines in her name. None were ever accepted or published.

Beyond sharing writing, their relationship was innocent. Brautigan, raised Catholic, knew Linda was too young, that he would have to wait before they could be involved in a proper relationship. Worse, Linda was not interested in Brautigan. He struggled with confused emotions, unrequited love, and a broken heart for the rest of the year.

Sunday, 2 October 1955

Brautigan's poem "Butterfly's Breath" published in Northwest Roto Magazine, Oct. 2, 1955: 14. The poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1955 > poem title.

Thursday, 3 November 1955

With a note dated this day, Brautigan gave Edna Webster several manuscripts of poetry and story collections, short novels, and experimental dramas written in the mid-1950s, as well as photographs and personal items. Several of these writings were dedicated to or referred to Edna and/or Linda.

Webster kept Brautigan's writing for years, selling them in October 1992. Many of the items in the collection, including Would You Like to Saddle Up a Couple of Goldfish and Swim to Alaska? and I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye and Other Pieces, were published as The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings in 1999. See Collections > Edna.

A facsimile of Brautigan's hand-written note opens The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.
On this third day of November, 1955, I, Richard Brautigan, give all of my writings to Edna Webster. They are now her property, and she may do what she wishes with them. If she has them published, all of the money derived from publication is hers.
     Richard Brautigan

Many of the items in the original collection were written prior to this date. Others were written later and perhaps given to Edna Webster for safe keeping when Brautigan moved to San Francisco, California. Others were manuscripts rejected by various publishers and returned, as per the return envelop Brautigan provided, to Edna Webster's Eugene, Oregon, address.

Wednesday, 14 December 1955

At approximately 9:30 this evening, Brautigan broke a window at the Eugene Police Station. He was arrested and placed in the Lane County Jail. He was fined $25.00 and given a ten-day jail sentence. After serving seven of the ten days he was declared mentally ill and ordered committed to the Oregon State Hospital for observation and treatment. What are the details behind this story?

Earlier in the evening, hungry and needing money to buy food, Brautigan sought out Pete Webster at his dormitory on the campus of Northwest Christian College where he was enrolled. Deanna Hershiser notes in her memoir about her father, that Brautigan asked Webster to loan him $20.00. Webster answered, "I'll loan you twenty dollars after you pay me back all the other money you've borrowed" (Hershiser 76). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Hershiser.

Rebuked, Brautigan walked to Edna Webster's home, hoping to find solace in conversation with her.

Later that evening, still upset, Brautigan was arrested for disorderly conduct at the Eugene Police Station inside City Hall, corner of West 11th Avenue and Willamette Street. Built circa 1891 as Eugene High School, the impressive brick and stone building was converted into City Hall in 1915. Shortly after the new City Hall, 777 Pearl Street, was completed in 1964, the building was razed.

According to the report filed by Officer William Smith, Brautigan entered the police station at approximately 9:30 PM, approached Smith, the duty officer, and demanded to be put in jail. Smith replied that Brautigan could not be put in jail since he was not a criminal. Brautigan left the police station and returned with a rock, which he hurled through the glass panel of the station front door. Smith arrested Brautigan for disorderly conduct and jailed him overnight.

Other reports suggest that Brautigan filled his pockets with rocks before entering the Police Station, apparently determined to be arrested and placed in jail.

Friday, 16 December 1955

Judge Barber was known for being tough on young offenders, and Edna Webster worried what this might mean for Brautigan. Hoping to influence Brautigan's release, she contacted Lois and Harold Barton, both noted for their community social and mental health work, and asked them to follow up on Brautigan's case and help however they could. One form of help, she thought, would be for the Bartons to provide a temporary home for Brautigan. She thought, and the Bartons agreed, that providing Brautigan a home away from the tension of his own family, would be a good step toward his recuperation.

Either Edna Webster or Lois Barton contacted Judge Barber and reported that he felt Brautigan needed to be taught a lesson, and perhaps needed psychological help. Seeking a better understanding of the situation, Harold Barton visited Brautigan in jail after his court appearance, coming away with the impression that Brautigan had committed a crime, in a highly agitated emotional and mental state, seeking help from suicidal thoughts.

Peter Webster also visited Brautigan, who was embarrassed by the visit and asked Webster not to visit again (William Hjortsberg 83; See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg). Perhaps Edna and Linda Webster visited as well. Brautigan recounted the visit from "my girlfriend" in the poem there was a wire screen between us noting his white jail uniform and the wire screen between them, concluding, "I could have just died" (Edna Webster Collection 98). See Collections > Edna Webster.

Friday, 23 December 1955

Brautigan was briefly examined by two court-appointed physicians in the Lane County Courthouse. Based on their recommendation, Brautigan was ordered committed to the Oregon State Hospital in Salem for observation and treatment of mental illness.

In his novel, I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye, Brautigan described sitting in a room in the Lane County Courthouse. "There were some men in the room. The men told me that they were committing me to the State Insane Asylum. Then I was standing outside the room" (I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye; See Collections > Edna Webster). From this we can conclude that his examination was cursory, and pro forma.

1956

Highlights: Left Eugene, Oregon . . . Visited Reno and Fallon, Nevada . . . More early poetry published . . . Settled in San Francisco, California . . . Poetry criticized by Robert Duncan . . . Unpublished manuscripts.

While at the Oregon State Hospital, Brautigan was given a total of twelve electric shock treatments and medication. He wrote letters to Linda and Edna Webster, asking both not to think him crazy. He wrote letters to himself, describing what he was thinking and feeling, mostly as a way to judge whether he was suffering memory loss from the shock therapy.

Mary Lou Folston (known as Lulu Mary or Mary Lou), Brautigan's mother, said that she and her husband, William Folston, Jr., visited Brautigan each week while he was in the hospital (Ianthe Brautigan 202; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe). Lawrence Wright portrayed a different scenario when he quoted Brautigan's half-sister, Barbara, saying, "I didn't know he was there until after they let him out. I know he had shock therapy. After that he seemed real quiet. The only thing he told me about it was that he learned to dance in there. But he would never open up to me again" (Wright 59). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Wright.

On one of her visits, Mary Lou brought Brautigan mail from Lilith Lorraine, editor of Flame. She had published "Somewhere in the World a Man is Screaming in Pain" in the autumn 1955 issue of her journal. This poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1955 > poem title. Lorraine asked for more poems. Brautigan sent her four poems for consideration.

Lorraine also forwarded a letter (dated 29 December 1955) from D. Vincent Smith who wanted to republish the poem "Somewhere in the World a Man is Screaming in Pain" in the first issue of his own literary magazine, Olivant. In response to Smith's request to see more work, Brautigan sent him a group of poems, titled Tiger in the Telephone Booth. After his parole from the hospital, Brautigan sent Smith a manuscript titled The God of the Martians but the novel was never published (see below).

Based on this opportunity, and thinking ahead, Brautigan wrote Evelyn Thorne, editor of the literary magazine Epos, in Lake Como, Florida, requesting a change to his author biography included with the poem "The Second Kingdom," to be published in the upcoming winter issue. The revised biography read: "Richard Brautigan, 21. I have been writing poetry since I was 17. Olivant will publish my first book of poems, Tiger in the Telephone Booth. Making paper flowers out of love and death is a disease, but how beautiful it is." The poem "The Second Kingdom" was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1956 > poem title.

Brautigan sent a manuscript titled Linda, a collection of fourteen poems with a dedication page reading "for Linda," to The Macmillan Company, New York, New York. The manuscript was rejected and returned in May of 1956.

Wednesday, 29 February 1956

Lillith Lorraine, editor of Flame, a literary magazine based in Alpine, Texas, wrote Brautigan rejecting the four poems he had sent her earlier. She had published "Someplace in the World a Man is Screaming in Pain" in the Autumn 1955 issue of her journal, and wrote that she wanted to see more poems like this one with its "exquisite satire." See Poetry > Uncollected > 1956 > poem title.

Tuesday, 12 June 1956(?)

Allegedly, Brautigan left Eugene, Oregon, bound for San Francisco, California, on this day, his parents' wedding anniversary. Mary Lou and William F. Folston were married 12 June 1950. Brautigan took only two small cardboard boxes, one for clothes, the other for selected manuscripts and works in progress. All other writings he left with Edna Webster.

In leaving, Brautigan cut off all contact with his family. His mother, Mary Lou, said, "I guess he hated us. Or maybe he had a disappointed love affair. Whatever. Richard practically abandoned the family when he left here. I haven't the slightest idea why" (Lawrence Wright 59). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Wright

Brautigan offered no goodbyes to anyone in his family, except for his sister Barbara, whom he saw by accident on Willamette Street in downtown Eugene, Oregon, immediately before he left town. According to Barbara, she had not seen her brother since his release from the Oregon State Hospital. They used to be close, but were no longer so. Brautigan said, "Well, I'm leaving" but offered no information that he was bound for San Francisco. "He said, 'I just wanted to say goodbye' . . . and that's the last time I ever saw him" (Hjortsberg 94). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Beyond his desire to pursue a career as a writer, Brautigan's life of extreme poverty and parental abuse would be a factor for his leaving. As Keith Abbott notes in his memoir, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan, his sister, and mother, on more than one occasion, lived in welfare hotels or motor courts (Abbott 82, 101). See Obituaries-memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Abbott.

Abuse by both parents, beatings by his "stepfathers," and abandonment by his mother were cited by friends and family.

"My father told me that during the Depression he and his sister were boarded out to a family for awhile. She was beaten every morning for wetting the bed. One of his drunken stepfathers came to visit and wrestled with him, almost breaking my father's arm. Luckily, the people he was boarding with stepped in and stopped the stepfather. (Ianthe Brautigan 128). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe.

Keith Abbott, in his memoir Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, quotes Brautigan saying one of his stepfathers "would just thrash him and thrash him" and once tried to break his arm. Brautigan remembered being "rented out" with his sister to do household chores and once watched a neighbor whip his sister (Abbott 101). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Memoirs > Abbott.

Abbott also said Brautigan claimed his mother loved young children but "ignored and feared them as they got older" (Abbott 101; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Abbott). And there was his mother's drinking. "The only two concrete things he mentioned about her was that she drank a lot and smoked cigarettes" (Ianthe Brautigan 94; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe).

"He just left is all," Folston said. "Didn't say where he was going. He just disappeared, like people do." Still, she never wondered about Brautigan after he left home. "When you know your child is famous, you don't worry, do you?" (Jennifer Foote D8). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Foote.

Although he said little or nothing to his family, Brautigan had apparently shared his desire to leave with the Bartons, even talked about his plans to pursue his goal of becoming a writer in San Francisco, California. Lois Barton drove him to the downtown Eugene, Oregon, bus station, but rather than taking a bus to San Francisco, Brautigan rode with his friend Milo Stewart who was driving there to visit his sister. In Sacramento, California, Brautigan got out of the car and hitchhiked to Reno, Nevada (Hjorstberg 97). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Wednesday, 25 July 1956

Brautigan's poems "Storm Over Fallon" and "The Breeze" were first published in The Fallon Standard. Neither poem was included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1956 > poem titles.

Fall 1956

Brautigan met poet Ron Loewinsohn on Grant Street, and handed him a notebook in which he had written the poem "A Correction." Loewinsohn enjoyed the poem and he and Brautigan became good friends, spending much of their time together.

Brautigan and Loewinsohn joined Jack Spicer's "magic circle," a group of writers discussing poetry each night at The Place. Brautigan and Spicer immediately connected and Spicer later helped Brautigan with the final editing of his novel, Trout Fishing in America and arranged for its first public readings after its publication.

According to Ron Loewinshon, "There was a circle of people led by Jack Spicer who were literary, college-educated, and gay. Spicer and that crowd were really very suspect to Richard and me, although Richard went to their meetings" (Peter Manso and Michael McClure 65). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Manso.

Poet and friend Michael McClure also commented on Brautigan's relationship with Spicer saying, "Richard was a disciple to some extent, or more aptly a pupil, of Jack Spicer. He must have met Jo Anne [sic] Kyger through Spicer, and maybe Joe Dunn that way too. (Dunn published Richard's first book in his White Rabbit Press series.)" (Michael McClure 36). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Memoirs > McClure.

Prior to their first meeting, Loewinsohn had seen Brautigan at The Place and a party hosted by Robert Stock where Brautigan read a few poems in his living room, perhaps his first public reading in San Francisco, and said he "almost never spoke, and walked around with his hands in his pockets, like he was hiding from everybody" (Peter Manso and Michael McClure 64, 65). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Manso.

This impression of Brautigan as an outsider was echoed by Nicholas von Hoffman. "[H]e stood to one side like a nineteenth-century statue without a pedestal, an objet d'art neglected, put in the back of the barn like a rusty threshing machine" (Hoffman 129).

Other comments about Brautigan's shyness were less kind. Allen Ginsberg called Brautigan "Bunthorne" after the winsome poet in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta "Patience" (Lawrence Wright 34; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Manso). William Hjortsberg notes that Ginsberg called Brautigan "Frood," and thought him a "neurotic creep" (Hjortsberg 115; See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg).

Although he knew many of them personally, including Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and his good friend Michael McClure, frequented The Place and the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, participated in their poetry readings, and was included in the historic photograph "The Last Gathering of the Beats" by Larry Keenan, taken in 1965 in front of City Lights Books owned and run by poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Brautigan always maintained that he was not a Beat, or a member of their movement.

The Beats did not like Brautigan's writing style, or appreciate his efforts to develop a new style of prose poetry, although they did appreciate his occasional use of shocking humor. Ferlinghetti later published some of Brautigan's poetry, and chapters from his novel Trout Fishing in America despite the fact that he never felt Brautigan developed fully as a writer.

"As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naif, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally" (Peter Manso and Michael McClure 65). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Manso.

Conger Beasley, Jr. agreed. "He was a close to being a genuine naif as contemporary American culture is likely to produce. He relied on his marvelous instincts to propel him through a story; that, plus his droll humor and off-beat characters, gave his novels a funky rhythm" (Conger Beasley 3). See References > Critiques > Beasely.

Wednesday, 26 September 1956

A collection of poems titled The Smallest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World, submitted earlier to New Directions in New York, New York, for publication, was rejected and returned to Edna Webster (per Brautigan's addressing of the return envelope). The manuscript dedication read,
James Dean.
An American genius.
Dead at twenty-four.

November 1956

Brautigan moved from his apartment at 1648 Grant Street to the Hotel Jessie, 179 Jessie Street, an alley off Third Street, south of Market Street. The $6.00-a-week rent was more in line with his low income as a struggling writer. Brautigan sold his Type A blood to the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank of the San Francisco Medical Society and delivered telegrams for Western Union on a bicycle throughout the financial district to earn rent money. At night, Brautigan wrote poetry which he mailed to magazines around the county.

1957

Highlights: Met San Francisco poets . . . White Rabbit Press established . . . Met and married Virginia Dionne Alder . . . Published poems in small magazines . . . Anthologized in Four New Poets.

Brautigan's poems "They Keep Coming Down the Dark Streets" and "15 Stories in One Poem" were first published in Danse Macabre, vol. 1, no. 1, 1957, pp. 18-19. Neither poem was ever included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1957 > poem titles.

January 1957

Brautigan met Virginia Dionne Alder (also called Ginny or Ginger) at a North Beach laundromat where Brautigan and Ron Loewinsohn were washing their clothes. Loewinsohn introduced Brautigan and Virginia, who invited them both to a party that night at her apartment on Filbert Street. They both attended and Brautigan and Virginia immediately became a couple.

Virginia had moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles where she attended the University of California Los Angeles. She worked as a typist at a financial district law firm, Weigel, Ripley, and Diamond. She lived in an apartment on Filbert Street, in North Beach, high up on Telegraph Hill, below Coit Tower, overlooking Fisherman's Wharf and San Francisco Bay. She shared the apartment with college roommate Lenore Yanoff, and Lester Rosenthal, her former college boyfriend.

Brautigan, financially distressed, had left the Hotel Jessie and was living rent-free in the apartment of a single mother in exchange for babysitting. Soon after they met, Brautigan moved into Virginia's apartment and Rosenthal moved out. Ginny supported them both with her job, and typed Brautigan's manuscripts while he continued his quest to become a successful writer (Abbott 44; See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Abbott and Hjortsberg 123; See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg).

Caroling (Lind) Geary, a student in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, moved to San Francisco in January, where she lived until April or May. Geary lived first in the YWCA before renting a tiny apartment in the bottom of a house on Filbert Street for $30.00 per month. Her upstairs neighbors were Brautigan, Virginia, and, for a short time, Lenore Yanoff.

Feedback from Caroling Lind Geary
"In January 1957, I got a severe Van Gogh complex and had to escape academia. My painting teacher was Cameron Booth. He was a student of Hans Hoffman and taught New York school abstract expressionism. He really was a closet romantic visionary under his neat business suit, lab coat and clipped moustache and non-representational art. He did a painting called "Crystals of Earth and Sky" where he tried to imagine the process of coal turning into diamonds. Imagine something happening underground over eons of time in a single painting? When I saw Booth's painting in an art show, I started to understand what he was talking about. It seemed like I could learn what I needed by living with the painting, so I bought it. He gave me 50% discount on the price. I mentioned this to set the context of the San Francisco scene. We focused there, freed by wealth of the industriousness of the immigrants and the natural resources of our country. We were longing to invent our culture. So, with my teacher's painting I took a bus to San Francisco to paint full time. The move was an early Beat version of the next decade's hippie drop out to Haight Street. After being robbed and working as a bus person in a restaurant, I realized I was not Van Gogh and missed the University Art Department. I took a bus back and was accepted back into the program that summer, with teaching assistantship and all. Everyone liked the work I had done in San Francisco and I got in touch with the scene, so it was great.

"I answered a newspaper ad for an apartment on Filbert Street. It was owned by a landlord woman in a huge mansion on some San Francisco hill. She first showed me the upstairs unit. It was old and dusty. The interior rounded off by layers of different colors of chipped paint. It was a railroad flat. Stepping off the side of the hill into it was like going into a big railroad car or ferry boat into the sky. There were no buildings to either side. Each room had windows that looked out into the brilliance of the reflected bay waters. It is close to Fisherman's Wharf. The place was big, empty and dark in the interior. I vividly remember a line of clear glass jars on narrow open shelves in the kitchen, each jar filled with things I'd never seen before, like oriental spices, little silver fishes, tiny octopi, and strange smelling herbs. I didn't know what these things were or where they came from or why they were there. Later I learned they came from nearby Chinatown, and I bought some.

"My 'apartment' was just a bunch of doors filled into the support posts below. What I used as a studio was probably just an old storage place, a tiny little square room with a door. Just whomped up by this old lady to get an extra rental unit. What I loved was that all the doors had the upper part as windows and the view of the bay and the light was great. My view was all three sides, except uphill to Coit Tower. At the top of the hill, below Coit Tower, was a small convenience store. Walking down the hill from the store I turned left into a small lane or alley to get to my apartment. I could also get to the Wharf by going downhill; can't remember the name of the major street down there. It was more difficult, or didn't connect to transportation as well, so I didn't go that way, only a few times. I didn't have a car. None of us did.

"When Brautigan moved in, shortly after I was settled, it was with two women: Ginger (childhood nickname for Virginia Dionne Alder) and Lenore Yanoff. Lenore moved out maybe in February and went back to LA [Los Angeles], where I got to know her later, when I moved there. Brautigan and Ginger were not married at the time. As I remember, it was not a triangle, not menage a trois. My impression was that Lenore and Ginger were friends previously, and Lenore was rather left out of Ginger's new partnership with Brautigan. It's probably quite a minor detail of the story of a life.

"Brautigan had a constant energy about him. I can't remember him sitting down. I think he liked the empty Fillbert Street apartment for the windows. He did look out a lot. Could 'lanking' be a verb, that is, participle? I would then say Richard Brautigan was lanking around. As in, he was being lanky. If I had been there for Halloween, Ginger would have come as a pumpkin, a lantern smiling light. Richard would have come as the farmer/scarecrow/ghost, a hover person that is always a couple of inches up from earth. Gliding. The Grateful Dead Song plays in my head, 'In the Attic of my mind, where all of my dreams are stored.' That would be my song for Brautigan."
— Caroling Lind Geary. Email to John F. Barber, 28 January 2003 and 27 January 2005.

Brautigan introduced Caroling to Beat poets. She bought their books at City Lights Books and listened to Brautigan and others reading their poetry at The Place, just up the hill from the apartment. Such readings were the inspiration for Which Poet?, a painting of Brautigan and other poets at The Place by Geary.

Saturday, 8 June 1957

Brautigan married Virginia (Ginny) Dionne Alder in Reno, Nevada. The ceremony was performed by Methodist minister Reverend Stephen C. Thomas, a Methodist minister. Witnesses were Ace W. Williams, a chapel visitor and Agnes Thomas, the Reverend's wife. Neither Brautigan or Alder had been married previously. Both were twenty two years of age. Both gave San Francisco as their place of residence.

Following their return from Reno, Brautigan and Virginia Alder moved into an apartment at 1565 Washington Street (Hjortsberg 125). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

August 1957

Brautigan and Virginia Alder traveled to the Big Sur area of California, south of Gorda, to visit with Price Dunn who was staying on property owned by Pat Boyd, a painter. Brautigan and Dunn met in the spring at a party at Virginia's apartment and became good friends. The events of the month-long visit became the basis for Brautigan's novel A Confederate General from Big Sur. Price Dunn was fictionalized as the novel's protagonist.

Fall 1957

Four poems by Brautigan: "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth's Beer Bottles," "The Mortuary Bush," "Twelve Roman Soldiers and an Oatmeal Cookie," and "Gifts" were first published in Four New Poets. Edited by Leslie Woolf Hedley. San Francisco: Inferno Press, 1957, pp. 3-9. This was Brautigan's first book publication. These poems were not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1957 > specific poem titles.

Four New Poets was an anthology featuring poetry by four poets Hedley described as "representing an articulate segment of a sometime-called 'silent generation'." Of Brautigan, the introduction said, "Richard Brautigan is a young poet who was born January 30, 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. He now lives in San Francisco where he is working on a book of poems, The Horse That Had A Flat Tire."

The other three poets included were: Martin Hoberman, Carl Larsen, and James M. Singer. At the time of publication, none of the poets was over the age of 25. Larsen edited Existaria, a Journal of Existant Hysteria, in which, in summer 1957, Brautigan published two poems: "The Daring Little Guy on the Burma Shave Sign" and "The World Will Never End." These poems were not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1957 > poem titles.

1958

Highlights: Involved with Dharma Committee . . . Published poems in small magazines . . . The Galilee Hitch-Hiker published.

Brautigan and Virginia lived at 1470 Washington Street (Polk County Directory)

Spring 1958

Brautigan's poem "Kingdom Come" was first published in the spring 1958 issue of Epos. This poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1958 > poem title.

Brautigan's poem "Twelve Roman Soldiers and an Oatmeal Cookie," originally published in Four New Poets, reprinted in Hearse. This poem was not collected in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1958 > poem title.

Brautigan's poem "The Mortuary Bush," originally published in Four New Poets, reprinted in Hearse. This poem was not collected in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1958 > poem title.

Summer 1958

Brautigan and Virginia Alder gave up their Washington Street apartment and hitchhiked from San Francisco, California, to Nogales, Arizona, where they crossed the international border into Mexico. They traveled by bus to Mexico City, stopping in Mazatlán and Tepic. After a week in Mexico City, Brautigan and Virginia traveled, again by bus, to Oaxaca, where they stayed for three months. Their return trip took them back to Mexico City, from there to Ciudad Juárez where they crossed the border into El Paso, Texas. From there they hitchhiked to Las Cruces, New Mexico, Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles, California, and finally, to San Francisco.

Brautigan and Alder rented an apartment at 461 Mississippi Street, on Potrero Hill, which they shared with artist friend Kenn Davis.

Winter 1958

Brautigan found part-time employment at Pacific Chemical Laboratories, 350 Clay Street, San Francisco, where he worked for several years preparing doses of powdered barium (Hjorstberg 150). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

1959

Highlights: Published poems in small magazines . . . Lay The Marble Tea published.

Three photographs, all taken by Virginia Dionne Alder, Brautigan's first wife, show Brautigan in San Francisco, in 1959. Brautigan and Virginia lived at 461 Mississippi Street (Polk County Directory and Bill Morgan. The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003). These photographs were possibly taken at that address.

Saturday, 9 May 1959

Brautigan's poem "The Whorehouse at the Top of Mount Rainier" published in the May 1959 issue of Beatitude. This poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1959 > Whorehouse.

April 1959

Lay The Marble Tea, a collection of 24 poems, published. These poems, as did most of Brautigan's subsequent work, blurred the boundaries between poetry and prose.

September 1959

Brautigan's poem "Swandragons" was first published in the September 1959 issue of Beatitude. The poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1959 > Swandragons.

Brautigan's poems The Rape of Ophelia, A Postcard from Chinatown, The Nature Poem, Horse Race, and The Last Music is Not Heard were first published in in the September 1959 issue of Foot. All were collected in The Octopus Frontier, published in 1960.

Brautigan's poem The Fever Monument published in the September 1959 issue of J. The poem was collected in The Octopus Frontier, published in 1960.

December 1959

Brautigan's poem 1942 was first published in J. The poem was collected in The Octopus Frontier, published in 1960.

1960

Highlights: Daughter Ianthe born . . . The Octopus Frontier published.

Brautigan and Virgina lived at 575 Pennsylvania Avenue (Polk County Directory)

The Octopus Frontier, a collection of twenty two poems, published.

Saturday, 30 July 1960

Brautigan gave a poetry reading as part of An Afternoon Dance Demonstration and an Evening of Dances presented by the Anna Halprin Dancers' Workshop in Marin County. The event also included an art exhibit by Manuel Neri and Joan Brown, dancing by Anna Halprin, A. A. Leath, John Graham, and others, new musical works by Stanley Shaff and Douglas McEachern, and lighting by Pat Hickey. The artistic director was Jo Landor (The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant Garde. Edited by David W. Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 268).

The dance by Halprin, Leath, and Graham was entitled "The Flowerburger" and was drawn from the same titled section of Brautigan's The Galilee Hitch-Hiker. More a performance piece than strictly dance, the dancers/performers moved about the stage while speaking words from Brautigan's poem, intermixing them, juxtaposing lines, creating new poetic prose. The group performed the dance around San Francisco, and around the country, for the next several years.

Wednesday, 21 December 1960

Brautigan participated in a poetry reading with Andrew Hoyem, Allen Dienstag, and longshoreman poet William Fritsch (aka Sweet Willie Tumbleweed) at the Coffee Gallery (formerly Miss Smith's Tea Room which closed in 1958), 1353 Grant Avenue, in San Francisco's North Beach. Fritsch was the husband of poet Lenore Kandel whose The Love Book was tried on obscenity charges in 1967. The handbill promoting the event was printed on 8.5" x 11" paper.

1961

Highlights: Begins writing Trout Fishing in America.

Brautigan's poem, "The Rain," published in Hearse: A Vehicle Used to Convey the Dead. This poem was not included in any of Brautigan's poetry collections. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1961 > poem title.

This was Brautigan's last appearance in Hearse, and his last publication in similar small literary magazines for years. Brautigan, disenchanted with earning a living as a poet, was, based on the success of Lay the Marble Tea and The Octopus Frontier, his self-publishing venture as Carp Press, more interested to pursue writing short stories and novels.

Friday, 17 March 1961

A broadside issued by Borregaard's Museum in San Francisco listed Brautigan, [Burgess] Jess Collins, Paul Alexander, Harry Jacobus, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, and other poets and painters scheduled to appear there. The Borregaard Museum, two floors of a Victorian house at 1713 Buchanan Street converted into a gallery by Ebbe Borregaard, billed on the broadside as "the largest private galley in San Francisco," was a landmark of the Sixties avant-garde.

The 8:30 PM free reading was arranged by Jack Spicer. Brautigan read selections from the evolving manuscript for Trout Fishing in Amercia focusing on his boyhood in Eugene, Oregon, and a forgotten poem entitled "Alas, In Carrion Umpire" (Hjortsberg 173). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

August 1961

Back in San Francisco the Brautigan's rented an apartment at 488 Union Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, above Yone's Bead Shop, next door to a laundromat, and two blocks from Washington Square Park. Brautigan returned to part-time work at Pacific Chemical Laboratories, 350 Clay Street, San Francisco, preparing doses of powdered barium (Hjortsberg 180). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

1962

Highlights: Separates from wife, Virginia.

Monday, 12 March 1962

Brautigan started a new novel, entitled The Island Cafe. Subtitled Part of a Short History of Bad Movies in California, the manuscript focused on what Brautigan eat for lunch each day at the Star and US Cafe, minute details he noticed there, and the film titles and show times at the Times Theater. After about three weeks, Brautigan abandoned the project, filing the manuscript in an envelope on the back of which he wrote "Never finished Novel."

Tuesday, 25 December 1962

Brautigan returned to his Union Street apartment to spend Christmas Day with his family, and to, as he wrote in his journal, "play at the man of the house for a little while longer." Then, "I go get drunk."

Following his separation from Virginia, Brautigan lived with Ron Loewinsohn and his wife, Joan, for about three months. While there, Brautigan used the back porch as a writing studio, working on the manuscript for A Confederate General from Big Sur, keeping each chapter in a separate envelope.

According to Bill Morgan, Virginia's affair with Aste brought Brautigan and Jack Spicer together. Spicer and Brautigan spent a great deal of time together at Cho Cho Tempura Bar, 1020 Kearny, owned by Jimmy Sakata. Spicer had a crush on Aste and this odd love triangle was the subject of his poem "The Holy Grail" (Morgan. The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003).

Years later, in 1984, Brautigan borrowed a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum handgun from Sakata and used it to commit suicide in his Bolinas, California, home.

1963

Highlights: Publishes first and only issue of Change.

Brautigan and Ron Loewinsohn decided to publish a literary magazine. Brautigan suggested the name, Change.

May 1963

Brautigan moved out of Ron Loewinsohn's apartment and into one of his own at 1482 Washington Street. From here, faced with lack of income, Brautigan moved four times before the end of the year seeking less expensive housing. Brautigan's only income was from his part-time job at Pacific Chemical measuring out barium swallows.

Tuesday, 16 July 1963

Brautigan moved to apartment 3 at 1565 Washington Street.

Friday, 11 October 1963

Brautigan moved to room 3 in the Mitchel Art Hotel, 444 Columbus Avenue. A week later, lacking money, he could not pay the rent and his room was locked, with his books, papers, and two manuscripts inside. Brautigan stayed with Andy Cole in his apartment.

Sunday, 1 December 1963

Brautigan moved to apartment C at 483 Frisco Street, which he sublet from friends away in Mexico. In addition to monthly rent, Brautigan cared for the owner's birds. The large foliage-filled aviary in the back of the apartment was the backdrop for a photograph by Erik Weber used on the back cover of Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur.

Brautigan and Weber met 28 September 1963 at a birthday party for Weber's wife, Lois. Learning that Weber was a photographer, Brautigan mentioned the prospective publication of A Confederate General from Big Sur and said he needed publicity and dust jacket photographs. Weber photographed Brautigan repeatedly, for both book publicity and story illustrations, until 1978 when, according to Weber, Brautigan ended their friendship.

1964

Highlights: A Confederate General from Big Sur published . . . Writes a fan letter to Ringo Starr, drummer of the music group The Beatles.

February 1964

The Beatles became the most popular music group in the world. Joanne Kyger tells this story. "The Beatles are in the air. Richard Brautigan and I sit at Vesuvio and memorize their names and pictures—that's John, and that's Paul. We write a letter with Jack Spicer to Ringo Starr" (Kyger 196). See References Literary > Kyger.

Spring 1964

Brautigan's story The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon was first published in the spring 1964 issue of Kulchur.

Brautigan quit his part-time job at Pacific Chemical and relocated to Bolinas, California, a small town across the bay and northwest of San Francisco, home to a significant colony of artists and writers. He lived in rent-free in an unfinished house on Dogwood Street. Brautigan worked part-time for friend Bill Brown who owned a landscaping business. He worked on his novels and wrote letters to editors around the country seeking publishing opportunities for his work.

Wednesday, 13 May 1964

According to the dedication included with the publication of the novel in 1968, Brautigan began writing In Watermelon Sugar in a house in Bolinas, California on this day. The house, under construction, unfinished, was located on Dogwood Street (see above).

Brautigan purchased a home in Bolinas in 1970. Several times from 1966-1968, before he bought his own house, Brautigan visited and stayed with writer and friend Bill Brown and his family according to Brown's son, Tony.

"Long before he moved to Bolinas, he would visit us at our home on the Mesa and if memory serves after all this time, he lived in our house for an extended period at least once. This would have been 1966-1968.

"I was in high school at that time and our home was in Bolinas, California. Bill Brown [the writer, and friend to Brautigan] was my father and my sister Maggie is married to Jim Koller.

"One my recollections/impressions of Richard is that while he wrote in what some of his critics called a random association loose sort of manner, he was very much a perfectionist when working on any task, including washing the dishes. Every fork tine was cleaned to perfection.

"One of the strongest memories I have is of a dark and stormy night. He and I were watching Gunsmoke in a smallish room that was somewhat overheated. Miss Kitty and Festus were struggling on foot across the desert, the buzzards circling above. Camera shots of the sun baking down and the shimmering sands. Time went on for awhile this way.

"Finally Richard yelled, 'I can't take it anymore!!!' threw open the window and stuck his head outside.

"When he closed the window and turned around, he was soaked from the rain, his moustache and hair drooping straight down from the soaking, glasses fogged. He got a huge smile on his face and said, 'That was a mistake.' We both started laughing.

"He read at a party I threw for a bunch of my friends, which was a very kind thing to do for us.

"I took a film class in my senior year of high school and was part of a small crew. We tried to make a short movie and Richard was in it at his home in San Francisco. I wish I knew what happened to that film.

"I think out of all the writers and poets I have met over the years, Richard was and remains my favorite person out of that group. Possibly because we would do things like stay up late, sitting in the kitchen and inventing things that might be found living in the chest freezer."
— Tony Brown, email to John F. Barber, 20 October 2005.

June 1964

Brautigan met Janice Meissner.

Sunday, 19 July 1964

Brautigan finished the first draft of In Watermelon Sugar, typing the dedication page.

November 1964

Brautigan left 123 Beaver Street, and moved in with Janice Meissner at her apartment (number 4) at 533 Divisadero Street.

During the national elections, Brautigan voted for Lyndon Johnson, thinking he would end the war in Vietnam. Instead, Johnson escalated the war. Brautigan felt betrayed and never voted again, refusing to take a political stance for the rest of his life.

Christmas 1964

Brautigan composed and sent a Christmas card to his friends. At the top of the card he wrote a poem,
"All the flowers
that Christmas bring
grow again . . .
grow again . . .
in the houses
where we live."

Below the poem Brautigan drew a house with smoke curving out of the chimney. Inside the house, he wrote "Merry Christmas." Above the chimney smoke he wrote the date, 1964. At the bottom of the page, he wrote his name, and that of Janice Meissner.

1965

Highlights: A Confederate General from Big Sur released . . . Continues work on Trout Fishing in America.

Friday, 22 January 1965

Grove Press sponsored a publication party and reading to celebrate the release of A Confederate General from Big Sur. The 8:30 PM reading was held at the California Club, 1750 Clay Street, San Francisco. A reception followed, 10:00 PM-midnight, at the Tape Music Center, 321 Divisadero Street. The 4" x 9" invitations were printed on textured, deckle-edge stock and included small illustrations.

Sales for A Confederate General from Big Sur were disappointing and Grove Press held off publishing Trout Fishing in America. They rejected Brautigan's two remaining contracted novels, In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion as Brautigan presented them and allowed their contract for Trout Fishing in America to expire in July 1966. Grove Press did, however, keep A Confederate General from Big Sur alive in small editions, which Brautigan resented.

With no publishing contract, Brautigan once again faced poverty. He worked odd jobs, borrowed money from friends, and sold copies of Lay the Marble Tea and The Octopus Frontier on consignment at City Lights Books. With no other economic skills, and no contact with society other than the San Franciso writing community, Brautigan focused on succeeding as a writer.

San Francisco's psychedelic scene was just beginning and the increased media attention focused on LSD, the hippies and happenings in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the Summer of Love (summer 1967) helped him realize this dream.

March 1965

Brautigan lived at 2830 California Street, just off Divisadero (Polk County Directory), with Janice Meissner.

Brian Nation lived four blocks from Brautigan and Meissner on Californina Street. He spent time with each and made a photograph of Meissner, which he describes in an email message

"In Detroit John Sinclair introduced me to Trout Fishing in America. Later that year I was in San Francisco. Dan McLeod introduced me to Joanne Kyger whom I later visited on occasion. I believe she was still married to—although separated from—Gary Snyder. At Joanne's apartment at 2921 Pine Street I met Ken Botto whose film I'd seen just days earlier. Botto shared an apartment at 2450 California Street with Jim O'Neill. Jim lived mostly with his girlfriend, so I moved in to his room. At Joanne's another time I met Richard Brautigan. The Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library was just a few blocks away at 3150 Sacramento Street. I visited the library regularly for reading material and also because the librarian was yet another in a series of very beautiful women I secretly pined for. On one visit I was checking out Confederate General from Big Sur. She mentioned that she loved Brautigan's writing. Suddenly there was Brautigan. I introduced them. Another magical confluence of romance, ideas, and events. Brautigan invited me back to his place, also in the neighborhood, four blocks from Botto's at 2830 California Street. There I met his girlfriend whose name I can't recall but which might have been Janice. I fell in love with her in an instant. I was 21, utterly single, and falling in love all over the damn place. Janice, Richard, and I became friends. Now and then I'd go by their place and we'd play Monopoly. Monopoly became a significant, recurring game during that particular time in San Francisco. And later, of course, Brautigan became a significant and very popular author for a couple of decades. Janice visited me once in a while, with or without Richard. One day I told her she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life and asked to photograph her. We crossed the street to an empty lot where she stood before a wall and I ran off about half a dozen shots. Later I discovered the film had stuck in the camera so that every photograph, plus others I took later, were all exposed on a single frame. I discovered this months later, back in Vancouver [British Columbia, Canada] when I managed to find a darkroom and it was too late to take more pictures of Janice. The negative was almost solid black in that spot but, determined to salvage even the ghostliest image of Janice, I exposed the photo paper for almost five minutes and this is all the evidence that remains of Janice."
— Brian Nation, email to John F. Barber, ***.

See also Nation's "Beat the Devil" website.

April 1965

Brautigan's poem "October 2, 1960" first published in April 1965 issue of San Francisco Keeper's Voice. See Poetry Uncollected > 1965 > poem title.

Saturday, 3 July and Saturday, 10 July 1965: Buzz Gallery

Brautigan read the newly-completed manuscript of his novel In Watermelon Sugar at the Buzz Gallery, 1711 Buchanan Street, San Francisco, California. He read the first half the evening of 3 July, the second half 10 July. In Watermelon Sugar was not published until 1968.

Buzz Gallery was an artist commune founded 21 June 1964 by Paul Alexander, Bill Brodecky, and Larry Fagin. Planned to remain open only one year, Buzz Gallery closed following the show by Jack Boyce, 19-20 February 1966. During its short tenure, Buzz provided a gallery where young San Francisco artists could show their work.

Joanne Kyger, in her essay "I Remember Richard Brautigan," writes, "I remember Richard reading his newly finished manuscript of In Watermelon Sugar in two parts over at Buzz Gallery on Buchanan Street, Saturday, July 3, and July 10. Tom Parkinson laughed in all the wrong places. The novel was dedicated to Don Allen, Michael McClure, and me. This was during the famous Berkeley Poetry Conference, July 12-24, 1965. It was a great fermenting stew of poets arriving. Richard was not a part of that" (Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. McFarland, 2006, p. 142.). See References > Studies > Barber.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference featured Charles Olsen, John Weiners, Gary Snyder, Edward Dorn, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, and Warren and Ellen Tallman, among others.

Bill Brodecky Moore, a San Francisco artist and one of the original founders of Buzz Gallery, in a brief history of the gallery, also recalls Brautigan's reading. "Richard Brautigan also packed the place with his reading of In Watermelon Sugar. I complimented him effusively afterward, even though I thought the book less good and more stylized than Trout Fishing in America, which I had thought dry and too deliberately droll when he read it in a Mission District former church (at which [Jack] Spicer, who had been a close adviser, was present, proving that his geographic rules were spotty). [Spicer felt that members of the poetry scene in North Beach never went west of Van Ness or south of California Street]."

Online Resources
Moore's monograph Buzz Gallery 1964-1965, published in Big Bridge (vol. 3, no. 1), a webzine of poetry.

Writer David Kherdian recalls drinking and playing pool with other unknown writers, including Brautigan, at Vesuvio, the bohemian bar facing the alley that separated Discovery Books and City Lights Books. Perhaps, however, Kheridan is confusing Vesuvio, which by all accounts never had a pool table, with Mike's other local bar where writers and others gathered to drink, talk, and play pool. Kheridan was writing Six San Francisco Poets (Fresno, CA: Giligia Press, 1969) and considered including Brautigan "in my book but disqualified him on the basis of his poems, that seemed to me minimal at best—but we had long, involved talks about [William] Saroyan, whose work he admired as much as I did. (Kherdian 269). See References > Literary > Kherdian.

Kherdian expressed his feelings further in this poem, "Lately Richard Brautigan Isn't Enough," published in 1969.
In Dundee
     orange marmalade
     comes in a jar
handsome enough to hold
     pencils & letteropeners
     and other nice things.
And I should mention
     Croydom, too, his partner.
They established it in 1797
(David Kherdian. The Sage, no. 12, Oct. 1969, p. 13)

Saturday, 23 October 1965

Brautigan and Janice Meissner hosted a Halloween party at their shared apartment, 2830 California Street, San Francisco, which was attended by all the royalty of San Francisco counterculture. Michael and Joanna McClure attended, as did Joanne Kyger and Jack Boyce, John and Margot Doss, and Erik and Lois Weber. Elvin Bishop, then a drummer for the John Coltrane Quartet, was there. Don Allen stopped by, just back from his trip to New Mexico to visit with Robert Creeley. The surprise guests were The Fugs, a legendary, underground punk band from New York City, in town to play at Appeal I, a benefit concert for the Mime Troupe, held early November at the Calliope Warehouse (aka, "The Loft") at 924 Howard Street. Banjo player Sandy Bull and The Jefferson Airplane also performed, as did poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The invitation, titled "You Are Invited to Become a Costume Party," was a computer punch card with the date and time ("Sat. Oct. 23 8:30 PM"), the address ("2830 Calif. St.), and the host names ("Richard Brautigan, Janice") handwritten by Brautigan.

Sunday, 5 December 1965

Brautigan posed with Beat poets and artists for a photograph by Larry Keenan in front of City Lights Books in San Francisco. The photograph is called variously "The Last Gathering" or "Poets at the City Lights Bookstore." According to Keenan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wanted to document the 1965 Beat scene in San Francisco in the spirit of early 20th Century photographs of Bohemian artists and writers in Paris. So, he gathered as many as possible in front of his bookstore and Keenan took the photograph titled "The Last Gathering of Beat Poets & Artists, City Lights Books." Brautigan is seen right of center, wearing a white hat. The original photograph was horizontal and showed the entire front of City Lights Books and a larger gathering of Beat poets and writers. The image shown here was cropped by Keenan from the original horizontal photograph and does not show all the Beats gathered.

An alternative photograph by Keenan includes, front row left to right: Robert LaVigne, Shigeyoshi (Shig) Murao, Larry Fagin, Leland Meyezove (lying down), Lew Welch, Peter Orlovsky. Second row: David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Daniel Langton, Steve (friend of Ginsberg), Richard Brautigan (wearing white hat), Gary Goodrow, Nemi Frost. Back row: Stella Levy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

In another alternative photograph by Keenan, Brautigan is seen in the back, wearing the white hat.

Keenan's photograph was first published on the front cover of City Lights Journal, issue 3 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1966). Brautigan made no literary contribution to this issue. The photograph in its original format is rarely seen.

The photograph was republished several times after that. One example is the front cover of Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems by Michael McClure (New York: Penguin, 1999).

This book reprints two books of poetry by McClure long out of print, The New Book and A Book of Torture and Star. These books are considered by some to represent the cornerstones of the Beat movement. Their poems impart a sense of the rich texture and individuality that fueled the San Francisco Beat movement.

December 1965

Brautigan sent a Christmas card to Donald Allen. The card, certainly picked by Brautigan to raise questions, featured a picture of a near-naked, tattooed blond female seen from the rear, her legs wrapped in a Nazi flag. The tattoo read, "Property of Satan's Slaves." On the inside, Brautigan wrote "Merry California Christmas!" and signed "Richard and Janice" [Meissner].

1966

Highlights: Summer of Love begins . . . Gets involved with the Diggers.

January 1966

Brautigan lived at 2830 California Street (Polk County Directory)

Saturday, 26 March 1966

Brautigan took a one-day trip to Tijuana, Mexico, a city known in 1966 for offering several clinics where one could undergo procedures for terminating unwanted pregnancies. Brautigan was researching ideas for a new novel with abortion as central to its plot. The working title was The American Experience by Richard Brautigan. Brautigan began on this new novel in November 1965. The notes Brautigan recorded during his Tijuana trip were included in the novel which became known as The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966.

May 1966

Brautigan read "Revenge of the Lawn" and other examples of his work at the Rhymers Club, Wheeler Hall, University of California Berkeley. His story, The Pretty Office was first published in the second issue of the club's mimeographed magazine, R.C. Lion.

Four days after his reading in Berkeley, Brautigan broke up with Janice Meissner, moved out of her 2830 California Street apartment and into one rented by Andrew Hoyem at 1652 Fell Street. Six weeks after moving in with Hoyem, Brautigan finished his first draft of The Abortion.

Sunday, 31 July 1966

The option held by Grove Press to publish Brautigan's novel The Abortion expired.

Wednesday, 24 August 1966

Brautigan terminated business relationships with Grove Press. He wrote to Barney Rossett, noting that "Grove's lack of interest in honoring the thirty-day decision paragraph in its December 3, 1965 letter to me has forced me to seek another publisher for my work."

August 1966

Brautigan's story The Menu/1965 was first published in the August 1966 issue of Evergreen Review. It was collected in The Tokyo-Montana Express in 1980.

December 1966

Brautigan's poems "The House," "My Nose is Growing Old," and "November 3," were published in the December 1966 issue of O'er. In addition, this issue also featured a full-page advertisement for The Galilee Hitch-Hiker to be published by Oar, complete with made up blurbs promoting the book.

Tuesday, 20 December 1966

Brautigan gave two poetry readings (9:00 and 11:00 PM) at The Coffee Gallery, (formerly Miss Smith's Tea Room which closed in 1958), 1353 Grant Avenue, in San Francisco's North Beach. Sharing the bill were William Fritsch (aka Sweet Willie Tumbleweed), Allen Dienstag, and Andrew Hoyem.

1967

Highlights: Poet in residence at California Institute of Technology . . . Involved with The Invisible Circus, a Digger event . . . Participates in the Bedrock One, a benefit for the Communication Company . . . Participates in several poetry readings . . . Trout Fishing in America published . . . All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace published.

Wednesday, 4 January 1967

Brautigan participated with David Sandberg and Jeff Sheppard in a poetry reading at the I/Thou Coffee Shop, 1736 Haight Street.

Friday, 13 January 1967

Brautigan attended a party hosted by Andrew Hoyem at his Fell Street apartment. Hoyem called his party "Meet My Television Set." Allegedly, Brautigan removed all his clothes save his bead necklaces and his hat.

Sunday, 15 January 1967

Brautigan left San Francisco with Andrew Hoyem who drove them to the California Institute of Technology campus in Los Angeles. Brautigan and Hoyem were to be poets-in-residence for the following ten days. Arriving at night, Brautigan and Hoyem were housed in the guest suite at Ricketts House on the Cal Tech campus where they enjoyed a late night party.

Tuesday-Saturday, 17-26 January 1967: Poet-in-Residence, California Institute of Technology

Brautigan and San Francisco poet Andrew Hoyem stayed on the California Institute of Technology campus in Pasadena, California, during this ten-day period. They lived in the guest suite at Ricketts House. This was the first of Brautigan's teaching experiences. The invitation came from John F. Crawford, instructor in the English Department who was working with Hoyem to publish a new translation of the Middle English poem Pearl.

Crawford wrote a short essay, titled "Poets in Transit," about Brautigan and Hoyem visiting the California Institute of Technology, which was published in Engineering and Science, February 1967. READ this essay.

During his time at Cal Tech, Brautigan wrote the poem At the California Institute of Technology, which was first published in the May 1967 issue of the school's literary magazine, Totem. He also wrote Fisherman's Lake and Mammal Fortress, two poems, both for Michaela Blake-Grand. Neither were ever collected or published. Additionally, he wrote Blake-Grand three times during his residency at Cal Tech.

Following the conclusion of their residency, Brautigan and Hoyem visited with physicist Richard Feynman whose work with quantum electrodynamics had won the Nobel Prize two years earlier. Additionally, they spent time in Hollywood where Brautigan wrote a poem (never published) entitled "Hollywood" in which he noted lonely men taking out the trash along a residential street overlooked by the famous Hollywood sign.

Saturday, 28 January 1967

Brautigan, with Morgan, and Andrew Hoyem attended a poet's party at the home of Jack and Vicki Shoemaker. Later, Morgan visited Brautigan in San Francisco, and Brautigan visited Morgan in Santa Barbara and exchanged a series of letters. See Non-Fiction > Letters > Susan Morgan.

Feedback from Susan Morgan
"In 1967 I was a sophomore at UCSB [University of California-Santa Barbara]. I had a very laid-back job as a baby-sitter for a guy [Jack Shoemaker] who managed the Unicorn Book Shop in Isla Vista, an enclave next to UC Santa Barbara housing inhabited mainly by students. The Unicorn was just a few blocks from campus in Isla Vista. One night, mid-January after I had returned from Xmas break, Richard Brautigan and Andrew Hoyem and maybe Lew Welch were at Jack's house when I arrived to baby-sit. They were doing a reading that night at the Unicorn. We chatted a little.

"After the reading the poets returned to see if I wanted to join them on a trip up to the Gaviota Hot Springs. We all headed up there in a VW MiniVan smoking weed and Richard played the finger cymbals and chanted. Richard did not smoke. It was a magical night with a full moon in the amazing hot pool in an opening in the woods with bats swooping over our heads. Andrew wrote a poem about it.

"I had vaguely heard of Richard. I thought he was quirky and interesting. Physically he was none too attractive, but he was charming. I think I brought him home to my apartment with me that night and then he started writing me and inviting me to visit him in the City. He came down to Isla Vista again several more times. Once he came to meet with Basil Bunting, who was poet in residence at UCSB.

"On one of my several visits to SF to see Richard he took me to a thrift shop off Fillmore near Union. I bought a lovely lavender satin dressing gown from the 1930's or '40's for $1.45 which I wore often. When he arranged for his neighbor Erik [Weber] to photograph the two of us that is what I was wearing. The photos (there is one of me alone too) were certainly not flattering of me. Richard liked to drink and at that time I was not a drinker at all. I had had a couple of glasses of wine the night before and was feeling horribly hung over. We had had dinner with, I think it was, Ron Loewenstein over in Berkeley. Even though Richard didn't drive we managed to get around lots of places. He was very restless and seemed to want to be constantly active and on the go. I was used to sitting around smoking dope and listening to music for hours on end, so it was always exciting to be with Richard. He introduced me to Michael McClure, took me to meet Free Wheelin' Frank (who wasn't home), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lenore Kandel.

"Richard took me to Lyle Tuttle to get a tatto, which at the time was quite rare thing for a woman.

"I was friends with him from early 1967 through about June when he was really getting famous and I felt he was getting too full of himself. He came down to Isla Vista and could not stop talking about all his glorious achievements. Previously he had been a humble, quirky, all too human character. I couldn't take the bragging and gave him the cold shoulder.

"I saw him the next year at a poetry reading and we were cordial and exchanged another letter.

"Then in 1968 or 1969, when I was living in Bolinas, I ran into Richard who was with a real estate agent one day. I greeted him warmly and he pretended not to recognize me. It was really bizarre and insulting. I don't know what that was about. But it changed my feelings about Richard and seemed a natural progression of the bloated ego he had exhibited in June of 1967.
— Althea Susan Morgan. Email to John F. Barber, 4 December 2005.

Brautigan and Morgan visited each other frequently. While visiting Morgan in Santa Barbara, California, Brautigan wrote the poem "The Sitting Here, Standing Here Poem" for Morgan, who recounts the poem's genesis. See Poetry > Uncollected > 1967 > poem title.

February 1967

Brautigan's novel A Confederate General from Big Sur was translated and published in Italy.

March 1967

During one of Susan Morgan's visits with Brautigan in San Francisco, Erik Weber photographed the couple in Brautigan's Geary Street apartment. The photograph was intended for use on the front cover of a possible future book. The book never materialized.

mid-March 1967

Brautigan's collection of poetry, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace was first published by the Communication Company in two different single-sheet formats, each intended for free distribution. Brautigan drew the idea of giving away his poetry from the Diggers, whose public street theater practice of giving away things he admired.

Brautigan arranged for the photograph he wanted to include on the front cover of his anticipated novel, Trout Fishing in America. He gathered Michaela Blake-Grand and Erik Weber in Weber's kitchen where Brautigan posed leaning against the refrigerator and Clark sat on a small stool, built in the furniture workshop of Clayton Lewis, to one side. Unhappy with the pose, Weber suggested they move to Washington Square. Here, posed with the statue of Benjamin Franklin behind, Brautigan standing and Clark again seated on the stool, Weber took the photograph used on the front cover of Brautigan's best known novel, and defined an era.

Friday, 24 March 1967

During a visit by Susan Morgan to Brautigan in San Francisco Brautigan wrote and dedicated to her the poem "Albion Breakfast".

Wednesday, 5 April 1967

Gray Line Bus Company began offering "San Francisco Haight-Ashbury District 'Hippie Hop' Tours" which they advertised as "the only foreign tour within the continential limits of the United States." The "Hashberry," as Gray Line called it, was world famous, as were the street theater antics of the people, the hippies, who lived there. The "Hippie Hop" tours were designed to give tourists a look and feel of the place. Monday through Friday, two buses a day followed a two-hour tour route from downtown San Francisco hotels through the Haight-Ashbury district. Tourists were given a "Glossary of Hippie Terms." By April, residents of Haight-Ashbury saw little interest in being subjects of such tours. Buses were met by Diggers and others who turned broken mirrors on the tourists, turning back a reflection of the gawkers' curiosity. "Novelist Richard Brautigan ambled about the streets carrying a mirror that he held out before likely looking tourists, exclaiming, 'Know thyself!'" (Gene Anthony 27). Anthony photographed Brautigan, mirror in hand, confronting tourists. After five weeks, on Monday, 15 May, Gray Line cancelled "The Hippie Hop" tour, citing traffic congestion in the Haight-Ashbury area (Charles Perry 171, 178, 193).

Thursday, 13 April 1967

Brautigan participated in the Joyful Alternative Peace Poet's Dance, 8:00 PM - 2:00 AM, at California Hall, 425 Polk Street, San Francisco, a large building owned by the German-American Association. This event was part of the lead up to the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam demonstration on 15 April 1967.

The Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, or Spring Mobe, or Angry Arts Week, was part of a nationwide protest against the war in Vietnam organized in November 1966 to sponsor antiwar demonstrations in the spring of 1967. Two mass demonstrations were planned: one in New York City, the other in San Francisco. On 15 April 1967 more than 125,000 people marched against the war in New York. In San Francisco, 60,000 people demonstrated. Up until this time, the Spring Mobilization was the largest ever antiwar demonstration.

The 13" x 19.5" promotional poster features a psychedelic illustration of a human head composed of the participant's names printed in blue ink, and a reproduction of book cover art by poet Kenneth Patchen on orange-red paper. The event is noted as "preperation" [sic] for the "giant march" scheduled for 15 April 1967.

The participants (in order of appearance on the poster) include Kenneth Patchen, Lew Welch, Charles Upton, Lenore Kandel (in absence), Robert Duncan, David Meltzer, Tom Parkinson, George Stanley, James Broughton with Joel Anderson on harp, Jeff Sheppard, Richard Brautigan, County Joe and The Fish, and Serpent Prowler. A light show was also scheduled.

Wednesday, 19 April 1967

Brautigan invited to attend a Reception Honoring Bay Area Writers by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

mid-May 1967

Brautigan participated in a three-day Writer's Conference sponsored by San Francisco State University at Camp Loma Mar in Pascadero, north of Santa Cruz, California. Over fifty writers were invited to participate including Stephen Schneck, Herbert Gold, Don Carpenter, James Broughton, Thomas Sanchez, George Hitchcock, Lester Cole, Lawrence Fixel, Lenore Kandel, Janine Pommy Vega, William (Bill) Fritsch (aka Sweet Willie Tumbleweed), and Stan and Anne Rice.

June 1967

A columnist who wrote about city walking tours for the San Francisco Chronicle visited "Hippie Hill," a small hill in Golden Gate State Park and a favorite spot to watch the gathering young people. Brautigan acted as her guide and asked her to point out the quiteness and color of the area (Charles Perry 199).

Sunday, 20 August 1967

Erik Weber and his wife Lois left San Francisco, bound for India. Prior to his departure, Weber took a photograph of Brautigan in the garden behind his Gerry Street apartment. The color photograph shows Brautigan, wearing a Navy peacoat and hat holding a yellow jonquil. Weber's photograph was used on the front cover of The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

Needing a photographer, Brautigan turned to Edmund Shea whom he had known for quite some time. Shea, a professional photographer, produced the photographs that appeared on the covers of several of Brautigan's books.

September 1967

Members of the band Mad River moved from Berkeley to San Francisco, California, to an apartment on Oak Street, overlooking the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. (They moved back to Berkeley in early 1968.) Brautigan, who knew the band, frequently visited their apartment. The band's second record album, "Paradise Bar and Grill," featured Brautigan reciting his poem, "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend."

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace published, first as a broadside then as a pamphlet of thirty-three poems by the Communication Company. Brautigan "gave" this poem to the Diggers. It was included in The Digger Papers.

At the end of September, the first copies of Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America were released. Trout Fishing in America was the first of three Brautigan novels and one poetry collection published by Donald Merriam Allen (1912-2004) and his nonprofit press, Four Seasons Foundation. Early, favorable reviews by Herb Cohen and Don Carpenter hailed Brautigan as a fresh new voice in American literature.

Thursday and Friday, 19 and 20 October 1967

Brautigan read his newly-published Trout Fishing in America in its entirety at the Unicorn Book Shop, 905 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, California. Two separate readings were offered. Brautigan read the first half of his novel on Thursday, 19 October and the second half on Friday, 20 October. The silk screen poster (24" x 18") by Chuck Miller, friend to Jack Shoemaker, owner of the Unicorn Book Shop, announcing the event printed an illustration of Brautigan and text in black on a blue background. Miller was a noted poster artist of the period. Miller's work appears in The Art of Rock (Abbeville Press, 1999).

1968

Highlights: In Watermelon Sugar published . . . The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster published . . . Please Plant This Book published . . . Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Anthology Program grant.

Monday, 26 February 1968

Brautigan participated in a poetry reading at the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, 330 Ellis Street at Taylor.

The event, called "Affirming the World Is the Thing," was designed to raise money for "A.F.T. strike fund" (American Federation of Teachers and "student strike fund" (San Fransisco State University).

The 13" x 19.5" silkscreened promotional poster featured heliotrope and olive green graphics and print on a heavy, cream-colored papers.

The twelve advertised poets included (in their order of appearance on the poster) John Logan, Joshua Bunce, Thom Gunn, Bill Anderson, Richard Brautigan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Muriel Rukeyser, Denis Levertov, Michael McClure, Kay Boyle, Robert Duncan, and Dennis Beall. Also present was Elizabeth Bishop, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former Poet Laureate of the United States.

Brautigan read the following poems:
Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt
A Witch and a 6 Pack of Double Century Ale
Chosen by Beauty to Be a Handmaiden of the Stars
Nice Ass
Wood
Critical Can Opener
She Sleeps This Very Evening in Greenbrook Castle
30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love
Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses on the Wind
Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist
In Her Sweetness Where She Folds My Wounds
Feasting and Drinking Went on Far into the Night (with false start; laughs and says "Cut," "Take Two," and then begins reading again)
The Net Wt. of Winter Is 6.75 Ozs.
Deer Tracks

Biographer Brett C. Millier provides the following account of Bishop's participation.
"She read twice in San Francisco, once at the Museum of Modern Art and once at Glide Memorial, the so-called hippy church, in a benefit for striking teachers at San Francisco State University. Elizabeth said she did the reading out of curiosity rather than political commitment; she had never seen Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, Kay Boyle or any of the other famous San Francisco poets and wanted to know what they were like. She smoked a little marijuana at the reading and decided she liked Brautigan, but 'in general, I'm afraid, I'm just a member of the eastern establishment of everyone here and definitely passé. I don't mind. I thought that Thom [Gunn]'s poems and mine were the best!—the rest were propaganda that takes me back to my college days and the WPA theatre and so on—propaganda, or reportage of all-too-familiar events'" (Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. University of California Press, 1993, pp. 412-413.)

When Bishop attended/participated in this reading she was living in San Francisco, 1559 Pacific Avenue, with Suzanne Bowen. Bishop lived in San Francisco from 1968 to 1970. (Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. 399-431.)

Bishop Referenced
Xiaojing, Zhou. "The Oblique, The Indirect Approach": Elizabeth Bishop's "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics." Chicago Review 40(4) Fall 1994: 75-92.
Reviews Elizabeth Bishop's prose poem "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" as the poet's response to the excesses of confessional poetry. Notes Millier's discussion of Bishop's two visits to San Francisco in 1968 (79).

Feedback from Ken Keiran
"Thanks to eBay I've got a mono half track reel to reel recording from February 1968 at the Glide Memorial Auditorium in San Fransisco. It not only has Brautigan, but also Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other poets reading for a benefit for the American Federation of Teachers Strike Fund and The San Fransisco State and Student Bail Funds. Richard's portion is about 10 minutes long."
— Ken Keiran. Email to John F. Barber, 10 July 2008.

March 1968

Please Plant This Book published by Graham Mackintosh. Given away free, this "book" was a folder containing eight seed packets, each containing seeds, with poems printed on the sides.

May-June(?) 1968

Brautigan allegedly on the guest list for a party honoring Charles Slack, a former Harvard University colleague of Timothy Leary, at Leary's house, 1230 Queens Road, in Berkeley, California. (Greenfield, Robert. Timothy Leary: A Biography. Harcourt, 2006, p. 337)

May 1968

Brautigan wrote a short story "An Apartment on Telegraph Hill" in which the narrator (a thinly disguised Brautigan himself) dreamed of having a girlfriend with a nice apartment on Telegraph Hill, in North Beach. The story remains unpublished. See Stories > Unpublished > 1968 > story title.

Brautigan's story seems to come true when he met Valerie Estes, who invited him to read his work at an art festival in Washington Square Park, planned by KQED radio in San Francisco. Brautigan did not participate in the festival, but he and Estes quickly began a relationship and Brautigan moved into her apartment on Kearny Street, in North Beach, on the slope of Telegraph Hill.

Feedback from V. Vale,
"In my younger years I slightly knew Richard Brautigan, mainly because I worked as a clerk at the front cash register cockpit at City Lights Books. I also managed a small apartment building in North Beach (where Philip Lamantia lived, above me) and Valerie Estes lived next door to me. Valerie and Richard began "dating" some time in 1967. I once went with Richard and Valerie to Marin County's Mount Tamalpais (he loved the acacia trees in bloom—bright yellow) . . ."
— V. Vale. Email to John F. Barber, 17 January 2006.

V. Vale (originally Vale Hamanaka) was the organ player for the first iteration of Blue Cheer, a San Francisco rock band of the era. Rock music legend notes that Hamanaka and Blue Cheer parted company when, after seeing Jimi Hendrix perform at the Monterey Pop Festival, band members Leigh Stephens, Dickie Peterson, and his brother, Jerry, decided to move the band toward a heavy power blues sound. Vale founded the magazine Search & Destroy in 1977 with a $200.00 donation from Allen Ginsburg to document the then current punk music subculture. In 1980 he founded RE/Search Publications which has published a variety of magazines and books focusing on modern primatives and other underground topics. Vale currently works as editor and publisher for his RE/Search imprint and frequently contributes to other publications.

The apartment building Vale describes was located at 1427 (now 1429) Kearny Street. Vale lived in the apartment building with his girlfriend of the time, Thea, an artist who made a couch in the shape of a giant pair of red lips. In addition to Lamantia, the building was also home to Nancy Peters of City Lights and other North Beach notables. The building is noted in The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour (Bill Morgan. City Lights Books, 2003, p. 16).

Estes says she met Brautigan in the June 1968 (not 1967 as according to Vale) when she interviewed him as a potential participant in an arts program she was organizing. They became involved soon after. She and Brautigan lived together in her Kearny Street apartment off and on until they ended their relationship in 1970. Brautigan kept his Geary Street apartment throughout, and sometimes lived there.

Monday, 10 June 1968

Brautigan participated in a poetry reading at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, 330 Ellis Street at Taylor, and Brautigan read poetry along with James Koller, Robert Dawson, Patrick Gleeson, Joel Waldman, Michael McClure, and Daniel Moore.

June 1968

Brautigan received an invitation from William P. Wreden, a San Francisco rare book and manuscript dealer, to write an introduction for the diary of a cross-country journey by Joseph Francl to the California gold fields. Wreden planned to published in a limited edition the 114-year old manuscript. Brautigan's accepted the invitation, and his introduction The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska was included in The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl: The First Bohemian to Cross the Plains to the California Gold Fields, published December 1968. The essay was collected and republished in The Tokyo-Montana Express.

Brautigan received an invitation from Gordon Ray, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, inviting him to apply for a Fellowship. Brautigan was nominated by Josephine Miles, professor of English at University of California Berkeley. Brautigan submitted his application in the fall 1968. He listed Miles, Kay Boyle, Herb Gold, and Stephen Schneck as his references. Brautigan completed and submitted the application for this, his second, application for the Guggenheim Fellowship. For his proposed project, Brautigan wrote, "I would like to finish a book of short stories." The summary of his education read, "I have no education that can be listed here." As for his career, Brautigan wrote, " . . . it doesn't seem like a career to me at all. It's just what I do with my life and what I choose to write about and what happens then." In conclusion, Brautigan noted his greatest satisfaction was "writing and putting together 5,000 copies of a book of poems printed on seed packets. The book is called Please Plant This Book, and it was given away free. There are now thousands of gardens growing from this book, and that pleases me."

Summer 1968

Brautigan appeared briefly in the Digger film, Nowsreal. See Screenplays > Appearances > 1968 > Nowsreal.

Monday, 5 August 1968

Brautigan applied for, and received, a California fishing license. His stated address was 2546 Geary Street, San Francisco, California.

October 1968

Brautigan wrote the poem "The First Lady of Purple" which he dedicated to Valerie Estes. The poem remains unpublished. See Poetry > Unpublished > poem title.

Brautigan was contacted by Barry Miles on behalf of Apple Records, asking if he were interested in working on a spoken word album. Brautigan responded that he was very interested and offered to provide a tape of himself reading his poem, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. The eventual outcome of this initial contact was the release of Brautigan's record album, Listening to Richard Brautigan.

December 1968

Brautigan's story What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees? was first published in the December 1968 issue of Evergreen Review. The story was illustrated with photographs by Erik Weber.

Inspired by an obituary in a September 1968 edition the San Francisco Examiner, Brautigan wrote the poem Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist which he self-published in an innovative publishing performance called The San Francisco Public Library: A Publishing House, 5 December 1968.

1969

Highlights: First collected works published . . . Participates in poetry readings and conferences . . . Nineteen stories appeared in Rolling Stone magazine . . . Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

Thursday, 30 January 1969

Brautigan shared the same birthday with V. Vale, who lived in the same apartment building as Valerie Estes. They all agreed on a shared birthday party, with guests free to wander between their apartments. Janis Joplin, Bill Brown, Lew Welch, Emmett Grogan, Dr. John Doss, and many others attended.

Feedback from V. Vale
"Richard and I shared the same birthday party in the year 1969. Janis Joplin attended and got very drunk. Richard used to come to City Lights fairly often and tell me about the latest movie he'd seen, usually at a 99 cent theater on Market Street. I can only recall The Drowning Pool and, Where's Poppa? He liked them best."
— V. Vale. Email to John F. Barber, 17 January 2006.

Feedback from Valerie Estes
"When I met Richard, I was living at what is now 1429 Kearny Street, Apartment 1. (At that time, it was 1427 Kearny Street. The numbering was changed when the building was remodeled around 1970.) Another tenant of the building was the former keyboardist of the Blue Cheer rock group, V. Vale, who now runs RE/search Publications in North Beach with his wife Marian Wallace. Although Vale's apartment address was on Genoa Place, the alley to the west which parallels Kearny Street, we all lived in the same building in effect since our back doors all emptied into the central air shaft and garbage chute.

Though years apart in age, Richard and Vale shared a birthday, January 30, so we decided to have a joint birthday party. Basically, it was an open house, with people coming in from both Kearny and Genoa and wandering between the two apartments. Folks who came included Janis Joplin and Emmett Grogan of the Diggers. As was often true, Janis was drunk and looking for more Southern Comfort, and Emmett was trying to score heavy-duty dope. (Neither Richard nor I were into dope, not even marijuana. Alcohol was our drug of choice.)

I'm not sure that a good time was had by all.
— Valeries Estes. Email to John F. Barber, 5 February 2007.

February 1969

Brautigan participated in a poetry reading at the United Methodist Church, 892 Camio Del Sur, Isla Vista, California. The reading was sponsored by the Unicorn Book Shop, 905 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, California, near the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus. Jack Shoemaker managed the Unicorn and co-founded North Point Press, Counterpoint, and Shoemaker & Hoard. Shoemaker invited Brautigan to participate in the Spring Renaissance Faire, 7-10 April.

Brautigan was invited to conduct a two-week prose workshop and give one reading at the Creative Arts Conference, to be sponsored by the United States International University (California Western), in San Diego, in August. His contract offered a $1,200.00 fee, lodging, and discounted meals in the university dining hall.

Brautigan's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship was denied. This was his second application for the award. The first was in 1965.

Saturday, 15 February 1969

Brautigan's story I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone was first published in the 15 February 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

Thursday, 6 March 1969

During an evening of drinking with poet Gary Snyder, Brautigan wrote the poem Third Eye as an improvised Zen tribute to his friend.

Wednesday, 12 March 1969

Brautigan and Valerie Estes traveled together to Albuquerque, New Mexico. From there, Brautigan and Estes traveled to Santa Fe where they stayed with Bunny Conlon and her brother, Al Eylar.

Friday, 14 March 1969

Brautigan and Estes visited Acoma Pueblo.

Sunday, 16 March 1969

Brautigan and Estes were invited to lunch with author William Eastlake and his guest, Lucia Berlin. After lunch, Brautigan and Estes drove to Taos, New Mexico, where Brautigan wrote the poem All Girls Should Have a Poem and dedicated it to Estes.

Tuesday, 18 March 1969

Brautigan, Estes, and Conlon drove to Abiquiú, New Mexico, where Brautigan attempted to present Georgia O'Keeffe with a copy of his poetry collection Please Plant This Book. At an adobe O'Keeffe maintained, Brautigan gave a copy of the book to a woman who answered his knock at the front door, not knowing whether or not the woman was O'Keefe.

Friday, 21 March 1969

Brautigan and Estes returned to Albuquerque, and flew to Los Angeles. Brautigan met with George Osaki in the art department of Apple Records. Brautigan selected the photograph to appear on the record album cover and agreed to write a publicity release. Brautigan insisted on final approval of all details related to the production of the record album, Listening to Richard Brautigan.

Sunday, 23 March 1969

Brautigan and Estes traveled by train to Washington, D.C., where they stayed with Bunny Conlon in her home. They all toured the Civil War battlefields around Washington, D. C.

Tuesday, 25 March 1969

During the day, Brautigan and Estes visited Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and Walden Pond. That evening, Brautigan delivered a reading at The Quincy Poetry Forum at Harvard University's Quincy House Dining Hall, 8:30 PM. Admission was $1.00. The announcement for the reading was printed in black ink on a white, letter-sized piece of paper.

Brautigan's friend, poet Ron Loewinsohn, arranged the reading. Years later, Loewinsohn recalled the reading for Peter Manso and Michael McClure who coauthored an article in the May 1985 issue of Vanity Fair titled "Brautigan's Wake."

"RON LOEWINSOHN: He read at Harvard, and I introduced him at Quincy House [The Quincy Poetry Forum, Quincy House Dining Room, 25 March 1969, 8:30 PM] where he gave a fine, straight reading—poems, stories, chatted a little. Six months, a year later he came back, but by then he was so big, so famous, that there must have been seven hundred people in Lowell Lecture Hall. After reading for about fifteen minutes in a disdainful, contemptuous tone, he just quit. People came up to him for his autograph, and he'd tell them, 'Fuck off.'"

Brautigan's second reading at Harvard University was on Saturday, 22 November 1969. Jeffrey S. Golden attended the reading and had quite a different reaction than Loewinsohn. His review appeared in the Wednesday, 26 November 1969 issue of the The Harvard Crimson.

Thursday, 27 March 1969

Brautigan met with Helen Brann, his new literary agent, and his new publisher, Seymour Lawrence, who had won the auction arranged by Brann to publish Brautigan's books. There was no formal contract between Brann and Brautigan until she started her own agency, the Helen Brann Agency, in December 1973. As a representative of the Sterling Lord agency, she negotiated with Lawrence to publish Brautigan's first collected work, the hardback omnibus edition of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar. Brann asked for a $20,000 advance against royalties for Brautigan along with very generous royalties for sales of individual copies of his books. In the afternoon, Brautigan and Estes flew back to San Francisco, Brautigan's literary career apparently off to a tremendous start.

Monday 7 April 1969

Apparently, a bad day for Brautigan, judging from his poem April 7, 1969

Thursday 10 April 1969

Brautigan began a book reading tour at Cañada College, near Redwood City, California, south of San Francisco. He spent the morning in Palo Alto with Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman, both writers. Both were connected to Midpeninsula Free University, an experiment in alternative education near Stanford University. He gave permission for All Girls Should Have a Poem to be published in the semi-annual catalog of course offerings.

Brautigan gave a reading in the Cañada College auditorium in the afternoon. After the reading, he was driven to the airport for a flight to Santa Barbara, where he was scheduled to close The First Annual Spring Rennaissance Faire with a reading.

Brautigan participated in the Spring Renaissance Faire, Isla Vista, Goleta, California. The "faire" ran from Monday, 7 April-Thursday, 10 April 1969. Brautigan's reading was scheduled for 8:00 pm, Thursday, April 10 in the University Methodist Church, 892 Camio Del Sur, and was the faire's concluding event. Other San Francisco poets participating in the "faire" were Lew Welch, David Meltzer, Jack Shoemaker, Gary Snyder, and Brother Antoninus [William Everson]. The handbill announcing the schedule of events and participants was printed in black ink on purple stock.

Saturday, 19 April 1969

Brautigan's story The View from the Dog Tower was first published in the 19 April 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

Friday, 16 May 1969

Brautigan traveled from Durham, North Carolina, to Chicago, Illinois, where he was scheduled to deliver a reading the following day.

Thursday, 29 May 1969

Brautigan participated in the First Commencement Exercises at The Urban School of San Francisco, 2938 Washington Street. The event, held "On the hill, Alta Plaza Park Jackson between Steiner and Scott streets" honored the school's first seventeen graduates. Brautigan, noted as a "poet-author," delivered a reading as the second item on the program. Following the program there were refreshments and touch football.

Monday, 2 June 1969

Brautigan participated in a Poetry Reading Benefit for People's Park at California Hall, 425 Polk Street, San Francisco, a large building owned by the German-American Association, two blocks from the Civic Center.

Sunday, 20 July 1969

Watching the Apollo 11 moon landing with Valerie Estes and friends Fritzi and Michael Drooth, at their apartment, Brautigan was impressed by the television image of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin footprints in the lunar dust, the first ever on the moon's surface. He wrote the draft of the poem Jules Verne Zucchini in response, contrasting the lunar mission with starvation on Earth.

Saturday, 9 August 1969

Brautigan's story The Memory of a Girl was first published in the 9 August 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

Saturday, 6 September 1969

Brautigan's story Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning was first published in the 6 September 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

Friday-Sunday, 10-12 October 1969

Brautigan was a participating author at the College of Marin Writers' Conference, held at the College of Marin, Marin, California. The College of Marin was a small liberal arts college north of San Francisco. Also scheduled were Kay Boyle, Josephine L. Miles, Herbert Wilner, Jessamyn West, William Dickey, William Stafford, and Carolyn Kizer. Brautigan conducted a seminar, "On Writing," Saturday morning. That evening, at 8:00 PM, he read his work with Stafford and Miles. The program for the event was a letter-sized sheet sheet of green paper, folded in thirds, printed on both sides in green and white ink.

Friday, 31 October 1969

Brautigan's collection of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar was released by Delacorte Press. Brautigan was in Boston to help promote/celebrate the release of his first, and only, collected work.

While in Boston, Brautigan visited the Trout Fishing in America School, an experimental school spread among eight storefronts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded by Peter Miller, a student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Trout Fishing in America School offered courses in English, math, science, criminology, theories of revolution, motorcycle repair, and more. Tuition was $10.00 per month. Students could earn a high school diploma in learning environments far different from formal academic programs.

Saturday, 22 November 1969

Brautigan gave a poetry reading in Lowell Lecture Hall, Harvard University. John Stickney included a description of this Harvard reading in his essay "Gentle Poet of the Young: A Cult Grows around Richard Brautigan." See References Studies > Stickney.

Peter Miller and several students from the Trout Fishing in America School attended the reading, along with students from Harvard. After a short reading of his work, Brautigan invited the audience to share their own readings.

Jeffrey S. Golden was present at Brautigan's reading and wrote a review for the The Harvard Crimson titled "Richard Brautigan On Saturday Night." READ this review.

Monday, 1 December 1969

Brautigan returned to San Francisco from Boston.

Saturday, 13 December 1969

Brautigan's stories A High Building in Singapore and Ernest Hemingway's Typist were first published in the 13 December 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

1970

Highlights: Participates in poetry readings . . . Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt published . . . Records Listening to Richard Brautigan . . . Divorces Virginia Dionne Alder.

Tuesday, 13 January 1970

Brautigan files petition seeking divorce from Virginia Dionne Alder. Brautigan and Alder married 8 June 1957, in Reno, Nevada. They separated Christmas Eve, 24 December 1962 in San Francisco, California. An interlocutory judgement was issued 17 February 1970; the final judgement 27 July 1970. The divorce petition was served by Valerie Estes (she and Brautigan were involved since June 1968) to Alder, who lived at this time with Tony Aste and their children at 17410 Arnold Drive, Sonoma, California.

Wednesday, 4 February 1970

Brautigan participated in a poetry reading and reception in Losekamp Hall at Rocky Mountain College, Billings, Montana.

March 1970

Brautigan's story The Betrayed Kingdom was first published in the March 1970 issue of Evergreen Review. It was collected in Revenge of the Lawn (1971).

Brautigan traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, to approve, with literary agent Helen Brann and publisher Sam Lawrence, details for the forthcoming publication of Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt. He visited the Trout Fishing in America School in Cambridge, staying with founder Peter Miller and his girlfriend Kat.

Tuesday, 28 April 1970

Brautigan began a series of nineteen poetry readings at California colleges as part of a spring tour arranged by the California Poetry Reading Circuit, based in the English Department at the University of California. The tour began at University of California Berkeley after which Brautigan visited and delivered readings at several branches of the University of California (Irvine, Santa Cruz, Davis, Claremont, and Santa Barbara) as well as Stanford University, California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, California Institute of Technology, Sacramento State University, and University of Southern California.

Following the reading at Berkeley, Brautigan met Jayne Palladino, a Ph.D. student in the comparative literature program, and recently divorced. Brautigan asked her to dinner at her apartment and she agreed to accept at a later date. This began a relationship that lasted for several years.

Thursday, 30 April 1970

Brautigan's collection of poetry, Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt was released. The book was immediately successful going through five printings in as many months, with over 120,000 copies in print. Brautigan's contract stipulated a $35,000 advance against royalties, the entire amount to be paid 120 days after publication.

Two readings were scheduled on this, the third day of the California Poetry Reading Circuit, one at Sacramento State University, and another at the University of California Davis. Brautigan invited Peter Miller, visiting from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Price and Bruce Dunn, Paul Kantner, lead guitar player for Jefferson Airplane, and Rip Torn to accompany him to these readings, and whatever other adventures they might devise. Torn recounted the events in his essay, "Blunder Brothers: A Memoir" published in Seasons of the Angler, edited by David Seybold. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Torn.

Thursday, 7 May 1970

Brautigan participated in a poetry reading at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. Terry Link said Brautigan appeared just before 8:00 pm wearing "blue denim, a blue vest and a long blue scarf, almost like a priest's stole, considering the location." Although the audience was clearly interested, Brautigan refused to read any prose. He read current poetry, some written that morning including "Your Love," which was never collected. See Poetry Uncollected > poem title.

To the significant lack of response from the audience, Brautigan said, "For a while I thought I was reading in a mortuary. I guess a church is the same thing." He said "I don't think the purpose of a poet is to write good poetry but to work out the possibilities of language and the human condition." In the end, despite his definition of poetry as "language and spiritual mercury," there was little if any interaction between the poet and the audience (Terry Link 26; See Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork Reviews > Link).

One of the poems Brautigan read was Voluntary Quicksand, a reaction to the killing of four students at Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, earlier in the day. National Guardsmen shot to death four students protesting the United States bombings of Cambodia on the Kent State campus. Brautigan wrote the poem after hearing news broadcasts about the killings.

late May 1970

Helen Brann negotiated a contract for Brautigan with Sam Lawrence and Dell Publishers for his newest novel, The Abortion and a yet unnamed (but soon to be called Revenge of the Lawn) collection of short stories. Brautigan was to receive $175,000 in advance of royalties for both books. Problems with the contract delayed its final settlement.

Spring 1970

John Stickney, a writer for Life magazine visited Brautigan in San Francisco. He stayed at Brautigan's Geary Street apartment, and traveled about the city with Brautigan and Valerie Estes. Stickney had received approval for his proposed article about Brautigan to be published in Life and was collecting material in earnest. Photographer Veron Merritt took several pictures of Brautigan.

Tuesday, 21 July 1970

Brautigan arrived in London, England, planning to spend the next two weeks involved with the English publication of his books. This was his first trip abroad. Robert Creeley and his wife Bobbie Hawkins, were in London at the same time and Brautigan spent several evenings with them, staying at their borrowed apartment rather than his room in the Ritz Hotel.

Monday, 27 July 1970

Final judgement issued for the divorce between Brautigan and Virginia Dionne Alder

Friday, 14 August 1970

Brautigan featured in a LIFE magazine story, "Gentle Poet of the Young: A Cult Grows around Richard Brautigan," by John Stickney. The article was illustrated with three photographs by Vernon Merritt III and one by Steve Hansen. See References > Studies > Stickney.

The first photograph by Merritt shows Brautigan by the side of a swollen California creek.

The second photograph, by Steve Hansen, shows Brautigan in front of the Trout Fishing in America school with students and faculty. The communal free school in Cambridge, Massachussetts, was named after Brautigan's second published novel, Trout Fishing in America.

The third photograph, by Merritt, shows Brautigan and ten-year old daughter Ianthe strolling the streets of North Beach, San Francisco.

A photograph of Brautigan by Vernon Merritt III taken for but not used in the LIFE magazine story was used in a boxed trivia game titled LIFE Magazine Remembers issued by Time Life in 1985 (printed by Selchow & Righter). The game featured a set of 702 playing cards, each with a popular and/or famous photograph from the archives of LIFE magazine. Each card had a series of questions about the subject on the back side. The 3" x 5" Brautigan card was number 34 from the set.

Monday, 14 September 1970

Brautigan applied for, and received, a California fishing license. His stated address was 2546 Geary Street, San Francisco, California.

November 1970

Brautigan posed for a series of photographs by Erik Weber to illustrate the publication of three stories in the December issue of Playboy magazine. This photograph shows Brautigan, lying on the bed in his 2546 Geary Street apartment, parodying the genre of the photographs that normally illustrate this magazine. This photograph was not used.

Ironically, Playboy had rejected nine stories by Brautigan in 1968. Brautigan, at the urging of friend Don Carpenter, sent these stories to his agent, Robert P. Mills, in New York, in January 1968. Mills sent the stories along to A. C. Spectorsky at Playboy (whom Carpenter had contacted directly via letter about Brautigan's forthcoming work). Spectorsky passed Brautigan's stories to Alan Ravage who rejected them early in February. Brautigan and Mills exchanged letters about this attempt to publish Brautigan's work. See Non-Fiction > Papers > The Robert Park Mills Papers.

Brautigan's record album, Listening to Richard Brautigan was released by Harvest Records.

The record album Paradise Bar and Grill by Mad River was released by Capital Records. Side 1, Band 3 featured Brautigan reading Love's Not The Way To Treat A Friend, a poem from Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt.

Brautigan's story Complicated Banking Problems was first published in the November 1970 issue of Evergreen Review. It was collected in Revenge of the Lawn (1971).

Brautigan participated with Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan in a poetry reading celebrating the opening of the University Art Museum at the University of California Berkeley in early November.

1971

Highlights: Revenge of the Lawn published . . . The Abortion published . . . Reaches height of literary success . . . Buys home in Bolinas, California.

Brautigan reached the height of his literary success. "[R]ight now Brautigan is riding high. He is the Love Generation's answer to Charlie Schultz. Happiness is a warm hippie" (Jonathan Yardley 24; See The Abortion > Reviews > Yardley). But, Brautigan's success began to falter and continued to decline throughout the rest his life. He experimented with satires of different literary genres and critics lamented the loss of the vibrant, exuberant, youthful writing of his first three novels. He was troubled by alcoholism, insomnia, and paranoia throughout the rest of his life.

March 1971

Brautigan's novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 published. In this novel a young man, the narrator, worked in a library, a Brautigan world of lonely pleasure. He met a woman, got her pregnant, and supported her abortion. In the process he learned how to reenter human society.

Brautigan received a letter from his sister Barbara Jean who expressed a desire to talk with him. Brautigan never responded.

Sunday, 16 May 1971

Seven poems by Brautigan (They Are Really Having Fun, We Meet. We Try. Nothing Happens, But, Home Again Home Again Like a Turtle To His Balcony, You Will Have Unreal Recollections of Me, Finding Is Losing Something Else, Impasse, and Homage to Charles Atlas) were first published in the May 1971 issue of California Living, the magazine section of San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, under the title "A Taste of the Taste of Brautigan." All were collected in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976).

Sunday, 13 June 1971

Brautigan, Sherry Vetter, and Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, left for a three week summer vacation along the upper Sacramento River. They stayed in hotels or cabins with kitchens and cooked trout caught by Brautigan. Brautigan recorded observations in a notebook memoir he titled American Hotels. The work was never published.

mid-August 1971

Brautigan and Sherry Vetter shared a five-day fishing trip to the North Fork of the Yuba River, in Nevada.

Wednesday, 15 December 1971

Brautigan bought an Arts and Crafts-style, three-story, wood shingled house located at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas, California. The house was located on a double lot on the west side of Terrace, just south of where Park Avenue joins Terrace from the southeast, property parcel #193-133-06. Brautigan bought the house for $32,500 from Alfred B. and Dorothy E. Parsons, who granted him the deed to this property on this day.

Built at the turn-of-the-century, the third floor had two servant bedroooms, a bath, and two other bedrooms separated by a landing. The second story had a large kitchen, pantry, a servant's staircase leading to the third floor, a large living room with a walk-in fireplace, a small bedroom, and an outside deck. The first floor had a master bedroom and a full bath. The house was reported haunted by the ghost of a Chinese servant woman who had killed herself in the house and was buried in the back yard.

A photograph by Ianthe Brautigan shows Brautigan in his Bolinas, California, house, 1971. Prior to Brautigan's purchase of this house it had been rented by David Meltzer from the Parsons through June 1972 for $150.00 per month. Meltzer edited The San Francisco Poets which included an interview with Brautigan and six poems collected in Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt. See References > Studies > Meltzer.

Allegedly, Brautigan's purchase of the house forced Meltzer, his wife Tina, and their children to leave their home. As a result, many members of the Bolinas community were upset by Brautigan's actions (Lawrence Wright 38). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Wright.

Michael McClure suggested that Brautigan's purchase of this home was the cause for the end of his friendship with Brautigan. "It was Richard buying the house that David and Tina lived in right out from under them and their two children that was the straw that broke my camel's back. I thought he should have bought it and let them live in it for nothing. Or even given it to them. . . . I felt that he was [after] David because David was like Richard's anti-type. David poured creativity, and in vast spontaneous amounts. I think Richard just had to get at David. So he bought the house and left it standing empty. Later, Richard shot and killed himself in that house" (Michael McClure 40). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > McClure.

In fact, Brautigan allowed the Meltzer's to stay in the house through the end of their lease, six months after he bought the house.

Bolinas, across the bay and northwest from San Francisco, enjoyed a reputation as a community of eccentric and creative individuals and was the home, over the years, to such writers, editors, and poets as Donald Merriam Allen, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Joanne Kyger, Thomas McGuane, David Meltzer, Daniel Moore, Alice Notley, Nancy Peters, Aram Saroyan, and Philip Whalen.

Brautigan had lived periodically in Bolinas since at least May 1964 when he started writing In Watermelon Sugar. See Biography 1960s.

After purchasing the home in Bolinas, Brautigan had Erik Weber photograph his apartment at 2546 Geary Boulevard (Street) from exterior (front, back, sides), the front door, down the long hallway, each of the rooms, and many close ups of most of Brautigan's possessions, including the contents of his refrigerator.

Following Brautigan's death in 1984, his daughter, Ianthe Brautigan sold the house to James Zeno, Jr. and Karlyn Zeno, of Bolinas, California, on 12 August 1986.

1972

Highlights: First trip to Pine Creek, Montana . . . Writes The Hawkline Monster . . . Awarded Washington Governor's Writing Award.

March 1972

Brautigan, his novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, and his collection of short stories Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 were noted in the booklet Washington State Authors 1971 (Washington State Library, Olympia, Washington, Mar. 1972, p. 1).

Sunday, 23 April 1972

Brautigan awarded the Washington Governor's Writing Award for his collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970.

The ceremony was held in the Washington State Library, in Olympia, Washington. The award was presented by Governor Daniel J. Evans. Authors present, or their representatives, were invited to speak briefly.

The Washington Governor's Writing Award was given to ten Washington writers each year. Books were submitted and reviewed by a panel of jurors. The printed program noted the Jurors for 1972 as John S. Robinson (Chairman, Olympia), Mae Benne (Seattle), Dale Nelson (Olympia), Dr. Clarence J. Simpson (Spokane), and June T. Thurston (Yakima).

The program also noted that the award was presented jointly by The Governor's Festival of Arts, the Washinton State Arts Commission, and the Washington State Library Commission. It was the seventh annual Governor's Writer's Day Open house "honoring Washington authors and photographers for their important contributions to our cultural life."

Other winners for 1972 included Beth Benley (Phone Calls From the Dead), Alain Enthoven (How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program), John Fahey (The Ballyhoo Bonanza), Bill Gulick (Snake River Country), Dee Molenaar The Challenge of Mount Rainer), J.K. Osborne (I Refuse), Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction), Victor B. Scheffer (The Seeing Eye), and Ralph Wahl (Come Wade the River).

August 1972

Brautigan, with Robert Junsch and Erik Weber began a road trip to Montana, in a rented car. Junsch was the driver; Weber the photographer. Brautigan was going to Montana at the invitation of author Thomas McGuane who first wrote in March 1971, inviting Brautigan to visit Montana. McGuane owned a fourteen-acre ranch on Deep Creek, in Paradise Valley, south of Livingstone, Montana, that served as headquarters for group of writers, artists, musicians, and actors, "The Montana Gang" as they called themselves. Brautigan would enjoy himself, said McGuane.

Brautigan set up quarters in a converted, one-room log chicken coop near the main ranch house, at first alone, but toward the end of the month he was joined by Sherry Vetter who flew from San Francisco to Montana. For the rest of the month, Brautigan enjoyed eating, drinking, and fishing with McGuane and his other guests. For example, Brautigan, Erik Weber, Jimmy Buffet, and William (Gatz) Hjortsberg fished Sixteen Mile Creek, near Ringling, Montana. Buffet's song about the small town, "Ringling, Ringling" was included on his record album Living and Dying in 3/4 Time (1974).

A photograph by Erik Weber shows Brautigan at McGuane's kitchen table. To Brautigan's right is Jim Harrison and an unknown person. Clockwise from his left are Tom McGuane, Bill Roecker, Becky McGuane, and Benjamin "Dink" Bruce. This photograph appeared on the back cover of Keith Abbott's Downstream From Trout Fishing in America.

Brautigan was impressed by the combined creative energy and non-stop party attitude of "The Montana Gang." He was also impressed by the machismo and ability of some members, like McGuane, to achieve financial security by turning their novels into movies.

Others were impressed as well and Livingston, Montana, and members of "The Montana Gang" were profiled in newspaper articles, some of which mentioned Brautigan. For example, Cheryl McCall, in her article "Bloomsbury Comes to Big Sky, and the New Rocky Mountain High is Art" (People Weekly, Nov. 3, 1980), talks about the actors, writers, and artists living in Paradise Valley, Montana, who where Brautigan's neighbors. Her article includes a photograph of Brautigan and Russell Chatam fishing. READ this article.

Phil Patton's article, "The Dude Is Back in Town" (The New York Times, 18 April 1993), focuses on the reemergence of popularity of Western style in furniture, furnishings, clothing, and collectables. Patton offers a time line "When Easterner Met West," detailing the history of the popularity of the Western style. He mentions Brautigan as part of Livingston, Montana, "Big Sky Bloomsbury." READ this article.

Robert Cross's article, "A Refuge in Montana: The Gossip-Column Set Slips Quietly into the Woods" (Chicago Tribune 20 September 1992. Travel Section, 1), focuses on Livingston, Montana, as the town near where author William (Gatz) Hjortsberg lives and writes. READ this article.

Toby Thompson's article, "Out There: Livingston, MONT: A Rumble Runs Through It" (The New York Times 11 April 1993, Sec. 9: 3), focuses on The Murray Hotel in Livingston, Montana, which has long been a watering hole for the rich and famous and otherwise noteworthy. READ this article.

Fall 1972

Brautigan broke his leg in Bolinas, California, allegedly while drinking at Smiley's, the local bar (William Hjortsberg 458; See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg), although his daughter Ianthe recounts Brautigan telling her he broke his leg by tripping over an exposed root on the Bolinas property. Sherry Vetter drove Brautigan to Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco to have his leg set, and then to his Gerry Street apartment. The relationship between the two was unraveling. Vetter did not see Brautigan again for four months.

Early December 1972

Brautigan, with his daughter Ianthe, flew to New York for a two-week stay. They played tourists, dining in fine restaurants and taking in the sights.

1973

Highlights: Buys ranch in Pine Creek, Montana.

Spring 1973

At the invitation of Dave and Sue Dill, owners of the Pine Creek Lodge, Pine Creek, Montana, Brautigan reserved their best tourist cabin for the coming summer.

Brautigan met Kazuko Fujimoto Goodman, who was translating his novel Trout Fishing in America into Japanese for forthcoming publication. Brautigan and Fujimoto talked often about the translation, and Brautigan, impressed with her care and attention, requested Helen Brann to include a stipulation in any future contracts for Japanse translation of his works that Fujimoto be his designated translator.

Mid-August 1973

Brautigan flew to Montana and settled into the cabin he had reserved at the Pine Creek Lodge, Cabin #2, the most desirable as it was the furthest from the road. He was soon joined by Roxy and Judy Gordon, Art and Suzy Coelho, and Peter Miller. The group drove to Crow Agency, Montana, south of Billings, for Crow Fair. Held every year during the third week of August, Crow Fair enjoyed its reputation as the largest modern-day Native American gathering in the country. Because Coelho had been adopted as a member of the Crow Nation, the group was able to camp as invited guests.

After returning to Pine Creek, Brautigan asked Miller, then working remodeling homes in Seattle, Washington, if he would be interested in a house remodeling project. Perhaps Brautigan was anticipating purchasing a home in Montana, a place he was rapidly coming to enjoy living.

October 1973

Jayne Walker visited in early-October over a four-day weekend. Just prior to her visit, Brautigan completed the manuscript for The Hawkline Monster, dedicated to "The Montana Gang." He showed Walker the 228-page typed manuscript, but refused to let her read it.

Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, arrived at the end of the month to visit for several days. This was her first trip to Montana.

November 1973

At Brautigan's invitation, Peter Miller agreed to return to Montana to talk with Brautigan about renovations he wanted to his new house before he moved in. Winter was not the season to undertake house renovations and Brautigan and Miller agreed to meet again in the spring to finalize plans.

At the end of the first week in November, Brautigan left Montana, flying to New York where he stayed for two weeks, visiting with friends, eating, and drinking. He also talked strategy with Helen Brann regarding how to sell his manuscript for The Hawkline Monster. They agreed to ask for a $75,000 advance against royalties and a first printing order of twenty-five thousand copies. Brautigan, as he had for all his other books, would retain approval of jacket design and advertising copy. The contract, somewhat revised, was signed in December 1973.

December 1973

Helen Brann sent Brautigan his contract with Simon & Schuster for publication of The Hawkline Monster. Negotiations had settled on a $50,000 advance for hardcover and quality paperback publication and a 15 percent royalty on the hardcover edition. She sent Brautigan a check for $45,000 (minus her commission) later in the month. Brautigan took his daughter, Ianthe and Anne Kuniyuki to Mendocino over Christmas to celebrate.

1974

Highlights: The Hawkline Monster published . . . Gives up Geary Street apartment in San Francisco, California.

March 1974

Brautigan traveled to Key West, Florida, where he stayed with Guy de la Valdène who was making a movie about fly fishing for tarpon. Valdène wanted to put writers and sportsmen together and film the results. At first, Brautigan resisted being involved, but ultimately relented and appeared in four scenes of Valdène's film Tarpon. See Screenplays > Tarpon.

Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, flew to Miami, Florida, her first time traveling alone, to join him in Key West. After two weeks in Key West, they flew back to San Francisco together.

Back in San Francisco, Brautigan kept company with Jayne Walker, Anne Kuniyuki, and Mary Ann Gilderbloom, without them knowing of one another.

Saturday, 1 June 1974

Brautigan, the crew of remodelers, neighbors, and assorted friends celebrated the completion of work on Brautigan's ranch house and writing studio with a large party. Soon after the party, the remodelers left and Brautigan moved into his newly remodeled ranch house at Pine Creek, Montana.

Friday, 21 June 1974

Brautigan began writing Willard and His Bowling Trophies, the second of his planned five novels in surrealistic versions of a popular literary genre, one every year. Willard and His Bowling Trophies was subtitled "a perverse mystery." It was the first writing project Brautigan undertook in his new writing studio in the top of his Pine Creek barn. He finished the short novel on 26 September 1974. It was published in late summer of 1975.

September 1974

Brautigan, bearded and overweight, posed in his 2546 Geary Street apartment for ten publicity photographs taken by Erik Weber in preparation for the forthcoming publication of his novel Willard and His Bowling Trophies.

Weber took nineteen photographs of Brautigan at a bowling alley on Chestnut Street, San Francisco, California. Brautigan posed outside the front door, frowning, and with bowling trophies and racks of bowling balls. He also posed, kneeling, in front of a wall. Brautigan however, disliked Weber's photographs for Willard and His Bowling Trophies and a front dust jacket color illustration by Wendell Minor was used instead.

The photograph of Brautigan kneeling in front of a wall was used on the front and back covers of Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork when it was published in 1976.

Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, returned to California for her first year of high school, and Price Dunn returned to spend a month with Brautigan, keeping him company and serving as his driver.

Friday, 1 November 1974

Brautigan left Michigan and traveled to New York City, where he stayed at the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street

December 1974

Brautigan moved out of his apartment at 2546 Geary Boulevard and into another at 314 Union Street, just above Washington Square, on the slope of Telegraph Hill. Keith Abbott, who owned a pickup truck, helped Brautigan box and move his possessions to the new apartment. The move was a slow one, not completed until early February 1975. Abbott described the move as "the usual nuttiness" in his memoir "When Fame Puts Its Feathery Crowbar Under Your Rock." See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Abbott.

1975

Highlights: Willard and His Bowling Trophies published . . . Writing Sombrero Fallout.

early February 1975

Brautigan met Nikki Arai, a Japanese American photographer and art dealer. Their relationship was short, but they remained friends for the rest of their lives. Arai was the focus of Brautigan's posthumous novel, An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, first published in France in 1994.

Siew-Hwa Beh moved into Brautigan's 314 Union Street apartment soon after the brief affair with Arai. Siew-Hwa Beh had been married four years while in college and both she and Brautigan had enjoyed other lovers, but the combination of two creative, independent individuals provided a strong, intense two-year relationship for the couple. Later, no longer involved with Brautigan, Siew-Hwa Beh married Michael Lichtenstein, who died in 1997. Her two sons were named Niles and Bryon. Eldest son Niles shares his name with Niles, California, one of the first places films were made in the state.

September 1975

Brautigan made a four-day fishing trip to Port McNeill on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, with Russell Chatham and two other fishing partners. Leaving Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Brautigan flew to San Francisco and spent a week with Siew-Hwa Beh.

Wednesday, 1 October 1975

Brautigan flew from California to Montana, and returned to his Pine Creek ranch after a ten-day absence.

Monday, 27 October 1975

Brautigan finished editing the first draft of Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. He sent a copy to Helen Brann, his literary agent, the same day. She negotiated a contract with Simon & Schuster who agreed to pay Brautigan a $50,000 advance, plus 15 percent royalty on each hardback copy sold. They published the novel in September 1976, after delaying two years so as not to conflict with sales of The Hawkline Monster or Willard and His Bowling Trophies. The first printing was thirty-five thousand copies. This was to be the third of Brautigan's planned five novels in surrealistic versions of a popular literary genre, one every year.

Thursday, 30 October 1975

Brautigan and Dingman returned to San Francisco. Back in his urban life, Brautigan had more time to spend with Siew-Hwa Beh. Their relationship was increasingly turbulent, punctuated by arguments.

December 1975

Back in San Francisco, Brautigan was preoccupied with his disintegrating relationship with Siew-Hwa Beh, and planning a trip to Tokyo, Japan. When Ianthe arrived in San Francisco after visiting her mother, Virginia, in Hawaii, Brautigan hardly had time for her brief visit and her bronchitis. Instead, he gave Ianthe money for antibiotics and take away food. As soon as she was well enough to travel, Ianthe returned to Montana where she was welcomed by the Cowin sisters.

1976

Highlights: First visit to Japan . . . Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork published . . . Sombrero Fallout published.

Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork, a collection of poetry, published. This collection was unique in that it its poems were grouped in titled sections and featured the crow as a dominant figure throughout. The hardback edition was released in early spring, the trade paperback in June. Brautigan wrote his own dust jacket blurb. The front and back covers featured a previously rejected photograph of Brautigan taken by Erik Weber at the bowling alley on Chestnut Street in San Francisco, in 1974 for Willard and His Bowling Trophies. Brautigan approved the use of this photograph for this poetry collection.

Brautigan began writing Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942. The novel, the fourth of his five planned genre novels, was published on 27 September 1977.

Wednesday, 21 April 1976

In a letter to Brautigan, addressed to his 314 Union Street, San Francisco, California, apartment, Helen Brann, Brautigan's literary agent, notes the closing of The Transatlantic Review. Noting the excellent reputation of the magazine, and her personal friendship with its owner, Joe McCrindle, Brann asked Brautigan, "Is there a story we can sell them for their last issue? They pay very little, but it would be a good place to be published."

In the same letter, Brann enclosed an invitation from The State Arts Commission and The State Library Commission to attend the 1976 Governor's Writers' Day Reception at the Washington State Library in Olympia, Washington, 2 May 1976. Brann noted she had turned down the invitation, "since you will not be in this country on May 2nd. I thought you might like to see the invitation."

Thursday, 13 May - Wednesday, 30 June 1976

With a visa for a two-month visit in hand Brautigan arrived in Tokyo, Japan, his first of several visits. His experiences and observations provided material for the collection of poems, June 30th, June 30th. His return to San Francisco, on 30 June, crossing the International Dateline and repeating the same day, inspired the title.

On first arrival, Brautigan was not allowed to enter the country. Brautigan has listed "writer" as his occupation, and immigration officials thought he might be a technical writer and would take a job away from a citizen. Once it was clear that Brautigan was a famous author, he was allowed to enter Japan. Bad treatment continued. After three days at the Imperial Hotel, Brautigan was asked to leave. The management judged from his looks and lack of credit card that he might not pay the bill (William Hjortsberg 563). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

One evening, Kazuko Fujimoto and husband David Goldman took Brautigan to The Cradle Bar and introduced him to the owner, Takako Shiina. Brautigan complained of his treatment at the Imperial Hotel and Shiina arranged a discounted rate for him at the Keio Plaza Hotel in the Shinjuko District. Brautigan and Shiina became good friends. Brautigan called her "my Japanese sister" and dedicated June 30th, June 30th to her. In 2002, Fujimoto wrote a memoir about her experiences with Brautigan and included a short memoir by Shiina. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Fujimoto

From his room, 3003 on the thirtieth floor of the Keio Plaza Hotel, Brautigan explored the neighborhood, writing observations and poems in his pocket notebook, creating an emotional diary of this first visit to Japan. Curt Gentry (author of Helter-Skelter) and his girlfriend, Gail Stevens, were in Tokyo and Brautigan and Gentry frequently accompanied Brautigan as he explored the Tokyo nightlife. Jack Thibeau visited for three days from the Philippines and he and Brautigan partied heartily. Tony Dingman also visited from the Philippines, where he was working with Frances Ford Coppola to complete his movie Apocalypse Now. This was another excuse to party. Brautigan visited The Cradle nightly and there he met a number of Japanese writers. His friendship with Shiina grew also, a result of his frequent visits. In between, Brautigan wrote poems based on his experiences and observations.

Sunday, 4 July 1976

Brautigan convinced Keith Abbott to join him in Montana. Tony Dingman was in the Philippines, and so not available. Brautigan paid Abbott's airfare to Montana and provide a wage during the summer. Abbott pursued his own writing in the mornings, and worked around the ranch during the afternoons. He recounts his experiences in his memoir, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Abbott.

August 1976

After Keith Abbott left, Brautigan enjoyed visits from Ed and Jennifer Dorn and a new Philippine girlfriend from Marin County, California, named Maria. Needing someone to drive him around, Brautigan convinced Price Dunn to return to Montana. Best friends for eighteen years, Brautigan and Dunn enjoyed drinking, fishing, and storytelling together. Brautigan asked Dunn to take Maria one afternoon while he prepared dinner. Maria, bored at the ranch, wanted to party and the afternoon continued until early the next morning. Brautigan was furious with jealousy when Dunn and Maria retuned. He ordered Dunn to leave, severing their relationship, never speaking to Dunn again. Maria left soon after the incident. Between guests and parties, Brautigan traveled to San Francisco where he saw Siew-Hwa Beh. They remained intimate despite their unraveling relationship.

Peter Miller (not the same one who started the Trout Fishing in America School) arrived at the Pine Creek, Montana, ranch to replace Price Dunn. Brautigan provided him room and board and a small stipend. Miller note the seemingly endless house guests and parties, as well as Brautigan's paranoia and unpredictable behavior as reasons why he decided to leave when Brautigan returned to San Francisco for a brief visit at the end of the month.

September 1976

Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel published. This novel featured two interrelated stories. The first was about a sombrero falling from the sky and its affect on humanity. In the second story, the narrator of the first thinks about his Japanese ex-lover who had recently moved out of his apartment. This was the third of Brautigan's planned five novels in surrealistic versions of popular literary genres, one every year. The literary genre used here was the Japanese "I-novel" complete with intense, personal autobiographical details that cause the reader to believe that the protagonist, the narrator, and the author of a text are a single identity. Brautigan was to be paid $50,000 in advance for hardback and paperback publication rights, along with a 15 percent royalty for every hardback copy sold. Thirty-five thousand copies were issued with the first printing.

Brautigan returned to Montana from San Francisco by the first of September, closed up the Pine Creek ranch for the winter, and left again for San Francisco before the end of the month.

November 1976

On her return from New York, Takako Shiina, stopped in San Francisco. Brautigan introduced her to his friends and took her to his Bolinas, California, home for a short visit with Robert Creeley and his wife Bobbie Hawkins.

Helen Brann, Brautigan's literary agent, visited San Francisco and hosted a party at her suite at The Stanford Court Hotel. Brautigan and Keith Abbott were among the many guests invited. Brautigan gave her a manuscript copy of Dreaming of Babylon.

Brautigan met Marcia Clay, a twenty-three-year-old painter. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Clay had recently returned to San Francisco after living in Paris, France, and Tokyo, Japan. She and Brautigan became good friends, spending time together almost every day until Brautigan left for Japan in February 1977.

1977

Highlights: Second visit to Japan . . . Married Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa), second wife . . . Dreaming of Babylon published.

Friday, 18 February - Sunday, 19 June 1977

Brautigan left San Francisco, bound for Tokyo, Japan, arriving 20 February, losing a day to the International Dateline. This was Brautigan's second visit to Japan in less than a year. During this visit, Brautigan met Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura, born 1994 in Sapporo to a very traditional Japanese family. After dropping out of university, she worked in public relations, hosting visiting international artists and musicians. She was given the assignment to interview Brautigan during his visit, and called him at the Keio Plaza Hotel. Although married at the time to an advertising man named Yoshimura, she went to Brautigan's hotel room for dinner. They quickly became lovers. The connection and opportunity was immediate for both. Akiko thought she had found a way out of the confining box of being a Japanese daughter and wife. Brautigan thought he had found the perfect Japanese woman to be his wife.

During this time Brautigan also edited the uncorrected galleys for Dreaming of Babylon.

As he had during his first visit, Brautigan stopped at The Cradle every night and continued drinking. One night he insulted American screenwriter Leonard Schrader who was there talking with Ryu Murakami (Shiina's lover) and Kazuhiko Hasagawa. Not wanting his friend to be so ill treated, Hasagawa rose and swiftly struck Brautigan, breaking his nose (William Hjortsberg 591). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Sunday, 19 June 1977

Brautigan returned to San Francisco, California, from Tokyo, Japan. Brautigan stayed with John and Margot Doss before he found a new apartment at 1439 Kearny Street, a block away from where he had lived with Valerie Estes in the 1960s and not far from his most recent apartment at 314 Union Street.

Tuesday, 20 September 1977

Akiko arrived in San Francisco and took up residence with Brautigan at his 1439 Kearny Street apartment

Tuesday, 27 September 1977

Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 published. This was the fourth of Brautigan's planned five novels in surrealistic versions of popular literary genres, one every year. The literary genre used here was hard-boiled Grade-B detective stories. Sales were disappointing: only eighteen thousand copies sold, with twelve thousand copies remaindered and sold wherever possible. Perhaps this is why Brautigan did not complete his five-books-in-five-years plan. This was the last of Brautigan's experiments combining literary genres.

Thursday, 1 December 1977

Brautigan married Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura, in a brief civil service conducted by Judge Pat Herron, at her home in Point Richmond, California. Brautigan desired a small, anonymous wedding, fearing his fame would attract uncomfortable attention from the press. He asked his lawyer, Richard Hodge, for help. Hodge arranged the ceremony with Herron. Brautigan and Akiko separated 4 December 1979 and were officially divorced 12 November 1980.

1978

Highlights: Books involved in censorship litigation . . . third visit to Japan . . . moved to 1264 Lombard Street . . . June 30th, June 30th published.

Sunday, 8 January 1978

J. D. Leitaker, the principal of Anderson High School in Anderson, California, removed seven Brautigan books from the school's library and from the developmental reading classroom of a teacher who had taught at the Northern California school for eight years. The school board voted later to ban The Abortion, Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, and A Confederate General from Big Sur. Not banned were The Revenge of the Lawn and In Watermelon Sugar. The San Francisco American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in October citing bookbanning as censorship. The case was decided in Brautigan's favor in December.

early February 1978

Brautigan and literary agent Helen Brann decided to delay publication of June 30th, June 30th until mid-October. The collection of poetry, mostly written during Brautigan's first two visits to Japan, was originally scheduled for publication in March. The decision to wait until October meant taking advantage of the entire school year to attract student attention to Brautigan's forthcoming book. More attention meant more potential sales.

Brautigan continued to work on his Montana stories, thinking to collect them, along with stories written while visiting Japan.

April 1978

Brautigan and Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura returned to Pine Creek, Montana, where Brautigan continued working on stories about Montana experiences. Brautigan began thinking that a sequence of stories, some about Montana, some about Japan, would be interesting and dramatic. He began making plans to return to Japan in June where he would write about his observations of life there.

Thursday, 1 June 1978

Brautigan arrived in Tokyo, Japan, his third visit to the country. Brautigan stayed at the Keio Plaza Hotel (room 3324) and resumed his routine of exploring and writing by day, drinking heavily at night, and then sleeping late the following day.

Brautigan did not bring his wife, Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura. She remained in San Francisco, visited friends in Seattle, and traveled to Pine Creek, Montana, at the end of June.

end of July 1978

Brautigan had written fifty-two new stories for his planned collection.

Friday, 11 August 1978

June 30th, June 30th was published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback. This collection of seventy-seven poems was Brautigan's eighth collection of poetry, his tenth poetry book publication, and the last to be published before his death.

The novel was inspired by Brautigan's trip to Japan in 1976 and is a poetic travel diary of his relationship with Japan. Brautigan was well received in Japan. In America he was out of favor. This collection of travel poems, poems about place, following the Japanese tradition of haibun, a collection of haiku gathered into a story line, was largely ignored.

end of September 1978

Brautigan and Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura traveled to Pine Creek, Montana. Brautigan wanted to be out of town when the ACLU filed suit against the Anderson High School District in Shasta County over their banning of his books in school libraries and classrooms. The suit was filed on 3 October 1978.

Before leaving, Brautigan released a press statement
September 24, 1978

On our Apollo 17 mission to the moon in December, 1972, the astronauts named a crater after a character from one of the books that is forbidden to be taught at Anderson High School. I do not think it is the policy of the United States Government to name the geography of the moon after a character from a dirty book.

The crater is called Shorty.

The book is Trout Fishing in America.

If Trout Fishing in America can get to the moon, I think it should be able to get to Anderson High School.
(William Hjortsberg 617). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Thursday, 9 November 1978

Brautigan completed his purchase of three properties in Livingston, Montana
Route 38; cost $57,585; value $178,000
107 1/2 South 3rd Street; a single-family residence; cost $57,000; value $57,000
311 1/2 West Callender Street; a single-family residence built in 1900; cost $52,000; value $52,000

middle of November 1978

Brautigan and Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura returned to San Francisco, California. At the same time, Dell Publishing / Sam Lawrence purchased publication rights to Brautigan's novel A Confederate General from Big Sur from Grove Press. They planned to reissue the book in September 1979.

1979

Highlights : Participated in MLA panel . . . moved to 2170 Green Street . . . fourth trip to Japan.

9-13 April 1979

Brautigan began his week-long residency at Montana State University, in Bozeman, Montana, the second week of April. Brautigan stayed in Bozeman, not at his Pine Creek ranch. Akiko stayed in San Francisco, decorating the couple's new apartment. As the poet-in-residence, Brautigan gave a reading at the Student Union and a presentation at Cheever Hall.

mid-May 1979

Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa) traveled to Tokyo, Japan. Brautigan remained in San Francisco.

William Targ, retired editor in chief of G. P. Putnam's Sons, contacted Helen Brann with an offer to publish a collection of Brautigan's stories. Targ had started a letterpress publishing company for hand-bound, limited, signed editions. He wanted to publish a collection of Brautigan's recent stories in a first edition limited to 350 copies. He would pay Brautigan $1,000. Brautigan selected twenty stories written in 1977 and 1978, titled the collection The Tokyo-Montana Express, and mailed them to Brann by mid-April (William Hjortsberg 630). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

July 1979

William Targ put The Tokyo-Montana Express into production. Leonard Seastone, of Tideline Press, was hired to handle the typographic design and letterpress printing.

end of August 1979

Brautigan finished the first draft of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by the end of the month. He received 350-plus copies of the colophon page for the Targ edition of The Tokyo-Montana Express for his signature. He took them with him when he and Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa) returned to San Francisco at the end of the month.

mid-September 1979

Brautigan, in Tokyo, checked into the Keio Plaza Hotel, where he had a room on the thirty-fifth floor. He resumed his regular habits of exploring during the days and drinking at The Cradle nights.

Bruce Conner visited Japan for a month, hosted by the International Communication Agency to present his short, experimental films. He stayed on the same floor of the Keio Plaza Hotel as Brautigan and the two spent time together. Although they had planned before leaving San Francisco to work on a film together in Tokyo, they made no progress, and abandoned the project.

Wednesday, 10 October 1979

Brautigan delivered a reading at Jean Jean, a performance center in the Yamate Church in Shibuya-ku. Brautigan shared the stage with Shuntarõ Tanikawa (William Hjortsberg 642). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Tuesday, 30 October 1979

Brautigan and Nosaka departed from Tokyo aboard the bullet train, "Hikari #6," to Kyoto where, at Mineyama, they transferred to a local train, "Tango #8," bound for Yonago where Nosaka delivered a lecture at the local hospital. Nosaka later wrote a fictionalized memoir of their experiences and discussions. According to Nosaka, Brautigan, referred to as "QJ" in the essay, sang "Rock around the Clock" and "Buttons and Ribbons" at a karaoke bar following Nosaka's lecture. On 31 October, they returned from Yonago to Kyoto where, perhaps shaken after witnessing a suicide at the hospital, and the train striking an 8-year-old boy at a crossing, they decided to go separate ways. They parted company on the Mineyama train platfrom. Brautigan was to deliver a lecture at the American Centre in Kyoto. Nosaka went home to Tokyo. Nasaka's essay, "Nichibeisakegassen [Japan-USA Drinking Battle]" was published in Bungei Shujyu in December 1979. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Memoirs > Akiyoshi.

Friday, 9 November 1979

Brautigan wrote "Japanese UFO," the title story for a planned novel about Japanese pornographic movies, of which he was a great fan. Although he wrote more stories, the book was never published.

Tuesday, 4 December 1979

Brautigan and Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa), his second wife, separated, living apart, she in Los Angeles, Brautigan in San Francisco. They were married on 1 December 1977 in Port Richmond, California. They entered divorce proceedings on 10 January 1980 and were officially divorced 12 November 1980.

1980

Highlights: The Tokyo-Montana Express published . . . Divorces second wife, Akiko . . . writer in residence at University of Colorado Boulder . . . gives up Green Street apartment . . . Participates in readings and promotional tours for The Tokyo-Montana Express.

end of January 1980

Seeking to elevate The Tokyo-Montana Express from a collection of short stories to a novel, Brautigan added several previously published works to the evolving manuscript. This, Brautigan hoped, would distance this proposed book from the small collection of short stories to be published by William Targ. At the end of the month, Brautigan sent the manuscript to his literary agent, Helen Brann, who forwarded it to Dell Publishing. Not expecting Dell to publish the book, Brann made a deal with Seymour Lawrence, confirming a $35,000 advance to Brautigan upon contract signing.

Thursday, 31 January 1980

Brautigan and Marcia Clay hosted an art and poetry reading party at Brautigan's 2170 Green Street apartment. Clay showed sixty of her paintings created over the past decade. Brautigan read poems written during the same time period. The party attracted more than 300 people. One was Alexander Besher who wrote a weekly business column for The San Francisco Chronicle. He and Clay met, started spending time together, and were married by the end of the year. This was the end of Brautigan's relationship with Clay.

Tuesday, 12 February 1980

The details regarding publication of The Tokyo-Montana Express were finalized by Brautigan's literary agent, Helen Brann and Seymour Lawrence. In addition to the advance already agreed, Brautigan was to receive another $25,000 if Dell or Laurel published a paperback edition. Additionally, he was to receive a 15 percent royalty on all hardback sales and retain all other rights. Publication date was set for October 1980.

Tuesday, 11 March 1980

Brautigan filed his Income and Expense Declaration papers with San Francisco County Superior Court in response to a request by attorneys for Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa) who sought to determine Brautigan's financial ability to pay spousal support.

Monday, 24 March 1980

Brautigan filed a Motion for Reconsideration and Clarification, apparently in response to Akiko's earlier request for spousal support.

Tuesday, 8 April 1980

Brautigan filed a Request for Admission of Facts and Genuineness of Documents seeking that Akiko admit the truth of his ownership prior to their marriage of the Bolinas property, that his literary work was created prior to their marriage, and that he did not edit, amend, or update of these works during their marriage. His intent was to establish separate ownership to these properties.

Friday, 25 April 1980

Brautigan fired his lawyer, Sandra Musser, and hired Joel A. Shawn to handle his divorce proceedings.

Friday, 6 June 1980

Brautigan participated in the Fourth Annual San Francisco International Poetry Festival sponsored in part by City Lights Books. The festival was held Friday-Sunday, 6-8 June 1980, in the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina. This poster, promoting the festival, notes Brautigan's participation at 8:00 PM, Friday, 6 June. Artwork by Frances Butler.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, publisher, and co-owner of City Lights Books was straightforward in his assessment of Brautigan's literary skills, saying, "As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naif, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally" (Peter Manso and Michael McClure 65). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Manso.

Conger Beasley, Jr. agreed. Of Brautigan, he said, "He was a close to being a genuine naif as contemporary American culture is likely to produce. He relied on his marvelous instincts to propel him through a story; that, plus his droll humor and off-beat characters, gave his novels a funky rhythm" (Conger Beasely 3). See References > Critiques > Beasley.

Wednesday, 18 June 1980

Brautigan's deposition scheduled for 1 July 1980, in the offices of his lawyer, San Francisco, California. Akiko's deposition scheduled for 3 July, in the offices of her lawyer, San Francisco. Brautigan submitted his deposition on 2 July 1980.

July 1980

Brautigan left as quickly as possible for Pine Creek, Montana, after his deposition. There, he started an affair with neighbor Marian Hjortsberg, whose husband, William "Gatz" Hjortsberg, had left her after starting an affair with another woman.

Four Japanese radio journalists arrived at Brautigan's Pine Creek ranch unannounced, wanting to interview Brautigan and record various sounds at his Montana home. They represented FM Tokyo and Pioneer stereo equipment and had come to record a commercial for the Pioneer "Lonesome Carboy" car stereo system. The finished commercial included sounds of steam engines and Brautigan promoting his upcoming book, The Tokyo-Montana Express. Terry McDonell wrote about this visit in his article, "Fish This", for Sports Afield, April 1999. See Trout Fishing in America > Reviews > McDonell.

Seymour Lawrence visited Brautigan to discuss the evolving plans for his upcoming promotional tour. Lawrence had arranged speaking appearances for Brautigan at various small, little-known colleges, at $1,500 per appearance. Book signings were planned and books and posters were shipped to Denver and Boulder, Colorado, bookstores in time for Brautigan's upcoming residency at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Saturday, 19 July 1980

While in Boulder, Brautigan gave a small reading and talk at the Chautauqua Auditorium. In a photograph by Mark Billingsley, Brautigan signs books following the reading.

Friday, 1 August 1980

Both Brautigan and Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa) signed a Marital Settlement Agreement in San Francisco County Superior Court. By terms of the agreement, Brautigan was to pay $1400.00 per month spousal support starting 1 August 1980 and continuing through 31 December 1981, or until Akiko's death or remarriage. Beginning 1 January 1981, Akiko agreed to waive any right to receive any money or property from Brautigan as spousal support. Both parties agreed that no other court would have jurisdiction to award spousal support to be paid by Brautigan to Akiko as a result of any relationship or transaction between them prior to that date.

Brautigan and Akiko were each awarded half of their community property as well as defined separate property. Brautigan's separate property included four properties in Livingston, Montana; one property in Bolinas, California; interest in, right to, and profit from June 30th, June 30th, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Dreaming of Babylon, The Abortion, Revenge of the Lawn, Sombrero Fallout, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork, The Hawkline Monster, A Confederate General from Big Sur, Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, The Tokyo-Montana Express, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, Lay the Marble Tea, The Octopus Frontier, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and Please Plant This Book; works in progress: The Tokyo-Montana Express (Targ edition), So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, and Japanese UFO; his fly fishing rods, reel, and line; and his 1969 Plymouth Fury automobile.

Monday, 1 September 1980

Brautigan and Masako hosted a Labor Day party at Brautigan's Pine Creek ranch. Brautigan cooked Swedish meatballs.

Feedback from Masako Kano
"In Boulder, I lived with Joyce Lebra, a professor in the university History Department and a very good friend of my father, Masamichi Kano. I called her Joycie Obachan (Auntie Joyce) as a young child, and she gave me a pretty American play doll with blond curly hair and blue eyes with long eyelashes. None of my kindergarten friends in Tokyo had anything like that. She was the last person to interview Mishima Yukio, avant-garde novelist, three-time candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, before he committed ritual suicide following his failed coup d'état attempt with four followers at the headquarters of the Japanese Defense Force, Tokyo, 25 November 1970. I helped her with translations for her research on Japanese military history while she was a resident researcher at Tokyo University in 1978.

"At the party where we met, Richard introduced himself as a writer and asked if I knew his name, I just shook my head because I had never heard anything about his works. I read the introduction of June 30th, June 30th to his friends and remember how silence fell in the room. I thought this anachronistic looking poet must have many followers. Later, he insisted that I show him the poems and prose I wrote in English for my university's serendipity magazine and he discussed them with Ed and Jennifer Dorn. This was my first notice of Richard's trait of discussing matters associated with me with other senior friends, either in person or through long distance telephone calls, while never sharing anything concrete about what he really thought of me.

"After a whimsical courtship involving a stuffed bear's head given him by a female friend [Simone Ellis] in Boulder, I ceremoniously became Richard's girlfriend. My parents and Joyce were very concerned about my involvement with Richard and to this date his name is atop the proud Kano clan's secret list because with this affair I intentionally broke the marriage engagement with another political family arranged by my grandfather when I was a baby.

"We left Boulder in August, after arranging permissions from Joyce Lebra and my father. Richard had an intense meeting with Joyce to negotiate the whole procedure, and finally she persuaded my father on the phone. Richard spoke with him on the phone too. Richard told my father that he [Richard] had a daughter similar in age to me and he understood how my father felt. I was quite fed up with them discussing my fate because it seemed that the affair that was supposed to make me a free woman still conjured all sorts of negotiations between elders, including Richard. But he was a kind of samurai responsible for me going to Montana, Big Sky, so in that sense, he seemed quite a traditional guy. It was not actually helping me to be a liberated feminist as my Auntie Joyce hoped for me! We went to Yellowstone National Park together and then to his Montana ranch. He told me a story of camping in Yellowstone and how a grizzly bear's shadow flickered on the canvas wall of the tent as the bear passed in front of the fading campfire.

"There in Montana, I met Richard's friends. I had never met people wearing cowboy boots and guns on their hips. It was like a movie set for me. Richard's friends were glad to see me and very nice and open hearted but I felt more like Richard's exotic pet than a real girlfriend being so much younger than most everyone except for Ianthe.

"Richard was wonderful at entertaining me in very charming and creative ways. He once exhibited a collection of wonderful musical instruments borrowed from Dobro Dick and decorated the table with daisies for me. We hosted some parties. He liked cooking beef stroganoff with fresh dills and sour cream. I tried some smoked trout sushi and curried rice. He once showed me how to cut mushrooms in the traditional Japanese way with a very sharp knife. We also did a lot of fun outdoor things like flying kites with his friends' children, and trout fishing, sometimes with Greg Keeler, sometimes without. Richard liked taking a nap on a rock when we fished little streams alone and asked me to sing while he lay quietly by the side of the stream. I sang Japanese nursery songs, school choir songs in English, and Franz Schubert's 'Ave Maria,' oddly his favorite, over the sound of the stream. He showed me how to shoot cans with a BB gun in the backyard, but I preferred to go fishing. I noticed the bullet holes in the kitchen wall and saw where he stored his rifles. I preferred to be outside, reading on a blanket, than to be inside the house while Richard worked in his writing room in the barn. Sometimes, I sat on the stairs in front of the barn, listening to the sound of his typewriter, watching the gorgeous sunset over the Montana mountains to the west, strangely feeling at home, for I grew up listening to the sound of the typewriter my father constantly used for his writings and translations.

"Richard at that time was in a great deal of pain because of his divorce from his wife, Akiko. I saw this pain for the first time in Montana when he talked on the telephone with her, or his lawyer. I did not feel jealous or upset, but rather frightened about the love turned into so much pain. One day I found a letter from Akiko's aunt, left open on an empty shelf in the living room, written in Japanese, which Richard could not read. Akiko's aunt encouraged her to keep growing cabbage in the garden. I went to see the garden in which they tried to grow fresh produce. It was abandoned. All the plants were dried and lifeless. I felt a kind of loneliness for Akiko through reading that letter. The physical condition of that letter seemed to suggest that it had been read many times. I felt the euphoric love of a midsummer's night dream between Richard and myself in Boulder was slowly fading away inside the coolness of his Montana house. Outside, the aspen trees in the fields turned a bright yellow color.

"Deviating from the memory in Montana, here perhaps I should explain a bit about my paternal family background. My paternal grandfather, Kizo Kano, was the chief editor of the newspaper called Nishi-Nippon Shinbun, which before the war was the top circulated newspaper in the southern island of Kyushu. Before World War II, he published several books of his own, as well as translations from English and German, on foreign affairs, political geology, and education. My grandfather Kizo was a true academic, and romantic. He recited the poems of Hakushu Kitahara to his grandchildren, studied at Berlin University and wrote beautifully in English and German. However he was drowning in political activities because of his friendships with Shigemaru Sugiyama, Seigo Nakano, Tanzan Ishibashi, Taketora Ogata, and the Genyosha group.

"My father went to Shuyuksn High School, where the son of Sugiyama and the writer Kyusaku Yumeno also attended. He shared the same sentiments with another son of Sugiyama, Tatsumaru, about the heavy political shadows their fathers threw into their lives after the war. Tatsumaru Sugiyama, in my opinion, was a brave hero of postwar conscience with its theme of pacifism and ecology of the Earth, which, if my father were still alive, he would share. Prominently multilingual, my father took a job translating for the USA medical doctors who came to treat 'hibakushia' patients and conduct research at the Atomic Bomb Centre hospital in Nagasaki. His mentor, Father Joseph Roggendorf at Sophia University where he assisted as a lecturer in English Studies, introduced him to this job. This work helped to support the family, especially since grandfather Kizo was not able to work during the occupation period under General Douglas Macarthur. My father had to swear not to share any information about his work with anyone outside the hospital.

"He hated to be involved in the political game like his father and so left his birthplace, Fukuoka, and started working as a journalist in Tokyo. He wrote regularly for the Oriental Economist and The Study of Current English. He was also famous for his technical translations among fast moving multinational companies like NEC and Fujitsu in the 1970s. He could translate in twelve different languages. He helped his friend Shinji Takano to compile a book in English on Japanese wild birds in the 1970s. He was also an avid chess player. My father died of acute stomach cancer, in July 1982, at 56. I sometimes wonder if his involvement helping those doctors at the Atomic Bomb Centre hospital made his life shorter than it supposed to be, since he would have been exposed to the still very strong radiation at that time. I was very close to my father and his death was a great loss to me. Richard consoled me in very beautiful way on the phone after the funeral of my father and sent me a caring, personal letter. It was actually my father's death that brought Richard and I close together again as it prompted him to visit Japan.

"Shuntarõ Tanikawa, Shuji Terayama, Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, and Akiyoshi Nosaka (See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Akiyoshi) were frequent guests and patrons of the Cradle Bar in Roppongi owned and managed by Richard's friend Shinna Takako. He went there almost every night while in stayed in the expensive Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku. They were a bit younger than my father's generation, as they were still middle school students at the end of the war. But the wound of growing up in post World War II Japan was felt strongly in conversations and writers' talks with Richard whose first impression of Japan was the Pearl Harbor attack and the death of his uncle in the war as he described in the introduction to June 30th, June 30th. When Richard returned to Japan and saw me again in 1983 and 1984, we often talked about Japanese modern literature in the sense of how to reconstruct identities after the enemy (America) turned into material God for the Japanese youth.

"Richard's fascination with Japan has been generalized, even mocked, in reviews of his work and in obituaries after his death. Several writers assumed his attraction to Japan was that of a poet's imagination of exotic places, or his attraction to Japanese females. I assure you it was not. Like most American writers who visit Japan, Richard could not read Japanese, but he read Japanese literature extensively in English translation when he was young and developed a deep understanding of past and current Japanese writers and literature. Richard seemed to have been helped to understand Japanese culture, literature, and art mainly from interaction with Takako Shiina (often referred to as Richard's Japanese sister) and her admirers, including writer Junnosuke Yoshiyuki and other contemporary writers and modernist poets like Shuntarõ Tanikawawho who patronized her bar, The Cradle, as well as the directors of independent theaters and movies.

"Richard was delighted that he had found a younger headstrong Japanese girlfriend who shared his passion for talking about the literary world. However, literary tastes between Richard and me were very different. I recall with a smile that he was rather terrified one day when he found out that in the book Modern American Literary Criticism he was placed neck to neck with Vladimir Nabokov who was my father's and my favorite writer at home. Papa read from the book to me in Russian.

"I have no idea why Richard hated Nabokov so much, for he could not explain it clearly when I asked. Perhaps he did not approve of the media controversy surrounding Lolita , especially its banning. I remember that we argued about the book Richard did not read, Glory, translated by Nabokov's son into English in 1971. My father mentioned the original title is something like 'exploit.' I thought the ending scene of Martin Edelweiss disappearing across border into the Soviet Union in the snow was so absolutely wonderful, but Richard dismissed my comment with his snort! Perhaps he just had to deny all those writers with Cornell, Harvard, and Yale university backgrounds ignoring other regional writers who also published novels.

"Discussing Japanese literature was much more fun for Richard and he even forgot to fill his drink while we argued. Richard must have thought of me a rather odd fish. With all 1980s economic glories shining in Tokyo, I, much younger than Richard, who was praised as the futuristic deconstructionist writer, and stood like an aloof worrier, often argued with him, defending the old fashioned attitude that literature needs to have a moral value in its core. I argued that despite the idiosyncrasy of Mishima's private life, his novels deepened the understanding of human nature, and to me, were not comparable with Richard's favorite, 'Dark Room' by Junichiro Yoshiyuki, or work by Osamu Dazai, or the plays of Shuji Terayama. I introduced Richard to Terayama's beautiful 'tankas,' Japanese traditional formatted poems, which were less famous than his plays and movies. He really enjoyed me translating them into English after I read them to him in Japanese.

"My favorite Japanese writer in the group of Richard's friends' was Hiroyuki Itsuki who was not really known outside of Japan, but wrote beautifully of the human pains and hopes to survive through catastrophes. His recent works show how he matured to seek the calmness and balance in Buddhism. I wished Richard would have known him. He was a young survivor of Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945. He was also from Kyushu Island. Richard was more attentive of me explaining other writers in 'the Third Generation,' in which his friend Junnosuke Yoshiyuki was included, especially those writers whose main novels were not translated into English. I also shared with Richard my favorite writers at that time, Kunio Tsuji (not the poet who became Richard's friend, but the novelist), Natsuki Ikezawa, Sawako Ariyoshi, Ayako Sono, and Yoshimi Usui whose work prompted us to visit together the countryside near Azumino, in Nagano prefecture, when Richard visited Japan in 1983.

"Like we did in Pine Creek, Montana, we strolled through the stream of people on the Yamanote platform, the street of Omotesando, and through Yasukuni Shinto shrine and park, continuing our heated discussion until the skies got dark and I had to go home to my mother and Richard, after escorting me to the ticket booth of Keio Private Line, went to the Cradle Bar and another night of deep drinking in Roppongi.

"Now back to Montana, in October 1980. My parents flew from Tokyo to New York City for my father's lecture tour organized by the Buddhist Educational Fund and Professor Fukuoka of Rissho University. I flew to New York to see my parents. Richard made me swear that I would return to him. He planned to arrange that I could finish my thesis while attending Montana State University as an exchange student. I remember Richard was planning a lecture tour and was worried about how to protect my identity. He had promised my father not to reveal my identity.

"In New York, my parents and university administrators convinced me that I needed to return to my graduate studies in order to keep my assistantship, which I depended upon for access to research materials. My father told me that he would not provide the money for my living expenses if I returned to Montana. So, I had to call Richard and tell him that I would not return to Montana. I was torn by this decision, as I really wanted to be different, but I knew that I needed to finish by educational degree. After I graduated, I returned to Tokyo, Japan.

"So, Richard and I went separate paths. We stayed in touch through letters and met again in January 1983 and May 1984 when Richard visited Tokyo. My last contact with Richard was a hand-written note from him saying he would come back to Japan in the fall of 1984.

"I must confess that I became Richard's girlfriend totally oblivious about his fame and his writings. In a way, the Richard I loved was not a famous writer, but just what he was as a man, and perhaps, a born poet. I got quite irritated if his ego blew out of size and was not afraid of saying so to him. Not all of his writings are literary masterpieces. I loved his poetry rather than prose after I started reading his books, though Marc Chéntier's study made me think more deeply about his style. (Richard came back from Paris and made me read aloud the English translation of Marc's book for him). I praise Richard's friend Don Carpenter's novel Hard Rain Falling for how he, like Richard, and other anti-East Coast writers achieved a common protagonist's honest voice. I myself have written some short stories in English recently, and find that poetic diction can provide such a base without the psychological nitty gritty. That was exactly what Richard conveyed in his prose writing. Though I think I am far more political than Richard as the content goes.

"I will end with a poem dedicated to Richard. If the American Dust website is for holding a torch for the spirit of the poet/writer, Richard's ghost would like to read the poem dedicated to him by his Puck, the nickname he gave me from Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream.

"Not Here"
For R

From every walk of life you could find me
You were a wind, a transparent wind,
It is not necessary to build
A wall of words between us.

From every walk of life we just left us,
One alone stopped on that open road
Winding up to a promised sky,
Wondered, if we would ever dream us?

Half inside of one thunderous night,
Our hide-and-seek in hunter's woods
Warped, danced and scratched us.
Only the heat of embrace remains . . .

From every walk of life I see you through me
You are the wind, the transparent wind,
No, it is not necessary to build
A wall of words between us.

Masako Kano, July 30, 2011
Buenos Aires, Argentina
— Masako Kano. Emails to John F. Barber, 26, 27, 28, 29 July 2011.

October 1980

Masako Kano left Montana and returned to Hofstra University, under pressure from her family. Brautigan tried to convince her to transfer to Montana State University, in Bozeman, Montana, and complete her graduate studies there. It was clear, however, to both she and Brautigan knew that she would not return. They remained friends, meeting in Tokyo, Japan, in 1983 and 1984. Kano was with Brautigan at the Keio Plaza Hotel while he typed the poem "Night Flowing River" and assisted both Brautigan and Shuntarõ Tanigawa who translated the poem into Japanese for its first publication in Asahi Shinbun, the top-circulated newspaper in Japan at the time.

Cheryl McCall, a writer for People Weekly magazine, arrived to write an article about the actors, writers, and artists living in Paradise Valley, Montana. Her article, "Bloomsbury Comes to Big Sky," was published 3 November 1980.

Photographer Michael Abramson accompanied McCall and photographed Brautigan fishing Armstrong Creek with artist and painter Russell Chatham, who, in his memoir "Dust to Dust" (Dark Waters. Clark City Press, 1988, pp. 28-34) recounts Brautigan as fragile and sensitive, not a macho hunter. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Chatham.

Abramson also photographed Brautigan sitting with his daughter, Ianthe, in front of his barn. The photograph was used later, on the front cover of Ianthe's You Can't Catch Death. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Ianthe. A similar photograph appeared later in People magazine, illustrating "Author Richard Brautigan Apparently Takes His Own Life, But He Leaves a Rich Legacy," a tribute by James Seymore (12 November 1984). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Tributes > Seymore.

Steve Chapple visited Brautigan in Pine Creek, for an interview to be published in The San Francisco Chronicle as part of the promotional efforts surrounding the forthcoming publication of The Tokyo-Montana Express.

Near the end of the month, Brautigan returned to San Francisco, where he took a room at the Kyoto Inn, in the downtown Japanese district.

Saturday, 1 November 1980

Excerpts from Brautigan's forthcoming The Tokyo-Montana Express were published in California Living, the magazine section of The Chronicle. These excerpts included "California Mailman," "The Beacon," "Open," "The Butcher," and "Sunday." The article was entitled "Five Stops on the Tokyo-Montana Express."

Monday, 3 November 1980

Brautigan signed copies of The Tokyo-Montana Express in the afternoon at Walden Books in the Tacoma Mall. At 8:00 PM, Brautigan gave a reading at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. After the reading, Brautigan was interviewed by Jim Erickson from the Tacoma News Tribune.

Wednesday, 5 November 1980

Brautigan took an early morning flight to Atlanta, Georgia, where he transferred to a flight to Los Angeles, California. From Los Angeles, he flew to Eugene, Oregon, his first return to his boyhood hometown since he left in 1956. He gave an evening reading at the University of Oregon.

Friday, 7 November 1980

Brautigan's divorce from Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa), his second wife, earned a final judgement in San Francisco County Superior Court. The judgement was filed 10 November and entered into Court records 12 November 1980.

Monday, 10 November 1980

Brautigan met with an undergraduate class at Boise State University before attending an autograph part at the Book Shop on Boise's Main Street. In the afternoon, Brautigan flew to Denver, and then took a connecting flight to Newark, New Jersey. He spent the night in New York City.

Wednesday, 12 November 1980

Brautigan flew to New York in the morning, and then on to Chicago, Illinois. He gave an 8:00 PM reading in the Ironwood Room at Triton College, in River Grove, a suburb of Chicago.

Friday, 14 November 1980

Brautigan signed copies of The Tokyo-Montana Express from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM at the Nebraska Book Store.

Michael Zangari, a reporter for the Daily Nebraskan, the daily student newspaper at the University of Nebraska, wrote an account Brautigan's appearance at the Nebraska Bookstore. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Tributes > Zangari.

Monday, 17 November 1980

Brautigan took an early morning flight from Seattle, Washington, to Missoula, Montana, where he signed copies of The Tokyo-Montana Express at 3:00 PM at the B. Dalton Bookstore in Southgate Mall. Brautigan spoke and read in the University Center Ballroom at the University of Montana at 8:00 PM. As with all his previous appearances, Brautigan was paid a $1,500 fee, plus 15 percent of all sales of hardback copies of his newest novel.

Wednesday, 19 November 1980

Brautigan flew from Denver to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was driven to Conway to Hendricks University. Brautigan delivered his standard reading/presentation at 8:00 PM.

Monday, 24 November 1980

Brautigan participated in a 8:00 PM poetry reading at the Kaufman Concert Hall, 92nd Street YM-YWHA, New York. Robert Creeley introduced Brautigan. A book signing followed.

Thursday, 27 November 1980

Brautigan, Eunice Kitagawa, Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, and her boyfriend, Paul Swensen, celebrated Thanksgiving by ordering room service and eating in Brautigan's Gramercy Park Hotel room.

Sunday, 30 November 1980

Brautigan was interviewed in his Gramercy Park Hotel room by Spencer Vibbert of the Boston Globe who wanted a story for the Tuesday edition to coincide with Brautigan's upcoming visit to Boston.

Tuesday, 2 December 1980

Brautigan met with Joe Fischer, a reporter for the Toronto Star at 1:00 PM. At 8:00 PM, Brautigan gave a reading in the offices of the Harvard Advocate, the nation's oldest continually published literary magazine.

Thursday 4 December 1980

Brautigan flew from Detroit to San Francisco, California, book promotion tour finished. He immediately moved into Eunice Kitagawa's Vallejo Street apartment, convient to both Enrico's and his office above Vesuvio Café.

1981

Highlights: finishes manuscript for So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away . . . article about his inability to drive published in People Weekly magazine . . . readings and presentations.

Friday, 13 February 1981

Brautigan traveled to Boulder, Colorado, where, as with his previous trip, he stayed at the Hotel Boulderado.

Saturday, 21 March 1981

Following on interest generated by his promotional tour for The Tokyo-Montana Express, Brautigan was contacted by People Weekly magazine. The magazine wanted an article about Brautigan and assigned Cheryl McCall, who had written an earlier piece about the literary and art scene in Paradise, Montana, "Bloomsbury Comes to Big Sky," published 3 November 1980. McCall was interested in the fact that Brautigan did not drive, and decided to make that the focus of her article, which would be styled as an interview with Brautigan. San Francisco photographer Roger Ressmeyer was hired to provide photographs of Brautigan for the article. Ressmeyer took many photographs of Brautigan including head-and-shoulders portraits, Brautigan riding around San Francisco in a rickshaw pulled by friend Dwain Richard Cox, Brautigan socializing with friends at Enrico's Cafe, a popular North Beach gathering spot at Broadway and Kearney, near City Lights Books, Brautigan in his North Beach office, located above Vesuvio Café, 255 Columbus Avenue, next door to City Lights Books, and Brautigan posing on train tracks and in front of junked automobiles at a San Francisco dock.

Sunday, 10 May 1981

Brautigan traveled to Pine Creek, Montana, where he worked on his evolving novel, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away.

July 1981

Eunice Kitagawa visited Brautigan at his house in Pine Creek, Montana. She told Brautigan that she was moving to Hawaii.

Saturday, 5 September 1981

Daughter, Ianthe, married Paul Swensen, a film director, in Santa Rosa, California. Brautigan did not approve of the marriage, and did not attend the ceremony. Brautigan wrote a single paragraph short story titled "My Name Forgotten in the Grass" about his feelings. "She is my only daughter, and the end of my family name. [. . .] My name became the shadow of an old deer bone among the green grass that doesn't know its name." The story was never published. See Stories > Unpublished > 1981 > story title.

Sunday, 27 September 1981

Brautigan left Montana and returned to San Francisco, California, where he stayed for two weeks at the Kyoto Inn located in the Japanese district (An Unfortunate Woman 2).

Sunday, 11 October 1981

Brautigan gave a 2:00 PM poetry reading at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The reading was sponsored by the Black Mountain II poetry series, a name used by the English Department at SUNY Buffalo.

Tuesday, 13 October 1981

Brautigan traveled by car with Robert Creeley, his wife Penelope, and their young son, Will, to Toronto, Canada.

November 1981

Brautigan moved to a house in Berkeley, California, located at 17 Eucalyptus Road (An Unfortunate Woman 2). A lawyer owned the house. His wife committed suicide there the previous year and he refused to live in the house. Tony Dingman arranged to live in the house rent free. He invited Brautigan to join him. Richard Hodge, Brautigan's lawyer joined them as well.

Sunday, 6 December 1981

Brautigan delivered his second reading for the Ketchikan Humanities Society at 7:30 PM. After the reading, Brautigan spend the night drinking with Terry Gardiner, the "wild legislator."

Tuesday, 8 December 1981

Brautigan traveled from Anchorage, Alaska, to Honolulu, Hawaii (An Unfortunate Woman 2, 12, 46-47, 47-50). While in Hawaii, Brautigan visited with Eunice Kitagawa, who had moved there from San Francisco in late August. Brautigan remained in Hawaii until mid-January 1982.

1982

Highlights: So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away published . . . Wrote An Unfortunate Woman.

In Hawaii, Eunice Kitagawa gave Brautigan a T-shirt with an image of a chicken atop a military tank and the words "Fighting Chickens" printed below. Brautigan wanted his picture taken with a fighting chicken and Kitagawa arranged for George Bennet to be the photographer. Brautigan recounts the experience with the chicken in his novel An Unfortunate Woman (8-11).

Saturday, 30 January 1982

On his birthday, Brautigan traveled across the bay to San Francisco. He was forty-seven years old. The bus on which Brautigan traveled passed a building fire in San Francisco. Brautigan got off the bus and watched the fire (An Unfortunate Woman 4, 15-20). Brautigan paid for a room in the Kyoto Inn, in the downtown Japanese district and spent the next week writing his thoughts and observations from Hawaii and the haunted house in Berkeley.

Thursday, 18 February 1982

Brautigan flew to Chicago, Illinois, where he was met by Dennis Lynch and driven to DeKalb, Illinois, about 50 miles to the west. Lynch and Brautigan met in 1979, when Brautigan participated in a panel discussion entitled "Zen and Contemporary Poetry" at the 94th annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), 29 December, in San Francisco, California. Lynch organized and chaired the panel. Lynch was an instructor in the English Department at Northern Illinois University and had arranged for Brautigan to visit, teach his class, and give a public reading. Brautigan stayed with Lynch, at his one-bedroom apartment on campus for ten days. Brautigan describes the trip in his novel An Unfortunate Woman (59-64).

Saturday, 27 February 1982

Brautigan returned to San Francisco, California, from Chicago, Illinois, and took up residence at the Kyoto Inn in the downtown Japanese district.

Thursday, 4 March 1982

Brautigan posed for photographs taken by Roger Ressmeyer that were to be used for the promotional and marketing efforts associated with Brautigan's most recent novel, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away. Ressmeyer took several head-and-shoulders portraits of Brautigan. One was used on the back flyleaf of Brautigan's novel. Additionally, Ressmeyer took the photograph used on the front and back covers of the novel at the Novato reservoir in northern Marin County.

June 1982

On weekends while teaching at Montana State University in Bozeman, and full time after the spring term was finished in mid-June, Brautigan stayed at his Pine Creek ranch. Here he started a new writing project, entitled "American Hotels" even while he continued work on the project begun on his birthday and now titled "Investigating Moods."

Late in the month, Brautigan sent a proposal for a book to Dell Publishing Company and his literary agent, Helen Brann. The proposed book would consist of four sections. The first, the unfinished project started on his birthday in January, would examine varieties of human existence revolving around tragedy. It would be called, at the advice of Becky Fonda, "An Unfortunate Woman." The second, "Japanese UFO," would contain stories about contemporary Japan. The third would be "American Hotels." The fourth would be a collection of stories set in Montana, none of which were yet written. Working title for this final section would be "Waiting for Deer."

Sunday, 4 July 1982

Finished with his newest novel, Brautigan turned his attention to summer celebration. Visitors obliged over the Fourth of July weekend. Dennis Lynch and a friend, Brad Donovan and his wife, Georgia, and Rip Torn and his three children, Ed and Jennifer Dorn and their two children, Dick Dillof, Bud Swearingen, and others gathered at Brautigan's Pine Creek ranch. Brautigan decided to throw a dinner party for Rip Torn and asked Brad Donovan for help with the grocery shopping and cooking. Donovan and Georgia used their food stamps to buy Brautigan's grocery list. Donovan helped in the kitchen and partook of the party swirling around him. His memoir, "Food Stamps for the Stars" (Firestarter June 1996: 4-5) is an interesting account of one of Brautigan's legendary parties. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Donovan.

Friday, 16(?) July 1982

Not wanting to remain alone at his Pine Creek ranch, Brautigan moved into Georgia Donovan's sister's vacant trailer at the Forest Park trailer park, along the banks of the Gallatin River, west of Bozeman, Montana. Here he had the chance to visit at leisure with Brad Donovan. They decided to write a screenplay about live in a trailer park. The result was Trailer, a rough, 100-page first draft. See Screenplays > Trailer.

Friday, 10 September 1982

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away published. 17,500 copies were printed. The novel sold less than 15,000 copies, and, like all of Brautigan's later work, received mixed reviews from critics. This was Brautigan's last publication in his lifetime.

October 1982

Brautigan returned to Bozeman, Montana, and took a room at the Baxter Hotel, on Main Street. He started work again on "American Hotels" writing about his travel and hotel experiences beginning in the 1950s. He filled nearly fifty pages in his notebook, sympathizing with the disappearance of the hotel as a living space. At the end of the month Brautigan stopped writing. "American Hotels" remains unpublished.

Brautigan spent much of the fall in Bozeman, at the Imperial 400 Motel, on Main Street, room 214, or at the home of Karen Datko, a reporter for the Bozeman Chronicle.

1983

Highlights: Visits Paris to promote French publication of his work . . . Visits Japan (his sixth trip) . . . Closes up Montana house, never to return . . . Travels in Europe.

Wednesday, 19 January 1983

Brautigan applied for and received a ninety-day visa to visit Japan before being driven to Palo Alto, California, where he delivered an 8:00 PM reading at Stanford University.

Monday, 24 January 1983

Brautigan received an invitation to visit Paris, France, for a week beginning April 11 for the publication of the French addition of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away.

Wednesday, 23 February 1983

Brautigan flew from San Francisco to South Bend, Indiana, to deliver a 7:00 PM reading at Notre Dame University.

Friday, 11 March 1983

Brautigan sent a letter to Helen Brann, his literary agent, ending their thirteen-year business relationship.

Dear Helen Brann,
After our last conversation about my new novel An Unfortunate Woman, I realized that our views on this work are so vastly different that it would be very difficult to continue our working relationship because this novel is one of the main directions of my future writing.

So I am terminating my relationship with the Helen Brann Agency effective as of March 11, 1983.

Regretfully,
Richard Brautigan

Brautigan and Brann spoke by telephone earlier in the month. Brann told Brautigan she could not find a publisher for An Unfortunate Woman because it was more autobiographical than fictional, and seemingly focused on Brautigan's bad marriage experience with Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa). Brautigan may have felt Brann was disloyal and, as he had done with others, cut off all further relations (William Hjortsberg 738). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Thursday, 7 April 1983

Brautigan left Pine Creek, Montana, and traveled to San Francisco, California.

Saturday, 9 April 1983

Brautigan had breakfast with Helen Brann, his former literary agent. He told her that if he published anything in the future, it would be in Europe where, based on recent critical and publishing success, he saw an opportunity to regain his stature as a writer. He left for Paris in the evening.

Monday, 11 April 1983

Brautigan was interviewed by Jean Baptiste Baronian, on assignment for Le Magazine Littéraire. At 5:00 PM he was interviewed by Gabrielle Rollin. In the evening, he visited with Marc Chénetier. See References > Critiques > Baronian.

Friday, 15 April 1983

Brautigan participated in an interview with a French television crew in his hotel room. At 7:00 PM, he gave a reading at Maison des Sciences de l'Homme on the Boulevard Raspail.

Sunday, 17 April 1983

Brautigan left Paris, France, bound for Tokyo, Japan, with stops in Frankfurt, Germany, Cairo, Egypt, and Aden, Yemen. This was Brautigan's sixth trip to Japan. As before, he checked into the Keio Plaza Hotel. His room on the thirty-seventh floor became his base of operations for next four months. Once settled, he resumed contact with Masako Kano, whom he convinced to help with an assignment from the West German version of Playboy magazine to write an article about West German fashion models working in Tokyo Japan. Kano would be his research assistant, able to learn information about the models and their work that would be unavailable to Brautigan.

Feedback from Jim DeBerry
"I first met Richard [Brautigan] in Tokyo. I had just taken a job for an American computer company that had a branch office in Japan and was staying at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku which was right across the street from the building where my company was located. After work there was a place called the Little Bar near the lobby of the hotel and just outside the main bar. I had made a lot of Japanese friends there who came after work for a few drinks. The Little Bar was open from 5 to 9 I believe.

"One day a rather tall stranger stopped by and ordered a beer. He was dressed just about like you see him in the pictures blue jeans and western shirt but no big hat. He stood next to me and we started talking. I introduced myself and he introduced himself and asked what I was doing in Tokyo. The name Richard Brautigan meant absolutely nothing to me as I had never heard of him. I asked him what he was doing there and he said "I am just a fifty year old hippy who has never outgrown it. He said he was a writer and named a couple of books that I had never heard of probably Trout Fishing [in America] and [In] Watermelon [Sugar].

"We often stopped by that Little Bar and just talked about nothing in particular. If anyone is ever in Tokyo and goes to the Keio Plaza he always stood in the same place about four feet over from the left side facing the bar. Maybe he left some 'Karma' there or something. We often did the Sunday New York Times crosswords there on Friday nights as that is when they were published in Tokyo. As a rule he finished first but not always. After the Little Bar closed I usually went to my room and he went over to Shibuya where a lady friend of his ran a bar.

"I felt that he was a fine person who cared for people. He once told me that I was the only American in Japan that he had anything to do with. He went into a small spiel about the Americans that were there that had nothing to do with the Japanese. He called them the Ropongi Crowd, I think. And he had little use for them. He felt that when one was in a foreign country that one should partake of that culture.

"For those of you who don't know Tokyo, Ropongi is the location of the American Embassy and most of the Americans hung out in mostly American clubs having almost nothing to do with the locals. These were the Americans that he had little use for. I suppose because I had a lot of Japanese friends, he saw me differently.

"He told me he usually came to Japan in the spring and went back to the states in the fall. I told him that it seemed backwards to me because Japan had such a mild winter and Montana was so cold. He said, 'Well, I come to Japan to get ideas for my writing and since I am lazy I go back to Montana to write because I am snowed in up there and am forced to write because there is nothing else to do.'

"This is getting longer than I expected. To make a long story short I came back to America in the spring of 1984 and ran across some of his books at a book store and bought them and enjoyed them very much. I think maybe if I had known of his books earlier then perhaps I might have been awed or something and our relationship would have been different. As it was we were just two Americans in Tokyo having a good time together.

"And before anyone asks I might add that I saw no signs of despondency or anything that would suggest his suicide in 1984. I guess the last time I saw him was in the late summer of 1983."
— Jim DeBerry. Email to John F. Barber, 2004.

end of May 1983

Brautigan was invited by the United States Information Agency at the U. S. Embassy to conduct presentations at cities across Japan. For each presentation, Brautigan would be paid a $75.00 honorarium plus a $113.00 per diem. Brautigan accepted the invitation, and planned a presentation in Kyoto on 20 June and one in Osaka on 21 June.

Wednesday, 8 June 1983

Brautigan had lunch with Donald Ritchie, American author who wrote about Japanese people and cinema, who recorded these impressions in his journal.

"Denim and corduroy, granny glasses, wispy red hair, uneven red moustache. Bright blue eyes, the moustache concealing an affable mouth. The aging hippy persona is there but is mostly due to the clothes: the studied appearance of the unlearned, does not know foreign languages, careful mispronunciations. Part of it is a pose, I think: the American anti-intellectual, Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad. But not all.

"He talks about himself . . .. He is not precisely attempting to justify himself, but is giving me a lot of information. Among the things spoken of is how different the public personal, created by 'the media,' is from the real self.

"[W]e speak of the ways in which the persona may be used. It is of use in getting people to go to bed with you. In fact, fame-fucking is a known result.

"He has had much experience. Further, he prefers his partners young. His persona is very reassuring. He is filled with earth-wisdom and, as one fo the original hippies, is by definition kind and understanding, things that female children, males as well, find attractive. He is at present with a young girl [Masako Kano], 'young enough to be my daughter.'

". . . I find his air of the faux-naïf very refreshing but I still do not know how faux it is. Perhaps it isn't. What he finds in me I don't know—we speak little about me."
(Donald Ritchie. The Japan Journals. Stone Bridge Press, 2004, pp. 193, 195-196).

Tuesday, 22 June 1983

Brautigan gave a reading in Osaka, Japan, as part of a speaking tour arranged by the United States Information Agency in the U. S. Embassy. The event was called "A Conversation with Richard Brautigan" and consisted of him reading his past work and then answering questions from the audience. At mid-month, Brautigan gave a reading ("Literature as a Living Process") at the Tokyo American Center (William Hjortsberg 758, 759). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

August 1983

Brautigan returned from Tokyo, Japan, to San Francisco, California.

early-October 1983

Brautigan and Brad Donovan completed a working draft of their screenplay, Trailer.

Sean Cassaday, and Toby Thompson helped Brautigan pack up the contents of his Pine Creek, Montana, ranch house. Brautigan was intent to leave the place forever. In the packing he gave a copy of the poem "Night Flowing River" (See Poetry > Uncollected > 1984 > poem title) and a story, "The Lost Tree" (See Stories > Uncollected > 1984 > story title), to Thompson who said he might be able to place them with the Washington Review of the Arts in Washington, D.C. (William Hjortsberg 775). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

The poem, "Night Flowing River," concerns Brautigan's attendance of funeral ceremonies for Terayama Shuji, in May 1983, in Tokyo, Japan. The story, "The Lost Tree" is about a tree in Boulder, Colorado, under which he had frequent sex with Masako Kano in July 1980.

Both the poem and the story, as well as a photograph of Brautigan by Thompson, were published under the title "Richard Brautigan: Tokyo and Montana" in the February/March 1984 issue of Friends of the Washington Review of the Arts.

Brautigan left Montana, bound for New York City. He never returned to Montana.

During a brief stay in New York, Brautigan visited with his daughter, Ianthe, and long-time friend, Tony Dingman.

Wednesday, 26 October 1983

Brautigan began a spontaneous tour of Europe. His first stop was Spain, where he traveled with a woman he met at the One World Poetry Conference. She lived in Palma, Majorca, and Brautigan stayed with her through the end of the month and into November.

November 1983

Brautigan in Zurich, Switzerland, for several days at the end of the month. While there he delivered a lecture at the University of Zurich, and gave a television interview with readings from The Tokyo-Montana Express (available online as Richard Brautigan Interview/Reading 1983 at the YouTube website.

At the end of the month, Brautigan flew back to Palma, Majorca, Spain, where he remained for a few days.

Tuesday, 6 December 1983

Brautigan traveled by train to Heidelberg, Germany, where he gave a 2:30 PM lecture at the English Department of the University of Mannheim.

Thursday, 8 December 1983

Brautigan gave an 11:00 AM lecture at the English Department at Bonn University. After the lecture, Brautigan flew to Berlin, Germany, where, that evening at 8:00 PM, he gave a lecture at The Amerika Haus. This was the end of Brautigan's German tour as arranged by the United States Information Service. Brautigan remained in Berlin for three days. He later told friends that he visited a former German concentration camp during his tour and suggested that his work in progress, The Complete Absence of Twilight was based on that visit.

Saturday, 10 December 1983

Brautigan attended a 5:00 PM book signing at The Author's Bookstore, in West Berlin. He met with the editors of Transatlantik and sold them the first German serial rights to his six-page story, "The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo" (William Hjortsberg 784). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

1984

Highlights: Continues travels in Europe . . . Takes own life in Bolinas, California.

Monday, 9 January 1984

Brautigan applied for a visa to visit Japan. At the end of his application, Brautigan wrote, "At the age of seventeen, I came in contact with Japanese culture and it has had a profound influence on my life. Japan has been my teacher. I wish to continue my education."

Brautigan was granted a six-month visa "for cultural activities" (William Hjortsberg 787-788). See References > Biographes > Hjortsberg.

February 1984

Brautigan's poem "Night Flowing River" (See Poetry > Uncollected > 1984 > poem title) and his story "The Lost Tree" (See Stories > Uncollected > 1984 > story title) were published in February/March issue of Friends of the Washington Review of the Arts. This was a republication of "Night Flowing River" and a first publication for "The Lost Tree." Both were the last works of Brautigan published in English during his lifetime.

Friday, 10 February 1984

Brautigan set about writing, hoping to generate something he could sell for income. The poem "Reflections" wondered what people would say after his death. Brautigan wrote "Death Growth," a grim mediation on death two days later. Other poems included "Death My Answering Service" and "Hopeless Candles." All remain unpublished. See Poetry > Uncollected > poem titles.

Brautigan began "The Same Story Twice," intended as a sequel to Dreaming of Babylon told by C. Card's son, but after five pages abandoned the effort. This work remains unpublished.

Brautigan also tried to continue work on a screenplay begun at the Owl Hotel in Amsterdam, Wear Out and Die, but abandoned the effort after four pages. He began a new screenplay, titled Clichè, envisioning a movie about 1950s mediocrity. The Killer was to be about Barbara Frederick, a woman pushing a shopping cart wondering if she could kill the Chinese woman in the next aisle (William Hjortsberg 791-792). None of these efforts were ever finished and all remain unpublished. See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Brautigan also contacted the United States Information Service at the U. S. Embassy, hoping to set up a paid speaking tour. Nagoya and Fukuoka expressed interest in having Brautigan speak at their American Cultural Centers, but plans were never finalized.

Brautigan visited with Masako Kano, but their relationship was over.

Sunday, 11 March 1984

Brautigan departed Tokyo, Japan, bound for San Francisco, California, where he checked into the Kyoto Inn, in the downtown Japanese district. Soon after he returned, Brautigan borrowed a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum from Jim Sakata, owner of Cho-Cho Tempura Bar, 1020 Kearny Street, a popular San Francisco Japanese restaurant. Brautigan claimed to be uneasy about moving into his empty house in Bolinas. In return, Brautigan gave Sakata a brick which he placed on the bar, in the corner where Brautigan always sat. The brick became a private memorial after Brautigan's death (William Hjortsberg 796). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Sunday, 1 July 1984

Brautigan was featured in "The Story of Brautigan in Big Sur" a memoir by Tamio Kageyama published in the July 1984 issue of Brutus. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Memoirs > Tamio.

August 1984

Brautigan closed his office above Vesuvio's Café and cleaned out his storage unit at the Army Street Mini-Storage. The items from both were taken by Mike York to Nucla, Colorado, where they remained until 1996 when they were discovered and purchased by Ted Latty, a Brautigan collector (William Hjortsberg 802-803). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

At the end of the month, Brautigan installed a telephone in his Bolinas home. Thinking that he might find success writing screenplays, Brautigan felt he needed to be more reachable. Brautigan called William "Gatz" Hjortsberg and asked him to collaborate on a screenplay about a woman serial killer. It was a mashup of Clichè and The Killer. Gatz suggested a new title: Skeletons in the Closet. The project never advanced beyond this initial conversation (William Hjortsberg 804, 805). See References > Biographies > Hjorstberg.

Brautigan also worked on a long prose piece about artist and writer Russell Chatham, a work that was never completed and remains unpublished. Seeking all sources of income, Brautigan wrote Paul Ferlazzo, head of the English Department at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, asking for a job teaching "fifteen students each term in writing prose" (William Hjortsberg 807). See References > Biographies > Hjorstberg.

Saturday, 8 September 1984

Brautigan gave Robert Junsch and his wife Shallen, who lived in nearby Stinson Beach, California, a number of signed books. In a copy of The Galilee Hitch-Hiker Brautigan wrote
This copy just is    
wishing and concerned one more week. Let's see what happens. Why
not? (happiness + happiness)

Saturday, 15 September 1984

Brautigan visited with Andy Cole, telling him about meeting his former wife Akiko (Nishizawa) Yoshimura. Later in the day he saw Margot Doss. At 11:00 PM, Marcia Clay telephoned Brautigan who said he wanted to read something to her but had to hang up the phone to find it. "Call me back in ten minutes," he said. When Clay called back Brautigan did not answer. She called repeatedly, each time getting only the answering machine (William Hjortsberg 811). See References > Biographies > Hjortsberg.

Thursday, 25 October 1984

Becky Fonda, wife of Peter Fonda, after not hearing from Brautigan for weeks, asked David Fechheimer, a private investigator in San Francisco, to check on Brautigan. Fechheimer allegedly called a friend in Bolinas, California. Robert Yench, of Bolinas, found Brautigan's badly-decomposed body in the second-story living room, near the walk-in fireplace, of Brautigan's home at 6 Terrrace Avenue. A .44 caliber Smith and Wesson handgun was found nearby with one fired bullet under the hammer. A gunshot wound to the head was the determined cause of death. Many obituaries, memoirs, and tributes were written about and for Richard Brautigan.

Brautigan's death rekindled bad feelings between his parents, Bernard F. Brautigan and Lulu Mary Keho as Mark Barabak recounted in his obituary for Brautigan. See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes > Obituaries > Barabak.

Brautigan's death also stirred up memories, and even some guilt, among his fans.

Feedback from Brad Harrison
"One of the first things my wife Susan and I found we had in common when we met in 1978 was our love of Brautigan's books. Long after we were married, in the summer of 1984, we were driving from Buena Vista to Fairplay, Colorado, when we crossed a pass called 'Trout Creek Pass.' I pulled over and got my fly rod out of the back of the car. My wife took a picture of me standing in front of the 'Trout Creek Pass' sign. We agreed we would find some way of getting that picture to Brautigan. We got back into the car, and when I was pulling out we were almost crushed by a large truck that came flying out of nowhere, his horn blaring. I thought we were dead. A narrow escape—foreboding?

"We read the 'Milestone' entry about Brautigan's suicide just a few weeks later in Newsweek, before we had a chance to send that picture. I couldn't believe it. I always wondered if delaying on getting that picture to his publisher was a mistake, that it could have somehow helped. Which is probably stupid, but from your website it sounds like that is what he needed most of all—to hear from his readers. I had just finished So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away."
— Brad Harrison. Email to John F. Barber, 7 December 2007.

Feedback from Georgia Donovan
"In the fall of 1984, Brad [Donovan] [See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Tributes > Donovan] and I were in Livingston, Montana, waiting for Richard to come home from his trail around the world. He was over-due, and we were expecting him sometime, maybe soon, and then became concerned. We didn't anticipate what had happened. Yes, we knew from experience that he could get depressed, especially during the full moons of fall. He'd usually call. One year he called to tell me 'a ghost story without a ghost.'

"Well . . . during the month after the September full moon, I got creeped out. It can be a spooky time of year. I'd never seen a ghost. My deeper thoughts are capped off by a fairly analytical nature, so maybe I was ruling out the 'unreal.' And yet, I developed a fear of looking at our windows at night, because I was absolutely afraid that I would see a dancing skeleton. That was the image that popped into my mind every time. A grinning, dancing skeleton... Now, I guess I was an expert at denial. I did not associate this with Richard. And yet, I had some very good times with Richard during what I teasingly called his "old age" phase, when he had broken his leg and went about with a cane. He was almost dignified, even jolly, if I'm allowed to stretch it a bit. We had pleasant times during those days. Since I had to work late and missed the "Burger Special" at the Eagles Bar, Richard would always make sure the waitress saved me a burger-plate, with another paper plate over it, wrapped in tin-foil, like a steaming hamburger UFO . . . It was sweet.

"And he would dance about with his cane. Think Grateful Dead style. He knew those guys in San Francisco. And now he was dead. Presumably gratefully, since it was his decision. After we found out, and I'll skip the part about the shock and mind-bending horror, the skeleton-reflection-images stopped. Just like that.

"I think it was him, rippling through the ether-world with his odd-humored way of saying, yoo-hoo . . . could somebody please find me? Because it was taking awhile for somebody to find him. Because he chose to do this far from his friends in Montana, so that those dear ones would NOT see that. I shouldn't have been surprised, and yet I was, completely, because I was remembering all the ways that Richard would enjoy little bits of life, making the most out of what came along. Hindsight . . . years before, during financial difficulty, my sister, Mary, said to him, 'Why don't you sell your house in Bolinas?' Richard answered, 'Oh, I'm saving that for later, for the end part of my life.' Being young and naturally optimistic, we figured that meant 'retirement years.' Of course, Richard thought differently.

"After all these years of not thinking about it as much as possible, I can finally appreciate his little ghost story."
— Georgia Donovan. Email to John F. Barber, 8 June 2011.

Cathy Carter , lived in Bolinas, and believes she saw Brautigan on the last day of his life.

"I was co-owner (1978-2013) with my then husband of the home at the end of Wharf Rd, Bolinas; it is located on the water where the Lagoon meets the ocean. The property was given to my ex-husband in our divorce. I did not know Richard personally, but, as an English lit. major at SFSU, knew of him. The visual memory of seeing Richard at the end of Wharf Road, for seemingly hours, on what turned out most likely to be his last day, I still remember quite clearly. It remains a 'wish I had' memory.

"On the day of what was determined to be Richard's death, there was a terrible stench from an intense red tide—the Lagoon water was red—and it was densely filled with small fish. It had been an unusually hot week in Bolinas, no breeze, yet I couldn't open windows due to the horrible smell—caused by thousands of anchovies suffocating in the Lagoon, trapped due to their numbers and unable to return out to sea. In 37 yrs of living there (1976-2013), I'd never seen before, or experienced since, anything similar to that day.

"I had closed our wooden blinds and curtains—for an attempt to try to keep from heating up further inside, and because it was exceedingly depressing to look out. The home is built on the mouth of the Lagoon, last house on Wharf Rd. before the beach and the rocks—where I saw Richard when I peeped out, as it was feeling rather claustrophobic inside with the shades drawn. In those days, we were the only full-time residents on Wharf, which was empty of human life that day—except for Richard and me.

"Richard was on the rocks (part of our property that was given in an easement to the County, and in direct view from our dining room windows). He had moved from the bench to a lower level of the rocks, laying on his stomach, face down and quite close to the water, staring at the dying anchovies for a very long while without moving. What struck me the most was that he didn't move his body at all, how closely he was intensely observing the fish, mesmerized. And, I did feel then that, due to his attachment with fish, he was feeling equally (possibly more so) depressed at their plight, with nothing any of us could do to save them.

"I was conflicted about whether to invite him in for tea or such, or let him be. I'd spent 1960s-70s around the super stars of the SF rock/ Bill Graham scene (did light shows, my ex traveled with Airplane, Doobies, etc), and by the 80s was being reclusive, reverting to shyness. After I had tossed that around for awhile, I saw him walking towards the house/ town, looking down, then he was gone.

I felt regret soon after, that I didn't get out of myself to connect with him. It's been a life lesson—I do wonder if I'd just stepped outside onto the street, and offered some human contact, if what evidently happened soon after might not have.

So, that's my memory, John. I'm certainly not the cause of his death—meant to write that I knew of a possible cause of his death. I do believe all the circumstances of the day (not night) that I describe above did contribute to significantly deepen his depression, then suicide.
— Email to John F. Barber, 26 January 2018

Ianthe Brautigan notes in her memoir, You Can't Catch Death, "I've bought a plot for my dad in a small cemetery near a seaside town on the rocky northern California coast. An elderly man, the volunteer caretaker, helped me with the purchase. There is a sheep pasture on one side of the cemetery and a grove of eucalyptus trees at the far end. The plot I purchased is at the top near the shade of several creaking trees. My dad spent so much time avoiding the sun I can't see putting him in direct afternoon rays with no respite. . . I know my father should have a marker and a place. But, placing a headstone would require knowing what I want carved in the stone. . . . I have decided on white marble, and I have decided that I don't take having the last word lightly" (Ianthe Brautigan 134-135). See Obituaries-Memoirs-Tributes Memoirs > Ianthe.

Brautigan's burial plot is possibly located in the Calvary Catholic Cemetery (aka Bodega Calvary Cemetary) in Bodega, California, near the top of the hill and under the shade of eucalyptus trees there. Ianthe Brautigan purchased a plot in this cemetery, which is listed under the name "Robert G. Brautigan," but apparently has not yet erected a marker. The cemetery is connected with St. Philips in nearby Occidental, California.

1985

Highlights: Brautigan's second wife, Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa), seeks reward from estate following his death.

A photograph of Brautigan, apparently an outtake from an article by John Stickney about Brautigan in the 14 August 1970 issue of LIFE magazine ("Gentle Poet of the Young: A Cult Grows around Richard Brautigan," see References > Studies > Stickney) was used in a boxed trivia game titled "LIFE Magazine Remembers" issued by Time Life in 1985 (printed by Selchow & Righter). The game featured a set of 702 playing cards, each with a popular and/or famous photograph from the archives of LIFE magazine. Each card had a series of questions about the subject on the back side.

The 3" x 5" Brautigan card was number 34 from the set. The front shows a full bleed black and white photograph of Brautigan. The back features a smaller version of the same photograph, Brautigan's name, trade text, and four trivia questions
A. Who is this author of In Watermelon Sugar? (Richard Brautigan)
B. What is the title of his novel that reflects his California background? (A Confederate General From Big Sur)
C. As a San Francisco author, what group of American writers is he identified with? ("The Beat Generation")
D. Who wrote On The Road, perhaps the best known of the group this man is identified with? (Jack Kerouac)

December 1985

Richard A. Hodge and Ianthe Brautigan, as trustees for the estate of Richard Brautigan, agreed to pay Akiko Yoshimura (Nishizawa) $13,000 and 15% of all proceeds in excess of $75,000 derived from the sale of any assets from Brautigan's estate, except for his properties in Montana. In return, Yoshimura (Nishizawa) agreed to relinquish any claims or rights to Brautigan's estate or under his will.