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by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn?
The first time we spent any considerable time with Richard Brautigan was in 1969. The occasion was the writers' conference at a private college in San Diego. It was about two weeks following the birth of our son, Kidd, on the D.H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos, New Mexico.
A strange and provocative little gathering typical of those heady days, the company included Richard Brautigan and Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley? and his wife (the writer Bobby Louise Hawkins?), the prominent San Francisco Renaissance poet, Michael McClure? and Jim Morrison?.
A few years and many miles later, we lived across the street from Richard in San Francisco — first out on Geary Boulevard and then in North Beach. In the summer of 1976, he invited us up to his small ranch on the Yellowstone River outside Livingston, Montana.
He was a generous host and enthusiastic cook. We went trout fishing. We went to Chico Hot Springs, a scruffy, but marvelous local spa. Richard was such a keen student of life that he even turned the pathetic, worn-out cowboy nightlife of Livingston into a tour de force.
The night before we left, we stayed up drinking Dickel with him and arguing about Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Richard did not like the idea of revolutionaries running around killing people. In fact, as a reasonably well-off landowner, he was not about to support a revolution of any kind.
It was when he moved in across the street from us on Kearny in San Francisco that we met Akiko, his quite beautiful second wife. They appeared to be very happy, and Richard was more than ever bowing and tiptoeing around, using quaint Japanese mannerisms. He had Akiko read us Japanese poetry and serve us tea.
Despite his tendency to inspire an almost competitive urge to drink up the night hours, it was always a pleasure to see Richard. When he came to stay in Boulder for six weeks in 1980, we saw him almost every day. However obnoxious his behavior might have been the previous evening, it was easy to forgive him. However deep his troubles — and he was going through complicated and painful divorce proceedings at the time — his mischievous or drunken behavior was more like that of a naughty boy than that of a disturbed adult. It was like he hadn't grown up.
He once told us that he grew six inches in his 13th year, all the growth occurring in the area around his knees. The doctors attributed it to a gland, which they proceeded to remove, using a local anesthetic. Watching his gland come out Richard described as one of the "memorable moments" of his life. The four additional inches he grew to become 6-feet-4 were "normal," but he had become a freak of sorts, and he seemed to carry that sense of himself in the slope and stoop of his narrow shoulders, in the strange, giraffe gait to his walk, and above all, in his vivid, almost childlike imagination.
It was as though something of that 13-year-old had always remained with him. In this respect, his last book, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, is particularly revealing. It provides biographical detail about Richard's boyhood — the drab welfare household of females from which he escaped every day to explore the big world and to search for characters who might have been his father. When I asked Richard whether the incident in which the boy narrator kills his best friend was fiction, he laughed and said yes.
When we went to Montana in July 1982. we were thinking of Richard, but we were out of touch. We had driven to Bozeman, to the trailer home of a former student of Ed's, Brad Donovan?, who was now living on the bank of the Gallatin River. Although we knew that Brad and his wife, Georgia, saw quite a lot of Richard, we were surprised and delighted to see him sitting on the trailer steps when we pulled up in our station wagon. We were touched that he was there to greet us, to be our host again in Montana.
Richard with Brad Donovan, Ed and Jenny Dorn and their children
Photo by Georgia Donovan
It was early in the afternoon, and Kidd, just a few days away from his 13th birthday, was anxious to go fishing. Richard had already started on a quart bottle of Dickel. Brad, an experienced Michigan fisherman, invited Kidd to go fishing in the Gallatin. It wasn't long before our daughter, Maya, came running back to tell us Kidd had a line on something big.
As we all stood watching Kidd with his line bowed across the flood water, angling his first fish, Richard looked on like Uncle Trout Fishing in America himself. That moment was caught, along with the trout, in Georgia's snapshot. It was the kind of coincidence Richard considered perfect — where real life mimics fiction.
He was careful, on bringing out his firearms the next day, to make certain the children understood they should never point guns in the direction of people. He then took them down to his target range and set them up for the afternoon shooting beer cans with an air rifle.
He rejoined us on the back porch then, laughing with that high-pitched sequence of hoots and howls of his over some monstrous joke he'd told the kids. Life was a very simple progression for Richard: he was a pure American for whom Japan was the final frontier, the ultimate Out West.
Empire Magazine?, The Denver Post, (May 19, 1985)
Reprinted in Edward Dorn's Way West: Stories Essays & Verse Accounts
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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