Richard Brautigan

By the time I relocated to California, I had read all of the available books by Richard Brautigan. Most of them included a list of all his books and pointedly included several that were even then quite scarce.
His style was most applicable to the 60s and the books suggested a new way of life with the peaceful quaint denizens of Watermelon Sugar. I was in my teenage years when I read his best known novels and poetry volumes.
His extreme self-consciousness was evident not only in the loving and fastidious descriptions of his life and his friends, but in the cover photos he selected for them. Most featured a posed photo of Brautigan dressed as a wild west hippie original, sometimes with a hippie lady friend alongside. His look was widely imitated soon afterward in the manner of his contemporary pop stars. It is so recognizably himself that even the briefest sketch can make even those with a cursory familiarity and hazy memory of him recall where they first encountered his look and his books.
Tall man with a soft hat made shapeless as a bucket, long blond hair, round wire-rim glasses and bushy mustache framing his mouth to his chin. Add a rumbled sportcoat, jeans and boots and filigree with some Haight Ashbury beads and you have the picture.
He had been a quite figure in the Haight during it's heyday. While living in a modest place on Geary avenue, he moved his affiliation from the dwindling Beat scene in North Beach toward the psychedelic precincts east of Golden Gate park. There his idealism and utopian thinking brought him comrades and a common cause with the Diggers. The Diggers operated a free store where all was donated and for the taking at no charge. They also fed as many of the youngsters who found themselves hungry and chilly on foggy gray streets with no money in their pockets after the lysergic acid wore away.
One of the most legendary of the Diggers series of free publications under the general rubric of the Communications Company, was a poetry pamphlet by Brautigan. Far beyond their usual mimeographed one-sheets on cheap stock, this book was a singular and elaborate production.
"Please Plant This Book" as it was titled consisted of a small glossy folio-style book whose every page contained a poem printed on an actual seed packet containing seeds of the plant in each poem's title.
I actually owned a copy myself but it was still back with my belongings in Massachusetts when in 1979 I got the opportunity to meet this highly elusive figure. He was known to give public reading only very rarely, but not only was he scheduled to read at the San Francisco International Poetry Festival but was advertised to be participating in appearances at both Cody's books in Berkeley and at City Lights in San Francisco.

(to be continued soon)