Interview with Richard Brautigan’s first wife

"Freedom?":
Richard Brautigan's first wife, VIRGINIA ASTE, speaks in a new interview

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/12/25/virginia-aste/

Interview by Susan Kay Anderson
12/25/09

Edited with Introduction by Mike Daily, with biographical information
contributed by John F. Barber, Richard Brautigan scholar

Less-than-revered by his Beat peers (Ginsberg gave him the ungainly
nickname "Bunthorne," Burroughs once observed him­drunk­crawling
along the floor of a hotel after a reading event, Ferlinghetti said
he "was all the novelist the hippies needed" because "[i]t was a
nonliterate age"), Richard Brautigan became internationally famous in
the late '60s for writing simple-yet-surreal poems, short stories and
novels that made readers marvel and burst out laughing. Brautigan's
personal life, however, was no laughing matter. Severe
alcoholism­drinking a bottle of brandy and two fifths of whiskey a
day during binges, according to friend Don Carpenter­and depression
over declining book sales led to Brautigan's suicide in September
1984. He was 49.

Brautigan began writing Trout Fishing in America in 1961 on a camping
trip he took with his first wife, maiden name Virginia Alder, and
their one-year-old daughter, Ianthe. Married in 1957 and separated in
1962, they officially divorced in 1970. Before the separation,
Virginia Alder had become involved with one of Brautigan's drinking
buddies, Tony Aste, with whom she later had three children (the first
in 1965, the second in 1968, the third in 1969). There is no known
record that she and Tony Aste ever wed, though she took his last
name. Virginia Aste eventually moved to Hawaii in 1975, without Tony,
who remained, living in Bodega Bay, California, and then San
Francisco, where he died in 1996.

Today, 75-year-old Virginia Aste is a political activist working as a
substitute teacher in one of the most violent school districts in
Hawaii. Susan Kay Anderson, a fellow educator at the school, recently
met Virginia Aste and interviewed her about her early life and
travels with Brautigan.

"Virginia Aste is not a 'little old lady type,'" Anderson reports.
"She is almost six feet tall and wears glasses, well-fitting outfits
and interesting jewelry. Her gaze never wavers. She laughs easily and
speaks in a measured, self-paced, quiet tone. She is quite funny and
self-effacing, able to laugh at herself."

"Much of Brautigan's past has remained shrouded in mystery for so
long as to become mythology," says John F. Barber, curator of the
comprehensive, multi-media online resource Brautigan Bibliography and
Archive. "Virginia's comments and insights [in this new interview]
are important because they help us better understand the stories
behind Brautigan, his life and his writings."

Like a Waterfall

Arthur: What were the '60s like?

Virginia Aste: The '60s were a lot like the '50s, a continuation of
[the '50s], except for '68 and '69. Then, everything changed. For
example, I took Lamaze [childbirth classes] for Ianthe's birth. They
didn't know what I was talking about in the hospital. They gave me
some pillows and helped me lie on my side. That was that.

The change came with the music. There were concerts every day­really,
really good concerts every two weeks or so. Groups from New York
came. The concerts were in Golden Gate Park.

At that time there was the Cow Palace, a big stadium­George Wallace
was to speak. All I remember was the atmosphere of hostility and
women there. This [Cow Palace] was a place where women burned their
bras; where riots happened. It was a feeling of a mob and impeding
violence and we just had to leave. We had gotten Ianthe a new
raincoat from her dad. Ianthe's raincoat pocket caught on a car as we
were leaving and she started to cry. It was no real riot that time,
but it felt like it could've been. What we were witnessing was a lot
of yelling and Wallace was yelling back. He was ranting. It was an
awful ending to an awful day.

For a year, there were free concerts every other week. It was wild.
Of course, there were precursors to this, pre-'60s. I purchased a
Rudi Gernreich bra­it was see-through­and took off my shirt during a
party. We saw how many people could crowd into a phone booth at a time.

In one house where we lived, there was something wrong with the
plumbing so the water ran and ran. It was like a waterfall. We turned
it stronger and then back again or we just got water.

We moved out of North Beach and out of Haight-Ashbury. There was a
lot of alcohol and pot use. There was the Ice Cream Store where
bikers and bus drivers took pills­early speed, the chicken
egg-producing drug, methedrine, cheaper than heroin. It was the time
of the Alphonse Mucha art style on concert posters: big bicycle
wheels on bikes, elongated figures riding, and the skulls and roses
of the Grateful Dead.

Richard admired the Diggers. Our whole thing was a proletarian idea
that you take care of everybody. I remember baking bread in coffee
cans. I did. We had everything available to us at the free store. We
never had any money. I don't remember paying for anything for a
while. This was the last half of the '60s.

Trout Fishing In America

Arthur: How did you meet Richard Brautigan?

Virginia Aste: I met Richard Brautigan at a laundromat in North
Beach. I had wanted to meet him. He was very alluring and I thought
he might've been from Germany. He didn't say much. I had Ron
Loewinsohn introduce us.

Richard was working in a lab that manufactured barium powder. People
drank the powders for X-rays­there were different flavors like peach,
strawberry, lemon. He came home smelling like those different
flavors. They hired Richard for one dollar an hour.

I was working downtown as a secretary. I carried the typewriter home
with me. It was very heavy. I typed up his poems. He began sending
them out to places like The Nation. He started with fifty poems.

I was working for two dollars an hour. I was good at Dictaphone. From
our tax return and claiming Ianthe as a dependent, we bought a 1951
Plymouth station wagon and took a trip across Idaho, five hundred or
six hundred miles across the Snake River. This became Trout Fishing
In America. Jack Spicer helped edit it. I helped edit, too, and typed
it because I could read his handwriting. I used to read lots of
[scrawly] doctor and lawyer handwriting.

In the Afternoon

Arthur: Did he read a lot? What was his writing routine like?

Virginia Aste: He would write in the afternoon because he watched
Ianthe in the morning. That became a routine because I was working.
He needed time and space, time and silence, but not totally. He did
not lock himself away.

Between me and Jack Spicer and Richard reading us stuff, we would
tell him to take out a lot. There wasn't much left. That was Spicer's thing.

He read incessantly at the Mechanics' [Institute] Library. It was a
library founded by a union in San Francisco. He'd read fiction on the
second floor. He'd read the Ladies' Home Journal. His earliest
reading was the National Geographic. He'd read old issues when he was
in elementary school and later read the Ladies' Home Journal. He read
Faulkner, Jack London, he read poetry.

I translated Neruda's work for him into English. Also Mayakovsky. I
took Russian then. A lot of people were killed under Stalin. People
still talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War in those days.

B Vitamins

Arthur: Did you see his writing as genius writing?

Virginia Aste: Yes, Richard was a genius in his writing because of
his humor. He was like Mark Twain or Saroyan because of his use of
irony. He would be right on target.

He also had a sense of the tragic. He had sentimentality for his dead
relatives but he was never syrupy sweet in that way.

He was very caring…cared very well for Ianthe. He paid the rent six
months in advance. He had a stockpile of food in the cupboards.
Probably because he cared for his sister, Barbara, while they were
growing up. He had grown up very poor. I almost got him sobered up. I
gave him a lot of B vitamins. After our baby, he began drinking
heavily. Lots of socializing.

I read on the Internet that he had had homosexual liaisons at this
time. It was when Ianthe was about four.

He had new fame. It was tremendously exciting. He began drinking
heavily and became abusive. One night, he wanted to have sex and
became violent­I shut him out of the bedroom. There were these thick
wooden doors. The next day I left with Ianthe.

What happened was totally against what we were all about. We were so
pacifistic. This was the dark side of what was going on. On the other
hand, he did love guns and loved going shooting.

To Say the Least

Arthur: Did he talk the way he wrote?

Virginia Aste: Yes. Yes! He had a constant dialogue going and had
constant jokes. He was interested in everything about art. Dada was
one of the themes. Jack Spicer said that one should pick out the
worst thing from a piece of writing and keep that and then write from
that. He told Richard that and he did that.

He was experimental like William Burroughs and the same [in the
sense] that he traveled around and had a huge following. Burroughs
would tear a page of his writing down the middle and then match up
the halves to different pages, creating interesting sentences, to say
the least.

I think Richard was very sad when I left him, taking Ianthe with me.
People didn't talk about addiction­about drinking­then. Oh, I
should've…maybe stuck with him. It was a few years later when the
lawyer had me sign for a divorce. I didn't make any claim to his work.

All of his early books, I know exactly what and where he is talking
about­even though the writing is ambiguous on purpose. I can picture
this or that place.

Once we lived in Big Sur, in a cave that was carved out of a hill
with a little roof jutting out of it to keep the rain off. He was
very interested in the history of WWI and WWII. Especially WWI and
the Civil War. He was particularly interested in the campaigns of the
southern generals. He talked about the Holocaust. He was fascinated
with the personalities surrounding Hitler and in the atrocities
dictated by the S.S.

Into the Creek

Arthur: Was he a history buff, a ghost town buff?

Virginia Aste: He was very interested in graveyards; gravestones.
Interested in imagining what people's lives were like­the food they
ate, the clothes, one hundred and two hundred years ago. He was
interested in the working people.

On our trip to Idaho, we read gravestones on old cemeteries.

He was always connecting different times and people and places
together. He did this constantly­made connections. He had a maniacal
laugh. Ianthe has the same…a real wild laugh.

In '57-'58, we did crazy things. Climbed up on the Palace of Fine
Arts and looked over the city­all the heads of statues toppled over.
Once with Kenn Davis, who was selling paintings at the time, we went
to a reading. The hood of our car flew off at one o'clock in the
morning as we approached the Bay Bridge. Richard jumped out of the
car, opened the trunk and threw it in. He could move really, really
fast when he had to.

We were cooped up inside five days once in Big Sur, up a little
creek. Water came down and we could not get up to the highway. He
jumped into the creek and got me. He never could swim. He never did
learn to swim.

He was capable of athletic feats nobody thought he could do.

In Big Sur, Richard was very interested in Price Dunn, who was "the
Confederate General of Big Sur" [from Brautigan's book of the same
name]. Price read the Greek classics, et cetera, as a child in
Alabama. He took us down to Big Sur. We were two or three weeks
there. We talked, fixed meals, had two cases of wine. I remember
there was an invasion of frogs there. We poured wine around the porch
to try to kill the frogs. They were kind of like the coquí in Hawaii.

As one of my friends said about Richard, "He was like shining too
bright a light on too small a thing." His writing was not voluminous.
By the time it got pared-down, and pared-down, there weren't a lot of
words. There wasn't a lot to work with.

He was good at listening to criticism. He worked with and listened to
Ron Loewinsohn, an academic and a poet. He wasn't like Robert Duncan
who was a traditional poet, or Ken Rexroth, who was a target for
poets because he was so academic.

Richard was contemptuous of literature taught in college. He got to
become the flavor-of-the-month for a lot of them. He liked the Black
Mountain College poets [Creeley, Dorn, Olson]. Richard knew Lawrence
Ferlinghetti; some of the artists. Artist Tom Field was a really neat
guy. He lived with us for awhile and was an inspiration to Richard.
He taught Ianthe drawing when she was two.

A Great Fan

Arthur: What do you think he would've thought about current
technology, the Internet?

Virginia Aste: In "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace"
[1967], Richard anticipated the impact of computer technology. He was
happy to get an electric typewriter. It was a lot of work making
corrections on copies of his work, and typing it over and over. It
took a lot of time. It was a lot of work.

He would've been a great fan of the word processor because he couldn't spell.

I think he ran out of things to write about, unlike Styron and
Mailer­who he didn't like. Alcohol shut down his spontaneity and
depressed him and accelerated/exaggerated the parts of his
personality that was pessimistic about people. I'm pretty sure he did
not believe in God or an afterlife. He believed in art and the arts
as the highest people could live for.

Freedom

Arthur: Was it unusual to be traveling and camping­going on a road
trip­with a child in Idaho? Did you grow up there, is that why you
went there on the infamous Trout Fishing In America road trip?

Virginia Aste: I grew up camping a lot. In those days, if you were a
hundred miles out of L.A., in Mojave, for example, you were in the
mountains. My father was a fisherman, he liked to fish. He was one of
eleven children. My mother was a school teacher. It took her sixteen
summers get her teaching license.

We took two trips. We had an Indian theme going with Ianthe in a
little pack. We almost suffocated Ianthe.

Arthur: A cradleboard?

Virginia Aste: Some misguided Indian thing. We were gone two weeks to
the Klamath River. Ianthe was too hot. When we took her out [of the
cradleboard] she sort of unwrapped herself and threw a fit.

On our trip across the Snake River we could watch Ianthe because she
had a pink fabric leash [harness] like a dog that we tied to a tree.
We used it one time. We had to be absolutely sure about her because
we were very close to the river. It had a steep cliff. A sharp
drop-off to the river.

We almost didn't make it. The first night, we drove down into an old
lake bed­ I think it was called Dollar Lake. Oh, was it there?
Anyway, we had boxes in our 1951 Plymouth, books, boxes of clothing
in the back of the station wagon in wooden crates, paper bags, baby
stuff. Lots of Dostoevsky, we couldn't go without Dostoevsky! God
forbid we go without that! Ha!

That night we slept inside the back of the car. Everything was on the
ground. Then, within minutes, a huge cloud burst. There was going to
be a flood of mud, huge raindrops, dollar-sized, the area began
filling with water. I put Ianthe somewhere. I started driving up this
road and I couldn't see.

Arthur: Richard was guiding you up?

Virginia Aste: Yes, we were in the middle of a huge cloudburst, we
were stuck­Dollar Lake, or wherever that was. The road wound around
and around. It was so impossible to see. That was the first or second
night of the trip. That was the beginning of Trout Fishing In
America. Sleeping in the back of that station wagon. That's why it
was so crazy. It was a shift car with the shift on the wheel.

Richard ate a lot of watermelon and had to pee in the night. That's
how we found out the lake bed was filling in.

Arthur: Lucky.

Virginia Aste: So, I don't know why we did the trip. Re-visiting
Idaho, I guess. We saw the Snake River in the beginning of its
decline and urban development. It was Indian-based.

Arthur: Romantic.

Virginia Aste: So romantic. Very romantic idea.

Arthur: Did a lot of writers take off with their families at the time and camp?

Virginia Aste: We were ahead or behind the times. Having a child was
unusual at the time. Well, some had children. David Meltzer had three
kids. Ron Loewinsohn had a child later. Robert Creeley. But from what
I read of Kerouac, his trips were not family-oriented.

Arthur: This seems a bit different compared with trips other writers
were taking across the country. Do you think?

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was quite amazing. The clutter of the station
wagon. Now, there are containers for everything. There weren't then.
[We used] wooden crates and paper bags. We had a ridiculous tent.
Stakes for the tent, food. The tent had to have stakes. It was
canvas. It did not pop up. If a stake was lost, you had to find a
tree, cut a new one.

Arthur: It sounds like homesteading.

Virginia Aste: Re-enacting a whole bunch of stuff­it was a long trip.
A canvas tent during the day is hot. Washing diapers in the
streams…we weren't conscious of the fact that it was polluting.

Arthur: You were mostly alone at the camp spots?

Virginia Aste: Yes, usually the only people except for local
fishermen. We saw some sheep, sheep farmers, and had to go through
the herd of sheep and then came back round again. The sheep men just
smiled. They knew [we weren't getting anywhere]. Richard wrote about this.

Arthur: You were really wild, adventuresome.

Virginia Aste: There were no maps, no guides. We went up and down the
creeks until we found a good place. Taking that tent up and down…we
were re-enacting some parts of our pasts.

We had traveler's checks and finding a place to cash them was hard.
There was nowhere to cash them. Like in those novels where you read
about the South, very backwoods. It wasn't convenient.

Our baby was always an icebreaker. Richard had a song he sang,
"Orofino Rose." He sang that over and over to Ianthe to get her to sleep.

Arthur: Why didn't you just use cash? I mean, what was the point of
traveler's checks? Because you were travelers?

Virginia Aste: Yes. We had gone to Mexico, to Oaxaca and had
traveler's checks there. That might've been a role model for that.
Richard was paranoid about losing money.

Arthur: It sounds sort of urban, but you were both raised in rural
areas. Or at least, not in big cities.

Virginia Aste: I was raised in the San Fernando Valley. It doesn't
exactly inspire your imagination there. San Francisco was really
inexpensive when we lived there. It was a city life, lots of poetry, but then­

Arthur: You wanted nature, adventure, taking the trip to write about
it on purpose?

Virginia Aste: Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table
with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn't know what he was
writing until later. He was always taking notes. His short paragraphs
were like poems. Real different writing. Coming back [after the
trip], it was very short on words, not prolific, turned into short
chapters that were almost poems. They were so funny.

But everything changed. Ianthe was two when I met Tony [Aste], my
later lover. Richard had become so abusive from alcohol. What boys
see done to women in their youth…Richard and I weren't about that at
all, we were into Camus­not towards others, but how we viewed ourselves.

Richard was fascinated by war­by WWI and WWII. He shot up one wall of
his house in Montana which had a clock on it.

Arthur: That must've been really loud.

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was like a war, the sound of war. I didn't
mind him going shooting, but…we had this spaghetti party, and
afterwards he yanked the door open. He didn't wake Ianthe, but he was
very violent. I left soon after with Tony.

In Richard's poem, "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace,"
his writing is a predilection in a way. It has come true. There isn't
anything you can do. The ether is full of good deeds and misdeeds­it
all gets recorded. I've never looked back. I don't sit around and
reflect on the past. I'm in the moment, in the now. I've lived that
way my whole life.

People were living in communes and trying to be peaceful. What it
came down to was falling into prior patterns. Richard just fell into
that as far as I could see. He liked Katherine Anne Porter a lot and
also Eudora Welty.

I think he had a special admiration for writers who were profound and
humorous at the same time. He really liked the Armenian short story
writer [William Saroyan] who wrote My Name is Aram. There were so
many things that I didn't ask Richard about. It was us against the
world and rebellion. Like living in a bubble. What did we want?

Arthur: Freedom?

Virginia Aste: Freedom from the society that had jammed people into
unhappy relationships and war. Freedom from that.

.