This book review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled “Love, Joe,” written by the downtown artist and writer Joe Brainard (1941-94) to friends including the poets John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and James Schuyler.
Before we get to those letters, a historical wrong must be righted. Next year is the 55th anniversary of the publication of Brainard’s experimental memoir, “I Remember.” I hadn’t read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know.
This newspaper missed two opportunities to review “I Remember.” The first was when the book appeared in 1970. The second was when it anchored a 2012 omnibus called “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,” issued by the Library of America. So, let’s spend just a moment on it. It’s a small but real American classic.
Each sentence in Brainard’s short, stream-of-consciousness memoir begins with the same words: “I remember.” The book, which chronicles his childhood in Oklahoma in the 1940s and ’50s and his later decades in New York City, dispenses small cubes of pleasure on every page. Its cumulative effect is sly but enormous.
Some of the entries are childlike and earnest:
I remember after opening packages what an empty day Christmas Day is.
I remember not allowing myself to start on the candy until the feature started.
I remember cold cream on my mother’s face.
I remember that there is always one soldier on every bus.
Others investigate culture and take a broader view of society:
I remember a lot of fuss about “The Catcher in the Rye.”
I remember when going to an analyst meant (to me) that you were real sick.
I remember not understanding how the photographer could have just stood there and taken that picture.
I remember when “atheist” was a scary word.
Still others recall his coming-of-age as a gay man:
I remember prophylactic machines in gas station bathrooms.
I remember how many other magazines I had to buy in order to buy one physique magazine.
I remember wondering if I looked queer.
I remember that Rock Hudson “is still waiting for the right girl to come along.”
Despite the commonplaces, everything in the memoir somehow seems to be on the page for the first time.
I’m not alone in revering “I Remember.” Paul Auster called it “one of the few totally original books I have ever read.” The French writer Georges Perec wrote a copycat version as a homage and dedicated it to Brainard.
Thus ends this public service announcement. Those who knew and loved this book already, forgive me.
Who was Brainard, anyway? He was closely linked to the New York School of painters, poets, musicians and dancers, of which the writer Frank O’Hara played a central role until his death in 1966. Brainard was an indelible if minor character in that loose avant-garde collective, which spun off minor characters in the same way the Beats did.
He was a frequent collaborator with the poets in his orbit. His often playful paintings, collages and drawings are held by the Whitney, the Met and MoMA. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl said of him, “The world has in Joe Brainard a semi-secret, maverick hero who will win new friends one by one indefinitely.”
Brainard’s letters in “Love, Joe,” written between 1959 and 1993, are low-key, offbeat and hit-or-miss. Let’s talk about some of the hits.
Many of his early letters are about being broke in New York City. He preferred to suffer and work at his art rather than take day jobs. He’d eat Snickers bars for dinner. Sometimes he’d steal brushes and X-acto blades and other art supplies. He liked plants. He’d walk to Central Park, find a wild one and take it home to raise it.
He was handsome and popular. His spectacular rear end rivaled Rudolf Nureyev’s, a contemporary observed. At a party, O’Hara “kept wanting me to go into the closet with him so we could ‘straighten everything out.’” Brainard went to bed with Allen Ginsberg, but it was a sorry experience; he found the older poet unattractive. Some of these letters are intense in their sexual descriptions.
Brainard was invited to overlapping dinners and parties and openings. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when he dined at Ashbery’s apartment in 1978 with guests that included Richard Thomas, who wrote poetry in addition to playing John-Boy on “The Waltons.” Brainard wrote about hosting his own “small acid dinner party” with “lots of bread and lots of cheese and lots of apples. And wine. (And acid.)”
He was a bit of a loner, however. There was something fragile about him; his slim ego was a vine he had precariously trained along a wall. He reports on his voracious reading, everyone from Iris Murdoch to V.S. Pritchett to Jane Bowles and Dawn Powell. He spent his summers in Vermont, where he liked to get a tan, often accidentally spotting his letters with coconut oil.
Anyone who thinks that dropping a lot of money on a haircut intended to make you look like you just woke up in a cornfield is a hipster phenomenon of recent vintage, heed this snippet of a letter from 1981:
Not very interesting news is a new haircut, by a punk barber, that cost $48, and looks like a $3 clip. (Very short!) His concept was to make me look like a farmer whose wife just cut his hair. In fact, I look very much like a monkey.
Brainard was an endearingly bad speller. Once when young he made a project of tearing out Page 130 from books in the Boston Public Library. He was later caught selling a book he’d borrowed and was put on a library watch list.
He writes a good deal about his art here, describing his work on collages and his wonderfully subversive and pornographic images appropriating the comic strip character Nancy. This book’s introduction, by Daniel Kane, reminds us that “nancy” is derogatory slang for a gay man.
Brainard worried about working in oils, wondering if he could live up to “the authority oils carry for me.” He was a cult figure who slowly drifted away from painting.
He died in 1994 from complications of AIDS. His later letters are moving in what is left out of them; he only hinted at his illness. His words make a little corkscrew of sorrow twist inside you.
Brainard was, in Emily Dickinson’s words, out with lanterns looking for himself. In these letters, you feel the force of a person fully met.
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