LOVE, JOE
The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard
Edited by Daniel Kane
Columbia Univ. Press. 396 pages, $35.
IF YOU’VE EVER written a bunch of postcards all at once, you know how hard it is not to repeat yourself. Artist Joe Brainard (1942–1994) wrote many letters from his boyfriend’s house in Vermont, to which they routinely escaped from New York for the summer. In these missives, he repeatedly apologizes for splashing suntan oil on the pages and mentions his ongoing attempts to gain weight and quit smoking. He might then describe the paintings he’s working on, what he’s making for dinner, or how horny he feels—twice mingling the latter topics by describing his technique for warming a zucchini in the oven, cutting a hole in it, and using it to masturbate.
In Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, editor Daniel Kane, an American literature professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, compiles a collection of Brainard’s undated letters to various friends and lovers. Through expert sleuthing, Kane pinpoints their dates—from 1959 to 1993—and groups the letters by their 31 recipients. While each chapter focuses on a different relationship, we primarily get Brainard’s side of the correspondence.
Born in Salem, Arkansas, and raised in Tulsa, Brainard was still in high school when he served as art editor for a poetry journal that his friends Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup started, featuring Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. After a brief stint at the Dayton Art Institute, Brainard followed Padgett to New York, where he befriended John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and others in the so-called New York School of poets and painters.
Letters to Andy Warhol reveal a mutual appreciation. But whereas Warhol’s work has an ironic slyness, Brainard’s art has a goofy, good-natured sincerity. Brainard’s drawings and paintings of the comic strip character Nancy depict her in absurdist scenarios (such as lifting her skirt to reveal a penis), but he’s not mocking the character—he’s celebrating her. At any rate, Brainard shied away from over-analyzing his art.
Reproductions of Brainard’s letters reveal his straightforward earnestness. He usually wrote in all-caps, used phrases like “hunky-dory,” and emphasized words with underlining and exclamation points. Sexual innuendos got parenthetical asides “(Slurp!)” Brainard’s bad spelling only adds to the letters’ charm. He never reread them before mailing, fearing that if he did, he’d never send them. In a letter to the painter Fairfield Porter he confesses: “To write fast is the only way I enjoy writing.”
Even more than his visual output, Brainard is best remembered for I Remember, a memoir of more than 1,000 sentences that recount memories of growing up and coming out with simplicity, specificity, and humor. The book’s power lies in how these repeated words—“I remember”—act as a mantra that evokes the reader’s own memories. In a letter to his publisher, Anne Waldman, Brainard writes: “I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written.”
Many letters touch on the challenges of his thirty-odd-year relationship with writer and librettist Kenward Elmslie. Brainard falls hard for actor Keith McDermott (“Any time of the day or night is horny time where you’re concerned”) but respects the boundaries of his primary relationship with Elmslie, an heir to the Pulitzer fortune. In one letter to McDermott, Brainard writes: “And—golly—I’d love to invite you to Vermont, but I can’t. This isn’t my house, you know.” One gets the sense that Brainard doesn’t want to risk losing summers working on his tan.
Kane’s biographical notes are excellent and keep you well-oriented in time, if you don’t mind constantly flipping to the back of the book. While Brainard would eventually die from AIDS-related pneumonia, his letters hardly mention the disease. He probably kept his suffering to himself because he didn’t want to bring people down or cause them to feel sorry for him. As his letters make clear, he was focused on joy, however inconsequential. “When I write I let my mind wander into all sorts of unimportant subjects,” Brainard confesses to an early patron. “I don’t mind, but I feel sorry for you who have to read it.”
Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brooklyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue, and on his website, criticalinfluences.com.
