No Ordinary Joe

Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard by Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane. 408 pages, Columbia University Press. 2024.

Joe Brainard had a reputation for being sweet. Contemporaries of the visual artist and poet often sidelined his accomplishments to speak or write about his interpersonal kindness. “Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist,” claimed his sometimes collaborator John Ashbery. “If many of the people I knew in New York in the seventies were twisted or paranoid or even evil, we all agreed one was a saint: Joe Brainard,” wrote Edmund White in his memoir City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, the rare glowing summation in a book that offers unvarnished depictions of everyone from Jasper Johns to White’s late boyfriend Chris Cox—who, like Brainard, died tragically young due to AIDS.

Brainard’s good reviews sand down his sharp edges at the same time as they acknowledge the essence of his practice. To read Joe Brainard or to see his art is to know him, to talk with him, to fuck him, or at least to try fooling around before you grab a meal together and resolve to be friends. He might be one of the most honest writers of the twentieth century; Brainard certainly did a great job of playing the part. And like anyone who is basically worthwhile, his friends maintained their belief in him by selectively ignoring his more ordinary qualities in favor of his exceptional ones.

This, in part, is why Love, Joe, a selection of Brainard’s letters, is such a welcome kink. Read front to back, it’s not exactly riveting—the volume makes most sense as a reference text for diehards of the tight-knit New York School that counted Brainard as a member, a group that also included, at various points, poets Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest, as well as artists Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter. But Brainard’s trove of letters leads him down from Mount Olympus on a staircase of his own words. Love, Joe reveals a man who had faults, as well as desires that could be pragmatic and unsurprisingly ambitious.

Brainard’s modern-day devotees seldom imagine him as a participant in the Manhattan art world in which he made his name. Yet he had a prodigious visual practice that encompassed freelance illustration and drew much of its verve from the craft: his bawdy, playfully naïve output included collages made in collaboration with writers, paintings of pansies and other flowers, domestic scenes rendered in oil, assemblages of cigarette butts, and appropriations of classic comic strip characters Nancy and Sluggo. Since his death in 1994 at the age of fifty-two, about fifteen years after he stopped showing new art and publishing writing in order to read, smoke cigs, and explore gay promiscuity’s possibilities, Brainard’s studio work has been mostly forgotten. Sure, every few years there’s a fantastic retrospective at his estate’s longtime gallery Tibor de Nagy. And the Met owns more than forty pieces by him—but it rarely displays them.

Brainard is now best known for his exquisite, gentle literary style. His opus, I Remember, is a sui generis, touching, nostalgic, brilliant book whose approachability has become its greatest liability. This askew autobiography is queer, sexual yet unsexy, ostentatiously innocent, and campy only to the extent that it bears witness to the commodified American culture of the postwar years, a thicket of pin-up stars and juvenile fads. It comprises hundreds of miniature fragments, many of them just a sentence long, each of which begins with the same, titular phrase—I remember.

I remember James Dean and his red nylon jacket.

I remember thinking how embarrassing it must be for men in Scotland to have to wear skirts.

I remember when Scotch tape wasn’t very transparent.

I remember how little your dick is, getting out of a wet bathing suit.

I remember saying “thank you” when the occasion doesn’t call for it.

I remember shaking big hands.

I remember saying “thank you” in reply to “thank you” and then the other person doesn’t know what to say.

Process-based and low-concept at once, Brainard’s form has become a perennial workshop prompt in creative writing classes, which, for an experimental poet, is like getting an endorsement deal with Nike—symbolically, if not profits-wise. Love, Joe reveals the “straightforward” literary sensibility of work published in his lifetime to be a crafty aesthetic feat. Brainard’s polished writing feels colloquial, madcap, and perfectly modulated for effect; his letters, on the other hand, are shambolic, repetitive, often unfinished, concerned with recipients’ expectations, and full of tics. Some of these are endearing affectations of fags in his era, such as writing “Slurp!” when he found someone cute. Others are windows into his manifold insecurities, for instance, when he worries constantly over his skinny body, or informs high school friend Joan Brix that he likes a set of self-portraits because they “make my penis look enormous.”

These letters don’t quite work as literature, though it’s highly possible that they work as art—sadly, they’re published without most of the visual elements on which Brainard lavished attention, from illustrations to emphases in his handwriting to different colors of ink used to signify when he left a letter unfinished for the night and returned to it later. (Who knows whether Brainard wanted his correspondence to be published, though he was career-conscious and well-read enough that he must have imagined the possibility that his mail art would eventually see the light of day.) While Love, Joe includes some black-and-white snapshots, it intends to record just the words, not the whole package.

This tome’s structure matches its subject. Its editor, academic Daniel Kane, orders the text by recipient, and Brainard often saw writing as a way of sorting out human connection’s mysteries. A chronological organization would make for a more thrustful reading experience, even if the letters themselves rarely disclose the personal tragedies that colored Brainard’s life. He never explicitly mentions his 1989 HIV diagnosis, only, with typical aw-shucks stoicism, a resultant bout of shingles and some digestive problems. Maybe Brainard didn’t know how to bring up terminal illness with his friends, or perhaps he was truly committed to upholding a sunny disposition in spite of bountiful evidence that life’s promise betrayed him.

As Kane writes in one of the perceptive introductory notes that start each section, “Brainard developed a style in his life, art and writing that was antithetical to the cliché of the ‘tortured artist.’” He led with a happy-go-lucky veneer in virtually everything he published. A two-page bon-bon called “Death,” included in the excellent Library of America release The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, turns mortality into a cartoon romp: “Sometimes it helps if we try to visualize things,” Brainard writes, “Try to visualize, for example, someone sneaking up behind your back and hitting you over the head with a giant hammer.” His letters tend to grapple with realities only slightly less universal than the inevitable end: namely, sex and money. 

We witness Brainard grow erotically as the collection unfolds, in part because it clusters pen pals from his closeted early years toward the beginning. One is Sue Schempf, a formative supporter of his work and a patron of the arts in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a teenaged Brainard gained local recognition for his precocious draftsmanship. He wrote to her often just after moving to the Lower East Side circa Christmas 1960. New York, he insisted, was rife with “queers & dope addicts all over the place. It really isn’t so dangerous, just damn depressing.” These letters, from a nineteen-year-old who was so poor that he ate out of garbage cans, were brazen pleas for aid—like most of his early correspondence. He had to appeal to the heartland mores of a benefactor and also, sometimes, he needed to outright beg:

I think it’s time we reevaluate our patron plan. I say this because last month I didn’t receive a single check, and the month before only two. My only income is the $25 I receive each month from you; my four patrons. My rent is now $30 instead of $24 because of a new heating system they installed. How I manage, I’m not sure. But I’m constantly having to sell books, clothes, and my blood. I’ve pawned everything pawnable, and sold everything sellable. When I do eat it’s nothing to speak of. . . .  However, “sob, sob” isn’t in place. I’m very happy.

He asked poets as poor as he was to send him money, and also for amphetamines, to which he maintained a productive addiction until his mid-thirties. Love, Joe demonstrates how Brainard relied on his pill regimen to maintain a prolific artistic output, and similarly about the joys of drinking and smoking weed—less combustible ingredients of his daily cocktail. But his letters hardly make mention of the trials of dependency or of the speed crash that would explode his relationship with work in 1976, a crisis that poet Ron Padgett narrates in his engrossing 2004 biography-à-deux, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard.

Brainard’s financial fortunes changed rapidly as the 1960s rolled on. He designed covers for ArtNews and The Paris Review, and sold his own pieces, first with The Alan Gallery and subsequently with the vaunted Fischbach Gallery. But the true shift happened in 1963 when he hooked up with Kenward Elmslie, a lesser-known member of the New York School who was a gifted writer, a forward-thinking figure in the avant-garde theater, and the grandson of Joseph Pulitzer. Brainard would go on to spend virtually every summer at one of Elmslie’s several properties, in Calais, Vermont, where he wrote, painted his lover’s pet whippet, sunbathed, got high, and hosted an assortment of the period’s artistic talents.

Love, Joe makes clear that Joe loved Elmslie—and also that he depended upon his pampered habits and extraordinary wealth. Their open relationship survived both of them growing obsessively attached to other men, among other rifts. As Brainard worried to the poet James Schuyler in 1969, “There is something missing in the area of passion and adventure.” He went on later in the same note:

I love Kenward so much I don’t think I could possibly hurt him. This is another problem. And surely to my advantage. Perhaps just this will keep me from doing something stupid. And sometimes I have doubts about myself in the money area too. Which makes leaving Kenward even more of a self dare. I do hope that I am not making myself sound terrible. Because you know I am not.

In 1975, Elmslie began a major affair with musician and poet Steven Hall—who shared a striking resemblance with a younger Brainard. Joe, meanwhile, sent letters to Elmslie in which he expressed regret over his self-professed lack of sexual wildness, and suggested his readiness to change by penning a fantasy in which they pee on each other in the shower. In 1979, Brainard met actor Keith McDermott at Elmslie’s fiftieth birthday party and developed immediate feelings.

He agonized over his relationship’s future, sending Elmslie a letter that delved into his conflicted emotions while simultaneously asking him for a huge loan against the Soho loft where he would live for the rest of his life. An irony of Brainard’s later years in the boho imagination is that he got by with enviable ease: he was a downtown artist with a spacious apartment, a place to go in the summer, the respect of his peers, a sturdy sense of sanity when he wasn’t deranged by speed, and no need to pull down a regular income. He was in his thirties, and he had the option to retire—which he took. In a letter to Schuyler, Brainard writes “I do enjoy money,” but he was more guileless than greedy. He seems as though he were floating serenely down the lazy river of his own American dream.

Brainard had adolescent designs on being an artist, never a writer, and so he confidently produced writing that was outside of convention, work that forged originality out of a simple, ingenuous surface. Art was his medium—consequently he inherited its millennia of baggage. He made work that was on the bleeding edge of a decade, the 1960s, that redefined the parameters of what was groundbreaking for decades to come. His last show at Fishbach, “The Show of 1,500 Small Works,” (1975-76) was no less inspired, a mixture of tiny collages and witty drawings, which Brainard sold for as little as twenty-five dollars in part as a rejection of the skyrocketing expense of the art market.

Brainard’s conceptual brilliance contradicted his conservative side: the most serious genre, he believed, was representational oil painting, and he felt compelled to excel with this laborious material and its traditional subject matter. Throughout a period, the late 1960s and 1970s, marked by efflorescing feminist art, conceptualism, and minimalism, Brainard produced eloquent, intimate work in a time-honored field, such as the still life Untitled (Toothbrushes), 1973–74, yet he lacked, in his own estimation, a classical aspect. Of course, Brainard was captivating for this very reason, because he wore his genius lightly, which felt appropriate in an epoch effervescent with pop culture. His ego, though, dragged along art history’s dead weight. Brainard compared himself unfavorably to old masters, giants of the nineteenth century, figurative painter friends such as Alex Katz, and untouchable modernists from his parents’ generation, such as Willem De Kooning. His own oeuvre, he declared, was slighter, less impressive, less “moral.” He writes about how much he likes oils in these letters, but he was merely convincing himself—a repressed pubescent boy insisting that he definitely does like girls. Brainard’s disbelief in his skill, coupled with the malaise of quitting uppers, set the stage for the end of his career as an artist.

If only overcoming this inadequacy and self-consciousness was his largest challenge. Brainard deserved things to be as easy for him as they sometimes appeared to be. He was, according to White, “embarrassingly generous” in his thirties and forties. He always paid for dinner and gave out cash to friends in need, and though terrible at managing his own finances, he didn’t have enough time for this trait to catch up with him—his arc had a peculiar beauty, as if he were constantly suspended in the halcyon days of middle-age and never had to come back to earth.

Any fan will want to know more, but Love, Joe keeps the denouement of this deceptively private man rather brief. It’s entertaining to read him comment on seeing Top Gun (“too noisy!”) and listening to The Smiths (“I don’t really listen. I just use it as company. Like a cat on a sofa.”). Yet Brainard’s tone is increasingly closed-off, his characteristic enthusiasm perfunctory, which happened as he withdrew from the cultural sphere long before AIDS-related pneumonia killed him. Love, Joe is about as close as we can get to knowing him during his twilight years because it denies us a procedural of decline, treating Brainard’s illness in the hushed way that he himself did—like a wraith waiting in the next room.

The conclusion of his career, the slow ramping-down of his daily routine, were conscious decisions before they became shaded by his death. Whether or not he actually arrived at a place that resembled contentment, his abridged life has become emblematic of the possibility: Joe Brainard was the rare avant-gardist who stopped laboring away at his art and chose to live for himself.