Ron remembers A life of artist Joe Brainard BY WILLIAM CORBETT
	Joe By Ron Padgett. Coffee House Press, 384 pages, $30 hardcover/$17 paperback.

Ron Padgett, poet, translator, and memoirist, had the good fortune to have as close friends two extraordinary artists, the poet Ted Berrigan and the artist/writer Joe Brainard. But what the gods gave they took away. Padgett saw both men die well before their time, Berrigan of liver disease at 48 in 1983 and Brainard of AIDS at 52 in 1994. He mourned these dear friends, but he has also commemorated them. Ted (Figures, 1993) is his memoir of Berrigan, and now he has published Joe, a memoir of the friend he knew from first grade in Tulsa until his death in New York City.

Ted — Padgett also met Berrigan in his native Tulsa — is a book of prose snapshots. Joe is a full-length portrait of the man Padgett loved, collaborated with as if they breathed as one, and nursed through his long and hard dying. Padgett’s prose is see-through clear, and with it he renders this good, thoroughly decent, modest, extravagantly generous man (this is an artist?) and first-rate artist as interesting as he was in life. (Because Brainard was a beloved friend of my family and me for more than 30 years, I know whereof I speak. We Corbetts are bit players in Joe.)

Padgett presents his and Brainard’s youth and growing up in matter-of-fact terms. Brainard’s early love for drawing was encouraged, as was Padgett’s love for reading and poetry. Although they lived in America’s provinces, through editing the little magazine White Dove Review while still in high school they contacted Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Jack Kerouac and published their poems. Padgett and Brainard were New Yorkers before they actually lived in the city. Padgett got there in 1960 when he enrolled in Columbia University; Brainard followed after a brief time at art school in Dayton. He then spent almost a year living hand to mouth on West Newton Street in Boston, half a block from my house, before returning in 1963 to become a full-time New Yorker.

Joe becomes more engrossing as Brainard’s relationship with his art, his lovers, and Padgett and Padgett’s wife, Pat, becomes more complex. From the start of their New York life, Brainard and Padgett produced collaborations that were the result of no specific theory or idea about art. They simply loved working together, and this comes across in all that they put their imaginations to. As Brainard settled into New York, his life became one of intense work on drawings, collages, constructions, book covers, flyers for poetry readings — from 1964 until his exit from the art world in 1978, Brainard was everywhere. His pattern was to rent an apartment or loft and fill it with his art, which he then sold or gave away before moving. (This was when young artists could maneuver in this way, before Manhattan became a rich man’s city.) Padgett shows, without making a point of it, that the Brainard who left the art world at the top of his fame busily rid himself of his art even as he threw himself into making it.

Brainard also wrote, taking naturally to the diary form and inventing the "I remember" device in which each entry begins with those words. Since it is impossible to read his I Remember without opening up your own memory, his book — called a masterpiece by no less than novelist and poet Paul Auster — is every man and woman’s autobiography. In emptying his memory, Brainard followed, it now seems, the path that he took in his art. I Remember was first published in 1970, with subsequent volumes, More I Remember and More I Remember More, appearing in 1972 and 1973. A 2001 Granary Books edition combines all three volumes.

After Padgett confronted him over his intensifying use of speed (an episode that’s grippingly told in Joe), Brainard withdrew from showing art while still in his 30s. Although he continued to draw and make art, he never again showed new work. Why this came to pass is a question asked by all who knew him. Padgett offers credible theories while the undercurrents in Joe suggest other ideas. It is now clear to me that Brainard saw the money-driven art world of the 1980s coming and decided he wanted no part of it. He was too busy giving away his money or spending it on friends to want the obligation of making more money for himself, gallery owners, and collectors.

Joe ends with the section "Saint Joe," in which Padgett writes, "It is tempting to think of Joe — someone so basically gentle and generous and whose life led him toward renunciation — as a kind of saint." In the end, he decides that he has yet to find a better word for his friend. It is a strength of Padgett’s restrained and tender book that this conclusion does not seem forced by sentiment and loss. Neither does he leave you feeling that his conclusion is the only or even the superior one. For me, it was Joe’s way of putting others before himself that made him exceptional. He did this in his art, too, where he gave dignity and purpose to the ordinary, the coffee cup and toothbrushes in their rack. The poet Ed Barrett has observed that Brainard gave the ordinary a "sacramental" life. Because of his humor and innate grace, he did so lightly, and his art is bright with good will toward the world. Joe is bright with friendship and a loving attention that releases its subject into the reader’s imagination.