If there was anything resembling a genuine “literary scene” in Seattle in the ’60s and ’70s, I suppose it would have occurred in faculty housing at the University of Washington, with Theodore Roethke and David Wagoner as its nucleus. The nearby Blue Moon was frequented more by leftist radicals and painters (such as Richard Gilkey, Lubin Petric, and Bill Cumming), but there were a couple of poets (John Pym and Pete Winslow) among the regulars, and a guy named Jack Leahy wrote an entire novel (later published) in a back booth there. The writer and legendary bigger-than-life bohemian figure Darrell Bob Houston would periodically erupt in flamboyant rants, but the nearest thing to an actual ongoing literary event at the Moon was this: A UW professor at the time (named Goldberg, Goldstein, Goldman, or something similar) was one of the world’s foremost experts on Chaucer. He was also a boozer and denizen of the Moon, where graduate students would cram into his booth and buy him beer after beer to loosen his tongue so they might pick his brain about all things Chaucerian. Some of us would try to eavesdrop, but it was ultimately futile, because after the third or fourth round of schooners, all the conversation would be in Middle English.
One night at the Moon, Pym—a pretty good although undisciplined poet—stripped naked and walked through the plate-glass door—crashed right through the glass—and was last seen casually strolling east on Forty-Fifth Street, leaving a little trail of blood. Houston also occasionally disrobed.
In those days, my friends and I bought books (when we could afford them) exclusively at the University Book Store. More conventional Seattleites purchased their tomes at Frederick & Nelson. I don’t recall any other options. Later, of course, I shopped at Elliott Bay.
As I’ve said elsewhere, drizzle drip for drizzle drip, salmon whisker for salmon whisker, no author has evoked this spectacularly mildewed corner of the US linoleum more eloquently and accurately than Ken Kesey in Sometimes a Great Notion, although if one wants a factual history of Seattle, the book to read is Murray Morgan’s Skid Road. Recently Jim Lynch’s Truth Like the Sun brilliantly evokes a particular period (around the time of the World’s Fair) of Seattle’s past.
You are probably aware that Thomas Pynchon lived in Seattle while working as a tech writer at Boeing. It’s believed that he wrote at least some of V. while here. Years ago, I met a jazz musician who’d been Pynchon’s Seattle buddy, and he showed me a photograph of the two of them. Having seen that photo, I realize why Pynchon never published his picture on one of his book jackets. When it comes to potential amorous responses from female readers, it wouldn’t have done him a bit of good. (Unlike my picture on the back of the hardcover edition of Jitterbug Perfume: holy moly!)
For Another Roadside Attraction, I was offered one and only one author event: a reading/signing at a smallish bookstore at Fourth and Pine, an area then favored by Seattle’s streetwalkers and their potential johns. Only a handful of people showed up for the event, but one of them was Darrell Bob Houston, who, embarrassed for me, went outside and invited some of the prostitutes, to inflate the crowd. After a while, pimps came inside looking to see where their girls had gone, and since there were several jugs of red wine and maybe a reefer or two, there soon was a raging (and largely illiterate) book party. The store had a very nice beige carpet upon which was spilled a quantity of red wine. It was the last author event that store ever staged.