Pierre Delattre

A prominent figure in the Beat movement later known for spirituality-infused novels and paintings, died peacefully at his home in Peñasco, N.M., on Oct. 18 after a brief illness. He was 92. In the late 1950s, Delattre was a minister leading the Bread and Wine Mission, a coffeehouse in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood that became a hub for poets, musicians and other artists. Delattre would later leave the clergy and immerse himself in Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies, which informed his first novel in 1971-”Tales of a Dalai Lama,”--as well as four later novels and a 1993 memoir, “Episodes.” Delattre’s art was also shaped by a series of other jobs, including railroad switchman, cab driver, film maker, magazine contributor and teacher at levels from first grade to graduate school. A writer throughout, he began to make his living from painting in 1990 after arriving in northern New Mexico. He sold many works from a gallery he operated in Truchas and later Taos, where Delattre would entertain tourists and art lovers. Though the Taos gallery closed during the pandemic, his paintings, and those of his wife Nancy Ortenstone, continue to be available at Jones Walker of Taos and website OrtenstoneDelattre.com. His new works were the focus of an exhibit at the Taos Center for the Arts last spring. Wherever he lived, Delattre tended to become a mentor to other artists. He was also an inveterate storyteller and sometime songster; for example, he and Ortenstone performed their own songs for several years on the Minnesota Chautauqua Circuit during a time he taught at the University of Minnesota. “Pierre believed that there is the extraordinary in the ordinary and lived his life with that world view,” said Rob “Tor” Torkildson, who met Delattre in 1984 at a graduate writing class at the university and later published one of Delattre’s novels and two essays. “Pierre literally saved my life several times with his encouragement.” Delattre was born in Detroit in 1930. His father, a French-born scholar also named Pierre Delattre, was an influential phonetician who taught at U.S. universities. Part of his son’s childhood was spent in southern France, a time that he would later say spurred an attraction to painters like Picasso, Chagall and Matisse. But Delattre would become equally inspired by Finnish folk tales from his mother’s side of the family. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Then he headed to the Bay Area, where he worked various jobs, wrote and preached on weekends in Stinson Beach. Ordained a Presbyterian minister, Delattre moved to Berkeley and worked at Stiles Hall, the university YMCA that actively promoted free speech and civil rights through acts such as hosting Martin Luther King. Mark Rutledge, who worked with Delattre at Stiles, describes Christian activities but also walking the Berkeley streets looking for magazines that might have published Delattre’s early stories. Another friend from that period, George Killingsworth, recalls such secular activities as making driftwood sculptures on the bay mud flats and Delattre taking him to a production of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” “He was my idol,” Killingsworth said. “I wanted to be like that.” Delattre, who once called the institutional church “the greatest impediment to spiritual life in America,” would further stretch its boundaries at the Bread and Wine Mission, which he ran with his wife, Lois. A writer for Time magazine, who caught up with the 28-year-old minister there in 1959, described the scene: “In old trousers and a hooded sweatshirt with a large cross hanging from his neck, Pastor Delattre is a busy man--serving his bread and wine, bailing his flock out of jail, counseling pregnant girls, speaking to church groups, being pointed out to tourists (the mission is a regular stop for sightseeing buses).” He would become friends with writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan and Bob Kaufman, and helped publish an influential magazine called Beatitudes. But the 1960s would bring change. Delattre, who was married with two children, broke up with Lois. He and his second wife, Carol, would move to San Miguel de Allende, a historic town in Mexico where he ran a writing program at the Instituto Allende. His past did not escape him, as Beat figures such as Neal Cassady of “On the Road” fame arrived. He died there of a combination of speed and tequila. “The police knocked on my door saying they had a corpse in their truck; my address was in his pocket,” Delattre wrote in “Episodes.” The death seemed to prove that the Beat-generation stars burned themselves out in doing too much too quickly. “I decided I wanted to burn a slow flame, and last a long time. Seen from the slow perspective of a saunterer, life was too beautiful to give up on too soon.” His next change was taking a writer-in-residence job near Minneapolis. He had ties in the region that included his brother, Roland Delattre, who taught at the University of Minnesota. His mother’s Finnish family also had a farm on a wooded lake in northeast Wisconsin, where Delattre later lived and wrote for a time. In 1980, he published a second novel, “Walking on Air,” which told the tale of a mystical circus family. It was later made into a musical in Peterborough, N.H. The Twin Cities were where Delattre met Nancy Ortenstone, who became his ultimate companion and collaborator. She had two daughters; the four of them moved back to San Miguel for a second sojourn. Much of the movable feast of artists later decamped to New Mexico, where Delattre and Ortenstone arrived in 1986. Aided at times by grants for his writing, they first settled in Dixon, near rugged hills where friend and artist Ra Paulette hand-carved a cave that Delattre would frequent with his dog Picasso. They later purchased and renovated a home in Peñasco, a small town at 8,500 feet amid the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Water rushes down an acequia that runs through the property, bringing a constant whoosh and feeding a stand of aspen trees. Besides creating scores of paintings there, Ortenstone and Delattre enjoyed lengthy walks through the wooded hills. While Ortenstone’s work is more abstract, Delattre’s paintings often have recognizable humans and animals, with a hint of a story to them. He often said he borrowed ideas from the magical realist authors of Latin America, but he preferred the term “fabulist” in describing his work. “My aim,” he wrote, “is to create as much happiness, beauty and love through my art as I possibly can.” Delattre’s writings also projected a calmness about the potential end of life. “Grandpa and I were always forced to the conclusion that since something cannot be created out of nothing there is no such thing as non-existence,” he wrote in “Korrigan’s Shadow,” a novel published in 2016. “Death is only a word for some kind of different life. Since not being can never be and being can never not be we always endlessly, timelessly, simply are.” Delattre is survived by Ortenstone; children Michele Delattre and Marc Delattre; stepchildren Carla O’Neal and Jennifer Tjosvold; grandchildren Owen Clark, Cameron Foxly, Grayson Dew, Devon Delattre, Hunter Delattre and Jack and Lauren Tjosvold; and great-grandchildren Avery, Hadley and Eveline Clark and Daisy Foxly.