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by Brian T.W. Way?
Kathryn Hume says of Brautigan's writing, "It looks simple. Simplicity rarely is though" (89). An Unfortunate Woman is a book that looks simple, a text written in a personal diary format routinely recounting day-to-day experiences. It is a novel which Richard Brautigan could not get published; by most accounts a dispute about its worthiness was the root cause of Brautigan's split with his long-time literary agent, Helen Brann?. (There may have been another book in the mix in this final dispute as well; the content of the manuscript that Brann rejected reportedly had a lot to do with Brautigan's divorce from his second wife, Akiko, which An Unfortunate Woman in its published form does not. There is some evidence that Brautigan may have been working on another prose manuscript during this time; Greg Keeler? mentions that he had started a novel entitled American Hotels and suggests that this manuscript scribbled on yellow legal pads is still "lying under wraps somewhere" (92).) While the posthumously published An Unfortunate Woman does not seem to be Brautigan's best work in spite of the praise given it by the likes of Tom McGuane? and Jim Harrison on the book's jacket, it is nevertheless an interesting book and most certainly more than "mainly a curiosity" (5) as H. J. Kirchhoff claims or without "any real insight" (12) as Andrew Gard adds in dismissive reviews. At the very least, although Brautigan's timing may seem hesitant or somewhat off, An Unfortunate Woman continues to chart out the course that Brautigan's fiction of the 1980s had set; at most, it takes his hybrid form one step further and, in the process, casts some reflective light upon the redemption which So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away seemed, temporarily, to have achieved.
The book begins with a personal preface by Brautigan about the shock caused by the death of a long-time female friend (Nikki Arai) from cancer and then contains a series of diary-like entries, date by date from January 30 until June 28, 1982. As Brautigan's works of the 1970s examined various genres of writing, so here, ostensibly, he turns to explore one more genre, the diary, but the book is more than just another genre experiment and the diary that he creates is certainly a curious one. The entries are progressively dated from January 30 in a present time but most deal with past events. If the word "diary" means a daily allowance or daily record then this is a daily record but, as such, it is a daily record of the writer's past, of his memory. As he claims, "one of the doomed purposes of this book is an attempt to keep the past and the present functioning simultaneously" (64). And that becomes a challenging task as he admits: "Yes, it is difficult to keep the past and the present going on at the same time because they cannot be trusted to act out their proper roles. They suddenly can turn on you and operate diametrically opposed to your understanding and the needs of reality" (66).
A further complication informs this work, as well. The unnamed writer of this fiction has the initials "R. B." and event after event, from the itinerary of trips taken to Japan and Chicago and Toronto and Alaska to a teaching sabbatical at Montana State to outrage and anger at his daughter's marriage and subsequent estrangement from her to reflection on his birth date, exactly coincide with the details of Richard Brautigan's own life:
^With this auspicious beginning, I'll continue describing one person's journey, a sort of free fall calendar map, that starts out what seems like years ago, but has actually been just a few months in physical time. (2)^
The phrase "free fall" is an ominous oxymoron, of course, implying an opening up of possibilities on the journey but hinting also of an imminent crash (foreboding images of death and cemeteries saturate this book). In speaking about one interesting person he has met who could have become a potentially "memorable character" in "a normal book, unfortunately not this one" (46), "R.B." comments: "What a selfish writer I am, using him only as a mirror to reflect my own ego, and no one to play the part and no movie" (47). From the outset, this is not to be "a normal book." As R. D. Pohl suggests, it is a novel that "seems to advance by digression and misdirection" (7) and as Simon Hall says: "It rubbishes the notion that narrative should be streamlined and proceed with a minimum of digressive hindrance towards some sort of conclusion. It is heavy with introspective reflection..." (22). Greg Keeler notes that an early working title for the book was "Investigating Moods" (148). In effect the voice which narrates — investigates might be the better word — the events of An Unfortunate Woman is fundamentally "introspective," not just "semiautobiographical" as the anonymous reviewer in Publisher's Weekly suggests; in effect, it is the voice of Richard Brautigan — he is his own narrator, he is his own fiction. In briefly considering An Unfortunate Woman in "Brautigan's Psychomachia," Kathryn Hume suggests that "Brautigan's observations are as sharp as always, but he finds no actions that can block awareness or create a distance between himself and the temptation of nothingness" (88-9). The point may be that he does not want to. Ostensibly, he is now involved in a complex hybrid form of writing in which the writer consciously writes himself and this comes with its own acknowledged challenges:
^The process of being this book only accentuates my day-to-day helplessness. Perhaps the task I have chosen with this book was doomed from the very beginning. I should have begun with the word "delusion."
Anyway, I'm not giving up. (59)^
As the narrative structure of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away toyed with the quasi-autobiographical relationship between the author and the narrator and the blond boy, here such barriers are intentionally (perhaps courageously) eliminated. In So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, the fiction is fiction — although there is a sketchy biographical rumour that Brautigan as a boy may have been involved in a shooting accident, it was a non-fatal event. Richard Brautigan as a child did not shoot and kill a best friend; in An Unfortunate Woman Brautigan's actual life, at least over a limited period of time, unfolds as a kind of raw reality. No distinction is attempted between what is real and what is fiction. An Unfortunate Woman as "free fall calendar map," a kind of labyrinthine recording of time and place, emerges then as autobiographical fiction, or fictional autobiography, in the process suggesting, perhaps, the true fictive nature of all such texts, of all writing. The book is not subtitled "a novel," as Trout Fishing in America was, but "A Journey." And in so many ways this is the logical extension of the disappearance of the boy in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away; what we now have is the disappearance of the narrator, himself. It is the ultimate baring or stripping away of the fictive process, metafiction pushed to the max. Appropriately, near the end, even the authorial voice here often seems tentative, wavering, unsure of its own ontological role:
^At this point you know more about what has gone on now than I do. You have read the book. I have not. I of course remember things in it, but I am at a great disadvantage right now. I am literally in the palm of your hand as I finish. ...
Because my plan was to write a book following like a calendar map the goings-on of my life. I can't return to the beginning and what followed after that. I wish I could. It would make things a lot easier. I know there are so many loose ends, unfinished possibilities, beginning endings. ...
I sense this book to be an unfinished labyrinth of half-asked questions fastened to partial answers. (107).^
As a journey that is a self-admitted "free fall calendar map," the book takes on the quality of a labyrinth. At several moments, the speaker reminds us that he will "get back" to some detail or event that he has mentioned. The full accounting of most events in An Unfortunate Woman is never told in an ordered or unitary way but offered to the reader as fragments scattered achronologically through various places in the text. The story of the Japanese cemetery in Maui, for instance, is told in fragments across several pages (23, 27, 33, 34-38) as is the recollection of the fake totems in Ketchikan (12, 21,46, 47), the plan for writing the book (51, 57, 83, 85, 86, 92, 104), the death of the hanged woman (3, 43, 44, 51, 52, 57, 58, 74, 75, 78, 108), and a host of other events. This is the route of a calendar map and, among other things for Brautigan, it represents the scattered nature of reality and of the way memory contains that reality. And, most important of all, of the challenge for a writer trying to record or respond to the world--as with the systems for communication in The Tokyo-Montana Express, failure always seems imminent, meaning always seems in doubt. This is the dark serendipity of occurrence.
On numerous occasions in An Unfortunate Woman phrases such as "no reason" or "no sense" are repeated. From the beginning, there is "no apparent reason" (1) for the lone brown shoe to be lying in the Honolulu intersection, no purpose in having a photograph taken with a chicken in Hawaii, no reason for the building to be burning in San Francisco on a Sunday morning, no cause given for the creation of fake totem poles in Ketchikan or for the deterioration of the Japanese cemetery in Maui. Its lights have been shut off because the caretakers have "decided that there is no reason for the cemetery to be lit at night" (33). In preparing for a newspaper interview in Ketchikan, R.B. emphatically exclaims "I had to make sense" (49) and then, self-defeatingly it would seem, talks about some crows and a hot dog bun. As one who has allowed temporal disorder to reign in his book, R.B. is tried in an imaginary courtroom for his misuse of time and neglect of writing dates: "I am considered a human monster by a lot of people who are devoted to and depend on time" (54). About the only timepiece in An Unfortunate Woman is an insomnia-inducing cuckoo clock (63). R.B. tries to "create a system to try and sort out" the events of his life by organizing his thoughts by numbers but a "contemporary interruption" and a two month gap doom his attempt. Reminiscent of Cameron, the gunfighter in The Hawkline Monster, R.B. initially resorts to counting the number of words in his journal because, as he says, "I wanted to have a feeling of continuity, that I was actually doing something, though I don't know exactly why counting words on a piece of paper served that purpose because I was actually doing something" (77). He gives up this futile activity and, at one moment, he simply realizes and admits "that sometimes we have no control over our lives" (51). And along this thematic line of thinking in the novel, darker concerns emerge — there is also no reason for the random violence of the world, for rape, for deaths by cancer or demise by suicide. There is no reason for the events or dates of one's existence or for the way the labyrinth of the speaker's mind operates. The structure of this fiction emerges as an attempt to acknowledge, to represent, these conditions. As R. B. says:
^I've just turned 47 and I can't go back into the past and realign my priorities in such a way as to create another personality out of them. I'm just going to have to make do with the almost five decades sum of me. (22)^
As the book develops, the fiction itself disintegrates at times and the writer claims not to know where it has gone (51, 57, 59, 64, 70) — the last of these being the most dramatic when the writing loses over two months of its life (this gap emphasized by listing a long paragraph of lost dates, that list reprinted on the book's back cover). As R.B. comments: "It becomes more and more apparent as I proceed with this journey that life cannot be controlled and perhaps not even envisioned and that certainly design and portent are out of the question" (59). Arguably, in keeping with a theme consistent through most of Brautigan's writing, here is a writer encountering the fiction of writing fiction in a text that, accordingly, enacts its own attempt to avoid fossilization, to avoid the death on a page that fictionalization produces, to achieve a kind of flexibility and renewal, even resistance or denial, as each new page is turned, as each new word appears. In observing that deteriorated cemetery in Hawaii, R. B. comments: "The pile of forgotten tombstones made no sense at all to me. I guess it is a part of everything else, including this" (37). The text that is being written, like the pile of tombstones, may make no sense; conversely, of course, and ironically, it is the only text that can be created in a world and for a life that makes "no sense." Gaps and interruptions and fragments and randomness and the absence of meaning are integral to the fiction as they are, in Brautigan's vision, integral to living. Literally, the author, one with his text, and the reader are along for the "journey."
As sense seems rarely to be found in the things of the world, neither is perfection:
^But, also, we must not forget that this is the route of a calendar map following one man's existence during a few months' period in time, and I think that it would probably be unfair to ask for perfection if there is such a thing. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space.
If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong? (15)^
The proposition is intriguing. In an artistic sense, how can the diary of a man who sees his life and universe with "nothing there" in any way be flawed? How can the writing be anything but what it is, "an unfinished labyrinth of half-asked questions fastened to partial answers" (107)? The structure of the book then accordingly fluctuates wildly from one recollection to another: the book begins with its preface about the female friend who has succumbed to cancer, then moves to an image of a lone shoe in a Honolulu intersection, then mentions in order a wide ranging series of topics unrelated except that they enter one after another into the speaker's memory: a rented house in Berkeley where an "unfortunate woman" has hanged herself, the writer's birthday, a trip to Toronto, the taking of a photograph with a chicken in Hawaii, a bus ride and burning building in San Francisco, a visit to see fake totem poles in Ketchikan, an imagined love affair in a grocery store, a Japanese cemetery, a vacation in Mendocino during which "R.B." is ill, back to the Japanese cemetery, a trip to Buffalo, the excursion to Toronto again, San Francisco and the hanged woman and two telephone calls, back to Ketchikan, back to the rented house in Berkeley, and so on, and so on. The book, as a calendar map, resembles a labyrinth, but a kind of labyrinth which never ends, with no designer and no real entrances or exits or centres, no meanings. If there is a monster, it is the labyrinth itself. R.B.'s comment about the random events of his life most certainly applies to the fiction written: "I guess this is just the way it happens if you have lost control of days, weeks, months, and years" (21). As it confesses, the text is a collection of "loose ends, unfinished possibilities, beginning endings" and simply seems to be what it is, the notation of those curious and random ideas and events that crossed through Richard Brautigan's experience in the fall of 1981 until he had filled the 160 page journal during the first six months of 1982. As Trout Fishing in America was completely revised seventeen times over a period of six years, one senses that An Unfortunate Woman was never revised. It exists essentially as it was written, the raw material of Brautigan's often raw encounters with the world in which he lived during that time, a mirror reflection of that world as seen through his own troubled condition.
Brautigan has been quoted as saying: "Nobody changes, I don't believe in change" (Manso 65) and as seeing "the past [as] a marble replica of breathing life" (Abbott 132). From beginning to end, his writing is a confrontation with the moment, a delicate encounter with the ineffable now, and, conversely, a rejection of all that would freeze perception or imagination, through ritual or structure or tombstone or word, as a substitute for existence. An Unfortunate Woman moves as close perhaps as writing can to the moment and to the real. It is a record by a living hand — including good days, bad days, gaps, banalities, absurdities, insightful observations, humour — of the living experience of the writer by the writer. Always he is on the immediate edge encountering his life's and his writing's "loose ends, unfinished possibilities, beginning endings" and never looking back, never reading back, never re-writing. It is what this book is, or at least tries to be (it might be likened to a extreme version of that spontaneous confessional style promoted by Kerouac and several of the Beats).
In spite of its idiosyncratic nature, perhaps because of it, An Unfortunate Woman is a book clothed in self-referentiality, inordinately conscious of the act of its own writing. Often R.B. talks directly to the reader for, as he says: "When people are talking directly to you, it takes an added and more uncomfortable effort to ignore them" (4). He discusses his plans in the book for the writing of the book:
^Well, what happened is that sometimes we have no control over our lives. My plan was to stay at a hotel in the Japanese section and finish this book and then go to Chicago, come back to San Francisco to take care of things, and then on to Denver, spend a few days in Boulder, Colorado, and afterwards fly to Montana to spend the spring. (51)^
Another time he talks of sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop, "writing and still determined, well, anyway, sort of, to roughly describe what happened during the February days when I interrupted this book by not writing and moved myself back to the house in Berkeley where the woman hanged herself" (57). At another point R.B. comments on "this notebook that I am writing in" (75) and counts the words that he writes on each page, calling it a "minor numerical theme" (77). He constructs a numbered list and tries to "create a system to try to sort out, and I might add in no particular order or priority other than the random selection of memory operation on its own retrieval system, some of the things that were or happened during my week and a half in the Midwest" (61). R.B. auto-analyses the content and structure of his writing:
^I'm actually writing something quite serious, but I'm doing it in a roundabout way, including varieties of time and human experience, which even tragedy cannot escape from. To put it bluntly: Life goes on. (75)^
In talking of his lover and his life, at one point, he is also talking of his fiction: "...how random and accidental this journey together is, almost like flipping a coin" (82). Turning his arm and turning the page of the journal in which he writes are the same thing (103) — he is his fiction. He notes that a man with some pastries did "cause me to have to dramatically alter a paragraph" (69), reflects on a gap in his writing when "a passage of over a hundred days between the words" (70) occurs, and concludes that "this book I'm writing will be over before anything is proved one way or another" (83).
Much of the book unveils snippets of an ongoing discussion between the writer and an assumed reader, or between the writer and himself. R.B. will provide textual road signs for the reader as when he remarks: "Oh, yes, I forgot to mention there's been a change in the calendar map" (15) or "Before I wrote that last paragraph, I had planned to mention that a Japanese man at another table is eating a doughnut..." (66) or "Now I'll get back to the rest of this book, whose main theme is an unfortunate woman" (74) or "Don't worry: I'll get back to it" (77) or "I'll tell you what: I'll flip a coin to see what comes up next. ... I'll be back in a minute and flip a coin: heads chores; tails love life" (79) or "Oh, yes, we're back on the same porch with no electrical storm in sight and the sun and the birds shining away in the sky..." (86). Toward the end, he talks of "using up the few remaining pages in this notebook" (106) counting down the number of lines and words left (109-110). On several occasions he tells the reader that he is "Back again" (98) or "I'm back" (109) or will be "Back in a moment ..." (91) and emphasizes the physicality of the text when he reminds the reader that he has just "returned to this place we have been meeting sporadically since January 30 of this year" (99). The text asks questions of the reader: "Have I mentioned that there is a creek nearby..." (79) or "Where was I before I noticed the spider setting up house-keeping on me? (104) and makes assumptions about questions the reader might have: "There has probably been a question that you have wanted to ask almost from the beginning of this little revelation of mine" (85). And a dramatic script concerning the incident of the broken leg is included with Author and Reader as the dramatis personae (74) and a question and answer session is created interrogating R.B.'s practices of disrobing (86).
The book often seems aware, perhaps fearful, of its own limitations, its potential failure as a text. As the book moves towards its conclusions, present events and interruptions increasingly seem to disrupt the account of past recollections and the writing becomes even more fragmented, struggling to a laboured conclusion, almost accounting for each line that is filled, and acutely aware of all that has not been accomplished. R.B. comments:
^What about all the things that are not here and how little did I do with what is here?
So many inconclusive fragments, sophomoric humor, cheap tricks, detailless details.
Why did I waste so much of these 160 pages in a notebook costing me $2.50 bought in a Japanese bookstore on my birthday? See, I'm doing it again. Perhaps I'm a helpless case and should accept my fate. With so little space left, I'm writing about how much this goddamn notebook cost. ...
I'm going to get up and walk around this Montana landscape for a little bit. A terrible sadness is coming over me. I'll be back in a while to make this book gone. (109)
In the final journal entry of his "free fall calendar map" R.B. speaks with a former writing student on the telephone. He gives her the following advice:
In other words, I told her to write about the things she knows about.
There would be plenty of time to write about what she doesn't know about. (107)^
An Unfortunate Woman is a book written about the things he knows, about the day-to-day observations and emotions and events of R.B. during a six month period of his life in a certain place and a certain time, or as he puts it, it contains "all the tumbled machinations that are a man's mind and his experience" (108). In this sense of reality, it is the only book that can be written. As R.B. declares about his writing: "I will finish as I started toward no other end than a human being living and what can happen to him over a given period of time and what if anything, it means" (107).
In keeping with his advice to his student writer, as his diary closes, R.B. comments: "So I now find myself bringing to an end this book, which is basically about all I know about, so painfully evident" (107). He then lists a series of unanswered questions and characterizes the book as the home in which he has lived since the day of his 47th birthday. The book resembles the life of its author and he regrets its haphazardness, its incompleteness as he or anyone else, one supposes, might have regrets about the unfolding of one's life:
^I am haunted, almost obsessed, by all the things that I have left out of here, that needed at least equal time, who is to champion their cause as with each stroke of my pen I consume this space, precious perhaps only to me, but precious, anyway. (108)^
Through its immediacies and self-conscious sensibilities, An Unfortunate Woman often reflects upon its own failure as a text to capture or express that which it is trying to do. It is a book filled with foreboding images
Writing is not an easy thing, R.B. seems to be telling us, as life is rarely an easy thing. Not much may really make sense. The elusive nature of writing, exploring, capturing, explaining, expressing one's place and time is a pervasive theme of An Unfortunate Woman — "one of the doomed purposes of this book is an attempt to keep the past and present functioning simultaneously" (64). To write, at most, is to write oneself, one's personal history and as R.B. has reminded us "it is difficult to keep the past and the present going on at the same time because they cannot be trusted to act out their proper roles" (66). One's sense of reality can be "fooled" (69). Which is to say, "Life goes on" (75). Obladi. Oblada. The challenge of the writer, through imagination and courage, is, like life, to keep going on and not succumb to the forces that would destroy be they cancer or suicide or sacrifice or fake totems or bad reviews or memory or ideas fixed in stone and statue and ritual. One must seek to attain a state akin to that which R.B. describes in the voice of his friend who is about to die from cancer:
^I guess what I am trying to say is that her voice was gently clear like a small candle burning in an immense darkened cathedral built for a religion that was never finalized, so no worship ever took place in there. (91)^
It is a "gently clear" voice that exists in a place of rituals "never finalized"; ultimately to arrive at such a state of becoming, to engage at least in "an attempt to keep the past and the present functioning simultaneously" (64), may require an act of courage, of grace. R.B. comments:
^... I looked forward to arriving at a period of grace in my life, and my late forties might be a good place to start.
What I meant by grace was a more realistic approach to the process of living to arrive at perhaps some tranquillity and to place a little more distance between the frustrations and agonies in my life, which are so often my own creation.
It is interesting that I used the word "realistic." (46)^
To use the word "realistic" is interesting, indeed. For what could be more realistic than the writing of An Unfortunate Woman, random and rambling, insightful and banal, fluid and awkward — from doughnuts to hot dogs to mythic sacrifice to personal estrangement, so real that at the end one is not sure what one has read. Perhaps 'experienced' would be the better word. For the book is a record of experiences and throughout one senses a grit and a courage in its writing, a kind of grace under pressure to which, I suspect, even that writer whom Brautigan most admired, Hemingway?, would have had to give some respect. As much perhaps as any human can do, perhaps all a human can do, Richard Brautigan's final words in this book are a fit summing up: "But I did try" (110).
Change 2? Fall 2006: 7-13
Excerpt from: Of fiction, film and fish: Richard Brautigan's metafictional romance (in progress)
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