Anders,2000

"Tragedy Prevades Brautigan's Books"
Smiley Anders
Sunday Advocate [Baton Rouge, LA], June 11, 2000, Sunday Advocate Magazine, pp. 12, 13.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

If there's any message in these two slim volumes, it's that the tragedy of suicide doesn't end with the death of the person who commits it.

In the first journal, counterculture author Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America and others) is haunted by the death of a woman who hanged herself.

Written in 1982, two years before Brautigan put a gun to his head and died at age 49, the disjointed account of five months of wandering, drinking, visiting cemeteries and musing on death is called a novel by its publisher. But, given the events that followed, it reads more like a farewell statement.

It has, like all Brautigan works, its droll moments.

In Hawaii, he has his picture taken holding a chicken, so he can hang the photo on the wall of his Montana ranch:

"People would visit me there and maybe one of them would ask about the curious photograph . . . Perhaps they would sense there was a story behind the photograph . . .

"'Is there a reason for that photograph? Is that some kind of special chicken?'

"'No, I just wanted to have a photograph of me and a chicken taken in Hawaii.'

"Where in the hell could they go from there?"

But most of the book is filled with hopelessness.

In the second journal, his only daughter, Ianthe, tells how a kind, if quirky, father turned into a hopeless alcoholic and, eventually, a suicide.

She found the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman after his death, but says she felt too guilty about his suicide—they were estranged at the time he killed himself—to think of seeking a publisher.

Her journal reads something like his—bits and pieces, and sometimes just shreds, of her life are presented, with little attempt at fashioning a traditional autobiography.

She tells of idyllic visits with her father—he and her mother separated when she was 3—n San Francisco and at his Montana ranch.

But she also tells of his later bourbon-fueled rages—the time he burned all the telephones in the house; the time she and a girlfriend escaped out a bathroom window and ran to the neighbors as he smashed furniture.

Finally she came to grips with his death, aided by a visit to his mother in Oregon, a grandmother she had never known.

"I started writing about my father because I needed a safe place to explore my feelings about him without having to explain anything to anyone," she writes. "For a long time, I blamed myself for his suicide. I felt that if I had been a better daughter he would have lived."

She says that as she wrote this series of short essays about her father, "slowly I began to realize that each piece was an antidote to a death/suicide that I was convinced on some level was infectious."

It has taken her years to come to grips with his sudden end, to realize it wasn't her fault, and that she didn't "catch death" from her talented but destructive father.

Bell,no-date

"The Endless Walk Of Richard Brautigan"
Robert Edward Bell III
Suite 101. ***?***.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

There are shadows surrounding the lives for those of us left or willing to face the dawnings of another precipice left by the glimmering brightened hues left after another morning has passed, letting these colors like some eternal summer stream downwards upon the soul like a river into eternity. Through this departing twilight few travelers, least of all may it be said writers, dare to venture; for the number of those returning from these distant shores, roaming into unknown territories, past the damp darkening forests named eternity often fall into the hallways of memory forever. Death awaits as a guide to this hidden doorway of light hiding amongst this land of shadow and form. Richard Brautigan was a writer who was not unfamiliar with these lands carrying distant cliffs; whose edges often frighten the best of writers away from their dangerous peaks and crevices. He was not stranger to these distant crevices, remote outreaches of the mind, the hallowed sacred grounds where the last footsteps of a man must reach before he rests coming to the end of this journey of life. That death permeates the writings of Richard Brautigan is no secret, for it seemed to be a major theme in his works. Even his few novels, where he diverted from his normal preoccupation with the morbid themes of death, decay, and an utterance for the beauty for lost things.

The book begins with a letter written in the first person narrative. He is writing to an annonymous person N. He tells of a telephone call that he receives informing him on the death of one of his dearest and closest friends. He makes several references to eating watermelon with his friend, some of them mixed with several auspicous passages referring to nature. Could this be a reference to Watermelon Sugar, or an earlier novel ? Who knows ? Is the watermelon sugar an allegory Is the watermelon an allegory serving as an opposite to the imagery of death that consistently fill the works of Richard Brautigan. He interrupts his friend in the middle of intercourse with a lover to eat watermelon and contemplate the tragic death of their friend. In this case, Brautigan seems to be dealing with the seriousness of death with the guise of humor that made him so popular with a generation and then concludes the passage with,

"I had gone to my friend's house to talk about it when I interrupted her lovemaking. The watermelon was just some kind of funny excuse to talk about my grief and try to get some perspective on the fact that I can never call you again on the telephone and tell you something like I've just done that basically only your sense of humor could appreciate." (1)

The story is told through a series of imaginative journal entries, some finished, some skipped over in lost time. The author uses a variety of literary techniques to keep the pace of the story clean and flowing with an even logical tempo. Flashbacks are used from an earlier viewing before he jumps back, typical Brautigan, into a journal entry. Often, the present moment will jump into this period of recollection, invading the past with a current thought or idea. Brautigan uses the art of minimalism to perfection, as he strips useless words from context, tells the story in with a straightforward style mixed with his own unique style of humor, and simplifies the strength of the English language, so that he deals with complex themes in a style that is simple and void of danling adjectives, clauses, or verb syntax. He throws in surprises throughout his prose, adding changes that speed or slow down the flow of the plotline. He tells stories within stories, switches to past and then draws the future into the ever-present present. He changes the order of the sequence in events, so that the novel presents itself as a neatly tied package for his reader to enjoy.

The introductory preface begins with a short and simple letter describing the tragic death of his close friend by suicide. In those moving and emotional declaration of his love for her friendship, he shows us a feeling of that emotional loss that every human experiences at some point in his or her life with the sort of antipathy that moves the reader with the heart, seeking the emotional reandering of loss through the feeling of the moment. The letter R may be a reference to the author himself. At this point, the preface as the rest of the book, becomes confusing. When Brautigan uses the first person narrative, is he refering to his own thoughts and actions or is he refering to a character that exists in fiction, whom he has created. Like Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac, it is often difficult to determine when the first person speaks for the thoughts of Richard Brautigan himself, and when these thoughts refer to a fictional character of the imaginary literary mind.

Where is the real Richard Brautigan and when does fiction surface and take over the subconscous prose of self-biography. This is a question that seems to rise over and over again in the writings of Brautigan, especially the prose more so than the poetry, making it almost impossible to determine when the author enters the narrative, and when the image created by Brautigan speaks inside the prose. As Brautigan describes the discovery of a shoe in the middle of a busy intersection, he begins the first page of his novel, but even in this first paragraph, the realities become blurred, as he races from one idea to the next, filling the reader with more and more imagery until his point is made. In this case, his humor comes across, and he gives us a picture of the beauty of the world contained in the smallest of everyday human experiences.

"I saw a brand-new woman's shoe lying in the middle of a quiet Honolulu intersection. It was a brown shoe that sparkled like a leather diamond. There was no apparent reason for the shoe to be lying there such as it playing a part among the leftover remnants of an automobile accident and there were no signs that a parade had passed that way, so the story behind the shoe will never be known." (2)

He continues with this passage displaying his humor in full form.

"Did I mention of course I didn't, that the shoe had no partner ? The shoe was alone, solitary, almost haunting. Why is it that when people see one shoe, they almost feel uncomfortable if a second is not about ? They look for it. Where is the other shoe ? It must be around here someplace. With this auspicious beginning, I'll continue describing one person's journey, a sort of free-fall calender map, that starts out what seems like years ago, but has actually been just a few months physical time." (3)

As can be seen, the lines blur as the narrator describes his hop-skotch travel around the country. Berkley, Montana, Maui. The names pass by the reader so fast, that the places become mixed up in a jumble of names, dates, and places, until it is hard to determine where this narrator has actually visited. Close to Brautigan's life? You bet. So close, that it seems that Brautigan may have put a lot of his own personal self, emotions, and ego into this short last work of minimalistic prose. The story proves haunting not only in the themes that he expouses on the written page, but in some of the conclusions that Brautigan eventually concludes. One of these can be seen in the reflective quote placed at the beginning of the book by his daughter.

"Iphigenia: A new home you make for me, Father Where will it be ?

"Agamemnon: Now stop—it's not right For a girl to know all of these things.

"Iphigenia: Father, over there when you have done All things well, hurry back to me from Troy !

"Euripedes Iphigenia in Aulis." (4)

As scholars read this work, it becomes increasingly clear that there was a great deal more going on with Brautigan's emotional state than many of his close friends may have realized. On visiting Haight Ashberry, I met an old aquaitance of the now famous but long deceased poet and prose writer, novelist.

"He was a beautiful man who had warm intellect and a wonderful sense of humor. Everyone in Haight Ashberry was shocked when we had learned that this wonderful man had ended his life."

Comments such as the one above are frequent around San Francisco, and lead one to ponder the complexities of Brautigan's emotional state. Like many writers, the clues may be found hidden in the pages of his works. In an, "Unfortunate Woman", his proccupation of death may have masked the horrors that a literary mind might encounter when dealing with the last ultimate mystery. Sometimes as has been said the lines between genius and madness are often skewed. Obviously, Brautigan was not mad, but when a writer walks in the shadows for too long, the end results may prove tragic, for even poets need their sunlight. Brautigan's fate may have been sealed from standing in the shaded places that inhabit the secret places of the mind for too long.

Bourgea,2000

"Gone Fishing: Writer Ianthe Brautigan Comes to Terms with Her Famous Father's Legacy"
Yosha Bourgea
Sonoma County Independent, Sep. 14-20, 2000: ***?***.
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.14.00/brautigan-0037.html
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Ianthe Brautigan Swensen was 24 in the fall of 1984 when she enrolled in a writing class at Santa Rosa Junior College. On Oct. 25 of that year, the body of her father, author Richard Brautigan, was found in a house in Bolinas beside a bottle of alcohol and a .44 Magnum. He was 49 years old.

It was in the class, taught by Sonoma County Poet Laureate Don Emblen, that Ianthe first began to write about her father's suicide. "For whatever reason, experiences were happening in my life that were so large they couldn't be contained in my body," she remembers. "So I started writing."

The journey she began that fall would find its way into print this past spring, 16 years later, with the publication of her first book. You Can't Catch Death (St. Martin's Press; $21.95) is a memoir of Richard Brautigan's life and of the aftermath of his death, as seen through the eyes of his only child. It is a haunting, perceptive portrait of a man whose great talent as a writer was shadowed by alcoholism and the ghosts of his past.

"There was a point when I realized that [I could] write about my dad using techniques of fiction," Ianthe says. "It felt almost easier to get to the material that way. When you write in your journal, or at least when I do, I'm complaining about things. But if you're telling your story in a more amplified way, all that drops away."

Ianthe now lives in Santa Rosa with her husband, producer/director Paul Swensen, and their 14-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Ever since You Can't Catch Death was released in May, she has been busy doing interviews and readings from the book.

"I didn't anticipate the enormous freedom that I would feel," she says. "The problem with suicide is that there's so much shame associated with it. When all the words were finally out there, it was like, OK, this is a good thing. Shame has an enormous amount of power over you."

Ianthe's first reading was in Santa Rosa at Copperfield's Books, where she is a part-time employee. The reception she received astounded her. "People have been giving me gifts," she says. "I get people who are interested in the book because they have some relation to suicide. Then there's a big constituency that's my dad's, and they're all so welcoming and excited to see me. I've not had one nut."

Richard Brautigan vaulted to fame in 1967 with the publication of his second novel, Trout Fishing in America. Written in a kaleidoscopic, deadpan-absurdist style that confounded critics and academics, the book caught on with the counterculture movement and became hugely successful, eventually selling several million copies around the world.

His other early books, A Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, also became popular, especially with college students. Early in his career he was labeled "the last of the Beats," an association that stuck with him long after he left the Bay Area and moved to a ranch in Montana. By the time of his death, he had published 10 novels, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories.

But for all the popular acclaim, Brautigan was never accepted by the American literary establishment. It may have been his popularity, in fact, that prompted many critics to write him off as a temporary phenomenon.

"His style is very literary, but it's also very accessible," Ianthe says. "I think we have confused accessibility with being nonliterary. In France, he's revered, and they write books of criticism about him. And he's appreciated in Germany and places like that. But here, he's still a secret, very word-of-mouth."

After she finished You Can't Catch Death, Ianthe discovered among her father's papers a manuscript that had been completed before his death, but never published. It was released concurrently with the memoir, under the title An Unfortunate Woman (St. Martin's Press; $17.95).

"There are parts of the book that are painful to me and will always be really painful, but when I look at them now, it's so much easier," Ianthe says.

The novel—which has been both praised and panned by critics—is written as an apparently haphazard pastiche of journal entries. Many of the events described in the book closely mirror events in Brautigan's own life. One passage reads, in part: "One of the letters I got today was from my daughter. . . . She got married last year and I disapproved of the marriage and things have been strained ever since then between us . . . . She and I were very close until she got married. Now our communication is minimal and strained. Perhaps I should bend a little. I don't know."

The passage was written in 1982, a year after Ianthe, then 21, got married despite her father's angry opposition. "It was the first time we had really disagreed on anything," she remembers. "And it came at a bad time for him, emotionally. He was not equipped for a disagreement. [In the past] I had pretty much acclimated myself to whatever his thing was, whatever he wanted.

"Now that I'm older . . . ," she pauses. "My husband and I lucked out, and we've been married 18 years, which is phenomenal. But I would not be thrilled if my daughter wanted to get married at 21."

Ianthe remembers a father who was both protective and permissive.

"Even though he was quote-unquote a bohemian, even though he was not monogamous, there was a real moral dimension to him," she says. "But it didn't involve exterior rules; it had to do with common sense and respecting people.

"I went to Haight-Ashbury as a 7-year-old with him, and we'd meet up with the Diggers, and they would have these big free dinners," she continues. "But as soon as the whole scene changed and got weird and violent, he stopped taking me there. He kept me very compartmentalized."

In the wake of Brautigan's death, newspapers and magazines from around the country had a go at his obituary. For the most part, Ianthe says, they got it wrong.

"I think that suicide terrifies people so much that they have to come up with really easy answers," she says. "The thing about the press is, you're kind of framed before you even start. People wrote things like: 'Richard Brautigan, onetime '60s icon, loses fame, loses fan base, kills himself.' They were sending him up, and then they threw in Trout Fishing, and that was basically the story."

Because there was so much more to the story than fame and death, Ianthe decided to add her own perspective. Both her father's life and his writing, she felt, deserved more than a cursory glance.

"Whenever I read my dad's stuff, there's always the sense of somebody alone, walking down the street," she says. "I see the shadow in everything, and the loneliness, and the hauntedness. But he always leaves you with something.

"My father was very funny," she says. "He wasn't gloomy all the time. That's why, for me, I accept the body of his work as a whole. You have the shadow side, you have the lonely side, you have the hysterically funny side, you have the dignified side. He was a storyteller."

Bradfield,2000

"California: It's A Jungle Out There; Books"
Scott Bradfield
The Times [London, England], 21 June 2000, p. 12.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Eccentric, chaotic and refreshingly unserious, Californian writers have produced a glut of great literature, says Scott Bradfield.

Serious writers aren't supposed to live in California. They aren't supposed to frolic on the white beaches, or drive convertibles down Pacific Coast Highway, or attend script-conferences with Tic-Tac-popping studio executives, where the only issue in dispute is how much to be paid, and how soon.

Rather, serious writers are supposed to be true to their vision, attend Ivy League/Oxbridge universities, happily publish books that don't sell, and live in derelict bed-sits close by their publishers in New York, London and Paris. In other words, they are expected to dream more conventional dreams than California. Otherwise, they might appear to be as vain and materialistic as the critics who applaud them—usually well after they're dead.

Eccentrically-entrepreneurial and poorly-networked, Californian writers usually sop up their educations at local libraries and second-hand bookstores (à la Steinbeck and Jack London); publish their work through fly-by-night small presses (Bukowski and the Beats); or assemble their oeuvres through the always-underestimated commercial paperback houses (Philip K. Dick and James Ellroy). They are a motley, distinctly unserious lot. Which is, of course, what makes them interesting.

"I know you're mad at me for being a Hollywood whore," the novelist John Fante once wrote to his New York agent, "but it's fun while it lasts." Which is probably a lot more than can be said about most literary whoredoms—academic, journalistic, or even those eligible for the Booker.

Say what you will about Californian writers, they do what they do with passionate intensity. And while self-invention may be their one over-riding characteristic, most can be slotted into one of the following four categories: the Hard-Boiled, the Spaced Out, the Street-Wise, and the Hippy Dippy.

The Hard-Boiled School, having enjoyed enormous commercial success, is now also accepted as capital-L Literature. And not coincidentally, it is a genre which depicts California as the sort of place that people who aren't lucky enough to live there wouldn't want to live in anyway: an urban noir of mean streets and disconnected lives where a few firm men (carrying guns, of course) try to sort out the demons from the angels—and usually bring justice to the proceedings a few minutes too late.

From The Big Sleep and The Player to Pulp Fiction and L.A. Confidential, the dispassionate lens of noir scans California's tacky suburbs to divulge secret histories of money, denial, and bad faith. In a land where anybody can be whoever they want to be, novelists don't delve too deeply into the question of who people really are, but rather trace the causal chain of one person knocking into another, bang bang, until somebody winds up dead. Even Pynchon's great California novels, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, are about revealing conspiracies of meaning which, in the long run, mean nothing at all.

When it comes to being Spaced-Out, nobody has been there and done that like Philip K. Dick. Dick was the sort of life-long Californian who wore his belief-systems loosely. And like many of his own characters—in novels as solipsistically diverse as Martian Time-Slip and Do Androids Dream of Electric- Sheep? (aka, Blade-Runner)—Dick claimed to have enjoyed both out-of-body experiences, and telepathic communication with interstellar beings. Conventional reality, for Dick, was something people cooked up in order to sell Barbie doll accessories and Mickey Mouse watches, so it is probably no surprise that his always dissembling virtual worlds have been discovered by the movie business. Hollywood executives likewise seem to believe that reality is something you do to earn a buck.

But while the Hard Boiled and Spaced Out schools are among the successful manifestations of the West Coast Weltanschauung, they aren't necessarily the best. And despite their current cinematic unpopularity, the Street-Wise crew represents California's most substantive literary-élite. Beginning with the socialist and Naturalist novelists—Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Jack London (Call of the Wild) and Steinbeck (In Dubious Battle)—the Street-Wisers crested into the late-2Oth century in the guise of John Fante, a transplanted Italo-Coloradoan who published the most emblematic Southern-California novel of his generation, Ask the Dust, back in 1939.

Like many California novels, Ask the Dust is semi-autobiographical, and describes an inner-city populated both by those who, in the words of Nathanael West, "had come to California to die" and those who came to live as well: "The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun . . . The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged." For Fante, California was a Paradise that people created for themselves. But a Paradise nevertheless.

Finally, California's most unfairly disparaged writer could well be Richard Brautigan, who breathed life into the Hippy-Dippy school during the Woodstock-era. By means of a series of funny, episodic and surreal comic novels, such as A Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan has remained a cult favorite on college campuses around the world, but his literary stature has never been writ large.

That may be about to change. Two new reissues from the Edinburgh-based publisher Rebel, Inc. may help Brautigan acquire some of the gravity he deserves. First, You Can't Catch Death, Ianthe Brautigan's memoir of coming to terms with her father's suicide (Richard Brautigan shot himself in the head at the age of 47) suffers from many longeurs, but depicts a genuinely talented man who wasn't at his best when he started drinking. Brautigan fled rural poverty in the Pacific Northwest to become the porkpie-hatted, walrus-moustached and very Whitmanesque poet who adorned his own dust-jackets, usually flanked by a distinctive-looking young woman (just to let the world know he wasn't that Whitmanesque).

For Brautigan, art was supposed to be, well, here comes that word again—"fun". Sometimes, though, fun had its drawbacks, such as the night Brautigan took his daughter to see Nureyev at the San Francisco Opera House, and was dismayed to learn that none of the performers in this particular ballet were ever going to start talking. "I'm going to go get a drink," he decided finally. It was a bad decision Brautigan kept making over and over again.

Along with daughter Ianthe's memoir, Rebel, Inc.'s second reissue is something unusual: a posthumous novel which is actually quite good, one of Brautigan's best, in fact. And while it recounts the last days of a writer who thinks too much about suicide, An Unfortunate Woman never ceases to be moving or surprising, and contains some of Brautigan's best work.

In some ways, though, this too-long-delayed posthumous novel reinforces a sad misimpression that California is often the last gasp of dying talents. For while many fine writers certainly died there—Fitzgerald, West and Aldous Huxley, to name a few—they probably would have died even quicker anywhere else. And, undoubtedly, they wouldn't have had as much fun doing it, or enjoyed better weather.

Carlson,2000

"An American Original Way Out of Style: Michael Carlson on the Literary Legacy of a Psychedelic Hero"
Michael Carlson
The Financial Times, 12 Aug. 2000, p. 4.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

By the time he committed suicide in 1984, Richard Brautigan was already an anachronism. Books like Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar or A Confederate General from Big Sur had been psychedelic talismans for the hippie generation of the 1960s, but they also possessed a hard moral edge which seemed out of place in the "Me" decade of the 1970s. Sales fell,; reviews were often vicious. As the 1970s morphed into the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s, Brautigan was not so much "out of place" as "out of mind", in more sense than one.

In reality, Brautigan had always been anachronistic. He came to San Franisco in its Beat heydey, from a background much like Jack Kerouac's or, as it turns out Ken Kesey's. His favourite writers, Faulkner and Hemingway, were hard drinkers: like them, he worked hard at his craft and his drug of choice remained alcohol. He was an authentic American surrealist, less a hippie than a father-figure for would-be hippies across America. It was no coincidence that he put a statue of Benjamin Franklin on the cover of Trout Fishing.

Hippies don't kill themselves by firing .44 Magnums into their brains. Knowing his fate puts a difficult burden on readers of An Unfortunate Woman, like being told the ending of a novel before you start it. The book, written in 1982 but unpublished until now, is a fitful diary which begins with the death of a friend and follows Brautigan through a dismal six months of travel, failed relationships, writer's block and overwhelming loneliness. It is a deeply sad book, and would be so even if not read as an extended suicide note.

Occasional nuggets of vintage Brautigan glimmer under the dirt. Once, he describes the writer as a passenger. Brautigan's best work is often deceptively passive: a surrealist senses and makes unusual connections. His friend had hanged herself: he stops to think of death-by-hanging as a spice, one you would not want to have to explain to your dinner guests if you used it in a recipe. Once, when his daughter asked him why he drank so much, Brautigan told her that "the kind of thinking he did was so difficult it formed steel spiderwebs in his mind, and drinking was the only way to get rid of them."

This is one of the few insights into her father's work in Ianthe Brautigan's interesting, but not revealing, memoir. Ianthe says she wrote about her father because she needed a "safe place to explore her feelings", while insisting that the book isn't therapy or self-help. It's least effective when it is just that. Yet, perhaps because as the child of an alcoholic Ianthe was often forced into the parental role, and as the child of a famous artist was often perceived as one of her parent's lesser creations, she is most perceptive when she writes as a parent. Her own daughter's observations provide us with a few authentically Brautigan moments.

Ianthe writes awkwardly, as imprecise as her father was exact. She is often distracted by minutiae, and comes alive only when she focuses on her father's life: she writes best about her father's childhood. She meets, for the first time, her grandmother, whose name went unmentioned by her father throughout his lifetime. Growing up poor in Oregon, Brautigan once threw rocks at a police station in order to get himself arrested and thus be fed. For his trouble he was sent to Salem, the hospital immortalised by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He received electro-shock therapy, for which he blamed his mother, who gave permission to the authorities.

Toward the end of An Unfortunate Woman, Brautigan mentions "A threatening electrical storm [that] did not materialise." Read together with his daughter's memoir, this becomes chilling. He gets depressed reading a life of Faulkner. He writes of becoming estranged from his daughter because he disapproved of her marriage, and how "ultimately stupid" family warfare is. Each paragraph seems another step toward the inevitable tragic ending. "The process of being this book only accentuates my day-to-day helplessness," he writes. The steel spiderwebs have turned into a steel trap. Finally, no connections are left to be made.

These books are not the best place to begin an acquaintance with Richard Brautigan's work, but read in concert they are a moving reminder for anyone who remembers the joys of discovering the strangely skewed vision of a most misunderstood American original. It's time for a new generation to make that discovery.

Duffy,2000

"A Daughter's Fitting Rescue"
Dennis Duffy
National Post [Ontario, Canada], vol. 203, no. 2, 17 June 2000, p. E13.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Two books can have a relationship as complex as any between two people. Ianthe Brautigan resurrected her father's unpublished novel, Unfortunate Woman, after she had finished her own memoir about Richard Brautigan, who died in 1984.

Who was he? The Web will tell you this: His 1967 novel, Trout Fishing in America, still remains a cult book. Germans revere him as an offbeat American pastoralist. He is classified under the Psychedelic Sixties. He was a Famous Person Who Was Depressed.

Brautigan took Kerouac's quintessentially American picaresque Beat narrative and mixed it with a sensibility as bleak as Samuel Beckett's. The result: The road novel goes post-modern. Kerouac's On the Road finishes with the biker's limitless horizon, part of that journey into the infinite that Walt Whitman first took Americans on. But Trout Fishing, as engaging now as when it first appeared, reflects a far edgier vision than Kerouac's.

Lost in ecstasy over the act of movement itself, Kerouac came up with home movies about drifters. Against these, Brautigan offered monochrome stills of people stuck in the same old absurd moments. Brautigan's work gives us what Emily Dickinson called zero-at-the-bone: minutely observed details, without any reassuring structure to hold them in.

Forget the glib pigeonholing of Brautigan as a Sixties writer. Drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll? He died a depressed drunk, shot himself in an empty house. No small resemblance to the man who wrote the other great American trout-fishing story, "Big Two-Hearted River," though Hemingway made sure his wife was around to clean up.

Alcoholics leave their children twice: When they move into the slow suicide the bottle offers, and when they make it to the big lonely they've been lurching toward. They turn their children first into parents, and then into searchers. Ianthe Brautigan's memoir replicates that search for the absent dad, making for a wrenching read.

Swamps of sentimentality and self-pity lurk in material like this. Ianthe Brautigan passes them by, focusing instead on yearning for a union lost almost as soon as it began. Of course she quotes Faulkner, so lucid on the past's inescapability, so mired in booze himself. Ianthe succeeds finally in meeting the grandmother whose identity and memory her father sternly concealed. She makes it into no great climax, however, but simply another way-station on a journey never quite to be completed.

For writers, the posthumous assemblages perpetrated by Ernest Hemingway's descendants have added a new terror to death. Your heirs will publish every third-rate fragment that you have left unshredded, unburnt or unchewed. Academics will squeeze your corpse in the same way. They come up with references and cross-checks establishing that what they are printing is what you actually wrote.

But the novel An Unfortunate Woman bears a different stamp of authenticity, making its own substantial case for why Richard Brautigan never published it in his lifetime. What he calls "a calendar of one man's journey during a few months in his life" is a tabulation of failure. Something cold-hearted diffuses itself throughout. The "unfortunate woman," a suicide, never develops into anyone other than an excuse for the writer's ramblings.

Too sick with flu to have sex with the woman who has scooped him up for an idyllic two-week holiday, the narrator grumbles instead. A "French bread, cheese, Greek olives, and white wine" picnic is for him "a sort of cliche" affair. Gothic, bathos and the pastoral meld into mopery, recalled years later with nostalgia.

What the narrator admits to as a technical problem—a "doomed . . . attempt to keep the past and the present functioning simultaneously"—seems in fact a moral one. How can you interest a reader in a flat, greyed-out vista unless, like Beckett, you can view it through a scrim of savage hilarity?

Yet something seems very fitting in Ianthe's rescue of her father's manuscript: How hopelessly distant its creator seems, how remote from any force that love—her love—might ever have exerted.

Fraser,2000

"The Brautigan Library"
Christopher Fraser
The Dartmouth Contemporary, Summer 2000.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Somewhere in San Francisco there exists a library devoted to the housing of unpublished books. It is all very simple. Either by "design or destiny," some books never make it into print. But they need not be without a home. Among this library's unorganized stacks of unknown or forgotten books can be found The Culinary Dostoevski, a cookbook full of recipes found in the Russian master's novels, as well as a personal epic about growing flowers in hotel rooms by candlelight. The librarian turns nothing away. He simply asks that you present your book in person, and shelve it where you please.

An awkward looking man named Richard Brautigan would occasionally entrust his novels to this library during the early and mid 1960s. The librarian never read them. No one read them. However, it occurs to the librarian that Brautigan's first novel had something to do with America.

When Richard Brautigan stumbled upon the idea of library that shelved only unpublished books, he was preparing work on his fourth novel. The year was 1966, and only the second of his first three novels had been published. In 1964, Grove Press did a short print run of A Confederate General from Big Sur, a riotously funny novel that was panned by critics and ignored by the public. His first novel, Trout Fishing in America, was completed in 1962, but only found its way into print five years later when a small San Francisco publishing house, Four Seasons Books, took a chance on his experimental novel. So, when Brautigan began work on his fourth novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, he had every reason to believe that it, too, would enter the ranks of the unknown. Bound for obscurity, if you will forgive the pun.

This would have been a sorry fate for one of America's most brilliant and innovative writers. But a remarkable thing happened in 1967. Trout Fishing in America—a humorous but illusive meditation upon death, waste, and the American dream—became an anthem for the counterculture. Within a year, Richard Brautigan was one of the most popular, and misunderstood, writers of the late 1960s. He was the novelist of the hippie generation. His old novels were taken off the shelves of obscurity, dusted off, and printed by major publishing houses. Life Magazine, that bastion for all things popular and innately American, dubbed him "the gentle poet of the young." No one seemed to care that those novels and poems upon which his reputation rested were penned before the first hippie donned a poncho. Nor did anyone notice that much of Brautigan's work dwelled upon death. People chose only to see rainbows, love, and the occasional Kool-Aid wino.

Still, anyone familiar with Brautigan's work can guess why the counterculture embraced Brautigan so heartily. His off-kilter humor presented an alternative to the formalism of contemporary literature. Peruse the pages of The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, a collection of poetry, and try to keep a straight face. While poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, Brautigan lyrically attacked the stilted intellectualism of the typical American scholar.

"I don't care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I'm bored.
It's been raining like hell all day long
and there's nothing to do."

Or, in "Love Poem,"

"It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don't love them
any more."

Is this really poetry? Brautigan should be likened to an irreverent version of William Carlos Williams. He attempts to capture each moment without adornment, relying upon the innate beauty of any subject for poetic effect. Humor does not negate meaning. Richard Brautigan's popularity was short lived, although his novels contained much original prose. From A Confederate General from Big Sur:

"I was, of course, reading Ecclesiastes at night in a very old Bible that had heavy pages. At first I read it over and over again every night, and then I read it once every night, and then I began reading just a few verses every night, and now I was just looking at the punctuation marks. Actually I was counting them, a chapter every night. I was putting the number of punctuation marks down in a notebook, in neat columns. I called the notebook 'The Punctuation Marks in Ecclesiastes.' I thought it was a nice title. I was doing it as a kind of study in engineering. Certainly before they build ships they know how many rivets it takes to hold the ship together and he various sizes of the rivets. I was curious about the number of rivets and the sizes of those rivets in Ecclesiastes, a dark and beautiful ship sailing on our waters."

Few American critics had ever liked his work. But with each successive novel, mainstream interest in that "hippie" phenomenon known as Richard Brautigan waned. By the end, no one would publish his novels. He died as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in 1984. Make of that what you will. This leads us back to The Brautigan Library. In the sixteen years since his unfortunate suicide, Richard Brautigan has faded into near obscurity. Only nine of his nineteen works are currently in print, and much of his poetry remains uncollected. However, two books were recently pulled off the shelves of nominal oblivion for inclusion in the Brautigan canon. The first, posthumously dubbed The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, is a collection of poems, short stories, experimental dramas, and truly novel novels that were written during Brautigan's youth. The second is a "novel" titled An Unfortunate Women, written two years before Brautigan's death.

Before he left the Pacific Northwest for San Francisco, Richard Brautigan was a self-proclaimed "unknown poet." As he wryly explained, "That does not mean I do not have any friends. It means mostly my friends know I am a poet, because I have told them so." At the time, Brautigan was unpublished and unappreciated, a motif which would again haunt him later in life. Before fleeing from Eugene, Oregon, and a life of poverty and silent alienation, Brautigan dumped his short life's work upon the mother of his first love. A note accompanied the deposit: "When I am rich and famous, Edna, this will be your social security." These early works make up the body of The Edna Webster Collection.

Though not on a par with the accomplished works of Brautigan's later career, these early pieces are not without merit. Breezing through these short poems and stories, one can chart, in a manner of speaking, the development of a truly original mind. That style which one may define as peculiarly Brautigan can be found within this short volume. His development of extended metaphors was nothing less than genius. And his uncanny ability to turn a phrase was no less impressive at age twenty-one as at age forty-one. In "Nightmare," he writes,

"A nightmare
came to me.
The nightmare
was wearing
a bikini
bathing suit.
Dig that
sexy horror!"

Tame at first, this poem effortlessly turns into something quite surreal.

Also, The Edna Webster Collection are pieces that hint at themes that would later preoccupy Brautigan's most expert works, including death, the unpredictability of life, and the power of imagination to change reality. And often, as one can see in the above-cited poem, the three are combined to varying degrees in many of these works.

Nevertheless, even without knowing the age of the author, one would rightly presume that a romantically driven young man must have written the bulk of these works. Like most guys his age, the young Brautigan was obsessed with love, and his conspicuous lack thereof. One of his better efforts, entitled "the eternal she," humorously describes one failed encounter with a girl.

"I gave
a girl my soul.
She looked at it.
Smiled faintly.
And dropped
It into the gutter.
Casually.
God! She had class."

The poem is wonderfully plotted. One can see the amorous transaction as though it were in slow motion. But like so many other pieces in the collection, this one employs the pitfalls of young love as its subject. Consequently, his early poems and stories are slightly marred by a naiveté that dates these works. The Edna Webster Collection is not meant for the ages. However, any Brautigan fan will find this volume a treat, searching among the missed steps and occasional gems for a man that defies explanation.

An Unfortunate Woman, on the other hand, is Richard Brautigan at his finest. It ranks among his most accomplished works, while simultaneously treading new ground. When pitted against his earlier works, novels from Brautigan's middle years must be considered at least mildly disappointing. Comparatively speaking, they lack his early degree of humor, creativity, and immediacy. An Unfortunate Woman evinces a revival of Brautigan's early style. One can see the plot stylings of Confederate General, stripped of its fantastic elements, as well as themes from Trout Fishing, refitted to the preoccupations of a forty-seven year old man.

This revival, however, does not imply a return. Brautigan made a conscious decision never to write the same novel twice. In reference to Trout Fishing in America, his most popular novel, he was often heard saying that he had no interest in writing "Son of Trout Fishing in America." In this tradition of personal exploration, An Unfortunate Woman takes shape as a spontaneous travelogue. Like Trout Fishing before it, this work lacks the trappings of plot and narrative continuity. Instead, Brautigan leads us through his story using a series of journal entries. The reader confronts one man, follows him on his journey across America, and learns his perspective on the meaning of death and the nature of suicide.

An Unfortunate Woman must be approached as a memoir. Ignore the dust jacket. St. Martin's Press may wish to parade this work as a novel, but the reader should know better. Our "protagonist" is a writer; he is an alcoholic; he owns a ranch in Montana; he is obsessed with Japan; and he is estranged from his daughter. In other words, he is Richard Brautigan.

But don't let this discourage you from picking up the book. Within the pages of An Unfortunate Woman, the reader is allowed to see Brautigan without pretense. Stripped of the mode of fiction, he is naked: complex, pathetic, and beautiful. The quirks are still there. But they simply function as a means of wrestling with a subject that plagued Brautigan his whole life: suicide.

What was Brautigan's stance on suicide? This is not clear in the book. Who is the "unfortunate woman"? Is it the stranger who committed suicide? Or is it the friend who grudgingly died of cancer? To tell you the truth, I don't think Brautigan himself knew. He always had a certain ambivalence about death. Fading into oblivion was a constant fear. Brautigan devotes several scattered journal entries to the presence of a pile of gravestones in the corner of a Japanese cemetery, and the silent terror that accompanies the prospect of one day being forgotten. Conversely, Brautigan also went through at least four suicidal periods in his lifetime, the last of which resulted in his death.

This dichotomy forms the basis of An Unfortunate Woman. Brautigan insists that the past should be remembered. Forgetfulness is presented as one of the prime tragedies of existence. Before discussing the pile of gravestones, Brautigan writes, "first there will be an abrupt digression here because somehow I feel if I don't write the following, it will never be written." What he wrote on this specific occasion is unimportant, for the whole of the book consists of digressions, often humorous, that attempt desperately to capture the minutia of everyday life. Hence, we hear the story of why, one rainy afternoon in Hawaii, the author had his picture taken with a chicken, or why the supermarket is one of the more exotic places to begin a love affair.

But, again, either by destiny or design, all things must be forgotten. At one point the author fails in the simple task of accurately describing one man eating a doughnut. He gives up in frustration. His hand is too slow, and the man will not stop moving. Life is not a still to be memorized, no matter how much one may wish to immortalize every moment. Death is inevitable.

Readers may wish to seek the answer to Brautigan's dilemma in a memoir recently penned by Ianthe Brautigan Swenson, daughter of Richard Brautigan. You Can't Catch Death is a deeply personal account of one daughter's attempt to cope with the loss of the man she most loved in life, her father. This is not a celebrity bio-expose. And it does not pretend to be a biography. Ianthe does not approach this subject as the daughter of a famous writer, but as the daughter of a loving, though troubled, man.

Like The Edna Webster Collection, You Can't Catch Death should be considered fare for the hard-core Brautigan fan, alone. Ianthe Brautigan Swenson offers the reader a view of her father not explored in his novels. Her thoughts accompanying the two new early and late Brautigan works add further depth to one of the most intriguing authors of the twentieth century.

Gard,2000

"Drama of Doomed Author Redeems Pedestrian Writing"
Andrew Gard
The Plain Dealer, 16 July 2000, p. 12.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan made a name for himself in the 1960s by writing unconventional stories and poems that displayed intelligence and wit. Trout Fishing in America, arguably his best book and certainly his most famous, sold more than 3 million copies and made Brautigan a minor pop culture icon.

As the years passed, Brautigan's popularity ebbed. His later work failed to catch the public's attention and often drew heavy fire from critics. He drifted deeper into depression, his alcoholism becoming more severe, until he committed suicide in 1984.

Sixteen years later, Brautigan has a new novel in print. An Unfortunate Woman, completed shortly before his death, is being published simultaneously with You Can't Catch Death, a collection of anecdotes and essays by his daughter, Ianthe. Each book captures the tragedy of the author's suicide. Neither has much else to offer.

A novel in name only, An Unfortunate Woman reads more like a series of journal entries. It spans a period of six months during which the narrator, indistinguishable from Brautigan himself, flies back and forth across the continent, apparently in search of an appropriate place to reflect upon a neighbor who has recently hung herself.

The scenes Brautigan describes are unexceptional. He watches a man eat a doughnut, contemplates a pigeon on a street corner, debates whether to take a walk. There is no attempt to create characters, plot or narrative tension. Even the deceased neighbor, the unfortunate woman of the book's title, is dealt with only in passing. Her purpose is to reflect Brautigan's dark state of mind.

In fact, the frequent references to loneliness, death and decay, coupled with the reader's knowledge of Brautigan's fate, form the primary attraction of An Unfortunate Woman.

"The passenger thought about their past together," runs a typical passage, "of first meeting, then becoming lovers, and days and nights together, crossing from one decade into another and then events crumbling away into blank years and the silence of emotional ruins." This sort of unintntional foreshadowing lends a measure of substance to an otherwise hollow book.

Ianthe's You Can't Catch Death fits neatly alongside An Unfortunate Woman. Loosely written, with only a semblance of structure or organization, it is a collection of memories, dreams and vignettes, from both the past and present. Again, it is only the aura of tragedy and the reader's sympathy for the author that hold the book together.

Ianthe remembers her father as two different people, one playful and doting, the other depressed and usually drunk. "This was the cycle of our lives, dark lonely despair one day and the hope of daffodils planted for a future the next," she writes. "My life was woven in the fabric of his an there were not many boundaries, yet the extraordinary quality of this hope is why I'm still alive... When he was present all was well, and when he wasn't I endured."

Much of You Can't Catch Death deals with Ianthe's attempt to reconcile these two personalities into a single man, and in doing so to understand his suicide.

In one of the book's better moments, this healing process leads Ianthe on a quest to find her paternal grandmother, who for years Richard had refused to acknowledge. She describes at length the time they spend becoming acquainted, looking at pictures, and comparing notes. Her prose is simple and to the point. Ianthe seems content to let the story tell itself, realizing that such scenes do not require embellishment.

Rarely in her book does Ianthe treat her father as a public figure, preferring to remember him as a man rather than as an author. When she does touch upon his career, it is usually only to defend the evolution of his work.

"His writing had only gotten better," she explains, "but times had changed, and during the wave of conservatism that had swept the eighties, people were distancing themselves from the sixties and confused this time with my father's writing." Despite her pain she never became bitter, always remaining her father's greatest fan.

Both An Unfortunate Woman and You Can't Catch Death draw their strength from the circumstances under which they were created. Neither is particularly well written, neither contains any real insight. But within each lies the tragic drama of a doomed man, and it is this that redeems them both.

Hall,2000

"Ghost Laid to Rest"
Simon Hall
The Herald [Glasgow, Scotland], 20 July 2000, p. 22.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The celebrated Beat writer Richard Brautigan's final manuscript appears in print now for the first time under the dubious guise of fiction.

The achingly elliptical and sometimes stunning An Unfortunate Woman seems on the one hand to bear all the hallmarks of a typical Brautigan novel. It rubbishes the notion that narrative should be streamlined and proceed with a minimum of digressionary hindrance towards some sort of a conclusion.

It is heavy with introspective reflection and dark themes, yet remains buoyant with lyrical nature poetry and brilliant, electric humour.

Brautigan dispenses altogether with linear time, confessing his book to be ''chronologically mischievous.'' It includes scripted dialogue between reader and author and a coda in which he thanks the Pilot Pen company for manufacturing the pens with which he wrote the manuscript. All the playful conventions and surface whimsicality of the post-modern novel are here, but this is also a deliberately garbled travelogue, an exploration of the jumbled confusion that is memory and the autobiographical memoir of a writer spiralling inevitably towards his suicide in 1984.

An Unfortunate Woman does lack the sustained energy and cohesion of some of Brautigan's other writings and, while there is a great deal here that will delight anyone who has enjoyed this author in the past, I can't quite agree with the publishers' assertion that this is a ''long-lost masterpiece.''

Ultimately, the process of creative writing failed as a therapy for Brautigan. His daughter Ianthe, however, has emerged from the debris of her father's suicide to write a memoir which charts the writer's life and her own subsequent journey towards healing. Her stated wish is to "break the silence and navigate suicide." What emerges is a frank and compelling narrative of great integrity which details fascinatingly the minutiae of her father's life.

A deeply loving man who went to extraordinary lengths to nurture, entertain, educate, and protect his daughter, Brautigan was an accomplished fly fisher, a sensitive lover of nature, and an incurable and depressive alcoholic. He first told Ianthe that he wanted to kill himself when she was nine years old.

His binges became progressively worse: Ianthe watched quietly as film stars, writers, and their wives—"the caretakers of famous men"—arrived at Brautigan's Montana ranch for outrageous dinner parties that descended into night-long drinking sessions.

No details are spared in this account, which, on balance, remains remarkably positive.

There is absolutely no self-indulgence in You Can't Catch Death, only a desire to lay Richard Brautigan's ghost to rest with dignity.

Hamlin,2000

"Two New Books Explore the Enigma of Brautigan"
Andrew Hamlin
The Seattle Times, 23 July 2000, p. L8.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Ianthe Brautigan Swenson still carries the card from a "reknowned expert on suicide" she visited only once, after her father, the celebrated author Richard Brautigan, committed suicide in 1984. This expert stared at her and asked questions between making telephone calls.

"'I think you are not grieving a lost father.'
'I think you are a mother grieving a lost son.'
This made me cry because it was true."

A mysterious exchange, more poetic than literal, but couched in sturdy, simple, descriptive prose bordering on the sharp, crisp, cleaving of haiku; these tropes marked Richard Brautigan's work even as his imagination charged over skewed terrain, and Brautigan's daughter wraps them around her like a favorite Sunday sweater as she charts the vortexes in her father's life, and the one he created in hers.

As a companion piece, An Unfortunate Woman, a notebook-sized "journey" found after Richard Brautigan's death but unpublished until now, provides his own take on the slow rustle of despondency. That book might be about its two unfortunate women, fiends of the author, one dead of cancer, one a suicide; but unlike Ianthe, the elder Brautigan will not joust the substance of his melancholy.

The opaque and oblique can carry Ianthe toward insight. Her father's meanings have to be caught refractively. "You cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words someone is dead," runs a passage in Richard Brautigan's short story, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane?." Perhaps thinking of that, An Unfortunate Woman flirts with camouflaging, settles finally for walking around it, as with a manhole.

Her father felt comfortable and generally stable, Ianthe writes, at his Geary Street Apartment in San Francisco, where she visited him frequently after her parents' divorce. He had just published four books and released a record album (featuring Ianthe on a chilling poem about lost love), and she "just knew that sometimes he was irritable in a way he had never been before."

After that apartment, she visited him at his Montana ranch, where she once poured bottles of George Dickel down the drain (he drank so much by that point that he never noticed); and his house in Bolinas, California, in which his body was eventually found; and in Japan, where he lived part of each year starting in 1976.

He read to her, encouraged her, with supervision, to experiment with his IBM Selectric, and once, by the side of a Montana road, comforted and protected a young girl who's wrecked her bicycle and bled from her ears. "His terror could ebb away, and I could have my invincible father back," Ianthe says of his sober periods. But by the end of the '70s, his work was out of vogue, and George Dickel became an outspoken houseguest.

For his part, Richard Brautigan retained to the end his spinning of sentence elegance: "The shadows are so close to the light that if the light were to make once slight mistake, the rainy shadows of this winter would take the room away instantly and join it with the rest of the house," runs a description of night in the hanged woman's house. Elsewhere he muses on being sentenced to death for not knowing what day it is, in keeping with his insistence on counting the words in the notebook, the pages until the end. What he thinks of his dead friends comes through occasionally in distilled poetry, more often in musings on, for example, a high and heavy pile of tombstones in a Hawaiian graveyard.

The graves are empty. The bodies are cremated in the "anonymous" shrine next door. If Ianthe learned to mourn her father as a lost son, perhaps her father mourns, through the unfortunate women, the mother he ran away from, the grandmother Ianthe eventually finds. These enigmas, like tombstones, squat, still and sad, in the words of Richard Brautigan's last novel published during his lifetime, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away.

Harrington,2000

"'An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey'; 'You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir'"
Michael Harrington
The Philadelphia Inquirer, 31 Aug. 2000, p. **?**.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan now seems as antique and quaint as the thrift-shop clothing he affected on the covers of his books, an author whose idiosyncratic, eccentric novels were required reading for 1960s youth, but whose cultural importance seems to have faded with the times.

We may remember his work with affection, but there's the feeling that he is one of those writers best loved when one is young, before the disenchantments of age sharpen the critical eye.

Brautigan came out of nowhere, selling 2 million copies of his novel Trout Fishing in America (1967), riding the wave of the counterculture to success as the essential hippie novelist. He enjoyed a half-decade of success, then suffered a slow decline for another decade, a victim of changing fashions and his own alcoholism.

In 1984, Brautigan committed suicide, shooting himself to death in his home in Bolinas, the holdout hippie enclave just north of San Francisco. He was 49, and if he is not exactly forgotten (most of his books are still in print, albeit in omnibus editions), his heyday certainly passed with the advent of the yuppies. Now, his novels are packed away in the attic with the tie-dye shirts and Strawberry Alarm Clock albums.

The best thing about the publication of An Unfortunate Woman, an autobiographical novel found among Brautigan's papers, is that it may lead to a rereading of his works and a reassessment of his place in the American literary canon. There is little else to recommend it, except to committed fans.

An Unfortunate Woman is the record of an obsessive writer winding down, slowly losing faith in his abilities. It's like reading a suicide note disguised as a novel.

In 1982, the fictional Brautigan sets out to fill a 160-page notebook, writing daily, creating "a sort-of free-fall calendar map" as he travels back and forth across the country, to Canada and Hawaii, pulled by speaking engagements, teaching assignments and love affairs.

But gradually his plan falls apart. First there is a gap of nine days in his writing schedule, then 14, then 111. Repeatedly, he apologizes to the reader "please bear with me," he writes early on, and then "please have patience with me," later, and finally: "Obviously I'm not very good at this."

But he once was good, very good. Trout Fishing in America is more than a hippie reverie; it's a peculiarly American classic, Hemingway put through a Beat blender.

Brautigan was no one-book wonder: The underrated dystopian fantasy In Watermelon Sugar (1968) may actually be his best book. Arguments could be made for including in the canon as well the losers-on-the-lam comedy A Confederate General From Big Sur (1964), the Gothic western The Hawkline Monster (1974), and some of the stories from The Revenge of the Lawn (1971). Four good books out of 12: an admirable record for any author.

You Can't Catch Death, Ianthe Brautigan's earnest, harrowing memoir of her father, is mostly valuable for its details of his life. Still a small child when her father became successful, she had the kind of unpredictable childhood one might expect, enduring his drunken rages, late-night phone calls threatening suicide, random acts of destruction (smashing furniture, shooting the clock off the wall of his Montana home and burning all the telephones in the fireplace), as well as enjoying the time he spent with her looking at clouds and planting daffodils.

This was the cycle of our lives, dark, lonely despair one day and the hope of daffodils the next," she writes.

Brautigan's novels may have been unique, but his story was sadly familiar: Artistic success is insufficient to make a success of life.

Jackson,2000

"Books: Eternal Hippy: Mick Jackson on Richard Brautigan: An Unfortunate Woman, You Can't Catch Death by Ianthe Brautigan"
Mick Jackson
The Guardian, 5 Aug. 2000, Saturday Section, p. 8.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Despite landing in San Francisco in the 1950s and having some early prose published by City Lights, Richard Brautigan will always be fixed in the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s—Woodstock and love beads—rather than with the Beat generation who came before. That's him staring out from the covers of Trout Fishing in America and The Hawkline Monster like some long-haired pioneer, a different woman beside him in every photograph. His novels and collections of short stories are tender, eccentric meditations which sold by the lorryload. But in the 1980s something happened. His publishers/readers/ reviewers (take your pick) are said to have turned against him. His boozing got out of hand, his depression got the better of him, and in October 1984 he was found in his house by the ocean having shot himself with a .44 Magnum.

For most of the 1990s the only way to get your fix of Brautigan was to trawl through the second-hand bookshops, but over the last couple of years Rebel Inc has been quietly publishing its own editions of his back catalogue. Now it presents two curiosities to accompany them: a "lost" Brautigan novel and a memoir by his daughter, Ianthe.

It's hard to pick up any posthumous publication without some degree of scepticism, and An Unfortunate Woman is no exception. The book takes the form of what Brautigan calls a "calendar map", as he travels from San Fran cisco to Buffalo, Toronto, Chicago, Hawaii and back to his ranch in Montana. Its fragmentary nature needn't necessarily concern us - one of his best collections, The Tokyo-Montana Express, was about as fragmentary as a book could be. What's more troubling are the large gaps between entries and the occasional note of distraction, as if for once the writing is not the most important thing.

His subjects are uncharacteristically sombre (an abandoned cemetery, a rape in the neighbourhood, a friend's death from cancer), although there are enough passages that remind you of him at his idiosyncratic best. His mountain ranch seems to revive his Zen-like humour—who else would contemplate how the snow on the distant Rockies thaws into the stream that flows through his garden where he fills the ice tray for his fridge? But by far the darkest shadow is that cast by Brautigan's approaching suicide. By some terrible twist we find ourselves more omniscient than the author, so that when he talks of looking for "some tranquillity . . . a little more distance between the frustrations and agonies in my life", we know what hope he has of finding it.

Considering how revealing he can be in his own books, it is perhaps not surprising that by the end of You Can't Catch Death, his daughter Ianthe's memoir, we feel that we have not learned a great deal more than we already knew. Through a series of vignettes she recounts her time with him in San Francisco (her parents separated when she was young), their changing relationship and her growing concerns for him. Along the way we hear of his drinking binges: the time he made a bonfire of all the house's telephones, the time he and a friend shot out the numbers on the face of the clock in the kitchen, the benders with Dennis Hopper (which gives some idea of the kind of quantities involved).

At times, Brautigan appears so preoccupied with himself that he threatens to neglect his daughter; she sometimes seems to have more of a parental instinct than he does himself. But it's the stories of the privations in Brautigan's own childhood that are the most affecting. As a young man, he was so hungry he smashed the windows of the local police station hoping to get himself arrested and fed. The plan went badly wrong. He was committed to a mental institution and given EST—something he believed his mother could have saved him from. When he finally got out, he vowed never to speak to her again. Ianthe remembers him showing her a photo—shortly before setting fire to it—and it's only when she sets out to try and track down her grandmother that the writing slips into gear and escapes its self-consciousness.

Johnny Rotten once warned us against trusting hippies. It's Brautigan's fate, having died when he did, to be condemned to a sort of eternal hippydom. But it would be a crime if the manner of his death were to contaminate his books, so that what once read like the words of a revolutionary became a manic depressive's verbal tics. He deserves better—he was an absolute original who found cause for celebration in the most unlikely places. The cover of every book should carry the slogan: Richard Brautigan—the hippy you can trust.

Kušnír,2007

""Popular Autobiography and Travel Book in One (Richard Brautigan's An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, 2000)"
Jaraslav Kušnír
American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. ibidem-Verlag, 2007, pp. 142-150.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The literary work of Richard Brautigan oscillates between romantic idealization and parodic metafictional paradox, between idealization of the private and secluded self and the violence of public life imposed on it, between humor and tragedy, between lyrical imagery, almost linear narration and fragmentary narrative strategies. In his works Brautigan treats many American "myths" (such as the American dream, the success story, heroism) related to American experience and American cultural identify. Neil Schmitz argues that Brautigan

[. . .] is par excellence the 'reader of myths' whom Roland Barthes describes at length in Mythologies, the interpretor who reads the 'mythical signifier'" [. . .] as an "inextricable" whole made of meaning and form" (Schmitz 1973: 110).

Many critics have commented on Brautigan's romantic vision of the world (Alsen, 1996; Baštín, 1996); his recuperation of pastoral myths (Schmitz, 1973; Pütz, 1979), his emphasis on depiction of the secluded and alienated narrator (Schmitz, 1979; Clayton, 1971), his individualism and the symbolic power of imagination (Boyer, 1987) or his connection with counterculture (Boyer, 1987; Clayton, 1971; Baštín, 1996). In my own book Poetika americkej postmodernej prózy (Richard Brautigan a Donald Barthelme) [Poetics of American Postmodern Fiction: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme], Prešov: 2001), I have emphasized the role and function of parody, popular culture and metafiction in Richard Brautigan's works. In many of them, especially in his parodies of popular genres from the 1970's, Brautigan uses parody in order to criticize the role of popular culture and mass media in shaping and distorting people's perception and vision of the world.

In his posthumously, but only recently published novel (Brautigan died in 1984, his novel An Unfortunate Woman was published in 2000) he used the form of a genre with a traditionally fixed structure—a journal, in which the narrator's strongly autobiographical entries (Brautigan's real journeys, his daughter, age, lecturing, local places where he lived and which he visited) are written in the poetic imagery with which the author treats the issues known from his earlier novels—nostalgia for youth, ageing, alienation, solitude, negative aspects of commercialized society and even death. The form of a journal, or "a brief calendar map of one's journey through life" (Brautigan 2000: 99) as the unnamed narrator refers to it, enables Brautigan to stipulate the poetic framework through which he contemplates the passage of time and its role in the narrator's life. In contrast to Brautigan's earlier novel The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980), the narrator in this book seemingly gives a more chronological narration (the narrator's entries in the journal run from January 30, 1982 to June 28, 1982—that is until shortly before Brautigan's real death). This novel, however, is rather reminiscent of a traveller's journal or autobiography, describing the narrator recording journeys across the U.S.A., Canada, and Hawaii. In his study of American travel and autobiographical writing Travel Writing and Autobiographical Studies (2001) John D. Hazlett gives the basic features of travel writing, which are, in his view "the fictionalization of the author-narrator,
the construction of the journey in a form that offers adventure or drama,
the conscious positioning of the author in relation to the "other" (which involves establishing distance or intimacy; meditations on national character, and a critique of U.S. culture), and finally
the conscious positioning of the autor in relation to previous writers and other travelers (which involves demonstrating his superiority to them)" (Hazlett 2001: 395)

Brautigan's narration does not give a detailed description of geographical location, but focuses mostly on present or recent past events. The narrator in this novel is fictionalized and he offers a critique of U.S. culture, but Brautigan undermines the second aspect of Hazlett's characterization of travel writing (this novel is neither adventure nor drama), parodies the national character (Hazlett's third aspect of travel writing) and excludes the comments on previous writers (the fourth aspect). The narrator, a 47 ear-old writer reminiscent of Brautigan himself, argues that

"[. . .] one of the doomed purposes of this book is an attempt to keep the past and the present functioning simultaneously" (Brautigan 2000: 64).

This statement not only reveals one of the key themes of the book—time, but it also confirms the metafictional status of the narrator who, in contrast to Brautigan's other book entitled So The Wind Won't Bow it All Away (in which he uses the related genre of fictional autobiography based on the narrator's childhood), deals mostly with present events. In her study on autobiography The Power of (Auto) Biography in Recent Literary Studies (2001), Isabel Durán argues that

"Autobiography—the story of a distinctive culture written in individual characters and from within—offers a privileged access to an experience (the American experience, the Black experience and so on) that no other variety of literature can offer. That is, autobiography renders in a peculiarly direct and faithful way the experience and the vision of a people—a group, a particular identity" (Durán 2001: 382).

Although Brautigan's novel presents the narrator's experience as marginalized (because of his ageing, and because of his rejection of commercial and mainstream culture), he undermines the seriousness of this experience through playful parody. The narrator's awareness of his status and his way of addressing the reader suggests [the] other relevant theme of the book:

"Now I'll get back to the rest of this book, whose main theme is an unfortunate woman. I'm actually writing about 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" (Brautigan 2000: 75).

Playing with both the reader and time, in addition to the passage of time itself, the narrator develops other themes related to misfortune and its symbolic meaning such as solitude, ageing and death, which the woman who has hanged herself represents. This woman and another dying of cancer are mentioned in several places in the book (pp. 24; 90; 93) and represent, in Brautigan's understanding, not only death but also solitude and loneliness, as well as the lack of motivation for living a purposeful life. Brautigan further develops his imagery of death by introducing the cemetery (pages 23; 33), tombstones (36) and shrines (36). Brautigan's narrator mostly describes his boredom, his eating habits, and his observation of weather and nature:

"Anyway, I had nothing to occupy myself with last night, so I made a huge pot of spaghetti sauce starting from scratch, slicing onions, mushroooms, a green pepper, etc. (97) [. . .] Being forty-seven years old hasn't slowed me down that much, but the other 95% of my life is very normal, quiet and often boring" (80).

The narrator's frequent interruptions of the linearity of his narration by referring to the momentary subject of his writing again refers to the lack of both inspiration and motivation, as if the narrator wanted to fill out the blank spaces in the notebook which much be completed willy-nilly:

"When I got this notebook to write about an unfortunate woman my plan was to end this journey when the notebook ended. There are 160 pages in the notebook. In the beginning I counted the words on each page after a day's writing. The first page was 119 words, the second 193 [. . .]" (76), and this manifests itself agin, as if with relief, in the folllowing extract:

"I'm now starting the last page (160) of this book. There are 28 lines to a page and I write on every other line, so I can add things in between the lines if I want to. That's 14 writing lines to a page times 160" (110).

For Brautigan's narrator, not only death but also life represent stillness, emptiness and solitude. Despite his detached, secluded and individualistic writing. In this case the fictional journal means for the narrator a constant attempt to establish communication with both natural and human worlds (women, lovers, friends, neighbours, his daughter) and to postpone death by writing a story (of his life), which is the scheme reminiscent of the Scheherezade story. Brautigan's narrator's attempts to establish contact with human beings fail very often not only because of the narrator's antipathy to some people (an Alaskan politician, a feminist student), but also because of his egocentrism and even narcissism, which is unable to develop deeper relationships either with men or with women. Although he has friends, they are either too far away from his residence (Chicago friends and others), or they are only formal partners for communication in his loneliness (his neighbors). His narcissistic ego does not allow him to overcome formal sexual experience and develop emotional relationships with either girlfriends or other women, including his daughter. He argues that

"I could not afford the luxury of a complicated love life. I had a simple love life and often when I have a simple love life, I don't have any love life at all. I sort of miss it, but the complications all return soon enough, and I find myself occupying sleepless nights, wondering how I lost control of the heart's basic events again" (Brautigan 2000: 21).

Brautigan's narrator is in the position of an eternal traveller observing life, but who is incapable of grasping either time or life in the position of real man or writer. He comments on his traveller's status in the following way:

"I guess that's what a passenger's supposed to do, pass from one oplace to another, but it doesn't make it any simpler. About all you can do is wish him luck, and hope that he has some slight understanding of what uncontrollably is happening to him" (20).

On the other hand, the narrator expresses his inability to control time boh as an ageing man and a writer:

"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).

For Brautigan, the narrator's inability to control the passing of time, life and even writing is a symbolic expression of his failure both to lead a purposeful life and to produce any successful writing. His narrator further argues that

"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. The process of being this book only accentuates my day-to-day helplessness" (59).

For the symbolic expression of such failure Brautigan uses not only these direct statements and the framework of the journal genre, but also the method and imagery of "displacement", "incompleteness" and the literary techniques which the narrator himself refers to as "[. . .] inconclusive fragments, sophomoric humor, cheap tricks, detailess details" (109). These methods and techniques enable him to undermine the traditional narrative and compositional techniques of the poular genres whose framework he uses (autobiography, diary, travel book), and at the same time symbolically to express the failure of the capacity of the individual and the writer to be successful and control both his life and writing. Displacement means the deliberate use of particular language, style, genre, events and situations set and made to work in inappropriate contexts. Incompleteness is related to events, actions and situations, both literal and symbolic, which begin or tend to begin, but which are interrupted and mostly never finished/completed. Thus for example, concerning displacement, Brautigan uses the form of a journal with exact dating reminiscent of a traveller's diary, in which however most of the described events and observations do not take place at the time they were recorded (see the dates), nor does the narrator's journal give the expected description of places he has visited. In the tourist paradise of Hawaii the narrator does not typically describe the wonderful scenery and the beaches, but he makes critical comments on the negative effects of commercialization (cars, pollution) and observes a cemetery instead. Thus the cemetery creates a displaced image of Hawaii in the context of traditional images and visions of this country. The narrator argues that

"Most people when they come to Hawaii do not come for the cemeteries. They are interested in the sun and the beaches: two things that I've never really cared for, so I'm kind of displaced here in Hawaii, but I make do with what I have, and what I have right now is this Japanese cemetery to explore" (Brautigan 2000: 28).

Alaska, like Hawaii, is not typically presented as a snowy country with polar animals, but is rather associated with consumer commodities (hot dogs, junk food), or with unsuccessful politicians. Displacement is also evoked by the parodic lovers among the soup cans in the supermarket, the movie theatres in big-city Chinatowns, and the narrator himself during his visit to his friends' place in Canada, when tragic events in the family make the narrator's visit undesirable.

Both Alaska and Hawaii lose their expected image in both Brautigan's and the narrator's understanding suffer from growing technological progress and commercialization:

"So much of America, even what were once unpoilable beautiful towns, look as if 'Los Angeles' had overflowed on them like a toilet bowl whose defecated contents all have something to do with the lifestyle of the automobile. I think the worst case of 'Los Angeles' automobile cultural damage I've ever seen is in Honolulu" (13).

Brautigan's fragmentary composition—part of which is his strategy of "incompleteness"—manifests itself not only in the unfinished, interrupted and fragmentary sentences, dialogues and conversations, but also in his depiction of incomplete events, situations and relationships, for example the relationship of the narrator to his lovers, friends, relatives and sexual partners (his love relations are mostly temporary or prematurely terminated; the sexual act with his partner cannot be completed because of his illness; his telephone conversation with his daughter neither improves nor re-establishes a good father-daughter relationship; his neighbors do not come; his travels never finish, and his journal remains incomplete). The narrator characterizes the book he is writing as "[. . .] an unfinished labyrinth of half-asked questions fastened to partial answers: (107), which are apparently left unfinished on purpose:

"There are ten writing lines left on this page and I have decided not to use the last line. I'll leave it to somebody's else's life" (110).

All these techniques symbolically express the narrator's inability to cope with both reality and successful writing, an inability to control them and to produce a meaningful existence. Thus it is not only death, symbolically and yet paradoxically expressing stability, stillness and solitude, which is the central metaphor of Brautigan's book; it is also chaos, disorientation and misunderstanding leading to "failure." Brautigan's narrator becomes only a passive observer and recorder of events and life, both as a human being and a writer, since these events cannot be either controlled or predicted. As he himself argues:

"Also, I am the last person to know what's going in in my life, but I have a feeling that's maybe the way it is with everybody and belief in self-understanding is only a delusion" (99).

Thus, for Brautigan, life represents an unpredictable and uncontrollable flowing chaos, in contrast to death which represents stillness and loneliness, but quite paradoxically also an almost harmonious stability evoking the effects of a lyrical, though cold Poe-ish melancholy:

"A lot of the tombstones were piled in such a way that you couldn't see whose lives they represented [. . .] It was as if they never existed [. . .] A person couldn't just drive by one day as I had just done and get out of the car and walk among the dead, thinking of them, wondering who they were and how they had lived.

"Being in the shrine, they were out of sight and out of mind. I had a feeling that the relatives who'd had then dug up and then put in the shrine did not visit their memories very often" (36).

For Brautigan, on the other hand, the natural world is poetic, idealistic and romantic and represents the desired harmony in communication between people that Brautigan's narrator so misses. Brautigan's narrator's desire for communication, for establishing contact between his secluded self and the rest of the world is expressed, for example, through the juxtaposition of romantic imagery with natural communication images:

"Today starts with me talking to a friend on the telephone last night.
Oh, yes, we're on the same back porch with no electrical storm in sight and the sun and the birds shining away in the sky and a few white clouds billowing about, seeming almost to be reflections coming off the snow in the mountains to the west, which go steplike miles to the Pacific Ocean far away and where I talked to a friend last night" (86-87).

or as it manifests itself in a different place in the book:

"I stared at the telephone, betrayed again by this strange instrument so far removed from nature. I've never seen anything in nature that looked like a telephone. Clouds, flowers, rocks, none of them resemble a telephone" (101).

In Brautigan's understanding, the human world, in contrast to nature, is rather spoilt, negative and excluded from natural harmony. Nature and the human world are very often marked by the negative effects of industrialization, not only in this but also in his other novels. Using fragmentary composition, the above methods of incompleteness and displacement along with frequent changing of the subject, often accompanied by lyrical imagery, undermine the narrative conventions of the genres whose narrative framework Brautigan uses (diary, autobiography, travel book) and created a parodic effect. This parody involves a critique of traditional literary forms and genres, as well as pointing out the negative effects of commercialization and a crisis in human relationships in the contemporary technologically advanced societies. At the same time, Brautigan's novel offers a playful, but also nostalgic contemplation on life, death and the passage of time, which means that he starts to develop a personal theme which later becomes general and universal. This strategy also undermines the traditional narrative strategies of autobiographies, diaries and travel books.

Although Brautigan's nostalgic and "serious" treatment of "life" and "death" is balanced by his use of humor together with playful but also ironic treatment of several issues such as love, women, human relationships and commercial culture, it is hardly enough for the production of a quality literary work. In his book Brautigan repeats some of his narrative and compositional strategies, as well as the eclectic motifs from his previous novels—love of (Japanese) women (Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel, 1976; The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1976), nature, pastoral nostalgia, solitude, the contrast between physical phenomna and poetic imagination, and imaginary situations. This book does not represent the best of Brautigan's artistic achievements and however playful with words and poetic imagery, it reveals Brautigan's artistic creative crisis, which is also one of the subjects of the book. Brautigan's real creative crisis manifests itself, for example, in his frequent and pointless descriptions of the subjects he is writing or wants to write about, but which are suddely interrupted without motivation. This can be seen, for example, in the scene with a spider on the narrator's arm, in which the subject is suddenly changed without any meaningful connection with the rest of the text:

"He sure is small. He's about four times bigger than a period. Goddammit, he is spinning a web! [. . .] I wish him all the luck in the world, and then blow him off my arm into the grass of the backyard, ultimately a better place than to live on my arm. I think the first time I took a shower with him at home on my arm with perhaps a few insects about the size of two periods in his web, it would be an irrevocable experience for him."

"Where was I before I noticed the spider setting up house-keeping on me? Oh, yes, I didn't go directly to the car after pouring myself a glass of wine. I walked over to my neighbors' house to see if they had gotten back from a month-long trip back East" (104).

This is nevertheless the most melancholic of Brautigan's books, in which the central symbol of death represents not only the lack of artistic motivation and people's inability to develop meaningful lives, but also portrays, as a result of this perhaps, the author's feelings shortly before his premature death.

Pohl,2000

"Brautigan's Last Book, Daughter's Memoir Cast Light on a Dark Subject"
R. D. Pohl
The Buffalo News, 1 Oct. 2000, p. F7.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Two weeks before his suicide in Bolinas, California, in 1984, Richard Brautigan was visiting friends in San Francisco. One of his stops was at City Lights Book Store, where poet and proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti showed him a window display featuring a bit of dried grass purportedly from Walt Whitman's gravesite in New Jersey. Brautigan examined the exhibit thoughtfully for a moment, then turned to Ferlinghetti and observed, "That sure gives a good argument for cremation."

This anecdote from Ianthe Brautigan's memoir You Can't Catch Death offers a counterpoint to the numerous reports of Brautigan's deteriorating mental state. The Richard Brautigan of this story is the one she will always want to remember: the tall, lanky, self-effacing folk surrealist and mordant wit who wrote Trout Fishing in America (1967)—one of the classic counter-cultural novels of the 1960s—and 18 other books of fiction and poetry, became a pop celerity, and spent much of the rest of his adult like shuttling between Tokyo, Montana and Northern California. In her preface to this book, Brautigan's only child explains her intentions in publishing this memoir 15 years after her father's gruesome death.

"This writing is very private. It is not a biography of my father. And it is not a biography of me, nor is it a public summing-up of our relationship or a celebrity tell-all."

Instead it is a young woman's memoir about her own grief and what went on inside herself while she dealt with the mysteries of her father's life and suicide. Overcome with emotion while visiting the house in Bolinas the day after his body was found, she was restrained by her mother—Brautigan's first wife Virginia Alder?.

You can't catch death, her mother admonished, giving Ianthe the title of this memoir. Estranged from his daughter for over a year prior to his death, Brautigan refused to attend or even acknowledge her 1983 marriage to Paul Swenson. She was afflicted with symptoms of survivor's guilt, prompting her to visit a prominent suicide therapist. I think that you are not grieving a father, the therapist told her. I think you are a mother grieving a lost son.

This insight frames much the rest of this memoir, leaving the reader with the inescapable conclusion that in the absence of other stabilizing forces in his life, Brautigan came to see Ianthe as his lifeline and connection to some semblance of family life.

Ianthe's account of his life on the ranch in Montana is particularly harrowing—the weekly junkets to a nearby town where he purchased liquor by the case, the all-night parties with Hollywood celebrities and neighboring writers Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane, and Brautigan's disturbing penchant for mixing hard liquor and hand guns.

More than a decade after Brautigan's death, and after the birth of her own daughter, Elizabeth, Ianthe sought her grandmother at her home in Eugene, Oregon, to find out more about her father's mysterious childhood and youth. The reconciliation between generations is the grace note on which the memoir concludes.

St Martins Press is choosing to market An Unfortunate Woman as Brautigan's final novel, although the book clearly reads more like a memoir or journal of the author's last productive months.

The narrator of the book is an author with the initials R.B. whose biographical facts correspond with Brautigan's own.

"The Unfortunate Woman" of the title is an unnamed female friend who hung herself under mysterious circumstances. We never learn much about her or the circumstances surrounding her suicide. Like much of Brautigan's previous work, the entire text—from its dedication to a longtime friend who died of ovarian cancer shortly after this book was completed, to its concluding lament over his estrangement from his daughter—seems to advance by digression and misdirection.

There is a thee-page account of a visit by the narrator to Buffalo in October of 1981 that more or less comports with the bizarre particulars of Brautigan's visit here that autumn, but the best writing in this volume features his wry, observational humor and ability to tell a kind of absurdist folk tale. There are some classic Brautigan passages here: the author eschewing the beaches of Hawaii to seek abandoned Japanese graveyards instead, a romantic fantasy sequence set in a supermarket, an avid young saleswoman attempting to explain the concept of Tupperware to a doubting Brautigan, and a laugh-out-loud story about a young woman in a modern dance ensemble who has difficulty staying awake during her floor work.

About halfway through the book, something remarkable happens. There are gaps in the dates of Brautigan's journal entries—he is suffering from chronic alcoholic blackouts—which he goes to great lengths to exorcise, at one point constructing an elaborate Lewis Carroll type fantasy in which he places himself on trial for indolence.

The tone of the passage is uncanny. Here is an author whose life and art are crumbling right in front of the reader's eyes, he knows that he's in trouble. The narrative takes on a kind of drama that transcends story. Brautigan is staking everything on his imagination and craft as writer to keep himself alive.

Ring,2000

"Richard Brautigan"
Kevin Ring
Beat Scene, vol. 37, pp. 16-18.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

With two new Richard Brautigan titles for fans to savour and his only child in the country on a brief promotional tour we felt it was an opportune time to talk with Ianthe Brautigan and add our comments on the new books, one by Ianthe herself.

He committed a tragic suicide in the 1980s at a real low point in his life, the heady days of the 1960s were but a distant memory and the books of Richard Brautigan seemed to fade like the flowers of the times. Only a diehard cult following seems to have kept his name alive in the intervening years.

Not many will have been aware that Richard Brautigan had a daughter, Ianthe, and this daughter has now reached a point where she feels she can begin to take care of her father's books and the possibilities of releasing previously unpublished writing. There appears to be revival underfoot and Ianthe Brautigan has been in Europe recently spreading the word and talking to fans around Britain.

Now here are the books. An Unfortunate Woman, apparently published only in France just prior to Brautigan's death in 1984, curious. A slim book but in possession of all the characteristics that won Brautigan a legion of admirers way back when. The whimsical charm, the off the wall capacity of humour, the drifting but perceptive observations of the man, his funny little digressions, after all a woman hangs herself, there are ghosts, it is a book of whistling through the graveyard with the dry leaves of Autumn skittering about in a weird atmosphere. Brautigan can be a profound man, intent on seeing what was behind the clouds, the woodshed or the possibilities that we all miss as we hurry along to the end. There's always an overpowering sense of melancholia whenever you pick up a Brautigan books and An Unfortunate Woman is not different, he talks of "canyons of nostalgia," and he playfully tells us as he sits in a diner, "the man was gone and so was his doughnut . . .". He describes the man as a ". . . pastry provacateur . . .". Wonderfully funny and surreal. Consider these couple of lines,

"Since I first came out a few moments ago there has not been another peep out of the sky except of course for the birds. They own the sky with their voices."

He makes oblique references to ecological concerns, citing the words of a well known song by Joni Mitchell, he can't remember her name but he does recall paradise and parking lots.

But even when being whimsical he is a profoundly saddened man, his life seems to disappoint him. In 1982 he is despondent about his daughter, I don't know why he was—she seemed like a loving daughter who put up with a lot of traveling back and forth between her divorced parents and never seemed to be in the same school for more than six months—He says, "One of the letters I got today was from my daughter. It was a Father's Day card. She is twenty-one and lives in the East. She got married last year and I disapproved of the marriage and things have been strained ever since between us. I know it has been hard on her but it has also been very hard on me because I love her very much. We'll just have to let enought time pass to solve this one. She and I were very close until she got married. Now our communication is minimal and strained. Perhaps I should bend a little."

Clues to Brautigan's relationship abound in You Can't Catch Death, written by daughter Ianthe. She's around 40 now and started putting together this book in 1995. The death of her father in 1984 has obviously left a big scar and even now with the completition and publication of the book that scar is not fully healed. Throughout there is talk of haunted houses, ghosts, spirits, atmospheres, Brautigan returning to Ianthe in her dreams. In the daytime he is dead, but at night he is alive—but mostly he is a comforting presence in her recurring dreams. Ianthe, only naturally, wants him to rest but you can sense her feelings of guilt—remember her father committed suicide and she constantly ponders if she could have stopped him from doing this—it is doubtful she could have done anything. The man she describes in this book is a headstrong, physically imposing bear of a man who was an alcoholic or near alcoholic, he loved her deeply, there are many photos of them together and this despite his travelling around and his life with people like Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison and others, wild times often.

She writes like her father, passages are succinct, cryptic even, it is a book as much about herself as it is about this cult American writer who happens to be her father, she confesses to concealing who her father was to avoid the inevitable questions—questions that will stir up the unease she feels about her past. She hadn't really come to terms with the tragedy of her father, their lives had been so connected and then a division of sorts when she married and coming just before his death. It is that division that appears to gnaw at her, so much so that she goes with her longtime friend Candence on a journey into her father's past up into the rainy American northwest to seek out her grandmother, Richard Brautigan's mother—a woman she had only spoken with briefly on the phone. Brautigan had hardly spoken of his early life in the area before he moved to San Francisco in the late 1950s—he alluded to poverty—a sort of white trash scenario. This was not what Ianthe found, she discovered Brautigan's mother to be tiny, evidently a good mother who tangled with a number of men in her youth, all of them no good and generally abusive—one of them being Richard's father. Only with her final relationship did Brautigan's mother meet someone of a caring disposition and he gave young Richard a good home, instilled in him a love of fishing and the outdoors life and generally provided some long overdue stability.

All more puzzling then that Brautigan committed a petty crime to be arrested and then sequestered in a mental institution for three months where he was subjected to brutal electric shock therapy. Years later Ianthe describes his aversion to light switches and things of that nature, his houses were often dark places.

It's not a biography by any stretch of the imagination and the intention was never to write one, the book has the feel of therapy for the author while giving us this impressionistic study of a very complex man. We learn little of his wives, his girlfriends are shadows, individual friends are like passing ships—at the heart of this book is father and daughter and a desperate longing.

But any third party reflection on either book are bound to be flawed so Beat Scene spoke with Ianthe Brautigan and the short interview follows.

Kevin Ring: Can I ask first of all how did your trip to Europe go and in particular England? Did you find there is still some interest in your father's writing? It is a long time since he was in the public gaze.

My trip to the UK was brilliant. Rebel Inc. Canongate did a fab job getting the word out. Everywhere I read it was packed. The audience was a great deal younger than it was in the States—mid twenties. They all complained about how hard it was to get my dad's books because most are out of print in the UK. I really enjoyed meeting a whole new generation of my father's fans. I love Scotland and England. What I noticed was that both in the States and the UK his younger fans really like his later work and ask interesting questions.

Kevin Ring: Can I ask is An Unfortunate Woman the book that was originally published in France some years ago? What was the timescale of it being published recently?

Yes, An Unfortunate Woman was published in the French language a couple of years back. After I sold You Can't Catch Death to St. Martins I reread An Unfortunate Woman and realized that I loved the book, and I finally felt ready to publish it in the English language. Part of it was that the critics had been so harsh concerning my father that I wasn't willing to put it out in the world (the French love my dad's work so I knew it would be received well there) but also there is a part in An Unfortunate Woman that was deeply personal and mirrored what had happened with my father and myself. I am so glad that I decided to publish An Unfortunate Woman. People love it, and I feel like in an odd sense my father has been set free.

Kevin Ring: I heard there is a film of one of your father's books? I'd imagine they would be complex books to film?

Yes, there is a short film based on So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. My husband directed the film and it's beautiful. Wind will be showing as a work-in-progress at a film festival this Saturday, so if you know anyone in LA that wants to come let me know. Paul got around some of the aspects that are problematic in adapting my father's work to the screen by concentrating on one theme in the book and simply staying true to my father's words. I love the film. The music for Wind was composed by a woman who lives in the UK. However, you are right his writing is complex and difficult to adapt to film. This is the reason that I hve been cautious about optioning my father's books. In fact I turn down a lot of requests. Right now, there are several film companies interested in adapting my father's writing to the screen, and what I'm hearing from the producers is exciting. They love and understand the books. So it's an exciting time, but it also means that I have to make difficult decisions. I don't know if I'm going to say yes. I feel an extraordinary amount of responsibility to make sure that my father would have been happy with the project.

Kevin Ring: Is there more Richard Brautigan to be published? I heard someone in Australia of all places has a Brautigan manuscript that is so far unpublished?

Yes, there is more unpublished writing, which will be published eventually. The next Brautigan book will be a book of short stories. And yes, there is a guy in Australia who turned up with a Brautigan manuscript. I'm deciding now if it should be published. If I do decide to publish it, you will be the first the know.

Kevin Ring: Did you enjoy your recent trip to the UK?

I loved the UK. Everyone was so nice to me. What made me the most happy was that the folks who loved my dad's writing wanted to talk about his later stuff. In America people are stuck on Trout Fishing (which I love), but right now I'm really digging on his later work—Willard, Dreaming, and Sombrero. So it was wonderful to have people stand up and talk about how much they loved Sombrero Fallout! This may sound a little dramatic, but my book tour of the UK really changed my life. I felt as if I had to go to the UK to remember what my father was about. He did so many interesting things with lit[erature] and events and readings back in the sixties, and you all are up to the same thing almost thirty years later. Every where I went in England and Scotland the Lit scene felt so alive and wonderful.

I was so inspired by the trip and an event the Rebel Inc. produced in Scotland, that when I got back by husband and I produced a multimedia event entitled Love, Sex, and Suicide. We had writers reading with images projected while they read. The event sold out, and we had a blast.

Uschuk,2000

"St. Martin's Offers Two Perspectives On The Late Richard Brautigan: His and Hers."
J. Uschuk
Tucson Weekly, 22-28 June 2000, p. 28.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

In 1984, novelist and poet Richard Brautigan got drunk and killed himself with a bullet to the head. He was 49 years old. Two weeks later his badly decomposed body was found next to boxes of unfinished, unpublished work. Unable to enter the house of his suicide, Brautigan's only daughter, Ianthe, had the papers delivered to her. She writes, "I have a lot of paper with blood on it, because when my father killed himself he bled on some of the pages he'd been working on."

The day the boxes were delivered, hundreds of flies escaped. The sight of flies that bred in her father's body leads Ianthe to panic. "I'm going to die," she cries to her mother. She fears the contagion of death. Her mother tells her, "You can't catch death." While this may be true, as this daughter's memoir explains, you can't run away from it, either. Death by suicide begs for healing and understanding, the task Ianthe Brautigan meets head on in researching and writing this memoir.

This daughter, like Brautigan himself, led an unusual and difficult childhood. She starts her story in San Francisco in 1960. One year after her birth, her parents permanently split up. Half of the year Ianthe lived with her mother, an impoverished single parent who would eventually raise four children alone. The other half of the year she lived with her enigmatic father.

Until 1974, Richard Brautigan lived in an unimposing apartment on Geary Street in San Francisco. Having moved there in search of what fired the Beats, he roamed North Beach with his small daughter straining to keep up. Memories from this time are pleasant as she sees her father rise to fame. While her mother "struggled to make ends meet," Ianthe explains, "my father seemed rich as Midas."

Newfound wealth led Brautigan to buy a ranch close to Livingston, Montana, in the beautiful Paradise Valley. Here novelist Jim Harrison taught Ianthe fly fishing. Brautigan drank late into the night and exchanged vivid stories with his fellow writers. In this community the writing consumed the writer. Ianthe explains that their work "had a life or death quality about it, [Writing] was the most important thing; everything else came in second, wives, children, even the writers themselves."

Life in Montana led Brautigan to alcoholism and recurrent threats of suicide. "If you weren't here," he tells his daughter, "I would have killed myself last night." The binges alternate with periods of sobriety and productivity until the inevitable happens: the daughter grows up and leaves.

Many years later Ianthe's grandmother tells her of her father's impoverished childhood and a court-ordered stay in a mental institution, where Brautigan was treated with shock therapy. "Those Brautigans," the grandmother says casually, "always killing themselves. One sister killed herself and a brother did too."

Ianthe Brautigan's straightforward writing style creates a work without self-pity that deftly substantiates her pain. In An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan's "travel journal" discovered after his death, Brautigan approaches the same subject of death, and suicide, but from his typically circumspect manner. With dark humor and irony, the elder Brautigan's last work acknowledges the preoccupation that eventually claimed his life.

The unfortunate woman of the title remains unnamed, but Brautigan lives in the "house in Berkeley where she hanged herself." Although we never envision the action itself, he invites us to speculate on its ramifications. The house is "high-ceilinged" and the "shadows in the house have been here for a long time." Brautigan is fascinated by the "atmosphere of the house and its role in eternity." As he explains, however, he can only come so close:

"I don't want to know which room she hanged herself in. One day somebody who knew started to tell and I said I didn't want to know. We were eating dinner at the time. You do not want to add death-by-hanging to any recipe you are cooking."

Even in his earliest works, Brautigan approaches pain by employing a unique combination of poetry and comic relief. Trout Fishing in America, his book of prose poetry that has sold over three million copies worldwide, is a fine example.

An Unfortunate Woman is not on par with that work, though it displays flashes of the inimitable Brautigan style. This alone makes it a must for the true Brautigan fan.

"My plan was to write a book following like a calendar map the goings-on of my life," Brautigan writes. "I can't return to the beginning. I will finish as I started toward no other end than a human being living and what can happen to him over a period of time and what, if anything, it means."

Brautigan leaves a fine body of work as legacy, and his daughter's memoir, reinforced by biographical detail, further illuminates his writing.

An Unfortunate Woman, while forced and rambling at its worst, nonetheless offers a meditation from another candid voice, disclosing Brautigan's struggles with alcoholism, and some insight into the state of mind preceding his untimely death.

Way,no-date

"Brautigan's Unfortunate Woman: Of the Journey and Grace"
Brian T. W. Way
Excerpted from Of Fiction, Film and Fish: Richard Brautigan's Metaficational Romance
(Used by permission of the author)
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

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:

". . . I told her that she was writing too far away from her own experience and that in this stage in her writing, she should stay a little closer to the things that she knows until she has the technical tools to make a bridge, a longer bridge, away from her own life. 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—the death by cancer, the suicide of the unfortunate woman, ruined cemeteries, forgotten and underdeveloped passages, missed days, unfulfilled opportunities, indolence and idle time, the abuse of alcohol, and a desperate need to fill the pages of a journal, the days of one's life, for the mere purpose (it often seems) of filling those pages, of completing that life. The references to Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (vii, 75, 110) remind one of the sacrificial and epic waste inherent in life across all ages—Brautigan's book was first published in France with the title Cahier d'un Retour de Troie—although we are also reminded that, whether Iphigenia or Brautigan or ourselves, it is life and, no matter how treacherously betrayed, no matter how fulfilled or unfulfilled, it is all that there is, and it is all that can be captured and immortalized in art. In art and in life, it would appear, the trick is to learn the trick.

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).

Works Cited
Abbott, Keith. Downstream From Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1989.

Anonymous. "An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey." Rev. of An Unfortunate Woman. Publisher's Weekly 15 May 2000: 86.

Brautigan, Richard. An Unfortunate Woman. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.

Gard, Andrew. "Drama of Doomed Author Redeems Pedestrian Writing." The Plain Dealer 16 July 2000: 12.

Hall, Simon. "Ghost Laid to Rest." Rev. of An Unfortunate Woman. The Herald, Glasgow, 20 July 2000: 22.

Hume, Kathryn. "Brautigan's Psychomachia." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 34.1 March 2001: 75-92.

Keeler, Greg. Waltzing with the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan. Boise: Limberlost, 2004.

Kirchhoff, H. J. "Fishing for Richard Brautigan." The Globe and Mail 5 August 2000: D5.

Manso, Peter, and Michael McLure. "Brautigan's Wake." Vanity Fair May 1985: 62-68.

Pohl, R. D. "Brautigan's Last Book, Daughter's Memoir Cast Light on a Dark Subject." The Buffalo News 1 October 2000: F7.