Rosie Kitto, an eccentric primary school teacher from England, finds herself a position as a nanny/ au pair/ governess in an uptight house in Manhattan’s upper East Side for the Wilder-Bingham family. She has recently suffered a breakup, and she desperately wants to have a baby, so she decides to say yes to everything, hence the title, and sleep with every male in the household, despite the fact they are already in relationships. Her resulting pregnancy is the opposite of the immaculate conception as she has been intimate with the father, Kemble, son, Teddy, and randy old goat grandfather, Thomas. By the end of the book, no one knows who’s the father, so they all decide to help her raise the baby together, which is so preposterous that it really doesn’t count as a spoiler.
We are meant to take against the matriarch and grandmother, Glenn,
because she is so cold that the men can’t help themselves but fall into bed
with the plump, voluptuous and voracious Rosie. Glenn tries to control her
family and replaces affection with obedience. “She has forgotten that if you
don’t stoke the fire, it goes out.” She is upset when she is ignored by her
family and she sits, “suspended in time, wondering if she matters”, while
everyone fawns over Rosie.
Rosie takes the young twins, Red and Three, on trips to museums and parks to teach them things – one almost expects her to pop through a chalk painting on the pavement. She knows more about the city than those who have lived there all their lives because she is special and curious and connected.Of course, the boys pay attention and learn what they are meant to; they all take up gardening and plant new life in the plot on the roof. The boys want their parents’ attention, but as they don’t get it, they are sad and Rosie offers life lessons in a mawkish manner.
The novel is crammed with out-dated clichés, about the
lack of sophistication in England, which the U.S. market will love. The whole
thing is written in the present tense, which is almost as irksome as her
attempts to be ‘one of us’, which come across as cringe-worthy. She is
apparently bold and direct. She teaches the boys to shout ‘Penis’ as loudly as
they can get away with in public spaces. Hilarious. If you’re six. Why should
others going about their business have to be disturbed by you indulging
yourself with profanity?
It is a country house mystery of the type favoured by
the Queens of Crime and follows the formula expertly. The blurb also summarises,
“Seven people might have murdered Eric Crowther, the mysterious recluse who
lived in the gaunt house whose shadow fell across the White Cottage. Seven
people had good cause. It was not lack of evidence that sent Detective Chief
Inspector Challenor and his son Jerry half across Europe to unravel a chaos of
clues.” The clues involve people trying to cover their secrets, such as blackmail,
homosexuality, adultery, class pretence, and other sins. Attitudes may have
changed, but the well-plotted drama and general motivation to keep things
hidden remains.
On one occasion, W.T. Challenor is exasperated with a woman
who doesn’t appear to grasp the sliding scale of the importance of secrets. He
tries to explain, “An elephant is large compared with a mouse, but it is
ridiculously small compared with Mount Etna. That secret may have been immense
six months ago, but now we are faced with a larger and much more terrible
secret. Don’t you realise what a murder means?” Women frequently exasperate
W.T., and he dismisses them as stereotypes. “Grace Christensen was a woman of
the pretty, graceful, feminine type that is not too clever.” Other of-the-era outlooks
are reserved for foreigners and ‘abroad’, where father and son head later in
the novel to track down a suspect. There is an unwritten code of conduct and
honour, which is also familiar from early 20th century novels. W.T.
states plainly, “I am an Englishman, and we like our facts like our food –
without subtlety. If you will honour me with your trust you will find that I
shall respect your confidence.” Far more serious is the stance towards
childhood trauma and the notion that the best way to approach distressing
events is to forget them.
First published in 1967, the novella has a
strong element of The Machine in the Garden about it, as Brautigan seems
to reflect on nature and the destruction of the environment. A child thinks he
sees a waterfall, but really it is “just a flight of white wooden stairs
leading up to a house in the trees.” The author remembers how he once mistook
an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont. “‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I thought
you were a trout stream.’ ‘I’m not,’ she said.” In another chapter, an
abandoned shack has a notice nailed to the front door. “NO TRESPASSING 4/17 OF
A HAIKU”
It
is nostalgic in the way that it captures a moment in time, but then suspends it.
The contemporary context may be a poor pretext for the sexism that was
prevalent in the era, but it can’t excuse the fact that some passages are misogynist
and highly distasteful. Brautigan was a contemporary of Kerouac, Burroughs,
Kesey and other (always male) beat writers. He usually refers to “the woman I
was travelling with” and women are peripheral, mentioned only in relation to
their use to men. “The only woman he could find up there was a
three-hundred-pound Indian squaw. She had twin fifteen-year-old daughters and
he wanted to get into them. But the squaw worked it so that he only got into
her. She was clever that way.”
Trout
Fishing in America writes letters; it is a slogan written on the backs of first
graders in chalk by a gang of sixth graders; it is a pen nib, “with a stroke of
cool green trees along the river’s shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed
against the paper”; it moves to Alaska to escape the heat of New York, leaving
a forwarding address; it has Maria Callas for a girlfriend; it is its own
autopsy as if “it had been Lord Byron and had died in Missolonghi, Greece, and
afterward never saw the shores of Idaho again”; it is an item for sale at The
Cleveland Wrecking Yard where it is sold by the foot length, “You can buy as
little as you want or you can buy all we’ve got left… We’re selling the waterfalls
separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we’re
also selling extra. The insects we’re giving away free with a minimum purchase
of ten feet of stream.”
There are oddly specific similes, many of which are fancifully extended. Dead fish “had been turned white by death, like frost on iron doors. Their eyes were large and stiff.” Some descriptions are gloriously visual. “The streets were white and dry like a collision at a high rate between a cemetery and a truck loaded with sacks of flour.” Others are nonsensical and absurdist for their own sake, such as when mentioning small wooden markers in a graveyard for the poor. “Eventually the seasons would take care of their wooden names like a sleepy short-order cook cracking eggs over a grill next to a railroad station.”
Sometimes
Brautigan falls into a simpler writing that comes close to being a studied
imitation of Hemingway’s plain style or even a parody of it. When travelling,
the narrator gets picked up by a farmer in a truck. “The farmer did not ruin
his audition for the Metropolitan Opera by making a sound. He just nodded his
head again. The truck started up. He was the original silent old farmer.” He
can deflate situations before they even begin. “The garbage was a problem for a
little while and then we discovered a way to get rid of it.” And he can include
universal transcendent hallucinogenic passages: “You made love standing,
sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls,
the floor and even the roof of the hut were covered with your sperm and her
come.”
One of the themes of the play I am directing, Dead Man's Cell Phone, is the way people interract through their phones rather than realistically and so their understanding of each other becomes skewed and depersonalised. In devising a poster to advertise the play, I wanted to spotlight the overload of impersonal information and intimate details and the way in which it is easy to become sucked into this heightened but depleted digital world. I didn't want any recognisable faces or features, other than possibly a hand which could belong to any body. These are my suggestions for what I had in mind.
