Barkham,1965

"Beats Are Becoming Intelligible Again?"
John Barkham
Dallas Morning News, Jan. 24, 1965, Sec. 4, 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.

Offhand I can think of no literary movement which has left so minute a mark on our literature as the so-called "beat generation." It was mostly talk, when you come to think of it. Although the beats have been with us for several years, it is surprising how minuscule has been their published output when measured against their headline hamming.

The most productive of the beat writers was been Jack Kerouac, and I believe he is no longer the high priest he once was. Among the poets Allen Ginsberg has won most notoriety. (Remember that nude photograph of him as an Indian fakir?) But the tangible contributions have been meager.

THE MOVEMENT, I am informed, is now in decline, and certainly there will be no shedding of tears in this quarter. What is left of it seems to be changing character, if the latest specimen before me is any guide. Richard Brautigan is a San Franciscan who hails from the Northwest and apparently shuttles between San Francisco and Big Sur. This first opusculum of his is a wacky, hilarious yarn set in that region, and it shows some significant departures from beat norms.

For one thing, it isn't bitter or sassy or "alienated," but just funny in a far-out, fantastic fashion. Not a word in it needs to be taken at face value. Although it is supposedly about a character who claims to be descended from a Confederate general, the general probably is a figment of his imagination; and, even if he weren't, you don't have to believe everything about him.

IN FACT, the nearest thing in the book to a general, Confederate or otherwise, is the author's photograph on the jacket. Brautigan sports a handlebar moustache which would instantly have won him a commission in the Royal Air Force during the Blitz. His book, however, is excessively non-military, being concerned with a kooky character named Lee Mellon, who disports himself with maidens and sundry other madnesses on the heights overlooking the Pacific.

The author's talent—and this he unmistakably has—lies in his deadpan whimsy. Being smart, Brautigan no longer seeks to shock, most of us being by now shock-proof. Instead, he amuses with gentle non-sequiturs.

Sample: "Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'That's right," he explained, 'I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid.""

And here's Mellon describing his Big Sur sanctuary: "I'm writing by lantern because there is no electricity down here. The wires stop five miles away and I think it's nice of them."

IT'S GOOD TO KNOW that the beats are becoming intelligible again. This doesn't necessarily guarantee a passport to posterity, but at least it ensures that squares over thirty can get a chuckle over books like this one. Richard Brautigan has a distinctive vein of humor he ought to cultivate. It's too good to be confined to the naughty little nightspots.

Brown,1971

"Richard Brautigan"
F. J. Brown
Books & Bookmen, Apr. 1971, pp. 46-47
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[Material deleted . . .]

Richard Brautigan may not be a professed necromancer, but his new novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, brings the past to vivid life. Not the past of the American Civil War, but the past of Contemporary Poetry and Prose, even of Transistion. This is a surrealist novel kept going by the exuberance of the author's invention. Until almost the end it capers satisfyingly enough.

The idea behind the title is beautifully fanciful. Mr. Brautigan pretends that Big Sur in California adhered to the South in the Civil War, contributing to the Confederate cause the 8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Boot Eaters. The descendant of the mythical general of this corps, Lee Mellon, is a friend of the narrator, Jesse.

These two live at one time in a ruined mansion where it rains in the hall, and at another in a shack that Mellon has built. The landlord of the mansion was a dentist who put on overalls to collect the rents. A fellow tenant was a poor old woman who lives on celery roots. Jesse was interested enough to look up in an encyclopedia whether you can live on celery roots. You can't!

Outside the shack is a pool in which thousands of frogs croak maddeningly. Mellon can silence them momentarily with a cry of "Campbell's Soups!"

No surrealist novel would be complete without some form of catalogue. Jesse counts, and lists for us, the punctuation marks in the first five chapters of Ecclesiastes.

Mr. Brautigan's novel is splendid while he is capering on the edge of reality. Curiously enough, it collapses into something like flatness when he ends up describing a 'trip' on hallucinatory drugs. He offers us five alternative endings, none of them particularly exciting; and then tells us that the book is having 186,000 endings per second, which I for one do not believe!

[Material deleted . . .]

Hogan,1965

"Rebels in the War with Life"
William Hogan
Saturday Review, 13 Feb. 1965, pp. 49-50
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.

A Confederate General from Big Sur, by Richard Brautigan (Grove, 159 pp. $3.95), follows a former Meridian, Miss., lad as he drifts along the Monterey coast on a tide of misfits. It is an area well known to William Hogan, book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Richard Brautigan's comedy of disaffiliation, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is a quaint, if unnecessary, contribution to the California Beat literature. Lurching between North Beach and the Henry Miller stretch of the Monterey coast, it focuses on a place of unwashed Peter Pans and the beautiful nihilism around them. However, more interesting than the main hip stereotypes who dominate this exercise in literary pop art are Brautigan's thrown-away characters—some of whom enter the proceedings for only a line or two. They are Saroyanesque: Thelma, the world's ugliest waitress; an eighty-four-year-old lady who lives on a pension of thirty-five cents a month; the owner of an abandoned house who is the current Class C ping pong champion of a rustic insane asylum. And the chief character's late great-grandfather, one General Augustus Mellon, CSA, who died the year of Halley's comet, and who may not have been a general at all.

But there is none of [William] Saroyan's Armenian Christianity here to help make Brautigan's characters jell and breathe. The potentially interesting ones dissolve before they are formed. What remains are malformed grotesques who should be amusing creatures (for, as a writer Brautigan is not without charm and exuberance), but, damn it, they never are.

Lee Mellon, whose adventures we are required to follow here, is a former Meridian, Miss[issippi]., lad who considers himself to be something of a rebel general in the war with life. A onetime Kansas tractor driver who boned up on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant before he drifted West on a tide of misfits, Mellon has a gift for getting his teeth knocked out and now is content to roll rich queers for a living, if that's the word. He shares the whole nonexperience of Beat life, sex, and the Monterey shore with a hip narrator-observer, presumably the author, who himself is something less than an IBM card-carrying conformist.

The result is a comic valentine from the subterraneans that rattles on like a tattoo on a bongo drum. Saroyan, Kerouac, and the ghost of Sherwood Anderson may have been looking over Brautigan's shoulder as he shaped his prose. For there is talent here. There is also a Look, Ma, I'm Dancing atmosphere, along with an extremely limited, four-letter-word shock vocabulary, which Brautigan, like so many young writers, relies on to make his emphasis, but which has long ceased to be emphatic. Here it's a drag that tends to erase whatever originality and freshness this young writer might have contributed to the Beat scene.

All the way through his short novel there is promise after promise that it will emerge a solid satire on Beat literature. But they are undelivered, and the result is fiction as innocent and dreary as a home-made fun movie. Better luck, and better discipline, next time.

Locklin-Stetler,1971

"Some Observations on A Confederate General from Big Sur"
Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1971, pp. 72-82.
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What intrigues us most about Richard Brautigan's novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is its strong resemblance to The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, little as the comparison might be appreciated by the authors of those classic works. In narrative technique the novel most closely resemblance Gatsby. Jesse, like Nick Carroway, is a first person peripheral narrator. The subject of his narration is a flamboyant, "romantic" character who, like Gatsby, reflects the materialistic values of the country. Gatsby and Lee Mellon decline in glamor in the course of the novels, but the former transcends his context and the latter does not. At the end of each novel the most prominent character is the narrator and both have witnessed the end of a dream.

This is the novel of a generation, The Sixties, which many would consider equally as "lost" or even more so than that of The Twenties. It details the sort of good and bad times of a social clique that one finds in the Hemingway book. Both groups are expatriates, although in the more recent novel the locale and expatriation is the "Confederate State" of Big Sur. Still, like the Hemingway group and unlike the protagonists of Easy Rider, the Brautigan characters are instinctively trying to escape from America.

There is the striking parallel of the physical impotence of Jake Barnes with the concluding psychological impotence of Jesse.

In both works the "fiesta" ends in an existential hangover. The drugs and whiskey of the Brautigan novel correspond to the obsessive wine-drinking of the Hemingway novel.

The Twenties were faced with the search for a new morality in the light of the Dead Gods. The Sixties were similarly aware of that Gotterdammerung. Jesse, like Jake, is trying to evolve an ethnic. Lee Mellon isn't even bothering.

Like The Sun Also Rises, A Confederate General is a war novel, or, more properly, a post-war novel. Hemingway, Mailer, Jones selected wars from their experience. Brautigan, like Stephen Crane, selects the Civil War. Brautigan, like Faulkner, feels that America has been in decline since that war. He calls it "the last good time this country ever had."

Ross Lockridge capitalized upon the advantages of the Civil War as setting for a traditional historical novel. Crane used it as a war to represent all wars as far as the infantryman might be concerned. Whitman saw it as a period of crisis out of which might well emerge a great democracy. For Brautigan the morally and spiritually crippling effects of the war have spread with Manifest Destiny across the continent, reaching at last the Coast:

"When I first heard about Big Sur I didn't know that it was part of the defunct Confederate States of America, a country that went out of style like an idea or lampshade or some kind of food that people don't cook any more, once the favorite dish in thousands of homes.

"It was only through a Lee-of-another-color, Lee Mellon, that I found out the truth about Big Sur. Lee Mellon is the battle flags and the drums of this book. Lee Mellon: A Confederate General in ruins."

In the nineteenth century many American writers turned their backs on European culture and looked to the West. The West became a symbol, a dream, a goal, a wilderness perhaps, but one alive with vast promise. Whitman (mentioned twice in the novel) and ((William Carlos Williams?? (also mentioned) are among the leading yea-sayers. Hart Crane? had his Spenglerian doubts, as did Nathanael West. Brautigan now lays the Dream to rest. Lee Mellon is called "a kind of weird Balboa" as he wanders along Number One, the nation's most westerly highway, cadging cigarette butts. The chapter is entitled "The Rites of Tobacco," summoning associations not only of the golden age of the Confederacy, but of the Jamestown settlement itself. Lee Mellon has a fantasy of walking all the way to Seattle, then turning East to New York without ever finding one cigarette butt: "Not a damn one, and the end of an American dream." This is an ironically barren end for one who hails from rich tobacco lands.

By mentioning him in the same breath with John Stuart Mill, Brautigan encourages us to think of Lee Mellon as a man of stature. He has like Mill a "truly gifted faculty." Whereas, however, Mill learned to translate Greek at the age of three, Lee Mellon's gift is for "getting his teeth knocked out."

The above is to some extent facetious, for Lee Mellon is a genius of sorts, a Mill without humanism. His ambition is to become "one of the dominant creatures on this shit pile." He is the master of the put-on, the con. He is ruthless and without a shred of altruism. He might, a century before, have been a robber baron. Hence, his surname.

In what sense is Lee Mellon a Confederate General? In that sense in which "confederate" equates with "counterfeit"? Probably. He is gradually reduced in stature throughout the novel, just as is his ancestor, August Mellon, in a series of flashbacks very reminiscent of the interchapters of In Our Time. Augustus Mellon turns out to have been no general at all, but merely a goof-off soldier, a sort of character out of Catch-22:

"'Where's Augustus Mellon?' the captain said.
'I don't know where he is. He was just here a minute ago,' the sergeant answered. He had a long yellow mustache.
'He's always here just a minute ago. He's never here now. Probably out stealing something as usual,' the captain said."

Augustus Mellon plays dead on the battlefield. He steals the boots of a dead, decapitated soldier. This parallels Lee Mellon's inhumane treatment of Roy Earle. He chains the psychotic millionaire to a log, screaming "You're a Nut." We should have been forewarned of his callousness by his treatment of "the fat girl" early in the novel. But for about a hundred pages his exploits seem generally funny. Then we find ourselves in the same position in which Calder Willingham places us in Eternal Fire: we are rooting for the wrong side, or for both sides.

The decline of Lee Mellon. We have been warned early by his treatment of the rich queer. This is a typical example of homosexual masochism—the sort of thing one finds in City of Night or Midnight Cowboy—but it is also indicative of Lee Mellon's sadism, his total self-absorption.

Lee Mellon, of all people, believes the heroic myth to which he is a living contradiction. He insists that the lie of Augustus Mellon's generalship be maintained:

"'Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate General. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate General in my family!'
'I promise,' I said and it was a promise that I kept."

This sort of American double-think has been noted time and again by our novelists and social critics.

Lee Mellon's second inhumanity involves Susan's pregnancy. She ends up dehumanized herself, a "baby-factory" coldly turning her succession of children over for adoption.

Lee Mellon describes himself as a poet—yet there is no evidence he has ever written anything. He is furthermore a pretentious student of literature—constantly reminding Jesse of the time he "read the Russians." (In a way he is a one-dimensional Dostoevskian hero, an underground man devoid of complicating ideals.)

He survives by exploitation; e.g., he gets the cabin by outwitting a "troubled religious fellow."

He wounds a doe with a .22. A cardinal sin of sportsmen is here compounded. He poses as nature lover but destroys the wilderness without a twinge of conscience. Certainly he is neither a Thoreau nor Hemingway nor Jeffers nor Steinbeck.

In Monterey he collapses drunk in his own vomit. Jesse hoses him off then hides him under cardboard to avoid detection by the police. Later Jesse returns:

"Lee Mellon slowly sat up. The cardboard fell away from him. He was unpacked. The world could see him now. The end product of American spirit, pride and the old know-how."

At Big Sur he lives in a "hole in the kitchen wall," like a rat. His staple is Jack Mackerel, which even the cats refuse to eat and which Jesse describes as "a gastronomical Hiroshima":

"After a dinner of jack mackerel you sit around and your subjects of conversation are greatly limited. I have found it impossible to talk about poetry, aesthetics or world peace after eating jack mackerel."

The roof of his hovel is a mere 5' 1", not tall enough for him (or his guests) to stand erect. He viciously defends "his inevitable wilderness" against invaders. Truly Lee Mellon is a man reduced to animal, man stripped of his ideals, and those who come in contact with him suffer a like fate.

The psychological deterioration of Jesse. We first notice Jesse's increasing mental instability about two-thirds of the way through the novel when he half-heartedly jokes about the damage to the soul of a steady diet of Lee Mellon's cooking. Up to this point, Jesse has remained in the background, portraying Lee Mellon for us, sometimes dazzling us with his imagery, but making no value judgments and telling us little of his own feelings. Soon, though, we find him irritated with Roy Earle's offer to buy Elaine for the night and, shortly thereafter, he states, "I wanted reality to be there. What we had wasn't worth it. Reality would be better." This is a crucial remark, for the progress of the book to this point (and the spiritual thrust of the Sixties as well) has been in the direction of a sur-reality, mind-expansion, a psychedelic rejection of the ordinary, the established, the banal. They have been playing at insanity, but confronted with Roy Earle they can see that real mental illness is no laughing matter. Worse, they have played insane to the point where they have actually gone a little mad, the lot of them. On marijuana, Elaine says she sees them all in the fire.

Significantly it is in the midst of their highest moments on dope that Roy Earle, a nightmare image, appears "at the edge of the firelight. He was chained to a log he had dragged from God knows where. It was just horrible." Furthermore, it is during the dope chapter that Brautigan switches from Civil War metaphors to images drawn from modern warfare.

When Jesse now makes love to Elaine his mind is elsewhere.

In a flashback, Augustus Mellon steals the boots of the headless soldier: "Private Augustus Mellon left the captain even more deficient, even more unable to cope with reality. (Our italics.)

Walking, Jesse says, "I would not fight it this time." Does he mean he won't fight reality or won't fight sanity? We're not sure, but on the next page he refuses to accept one of Roy Earle's fantasies—the first time in the book that any character has insisted on literal reality. (One recalls Jesse's fiction with Susan of not having seen Lee Mellon—even with Lee Mellon standing next to him.)

When Roy leaves, Jesse says, "I didn't feel very good at all. More rooms were being vacated. The elevator was jammed with suitcases."

Lee says of the frogs, "They've probably committed themselves to some place like Norwalk. They're all in psycho-fucking-alligator shock."

When Jesse learns that the alligators have been taken to Hearstville to retire "among the temples and the good life," he says, "I was really gone. My mind was beginning to take a vacation from my senses. I felt it continuing to go while Lee Mellon got the dope."

Jesse is by now exhibiting two classic symptoms of psychosis and of drug use: dissociation of the mind from the senses and loss of the time sense. The climax of this alienation from the self and from the external reality occurs in the final scene wherein Jesse is impotent because he simply cannot respond to the external reality of Elaine's body.

We have come to a conclusion distinctly reminiscent of the catastrophe of The Day of the Locust—the simultaneous disintegration of society and of the self. Insanity reigns, as the characters search for a lost pomegranate, but only Jesse is aware that there is anything crazy about the whole thing. And both books conclude near the Pacific limits of America, the nation of the Dream.

Jesse's final comment: "There was nothing else to do, for all this was the destiny of our lives. A long time ago this was our future, looking now for a lost pomegranate at Big Sur." There are strong echoes of Faulkner in the rhetoric and also in the theme of historical determinism. Cf. the introduction to The Sound and the Fury where Faulkner says that Caddy was destined from the moment she was conceived to one day be an unwed mother.

There are uncanny similarities between the style of Hemingway and that of Brautigan. Both rely on coordinate structures, present participles, prepositional clauses; both avoid subordination. Both are addicted to irony, understatement. There is a strong emphasis on dialog in the works of both writers. Both, in other words, adhere to the art of omission, the "iceberg theory."

Brautigan, however, is a poet and his novels are what one refers to as a poet's novels, both in form and in style. (The term has been used most justly of the novels of Cesare Pavese.) Witness, for instance, the use of the cryptic metaphor—cryptic in the sense that the comparisons are not obvious, they are at a number of laconic removes. His poem, "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster," is a good example. Brautigan compares the physiological and mental damage caused by a birth control pill to the process of a mine disaster:

"When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you."

In the novel, Brautigan writes, "A seagull flew over us, its voice running with the light, its voice passing historically through songs of gentle color. We closed our eyes and the bird's shadow was in our ears." This is not prose logic. This is closer to the poetic logic of associations espoused by the Symbolists and Surrealists and condemned by such critics of obscurantism as Yvor Winters.

The following is another example of Brautigan's zany use of metaphor:

"'Your alligator looks like a harp,' Elizabeth said, as if she really meant it: with strings coming off her words.
'Your alligator looks like a handbag filled with harmonicas,' Lee Mellon said, lying like a dog with whistles coming off his words.
'Up your alligator,' I said. 'Is there any coffee?' They both laughed. Elizabeth's voice had a door in it. When you open that door, and that door opened another door. All the doors were nice and led out of her."

Roy Earle swallows whiskey "with a hairy gulp. Strange, for as I said before: He was bald."

When Jesse goes to the cabin to read Ecclesiastes, Lee Mellon says he is "going to sit here and read frogs."

Jesse agrees to get drunk with their stolen money if "I can fill my pockets with rice when we get there, and put a pound of hamburger in my wallet." He uses the word wallet "like a mausoleum."

While they are drinking a bottle of wine, "the sun broke like a beer bottle on the water. We in a shallow sort of way reflected ourselves in the broken glass of the Egyptians."

Jesse compares an old woman to the comic strip character "The Heap." The comparison consumes two paragraphs and constitutes a revival of the Homeric simile, stripped, however, of periodic rhetoric.

The old woman has a hotplate in her room. "A hotplate in a little room is the secret flower of millions of old people in this country. There's a poem by Jules Laforgue about the Luxembourg Gardens. The old woman's hotplate was not that poem." This is reductio ad absurdum of the rhetorical device of litotes.

Brautigan's style is touched by the spirit of Dada. In the early chapters in particular there is an irreverence, a sansouciance, a willingness to trust to the random association, which places it in the tradition of Tzara, Arp, Balso Snell, S.J. Perelman, and the Marx Brothers. There is a sense of fun, a relaxed quality to the prose. Brautigan makes reference to Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight, and that work certainly is a predecessor of the present novel, but we are spared the earlier work's heavy symbolism, its self importance, its verbosity—all the plagues of the off-beat novel. In Watermelon Sugar reminds one more of the Patchen novel.

The mention of Dada reminds us of two points that must not be obscured by our analyses: (1) although this is a serious work and definitely not an anti-novel, it is nonetheless a very funny book as well, especially the early chapters... and (2) one runs the risk of over-interpreting any work that rings of Dadaism—Brautigan is surely not one to bind himself too rigidly to consistency, symmetry, the unities. He rules by fiat.

The novel might also be approached as a series of character studies of the young women of the Sixties, reminiscent again of The Great Gatsby with its incomparable cameos of Daisy, Jordan Baker, Mrs. Wilson...

Susan: She comes to San Francisco to give her maidenhead to a poet and settles for that "confederate" poet, Lee Mellon. Jewess, daughter of "the freezer king of Sepulveda Boulevard," she is sixteen when she is impregnated and deserted by Lee Mellon. Disowned by her father, she gains a hundred pounds, has and relinquishes one baby per year. She takes up smoking cigars, movie-going, and German-hating. She is through at 21. her five year career matches the time-span of the novel. Her corruption is to some extent a result of the destruction wrought by Lee Mellon upon all his associates, but it is in another sense exactly what she asked for.

Elizabeth: A $100 call girl in L.A. three months of the year, she spends the other nine months "like some strange pregnancy" in Big Sur caring for her four children by a husband killed in Korea. (This is the only mention of those recent wars which have contributed to the spiritual tenor of the Sixties.) She is tender to her children, will not harm a thing, but she is not without corruption. As a call girl, she caters to the high-priced perversions, and of course, she succumbs to Lee Mellon. At the end she is swaddled in the garments and the metaphors of the Confederacy. Jesse seems puzzled by her; he watches her constantly, more from fascination than from sexual attraction.

Elaine: She is the most complicated and profound of Brautigan's portrayals. She blossoms, but it turns out that her flower is the sick rose. Heady, eager for life, she has put college, her parents, the East behind her, and she has opened herself with enthusiasm to all the new life has to offer. She speaks Lee Mellon's absurd dialect as easily as he does:

"'What do your parents do?' Lee Mellon said paternally.
I choked on my coffee.
'I'm their daughter,' Elaine said.
Lee Mellon stared blankly at her for a few seconds. 'Sounds like a vaguely familiar story. Conan Doyle, I guess. The Case of the Smart Ass Daughter,' Lee Mellon said."

It is her idea to buy the alligator which rid the pond of the frogs. She takes to dope as if it were personally invented for her. At the end she has no sense of tragedy, doom, or even peril.

Jesse provides symbolic keys to her personality by linking her with Alice and Ophelia. For Alice was, after all, the prototypal woman of the Sixties (cf. the Jefferson Airplane's hit, "White Rabbit."). Alice is the queen of psychedelia, she who dispenses the pills that make you larger and the pills that make you smaller. Elaine is perfectly at home in the "wonderland" of Lee Mellon's Confederate State of Big Sur. Ophelia, like Alice, left one insane world for another.

Brautigan concludes the novel with 186,000 alternative endings per second, of which several are sketched for us. The endings represent stylistic variations. Jesse's breakdown and the search for the pomegranate are not contested.

A scientific footnote to these endings. Nothing can exceed the speed of light without becoming "thinner" than light and ceasing to exist. The endings produce a deliquescent effect, a Tempest-like dissolution but without the harmony of Shakespeare's play.

A philosophical footnote to the endings. Einstein's only constant is the speed of light. The world of the novel is one devoid of moral and psychological constants. Elizabeth and Elaine have learned to cope with such a world. Lee Mellon rises to military dictator. It is more a commentary on the world itself than on Jesse that he simply can't handle it. It is the mark of tragic heroes, Hamlet for instance, that they are incompatible with the world.

Miscellany: Lee Mellon's great-grandfather, Augustus Mellon, died in 1910. Brautigan reminds it was that ominous year in which Mark Twain also died, and the year of Halley's Comet. Is this an effort to reinforce the whole theme of America in decline?

As much sexual activity as there is in the novel, Brautigan eschews exploiting the opportunities for prurient scenes. E.M.W. Tillyard has noted that a topic may be so much a part of the age-mind that it manifests itself by its absence—it is simply taken for granted.

Brautigan's respectful mention on Winesburg, Ohio?

Regionalism in American Literature? Steinbeck, Jeffers, Miller, Brautigan...

San Francisco: Brautigan notes that the 1960's are the centennial of the great San Francisco literary flowering of the 1860's.

An exam question for critics: compare Brautigan's analysis of the California subculture with the similar analysis of the New York City scene in The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart.

There is a schoolteacher from Jesse's boarding house who journeys to Europe. He dies on the gangplank while returning home: "He didn't quite make it. his hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gangplank and landed, plop, on America." Is this a parody on America as the promised land? Cf. Elia Kazan's America, America.

Symbolism? Seagulls, frogs, cormorants, and flies abound. But never trust a Dadaist. Besides, one tends to find such creatures near the ocean.

The non-fiction novel of Mailer and Capote? This is not it, although we do have the inclusion of "documentation" from the book, Generals in Gray.

To come full circle: like A Sun Also Rises, A Confederate General from Big Sur is a very funny, very sad, and very important novel.

Martin,1970

"A Confederate General from Big Sur"
Martin [sic]
Daily Planet [Coconut Grove, Florida], 21 Sep. 1970, 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.

Remember how sometimes you'd get stoned and start giggling? I mean, sometimes you'd hear something that sounds funny and you'd start chuckling . . . then you'd start giggling, and it would seem so funny . . . you'd seem so funny that you'd really start generating, and you wouldn't be able to talk or walk or even sit in a chair. Helpless, you'd be snickering, laughing and cracking up so hard that you'd fall on the floor and hold your sides for interminable lengths of time with only thirty second breaks for air. Has it happened to you?

Well, you might laugh like that when you read Richard Brautigan's "A Confederate General from Big Sur."

Big Sur is mostly a big redwood forest growing down to the cliffs of California's Pacific Ocean. There is an attitude of happiness that exists there which attracts only the most together freaks who goof with life with an air of mastery that takes all the downs out of being hip.

There is of course, actually, no Confederate General anywhere in Big Sur or the book. However the character of Jesse thinks that his friend Lee thinks he is . . . or at least fantasizes that Lee thinks he is . . . when actually he knows that during the Civil War there was nothing but Digger Indians in Big Sur. People who didn't wear clothes, didn't have fire, shelter, culture, didn't grow anything, didn't hunt or fish, didn't bury their dead or give birth to their children, but simply lived on roots and limpets and sat pleasantly out in the rain.

As a matter of fact, Richard Brautigan is prepared to arm you with an abundance of antidotes and extracted wisdom.

There is always someone around who will go to bed with a fat broad, you'll read.

You'll meet the world's ugliest waitress, but understand that Helen of Troy would have looked out of place.

You'll go down to wake up Lea in the sack with a young girl . . . their feet sticking out of one end of the sack; their heads out of the other. At first I thought they were fucking, and then, I could see that they weren't. But I hadn't been far behind. The room smelled like Cupid's gym.

You'll meet Elizabeth with the beauty and grace of a swan who lived nine months out of the year at Big Sur. She wore her hair long and loose about her shoulders, and on her feet she wore sandals, and on her body she wore a rough, shapeless dress and lived a life of physical and spiritual contemplation.

The other three months she went to Los Angeles . . . a hundred dollar call girl who specialized in providing exotic pleasure for men who wanted a beautiful woman to put out with some weird action.

And, maybe, if you're at least literate and can identify Albion moonlight you'll laugh and understand that in this great big world . . . and wide . . . there's not much else to do.

Rollyson,1986

"The Confederate General from Big Sur"
Carl E. Rollyson, Jr.
Masterplots II. American Fiction Series, Vol. 1, 4 vols. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1986, pp. 325-329.
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.

Author: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)
Type of plot: Comic fantasy
Time of plot: The 1960's
Locale: San Francisco and Big Sur, California
First published: 1964

Principal characters:
JESSE, the novel's narrator and chronicler of Lee Mellon's exploits
LEE MELLON, the protagonist and self-styled descendant of a Confederate general
ELIZABETH, a part-time prostitute and Lee Mellon's woman
ELAINE, Jesse's woman and mainstay
JOHNSTON WADE, a "crazy" insurance executive whom Lee Mellon dubs "Roy Earle," the Humphrey Bogart character in the movie High Sierra

The Novel
The very title of Richard Brautigan's novel emphasizes the unusual conjunction of events, characters, and places that distinguishes much of his fiction from conventional treatments of history and society. His characters are drawn to powerful figures, such as Lee Mellon, who define their own reality; fantasy, in other words, is related as fact—primarily because, in Brautigan's view, human beings make up their lives as they go along, regardless of what the history books and common sense seem to prescribe. The results of this flaunting of realism are usually comic and ironic and in the service of the novelist's perception that reality is not nearly so stable or so reliable as serious recorders of fact would have it.

Lee Mellon, for example, claims to be from the South, although he has no trace of a Southern accent. His great-grandfather was a Confederate general, he tells the narrator, Jesse, although on their trip to the library they find no General Augustus Mellon in the history books. Jesse, who admires Lee and takes on his propensity for rewriting history, begins the book by stating that Big Sur was the twelfth Confederate state. Both characters engender a sense of history that is true to their own situation—that is, as outcasts from the dominant culture, they have picked a time and a place that suits their identities; they have seceded, so to speak, from the mainstream and fashioned a counterculture.

As befits an unconventional novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur has no plot; rather, it follows a series of related adventures in which Lee and Jesse drop out of society. At first, however, Lee Mellon is a character (noteworthy for the great number of teeth he has lost) whom Jesse admires from afar as "a Confederate General in ruins." Lee has no army, but he does carry on a kind of assault against the status quo by illegally tunneling into and tapping the main gas line of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and by taking up with Susan, the daughter of the "Freezer King of Sepulveda Boulevard."

Lee Mellon's battle with society, however, does not amount to much, and he retreats to Big Sur, building his own cabin like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). He is hardly a self-sufficient model, even if he does manage to live without electricity. The five-foot-one-inch ceiling of his cabin, for example, is a poor affair and reflective of his impracticality. Yet this is his charm, and he succeeds in luring Jesse to Big Sur after the latter has lost Cynthia, the woman who has kept him in San Francisco.

Much of the rest of the novel details their meager existence at Big Sur. The men are short of food, and Jesse is troubled by a melancholia relieved on occasion by Lee's energetic imagination and resourcefulness and by the appearance of two women, Elizabeth and Elaine, who (along with "Roy Earle") create a weird, momentary utopia out of a culture of scarcity.

The Characters
Although Lee Mellon is the "hero" of the novel, he is hardly an admirable character. He can be very cruel, calling the poor, demented "Roy Earle" a crazy man and keeping him in isolation from the others. When two teenagers are caught trying to siphon gas from Lee's truck, he elaborately creates a scene in which he debates with himself and Jesse over whether he should kill them. Even though his rifle has no bullets, Lee assumes an authority that is as impressive as it is frightening. In the right time, he probably would have made a vicious soldier.

Jesse is a puzzling character. He is obviously attracted to Lee and apparently is not discouraged by his partner's slimy ethics and mangy life-style. Jesse notes Lee's low-life characteristics but never editorializes—probably because he has no firm convictions himself. He is, in a manner of speaking, in Lee's tow. He is drawn to Lee's women—especially Elizabeth, who seems to be the sanest and most truly self-sufficient character in the book.

Elizabeth works part of the year as a prostitute, so that she can live the rest of the time as she likes. She is a professional and very good at pleasing men when she is on the job. If they want her to make them uncomfortable, she obliges. When she is not employed, however, she is sensitive and decent. She is obviously a woman of considerable self-confidence who copes with a corrupt society in order to get what she wants. Her sense of proportion is what makes her stand out from the other characters.

Elaine is Jesse's substitute for Elizabeth. Elaine comes from a wealthy background and surprises Jesse with her passion for him. He is unaccustomed to being able to attract and hold a woman. She makes him feel good about himself for a while, but by the end of the novel it is clear that her erotic ministrations will not be enough to pull him out of a severe depression.

"Roy Earle," whose real name is Johnston Wade, sees in Lee Mellon the reverse image of himself. Wade has been highly successful, a good provider for his family, but his dedication to business has driven him mad. Lee, on the other hand, lives as he likes with no thought of pleasing others, although he does, in fact, often make people happy—including Wade, who takes him home, much to the outrage of his family. While in some sense Lee is good for Wade, Lee does not try to hide his mixed motivations. On the one hand, he has been direct and sympathetic in a way that Wade values; on the other hand, his objective is to get Wade's truck. Furthermore, Lee romanticizes his greed by making this insurance man into "Roy Earle;" although Wade, who is fat and balding, bears not the slightest resemblance to the film star Humphrey Bogart?.

Themes and Meanings
In the figure of Lee Mellon, Richard Brautigan satirizes the myth of the self-made man. Lee is self-deluded in claiming ancestry from a Confederate general, although his conceit has an ironic truth to it in the sense that Lee, like Robert E. Lee, is ultimately a loser. He loses grandly, and he loses ridiculously. Like the causes of death listed for the Civil War generals in the section that prefaces the novel, "Attrition's Old Sweet Song," Lee Mellon has suffered many different kinds of defeat. His illusions do give him a kind of power, though, that eludes the more conventionally successful Johnston Wade. Like his putative Civil War namesake, Lee Mellon thrives in people's imaginations, regardless of the fact that he has been, by several different measures, a failure.

What Jesse ultimately makes of Mellon is not entirely clear, although he recognizes the appropriateness of their names—outlaws both, they try to transcend their shortcomings in legendary, tall tale exploits, in episodes such as the one in which they buy two alligators to rid themselves of the noisy frogs that disturb their peace. Near the end of the novel, italicized passages portray the none too heroic adventures of Private Augustus Mellon. Evidently, Jesse has come to imagine, if not to admit explicitly, the absurdity of Lee Mellon's megalomania. The terse, documentary style of these Civil War scenes are a stunningly effective rebuke to the characters' fantasies.

Critical Context
A Confederate General from Big Sur has had a mixed reception. it is usually not ranked as highly as Brautigan's masterpiece, Trout Fishing in America (1967) because the narrative point of view is somewhat clouded. Critics admire its comic inventiveness, however, and students have remarked upon its humor even when they are hard put to explain it.

Perhaps it is the unexpectedness of the connections Brautigan makes that delights some readers and dismays others. His similes and metaphors are often literally farfetched, seemingly awkward, and therefore subversive of literary conventions: "Elaine stared at the waves that were breaking like ice cube trays out of a monk's tooth or something like that. Who knows? I don't know." The inconclusiveness of the prose, the flatness of the style, can be irritating and boring. Yet the honesty inherent in forsaking smoothness and in admitting that all metaphors are only approximations, a part of the writer's search for appropriateness, is refreshing. The question in regard to this novel is whether Brautigan has balanced the opposing principles alive in all of his work: coherence and chaos.

A considerable poet as well as a novelist, Brautigan has favored writing in short units. Nearly all of his poems and short stories are quite brief, and the chapters of his novels rarely exceed five or six pages. A Brautigan novel seldom goes beyond two hundred pages. Yet there is a significant amount of monotony in his work that is the deliberate result of a casual, nearly self-negating style: "It is important before I go any further in this military narrative to talk about the teeth of Lee Mellon. They need talking about." For a different kind of writer, the second sentence would surely be superfluous, but for a Brautigan narrator there is almost a pathetic need to state the obvious. He has been called a "sweet" and a "gentle" writer because of this modest, apologetic way of imposing upon his readers.

Coupled to his assertions of the obvious is a bitterness and irony that is quite savage. Although it is masked by the cuteness of chapter titles such as "To a Pomegranate Ending, Then 186,000 Endings Per Second," Brautigan's sensibility seems at sea in a world that is disintegrating in narratives that barely hold themselves together. Thus, A Confederate General from Big Sur has five different endings plus a speedup of endings "until this book is having 186,000 endings per second." His world is essentially unstable, and he constantly attacks those who think life can be counted and measured. His lists of numbers and statistics are always parodies of the real thing, since the real thing, he believes, is always falling apart faster than it can be computed.

The instability of human character is what attracts Brautigan. He argues against everything that makes life static; history immobilizes human beings and novels ought to bring life back to the living and the dead, a point made by the conjunction of past and present in his title A Confederate General from Big Sur. Near the beginning of the novel, Brautigan demonstrates how literature is a form of renewal. Describing a Union assault on Confederate forces, Jesse remarks, "at the instant of contact, history transformed their bodies into statues. They didn't like it, and the assault began to back up along the Orange Plank Road. What a nice name for a road." On several occasions, Jesse exhibits a superb historical imagination, placing himself precisely in the past yet, as in this instance, remaining himself. As Edward Halsey Foster puts it, "the feeling that an individual should not be understood primarily as a function of time and place, as a psychological compromise between public and private needs, but rather as a self potentially and ideally independent of history underlies Brautigan's best work." That human beings are only "potentially and ideally independent of history" is what accounts for the melancholy strain and truncated achievement of much of the author's work.

Van.Vactor,1971

Anita Van Vactor
The Listener, vol. 85, no. 2183, 28 Jan. 1971, p. 121.
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 is already known in England from his later books than A Confederate General from Big Sur. This moody, self-delighting fantasia is among other things a celebration, wry and hyperbolic by turns, of the "classic" American wilderness theme: a life improvised in the woods where, as Emerson says, "a man casts off his years," shedding the accumulations of history and ego, and becomes a child. It is also, haphazardly, a reflection upon the continuing assimilation of the "classics" themselves into self-liberating experiments: their casual presence, from Hemingway ("the hotcakes were good and the bacon and eggs were good and would fill you up") to Superman ("the throbbing pulse of a metropolitan city"), seems more familiar than "life," whose "strangeness" finally defeats the efforts of Jesse, the narrator, to "put it all together."

Except for the adventures of language, nothing much can be said to happen. Jesse and Lee Mellon, "the battle-flags and drums of this book," mostly hang out at Lee's cabin in Big Sur, trying to hustle food by day and silence the frogs by night. The cabin, like all of Lee Mellon's arrangements, is a magically incongruous structure—dangerous too, having one wall of glass, one wall "that was but a space of air," and a 5'1" ceiling that can't be got used to, existing as it does "beyond human intelligence and co-ordination." The cabin is like a sign of Lee Mellon—the presence that corresponds to his absence, since, although he has attributes, he seems not really to inhabit them. A hero of confusion and beautiful deficiencies, embattled, a kind of monumental ruin, he also has the disturbing innocence of a creature unaffected by temporal modes of being. He has no sense of responsibility whatsoever. These two are joined by a crazy San Jose insurance man, mad as a refuge from his family's collective ego-trip, and a couple of marvelous and intuitive girls— one of whom lives "a life of physical and spiritual contemplation" at Big Sur for nine months of the year, and for the remainder transforms herself into a fancy $100 LA call girl. Like Lee, she does not quite belong to "modern times."

They form, Brautigan seems to imply, a temporary community of the hip elect, free of ego hang-ups and cohering, in its own improbable way, by delicate spiritual affinities, by "touching the same either." Lee Mellon is their source of grace, their ceremonial centre; his mere existence changes inconsequential acts into ritual: "We were all joined together in the famous Lee Mellon Indoor Stoop." But anarchic as well as ceremonious: to lose ego is to enter a condition of exhilarating instability, in which resemblances between the real and the unreal proliferate with wanton energy, in which what we think of as distinct categories of experience—"events," "characters," "words"—share the same protean nature, perform strange feats of association, swap places with irresponsible ease.

Jesse discovers (in the process of tracing—or inventing—Lee Mellon's family history) that Big Sur was a member of the defunct Confederate States of America, inhabitated in those days mainly by Indians. Sometimes antic, sometimes gravely menacing, this Civil War yarn crops up intermittently, a metaphor (perhaps) about the doomed possibilities of "secession" from the shabby exigencies of reality, an elegiac suggestion of lost promises and potencies, of some mythical time in which Lee Mellon "a Confederate general in ruins," might have made sense.

What troubles me about this book is that you can't read it without joining it. It practices a special form of elitism: on the face of things, its manner is open and amiable, it "hangs loose," and yet (in the style of certain American communes I'm acquainted with) its fun seems deliberately calculated to provoke defensive responses, and if you do respond defensively, if you don't dig, you're out—there's no other provision made for you. Perhaps it's this veiled arrogance more than his "beauty" (or perhaps this is his "beauty") that accounts for Brautigan's current appeal to the young.

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Wordsworth,1971

"Bleak Choice"
Christopher Wordsworth
Guardian Weekly, 20 Feb. 1971, p. 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.

This week's fiction is no more cheerful than the week's news, offering mostly bleak choice between aimlessness and lovelessness. Although no one could be less ostensibly angst-ridden than the author of A Confederate General from Big Sur there is a faint sound even here of the wind soughing through the branches of disillusion. As usual, Brautigan is celebrating the American dream at a point where the stallions of hope have long since turned to dead meat on the prairie, or into clothes-horses, or any of the absurd turns that dreams can take, in a tumbleweed style that can shift through rapture, mock-rapture, to nonesense, with matching inconsequentiality.

The purpose is drift, and the drift is autumnal. "Yes, one could think of seagulls. We were awfully tired, hung over, and still drunk. One could think of seagulls. It's really a very simple thing to do . . . seagulls: past, present, and the future passing almost like drums in the sky." So Lee Mellon, on the trail of a mythical grandfather he claims was a Confederate general, and his chronicler Jesse drift on the road past Kerouac, past mildewed milestones of the old West, shacking up with other battered innocents—only Lee's innocence is slightly tarnished by the fact that he served 10 years for murdering his parents (or did he?).

Sex is pleasurable in a hazy, companionable way: "I was pleased with myself for it had been a long time or seemed so, and pleased with myself again, and again pleased to be pleased again." They count the punctuations in Ecclesiastes by lantern, purchase two alligators to eliminate frogs, meet a mad fugitive tycoon who buries a pomegranate like Timon, and tries to give away a fortune in dollars, sift similes that emerge sometimes as "a smile like a ragged Parthenon" sometimes as "a bottle of beer in a haze, the sun was plying its ancient Egyptian trade." In the end, full of "grass" and emptiness, a dream within a dream, they simply toil and watch the pointless Pacific. To write it off as an artless rainbow-chase is to give it less than its careful and intricate due.

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