A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan

First published: 1964

Type of plot: Comic fantasy

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: San Francisco and Big Sur, California

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.

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.

Bibliography

Abbott, Keith. Downstream from “Trout Fishing in America”: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1989. A personal account of Brautigan from a longtime friend. Some of the book is Abbott’s own memoirs, but it also contains interesting anecdotes and insights into Brautigan’s life and work. Chapter 8, “Shadows and Marble,” presents critical commentary on Brautigan’s novels, in particular Trout Fishing in America.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983. Chapter 7, “Postmoderns and Others: The 1960s and 1970s,” cites Brautigan, placing him in the genre of writers who “celebrated the hippie youth spirit.” Bradbury gives succinct but insightful critical commentary on Brautigan’s novels. He sees Brautigan as much more than a hippie writer, whose spirit of “imaginative discovery” has spawned a number of literary successors.

Chenetier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. London: Methuen, 1983. Assesses Brautigan’s writing in the context of the 1960’s, and traces the development of his art beyond the confines of a cult figure. An appreciative study that analyzes Brautigan in the light of his poetics.

Kaylor, Noel Harold, ed. Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. See Farhat Iftekharuddin’s essay, “The New Aesthetics in Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970.” Although this essay deals primarily with Brautigan’s short stories, Iftekharuddin’s discussion of literary innovation and his treatment of other Brautigan critics make this an important contribution to an understanding of the longer fiction as well.

Wanless, James, and Christine Kolodziej. “Richard Brautigan: A Working Checklist.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 16, no. 1 (1974): 41-52. A compilation of secondary material on Brautigan, complete through 1973. Lists novels (including their serial form), poetry, short stories, and uncollected pieces, as well as reviews and critical commentary on individual works. A valuable resource for the Brautigan scholar.