Loading...
 
Locklin and Stetler's essay on 'Confederate General'
Print
English
Flash player not available.


Some Observations on A Confederate General from Big Sur

by Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler?
California State College, Long Beach

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 and 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(external link).

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.


Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction? 13(2) 1971



Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.