Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player Hip Elect | A Confederate General from Big Sur by Anita Van Vactor? 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, inhabited 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. The Listener 85(2183) January 28, 1971: 121 Note: The above is an excerpt from a longer article which includes reviews of Heirs to the Past by Driss Chraïbi and A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan.

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