“There was a ship going someplace. It was a Norwegian ship. Perhaps it was going back to Norway, carrying the hides of 163 cable cars, as part of the world commerce deal. Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another country, just like in grade school. They traded a rainy spring day in Oslo for 163 cable car hides from San Francisco.” (Excerpt from “A Confederate General in Big Sur” by Richard Brautigan, 1965.)

I first read “A Confederate General in Big Sur” when I was a teenager and I just finished reading it for the second time. I would like to think that this novel has made the same impression upon me as forty something odd years ago, however I must say that in addition to the impression that remains from forty something odd years ago, I noted many things in my second reading that I could not have perceived when I was a teenager. 

My father was Keith Abbott, later ordained as a Zen monk and taking on the name Kumasen to become Keith Kumasen Abbott. He was a friend of Richard Brautigan. 

When I was child my parents lived in Berkeley on Sutter Street between the years 1974 and 1976. My father was in charge of my school attendance. I was not an early riser and my father did not endeavor to wake me up in the mornings. 

However, when Richard was in town, rather than letting me meander out the door to school with my pre-fabricated “please excuse Persephone’s tardiness” note in hand, my father would inform me that I would be spending the day with him and Richard in San Francisco. And not going to grade school. From the handful of such afternoons in San Francisco I can say that I remember Richard Brautigan reasonably well. 

I also remember that my father was visibly moved and haunted by the death of Richard in 1984. In 1989 my father, after having written articles about his friendship with Richard, compiled the material and produced a memoir of his friend entitled “Downstream from Trout Fishing in America”. The memoir was reworked and republished in 2009. There are marked differences between the two versions of “Downstream from Trout Fishing in America” whose title refers to Richard Brautigan’s novel “Trout Fishing in America”. Published in 1967 “Trout Fishing in America” catapulted Richard Brautigan’s name to fame.

Richard’s earlier novel “A Confederate General in Big Sur” was not well received. However, after the success of “Trout Fishing in America”, the earlier novel was republished. At the start of this review I quoted the excerpt from “A Confederate General in Big Sur”  about the hides of cable cars being traded for a rainy day in Oslo. This concept is, of course, pure fantasy (trading untradeable items for a potential non profit) as well as presenting a delightful notion that re-orients the American pelt industry’s activities, trading the hides of cable cars instead of, presumably, animals.  Cable cars were, in the early 1960’s, an iconic tourist attraction, however, undoubtedly not to the extent that it is today. 

Many questions arise in my mind in regards to this small passage about the hides of cable cars. For instance:

Do cable cars experience pain? 

Should readers themselves be feeling any pain that the hides are being stripped off of cable cars?

Are cable cars secretly animals? 

Is someone turning a profit in cable car hides?

Are we losers because we don’t recognize a decent business plan?.

Are there enough cable cars available for culling?

Could cable cars soon become extinct? 

Just exactly how was the hide taken from a cable car? 

What is the process of skinning a cable car?

Do readers feel any personal loss themselves, culturally or financially, by the sale of cable car hides? 

Should readers have, in advance, prevented the sale of cable car hides? 

Should a protest be organized?

Are readers themselves being cheated by the trade of cable car hides for rainy days? 

Who is getting the bargain? Oslo or San Francisco?

What could cable car hides be used for? Wallets? Lamps? Upholstery in for Rolls Royces? Or for the manufacturing of Virginia Woolf’s invisible commas and sold sporadically on night time television via Canada?

As a child I was present for some conversations between my father and Richard Brautigan that fell along these lines of questioning and reflection during those afternoons in San Francisco. Although I don’t remember the specifics, I was quite young, this pattern of negotiation between reality and unreality is quite familiar. 

But not only did my father and Richard share many stories in conversation, they also shared a certain friend. To quote an online article from November 15,  2018:

“It was a short notice from the Black-Cooper Sander Funeral Home: Price A. Dunn – September 17, 1934 – July 18, 2018 Born in Trinity, Ala. Resided in Monterey, CA. 

But the story behind that brief is more complicated. 

Dunn, who led a (literally) storied life, as a lover of life, fine food and women, was the inspiration for Lee Mellon, the fictional protagonist of Richard Brautigan’s first novel, A Confederate General From Big Sur. Published in 1965, it put the novelist and poet, famed for his floppy blond mustache, signature brimmed hat and whimsical perspective on the universe, on the literary map. 

Dunn discounted the mythology turning him into someone who was just a character in his friend’s book. ‘If you brought up Lee Mellon, he would change the subject or make a sarcastic remark,’ his friend Grace said. ‘Maybe Richard had some kind of love affair with the Confederacy, since Price was such a character, and he was a womanizer in a way that Richard wanted to be, but couldn’t pull off as well.’

Victor Henry, a reference librarian at the Monterey Public Library, added a coda to the funeral notice that was posted this summer: ‘I’m going to miss Price Dunn, the Confederate General from Big Sur. Over the years, we had superlative conversations about literature, music, society, etc. [He] was a voracious reader, checking out 10 to 20 books at a time. I will miss him.’”

Just like Lee Mellon in “A Confederate General in Big Sur” was based on the real person Price Dunn, the character of Buck, a prime figure in Keith Kumasen Abbott’s novel “Mordecai of Monterey”, was also inspired by Price Dunn. Published in 1985, the year after Richard’s death, “Mordecai of Monterey” was written rather quickly although Keith must have started writing the novel well before autumn 1984. It seems to me that my father somehow felt compelled to write his own version of the “Confederate General” personna and perhaps he might have felt freer to publish “Mordecai of Monterey” after Richard’s death. 

Keith’s version of Price Dunn (Lee Mellon) is perhaps a friendlier one, but honestly I can’t tell you this because I really don’t ever recall meeting Price Dunn in person. Although I must have met the man more than once. I do remember routinely hearing the stories of “what Price was getting up to now” which I will say interested just about everybody who had ever met Price. 

In a letter to a friend my father reports on his visit to an aging Price Dunn in 2011:  

A few years ago I decided, and at the time it was more of a feeling than a pointed decision, to edit and re-release “Mordecai of Monterey”. The novel needed some reworking (both the inspiration of cocaine and the distraction of cocaine was evident in the 1985 version) and it took me over a year to finish the project. I used letters and materials from the 1970’s (which is the period that the book represents) to help not only reduce excess or run-on material in the book but also add some odds and ends to round out the story. And I say that I have “retold” my father’s story.  The bulk of the book is my father’s writing  and then the fringes are my “retelling bits”. One thing is certain though, I did not recognize Richard Brautigan in any of the characters in “Mordecai of Monterey”. The main character of my father’s book, Mordecai, is based on the poet Michael Sowl with whom my father had a lifelong friendship.

With “Mordecai of Monterey” edited and released in September 2024, I decided it was time to reread “A Confederate General in Big Sur”. Of course, I knew that Lee Mellon and Buck were essentially one and the same person and I instantly saw the parallels and the differences between the versions of Price Dunn.

On the very first page of “A Confederate General in Big Sur” the following question is found:

“The Santa Lucia Mountains, that thousand year old flophouse for mountain lions, a hotbed of Succession?” 

I noted with interest the mention of mountain lions. In “Mordecai of Monterey” the character Buck is fighting with a mountain lion who is eating the trout at the trout farm (and the presence of the trout farm is undeniably linked to Richard Brautigan’s novel “Trout Fishing in America”) while in “A Confederate General in Big Sur” the character of Lee Mellon is engaging in a war with the frogs living in the nearby pond which is eventually solved by the purchase of two alligators. The alligators like tenderizing pork chops and, incidentally, I remember sitting in Enrico’s in San Francisco with Richard and my father who were discussing pork chops while I was enjoying a “Shirley Temple”.

Quite early in “A Confederate General in Big Sur” an episode appears in which the character of Lee Mellon beats up a homosexual character. I read this chapter with some distaste. I came to realize that when editing “Mordecai of Monterey” at a section near the end of the novel when the protagonist Mordecai is looking for a place to stay, I had come upon a sentence in which Buck’s friendship with a homosexual character named Lester was overly explained. My father’s sentence stuck out oddly and I was perplexed. I didn’t know then that Keith was defending Price by emphasizing that Buck could be friends with Lester. My father’s over-explanation of how heterosexual Buck was great friends with the homosexual Lester appeared to me, at today’s standards, as being condescending. I simplified the passage and I have to stand by my editing because hardly anyone would grasp at the “correction” Keith was making. 

Throughout both books there are unending tales of unpaid electrical and gas bills (further the unpaid telephone bills are a running gag in “Mordecai of Monterey”) and the installation of a stove is a point that is made by both authors, as well as the collection and use of green wood.

I very much enjoyed the passage from “A Confederate General in Big Sur” when Lee Mellon writes his friend Jessie: 

“Just what I said – no clothes on and a God-dman whale! Can’t you smell that sweet sagebrush-by-the-ocean air of Big Sur? Have you no feelings, sir? Do I have to draw you a nostril picture? Tell the broad to take a flying at the moon aned come down here with that whistkey and let’s catch some abalone and piss off a cliff – As always, Lee Mellon” 

Here’s a “Mordecai of Monterey” run down to that passage: Nude scene in garden with Buck blasting loaves of Wonder Bread with a shotgun, Buck who is being chased by the “Nose” for unpaid telephone bills, and, of course, there’s no end of opportunities to piss off a cliff. 

Familiar from another passage from  “A Confederate General in Big Sur” when Lee Mellon writes:

“I’ve got a garden that grows all year round. A 10:30 Winchester for deer, a .22 for rabbits and quail. I’ve got some fishing tackle and The Journal of Albion Moonlight. We can make it OK.”

Both the characters Lee Mellon and Buck have ideas about remodeling that are challenging to conventional manner of thinking:

“‘Want to put another log on the fire?’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I think it could use another log. What do you think?’ 

I looked at the fire. I thought about it. Perhaps I thought about it a little too long. The days at Big Sur could do that to you. “Yeah, it looks like it could,’ I said, and went around to the other end of the cabin and walked through the hole in the kitchen wall and got a log from the pile.” (“A Confederate General in Big Sur”).

“The next morning, when Mordecai opened the front door of the Alice Street house, the door smacked up against something hard. Mordecai peered in around the door. He found himself looking over the end of a bathtub. Mordecai shut the door and looked back around the side of the house. In the high grass to the side of the Plywood Swamp a patch of dead brown weeds marked the spot where the bathtub used to be. ‘Must be the same bathtub,’ Mordecai said to himself. He opened the front door again and studied the arrangement. The back end of the tub was sticking out of the destroyed shower stall and blocking the passageway. The only way into Buck’s house was to crawl under the bathtub. It was too high to climb over. Crawling under it looked tough, as there were blocks and planks of wood jammed under the bathtub’s gold painted griffin’s feet, minimizing the space under the bathtub.” (“Mordecai of Monterey”)

I kind of wish, though, that my father had used the seagull motif that comprises the end of Richard Brautigan’s “A Confederate General in Big Sur” because it was such a lovely ending. But of course, that was all Richard’s doing. 

 Photo of photocopy of an original photo by Erik Weber.