SOURCE: Pietralunga, Mark. “Luciano Bianciardi Translates Richard Brautigan: Rebellion at Big Sur.” Romance Languages Annual 10, no. 1 (1998): 345-49.

[In the following essay, Pietralunga compares Brautigan's Confederate General from Big Sur to some of the work of its Italian translator, finding biographical and literary similarities between the two writers.]

In his “Diario americano 1959-60,” Italo Calvino writes about his impressions of Northern California and, in particular, of those scenic locations near the Monterey peninsula where a number of well known writers had established their residences. In the section entitled “Questi paradisi terrestri,” Calvino observes:

dove viv ono gli scrittori americani, non ci starei morto. Non c'e' altro da fare che sbronzarsi. Un giovanotto che si chiama Dennis Murphy o qualcosa di simile che ha scritto un best-seller, The Sergeant, che ora gli ha tradotto Mondadori nella Medusa gli e' arrivata proprio ora la copia e me la mostra e crede che sia un piccolo editore—arriva al mattino con tutti i polsi feriti. La notte si e' sbronzato e ha spaccato a pugni le vetrate della sua villa. Di Henry Miller che vive qui a Big Sur sappiamo gia' che non riceve piu' nessuno perche' sta scrivendo. L'ultrasettantenne scrittore che ha sposato da poco una moglie diciannovenne dedica tutto il resto delle sue forze allo scrivere per finire prima di morire i libri che ancora vuol scrivere

(Eremita a Parigi 103).

It is here in this so-called Pacific paradise where Richard Brautigan sets his 1964 novel Confederate General from Big Sur. A lengthy exchange of letters between the work's main characters, the narrator Jesse and his charismatic friend Lee Mellon, captures the tone of the novel and seems to corroborate Calvino's impressions of this haven of American writers. In these letters the lovelorn Jesse, who is unable to cope with big city life in San Francisco, hopes to join Lee Mellon at his makeshift retreat in Big Sur. Upon hearing of Jesse's wish to follow him to Big Sur, Lee Mellon replies: “Great! Why don't you come down here? I haven't got any clothes on, and I just saw a whale. There's plenty of room for everybody. Bring something to drink. Whiskey!” (54). Farther along in their correspondence when Jesse asks Lee Mellon how he keeps alive at Big Sur, the latter responds: “I've got a garden and it grows all year round! A 30:30 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. What do you want, a fur-lined box of Kleenex to absorb the sour of your true love Cynthia, the Ketchikan and/or Battle Mountain cookie? Come to the party and hurry down to Big Sur and don't forget to bring some whiskey. I need whiskey!” (60). Jesse and Lee Mellon had met in San Francisco. Lee had just hitchhiked up from Big Sur where, along the way, he steals some money, a watch, and the keys to the car of a wealthy homosexual who had wanted him “to commit an act of oral outrage” (23) but was nevertheless quite content with a blow to the head with a rock from the “good looking, dashing, toothless raider” (24). After a series of unconventional experiences, including Lee's “siege” of Oakland and a “daring cavalry attack” to tap a gas line of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company for light and heat, Lee resumes his wanderings, this time to Big Sur, where he settles in a ramshackle cabin that he had built with yet another disturbed friend. Jesse, after finally letting himself be convinced to join Lee Mellon, learns that life in Big Sur is far from being the Pacific paradise that he had been led to believe, particularly when money is lacking and you are constantly being hounded by the nightly croaking of thousands of frogs in a nearby pond. However, they soon come into some money ($6.72), which Lee Mellon takes from two teenagers whom he catches attempting to steal gasoline from his truck. With their “riches,” Lee proposes to hitchhike to Monterey to get drunk. In a small bar in Monterey, with Lee “passed out underneath the saloon” (89), Jesse meets the lovely Elaine, and the two are soon off to the young woman's place. The next morning the couple retrieve Lee, still “under a saloon covered with cardboard” (93), and return to Big Sur, bringing with them two alligators purchased by Elaine in order to take care of the frog problem. Back in Big Sur Elaine decides to set up house with Jesse, while Lee Mellon finds himself being comforted by the enchanting Elizabeth—a beautiful free spirit who works three months a year as a high-priced call girl in Los Angeles.

Their seemingly idyllic world is soon disrupted by the arrival of Jonathan Wade (of the “Johnston Wade Insurance Company”), a psychotic middle-aged millionaire, who has run away from his greedy wife and children, convinced that they are determined to put him in a mental hospital. After directly experiencing the aggressions of Lee Mellon, Wade, appearing to regain his sanity, suddenly feels the urge to return to his routine and sets off for a business appointment. The two friends and their girlfriends “go down to the Pacific and turn on and go with the waves” (152) with Jesse unable to perform during a sexual encounter initiated by Elaine. The novel concludes by offering more and more endings unraveling faster and faster, leading to what Brautigan calls “186,000 endings per second” (160). These endings are the only real revolution that takes place in the novel.

In his book-length study of Brautigan, Terence Malley places Confederate General from Big Sur within a category of American literature that has been broadly defined as American Pastoral. The stories that belong to this pattern, writes Malley, deal with “a man going off alone (or two men going off together), away from the complex problems and frustrations of society into a simpler world close to nature” (93).¹ As Calvino's opening observations remind us, Brautigan is not the first American writer to locate his “Paradise Regained” in Big Sur. Malley makes reference to two works about Big Sur that bear an important relationship to Confederate General: Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957) and Jack Kerouac's Big Sur (1962). In fact, in Confederate General we catch a glimpse of Henry Miller, sitting in his old Cadillac near his mailbox, waiting for his mail to be delivered. In this casual observation, one intuits a general indifference on the part of Brautigan's characters toward Henry Miller and his literary reputation. Nevertheless, as Malley accurately notes, Miller's presence in this environment is unavoidable: “The gigantic figure of Henry Miller casts its long shadow across Confederate General […] In some respects, Brautigan's Big Sur corresponds closely to Miller's—a place of beauty and privacy and freedom and (that word and quality Miller likes so much) ambience. For the most part, Jesse and Lee act out the advice that Miller repeats to himself and to us in the first section of his Big Sur: ‘Stay put and watch the world go around!” (96). However Malley is quick to note that, while Miller has served, if only partly, as Brautigan's literary guide to Big Sur, “Brautigan's depiction of Jesse and Lee Mellon's Eden is ultimately very different from Miller's (or anyone's)” (96). Instead, in Confederate General everything is built on, and perceived through Lee Mellon's “wonderful sense of distortion” (83) to which Jesse has religiously ascribed. After all, Lee Mellon, observes Jesse, is “the battle flags and the drums of this book” (20). This “sense of distortion” is most evident in Mellon's claim that his great grandfather was a courageous Confederate general at the Battle of Wilderness, a battle which proved to be a turning point in the Civil War. Even after Lee and Jesse fail to find any references to a Confederate General Augustus Mellon in Ezra J. Warner's Generals in Grey, this fact does not prevent Lee Mellon, as Marc Chenetier writes, “from living in the imagination of his descendent and acting as a control on the wild antics the text will perform in its claims to freedom”(23). That freedom, or what Chenetier calls a “wilful violation of reality”(23), dictates the entire course of the novel.

As Edward Halsey Foster notes, Confederate General from Big Sur is “about people who cultivate an attitude of emotional and intellectual detachment that was to be found at the very center of the existential, alienated culture characteristic of the hipsters and the beats of the 1950s”(5-6). At Big Sur the ultimate awareness, rebellion, and resignation take place on the farthest extreme, geographically and intellectually, of contemporary America. Confederate General from Big Sur offers a vision, concludes Foster, “in which there is no historical progress, but in which all possibilities can be realized”(47). From this perspective, Lee Mellon's ability to live the life of a Confederate general one hundred years after the South has been fought and lost is beside the point. As we have mentioned, his life seems to be a strange series of echoes from American literature and myth, particularly the literature and myth of rebellion. For the beats, rebellion was a personal matter. A man did not change the system he changed himself. Together with a distrust or loss of faith in historical progress, what the beats shared was their individual horror at what a nation in the name of economic progress had done to itself.

In an essay written not long after his return from America in 1960, Calvino analyzes Italy's so-called “miracle years” and argues that there was a scarcity of rebels in Italian literature.² He points out that Italy had nothing comparable to the “beat generation,” the “beatniks,” or England's “angry young men;” instead, the Italian writers expressed quite differently their lack of faith in history: “I libri che escono e che hanno piu' fortuna portano anch'essi come segno dell'epoca un accentuarsi della sfiducia nella storia, ma ad affermarlo non sono voci di arrabbiati o di nichilisti, ma caso mai sono le quete ragazze casalinghe di Carlo Cassola” (78). The successful novels in the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s were written by authors who turned their backs from an Italy that bathed in the euphoria of its modernity. For Cassola, it was a withdrawal to the traditional myths of the provinces and to characters, like Mara of La ragazza di Bube, who possess such positive qualities as a strength of spirit and a genuineness of feelings. This return to the traditional values of the provinces is accompanied by a stylistic return to traditional narrative forms.

Luciano Bianciardi's La vita agra is one of the few “angry” voices of protest to come out of the “miracle years.” Although those same traditional myths of the provinces are operative in Bianciardi's 1962 novel, the world of “buoni sentimenti” exists as part of a distant place of memory and salvation, which enables the protagonist, a self-proclaimed anarchist who has come to Milan to execute a hostile mission against the chemical giant Montecatini, to survive in the grim, inhuman metropolis. Unlike Cassola, Bianciardi felt the need to leave the security of the provincial life and to seek some connection with the world of the Insiders, for he believed this was the only way possible to expose the depressed state that lie hidden under the mask of progress. He hoped to prevent the miracle that was taking place in Milan from infecting the rest of the country. La vita agra is a novel of protest against this miracle and the angry statement of his failure to defeat it. Both the protest and failure are depicted by the protagonist's attempt to undermine the capitalistic system that ultimately consumes him. His reluctant but eventual integration into the consumer society is accompanied by the complete disintegration of the self. At the novel's conclusion, the narrator, who is lost in the chaos of words, is totally deprived of the self. The mechanical routine of his job as translator, at a time when translators found themselves inundated by the new consumer's demand, has affected his most intimate actions (his loss of a sexual drive) and forces him to seek refuge in sleep.

In drawing comparisons between Bianciardi's “angry” novel and the “beat” writers, critic Giuseppe Nava has written: “Come i ‘beat,’ il protagonista di Bianciardi vive tutto nel presente, ormai scisso dal passato e reso incapace di progetti per il futuro dalla condizione in cui e' murato. Non gli resta, per sentirsi vivo, che la rabbia come reazione istintuale ed estrema difesa: una rabbia che e' impotente pratica e sogno consolatorio di un futuro utopico di vita rurale e di libera azione sessuale, quale appunto nella letteratura ‘beat” (17). In the midst of the confusion of voices between his world and that of the languages and lives of the characters of his translations, such names as Jack Keruoac and Henry Miller appear and, like all else in this Babel, are distorted.³ Prompted by Bianciardi's reference to Miller and Keruoac, Rita Guerricchio writes:“La ricorrenza di questi ultimi due assicura la consapevolezza da parte dell'io narrante di indubbie suggestioni subite da parte di entrambi, afflitto anch'egli, come in particolare l'io esorbitante dei Tropici, da un'ansia predicatoria di grana moralista proprio laddove piu' smodata si fa la proposta oscena, piu' anarchica e ribelle l'avversione alla civilta' meccanica. Non c'e' dubbio che sull'inarrestabile fluire del monologo della Vita agra abbiano agito anche altri modelli del cote' ‘bitinicco’ e arrabbiato, autori tradotti nello stesso giro d'anni come Kerouac e Burroughs […] e Patchen e Donleavy e Behan, tutti portatori di un anarchismo protestatario variamente modulato fra provocazione e sberleffo, e sopratutto affidato a un io personaggio ribaldo e guastatore” (79).⁴ Bianciardi's attraction to works that question, mock and rebel against the status quo and the acceptance of majority values, explains, in many ways, his decision to translate Brautigan's Confederate General from Big Sur. It is important, however, to keep in mind that Bianciardi translated A Confederate General from Big Sir after La vita agra, which is one man's failed attempt to change the system from within. After the experience of La vita agra, Bianciardi sees himself transformed from a rebel with a cause to a rebel without a cause. In a letter to his friend Mario Terrosi, Bianciardi wrote about his attempt to oppose the system by writing a novel of protest: “Quel che potevo l'ho fatto, e non e' servito a niente. Anziche' mandarmi via da Milano a calci nel culo, come meritavo, mi invitano a casa loro e magari vorrebbero … Ma io non mi concedo …” (99). Subsequently, Bianciardi, artistically and personally, retreats from the “real” world, opting for a self-imposed exile at Rapallo. Alberto Gessani describes this point in Bianciardi's life: “non ha il cinismo autentico del pennivendolo, e quello d'intrattenere la gente con la letteratura facile del boom non e' stato mai e non puo' essere il suo mestiere. E allora, chiuso ogni conto con il presente e con il futuro, non gli rimane che il passato: il passato storico piu' o meno lontano, vissuto o no, che sfuma insensibilmente nella fantasia e si fa mito: mito evocato come luogo nel quale far parlare l'anima e come fuga momentanea dal ‘labirinto di griglie scure’ in cui si deve pur vivere” (57-58). By evoking once again the ghosts of the Risorgimento and Garibaldian campaign, Bianciardi attempts to cope with the present and give vent to his anger. In the introduction of his personal interpretation of the Risorgimento, Daghela avanti un passo!, Bianciardi describes the events and human passions of this historical period as “eroicamente festosi, coloriti, un poco matti persino”(8). Inherent in the term “matti” is that element of rebellion against organized authority and a spirit of freedom that attracted Bianciardi to such writers as Henry Miller and Jack Keruoac, who infused their poetic world with an irrationality, linguistic or otherwise, as well as a sense of anarchy. These are the same characteristics that Bianciardi brought to his very personal treatment of history.⁵ Through a sense of irony and a great deal of fantasy, Bianciardi's vision of history acquires an unreal quality enabling him to mix characters and events of the present and past. Bianciardi's strong interest in popularizing, as well as fictionalizing, Italian history and his desire to raise the Risorgimento to the same epic level as the American Civil War are, one can deduce, other reasons behind his eventual decision to translate Confederate General from Big Sur. An affinity between Bianciardi's own phantasmagoric view of history, best depicted in his final novel Aprire il fuoco and Brautigan's treatment of the historical past, is immediately evident in the novel's Italian title Il generale immaginario. In his brief preface to the novel, Bianciardi poses the following questions: “Tanto per cominciare, il problema e' questo: credere o non credere che fra gli stati confederati ci fosse anche il Big Sur? Chilometri di rocce, sabbie, gabbiani, patelle, nuvole, flutti, ranocchi, e in piu' certi indiani cosi selvaggi che non coltivavano la terra, non cacciavano, non raccoglievano bacche, non si riparavano dalle intemperie: possibile che tutto questo fosse un giorno uno Stato, capace di mandare al fronte i suoi volontari, agli ordini del favoloso generale Mellon?”⁶ Bianciardi concludes this short introduction with an observation that further explains his attraction to the work: “C'e' persino Henry Miller, fermo ad aspettare il postino nella sua vecchia Cadillac. E c'e' infine l'autore, che e' un matto, anzi un poeta. La letteratura che chiamiamo beat ha trovato il suo umorista.” Perhaps following the trails of their mythic mentor Henry Miller, both Brautigan in the Confederate General from Big Sur and Bianciardi in Aprire il fuoco, have their main characters escape from the city and seek refuge (or freedom) near the sea. By merging, or distorting, the present and the past in their respective works each author appears both to exalt the past from a nonconformist perspective (Brautigan: “while all around them waged the American Civil War, the last good time this country ever had,” 148; Bianciardi: “il piu' grandioso avvenimento [the Risorgimento] della storia italiana moderna,” Terrosi, 93) as well as to emphasize history's failings in changing the present. Brautigan's present day general is a “Confederate General in ruins” (20), while Bianciardi's adaption of the historical Five Days of Milan in 1848 to a contemporary setting of 1959 is viewed as a “Rivoluzione che ando' fallita” (170). In both works, past ideals which motivated the events like the Civil War, the desire to explore new frontiers, and the Risorgimento are now lost, distorted, or misdirected in a confused present, where freedom is more a state of mind, often induced by drink or other forms of drugs, rather than a reality. Ultimately, watching the whales at Big Sur in Confederate General or waiting for the dolphins to appear at Nesci⁷ (fictitious name for Rapallo) in Aprire il fuoco reflect the sense of resignation and futility that pervades each novel. Consequently, both novels conclude with the narrator's recognition that paradise or freedom have not and cannot be regained, that the good world or the glorious past are unattainable. In the Confederate General, this is reflected in the feeling of vacancy or tedium that overwhelms Jesse at the novel's conclusion (just a few short days after his arrival) as he is unable to find an authentic identity in an illusory world. The fact that he is ultimately more attracted to Elizabeth, the beautiful call girl from Los Angeles, who is on hiatus in Big Sur, than to the rebel Lee Mellon seems to imply that he still feels an urge to drop back into that society in which he felt so alienated. In other words, Big Sur is not, he learns, a long-term solution to his feeling of alienation. Similarly, from his exile in Nesci the revolutionary professor in Aprire il fuoco, having been deprived of a cause, sees no values in which to believe. The fact that he sees himself as a permanent “inquilino” confirms his sense of alienation and a feeling of not belonging. Having failed to re-ignite the mythical passions of the past, his only solution is death. In fact, the signal the revolutionary is waiting for to “aprire il fuoco” is really a presentiment of death. The bottle of grappa, always “a portata di mano” (22) of our “professor” in exile, is perhaps a momentary solution but not a conclusive one. On this note Maria Clotile Angelini writes: “l'alcol, che negli anni precedenti era stato la ‘carica’ necessaria per affrontare le conseguenze dell'isolata ribellione di ‘formica’ indocile, e' divenuto poi la droga e lo strumento di morte con cui annullare il fallimento di un'esistenza e lo scacco” (109). Henry Miller's advice “Stay put and watch the world go around!” does not seem to work any longer for either novelist. Miller, who inspired a literary spirit of rebellion in both Brautigan and Bianciardi, like the myths of the Civil War and the Risorgimento, seems to be a thing of the past and no longer a place to turn for solace. In fact in a letter dated February 23, 1968 Bianciardi writes about Miller: “sto traducendo un volume di saggi di Henry Miller, il quale invecchiando e' diventato mistico, e parla di continuo di Cristo, dicendo oltre tutto delle solenni fesserie” (“Brani di lettere inedite” 30). Similarly, the “beat's” life-style of drink and “dropping out” leads to a moribund existence, dictated by a deadening routine, as Bianciardi eloquently demonstrates in Aprire il fuoco. Calvino's description of Big Sur during his visit to the United States in 1959 appears to be prophetic, at least for Bianciardi. The latter's escape to his Big Sur in Liguria ultimately leads to drink and death. Calvino's observation that Henry Miller, a type of father to the beat generation and to Bianciardi “non riceve piu' nessuno” and that he [Calvino] “non ci starebbe morto” in Big Sur confirm his own rejection of isolation as the intellectual's way of combatting the system. In fact, Calvino further substantiates this conviction at the conclusion of his essay “I Beatniks e il ‘sistema”: “Vi diro' solo che non vorrei che la nuova generazione fosse una beat generation, ma vorrei che ereditasse insieme al nostro atteggiamento positivo verso la vita anche la nostra insopprimibile, amareggiante, sacrosanta insoddisfazione” (81). While Bianciardi clearly shares Calvino's dissatisfaction with the system, he, as an outsider, chooses to fight the battle alone. Bianciard's own experience, as depicted in La vita agra and Aprire il fuoco, tells us that his connection with the “Insiders” has been short-circuited. Consequently, Calvino's letter to Bianciardi of September 7, 1962, in which he expresses his dismay in the latter's choice of publishers for La vita agra, captures both Bianciardi's spirit of freedom as well as his inability to live within the system: “Caro Bianciardi, vedo il tuo libro annunciato nella pubblicita' di Rizzoli. Sei diventato matto?” (I libri degli altri 105).

Notes

1. Malley refers to Leslie Fiedler's study Love and Death in the American Novel in which the latter notes that this theme of man/men fleeing society is at the heart of many American literary classics. Malley writes: “In fact, Fiedler finds the legend of ‘Rip Van Winkle’—the man who cops out of his domestic duties by boozing off to sleep in the mountains—to be the central myth of our literature” (93).

2. This discussion of Bianciard's novel as an “angry” novel within the context of Calvino's essay “I beatniks e il ‘sistema” was previously included in my essay “The Emotional Deterioration of an Ordinary Man: Luciano Bianciardi and the ‘Miracle’ Years in Milan.” See 140-42.

3. In La vita agra, Bianciardi writes: “L'avrei pensata e l'avrei scritta come un bitnicco arrabbiato, dieci anni or sono, quando il signor Jacques Querouaques forse non aveva nemmeno imparato a tirarsi su i calzoni […] Provero' l'impasto linguistico, contaminando da par mio la alata di Ollesalvetti diobo,' e ‘u dialettu d'Ucurlais, il Molinari Enrico di New York […] (33-34).

4. We are reminded that Bianciardi translated both Tropic of Cancer (1962) and Tropic of Capricorn (1962), which resulted in legal battles and scandals due to content and language. In addition, Bianciardi translated in 1961 the anthology The Beat Generation and The Angry Young Men, choosing as his title Narratori della Generazione Alienata, just a year before the publication of La vita agra.

5. In his introduction to the novel Aprire il fuoco, Oreste Del Buono describes Bianciardi's non-conformist treatment of historical events and, in particular, to those related to the Risorgimento: “Il protagonista [of the novel], infatti, si dice in esilio per avere partecipato in Milano all'insurrezione armata del 1959. Del marzo 1959. Gia' perche' Bianciardi rifa' la storia delle cinque giornate care alla retorica risorgimentale spostandole, pero,' in tempi piu' prossimi, e confondendo e rimescolando personaggi di allora con personaggi di ora. Il risorgimento, lo studio non conformista, ma appassionato del risorgimento, costante della carriera di scrittore di Bianciardi” (iv-v).

6. Bianciardi's introductory comments to his translation of Il generale immaginario appear in the edition's back cover.

7. Zolita Louise Vella notes that Nesci is a “play on the Latin verb ‘nescio:’ to know not, to ignore, and a commonly used word in the Ligurean dialect that means idiot, stupid, ignorant” (154).

Works Cited

Angelini, Maria Clotilde. Luciano Bianciardi. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980.

Bianciardi, Luciano. La vita agra. 1962. Milan: Rizzoli, 1980.

———. Aprire il fuoco. 1969. Milan: Rizzoli, 1976.

———. Daghela avanti u passo! 1969. Milan: Longanesi & C., 1992.

———. “Brani da lettere inedite.” Confronti 3 (October 1972): 29-33.

Brautigan, Richard. Confederate General from Big Sur. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

———. Il generale immaginario. Trans. Luciano Bianciardi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1967.

Calvino, Italo. “I beatniks e il ‘sistema.” Una pietra sopra. Turin: Einaudi, 1980.

———. I libri degli altri. Ed. Giovanni Tesio. Turin: Einaudi, 1991.

———. Eremita a Parigi. Milan: Mondadori, 1994.

Chenetier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. London: Metheun, 1983.

Feldman, Gene and Max Grettenberg, eds. The Beat Generation and The Angry Young Men. New York: The Citadel Press, 1958.

———. Narratori della Generazione Alienata. Trans. Luciano Bianciardi. Parma: Guanda, 1961.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Richard Brautigan. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

Guerricchio, Rita. “La vita agra.” Luciano Bianciardi tra neocapitalismo e contestazione. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992.

Malley, Terrence. Richard Brautigan. New York: Warner, 1972.

Nava, Giuseppe. “L'opera di Bianciardi e la letteratura dei primi anni Sessanta.” Luciano Bianciardi tra neocapitalismo e contestazione.

Pietralunga, Mark. “The Emotional Deterioration of an Ordinary Man.” Italiana IV: Literature and Society. West Lafayette: Bordighiera, 1992.

Vella, Zolita Louise. Luciano Bianciardi: His Life and His Works. Image of a Dilemma. Diss. Columbia University, 1976. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1976. 76203998.