My final read for the #1962Club is by an author who’s meant an awful lot to me over the years – Jack Kerouac. I’ve talked before about how I first discovered the Beat writers in my teens, devouring all of their books, and although I’ve drifted away from their work for periods I still love their writing and get much out of it when I come back to the texts. So when I found that his novel “Big Sur” was published in 1962, I knew I would be revisiting it for the Club.

My original Panther edition from way back when plus a later copy – I confess I read the latter because my original is a bit crumbly and fragile…

The book is described as a novel, but like all Kerouac’s books it’s most definitely thinly veiled autobiography. Narrated by Kerouac’s alter ego, Jack Duluoz, it’s set in the time after he had become a famous author following the publication of “On the Road”, courted by the media and hounded by fans, keen to become ‘beatniks’ themselves. Burned out by this, Duluoz travels from the East Coast to the West, to meet up with his old beat buddies and try to escape the media attention. His friend Lorenzo Monsanto has arranged to lend him a cabin down by the sea where he can isolate, dry out from the demon drink and reset himself. After a drinking binge on his arrival in San Francisco, Duluoz finally makes it to the cabin and battles to develop an inner calm.

He seems to be succeeding, but the lure of company and booze is too strong and after three weeks he’s back in San Francisco, hooking up with his old hitching companion Cody Pomeray, and back on a bender again. The effects are instant and drastic, and in a desperate attempt to break free of this cycle, Duluoz makes a disastrous trip back to the cabin along with a couple of friends and one of Cody’s girlfriends. As my Offspring used to say, end well it will not…

It’s blue dusk all up and down the California world—Frisco glitters up ahead—Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we cant communicate them any more and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books—Too late, too late, the history of everything we’ve seen together and separately has become a library in itself—The shelves pile higher—They’re full of misty documents or documents of the Mist—The mind has convoluted in every tuckaway everywhichaway tuckered hole till there’s no more the expressing of our latest thoughts let alone old..

“Big Sur” is a very dark and honest piece of writing, wrenched from Kerouac’s soul in a Benny-induced ten-day frenzy in 1961. He foregrounds his eventual breakdown in the cabin from the start of the book, so the reader knows what is coming, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting. Kerouac spent much of his life oscillating between the wish for a quiet life of contemplation and the need to go out and party with his friends, getting rip-roaring drunk. That divided nature is a constant throughout his work, and although the alcohol made him loud and lively, there is the sense that he was an insecure man behind it all, trying to negotiate the conflict between the good Catholic boy he was brought up as and his wilder side.

Reading “Big Sur” again after so many years, I was very much struck by the struggle Jack was having in the wake of the success of “On The Road”. He alludes to it throughout “Sur”, relating crazy situations with people coming to his mother’s house (where he lived) to track down the ‘King of the Beats’ and the misconceptions that were held about him. “Road” covers events that took place in the late 1940s, and was written in 1951; it wasn’t published until 1957, and so by the time it and its author became famous, Kerouac was a much older and very different person to that young man hitching across the vast distances of the USA. The disjuncture between the “Road” character and the real man, all those years on, was hard for people to accept and understand, and I suspect had much to do with Kerouac’s retreat into alcohol.

…after all the poor kid actually believes that there’s something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I’m supposed to be the King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I’m sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I’ll jump up and down and say yes yes that’s right, which I cant do any more—My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing—Like those pathetic five highschool kids who all came to my door in Long Island one night wearing jackets that said “Dharma Bums” on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old according to a mistake on a book jacket and here I am old enough to be their father…

Putting all that aside, though, how does the book stand up on this re-read? Well, I haven’t read “Big Sur” for some time, and my last revisit must have been pre-blog. So I approached it remembering the outline, but not the detail, and my main take from it is how much I love Kerouac’s prose. I remember being hypnotised by that from the start when I first encountered it in “The Dharma Bums”, a book I read in college. I loved his poetic, long and looping sentences, his stream of consciousness, his lack of conventional sentence structure. His voice seemed so distinctive and individual and it still does – everything came alive as I read “Big Sur”, the creek, the cabin, the sea, San Francisco, the madcap group barrelling down the highway off in search of adventure. Kerouac’s description of the breakdown is dark, vivid and unforgettable, and it’s a measure of his skill as a writer that he can take such a devastating experience and render it in prose. Quite breathtaking.

Reading the Beat writers in the 21st century is not without its issues, of course; their attitudes to women were extremely problematic (to say the least); racial terminology is old-fashioned and when Duluoz is at the height of his mania, his paranoia extends to persons of colour. My usual approach to this is to look at a book in context, acknowledging it is of its time, which I did here. And many of Kerouac’s attitudes are interesting; he recognised early on the pathAmerica was taking into conformity and mass market culture, and that comes out in his criticisms of ‘straights’; he lambasts the plastic families he sees driving past him while he attempts to hitchhike, products of the American consumer society which had been developing through the 1950s and into the 1960s. However, what I take most of all from “Big Sur” is a stunning and beautifully written self-portrait of a man at breaking point, who still finds moments of glory in life; and also a sad reminder of how Kerouac’s life would continue to deteriorate from that point until his early death in 1969.

But it is beautiful especially to see up ahead north a vast expanse of curving seacoast with inland mountains dreaming under slow clouds, like a scene of ancient Spain, or properly really like a scene of the real essentially Spanish California, the old Monterey pirate coast right there, you can see what the Spaniards must’ve thought when they came around the bend in their magnificent sloopies and saw all that dreaming fatland beyond the seashore whitecap doormat—Like the land of gold—The old Monterey and Big Sur and Santa Cruz magic—So I confidently adjust my pack straps and start trudging down the road looking back over my shoulder to thumb.

Had it not been for the #1962Club I doubt I would have picked this book up for a re-read right now, but I’m so glad I did. It was a moving and hypnotic experience, and I’m actually now wondering if I can fit in some further Kerouac revisits. I had a very profoundly affecting time reading the ‘scroll’ version of “Road” back in 2013, and I think some of his other works definitely warrant digging out from the shelves. But for now, I shall imagine Kerouac in his more peaceful moments, sitting at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and staring at the stars while he contemplates the universe…