Source of book: I own this.
This was this month’s “Make it a Double” selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. Starting this year, because a bunch of us have a bit of extra time on our hands due to a certain malevolent virus, our hosts decided to add an optional second book for those who wanted a bit more to discuss. In this case, Big Sur was the very first book the club discussed, a full decade ago, long before I joined it. The leaders of the group wanted to revisit it, and a few of us wanted to read it for the first time. Having read and enjoyed The Dharma Bums and Joyce Johnson’s biography of Kerouac, The Voice Is All, I was happy to give this one a try. My book also included the long poem that Kerouac wrote on the beach during the visit to the cabin, “Sea,” so I read that as well.
I was confirmed in my earlier impressions of Kerouac’s writing. It is unique, if often imitated now, and appeals to me in its style. There were so many moments of brilliant description in Big Sur, moments of insight and truth, and memorable phrases. And also, there was a never-ending sequence of truly terrible personal decisions made by Kerouac, whose awareness of his self-destructive tendencies never made him actually change. The Dharma Bums is a bit more of a positive book, written about an earlier time, before Kerouac was as famous or wealthy, and still expected to find the epiphany that would change his life. To quote Johnson about how Kerouac was in real life:
“Jack seemed to be hoping that the voyage would be a cleansing and transformative experience from which he would emerge renewed like a character in a novel.”
By the time we get to Big Sur, Kerouac is even more badly alcoholic than he was, and life seems more depressing to him. By the end of the book, he has drunk himself nearly to death twice, and driven himself into an alcohol-fueled paranoia and break with reality. And also, well, I will have to tell about that later in this post. Let’s just say that the decisions he made were...not good.
Like most of Kerouac’s books, they are largely autobiographical, and tell of other real people under assumed names that vary from book to book. (Apparently at the insistence of his publisher, who was afraid of libel lawsuits. Although, honestly, Kerouac doesn’t really slander his friends - he is always the worst person in his books.)
Another difference from The Dharma Bums is that Big Sur is much less sprawling, and seems to have an actual narrative arc and plan to it. Which is fascinating, considering Kerouac sat down and typed it over a mere ten day period, and, as was his practice, didn’t edit it. That it holds together as a coherent work is a testament to both Kerouac’s skill as a writer, and his ability to work out his books in his head before he wrote.
The book opens with Kerouac waking up in a San Francisco hotel room after a drunken bender that left him unconscious for two days. His plan had been to accept Lawrence Ferlighetti’s invite to his primitive Big Sur cabin, quietly stay there for a few weeks, then surprise his friends at his arrival. Instead, he goes to Ferlinghetti’s book store (still in existence, although Ferlinghetti just passed), runs into friends, and goes out and drinks all night.
Eventually, he does make it out to the cabin, in the first of three visits recounted in the book. For this one, he is alone, and eventually goes stir crazy after a couple weeks, and goes back to San Francisco for company. The other visits are more social, with various and changing casts of characters sharing the place with him.
The famous Big Sur Cabin - the small size explains why many ended up sleeping outside.
Right before the final visit, Kerouac meets up with Neal Cassady (Cody in the book) - his weirdly homoerotic-but-not-sexual-bro-crush - and ends up making one of the worst decisions of the book. Basically, Cassady is married with kids now, but has a girl on the side, Billie. Wanting to cut ties with Billie, Cassady pushes her off on Kerouac. The two of them hook up, and Kerouac ends up living with her for a while, drinking himself into a stupor during the day, and having wild sex (often in front of her kid) in the evenings. Before taking her and the kid to the Big Sur cabin for the final visit (when he goes crazy), he has the brilliant idea of introducing Billie to Cassady’s wife, which goes about as well as expected. See, great decisions, made under the influence of cheap booze. Of course, Cassidy was no better, married to Caroline, bigamously married to another woman, keeping multiple mistresses, and occasionally sleeping with Allen Ginsberg. I honestly do not understand the magnetic attraction Cassidy had for so many people.
The book ends with Kerouac’s breakdown, and the first glimmers of a (brief) sobriety afterward.
I feel like I could pick so many of the descriptions to quote, but I settled on just a few. Kerouac’s writing is kind of like poetry or jazz or a free-flowing stream of consciousness, with neither sentences nor normal punctuation. Here is how he saw the cove at Bixby Canyon - the site of the iconic Highway 1 bridge, and accessible only by cabin owners and their guests.
Big elbows of Rock rising everywhere, sea caves within them, seas plollocking all around inside them crashing out foams, the boom and pound on the sand, the sand dipping quick (no Malibu Beach here) - Yet you turn and see the pleasant woods winding upcreek like a picture in Vermont - But you look up into the sky, bend way back, my God you’re standing directly under that arial bridge with its thin white line running from rock to rock and witless cars racing across it like dreams! From rock to rock! All the way down that raging coast! So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has that reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.
Already, by the end of the passage, you can see that his love of the natural beauty is turning sour and paranoid. One of the brilliant things about the book is how the change happens bit by bit, until everything crashes onto the sand, so to speak. It feels like a giant wave that obliterates all that is good in Kerouac’s life.
And such things - A whole mess of little joys like that amazing me when I came back in the horror of later to see how they’d changed and become sinister, even my poor little wood platform and mill race when my eyes and my stomach nauseous and my soul screaming a thousand babbling words, oh - It’s hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.
By the time of the second visit to the cabin, his language had turned to things like this:
But the new Big Sun Autumn was now all winey sparkling blue which made the terribleness and giantness of the coast all the more clear to see in all its gruesome splendor, miles and miles of it snaking away south, our three jeeps twisting and turning the increasing curves, sheer drops at our sides, further ghostly high bridges to cross with smashings below - Tho the boys are wowing to see it - To me it’s just an inhospitable madhouse of the earth, I’ve seen it enough and even swallowed it in that deep breath -
One of the poignant events after he returns to the city is that Ferlinghetti informs him that his mother wrote to tell him that his beloved cat had died. Kerouac - like myself - was a cat person, and it really affected him. It haunts him later in the book, even though he knows that Tyke was really old at that point.
Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother - I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting - He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he’d just purr, he had complete confidence in me -
Another interesting description was made by Lew Welch (Dave Wain in the book), a more minor poet who was, believe it or not, Huey Lewis’ stepfather, describing Jarry Heiserberg.
“On a sort of pilgrimage, see, with all that youth, us old fucks oughta take a lesson from him, in faith too, he has faith, I can see it in his eyes, he has faith in any direction he may take with anyone just like Christ I guess.”
(Side note here: my edition has a section in the back with all of the real-life people and their names in the various books. It’s super helpful.)
My general opinion is that male writers aren’t particularly good at writing about sex - I think the rule is pretty solid - but I actually liked a passage in this book.
At first of course it’s a great ball, a great new eye-shattering explosion of experience - Not dreaming, I, what’s to come - For with sad musical Billie in my arms and my name Billie too now, Billie and Billie arm in arm, oh beautiful, and Cody has given his consent in a way, we go roaming the Genghiz Khan clouds of soft love and hope and anybody who’s never done this is crazy - Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah’d and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love - Don’t let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of love, it’s awful, we’re stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama - Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow - The secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan and Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under the fall leaves.
“Clashing wits and bodies” is perhaps my favorite Kerouac phrase of all time. Unfortunately, much of the rest of what Kerouac says about Billie in the book is quite sexist. This despite the fact that she (and the other women in his life) are the stable, responsible ones who tend to support the men financially and emotionally. The 1950s weren’t the only sexist era, of course, but those who remember them with a rose-tinted vision of loving and considerate men are creating a false reality. Of course there were good men. But even they usually expected women to take care of them in multiple ways.
There is also a hilarious chapter consisting mostly of a conversation between Kerouac and Dave (Lew Welch) when Kerouac invites him and his wife to the cabin. I won’t quote it all, but one line was particularly fun.
“And what’s the purpose of all this?” - “Ah, Daddy, maybe just to see you again and we can talk about purposes anywhere: you wanta go on a lecture tour to Utah university and Brown university and tell the well scrubbed kids?” - “Scrubbed with what?” - “Scrubbed with hopeless perfection of pioneer puritan hope that leaves nothing but dead pigeons to look at?”
That’s kind of an interesting take on the jingoistic history education we still have here in the US, actually. “Hopeless perfection of pioneer puritan hope.”
The final breakdown is harrowing. It goes on for chapters, but here is a central passage.
But here I am again mooning by the creek hiding from all of them each five minutes tho I can’t understand what makes me do it - I HAVE to get out of there - But I have no right to STAY AWAY - So I keep coming back but it’s all an insane revolving automatic directionless circle of anxiety, back and forth, around and around, till they’re really by now so perturbed by my increasing silent departures and creepy returns they’re all sitting without a word by the stove but now their heads are together and they’re whispering - From the woods I see those three shadowy heads whispering me by the stove - What’s Dave saying? - And why do they look like they’re plotting something further? - Can it be it was all arranged by Dave Wain and Cody that I would meet Billie and be driven mad and now they’ve got me alone in the woods and are going to give me final poisons tonight that will utterly remove all my control so that in the morning I’ll have to go to a hospital forever and never write another line?
And on and on it goes, getting more and more insane and conspiratorial. At least Kerouac could blame the ethanol - not sure how Q Anon followers found themselves sounding like alcoholics who have blasted their brains into a neuron storm…
The book ends positively, however. Kerouac finally is able to sleep, and wakes up sober and clear headed for the first time in weeks. Alas, it wouldn’t last, and even the writing of the book wasn’t enough to get Kerouac off the sauce - he would die of alcohol-related issues barely older than I am. The final line is memorable:
There’s no need to say another word.
***
“Sea,” the poem, was written during the first visit to Ferlinghetti cabin. It is very much a free verse, stream of consciousness, free form improvisation. Parts of it are in French - Kerouac’s first language - and even the parts in English contain words from French and Spanish mixed in here and there. Many of the words related to sounds are invented. It is an interesting experience to read, very much about the atmosphere rather than meaning.
Kerouac seems haunted by the seeming emptiness of the sea, and the fact that the land itself consists of rock layers laid down millions or billions of years ago. The sea itself seems ancient, and mankind so brief and insignificant. The poem takes up 19 pages in my edition, and rambles quite a bit. But it is a poem, after all, and the journey is the point. Here are my favorite sections:
Shoo-----Shaw-----Shirsh-----
Go on die salt light
You billion yeared
rock knocker
Gavroom
Seabird
Gabroobird
Sad as wife & hill
Loved as mother & fog
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Sea! Osh!
Where’s yr little Neppytune
tonight?
Neptune now his arms extends
while one millions of souls
sit lit in caves of darkness
The woman with her body
in the sea------The frog who
never moves & thunders, sharsh
------The snake with his body
under the sand------The dog
with the light on his nose,
supine, with shoulders so
enormous they reach back to
rain crack------These leaves hasten
to the sea------We let them
hasten to be wetted & give
em that old salt change, a
nuder think will make you see
they originate from the We Sea
anyway------No dooming booms
on sunday afternoons------We
run thru the core of cliffs,
blam up caves, disengage no
jelly or jellied pendant
thinkers------
Our armies of
anchored seaweed in the
coves give of the smell
of jellied salt------
With weeds your roses,
sand crabs your hummers?
With buzzers in the sea!
With runners in the deep!
This Sceptred Osh, this wide leg
spanning rock U.S. to rock
Ja Pan, this onstable
roller roaming all,
this ploosher at yr gory
dry dung door, this mouth
of silverwhite arring to hold thee,
this purger of conscience
arra for thee------
No mouse in here but’s got
a little glee------and
aft, or oft, the osprey
in his glee’s agley------
Oh purty purty ocean
me------
Sop! bring the Scepter down
Again you’ve accepted me!
That is enough to give the idea a bit. It definitely fits with the book itself, filling in some of the gaps in what he describes and giving form to his extended time on the beach. I would recommend reading them together if you can.
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