I was trapped in the amniotic sac of Kerouacâs Big Sur for weeks. I couldnât finish the book and âget born,â as Bob Dylan would say. It was like a safe space where I could hide from the prospect of starting other books.
I would like to say it was a pleasant reading experience but it turned out not being. My priorities were fucked. The book is 216 pages long and I tore through the first 170 or so just fine but then paused there at the end for too long. I partially blame Kerouac for this abruptness. Kerouac is famously something of a shapeless writer, or at least, if he works in shapes they are too subtle for me to discern.
The novel is about a writer named Jack Duluoz who is being celebrated as the âKing of the Beatniks,â after writing a hit novel about the experience of living a beat existence. He travels from the east coast to visit his friend Monsanto who runs a bookstore in San Francisco, and who is willing to let Duluoz stay in his cabin in Big Sur for a spell, to âget away from people.â Monsanto is the stand-in for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Iâm sure that every character in Big Sur, as a roman a clef, corresponds to a real person in Kerouacâs life, but Iâm too exhausted to look up who is who exactly. One of the remarkable features of the Beat Generation is that if youâre shallow like me youâre aware that there is a quite large body of âminor Beatsâ supporting the big threeâKerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughsâwho have become anonymous to all but the researchers and the devotees, aware but unmoved to learn their names.
Duluoz is moved by the nature and solitude he experiences at the cabin at Big Sur, and the first part of the novel reflects this. He establishes a routine and learns the rhythms of the idyll there, the fierce ocean that speaks to him, the animals that visit him looking for food. He achieves a Zen-like level of careless concentration among the trees and the weather and the universe.
And then he goes and fucks it all up by needing people and alcohol. It wouldnât have been a novel, I suppose, if he had just stayed in Thoreau-land, but you read the novel slapping your forehead that he repeatedly has to indulge the extroverted beatnik side which catches a bus back to San Francisco to hang out with his friends. Reading this in the forced isolation of COVID-19 was a strange experience. Maybe I envied Duluoz the freedom to go out and physically find his community and party. It was another time.
The patterns of his self-destructive behavior were all too true to life, I assume. Kerouac famously died of alcohol-induced bad health, hemorrhaging blood at the very end of his life back east with his mother. Duluoz hooks up with his network of friends and gets sauced. He seems to be at least vaguely aware that this life is not good for him but he doesnât have access to the full insight that he could change. Iâm speaking from a position of sober judgment and privilege, one could say, when I say that Duluoz was exasperating.
Duluoz reconnects with his friend Cody Pomeroy who corresponds to Neal Cassidy in reality: the famous beatnik bromance. Codyâs been in prison and they go on a tear driving all over that part of California. Cody introduces Jack to a woman named Billie, part of Codyâs love-web. Cody is something of a pimp and panderer and this is how you get a woman in this world, apparently. Jack gets ensnared with Billie, who is a single mother with a kid Elliott, and she falls hard for Jack. They all go out to Big Sur and shirk responsibility in various ways. Jack is too soused and neurotic to make love to Billie (the kid is always right there as well, Billie trying to initiate sex while her kid is pulling on her leg, not conducive to amorous activity I should think).
I take some blame for not interacting with the novel in an optimal level I admit. I felt at the end I just didnât care, and was bitter than all the concentration went out of me. This novel was called by somebody âthe one novel to read if youâre trying to figure out what all the fuss is about with the Beats.â (Paraphrasing.) The highlights of the novel for me were not the plot (didnât seem to be one, a premonition of contemporary autofictional maneuvers?) but the poetic rush of Jackâs inner life as he described events and other people and the madness of that life. Maybe it needs to be reread but I canât do that, too many other, more recent, more relevant books to read.