Jack Kerouac is the kind of author that you either get or you don’t. The people who don’t get him usually hate him and to be fair, a lot of the people who love him don’t really get him either. The ones who do get him are those who read and re-read most of his works over and over again, discovering something new each time they burn through one of his novels. Kerouac’s works really do get richer with repeated readings and when you begin to see the broad patterns across his books, you realize how organically interconnected the entire oeuvre actually is. Of course, some of his writing are forgettable; his poetry is first to come to mind, Satori in Paris could be skipped, and Book of Dreams can be taken or left alone although I think it is worth at least a quick skim since the dream he has where is sitting on the toilet and eating the toilet paper instead of using it for its intended purpose is bizarre and hilarious. His later work, Big Sur, is necessary since it shows where Kerouac ended up in life; it refers back to other books he wrote in a significant way and acts as a sad and depressing culmination of a life lived too fast.
This short novel starts with Jack Duluoz sinking into a drunken depression in San Francisco. After becoming a famous author, he isn’t happy or comfortable with the attention he gets and drinks himself into a stupor night after night while sleeping in a cheap hotel. He decides to sober up and reconnect with himself and his spirituality while staying in a cabin at Big Sur, the canyon and beach head just outside of the city. Experienced Kerouac readers will see the connection here with the time he spends on Desolation Peak in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. At Big Sur, Duluoz tries to complete what he didn’t finish on Desolation Peak. Like some kind of Pagan faun, he wants to connect with nature while at the same time reaching Buddhist enlightenment and atonement with the Catholic God, all the while writing about the experience. Instead of rapturous ecstasy, his encounter with the massive waves of the Pacific Ocean is sublime, scaring him half to death while casting an even darker shadow over his existence than what was there before. He also walks in the canyon and relaxes by the creek and these passages about nature are some of the most lyrical, rhythmic, and melodious prose that Kerouac ever wrote. His writings about forests and mountains often sound like joyous Elysian music being played softly on a flute.
The solitude and the overbearing sound of the ocean start to get to him so Duluoz heads back to San Francisco to party with his friends. He is possessed of a never ending restlessness and can never stay in one place for long. When Jack Duluoz is in the city he longs to be in the wilderness and when in the wilderness he longs to be in the city. Back in San Francisco he meets up with Lorenzo Monsanto (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and a couple other guys. They hang out, get drunk, and do the usual Beat Generation things. They get tired of being in the city so Duluoz takes them all out to the cabin at Big Sur. The parties start off well but then Duluoz gets drunk and depressed so they follow him back to San Francisco. He bounces back and forth like this throughout the novel. This is standard Kerouac writing though with the difference that his mood swings start slowly creeping into the narrative.
Along the way, Jack Duluoz reconnects with his old friend (significant other? Muse? Latent homosexual lover?) Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady) and his wife Evelyn (Carolyn Cassady). Many references are made back to On the Road and it seems as if Duluoz is trying to recreate the good times he had when they were young. But Cody is married with children and a little mellower. Duluoz doesn’t hesitate to mention that Cody had always shared Evelyn sexually with him. In fact, Cody has a new mistress named Billie and he is eager to have Jack Duluoz meet her so they can sleep together. Jack and Cody had always had a curious habit of sharing their sexual partners with each other. (Check out Carolyn Cassady’s writings for further insight into this. She says that they were simultaneously her two husbands).
Billie lives in an apartment with her son Elliot and hangs out with a rough crowd. When Duluoz starts sleeping with her and staying at her place, everything starts going to hell. He starts drinking heavily and falls into a pit of drunkenness, depression, and self-loathing. He decides one last time to go back to Big Sur with Billie and Elliot. They are accompanies by his poet friend Dave Wain (Lew Welch, a Beat Generation poet who later committed suicide) and his nudist Romanian girlfriend named Romana. With each succeeding visit to Big Sur, Duluoz gets more crazy and unhappy. This time he hits rock bottom. He keeps getting more and more drunk while falling into an abyss of dipsomania, delirium tremens, hallucinations, paranoia, despair and an almost complete nervous breakdown. In one of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs “Ballad Of a Thin Man” he sings “something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr Jones?”. This line could have been about Jack Duluoz at Big Sur but the name “Duluoz” doesn’t really harmonize well with the music (but Bob Dylan never really was a master of harmony anyways, was he?). Billie doesn’t react to his insanity in a sympathetic way either. She switches from insisting that she can save him by marrying him but then flies into rages where she beats her son and threatens to commit suicide while Duluoz’s nerves are so frayed he can’t comprehend what is really happening. Dave Wain and Romana are too drunk and too busy having sex in the woods to acknowledge Duluoz’s mental collapse as well.
For the first three quarters of Big Sur it appears that Jack Duluoz is at the onset of his mid-life crisis but this turns into a full on psychotic episode that takes on the dimensions of a personal apocalypse. In some ways, the end of the novel reads like a retelling of the climax of Dr. Sax. Remember his vision of the massive snake that devours the entire world? Big Sur, in the end, is like yet another Catholic Armageddon mental meltdown. But this time it is more harrowing, hopeless, and frightening than anything else Kerouac has ever written. Big Sur might even be a borderline horror novel. Part of what makes it so disturbing is that Kerouac had a talent for such honest and personal writing that a reader can feel as if they are on intimate terms with him, as though Kerouac is a close friend and companion. When he plunges into insanity, you go along with him and end up hurting just as badly as he does. Being inside his mind as he self-destructs is even more painful when you remember what a gentle and kindhearted literary persona he built up in his previous works. But then you can’t be surprised because he lived so fast and hard that he could do nothing in the end but crash and burn. Neil Young sings that it’s better to burn out than to fade away and this novel is Kerouac’s moment of burning out.
Severe alcoholism is a disease and it was an illness that obviously afflicted Jack Kerouac. He probably had some some underlying mental health issues too. If he had sought treatment for his problems would he have written all these great books? Only lovers of Kerouac’s writing should be allowed to contemplate that answer. The rest of you can just shut the fuck up.
So now Big Sur will go back on my shelf, along with all my other Jack Kerouac paperbacks, to wait a few more years when I begin re-reading his whole literary cycle again. As I have gotten older his books have become more meaningful to me. The span that stretches from The Town and the City to Big Sur is an odyssey like The Lord Of the Rings only it isn’t mythical or fantastic. It is realistic and personal.
Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. Penguin Books, New York: 1992.
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