Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

America fiction

Source – personal copy

I had looked down the list of books from 1962, and I had quite a few on my shelves, so I decided rather than buy in books I had before for some other clubs. So this is a reread, a rare reread, but I read it in my teens, and I think I may have reread it when I got the current copy I have of this book it. I was a hge fan of Kerouac, but I tried last year to read a copy of On the Road I had been sent. Honestly, I just couldn’t get into it. I often hear people talking about books feeling different at various readings and ages, but I wonder if we grow out of writers. I think Kerouac is a writer a lot of males in their late teens fall in love with his sense of adventure and rule-breaking appeals at that age. His books are largely autobiographical, and this is the same with this book which followed three visits he had made to a cabin in Big Sur. He maybe managed to catch him as a writer with drug issues as, over the three visits to the cabin in the woods, he seems to have become more drug-addicted, and his sanity is drifting.

“And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I’ll do in three weeks only) ‘no more dissipation, it’s time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that’s it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony…it’s time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time…Yay, for this, more aloneness

I like this description of Big sur and the effect on him.

Jack Duluoz, who is basically Kerouac himself, is a beat writer starting to gain success as a writer and the pressure that follows that so much. He decides he needs to escape the city, and his friend Lorenzo (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) has a cabin in Big Sur, so he heads up there. He is trying to capture the sense of solitude and nature (I felt he was trying to do a  Walden in a way back to nature and clear his mind after the first visit we follow him back to the city, but this is a man who is starting to fray at the edges his drinking is increasing and mental health is suffering as he deals with his friend Cody and his wife Bily who is struggling with her own mental health issues. As his mind starts to drift, he goes back, but the other visit, the sense he got on the first visit is gone in fact, they make him worse this is a man struggling with the bottle and the pressure of fame. In a way, this may be one of the first novels that deals with celebrity, as Kerouac is writing about his struggles with the bottle and his own sanity at times.

Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night’s drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there’ll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you’re chemically overloaded and you’ll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in ― Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)… well, there’s more of that up later.

This quote aout drinkers remind me of my 20s I drank to much and now rarely drink but had times like these.

Like most of his novels, he wrote this book in a few days on a roll of paper like he did On The road. He wrote this book in ten days, and there is a sense of a man struggling with fame and addiction. This is maybe the start of his downfall. He died seven years after writing this book in the early sixties, but this was maybe his last great novel, although I do love his later novellas. Now I found this okay I wasn’t as connected as I was in my twenties. I feel now it is a great portrait of fame and the price of fame but also about escaping to nature to recharge all ring true these days. I had watched the film of this a few years ago, but I remember it being a middling film as there seemed to have been a few films around the beat writer in a few years. Have you read This Kerouac or any of the others he wrote?

Winston score – B the price of fame and its effects on your mental health captured in the early days of celebrity.