“Manhattans and more Manhattans and finally when we got back to the cabin… I was alone with this mad beatnik kid singing me songs and all I wanta do is sleep—But I’ve got to make the best of it and not disappoint his believing heart… My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing… But having one last quart of port with me I agree to follow him to the beach.” – Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

In the summer of 1960 Jack Kerouac was burned out. He was famous internationally due to the publication of On The Road (1957) and his drinking was out of control. Jack’s friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the renowned City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, invited him to spend the summer at his cabin in Bixby Canyon in Big Sur. Jack would be there by himself, no media, the beautiful Pacific coastline and the ocean all helping him get his head together.

The retreat did not go well. Kerouac’s alcoholism was too far along to deal with the isolation he experienced at Bixby Canyon. He continued to drink and had a breakdown. The following year, looking back at that time, Kerouac wrote Big Sur (1961), as close to a memoir as a novel can get.

Big Sur is the second Kerouac novel I have read. I have always been more of a fan of biographies about Kerouac than his novels. I read On The Road years ago and though I could see the writing talent, I found the book hard to get through. There is an aimless quality to On The Road in which Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and his friends drive across the country and back again. They have adventures but none that hooked me. I also never got what the big fuss was about Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady).

But I enjoyed Big Sur. Kerouac wrote his novels in what he referred to as spontaneous prose and he had real talent for this type of writing. And Big Sur has a depth to it that I found missing in On The Road. It’s the hangover after the party. And I learned a lot.

In Big Sur Jack Duluoz (Kerouac), while trying to rest and regroup in his cabin, is visited by a number of his friends, including Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady). Cody, fresh from prison for an overly harsh marijuana charge, is married with children and he is trying to be a good father and husband.

The problem are the other friends who arrive at Bixby Canyon, enablers in Jack’s self-destruction. And by the end of Big Sur, Jack Duluoz is in a bad way and maybe it was inevitable. When you are dealing with decades of drinking, a cabin in the woods is not going to work, a stay in the hospital might.

Big Sur has depth, lessons about life. Sream of consciousness writing is not easy to do but Jack Kerouac pulled it off and so my rating is 4 stars.