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Should you read this book? Well, to quote Jack Kerouac himself, “I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference."
What inspired me to read Big Sur, which I somehow skipped in all earlier Kerouac stints, was Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar's 2009 LP: One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. If you've not heard about the album, its genesis was Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas requesting songwriter Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) to compose some songs based on the Big Sur text for the soundtrack of a documentary film attempting to depict the period of Kerouac's life when he was dogged by the celebrity resulting from the big sales success of On The Road, trying to quit drinking and writing this novel.
According to Noel Murray's review of the album in the A.V. Club, the original intention was for a variety of name musicians to perform Farrar's compositions with him, but he clicked so well with Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) in preliminary production that the two of them completed all 12 tracks. The album is a damned fine listen in my opinion, but it’s the title track—which I believe I read somewhere is more a Gibbard than Farrar composition—that manages to illuminate something quintessential about my perceptions of Kerouac, particularly the Kerouac of this final novel who can look back on all the excesses and holy goofs from the roads of his erstwhile youth and wonder if it was all worth it. As far as I can tell, the only line in the song's lyric that comes from Big Sur is the title/chorus ("one fast move or I'm gone"), but all the other words ring true to the Kerouac I see in my mind's eye after having read seven of his novels and (a long time ago) Ann Charters' biography.
Listen to at least the title track yourself, paying close attention to the words. Whether it was Gibbard or Farrar (or both) who wrote them, they really hit upon what I see as the core of Kerouac. During one of my earliest times listening to the song, I found myself thinking of the beautifully turned close of the first chapter in Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, where a third person narrative voice, rarely if ever used in Kerouac's later work, describes the exterior of the Martin family's house: "When all the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off in the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the wind swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn—you could stand in old Galloway Road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever."
I'm not trying to romanticize the man. That has been done to death way before Gap used an airbrushed version of one of Jerry Yulsman's Kerouac photos to move units, before a living William Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial ("Who couldn't use such easy money, kid, I'm hustling myself," I can almost hear him croak in defense), in other words, before American commerce learned to pimp hip so hard that anyone foolish enough to be a true believer was left to wonder whether they missed the bang or whimper that had heralded everything cool tipping over into a vat of meretricious shit. But that too is a case of "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." More on that in a minute.
What I am trying to say is that the man could write and write well when he put his mind to it. One of the most important things a writer can do, besides tell a story, is make a reader feel something. And few writers can make me feel loneliness like Kerouac could. Similar to what Burroughs has written about Hemingway and the subject of death, loneliness was Kerouac's thing, his specialty. Sure, you find a fair share of exhilarating headlong rushes into life that "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding" in Kerouac's body of work but is it that much of a stretch to imagine those were inspired by the desire to take flight from a haunting inherent loneliness? And, I think, it's when his prose strives to convey the bedrock loneliness of the human condition—or at least his condition—that it really takes off to a place beyond ultimately predictable descriptions of what it feels like to be on the passenger side of car expertly driven at breakneck speeds.
Having decided to read Big Sur, I went online and bought a used copy of the original 1963 Bantam Books paperback edition (original cover price-75¢!). The synopsis blurb on the cover page is at least 75 cents worth of hilarity. Consider the following:
Clearly the boys in the marketing division of Bantam Paperback Books thought it best to reduce anything that might have been authentic, original, artistic or (god help us) hip about the novel to teaser copy that reads like it would have been more at home on a poster for a B-movie horror flick. This is what I meant by "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." The ad executives from a couple of yesteryears ago thought people could be swayed to buy Gap clothes if they were associated with the images of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac. Further back in '63 apparently some creepy Don Draper types thought the best way to sell Jack Kerouac’s final novel was to render an overview of it in third rate Mickey Spillane type bombast.
But, I can hear you asking through clenched teeth at this point, what did you think of the goddamned novel? When I told several people I planned to read it, I was warned that it’s a bleak, unsparing “breakdown” novel and that Kerouac would take me right along with him. That’s true enough. Yet for all the time Kerouac seemed to devote to working on his own unique style (his "spontaneous bop prosody," which was a double edged sword just as likely to turn him into a silly flibbertigibbet as help him produce searing, evocative prose), I get the sense that he didn’t spend too much time thinking about the structures into which he flaunted his style. Many chapters before the breakdown really manifests itself in his behavior, he makes numerous references to its pending arrival, so it comes off as less poignant and less visceral—to me—than it might have had it been allowed to gradually build with scant foreshadowing. Even so, as the book’s “plot” descended fully into Kerouac/Duluoz’s paranoia and delusion, I sensed an organic acceleration to the pace as if we were zooming ever faster toward a horrible crash. The description of his dream of the “vulture people” near the end is so weird and repulsive that—as another Goodreads review of this book mentioned—you absolutely don’t buy the “and then I woke up to find that I, and everything else, was just fine and dandy and golden” ending. In dramatic contrast to Visions of Cody (which I thought was a travesty), I’m glad I read Big Sur. Seldom did I find the book taking me away from myself in the way books that I think are truly great do, but it was aggressively honest of Kerouac to stick with his self-aggrandized autobiography as legend approach to his novels after things were not nearly as fun for him as they once were.
Here’s a thought that’s immediate, unrehearsed, unrevised and probably more than a little bit irresponsible (seems like Kerouac would, if not approve, perhaps recognize a kindred spirit): yesterday I listened to Mark Helprin being interviewed about his newest book In Sunlight and In Shadow. I’ve not read it yet nor have I read Helprin’s most famous book Winter’s Tale. I might find myself duly impressed—taken away from myself even—by either of those books when I do finally get around to reading them. But good lord almighty did the man sound so pedantic, so full of himself, so much like someone I would not want to sit down and have a beer with (I’m confident he would see no value in having any exchange with me either) and so convinced of his relevance, if not his superiority, that I shuddered.
When Kerouac, on the other hand, writes in Big Sur “Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth,” I feel like the human being who was on the other end of that writing would never have shoveled Helprin’s brand of shit in my direction for very long, even if I let him get away with it. But this—as I warned—is hardly a sensible position. Just pure gut. In this book, and in all of his others that I’ve read, Kerouac is interesting when he’s interesting and not when he’s not, but he’s always pure gut.
What inspired me to read Big Sur, which I somehow skipped in all earlier Kerouac stints, was Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar's 2009 LP: One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. If you've not heard about the album, its genesis was Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas requesting songwriter Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) to compose some songs based on the Big Sur text for the soundtrack of a documentary film attempting to depict the period of Kerouac's life when he was dogged by the celebrity resulting from the big sales success of On The Road, trying to quit drinking and writing this novel.
According to Noel Murray's review of the album in the A.V. Club, the original intention was for a variety of name musicians to perform Farrar's compositions with him, but he clicked so well with Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) in preliminary production that the two of them completed all 12 tracks. The album is a damned fine listen in my opinion, but it’s the title track—which I believe I read somewhere is more a Gibbard than Farrar composition—that manages to illuminate something quintessential about my perceptions of Kerouac, particularly the Kerouac of this final novel who can look back on all the excesses and holy goofs from the roads of his erstwhile youth and wonder if it was all worth it. As far as I can tell, the only line in the song's lyric that comes from Big Sur is the title/chorus ("one fast move or I'm gone"), but all the other words ring true to the Kerouac I see in my mind's eye after having read seven of his novels and (a long time ago) Ann Charters' biography.
Listen to at least the title track yourself, paying close attention to the words. Whether it was Gibbard or Farrar (or both) who wrote them, they really hit upon what I see as the core of Kerouac. During one of my earliest times listening to the song, I found myself thinking of the beautifully turned close of the first chapter in Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, where a third person narrative voice, rarely if ever used in Kerouac's later work, describes the exterior of the Martin family's house: "When all the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off in the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the wind swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn—you could stand in old Galloway Road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever."
I'm not trying to romanticize the man. That has been done to death way before Gap used an airbrushed version of one of Jerry Yulsman's Kerouac photos to move units, before a living William Burroughs starred in a Nike commercial ("Who couldn't use such easy money, kid, I'm hustling myself," I can almost hear him croak in defense), in other words, before American commerce learned to pimp hip so hard that anyone foolish enough to be a true believer was left to wonder whether they missed the bang or whimper that had heralded everything cool tipping over into a vat of meretricious shit. But that too is a case of "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." More on that in a minute.
What I am trying to say is that the man could write and write well when he put his mind to it. One of the most important things a writer can do, besides tell a story, is make a reader feel something. And few writers can make me feel loneliness like Kerouac could. Similar to what Burroughs has written about Hemingway and the subject of death, loneliness was Kerouac's thing, his specialty. Sure, you find a fair share of exhilarating headlong rushes into life that "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding" in Kerouac's body of work but is it that much of a stretch to imagine those were inspired by the desire to take flight from a haunting inherent loneliness? And, I think, it's when his prose strives to convey the bedrock loneliness of the human condition—or at least his condition—that it really takes off to a place beyond ultimately predictable descriptions of what it feels like to be on the passenger side of car expertly driven at breakneck speeds.
Having decided to read Big Sur, I went online and bought a used copy of the original 1963 Bantam Books paperback edition (original cover price-75¢!). The synopsis blurb on the cover page is at least 75 cents worth of hilarity. Consider the following:
A NIGHTMARE SUMMER
DULUOZ—The King of the Beatniks—tortured, broken idol of a whole generation; great modern sex god who just wanted to be alone with his cat; all-time boozer of the century who was slowly drinking himself out of his mind.
BILLIE—his fashion-model mistress who knew every dirty trick in the book. Duluoz was her man, meal ticket and stud rolled up into one, and she wasn't going to let him get away from her no matter what!
ELLIOT—Billie's son—he saw things that would make any adult flinch.
AND
BIG SUR—the lonely, wild surf-pounded shore where Duluoz went to hide; where the world tracked him down and made its final attempt to destroy him.
Clearly the boys in the marketing division of Bantam Paperback Books thought it best to reduce anything that might have been authentic, original, artistic or (god help us) hip about the novel to teaser copy that reads like it would have been more at home on a poster for a B-movie horror flick. This is what I meant by "twas ever thus, science and time have only made it worse." The ad executives from a couple of yesteryears ago thought people could be swayed to buy Gap clothes if they were associated with the images of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac. Further back in '63 apparently some creepy Don Draper types thought the best way to sell Jack Kerouac’s final novel was to render an overview of it in third rate Mickey Spillane type bombast.
But, I can hear you asking through clenched teeth at this point, what did you think of the goddamned novel? When I told several people I planned to read it, I was warned that it’s a bleak, unsparing “breakdown” novel and that Kerouac would take me right along with him. That’s true enough. Yet for all the time Kerouac seemed to devote to working on his own unique style (his "spontaneous bop prosody," which was a double edged sword just as likely to turn him into a silly flibbertigibbet as help him produce searing, evocative prose), I get the sense that he didn’t spend too much time thinking about the structures into which he flaunted his style. Many chapters before the breakdown really manifests itself in his behavior, he makes numerous references to its pending arrival, so it comes off as less poignant and less visceral—to me—than it might have had it been allowed to gradually build with scant foreshadowing. Even so, as the book’s “plot” descended fully into Kerouac/Duluoz’s paranoia and delusion, I sensed an organic acceleration to the pace as if we were zooming ever faster toward a horrible crash. The description of his dream of the “vulture people” near the end is so weird and repulsive that—as another Goodreads review of this book mentioned—you absolutely don’t buy the “and then I woke up to find that I, and everything else, was just fine and dandy and golden” ending. In dramatic contrast to Visions of Cody (which I thought was a travesty), I’m glad I read Big Sur. Seldom did I find the book taking me away from myself in the way books that I think are truly great do, but it was aggressively honest of Kerouac to stick with his self-aggrandized autobiography as legend approach to his novels after things were not nearly as fun for him as they once were.
Here’s a thought that’s immediate, unrehearsed, unrevised and probably more than a little bit irresponsible (seems like Kerouac would, if not approve, perhaps recognize a kindred spirit): yesterday I listened to Mark Helprin being interviewed about his newest book In Sunlight and In Shadow. I’ve not read it yet nor have I read Helprin’s most famous book Winter’s Tale. I might find myself duly impressed—taken away from myself even—by either of those books when I do finally get around to reading them. But good lord almighty did the man sound so pedantic, so full of himself, so much like someone I would not want to sit down and have a beer with (I’m confident he would see no value in having any exchange with me either) and so convinced of his relevance, if not his superiority, that I shuddered.
When Kerouac, on the other hand, writes in Big Sur “Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth,” I feel like the human being who was on the other end of that writing would never have shoveled Helprin’s brand of shit in my direction for very long, even if I let him get away with it. But this—as I warned—is hardly a sensible position. Just pure gut. In this book, and in all of his others that I’ve read, Kerouac is interesting when he’s interesting and not when he’s not, but he’s always pure gut.
