Coastal stories—a book review…
Kerouac on the coast: Big Sur
I USED TO STAY at the community atop the rainforest escarpment above Broken Head where my partner lived among the carpet pythons, the brown tree snakes and the green frogs. When she drove off to work of mornings I would sometimes drive her van down to Broken Head and wander along the scalloped beaches and over the rainforest headlands that make up the bushland reserve.
Here, the coast offered an exhilerating ruggedness where the escarpment fell to the sea in a confusion of rock and sand. Within the forest of olive-green eucalypts and bangalow palms that clad the escarment it was a still, humid world of ferns and the scurrying sounds of unseen creatures in the undergrowth. It took awhile to figure out why this coast reminded me of something. Then I realised what it was. Sure, Broken Head wasn’t Big Sur. In comparison it wasn’t even a microcosm of it. It was just that I made some kind of spurious connection between the place and reading Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur at the time.
Serendipity, the property atop the escarpment that my partner called home, was rainforest-wrapped and mosquito-infested. Just down the road was veteran surfing movie producer George Greenough’s pyramidal house sticking up above the rainforest. But there was no one like Jack Kerouac living here at Broken Head in a shack like he and others occupied at Big Sur, although the residents of the community my partner called home lived in shacks around a big community house. Living there too was the property owner, Ian Cohen, environmental campaigner, later state MP, surfer. He was an established presence on the coast, I guess you would call it, thanks to his high-profile environemntal campaigning which garnered a lot of support.
Big Sur. Twice, maybe three times I’ve read the book and I’ve watched the movie. The book… it must have been in the 1980s or the following decade that I first read it. It forms the sad final volume of my three favourite Kerouac novels that started, chronologically, with The Dhamma Bums, then the discovery of On The Road leading on to Big Sur with Desolation Angels and other Kerouac works in between. On the Road documented in novel form Kerouac’s 1947 journey across the US, New York to San Francisco. The book was published a decade later.
As with The Dhamma Bums, I enjoyed On the Road because of Kerouac’s writing style and the loose, aimless lifestyle of he and his friends. It wasn’t just me. It seemed others of my generation found the lifestyle appealing too. I think it had much to do with the then-rising popularity of the US folk music scene, particularly the songs of veteran folk singer Pete Seeger and someone new to the music scene, Bob Dylan. Inspired, some set out on their own road trips while most of us were content to read about it. My road trips at the time were solo car journeys to the NSW Far North Coast and northward made during my holidays from work.
Like Big Sur, On The Road was made into a film. I found the movie lacking in some quality that, not having any of the mental tools of the film critic, I can’t quite define. I usually find films based on books bear only a superficial resemblance to their print counterparts.
Big Sur the movie was different. There’s much narration from the book and I found the film parallels the book closely. The visual portrayal of Bixby Canyon where Kerouac sought escape in 1960 from the attention that the success of On The Road brought portrays the forest and the rugged Big Sur coast, the trail to the cabin through the bush and the highway where it crosses the canyon on that high, elegantly-arched bridge.
The story goes that, seeking refuge, Kerouac journeys to the West Coast and after a binge drinking session with his Beats friends in San Francisco he makes it to Bixby Canyon, to the shack of his friend, the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Here, he writes reflectively and comments on the popular perception of himself, contrasting that to the reality…
“…there’s my hopeful rucksack all neatly packed with everything necessary to live in the woods, even unto the minutest first aid kit and diet details and even a neat little sewing kit cleverly reinforced by my good mother (like extra safety pins, buttons, special sewing needles, little aluminum scissors)…
“…all over America high school and college kids thinking ‘Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking’ while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded…”
Kerouac’s first stay was one of three he spent in the shack, the others often in company of his Beats friends from the city. But here, alone, you get the picture of how Kerouac struggled with life. He wanted to escape the city and popularity but once at the shack he pines for the city and his friends…
“…and it’s finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for cities at last…”
And so it goes… canyon to city to binge drinking… and back again, city to canyon. Until, leading to a transition point in the film, he has a delirium breakdown, falls asleep and awakes seemingly a changed man whereupon he realises he must once again make that transcontinental journey back to his mothers’ home in New York. Transition, both downwards and upwards and from city to shack runs as a theme in the film as it ran through this period of Kerouac’s life.
When I was living in a little shack, alternately freezing through the winters and baking through the summers in the uninsulated little building among the fruit trees and chooks in a backyard in coastal Manly, I would visit a second-hand bookshop in town that featured a rack of titles by the Beats. Once, I asked the young woman behind the counter at Desire Books who bought these titles. She told me that young people were starting to read the stuff. I found that interesting. Could it be, I asked myself, that they are discovering Kerouac just as I had done at a similar time of life? I hope so.
More travels in the imagination with PacificEdge…
