Kerouac's Breakdown at Bixby Canyon

Three years after "On the Road" made him famous, Jack Kerouac was in a bad way. The novel had sold, the interviews had accumulated, the strangers had arrived at his mother's door expecting to meet the king of the open road, and what they found instead was a man who had not wanted any of it in exactly the way it came. In the summer of nineteen sixty, Kerouac took the train west and walked into Bixby Canyon carrying a sleeping bag and a case of wine.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco bookseller and poet who had published "Howl" and who owned a cabin in the canyon, had offered him the place as a refuge. Kerouac arrived expecting to find quiet. He found the opposite of quiet inside himself.

What happened in that canyon over three weeks is documented in the novel "Big Sur," published in nineteen sixty-two. Kerouac describes panic attacks on the beach at night, the surf loud enough to feel like a physical threat, auditory hallucinations in the dark of the canyon walls. He describes what he calls a vision of the Cross written in the stars above the Pacific, terrifying and involuntary. He is forty years old, drunk most of the time, and the fame that was supposed to validate him has instead exposed every fissure.

"Big Sur" is one of the most unguarded accounts of collapse in American literature. It does not romanticize the breakdown. Kerouac is not Hemingway contemplating his wound; he is frightened, and he says so on every page. The road-trip optimism of "On the Road" is more comfortable than the breakdown at road's end; the second book is less read, and arguably the more honest.

Kerouac died nine years after that summer, in nineteen sixty-nine, at age forty-seven. The canyon is just off the highway, unmarked. The beach where he sat in the dark is a public shore, accessible on foot.