Ms. Hen reviews Big Sur

Ms. Hen at The Beat Museum

Big Sur

Jack Kerouac

Farrar Straus & Giroux

1962

Ms. Hen read some books by Jack Kerouac when she was young, as most people do when they are young. She read ON THE ROAD, and THE DHARMA BUMS, and when she read them, she liked them. She was not as educated then as she is now, however. She decided to read BIG SUR to prepare for her trip to San Francisco, and she ended up reading the book while she was there on her vacation seeing the sights and being a tourist, riding the cable cars, and taking pictures of The Golden Gate Bridge.

When Ms. Hen read ON THE ROAD, she thought that the writing was very fast, and might have needed some more time spent on the editing. When she read BIG SUR, she was surprised how many misspelled words there are, and also how much punctuation is missing. Ms. Hen wonders if he would get away with that if he were a woman.

That brings Ms. Hen to another point. People have said that Jack Kerouac and the Beats did not like women, and she could tell by this novel that this was true. Kerouac describes in length all the men friends he has, and how interesting they are, and what about them is cool and fascinating, but the women characters are only perceived as a piece of flesh, people who "look good in a tight pair of bluejeans." Ms. Hen didn’t like this. She thought she liked Jack Kerouac, but she decided if she met him, she wouldn’t like him, and he probably wouldn’t like her either.

This novel is about a writer who has become famous, and has a hard time being famous, and afterwards spends some time in Big Sur, at his friend’s cabin in a valley near the beach. He enjoys his solitude, but yearns to go back to San Francisco where the action and the parties are taking place. He goes to The City Lights Bookstore, where Ms. Hen visited on her vacation, and he tries to get together with his friends and get drunk. He hangs out with his friends, and eventually meets a woman, who was involved with his friend Cody, and Jack has an affair with her. He thinks she’s unstable, but he’s unstable, too. They take her son and some other friends with them to Big Sur. Everything ends up in a mess.

At The City Lights Bookstore

Ms. Hen was in the process of reading BIG SUR when she went to the Beat Museum in San Francisco near The City Lights Bookstore.  She saw some artifacts that the writers had when they lived in San Francisco, there are lots of pictures, and Allen Ginsberg’s organ, and she watched a film about the writers, who incidentally, were all men. The Beats didn’t like women writers, and if a woman was trying to write, they thought it was cute. Ms. Hen doesn’t like this. She doesn’t regret reading this novel, because it’s well written, and enthusiastic, but she doesn’t think she will be reading Kerouac or other Beat writers any time soon.

Allen Ginsberg's organ