Books in Brief

Big Sur, by Jack Kerouac (Farrar, $4.50). This twelfth volume of The Duluoz Legend, a cycle of books that began with On the Road and “forms one enormous comedy,” takes our hero on a binge in and around the Henry Miller latitudes. Big Sur is merely a highly personal record of several weeks among some of the elect friends of the author. Some of these are fairly well-drawn characters and Mr. Kerouac succeeds in convincing us that they are interesting people: secret poets, charming garage workers fresh out of stir on a narcotics rap, kids from good families having a holiday from convention, and so on. One wishes that they had been put into a novel and made to do things, such as display their characters in action (one gets tired of being told that so-and-so is echt Beatnik and really with it, take my word for it, kid), fall in love, die, ride into the sunset, or whatever. The book has to be accepted as memoir-writing and for the curious it has its good points. To fill it up, the publishers have printed a twenty-three-page poem which the author wrote on the same expedition that yielded up the anecdotes of the narrative. The closing lines of the poem are: “Clock—Gomeat sea need / be deep I see you / Enoc’h / soon anarf / in Old Brittany.” The other lines of the poem aren’t any clearer or less cryptic, and this leads us to wonder if one of the more puzzling hallucinations of Beatnikismus isn’t the assumption that its private lives and private language are a matter of general interest and universal concern.

G. DAVENPORT

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Big Sur, by Jack Kerouac (Farrar, $4.50). This twelfth volume of The Duluoz Legend, a cycle of books that began with On the Road and “forms one enormous comedy,” takes our hero on a binge in and around the Henry Miller latitudes. Big Sur is merely a highly personal record of several weeks among some of the elect friends of the author. Some of these are fairly well-drawn characters and Mr. Kerouac succeeds in convincing us that they are interesting people: secret poets, charming garage workers fresh out of stir on a narcotics rap, kids from good families having a holiday from convention, and so on. One wishes that they had been put into a novel and made to do things, such as display their characters in action (one gets tired of being told that so-and-so is echt Beatnik and really with it, take my word for it, kid), fall in love, die, ride into the sunset, or whatever. The book has to be accepted as memoir-writing and for the curious it has its good points. To fill it up, the publishers have printed a twenty-three-page poem which the author wrote on the same expedition that yielded up the anecdotes of the narrative. The closing lines of the poem are: “Clock—Gomeat sea need / be deep I see you / Enoc’h / soon anarf / in Old Brittany.” The other lines of the poem aren’t any clearer or less cryptic, and this leads us to wonder if one of the more puzzling hallucinations of Beatnikismus isn’t the assumption that its private lives and private language are a matter of general interest and universal concern.

G. DAVENPORT