The Story of a Nervous Breakdown

Going somewhere and returning and going back and returning again ... this has always been the rhythm of Kerouac's fiction. This book chronicles three trips to a rustic cabin in Raton Canyon (in real life, Bixby Canyon, in Big Sur on the California coast. These sections are interlaced with scenes of life in San Francisco. The Kerouac character is Jack Dulouz , who appears in several other Kerouac novels as well. It is generally accepted that the book describes the events nearly as they occurred in real life.

Jack Deluoz, a Beat celebrity, badly needs peace and quiet and sobriety. Close friend Lorenz Monsanto (in real life, Lawrence Ferlinghetti helps him plan a 'secret return' to San Francisco so he can avoid being tempted into a typical drinking binge with admirers and hangers-on. But Deluoz foils his own secret entrance:

"... instead I've bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop at the height of Saturday night business ... and 't'all ends up a roaring drunk in all the famous bars the bloody 'King of the Beatniks' is back in town buying drinks for everyone -- Two days of that, including Sunday the day Lorenzo is supposed to pick me up at my 'secret' skid row hotel (the Mars on 4th and Howard) but when he calls for me there's no answer, he has the clerk open the door and what does he see but me out on the floor among bottles, Ben Fagan stretched out partly beneath the bed, and Robert Browning the beatnik painter out on the bed, snoring ..."

Lorenzo insists that Dulouz needs to get back to nature to sober up. Dulouz agrees. He takes a cab to Big Sur, wanting to face nature alone, to write poetry and find the inner peace he'd lately lost.

The First Trip to Raton Canyon