June 26, 1961
Manor House
Big Sur, California
Dear Mr. Lord:
Fortunately, the check for the Big Sur article took the sting out of your pompous and moronic rejection of my work.
Here’s the 20 cents it cost you to send the damn things back. I don’t want to feel that I owe you anything, because when I see you I intend to cave in your face and scatter your teeth all over Fifth Avenue.
I think we are coming to a day when agents of your sort will serve no useful function except as punching bags.
Cordially,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO FRANK M. ROBINSON, ROGUE:
At last Thompson placed a feature article in a national magazine: Rogue, a men’s journal similar in appeal to Playboy, which paid him a handsome $350 for the following controversial exposé on the real Big Sur, with its famed “baths” the chic new meeting place for San Francisco homosexuals.
“BIG SUR: THE GARDEN OF AGONY”
If half the stories about Big Sur were true this place would long since have toppled into the sea, drowning enough madmen and degenerates to make a pontoon bridge of bodies all the way to Honolulu. The vibration of all the orgies would have collapsed the entire Santa Lucia mountain range, making the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah seem like the work of a piker. The western edge of this nation simply could not support the weight of all the sex fiends and criminals reputed to be living here. The very earth itself would heave and retch in disgust–and down these long, rocky slopes would come a virtual cascade of nudists, queers, junkies, rapists, artists, fugitives, vagrants, thieves, lunatics, sadists, hermits and human chancres of every description.
They would all perish, one and all—and, if justice were done a whole army of tourists and curiosity-seekers would perish with them. All the people who come here “for a few kicks” would share the fate of the doomed residents, and anyone surviving the Great Slide would be done in by Killer Whales. The casualty list would be a terrifying document. In addition to the locals it would include voyeurs of all types, hundreds of free-lance pederasts, every sort of predatory jade, and a legion of would-be orgy-masters.
None of this is likely to happen, however, because almost everything you hear about Big Sur is rumor, legend or an outright lie. This place is a myth-maker’s paradise, so vast and so varied that the imagination is tempted to run wild at the sight of it.
In reality, Big Sur is very like Valhalla—a place that a lot of people have heard of, and that very few can tell you anything about. In New York you might hear it’s an art colony, in San Francisco they’ll tell you it’s a nudist colony, and when you finally roll into Big Sur with your eyes peeled for naked artists you are likely to be very disappointed. Every weekend Dick Hartford, owner of the local village store, is plagued by people looking for “sex orgies,” “wild drinking brawls,” or “the road to Henry Miller’s house”—as if once they found Miller everything else would be taken care of. Some of them will stay as long as a week, just wandering around, asking questions, forever popping up where you least expect them—and finally they wander off, back to wherever they came from, often complaining bitterly that Big Sur is “nothing but a damn wilderness.”
Well, most of it is, and the geographical boundaries of Big Sur are so vague that Lillian B. Ross, one of the first writers to live here, once described it as “not a place at all, but a state of mind.” If that sounds a bit mystic, consider that the Big Sur country—which is what you mean when you say Big Sur—is roughly eighty miles long and twenty wide, with a population of some three hundred souls spread out across the hills and along the coast. The “town” itself is nothing but a post office, village store, gas station, garage and restaurant, located a hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco on Highway One.
Prior to World War Two this place was as lonely and isolated a spot as any in America. But no longer. Inevitably, Big Sur has been “discovered.” Life magazine called it a “Rugged, Romantic World Apart,” and presented nine pages of pictures to prove it. After that there was no hope. Not that Henry Luce has anything against solitude—he just wants to tell his five million readers about it. And on some weekends it seems like all five million of them are right here, bubbling over with questions:
“Where’s the art colony, man? I’ve come all the way from Tennessee to join it.”
“Say, fella, where do I find this nudist colony?”
“Hello there. My wife and I want to rent a cheap ten-room house for weekends. Could you tell me where to look?”
“How’re ya doin’, ace? Where’s this marijuana farm I been hearin’ about?”
“Good morning, old sport. Hope I’m not disturbing you. I … ah … well, you see I understand you people have some jim-dandy parties down here and I was wondering if a few bottles of booze would get me an invitation.”
Or the one that drove Miller half-crazy: “Ah ha! So you’re Henry Miller! Well, my name is Claude Fink and I’ve come to join the cult of sex and anarchy.”
Most of the people who’ve heard of Big Sur know nothing about it except that Miller lives here—and, for most of them, that’s enough. There is no doubt in their minds that anyplace Miller lives is bound to be some sort of sexual mecca. The mere suspicion brought dozens of people to Big Sur, but when somebody wrote an article about the Cult of Sex and Anarchy he was organizing here, they came from all over the world to join it. That was close to ten years ago, and they’ve been coming ever since.
Ironically enough, Miller came here looking for peace and solitude. When he arrived in 1946 he was a relative unknown. His major works (Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn, The Rosy Crucifixion, Black Spring, etc.) were banned in this country (and still are). In Europe, where he had lived since the early Thirties, he had a reputation as one of the few honest and uncompromising American writers. But when the Nazis over-ran Paris his income was cut off at the source and he was forced back to the United States.
His contempt for this country was manifest in everything he wrote, and his vision of America’s future was a hairy thing, at best. In The World of Sex, a banned and little-known book he wrote in 1940, he put it like this:
What will happen when this world of neuters who make up the great bulk of the population collapses is this—they will discover sex. In the period of darkness which will ensue they will line up in the dark like snakes or toads and chew each other alive during the endless fornication carnival. They will bury themselves in the earth and go at it hammer and tong. They will fuck anything within reach, from a keyhole to a mangy corpse. Anything can happen on this continent. From the very beginning it has been the seat of cruel practices, of blood-letting, of horrible tortures, of enslavement, of fratricide, of sacrificial orgies, of stoicism, of witchcraft, of lynching, of pillage and plunder, of greed, of prejudice and bigotry, and so on.… We have seen everything here but the eruption of sexuality. This will be the last outburst, the flood which will carry the robots off. The enormous and elaborate machine which is America will go haywire. It will be the aurora borealis which will usher in the long night. They say a higher type of man will develop here one day. It may be possible, but if it happens it will be from new shoots. The present stock may make wonderful manure, but it will not yield new men.
These are the words that came back to haunt him when he moved to Big Sur. No sooner had he settled here, hoping to separate himself from what he called “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,” than thousands of people sought him out to shake his hand, to ask his advice, and to bombard him with their own visions and predictions. Day after day, year after year, when all Miller wanted was a little privacy, they struggled up the steep dirt road to his house on Partington Ridge; if there was a fornication carnival going on up there, they were damn well going to be in on it. At times it seemed like half the population of Greenwich Village was camping on his lawn. Girls wearing nothing but raincoats showed up at his door in the dead of night, wild turks hitchhiked out from New York with duffel-bag
s full of everything they owned, drifters arrived from every corner of the nation with sacks of food and whiskey, and destitute Frenchmen came all the way from Paris.
Miller did his best to stem the tide, but it was no use. As his fame spread, his volume of visitors mounted steadily. Many of them had not even read his books. They weren’t interested in literature, they wanted orgies. And they were shocked to find him a quiet, fastidious and very moral man—instead of the raving sexual beast they’d heard stories about. When no orgies materialized, the disappointed cultists drifted on to Los Angeles or San Francisco, or stayed in Big Sur, trying to drum up orgies of their own. Some of them lived in hollow trees, others found abandoned shacks, and a few simply roamed the hills with sleeping bags, living on nuts, berries and wild mustard greens. The ones who didn’t stay went off to spread the word, and with each retelling the stories got wilder and wilder. More people arrived, driving Miller to the brink of despair. He posted a large, insulting sign at the head of his driveway, cultivated a rude manner to make visitors ill at ease, and devised elaborate schemes to keep them from discovering where he lived. But nothing worked. They finally overwhelmed him, and in the process they put Big Sur squarely on the map of national curiosities. Today they are still coming, even though Miller has packed his bags and fled to Europe for what may be a permanent vacation.
The special irony of all of this is that Miller has written more about Big Sur—and praised it more—than any other writer in the world. In 1946 he wrote an essay called “This Is My Answer,” which eventually appeared in his book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, published in 1958, long after the first invasion.
“Peace and solitude!” he says. “I have had a taste of it even in America. Mornings on Partington Ridge I would often go to the cabin door on rising, look out over the rolling velvety hills, filled with such contentment, such gratitude, that instinctively my hand went up in a benediction.… That is how I like to begin the day.… And by God, that is why I came to Big Sur and settled down. I want every day to begin thus … here there is peace and serenity, here there is just a handful of good neighbors and the rest is wild animals, noble trees, buzzards, eagles, and the sea and the sky and the hills and the mountains unending.…”
Needless to say the day would come when Miller could look out his front door and see a lot more than trees, wild animals and a handful of good neighbors. On some mornings he would forego the benediction in order to shake his fist at the horde of geeks who had gathered in his yard. But his was a special case; he was a marked man. The rest of Big Sur has put up a stern resistance, and, although the battle was lost from the very beginning, the steamroller of progress has made slow headway here. In some spots, in fact, it has bogged down altogether.
There are people here without the vaguest idea of what is happening in the rest of the world. They haven’t read a newspaper in years, don’t listen to the radio, and see a television set perhaps once a month when they go into town.
To read a New York Times in Big Sur can be a traumatic experience. After living here a few months you find it increasingly difficult to take that mass of threatening, complicated information very seriously. Sitting here on a cliff above a rocky beach, on the edge of a vast and empty ocean, with the hills stacked up behind you like a great wall against the chaos of war and politics, the world of The New York Times seems unreal and altogether foreign, so completely opposed to the silence and the beauty of this coast that you sometimes wonder how the people who live in that world can hold on to their sanity. Not all of them do, of course. People are losing their grip every day. Thousands have cracked up from reading too many newspapers, and countless others have gone under for no apparent reason at all.
Not so in Big Sur. Here they didn’t even have electricity until 1947, or telephones until 1958. In New York, where you’re forever hearing stories about the West Coast “population explosion,” it is hard to believe that a place like this still exists. Compared to the rest of California, Big Sur seems brutally primitive. No sub-divisions mar these rugged hills, no supermarkets, no billboards, no crowded commercial wharf jutting into the sea. In the entire eighty-mile stretch of coastline there are only five gas stations and only two grocery stores. A fifty-mile stretch is still without electricity. The people who live there—and some of them own whole mountains of virgin land—are still using gas lanterns and Coleman stoves.
Despite the inroads of progress it is still possible to roam these hills for days at a time without seeing anything but deer, wolves, mountain lions and wild boar. Parts of Big Sur remain as wild and lonely as they were when Jack London used to come down on horseback from San Francisco. The house he stayed in is still here, high on a ridge a few miles south of the post office.
With a little luck a man can still come here and live entirely by himself, but most of the people who come don’t have that in mind. These are the transients—the “orphans” and the “weekend ramblers.” The orphans are the spiritually homeless, the disinherited souls of a complex and nerve-wracked society. They can be lawyers, laborers, beatniks or wealthy dilettantes, but they are all looking for a place where they can settle and “feel at home.” Some of them stay here, finding in Big Sur the freedom and relaxation they couldn’t find anywhere else. But most of them move on, finding it “too dull” or “too lonely” for their tastes.
The weekend rambler is a very different animal. He may be an account executive, a Hollywood fag, or an English major at Stanford—but whatever he is he has heard the Big Sur stories and he is here to get his kicks. His female number is the part-time model from L.A., or the bored little rich girl from San Francisco. They arrive singley and in packs, on Friday and Saturday, quivering with curiosity and ready for anything that comes their way. These are the ones who start orgies—the gin-filled Straight Arrows and the secret humpers who come out of the city to let off steam. They will start at Nepenthe, summer headquarters for the local drinking class, and finish in the big Roman tubs at Hot Springs Lodge, ten miles down the coast. Girls will come into Nepenthe on a Saturday afternoon, freeze the whole bar with a haughty stare—and by midnight they’ll be romping in and out of the crowded tubs at Hot Springs, stark naked and shouting for more gin. The bath-house is an open concrete shed, looking out on the sea, and the tubs are full of hot sulphur water and big enough to hold as many as ten people. During the day most people observe the partition that separates the men’s side from the women’s, but once the sun goes down the baths are as coeducational as a cathouse New Year’s Eve party, and often twice as wild.
This is the glamorous side of Big Sur, the side that occasionally matches the myth—and none of it is hidden away in the hills, as a lot of people seem to think.
The highway alone is enough to give a man pause. It climbs and twists along these cliffs like a huge asphalt roller-coaster, and in some spots you can drop eight hundred feet straight down to the booming surf. The coast from Carmel to San Simeon, with the green slopes of the Santa Lucia mountains plunging down to the sea, is nothing short of awesome. Nepenthe, open from April to November, is one of the most beautiful restaurants anywhere in America; and Chaco, the lecherous old Tsarist writer who, in his words, “hustles liquor” on the Nepenthe terrace, is as colorful a character as a man could hope to meet.
There are plenty of artists here, and most of them exhibit at the Coast Gallery, about halfway between Nepenthe and Hot Springs. Like artists everywhere, many do odd jobs to keep eating and pay the rent. Others, like Bennett Bradbury, drive new Cadillac convertibles and live in “fashionable” spots like Coastlands or Partington Ridge.
On any given day you might walk into the Village Store and find three Frenchmen and two bearded Greeks arguing about the fine points of Dada poetry—and on the day after that you’ll find nobody there but a local rancher, muttering to himself about the ever-present danger of hoof-and-mouth disease.
The local poets outnumber the wild boar, but Eric Barker is the only “name,” and he looks too much like a f
armer to cause any stir among the tourists. For that matter almost everyone in Big Sur looks like either a farmer or a woodsy poet. People are always taking Emil White, publisher of the Big Sur Guide, for a hermit or a sex fiend; and Helmut Deetjan, owner of the Big Sur Inn, looks more like a junkie than a lot of hopheads who’ve been on the stuff for years. If you saw Nicholas Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, walking along the highway, you might expect him to flag you down, wipe your windshield with an old handkerchief, and ask for a quarter. Some of the local fags are easy to spot, but almost anyone could be a nudist or a lunatic—and some of them probably are.
To see Big Sur is one thing, and to live here is quite another. Anyone can perch on the glamorous surface for a few days, idling, drinking and looking for orgies—but beneath that surface is a way of life not many people can tolerate.
There is no glamour in the little man who comes down from the city to “get away from it all”—and runs amok on wine two weeks later because there is nobody to talk to and the silence is driving him crazy. There is nothing exciting about loneliness, and Big Sur is full of it. If you can’t stand isolation this place can spook you right out of your mind. I’ve had people curse me bitterly for not staying “just a while longer” to keep them company, and I’ve had people in my house who wouldn’t go home because they couldn’t stand the idea of going back to their own place to be alone again.
Today the population of Big Sur is smaller than it was in 1900, and just about the same as it was in 1945. Hundreds of people have tried to settle here since the end of the war, and hundreds have failed. Those who come from the cities, hoping to join a merry band of hard-drinking exiles from an over-organized society, are soon disappointed. The exiles are hard to locate, and even harder to drink with. Soon the silence becomes ominous; the pounding sea is too hostile and the nights are full of strange sounds. On some days the only thing to do, besides eat and sleep, is walk up to your mailbox and meet the postman, who drives down from Monterey six days a week in a Volkswagen bus, bringing mail, newspapers, groceries and even beer.