The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [1]
When Gary Snyder, the Zen poet immortalized as “Japhy Ryder” in The Dharma Bums, first met Jack Kerouac in San Francisco in the fall of 1955, he sensed about him “a palpable aura of fame and death.” Snyder, then twenty-five, was eight years younger than Kerouac and virtually unpublished. Though far from famous, Kerouac had a novel, The Town and the City, which came out in 1950 to generally good reviews if tepid sales, behind him; several of his more recent and experimental pieces, whose energy and “evocation of people” impressed Snyder immensely, were beginning to find their way into the small literary magazines of the day. But Snyder did not know that Kerouac had “already accomplished,” in his words, “a huge life work”; outside his original Beat circle in New York City, no one did. After his breakthrough into the all-out confessional and bebopinspired style he named “spontaneous prose,” in a creative feat seldom matched in American letters, Kerouac had written five major novels between 1951 and 1955 that no publisher would touch—On the Road, Kerouac’s first venture in the new style, had itself been rejected a half dozen times. The signature avantgarde works of the other charter members of the Beat Generation, Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), both heavily influenced by Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method, were in print within months of their completion. Only Kerouac had to endure the sickening, heartbreaking wait, “turning out manuscripts,” he wrote his agent Sterling Lord on February 24, 1956, which “keep flying away into the void.” “Why,” he wondered, “don’t they realize I’m good?”Snyder was right that fame was in the wings. On the Road, even today the best-known of Kerouac’s works, was finally published in September 1957. Still young in years and handsome as any movie star—Salvador Dali pronounced him “more beautiful than Marlon Brando”—blessed with a voice that was in itself a musical instrument, a lightning-swift mind, and an uncanny instinct for absurdist comic timing and impromptu gloom-and-glee drama, Kerouac became an overnight sensation, the first literary figure of the full-fledged media age, interviewed on TV talk shows and reading his work to jazz accompaniment at the Village Vanguard. But attention was not respect.
In advocating spontaneous composition with little or no revision, Kerouac was demanding more discipline, not less; the writer, like the athlete or the jazz musician, was to commit himself to daily and endless practice in letters, journals, and “sketching,” as Kerouac called his fast-as-hands-can-print transcriptions of his immediate surroundings, all training for the moment of performance. The skills of improvisation, devalued in the modern industrial West, were to be laboriously unlocked, like prisoners buried in a cave led by a perilous route back into the light. Nor did the fact that Kerouac’s work was openly, unabashedly autobiographical, that he staked everything on an ethos of almost physical intimacy in which the somatic self’s fluctuations defy the censorship of the mind, bringing the narrative “I” as close to himself as possible and abolishing the traditional distance between author and reader, mean the result was life, not art. Kerouac was indeed compiling in his novels what he called a “contemporary history record” of his times, but he may have been the first American writer to self-consciously discover, as the critic William Crawford Woods puts it, that “history becomes fiction in the…act of being written down,” a discovery that would underpin the work of contemporaries as diverse as Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Hunter S. Thompson. The true story of postwar America in all its speed, tomfoolery, and sorrowfulness, Kerouac believed, could only be told as interior monologue and confession. Once unleashed by “one hundred percent personal honesty,” in Kerouac’s now famous phrase, the inner self would discover its own art form; it had taken him fifteen years, he estimated, to tap and train his own “voice.”
Kerouac, as the poet