The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [11]
Ginsberg thought The Dharma Bums flattering, less personal and “wild” than Kerouac’s other major works, and Kerouac was aware that he had caught the moment’s optimism while playing down its darker side. Natalie Jackson’s suicide occupies only a few pages, yet in his first plan for the book, sketched out in March 1957, Kerouac described it as the novel’s culmination; Neal Cassady, not Snyder, was to take center stage. The night of the Six Gallery reading, Kerouac confided to a friend, he’d gone on “the worst binge of my life,” coming to with scabs on his face. Yet the alcoholism that did so much in real life to destroy his relationship with Snyder is treated in The Dharma Bums as a relatively minor sore point between friends. In late 1961, Kerouac assured Snyder that he’d like Big Sur, in which a drunken Kerouac is patently unable to endure either solitude or society, better than The Dharma Bums; it’s “honester.”
Kerouac’s holdback on personal revelations in The Dharma Bums has costs, starting with its jarring tone of misogyny. Although Kerouac was always more interested in his male characters, in his other books, most notably The Subterraneans (1958), he compensates by exposing his own troubled masculinity, homosexual impulses and all; the reader is invited to understand a fear, a belittling of women Kerouac himself does not entirely condone. But no such self-examination takes place in The Dharma Bums. Princess, one of Japhy’s several girlfriends, sleeps with all the men she meets, Ray casually informs us, because she knows that as a woman she can never become a Boddhisattva herself. Ray, vacillating between vows of celibacy and envy of Japhy’s easy sexual prowess, says “pretty girls make graves,” meaning that the cause of death is birth or procreation, but we don’t really learn how it feels to believe this. The ethnically bland name “Ray Smith,” though it was the name Kerouac originally gave Sal Paradise, his alter ego in On the Road, is an exception in Kerouac’s work after The Town and the City. As a French-Canadian-Iroquois-American, Kerouac considered himself part of a minority group, and he didn’t want to pass. Even Sal is of Italian descent; if Ray is anything other than a mainstream Euro-American, we don’t know it. Nor, a true anomaly, do we learn much about Ray’s childhood.
Yet this curtailment of subjectivity and the curious narratorial vacancy it sometimes entails are also part of the special and vast charm of The Dharma Bums. In Kerouac’s other books, childhood is the inescapable theme precisely because the narrator is avowedly an adult, enraged that the time of innocence is over. No one expects children to hold coherent political and philosophical views or to conduct self-analysis. Children aren’t asked to support themselves, to make permanent commitments or to have sex, much less marry. And children by and large don’t habitually get drunk. Indeed, adults who force children into such activities are held to be committing crimes, against nature as well as the state. Kerouac novels such as Visions of Gerard (1963), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Vanity of Duluoz (1967), self-consciously told from the perspective of the alcoholic and disillusioned adult man, are murder mysteries in disguise—who killed Ti-Jean, and why? In assessing the damage done, the grown-up Jack is the prosecutor’s Exhibit A. In The Dharma Bums, however, Ray actually does for a few precious moments regain childhood’s bliss. His fears, his drinking, even the tensions that occasionally surface between Ray and Japhy can, at least for now, under the magic spell of Japhy’s sheer lively health, be contained. All spells will eventually be broken but disillusion here is postponed, not courted. Kerouac’s popping and parenthesizing