The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [12]
The visions that come to Ray are large, all-encompassing—“Everything is all right forever and forever,” he realizes—but the novel’s language and imagery often suggest the close-up, the near, intimate, and dear: the “petrified rabbit” listening to the sounds of their approach, the “little creek, shallow as your hand.” And the universe is not only vast but elastic, “everlastingly loose and responsive…beyond empty space blue.” All large gifts are made up here of small pleasures—“a rainbow,” Ray says, in one of Kerouac’s most perfect haikus, capturing both the leap and modesty of the book, is “a hoop / for the lowly.” The solution, he decides, is to pray in solitude “for all living creatures…it was the only decent activity left in the world.”
If the real-life Kerouac found Desolation Peak more ordeal than inspiration, if he could not possibly have stuck it out in Japan as Snyder did or spent years living in Tangier à la William Burroughs, what he did have was curiosity at depth, a willingness to enter other people’s worlds and live there on their terms, not his, no matter how foolish he looked, no matter how many mistakes he made. It’s difficult to imagine Burroughs signing up for a lookout job in the northwest or Snyder exploring New York’s underworld, or indeed any other contemporary writer willing and able to do both. Unlike Snyder or Ginsberg, Kerouac sustained very few intimate relationships over the course of his life, yet it’s exhausting even to contemplate the extraordinary amount of time this “strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic,” in his own description, spent at close quarters with other and very diverse people: driving cross-country with Cassady or later the photographer Robert Frank, living in their various homes with the Cassadys, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder, and others. Nor were such visits usually passed in drunken stupors or made up of superficial contacts. Locke McCorkle, the original of Sean Monahan in The Dharma Bums, remembers that Kerouac was the only one of his friends his wife would let babysit their children.
Children live in other people’s worlds because they have to; to do so voluntarily as an adult can be the mark of a special and courageous kind of artist. This openness, this almost miraculous adaptiveness, the complete receptivity of his sensorium, was Kerouac’s greatest gift, what made him count as a leader, in Michael McClure’s words, in our “longterm biopolitics,…our effect on everything.” Japhy Ryder was the last of the mythological figures Kerouac would add to the American pantheon. After The Dharma Bums, he centered his narratives on himself, now a castaway on the island of adulthood ever less sure of rescue.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, ed. Carole Tonkinson. New York: Berkley, 1995.
Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance. New York: Cambridge, 1989.
Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, 1997.
Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
Jack Kerouac, “The Vanishing American Hobo,” in Lonesome Traveller. New York: Grove, 1988.
———Selected Letters, 2 vols., ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995, 1999.
Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History. New York: Oxford, 2002.
Gary Snyder, “Notes on the Beat Generation,” in Beat Down to Your Soul, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Alan Watts, Zen and the Beat Way. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1997.
William Crawford Woods, “‘A New Field’: A Note on The Dharma Bums,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3:2 (1983): 7–14.
—Ann Douglas
May 2006
Dedicated to Han Shan
The Dharma Bums
1
Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled