The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [4]
An honor student and a three-sport athletic star in high school, Kerouac went to Columbia on a scholarship in 1941. His commitment to writing, conceived early, never faltered, but when it came to upward mobility, his attention span was short. Dropping out, as he did during World War II, first from Columbia, then from the U.S. Navy, became his vocation, dropping out and down: into Harlem’s jumping jazz joints where bebop, as Langston Hughes put it, was letting midnight out on bail, into the honky-tonks and all-night cafeterias of Times Square populated by a subterranean throng of hustlers, drug addicts, pimps, and visionary losers exploring the perils and power of obscurity. In July 1947, Kerouac began bumming his way west, determined to rediscover the continent, learning its secrets from those seldom caught by the camera’s eye. Kerouac brought to the task of chronicling his age his own extraordinary cultural ESP, an ability to be “right on top of things” at which Snyder marveled. He caught the first signs of pop trends reflecting subtle shifts in historical reality, like the vogue of black leather jackets and T-shirts for men or the raised public profile of high-fashion models right after the war. From the moment he met Gary Snyder, he knew, as he had when Neal Cassady, the real-life original for Dean Moriarty, the Denver “jailkid,” exuberant con man, desperate Lothario, and hot-rod hero of On the Road, first knocked on his door almost a decade earlier, that Synder represented the new, the next thing; like Neal, he was subject matter as well as soul mate.
Both Cassady and Snyder were rebels, pointing not to the broad thoroughfares of American life but to the detours and exits, the places where the Depression, sacred ground to Kerouac, Cassady, and Snyder alike, still lingered amid the staggering prosperity of the richest, most successful nation in history. At one moment in On the Road as Sal Paradise is trying to hitch a ride, a car full of teenagers yelling “We won! We won!” whizzes by. “I hated every one of them,” Sal says. It is still hardly surprising that Snyder and Cassady, despite the overlapping circles they moved in, never became friends. If both were ahead of their times, Cassady anticipated the delinquent hipster who flashed across innumerable screens in the teen-exploitation films of the fifties; Snyder, the ecologically minded Woodstock nation of the 1960s, refusing to be “imprisoned,” in Japhy Ryder’s words, “in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.”
Like Kerouac, Cassady was a Catholic who could quote Biblical chapter and verse, while Snyder, a Buddhist who had moved beyond theism, held the Bible and its anthropomorphic view of creation partly responsible for the damage man had wreaked upon the earth. An autodidact, Cassady’s politics didn’t go much beyond dodging and outwitting any law that impeded his prodigious motion; Snyder was a well-educated and articulate intellectual who had tangled with the sterile communism-versus-capitalism debate of the times to emerge an anarchist. To him the world’s dominant major nation-states were “monstrous protection rackets,” emblems of “greed made legal with a monopoly of violence.” Born Skid-Row poor, Cassady worked hard, if intermittently, on the Southern-Pacific railroad to provide for his family; Snyder was proud to be one of the small band whose members had “freely chosen to disaffiliate [themselves] from the ‘American standard of living.’” Cassady was impulse incarnate; Snyder thought that excess desire, whether for material goods or epistemological certainties, was the source of suffering. A lifelong victim of violent mood-swings now deranged by the uppers to which he was addicted, Cassady died of exposure on a train track in Mexico in February 1968 just short of his forty-second birthday; he had long since abandoned the