The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [5]
By 1955, the days of Kerouac’s closest friendship with Cassady were over. That spring he wrote Cassady’s wife Caroline of the “good times when Neal respected me”; “something has happened and everybody has changed,” he said sadly. At the legendary Six Gallery poetry reading on October 13, 1955, chronicled in The Dharma Bums, which inaugurated the San Francisco Renaissance, the occasion on which Ginsberg first presented Howl and Snyder followed with “A Berry Feast,” Kerouac, too shy to take the stage himself, supplied the ecstatic audience with jugs of wine and led it in chanting “Go!” Everyone present knew a new age had dawned. “We had gone beyond a point of no return,” Michael McClure, another young West Coast poet introduced at Six Gallery (he’s Ike O’Shay in The Dharma Bums), said, “and we were ready for it.” Cassady was there too; he would later play muse to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, but on that night he asked a friend if he could stand near him. “I don’t know anybody here,” he explained. Though Cassady appears in The Dharma Bums (as Cody Pomeroy), he’s a minor character.
If Cassady, a son of Missouri and Colorado, had opened to Kerouac the gates of the West, Snyder, bred in Oregon, ushered him through them to places Cassady lacked the patience to seek and taught him the skills to survive there—among the lakes, rocks, and woods, the northwestern mountain fortresses as yet untouched by America’s headlong material progress. Cassady, whose automotive frenzies mimicked what they outpaced, always “wrapped up,” in Kerouac’s words about Dean Moriarty in On the Road, “in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road,” was a sorcerer’s apprentice; once set in motion, he couldn’t stop. All Snyder’s activities were purposeful; a scholar of Native American lore, he laid bare the foundations of earthly being in places which were American sheerly by accident. Growing up in Oregon, Japhy, the descendant of pioneers and Wobblies, tells Ray Smith, Kerouac’s stand-in in The Dharma Bums, “I didn’t feel American at all”; parting from him and heading for Desolation Peak, Ray senses Siberia in the northernmost reaches of America. What matters are latitudes and landmasses, not the countries that claim and dispute them. Citizenship here is potentially global; Dean Moriarty could only be American but Japhy appears in Ray’s visions as a mischievous Chinese sage.
Time magazine’s summation of The Dharma Bums as “On the Trail” held more than a grain of truth. After crisscrossing the country half a dozen times by car with Dean Moriarty, Sal feels like a traveling salesman watching the landscape speed by in a blur—he has missed “the pearl” he sought. Next time, he will make a “pilgrimage on foot.” The Dharma Bums recounts the sequel. Climbing Matterhorn Mountain with Japhy, an episode that forms the climax of the first part of the novel, hopeful he is now leaving his “recent years of drinking and disappointment” behind, Ray vows to tramp “all over the West and…the East, and the desert,” “mak[ing] it the purer way” at last, and Japhy will be his patron saint. On Desolation Peak, Ray sees not mountains and lakes but “Japhy’s mountains” and “Japhy’s lake”—“Japhy had been right,” he concludes happily, “about everything.” It’s not coincidence that Kerouac wrote Visions of Gerard, a tribute to his dead brother published in 1959, not long after his hike up Matterhorn; both books are free-form acts of modern hagiography and prayer. One brother had summoned up thoughts of the other.
The meeting of Kerouac and Snyder held reverberations beyond their personal or even artistic collaboration. As Ginsberg, the PR genius of the Beat Generation who had moved to Berkeley the year before, realized, a fusion was taking place of the “San Francisco West Coast Bohemian-Anarchist-Modernist tradition” and “the New York impulse or energy,”