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By Root 923 0

with “Kerouac’s obvious genius” as catalyst—it was America’s first truly bi-coastal literary movement, and the shared excitement was electric. “I thought [the East Coast] was dead,” Japhy tells Ray and Alvah Goldbook (Ginsberg) in The Dharma Bums. “We thought the West Coast was dead!,” they chorus back. It made sense that, despite the eastern metropolis’ unrivaled artistic resources, the place of rendezvous was San Francisco, not New York City, the Beat Generation’s launching pad. In Kerouac’s words, “all the…loose American elements” were voyaging in that direction, leaving the “brown and holy” East for the “great dry West,” a region “white like washlines and empty-headed.” California’s population increased seventy percent between 1940 and 1950, while for the first time in its history, New York lost more people than it gained. The fact that the destination of the westward migrants was usually Los Angeles, a suburban “jungle,” in Kerouac’s hostile description, the “most brutal of American cities,” not Frisco, its older neighbor to the north, was part of the city’s charm.

A century past its Gold Rush boom, free of the grotesqueries of constant gestation, San Francisco had the same feeling of “whacky comradeship” Kerouac loved in New York. Made largely of wood, its steep houses and steep hills piling conversationally upon one another, San Francisco, unlike L.A., the world’s car capital, was a pedestrian’s city scaled to the human being. Sprawling landlocked L.A. had to hack an outlet to the sea; Frisco perched atop its own bay, a tuning fork of East-West vibrations, with nothing between it and China or Japan save the vast glittering waters of the Pacific. Chinese workers arrived in the area in the 1850s to build the railroads, bringing their Buddhist temples with them, and the Japanese followed in the 1890s. When Kerouac, who had immersed himself in solitary studies of Buddhism at the start of 1954, arrived on the scene and expressed his surprised delight that there were other Buddhists in America, Kenneth Rexroth, the elder statesman of the West Coast poetry scene, satirized in The Dharma Bums as Reinhold Cacoethes, promptly put him down. “Everybody in San Francisco is a Buddhist, Kerouac. Didn’t you know that?”

San Francisco, of course, whatever its edge, had no monopoly on things Buddhist. Interest in the East had been building since the late 1940s, part of what the historian Robert Ellwood calls “the spiritual underground” of Cold War America. The Seven-Storied Mountain, an autobiography by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose career Kerouac at moments thought might be a model for his own, was a surprise bestseller in 1948; Merton began studying Buddhism in the early 1950s. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) popularized the idea of the quest as the core of mythology, religion, and literature in the East as well as the West; Morey Bernstein documented a purportedly real-life case of reincarnation in America in The Search for Bridey Murphy, a bestseller in 1956. D. T. Suzuki, who had arrived from Japan decades earlier, began lecturing on Buddhism at Columbia University in 1950; Japhy Ryder has Suzuki’s books on his orange crate shelves in The Dharma Bums, and Kerouac himself went to visit the sage in New York in the fall of 1958. Suzuki took one look at Jack’s flushed face and advised him to stick to green tea. As Kerouac was leaving, he asked Suzuki if he could stay with him always. Suzuki replied enigmatically, “Sometime.” In July 1958, three months before The Dharma Bums was published, Time remarked that “Zen Buddhism is growing more chic by the moment,” and Mademoiselle ran a surprisingly intelligent article on it around the same time.

In fact, Kerouac’s turn East had been prompted by rereading Walden (1854), an impeccably New England source. Thoreau, a hero to Snyder as well, called the Hindu Bhagavad Gita a summit of wisdom and art that made the “modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial”; he published the first sutra, a poetic rendering of Buddha’s teachings, to appear in English