The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [7]
Snyder, however, though he had initially professed himself “amazed and touched” by the “many nice things” Jack had said about him in his “beautiful book,” was not happy. “I told you I liked it,” Snyder wrote an apprehensive Kerouac in March 1959, “but that doesn’t make it right…. Do you think you understand [Buddhism]?” Snyder referred darkly to a hell “where they pull out the writer’s tongue with red-hot pliers.” Though the two patched up their quarrel, Snyder always believed that Jack had taken little more from Buddhism than its emphasis on compassion and its sense of the vastness of time and space—both of which were already present in Kerouac’s version of Catholicism and evident in his work as far back as The Town and the City. Echoing mainstream reviewers, Alan Watts (“Arthur Whane” in The Dharma Bums), who popularized Buddhism in several bestsellers, said Kerouac had “Zen flesh but no Zen bones”; he had confused Zen’s “‘anything goes’ at the existential level with ‘anything goes’ on the artistic and social levels.”
But it was Buddhism’s comparative lack of dogma that attracted Kerouac in the first place. Snyder might see Buddhism as a chance to move past the confines imposed by notions of an all-powerful God; Buddhism itself does not require its converts to renounce their former faith. From the start Kerouac was skeptical about the Zen branch of Buddhism to which Snyder gave his allegiance, a set of practices structured as a stringently disciplined ascent to ever greater degrees of enlightenment. In The Dharma Bums, Ray Smith openly scorns “those silly Zen masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly questions”—it’s just plain “mean.” Kerouac preferred the older all-embracing Indian Mahayana Buddhism to the Japanese Zen model, which to his mind could breed self-righteousness; “righteousness,” Ray realizes, is itself the greatest sin, one to which he himself is far from immune. Ray almost perversely refuses to climb all the way up Matterhorn Mountain, though the last stretch is within his sight and within his capability. Clinging to his “protective nook” instead, he momentarily wonders if Japhy, however admirable, is not insane. If Japhy’s Buddhism is about action, Ray is “Buddha the Quitter.” Kerouac wanted to go further; he didn’t want to be tested or pushed. It may be as significant not to reach the peak as to scale it.
Japhy’s role as master to Ray’s disciple is never fundamentally challenged, nor do we ever doubt the profound camaraderie between them. Still, a subtle current of antagonism between its two main figures runs throughout The Dharma Bums. Snyder had a number of good reasons to be uncomfortable with Kerouac’s portrait of him. A private man with a healthy sense of his own limitations, he didn’t want to be held up as the model for his times, nor, as a neo-imagist poet very influenced by Ezra Pound—“that pretentious nut,” scoffs Ray—a style in many ways antithetical to Kerouac’s, did he wish to be forever associated with the Beat Generation. Though both writers were fascinated by the three-line Japanese haiku form, “a sentence that’s short and sweet with a sudden jump of thought,” in Kerouac’s definition, “a whole vision