The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [9]
The no-nonsense William Burroughs, chastising Kerouac for his new faith in 1954, said that in the West, Buddhism could only be part of “history,…a subject for understanding”; the “California Buddhists” were “trying to sit on the sidelines.” But the sidelines were just where Kerouac wanted to be. Unlike the creeds and ideologies of the West, or Russia for that matter, Buddhism wasn’t responsible for the insane atrocities of human history as Kerouac named them in a catalogue of nightmares in Desolation Angels: not for the guillotine or the burning stake, the concentration camps, gas ovens, and barbed wire, nor for the ruinations of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. If no Westerner, and certainly not Kerouac, could fully understand Buddhism, Buddhism served the West, in Kerouac’s words, as a “form of heresy,” “gentle” and “goofy,” but heresy all the same. Kerouac’s political views insofar as he formulated them were increasingly reactionary, but he feared the “America-lovers” as much as the “America-haters.” At a time when Americans were routinely told they had only two choices—Soviet-style communism or American capitalist democracy and all that went with it—Buddhism offered a third way. In The Dharma Bums, in a characteristically unflappable bit of apparent illogic, Henry Morley remarks of Buddhism, “I’m not much interested in the belief part of it.” “I’m neutral,” he says, and Japhy gives his imprimatur, shouting, “Neutral is what Buddhism is!” Buddhism was a recovery program for the West, “a hospital,” Kerouac wrote in Mexico City Blues, “for the sick, / Lying high in crystal.”
Buddhism promised Kerouac a world where wanderers could fashion their own religious order, one more ecumenical than Christianity ever devised, a special form of the gathered church, “big wild bands of holy men,” in Kerouac’s words in The Dharma Bums, “Zen lunatics” bringing the “vision of freedom of eternity” to all creatures and sanctifying a way of life fast disappearing in America: the way of the vagrant, the hobo, the bum. The “Dharma” in Kerouac’s title meant “truth,” but the word “Bums” held an older and deeper resonance. It summoned up the Depression images of his boyhood Kerouac loved, men traveling “with nothing but a paper bag for luggage,” as he put it in Desolation Angels, “waiting in line for coffee and donuts…forag[ing] in riverside dumps looking for junk to sell,” an image with a long pedigree in American life and popular culture from the Wobblies’ songs and Charlie Chaplin’s tramp to Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a movie Kerouac cited fondly in On the Road, and the Judy Garland-Fred Astaire number “A Couple of Swells” in Easter Parade (1948). In “The Vanishing American Hobo,” a tidal-wave jeremiad against the ever-stepped-up surveillance operations of the postwar United States published in Holiday’s March 1960 issue, Kerouac widened the category further, putting Christ and Buddha at the head of a line that included Ben Franklin, the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, and Teddy Roosevelt.
The bum has always had a mixed reputation in American life. Often frowned upon, at other times, he was idealized as “The Happy Hooligan,” in the title of one old ballad, the emblem of what Kerouac called a very American “special idea of footwalking freedom,” never a criminal, yet living by his wits in the best