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by Chris McGowan A few decades down the road from its publication, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums seems positively prophetic. The book tells of Kerouac's adventures with his Beat-Generation bohemian cohorts in '50s America, and we can see how they and other hipsters of the time paved the way for the social and cultural revolutions of the following decades. Originally published in 1958, the book covers events in Kerouac's life between September '55 and August '56. At the time, he had a rucksuck full of much praised yet still unpublished writings, and was soon to ride the whirlwind of fame that would be generated by the publication of On The Road. He was also trying to follow the path of Buddhism while shaking the demons of melancholy and booze, at a time when cocktails were served at business lunches and few in America had ever heard of "Zen," let alone the Dalai Lama. There's not much to the plot: Ray Smith (standing in for Kerouac) visits his pals Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder) and Alvah Goldbrook (poet Allen Ginsberg) in Berkeley, bounds up Matterhorn Peak with Ryder, explores Buddhism, attends a now-legendary San Francisco poetry reading (at the Six Gallery), and generally tries to find new kicks and follow his bliss. As it describes Ray's wanderings, The Dharma Bums is full of optimism and melancholy, and romantic in its own unique way: Goethe meets Han Shan in the land of Eisenhower. It is one of the alcoholic writer's last stabs at breaking through his sadness, trying to step through a door into a new life. He is close to succeeding but for the wine and his unshakable brooding and impracticality. The book swings between "wild, yelling, wailing, stomping" around with lusty excited optimistic talk and "all is emptiness anyway" sighs and renunciations. Unfortunately, it is a document of a personal transformation not completed and a last happy season before the storm. In real life, Snyder took off to study in Japan and Kerouac lost his steadying influence, and fame and success would drive the already shy writer further into his bottle. The Dharma Bums has great descriptions of places, attitudes, and people, including a marvelous portrait of the charismatic poet Snyder. The writing has a casual tone, yet is vivid and focused, and startling in its forecasting of cultural things to come. Kerouac was way ahead of his time with his evocation of Buddhism-in-action in '50s tract-home America. And he articulates the discontent of Americans unhappy with their country's prevailing zeitgeist. The character Japhy says, "You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values." We feel the groundswell of the coming decade: of hippies, sexual liberation, the environmental movement, the Green Party, and college students backpacking through Europe or their own mountains. Japhy adds, "I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, young girls happy and old girls happier....Ray, by God, later on in our future life we can have a fine free-wheeling tribe in these California hills, get girls and have dozens of radiant enlightened brats, live like Indians in hogans and eat berries and buds...East'll meet West anyway." It worked out that way for Gary Snyder (who went off to live in the Sierra Nevada foothills and has had a long career as an accomplished poet, naturalist and professor). It wasn't the path for Kerouac after all, yet his visions, wanderings and electric prose in The Dharma Bums, On The Road and other books have inspired millions of readers all over the world. © Chris McGowan
2003
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