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The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac
About halfway through The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac’s charismatic and meandering 1958 adventure novel, Ray Smith, Japhy Ryder and Henry Morley sit around a fire on top of Matterhorn Peak. As they discuss their day climbing the mountain, Ryder, based on the poet Gary Snyder, begins to speak excitedly about Walt Whitman,
“I’ve been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up salves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the attitude for the bard, the Zen Lunacy bards or old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”
The speech is a wonder. Yes, it rambles; but it’s also passionate and thoughtful, and may be the best example of why so many love Kerouac and the Beats. Like many young people, Kerouac saw the so called “real world” and it didn’t make sense him. What he saw was a spiritually empty world. A culture that valued “all that crap they didn’t really want anyway” but didn’t value anything of importance like love. He saw most people were “imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume” for stuff “you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway.” What Kerouac valued above all else was freedom, and the world of his parents was slavery. And through his new found faith in Zen Buddhism infused with some regular guilt-laden Catholicism, Kerouac gives us glimpse of freedom that many of us never see. It is this spirit that permeates throughout The Dharma Bums and makes it an important book.
The novel, however, is not without its problems. Plot was unimportant for Kerouac, and it shows in The Dharma Bums, as it essentially recycles the plot of On the Road, his most famous novel. Like On the Road, the main character Ray Smith, a thinly veiled cover for Kerouac, travels the country back and forth through the country in search of life and adventure. Early on he meets Japhy Ryder, the great Zen Buddhist poet, and Smith idolizes him throughout Dharma Bums, just like Kerouac worships Dean Moriarity in On the Road. The pair drink, climb mountains, enjoy a Buddhist orgy called “Yab-Yum” and generally have a great time. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that passages become predictable in their unpredictability. (You mean the characters drank a whole lot of booze, rambled about life and tried to hit on girls all in the same night? I thought I read this book already?)
And like the On the Road, there are long, sprawling passages about nature, life, hitchhiking and women, which never fly by so quickly that the reader barely takes a breath; they are beautifully written and whisk you into unknown worlds and scenes as we get a taste of life through the prism of Beat-style Zen Buddhism. But these passages often go on too long, leaving me bored at times and wishing that Kerouac had just listened to a real editor.
And lastly— and this may just reflect how square I’ve become to the Beats message— but at times while reading The Dharma Bums, a thought would occur me: To Kerouac freedom and irresponsibility are the same thing. (There were times I wanted to yell “get a job, you hippie.”) It seems to me a real spiritualist believes quite the opposite. The poet understands that freedom doesn’t come in adventure and drinking but comes with seeing the beauty in the mundane and everyday. There is no doubt Rilke understood this as he once said “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” And there are times Kerouac seems to understand this too. But most of the time Kerouac’s version of freedom just seems like a child’s fantasy, the wishful hopes of a lost soul.
Checkout this interview Kerouac gave to Steven Allen in 1958:
