Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums (a return)

I haven't been here for a while, as writing about music proved a lot easier and I guess more immediately and communally satisfying. However, now that I've further developed my Hardcore for Nerds output into Tumblr, it seems a good time to come back to this my original blog - which was meant to be my internet niche.

[Of course, I've still been reading, though I have to say it's too often much easier to flip open a laptop and check my blog list than it is to sit down with a paper, non-interactive, Web 0.0 book - though I know that the latter still ultimately provides the greater pleasure. Currently I'm reading Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), and wondering why it's so uncannily similar to Mad Men; while dipping in and out of the Big Book of Zen, aka Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, (Vol. 4); and I'm stalled out on Henry James's Portrait of a Lady (really really good book for a mental transatlanticist such as myself, but 19th century novels aren't cut out to compete with 21st century distractions) and Alex Ross's thick The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (I need to proxy my way into Spotify so I can actually listen to what he's talking about). Plus I'm still reading and essay-writing about a variety of historical and political academic topics.]

Today's posting on Tumblr focused on a short-lived, early 1990s hardcore punk band from California called Han Shan, whose sole output, an eight-song woodblock-printed 7", was incidentally the very first post on the Hardcore for Nerds blog. As a commenter on that post said:

"...This band also got me into the poetry of Han Shan, who I recommend. English translations by Gary Snyder and Burton Watson are pretty good. The fact that a punk band fused their aesthetic with ancient Chinese poetry changed my perception of the possibilities of hardcore."

That translation by Gary Snyder (as 'Japhy Ryder') is part of a key scene of The Dharma Bums, where Kerouac first visits his informal mentor in Berkely:

A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting cross-legged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, ‘Ray, come in,’ and bent his eyes again to the script.

‘What you doing?’

‘Translating Han Shan’s great poem called “Cold Mountain” written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings.’

‘Wow.’

'When you come into this house though you've got to take your shoes off, see those straw mats, you can ruin 'em with shoes.' So I took my softsoled blue cloth shoes off and laid them dutifully by the door and he threw me a pillow and I sat crosslegged along the little wooden board wall and he offered me a cup of hot tea. 'Did you ever read the Book of Tea?' said he.

'No, what's that?'

'It's a scholarly treatise on how to make tea utilizing all the knowledge of two thousand years about tea-brewing. Some of the descriptions of the effect of the first sip of tea, and the second, and the third, are really wild and ecstatic.'

'Those guys got high on nothing, hey?'

'Sip your tea and you'll see; this is good green tea.' It was good and I immediately felt calm and warm. 'Want me to tell you about Han Shan?'

'Yeah.'

'Han Shan you see was a Chinese Scholar who got sick of the big city and took off to hide in the mountains.'

'Say, that sounds like you.'

'In those days you could really do that. He stayed in caves not far from a Buddhist monastery in the T'ang Hsing district of T'ien Tai and his only human friend was the funny Zen Lunatic Shih-te who had a job sweeping out the monastery with a straw broom. Shih-te was a poet too but he never wrote much down. Every now and then Han Shan would come down from Cold Mountain in his bark clothing and come into the warm kitchen and wait for food, but none of the monks would ever feed him because he didn't want to join the order and answer the meditation bell three times a day. You see why in some of his utterances, like - listen and I'll look here and read from the Chinese,' and I bent over his shoulder and watched him read from big wild crowtracks of Chinese signs: 'Climbing up Cold Mountain path, Cold Mountain path goes on and on, long gorge choked with scree and boulders, wide creek and mist-blurred grass, moss is slippery though there's been no rain, pine sings but there's no wind, who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?'

'Wow.'

'Course that's my own translation into English, you see there are five signs for each line and I have to put it in Western prepositions and articles and such.'

'Why don't you just translate it as it is, five signs, five words? What's those first five signs?'

'Sign for climbing, sign for up, sign for cold, sign for mountain, sign for path'

'Well then, translate it "Climbing up Cold Mountain path"'.

'Yeah, but what do you do with the sign for long, sign for gorge, sign for choke, sign for avalanche, sign for boulders?'

'Where's that?'

'That's the third line, would have to read "Long gorge choke avalanche boulders"'

'Well that's even better!'

'Well yeah, I thought of that, but I have to have this pass the approval of Chinese scholars here at the university and have it clear in English'

'Boy what a great thing this is,' I said looking around at the little shack, 'and you sitting here so very quietly at this very quiet hour studying all alone with you glasses...'

'Ray what you got to do is climb a mountain with me soon. How would you like to climb Matterhorn?'

'Great! Where's that?'

'Up in the High Sierras. We can go there with Henry Morley in his car and bring our packs and take off from the lake. I could carry all the food and stuff we need in my rucksack and you could borrow Alvin's small knapsack and carry extra socks and shoes and stuff.'

'What's these signs mean/'

'These signs mean that Han Shan came down from the mountain after many years roaming around up there, to see his folks in town, says, 'Till recently I stayed at Cold Mountain, et cetera, yesterday I called on friends and family, more than half had gone to Yellow Springs," that means death, the Yellow Springs, "now morning I face my lone shadow, I can't study with both eyes full of tears."

'That's like you too, Japhy, studying with eyes full of tears.'

'My eyes aren't full of tears.'

'Aren't they going to be after a long time?'

'They certainly will, Ray ... and look here, "In the mountains it's cold, it's always been cold not just this year," see, he's real high, maybe twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet or more, way up there, and says, "Jagged scarps always snowed in, woods in the dark ravines spitting mist, grass is till sprouting in the end of June, leaves begin to fall in early August, and here I am high as a junkey-"'

'As a junkey!'

'That's my own translation, he actually says here am I as high as the sensualist in the city below, but I made it modern and high translation.'

'Great. I wondered why Han Shan was Japhy’s hero.

‘Because,’ said he, ‘he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of things, a vegetarian too by the way though I haven’t got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they can. And he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself.’

Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (Yet Another Extract)

Like On the Road, Desolation Angels is primarily a novel of many journeys, with Kerouac as ever trying to live out (and describe) the American Dream as idiosyncratically and as anti-materialistically as possible. That, aside from the philosophical musings and emotional agonising, is the pure simplicity of the book. Kerouac was an author who combined deep introspection of his own psychological state with close observation of the world around him. Together, this produces in his writing neat, lyrical stories which would merely be called ‘real-life’ if, in fact, they were not so sublimely realistic and uniquely beautiful. Here, in ‘Passing through New York’, Kerouac nearly loses his complete pack while riding the bus – the story passing from sudden disaster to existential angst, on into biography, then religious mysticism and back to calm, Zen-like relief again:

“I got down to the bus station with my rucksack and foolishly (high on Jack Daniels) began talking to some sailors who then got a guy with a car to drive out to the back streets of Washington in search of an afterhours bottle. A Negro connection was dickering with us when up walked a Negro cop who wanted to search us all, but was outnumbered. I simply walked away with my rucksack on my back, to the station, got on the bus and fell asleep with the pack by the driver’s well. When I woke up in Roanoke Rapids at dawn it was gone. Somebody had taken it off at Richmond. I let my head fall on the seat in that harsh glare nowhere worse in the world than in America with a stupid guilty hangover. A whole new novel (Angels of Desolation), a whole book of poetry, and the finishing chapters of another novel (about Tristessa), together with all the paintings not to mention the only gear I had in the world (sleepingbag, poncho, sweater of holy favour, perfect simple equipments the result of years’ thinking, gone, all gone. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever. Soldiers waited for the bus smoking. Fat old North Carolinians watched hands aback clasped. Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere, sick and crying. Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make life something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobiles day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere. I saw the glum faces of my mother, of Irwin, of Julien, of Ruth, all trying to make it go on believing without hope. Gay college students in the back of the bus making me even sicker to think of their purple plans all in time to end blind in an automobile cemetery insurance office for nothing. Where’s yonder old mule buried in those piny barrens or did the buzzard just eat? Caca, all the world caca. I remembered the enormous despair of when I was 24 sitting in my mother’s house all day while she worked in the shoe factory, in fact sitting at my father’s death chair, staring like a bust of Goethe at nothing. Getting up once in a while to plunk a sonatas on the piano, sonatas of my own spontaneous invention, then falling on the bed crying. Looking out the window at the glare of automobiles on Crossbay Boulevard. Bending my head over my first novel, to sick to go on. Wondering about Goldsmith and Johnson how they burped sorrow by their firesides in a life that was too long. That’s what my father told me the night before he died, “Life is too long.”

So wondering if God is a personal God who’s actually personally concerned about what happens to us, every one. Putting us up to burdens? To Time? To the crying horror of birth and the impossible lostness of the promise of death? And why? Because we’re fallen angels who said in Heaven “Heaven is great, it better be anyway” and off we fell? But do you even remember doing such a thing?

All I remember is that before I was born there was bliss. I actually remember the dark swarming bliss of 1917 altho I was born in 1922! New Years’ Eves came and went and I was just blisshood. But when I was dragged out my mother’s womb, blue, a blue baby, they yelled at me to wake up, and slapped me, and ever since then I’ve been chastised and lost for good and all. Nobody slapped me in bliss! Is God everything? If God is everything then it’s God who slapped me. For personal reasons? Do I have to carry this body around and call it mine own?

Yet in Raleigh a tall blue-eyed Southerner told me my bag was being shipped to my destination station in Winter Park. “God bless you,” I said, and he did a calm double take.”

Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (A Photographic Interlude)

I've recently returned from a short hiking holiday in the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia, a holiday on which I brought Desolation Angels along with me to read. Call me an idealist, but part of me was looking for some kind of beat Kerouackian journey of experience in the wilderness - not that we were that far from people most of the time - and indeed, part of the time it was like this. These photographs (presented in chronological order) were taken on a beautiful cloudless day, on a 15k ridge walk to the peaks of Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr (some way to the northwest of Mt. Snowdon, Yr Wddfa). I used a Fuji FinePix S7000 digital SLR, and converted the pictures afterwards (mostly with a red filter... as all b/w photographers know, it is great for bringing up atmospheric skyscapes).

Desolation Angels isn't much of a mountain book - in spite of its beginning with Kerouac in situ on a mountaintop like the crazy ascetic monk he always wanted to be - and I think The Dharma Bums, with its vivid account of Ray, Japhy and Morley's hike up the Matterhorn, better fits that description. Nevertheless, the solitude and inescapable vastness of the mountain landscape is a key emotional and philosophical theme of the novel. Mt. Desolation, and the rest of the Cascades for that matter, are probably incomparably vaster and emptier than the rocky enclave of Snowdonia, but I'm going to go ahead and draw the comparison anyway.

I'm no poet, and I'm not really all that much of a writer - definitely more of a reader! - so here's my own artistic response to Kerouac's "Desolation Blues" in Twelve Choruses: "Desolation Black & Whites" in Twelve Portraits.

Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels is one of Kerouac’s later books, first published in 1965, nearly a decade after On the Road. Clearly, it is somewhat more advanced in both style and content, and can seem a little daunting in comparison. More dense than breathless, it is nevertheless a wonderful expansion of the great and profound Beat odyssey which begins with On the Road. I first found it in the college library in hardback, and avidly read the 186 chapters within a couple of weeks, at whatever opportunity presented itself.

Desolation Angels is more fragmented than the other Kerouac novels, in fact made up of two books, ‘Desolation Angels’ and ‘Passing Through’, Book One containing one hundred and two chapters, and Book Two eight-four, all of fairly short length. The chapters are further arranged by setting or theme: ‘Desolation in Solitude’, ‘Desolation in the World’; ‘Passing Through Mexico’, ‘Passing Through New York’, ‘Passing Through Tangiers, France and London’ and ‘Passing Through America Again’.

The Kerouac canon, or more specifically the ‘Duluoz Legend’ (the series of autobiographical novels, each written and published at the time with Jack Duluoz, i.e. Kerouac, under different aliases) overlaps significantly at this period. Desolation Angels begins almost exactly as The Dharma Bums ends, with Kerouac as a fire lookout in the High Cascades. Not only was the experience of Mt. Desolation made into the centrepiece of this novel (purportedly transcribed directly from his journals written at the time), but it is recorded in poetry in ‘Desolation Blues’, and in prose in ‘Alone on a Mountaintop’, part of Lonesome Traveler – which, to further complicate matters, also recounts the experiences of ‘Passing Through Tangiers, France and England’ as ‘Big Trip to Europe’. Finally, the tail-end of Desolation Angels hints at the even darker writing of Big Sur, Kerouac’s deeply disturbing tale of the D.T.s and paranoia in an isolated coastal cabin on the wild California coast, as a refuge from his unwelcome and intrusive new celebrity:

‘But enough about California for now – I later had adventures down there that were really horrible and only as horrible as you get when you get older and your last moment impels you to test all, to go mad, just to see what the Void’ll do – ”

As I say, Desolation Angels is a fragmented work, perhaps a return to the epic grandeur of the Great American Novel Kerouac always wanted to write, and away from the relative brevity and unrelenting movement of On The Road. Desolation Angels possesses in many ways a broader scope – travelling outside of the American continent, for a start – but also a broader, more reflective vision. Having absorbed and refined the exuberant style of On The Road, as well as progressing through the Buddhist mysticism of The Dharma Bums, the Kerouac of Desolation digs that little bit deeper into the Beat lifestyle.

At the same time, Desolation Angels has its extremes of wild exuberance as well as solemn introspection; it still works quite excellently as a Beat novel, as a superbly creative celebration of life’s loves and sorrows. It starts with Kerouac having attained the spiritual and literal peak of the previous novel, and yet grappling with the implications of prolonged (although desired) solitude. Here, Kerouac descends the trail on his return from his 63-day stint as fire lookout:

“The best way to come down a mountain is like running, swing your arms free and fall as you come, your feet will hold you up for the rest – but O I had no feet because no shoes, I was “barefooted” (as the saying goes) and far from stomping down on big trail-singin steps as I bash along tra la tra la I could hardly even mincingly place them the soles were so thin and the rocks so sudden some of them with a sharp bruise – A John Bunyan morning, it was all I could do to keep my mind on other things – I tried to sing, think, daydream, do as I did by the desolation stove – but Karma your trail is laid out for you – Could have no more escaped that morning of bruised torn feet and burning-ache thighs (and eventual searing blisters like needles) and the gasping sweats, the attack of insects, than I can escape and than you can escape being eternally around to go through the emptiness of form (including the emptiness of form of your complaining personality) – I had to do it, not rest, my only concern was keeping the boat or even losing the boat, O what sleep on that trail that night would have been, full moon, but full moon was shining down on the valley too – and there you could hear music over the waters, and smell cigarette smoke, and listen to the radio – Here, all was, thirsty little creeks of September no widern my hand, giving out water with water, where I splashed and drank and muddled to go on – Lord – How sweet is life? As sweet

as cold

water in a dell

on a dusty tired trail –

- on a rusty tired trail – bestrewn with the kickings of the mules last June when they were forced at stickpoint to jump over a badly hacked pathway around a fallen snag that was too big to climb, and Lord I had to bring up the mare among the frightened mules and Andy was cursing “I cant do this all by myself goddamnit, bring up that mare!” and like in an old dream of other lifetimes when I handled the horses I came up, leading her, and Andy grabbed the reins and heaved at her neck, poor soul, while Marty stabbed her in the ass with a stick, deep – to lead the frightened mule – and stabbed the mule – and rain and snow – now all the mark of that fury is dry in September dust as I sit there and puff – a lot of little edible weeds all around – A man could do it, hide in these hills, boil weeds, bring a little fat with him, boil weeds over small Indian fires and live forever – “Happy with a stone underhead let heaven and earth go about their changes!” sang old Chinese Poet Hanshan – No maps, packs, firefinders, batteries, airplanes, warnings on radios, just mosquitoes humming in harmony, and the trickle of the streamlet – But no, Lord has made this movie in his mind and I’m a part of it (the part of it known as me) and it’s for me to understand this world and so go among it preaching the Diamond Steadfastness that says: “You’re here and you’re not here, both, for the same reason,” – “it’s Eternal Power munging along” – So I up I get and lunge along with pack, thumbed, and wince on ankled pains and turn and turn the trail faster and faster under my growing trot and pretty soon I’m running, bent, like a Chinese woman with a pack of faggots on her neck, jingle jingle drumming and pumping stiff knees thru rock underbrush and around corners, sometimes I crash off the trail and bellow back on’t, somehow, never lose, the way was made to be followed – Down the hill I’ll meet thin young boy starting out on his climb, I’m fat with butchers, and it’s Springtime in the Void – Sometimes I fall, on haunches, slipt, the pack is my back bumper, I burnst right along bumbling for fair, what words to describe hoopely tootely pumling down a parpity trail, prapooty – Swish, sweat – Every time I hit my bruised football toe I cry “Almost!” but it never gets it straight so’s lame me – The toe, bruised in Columbia College scrimmages under lights in Harlem dusks, some big bum from Sandusky trod on it with his spikes and big boned calf all down – Toe never recovered – bottom and top both busted and sore, when a rock prods in there my whole ankle will turn to protect it – yet, turning an ankle is a Pavlovian fait accompli, Airapetianz couldnt show me any better how not to believe I’ve strained a needed ankle, or even sprained – it’s a dance, dance from rock to rock, hurt to hurt, wince down the mountain, the poetry’s all there – And the world that awaits me!”

To my mind, Kerouac is by far one of the most enjoyable writers to read in prose. I noted in my review of The Dharma Bums that I hadn’t talked much about Kerouac’s actual writing style, so I’ll try and rectify that here. ‘Beat’, ‘poetry of pure prose’, ‘spontaneous prose’, there are plenty of phrases to describe it – but, in the end, you can only experience it for yourself.

The extract above is as good as any, really, for appreciating the pure Kerouac style. Both palpably exciting and intellectually clever, his writing is to me often absolutely captivating. Moreover, it is (paradoxically, given the last remark) wonderfully free – in the sense that as a writer Kerouac plays loose and fast with language. Spontaneity, wordsmithery, humour, aural and visual allusions, all play a part in creating that superbly original style. Kerouac for me is someone who has deconstructed language – breaking down the conventions and constrictions of standard prose into a sublime string of words, phrases, meanings and transcendent emotions.

As an Irishman, I am that little bit proud to draw a link between Kerouac and the past master of expansive, streaming prose – James Joyce. A clearly acknowledged influence on Kerouac, what Joyce did in 1922 with Ulysses was to deconstruct both the novel and the language with which a novel was written. Obviously, Kerouac rarely reaches the extremes of that infamous book – although parts of Desolation Angels definitely come close – and as a Joycean, he was a partial, if devoted, follower. In his early journals (windblown worlds, p. 48) he remarks:

“…I do believe in the kind of writing that gives effortless pleasure to the reader. In the end, I am my own greatest reader. Also, I believe in sane writing, as opposed to the psychotic sloppiness of Joyce. Joyce is a man who only gave up trying to communicate to human beings. I myself do that when I’m drunk-weary and full of misery, therefore I know it’s not so honest as it’s spiteful to blurt out in associations without a true human effort to evoke and give significant intelligence to one’s sayings. It’s a kind of scornful idiocy.”

I’m pretty sure he was taking about Finnegan’s Wake, however! With some qualifications, the Joyce-Kerouac comparison is really crucial, in my opinion at least, to appreciating Kerouac’s writing. The trail extract above, while fairly straightforward, contains many Joycean elements, particularly in the association of words and sounds – creating a tone similar to that in the following extract. The blending of rhythms, orthography and jokey humour is evocative of language in its cultural association – here in a earthy, folksy American style rather than, as with Joyce, the cosmopolitan Dubliner speech. The style is used for both meaning and effect, for art and for emotion – but most of all, to show the capabilities and potential of language, its biblical, time-honoured significances, and the way it should intimately affect the reader. So here’s how Joyce did it (in the ‘Oxen of Sun’ chapter of Ulysses, as Bloom converses with a nun in the maternity hospital – I think)

“As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefore sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her asked if O’Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O’Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God’s rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men’s oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for go as he came.”

There is both a style and a meaning to this novel. Desolation Angels is - for all its superficial, carefree wanderlust experiences - a deeply philosophical, mystical and even religious work of literature. As Kerouac wanders from Seattle to San Francisco, Mexico, New York and Europe, he ponders the existential suffering of his life. The super-vibrant characters of On The Road and onward criss-cross this whole novel as well; Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and innumerable other literary heroes. Those people, who were previously Beats, Zen Lunatics or just sorrowful friends are all now, in Kerouac’s eyes, ‘angels in desolation’. In all, Desolation Angels reads like a massive beatific vision of a country and culture which Kerouac alternates between being jaded or eagerly anticipatory of. The novel alternates between both beauty and sadness.

Desolation Angels is an intensely psychological novel – an explanation, as Nelson Algren remarks, of ‘what the place of religion may have been in the Beat mystique’. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose spoke of literary freedom – freedom of style, and of content. As he says himself, returning again to Joyce, (windblown world, p. 242):

"Come a day there will when… authors of exact imagination will be free, as Joyce felt free, to wind out their moody shroud about the riddle of the tale being told."

Desolation Angels is also, lastly, a symbolic novel – an idealist novel, centred on the feeling of desolation, not depression but a feeling of ‘lostness’ in the world – based around an intense personal sadness and vibrant, mystical experience of suffering and joy. As he writes in the final chapter:

"How we continue in this endless Gloom I’ll never know – Love, Suffer and Work is the motto of my family (Lebris de Keroack) but seems I suffer more than the rest – Old Honeyboy Bill’s in Heaven for sure anyway – Only thing is Where’s Jack Going?”

Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac is one of the best, if not the best, author that I’ve ever found. Especially since he was an author with a wide and varied body of work. Jaroslav Hasek (see below) wrote one very good book – which in fact he never actually completed, finishing only four out of a planned six volumes of The Good Soldier Schweik. Whereas Kerouac, effectively, spanned an entire generation of subculture with his work. It’s fair to say Kerouac is synonymous with the ‘Beat generation’, although so much so as to obscure the variety and contrasts of his books; from the hopeful ‘Great American Novel’ of The Town and the City, to the intensity of his classic On the Road as well as his later output, such as Big Sur, in which ‘the mirror of the Beat way of life is hammered at and it shatters’.

Which is why, in a way, I am choosing for this post his 1959 book, The Dharma Bums - even beyond the fact that it is, probably, my favourite Kerouac novel. I won’t pretend that I didn’t get into Kerouac through, and directly from, On the Road. Neither will I even suggest that that book is less than deserving of its immense acclaim. Rather, I hope to present The Dharma Bums as a gentler, perhaps subtler introduction to the beauty and sublime genius of Kerouac, uncrowned King of the Beats.

First of all, The Dharma Bums is, and isn’t, a book about Buddhism. Mostly, it is; although its religion is of an oblique nature, and the book has its fair share of the secular hedonism of On the Road. Basically, the novel follows Kerouac’s autobiographical alter ego, Ray Smith, journeying around the west coast of America with various Beat hipsters and ‘Buddhist cats’. There’s a loose dichotomy of urban, Frisco loucheness and wild, outdoorsy solitude. It starts with Smith on the railroad, hopping freights, and ends with him alone on ‘Mt. Desolation’, a Washington peak where the idealistic nature-lover gets a job as a fire lookout. In between, there’s poetry, drink, girls, and various socially uncountenanced nonsensical high jinks – roughly in that order.

The Dharma Bums is a classic Kerouac story of vibrancy and exuberant lifestyles – ‘A descriptive excitement unmatched since the days of Thomas Wolfe’, according to the New York Times – but also a beautifully tender exposition of idealism, compassion and small philosophical virtues. At the centre of The Dharma Bums spiritual and literary heart is the character of Japhy Ryder (in real life, Gary Snyder, a noted ecologist, socialist and poet). Japhy, throughout a bosom pal to the older Kerouac, is a devotee of Zen Buddhism and plays the foil for Kerouac’s efforts to find peace and understanding in the titular Dharma (dharma loosely translates as ‘truth’ or ‘law’, and is fundamental to the terminology of Buddhism and spiritual enlightenment). His efforts are not entirely successful, as is explained in this Penguin blurb:

"Following the explosive energy of On the Road comes The Dharma Bums, in which Keroauc charts the spiritual quest of a group of friends in search of Dharma, or Truth. Ray Smith and his friend Japhy, along with Morley the yodeller, head off into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude and experience the Zen way of life. But in wildly Bohemian San Francisco, with its poetry jam sessions, marathon drinking bouts and experiments in ‘yabyum’, they find the ascetic route distinctly hard to follow"

Part of the beauty of The Dharma Bums is its contradictions and simple, honest humanities. Penguin recently released a deluxe classic edition with a scholarly introductory essay by Ann Douglas (and extra nice artwork to boot) which discusses the philosophical, moral and psychological issues of the book – of which there are complex and many. Nevertheless, they fail to obscure either the innocent idealism and zany happenings, or lyrical and prosaic sensibilities (of which I am conscious of having said far too little here) of this wonderful novel.

Indeed, the literary quality of this, and all of Keroauc’s work (his ‘poetry of pure prose’) is what ultimately assures it a devoted readership. As a mere taste, here is one description of many of the marvellous ‘Japhy Ryder’, the archetypical Dharma Bum:

"…About a mile from there, way down Milvia and then upslope toward the big campus of the University of California, behind another big old house on a quiet street (Hillegass), Japhy lived in his own shack which was infinitely smaller than ours, about twelve by twelve, with nothing in it but typically Japhy appurtenances that showed his belief in the simple monastic life – no chairs at all, not even one sentimental rocking chair, but just straw mats. In the corner was his famous rucksack with cleaned-up pots and pans all fitting into one another in a compact unit and all tied and put away inside a knotted-up blue bandana. Then his Japanese wooden pata shoes, which he never used, and a pair of black inside-pata socks to pad around softly in over his pretty straw mats, just room for your four toes on one side and your big toe on the other. He had a slew of orange crates all filled with beautiful scholarly books, some of them in Oriental languages, all the great sutras, comments on sutras, the complete works of D.T. Suzuki and a fine quadruple-volume edition of Japanese haikus. He also had an immense collection of valuable general poetry. In fact if a thief should have broken in there the only things of real value were the books …

...orange crates made his table, on which, one late sunny afternoon as I arrived,was steaming a peaceful cup of tea at his side as he bent his serious head to the Chinese signs of the poet Han Shan. Coughlin had given me the address and I came there, seeing first Japhy’s bicycle on the lawn in front of the big house out front (where his landlady lived) then the few odd boulders and rocks and funny little trees he’d brought back from mountain jaunts to set out in his own ‘Japanese tea garden’ or ‘tea-house garden’, as there was a convenient pine tree soughing over his little domicile.

A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting cross-legged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, ‘Ray, come in,’ and bent his eyes again to the script.

‘What you doing?’

‘Translating Han Shan’s great poem called “Cold Mountain” written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings.’

‘Wow.’ … "

(Ch. 3)