The Dharma Bums (1958)
Jack Kerouac
Ah,
old Jack Kerouac: the man, the myth, the legend. When I think about Jean Louis
Kerouac I almost feel like I’m trying to describe some mythological figure,
like Odin or Hercules or something, an alien non-human from an ancient
prehistoric time, who was subject to our own mortal failings (like the old gods
of myth were) but somehow untouched by the reality of the world. Yeah, you
could just go out on the long lonesome highway and live like a hobo bum and
then write some books about it, get a jug of wine for a quarter and go down to
the train tracks and make yourself a little camp, with a fire, roast some
franks, heat up a tin of beans, anyone could do that. Sure. It’s both romantic
and repulsive, which is sort of how Kerouac’s books read. He presents himself
as a guy just out there to experience life, to live it more fully than any of
the squares in squaresville do but who is also, at times, a monumental loser.
He fails, he fucks up. He gets drunk and does stupid things.
As
a teenager I had a deep obsession with the Beats for a good couple years
running. I blame my junior year English teacher: we had to write an essay about
an American poet, a fairly long essay for a high school assignment, it was like
a whole research project sort of deal, she gave us a long list of poets to
chose from, each with a little blurb describing the poet, and the one that
described Allen Ginsberg really had my number so I chose it. She
called us out one by one to announce our selections, and we weren’t allowed to
chose the same poet as anyone else, so that everyone had a different topic (she was probably tired of reading thirty essays about Robert Frost) and I
remember being so nervous that someone was going to pick Allen Ginsberg before
me. I really wanted Allen Ginsberg to be mine. If you’ve ever played Fantasy
Football you know what I’m talking about: say you’ve got a pick towards the end
of the first round so you sit there nervously hoping that no one will disrupt
your strategy by picking Tom Brady or Adrian Peterson ahead of you and then
when your turn comes you leap up and yell (or lower your voice for suspense),
“Tom Brady!” So we had a month or two to do this project and on weekends I rode
the trolley to the downtown library (which is an hour and a half trolley ride
from where I grew up, I was dedicated or, more likely, didn’t have anything
better to do) and looked up books on the Beats, on poetry, on anything
relevant. Me in the library with my dorky little canvas book bag and my dorky,
awkward, shuffling walk checking out those iconic City Lights editions of Howl and Kaddish and sitting at one of the tables taking notes from some
lame Critique of 20th Century American Poetry, while the homeless
men jacked off at the computers. Afterwards I’d go to this vegan punk rock
Mexican restaurant that was a block up from the library and eat a burrito and
read. Actually that place reminds me a lot of how I feel about the Beats now,
as a grown man: I was enamored as a teen but I don’t know if I’ll ever need to
go back. Last time I went, probably four or five years ago, the place had a B
rating from the health department and the service was awful. Maybe my tastes
changed or now I’m just seeing things as an adult. I guess back to the point:
that was probably the best thing I’ve ever written in my stupid life (sucks for
me) and it sparked a long-term fascination with the Beats. There’s something
about the Beats, and Jack Kerouac especially, that if they catch you in the
right time and place they can really hit you where you live. A real punch in the
gut. It caters to or preys upon the same sort of awkward romantic teenaged
impulse that would inspire one to listen to Morrissey or own a dorky little
canvas book bag, full of dorky little books, that slaps against your scrawny
ass when you shuffle around your deeply lame and culturally dead hometown and
wish you could just get out and go somewhere else.
So, when I was a young adult I read several of Kerouac’s books (On the Road, Tristessa, The Subterraneans, and I think that’s about
it) but this was my first time reading one as a grown man, with grown-up ideas of my own
and life experiences and all that crap, and I was shocked at how different my
opinion on Jack Kerouac was this time around. I still think he’s a great writer
but he is definitely a very flawed one, and his flaws are the sort of things I
would have ignored (or not caught at all) or romanticized earlier in my reading
career but now seem quite noisy and unavoidable to me. He can expertly describe
the feeling of being in one place at one time, that’s really his strength as a
writer, but he fails to string all these impressions into a coherent whole. He
creates something that is less than the sum of its parts. His prose is at times
quite nice, very sloppy and enthusiastic, very loose, easy and free. Kerouac is
sort of like a really excited guy at a party who is very into something and
wants to share it with you and wants you to be into it as well. He has this
sort of washed-out and faded sentimental Polaroid tone that is cloying in other
writers but not so much with Kerouac. It’s very uniquely American. I don’t
think he’s avante-garde or anything like that. He’s solidly American, very
sentimentally American. Quite conservative in a lot of ways. He’s basically a romantic, which is the most
conservative breed of writer.
Unfortunately
the problem with this book is that it’s basically two books, one great
and the other horrible. The great parts are the beginning and the end, when
he’s doing cool things and telling you about them because he wants you to hear
and he wants you to do something cool with your time too, and the awful part is
the very long tedious middle section when he’s hitchhiking across the country,
going to parties, and droning on and on about Buddhism. Now, if you know
anything about anything you know that there isn’t anything on this planet more
boring than white people talking about “Eastern Spirituality”. I know next to
nothing about Buddhism--which is already more knowledge than I want or need--but word on
the street is that Kerouac was a very bad Buddhist, in that he completely
misunderstood very basic teachings of the religion. I’m not qualified to
comment on his interpretations of religious dogma except to say that I don’t
give a flying fuck. It was some of the least enjoyable, most repetitive and
shallowest writing I’ve ever read. That’s the part where Kerouac the character
comes off the worst: he sounds like an obnoxious flake, lamely wading in a very
shallow pool of spirituality where the only thing that’s deep about him is his
misogyny (women are sex objects to him), just a creepy drunken lecher. But those good sections are really
good. The first part of the book concerns a weekend climb up Matterhorn Peak in
the Sierra Nevadas in the company of a poet and a crazy guy. What I loved about
this part is that one, the prose is beautiful, and two, how wide-eyed and
emotionally naked Kerouac is. Sometimes in moments of existential despair I
feel the loss of childlike wide-eyed idealism in my own life and it’s
invigorating to see it still thriving in another man. He doesn’t even get to
the top of the mountain. He chickens out and fully admits to being a wiener,
which isn’t something that most writers, as self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing
a species as they are, would ever own up to.
The second good part, the end of the book, he goes up to the Cascades
and works as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak for a summer. Desolation Peak!
What a name. The other nearby peaks have names like Terror, Fury, Challenger,
Despair. Sounds like a hell of a place for a fellow to be alone for three
months with some books and clouds for company, and an old skillet to fry your
morning bacon in and in the cool morning air sitting out on the steps in your
old ratty sweater, smoking a cigarette and watching a deer in the meadow
surrounding your cabin… you’d really have to twist my arm. He just goes up
there and reads and thinks. What a lucky duck.
Kerouac’s
books kind of have this real retrospective sadness to them that I’m sure is
just a product of their vintage. They come across now as in a way eulogizing an
America that doesn’t really exist anymore, if it ever did. Kerouac exerts a lot
of effort in making hitchhiking sound like the best and only mode of travel,
and maybe it was in 1954 but I don’t think anybody seriously does it now. Maybe
homeless teenage runaways do, but not intellectuals and poets. One, no one would
ever pick you up. Two, if someone did pick me up I know that I’d end up dead.
Some truck driver would chain me up back with the broccoli, rape me from Kansas
City to Buffalo, and then chop me up into little pieces, stuff ‘em in a garbage
bag, and leave the bag on the side of the road. My remains would never be found
or identified. Not to mention the homeless teenage runaways stealing all my
stuff and beating me up and whatever methods of torture angry and bored cops can imagine dishing
out to some poor guy with no fixed address who may as well be nameless and
nonexistent. It’s hard to move around, especially if you’re poor. Poverty keeps
you in one place, roots you, it’s an anchor, a millstone, no matter how much
one wants to romanticize it. There’s no dignity or poetry in poverty and it
doesn’t free one from the bonds of materialism except through an early and
lonely death after a lifetime of bone grinding misery. I suspect it was much
the same in the 1950s, and for every Jack Kerouac there’s a million Tom Joads
trapped in the merciless teeth of their circumstances. And there’s no hope of
being a fire lookout. It costs an arm and a leg to rent the cabin Kerouac
stayed at for a summer, and they use satellites to monitor for fires now. Nobody
needs a guy in a cabin anymore.
I
dunno if I could say I actually liked the book or not. I guess I’m mostly
negative on it. It’s very gauzy and sentimental and a bit shallow at times. Kerouac
isn’t a very deep thinker so he doesn’t have much to say about his times except
that they happened, but he does have a way of making those times real and
inviting you to sit around the fire and share with him. He’s very friendly and
conversational. It’s kind of a unique approach even if it isn’t the most
intellectual one, and Kerouac definitely does deserve a place in the American
canon, in our cultural memory, though probably not ranked as highly as he often is. He’s not good, but he’s great, and he embodies something about the
American automobile zeitgeist that few others really nail down; he’s the
architect of a kind of Manifest Destiny of the soul. He's great for most of the reasons people already believe and I suppose the most damning thing I could say is that if he were still alive today, and was still writing, or was just beginning his writing career, then he wouldn't be a great writer, if he became one at all. Most of his greatness is in the fact that he helped shape his times and was fully a product of them, and had the foresight to write some of his experiences down and could sometimes turn a nice phrase, but not because he was a deep or original thinker. He's a describer and not an explainer, and in my mind that makes him a lesser writer. I think he'd be particularly ill-suited to describing or explaining the 21st Century, totally lacking the tools or imagination to deal with it. Too emotional, too scattershot and inconsistent, too self-absorbed and totally guided by some lesser organ, the heart or the gut or the penis, with little to no moderation from the organ that actually has things to say: the brain. The sad fact is he'd probably just end up some tattooed hipster burnout with a substance abuse problem waiting tables at an avante-garde tapas bar. Or a yuppie or something awful like that.
Listen, I’ll tell you
honestly as I can what I felt like when I read this book. I felt like a trip to
San Francisco. Have you ever been to San Francisco? You drive eight, nine hours
excited about your weekend up there walking around the Wharf eating crab in
your dorky little peacoat in one of the most culturally important cities in the
history of America, and when you get there it’s completely disappointing, a
phony tourist trap. It’s not at all what you wanted it to be and probably it never
was.
