The Dharma Bums

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 20^th 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.