The New Criterion

In the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, the loosely autobiographical story of several hikes he took a year after On the Road, Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) explains to the complaining Ray Smith (Kerouac) that they still have a long way to go: “We got a plateau and then scree and then more rocks and we get to a final alpine lake no biggern this pond and then comes the final climb over one thousand feet almost straight up. …” Honestly, I was ready to stop at the scree.

While Viking Press adorns the edition with a lively cover—an amoebic shape that recalls Jean Arp’s woodcuts—the introduction by the editor Ann Douglas rehearses shopworn tales of the Beat Generation and Kerouac’s Buddhism. Unfortunately, this historical context dates the novel and limits the appeal of this anniversary edition.

Douglas quotes Capote’s classic put-down—that On the Road was “typing, not writing”—then has nothing further to say about the prose. It is not his writing so much as his “openness” that she admires: the “complete receptivity of his sensorium, was Kerouac’s greatest gift,” she explains. While this may be true of Kerouac the hitchhiker and Zen Buddhist, it is certainly not true of the novelist. In Dharma Bums, his observations can be refreshingly unfiltered, but there is no reward—no meaningful synthesis—just a forced epiphany at the end of Smith’s seemingly endless treks.

Returning home after climbing Matterhorn Peak in California, Ray is frustrated by his family’s inability to grasp his new outlook, and he retreats to the woods to meditate. In a rare moment of stillness, when the reader is not asked to hop a freight train or jump between boulders, Ray’s thoughts run on:

All enthusiastic I went back to the woods that night and thought, “What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I’m a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I am empty and awake, that I know I’m empty, awake, and that there’s no difference between me and anything else…”

Kerouac’s confusing rhetoric excludes the reader from what is meant to be a shared moment of clarity, and his question is a sad attempt to grab our flagging interest. Critics have praised Kerouac for the honesty and humility of his raw thinking, but here, concerned with his own state of consciousness, he fails to keep the reader awake.

Nirvana in The Dharma Bums arrives oddly in the form of food: “macaroni with sizzling hot sauce,” “buckwheat pancakes” with “Log Cabin syrup,” “raspberry Jello the color of rubies setting in the sun,” a “nice big Hershey bar.” Ray’s immersion in these elemental pleasures is a lot more satisfying than his grandiose epiphanies. Succinct and specific, such descriptions enliven Kerouac’s prose; they are welcome diversions in a novel that requires a crash course in what Douglas calls the “San Francisco West Coast Bohemian-Anarchist-Modernist tradition.” Pass the raspberry Jello, please.