the ecstasies of Jack

The interview, which took place in the beat writer's home in 1968, quickly took a strange turn. The at-first reticently amiable Kerouac grudged the company of his interviewers, yet quickly offered drink and pills, pills that were “a little white beard in your mortality”. And then, at the end, in the last word, Kerouac prompted the interviewer; he tells him to ask him what Kerouac means. “Jack, just tell me what Kerouac means?”. It's like he isn't so sure, himself. Like he's looking for confirmation.

I came to Kerouac, to all of the beats, “late”. And by this I mean, I read them when I was twenty five, in a hot summer burst while I sat on night buses and waited in coach stations and ran out of money in Austria, with the snow line tantalising on the Julian alps. In a sense, I expected an affinity, because I had been told there would be an affinity. Jack Kerouac was the beat darling, the road hipster, the vernacular poet ; he was the novelist for the down and out, for the “sentimental young man”.

And so when I began to read, not On the Road but The Dharma Bums, I read with an expectation to confirm certain things, impressions, that I had been given. But in that reading, and in subsequent readings, I found not only that I intensely liked (I'd half expected not) Kerouac, but that I liked him in spite of this reputation – of the hip beat poet. Where he travelled wasn't important. What he drank or took was not important. It was in the level of words and in the metrical structure of his writing; a prose that creates an atmosphere of expansive, ecstatic mysticism. For me, it's just not about the road. It's about the vision.

 *

 For me, Kerouac is not “the beat poet”. He is the complex, confused man who saw himself variously as a speaker, a listener, a Catholic mystic. When I first brought my copy of Dharma Bums, in a little, musty bookshop in the afternoon's cold, I actually felt slightly embarrassed, as if I were late to a party that everybody else had left. I confided to a bookish friend about not having read Kerouac, and he seemed taken aback. He didn't like Kerouac, but as a younger man had been carried away by him. “But why don't you like him, now?” I asked. He replied, “well, because he's immature. I mean, all those crazy days and nights, all that posing and strutting. I mean, you can't live like that”.

 He wasn't the only one. I kept talking to people, before I'd even read the book, and they each said similar things, how Kerouac was more like a “rite of passage”, an “object” from their youth, than a book in its own merit, in its own glow. And then I thought back to when I was young, and people my age were reading him, or had read him, and they said there was this “affinity”, but an affinity that dies out; “you outgrow it”. Even my parents said it. But none of them really “liked” it. None of them had a copy on their shelves. They wouldn't dream of reading it again, even if they did. What had once seemed so sexy and cool and exciting was dead. Now the world has changed; move with it. So I thought I'd give Kerouac a try.

 *

The Dharma Bums was not brooding like I thought it would be. Nor was it really pretentious. If anything it was light-hearted, fulsome, naïve. Like its bigger, bad cousin, On the Road, it has the same narrative mechanic, of the relationship between a teacher and his pupil (here, Japhy and Ray, rather than Dean and Sal), but it is not and cannot be the same. Automatically, Dharma Bums is a less self-aware, less pensive book precisely for its exposure to early West Coast Zen ; not the patient practice of the Zen we think of now, but the idea of Zen as thought association, gladness, openness. Ray cuts a naïve figure, torn between the bright city lights and the solitude of the mountain. Japhy, his teacher (based perhaps not too loosely on the poet Gary Snyder), provides the entrance and exposure to Buddhist thinking, to meditation and the loss of stricture. It, too, is a short, glad little book. But despite this honesty and earnestness, the book received not a little criticism; Ruth Fuller Sasaki said, “his [Kerouac's] Buddhism is the most garbled and mistaken I have read in many a day […] as a novelist he shows no talent whatsoever and no imagination”. Reading those words, I think Ruth Sasaki is wrong and crude in her own way. I think very much that Kerouac's glib openness, his sensitivity, are quite earnestly connected with particular strands and expressions in Zen thought and practice. And even then, Ray/Jack doesn't pretend he is somehow a Zen Master – the entire book lays itself open through its naivety, because it is exploring a principle, a sentiment.

The “garbled” critique of Ruth Sasaki is, then, a little amusing when Kerouac himself dedicated the book to the wry Tang dynasty Chinese poet Han Shan; the poet who poked fun at his own detractors with; “Mister Wang the Graduate / Laughs at my poor prosody. / I don't know a wasp's waist / much less a crane's knee / And, he followed, “my words come helter skelter”.

By opening up his Dharma Bums to that expression, Kerouac was linking himself with a particular strand or line of Zen-inspired thought, of a Zen lyrical practice. We must also remember that Kerouac was painting a portrait ; of a time and place. The torid, drunken debates of the characters in hot city jazz bars are supposed – I think – to be a little bit funny, a little off piste. “You'll be sorry some day. Why don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you; it's with your six senses that you're fooled into believing [that] you have six senses”. And then, its associations too are supposed to be raw ; the prose is vernacular, glad, ecstatic. “Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence”. You can, like Ruth Sasaki, say that this just “isn't proper”, or you can go with it like Han Shan, or to pare Zen back to its Gathas and prayers, such as the teaching of the seven Buddhas ;

“Not to commit evils, /
 But to do all that is good, /
 And to keep one's thought pure - /
This is the teaching of all the Buddhas /”

 I think the reason that Dharma Bums rubs off the wrong way is because it is less procedural, less academic than critics like Ruth Sasaki would have liked. So be it, then. But I think it has an essential purity and consciousness about it that escapes, gladly, all of that. Its mistakes are both as relevant as irrelevant as the things it gets right. In a way, Ruth Sasaki was saying, “hey, he's not doing Buddhism right”. And that, for anybody who has sat on a mat in a Buddhist centre, is a downright annoying criticism to make.

 *

But then there was On the Road, which really is not On the Road but the original manuscript of it, and then it was Visions of Cody. The fact that Kerouac bifurcated On the Road into so many separate imaginations, later rereadings of the whole, tells us a great deal about his discomfiture with it, about his own vision of their being, somewhere, a true imagination of it – the history to the myth. But in its pages – whether it is On the Road, the manuscript, or Visions of Cody, there is also my own discomfort. The fact that I don't like Dean Moriarty, but that's okay. And while Ray's friendship with Japhy seemed idealistic but good, that of Sal and Dean seemed dangerous and poor, built on nothing but air. And the skewed relationships that the characters set up for each other, I knew, were doomed to fail not because they were intrinsically bad, but because they didn't have the sense, the emotional sense, to sort their lives out.

On the Road is a lot about people getting hurt because they are insensitive to one another. All of the quaint expectations that I had built around Dharma Bums now suffered in light of this. At first I just thought, “I'd been told to expect this”. But then I looked again, and read again.