Dharma Bum

I recently submitted a major written project for my master's degree in journalism, a long-form piece entitled Fathers and Sons about two generations of environmentalists living in a small mountain town in Idaho. The feeling of completing a defining and important task usually overrides the despair of suddenly having nothing to do, but sitting in my trashed office full of proposal drafts and coffee-stained newspapers I concluded that what I'd handed to my committee wasn't at all the project I'd envisioned writing.

To quiet my mind I purchased an old favorite book, The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac. It's the book that made me excited about writing when I was in high school, and if anything could elevate my spirit, it was Kerouac's unique ability to bring the Pacific Northwest, the part of America from which I hail, into vivid relief.

Boy was I mistaken.

Yes, The Dharma Bums still glows with poetry and detail. But like my project, dead ends, unrealized ambitions and disillusion define it more than what Kerouac likely intended to write. In the final passages of the novel, Kerouac’s stand-in Ray Smith sits atop Desolation Peak where he has agreed to keep fire watch. Instead of the spiritual enlightenment or the “becoming Buddha” he seeks in the solitude of the Cascade range, he finds only the silent specter of Hozomeen Mountain, which “stood there returning the attack with a surl of silence.”

I made a tremendous investment of time and energy into Fathers and Sons, only to realize that my story was ultimately about neither. In fact, after reflecting on the interviews I’d conducted, I decided that I could vouch for everything in my project except the parts about the relationship between fathers and sons.

In the hours before submitting my project, it dawned on me that I could only suggest a metaphorical father/son relationship between my Idaho environmentalists, and that I’d written about facts and figures more than I’d written a story. Like Ray Smith waiting for Hozomeen to speak to him, I had undertaken a journey only to arrive at an unintended destination.

Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums in a fit of Buddhist enthusiasm in 1957 after publishing the hugely popular but dimly understood novel, On The Road. It’s the story of Ray Smith bouncing between huge personalities, the cultivation of his own Buddhist philosophy, and his core values shaped by Roman Catholicism while he traipses around America in the vain hope of becoming a “Dharma bum.”

Most importantly, it’s a novel about calls and responses. While climbing the Matterhorn in the Sierras, Smith and his mentor Japhy Rider shout haikus at each other, and communicate using yodels with their lost companion Morley. All this back-and-forth reinforces Smith’s burgeoning Buddhism, but we quickly realize that Smith’s exploration of eastern philosophy depends on this reinforcement.

As Smith’s friend Alva (a thinly disguised Allen Ginsburg) points out, “Your Buddhism has made you mean Ray.” It’s the first of several signs of Smith’s growing pretention and moral incompatibility with his newfound interest. The more he tries to become a Dharma bum, the more that incompatibility strikes the reader.

In the climactic scene atop Desolation Peak, the silence of Smith’s surroundings is too much for either him or the reader to bear, since it connotes nature’s denial of profound truths, ostensibly because of Smith’s moral and intellectual dishonesty.

The Dharma Bums is best read as a preamble to the physical and psychological collapse described in Big Sur. The emotional void at the end of Dharma Bums foreshadows Kerouac’s eventual abandonment of Buddhism, and demonstrates what happens when we find things we weren’t looking for. Kerouac got a novel out of his misadventure. I got Fathers and Sons.