Jazz! Bursts of aural lightning shoot through the room on a frenetic frequency, charging every listener with electric convulsions, forcing feet to tap rhythms on the beer-soaked floor and fingers to roll tiny drumbeats across the tables, little thumping echoes of brushed beats and imitations of walking bass lines. Mad squeals of tortured trumpets erupt from under the sweaty lights like passing birds calling down to earth: hear me, hear me, hear me. Jazz! Like a page out of a notebook from Sensation herself.
When I first fell in love with wordplay and the craft of creative writing, it was largely because of Jack Kerouac. He inspired me to try unconventional things, even if in their unconventional-ness, they were being conventional. When I read his seminal work, On the Road, a twitchy sensation starting bursting out of me. It only went away—or was at least slightly sated—when I went out and bought a notebook and started scribbling my own stream-of-consciousness tirades and staccato bursts of beat poetry. I imitated Kerouac in my writing and, to some degree in my lifestyle. On the Road inspired me to check out bands of all genres, including jazz. I watched old timers play standards in a smoky club, still too young to be there at all, but ordering coke instead of beer and appreciating the knowing glance of the tired guy behind the bar. I had a few inspired adventures, and indulged in crazy, exuberant conversations with my friends at the time, a ragtag group of students.
If On the Road inspires jazz-based poetry and stream-of-consciousness prose, then Kerouac’s later work, The Dharma Bums inspires an interest in eastern philosophy, mountain-climbing, and meditation. Written in the same quintessentially Kerouac style, with all its intense exuberance, moments of comic pathos, and florid descriptions of beauty in likely and unlikely places, The Dharma Bums is a classic piece of beat literature. “That mad Morley!” he writes of one of the characters. “And this was only the beginning of the misadventures of that most remarkable man (as you’ll see now), that remarkable man who was probably the only mountainclimber in the history of the world who forgot to bring his sleeping bag.”
The story follows the adventures and misadventures of the narrator, Ray Smith, and his mysterious friend, a mountain man meets Buddhist monk Japhy Ryder. (The two characters are respectively based on Kerouac and Gary Snyder, a back-to-basics Beat poet who later won a Pullitzer Prize for his poetry prowess.) Smith is a rail-hopping, wine-drinking, writer living life large and intense. He’s somewhat impressionable. He meets Ryder and immediately looks up to him. Ryder is laid back but with a barely-supressed energy for getting out and actually doing things—real things like climbing mountains and composing haikus like ancient Chinese poets. He’s in touch with a side of life that Smith doesn’t know a lot about—living on the land, climbing mountains and such. Ryder (and his real counterpart, Snyder) grew up in rural Oregon. He’s also intellectually knowledgeable about a variety of eastern philosophies including Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. Ryder represents a way of living that Smith is looking for. And Smith, for Ryder, is not only a protégé of sorts, but an inspiration in his own right, a champion of pouring out prose in the way Kerouac is of course famous for. Other barely-masquerading as fiction real-life Beat characters make an appearance, too, including the inimitable Allen Ginsberg (called Alvah Goldbrook in the book) and Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s inspiration for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Ginsberg’s legendary live performance reading his beat poem, Howl, is captured in the book.
Dharma Bums is a book that’s bursting with life. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s serene, meditative, zen. It’s intellectually inspiring. It’s musical and lyrical. And above all, it’s a great read – Kerouac has an uncanny skill of making the pages fly by, always capturing energy and exuberance, finding the poignant moments and the silly moments in equal measure.