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