I had a very negative reaction to some of this book and a very positive reaction to other parts of it. It’s an original, infuriating, engaging and arrogant mixture of half-baked philosophical insights interspersed with some profound sagacity. I suppose I can hardly call it a bad book with all the sensations and sentiments it aroused in me.
Let’s start with a paragraph on what you can know about this somewhat scattered narrative. Ray Smith, an older than college age man but probably no older than 40, used to be a ‘lionized’ young author but now lives as a ‘dharma bum’. He rolls around hitchhiking, jumping trains, getting drunk, fraternising with a literary bohemian crowd, thinks about Buddhism, writes poetry and prays. He seems to have been involved in an academic institution at one stage as he makes reference to his stipend or scholarship money. The prose and narrative rattle along in such an uneven and helter skelter way that it’s hard to recall every precise detail. In the course of the book, he goes to visit his friend / crush Japhy who appears to be an academic at Berkeley. I think Smith meets Japhy in the course of the book but becomes so infatuated with him and eulogises about him at such length it feels like he is a much older friend. Smith thinks Japhy is cooler than a polar bear's toenails and looks up to him as some kind of mentor or role model. The relentless commentary on just how great Japhy is could be read as repressed homoeroticism, especially when he talks about how Japhy is ‘a real man’, but, in the main, I just found it boring, a bit ridiculous and then faintly nauseating. Anyway, the pair pass a while together living in Japhy’s shack in a larger property’s garden and take a hike up a mountain before Smith goes hitchhiking home to visit his family. He returns, spends more time with Japhy, they take another hike, Japhy goes to Japan on some project or other. Smith goes to live on top of a mountain as a forest fire lookout in Washington state; a job that Japhy did the year before him but can’t repeat because of his Japanese voyage.
So what is there to like and dislike? Let’s start with the good stuff and finish off with some scathing criticisms! First, and most importantly, the idea of spontaneity and immediacy in writing. This was especially relevant to me as I am struggling to complete several longer book reviews while I was reading this book. The repeated appeals to these values struck a chord with me and made me feel that I may be guilty of overvaluing comprehensiveness and complexity in my reactions over authenticity and speed! As someone who is always going off on tangents, I felt like this was a really valuable point. Ordinarily, I would probably look up some things about the author and the places mentioned in the book before I start writing but I resolved to write something as soon after finishing as I could and I’m writing this no more than an hour or so after completing the book.
Something else I really loved and admired was the overflowing enthusiasm and love the author has for nature and the outdoors. His descriptions of the euphoria of being in nature and the sheer joy of hard physical exertion, a feeling of self-sufficiency, having minimal material things but being well equipped for your environment, freedom and independence are all spot on. He’s also brilliant in his acerbic reflections on society and mainstream life as he seems it, for example:
“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what?” (p166)
I also couldn’t help myself from liking his wild enthusiasm and belief in what he is doing. Simultaneously, the arrogance could be grating but the feelings it evoked were wonderful. A sort of, “who-gives-a-fuck, we know better than everyone and are experiencing things those idiots couldn’t even imagine”. Obnoxious stuff, to be sure, but also enchanting in the way they want to do something different, throw two fingers up at conventional knowledge and are totally committed to that cause. The self-belief and self-satisfaction are almost regal in their splendour; they see themselves divinely anointed! I found all this very appealing and in some passages intoxicating.
However, these good things come at a cost. While the arrogance and religious fervour have their moments most of the time it’s just annoying, conceited nonsense. As with all religions, I find the need to express such certainty is laughable when compared to my own experience. Some might make an appeal to faith and perhaps that is what it boils down to. But why do most religions claim that they know everything when it is so blatantly obvious that humans know nothing? Oh, it may be lost, mystical knowledge, you say, which of course I couldn’t disprove any more than you could prove it! Humans are perennially groping about in the dark when it comes to the fundamental questions, in my opinion, and twas ever thus! Viewed from this perspective, most religions’ claims amount to crude advertising: Click here to understand the meaning of life and be eternally saved (watch out for fakes and frauds! Come to us for the one true religion, all others are wrong!!). Why do they all make such absurdly concrete claims when human experience is so decidedly uncertain? It all strikes me as tall tales to pacify the pretty terrifying reality that no one has even the slightest idea what is going on! I know such a pitiful amount about Buddhism, and perhaps the ideas in this book are an esoteric expression of this religion, but I struggled to see how everything could be nothingness and the void (an excellent and fascinating idea) but, nonetheless, Smith could be enthused about reaching nirvana through prayer or gaining some other kind of reward for is behaviour. Like the saved and the damned in Christianity, such a petty, decidedly human hierarchy seems to me to have nothing to do with the fundamental transcendental nature of the universe and everything to do with making silly, insecure, little humans feel special about themselves. Oh, look at me! I’m a special monk! Bah! Religions! Even if you ignore the philosophical inconsistencies, and my own philosophy is full of them so who am I to critcise, there was plenty more to annoy me!
The way Smith is always rattling on about Japan or China and Buddhist monks in a rambling and disjointed way is pretentious in the extreme. He is also very pleased with himself in describing his drunken exploits, sexual orgies, meditations, meals; pretty much everything in fact! Thankfully, this was leavened by a couple of incidents of humility and stories where he isn’t an absolute hero who is on the verge of saving the whole planet. Before I got to the first one of these I was thinking about abandoning the book just for it’s sheer self-satisfaction. The first incident was when he’s too scared to make it to the top of the mountain on the first hike with Japhy and the second is his stilted performance in the orgy although, even here, he intimates he got it sorted out in the end and then later on portrays himself as above sexual desire - a dubious assertion!!
Smith’s journey home was an interesting example of the duality I found in this book. Smith goes home and takes a lot of shit from his family for being unconventional and I felt sympathetic towards him. He is a searcher for higher meaning, an adventurer, albeit a pretentious one. His brother, especially, seems to find his Buddhism annoying and tests him about it. I suppose I would probably find his eccentricities annoying if I was his brother as we’re always looking for the worst in our siblings. If my brother got wasted all the time and started spouting off about meditation and eastern scholarship all the time, while interestingly never seeming to read anything apart from magazines, maybe I would get pissed off with him too. But at the same time, his desire to be amongst nature is harmless and I admired him for the originality of his thought. I felt he was somewhat harshly treated by his overly conventional family. Then all this sympathetic feeling was ruined by Smith’s ridiculous claim that he performed a miracle on his mother’s cough after having a vision in a dream! This sort of tosh reminded me of Paolo Coehlo’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ and that is in no way meant as a compliment. Sadly, this wasn’t the only pseudo-miraculous episode in the book and they’re all as ridiculous as each other. This passage is exemplary:
“During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilising physical opportunities to punish themselves because their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last ‘miracle’ because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.” (p125)
Other highlights of the genre include:
“A great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it’ll be guys like us that can start the thing.” (p170)
“We’ve dedicated ourselves to prayer for all sentient beings and when we’re strong enough we’ll really be able to do it, too, like the old saints.” (p175)
The fact remains that while passages like this make me deeply irritated it is probably this kind of thinking that contributes to the books more appealing points about spontaneity, philosophy and life. Smith, or Kerouac, or whoever is narrating is swept up in a wave of euphoria for his new ‘knowledge’ however fleeting or superficial it may be.
I imagine the prose style used in this book was considered sensational in the 1950s. It still felt original to me but not especially beautiful. It has a furious immediacy which I admired more for it’s philosophy than the actual final product of the style. He seems to be saying, ‘Come on! Now! Let’s write something! Anything! Let’s have some ideas! Let the universe flow through us! But we must act!’. I loved this idea and it made me sit down and write immediately, which I’m grateful for. In this sense, I wholeheartedly think of this as a good book. The prose itself was much more so-so. I felt it was pretty unclear, a bit jarring, confusing in places and was neither pleasant nor easy to read. Equally, it would be folly to say the author couldn’t write. There are occasional flashes of brilliance that make some of the slog worthwhile. It’s a bit like Nabokov but without the ornamentation upon adornment upon decoration; a minimalist, spontaneous, hobo Nabokov! Just now I have a vision of Kerouac as a hobo and Nabokov as a Tsarist era aristocrat - both with the same character: they talk incessantly and some of what they say is amazing and makes the most spectacular impression, in part because of their elaborate outfits and personalities, but the more time you spend with them the more you realise they talk a lot of rubbish besides and are really far too eager to impress upon you how clever and wonderful they are. They’re both too shouty in very different ways but with a surprisingly similar outcome. In the case of Nabokov, where I have read about four of his books, I feel better qualified to make this comment than with Kerouac where this is my first. A quick example of a passage I loved, the earlier quotations can serve as examples of what I didn’t like:
“Poor Raymond boy, his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it’s such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live’ and on this I’d go to sleep like a lamb. Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing IS nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?” (p199)
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have no idea of the background of this book or Kerouac further than to say it is set in the 1950s and, I think, was written then too. At some points I thought the whole thing was a sham and quite a poorly constructed one too. How could someone who hoboed around on the railways not have equipment like a sleeping bag or backpack? Why does he have to buy these when he meets up with Japhy? Money and food mysteriously appear out of nowhere and there are almost too many mundane reference to mundane places included in the text. Some parts felt more authentic than others but the narrative in general had the feel of a tall tale or, at least, a heavily embellished one! Some bits about Smith being a poet and his reference to being a young author made me think it might be autobiographical, although that’s a slippery concept when it comes to novels because, at some level, of course it is! How could it be otherwise?
This book has the infectious enthusiasm of someone who truly believes that they have discovered the key to life; with this comes unbearable arrogance and pretension! But the enthusiasm is sometimes a joy to behold and the book has some good ideas about spontaneity, communing with nature, self-sufficiency and being unconventional and a lot of half-baked rot too but thankfully it’s not that long! So all in all, this book had a couple of great ideas and a few great passages but was also irritating and a bit jarring to read at points. However, I definitely enjoyed the overall experience of reading it and would recommend it.
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