Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of some of Jack Kerouac's poems.
Book Review
The Dharma Bums, Traveler, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1995
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.
“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac’s major works, “The Dharma Bums”, a novel that explores his and his ‘beat” companions fascination, at least part time fascination, with the Buddhist lifestyle and philosophy in his well known spontaneous writing method at a time when he was trying to keep body and soul together, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have had more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Kerouac’s better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of his book of essays “The Dharma Bums”.
In a sense, as Kerouac himself often admitted, his fascination with Buddhism was something of an extension of his Gallic-etched Catholicism. That makes sense in that both religious expressions are filled with ritual and intense mystery. Thus, when Jack went west in the mid1950s to San Francisco and hooked up with the likes of poet Gary Snyder who was already a serious student of that religion/philosophical outlook it was natural that the restless Kerouac and the others would be attracted to this form of life, although it probably was, in the end, far too rigorous for Kerouac with his many earthy appetites. Nevertheless, this book presents that lifestyle and the youthful search for fulfillment that this searching represented in a very positive light and proved to be helpful to him in getting through some rough patches. Allen Ginsberg, a very close Kerouac friend at the time, became, for a while, a devotee of more substance and notoriety. However, and here we get back to the political realities, when the deal went down that religious philosophy could not hold up against the harsh political choices of the late 1960s when things got very “hot” in America, and the world.
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