The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s.

This article is about the novel. For the band, see Dharma Bums (band). For the temple in San Diego, California, see Dharma Bum Temple.
The Dharma Bums
First edition
AuthorJack Kerouac
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel, Beat literature
Set inCalifornia, North Carolina, Washington and elsewhere in the U.S., 1955–56
PublishedOctober 2, 1958 (The Viking Press)[1]
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages187
OCLC23051682
813/.54 20
LC ClassPS3521.E735 D48 1990
Preceded byThe Subterraneans
(1958) 
Followed byDoctor Sax
(1959) 

The book concerns duality in Kerouac's life and ideals, examining the relationship of the outdoors, mountaineering, hiking, and hitchhiking through the western US with his "city life" of jazz clubs, poetry readings, and drunken parties. The protagonist's search for a "Buddhist" context to his experiences (and those of others he encounters) recurs throughout the story.

Released just one year following the success of his previous novel, On the Road, The Dharma Bums was another success for Kerouac and became one of his most popular books. The novel would also go on to have a significant influence on the Hippie counterculture during the 1960s.

Plot summary

The character Japhy drives Ray Smith's story, whose penchant for simplicity and Zen Buddhism influenced Kerouac on the eve of the sudden and unpredicted success of On the Road. The action shifts between the events of Smith and Ryder's "city life," such as three-day parties and enactments of the Buddhist "Yab-Yum" rituals, to the sublime and peaceful imagery where Kerouac seeks a type of transcendence. The novel concludes with a change in narrative style, with Kerouac working alone as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak (adjacent to Hozomeen Mountain), in what would soon be declared North Cascades National Park (see also Kerouac's novel Desolation Angels). His summer on Desolation Peak was desperately lonely. “Many's the time I thought I'd die of boredom or jump off the mountain,” he wrote in Desolation Angels.[2] Yet in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac described the experience in elegiac prose.

One episode in the book features Smith, Ryder, and Henry Morley (based on real-life friend John Montgomery) climbing Matterhorn Peak in California. It relates Kerouac's introduction to this type of mountaineering and inspired him to spend the following summer as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on Desolation Peak in Washington.

Chapter 2 of the novel gives an account of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery reading, where Allen Ginsberg ('Alvah Goldbook' in the book) gave a debut presentation of his poem "Howl" (changed to "Wail" in the book). At the event, other authors including Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen also performed.

Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.[3]

Character key

Kerouac often based his fictional characters on friends and family.[4][5]

"Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work."

— Jack Kerouac [6]
Real-life person Character name
Jack Kerouac Ray Smith
Gary Snyder Japhy Ryder
Allen Ginsberg Alvah Goldbook
Neal Cassady Cody Pomeray
Philip Whalen Warren Coughlin
Locke McCorkle Sean Monahan
John Montgomery Henry Morley
Philip Lamantia Francis DaPavia
Michael McClure Ike O'Shay
Peter Orlovsky George
Kenneth Rexroth Rheinhold Cacoethes
Alan Watts Arthur Whane
Caroline Kerouac Nin
Carolyn Cassady Evelyn
Claude Dalenberg Bud Diefendorf
Natalie Jackson Rosie Buchanan

Reception

Gary Snyder wrote Kerouac saying "Dharma Bums is a beautiful book, & I am amazed & touched that you should say so many nice things about me because that period was for me really a great process of learning from you..." but confided to Philip Whalen, "I do wish Jack had taken more trouble to smooth out dialogues, etc. Transitions are rather abrupt sometimes."[7] Later, Snyder chided Kerouac for the book's misogynistic interpretation of Buddhism.[8]

See also
Wikiquote has quotations related to The Dharma Bums.

References
  1. "Books Today". The New York Times: 34. October 2, 1958.
  2. "Kerouac on the Brink". The Attic. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
  3. Kerouac, Jack (1994). The Dharma Bums. Great Britain: Phoenix Harpercollins. p. 15. ISBN 0586091580.
  4. Sandison, David. Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. 1999
  5. Who’s Who: A Guide to Kerouac’s Characters
  6. Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody. London and New York: Penguin Books Ltd. 1993.
  7. Suiter, John (2002). Poets on the Peaks. Counterpoint. p. 240. ISBN 1-58243-148-5.
  8. Suiter, John (2002). Poets on the Peaks. Counterpoint. p. 245. ISBN 1-58243-148-5.
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