I felt a kinship with Kerouac while reading this book. I’m not quite a full-blown train-hopping bum, but I’m a traveling writer, and I have an interest in Buddhism (I’ve read the Dhammapada and a few other modern books on meditation).
I felt Kerouac especially when he wrote in chapter 26,
“I had an overwhelming urge to close my eyes in company. I think the girls were terrified of this.”
He did what he wanted though. Like when he was back home in North Carolina going off into the woods to meditate and his brother-in-law was giving him a hard time. Counterculture starts with individuals like Kerouac, brave enough to go against the grain.
I wonder how Kerouac wrote this book. I know he kept journals. I wonder if he just always had a journal in his rucksack and would write whenever he was hopped up on a flatcar, sitting shotgun in a hitched ride, after his meditations, or in the midst of the drunken parties. Or maybe he just sat down and remembered and wrote it all in one big sprint like he did with the original scroll for On The Road. If he was able to do this, he must have had a memory like a steel trap.
In either case, he’s inspired me to keep a journal. This way, I can write a longer-form “fiction” work by just puzzling together the pieces of my journal. I would only include the interesting parts. I bet Kerouac did this too. The way he would skip over whole parts of his trip and just name the cities and cover a thousand miles and two weeks with just a few sentences but then write three whole pages about a ten-minute conversation with Japhy. The reader can still follow along because they’ve got the context of the whole story but the interesting parts are zoomed in and the non-interesting parts are zoomed out so the reader can just see the bare minimum they need in order to keep the story moving along in a logical progression.
Whereas some authors seem to start with a general plotline in mind and then proceed to write the detailed scenes for each point along the way, my guess is that Kerouac in this book started with the scenes, probably recording them in a journal near the time that they actually happened and then, after he had enough to make a book, strung them together with a plotline.
The poetry of the moment is a strength of this book greater than any plot devices like suspenseful rising action or surprising climax. If I had to choose one overarching climax it would probably be the final days of partying at Sean’s house and then Japhy going to Japan, but this was not the climax I was looking forward to the whole book, like the final battle in a fantasy novel. There were small climaxes, small payoffs throughout the book that made it so that I could pick up the book and, even if I only read a few pages, be satisfied enough by the time I closed it, having read at least one or two good poems dressed in prose clothing—each rising, climaxing, and falling within a small space of words.
Having read Lolita just before this, here are some of the differences I noticed between Nabokov and Kerouac. Nabokov’s vocabulary is much broader, maybe double Kerouac’s. Nabokov used more punctuation, especially parentheses and dashes, although Kerouac used these occasionally. Nabokov abided by the rules of grammar more than Kerouac. Kerouac has a style of run-on sentences when the scene is really going and tends not to include commas and just join phrases together with the word “and.” I’ve noticed a similar use of the conjunction in Hemingway. Overall, Nabokov’s writing is more ornate and studied while Kerouac’s is more stream-of-consciousness and raw.
In chapter 33, at the end of the book, when Ray Smith finally gets up to his lookout cabin for the summer atop Desolation Mountain, he writes,
“And suddenly I realized I was truly alone and had nothing to do but feed myself and rest and amuse myself, and nobody could criticize. The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.”
And another great quote from chapter 33:
“But let the mind be aware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”
The diction here demonstrates Kerouac’s ability in this book to take Eastern wisdom that may seem other-worldly and inaccessibly-mystical to a Westerner like me and filter it through the mind of a wine-drinking, beat poet and make it simple and colloquially American in a way that is refreshingly obvious and not pretending to be too high and hidden within the walls of a monastery somewhere in the Himalayas.
Source: Kerouac, Jack. Dharma Bums. Penguin Books, 1976.