It’s typing.” goes Truman Capote’s famous, if snide comment on Jack Kerouac. According to Mass Moments (a project of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities) which sends out daily notes to subscribers about events that occured on the current date in Massachussets. It turns out that on this day, March 23rd, in 1948 (just shy of four months before I was born) Jack Kerouac began writing what would be his first novel, The Town and the City. He would finish it in 1950 and immediately begin On the Road.
As it happens a couple of years ago I had to drive from Boston (well, Newton) to Toronto to attend a Zen teacher’s conference. I was originally going with some friends, but their plans changed, and I was going to be driving alone. In anticipation I visited our local library and checked out a couple of books on tape. One was Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s paean to Gary Snyder and the emerging “Western” Zen community or at least it’s literary precursors.
I hadn’t read it since I was sixteen or seventeen. As they say, a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then. My first encounter with Dharma Bums all those years ago was one of the more deeply moving experiences of my young life. It, in part, influenced my interest in Zen. So, I was curious what my more “mature” insight into the book would be.
As I drove along I listened to it. And I experienced two revelations as the narrative played out through Massachusetts, New York and Ontario. First, my goodness, it’s sexist. I mean really sexist. And second, it has more authentic Buddhism in it than I had thought it could, considering who Kerouac was.
I gather On the Road is the only book of his read much anymore. Sometime in the not too distant future I plan on rereading it. But I can see why his star has faded. There is something narcissistic and perhaps “boyish” about his writing. I think of the neo-Jungian term puer aeternus.
Still it seems his writing has considerable merit. (If you can factor in the flaming sexism and allow a little for time and place…) At least I think so. And I hope people might consider re-reading, or, maybe even, reading him for the first time. He gives a fascinating snapshot of the Beat era, a major literary moment in North American culture, and the prefiguring of much that has become us.
And narcissistic or not, his writing really does carry one down the road.
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