By Denis Johnson
THE DHARMA BUMS
By Jack Kerouac
There is the California found on the map, and the California found in the imagination, and each has held a grip on writers throughout its twisted history as the Western Edge of America. For most Filipinos, California usually means San Francisco or LA – a place of jobs, dreams and Jollibee. But it has always held a darker side beneath the sunny skies.
Two American writers distant in time but similar in outlook have tackled the coastal curves and dense forests of California: Jack Kerouac covered this turf in novels like Big Sur, The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums back in the ‘50s. Modern novelist Denis Johnson updates the Beatnik/Buddhist outlook, blasting it through the prism of modern California lifestyles in 1997’s Already Dead.
Far from Johnson’s best work, Already Dead reads like noir grown wild, populated with strange West Coast characters whose motives are never pure and clear. The story concerns the son of a wealthy landowner, Nelson Fairchild Jr., whose misguided efforts to save his marijuana crop from fee-collecting dope dealers lead him to off his wife, or, more precisely, to engage a Nietzsche-spouting drifter to do the dirty deed for him. Also entangled in this gnarly web are a lesbian witch named Yvonne who channels the dead; a pot-dealing ex-surfer trying to track down a pair of gay hitmen; a mammoth ex-biker called Frankenstein; an LA cop who likes beating up his girlfriends; and a cast of dreamers, workers, single moms and burnouts who could have stumbled in from a late ‘70s Robert Altman film.
In fact, if the terrain sounds a bit like Quentin Tarantino, you’re getting warm. Bad things happen, but never the way you’d expect them to, and some redemption is possible after all the ill California winds have blown away. Johnson’s main weapon here is language. He has a terrific gift of engagement, of seeing something spiritual or transcendent in everyday lives and everyday terrain:
Van Ness turned right and continued toward the harbor only because he enjoyed the look of things in that direction. Van had known many such communities, some that included shabby houseboats. He liked the seafarers and the little clubs of progeny they brought with them from harbor to harbor. The land descended through a flat wandering valley, once perhaps some great diluvial watercourse, but not so much as a creak remained of it that he could see. Still the line of trailers and junk heaps might have been floated and abandoned here by a flood. Not a soul in sight, and the ocean was enormous. Here were homes, a large half-built restaurant, a fine new pier, boats at anchor. Everything waited to be touched, explored – fingered, broken.
What comes through is a poetic voice, in touch with the reality behind the veil (Johnson is also a poet, besides being an occasional foreign journalist). At times, the voice sounds like Kerouac’s.
Jack Kerouac, the voice of the Beat generation, spent his relatively short life traveling from coast to coast, sometimes driving, sometimes hopping freight trains. He settled in fishing towns and did a stint in the merchant marines before penning his non-stop accounts of life in search of satori, or Buddhist enlightenment. As was the intellectual fashion of the ‘50s, Zen Buddhism was an imported ideal. But Kerouac, fellow poets Gary Snyder and a few others actually tried to live the Zen lifestyle.
The Dharma Bums tells of Ray Smith, an East Coast drifter who visits a West Coast logger named Japhy Rider. The two hold marathon parties, climb mountains and rediscover nature, all the while discussing and seeking the essence of Zen existence. If Kerouac’s prose strikes modern readers as precious and naïve, the ideals expressed harken back to early American transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau:
Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps…
Far from advocating suicide or jumping off mountains, Kerouac had a certain gift for looking at things in a fresh way. Perhaps it really was Zen enlightenment, though the feeling never seemed to last for him beyond the page. And this, in a nutshell, is what happened to the Beat movement and the Hippie ideal. Somewhere along the twisted coasts of California history, the ideals of the ‘60s turned into commercial survival. Whereas Ray Smith and Japhy Rider chose to reject the "dumb white machinery of the kitchen" found in middle-class existence, the characters in Already Dead are merely washed-up Baby-Boomers, battered and beaten by decades of simply trying to make it. Their ideals have sprouted – mutated – into entrepreneurial enterprises – whether growing marijuana for profit or grabbing seaside land for condo expansion.
Some sense of satori still shines through in their thoughts and reflections, but on the day-to-day level, it’s all about embracing a California dream that’s forever slipping through their fingers like beach sand. These are losers, in a real sense: people who have gone through so many lifetimes of grabbing and losing material things that all they have left is the receding feeling of having once possessed something. It’s a curious perversion of the Beatnik ideal, which in itself was but a literary distortion, never to be found by backpacking devotees on either East or West coast.
But maybe what really counts is on the page. In the prose of both Kerouac and Johnson, the Beat idea still comes through: it’s the sense of being alive, of seeing the twinkle of something immortal in everything around you, no matter how illusory (or often drug-inspired) that perception turns out to be. Already Dead reads like an update on Kerouac’s clan, 40 or 50 years later, answering the question: What ever happened to those Beatniks living down by the California coast?