Jack Kerouac’s breakthrough may have been his 1957 novel, On the Road, but I’ve always preferred his follow-up, The Dharma Bums, which appeared the next year. For one thing, there’s less baggage around the book. For another, it’s spare and self-contained, mostly taking place in Northern California and revolving around the author’s friendship with the poet Gary Snyder, fictionalized as Japhy Ryder. Kerouac was at his best when he was writing lyrically, and The Dharma Bums contains some fervent passages. Here he is describing San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery reading of October 1955, where Allen Ginsberg introduced his long poem Howl: “Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters…and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy.” And here, a moment of satori on a climbing trip in the Sierra: “It happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps…and in that flash I realized it’s impossible to fall off mountains.” It may seem naïve now, as it perhaps did in its time, but I can think of no more succinct illustration of the presence Kerouac was seeking, a kind of timelessness that comes to us only in moments, if we are fortunate enough to have it arrive at all. More than anything else I read when I was younger, this is the book that made me want to be a Californian.•
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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