Customer Reviews

The Dharma Bums: 50th Anniversary Edition

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My review is not focused on the content of The Dharma Bums as much as the production of the book itself. Let it be known this is one of my favorite books of all time and I consider it Kerouac's best. My issue is with the publisher, Penguin, who has simply revamped its "Penguin Classic" edition with Ann Douglas's intro to make a Hardcover. Yes, Douglas's intro is excellent, but the only difference with this new Hardcover 50th Anniversary Edition is that is has 2 or 3 pages of a letter in which Henry Miller writes about The Dharma Bums. For me who is a bibliofile. I don't want a cheap quality cardboard book. I used to work for an Univ. Press and know about production options. Penquin basically chose the cheapest. Every single copy in 3 bookstores were banged up. You might say this isn't the publisher's fault, but it is because they didn't make a quality product that could stand even being stacked on a shelf, imagine opening it and reading it. People who want a 50th Anniversary edition want something special because it has a special meaning to them, if not buy the paperback. So I guess that's what I suggest. The Penguin Classic edition has new artwork, quality paper and the same intro, without the high price. I wish Penguin would follow Knopf's example and do beautiful books like those in their Everyman's Library Series.

The year 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's most famous novel, "On the Road." The event received a great deal of attention with the publication of the original scroll edition of the text, a 50th anniversary commemorative edition, a compilation of five "Road Novels" by the prestigious Library of America, and several excellent books and articles about Kerouac.

The interest in Kerouac (1922-- 1969) continues.This year, 2008, has seen the publication of Kerouac's highly personal tribute to the Buddha written in 1955, "Wake up! A Life of the Buddha" together with an early novel,"The Hippos were boiled in their Tanks", written with William Burroughs. With the 50th anniversary of "The Dharma Bums" Kerouac's most popular novel after "On the Road", this new commemorative hardback edition of the text has been issued with a short letter written in 1958 by novelist Henry Miller to the publisher in praise of Kerouac's book and a previously published essay introducing the novel by Ann Douglas. The book is attractive and, here on Amazon, reasonably priced. Many paperback editions of this work are available and the Library of America's collection, which includes "The Dharma Bums" may by the best choice of all. Nevertheless, this volume is a good choice for those readers who love this book or for the lover of Kerouac on your holiday list. The remainder of this review consists of my review on Amazon, with modifications, of an earlier edition of "The Dharma Bums".


Following the success of "On the Road", Kerouac's publishers initially rejected his manuscripts such as "The Subterraneans" and "Tristessa." But his publisher asked him to write an accessible, popular novel continuing with the themes of "On the Road." Kerouac responded with "The Dharma Bums" which was published late in 1958. "The Dharma Bums" is more conventionally written that most of Kerouac's other books, with short, generally clear sentences and a story line that is optimistic on the whole. With the exception of "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums" remains Kerouac's most widely read work. I had the opportunity to reread "The Dharma Bums" and came away from the book deeply moved.

As are all of Kerouac's novels, "The Dharma Bums" is autobiographical. It is based upon Kerouac's life between 1956--1957 -- before "On the Road" appeared and made Kerouac famous. The book focuses upon the relationship between Kerouac, who in the book is called Ray Smith and his friend, the poet Gary Snyder, called Japhy Ryder, ten years Kerouac's junior. Kerouac died in 1969, while Snyder is still alive and a highly regarded poet. Allen Ginsberg (Alvah Goldbrook) and Neal Cassady (Cody Pomeray), among others, also are characters in the book. Most of the book is set in San Francisco and its environs, but there are scenes of Kerouac's restless and extensive travelling by hitchiking, walking, jumping freight trains, and taking buses, as he visits Mexico, and his mother's home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina during the course of the book.

The strength of "The Dharma Bums" lies in its scenes of spiritual seriousness and meditation. During the period described in the book, Kerouac had become greatly interested in Buddhism. He describes himself as a "bhikku" -- a Buddhist monk -- and had been celibate for a year when the book begins. It is easy to underestimate Kerouac's understanding of Buddhism. As with many authors, he was wiser in his writing that he was in his life. There is a sense of the sadness and changeable character of existence and of the value of compassion for all beings that comes through eloquently in "The Dharma Bums." Smith and Ryder have many discussions about Buddhism -- at various levels of seriousness -- during the course of the novel. Ryder tends to use Buddhism to be critical of and alienated from American society and its excessive materialism and devotion to frivolity such as television. Smith has the broader vision and sees compassion and understanding as a necessary part of the lives of everyone. Smith tends to be more meditative and quiet in his Buddhist practice -- he spends a great deal of time in the book sitting and "doing nothing" while Ryder is generally active and on the go, hiking, chopping wood, studying, or womanizing. At the end of the book, he leaves for an extended trip to Japan. (He and Kerouac would never see each other again.)

"The Dharma Bums" offers a picture of a portion of American Buddhism during the 1950s. It also offers a portrayal of what has been called the "rucksack revolution" as Smith and Ryder take to the outdoors. in In a lengthy and famous section of the book, they climb the "Matterhorn" in California's Sierra Mountains. In the final chapters of the book, Kerouac spends eight isolated weeks on Desolation Peak in the Cascades as a fire watchman. In an ending reminiscent of the ending of "On the Road", Kerouac writes:

"Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I'e grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void, God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, 'O ever youthful, O ever weeping'. Down on the lake rosy reflection of celestial vapor appeared, and I said 'God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. 'I have fallen in love with you God. Take care of us all, one way or the other."

For all his love of Buddhism, Kerouac remained a theist. He came back from his experience on Desolation Peak, he tells the reader, yearning for human company.

Sexuality plays an important role in "The Dharma Bums", against the backdrop of what is described as the repressed 1950's, as young girls are drawn to Ryder and he willingly shares them with an initially reluctant Smith. The book includes scenes of wild parties tinged, for Smith, with sadness, in which people of both sexes dance naked, get physically involved, and drink heavily. Near the end of the book, Ryder offers Smith a prophetic warning the alcoholism which would shortly thereafter ruin Kerouac's life.

"The Dharma Bums" is a fundamentally American book and it is full of love for the places of America, for the opportunity it offers for spiritual exploration, and for its people. Kerouac's compassion was hard earned. In his introduction to a later book, "The Lonesome Traveller" he aptly described his books as involving the "preachment of universal kindness, which hysterial critics have failed to notice beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the 'beat' generation. -- Am actually not 'beat' but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic." I found a feeling of spirituality, of love of life in the face of vicissitudes, and of America in "The Dharma Bums." The work was indeed a popularization. But Kerouac's vision may ultimately have been broad.

Robin Friedman

The best, most fun, most I want to be like Kerouac of the(admittedly) few Kerouacs I have read. This one, three times. Women deserve better in Kerouac, but hey, it's the fifties. Poor Jack fell apart in the sixties. Anyway, Bums has all the famous people thinly disguised. Gary Snyder, who is so smart he still lives and is a real Buddhist, not a fake like most of us. Ginsberg is there, Alvah Goldbook for God's sake, having sex with women. It is another road trip, back and forth across what was fast becoming the wasteland we know with pockets of natural beauty wonderfully described. You get a fairly linear narrative but the jazzy rythms intrude, the man was a frustrated musician. Maybe he should have taken more psychedelics and left the booze alone. Booze is too much of a sacrament in Bums, we know there are better things to use as sacraments. Of course, most Buddhists avoid alcohol, except some crazy Zen masters who did as they pleased, no rules please. What Jack describes in the book is still his vision of what he hoped for, but knew would not happen. It probably killed him, but the book, in a very nice yet inexpensive edition is a trip to read, and perchance to dream...

Not as advertised. These copies are remaindered and are marked on the bottom as such with a felt-tip line. I had purchased this as a gift but was unable to give it due to the remaindered marking. The online information about these books fail to mention their remaindered status.

Kerouac may be best known for On The Road, but this is by far my favorite of his books. Looking back, it has probably been the most influential book on my life. The story is just so honest and original and beautiful, it confirmed my desire to be a writer when I read it as a sophomore in high school. But not just a writer. It made me want to live my life without shackles, free like Kerouac's character Japhy (Gary Snyder), climbing mountains and writing poetry. It captures the Boho 50's era like no other, especially in the Bay Area. Finally, it inspired me to learn more about Buddhism and eventually spend a year in a Buddhist monastery. I've never met someone who has read The Dharma Bums and hasn't loved it. It's one of the best books of the 20th century.

By Jaimal Yogis, author of Saltwater Buddha

This commemorative edition does not add much to the new Penguin Classic with cover art by "Jason" except a two-page letter by Henry Miller to the publisher. While representative of the New York-transplant-to-hip Northern California milieu that he shared with the Beats, readers may opt for the paperback instead. While a handsome hardcover, the paper appears no more or less durable than the paperback. A lesson in impermanence that the book's contents may well repeat?

Just before "On the Road" brought him the success he craved, Kerouac wrote this account of the "Zen Lunatics" and Gary Snyder's prediction of a "rucksack revolution." This is my first Beat book; in middle age I admit lingering distrust of their sometimes condescending attitude towards the rest of us.

That being said, this novelization may make the young feel vigorous and the mature wistful. Hearing "Japhy Ryder" gush about bulgar and yabyum, green tea and trail mix, baked bread and paisley shawls, Goodwill and hi-fi jazz before the massive commodification of counterculture filters the innocence of these early free spirits from Eisenhower's decade into a muted sepia. It's instructive, as Ann Douglas notes in her introduction, that "Ray" as Kerouac strives towards a greater sympathy than Snyder-as-Japhy expresses with the "straights" who must, after all, fund the hikes and the naps of the Beats. There's a sense of slumming, by these two students wanting to imitate a "bhikku," a dharma bum. Japhy in real life's Reed-Indiana-Berkeley, Ray's author a scholarship-dropout from Columbia, allied with other privileged folks from the Ivy League and NYC bohemia. I don't know why, but there's an aura of play-acting and noblesse-oblige irritating me about their admirable but somehow smug quest. Blame it on Berkeley?

Ray appears, to his eternal credit, aware at least of the contradiction between a Zen lunatic lording his insight over the unenlightened crew-cut and bee-hived masses and his own self struggling, who down on his luck has to go back to North Carolina to live off his kinfolk. Some of the best moments in this book come when Ray tells of his tramps by train and hitchhiking.

Apropos, this book was written in ten days and nights at his mother's place in Florida. As his fictional self, Ray ponders the contradiction between the San Francisco party scene of dissolute intellectuals and his family, unable to comprehend Ray's notions and his lazy habits. "And I thought of Japhy as I stood there in the cold yard looking at {his mother as she does the dishes]: 'Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and "kitchen machinery" he calls it? People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums. Compassion is the heart of Buddhism." (100)

Yet, the Beats' stance against conformity did inspire generations towards more righteous behavior, along with a lot of excess on that road to wisdom. It's noteworthy that the narrator opens by admitting that while he was once more devout before he met Ryder, now he's "a little tired and cynical." (2) Ray seems already to have studied the dharma largely on his own and passed through the initial, somewhat superior stage, and now feels it's a lot of "lip service." Still, meeting Japhy, Ray perks up.

The centerpiece of the narrative, the climb of the Matterhorn, makes one compare that Sierra peak to the manufactured scale mold towering in smaller form above the then-new Disneyland further south in California. The impression of a still largely rural state, even around the Bay Area, leaves a sense of loss for those who live in the state now. The Beats and then hippies, no less than Cold War defense industries, transformed California into a busier, tawdrier, and uglier place, with dreamers and schemers lured by the rhapsodies in Kerouac and Snyder and their mates.

Unable to stay in the South with his family, inarticulate in sharing with them his understanding of Buddhist dharma, Ray goes back after bumming it along the Mexican border just as he left, back west to work as a Cascadia fire-warden at Desolation Peak's lookout. There, as the story ends, he finds his expected peace. "I made raspberry Jello the color of rubies in the setting sun." (183) The interim return to California, full of parties in Marin, as with the previous woozy bashes in San Francisco, does drag the momentum down for long stretches of this short book. The contrasts between boho decadence and natural purity may be intentional, but the wobbly, hungover funk does hobble the pace. The comparisons between energy and dissipation do, on the other hand, underscore the lesson of impermanence, even of happy times, and the necessity for self-discipline.

Japhy reminds Ray of the change coming when more people join their refusal to conform. "East'll meet West anyway. Think what a great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody." (155)

Kerouac here's still young enough-- even if nearly a decade past Snyder-- to hope. "Something will come of it in the Milky Way of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom misunderstandings, friends. I felt like telling Japhy everything I thought but I knew it didn't matter and moreover he knew it anyway and silence is the golden mountain." (53) This typical passage captures the tone of the novel-as-memoir. Based as Douglas notes on smart predecessors like Thomas Wolfe, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, and Céline, Kerouac sought an admirable purity in his style. It may be difficult for us half-a-century later, jaded, to hear its freshness, but its sincerity lingers in moments such as when he tells us of the moon on water as they descended the mountain on a dark night. "Everything up there had smelled of ice and snow and heartless spine rock. Here there was the smell of sun-heated wood, sunny dust resting in the moonlight, lake mud, flowers, straw, all those good things of the earth." (68-69) This may not be the more manic Kerouac that made him famous, but it may give today's uneasy riders a more lasting lesson in the legacy he left us.

(P.S. Also see Keroauc's "Wake Up! A Life of the Buddha," reviewed by me; written 1955, published 2008.)

The Dharma Bums has the Jack Kerouac style that On the road carried, but is faster paced than the authors most famous work. The themes are drastically different also, On the Road being a sensualist's dream, and Dharma Bums being the down to earth maturity that came from years of living on the road. Nature is a key factor in the book, its no Walden but the way Kerouac intertwines nature, Buddhism and the American dream is a very entertaining read. I would recommend this book over On the Road simply because it is shorter and blends a variety of things that are uncommonly seen together. The only difficulty was having to look up a few terms in regard to the eastern religions, but even that doesn't detract from the flow of the book. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who liked On the Road, and if you haven't read any Kerouac, this is a good place to start.

I already owned this book in paperback and loved it ... treated myself to a special hardback version.