BOOK REVIEW

VANITY OF DULUOZ

by Jack Kerouac

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity"

Ecclesiastes 1:2

My, my, Jack. What have you done?

The answer, it seems, is "everything under the sun".

This book starts and ends with reference to Ecclesiates, or the "Wisdom of Solomon", from the Old Testament. It shows a Jack who, in his older years, did in fact turn back to his "little lamby Jesus", as opposed to the Buddhism heavily endorsed in the last Kerouac book I reviewed (see Dharma Bums).

It is also the prattle of old and hardened Jack, heavily hitting the sauce during this time and entrenched in the cultural viewpoint of his mother. The book was written in a tone directed towards his third "wifey", Stella Sampas, in an attempt to show her where he had been and how he got to where he is now. The story is a recap of Jack's "formative" years, covering time periods from his early years as a student and athlete in Lowell, MA, to his time in the Merchant Marine, and ending with the death of his father in 1944. It is essentially the description of the events that led him to find his calling as a writer.

It is also the most boring and tedious work I have read of his, and runs a close tie for the most difficult Kerouac book for me to finish (up there with Visions of Cody). I would not recommend this book to anyone who was not a serious Kerouac fan like myself. In truth, it was only my desire to know all about his life and read every line he has written that compelled me to finish this book. I kept wanting to put it down in place of another fiction novel.

The book is somewhat interesting in that it includes details from Kerouac's life history not found in other places. Some of the stories from the Merchant Marine days are actually fascinating, including his travel to exotic locations. It amused me to read stories about him leaving the boat when he wasn't supposed to to get drunk somewhere, sometimes losing all his money in the meantime and having complicated scenarios where he has to somehow get the money to get back to the boat. To know about what inspired him to write before he wrote anything that amounted to much was engaging, and I would love to get my hands on a copy of The Sea is My Brother, or the manuscript he lost in a taxi cab that was never recovered or published.

Another facet of the book that I found interesting as well is how he refers to his friends, or doesn't, in this book. By this time in Jack's life, his friendship with Allen Ginsberg had lasted through several decades. Ginsberg was, I believe, instrumental in getting Jack published and getting him literary attention. Even though their friendship had suffered a cooling off period due to Kerouac absorbing some of his mothers anti-sematicism, Ginsberg was still victim to phone calls in the wee hours of the morning from a drunken Jack. However, Kerouac says very little about Ginsberg in this book, even though this was a significant friendship during this time period, and what he does say is not very nice ("I never really liked him much", also a suggestion that Jack and his first wife felt Allen to be lecherous). The book does, however, wax sentimental about William Burroughs (all these people by pseudonym, of course), who by this point had put Kerouac clean out of his life for all his wine-reeking offensiveness as a friend.

Historically, this book is important in terms of understanding how Jack the boy became Jack the man, who published many novels of importance during his lifetime. However, it is written with little of Jack's usual "poetry-like prose", is missing the language that made his previous books so popular. It is a good story without the narrative and depth to support it. The style is tedious and the tone pretentious, and I would put any other Kerouac book in front of this one as more accurate examples of what I loved about his writing.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON....
To continue with my occasional riffs on Beat Generation books, and my quest to re-read all of the "Dulouz Legend", I have another book review to share with you....
DHARMA BUMS
by Jack Kerouac

Ahhhh. Very nice. I loved this book.
I actually read this the first time when I was a teenager, but I think I didn't absorb it completely. I couldn't remember many of the details, and my memories were connected with two guys I knew in school that reminded me of the main characters. Perhaps it is just that during that time, my understanding was that they WERE characters, fictional devices used to tell a story about hiking up a mountain and hitchhiking. My knowledge of Kerouac's life is much more complete now, and now, half a lifetime later and reading it again, I understand. I see the character "Ray Smith" as Kerouac himself, telling a story centering around his friend, Gary Snyder(pictured above as he was at the time of the book), known as "Japhy Ryder" in the novel.
Now, granted, Kerouac always told a version of the truth, although probably not all the truth. He certainly made free use of poetic license. He also tended to base his characters on real people, who were "true romantic heroes of the West", but distorted them and blew them up so that what you are seeing is really a caricature, not a character.
Gary Snyder himself said at one point Dharma Bums was not Kerouac's best work, and that "it was written too hastily". It is true that Kerouac was under a lot of pressure from his editors to produce a book to follow up "On the Road" that had more commercial appeal than some of the other things he was working on at the time (like "Visions of Cody", which is a tough read, even for a Neal Cassady (aka "Cody") fan).
However, I really liked this book this time around. It has some of the best descriptions of natural beauty that I have read ever in a novel. He gives detailed descriptions of hikes taken with Snyder, including a climb up Matterhorn, that took my breath away. This is Kerouac laying the groundwork for the "rucksack revolution" he visualized, and probably inspired lots of young people to pick up packs and head for the open road and undiscovered vistas.
The book ends where "Desolation Angels" picks up, with Kerouac on an isolated mountain top in Washington called Desolation Peak (here in the pic). I found it very interesting to read this description of his adventure here, with him painting it in happy tones, instead of the depressing tones of "Desolation Angels". Instead of focusing on his loneliness and inner struggles, he describes the scenery and his place in it with happiness and peace.
Snyder certainly influenced Kerouac in terms of religion. Kerouac was already intrigued by Buddhism when he met Snyder, but here in this book, you see Snyder teaching him more about this religion that they both had in common at this time. Snyder was truly and deeply Buddhist, and teased Kerouac that at the end of his life, he would be praying to his Christian God, with all his notions of "little lamby Jesus", and that teasing was right on. Here in this book, though, they introduce several notions of Buddhism that may have inspired readers to learn more about eastern religions themselves.
Overall, I decided that this was the ONE book I would ask my husband to read. We have been married for ten years and he does not read or have any interest in hearing about the books that mean so much to me, but he told me early in our marriage that he would read ONE book that I selected and talk about it with me. Ten years later, I still had not found that one book that summed up everything I liked about reading.
Well, folks, this one is it.