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Perpetual Movie. No stacked-deck determinist. Jack Kerouac has been a happily adoring pantheist who regards the world and man as set and characters in a perpetual movie that God, a heavenly Darryl F. Zanuck. enjoys making and watching. Nobody was planning to give Kerouac the Nobel Prize for On the Road, The Dharma Bums or the string of other books about himself (under the fictional name Jack Duluoz) that cheerfully celebrate the joys of bed. bumming and Zen Buddhism. But he had a rollicking, coin-as-you-go poetic style that recreated a direct, personal, uniquely American experience. He seemed secure as a perpetual adolescent—free of thought, full of feeling, blessedly zooming back and forth across the country.
Alas, a cruel thought has intruded upon Kerouac's world. Though he has managed to write a book about this fell experience, it is clear that things will never be the same again—"like those pathetic five highschool kids," he explains, "who came to my door one night wearing jackets that said 'Dharma Bums' on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old ... and here I am old enough to be their father."
What can a beat do when he is too old to go on the road? He can go on the sauce. In Big Sur Jack does. But swilling bourbon and ginger ale doesn't seem to help. As a last straw, Jack makes it down to a lonely cabin on Big Sur, the scenic headland below Monterey where Ur-Beat Henry Miller has found his haven. He communes with nature: a bug he tenderly rescues from drowning, an old mule who looks at him with "Garden-of-Eden eyes."
Eatless Days. Soon he is off again, back to five eatless days on the sauce, back to his San Francisco pals, back to a skinny but accommodating fashion model. "I want us to get married," she urges him, "and settle down to a sensible understanding about eternal things." But the King of the Beats is not fooled. "I see it all raving before me," he mumbles, "the end less yakking kitchen mouthings of life, the long dark grave of tomby talks under midnight kitchen bulbs." In the end he settles for a howling emotional crisis —which on a grown-up would look very much like the DTs.
A child's first touch of cold mortality —even when it occurs in a man of 41 — may seem ridiculous, and is certainly pathetic.
In Kerouac's case, though, there may be compensations. Think of the books, man, a whole new series: The Dharma Bums Grow Up, The Dharma Bums on Wall Street. Who Knows, maybe even The Dharma Bums in the White House?