The Yabyum Kid

THE DHARMA BUMS (244 pp.)--Jack Kerouac--Viking ($3.95).

Jack (On the Road) Kerouac might have called his latest novel On the Trail, or How the Campfire Boys Discovered Buddhism. The book is less frantic than On the Road, less sexy than The Subterraneans, but it reconfirms Kerouac's literary role as a kind of Tom Thumb Wolfe in hip clothing. Like other Kerouac novels, the book has the sound of jazzed-up autobiography, and the most fictional thing about it may well be the brand of Buddhism (ostensibly Zen) that the beat hero and his pals preach and practice.

Holy Concubines. The novel's first-person narrator, Ray Smith, is 1) a poet, 2) a coast-to-coast freight-hopping, hitchhiking bum, and 3) a species of religious nut who visualizes himself "wandering the world ... in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise." He is a bug on prayer, and some of his meditations are beguiling, as when he contemplates "David 0. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha." A hip peg in a square world, Ray meets his oddball twin in Japhy Ryder, a twinkly-eyed Zen Buddhist hobohemian who lives in a shack at Berkeley, Calif. Japhy's remedy for a "sick civilization" is mountain climbing. But before the two buddies hit the trail, Japhy initiates Ray in a nonascetic pastime he calls "yabyum,"*and it makes such fictional standbys as nude mixed bathing seem mid-Victorian. A yabyummy blonde compliantly strips to the buff to play the role of the "holy concubine" in the first of several "Zen Free Love Lunacy orgies." Rucksack Revolution. This may explain why Ray drags his sneakered feet a bit when the boys finally start climbing the Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada. This climb, which occupies about a fourth of The Dharma Bums, is a writer's set piece, a hymn to nature. Kerouac's poetic imagery of towering snowscapes, frosty-breathed dawns, star-drugged nights suggests that the great American romance is still the Great Outdoors. At trip's end Japhy prepares to leave for a Japanese Buddhist monastery, while Ray is possessed by a Whitmanesque vision of "a great rucksack revolution," with "millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray . . . making young girls happy and old girls happier."

This vision helps to illustrate Author Kerouac's unhappy faculty for confusing freedom with irresponsibility, for abusing the Zen Buddhist idea of the inseparability of good and evil by using it as an excuse for self-indulgence. Kerouac's protest against the urban work life (which he once called "the midtown sillies world") and the suburban home life of the U.S. middle class ("all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen") is trenchant but scarce!" new. And Kerouac's cult of "spontaneous writing" makes his pages at least as sloppy as they are sprightly; but if his style irritates, it seldom bores.

*In Tibetan, yab is an honorific for father and yum for mother, signifying the spiritual idea of cosmic polarity much as the principles of yang and yin do in Chinese thought.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.