Famous First Sentences: The Dharma Bums

There is a liberating aspect to modern American story-telling that mixes the wiles of the raconteur with the confessions of an honest, but suffering, heart. Even before Holden Caulfield so famously disparaged the need for proper exposition and all that other "Dickens crap" (1951), American literature has been able to dispense with the dictates of tradition, combining the vernacular and characteristically "autobiographical" persona -- that we first encounter in the previous century's Huck Finn -- with a few generations' worth of Joycean stream of the unconscionable, Jazz Age scandal-mongering, the more powerful jazz itself of the fifties, and two world wars' worth of hurting.

Phew.

Voices in the U.S. are unrestrained. They come from minds as open and wide as the rolling prairie (as Henry James described his protagonist as having in The American,1877), broad and true. And set free from conventions of travel by lack of money -- a habit picked up during the Great Depression -- these liberated minds are ready to get on the road, indeed, by the mid-point of the Twentieth Century. The Beat Generation was as inevitable as the later Summer of Love.

Interestingly, Kerouac once instinctively replied "I'm not a Beatnik, I'm Catholic" -- as if the two were mutually exclusive, in his mind, at least.

Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffle bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.

I always used to enjoy asking students to state the obvious about any issue at hand when they were stuck for an answer or interpretation. But here, with Kerouac, all we really need is the first word of The Dharma Bums to get us into a lively examination of the text.

Hopping.

It is not a "Jane Austen" word. Hell -- this word isn't even wearing a tie. And it is used in a wide variety of expressions in English, from the obvious "hopping a train" to the later "hopped up on coke" and "hop out" or "hop on out." And then there's the injunction to "hop it." In short, it's a loaded word, and fine instinct directs writers to choose words so richly weighted as this.

And not only that, but this is also a present participle -- an action taking place before our eyes; definitely not staid and static expository description of the kind Holden Caulfield so detested.

Hopping a freight. How quintessentially north American, and what a vast array of images these opening words conjure. Hobos. Bums, tramps, yes -- but morphed into an almost romantic symbol of freedom by the lasting impact the Great Depression had on the imagination of the nation, followed all-too-closely by the Second World War.

I like the easy-rolling informality, yet neat composure, of this first sentence. Read it aloud for yourself (go on, I won't tell): don't those prepositions and conjunctions come around every few words like the motion of a train rolling over the tracks? Kerouac doesn't need to tell us he's on a train (he omits the noun, using what would have been the qualifying "freight" to denote the whole) -- (yeah , all you smart-asses in the back, it's synecdoche and no , that's not a place in New York).

The composure fits the speaker, as well as the sentence. The placement of the duffel (another indispensable artifact for a ramblin' man) is neatly under his head, he lies flat with his leg crossed over the other at the knee -- this is contained and deliberate, not casual or accidental. So is Kerouac.

The key word in this sentence? Right, you're way ahead of me: it's "contemplating." Now, before you biographer-types start pointing out that contemplation is an essential component of a Roman Catholic upbringing, the likes of which young Jean Louis Kerouac, he of the French-Canadian parents, undoubtedly had, let me just say that Kerouac's study of Buddhism was more detailed and consciously committed than many of his successors in the trendy Zen focus of the later Sixties and early Seventies.

John Suiter has said of Kerouac that the Diamond Sutra was "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read." His biography of Siddhartha Gautama wasn't published until after his death (of complications caused by cirrhosis of the liver -- not a very Zen Buddhist way to go, by any means).

So, why did I choose The Dharma Bums, and not On The Road? Just to be ornery. And also to point out that jazz -- in words as in music -- has its foundation in the neat and classical knowledge of how the medium really functions. Truman Capote once said of Kerouac's work "that's not writing, that's typing" -- and that was part of the liberating process, too (Kerouac used long rolls of paper as one continuous "scroll" for both On the Road and Bums).

The Dharma Bums is also mostly about Gary Snyder, whom Kerouac admired tremendously.

After Kerouac, the world was ready for Hunter S. Thompson. But that, I fear (and I do mean fear) is the topic for another day. . .