Part I of a couple of posts (who knows, maybe 3) on Kerouac in the Wilderness.
In Dharma Bums, Kerouac describes visiting Japhy Ryder (i.e.
Gary Snyder) in his shack near Berkeley and Japhy talks to him about the
difficulty of translating Han Shan’s poem Cold Mountain from the original
Chinese. Jack is impressed with the
similarities between Han Shan and Ryder.
“That’s like you too, Japhy, studying with eyes full of tears.” Han Shan, Ryder said, was “a mountain man, a
Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things…
he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true
to himself.” Ray Smith (i.e. Kerouac)
responded, “That sounds like you too.”
“And like you too, Ray”, Ryder generously replied.
Thinking that it would be a good thing for Kerouac to have
some solitary time in the mountains, Snyder encouraged Kerouac to apply to work
a summer as a fire lookout in the Northern Cascades in Washington. The first part of Kerouac’s novel Desolation
Angels, based upon his notebooks from the summer of 1956, recorded Jack’s
summer of anguish and paranoia in his mountain retreat. Though Kerouac may not be everyman – at times
he’s jubilant, at times morose, verbose, braggardly, brilliant, invariably
drunk, incessantly dissecting, sullen, always writing, experimenting,
vagabonding, observing minutely, oedipally strange, holy, obnoxious –
nonetheless Jack’s ordinary failure in the wilderness is perhaps a more
successful account of the meaning of wilderness for us everyfolk than all the
successful accounts written by the hard men of the great American Wilderness
tradition.
