When it was released in paperback, Signet marketed The Dharma Bums as “the book that turned on the psychedelic generation… a barrier-smashing novel about two rebels on a wild march for Experience from Frisco’s swinging bars to the top of the snow-capped-Sierras. Here are the orgiastic sprees, the cool jazz bouts, the poetry love-ins, and the marathon binges of the kids who are hooked on Sensation and looking for the high…” (Signet classic edition). This later spin reflects the twists and turns put on the book after its publication, as a kind of beacon of the Woodstock generation. In fact, Kerouac, and his travel companion Gary Snyder in the book, warned against this very reception.

The Dharma Bums represented a shift in heroes, away from the volatile, dangerous world of Neal Cassady and towards the nature-loving, introspective philosophy of Gary Snyder (though with a similar manic intensity!) Kerouac (Ray Smith in the novel) travels across the U.S. and Mexico, traversing much of the same country found in On the Road. With poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) as his guide, Kerouac ventures into the California Sierras, seeking the mystics who’ve embraced nature. He spends time isolated, observing the harmony of nature in a fire lookout station on Desolation Peak, high in the Mt. Baker Wilderness. Against these wilderness pilgrimages are set the urban artistic engagements Kerouac had with Kenneth Rexroth (Reinhold Cacoethes), Michael McClure (Ike O'Shay), Philip Whalen (Warren Coughlin), Philip Lamantia (Francis DePavia), and Allen Ginsberg (Alvah Goldbook). This tonal shift toward nature and Eastern philosophy proved calming to Kerouac, but Snyder’s prophecy of where this could lead – to the Woodstock generation – is among the book’s most haunting passages: “the whole world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't want anyway...l see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of em Zen lunatics who go about writing poems (DB, pp.97-98).”

The Dharma Bums erupted out of the immense pressure put on Kerouac after the surprising success of On the Road. With the literary spotlight came expectations of sustained commercial output. Viking had the right of first refusal of any new manuscripts and refuse they did, turning down Maggie Cassady, Doctor Sax, and Visions of Gerald. Malcolm Cowley, who was Viking's fiction consultant at the time, later recalled that somebody at Viking finally said, “Why don't you just carry on what you were doing in On the Road? And Jack sat down and did his Dharma Bums” (Gifford and Lee, Jack's Book: An Oral Biography, p.243).

When beginning work on his follow-up to On the Road, Kerouac stayed on formula, creating another long scroll of paper on which to let the text flow. He continued his practice of relying on his detailed journals and well-honed memory to craft a new narrative, but this time he went after something far more meditative than later publisher’s blurbs would suggest. In May of 1957, Kerouac wrote to his agent, Sterling Lord, “I’ve just started and am working furiously on a new narrative adventure (I don’t write ‘novels,’ as you know), the title AVALOKITESVARA [apparently an early working title], which is a picaresque account of how I discovered Buddha and what happened in my experiences, often hilarious, as an American Dharma Bum (or bhikku, wandering religious teacher) …. It has all kinds of hitch hiking scenes, girls, new characters I’ve never written about (such as Gary Snyder who wanders in the mountains alone for months and comes down to, among other things, organize Tibetan yabyum orgies with the girls), railroads, wine, dialog, the story of the San Francisco poetry movement which began one drunken night, my meditations in the North Carolina woods, all written in a wild undisciplined way which is consistent with the spirit of the freedom of the Tao (the Chinese Way) …. Perhaps it’ll take ten years to publish it but we’ll see how ON THE ROAD sells, from which it wont be too different except in style, to which people’ll catch up–I just get possessed and write as I wist, which is the only way” (Selected Letters 1957-1969, p. 44).

Kerouac’s means of “writing furiously” and writing as he wist included long sessions fueled by Mexican Benzedrine, and his weary letters from this period reflect the toll it took on him. He wrote to Ginsberg on 30 November 1957: “I’m rather good novelist now, my in-progress work is THE DHARMA BUMS about Gary and 1955 and 56 in Berkeley and Mill Valley and is really bettern ON THE ROAD, if I can only stay sober enuf to finish it now…” He was at the same time negotiating the sale of the movie rights to On the Road (“Brando may come dig me in nightclub, I’ll make a trust fund and disappear on Zen Lunacy Road and you can all join me”) with money woes continuing to plague him. The prospects of a second successful book in a row engaged him: “I am bugged and sad and mad and writing a great novel, THE DHARMA BUMS, wow, wait’ll they read that one! How great Gary is in it, and Whalen … you’ll see” (Selected Letters 1957-1969, p. 99). Kerouac had begun work on The Dharma Bums on November 26, 1957. In 18-hour sessions, battered with drugs and alcohol, Kerouac completed the manuscript eleven days later on December 7. Two days after that, he wrote to his editor Malcolm Cowley: "I'm mighty proud to let you know that I have just finished a new novel, written like On the Road on a 100 foot roll of paper, single space, cup after cup of coffee, the last chapter infinitely more sublime than anything in Road and the whole thing quite different..." (Benedict F. Giamo, Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester, 2000, pp. 131-132).

A most Beat Beat novel, The Dharma Bums both recounts and critiques incisive moments in the movement’s history. In the letter Kerouac had sent to Lord mentioning “the story of the San Francisco poetry movement which began one drunken night” he refers to the reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl at Six Gallery in 1955. With Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen all reading, Kerouac immortalizes this landmark moment in American letters (Ginsberg is Alvah Goldbook in the novel, and “Howl” is recast as “Wail”):

Lot

Kerouac, Jack | Typed letter to Allen Ginsberg, a blunt letter addressing a rift in their friendship

10,000 - 15,000 USD

“Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness…”

The scroll was complete by the following January and he was in Orlando, living in his mother’s apartment (this auction also features an outstanding presentation copy of the novel to her, see the succeeding lot). Kerouac sent his typewriter out for a complete overhaul before taking on the task of retyping an editor’s draft onto standard 8 ½ x 11 inch sheets (this version was sold at Heritage, 8 March 2017). Upon submission to Viking, Kerouac was thrilled with their enthusiastic feedback and wrote to Philip Whalen: "My ms. about Gary you & me & Dharma Bummies has flipped Madison Avenue over, they plan it for the Fall with full trimmings...they all read it twice not once...it is loaded with bodhisattva magic, nagically [sic]...a must book of the list of every freelance ghost, et. etc." (March 4, 1958, Selected Letters, page 165). But once he saw Viking’s edits to the submitted manuscript, his mood soured: "I had to go to NY the other day,” he wrote to Joyce Glassman, “mad as a hatter to contest Viking's shitty idea of making as much as 4,000 corrections on Dharma Bums. They said copy-editing hadnt hurt ROAD but that was a short-sentence style that couldnt be hurt. They agreed first to start all over again, I told them at my expense too, to prove to them I meant it, now after I'm back home they start to hedge and want me to go over the galleys and make my 4,000 restorations to the original (hardly any room in the margins) and finally now the damn galley aint arrived in the mail from them and if they are trying to sneak over their ersatz version of DB on me they've lost a writer..." (Selected Letters, page 145).

Lot

Kerouac, Jack | The Dharma Bums, inscribed to his mother and her two cats

70,000 - 100,000 USD

Kerouac’s corrected galleys were returned to Viking on June 18, 1958. In his accompanying letter to Helen Taylor he demanded they adhere to his revisions: "Here are the galleys exactly as I want them published. I want to be called in to see the final galley and check it again against my original scroll, since I'm paying for this and my reputation depends on it. I want to make sure we put out a book we can really be proud of. Just leave the secrets of syntax and narrative to me... Anyway, now I'm starting on new novel MEMORY BABE and when I hand in the neat doublespaced ms. I want you to go over it for the ten or twelve 'mistakes' or 'serious problems' in it and we'll thrash out, but no more irresponsible copy-editing of my Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn prose" (Selected Letters, page 149).

Kerouac’s 61-foot long, single-spaced scroll — an art object in its own right — unravels the inner workings of his earthly and spiritual journey at this tumultuous time. It is a cascade of meditations on nature and the human condition, and shows him sparring with demons both personal, familial, and collegial. Having embraced Buddhism in 1953, “Kerouac’s interest in Eastern philosophy anticipated that of general Western culture by a decade or more” (Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac, p. 199). The Buddhist credo “first thought, best thought” rang particularly true to Kerouac, and he brought this spirit to his working methods on the On the Road and The Dharma Bums scrolls, only to have those first thoughts perverted through the bureaucratic, but pragmatic, engines of mass market publishers. In The Dharma Bums scroll, Kerouac makes few revisions, a refined demonstration of his use of spontaneous composition, but also, perhaps, a new honoring of the first thought. Still, there are many differences in the published text. In Chapter 6, describing the drive with Snyder and John Montgomery into the Sierras to climb Mount Matterhorn, Kerouac deleted an entire passage, and later in the scroll, he made pencil notes indicating that two sections recording Kenneth Rexroth's critical comments on fellow poets should be brought together, as they have been in the published book. Kerouac made slight changes to his description of his days on Mt. Desolation and modifications to the oft-quoted passage in Chapter 33 that describes his vision of the world upside-down, and man “a weird, vain beetle full of strange ideas.” There are also significant rearrangements of text sections between the scroll and the published book, perhaps introduced by Kerouac and Viking editors in the preparation of his page-form typescript. An authoritative comparison of the two typescript drafts remains to be undertaken.

PROVENANCE:

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) — Gabrielle Kerouac, his mother (d.1973) and Stella Sampas Kerouac, his wife — Stella Sampas Kerouac (d.1990) — Anthony G. Sampatacacus, brother of the preceding (d.1999) — Christie’s New York, 8 April 2003, lot 166 (undesignated consignor)