Kerouac's Buddhist phase roughly coincided with the lowest Beat ebb of his career fortunes. The earnestness, sincerity and naivete of his involvement with the teachings are characteristic of him, as is the confusion, vulnerability and utter openness of heart we find in these pages. At least briefly he found in it precious refuge and consolation. The chart of Kerouac's psyche that emerges from these notebook pages of purported Buddhist studies reveals a quicksilver instability never so fully reflected in his fiction.Ī lapsed Catholic still haunted by images of guilt, sin and death - deeply imbued in childhood and in his view darkly corroborated by events suggesting a tragic fate at work in his family ever since - Kerouac came to Buddhism at a time of dejection and disappointment.
Then again, perhaps no other Kerouac volume has given away so much "inside" data about the writer. This hefty tome comes billed as "experimental nonfiction," an appellation that doubtless would have confused its author, who consistently and intently represented his fictional accounts of his life (or "legend") as a single, long experiment in truth-telling. It's also the intimate logbook of a period of restless self-uprooting, semivoluntary poverty, celibacy and asceticism that immediately preceded the life-changing publication of "On the Road." "Some of the Dharma," the last of Jack Kerouac's important withheld writings to see the light, is the two-year journal of his truth- seeking Buddhist wanderings in the mid-1950s.
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