Beat-ing Off: more book reviews.

The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson

Since Weldon just mentioned Hunter Thompson, it looks like I’d better act quickly. This month’s book review features the man’s opus, which I’ve casually paired against one of the novels of an earlier, and equally famous, seeker of refuge (and, as it happens, local son), Jack Kerouac.

Although their aesthetics are worlds apart (and although I couldn’t resist the title), I hold Thompson as a worthy companion read for the beat writer. I like even better to put these novels in a broader arc, and the antecedant that leaps most immediately to mind is Jerome K. Jerome shipping friends around at the turn of the last century in different conveyances. (Were I more ambitious about these of reviews, I’d take on another of Mr. Jerome’s for this series, but there’s only so much of that sort of thing I’m willing to take at a time.) Each consists of the same thinly fictionalized autobiography; each is presented with similar mixtures of escape, male bonding, comedy, and philosophical interjections. The escape is for the characters, and the hideout isn’t so much the wilderness as it is civilization’s fringe, not a matter of pitting brawn against the savage forces of nature, but rather a retreat to a place safe enough and independent enough to explore the world from the writer’s own perspective. Over the arc of these novels, this required increasingly drastic measures for the getting away. Late Victoriana could be ditched in a comfortable outing down the Thames. Kerouac needed the deep woods and old weird America to hide himself in, and only thirteen years later, it took Hunter S. Thompson copious amounts of drugs. I also like imagining this progression of philosophies, which are poked in as wistful or wondering asides, and over the intertextual century, there is a growing refutation of the status quo: from ambivalent glimpses of the human condition, to an escape from Western philosophy, to, in Thompson’s case, a horrified rebuke of it. Read the three of them together, perhaps, as commentary on how invasive society has become (and how quickly).

Jack Kerouac came into into my literary purview over ten years ago, when I combined my meager estate with my wife’s. On page twenty-five or so, I found the bookmark that I placed in this copy of The Dharma Bums in 1997, where I stopped reading it the first time. It’s more atmospheric and philosophical than it is tensely plotted–it doesn’t demand a breathless page-whipping race to the finale. It’s a buddy story, and a travel novel, which does ramble from somewhere to somwhere else, but not with any particular urgency. Kerouac writes himself in as Ray Smith, and the story details his friendship and experiences with Japhy Ryder, together exploring Buddhist philosophy as well as the natural landscape of California and the Pacific northwest. Ryder is based on a real writer of Kerouac’s acquaintance (who is still writing in fact), as, evidently, are all the other characters in the novel, not that the knowledge would have helped me much to keep score. I liked most of the odd bastards, and if they weren’t a particularly responsible bunch, they were benevolent, and they seemed like great fun to be around. In the book, stuff happens, and the friendship between Ray and Japhy evolves over time, but any given ten pages of this book give a similar satisfaction as any other ten, and it’s natural to limit the reading to an easy evening, pleasant to pick up and just as easy to put down. Which is probably what happened eleven years ago.

In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s embrace of Zen Buddhism is a sort that reaffirms his own lifestyle, absent any spiritual effort that doesn’t satisfy him. Not that it didn’t take some personal effort, but it did often feel self-serving, and maybe even a little self-aggrandizing. I could see the author as that mild, friendly, half-baked, humbler-than-thou sort you sometimes find at parties. It’s like a Bohemian slacker superstar version of, say, Deion Sanders glorifying Jesus with his touchdown-scoring awesomeness. Admittedly, I like Jack’s sense of splendor a lot better, and his voice is nice enough too, moving along at an elemental groove, and able to summon as much child-like enthusiasm for immense natural wonders as he can for simple human pleasures. Although I distrusted the spirituality, and found the book a little skimpy on cerebral jollies, Kerouac is out to find and celebrate the things of the world that are still pure and good, and in his travels he always gets there, and it’s nice to be along on the trek. The solitude and the friendship, the spirituality and the beauty, they all get through just fine.

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I’m not just a newbie to Kerouac. Prior to cracking Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I’d never read Hunter S. Thompson, which no doubt gets me behind on the mythology. What can I say? In some ways I’ve lived a sheltered life. But please don’t think of me as an ignorant naif, instead imagine me as that great legal fantasy of an impartial juror, a man who, but for the surprising exception of the famous case at hand, is relatively well-informed. Well, another disclosure: maybe not that well-informed. But you know what I mean.

Fear and Loathing is a binge through sin city, following Thompson (as Raoul Duke) as he, with his attorney (one Dr. Gonzo) in tow, ostensibly reports on the fabulous Mint 400 motorcycle race and a DA’s conference on the threat of illegal drugs. Pursuits, as the subtitle goes, of the American dream? Well maybe, but more on that in a moment or two. First, an objective reviewer such as myself must address the drug theme, which is what inflates maybe a dozen pages of journalism and commentary to something novel length. Now, I don’t have much of a purchase point with such high-level debauchery–at no moment do Duke and Gonzo escape the influence of substances swallowed or inhaled, and maintaining that state requires some high level of industry on both their parts–but I’ve spent enough irresponsible time with (mostly) legal drugs to appreciate the motif. It’s not quite a comedy, but it’s got some good comic timing, centered about the recklessness and the shrewd insanity of a drunk. I got some quality laughs out of the characters’ carefully debated illogic, and the shoestring confidence games they had to wield to get out of those same scrapes they got themselves into in the first place. The alarming acid hallucinations fit in well enough as metaphor, or as grounding, but I’m still square enough to have been horrified at the random experimentation, ingestion of industrial chemicals, and some of the physical effects of their extreme dilettantism.

[Twiffer adds: "[In Vegas,] staying drunk the whole time is a necessary defense mechanism. viewing that sort of constant, base debauchery askew through the lens of LSD [...] it speaks to a strength of character and inherent faith that, deep down, people are good, to take such a trip and not wind up either a hermit or a raving lunatic.”]

Thompson’s comic voice does have a familiar tone, and I’m not sure if it’s recognized from film, or from a thousand next-day accounts of foolish escapades (or, for that matter, from however many of Thompson’s intellectual heirs). He conducts that timeless brilliance of “acting nonchalant” as the world goes to shit around him like a maestro, and he’s mastered the classic art of puncturing assumed dignity with irreverence. He sets a considered pause here to frame a gag, and there, he’s got the contrasts of outward calm against the thoroughly absurd or of drug-addled mania over the bland and mundane. The language on the whole is witty and apposite, and it utilizes mock-seriousness very well. Our heroes sincerely throw around words like “vile,” “swine,” and “maniac,” which are funny on their own, and on a higher level, the sober truths (and ironies) of them are carefully considered, even as they pertain to the protagonists’ own selves. (Their petty criminalities against The Man are funny by similar measures, especially in that town, but one or two innocents may have been abused. This was much less amusing.)

But Fear and Loathing is not just for the jokes, and there are sober truths behind it, truths that need to lie behind to keep the book from achieving anything more than a blivot of props and gimmicks. I would have preferred a firmer bedrock of substance: there were ten pages of hijinks for every three-paragraph insight, and here, the insights are the brilliant parts. I’ll admit there are some fine juxtapositions and contrasts, but maybe there are too many left for the reader to decipher. Vegas is portrayed as your standard-issue den of iniquity, but the point’s made that it’s an ugly conservative version of sin, a real cop’s-night-out sort of lawlessness: implicitly violent, outright objectifying, and personally destructive in an orderly and artificial sort of way, from which the real (and presumably less harmful) weirdos are exiled. You might call it an affirmation of genuine feakiness, although I didn’t come out approving of Gonzo and Duke’s lifestyle either, and these two men carefully refute the drug-fueled idealism of the previous decade’s youth movements as well. “The American dream,” when they find it, is burnt out and irrelevant to any personal quest that either Horatio Alger or Timothy Leary may have dreamed up. It’s just a dangerous journey with not much at the end of it. You might say it takes lunacy to show the lunacy.

As a final note I found the lamented demise of 60s idealism a bit tired in 2008–the boomers have reinvented their generation half a dozen times by now–but I expect it was potent in 1971. I have no reason to believe, however, that Thompson himself ever gave up his integrity. Before I finished writing this, and apropos to Weldon’s previous post, I came across his 1994 eulogy of Nixon, now the second piece of his I’ve read, and I recommend it. It’s brilliant without all the drug gimmicks.