Chapter 1

Introduction: Culture, Raw and Cooked, or Jack Kerouac and the Works of

Oswald Spengler

As Ray Smith, Japhy Ryder and Henry Morley—the aliases of Jack Kerouac,

Gary Snyder and John Montgomery in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums—descend from a

Zen-inducing climb up California’s Matterhorn Peak, food is the main thing on all of their minds. “We were so honestly hungry it wasn’t funny and it was honest,” Smith says (70). For most of the novel, characters subsist on trail-ready and simplistic fare.

But after the taxing climb, Smith desires something more. He wants a “raving great dinner of baked potatoes and pork chops and salad and hot buns and blueberry pie and the works,” and when Ryder expresses philosophical discomfort with the indulgent nature of Smith’s cravings, Smith challenges Ryder’s authority (69). “You may know all about mountains but I know about where to eat,” Smith defiantly tells

Ryder, whose sagacity holds supreme for most of Dharma Bums (69-70). In this moment, Kerouac, through his alter ego Ray Smith, diverts from his consistent theme of having “nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion” (On the

Road 126). When it comes to food, as this episode suggests, he knows something more.

Kerouac and the Beat movement are frequently associated with the sensory experience of hearing particularly embedded in the phenomenon of jazz, but this episode of Dharma Bums suggests that another sense, taste, is perhaps of equal significance to a writer whose beloved Bird [Charlie Parker] even extolled “Salt

Peanuts” and “Scrapple from the Apple.” From the apple pie à la mode consumed in 2

Adventures in Good Eating-like roadside diners, to the bulgur wheat, brown bread and “mysterious Chinese dishes” of both Japhy Ryder’s cooking and San Francisco’s

Chinatown, to the roast turkey dinners, cereal, hamburgers and prepared-by-mom cakes and pies of the Martin household, food is ubiquitously present in Kerouac’s novels. Furthermore, food, in its physical form, its consumption and its appreciation, are central to the author’s novelized critique of post-war America.

The following pages will use food as an expressive focal point to frame, inform and contextualize a literary analysis of how Kerouac writes food into his works. The thesis will begin by exploring how heroic eating and agriculture delineate the connection of food to civilization in The Town and the City, then will proceed to outline how uprooted agents of marginal cultures interact with food in

On the Road. At its close, I will argue that The Dharma Bums presents an attempt to create a syncretic fusion of foods and cultures that allows for the evasion of both social and individual decline, the two themes to which food is closely tied in

Kerouac’s novels. Both projects can be linked to Kerouac’s in-depth introduction and response to the pessimistic German philosopher Oswald Spengler at the behest of

William Burroughs in 1944 (Maher 122).

Spengler’s The Decline of the West was an “oft revisited classic” of the post- war literary world, a dense volume that, according to critic Northrop Frye in his

1974 review “Decline of the West,” gave Spengler’s work “a permanent place in twentieth century thought,” despite numerous flaws (8). “For the book of the kind he wrote the general principle holds that if one is in broad sympathy with what he is trying to do, no errors or contradictions or exaggerations seem fatal to the general 3 aim; if one is not in sympathy with it, everything, however correct in itself, falls into chaos,” Frye said (6). Published in 1918 and then in 1922 in two volumes, the work was Spengler’s attempt to solve “The Riddle of History” in the midst of what he augured to be Western culture’s downwards spiral towards extinction by the end of the 20th century. While Spengler envisioned his text as a definitive treatise on human history, and his work was indeed influential on post-war thinking, it is important to note that his fatalistic argument is not considered authoritative or conclusive. “While Spengler is one of our genuine prophets, he is not our definitive prophet,” wrote Frye (13).

Spengler formulates history as “a picture of endless formations and transformation…the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms [Cultures]”

(Decline v.1 96). He analyzes history through the split context of world-as-nature, or

“things become,” and the world-as-history, or “things becoming,” which must be captured as it is in the process of being actualized, a state he calls the “Pure Present”

(v.1 6, 9). Cultures are the actualizations of existence that naturally spring from history, and do so because of time, which gives direction to the world, and space, which is the bringer of the “problem of extension”—the “prime symbol” of humans’ attempt to project themselves as something greater than mere organisms (v.1 174).

Cultures—which encompass the organic manifestations of arts, sciences, religions, etc.—begin to confuse time for space, a phenomenon viewed in the prevalence of the clock in the Western world. Spengler argues that this “problem of extension,” which is propagated by the rise in the “world fear” of mortality, intensifies into the

“Problem of Civilization”—the dying winter of a Culture and the reason for the 4 current “Decline of the West.” (v.1 31) Like a wave of a stream, Civilization is when a

Culture extends itself too high and crumbles, exhausted, back to the level direction of time, which, to fill space, will inevitably begin to extend again with the rise of another Culture. Thus Spengler’s idea of history as the “waxing and waning of organic forms” (v.1 96).

The “Problem of Civilization” manifests itself in Spengler’s eyes as the transition of cultures spread among provinces and towns to the centralization of culture in a world-city, or Megalopolis, where it dies. Spengler argues that polis- centered Grecian society—a “town-culture” to his eyes—was the summer to the

Classical world culture, while the imperial, city-centered empire of Rome was the winter (v.1 107). To Spengler, “all great Cultures are town-cultures” (v.1 90). This is because towns preclude the tyranny of money, an inorganic form that comes to life within the megalopolis. For Spengler, money causes the world to become superficial,

“practical, soulless, and purely extensive,” and turns a living, organic culture into a mummy (v.1 353).

Agriculture is one of the primary means through which a “town-culture” shifts to the Megalopolis in Spengler’s narrative. “Primeval man is a ranging animal,” said Spengler, referencing the nomadic hunter-gatherers of early humanity, but humans evolved to practice agriculture so that they could set down roots, like a plant (v.1 89). The farmhouse, then, becomes “the great symbol of settledness,” and is “property in the most sacred sense of the word” (v.1 90). A town springs up as a collection of a “rustic group of farms and cottages,” but when it grows large enough and collective enough to become a city, humankind loses its “specific attunement” to 5 a locale and the land, and culture becomes “incomprehensible to the peasant of the soil.” (v.1 91) The respective culture thus becomes inorganic, disjoined from its roots in the Earth.

The catalyst for this change in Spengler’s telling of history is the tradesman, or intervener, who practices a “refined parasitism” that transfers the life-giving intrinsic value of a good—i.e., food valued for nutrition, social value and sensory pleasure, and traded with other goods on a similarly appraised basis—to a valuation rooted in the inorganic idea of money (v.1 478). The city grows, the local or town market disappears, and the interveners’ power increases parallel to the value of money in trade. Meanwhile, provincial, organic life—culture—dries up. Goods increasingly become produced in factories, with less and less emphasis on the soil, making spiritual “unfruitfulness” a hallmark of the megalopolis. The true urbanite

“is not a producer in the prime terrene sense” and does not have any “inward linkage with the soil or goods that pass through his hands,” while the marginalized and disappearing peasant is “the only organic man, the sole relic of Early Culture”

(v.1 481, 354). The soulless trader then becomes master of the evolving, sickly culture, which is driven to a tenuous extension by the inorganic piling up of money—as seen in the “world-city economy” markets of London, New York, Paris and Berlin—and then exhausts its expressions in regurgitated actualizations and materialistic values, thus collapsing back to level again. Spengler predicted that

Western culture was fated to end by the year 2000, and so, when Kerouac first read

Spengler at Burrough’s insistence, times would have seemed bleak to a Spenglerian. 6

In Kerouac’s post-war American environment, the establishment of the highway system, the rise of suburbanization and the expansion of consumer culture helped fuel a shift from pastoral livelihood to materialist lifestyles clustered primarily in and about the rims of major cities. Kerouac’s canon, which he wrote primarily in the immediate post-war era, reflects frequently on this seemingly

Spenglerian transition towards cultural collapse in America. In the texts of The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), and The Dharma Bums (1958), Kerouac wrestles with the implications of this change explicitly. The Town and the City chronicles a family’s move from a romanticized town set in Massachusetts to life in

New York City. In On the Road, characters frenetically wander America from a home base in the historically industrial town of Paterson, N.J., exploring many of its major cities while appreciating the vast in-betweens of the country along the way. Dharma

Bums wrestles with the question of how to reconcile a removed, rustic life in the mountains of Washington state with jumping life in San Francisco. Throughout all of the novels, Kerouac seeks some sort of escape.

Kerouac’s mercurial temperament towards both the urban and the rustic in those works is emblematic of his relation to Spengler’s influence: While he may find truth in some of Spengler’s ideas, his writing suggests that he believes that the philosopher’s fatalistic decrees weren’t authoritative or necessarily complete. The motif of food, the agricultural product that formed the basis of the progression from town to city in Spengler’s text and the one thing that Kerouac—in the guise of Ray

Smith in the aforementioned quote—declares that he knows, is the prevalent 7 medium through which Kerouac engages and discusses Spengler’s pessimistic notions of cultural decline.

The post-war shift of the American populations to suburban and urban areas was accompanied by a radical change in the production of food. According to food writer Michael Pollan in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the post-war era in

America was when the system of industrial food production, as opposed to pastoral agriculture, began its national domination (7). Because of industrial agriculture, food lost its organic ties to the Earth and the sun. Humans turned to petrochemicals, as opposed to natural sunlight, to grow crops, then accelerated plant growth with the “Faustian bargain with nature” that was Fritz Haber’s 1909 invention of synthetic nitrogen—a good churned out heavily by former munitions factories in the years of post-war production—rather than sticking to the natural process of nitrogen fixation done since the beginning of time by microbes in the soil

(Omnivore’s Dilemma 8, 44).

This change morphed food diversity, production and seasonality beyond what the origins of agriculture could have ever foreseen, and gave birth to the monoculture-based, cost and science-centric processed food industry. Food became a mainstream commodity, as opposed to an intrinsically valued, agricultural good, which “severed the link between any producer of a foodstuff and its ultimate consumer…stripping qualities and histories from the harvest of a particular farm and farmer” (Omnivore’s Dilemma 60). This industrializing of food, which usurped anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ idea that “nature and culture, are also opposites in respect to rawness and cooking,” turned what was once an intimate, involved and 8 organic manifestation of actualization in society into a material good valued only in terms of money (Levi-Strauss 248). And so re-enter the prophecies of Spengler.

As Frye noted in his criticism of Spengler’s Decline of the West, the book’s argument consists of a fragile system of logic that unravels if one of its many constituent parts fails. The “fellahin,” or the marginalized peasants that are swept into the inevitable waxing and waning of history with little agency, are one of

Spengler’s constituent themes with which sociologist Theodor Adorno found particular issue. To Adorno, Spengler failed to give full credence to the importance of counter-cultures that ran parallel to the mainstream cultures of societies depicted in Decline of the West, and so problematically eschewed exploration into the role of the “victims of recurring night” that were his fellahin (56).

Critics aren’t necessarily warm to Kerouac’s interpretation of Spengler’s idea of fellahin, or what Kerouac referred to as “fellaheen,” either. “Kerouac’s ‘fellaheen’ romanticization of the earth and its peoples as some kind of eternal agricultural peasantry and source of redemptive beatitude made, at times, for a bad faith Cold

War binary of historicized otherness,” wrote Rob Wilson in 2012 (200). From

Kerouac’s pidginized Spanish to his depictions of native Mexicans and Tangiers’ locals, Wilson finds issue with Kerouac taking all of the “agricultural peasantry” of the world and lumping them into a single, over-arching category. Wilson’s charge appears to hold true upon evaluation of Kerouac’s canon, but in a way his imputation obfuscates the significance of the fellaheen’s inclusion.

Kerouac’s exploration of the fellaheen isn’t so much concerned with identity as it is phenomenology. Critic David Sterritt wrote in 1998 that the definitive center 9 of Kerouac’s “fellaheen” populations is their ties to the soil and organic life. In

Kerouac’s writings, according to Sterritt, fellaheen civilization is important because it “ain’t as bad as that German Civilization,” and instead presents action and working interactions—i.e. cooking and eating—that engage with “the native earth” (Sterritt

231). Kerouac, then, looks to his “fellaheen” as rehabilitative representations of

Spengler’s peasant, “the only organic man, the sole relic of Early Culture,” as heroes that have escaped Spengler’s cyclical doomed history, not as a class of individuals that Kerouac, as some omniscient Anglo-European saint, needs to save and edify.

Kerouac therefore uses the “fellaheen” and the phenomenology of their ties to food to create a counter-cultural hole in Spengler’s argument akin to the objections of Adorno. Adorno argued that the problem with the notion of fellahin in

Spengler’s rhetoric was that the author portrayed them as powerless victims, individuals doomed to live on the ruins of culture and civilization without any historical agency. They solely serve to emphasize the fatalism of Spengler’s decrees.

Kerouac, however, directly challenges Spengler’s formulation by uniting and cris- crossing the modern foodways of post-war North America with those of the

“agricultural peasantry” of the “fellaheen.” Kerouac himself belonged to a counter- culture, the Beats, that preceded a later countercultural awakening in the 1960s and

1970s that embraced organic and unprocessed food as political and socio-cultural identifiers of dissociation from the mainstream.

Kerouac’s written amalgam of decadent, processed modern food and the intrinsically valued, tied-to-the-Earth food of fellaheen agricultural peasants—the sole relics of early culture that Spengler noted—effectively collapses Spengler’s frail 10 argument at its most crucial point. Through Kerouac’s works, a more complex and nuanced view of agriculture is restored by Kerouac and used to respond to the philosopher’s pessimistic prophecies. Foundationally, Spengler lays forth his historical formula and then argues it through deductive reasoning and the symbolic connotation of historical phenomena that include art, architecture, faith and food.

Conversely, Kerouac attempts to retrace and reinterpret Spengler’s model by turning the symbol proof of food from symbolic allegory to counterpoint, and, finally, balanced harmony, through inductive reasoning.

By repetitively associating family meals and eating with glimpses of light in the trials of the Martin family, by repeatedly engaging hunger, meals and regional eating with the revelations that accompany travel in On the Road, and by prominently featuring food, diet and drink as parts of the spiritualist self-searching between country and city in Dharma Bums, Kerouac examines and questions whether food is the accelerator of cultural decline that Spengler argues it to be, or a cultural phenomenon through which a supposedly late culture can circumvent that fate and elude Spengler’s pessimistic understanding of history.

11

Chapter 2

Bittersweet: Heroic Eating and Cultural Transition in The Town and the City

Kerouac’s The Town and the City begins with a removed survey of the town of

Galloway that captures, in words, a landscape portrait akin to those of America’s

Hudson River School artists:

The Merrimac River, broad and placid, flows down to it from the New Hampshire Hills over ancient stone towards a place where the river suddenly swings about in a wide and peaceful basin, moving on now around the flank of the town, on to places known as Lawrence and Haverhill, through a wooded valley, and on to the sea at Plum Island, where the river enters an infinity of waters and is gone. Somewhere far north of Galloway, in headwaters close to Canada, the river is continually fed and made to brim out of endless sources and unfathomable springs (3, emphasis mine).

Following the Merrimack from its natural sources to the town of Galloway, these sentences carry the reader onward via the aesthetic replication of a river, emulating the slow rolling waters through repetitive pauses and bubbling plosives that wind from the pastoral to the pedestrian, all the while guided by the consistent presence of directional prepositions. Through these devices of consonance and clausal continuance used persistently throughout this excerpt, despite the shift in setting from the hills outside Galloway to the town itself, Kerouac establishes the urban and pastoral scenes as interwoven. Thus, using romantic prose borrowed from the likes of Thomas Wolfe and James Fenimore Cooper, Kerouac unfurls the picture of a town with roots intertwined with nature.

Kerouac lusciously paints Galloway as a town with “farmers in trucks buying up supplies and groceries and transacting a little business,” where fruits, vegetables and cider are sold at roadside stands, where pedestrian interactions all are done by first name and, where just past a dairy farm, there is “one rambling Victorian house 12 with a battered gray look, a high hedgerow all around tress huge and leafy that almost obscure the front of the house” (6). It is the home of the book’s central protagonists, the Martin family. There, in the Martin home and in Galloway, Kerouac saccharinely says, there is “something beautiful forever” (7).

The Town and the City, according to Kerouac biographer Anne Charters, is the fourth book of Kerouac’s greater artistic vision, the thirteen-book Duluoz chronology (Biography 388). However, it is the first book in the series that contains part of the greater character map found in On the Road, Dharma Bums and

Desolation Angels (Charters, Biography 389). The book, which Kerouac wrote from

1946 to 1949, was the author’s first published novel (Charters, Bibliography 15). It chronicles the lives of members of the Martin family as they disperse and change in the course of a move from their first Galloway home in the mid-1930s to a tenement in Brooklyn in the years during and after the close of World War II. While constructing the novel, the young author looked to his romantic peers of the past for aesthetic guidance. Charters quotes an important letter from Kerouac to his friend

Charles Sampas explaining how the book manifests those influences in the form of the town: “Lowell1, like Winesburg, Ohio or Asheville, North Carolina or Fresno,

California or Hawthorne’s Salem, is always the place where the darkness of the trees by the river, on a starry night, gives hint of that inscrutable future Americans are always longing and longing for,” Kerouac wrote (Charters, Bibliography 15). Critics, however, took issue with this and other elements of what they believed to be

Kerouac’s dated style.

1 Galloway, the setting of The Town and the City, is a fictionalized version of Lowell, Massachusetts, the town in which Kerouac grew up. 13

F. Cudworth Flint, when reviewing the book for The Sewanee Review2 in

1951, dismissed its aesthetic with scorn. “Mr. Kerouac is a young New England counterpart of Thomas Wolfe, romantic egoist par excellence,” Flint wrote, going on to say that “No special significance attaches itself to the point at which the point begins,” while also attacking Kerouac’s depictions as indulgent and effete (“Nine

First Novels” 138). Flint further says that “of selectivity—the means of requiring excellence in structure and texture alike—this novel hardly exhibits a trace,” and chastises Kerouac for his over-emotional lack of humor (139). Yet, Flint failed to observe the reason behind Kerouac’s chosen aesthetic in the opening section of The

Town and the City, which was to insert a purposeful irony into the book.

Deeper into The Town and the City’s opening pages, after Kerouac describes the convivial, tightly knit activities of people interacting in the mill town’s center,

Kerouac underscores the novel’s romanticizing of pastoral, agriculturally-inclined life:

These are the things that closely surround the mills and the business of Galloway, that make it a town rooted in earth in the ancient pulse of life and work and death, that make its people townspeople and not city people (5).

As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, the crucial moment in Oswald

Spengler’s formula for cultural decline is the migration from town to city, in which humans transition from a collection of households “rooted in the earth” to an inorganic, cold and material urban society. Kerouac began writing The Town and the

City at the close of WWII, the moment at which the American population began accelerating its move to areas in and about the rims of cities and its meteoric spike

2 The Sewanee Review was a mouthpiece of the New Critics, a literary movement that touted back-to-the-earth themes and close reading-worthy high style in the 1950s. 14 in material spending. That is why, in The Town and the City, the protagonist Peter

Martin acknowledges that with World War II “an incomprehensible, misty, guilt- stricken, haunted kind of time had begun” (295). Since this moment comes midway through the novel, in the midst of the Martin family’s migration from Galloway to a life in New York City, the meaning appears explicit: Kerouac is declaring that the novel illustrates an America parallel to Spengler’s central moment in the process of decline. As critic James T. Jones notes:

The novel’s title takes the terms used by the German historian Spengler to indicate the shift from feudal village life to modern city life, which Kerouac described in a notebook in the early 1950s as the main theme of the Duluoz Legend, and applies them to Jack’s shift from youth in Lowell to the beginning of adult life in New York City… (Jones 57)

The first half of The Town and the City, which is primarily centered about the

Martins’ first home on the outskirts of Galloway, begins during the Great

Depression. Despite the rampant poverty found in America at the time, the

Martins—a nine-member family (ten if one counts Julian Martin, who dies in the first few pages)—experience a blissful life filled with relative bounty. This insular status is another key intersection with Spengler’s formulation of history: Spengler says the difference between cities and towns is that cities “do not inwardly form worlds in themselves” (v.1 91). Ergo, the stock market collapse of one city made all of them susceptible to poverty, while the idyllic town, Galloway, was shielded from economic crisis by its self-contained, economic isolation, a notion that would explain the novel’s early sumptuous dinner scenes.

Much of the Martin family’s initial, lavish and town-centric felicity is exhibited in its eating, from the roast turkey dinner that punctuates middle son 15

Peter’s victory at a high school football game to the oatmeal, toast, milk, cakes, boiled dinners and coffee that the mother, Marguerite, “the best cook in town,” sets out in near-surfeit (8). Rather than scrimp on consumption and save their abundance to preserve material wealth, as one would expect from a family living in the increasingly desperate landscape of mid-Depression American society, the

Martins eat heartily, thus retracing Spengler through the lens of food, which, as a symbol of agriculture, is the social feature that instigates the evolution from town to city.

References to heroic eating abound in the early sections of The Town and the

City. “If you’re a hero, Petey boy, it’s cause your mother feeds you like a horse” (85),

George Martin, the father, says after his son’s climactic football victory. To describe

Peter’s appetite, Kerouac writes that “His mother would feed him great boiled dinners, and he would eat them with a voracious abstracted intensity…as though everything were part of one great hungry plan to succeed” (55).

Further references to food in The Town and the City include George Martin’s fantastic regular breakfasts of pancakes, bacon, coffee, eggs and Vermont maple syrup, as well as a seemingly endless meal that Peter scarfs down in a roadside diner that only causes him to “grow hungrier and hungrier, for some odd reason”

(232). These illustrations reflect the bygone cultural trope of heroic eating that historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto discusses in his book Near a Thousand Tables.

According to Fernández-Armesto, societies from classical Thrace to France at the 16 dawn of the 19th century and even America at the beginning of the 20th century3 championed indulgent eating, which directly honored the gifts of each society’s respective deity, or deities, through consumption (102-107). However, the transition of food from an intrinsically valued good to a social and material one abolished that ideal by “rites of politesse” (Fernández-Armesto 118).

Similar to Spengler’s depiction of problematic city culture, food became intellectualized and monetized in its migration from heroic eating to polite conservation, regulated diet, commodities and aesthetic plate construction. By using the motif of heroic eating in a society that should otherwise look down on such consumption, Kerouac again uses irony to highlight the disjointedly idyllic nature of those early moments in the book, which seem sugary precisely because they have been grafted from an earlier, less desperate stage in Spengler’s historical progression of society that Kerouac and his readers, following the book’s publication in 1950, would have been uprooted from.

The process of eating, which is more predominant in the first half of the book than the later half, is also important because it reflects the Martins’ ability to directly engage with agriculture, keeping with the “specific attunement to the soil” that

Spengler found key to cultural flourishing (91). In fact, it seems to re-digest

Spengler’s genesis of cultural decline, agriculture, in the form of allegory. Galloway, as Kerouac depicts it from the very first page, represents an organic system of eating in which some higher, unnamed being feeds—or “continually fed” (1)—the

Merrimack, which in turn feeds agriculture, which then feeds people, all in close,

3 Fernández-Arnesto cites, as proof for this era’s championing of heroic eating, the prodigious appetite of jazz great Duke Ellington. 17 organic connection. This, along with the farmers milling about downtown at the market, the dairy pastures, and the abundance of produce available all around, reinforces the sense that Galloway is still, in a ways, the “rustic group of farms and cottages” attached to the Earth that Spengler describes as a town (91). In fact, when

Peter Martin leaves Galloway to attend prep school and then the University of

Pennsylvania, he returns to the town with a sense of redemption, thinking to himself that “he was rediscovering his Earth, which he had been away from too long” (146).

The Martin family is forced to leave its Galloway home when a mortgage lender seizes the house amid the family’s economic hardships, which occur, ironically, during the historically booming post-World War II era. Peter describes the moment as having to “pull up his stakes,” which calls to mind imagery akin to the uprooting of a plant, the organic metaphor Spengler uses to describe the town to city transition (239). The lender, or catalyst of this change, is strongly redolent of the trading “intervener” that Spengler says is responsible for shifting goods like food from intrinsic to material values, which in turn instigates the cultural decline towards city culture, and so this plot shift further fleshes out Kerouac’s allegorical retracing of Spengler’s theories.

The allegory also parallels Spengler in its harkening back to pioneer culture, a time that George Martin lauds as the best point of American history. During that era, settlers would put down stakes while claiming land during westward migration.

James Fenimore Cooper, the author whose romantic prose is evoked in the opening scene of The Town and the City and who is occasionally alluded to throughout the

Duluoz Legend, captured the evolution of pioneer life using a similar aesthetic in his 18

“Leather-Stocking” novels from the early half of the 19th Century. The central character of those novels, Natty Bumppo, is outspoken in his Spenglerian distaste for materialistic corruption and the disruption of organic life by settlement, and in one scene of the novel The Pioneers (1823)—a book in which Bumppo continuously shows contempt for the effect of wealth on the wilderness—the pioneer explicitly condemns material valuation:

…your betterments and clearing has druv the knowing things out of the country; and instead of beaver-dams, which is the natur’ of the animal, and according to Providence, you turn back the waters over the low grounds with your mill-dams, as if ‘t was in man to stay the drops from going where He wills them to go (402).

The allusions to Fenimore Cooper are clearly not coincidence, but a reinforcement of the romanticized, allegorical and organic town setting in Kerouac’s novel. To further prove this connection, note the one major disruption of town life in Galloway throughout Kerouac’s novel: a failure of local dams in a flood that destroys large swaths of the town. Here, Kerouac is layering an American literary narrative into his retraced allegory of Spengler’s historical theory. Yet, at the same time, he is highlighting the gaucheness of his epochal grafting through an ironic use of the naturally sublime and saccharine, the same device that appears in the previously discussed Fenimore Cooper allusion in the novel’s immediate first pages.

The allegory, however, transitions from sweet replication of early culture to a bitter representation of culture in decline. Once the Martins, “uprooted by war,” move to New York City from a temporary flat in downtown Galloway, the felicity of their initial town life begins to evaporate (343). Marguerite Martin at first attempts 19 to restore that quasi-agricultural, heroic eating-filled original ideal by recreating a similar environ for George and Peter in their Brooklyn home:

This woman had turned on the lights, swept the floor in the kitchen, rolled a bright linoleum on it, set the table with a clean white tablecloth, brewed some coffee, put out the plates, opened some cans and heated a supper…she sat them down, kissed them with delighted understanding, brought the food steaming to them and bade them live, loved and abide in the Earth, right there in Brooklyn (347).

Yet things are not the same. The food, once omnipresent, fresh and close to the

Earth, is instead canned, and the proximity to farming disappears. George Martin, while walking through downtown New York City, laments that “All his life he had taken it for granted that he could walk down a street and say hello and a few words to someone he knew” (351). And Peter, standing in the middle of Times Square later in the novel, notes that the assortment of pedestrians there, though diverse, are “the same people he had seen so many times in other American cities on similar streets”

(361). Despite Marguerite’s efforts to bring the family back to the idyll with great meals, a fundamental link to that organic town culture has definitely been broken.

While the Martin family is living in New York, George, the father, discovers he has terminal cancer. As he begins a decline to death, Peter, who has become caught up, confused and lost among city intellectuals—the Leon Levinsky, Will Dennison and Kenny Wood characters who represent, respectively, Kerouac’s real-life friends of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Lucien Carr—suddenly desires to return to home. Once back, after being greeted warmly by his father and a meal of

“home-made soup and three porkchops grilled a deep brown, peas, mashed potatoes, fresh tomatoes, bread and butter, two glasses of milk, two pieces of chocolate cake, a small piece of home-made date pie, and hot coffee” from his 20 mother, he is treated to an intimate conversation between his parents during which they reflect upon better times in life (406).

“The best kind of life, as far as I’m concerned, was the life we used to live on my grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire,” Marguerite begins (411). She goes on to recall how much George used to eat back then, how she and her aunt “picked turnips and cabbage and carrots and potatoes and peas fresh out of the garden and made a big stew…with all the vegetables still juicy from the ground,” and how her grandfather kept barrels upon barrels of cider in the basement that George loved to drink (411-412). George, in turn, recalls how he would fish for dinner, which further stimulates Marguerite’s memories of pulling molasses candy, drinking hot wine, milking cows for “thick cream you could cut with a knife,” eating fresh eggs with brisket, and consuming fresh bread served with cream and maple syrup for dipping (412). “That was all so long ago…My uncles are still living like that in New

Hampshire and others in Canada, and that’s the best life there is,” she declares at the conclusion of the memories, none of which once mention that focal point of the family’s trials—money. “When it comes to living the way people were intended to live, give me the country and the small town,” Marguerite finishes. (412).

The charge seems to align Kerouac perfectly with Spengler’s convictions that the family is living at the point of cultural collapse in an inescapable cycle of history.

As Kerouac has Leon Levinksy declare in the middle of the novel’s city setting, Peter, his family and his friends are “surrounded by the decline of the West on all sides,” and in this explicit Spengler reference, Kerouac reveals that his characters are 21 individuals living “among the ruins of bourgeoisie civilization” (411-412)4. But, the events that unfold following George’s death near the book’s close remove that solid concordance between Kerouac’s prose and Spengler’s fatalistic theories.

George’s body is buried in New Hampshire, and the funeral brings the Martin family back to the mother’s eulogized beginnings. There, they meet the other members of Marguerite’s family who were “born and begun on that farm generations before, from the oldest gaffer who sported a handlebar mustache…to the little one squawling in his mother’s arms,” and are all returning to their organic roots in the soil from “the furthest reach of folding earth and darkness” (490). The family, while there, sits down to a big, heroic dinner with “the finest turkey you’ll ever eat,” and afterwards, Joe declares his new plan of moving the family back to a farm outside of Galloway (488, 492). While this appears at surface-level a resolution for the family, the idea that bliss can only be found in a reversion to town culture— thus restarting Spengler’s cycle from the beginning—doesn’t necessarily combat the

German philosopher’s fatalism; it aligns with it allegorically. The way in which

Kerouac chooses to end the novel, however, in a modification that came just before publishing at the insistence of fellow Beat author John Clellon Holmes, does change and challenge the Duluoz Legend’s alignment with Spengler’s notion of history

(Charters, Biography 96-97).

At first, when Kerouac had Clellon Holmes read the manuscript, the novel was to end on the scene of the great family dinner, thus completing and solidifying the significance of the Martins’ reversion to intimately agricultural, town culture

4 The real person that the Levinsky character represents, Allen Ginsberg, was with Kerouac for Burrough’s in-depth introduction of Spengler to the Beats. 22

(Charters, Biography 96-97). However, at the insistence of his own ego and his peers, Kerouac changed the close of his novel, and so announced his challenge to

Spengler’s theory. After a moment in which Peter has a spiritual epiphany and confronts his brothers Francis and Joe about submitting to the certain beginnings, ends and rhythms of life, he leaves the pastoral ideal of Galloway, hungry for an answer:

He was on the road again, traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the lights of the river’s cape, toward tapers burning warmly in the towns, looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life...voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: ‘Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter?’ And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along (499).

Spengler’s formula regarding historical cycles of agricultural and urban life had some significance to Kerouac, though he didn’t necessarily see it as complete or final. As the ending of The Town and the City indicates via the closing scene with

Kerouac’s alter ego of Peter Martin, there was more to explore outside of the cycle.

Rather than continue his allegorical exploration of Spengler’s pessimistic cultural transition from town to city through the lens of cooking and eating, Kerouac challenges Spengler’s formula of history, cultural decline and agriculture in his second novel, On the Road.

23

Chapter 3

Shake Me That Cream: On the Road and the Defiance of Spengler’s Formula

Peter Martin’s decision to hurry along towards the promise of adventure instead of returning to Galloway at the end of The Town and the City marks a major transition in Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend. Here, the saga shifts from an allegory of

Spengler’s formula in which catharsis is a return to an organic, pastoral life, to a new notion that drives the tale in a contrapuntal direction. According to Kerouac, for whom Peter Martin serves as a doppelganger, the shift “began the part of my life you could call my life on the road” (On the Road 3), and in On the Road, the book that represents Kerouac’s multiple country-crossing adventures with Neal Cassady, a.k.a.

Dean Moriarty, the delineated tenets of time, space and movement that are key to

Spengler’s historical theory are challenged and defied using contrarian, fragmentary form and language (3). In The Town and the City, food forms an allegorical parallel between Spengler’s idea of history outlined in The Decline of the West; in On the

Road, this relationship become more complex and even aberrant—food, while still retaining elements of allegory, becomes a metaphorical opposition to Spengler’s writings, too.

Witness Sal Paradise—Peter Martin and Kerouac’s equivalent in On the

Road—surveying the city of San Francisco, then describing the scene using a similar technique from the opening, tone-setting Merrimack depiction from The Town and the City:

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke 24

and goldenness in the later afternoon of time. ‘There she blows!’ yelled Dean. ‘Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can’t go any further ‘cause there ain’t no more land!’ (170).

As stated earlier in this thesis, The Merrimack passage from Town and the City mimics the pastorally inclined perspectives of romantic writers and the Hudson

River painters with a repetitive mellifluousness that rolls smoothly like the river, and in turn symbolizes the organic, natural prosperity of Spengler’s early cultural stages. But On the Road turns the technique on its head and abjures the previous novel’s allegorical affirmation of Spengler’s theory.

On the Road’s respective surveying passage lacks pauses. It runs exasperatedly from one visual item to the next without spatial connection or progression. The opening sentence closes with a quick staccato of closely juxtaposed plosives, ending on the rhythmic climax of a long, pulsing phrase of monosyllabic and disyllabic words. Spasmodically short sentences follow with another contrast in rhythm, one that is further heightened by exclamatory emphasis. Repetition only occurs once, but with heavy variation—“No more land!” is turned from an independent declaration to a subsidiary one in a compound sentence. And, most importantly, this panoramic survey technique borrowed from The Town and the City and its romantic influences is grafted onto a city, not the typical natural, organic scenery of its romantic referent. The only invocation of agricultural tableau is the

“potato patch fog”—a description that refers to a geographical location (the

Potatopatch section of the San Francisco Bay) more so than an agricultural product.5

5 Ironically, this dangerous section of the bay was named after its ability to toss potatoes from the loads of ships that attempted to cross it in the 1800s (Sloan 121). 25

The genesis of Spengler’s argument that healthy, town cultures are doomed to become moribund city cultures via agriculture is reliant on space (elevation, centralization), time (direction) and direct, deductive connections between

Spengler’s narrative thesis and history. The Town and the City allegorizes Spengler’s formulation by paralleling each of those central tenets. Kerouac’s On The Road, as the above passage shows, shatters that link; time and space melt into mutable concepts as Paradise and Moriarty traverse hundreds of miles in what seems like seconds over the course of a few sentences. And yet, without the presence of space and time and amid the frequent setting of cities, Kerouac still attempts to show that his representations of Spengler’s agricultural basis of cultural flourishing, food and cooking, can still exist without roots, thus disparaging Spengler’s pessimistic decrees.

Kerouac’s treatment of food in On the Road is comparable to the widely commented upon treatment of music in his seminal novel. Critic William Hogan is one of the many that consider On the Road to be, in essence, a jazz novel

(Encyclopedia of the Novel 960). According to Lawrence Levine:

Jazz was, or at least seemed to be, the product of a new age; Culture was, or at least seemed to be, traditional—the creation of centuries. Jazz was raucous, discordant; Culture was harmonious, embodying order and reason. Jazz was accessible, spontaneous; Culture was exclusive, complex, available only through hard study and training (The Jazz Cadence of American Culture 433).

Jazz, according to this excerpt, opposed traditional Western culture. It was expressive, spontaneous, sporadic. In its original musical form, it flirted in an out of metered time and scalar melody, more focused on organic feeling and fluidity than structured progression and formulaic theory. Cyclical motion, through repetition, is 26 lost in variant riffing. In the 1952 book Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison describes the phenomena of listening to jazz—specifically, Louis Armstrong—as “a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat…Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it slips ahead” (8).

This isn’t to say that On the Road completely splits from Spengler’s formula.

The novel retains Spengler’s base idea of agriculture as a source of cultural health, but uproots it from his idea of a space and time-delineated historical map. Rather,

On the Road functions as a counterpoint to Spengler’s original tune—though foundational motifs from Decline of the West remain intact, the melody and motion of the tune they underlay has transformed.

Critic Edward Said once wrote of modern classical pianist Glenn Gould—who was known for his transformative, jazzy takes on composers such as Beethoven and

Mozart—that what set Gould apart from the chaff was his “extraordinary contrapuntal logic” (23). To further elaborate, Said explained that “Gould could apparently disappear as a performer into the work’s long complications, thereby providing an instance of the ecstasy he characterized as the state of standing outside time and within an integral artistic structure” (31). Like in The Town and the City,

Kerouac uses food in On the Road to symbolize a central point of prosperity, thus borrowing from the Spenglerian artistic structure. The counterpoint, however, consists of how he treats and where he places food in the latter.

Unlike in The Town and the City, On the Road uses the time and space-defying facets of jazz to uproot and disjoint the intrinsic, organic value of food from a 27 specific place, producer and season, the organic connections that Spengler argues are key to the healthy, early cultures of history. Cream, or milk,6 which harks back to the dairy farm imagery that Kerouac uses to describe the country around Galloway, is found again and again in On the Road, but its appearances are varied and disconnected from any single definition or place. Using the variant riffing found in jazz lines, Kerouac writes cream over and over in the book in differing forms in myriad places: It is in the cream puffs that represent New York to Dean, the topping to apple pie à la mode served in a roadside diner, the chocolate ice cream that

Paradise and Remi Boncoeur steal from a military barracks cafeteria, the butter in bread and butter sandwiches that Paradise eats to avert starvation, the cheese that

Paradise and Dean steal from merchants, the homemade peach “ice cream” (more like milk sorbet) that the gang eats at Ed Wall’s ranch house, the buttermilk and beans Paradise yearns for in Texas, the cream that young Dean gorges himself on until he pukes in a recollection of his past life, and a milkshake—“A very beautiful

Colorado girl shook me that cream; she was all smiles, too,” Paradise says of that last frozen treat (36-37).

Unlike the cookery associated primarily with Marguerite Martin in The Town and the City, Paradise’s eats come from anyone, anywhere and in many forms—they have no roots. And yet, unlike Spengler predicted, these foodstuffs don’t lose their intrinsic value despite their lack of connection to a specific farming locale. Kerouac directly defies Spengler’s edict about how the disconnect created by city culture is

6 Appropriate to Kerouac’s attempted refutation of Spengler, a food item that does not travel well and is inherently rooted to locales—thus the term “milk shed” for the milk-producing areas for a specific region. 28 destined to create material valuations of agricultural goods that lead to cultural decline in On the Road. Paradise appreciates his food solely for its flavor and nutrition—he values it intrinsically—unlike the growing American sentiment that food should be something indicative of economic, social and scientific prosperity. In

The Town and the City, Kerouac accomplishes this illustration of food’s intrinsic value in found in Spengler by attaching the motif to a thematic map akin to the formula outlined in The Decline of the West. On the Road is contrapuntal because it retains that concept of value, but, via metaphor, illustrates it in disparate, mutable settings. Instead of continuing the parallelism of allegory, in On the Road Kerouac shakes up and changes Spengler’s idea of cultural flourishing much like Paradise’s

“beautiful Colorado girl” participates in the transfiguration of cream into a milkshake.

There is, however, an overlap between On the Road and the Spenglerian allegory of The Town and the City before Kerouac transitions to his counter-melody to The Decline of the West. At the end of Part One of On the Road, Paradise interrupts his first cross-country adventure to re-attempt the idyll of pastoral life with a short- lived muse, Terry, a Mexican immigrant from a family of field workers, much like

Peter almost returns to Galloway at the close of The Town and the City.

In that section of On the Road, Sal, Terry and her young son Johnny pick cotton for a farmer at the rate of three dollars per hundred pounds while living alongside the farm, eating canned food from what appears to be a grocery store run by the farmers and paying rent for a tent that is also owned by the farm (95). It is an adverse situation much akin to that of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s Grapes of 29

Wrath, a novel published in 1939 that depicted the hardships faced by the “Okies” as they were forced off their land by the expansion of agribusiness at the dawn of industrial agriculture in the early 20th century. In fact, Paradise, Terry and Johnny live and work among many of what Kerouac calls “Okie” families. But, despite the low wages, the proto-family’s hunger, and the difficulty of the work, Paradise says:

The days rolled by. I forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carlo and the bloody road…I was a man of the earth, precisely as I dreamed I would be, in Paterson (97).

The phrase “man of the earth” is a reference that reflects Paradise’s awareness that he is living among Spengler’s “fellaheen”, the marginalized, peasant populations that remain bound to the soil through farming for others and simultaneously lack the power to resist subjugation to the cycle of history. As Paradise says in describing the matriarchal organization of Terry’s family: “the sad, fat brown mother prevailed, as she always does among the great fellahin peoples of the world” (98).

But while Paradise says that this living made him ironically feel “like I’d found my life’s work”, that he felt “like a million dollars”, and that it was during this time that he ate “the greatest meal of my life,” which seems to confirm Spengler’s assertions about the supremacy of pastoral living, almost as soon as Paradise makes these declarations, he turns away from this agricultural form of living (96-97, 101).

Also, ironically, Paradise’s “greatest meal” is canned spaghetti and meatballs and store-bought cake, not the products of his “man of the earth” way of life (100). Only one page after declaring that pastoral living makes him feel “like a million bucks”,

Paradise packs his bags and leaves for New York, saying simply, “Well, lackadaddy, I 30 was on the road again” (101). It is almost as if he is merely departing from some caprice.

The idyll, as shown by Paradise’s whimsical absconding from it, is clearly fragile and ephemeral, and Kerouac constructs it that way purposefully. But within

Paradise’s laudatory passage about this time in his life, there is a hanging ambiguity that undermines this purposeful insertion. The sentence “I was a man of the Earth, precisely as I dreamed I would be, in Paterson,” contains commas that separate

“precisely as I dreamed I would be” into a non-essential relative clause, leaving “I was a man of the Earth in Paterson” as the main clause. This is ironic, for Paterson,

N.J., was a town designed to hold and proliferate industrialization, and so would be counter-intuitive to Spengler’s idea that only agricultural peasants could be true people of the earth. However, if Paradise’s sentence is instead read holistically, with the commas only contributing rhythmic flow, the meaning entirely changes. Instead,

Paradise would have been “a man of the earth precisely as I dreamed I would be in

Paterson,” which places Paradise into a situation allegorical to Spengler’s: A constituent in the dead center of a declining Western culture looking back from his historical position romantically, even wistfully, to wish for a pastoral life.

The unresolved discrepancies between the idealism and irony of this pastoral scene are revisited later in the book when the concept of living among Spengler’s agricultural peasantry of “the fellaheen” reappears. This occurs as Paradise,

Moriarty and their friend Stan Shepard take one final road trip to Mexico. As Sal,

Dean and Stan approach Mexico City, “the end of the road,” they encounter a group 31 of indigenous Mexicans in the jungle in yet another moment of narrative panorama7.

Sal describes the scene as follows:

Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, stretching out our hands in the same, same way (299).

Unlike the “lackadaddy” departure from his time with Terry, Paradise’s tone is notably more moribund here. Modern civilization, instead of offering Paradise his optimism of endless adventure and potential in the confuted time and space of being on the road with Dean, has turned inwardly destructive, much like the implosive nature of the atom bomb the character so fears. His dreams have faded to a “poor broken delusion.” The road is finite, fragile, destructible, and the progression of civilization itself is the likely reason it will crumble. Dean’s boundless energy will cease. These fellahin, to Paradise, truly live a life superior to the doomed one of

Western civilization, a sadness that he figures they can’t fathom, as they exist in its margins, unlike Terry, her family and the “Okies.” Despite Kerouac’s attempts at counterpoint, here it appears the Spenglerian fatalism returns as he fails to reconcile his confused, idealistic and ironic depictions of pastoral living.

As noted in the introduction to this thesis, Theodor Adorno found much to disagree with in Spengler’s notion of the “victims of the recurring night” that were

7 The device, which Kerouac borrowed from romantic writers and used in The Town and the City, not only also appears in the San Francisco scene inserted in the beginning of this chapter, but also in passages that survey Denver and the highways encroaching into the Catskill Mountains in New York state. 32

Spengler’s “fellahin.” Kerouac’s writing of the Mexico City scene that follows his encounter with “Indians” in the jungle elaborates on a point similar to Adorno’s, as

Paradise calls Mexico City “the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road” (302). Unlike Spengler, who treats the lives of marginalized peasants as separate and subject to the doomed but dominant city cultures of time, Kerouac tries to defy that formula by creating an amalgam that essentially inflates town culture into a “great and final wild city,” of collected agricultural peasants (the fellahin) at the “end of the road.”

There, Paradise, Moriarty and Shephard eat “beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria” while “on corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hotsauce on newspaper napkins” (301-302). The food represents a mockery of

Spengler’s ideas. The boiled head of a cow—or cabeza de res—is peasant food, yet it is consumed alongside luxurious rib-eye steaks, and nothing seems to cost real money. Not only is the steak cheap, liquor at Mexico City pulque bars costs two cents. Though it is present, the material valuation of food in monetary terms seems inane to the Americans whose previously meager wealth became “great stacks of pesos” that they “stuffed into their pockets in delight” after crossing to Mexico

(275). Pure sensory delight and nutrition become all that matter in regards to food, the agricultural focal point of Spengler’s deductive argument, for currency, that ill facet of late cultures, has become formless. Paradise relishes the smell of sour pulque; he savors the sight of the construction of cabeza de res tacos and the

“beautiful” steaks that become delicious via the suggestion of synesthesia. Here 33 again, Kerouac turns Spengler’s formula of history on its head. Coincidentally,

Kerouac’s authorial rhythm lapses back into to its sporadic jazzy tone from the even, rolling rhythm of the preceding jungle scene and the episode with Terri, and places him back in a “separate sense of time,” or, as Said put it, Gould’s state of ecstasy.

Much like jazz combined tribal music with refined, Western influence, both of which come from separate cultures and spans of time, Kerouac attempts to paint

Mexico City as both the town of Spengler’s cultural spring and the city of its winter in Kerouac’s contrapuntal depiction. But it does not represent a resolution to On the

Road’s attempt at counterpoint, and does not affirm Kerouac’s attempts at writing himself out of Spengler’s doomed sense of time for Western Civilization. Food, despite being a critical point in Kerouac’s attempt at re-constructing of history, ends up disparaging his reformulation by the novel’s end.

In Mexico City, Sal falls ill with dysentery, a disease that is transmitted by the ingestion of infected water or food. And while it is tempting to ascribe this affliction to lower-quality water supplies in Mexico, the truth of the matter is that Paradise’s gut problem has been fomenting since ‘Frisco. In Part Three of On the Road, Sal suddenly has to go to the bathroom and has to run out of Camille and Dean’s house—where their arguing obstructs his way to the toilet—to look for a nearby bar where he can go instead. He doesn’t find one, but when he returns to the house

Camille has left the bedroom, and so takes care of his business (187). On page 209,

Paradise overhears Dean lengthily propositioning a gay man for money, all while

Paradise is in the bathroom. Still later, he and Dean are both afflicted by “horrible nauseas” (214). 34

Though the sickness comes to a head in the final great fellahin city, it does so out of irony. Paradise seems to have contracted the intestinal disorder at some point during his American period of consumption, and so in the end, he cannot escape his status as a Westerner even as he discovers the ideal fellahin town-city. The contrapuntal construction of Mexico City doesn’t reconcile the ironic and idyllic because, as critic Jorge García-Robles notes, Kerouac’s distant perception as an

American clouded the truth:

Throughout his life, Kerouac clung to this idyllic image of Mexico, as depicted first and foremost in his novels and travel chronicles, less so in his correspondence. Yet this spiritual, almost redemptive Mexico (as portrayed in the final pages of On the Road) ran up against the writer’s actual experiences, particularly in Mexico City, where he was generally extorted, assaulted and harassed. Still, Kerouac strove to convert—quite literally—its sordidness into profundity, its repulsiveness into holiness. He never abandoned this beatific vision of Mexico because his literary blueprint demanded it (x).

García-Robles criticism shows that Kerouac is ineluctably rooted to America, and so suggests that the Spenglerian cycle of history is doomed to continue for both

Paradise and his constituent, inescapable homeland. Kerouac can’t reconcile his own roots to the contrapuntal fellahin ideal. That’s why, when returning from Mexico

City, Paradise encounters the elderly transient who urges him to “Go moan for man,” and the novel closes with the effective end of Paradise’s frantic years of living on the road. He has discovered that the asphalt is not limitless and mutable, but has a definite beginning and end (306).

This theme is rehashed and reconstituted in the final scene of On the Road, when Dean recedes out of view and into the crowd of Manhattan as Paradise pulls away in a limousine while accompanying his friend, Remi Bonceur, to the 35

Metropolitan Opera. At this point, Dean, the early protagonist and heroic eater of On the Road who chugged cream until he puked as a child and shocks Paradise when he doesn’t leap “to wolf the food at once” after a tiff between them at a Denver Diner—

“….the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years…he likes to eat so much…He’s never left his food like this,” Paradise says—has fallen. In the beginning of the book, Kerouac writes Dean as a modern pioneer—a cowboy (“a young Gene Autry”)—that mimics and redefines the Natty Bumppo references in the

The Town and the City (5). But by the time the gang is on their final trip to Mexico,

Dean has become a “mad Ahab at the wheel,” a reference to the ominous romanticism in Melville’s Moby Dick that reinforces the notion that a quest of defying Spengler’s formula is a monomaniacal chimera (234)8.

Beyond that, the shift from Dean’s presence to Bonceur’s at the close of On the Road is significant. Bonceur’s taste is deeply superficial, and despite being incredibly poor, he ignites his wife’s fury by having her make him his “filthy brains and eggs, and your filthy lamb curry, so you can fill your filthy belly and get fat and sassy right before my eyes” (75). Both of these dishes belong to the canon of fine dining9—unlike Sal and Dean’s unadorned bread, cheese and hamburger meals— and much of their value has to do with the wealth associated with them, not intrinsic worth. For further proof of Remi’s materialism, it is shown that he also feels the

8 Interestingly, critic Bill Brown notes that Moby Dick “prefigures the modernist epistemological shift away from objects as a source of secure meaning that is nonetheless an aesthetic shift toward objects as the source of phenomenological fascination” (127). 9 Ironically, “curry” originated in Eastern areas such as India to describe a spiced sauce, but was appropriated as a catchall term used to describe foods and pre- packaged spice mixes in Western cultures that were adapted from and inspired by those cuisines (Taylor, “Curry: Where did it come from?”). 36 need to make an impression on people like his stepfather by going to expensive restaurants, like Alfred’s in North Beach, regardless of his penury. Bonceur, as

Paradise’s close friend, confirms his inescapable ties to Western material decadence, and cements the impossibility of flat-out defying Spengler’s formula. As their limo pulls out of view of Dean at the book’s close, Sal says:

…the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rages of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty (309- 310).

The passage rings of pessimism, returning Kerouac to Spengler’s prophecies of doom with repeated, imagery-based portents of dimming light (the drooping star, the coming night and the darkening rivers) and completion (the cupping peaks and crests of waves about to break on the shore). Furthermore, Kerouac’s prose has stepped back from its helter-skelter jazz construction to measured rhythmic progression, and moves through comma-separated clauses that alternate consistently between long and short phrases and re-affirm the solid sense of time, space and direction that is inherent to Spengler’s formula of history.

By the close of On the Road, the flirtation between the allegorical connection and the metaphorical opposition of food exhausts itself in contradiction. In

Kerouac’s attempt to write a novel that paradoxically incorporated food as an allegory for Spengler’s agricultural flourishing while also metaphorically placing food outside of Spengler’s progression of time —in Gould’s state of ecstasy—the author failed to recognize the need for a reconciliation of the two themes. As Said 37 stated earlier, Gould’s “extraordinary contrapuntal logic” harmoniously combined an externalized state of ecstasy with the interiority of an integral artistic structure.

In Kerouac’s On the Road, the attempts to run the spokes off the wheel of time and space, the monomaniacal and fallible mutability of Dean and Sal’s quixotic road, provide too disparate a concept to reunite with the idealistic, intrinsic value of food borrowed from Spengler’s formula of history. Kerouac strove to drive to liberation from decline in his second novel, but missed the crucial junction of connection between ecstasy and allegory that would have made his contrapuntal attempt to refute Spengler hold.

38

Chapter 4

‘How Oral You Are’: The Dharma Bums and Culinary Syncretism

From the rush of On the Road, Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend segues into The

Dharma Bums (1958), a markedly more tranquil text than its predecessor. As a book it exists somewhere between the slow, mellifluous cadences that emblematize the antiquated idealism of The Town and the City, and the fast-paced, frenetic attempt to run the spokes off the wheel of time in On the Road. And yet The Dharma Bums extends a new take on the author’s food-centric Spenglerian theme, one that mediates the interpretations of culinary worlds found in the other two novels.

The Dharma Bums opens on a new character representative of Kerouac, Ray

Smith, consuming a meal of bread, cheese, wine and sardines. From there on the novel harps on foodstuffs—from raisins to bulgur and bacon and pea soup—so constantly that the female character Psyche even comments on it at one point, saying: “How oral you are, Smith, you’re always eating and drinking” (138). In this quote, Psyche, as an explicit vehicle for the injection of the author’s self-awareness, essentially delineates the cathartic food-Spenglerian connection Kerouac attempts to outline within this crucially epicurean novel.

It is in The Dharma Bums that Kerouac lays out his formulaic idea that pure and careful consumption of food can save one from becoming a citizen of Spengler’s doomed Western Civilization. Rather than attempt to become a member of the timeless and marginal fellaheen (Kerouac’s dream of escape in On the Road) or retreat to a peasant-town past (as he attempts in The Town and the City), in The

Dharma Bums Kerouac abandons his peasant-farmer ideals of a safe, stable and 39 healthy civilization. Instead, Kerouac uses food and drink to reconcile his longed-for early cultures with his modern, post-war American milieu.

Japhy Ryder, Smith’s friend and hero in this book, introduces a new form of divergence from Spengler by shifting focus to a more pragmatic alternative to On the

Road’s maniacally self-deflating Dean. According to critic Matt Theado, despite the

Boswell-Johnson parallelism of the Paradise-Moriarty and Smith-Ryder relationships:

Ryder is decidedly distinct from Moriarty, whose energies do not sustain him after the road adventures. Ryder is the healthy alternative (155).

Compared to most characters in Kerouac’s novels—especially Moriarty—Japhy is relatively ascetic. He lives in a shack with little or no belongings, shirks overzealous consumption, devoutly practices Buddhism, and is far less self-concerned than Dean in his relationships with both women and men. As a mountain climber and nature lover, Ryder encourages Smith to find himself in the woods, and consistently argues for “a great rucksack revolution” in which Americans shed the homogeneity and drabness of commodity culture—which contains an inherent emphasis on the material values of Spengler’s late stage cultures—in order to form a new tangent civilization (73). The tenets of the “rucksack revolution,” according to Ryder are:

…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 that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures… (73-74)

In this idyllic description, Japhy’s cadence represents yet another key differentiation between himself and Kerouac’s prior hero of Dean. The rhythm of his speech is 40 fundamentally iambic and even-metered with emphatic swells, moving in logical order towards a conclusive idea. Moriarty’s speech patterns, on the other hand, are sporadic; frequented by excited yelps and interjection; often expansive; and with few pauses. Furthermore, while Moriarty falls into the ominous romantic categorization of a “mad Ahab at the wheel,” Japhy brings Kerouac’s focus back to re-examine the idealistic Natty Bumppo character from Fenimore Cooper. As

Theado notes, the pure kinetic energy of Moriarty and his speeches “do not sustain him,” by the close of On the Road; Dean is defeated, abandoned, silent—similar to the doomed Ahab of Moby Dick. Japhy, however, reminds Smith of a “Natty Bumppo” after having spent his “boyhood in those Eastern Oregon forests,” and restores optimism to the legend (43).

Further unlike Dean, Japhy does not run from the culture he is inherently part of as a young American in the `50s—he does leave for Japan at one point, but with a clear intention of returning. Instead, he espouses and acts out this “rucksack revolution” mindset within that late-stage American milieu. Though Moriarty burns with the desire to move, to run, to endlessly drive away from civilization to find his new idea of “time” and “IT,” he is stultified by the physical end of the road and his inherent need to consume; Japhy, on the other hand, “offers the opportunity to escape the spiritually stifling aspects of civilization by literally stepping out of it”

(Theado 156). To clarify, this escape that Japhy performs is a spiritual and phenomenological one, rather than a physical one—after all, Japhy lives in the hills of Berkeley. Rather, it is his spiritualism and behaviors that set him apart from standard civilization. The movement that Dean attempts is physical, but since 41 distance is an ineffective medium for solving such a metaphysical problem, Japhy’s escape from civilization becomes more sustainable and complete. Ryder, therefore, is the perfect emblem of Kerouac’s shift to a desire to form a new side-culture—or fellaheen movement—within America instead of continuing his attempts at merely appropriating or pastiching other marginal cultures as his own in an attempt to subvert his part in cultural decline (Selected Letters 58).

An integral part of Japhy and the rucksack revolution’s code of values is food.

Kerouac and Japhy’s real-life inspiration, Gary Snyder, both grew up in an era in which processed food production became widespread and mainstream.

Scientifically modified, processed food was even vogue in that era, egged on by national pride in the production and scientific progress of the country during the

Cold War. By obliterating the ties to the soil and farm that could make food part of a healthy and organic town culture, and replacing its pure iterations with foods modified and processed into new forms by scientists and profiteers, this facet of the post-war era aligned it all the more closely with Spengler’s idea of a decaying, late culture. In one passage, Japhy comments on this major materialistic cultural change with a subtly food-referencing edge:

“All these people,” said Japhy, “they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it’s all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly want to eat in the bathroom” (28).

This desire for consistence, control and sanitation mimes the increased desires to sanitize, purify and control food via industrial processing that was occurring in post- war America. Thus Japhy makes his closing statement that people “secretly want to 42 eat” their “creamy soaps” in a riff that calls to mind Kerouac’s gustatory muse of cream in both The Town and the City and On the Road.

Rather than caving to the inorganic, chemically sanitized tenets of this new inorganic ideal for food in the post-war era, Japhy’s diet is simple, pure. His grocery list on page 26 of the novel is as follows: “Bulgarian cracked rough wheat,” bacon, tea, “real chocolate pudding” (or as he also says, “not that instant phony stuff”), dried vegetables, peanuts, raisins, dried apricots and dried prunes. He also loves cooking with rice and soy sauce. As Smith notes, all Japhy needs “is his rucksack with those little bags of dried food” (58). Unlike the enriched, fortified, preservative- laced and other scientifically enabled products that became popular in that era (see

Spam, breakfast cereals, chicken nuggets, white bread), Japhy’s diet consists of whole foods that are largely unadulterated, save the processes of drying and smoking.

One of his favorite foods, the black and brown breads baked by the character

Christine Monahan, is a perfect example of how Japhy’s diet is key to his subversion of mainstream, consumerist culture, for Sean Monahan and his wife are both known for their striving to “live the joyous life in America without much money” (122).

Christine, Ray tells the reader, “is an expert of making food out of nothing” who bakes her own “brown bread and cookies” and makes “delicious soups and fresh biscuits” (122). And since the Monahans make food from nothing, they are more akin to the peasants of Spengler’s early, healthy cultures who raise food from the earth than they are to store-going citizens of a late, material culture. 43

Kerouac’s emphasis on the coloration of Christine’s breads doubles the

Monahans’ symbolic gesture of non-material culture by also making Christine’s bread a symbol of the social and historical redemption of pure, unadulterated food.

White bread, as explained in William Rubel’s book Bread: A Global History, long stood as a means for separating decadent classes able to afford white flour from lower classes, who were relegated to consume darker, denser breads made from whole-wheat flour (which is less expensive due to its preservation of original weight) or flours from other grains such as oats and rye (39). In the 20th century, that early Spenglerian dissonance (food being valued for material rather than intrinsic nutritional worth) became exacerbated by the industrialization of baking and the creation of fortified, preservative-laced and additive-filled “Wonder Breads” and other processed foods that promoted the idea of “A Land of Plenty” through stratified production and food technology (Near a Thousand Tables 102).

Japhy, and then Smith as his acolyte, specifically consume black bread, brown bread and rye crisps throughout the novel in a phenomenological defiance that presaged the importance of the white bread versus brown bread debate of the

1960s and 1970s. In that era, the counterculture consumed a diet “based on whole grains and unprocessed, organic ingredients” in order to defy the military-industrial complex (The Ominvore’s Dillema 143). They also did so because the prime characteristic—the whiteness of the product—symbolized the domineering, attempted “bleaching” of other cultures by dominant (and, according to Spengler, decaying) Western ones. As food writer Michael Pollan explained, the counterculture: 44

…seized on white bread as a symbol of all that was wrong with modern civilization. Brown bread, being less processed than white, was clearly what nature intended us to eat. Baking and eating brown bread also became a political act: a way to express one’s solidarity with the world’s brown peoples (seriously), and to protest the ‘white bread’ values of one’s parents, who likely served Wonder Bread at home (262).

By consuming breads made most always of adjunct or whole grains, Japhy further distances himself, via the phenomena of eating, from Spengler’s fatal narrative of

Western Civilization. The consumption of dark breads is a behavior, by association, that he passes on to Smith throughout the book.

Through Ryder’s lessons on Buddhism, simple living, nature and eating, as with the dark breads, Kerouac—via Smith—is left to re-interpret and adjust this neo-fellahin “rucksack revolution” culture to fit snugly within mainstream society, rather than continue the failing Duluoz quest of establishing external salvation from cultural decline. In Smith’s filtered lessons from Ryder, Kerouac unveils his solution to bridge marginal, timeless fellahin cultures with mainstream, falling ones: To create syncretism, or the merging of the two.

In Nancy M. Grace’s work Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination, the author posits that, though Kerouac searched to remove himself from the world in the Duluoz Legend, he knew his final solution did not represent a complete fulfillment of that ideal. Take, for example, Smith’s adherence to Buddhism, which is actually undermined by his strong ties to Catholicism. On page 86 of Dharma Bums

Smith says, “Isn’t Heaven Buddha’s Nirvana,” a sentence that employs capitalization in a way that indicates faiths of equal merit and order in Kerouac’s mind. As Grace says, “Kerouac’s Christian Buddhism is distinctly American, the human presence embodied in the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Buddha’ rating wisdom, progress and divinity in 45 the individual who resides in a New World where the vision of human goodness flourishes and seeds itself” (158).

Kerouac’s dilution of a marginal faith epitomizes the oft-appearing syncretic application that Smith comes to use for most every facet of Ryder’s idealistic teachings: It combines one faith considered marginal by Spengler’s Western-centric eyes, Buddhism, with a fallen form of faith from late Western civilization,

Catholicism. Take when Smith first goes into the mountains and hikes with Ryder, but doesn’t make it up Mattherhorn mountain all the way:

“This is too high!” I yelled. I was really scared. Supposing I’d start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding any time anyway…Finally I came to a kind of ledge where I could sit at a level angle instead of having to cling not to slip, and I nudged my whole body inside the ledge just to hold me there tight, so the wind would not dislodge me, and I looked down and around and I had had it. “I’m stayin’ here!” I yelled to Japhy (62).

Smith watches Ryder slip and slide his way to the top, “collapse and pant and get up and make his run again,” and knows that Ryder is working with a decree of “when you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing,” yet Smith stops behind him (62).

But is he a coward? Not quite, for Smith’s language represents an epiphany that modifies his position from acolyte to cultural innovator as Japhy falls into

Spenglerian allegory. The repetitive language that anticipates falling or regressing— whether it is slipping or sliding back down the scree, Japhy stumbling, or the idea of literally falling off the mountain—is evocative of Spengler’s idea that cultures crumble when they overextend into space with the passage of time. Smith understands that Ryder is attempting to subvert that pessimistic paradigm by continuing to climb on past the mountain, or the boundaries of space, but such a quest appears quixotic to Smith, almost paradoxically parallel to the driving forces 46 that lead to the decay of material cultures. Instead, Smith settles for a “level” ledge close to the peak where he won’t be dislodged and says, “I had had it” (62). To

Smith’s mind, he will assure a doom for himself parallel to his Western culture if he attempts to extend himself any further.

This revelation signals a shift to Smith’s independent development of a mediated fellahin culture that incorporates many of Ryder’s lessons. As soon as the trio of Ryder, Smith and their friend Morley finish that first climb, Smith urges the group to a restaurant where they order a decadent meal of port wine, baked potatoes, pork chops, salad, hot buns and blueberry pie (70). Ryder is uncomfortable with the meal, but Smith tells him:

“That’s what’s the trouble with you Japhy, you’re just an old anarchist scared of society. What difference does it make? Comparisons are odious” (70).

Ray’s logic, essentially, is that one cannot form an idealism external of society, then attempt to function by rejoining society and grafting external ideals back in without adjustment. It seems to have occurred to Smith that one must apply and modify such idealism in a way so that it fits within a given milieu because, as he says,

“comparisons are odious.”

Ray leaves Ryder not soon after this scene. He strikes back out to the road to return to his mother10—who, this time, is located at his sister’s house in Rocky

Mount, North Carolina—in a plot segment of a similar vein to Paradise’s journeying in On the Road. This time, however, the “kicks” are limited, and the central and seemingly sole focus of this concisely written journey (it only lasts from page 94-

10 In certain editions of On the Road, the aunt character is actually Sal/Kerouac’s mother. 47

101) is what Smith eats: Hot dogs, hamburgers, fries and a strawberry shake in

Beaumont; ice cream in Calexico; cabeza (head) soup with onion, a hot doughnut stick (churro) and oranges in Mexico; raisins, peanuts, carrots, cans of pork and beans on the road; roast pork and yams in Oklahoma “worthy of my mother’s own kitchen”; and a “great protein feast” of fried steaks and milk in the middle of the desert with a trucker (94-99). The litany of items recalls the foodstuffs and meals enjoyed in Marguerite Martin’s kitchen and diners in The Town and the City; the eats in the roadside stops and the voracious steak feasts at Ed Wall’s ranch and in Mexico

City in On the Road; and the early “rucksack” food shown to Smith by Japhy in The

Dharma Bums. And in this recounting of all these intended loci of connection to early, healthy, close-to-the-earth cultures, the implication is as follows: Kerouac has discovered a panacea that incorporates the use all of those food items—modern, home-cooked, from-the-farm or no—to redeem the inorganic and material value of food that is an endemic part of Western cultural decline.

Preceding that journey, and central to the development of Kerouac’s panacea, is a crucial revelation that occurs in the woods outside of Smith’s sister’s home in

Rocky Mount. As Smith sits meditating among the trees, he suddenly throws himself on the ground and cries, “I’m gonna die!” (104) His epiphany continues as follows:

…there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that the truth is realizable in a dead man’s bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live. I knew this! I also knew that I was the worst bum in the world. The diamond light was in my eyes. My cat meowed at the icebox, anxious to see what all the good dear delight was. I fed him (104).

48

In this passage, Smith describes the Earth as basically being infertile, not giving life as it does in the key farming interaction that nourishes an early culture in the

Spenglerian formula. However, the anodyne to the feeling of being trapped in that adumbrated Earth of late culture is explicitly described in this passage as food. Not only does milk—a good that has to be produced in close locality to consumers, and that appears again and again in all of the books discussed in this thesis—in the eyelids restore Smith to warmth from the cold, giving him life again rather than cultural death, the passage closes on him describing the “dear delight” of his redemption as being located in the icebox.

Since this passage starts with the romantic language-laden cadences of The

Town and the City and modulates to the comma-less, rushing rhythm of On the Road,

Kerouac’s conclusive idea for the use of food as a solution to subvert cultural decline at the passage’s end is implied to derive slightly from each—just as this passage presents a linguistic amalgam. Food becomes, as with religion, a form most ideal to

Kerouac when made syncretic.

Towards the conclusion of The Dharma Bums, Smith returns to Ryder’s home in California, and his newfound, revelatory wisdom about food causes him to invert the previous hierarchy of the novel in which Ryder cooks and determines the foodstuffs. Now Smith is in charge of cooking and eating. When he arrives, Smith makes a meal of New England beans, coffee and Christine’s bread for Ryder that brings “all the big substantial pork-and-beans of the world” into the home (126).

Later, Smith and Ryder enjoy a meal of buckwheat pancakes, butter and Log Cabin syrup akin to George Martin’s favorite breakfast in The Town and the City, and at one 49 point Smith fills Ryder’s pantry in order to “feed all the bhikkus” with a stock that incorporates flour, oatmeal, sugar, molasses, honey, salt, pepper, onions, rice, dried milk, bread, beans, black-eyed peas, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, lettuce and coffee— all of which, essentially, are unprocessed foods (130, 138). Smith and Japhy climb a mountain again, but this time during the climb they enjoy a meal of dried pea soup dressed up with bacon, rice and foraged mushrooms, then finish the hike with a bar of Hershey’s chocolate (158,160). Their diet has shifted from rigid idealism to soft, somewhat pure pragmatism. It’s mixed between whole and processed—it’s syncretic, adaptable to the place and time.

The beans and buckwheat pancakes of those later breakfasts recall Kerouac’s proud Breton origins—Barry Miles discussed in a New York Times excerpt of his book Jack Kerouac King of the Beats how “Kerouac provides enormous Proustian catalogues of food” including “three Breton staples: pancakes, sardines and beans”—and so re-establish the rooted, close-to-the earth connection of Spengler’s formula through allegory. Meanwhile, the whole foods depicted in this new dietary ideal reiterate Ryder’s phenomenological defiance of late culture through eschewing processed foods. The mixture of those thematic appearances of whole foods with the presence of processed foods from late cultures—such as Hershey’s chocolate bars, dried pea soup, and, later, “purple Jello” (181)—collapses space and time. This syncretism salvages what Kerouac saw as a dismal post-war American food system and creates a new optimistic cosmology that replaces Spengler’s cyclical theory.

Food, in Kerouac’s novels, replicates Proust’s madeleine: It presents an embodiment

Gould’s state of ecstasy external of time while still providing a sensory experience 50 for the present, and, in doing so, allows the consumer to transcend a single, linear idea of time.

51

Postscript: ‘Ecstasy Pie’ and the Other Side of the Mountain

A New York Times cooking newsletter from Sept. 13, 2015, paid tribute to

Kerouac on the 48th anniversary of On the Road. The newsletter, which described what Kerouac was eating around “the tumultuous weeks of the fall of 1957,” cited

Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend from the time when On the Road was published (Sifton). According to Johnson, Kerouac’s diet at the time included many of the culinary mainstays of his novels—hamburgers, dried pea soup jazzed up with bacon, and dumplings from Chinatown—as well as pasta with green sauce, minute steaks and frozen vegetables (Sifton). But, to Johnson, the “biggest culinary triumph” from that time in her and Kerouac’s lives was:

…an apple pie with a graham cracker crust, which I made one weekend when we were visiting friends upstate who had apple trees in their yard; Jack improved it by topping it with a can of Reddi-wip and pronounced it Ecstasy Pie (Sifton).

This “Ecstasy Pie” epitomizes the escape from the Spenglerian cycle of doom that

Kerouac finds in The Dharma Bums. It combines the modern-day accoutrement of

Reddi-wip with a homemade pie composed of apples grown by its consumers—a mish-mash of late culture, processed food and rooted-to-the-earth, town culture food. It is an object representation of remaining tethered to a cultural milieu while still retaining—in fact, embodying—Gould’s “state of ecstasy,” the stepping out of time while remaining within a specific structure described by Said. “Ecstasy Pie” represents Kerouac’s syncretic use of fiction to elude Spenglerian cultural decline.

But while “Ecstasy Pie” embodied the optimistic peak of Keraouc’s engagement with Spengler in his Duluoz Legend, it was not the end of the author’s writings related to The Decline of the West. Those weeks surrounding the 52 publication of On the Road were tumultuous, as Johnson put it, because of what they did to Kerouac and his career.

Kerouac wrote an article for Viking immediately before On the Road’s release to unpack the Beat Generation for the press. “Beat,” Kerouac explained, was derived from Spengler’s Decline of the West (Maher 351). The movement, Kerouac said, was his idea of “the popular syncretism” that can found in the springtime of a culture

(Maher 351). But when On the Road, which earned him the title of “King of the

Beats,” was released, Kerouac found himself in an unfortunate position. Fame consumed him. The Beats became less of a movement and more of a cultural aesthetic. As fellow beat author John Clellon Holmes said, the meteoric rise to pop icon “so discombobulated him [Kerouac] that for the rest of his life he never, never got his needle back on true north” (Gifford and Lee 241).

Kerouac found, as he finished writing Desolation Angels and the rest of his

Duluoz trilogy, that he and his movement were being turned into a commodity of a late stage culture. The litany of items that he eats while residing on the mountain in

Part One of Desolation Angels reflects that awareness. His foods, for the first time, are extensively branded—their values become more related to their commercial names than their existence as items of sustenance. In Part One of Desolation Angels, the Kerouac character, Jack Duluoz, consumes Bisquick, “Kitchen Bouquet gravy juice”, “Chef Boyardee’s Spaghetti Diner”, Lipton soup, Maxwell House coffee and

“Lumberjack syrup”, “Nesquik” café au laits, and a “Kraft Cheese Noodle Dinner”

(37-38). 53

There are still glimpses of the Dharma Bums’ idealism. After all, Desolation

Angels essentially picks up where the Dharma Bums left off, with Kerouac’s character on watch on Desolation Peak.

For instance, at one point, Duluoz makes a homemade “Chinese sweet and sour sauce” out of turnip greens, sauerkraut, honey, molasses, red wine vinegar, pickled beet juice and “sauce concentrate” then pours it over rice (45). The dish acts as a quasi-Proustian madeleine, one that reminds him of his father’s favorite

Chinese restaurant in Lowell, as well as the foods Japhy—who is referred to in this book as Jarry Wagner—introduces him to in Dharma Bums (45). The event is a brief moment of escape in a book otherwise plagued by pessimism. As Duluoz says of his even his sublime mountain at the beginning of the book:

Even Hozomeen’ll crack and fall apart, nothing lasts, it is a faring-in-that- which-everything-is, a passing-through, that’s what’s going on, why asks questions or tear hair or weep the burble blear purple Lear on his moor of woes… (5)

This is a humble beginning to the theme of decline and death in Desolation Angels.

Even when Duluoz tastes fresh apples he thinks they taste of “Autumn…the flavor of cider and of tragic finality,” and they remind him that “soon it will be cold and all done” (47). He thinks that “the whole world is nothing but a big sleep made of reawakened material” and loathes the fact that “America makes me sick, I can’t eat paper” (47,101). Here, Duluoz is re-affirming his entrapment in a Spenglerian cycle of time, and is also explicitly describing the food’s shift from having intrinsic, nutritional and organic worth into a commodity valued in money. That link of commodity foods to late cultures is also re-established in Desolation Angels in the following excerpt about post-war American food systems: 54

We can grow greens and invent synthetic factories finally run by atomic energy that will plop out loaves of bread and unbearably delicious chemical chops and butter in cans—why not?—we’ll have perfect medicine and drugs to carry us through everything short of death—and we’ll all agree that death is our reward (221).

Big Sur revisits that pessimism by again describing how Kerouac and the Beats have become aesthetic commodities rather than Kerouac’s wished-for second coming of the fellahin. When Jack Duluoz talks about his relationship with Cody Pomeroy (Neal

Cassady, or Dean Moriarity from On the Road), he says that it is “too late, too late, the history of everything we’ve seen together has become a library in itself” (140). By this book, the Beats have transitioned from human beings to characters in popular selling books, and have so disrupted their organic sense of self.

Big Sur, I would argue, is the nadir of Kerouac’s Spenglerian pessimism. It is a book that exhibits, through Jack Duluoz, the fall into alcoholism that eventually killed its author, including the horrific delirium tremens he suffered in his attempts at withdrawal. It features the prominent idea of “mortal hopelessness”, or the fact that that world is “rounded by the counters of my deathskull,” doomed to decline with Kerouac in the whirlpool of a falling culture (41, 167). Consumption has turned away from Kerouac’s suggestion that it can be used to escape the Spenglerian cycle of decline, and instead has turned into an ill that adds to his desperation. Duluoz sees, at the beginning of Big Sur, “a strewn mess of bottles all empty, empty poorboys of white port, butts, junk, horror,” symbolizing empty, decadent consumption (7). He tries to physically escape this consumption and the civilization it epitomizes, via a physical removal, as in On the Road, to a cabin at Big Sur. But as

Duluoz notices, “prune fields and vast beet fields” are disappearing. Farming, that 55 crucial interaction with the soil that is key to cultural flourishing, is fading away

(62).

This feature of transitioning American society transitions from an external conflict to an intimate one as Duluoz laments that the Beat idea has become an aesthetic commodity. When a young man, Ron Black, tries to stay with Duluoz at the

Big Sur cabin following a visit by everyone from San Francisco, Duluoz says:

…the poor kid actually believes that there’s something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I’m supposed to be King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I’m sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I’ll jump up and down and say yes yes that’s right, which I can’t do anymore (Big Sur 109).

Duluoz later says, in regards to the Beats: “we’ve been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered—The circle’s closed in on the old heroes of the night” (68). The imagery of a closing circle appears akin to a closing mouth–a bite. The world, as

Kerouac understands it, is consuming him and his movement like a dish.

This presence of pessimism is not new in Desolation Angels or Big Sur. It also appears in the Mexico City settings of Tristessa (written in 1956) and the bleak jungle scene of On the Road, which are only salvaged by the promise of physical escape into the worlds of the fellahin. Rather, these later books represent Kerouac’s own transformation into a commodity, and the fact that even careful phenomenological attention to cooking and eating could not redeem his ties to the culture in which he became a sellable aesthetic.

This feeling of ineluctability pushed Kerouac into the pattern of drinking himself to death, a behavior akin to how Tristessa, Kerouac’s junky centerpiece of

Tristessa who reminds him of “the whole Fella Ollah lot,” abuses morphine (28). 56

According to Kerouac’s narrator in Tristessa, Tristessa takes the drug so that she can die, even if subdued, “in her native Earth” (28). In other words, the numbing effect of morphine and alcohol, even if detrimental, is preferable to the Spenglerian fate

Kerouac found himself facing as he and his Beat movement themselves became commodities.

As Kerouac notes through Duluoz near the close of Big Sur, though he had his syncretic, escapist ideals, “I’m bound up inside like constipation” (186). Even with his assiduous attention to cooking and eating, he could not quite escape being consumed himself by cultural decline.

57

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