Reception
Some reviewers criticized Dharma Bums for being spiritually crude and lacking seriousness. Ruth Fuller Sasaki found it a good portrait of Snyder, but thought Kerouac knew nothing about Buddhism. She wrote to Snyder, "His Buddhism is the most garbled and mistaken I have read in many a day ... I think everyone grants Kerouac's sensitivity of reaction and his ability to vividly write those reactions. I found the first mountain climbing episode quite exciting. But as a novelist he shows no talent whatsoever and no imagination." Alan Watts discounted it as "Beat Zen": "a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen."
Snyder wrote Kerouac, "Dharma Bums is a beautiful book, & I am amazed & touched that you should say so many nice things about me because that period was for me really a great process of learning from you...." but confided to Philip Whalen, "I do wish Jack had taken more trouble to smooth out dialogues, etc. Transitions are rather abrupt sometimes." Later, Snyder chided Kerouac for the book's misogynistic interpretation of Buddhism.
Read more about this topic: The Dharma Bums
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)