The Daily Novel

Last night I went in to the web to find out a bit more about Pirsig and how his book had been received. I found one review dated 1974 by the renowned philosopher, Professor George Steiner. It is a hatchet job that shows once again that academics do even better than journalists when they use their pens as weapons of mass destruction. The venom oozes from his pen.

Let me give you three examples.

Told by the blurb that we have here “one of the most unique and exciting books in the history of American letters,” one bridles both at the grammar of the claim and at its routine excess.

I have included the first quote for balance, because Steiner’s comment is fair. He is attacking the publishers, who did over-hype it. Frequently today’s publishers sell books as if they were just another product to make profits from on in our consumerist society. It makes me long for the days when people got their books from the lending library.

But there are pedestrian stretches, potted summaries of Kant which betray the aggressive certitudes of the self-taught man, misattributions (it was not Coleridge but Goethe who divided rational humanity into Platonists and Aristotelians).

The second quote starts a section in which Steiner brings in his big guns to shoot down the whole beat generation. It made me feel sorry for Steiner. Has he never experienced the exhilaration and soaring spirits you can feel on a bike on the open road? Even on a Bantam 125 cc. Even on a bicycle whizzing down one of these big hills on Salisbury plain and noticing out of the corner of your eye the stones of Stonehenge.

He dismisses the journey by pointing out that Kerouac and other beats had done it before, using the open road as a metaphor for getting away from the consumer society. But one of the reasons the book was so successful is that this metaphor is deep in the American psyche. The frontier spirit where the settlers moved steadily west and populated the vast empty plains of the mid-west. There are countless examples in American literature of novels that have used it. John Steinbeck is one that comes to mind. And one of the most popular American poems by Robert Frost, about ‘the road least travelled’ catches that spirit in a couple of lines.’

But there are pedestrian stretches, potted summaries of Kant which betray the aggressive certitudes of the self-taught man, misattributions (it was not Coleridge but Goethe who divided rational humanity into Platonists and Aristotelians).

The third paragraph is the clincher. It demolishes Pirsig’s attempts to understand academic philosophers like Kant and to relate their thinking to that of poets like Coleridge. Steiner’s demolition would have been totally OK if Pirsig had submitted the work as a thesis for a Ph D in Philosophy.

But he did not. He wrote a book, which was, as Tim Adams called in his Observer article about the ‘quest for meaning’. He wrote it (and this is me speaking not Adams) in the form of a novel, but what was in it was fact not fiction. It was Pirsig and his son on the motor bike, not two characters he had invented in his imagination.

Pirsig’s book is still in a cardboard box along with my diaries of those years. But my memory is pretty clear. Neither I, nor my friends in the organisational behaviour at the London Business School, found any ‘aggressive certitudes’ in the book. In fact, rather the opposite. We respected him for having the courage to write about his own confusion. And we thought that he was asking some of the most important questions of our time.

But the most moving parts of the book are those in which he allows some of the pain and suffering to come through. The quest for the meaning and the struggle to understand an academic subject are both inevitably painful sometimes. In Pirsig’s case it got him locked up in the loony bin and diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. There is one paragraph about shock treatment in the Adams interview which reveals that pain far more vividly than anything I can remember from the book.

RP: Well they put a little rubber thing in your mouth and then they gave a drug like curare, used by South American Indians in their darts. It stops your lungs before it stops your mind. Before you go under you had a feeling like you were drowning. I woke up one time and I thought: ‘Where the hell am I?’ I had a feeling I was in my Aunt Flossie’s house, which I had liked as a child. I thought I must have passed out drunk. I started walking around; a nurse looked at me nervously. And a doctor came up, and he said: ‘Do you know who I am?’ So I just read his name on the little name tag. He did not realise that and it freaked him out. He said: ‘You are coming out of this really fast, too fast.’ [laughs]. You want to see real insanity, go to one of those places. This was after the 14th treatment I think.

He is talking over thirty years later and pain is still there but he manages to talk about it with a touch of humour.

It is this underlying pain that makes the Zen book different from what I can remember of other beat books and many New Age books. It does not promise you Nirvana.

Much of the power of the book comes from the zest of the American frontier spirit. Today not only all America, and most of the earth, but some of the universe, has been explored. The last great unknown territory is the country of the mind. And we need explorers of many kinds to help us understand it better; novelists and poets as much as scientists from many disciplines.

I think Pirsig wrote an important book which is still worth reading. He took one the ‘roads least travelled’. And I think he is a decent human being. If he ever comes to London I would like to shake his hand.