From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 01 2004 - 03:45:30 BST
Hi all,
My recent withdrawal from the MD notwithstanding, I just had to share this
one with the friends I know I still have here :-)
Anyway, following up on a lead I found at Ian Glendinning's wonderful
Psybertron website (http://www.psybertron.org/pirsigpages.html), I shuffled
down to the basement of the New York Public Library and eventually was able
to locate this "long lost" Pirsig article. It's a book review he wrote for
the The New York Times Sunday Book Review which was published on June 8,
1975. I had to retype the whole thing from a blurry print-out of a
microfilm archive. Words that (I think) were in italics are herein rendered
with asterisks.
It's my gift to you.
Enjoy...
and take care
rick
--------------------------------------------------
A husband without a wife
ONE MAN, HURT
A Shattering Account of the End of a Happy Marriage. By Albert Martin. 278
pp. New York: Macmillan. $8.95
By Robert Pirsig (Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance," is now a Guggenheim Fellow writing a second book.)
"One Man, Hurt" describes in detail the agonizing chronology of a divorce,
shows the life that preceded and surrounds it, and calls for opposition
to the social trends the author feels produced it. As a document of marital
bliss and as an attack on feminism it backfires completely. The author's
atrocious suburban banality drowns out everything else.
We never get done reading how much the author loves his wife, his children,
washing dishes, doing diapers, his house (a suburban one in Connecticut),
his neighborhood, his job, his church, his priest, his mother and father,
his mother-in-law, his father-in-law, the Little League, kid's hockey, TV,
their cats and dogs. For him suburban life is some sort of continuous
ceremony, a ritual he must have learned to imitate watching old Andy Hardy
shows on the late-late movie on TV. Then, when his wife tells him she wants
a divorce to "discover herself," he cries *what* is she *talking* about?
What more can he possibly *give* her? Throughout the book, he never finds
out.
However, if one can transcend this banal level, one can find in this book
some unexpected literary merit. The author tells us how miserable he is,
yet because he doesn't know how to render it properly we never see it for
ourselves. But he really is miserable. As one reads on, one begins to see
beneath the surface of his plastic suburban style and acquire tolerance and
even sympathy for his predicament. His one saving grace begins to shine
through: he is not an arrogant man. He sincerely tries to learn what is
wrong, tries to change himself. He really *is* hurt, and he hasn't
deliberately hurt anyone else to provoke it. What are the real causes?
What could he have done? he asks. What can he do now? It would be an act
of arrogance not to try to answer.
The first key is his pathetic clinging to the material symbols of
middle-class life. This, one discovers, is a poor boy, ambitious and
undoubtedly hard-working, from a Polish Roman Catholic childhood in New
England. Everything he loves, down to his cats and dogs, are symbols of his
upward rise from the background of his immigrant parents. Now, like Jay
Gatsby and Sammy Glick before him, he sees it all turning to ashes. The
central shining symbol of his own aspirations, the ballet dancer on the New
York stage whom he persuaded to marry him, wants out. She sees her whole
life is just a cheap symbol, like everything else in his world and she wants
something more real.
She asks him to look inward, but he doesn't know what she is talking about.
For them there is no inward self, only roles. He is a totally
other-directed man, a result of a background he cannot change and cannot
even understand. At the superficial level of his own understanding there is
no difference between his New England Catholicism and his wife's Texas
Methodism, but at a level he is unaware of there are very deep differences,
and these, I think, are the root of it all.
I once taught a college course where I asked the class, "Is the an absolute
external morality?" And I was astonished to discover that, without
exception, every Catholic student said yes, and every Protestant student
said no. There is a profound division here.
For the traditional Catholic layman, morality is external. The author
remembers vividly the terror he felt in parochial school when he saw what
happened to Cecelia after she defied Sister Anastasia. He still feels it.
For him the other-directed authoritarian system of his moral education has
become the pattern of his life, and we see in page after page his professed
love of, and obedience to, authority. He is a system player. That is how
he had to learn it. You love the system and the system loves you. Now the
system is failing and he is without a clue and in terror as to why this
should happen.
Protestants, including his own wife, tend to take more heed of their own
consciences when coming to moral decisions. This is more true among
Methodists than many other sects, more true of all, I think, among
Protestants residing in the state of Texas. In fact, if there's one thing
the traditional Texas Protestant knows how to do better than anything else,
it's how to make up his *own* ornery mind about what is right and what is
wrong, and *keeps* it made up, come hell or high water, or anything else you
might want to run in front of him. Texas girls see this in their fathers
and grow up unconsciously expecting to find it in every man. This,
tragically, in the one thing the author cannot supply. He must run to
authorities for every moral decision and every major idea in his head. And
by Texas Protestant standards this makes him a moral weakling and a failure,
and this, I think, is why his wife cannot love him. And there is nothing he
can do about it.
Nevertheless, I think this book will provide a happy ending for its author.
It is, among other things, a 278-page marital advertisement which should
produce dozens, if not hundreds, of matrimonial offers. I hope, for his own
sake, that his final choice is someone who really appreciates him for the
good man he is. Preferably, it should be an Eastern, Polish, Roman Catholic
woman, heavy-boned and big-breasted, domineering and authoritarian, from a
childhood of poverty like the one he got away from by marrying the little
ballet dancer from Texas. She should love him earthily, and also her
children and her church discipline and the suburban life, because she finds
in these things the meaning of life itself. He deserves it.
As for his divorced wife, I don't know what will happen. She has a hard
life coming.
But there's a feeling, rising up from deep inner sources, that in the end,
when it is all over for all of us, it will be she who goes to heaven long
before he does.
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