From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Fri Jul 02 2004 - 00:32:06 BST
For those interested in this biograhical stuff,
I've just uploaded the review that Rick provided,
together with the damning article that prompted Rick
to search for it in the bowels of the New York Public Library
Try here
http://www.psybertron.org/2004_07_01_archive.html#108872348552105903
or here to go direct to the article
http://www.psybertron.org/stpaulnews.html#Bigotry
Enjoy, if that's the right word for it.
Ian Glendinning
----- Original Message -----
From: "Valence" <valence10@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 3:45 AM
Subject: MD Pirsig the Critic
> 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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