PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

Brinkely-Rogers was a 19-year-old member of the US Navy in 1959 and his ship was the USS Shangri-La. It roamed the Western Pacific and one of the ports it periodically stopped in was Yokosuka, Japan, where a major US naval base is located. While in port there, Rogers meets a bar girl who, seeing him carrying a book into the bar, asks him what he is reading. Turns out it's a book of poetry (Dylan Thomas) and from there a relationship blooms. Yukiko (not her real name, which Rogers never reveals) turns out to be literary herself and teaches him much that he doesn't know, not only about literature but classical Japanese cinema and more. She believes in him, tells him he must go to college, get an education, and become a writer. He credits her with the fact that he did do all that -- although the writing turned out to be reporting for various news outlets as he traveled the world. 

Yukiko is more than ten years older than Paul and her history is a history of the trauma of Japan at the end of the war. She was born in Manchuria at the time Japan occupied it and was repatriated after the war but lost both her child and her father. She subsequently lived in Hiroshima and had a relationship with a gangster (yakuza) but we never learn her whole story, as Rogers himself did not know it. 

 

But the center of the story is their relationship. It is chaste -- she seems to want it that way and he doesn't ask why. But it is also passionate. Now, decades later -- the book was published in 2016 -- Rogers has only Yukiko's letters to refresh his memory of their time together, but they are enough to recreate their love from so long ago. 

The memoir evokes not only the youth of Brinkley-Rogers but a whole era. On the Shangri-La, ironically, are atomic weapons -- weapons such as were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fourteen years earlier. Paul and Yukiko are aware of the irony of their love, and that of many other service members who in fact consummated their relationships and perhaps married their Japanese girlfriends -- girlfriends they would never have met but for the war and American victory. 

Later in his life, Paul returned to live in Japan as a reporter for a couple of years. He tried to find Yukiko but couldn't. But what he knows is that his life was fulfilled because of the encouragement of a bar girl he met by chance when he was still a teenager.

And we, as readers, can experience a long-ago time and its mark on one of those who lived through it thanks to Brinkley-Rogers' efforts.

INTO THE HEART: ONE MAN'S PURSUIT OF LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE YANOMAMA, by Kenneth Good, with David Chanoff

This is probably the best memoir I've ever read. Right from the start, we are there with Kenneth in the Amazon rain forest as he learns to adapt to a life utterly unlike anything he has ever experienced. We read greedily because we want to know how Kenneth makes it through his trials (We know that he does make it through them because the dust-jacket unfortunately tells us so.)

Good is an anthropology PhD student when he goes to the Amazon to study “Protein capture” among the Yanomama (sometimes called Yanomami), a tribe that was, in the 1980s, mostly uncontacted by the outside world. There were the occasional boats coming down the river with malaria medicine for them and sometimes a researcher or two, but most of the tribespeople had never seen anything but rain forest. They didn't wear clothes and lived communally in one large dwelling, with each family having its own hearth.

We see Kenneth as he gradually adapts to the sub-tribe he has chosen, and they to him. He begins by building a hut a short walk from their communal home but then moves closer and finally moves into the dwelling itself. (It would be a stretch to call it a house because it doesn't have walls.) Meanwhile, a little girl especially likes him and after Kenneth has been there a number of years (with absences to obtain more supplies – he doesn't eat their food – and renewal of the permit he needs to be legally in a protected area of Venezuela), he is betrothed to this girl. When she finally has her menses, it is time for them to be husband and wife in the traditional way.

But Kenneth's long absences are a huge problem. An unattended woman is considered fair game by other men in the community and his wife, Yarima, suffers from this. After a particularly long absence because of trouble getting another permit and funding to continue his research – Good is continuing to research the Yamomama  even as he integrates into the community – the decision is made to leave and return to the States.

The description of how Yarima first encounters what we take for granted in this complex world of cars, supermarkets, clothing, and so much else is fascinating. But then again, the whole book is fascinating. I credit the co-author with helping make the book such an exciting read because I have read more than my share of anthropological writing and it is boring in the extreme.

Unfortunately, I already knew what happens after the events in this book because I had read Kenneth's son, David's book, written after he became an adult. (See the post here, "Writing a Memoir for the Best Reason.") It's best to read this one first.

THE RAZOR'S EDGE by Somerset Maugham

Note: Spoilers herein!

I read a review that said that THE RAZOR'S EDGE is about the ways people find happiness. Now that I think about it, I suppose that's right. There is Larry, who is seeking -- I won't say "Truth" because he doesn't really know what he is seeking until he finds it -- but he is only one character, and arguably not the main one. The other characters seek wealth, attention from those who "matter," accumulation of things -- all in their own ways trying to find satisfaction

But Larry is the one we are concerned with here. He is the one who is not happy to live an ordinary life, and thus the one that no one understands. He tramps around Europe and bumps into this or that wisdom and finally ends up in India with Advaita saints. He finds what he is looking for and since he no longer needs to be "somebody" (unlike all the other characters),  he goes back to America with the intention to become a taxi driver.  

Does he get enlightened? He describes his illumination to the narrator (a fictional Maugham): "I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived." (See my extended quotation on my other blog, miracleofawakening.blogspot.com.)  Is this a dissolution of the self? I'm not sure. The rest of the extended account sounds like it is written by someone who merely imagines what enlightenment must be like. That is, all these wonderful experiences occur to the self. This is the one thing that people who imagine what getting enlightened would be like can't conceive of: that the person who wants this disappears!

Advaita in THE RAZOR'S EDGE

I read Somerset Maugham when I was young but probably never got around to "The Razor's Edge." At least I don't remember reading it. It's more sophisticated than I recall Maugham being: a novel disguised as a memoir. But the topic is what drew me. 

It centers around a man, Larry Darrell, who goes to India to find peace after being traumatized in World War I. Here's a passage from the novel -- a conversation between Larry and the narrator after Larry has returned from India:

"He listened to me with his eyes fixed on my face in a meditative, unblinking gaze that suggested to me, I don't know why, that he was listening to me not with his ears, but with some inner more sensitive organ of hearing. It was queer and not very comfortable."

The Gaze. 

This passage occurs about half-way through. I'll have more to say when I've finished.

Favorite Memoirs and Novels about Spiritual Awakening

I was delighted with the response to my comments about literature in my BATGAP interview last week. https://batgap.com/ (In a day or two, I expect my interview will migrate from the top of the page, but it's interview #550 if you want to take a listen.)

Many people on the Facebook BATGAP page recommended books that are important to them, so if you're on FB, you might want to take a look. I want to post my own list of some of my favorite spiritual memoirs and novels here.

Note that this list does not include any of the hundreds of books that include biographical elements but are mostly commentary on what awakening/enlightenment is.

NOVELS ABOUT PEOPLE TRYING TO GET ENLIGHTENED (OR AT LEAST FLIRTING WITH IT)

Consolations
Sally Wolfe

Breakfast with Buddha, and Lunch with Buddha
Rolland Merullo

A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki

Enlightenment for Idiots
Anne Cushman

Special Karma
Merry White Benerza

MEMOIRS

Ambivalent Zen
Lawrence Shainberg

Enlightenment Blues
Andre van der Braak

Turtle Feet
Nokolai Grozni

Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
Natalie Goldberg

Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye
Marie Mutsuki Mockett

NOVELS NOT EXPLICITLY ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT BUT WONDERFULLY SPIRITUAL

Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walters

The Hours
Michael Cunningham

In the future, I'll try to add a one-sentence summary of each book, but meanwhile you can Google them or find them at one of the three places I review books: here, the Buddhist Fiction Blog, or Goodreads.

Please feel free to comment. Especially if you've read any of these books, I'd like to hear your impressions.

We realize the essence of life when faced with death

I came across an article by James Wood in the November 27, 2017 issue of The New Yorker that speaks to what is gradually becoming, for me, a new way of looking at literature. It begins with a summary of a short story by Luigi Pirandello, "A Breath of Air," which I'm going to summarize even more briefly than Wood did: a man who has had a stroke lies in bed at home and realizes that everyone around him has changed, but when he asks them about it, they all deny that anything is different. Finally, he understands that the other family members are embodying the spring which has come; he, having been near death, is the only one who can feel the pulsing life brought about by this change.

I had a similar experience after my stroke last year. It seems we can realize the essence of life when we are on the verge of losing it.

Woods goes on to the main topic of his article: a novel -- Reservoir 13 -- by a young British writer, twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, Jon McGregor.  His new novel takes place in a village in northern England but is really about nothing except life -- how life manifests in every way. Who would read such a book? I suppose I would because I have ordered it.

Am I looking for another Beautiful Ruins? Of course. I am always looking for another such masterpiece -- and trying to comprehend how this can be done in words -- how a writer can lead us into what is essentially a transcendent experience through language.

Contradictions in Memoir

As I read Diane Rehm's memoir, which I mentioned in a previous post, one thing I notice is how ready she is to admit inconsistent thoughts and feelings. In truth, we are filled with such inconsistencies, but often we are content to tell ourselves that we feel what we want to believe we feel or, more simply, what we feel most of the time.

Actually, though, our minds are a jumble of thoughts, which tumble into consciousness willy-nilly. This fact may not cause so much trouble were it not for our belief that it shouldn't be so -- that we should be consistent. 

I used to teach English to college freshmen, the main curriculum of which, I'm sure many remember well, is how to write a composition. Mostly, this means a paper that makes an argument leading to a valid conclusion. I would often write things like, "Contradiction?" or "How does this follow?" in the margins of students' papers. They were supposed to learn how to be consistent. If a student was arguing for gun control, announcing that he had two guns under his bed was acceptable only if he explained why in a way consistent with his main thesis. But suppose he both loved and hated guns? There wasn't much room to write a paper about that -- and yet, wouldn't that be much more interesting?

So, partly, this desire to be consistent, or the belief that one should be, is the result of people like me  training young minds to avoid the actual contradictory nature of experience -- especially internal experience. But it is also the result of the need for identity. We want to take a stand, to have a point of view, because it helps define us in ways we want to be defined and seen by others.

This may be one reason it is so hard to write an honest memoir. We always thought we were such-and-so kind of person, but when we sit down to write, lots of thoughts and feelings that contradict our images of ourselves begin to bubble up. What we do with that determines whether we have a memoir worth reading. 

Why We Read Memoir

Previously, I discussed why we might write a memoir. Here, I want to look at the other side of the equation: why we might want to read one.

First of all, we need to relate to the writer. If the writer is not famous -- in other words, his or her only claim to fame is the actual writing of the book we are reading -- this is especially important. How is the writer like me, we want to know. Does s/he have a problem similar to mine that has been explored, clarified, or resolved through writing? What can I learn about my own situation? (And what I learn might only be the realization that I am not alone with my difficulties.)

But even if the writer is well-known for other endeavors, we still need to relate to him or her. Even if the person's fame is beyond what the ordinary person can ever imagine, we want to know that s/he is human, that he or she has foibles, and vulnerabilities. And we don't want to hear a gripe list -- how others have wronged this person while s/he has never made any mistakes.

I read a memoir some years ago. I don't remember the book's or author's name, but I remember the content. Years ago, this now-elderly woman tells, when she was young and living in France, she'd had an affair with Sartre. This was no fame-by-association memoir, however. It was a complaint -- a very loud one. She was a student at the school where Simon de Beauvoir taught, and she claimed that de Beauvoir seemed to favor her and befriend her but in fact, she was procuring young girls for Sartre. I have no idea how true this is, but it's certainly the way this woman experienced it. And now, many decades later, she still resented her treatment.

There's a certain dirty-laundry aspect of this kind of tale that makes it a good read. It also has a shirttail aspect: that is, no one would read a book like this if the other participants in the story weren't famous. But how much more interesting such a book would be if there were a bit of introspection.  The author spends the whole book trashing two people who were in the intellectual vanguard of a whole generation.  But the wider significance of her tale is never discussed.  

It can't be denied that desire for titillation offered by such a tale can be a reason to read a memoir. But it isn't the best or highest reason. The writer who learns something about himself or herself as a result of writing is the writer whom we as readers also learn from. This is where the motives for writing and reading a memoir intersect.

Writing a Memoir for the Best Reason

As we get older, many of us want to write a memoir -- to press into stone before it is too late what our lives were about, what was significant. But what was significant to us as writers may not be what would be significant to readers. Writing a good memoir, it seems, requires some of the same empathy that writing a good novel does: we need to ask what is universal about experience and frame our narrative in such a way that others can see themselves even in a tale whose facts are very different from those of our own lives.

So, a good memoir requires an intersection of the writer's reasons for writing and the reader's reasons for reading. I'm going to talk about the first in this post, and in a subsequent post, I'll talk about the second. And in talking about the first, I mean to discuss not only what a writer's motive should ideally be but what it actually is in various cases.

When I was younger, a certain man in my spiritual community had developed Parkinson's. He was a big, strapping man, and he so disliked his new, dependent condition that he was often resentful and uncooperative when his wife tried to help him. In the end, unable to deal with both the difficult medical issues and the changes in personality due to her husband's disease, she moved him to a long-term care facility

He hated it! He wanted to go home again. But it was not going to happen.

I had known this man before disease struck as both generous and wise, and, sorry to see him trapped in a situation over which he had no control, I began to visit him. He told me that he wanted to write a memoir of the time he'd spent in Africa when he was young. He had been an aid worker and also climbed Kilimanjaro. He couldn't perform the physical act of writing anymore -- and this was before the various digital aids were available -- but he proposed that he would record his experiences on tape. Would I be willing to transcribe them?

I saw this project as something this man desperately needed for his survival in a situation  where so little of what he had been remained. He would assert that, indeed, his life had meaning -- both to him and others. So, while I didn't have a lot of free time, I acceded to his request, suspecting that my services would in fact never be needed anyway.

In fact, although I visited my friend several more times, it wasn't long before his mind was so confused that recording a memoir was the last thing that would have occurred to him. The final time I visited, he didn't even recognize me. Kilimanjaro and Africa had blown away with the wind.

Did the world lose a good book because someone waited too long to write it? I can't know the answer to that. But I do believe that the motive to put your life on paper before it's too late isn't enough to make a compelling read -- assuming you are expecting readers other than family and friends. And this is true even if your experiences were unusual or interesting. 

What motive is necessary, then, to create a good book?  I'm reading two memoirs currently, One is On My Own by Diane Rehm, the NPR talk show host. The other is The Way Around: Finding my Mother and Myself among the Yanomami bv David Good, the son of an anthropologist and a woman in the Amazonian tribe his father was studying. It's easy to see how different these books are, and I'll talk about that in the next post, when I discuss why people might want to read a memoir. I've barely started both books, but I think the titles and first pages give an idea of why these authors took up their pens.

Although Diane Rehm is near the end of her life, she didn't just want to record her experiences so they wouldn't be lost. The title, On My Own, gives a hint of her main aim. She wants to record how she is growing, changing as a result of having to live life without her long-time, recently deceased husband. What is she learning or has she learned from this?

David Good is not well known and he is only in his thirties. Unlike Rehm's book, his would not have been published had he not had an extraordinary story to tell. And yet, his motive, it seems to me, is not so different from Rehm's. He is looking for himself -- or, rather, for aspects of himself that he has not accessed yet. It's about self-discovery.

I've heard other memoirists say as much -- that you don't write about what you know about yourself but you write in order to find out something you didn't know. Your book is the result.    

Kazuo Ishiguro -- Congrats!

So nice to see something good happening in the world. So good to see someone as deserving as Ishiguro win the Nobel Prize.

I heard clips of several of the many interviews he did yesterday. He talked about the many themes of his work -- how people miss opportunities, how they lie to themselves in order to continue in what would otherwise be intolerable situations.  His work is varied and always profound. He said that, although he was raised in the UK, he grew up in a Japanese household, so he saw things through Japanese eyes. Sounds like a thesis for some graduate student somewhere.

Congratulations to a great writer, and, maybe more important these days, a good man.

Was Lewis Carroll enlightened?

I daresay I'm like most of my contemporaries in knowing about Lewis Carroll's Alice books – without having read them. As a child, I owned a 45 rpm record containing the songs from the 1951 Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland and I saw the movie as well. But, having just read Anthony Lane's article in the June 8 and 15, 2015 New Yorker, I see now how much I didn't know about these tales.

Of course, we are talking about a journey here – and Lane's choice of quotations, if not his text, make it clear that this is a spiritual journey. Here's the first:

“'You know very well you're not real.'

'I am real!' said Alice, and began to cry.

'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked: 'there's nothing to cry about.'

'If I wasn't real,' Alice said – half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous – 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'

'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.”

Was Carroll enlightened? Or just amusing himself? Or maybe a combination of both?

Here's another: 

“I hardly know which is me and which is the inkstand. . . . The confusion in one's mind doesn't so much matter – but when it comes to putting bread-and-butter, and the orange marmalade, into the inkstand; and then dipping pens into oneself, and filling oneself up with ink, you know, it's horrid!”

Rumi, who definitely wasn't kidding, expressed it thus:

                                              There are no words to explain

                                  no tongue,                                             

                                              how when that player touches

                                 the strings, it is me playing

                                 and being played,

                                              how existence turns

                                 around this music, how stories

                                 grow from the trunk, 

                                              how cup and mouth

                                 swallow each other with the wine. . . .

George Eliot, Self-Centeredness and Fiction

Not too long ago I received an email from an acquaintance who, knowing I'd written a novel, and perhaps as an apology for being uninterested in reading it, said that he and his wife didn't read novels anymore as such reading material was incompatible with their spiritual journeys.

It may be that this man believed that novels are just entertainment. He may have been one of the many serious people I have met who believe that “truth” means facts and therefore only comes in nonfiction form. But even though my own definition of truth obviously differs from this, I myself have some doubts about the novel as a means of delving into the deeper truths of who or what we are.

Some define a spiritual novel as one about spiritual topics. But maybe it's more a matter of what the underlying assumptions are. In most novels, literary or not, we follow one or more characters over a fictive period of time. Does this not reinforce the idea that the stories we each tell ourselves about our own lives are true? Do we not believe that, like the characters of whose lives we read, we have a true history that reveals what we essentially are?

Perhaps, then, a spiritual novel is not so much about spiritual topics as about challenging this belief in a fictive self as representing a fundamental truth about being human. I've been reading Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, an unclassifiable book that is part criticism, part biography, and part autobiography. Mead quotes George Eliot as saying, “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” (p. 158, quoting from an essay by Eliot entitled, “The Natural History of German Life”).

Mead goes on to show how this attitude is exemplified in Middlemarch: “This notion – that we each have our own center of gravity but must come to discover that others weigh the world differently than we do – is one that is constantly repeated in the book. The necessity of growing out of such self-centeredness is the theme of Middlemarch. In one of the most memorable editorial asides in the novel, Eliot elaborates upon this idea of how necessary it is to expand one's sympathies: 'We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves,' she writes.”

This sounds suspiciously like a Buddhist teacher lecturing her students on the inter-connectedness of all beings.

Those who are really serious about spiritual awakening or enlightenment – especially those who have had a glimpse or more of it – might say that the self-centeredness into which we are all born only disappears when we realize “no self,” and that it is not something that can even be approximated by identifying sympathetically with others. Nonetheless, surely it is worth something to be able to glimpse what the world might look like if we all really knew in our guts what we know in our minds: that our own perspective is only one of a multitude of perspectives – that each and every being on the planet comes from a center known as a “self” and that each of these perspectives is equally, relatively speaking, valid.

Following another's path

I'm reading Consolations by Sally Wolfe, a novel about a woman who converts to Catholicism and becomes a nun. It was Thomas Merton who inspired the protagonist, and reading this caused me to recall my own reading of Merton and how I also felt drawn to Catholicism because of him, although, unlike the protagonist in Consolations, I never followed through.

It's probably a good thing. There were other times when, inspired by someone following a certain path, I did do so. When we are young, we are looking for someone who knows because, God knows, we don't. And there's a lot of danger in that – because we all have our own individual path in life, and the trick is to find that path, not to follow someone else's.

How do we find the confidence when we are young to look inside and “follow our bliss” as Joseph Campbell counseled?

Embattled Saints: My Year with the Sufis of Afghanistan by Kenneth P. Lizzio

In a book I recently reviewed, Kenneth P. Lizzio tells a fascinating story of his life with present-day Sufis, adding much historical background to his tale. See my review here:

http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2014_07_020733.php

Narration in fiction and memoir

I just finished a book that reads like a memoir although it is labeled fiction. This got me thinking about the difference between the two.

I think of Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham's classic coming-of-age story. Although Maugham admitted that this was basically his own story, through which he exorcised his demons from childhood, it comes across as fiction. Why?

When we write a story, all of the characters are invented by the author. Even when authors use people from their own lives as characters, they choose the characteristics of those people needed to make the story work. If a writer is competent, no real person makes it into a story unchanged because fiction writing involves selection -- selection of details that fit with what the author wants to say. And by selecting some characteristics and ignoring others, we implicitly alter a personality.

If a story is narrated in the first person, the same principle applies in terms of creating character. The only thing that differs is that, since the point of view is the narrator's, only what the narrator sees and knows and believes gets recorded.  The only way -- and the prime way -- that the reader gets to know how others see the narrator, or that the narrator has a false view of himself, is to create situations in which other people in the story reveal -- usually through dialogue --how they see the character.

In a memoir, though, the writer is completely fused with the narrator. The writer is trying to tell the truth of his or her experience. But this is going to look different from the way it looks when, in fact, the narrator and writer are two different people.  For one thing, none of us knows ourselves very well, and none of us knows ourselves the way others see us -- and everyone we know sees us differently!  But there is a more important difference:  although the fiction writer creates a fictional interior world for the first-person narrator, this is not the same kind of interior world a real person experiences.  A real person has an implicit understanding of the world that is never voiced in words, even to himself.  Why not?  Because he has never known anything else!  Language is about contrasts, and the fictional narrator can be created and defined by his characteristics because the writer knows what the myriad other possibilities are.  But the real person has been "me" as long as he/she can remember and the world has looked as it looks through those same pair of eyes for a long as can be remembered.  The only time, then, that we, in real life, give voice to our interior sense of the world is when something dramatic happens in our lives which causes us to question our implicit assumptions.

So, this is what makes memoir so tricky.  There is an assumption that the world looks to others the way it looks to us -- and, more importantly, the unconscious assumption that our way of viewing the world is shared with our readers.  When this assumption is never overcome, we end up with a piece of writing in which the writer thinks he/she has revealed something deep or true but the reader comes away thinking, "What was that all about?"  And a memoir billed as a novel will have this same characteristic, because it really doesn't matter if the characters' names are changed or if some events didn't happen as portrayed:  if the writer is not able to create a persona separate from the way she knows herself on the inside, the work will not succeed.

Cultural truths and novelists

In the current issue of Poets and Writers, Mary Stewart Atwell discusses the question of whether writers have the right to portray the inner life of people very different from themselves -- whether urban writers can write about rural characters, men about women, or one race about another.  One point of view, she states, is that "if you have the writing chops to convince a reader of the authenticity of a character's inner life, no one's going to care whether the character is based on yourself or made out of whole cloth."  Of course, many of the best writers do manage to convince us of the inner life of characters they resemble very little -- people of differing cultures and nationalities, for example.  But I'm wondering if there isn't a broader question here.

Since this blog focuses on books by people who have written about their journeys to different parts of the world, I find this topic particularly relevant.  Of course, with memoir, people don't usually try to get inside anyone's head but their own, so I'm thinking here mostly of novels.  Particularly when I was reading two of those I've reviewed here -- Audrey Hepburn's Neck, by Alan Brown, and Country of Origin, by Don Lee -- I pondered this question, as both of these American writers have peopled their novels not only with Westerners living in Japan but with Japanese characters whose inner lives are also explored.  Without doubt these portraits convinced me of their plausibility. But at the same time I asked myself whether Japanese people would be convinced.   

So, I think we need to look a bit more deeply at this question -- because people of the same culture as the author of a book may be convinced that the character from another culture is authentically described, but that may not in fact be the case.  Instead, the author may unwittingly be perpetrating a stereotype.  We see this most clearly when we look at American literature of the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries in which African Americans were portrayed by white authors.  So it is not, it seems, just a matter of being convincing but of actually knowing enough about the people who are portrayed to be able to tell the truth about their souls.

And I think this is true not only with respect to the individual characters from another culture but with respect to the culture as a whole.  The author may convince us that such-and-such behavior is typical of a certain culture, but if we know nothing about that culture, that is not a difficult task -- nor is it proof that the portrait drawn is accurate.  How many times have I heard someone who spent a week in Japan pontificating on the "Japanese people"?  Authors are not immune from this kind of over-simplification -- especially if it serves the wider goal of the story.  Myself, I would beware of believing a writer who has not spent a good deal of time living with or, if that is impossible, at least seriously studying, the culture of people he is describing in his work.  "Writing chops" are no substitute for knowledge. 

Eat, Pray Love: On Being Oneself

Many of you have no doubt already read Elizabeth Gilbert's EAT, PRAY, LOVE, but I'm just getting to it.  I'm in the middle part now, about Gilbert's time at an Indian ashram.  For people who know a lot about Eastern spirituality, it's a bit redundant in the places where she's laying out Eastern philosophy, but the personal parts make it worthwhile.

One of those is where Gilbert describes herself as a social butterfly -- even at the ashram, she admits with dismay.  She determines that she will change, that she will become the quiet one, and everyone will admire her for her steadfastness.  All day long, including while she is scrubbing the floors -- her job since she arrived -- she will not utter a peep.

And, wouldn't you know it, she is almost immediately called to the job assignment office and told that she will have a new job -- hostess for arrivals at the retreats about to be held! 

And life is like that, too, isn't it?  Our ego has some ideal of what we should be, but then life comes along and says, "I don't think so.  Try just being yourself." 

In Thomas Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE similarly we have a character who wants to be what he is not.  The whole book is about how Jude thinks he is too smart for his station in life.  He's a snob -- and yet, although he's not likeable and we know he will get his comeuppance, we somehow want him to succeed -- at least I did. 

Although Gilbert is a likeable character and Jude isn't, in both cases we care what happens.  Maybe it's because this characteristic is so universal.  We all want to think we are special and that we deserve more credit than others have given us.  But as a therapist once said to me, "Give yourself credit."  When we really do that, maybe it's not so necessary to try to earn it from others by putting on a suit of clothes that doesn't fit.

Wisdom, Writers, and Real Life

In the American Masters film on Alice Walker recently shown on PBS, I learned that Walker's daughter doesn't speak to her and that Alice has never seen her grandson.  Apparently, Walker's only child felt ignored when she was growing up and is not about to forgive a mother who, at least to her mind, put her art ahead of her.

Last month, when I told a member of my writers' group that I was going to be in a workshop led by Andre Dubus, she said, "Oh, I read a story by him in college that's always stayed with me. It was called, 'Adultery.'"

Since this woman is nearly my age, I knew the author of this story had to be not Andre Dubus III, with whom I would be spending eight days, but Andre Dubus II, his father.  And since I was in the middle of reading Andre III's memoir, TOWNIE, I had to stop and ponder when I came upon "adultery" as one of the sources of the divorce that so devastated young Andre.  I haven't read the story, "Adultery," but the subject was certainly, at some point in time, much on the senior Dubus' mind.

These very different writers in very different family situations raise the question of the intersection of real life and art.  I don't know about others, but when I read a writer I like, I usually imagine the kind of person that writer is based on what he or she has written.  But then I come across something like an estranged child, or one who committed suicide (two in Eugene O'Neill's case), or the alcoholism so prevalent among writers of a certain generation, and I have to reconsider my assumption.  Andre III said about his own father that his writing was bigger than he was.  Maybe that is true for all writers.  Where does the genius, the wisdom, come from, then?  And why is it that so many writers are unable to manifest in their own lives the wisdom they display in their books?

Twenty-five and foolish; thirty and disillusioned

In a recently published short story, Elizabeth Crane's character, after recounting how foolish she was at 25, writes,  "I wouldn't trade places with anyone under thirty if you paid me." 

I read a lot of memoirs by Westerners who go abroad seeking enlightenment.  I do this partly because I enjoy all the varieties of this kind of experience and partly (mostly?) because I'm trying to write my own memoir about living in a Buddhist temple in Japan when I was 22 and I want to see how other people have dealt with this subject.   Now, I'm almost finished with a memoir by Suzanne Morrison, YOGA BITCH.  At 25, the author went on an extended yoga retreat in Bali. She had Western teachers and all of the students were Western, so even for that reason alone, her experience, while stressful in some ways, was not nearly as traumatic as mine was. But it's interesting to see the similarity, too -- the way, if enlightenment is what we ourselves want, at that age we project it onto our teachers.  Then, of course, when our eyes are opened later on, when our teachers are revealed as imperfect, there is disillusion.  

Male and Female Memoir: Part II

I finished two memoirs about Japan recently -- Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING.

Granted, these writers went to Japan at different times -- Iyer in the 1980s and Rizzuto in 2001 -- and for different reasons.  Iyer didn't have any family connection with Japan at all but had been fascinated with the country ever since a brief stopover with his mother when he was young.  And his interest in Zen led him to choose Kyoto for his stay as well as to contact many people practicing Zen. He even lived in a temple himself for awhile.  From my point of view, I have to say, I think his interest was much too intellectual to really lead anywhere, but nonetheless it was a focus for him. 

Rizzuto went for completely different reasons.  She is half-Japanese and she wanted to explore the impact the bombing of Hiroshima had on Japanese Americans who were caught up in that event.  Perhaps these unfortunate people were visiting relatives in Japan at just the wrong time or had left the States rather than live in a relocation camp.  Naturally, she chose Hiroshima as her base.  She didn't know people personally ahead of time but she had several connections, and she had also received a grant to write a book based on her research -- a novel that seems to have been abandoned in favor of the memoir she finally published.

But, although these differences are very real, what strikes me more is the difference in tone.  I have been trying to pin this down, to put in words this difference which I've noticed again and again in memoirs of men and women, and maybe I'm getting close.  I think it is that the main question around which men form their narrative is, "How did this experience change me?" while the main question women ask is, "How did this experience help me discover who I really am?"

Maybe this seems like a subtle difference but, really, I think it makes all the difference.  It seems that men, as a rule, already assume that they know who they are.  Their experience, especially in a foreign country, will add to who they are and perhaps cause them to reconsider things they have always considered true, but the self who is having those experiences is never basically in doubt.

But with women, the result seems almost always to be, "I thought I was this sort of person, but through this experience I have now discovered that I am not that person I always thought I was: I am a quite different person, or maybe I am someone I have not yet completely discovered."  So, for example, with Rizzuto, she went to Japan leaving her family in New York, but her research into the effect of the bomb on the lives of survivors could not be separated from the effect of those she interviewed on her own personal life.  She had thought she was one kind of wife and mother but before long began to question the roles she had played so naturally up until that time.

Iyer's outcome is more modest.  There is no doubt that he has been affected deeply by his experience -- and especially by the "lady" with whom he became involved -- but he goes home with his basic "self" in tact.  Of course, if he'd taken Zen more seriously, that might not have been the case, but one doesn't usually find what one doesn't know one is looking for, and Iyer does not seem to have thought he was looking for a deeper, truer self.