The interview: Robert Pirsig
The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.
The interview: Robert Pirsig
The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.
Tim Adams
Sunday November 19, 2006
The Observer
At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of ‘quality’. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.
Pirsig doesn’t do interviews, as a rule; he claims this one will be his last. He got spooked early on. ‘In the first week after I wrote Zen I gave maybe 35,’ he says, in his low, quick-fire Midwestern voice, from behind his sailor’s beard. ‘I found it very unsettling. I was walking by the post office near home and I thought I could hear voices, including my own. I had a history of mental illness, and I thought: it’s happening again. Then I realised it was the radio broadcast of an interview I’d done. At that point I took a camper van up into the mountains and started to write Lila, my second book.’
It is that second book, recently republished, that has prompted him to talk to me now. He sits in a hotel room in Boston and tries, not for the first time, to make some sense of his life. He is, he suggests, always in a double bind. ‘It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness … If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don’t talk about it no one knows it is there.’ Generally, rather than analysing, he says, he would rather ‘just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees’. Reclusion has its discontents, however. ‘In this country someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect.’ He pauses, laughs. ‘I guess I fall somewhere in between.’
Ever since I first read Pirsig’s motorbike quest for meaning, when I was about 14, I’ve been curious to imagine its author. Part of the compulsion of that book, which has sold more than five million copies, is the sense of autobiographical mysteries that remain unexplained. While Pirsig’s narrator tries to marry the spirit of the Buddha with western consumerism, discovers the godhead in his toolkit, and intuits a sense of purposive quality independent of subjects and objects, he also constructs a fragmentary picture of his own past. His pre-shock-treatment former self, the ghostly Phaedrus, haunts his travels across the Midwest.
‘What I am,’ he writes at one point, ‘is a heretic who’s recanted and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has savd is his skin.’ My 14-year-old self double-underlined this and put two Biro exclamation marks in the margin. Twenty-six years, and several revisionist readings of the book later, I’m still wondering what Pirsig thinks of when he thinks of himself.
He suggests a lot of that idea still goes back to his childhood as a disaffected prodigy. He says that ever since he could think he had an overwhelming desire to have a theory that explained everything. As a young man – he was at university at 15 studying chemistry – he thought the answer might lie in science, but he quickly lost that faith. ‘Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even.’
He went to search elsewhere. After the army he majored in philosophy and persuaded his tutor to help him get a place on a course in Indian mysticism at Benares, where he found more questions than answers. He wound up back home, married, drifting between Mexico and the States, writing technical manuals and ads for the mortuary cosmetics industry. It was when he picked up philosophy again in Montana, and started teaching, that Phaedrus and his desire for truth overtook Pirsig once more.
At that time, he recalls, in his early thirties, he was so full of anxiety that he would often be physically sick before each class he taught. He used his students to help him discover some of the ideas that make up what he calls the ‘metaphysics of quality’ in his books, the ideas that led him to believe that he had bridged the chasm between Eastern and Western thought. No two classes were the same. He made his students crazy by refusing to grade them, then he had them grade each other. He suggests that by the end of each term they were so euphoric that if he had told them to jump out of the window they would have done. The president of the university gave a speech, and he contradicted him in the middle of it by shouting: ‘This school has no quality.’ He saw clearly how American society was disconnected from life and he believed he could help it connect. He was reading Kerouac, and trying to live in truth.
Alongside that, I say, as he describes that time with some fervour, I guess there was some depression setting in? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘there was fear. All these ideas were coming in to me too fast. There are crackpots with crazy ideas all over the world, and what evidence was I giving that I was not one of them?’
Such evidence proved harder and harder to present. One day in the car with his six-year-old son Chris, his mind buzzing, Pirsig stopped at a junction and literally did not know which way to turn. He had to ask his son to guide him home. What followed was the point where he either found enlightenment, or went insane, depending on how you look at it (really the root of all the questions in his first book).
‘I could not sleep and I could not stay awake,’ he recalls. ‘I just sat there cross-legged in the room for three days. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers …’
It was like a monastic experience?
‘Yes, but then a kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realised that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either – in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.’
Midwestern American society of 1960 took the psychiatrist’s view. Pirsig was treated at a mental institution, the first of many visits. Looking back, he suggests he was just a man outside his time. ‘It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside the culturl norms, the culture has to protect itself.’
That immune system left him with no job and no future in philosophy; his wife was mad at him, they had two small kids, he was 34 and in tears all day. Did he think of it at the time as a Zen experience?
‘Not really. Though the meditation I have done since takes you to a similar place. If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness. And you get a lot of opportunities for staring in an asylum.’
When he was released, it only got worse. He was crazier; he pointed a gun at someone, he won’t say who. He was committed by a court and underwent comprehensive shock treatment of the kind described by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
I wonder if he remembers the mechanics of it?
‘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.’ He laughs. ‘This was after the 14th treatment I think.’
When his wife came to see him he knew something was wrong but he did not know what it was. A nurse started to cry because she knew that his wife had divorced him while he had been in hospital. ‘The funny thing about insane people,’ he says, ‘is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.’
Pirsig was able to keep a tenuous grip on his former self, despite the treatment. He figured that if he told anyone he was in fact an enlightened Zen disciple, they would lock him up for 50 years. So he worked out a new strategy of getting his ideas across. He embarked on a book based on a motorcycle ride he made with his son, Chris, from Minnesota to the Dakotas in 1968. ‘It was a compulsive thing. It started out of a little essay. I wanted to write about motorcycling because I was having such fun doing it, and it grew organically from there.’
When the book came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time. George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways. At the heart of it was his relationship with his son, Chris, then 12, who himself, unsettled by his father’s mania, seemed close to a breakdown. In 1979, aged 22, Chris was stabbed and killed by a mugger as he came out of the Zen Centre in San Francisco. Subsequent copies of the book have carried a moving afterword by Pirsig. ‘I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still,’ he says now. ‘He wasn’t a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son …’
I ask what Chris thought of the book, and Pirsig’s face strains a little.
‘He didn’t like it. He said, “Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false.” It threw him terribly. There is stuff I can’t talk about still. Katagiri Roshi, who helped me set up the Zen Centre in Minnesota, took him in hand in San Francisco. When Katagiri gave Chris’s funeral address tears were just running down his face. He suffered almost more than I did.’
When his son died, Pirsig was in England. He had sailed across the Atlantic with his second wife, Wendy Kimball, 22 years his junior, whom he had met when she had come to interview him on his boat. She has never disembarked. He was working at the time on Lila, the sequel to his first book, which further examines Phaedrus’s ideas in the context of a voyage along the Hudson with Lila, a raddled Siren, as crew.
The book is bleaker, messier than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though it carries a lot of the charge of Pirsig’s restless mind. ‘If I wrote it today,’ he says, ‘it would be a much more cheerful book. But I was resolving things in Lila; the sadness of the past, and particularly Chris’s death, is there. Zen was quite an inspiring book, I think, but I wanted to go in the other direction with Lila and do something that explored a more sordid, depressing life …’
He hoped Lila would force the ‘metaphysics of quality’ from the New Age shelves to the philosophy ones, but that has not happened. Though a website dedicated to his ideas boasts 50,000 posts, and there have been outposts of academic interest, he is disappointed that his books have not had more mainstream attention. ‘Most academic philosophers ignore it, or badmouth it quietly, and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that “quality” can not be defined,’ he says.
This desire to be incorporated in a philosophy canon seems odd anyhow, since the power of Pirsig’s books lie in their dynamic personal quest for value, rather than any fixed statement of it. But maybe eventually every iconoclast wants to be accepted.
He still sails. He lives in rural New England and has just been up to the islands of Maine with his wife on the same boat that he describes in Lila – perfectly maintained, of course. He lives these days in cyberspace, he says, where his ideas circulate. He plans to learn to tango, and visit Buenos Aires. He’s just discovered YouTube. He doesn’t write any more, though, and he hardly reads. I wonder if that old depression ever returns?
‘I’ve been hit with it lately,’ he says. ‘It did not seem related to my life in any way. I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell. But I did for the first time go to a psychiatrist. He said it’s a chemical imbalance and he prescribed some pills and the depression has gone.’
Otherwise, he says, he tries to live as best he can to the dictates of ‘his dharma’: to stay centred. I ask if he fears death.
‘I’m not depressed about it,’ he says. ‘If you read the 101 Zen Stories you will see that is characteristic. I really don’t mind dying because I figure I haven’t wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn’t screw up.’
He smiles. ‘It was just that I was listening to a different drummer all along.’
Pirsig’s pearls
· The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
· Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.
· Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
· Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?
· The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Now and Zen
Born 6 September 1928, Minneapolis.
Family Father was a law lecturer and mother was Swedish-born. Pirsig married Nancy Ann James in 1954. They had two sons: Chris, and Ted, now 48. Now married to journalist Wendy Kimball, with whom he has a 25-year-old daughter, Nell.
Education Judged to have an IQ of 170 at age nine. Went to University of Minneapolis at 15, but joined the army in 1946, serving in Korea before returning to the university to study philosophy. Then studied at Benares in India.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Appears in Guinnes Book of Records as the bestselling book rejected by the largest number of publishers (121). Sold 5m copies worldwide.
· Lila is published by Alma Books (£7.99). A slipcased, signed limited edition is available at selected Waterstone’s (£45)
‘I want more than my share’
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Kingsley Amis had a vast appetite for work, words, women… and conflict. A lifetime of excess makes him an irresistable subject, says his biographer Zachary Leader
The first Amis novel – exclusive extracts
Barnes and Amis – the big row
‘Into our china shop of familial sensitivities,’ Martin Amis wrote of a previous biographer, ‘[he] had come lurching and bucking and blundering. Every time he bent over to inspect a shattered vase, he would clear another shelf with the sweep of his backside. What was he doing in here?’
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Air of confrontation: Kingsley Amis |
Martin was my friend, and when he asked me to write his father’s authorised biography, my first thought was to turn him down. I had already edited Kingsley Amis’s Letters (2000), and though my admiration for Amis’s writing had grown over the years, as had my fascination with the man, I was wary of signing on for another long stint.
There was also the ‘bucking and blundering’ passage. Martin tried to reassure me: it wouldn’t be like that, I wouldn’t be like that. In the end, two factors helped to change my mind: time, to recover from the task of editing the correspondence, and the realisation that if I declined I would have to pass on to someone else hundreds of unpublished letters I had collected, as well as the detailed chronology I’d constructed to make sense of them. It was not just that I couldn’t relinquish all that work, I couldn’t relinquish the task of explaining Amis’s life.
Writing the biography turned out to be great fun, but it was not without difficulties. To begin with, there was the matter of Amis’s productivity. He wrote 25 published novels, seven volumes of poetry, 11 works of nonfiction, several dozen short stories, nine plays for radio and television, more than 1,300 pieces of uncollected journalism and almost 2,000 letters. He also edited 17 books of verse and prose.
As one of my aims in the biography was to make a case for the breadth and depth of Amis’s literary achievement, the book was unlikely to be short. Then there was the matter of Amis’s influence, admitted even by those who deplored it.
For about 40 years, from the publication of Lucky Jim, in 1954, to his death, in 1995, Amis was a dominant figure in the writing of his age: at the hear of the pre-eminent poetical grouping of the period, the Movement, and complexly implicated in its various schemes of self-promotion; the earliest of redbrick novelists and Angry Young Men (it is Amis’s face, not John Osborne’s, that features on the front cover of Humphrey Carpenter’s 2002 study of the ‘Angries’); the most prominent literary figure among political, cultural and social polemicists, for elite and popular audiences alike.
Nor was Amis’s life away from the desk without incident, as he claimed the lives of most writers were. Deprivation may have been to his friend Philip Larkin what daffodils were to Wordsworth, but Amis wanted no part of it. That he was a man of alarming energies and appetites, the funniest man most people had ever met, or the cleverest, or the rudest, helped to make him a celebrity, everywhere quoted in newspapers and periodicals.
His excesses, though, took their toll, on others as well as himself, as his writings make clear. ‘I want more than my share before anyone else has had any,’ a joke catchphrase, eventually found its way into Take a Girl Like You (1960), uttered by Patrick Standish, ‘the most unpleasant person I’ve written about.’
Few have been as perceptive or funny about bad behaviour as Amis, or been as consistently accused of it. What truth was there in these accusations? What, moreover, were Amis’s motives in writing about his sort of bad behaviour?
To understand or excuse or apologise for it? Such questions are implicitly raised in the novels themselves, as when Patrick Standish tells Jenny Bunn: ‘I’m not trying to get credit with you by saying I know I’m a bastard. Nor by saying I’m not trying to get credit. Nor by saying I’m not trying to by saying& trying& You know what I mean. Nor by saying that. Nor by saying that.’
Comparably self-conscious passages occur throughout Amis’s novels: like all his central characters, he was rarely simple or single, even at the end of his life, when the person and the persona often seemed indistinguishable.
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Second wife: the writer at home with Elizabeth Jane Howard |
If stamina was an important requirement in writing the biography, so was tact. The contract I signed with the Amis estate allowed me exclusive access to unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. Thanks to a letter of introduction from Martin Amis, almost everyone I approached agreed to be interviewed. The very few exceptions were women, usually ex-lovers (in Martin’s phrase, Amis was ‘a heroic adulterer’).
I went three times to Ronda, in Andalucia, to interview Martin’s mother, Lady Kilmarnock, Amis’s first wife. There I also interviewed Martin’s older brother Philip, an amusing, nervy man, as brilliant a mimic as his father. The family was open and generous, as was Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. Though Amis was rarely out of the public eye, aspects of his life, often painful ones, remained hidden, or known only to a small circle of friends.
If I thought these aspects revealing, either of the life or the work, I wrote about them. In my contract with the estate, which had no right of veto as to style or content (bu could deny permission to quote from unpublished materials), I undertook to show the executors what I had written before the book went to press.
When I did so – not without trepidation – only a single objection was raised, to an unflattering description of Amis by one of his supervisees at Cambridge. This description struck Martin as unbelievable as well as cruel. Given everything else that he and Jonathan Clowes, the estate’s other executor, let pass, I agreed to cut it.
Among the most difficult or delicate material I included was an account of Martin’s sister, Sally, whose life was calamitous from the start. At two years and nine months, she fell from a table in the garden, landing on her head and fracturing her skull, went into convulsions, then a coma and nearly died. Some months later, while staying with her paternal grandparents, her grandmother died in her presence.
The circumstances of her death were particularly upsetting, for the grandfather had just gone to work and Sally was left alone all day with her grandmother’s body. When Amis’s father returned home, he discovered his wife lying dead on the bedroom floor, her face smeared with the lipstick Sally had removed from her handbag and clumsily tried to apply to her lips.
‘When Sally got back to Swansea,’ commented a friend, it was clear ‘how anxious the experience had made her. If she saw her father asleep& she would try to prise his eyes open for fear that he, too, had died.’ Her adolescence was no less troubled. She became an alcoholic while still at school, married disastrously and died at 46. Amis’s relations with her were complex and revealing, in ways that disturb but also bring credit to them both.
The task of gathering evidence took two-and-a-half years, not counting the four years I’d spent editing the Letters. One of these years was spent at the principal repository of Amis’s papers, the Henry E. Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, a paradise of rare books and manuscripts, botanical gardens and 18th-century English paintings.
The Amis archive at the Huntington consists of 68 boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, pocket diaries, correspondence, and ephemera. The Huntington also possesses Amis’s library, including a number of books with witty or telling annotations, as well as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s archive, about 90 boxes to date.
Elizabeth Jane Howard was – and is – a great giver of dinner parties and houseparties, and Amis, too, loved company.
Among her papers are hundreds of bread-and-butter notes, many from celebrated guests, among them Iris Murdoch, John Betjeman, Julian Barnes, C. Day Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis, who at 16 wrote charmingly to thank Jane for advice over homework (‘There was exactly the right pressure on me to make me work,’ a sure touch Jane also showed with Martin at this time) and over how to get on with his parents. I probably know more about the bread-and-butter note than any man alive.
Amis sold his archive to the Huntington in 1984 for $90,000 and wasn’t the least bit embarrassed about having done so. When in 1960 Philip Larkin sought to enlist him in a campaign to preserve British literary manuscripts – a campaign now taken up by Larkin’s biographer, Andrew Motion – Amis’s reply was characteristically forthright: ‘I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I have no feeling one way or another about such bidder’s country of origin.
It seems to me no more inconruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University, should have a collection of Robert Graves’ manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied.’
The Amis archive in the Huntington is full of gems and mysteries. Among the unpublished manuscripts are three substantial novel fragments, each more than 100 pages, plus a completed novel entitled The Legacy, the immediate predecessor to Lucky Jim.
The Legacy is interesting for a number of reasons, not least for its Modernist tricks (beginning with the hero’s name: ‘Kingsley Amis’). It was rejected by 14 publishers before Amis’s agent gave up on it, and, though Amis consistently disparaged its ‘experimental’ character and was glad it was never published, while at work on it, as his letters attest, he liked what he had written.
I think it worth publishing, partly out of biographical interest, partly because it is often funny and perceptive, especially about small-town suburban manners and mores. The Huntington also possesses a handful of unpublished poems of power, one of which, ‘Things tell less and less,’ I brought to the attention of the executors and arranged to have published in the TLS in 2004, to widespread and approving notice. As it and several other unpublished works suggest, there is ample room for a new Collected Poems.
Among the mysteries in the Huntington archive are several posed by Amis’s pocket diaries, some of which contain coded symbols, abbreviations and numerals. In the diary begun the day after his 50th birthday, on 17 April 1972, a time of deteriorating relations with Elizabeth Jane Howard, increased drinking, and a related loss of libido, each entry is followed by a number, never less than three, never more than eight.
These numbers could signify drinks, presumably spirits, with wine and beer not counted, but they might also stand for pages written or marks out of 10 for the day, though an entry like: ‘F: Too hung to do anything exc abt 2 letters. 7,’ would seem to rule out all three possibilities, given the hangover.
The entry contains one other mysterious feature: ‘F,’ which appears very infrequently in the diary. If it stands for what one thinks it does (as opposed to, say, ‘fibrillation’, never mentioned in the correspondence), what is it doing on a hangover day, unless it took place in the early hours of the morning, while drunk? I spent many an afternoon in California pondering such puzzles.
Before the Huntington purchased Amis’s papers, he sold several important manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas (which partly accounts for the relatively low price the Huntington paid for what remained). Among these manuscripts is a partial typescript of the first version of Lucky Jim, originally titled ‘Dixon and Christine’. The differences between ‘Dixon’ and Jim are striking, beginning with the fact that Jim, disconcertingly, is called ‘Julian’, quite the wrong name.
The typescript contains numerous pencilled annotations, previously unidentified. But anyone who knows Philip Larkin’s hand, will recognise him as their author. Larkin’s crucial role in revising Lucky Jim has long been recognised, but its extent has been a matter of controversy. Larkin’s most important suggestion was that Amis ‘sod up the romantic business actively’, by which he meant make the novel more like a romance, with proper dragons and witches.
The comic blcking figures – Professor Welch, the odious Bertrand, Jim’s affected girlfriend, Margaret, whose laugh is like ‘the tinkle of tiny silver bells’ – are sometimes sympathetically treated in ‘Dixon and Christine’; in the revised version, they are unsympathetic throughout, or almost throughout.
What the typescript also makes clear is how Larkin improved the novel in smaller ways, with many warnings against artificial or overwritten dialogue, as in ‘terribly unnatural’ or ‘This speech might come from a stage play TOO BAD to be produced’ or ‘Horrible smell of arse’ (later abbreviated to ‘HS of A’) or ‘GRUESOME AROMA OF B’ (presumably ‘BUM’).
Other suggestions concern pacing, as in ‘not going quickly enough’ or ‘too detailed for their purpose’. The best of these annotations reads: ‘This speech makes me twist about with boredom.’
When I returned to London from my year in California, Martin and his family were about to move to Uruguay. By the time he returned, several years later, the first draft of the biography was complete. Martin is not always the world’s most reliable correspondent; his collected letters will make a slim volume.
Once I’d begun writing we were able to meet only a couple of times, when he returned to London to see his sons. He patiently answered my queries, offering corrections of fact and emphasis. His attitude to the biography, I now suspect, owed something to his father’s example.
When Martin began his first novel, The Rachel Papers, Amis left him to it. Initially, Martin attributed this non-reaction to ‘sheer indolence’, but he soon came to see it ‘as a parental instinct, and a good one’. A similar instinct may have inspired Martin’s policy with me. Whatever its origin, I am grateful for the freedom he allowed me.
The Life of Kingsley Amis’ (Jonathan Cape) is available for £26 (rrp £30) plus £1.25 p&p. Call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115
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布朗肖（左）和列维纳斯（右）。
《列维纳斯》托尔奈·阿兰著阿尔马当出版社2006年10月版定价：15.50欧元
《布朗肖》阿尔蒂·库尔等著同谋出版社2006年10月版定价：22.00欧元
德里达在给列维纳斯的悼词中曾这样写道：“对我们大多数人，特别是对我本人，这种绝对忠诚、堪称楷模的思想友谊，布朗肖与列维纳斯之间的友谊，乃是一份恩典，一件礼物；出于不止一种理由，它仍然值得我们这个时代祷告，它是一个幸运的事件，也是降临在那些能优先成为他们二位中任何一位的朋友的人的祝福。”今年是法国这两位思想上的同行者列维纳斯与布朗肖共同诞辰100周年，从年初伊始，对于他们两位分别的纪念活动就层出不穷，在巴黎尤奈斯库中心举行的一场为时4天（11月13—11月16日）的学术研讨会，更是将两位作家、思想者摆放在了一起怀念与膜拜。有一种说法，把上个世纪40至70年代的萨特比作法国知识界的白天，这位存在主义大师和战士所代表的显派们的光芒，遮掩了许多思想界的另类存在，如列维纳斯和布朗肖。他们在时间和空间上被人们不同程度地遗忘和忽视，相反，他们也因此具有了一种夜晚的气质，幽深、绵长，越来越多的后世者也开始燃着一些火把、点亮一盏灯笼，进入那些黑暗的宝藏中寻找和探究。
列维纳斯这个来自立陶宛的犹太流浪者，将胡塞尔与海德格尔的思想开创式地引介到法国，并在二者思想的基础上，展开了他的改造与批判，进而构建了一种“为他者的哲学”：以“他人”的存在及其对个人的绝对保障为基础，展开现象学的一系列还原活动。也就是从个人生存的“亲在”、“此在”及其对于有限的生存时间历程的“烦恼”、“忧虑”的体验中，转向由“他人”的视野所构成的无限广阔的无止境的超越世界。他使西方思想界冲破了自启蒙时代长久以来以个人和自我为中心的牢笼，而为我们论证了一个“他人”存在的绝对无限性的崭新价值观。一位当之无愧的为“他者”的哲学家，他不停地消解“自我”，而强调一种面对“他人”面孔时的责任感。
布朗肖则更像是一个自我引退的思想者，就像通常他著作勒口上的自我介绍：“莫里斯·布朗肖，小说家和批评家，生于1907年。他的一生完全奉献于文学以及属于文学的沉默。”要知道，这位几乎在我们视野里消失的大师，操办和主宰了法国20世纪知识界近乎所有的大事件：从新小说到先锋文学；从阿尔及利亚的“121人宣言”到巴黎“五月风暴”的作家行动委员会；从对萨德、洛特雷·阿蒙的重新发现到对荷尔德林、卡夫卡等人的崭新诠释；他既是萨特、巴塔耶的同辈人，又是福柯、巴特、德里达精神上的导师。而后半生逐渐消隐的他，拒绝一切采访和出头露面，就像戈达尔形容自己时所说的，成了“被遗忘者中最为著名的一个”。
除了同为思想界的隐者之外，其实有更多的理由将这两个人放在一起纪念。从早年他们共同在斯特拉斯堡的哲学学习，到纳粹占领时布朗肖对列维纳斯一家的帮助，再到战后他们对二战中犹太人那场浩劫的难以言说的言说，永恒的友谊贯穿了他们整整一生。布朗肖在他的著作《文学空间》（已由商务印书馆出版）中说：犹太人是这个世界上惟一不将自己的根基建立在土地上，而是建立在一本书———《圣经》———上的民族，这本书又名“写作”。而布朗肖与列维纳斯思想上的友情也正是源于这种犹太式基调，一种该隐与亚伯（流浪与被害）双重身份的重叠，也正因为如此，他们一同继承并根本地反驳了海德格尔的存在哲学。
今年10月刚刚出版的两本对列维纳斯与布朗肖的研究著作，也就显得格外恰逢其时。
前者《列维纳斯：他者的哲学，还是自我的哲学？》系统地介绍和探究了列维纳斯以伦理学为核心的哲学体系；后者《布朗肖：时间的证据》则是一本当前十几位法国知识界精英对布朗肖的研究论文集。这也成了这两位思想者由隐到显的一次有效的证明，是的，金子埋得再久，一旦出土，它照样会发光。
□发自巴黎
「榜评」
快乐读书快乐生活
与上周相比，本周总榜变化颇大，但未必有多少新意。唱主角的大多是生活类图书，比如《快乐生活（一点通）》这本“新家庭百事通”再度占据榜首。《无毒一身轻Ⅱ》和《人体使用手册》都不算新书了，其中的保健理论和建议，也并非毫无争议之处，但还是卖得很好，也可以看出都市人对健康的重视，对疾病的恐惧以及一向以来养生知识的缺乏。而伊能静和写《美容大王》的大S一样，爱美成癖、对保养的钻研到了某种极致，她们俩曾一起上过小S主持的“康熙来了”，谈起保养、购物、奢侈品，很有惺惺相惜的意思，那期节目真是“女人”得要命。伊能静主持的“美丽艺能界”虽然因为收视不佳，今年5月停播了，但其中不少秘笈至今仍被女人们奉为圭臬。以自己的经验，结合一年多以来主持节目时交流而来的心得，写这本《美丽教主之变脸天书》，难怪其中的介绍更细致也更得体，蛮有诚意的。倒是徐熙媛最近又推出一本《大S美丽随笔》，除了告诉吃燕麦＋牛奶＋水煮蛋的早餐来排毒、瑜伽对保持身材的好处外，基本上是写真和闲散的心情随笔，文笔极为普通（倒是同时有中文和法文，但这对读者应该没多少意义吧），突出的是“恋爱中的女人最美”，再也没有“授人以渔”的余暇了。
当然耀眼的新书还是有的，《长尾理论》显然是读者期待已久的，携“亚马逊畅销书榜经管类第一名”威势而来，一上市就跻身总榜。作者克里斯·安德森（ChrisAnderson）是美国《连线》（Wired）的总编辑，在他的领导之下，这本杂志从人（而非技术）的角度探讨技术，以及技术对政治、文化、社会和伦理道德带来的冲击，重新定义了数字文化，也因此在2005年获得“卓越杂志奖”金奖。“长尾理论”克里斯·安德森对互联网所缔造的美丽新世界的观察心得，如果要以一句话概括它的冲击性，那就是印在书封面的广告语“彻底颠覆80/20法则”。虽然“长尾”一词诞生不久，而且从研究案例上也是从数字媒体和音乐产业中获得实证，但它的前瞻性，对非互联网或娱乐媒体产业也同样充满启发。
此外，上海译文出版社趁《在路上》出版50年之机，重新引进、翻译了这本“垮掉的一代”的代表作。该书在国内较近的版本是2001年漓江出版社的“全译本”，译者文楚安，评价还不错。新译本除依据权威版本译出外，还增补了凯鲁亚克研究权威专家的导读，译者是国内著名翻译家、新华社高级编辑王永年。不过，王先生在接受采访时表示自己与凯鲁亚克，与这本年轻人的小说有代沟，受人之托勉力为之，“翻译得比较苦”。
「小说」
《诛仙》2005年1月开始推出简体字版，到现在将近两年了，总算出到了“7”，读者的耐心越来越好了。当然这也是没办法的事！网上开了头但结尾遥遥无期的“千年大坑”多了去，萧鼎已经算比较有“责任感”的了。当然啦，再怎么也比不上斯蒂芬·金的“黑暗塔”系列，历时30多年才完篇，据说曾有死囚发毒誓守密，恳求他透露结局……
如此看来，我们还是幸运的。
「非小说」
《一个人上东京》是高木直子系列绘本的第三本，身高150cm的女生怀着当插画家的梦想，来到东京，有小小的开心，和更多的沮丧与挫败感。这种心情本城读者想来很有共鸣！比较而言，更有热销潜力的应该是《赖声川的创意学》。尽管赖声川本人多年专注于剧场和电影，但他的见识、思考方式和诚意使得这本书成功“跨界”，在更多的领域造成话题。
「学术」
《哲学要义》是叶秀山先生给北大新生上课的讲义，虽然经过整理，但口语味道还是很浓，读起来十分亲切、流畅。巧的是榜单上还有两本类似风格的图书。《这个世界会好吗》是梁漱溟晚年口述，上榜已经很长时间了，而纪德的《关于陀思妥耶夫斯基的六次讲座》用巴黎式的思维思考俄罗斯式的问题，带有浓厚的法国阅读经验。
「经管」
「生活」
「儿童」
新京报图书排行榜数据由北京图书大厦、王府井书店、中关村图书大厦、涵芬楼书店、三联韬奋图书中心、万圣书园、风入松书店、国林风书店、第三极书局、卓越网上书店、当当网上书店等提供。
今天的人不大知道何廉是谁，他于1895年出生在湖南邵阳农村，1919年赴美留学，获耶 鲁大学博士学位，1926年回国之后，曾在南开大学从事经济学研究和教学十年，进行了大量卓有成效的经济学研究和普及工作，成为一位享有声望的经济学家。他在《大公报》推出的统计副刊专栏，按时间排列所有中国重要的经济、金融统计数字，曾轰动一时。之后，《大公报》持续刊出他主编的《经济周刊》也在全国产生了很大影响。他还是《独立评论》的重要撰稿人。从1936年起，他应蒋介石入之邀，十年间先后担任行政院政务处长、经济部次长等要职，是蒋在经济事务方面的重要顾问，一度备受蒋的宠信，近距离地观察过这位主宰大陆命运二十多年的枭雄，一位经济学家的回忆为我们进一步认识蒋介石的真面目，了解国民党统治时代提供了许多第一手的珍贵史料。
西安事变前不久，何廉随蒋介石在洛阳住了一个多月，第一次“有机会经常看到委员长的一套生活方式以及他处理事务的方法。”使这位经济学家“弄明白了中国实权的情况”（《何廉回忆录》，中国文史出版社1988年版，114页，以下只标页码）这就是“政府的真正实权所在，始终是围绕着委员长转的。委员长不仅是行政院的头，军事委员会的头，党的头，如果化成实权来说，他是万物之首。”（115页）这位当时位居行政院政务处长的经济学家惊讶地发现——“几乎每份重要的报告，按理应直接送交南京行政院的，却首先来到了委员长的驻地办公室。”他的去向和个人的驻地办公室从来都是保密的。他的侍从室机构庞大，俨然就是政府中的政府，国家的真正中心，凌驾在整个国家体制之上。他走到哪里，哪里就是权力的中心，整个政府是跟着他的腿转动的。即使他休假期间，“翁文灏和我曾多次去他奉化的家，向他汇报有关行政院的事项。”（124页）
“我开始认识到，他认识人，也懂得用人，但是他不懂得制度和使用制度。我和他谈问题时，一谈到许多事情该制度化的时候，他的注意力就会向别处转移。我对他有这样的感觉，从根本上说，他不是个现代的人，基本上属于孔子传统思想影响下的人。他办起事来首先是靠人和个人接触以及关系等等，而不是靠制度。
办什么事，作什么变动，只要他认为怎么方便就怎么办。……他随身总带一支红铅笔和一叠纸，如果他认为该作出决定或给哪位来访者一笔钱，他会立即签发一项有关的手谕。这类手谕无数次都是用红铅笔写的，到处流传“（117—118页）
他不是皇帝，胜似皇帝，随心所欲，活脱脱一个 “朕即国家”的现代版，何廉说：“最活龙活现的一次，是1936年秋孔祥熙官邸一次十分非正式的会议上，孔接到委员长侍从打来的电话，说委员长要这么一笔款子。这仅仅是一次电话传呼，也没有手谕。孔打趣地对我们说：”看，委员长要款，我该咋办？‘孔让他的秘书通知上海中央银行用专机把款送交委员长。“（110—111页）另有一次，1937年春天，孔祥熙将以中国特使身份去参加英国女王的加冕典礼，在告别宴会上，”孔非常自私地要委员长给他颁发文职官员的最高勋章，这样他好戴着去伦敦。委员长对我说：“何先生，你就关照此事，给孔博士颁发勋章。’通常像这种颁发任何类别勋章的事，首先要在行政院会议上提出讨论并通过决议。所作决议还得送呈国民政府主席，由他来颁发勋章。现在这一切程序都不用了，只是委员长一道非正式的口谕，就得把勋章给孔祥熙送去。我通知了国民政府，第二天早晨勋章就由专机送交给孔。这真是滑天下之大稽，我觉得十分可笑！”（124页）
“他是一个信赖人而不重视制度的人，如果一个人和他很接近，那个人就可以受到他的庇护”（183—184页）1939年后期到1940年，何廉没有机会和蒋介石直接接触，他很快发现自己陷入批评、攻击之中，1942年2月，他主管的农本局多人被特工拘捕。直到张家璈给蒋写信，蒋大发雷霆，说并没有让他们逮捕那些人，只是指示“集中讯问”。事后放人时，戴笠还要求经济部“打收条领人”，戴只承认“他错误地理解和解释了委员长的命令”。事后何廉调任军事委员会参事室参事，他不到任，秘密警察就在他家门外站岗，监视他，他出门就跟着他，连日用必需品也削减了。总之是非逼他就范不可。那年，何廉想去香港，买飞机票要警方特别安全办公室批准，等了几乎两个月都没音讯，最后求助于蒋本人，几天就办成了。
显然在一个人的治下，喜怒无常，朝令夕改，只能是一个没有任何保障、不确定的社会，恐怖、灾难随时可能降临到每一个人身上。何廉不过是书生从政，他的遭遇不算什么，处在权力顶峰的蒋介石不也有过命在旦夕的西安之劫吗？连杀人不眨眼的魔王戴笠也不无抱怨，他曾对张家璈说，“为委员长工作非常难办。戴说，委员长给你指令，要你去调查某人或某事，但中途又打住或放慢了。”（220页）
1946年，何廉多年的心血编制的战后经济建设纲要被束之高阁，连一纸空文都算不上，“除了1000份已印发的和几份英文翻译本外，纲要从没有公布。”（252页）一个信奉自由主义、有理想的学者在这样的体制下注定了只能是“装饰品”，是可以呼之即来、挥之即去的道具。这位经济学家在经历宦海沉浮之后，终于下决心地离开蒋介石政府，结束十年官场生涯，回到独立的学术研究中，他在南京创办了著名的《世纪评论》周刊，在上海创办了中国经济研究所和《经济评论》。以他十年来对蒋介石以及这个政权的近距离观察，他说：
“我越来越清楚地体会到，委员长或许不是国家从事经济建设的理想的领导者。他主要是一个具有中世纪思想意识的人，他对经济建设的认识，和19世纪早期的维新派李鸿章、张之洞没有多大不同。对委员长来说，经济建设意味着经济的移植，看来他并不真正懂得为经济建设建立主要机构的重要性。
从委员长看来，人事关系的重要性超过机构设施，而委员长要求于部下对他的忠心和驯服超过对才干和正直的要求。要是一夜之间突然变心转意，就意味着机构和政策的变更的话，一个国家怎能平平稳稳、很有效率地从事经济建设？要是那些负责经济建设的人不是首先在公正有为的基础上遴选，一个国家怎能有效地进行经济建设？假使委员长的整个信任概念是以关系的亲疏为基础的话，我怎能为他从事经济建设工作？“（265—266页）
何况蒋介石“在政治上关心对付旁的政党，特别是共产党，超过他对经济建设的关心。……在他所定的大政方针之下，整个政府全力以赴处理政治问题，几乎将经济问题置诸度外。”（266页） 尽管自1930年代起，他大量起用翁文灏、王世杰、蒋廷黻、张家璈、吴鼎昌、何廉、叶公超等专家教授，也许他的初衷是良好的，给他们显赫的职位，早在西安事变发生后，何廉就看得很清楚：“翁文灏和我虽都在政府中位居高职，比起‘圈内集团’来，毕竟还是外人。我们并非政府是里层人物，也非党的成员，我们不过是政府的‘装饰品’！我们从未能搞清楚幕后究竟在搞些什么。”（121页）何廉不无痛苦地认识到蒋介石“或许看重吴鼎昌、蒋廷黻、张家璈，或许也有我自己的意见，但他从不真正信任我们。”（266页）所以这些受西方教育、学有专长的学者从来都不在蒋介石政权的“里层”。在这个浓厚人治色彩的政权“里层” 是孔祥熙、宋子文这样与他有裙带等关系的贪婪自私、腐败无耻的人物，蒋真正信任的是他们，所以孔掌握的财政部针水不进。蒋介石掌握着无限的权力，他通过亲戚、亲信控制权力，没有任何章法可言，他“常常绕过了机构，而去信任那些最亲近他、忠于他、服从他的人。他信任孔祥熙和宋子文，因为他们是姻兄姻弟，他信任孔祥熙胜过宋子文，因为孔更听他的话；他信任陈立夫因为陈的叔叔是他把兄弟；他信任俞飞鹏，因为是他的表弟兄；他信任张群，因为张群、陈其美、黄郛和他是把兄弟；他信任黄埔军校毕业生超过同样的团体，因为他是军校校长，而在中国师生关系几乎亲似父子。唯一可能例外是陈诚，他们之间非亲非故，但陈诚是他的同乡”（266页）他“老是准备让他随便哪个下属成群结党，只是要由他来当头头，而事实上，他是每个派系的最高领袖。……在心底里，委员长有一种操纵驾驭的嗜好，他要在矛盾中显示他的至高无上。他允许甚至鼓励搞派系活动，因为只要派系继续活动，唯有他才能使不同的派系捏合在一起。”（214页）
尽管如此，在这位沐浴了欧风美雨、受过严格学术训练、满脑子自由主义的学者眼中，蒋介石“是个可以共事的好人”，“他十分耿直，也非常坦率，他总设法使你明白，他在想些什么。他会给你答复：或者是，或者否，要不就等等，他不会使你灰心丧气的。”（117页）“他生活十分简朴。每天清晨起身很早，做一小段锻炼，就进行祈祷，……整个上午，他都用来批阅文件……”，他“吃得很少，吃得也很简朴。”（115页）他一贯称何廉为“何先生”。作为一位传统型的政治领袖，他或许不无魅力，但他中世纪的思维方式、行事作风，在一个急需向现代化转型的时代里注定将以失败告终，这是人治社会的必然，蒋介石的失败不仅是他个人的悲剧，也标志着他身体力行的这种千年相续的统治方式到20世纪已走到尽头，任何不可一世的独裁者试图依靠人而不是制度终将无法挽回地步入衰亡，蒋介石只是其中一个显著的例子罢了。
钱钟书，字默存，号槐聚，笔名中书君，1910年出生于江苏无锡。1933年，清华大学外文系毕业；1935年至1937年在英国牛津大学学习，获得文学士学位；1938年在法国巴黎大学进修并于本年因被母校清华大学聘为最年轻的教授之一回国。1941年出版散文集《写在人生边上》；1946年出版短篇小说集《人、兽、鬼》；1947年出版了长篇小说《围城》；1948年出版《谈艺录》。1979年出版了100多万字的《管锥编》极大地震动了学术界。1980年《围城》由人民文学出版社重印，并多次印刷，发行100多万册。另还出版有《七缀集》、《宋诗选注》等。
钱钟书一辈子钟情于书，据其夫人杨绛说，她在1973年为钱钟书整理读书笔记时，即有整整五大麻袋之多，堆在屋里高高的如一座小山，每一本笔记本上都密密麻麻地记满了中文、外文。他还精通六七种语言。
钱钟书在清华读书的时候跟曹禺和吴组缃是同班同学，他到清华后给自己立下的志愿是“横扫清华图书馆”，那时侯他不过才18岁，他终日博览中西新旧书籍，可谓一心只读圣贤书，是去图书馆借书最多的学生，并且他的考试成绩在班里总是第一。是全校公认的才子，在念大二时就由吴宓教授推荐他给本系学生带课。
钱钟书因为自己才高一世，所以颇自负自许，相当的“狂傲”，像极了古代的庄生。大学快毕业时，清华大学挽留他继续攻读西洋文学研究硕士学位，他曾说：“整个清华，没有一个教授有资格充当钱某人的导师！”。他架子相当大，从不愿拜访别人，更不拜访名人，只埋首脚踏实地做学问，并且在学问上对自己要求很高，也很严格。后来当他很有名气的时候，也总拒绝人们对他的采访。
钱钟书在西南联大外文系任教不到一年时间，便于1939年夏天辞职了，据说是不怎么得意，亦有说法是当时湖南宝庆县蓝田镇的国立师范学院请钱钟书去此校筹建外文系。
钱钟书一生对政治不感兴趣，可以这么说，他超越了那现实和时代，不想与之抗争，才守住了本性。他从1944年到1946年，用了两年时间，以每天写五百字的速度完成了长篇小说《围城》。《围城》虽然至1949年三月就已三次出版，也很畅销，但当时文艺界却对此书普遍评价不高。所以1980年以前，所有《中国现代文学史》和小说史的专著都对此书持基本上忽略的态度，有的甚至只字不提，许多青年人根本不知道有《围城》一书，连钱钟书的名字也未曾听说过。
1949年9月，钱钟书与杨绛应邀请重返清华大学任教。此前香港大学和牛津大学也邀请过钱钟书过去任教，都被他拒绝了。1953年，他又被调到中国社科院文学研究所任研究员，一直到退休都在那里工作。
奇怪的是从1949年至1957年，钱钟书没有发表任何文章、评论，也没有新的著作问世。是显示了他不可思议的聪明睿智，还是他遵从了默默者存的道理？也许是他从1950年起被中央邀请担任“《毛泽东选集》英译委员会”主任委员的原因？
1966年起的文革十年中，钱钟书又沉默了，还是没有发表任何文章、评论。只是他早已准备耐得半辈子寒窗寂寞，决定从创作走向研究，默默为世界文化奉献自己的智慧——偷空写《管锥编》。其间有近两年时间被下放到河南干校劳动，其艰苦程度可想而知，并因此大病一场，估计是没书看给憋的。
1975年基本写完《管锥编》。1979年，洋洋四大册，近百万字的《管锥编》由中华书局出版发行，成为当年学术界一件大事。《管锥编》是钱钟书气魄最宏伟阔大的著作，它打通一切文学体裁界限传统，对文化研究的贡献很大，尽管其侧重点仍在文艺学方面，却也几乎囊括了古今中外人文科学的所有门类。更为奇怪的是钱钟书完全采用文言文来写的《管锥编》，且处处见得生花妙笔和博大精深。如《管锥编》里面揭示了中外文学中共有的一种艺术方法和规律，即通感。就是人的视觉、触觉、嗅觉、味觉可以互通或交通，也叫感觉移借。应用通感的理论，在文学上许多看似不通的问题就迎刃而解了。钱钟书是第一个把“通感”现象引进我国文艺理论界的人，而且讲得相当精辟、生动，例证不穷。《管锥编》里面诸如此类的创见有好多，不再一一赘述。
钱钟书那照相机式的记忆力，学贯中西古今的博学，滔滔不绝的口才，浓郁的机趣与睿智，澹泊宁静毁誉不惊的人格，使他极富传奇色彩。他总是惜时如金，潜心读书研究，他甘于寂寞，不媚世媚俗，不求闻达，而又懂得生活之乐趣，如此真正大学者怎不让人肃然起敬？
钱钟书只是醉心在学问里遨游，面对周围环境，钱钟书根本不予理会，钱钟书就是钱钟书。他的人生实践在不经意间向世人阐述了知识就是力量，创新即是生命的铁律。
钱钟书极不爱应酬，好象也不关心国事，也缺少大多数知识分子为推进现实进步而常怀有的那种批判精神。也许是他的智慧和才气把一切都看透了，才会如此吧。每想至此，我总在心里笑着对自己说：“哈，钱钟书这家伙”。
在对世事常抱漠不关心的态度中，钱钟书以自己的努力和成就站立成文化界一位举世瞩目的人，成了一代大儒。这一点跟数学家陈景润很相似。脚踏实地，专注于自心，以自己的成就证明了自己的巨大存在，也许这即是人生之大聪明和大超然吧。
Emily Wus stories have appeared in both Chinese and American publications. She is one of the featured subjects in the film Up to the Mountain, Down to the Village. She lives with her two children in Cupertino, California.
