Customer Reviews

The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The oddest and most disturbing memoir of abuse is perhaps Kathryn Harrison's book "The Kiss", about her sexual relationship with her father, a relationship that extended into adulthood. In contrast, Natalie Goldberg's book is odd precisely because it is difficult to figure out who did what harm to her, despite the fact that the book is packaged in the language of sexual expoitation. That her father could be boorish, insensitive, unattuned to his daughter's needs, and at times frightening, is not in doubt. Whatever sexual doubts and insecurities the author harbored, were only amplified by his grossly unattuned parenting of her. And while the author takes pains to document allegations that her beloved Zen teacher, the renowned Dainin Katagiri Roshi, she states that he never sexually expoited her. To be sure, both men disappointed her. And this seems to be the crux of the memoir. It is really a lament about disillusionment, important people in the author's life who were flawed and imperfect, despite her emotional needs that they be otherwise.

To her credit, Natalie Goldberg is a fine writer, who manages to put her own frailties on the page for the reader's scrutiny. She deserves credit for this. The book will lead readers to question our own assumptions about teachers, about parents, and about the failure of those important people in our lives to be 'perfect'. Goldberg doesn't provide any neat and tidy epiphanies here. But in a sad and loving tribute to her teacher, she leaves the best lines about this matater for Katagiri, himself. In response to a question from a student, asking if "it's okay to just listen to yourself?", Katagiri responds: "Ed, I tried very hard to practice Dogen's Zen. After twenty years I realized there was no Dogen's Zen." Dogen was the 13th Century Zen monk who founded Katagiri's sect, and Katagiri seems to be saying that real spiritual growth involves taking responsibility for our own growth, and freeing ourselves from the grip of childlike fantasies of perfection. This by no means excuses expoitive misconduct by spiritual teachers or, for that matter, parents. It does mean that if, at least in adulthood, we know it's "okay to listen to yourself", the teacher's power to harm is diminished. While there is no sign the author has quite learned this lesson, she at least understands it well enough to make it available to the reader.

This book differs in subject and style from Natalie Goldberg's previous books. Here she writes of feeling betrayred by two father figures, her natural father and her Buddhist teacher Katagiri Roshi, the bartender and the monk of the subtitle. Attending an abuse group, she begins to remember episodes from her childhood and she wants her family to acknowledge how they harmed her.



Without sparing herself, and with a hint of irony, Goldberg writes of confronting her parents by letter. They react with almost comic bewilderment. Goldberg's mother, Sylvia, a child of immigrants, views the world literally: did you eat and sleep? Were you warm? Her father, Buddy, ran a "rough" bar for years. His response to Goldberg's accusations was, "Were you on drugs?" Psychology, the author summarizes, was developed in a country outside Brooklyn.

Even after the family reconciles - which means she begins speaking to them after three years - Goldberg's parents still don't understand her new life. When Goldberg offers to give them a Zen experience, her father begins singing along with the silence bell. In one of their last visits, Buddy whispers an insulting remark about Natalie's weight.

The author gets her second shock, as word spreads about Katagiri Roshi's numerous love affairs with Zen students. She begins to remember episodes she'd tried to ignore. She recalls Roshi's remarks about her beauty. And ultimately she recognizes that Roshi gave her a tremendous gift, regardless of his personal life. She writes (page 136) that both artists and religious leaders can be "enlightened" in their work, yet function "cruelly and ignorantly" in their personal lives.

Toward the end of Great Failure, Natalie writes about crashing her car while fiddling with knobs on her tape deck. She adds, almost casually, that she'd been given "two or three" speeding tickets in the past six months, including one where the police actually chased her down. These episodes were disturbing.

She realizes she's acting out rather dangerously, and she realizes she's in an in-between phase, losing Roshi but not finding another touchstone. She doesn't judge herself, just reports, and in fact people often do behave in unusual, even bizarre ways when they're in the eye of the transitional hurricane.

I think the key to this book is Natalie's wish to be remembered like her heroes, not just as a writer, but as someone who dealt with loneliness and made mistakes. Because she tells these stories about herself, that's exactly how she will be remembered.

"Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology," writes writing guru/Zen practitioner Natalie Goldberg. In The Great Failure, she ponders her own psychology after a life-shattering realization causes her to reassess her relationships with her father, her Zen teacher and ultimately herself while she searches for balance in both her spiritual and writing practices.

Goldberg describes her father (the bartender) as an old-fashioned man's man with fluctuating boundaries. In daring to capture the full bravado of her larger-than-life Jewish father, she illuminates the intricacies of a precarious father-daughter relationship. She writes about how she tried to teach her parents to meditate during one of their rare visits to Santa Fe from Long Island. Her father interrupts the session by launching into his personal rendition of "Hello Dolly" while accompanying himself with his daughter's meditation bell. This and other more inappropriate behavior by both of her parents led Goldberg to reduce their contact to letters for several years; this tenuous relationship also leads Goldberg ultimately to Dainin Katagiri Roshi, a dynamic, celebrated Zen master.

Goldberg explores the link between her charming father and her charismatic Zen teacher when she learns a few years after Roshi's death that he'd had affairs with some of his female students. Faced with this truth, Goldberg's perceptions about her teacher are completely shattered. "I had the illusion that he (Roshi) was perfect," she writes. Complicating matters is the fact that she wrote lovingly of her devotion to Roshi's teachings (and about his death) in an earlier memoir entitled Long Quiet Highway.

Goldberg describes the betrayal she felt regarding Roshi's secret life, and how it mirrored the feelings of betrayal by her own father when she learned of his adulterous past. Ultimately, these two very powerful and provocative relationships in her life cast doubt on her understanding of herself.

In spite of her piercing honesty and elegant writing, Goldberg's latest feels self-centered and precious, like writings from a diary rather than a compelling narrative. Many readers may conclude that this story isn't so significant after all and will probably wonder about its relevance. Disillusionment is so very often the stuff of life and there are scores of brilliant books on the matter that stand out brighter than this one. However, the writing is provocative and straightforward and Goldberg's mission here-as it always has been-is personal. Full of Goldberg's generosity and trademark gifts for both humor and teaching, The Great Failure ultimately touches our hearts and minds as we come to recognize the ways in which each of us fails to confront our own illusions.

If you are looking for writing advice in The Great Failure you will be disappointed; however, Goldberg's fans will appreciate her dogged determination to get at the truth and to come clean about personal failings. This is the path Goldberg has unwaveringly navigated throughout her writing life. In The Great Failure, Goldberg puts her teachings to work.

Reviewed by Jeanie C. Williams

Idealization of spiritual teachers can be so strong that news of their ethical misconduct is just as shocking after their death as while they are alive. In her latest book, The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (Harper San Francisco, 2004) Natalie Goldberg poignantly reveals her dismay and disappointment at finding out, several years after his death, that Katagiri Roshi, her Zen teacher, had slept with some of his female students. Similarly, Goldberg shares her dismay at finding out about her father's extramarital affair after his death.

Psychotherapists, doctors, school teachers, college professors, and supervisors at work may represent parental figures from the past to their clients, patients, students or employees. These relationships may evoke yearnings and expectations in clients, patients, students or employees that may or may not be met. "I needed to be reflected in another," Goldberg admits (p. 101). This is what Freud had called "transference," and the relationships between spiritual teachers and their students are fraught with potential for sticky transferences that may become very difficult to work through-especially since they are rarely, if at all, acknowledged or commented on in the spiritual teacher-student relationship. "Unknowingly, Roshi became my mother, my father, my Zen master" (p. 102).

Not only do spiritual teachers represent parental figures for their students-in a very real sense, they represent, for want of a better term, the Divine. For example, Zen students may believe that their Zen teachers are deeply enlightened individuals who, because of their many years of meditation and training, and because of the authority vested in them by virtue of ceremonies that sanction the transmission of the Buddha's teachings, are infallible spiritual heroes. "I had made him [Katagiri Roshi] perfect," Goldberg confesses. "Because of my family abuse, I was driven to get what I had longed for in my family" (p. 101). "He spoke to me evenly, honestly. My hunger was satiated-the ignored little girl still inside me and the adult seeker-both were nourished" (p. 118).

As Goldberg looks back on her six years as Katagiri Roshi's student, she identifies moments when her idealization was weakened:

"I had a glimmer then of the chasm between the Zen master and the lonely, insecure man. That moment was an opportunity to hold contradictory parts of him, to understand life doesn't work in a neat package the way I wanted it to. I could have come closer to his humanity-and mine. But I wasn't ready or willing. I had a need for him only to be great, to hold my projections. In freezing him on a pedestal I had only contributed to his isolation" (p. 115).

As a former Zen student of fifteen years (eleven under the direction of one teacher), I recall how I, too, needed my former teacher to "be great." Would I have idealized her less if my own personal needs had been less, or if I had acquired enough perspective of how the Zen institution had contributed to mythmaking through the centuries? Goldberg was fortunate to have that glimmer. Was Goldberg an unusually perceptive student, or did her Zen teacher allow himself to be revealed in some ways, however small? Many Zen teachers in the west seem to do everything possible to avoid being seen as real people: they put on a façade that is impossible to live up to, or hide behind their role, or discourage reading and study about Zen-a necessary element for placing the Zen institution and the teachers who represent it in an appropriate historical and cultural context.

Sooner or later, façades come tumbling down, hypocrisy and secrets reveal themselves. One would expect that long-term idealization would come to an end, or at least be compromised. "Eventually, as the teacher-student relationship matures, the student manifests these [projected spiritual] qualities herself and learns to stand on her own two feet. The projections are reclaimed. . . . We close the gap between who we think the teacher is and who we think we are not. We become whole" (p. 91).

One would hope. Goldberg describes the best-case scenario, and rightfully points out the student's role in growing up spiritually. But spiritual teachers themselves have a part to play as well. If Zen teachers are savvy enough, their relationships with their students will become more down to earth and horizontal-and not just regarding the meditation practice itself. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Many longstanding western Zen students are unable to reclaim their projections, precisely because their Zen teachers, threatened by such reclaiming, do not foster it and cling to authoritarian, top-down ways of relating to their students.

Goldberg describes her struggles with deep loneliness and lack of a sense of purpose after losing her Zen teacher and her father. Years after the death of Katagiri Roshi, Goldberg realizes that the "regimented practice" of formal Zen meditation no longer fit her (p. 97). Goldberg goes on to share her ongoing process of making peace with her Zen teacher's and her father's past in her journey toward writing as spiritual practice.

Although at times Goldberg leans a bit too heavily on the individual student's role in idealization and subsequent disappointment in Zen teachers, The Great Failure offers solid insights into the often problematic transferences that develop in students with respect to their spiritual teachers. Written with honesty and sensitivity, this book is recommended reading for anyone who has ever left a spiritual teacher for any reason, and for those who wish to understand the nature of the relationships between spiritual teachers and their students.

I disagree with one of the reviewer's who claims Natalie wants to portray herself as a victim. To the contrary, this book, more than any of her other books, deals with all the emotional turmoil inherent in being betrayed or discovering a betrayal of someone you love. Betrayal is an insidious act and healing from it is not an easy ride. In many ways it is much like Kubler Ross's stages of death -- anger, denial, bargaining, etc. etc. Natalie leads us through all her stages, and in the end, we see the human beings behind the betrayers....and after all, being human, she lets us know we each in our own way betray someone at some point. Americans tend to like "happy endings" when it comes to stories like this one. The ending here transcends happiness and ends up embracing acceptance, which is the ultimate act of healing from any betrayal.

Natalie Goldberg's book The Great Failure is a good example of why writers should mine their family for fiction, but only write about the real events for private consumption. She, like many others before her, tries to swim the sea of emotions, but like so many others, she fears drowning and sticks to the shallows. I'll give her this: memoirs are almost impossible to write in an engaging way because humor and irony require a certain distance from the subject - and emotional distance from your parents is something no one can achieve, no matter how much you might crave it.

So like many memoirs before it, this one is filled with interesting anecdotes that don't fully add up. Take, for example, The Letter. When Ms. Goldberg realizes the impact of her father's boundary crossing, she writes him a scathing letter telling him exactly what she thinks of him. All well and good: we've all vented ink. But she mailed hers. I ask you: what could she possibly have hoped to accomplish? Was she that new to the process to actually think he might understand or apologize? She'd have had my pity if she'd mailed it in the heat of the moment, but she'd carried it with her for a month. All we're told is that she mailed the letter right after her Zen teacher's funeral, and we're left to infer that in her grief, she had nothing else to lose. Still, why make the reader guess? Ms. Goldberg may not have been able to articulate her reasoning at the time, but now it's 15 years out and she should know.

She also doesn't explain why three years after this, she decides to start talking to her parents again. She's in Prague and lonely, and this somehow translates to calling Daddy once she gets home. Fine...but we're missing a whole lot of steps here.

We're treated to a great deal of talk, but none of it seems to translate into practice. At the end when her dad is old and sick and she's been doing Zen for a million years, he makes a comment about her weight and she instantly turns sulky and childish. Hello? Has no Zen equanimity sunk in? Has there been no hardening by the fires of abuse? The real answer is "Forget you, I'll weigh whatever I want to weigh." Can't we at least have her awareness and humor about the infinite being no match for pre-verbal conditioning?

If only Ms. Goldberg had access to outside readers for this manuscript - people who didn't know her personally, had never read her other books, and didn't care if they were invited to the next retreat or not. They could have pointed out the fact that dad and the Zen master get reams of ink, yet the ex-husband is dispatched with a few bare sentences. Surely in a memoir about the important men in one's life - which is what this seems to be - the writer would mention what it was about the guy that was so attractive in the first place, and why she later left.

Similarly, Ms. Goldberg mentions that she's now living with a woman, leading me to wonder why, in a book about emotional honesty, is she drawing this line, too? We'd expect that her Zen teacher wouldn't care who she slept with, but a father who grew up during the Depression and served in WWII would not likely be so blithely okay with it all. Giving us her coming-out story would have rounded him out and shown us whether at the core, he really did love her.

The Great Failure apparently arose from Ms. Goldberg's need to update a previous book about a Zen teacher who after death had been exposed as less godlike and more like unto human. Her effort to bring balance to his memory is a noble endeavor, but would have been more forceful as an essay. His postmortem simply wasn't enough to sustain his half of the book, and her addition of a Zen teaching story further weakened the impact because it was too intellectual and "heady" and had no emotional resonance with a book that's intended to live in the heart.

The reader is left profoundly wondering what it all means. Ms. Goldberg is known for her interest in the process of writing, and it's disappointing that she didn't keep that focus in her memoir, too. I would have been interested to find out whether her desire to be a writer came from having this guy as a father. How different would her life have been if she hadn't met a Zen teacher who urged her to keep writing? Addressing these questions and others would have brought an interesting focus to the memoir, but alas, she chooses to dwell on the reconciliation aspect, and stays within the same old ruts that quickly become boring.

Expect a quick read and some comfort knowing that other writers have endured hellish childhoods, but sadly, don't expect any revelations that will mean anything in your own life.

I first read Long Quiet Highway against my better judgement years ago. I was smitten before I realized it and ended up reading everything of hers I could. I love the way she grounds all her writing in tiny details of the world. It's so loving and joyful and real.
The title should have clued me in. 'The Great Failure'. By the second page I realized it wasn't what I'd signed up for. We were going to be uncomfortable, we were going to be angry, and we weren't going to hide it behind anything. There is a sense of loss that seeps from the pages right into you. The book unfolds as a very honest quest: how to deal with betrayal from people you loved and looked up to, when they didn't ever mean to betray you. How can you come to terms with you own sense of love and loyalty towards people who injured you. And how can it be released if it has to hidden?
This is not a judgemental book. It is very human.

I put off reading Natalie Goldberg's memoir The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth for several years, although the premise interested me. I had read an article in "What is Enlightenment?" magazine, "Women Who Sleep with Their Gurus ... and Why They Love It" by Jessica Roemischer, which had challenged my beliefs about power and pressure in teacher/student sexual relationships. That article segued well into Natalie Goldberg's book, but after reading customer reviews of "The Great Failure," I couldn't bear to listen to her whine about how her teacher let her down by sleeping with students, which she learned about only after his death, and which reminded her of inappropriate remarks her father had made to her as she was growing up.

I finally read the book, and I was pleasantly surprised. As I read it, I felt that Goldberg was well aware of her own infantile wishes to have a better father, a different childhood, and a blameless teacher. This struggle with Utopian yearnings was lost on reviewers who instead latched on to the story of her understandable disappointment and disillusionment.

Goldberg also has plenty of perspective into the victimization encouraged by the consciousness-raising movement of the 1970s, which she dutifully internalized -- to the bafflement of the parents she then confronted, and from whom she estranged herself for some long time.

The postmortem revelations about Katagiri Roshi's various affairs put Goldberg into a crisis, making her question everything he had taught her, and to look with a freshly disillusioned eye at remarks he'd sometimes made to her, which seemed after the fact to be a kind of fishing as to her availability.

But Natalie Goldberg took advantage of the opportunity for an advanced step in emotional maturation, one that allowed her to see through her teacher's persona, inviting him to continue teaching her even after his death, which allowed her to make peace both with her teacher as a real person, and with her father.

In the Bible, Paul taught that believers shouldn't challenge the cohesiveness of the community by partaking in activities that others find questionable. In advising the young church on whether or not one may eat meat, Paul says in Romans 14: "Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall." (Also see 1 Corinthians 8 for a similar injunction.)

But that perspective has fallen out of vogue, in favor of boundaries and individuation and diversity.

Is it incumbent on a teacher to adjust his life and his actions to refrain from disillusioning students? I would say "no" -- I'm at a point in my journey where disillusionment is a window into my illusionment -- but I'm interested in how others approach the subject, and Natalie Goldberg has a valuable perspective into the distress of the sangha when secrets inevitably come out.

Natalie Goldberg gives us a rare chance to read about how devotional love and honesty are a path filled with disappointments and mirrors. I was delighted to find this book in print, after years of feeling alone in my desire to reveal the truth about my own teachers.

Courage is hard won in this memoir, and the writing is vivid, making me run back to the memoir I started when I met Natalie, just before Katagiri Roshi died. My own parents and spiritual teachers used language in ways that made me hypervigilant about boundaries. I was always overstepping my bounds. Devotional people and children give allegiance to teachers who aren't always congruent within their own lives. Some of us come up with the pearl, others choose victimhood. Natalie is one of those rare people who sees how to use pain as a gateway. Her memoir helps me realize how I stand in relation to these issues, where I haven't been honest with myself.

Jesse White, School for Wonder founder

It took me a long time to put this review together in my mind and heart, sort of taking the time to really digest the words and experiences of Natalie Goldberg, who is one of my absolutely favorite writers and minds out there today.

I have given her books, "Writing Down the Bones" and "Wild Mind" to writer friends of mine. I adore her work.

So on the first reading of this book, I was troubled. This book did not sound like the Natalie I knew on the first read through - I thought, "This sounds like a victim-y person from the big rush of "You hurt me you horrible, wicked person you and I will publicly flog you for doing it, too!"

I harkened back to a conversation I had with a therapist. I shared with her an experience I had which someone had labeled "abuse" and that label caused friction in my mind and heart.

The therapist said, "That is completely normal" and I let go of the "abuse."

It was like when I read the previews of this book, I saw words like "molest" and I was horrified. When I read the book I kinda said, "What?"

What was exceptional was Natalie's writing. She never fails to woo me with her brilliant metaphors, her connection to the sacred and her willingness to be human, to kvetch when she feels like it and witness the world as it unfolds.

This particular book feels to me like it could use some more unfolding.

I heard the writing turning the bend... and kind of stop, I felt, before the unfolding was complete.

My hope is long-time Natalie fans read this book and dwell in gratitude for Natalie modeling how right it is to simply be where you are - and for newcomers to start with "Long Quiet Highway" and then "Wild Mind" or "Bones" and ease into this one.

The bottom line in the book is loving in spite of failures and shortcomings.

The love between Natalie and her parents - both of them - and Roshi... and the imprint of that love... that is what shimmers out to me several weeks after first reading.