Customer Reviews

The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This daughter's tribute to her father is a very compelling and, at times, disturbing read. I say disturbing because Leonard Wolf is both a towering, magnetic intellect and passionately even dogmatically convicted, "all or nothing" personality. As T. S. Eliot said of Samuel Johnson, "he is a dangerous man to disagree with." In the section titled, Do Nothing Without Passion, I did feel much empathy for a poor soul named, Malcolm, against whom I felt, as he was an absent and shunned husband, Naomi and Leonard united. At a climactic moment when Leonard, Naomi, and Malcolm's wife are discussing the wife's marriage, Leonard invokes a passage from Chaucer's, Troilus and Criseyde, to proclaim, "Chaucer is saying that after a while, Criseyde felt no pain at the absence of Troilus. If a string with knots was pulled through a heart, it would hurt! No knots, no pain. You marry someone if you literally cannot live without them; if they have made knots in your heart that cannot ever be released, by time, by distance. About marriage, it means, in plain words: if there is no passion, forget it" Aside from Leonard probably being right, painful as that is to process, I would have to ask both Leonard and Naomi, how would you feel if your wife or husband were the beneficiary of such an exhortation by the well-intentioned in your absence?

As a father of two independent daughters I was yet extremely moved by Naomi Wolf's tribute to her father; thrilled also by the generosity with which she shared so much and so intimately from his views and his life. Leonard Wolf is, I emphasize, a man of intense vibrancy and depth that goes far beyond his horror fiction scholarship. Estimable as his criticism is, I have long known and sought his other many sides as poet, dramatist, and novelist (perhaps this book will spark a Leonard Wolf revival so we can finally enjoy his science fiction poetry and his dramatization of The Rape of Lock among other works that have never been widely available). I also must confess that I came to the book very eagerly and very eagerly biased as I was very blessed to have been a part of his Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, seminar in back in 1971 when I experienced the man first hand. His teaching went way beyond the seminar subject, and it has had a huge impact on my life. "No one, absolutely no one, is exonerated from the love experience," I can still his deep, soft voice intoning. He took that observation to an explanation of how Emily Dickinson had so much more to say about love than Walt Whitman did (I sure as hell agree with him on that).

At first glance many of the title headings, such as Use Your Imagination and Identify Your Hearts Desire might appear to be from a book that is just another spin from the vast amount of banality flooding out of the human potential movement. As one reads the accounts in the book, however, one can see how Leonard Wolf lives his values in such a convincing way that one must confront him directly, either to follow or strongly depart. I have discovered that I have learned far more from differing with him, and pursuing the challenge in the difference, than from living comfortably in agreeing with him (I agree with him on many if not most of his views).

Treehouse is a treasure.

This book came highly recommended by my dad ~~ he was recommended to read it by one of his photographer friends. This book is definitely a keeper in my library! It is intense, thoroughly thoughtful, honest and engaging. While the lessons may be geared to writers, it really is geared to everyone. There is a creative bent in each of us and our life is just as important as some of the well-known writers/artists. We have to strive to find the peace deep within us and Wolf's father was just simply pointing it out to the reader.

In today's world, life is hectic and stressful enough that sometimes, we wake up one day and realize this is not where we want to be. It doesn't matter who you are ~~ you matter. It's that simple. Leonard, Naomi's father, was just mentioning that life is too short for regrets. Now he's not advocating drugs or wild sex or anything like that. He's advocating that each of us find deep within ourselves how to be a much better person because each of us has so much to offer to the world. Obviously, we all can't be Monets, but we can strive for that. The basic lesson is to find our creative vein and discover just what it is that makes individuals happy and unique in their lives.

In this book, this author's family and herself have found a wild corner in Boston's Corners where they had to basically rebuild the house from bottom up and clear the land. Her daughter wanted a treehouse built and Naomi decided to help her build one. Through their building sessions or anything, Naomi and her father would talk. Sometimes friends would join them and other times, it was just them. This book is like a treehouse ~~ starts off slowly and uncertainly then by the end, it's radiant and beautiful with the joy flowing from the author's pen.

Despite the heaviness of the topics sometimes, I never found this book to be a drag. Instead, I find this book to be joyous and uplifting and encouraging. It was an intimate book between author and reader. We're in this together, me reading her thoughts which flowed very eloquently, by the way, and her sharing her insights of what she has learned from her father and life experiences. It is encouraging in the sense that you feel your spirit awakening and you're reaching for a highlighter to mark certain passages just because it speaks to the heart. It is uplifting to know that it's never to late to find your dream again and strive to make it come true.

I will rate this one as one of my top ten reads of 2005. I have never read any of Naomi Wolf's books before though I have heard of her. This book is just inspirational in itself and it is definitely one that I would recommend to every serious reader. It is joyful and wonderful that it's just a perfect addition to your library!

12-20-05

I heard Naomi Wolf being interviewed on NPR about this book. The interview and a short passage she read prompted me to buy the book. I am so glad I did... It's filled with lessons I have learned from many diverse sources over the years. It's so nice to have these lessons now contained in one entertaining and heartfelt volume. The love she has for her father and the passion and wisdom he imparts to her (which she is finally starting to appreciate) is joyously and entertainingly shared within these pages. I am going to reread The Tree House often and share it with family and friends. This is one of those books that can change your life. I only wish Naomi's father Leonard was still teaching. It would have been grand to be his student.

This is a beautiful book, a tribute not only to a father, but also to an extraordinary teacher with a passion for living. Naomi Wolf shares her father's poetic wisdom, lesson by lesson, by recounting a summer spent building a tree house with her children, her friends, and of course, her father, Leonard. As she looks to him for advice on how to build this metaphorical house, she opens herself to his wisdom in helping her to become a better teacher. She, in turn, teaches us. The Treehouse is a book that should be read by every aspiring writer.

Each lesson begins with a description of what Leonard is wearing, from a yellow rain slicker like Paddington Bear, to an "intellectual-in-the-1970s outfit," to a red flannel Basque shepherd's shirt and Argentine gaucho hat, and also tells what strange (or conventional) brew he is drinking. In addition to his outfits, Wolf's descriptive writing allows us to see his thick white eyebrows dance with expression and hear his voice as he lyrically speaks in quotes from Thoreau, Emerson, Chaucer, Dickenson, etc. Throughout the lessons, Wolf lapses into memoir, recounting her San Francisco childhood, and a small bit about her rise to fame after the publication of "The Beauty Myth," but only because it helps to explain the person she had become in spite of (or perhaps, because of) her father. Even more interesting is the biographic account of her father's bohemian life.

In the final lesson, as Leonard teaches the need to own your creative work, to "sign it and let it go," to me, the words that spoke the loudest were: "Once the work is out in the world, it is none of your business what your readers make of it." Again, wonderful advice for writers. As for reviewers . . .

I felt the need to review this book and give it my highest recommendation.

Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

Have always appreciated Naomi Wolf's works and this book gives the reader a peek inside the home that helped make her the woman that she is. The only issue I have with her writing style in this books is how she goes back and forth from calling her Dad by his first name and then simply referring to him a Dad.

Loved reading about the different periods on both coasts that she have live in, which gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a well traveled woman, who also lived a unique life that was very much life the places she happened to be living in.

Loved reading about her 'nearly derelict house in the midst of a desolate meadow that was dense with thorns' in New York State. And the tid bits about the state of the house as they set about to make it livable, the daffodils poking out in the midst of nowhere.

The various lessons she writes about are: Be Still and Listen, Use Your Imagination, Destroy the Box, Speak in Your Own Voice, Identify Your Hearts Desire, Do Nothing Without Passion, Be Disciplined With Your Gift, Pay Attention to the Details, Your Only Wage Will Be Joy, Mistakes Are Part of the Draft, Frame Your Work, Sign It and Let It Go.

Who better than Naomi Wolf, already a famous author, to tell tehstory of the life of her father, the gifted poet and novelist Leonard Wolf? It seems that, at forty, Naomi was undergoing a troubled latch in her life, though it's soort of cloudy why she suddenly felt so disengaged on the one hand and, on the other, so concerned and doubtful about the life choices she had already made. Someone looking at her would think she had it all! And yet inside, she was deeply miserable.

So she decides to try to get some elder wisdom from her dad. He, Leonard Wolf, is not to be confused with Leonard Woolf with two oo's, the one who married Virginia Woolf. But I expect plenty of people mixed them up. In one wellknown story, the novelist E M Forster made an American tour after World War II, and he was inveigled to UC Berkeley, where he snubbed the faculty and the dean and instead had tea with a group of student poets led by Leonard Wolf. Perhaps Forster thought they had already met? That would tie in with his Mr. Magoo persona. As Naomi Wolf relates, Wolf was in the very center of the so-called Berkeley Renaissance, a short-lived poetic movement of great distinction that centered around the English Department but was distinctly separate from it. Wolf and other poets, including Robert Duncan, Mary Fabilli, Jack Spicer, Thomas Parkinson, Landis Everson and Robin Blaser, sought to change the face of poetry and to yank its still beating heart from the purlieux of New York, Paris and London and consecrate it at Berkeley.

Wolf's beautiful, shiksa wife Pat, an extremely talented writer herself, was part of the mix. Leonard and Patricia later separated in the mid 1950s, and he married Naomi's mother. Naomi frames her story in the lessons Leonard taught her. Each chapter is like a little sermon in which Naomi takes the Leonardine text and expounds on it, and how it fits into her own writing, her own life, her teaching practice, her children and the circle of young female writers and activists she is committed to encouraging. Leonard must be over eighty by now, still hale and hearty and filled with great wisdom. Besides being one of the United States' most criminally ignored poets, whose very first book HAMADRYAD HUNTED is a classic of postwar literature, he is an expert on DRACULA and Francis Ford Coppola used his expertise as a consultant when he made the film version of Dracula with Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder.

The Treehouse is one of eight books of the thousands published in 2005 to receive a Books for a Better Life award in a ceremony like an "Academy Awards" for books. Hurrah to Larry McMurtry, who won an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain and reminded the audience of the importance of books. The seven other winners in this amazing prize-winning list are: The Tender Bar (J.R. Moehringer), The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls), Undoing Perpetual Stress (Richard O'Connor), The Sociopath Next Door (Martha Stout), Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships (John Welwood), Unattended Sorrow (Stephen Levine), and Jim Cramer's Real Money.

This book contains some gems for writers. Throughout the book, Wolf and her father are building a treehouse for her daughter. Leonard Wolf has a series of key points that he regularly teaches. "Be disciplined," Leonard said, again looking up from his class notes. "Do you want to know how to become a writer? It is not romantic." Then he glared from under his white brows and almost harshly said, as much about life, it seems, as about writing, "There is no revising a blank page. Keep going."..."Even when you do not feel like it-especially then-GO ON."

"Writer's block," he said, "comes about when you let yourself yield to two false notions about your task. The first is that writing is a profound occupation, important as a means of expressing the self, some truth about life, or about the universe. This is all nonsense."

"The second false notion is that writing must at every moment be perfect. No one objects to perfection eventually, but the idea of it does nothing to help you get started." (p. 176-177)

Many people will gain truth from reading these stories.

It was totally enjoyable to read of her experiences and insight to her father's life.

Naomi Wolf presents to us the lessons her father, poet Leonard Wolf, gave his students throughout his teaching career. The portrait she presents is that of a character that just about everyone would wish to have known or to have had in their lives. The wisdom and light in his words provide windows on an enchanted world, the world as filtered through his unique spirit.

The writer presents his "12 lessons", which are lessons of life more than of writing, while simultaneously telling the story of how he helped her build a treehouse for her daughter in the years before he passed away. How his lessons could be applied is demonstrated through past and present situations from his life, that of the author, and various people in their lives.

She writes of where Leonard comes from, his background in Romania and his Jewish family, the story of their immigration to the United States, the strife and hardship of his childhood, and how "his mother used her imagination to survive poverty" and how he, too, followed her example, whereby "reading saved him", and "stories and poetry made reality bearable" and how all that contributed to his belief that "everyone is here on earth as an artist".

Leonard believed in the magical power of art. To him, racism, fascism, etc were all "failures of the imagination". He believed that artists were more important than politicians. He believed that a person should disregard their work's "marketability" and follow their passion, as the joy of the work itself is the biggest reward. He believed that "being true to the inner light is absolute".

A commendable effort on the part of Naomi Wolf to transmit his lessons to us before he was no longer there.

However, this work would have been even better had she managed to contact some of his former students and get some of their memories of him. Since he taught creative writing for many decades at a college in California, surely, it would not have been difficult to track them through the alumni office. I am sure that anyone who had a teacher like Leonard in their lives would remember him, and, since they were writers (or aspiring-writers), they'd have had no problem in articulating their memories and experiences. Even a few such testimonies would have enriched the book considerably.

The reasons why I'm not giving this book five stars is because of a "slight ethical blunder" on the part of the author, in one of the parts where she describes characters from her present life, to show Leonard's influence on them, and how he helped them get to a place where they could see their inner light and act upon it.

However, while the author stated at the beginning of the book that she's changing her friends' names to protect their privacy, one particular character was singled out for what would probably make his identification extremely easy, even if his name has been changed. He was the partner of a friend of the author, who made that friend "very unhappy". When Wolf wrote about him, she went into great lengths to enumerate details about his background and parents, details such as the exact district of London they lived in, the specific jobs they held, what they were known for in their communities, etc. etc., details whose sole purpose seemed to make that person identifiable. Nowhere in the book did the author relegate such meticulous detail to the entire family of one of her friends.

Anne Lamott wrote of the issue of "revenge" in writing, in her book "Bird by Bird" in a lengthy and amusing way, she stressed, however, the imperativeness of camouflage of whoever the author wishes to settle scores with. "Revenge" has been acknowledged as a possible motivation for writing, BUT, there is a very clear rule about where to draw the line, making "the target" unidentifiable. In this book, the author crossed that line, and I, as a reader, felt somewhat ambushed, used, and extremely dismayed. She was responding to an unfortunate desire to jab the person involved, using, or, more accurately, abusing, her power as a published writer.

Interestingly, the author also wrote of how her friend, once she broke up with the gentleman in question, had two relationships, one in which she, more or less, lavished in utter sensual delight, but "that was all there was to it" (great sex, basically), and the other, where she found what seemed to be the perfect partner, her soul-mate, the whole package. One can't help but wonder, wasn't that "revenge" enough?

The lofty world created by the memory of Leonard got tainted by this apparently irresistible and petty urge to get back at that person. And while his identification might have satisfied that urge, it did little service to the author's ethical credentials in my book.

From her portrayal of Leonard, I doubt if he'd have approved of that vendetta stunt either.

Vendetta stunts notwithstanding, this book is definitely worth reading, for the chance to bask in Leonard Wolf's views on life.