Customer Reviews

Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (SkyLight Lives)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Alan Watts was one of the celebrities of San Francisco's 1967 'Summer of Love'. His version of Zen Buddhism was regularly broadcast on the newly emerging FM radio stations that served the booming teen market. As a teenager, one of these broadcasts introduced me to Zen and I've always appreciated Alan's efforts to bring me that message.

I was surprised to discover Watts ending his life at the relatively young age of 58. According to Furlong, he averaged a bottle of vodka per day during his last years. He passed away in his sleep, probably from heart failure. To the end, he maintained a workaholic lifestyle which supported two ex-wives, wife number 3, and a steady stream of affairs with innocent young women enchanted by his 'talk'. He was survived by all three wives and at least 7 children.

Alan started his life in England and grew up in 'public' schools. In his teens (1934) he published his first book on Zen Buddhism. He continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life.

He seems to have dodged the British draft in 1939 by moving to America, and dodged the American draft in 1941 by enrolling in an Episcopalian seminary. In the mid 40s, he took up the role of college chaplain and remained one for about 5 years. At that point, a dramatic affair with a beautiful coed ended the priestly career and first marriage. His later career as a free-lance writer and lecturer-at-large was shaped by this scandal.

And, does any of this matter? Does his alcoholism color how one reads his books or listens to his recorded lectures? This question is the focus of the biography. Furlong concludes it doesn't. Watts was the 'coyote' of Native American legend, bringing fire to mankind, but getting his tail burnt in the process. Exactly how he fit into the 'beat' and 'hippie' movements is never directly addressed, though Furlong connects Alan with all the key names. There isn't a serious effort to explore Zen, either. The focus is more personal, modern and western: Do the private weaknesses of your favorite celebrity change your reaction to the 'message' that celebrity delivers via TV, movies or radio?

If this sounds interesting, you might want to look into 'The Golden Guru'.

This book will surely be of great interest to those who found this friendly philosopher compelling, but we should take care not to judge him too harshly on account of it, as many reviewers have. Watts always eloquently alluded to the limits of language and of drawing conclusions, and those limitations are on display in this work. He taught that life was more like flowing water than sharp words, that the issues are never really black or white. He was a complex man in a confusing age, and it's too easy to generalize in such a small format about such a large person. Great abilties can be the other side of great faults. Also, just as the 40's and 50's hadn't recognized the full folly of tobacco, the 60's and 70's hadn't entirely wised up to alcohol and drugs. The times themselves were intoxicated and chaotic, and a lifelong addiction to fame is hard for many to bring to an easy end. It was sad to read, but sorrow attends all our lives, and an intellect of that strength exacts a toll on other parts of the personality, and the author makes clear this was a man brilliant from the beginning, to the imbalance of his emotional life. But wisdom often is born of failure and struggle, and his loss was our gift. I consider him one of my finest teachers while growing up, and nothing in this book changed that. He "played" his part to teach us that the falseness and contradictions of the world can be reconciled in one true spirit.

I've been interested in Watts for a number of years now, having read a few of his books and listened to several of his lectures. As I came to hear of his "dark side," I became curious about his life, and so I was happy to find Monica Furlong's biography. As one of the only book-length treatments of Watts (apart from his own autobiography, of course) I'm glad to have read this and I learned a lot from it. I do have some criticisms, though. For one, not having read Watts' autobiography before Furlong's book, I felt she depended on the autobiography far too much in the beginning chapters; since she was quoting so much, why shouldn't I just read the autobiography instead? For my money, the highlight of the book was the middle section on Watts' time as a minister. The chapter devoted to Watts and Eleanor's correspondence was really fascinating, and I appreciated how Furlong (finally) started to read the autobiography against the grain, criticizing Watts' tone and pointing out what he isn't saying. Not only was Furlong giving me something the autobiography wouldn't, but she opened up new ways of looking at the autobiography, and Watts himself.

Unfortunately, that level of scrutiny falls off during the remaining sections on Watts' rise to fame as a guru figure and his subsequent physical decline. Perhaps because this is the most well-documented period of Watts' life, Furlong goes through this period fairly quickly, I think. It's not that I feel like I'm missing key events in his life; that would be nice, of course, but, again, it would be relatively easy to find that out myself. Rather, I miss the analysis Furlong applies to Watts' rationalizations of becoming a minister. There are a lot of contradictions in Watts' life, particularly in this final period. As someone who talked the talk but who couldn't or wouldn't walk the walk, where does that leave us with regard to Alan Watts? How should we see him -- as a teacher, an object lesson, a joke? Do his personal shortcomings undermine his work, and if so how badly? How do we reconcile the man and the work?

It's not that I want to be told what to think, but Furlong had access to people who were close to Watts and who, presumably, have some opinions about questions like these. They seem like important questions, too, when assessing the value of a spiritual figure. Perhaps I'm asking too much of Furlong here, though if I am it's because when she does shift into a critical mode it makes for some good, compelling reading. But the questions left unresolved here only leave room for another biography.

Although I have given this book 5 stars, it deserves some serious criticism. Monica Furlong's earlier biography of Thomas Merton is quite a bit longer as well as more objective. She would seem an ideal biographer for Watts, and yet the results are somewhat disappointing. The original UK hardcover of this work was entitled "Genuine Fake," which is a sad example of using someone's own words against them. The American title "Zen Effects" is much better. The first two thirds of the book are quite excellent, but Furlong's coverage becomes more superficial as well as less sympathetic after circa 1955. Since Watts' last two decades on earth were his period of greatest fame, perhaps she felt that we already knew enough about that period. However, much of what we thought or remember may be in serious need of revision and reexamination. I feel the ideal account of Alan Watts' life has yet to be written. Since I first encountered his work in 1968, there have been several times when Watts' books and/or lectures have made me happier to be alive. No philosopher or spiritual teacher can do more than that. Many other readers have had similar experiences, no doubt. Therefore a more detailed and respectful biography is long overdue. The entire New Age movement would be nearly inconceivable without Watts' contributions. There is only one other biography of Watts - the other (by David Stuart) is long out of print and decidedly inferior to Furlong's book. There is also the autobiography "In My Own Way," much the best written of the three. If you love Watts, you should read all of these as well as all his books (some sadly out of print). But I hope someone out there will research and write the definitive Watts biography, or else I will have to do so myself!

listening to his taped lectures or watching the video recordings should read Monica Furlong's biography first.

Monica Furlong has written a discreet, respectful biography of a man whose reputation is still a flickering flame, whose seven children and three wives still profit from his works and whose former friends and associates remain, for the most part, silent about Watts' personal life, at least in writing.

I imagine that Furlong wrote the biography with anxious glances over her shoulder at imagined lawyers defending what is left of Watts' reputation but she manages quite well anyway, to provide a very good outline of his life that we are, I think, invited to fill in with our imaginations.

The external events of Alan Watt's life are not pretty:

For example, he quite suddenly "converted" to Episcopalianism after many years as a Buddhist, and became a Priest without going through the normal academic preparations. Powerful people within the Church hierarchy "pulled strings" for him, to "get him in" based on the reputation of his books, mostly on Buddhism and Zen.

His daughter Joan suggested that one reason for his sudden "conversion" from Buddhism to Christianity was that it was 1941 and Watts was eligible for the draft. Being a Priest would keep him from being drafted.

Watts was formally asked to leave the Church after his wife, Eleanor, sent a letter to Bishop Wallace Conkling, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Chicago, complaining about Watt's unusual sexual demands. In the letter, Eleanor said that Watts demanded that Evelyn beat him as the only way he could have sexual satisfaction with her.

He also inflicted various tortures upon himself to achieve orgasm ... He told me that he had practiced masturbation more than once daily from his schooldays to the present and that as the fantasy life which accompanied this practice grew more compelling he spent hours in drawing pornographic pictures and reading pornographic literature to excite his interest.

As a result of this and other complications with his marriage, the Church was in the process of asking Watts to leave when Watts resigned. He then married his second wife, Dorothy, which caused automatic excommunication from the Episcopal Church because he was still considered married to his first wife, Eleanor.

In the end, Watts was married three times and was, by his own admission, unfaithful to all three of his wives.

Watts' own father regarded his son as "a failure as a husband and father."

Watts admitted to being a bad father, mostly from simple neglect. He said, justifying himself in his autobiography:

the Disneyland 'world of childhood' is an itsy-bitsy, cutie-pied, plastic hoax; a world populated by frustrated brats trying to make out why they are not treated as human beings ... If my children have found me distant and aloof, this is the explanation.

He left his second wife, Dorothy, and his four children, when she was pregnant with their fifth child. During his marriage to Dorothy he spent most of his time away from home and behaved like a single man, according to his friend Gary Snyder. Furlong reports that Watts was drinking heavily by then, in 1960, "mostly vodka."

Watts' friend Roger Somers said of Watts numerous sexual adventures,

He saw [these women] freely, was quite effective with them, and loved them, but to live with one of those - here was the crack in the vase: his unwillingness to accept joy. Instead his self-importance was demonstrated by their inability to cope - he would take over from them - and of course, they would end up morbidly dependent upon him. This was not like the man who was talking to us about Zen. That's not Zen - that's Zen backwards.

One of his closest friends, Gary Snyder, said of him "He was one who sowed problems wherever he went."

Jack Kerouac describes him in his novel Dharma Bums (as Arthur Whane,)

[Watts] stands in the firelight, smartly dressed in suit and necktie, having a perfectly serous discussion about world affairs with two naked men.
"Well, what is Buddhism?" someone asks him. "Is it fantastic imagination, magic of the lighting flash, is it plays, dreams, not even plays, dreams?"
"No, to me Buddhism is getting to know as many people as possible." And there he was going round the party real affable shaking hands with everybody and chatting, a regular cocktail party.

The famous Zen scholar and practitioner, Masao Abe said of Watts: "I think he's a very clever man, clever interpreter of Zen, but I don't know how much he has practiced Zen meditation."

That was, I think, a dismissal of Watts claim to be a Zen teacher. (Zen is, after all, explicitly said to be beyond theory and words and is instead, essentially, a way of life.)

Watts clearly drank himself to death: His doctor told him that if he didn't quit, he would surely die and when his son Mark, like the others, was troubled by his drinking:

"I'd say to him, 'Dad, don't you want to live?' and he would say, 'Yes, but it's not worth holding onto.' "

His third wife's niece, Kathleen, asked him, "Uncle Alan, why?" "When I drink I don't feel so alone," he told her.

The Jungian analyst, Jane Singer, visited him in the hospital where he was suffering from delirium tremens. "That's how I am," he said to her sadly. "I can't change."

In 1968, he said to Paula McGuire, his editor at Pantheon Books, "If I don't drink, I don't feel sexy."

Just before his death, Watts found the time to write a remarkably honest essay which sums up his career, called Trickster Guru. Here are some relevant excerpts:

It must be understood from the start that the trickster guru fills a real need and performs a genuine public service. Millions of people are searching desperately for a true father-Magician, especially at a time when the clergy and the psychiatrists are making rather a poor show, and do not seem to have the courage of their convictions or of their fantasies. Perhaps they have lost nerve through too high a valuation of the virtue of honesty ...

you must eventually come to believe in your own hoax, because this will give you ten times more nerve. This can be done through religionizing total skepticism to the point of basic incredulity about everything - even science. After all, this is in line with the Hindu-Buddhist position that the whole universe is an illusion, and you need not worry about whether the Absolute is real or unreal, eternal or non-eternal, because every idea of it that you could form would be, in comparison with living it up in the present, horribly boring.

Watts made his last visit to his home town in England, Chistlehurst, to celebrate his father's 90th birthday, in 1971. Monica Furlong reports that it was very late and Watts was giving a long-winded speech that no one was interested in when one of the impatient waiters was heard to say "If Confucius here would just stop talking we could go home."

The waiter undoubtedly went to the country school nearby where the boys were all rumored to say "ain't" instead of "isn't" and where Watts' parents were afraid to send him. The waiter could spot a trickster guru from the back of a dark room, after midnight, without any problem.

Alan, summed up his own education this way,

I was sent to a boarding school (Saint Hugh's) for instruction in laughing and grief, in militarism and regimented music, in bibliolatry and bad ritual, in cricket, soccer and rugby, in preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry) and in subtle, but not really overt, homosexuality.

Instead of England getting a very impressive and imposing head waiter, America got a very impressive and imposing trickster guru. We shouldn't complain too much about that, after all.

I realized well into this book that it essentially consisted of the author quoting Alan Watts' autobiography, and then projecting her own amateur psychological interpretations onto her subjects' character and motivations. After spending some time pondering the author's possible issues as reflected in those (mostly negative) projections, I decided to read the actual autobiography. In spite of the limitations inherent in analyzing oneself, I found Alan Watts' insights into himself to be much more fascinating.

This book suffers from a problem that is common with biographies. There is minutia that is covered in quite dry detail (especially in the chapters on Watts's early life), yet the very obvious and interesting stories are glossed over, generalized, inaccurate or left out completely. For instance, several pages are devoted to the kinds of food that Watts liked in grade school, yet Watts's relationship with Jack Kerouac is vaguely generalized in a paragraph that completely contradicts everything else that we have read about the friendship that the two had. At times it seems as if the author was not very interested in Alan Watts or his place in culture at all, but rather she seems to have been laboriously and dutifully compling facts as if she were writing a high school book report that had been assigned to her. Considering the fact that I wasn't there, I would much rather read a biography by someone who was not only there but interested. It appears that Furlong was neither.

I appreciated this book and always enjoy Ms. Furlong's research and writing style. To be honest, I was surprised to discover an old counterculture hero was such a combination of earnestness and flimflam opportunism. Too bad.

But having said that, I guess few of us are totally consistent in our lives. But in a way, isn't that the definition of integrity? So, I don't think Watts had much integrity, if this book is accurate. But he was obviously a profoundly talented man who moved many people to broaden their view of the world. And that is worth a lot.

As for all the adoring young women that he took advantage of, well, perhaps we are applying today's values on yesterday. They didn't think it was so wrong for a person in authority to have affairs with their students. Today it is abhorrent and certainly a firable offence -- but I doubt he understood the dynamics of abuse in that sort of situation.

As for the business about him and "spanking," I don't think that needed to be included. Did we really want to know that??

But I do recommend the book. It is good to remember that people are just people. As the Buddhists would say, a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. So what did anyone really expect.

Here is a book that changed my perception of its subject.

I met Alan Watts about a year ago through a series of recorded lectures. From the first listen I was enthralled by his learning, wit, and eloquence. His talks were magic spells woven from strands of Zen, mystic Christianity, Taoism, and psychology, calling the listener to wake up, to see through the assumptive illusions of life, to put aside the effort of trying to change yourself and simply be yourself. For more than a couple of months I listened rapturously nightly, often going back to some of the more challenging and insightful talks.

Aside from a lecture in which he spoke about his childhood interest in Asian art and his experience of English boarding school, what little I knew about him I picked up from references in his talks: he lived in California, was a former member of the clergy, had experimented with psychoactive drugs, and had met or knew a seemingly large coterie of influential and interesting people.

What I didn't know was what an utter shambles he made of his personal life, which author Monica Furlong chronicles painfully enough in Zen Effects. Watts seemed never to have had any great purpose in life except to enjoy as much of it as possible, but for as much enjoyment as he received he seemed to have caused an equal amount of grief for those around him. He was, Gary Snyder remarked, "one who sowed problems wherever he went."

His only professional experience as a clergyman ended in shame for his wife, his parents, and his church. For all the wit and charm and understanding he exhibited in public life, his private life was a cold and callous string of marriages punctuated by infidelity and child neglect. And despite a call to his audiences to embrace uncertainty, his fear of loneliness led to an alcohol induced death at the age of 53.

In many of his lectures, Watts referred to himself self-depreciatively as a philosophical entertainer and a genuine fake. I used to think he was simply making fun of himself, a bit of harmless manipulation of the audience. In the context of his personal life, though, the remarks seem almost confessional, a plea for understanding and perhaps forgiveness.

For many who idolized him, the pain of deceit is too great to bridge the gulf between Watts' public teachings and his private life. For myself, I can still appreciate his great intellect, his insight, and his ability to communicate. But I'll never quite think of him the same.

#

a mostly entertaining and enlightening exploration of a very interesting life. The author wisely discovers the many facets of Watts' brilliance while not shying away (nor too harshly condemning) his failings.

I was a little put off by her condemnation of Leary and her accusations/implications that many more suffered, rather than benefited, from their entheogenic explorations. Also, given the modest size of this book it struck me as odd that she was so critical of Watts' autobiography, from which she surely pulled much information. Having just read biographies of Aldous Huxley and Clive Barker, both of which were expansive compared to Zen Effects, it seemed strange to so quickly get through this one.

All-in-all I think she did a pretty good job, writing something that is eloquent and memorable, and this work will hopefully steer many toward the wonder of Alan Watts.