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Nothing quite like 'Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'

By Carl Heintze

Back in the 1970s a college professor named Robert Pirsig wrote a book with the arresting title: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's never been anything quite like it in American literature. Indeed, the whole story of Pirsig and Zen is unique, without exact equal.

His story is the kind that makes other authors gnash their teeth and roll their eyes.

Here's what happened:

Pirsig was a kind of gypsy scholar, but a brilliant one, nevertheless. He was reputed to have an intelligence quotient of 160 or so, enough to make him eligible for Mensa, the organization for those with high IQs.

He studied at some unusual places--the University of Benares in India, for one--and he was, for a time, a teacher at the University of Montana. But when he wrote the book, he was a technical writer.

By then he was married and the father of two sons. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteance purports to be a trip he and his eldest son, Chris, who was then in his teens, took from Minneapolis across the northern tier of Western states to San Francisco.

But it's a lot more than that. It's also a discussion of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, how to teach (and how not to teach) and a lot of other things all sort of mixed up together.

Pirsig had a hard time getting Zen published. Supposedly it was rejected by over 100 publishers and agents before it was finally accepted by William Morrow. They didn't think it would earn back much more than its publishing costs.

Little did they know.

In the time since it first appeared, it's become a classic of the chaotic years of the '70s, when a generation was seeking new answers as to how to live in a post-Vietnam America.

It's never been out of print, and it's supported Pirsig through the rest of his not-always-rewarding writing career. Although he's published a couple of other books, neither of them have equaled the success of Zen.

As I've said, Zen is a peculiar book. (It's even had a book written about it, trying not too successfully to explain it.)

For years librarians have worried over whether Zen is nonfiction or a novel. My own guess is that it is some of both. Pirsig says in a brief introductory note that some parts of the story have been changed "for rhetorical purposes."

I take that to mean he has moved events around and fiddled with time to make a better story. Whatever he did worked because the book gradually grabs the reader and carries him or her through to the end.

Early in the book a character named Phaedres appears and gradually becomes as important as Pirsig himself. I won't spoil the story for those who haven't read it, but I will tell you Phaedres is at the core of what happens.

Along the miles of the motorcycle journey, Pirsig also introduces what he calls Chatauquas, brief intrusions of what I guess you'd call elemental cosmetology. At first they seem intrusive, but after awhile it becomes clear they're important to the story, too, because what Pirsig is about is the really big question: who and what are we and what is our place in the world?

The answer he reaches is not the answer everyone is going to come up with, but the journey is fascinating. Zen also is a "journey" book in the grand tradition of On the Road by Jack Kerovac and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

There are two sequels to Zen.

You have to know about the first to understand the second.

After he reached maturity, Chris, the teenaged son, moved to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. He was stabbed to death in front of it. Pirsig was heartbroken. He got divorced, remarried and miraculously then became the father of a girl named Lila. Lila is the name of his second book that takes up where Zen stopped, sort of, with an account of a trip down the East Coast in a sailboat with a young girl named Lila.

I take Lila to be life or life renewed and the boat trip an attempt to incorporate this into a new "journey" book.

Alas, it doesn't work as well as Zen. Pirsig also wrote a third book that sank without notice. Since then he has been silent. He apparently lives much of the year in England, grants few interviews and is now elderly.

But Zen marches on.

As its introduction says, it won't teach you much about motorcycle maintenance and probably even less about Zen Buddhism, but it will hold your attention if you can get beyond the first 100 pages.

And my guess is it will continue to maintain its own special and peculiar place in American literature.