Tom Zito's 1974 Profile of Robert Pirsig

Tom Zito's profile of Robert M. Pirsig was published August 5, 1974 in the Washington Post, and syndicated widely in other newspapers. Zito had spent two weeks that summer with the reclusive Pirsig "bumping along mountain roads" in a VW camper in Montana. Pirsig had retreated to the "high country of the mind" to read and begin writing his follow up book, working title Them Pesky Indians, just after the meteoric success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published that April. That book had been published without a photo of the author... Pirsig didn't want his appearance to color the thoughts of his readers. But Zito convinced him to pose for this famous photo of him in the Montana mountains. That photo and more of Zito's story of his time with Pirsig are here:
http://www.zito.com/back-09.html

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The Wizard of Bozeman Motorcycling Through Zen

By Tom Zito, Washington Post
(Originally published Aug 5, 1974)

Bozeman, MT-

Elevation 4,461 feet. The early snow on the peaks ahead is melting now, gouging fast flowing and forceful artery beside the red dirt road. The sound of the surgeon stream masks the groans of the pick up camper Robert Pirsig is plowing further into the Hyalite mountains.

Silent, with eyes straining and transfixed somewhere beyond, Pirsig seems pushing to leave Bozeman and all else behind, gazing ahead to the Alpine-flowered slopes, perhaps caught once again in the reality that had surrounded him six years ago as he headed west on a motorcycle, “the fear that comes from knowing here is nowhere you can possibly run.”

Earlier in the day a clerk at the Phillips Book Shop on Main Street had take Pirsig;s first and only work, “Zn and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” out of the display window. Never mind that critics in London’s Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Newsweek, the New York Review of Book and virtually every other low-middle- and high-brown publication have hailed Pirsig as one of the most profoundly reflective thinkers to stimulate the popular consciousness since (pick one) Jack Kerouac, Ariistotle, Charles reich, Hermann Hesse or Buddha. Never mind that Bantam had bought the paperback rights for $370,000 after the book stunned even its publisher by selling almost 50,000 copies in its first two months. Never mind that Pirsig was invited to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship- which he received- as a result of “Zen…”. Never mind that professors at Princeton were clamoring in an annoyance because the University book shop was sold out of it, that rock musicians and doctors and bank officials and street vendors were talking avidly about this travelogue of mental inquiry, that The-Book-Of-The-Month-Club had decided, after once rejecting it, to choose “Zen…” as its September alternate, that traditionally macho True magazine had excerpted the first five chapters in its July issue.

“No, I haven’t the slightest idea what a book with title like this is about at all,” the clerk had said. “But some of our customers complained that it wasn’t very kind to Bozeman.”

Again, in the camper, a sense of the demon that haunts Pirsig: The night before the author had had a nightmare. It was April 15, Publication Day. The Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack on the United States. He had labored four years to yield this compulsive mind map of a book and milliseconds of torrential energy had reduced it to cosmic dust.

“A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.”

It is summer, 1968. Robert Pirsig, 39, and his 11-year old son, Chris, straddle a 305cc red Honda Superhawk and leave their home town of St. Paul, Minn., for two-month motorcycle adventure.

Pirsig, who holds a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota- where his second generation German father is dean of the Law School and his wife a public relations official— is taking time off from his technical writer’s job at Northern Ordinance, a large manufacturer of naval equipment. The two Pirsigs are traveling with John and Sylvia Sutherland, friends of the family.

“You see things vacation on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car, you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a Fram.

“On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by four inches under your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”

The motorcycle trip was the genesis of an immense mental journey. It was a return to Bozeman, where in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s Pirsig had taught English at wha students call “Moo-You- The Udder University,” to distinguish Montana State here from the more prestigious University of Montana; where he recalls, “You’d ask a student why his face was all bloodied up and he’d reply, “This guy said a Chevy’s better than a Ford…,”where he had encountered the dilemma of determining whether quality- the central concern of his book- is subjective or objective; where his obsessive anxiety over the problem would seed a mental collapse that eventually hospitalized Pirsig for a series of shock treatments.

“Approximately 800 mills of amperage a durations of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had been applied on 28 consecutive occasions in a process known technically as “Annihilation ECS.” A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in technological faultless act…”

The strain still shows. Now 45, Pirsig’s hair is gray and stress lines round his eyes are set too deep to be relieved by sleep or vacation. He’s back in Bozeman, up in the mountains in his camper, the same camper he parked on the north shore of Lake Superior to write the las five chapters of “Zen…,” again seeking the wilderness for work on a second book.

He dresses sloppily: every day a green Army fatigue shirt over a white T-shirt, black slacks and socks and a pair of tennis shoes. He drinks a lot: perhaps a martini before breakfast, another at lunch, a pitcher of beer in the afternoon, a martini before dinner and a scotch after. He carries anthropology books and a clipboard around with him and constantly is making notes to himself: call home, take a bath, buy oil for engine. His favorite expression is “real good,” which he uses as a greeting, a farewell and a general exclamation. He’s say, “Wanna take a ride,” get in the pick-up and drive without further talking across several hundred miles of two-lane Montana roads, looking off at the solid masses of mountains miles in the distance.

Writing “Zen..” Took Pirsig 600,000 words and four and half years, “four years if you don’t count typing the third manuscript,” he says. It was completed in June 1972, with the last five chapters written in the camper.

“ I would go to be at 6 p.m., get up at 2 a.m. and write until I went to work at 8,” Pirsig says. “I did that for two years, first at home but then my wife threw me out. Expected the kids to shut up at six so I could sleep and she didn’t think that was fair. So I got a $12-a-week room at a flophouse. My boss let me come into the office and write early in the morning, and I’d up for breakfast at my own house each day. Writing this book was a compulsive act and whoever stood in the way of it was going to get hurt.”

The book was offered to 122 publishers, by mail and in person, none of it through an agent. Only Morrow accepted.

“Zen…” is Pirsig’s attempt to synthesize his past and present as well as the subject-object dichotomy that has fascinated philosophers from Socrates on. It’s a quest for a reassertion of maligned classical values, an attempt to reconcile philosophy, science and humanism, all done within the context of the trip. Events on the road spawn cognitive acts. John’s dictate for “creeping technology,” his lack of interest in maintaining his motorcycle for instance, prompts Pirsig to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does he may have some clues as to what has gone wrong in this 20th century.

For him, the motorcycle is a system or concept worked out in steel. He analyzes 2,000 years of epistemological arguments- the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant: “In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions… What is the truth and how how you know it when you have it?… How do you really know anything? Is there an”I,” a “soul which knows or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?… Is reality basically change, or is it fixed and permanent?… When it’s said that something means somethings, what’s meant by that?”

These are the things Pirsig concentrates on: the questions professors traditionally tell students are the reasons for the existence of the college; the problems men study for t3 years in hopes of becoming Jesuits; the paradoxes mystics in Tibet contemplate their entire lives. They’re timeless concerns, unusual only in the way “Zen…” has turned them into a salable phenomenon of concern in an age of unconcern.

“Certainly we were surprised when the book took off,” says 32-year-old Jim Landis, the Morrow senior editor who bought the book. “A hit on this level is something you don’t count on. Obviously it was good book. It had rhythm. Now it’s a cultural artifact; it lives by itself.”

Pirsig frames the reaction:

“There was a supersaturation condition in the country- all the problems everybody is feeling, what direction our whole national culture is going in, a general felling of unhappiness about the quality of American life: everything from Watergate to the price of bread at the local grocery. I think the book is acting as a seed crystal to solidify ideas about what’s going on.

“But it can get troubling. People are calling it another Bible and I don’t want that.”

In fact, it was Pirsig’s dislike for publicity that brought him back to Bozeman.

“What got to me was one day I was walking to the Post Office and some woman came up to me and asked, “Aren’t you Robert Pirsig?” That really bothered me. Then the mail started getting heavy- a lot of it from people with mental problems. People are calling on the phone: “What motorcycle should I buy/“. How much of a public person can be real? If it’s all real you get killed. I don’t to e a phone.

“So one morning I just up at three. I told my wife, ‘I just have to get out of here.’ We had the camper packed in a half an hour and I was on the road. Trying to adjust to the sudden shift of personal situation is probably the worst part of success- certainly it is for me. Maybe everybody is talking about the book. That’s a good reason to be in Bozeman. Here I have my anonymity.”

Pirsig came here in June to escape the demands of mounting St. Paul so he could seriously work on his second.

His call to age to an interview was revealing:

“I’m standing here in a phone booth,” he said. “My wife just told me Bantam bought the paperback rights for $370,000 and there’s just no one here in Bozeman I can tell that to and have it mean anything.”

Up in the mountains, Pirsig’s camper becomes a mobile study. He works with a large card file, scratching ideas on individual index cards and then arranging the book by shifting the order of the cards. He types drafts of chapters on an old black Royal portable that was his wife’s high school graduation present. Pirsig stretches out on a mattress in the camper, the typewriter on his lap, card catalogs to his right, half-frame eyeglasses balances on his nose. Sometimes he says he’ll sit for a week and do nothing just to clear his mind.

The second book Pirsig is working om is called, “Them Pesky Redskins.”

“I’m trying to examine the interface between cultures,” he says. “This book tries to apply the metaphysics of quality worked out in “Zen…” to anthropology. It’s going to be very scholarly. The only people who’ll be disappointed will be people who want to be entertained. I mean, this going to be dull.

“Let me explain. I want to look at the places where Indian and white cultures butt up against each other. American Indians are involved not in a refusal to accept the American way of life. They interested in a separate reality.

“All the things the Zen Buddhists say you do, but don’t, the Indians do without even talking about it. I have an intuition that they’re all after the same thing, but the Indians are on such a higher level.”

He removes his eyeglasses, sets the typewriter down and walks out into the lush mountain meadow. Off in the distance the stream is rolling down off the peaks and today Robert Pirsig has decided to search for the source.

The text of Tom Zito's profile is included here strictly for education purposes. The Washington Post retains copyright.