Are you here? It’s The Paul Leslie Hour with a book review of The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth by Natalie Goldberg, published by HarperSanFrancisco in 2004.
The loneliness of writing
So often we look over our shoulders thinking we’ll find someone, but there’s no one there. Natalie Goldberg especially likes to remind writers of that fact. At least at first, nobody cares about whether or not you write, so you have to do it. But wherever we are, our thoughts summon the characters of our real life story. There exists an echo of this person or that one, and as you go through the years, so many of those people exist only as memories.
Weaving two worlds
I finished reading The Great Failure in the early evening, in a garden in Transylvania, Romania. This was one in more than a handful of books I’ve read by Natalie Goldberg, a bestselling author with many titles to her name, the most well known being Writing Down the Bones.
The Great Failure is Natalie’s personal narrative about two monumental people in her life: her father Ben Goldberg, who was a bartender — kind of an everyman, not all connected to Zen. The other was at the center of the Zen world, Dainin Katagiri Roshi. These two characters came from two worlds, a statement that’s true from a lot of vantage points. Where Goldberg excels is in weaving these two worlds.
We encounter many people as we walk through this world, but some giants always tower in our minds. Our parents are a given. As children, our mother and our father are the gods that hold the key to our survival and well-being. But then there are those who we never would have imagined entering the story. We go out into the territory where we seek other figures to either fully or partially replace the figures of our youth. It’s a part of eventually becoming the person you are. At first these prominent figures seem so idealized. Even their flaws may feel like perfections. Eventually we come to see in totality everyone we are able to examine long enough.
The cost of knowing
This is a big component in The Great Failure. To know others is to open yourself to inevitable wounding. It’s not easy. The answers we seek often come with a great price, but The Great Failure is a reminder of what a gift it is to know the good and the not so good.
Goldberg is a great teacher for writers, and the success of her craft writing books have tended to overshadow her memoirs. The Great Failure may be the most honest and personal writing I’ve read, outside of letters. It seems like a book that is an uncovered secret. Her voice seems to talk right into your ear. Twice I found myself thinking I might cry, when once I did. Here’s the thing: she accomplished this kind of writing only by going where the conventional wisdom forbids writers from going. “It’s only for your family,” or “nobody needs to know about that,” undoubtedly entered Natalie’s mind.
It’s all there. “Whatever you need to say, tell it all,” Natalie Goldberg writes in The Great Failure. This book makes for wonderful reading, and if you’re a writer: it’s the last lesson.
