From the Los Angeles Times:
In the nearly five years it took Robert Pirsig to sell “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” 121 publishers rejected the rambling novel.
The 122nd gently warned Pirsig, a former rhetoric professor who had a job writing technical manuals, not to expect more than his $3,000 advance.
“The book is not, as I think you now realize from your correspondence with other publishers, a marketing man’s dream,” the editor at William Morrow wrote in a congratulatory note before its 1974 publication.
He was wrong. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” sold 50,000 copies in three months and more than 5 million in the decades since. The dense tome has been translated into at least 27 languages. A reviewer for the New Yorker likened its author to Herman Melville. Its popularity made Pirsig “probably the most widely read philosopher alive,” a British journalist wrote in 2006.
Pirsig, a perfectionist who published only one major work after “Zen” but inspired college classes, academic conferences and a legion of “Pirsig pilgrims” who retrace the anguished, cross-country motorcycle trip at the heart of his novel, died Monday at his home in South Berwick, Maine, the Associated Press confirmed. He was 88 and had been in failing health.
“Zen” and Pirsig’s less successful 1991 novel, “Lila,” are not easy reads. In both, he develops what he calls the “Metaphysics of Quality,” a philosophy that attempts to unite and transcend the mysticism of the East and the reason of the West.
“Zen” is the account of a 1968 motorcycle trip that Pirsig, his 11-year-old son Chris and two friends made from Minneapolis through the West. A fifth traveler was sensed but unseen: Phaedrus, Pirsig’s alter ego, brilliant, uncompromising and obsessed with the search for truth. Like the real-life Pirsig, the ghost-like Phaedrus had an IQ of 170, entered a university at 15 and, as a young man, was committed to mental hospitals where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy.
“He was dead,” Pirsig’s narrator writes in “Zen.” “Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain.”
Link to the rest at the Los Angeles Times and thanks to Joshua for the tip.
I read it in the mid-’70s and found it almost unbearably tiresome. But then I find all philosophy tiresome unless it’s disguised as compelling narrative (I can read Camus and C. S. Lewis because they’re *telling a story*).
Only way I got through it was skipping the motorcycle stuff and anything that smacked of philosophy, just as many if not most readers of Melville get through Moby-Dick by skipping the whaling lore and how-to-tie-knots bits.
YMMV, of course. Obviously some people like it.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, along with On the Road and a few others, was a crucial read for me back in the early 1970s. Thanks to those radical writers, I got out on the road myself and matured as a person and as a writer. I reread it a few years ago and it held up well; I think I liked it even better than the first time. A true classic.
RIP, Pirsig.
Every author should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Because half the people who read it will react in a positive manner.
Half will love the ‘spiritual message’ and the other half will reject it as a work of BS.
It proves just how subjective of an activity reading is.
Well, I’m in the second half… IIRC, about ten or fifteen pages in, and it hit the wall. (That was long before Kindle.)
Suppose I should check for a cheap used copy sometime along here. I’m more willing to read BS that sells these days, to figure out how they manage it.
It’s worth reading. No matter which side you end up on.
I got a lot out of it – but didn’t have a ‘spiritual awakening’ from reading it.
I was at University in the 70’s; a student of Civil Engineering. The Calculus Professor was tall, long haired, drove a Harley. When we would do poorly on tests he would wax philosophical on _Zen and the Art_. It wasn’t until decades later, when I finally read the book, that I understood that he wasn’t quoting from the book, but capturing the essence of the book.
When I read reviews or discussions about the book, I can see that they never actually read the book.
When he wrote _Lila_ he mentioned Robert Redford wanting to make a move based on _Zen and the Art_. That’s physically impossible since the story occurs in his mind. Like Sol Stein points out, an “immediate scene” is what is “filmable”, and there is very little that is filmable in _Zen and the Art_.
I still buy extra copies of his books to give to people. If they read the books, they understand. If they try to skim the books, they miss everything.
_Zen and the Art_ is one of those books that does not contain the answer; it is the answer.
I read the book when I was very young and probably a lot of it went over my head but I was fascinated. How ANY editor could have read it and not understand its quality, its inventiveness, its creativity, its originality is totally beyond me. The quality of the writing and the story leaped off the page. What’s the MATTER with editors?
What isn’t the matter with editors?
You may recall the words with which an American editor rejected Animal Farm: ‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.’
Alberto Manguel, who knew the business thoroughly and well from both sides of the author-editor divide, does a delightful job eviscerating the mystique of The All-Knowing Editor in an essay called ‘The Secret Sharer’. You can find it in his collection, A Reader on Reading.
Short summary: Editors used to be either (1) those who ran newspapers and magazines, or (2) those who prepared a dead author’s unfinished work for publication. The idea that a book by a living author required the services of an editor originated scarcely 100 years ago, and for decades after, hardly travelled outside the English-speaking countries. Publishers working in other languages (and English-language publishers before the 20th century) either bought books or did not, and if they bought them, published them exactly as written (apart from copyediting, which was applied with a lighter hand in those days). Most of the world’s enduring literature was written and published without their dubious help.
I love it when commenters here at TPV share these publishing tidbits. Thank you, Tom Simon. I’ll get around to reading that book sometime next week. It reminds me of what DWS has been saying for a while: write clean copy in the first draft, have a first reader pick nits, do a copy edit, publish, don’t look back.
Editors are smart people. They probably did recognize all that stuff about the novel.
They just didn’t know how to MARKET it. Or how to categorize it. Fiction, sure, but also philosophy and self-help.
I’ve thought about that book quite a bit in the twenty five years since I last read it. Time to check it out again.
Once again proving that no one actually knows what will sell, or why. The only way to know is to get it out there where it might be seen by those that might like it.