The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth

Natalie Goldberg gives us a rare chance to read about how devotional love and honesty are a path filled with disappointments and mirrors. I was delighted to find this book in print, after years of feeling alone in my desire to reveal the truth about my own teachers. Courage is hard won in this memoir, and the writing is vivid, making me run back to the memoir I started when I met Natalie, just before Katagiri Roshi died. My own parents and spiritual teachers used language in ways that made me hypervigilant about boundaries. I was always overstepping my bounds. Devotional people and children give allegiance to teachers who aren't always congruent within their own lives. Some of us come up with the pearl, others choose victimhood. Natalie is one of those rare people who sees how to use pain as a gateway. Her memoir helps me realize how I stand in relation to these issues, where I haven't been honest with myself. Jesse White, School for Wonder founder

A lot of people naively equate Buddhism with vegetarianism, pacifism, incense and robes and statues of a potbellied man sitting cross-legged, fuzzy-wuzzy "love everybody even the mosquitoes" cumbiyah type sentiments. Yet the essential core teaching of Buddhism, which most people (especially Westerners) find wholly incomprehensible and/or deeply frightening, is that of EMPTINESS: the ultimate reality that all phenomena is empty of any independent or permanent self-existence; that everything is constantly arising and then passing away in a Tinkertoy universe where nothing is solid and there is really no ground to stand on other than the fact of groundlessness; and that given these conditions, all of our thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions cannot be wholly trusted because they are also contingent and conditioned upon a vast and unknowable field of causes of conditions. Thus it is essential to cultivate and maintain the "not-knowing mind," or what Shunryu Suzuki called "beginner's mind." A mind that is totally open, neutral and absolutely aware of its own deep limitations, aware of the utter impossibility of predicting the future or really "knowing" anything with absolute certainty, yet is eager and accepting of whatever happens rather than being attached to certain ideas or preconceptions of what "ought to" or "should" happen. In a brilliantly subtle and seamless way, Natalie Goldberg's book delivers this difficult but indescribably liberating emptiness-teaching by examining, in parallel, her relationship with her father and her relationship with Katagiri Roshi, her Zen teacher---and the deeply painful betrayals she suffered from both of them. Shakymuni described his teachings as going "against the stream" of the prevalent, conditioned human tendencies to cling to our ideas instead of facing reality, to yearn for various delusions of solidity and permanence and certainty in our lives. Thus we tend to idealize and mythologize our fathers/family and our spiritual teachers, creating little mental cocoons of security and safety for ourselves---until reality intervenes and those delusions come crashing down around us. If we are fortunate, we eventually come to accept and even feel grateful for these apparent catastrophes, for they awaken us to the fundamental unknowability of life, the constant unfolding mystery all around us and within us. Hence the paradoxical title: "The GREAT Failure" with its double meaning (great = huge, but also = excellent). This awakening comes after Goldberg discovers, after both had already died, that her father was an unfaithful husband, and that Katagiri had secret affairs with his students. The negative reviewers who are quick to dismiss this book as merely self-indulgent venting and raging cannot really be blamed; like most Americans, they are simply unfamiliar with the Buddhist perspective from which Goldberg writes.

This book differs in subject and style from Natalie Goldberg's previous books. Here she writes of feeling betrayred by two father figures, her natural father and her Buddhist teacher Katagiri Roshi, the bartender and the monk of the subtitle. Attending an abuse group, she begins to remember episodes from her childhood and she wants her family to acknowledge how they harmed her. Without sparing herself, and with a hint of irony, Goldberg writes of confronting her parents by letter. They react with almost comic bewilderment. Goldberg's mother, Sylvia, a child of immigrants, views the world literally: did you eat and sleep? Were you warm? Her father, Buddy, ran a "rough" bar for years. His response to Goldberg's accusations was, "Were you on drugs?" Psychology, the author summarizes, was developed in a country outside Brooklyn. Even after the family reconciles - which means she begins speaking to them after three years - Goldberg's parents still don't understand her new life. When Goldberg offers to give them a Zen experience, her father begins singing along with the silence bell. In one of their last visits, Buddy whispers an insulting remark about Natalie's weight. The author gets her second shock, as word spreads about Katagiri Roshi's numerous love affairs with Zen students. She begins to remember episodes she'd tried to ignore. She recalls Roshi's remarks about her beauty. And ultimately she recognizes that Roshi gave her a tremendous gift, regardless of his personal life. She writes (page 136) that both artists and religious leaders can be "enlightened" in their work, yet function "cruelly and ignorantly" in their personal lives. Toward the end of Great Failure, Natalie writes about crashing her car while fiddling with knobs on her tape deck. She adds, almost casually, that she'd been given "two or three" speeding tickets in the past six months, including one where the police actually chased her down. These episodes were disturbing. She realizes she's acting out rather dangerously, and she realizes she's in an in-between phase, losing Roshi but not finding another touchstone. She doesn't judge herself, just reports, and in fact people often do behave in unusual, even bizarre ways when they're in the eye of the transitional hurricane. I think the key to this book is Natalie's wish to be remembered like her heroes, not just as a writer, but as someone who dealt with loneliness and made mistakes. Because she tells these stories about herself, that's exactly how she will be remembered.

I disagree with one of the reviewer's who claims Natalie wants to portray herself as a victim. To the contrary, this book, more than any of her other books, deals with all the emotional turmoil inherent in being betrayed or discovering a betrayal of someone you love. Betrayal is an insidious act and healing from it is not an easy ride. In many ways it is much like Kubler Ross's stages of death -- anger, denial, bargaining, etc. etc. Natalie leads us through all her stages, and in the end, we see the human beings behind the betrayers....and after all, being human, she lets us know we each in our own way betray someone at some point. Americans tend to like "happy endings" when it comes to stories like this one. The ending here transcends happiness and ends up embracing acceptance, which is the ultimate act of healing from any betrayal.

I was fortunate to hear Natalie Goldberg speak about "The Great Failure" recently at the Maui Writers Conference. The scene she recreated from her life resonated so much with me that I left in the middle of her keynote address to buy 1 of the 4 remaining books at the bookstore! It was definitely worth it. Natalie generously shares her self-doubts and fears, and paints a vivid, honest picture of her natural and spiritual fathers and her relationship with both men. She speaks of her love, anger, and feelings of betrayal with sweetness, humor, and compassion. Thank you, Natalie, for continuing to teach by example and for reminding us about the power of forgiveness.