The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck

304 Pages·2001·2.971 MB·English

by  John Steinbeck IV, Nancy Steinbeck

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Andrew Harvey
Introduction

1. Entropy
2. Mom and Pop
3. The Wound
4. The Wild Tibetan
5. Naropa Nights
6. Chateau Lake Louise
7. Room Service
8. Prince Charming the Fourth
9. Outside In
10. Boarding School
11. Trouble in Paradise
12. Revolt
13. A Geographic
14. The Rose Garden
15. At War with Dad
16. Home-1967
17. The Scene
18. Saigon Again
19. The Coconut Monk
20. The Turn of the Screw
21. Broken Taboos
22. Decent
23. Billy Burroughs
24. Kissing Trains
25. Whip Stall
26. Close Encounters
27. The Kerouac Festival
28. Apocalypse Now
29. Magical Thinking
30. Mother
31. Our Magical Kingdom
32. Impermanence
33. 1984
34. Blood, Sweat, and Tears
35. Hell Bent
36. Last Ditch
37. Last Straw
38. Pentimento
39. The Two-Foot Drop
40. The Receptor Site-My Father’s Grave
41. Larger than Life
42. Grace Notes
43. Icarus’s Flight
44. The Karma of Words

Appendix: Time Line
Bibliography
Index
Photos
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my agent, Laurie Harper, for her unwavering
enthusiasm, and my editor, Steven L. Mitchell, for believing the two voices could
work together.
I am grateful to Paulette Mariano for her humor and encouragement, to
Cynthia Lester for her insight, and to Brad Paulson for his love, wisdom, and
inspiration.
Special appreciation to those who sustained and maintained me during the
writing of this book: Pete Beevers, Beth Robinson, Andrew Harvey, Eryk Hanut, Jay
Rosenthal, Mimi Gladstein, Ted Hayashi, Louis Owens, Mary A. Read, Carol
Hammond and the Wichita girlz, Kim Wann, Irma Preston, Shannon Smith, Lisa
Buchanan, Missy Wyatt, Pat Lawler, Nan de Grove, Luigi Tindini, Marie and Sean
Warder, Carol and Jim Heidebrecht, and Duncan Campbell.
Foreword by Andrew Harvey

I am honored to write a foreword to this lacerating, profound, and exquisitely
written book. The Other Side of Eden has harrowed and elated me, shattered my
heart, and made me laugh raucously out loud. In John and Nancy Steinbeck’s
sophisticated and naked company, few extremes of human emotion go unexplored,
often with a brutal brilliance that is as purifying as it is terrifying. This is one of the
most original memoirs of the twentieth century. Anyone who finds the courage to
read it as it deserves to be read—slowly, rigorously, bringing to it the whole of their
feeling and intelligence—will find themselves changed.
All great memoirs are a clutch of different books marvelously conjured into
one. The Other Side of Eden is no exception. It is at once an exorcism of family
wounds and secrets, an expose of the projections of religious seekers and of the
baroque and lethal world of New Age cults and gurus. This poignant unfolding of a
great love affair between two wounded, difficult, but dogged lovers is also the
account of a journey into awakening through the massacre of illusion after illusion, to
the awakening that lies on the other side of Eden. Few books risk, or achieve, so
much under such blisteringly candid authority. Reading it is as much a rite of passage
as a literary experience.
First, the exorcism. Many readers will undoubtedly be attracted to the most
“sensational” aspects of the book—John Steinbeck IV’s terrible alcohol-and-drug-
ravaged struggle with the shadow of his famous father. Anyone hungering for cheap
dirt or the easy satisfaction of the destruction of a celebrity idol will go away
disappointed. The younger Steinbeck shirks nothing of his father’s violence, inner
desolation, addictions, occasionally pathetic and outrageous phoniness, and is honest
about the lifelong, life-sabotaging wounds these caused him. He is far too intelligent,
however, not to know and celebrate also how generous and tender his father could
sometimes be. John is also far too wise not to understand that the very terror of his
father’s legacy was itself a kind of appalling grace—one that would nearly kill him
again and again, yes, but which would also constantly goad and harass him, against
great odds, to discover his essential self and the supreme values of spiritual clarity
and unconditional love. Those who admire the elder Steinbeck’s writing, as I do, will
find nothing here that sours their admiration. If anything their respect for both the
work and the man will only grow sadder and more mature as they acknowledge the
struggles both had to endure. Dreadful though his father’s legacy partly was, the
younger Steinbeck did not allow it to annihilate him. He fought it, and himself, with
agonizing courage to finish his life at peace with those he loved, with his past, and
with the world. His father left two or three real masterpieces as signs of his truth. The
younger John’s masterpiece was the scale, reach, and passion of his life, a life that
could only be written by a combination of Thurber, Dostoevsky, and Milarepa. The
marvelous writing he achieved in this memoir is also in itself a victory, all the more
rare because of the atmosphere of forgiveness and awareness that bathes it with a
final, and healing, light.
This light of rare, bald awareness also bathes Nancy and John Steinbeck’s
expose of their disillusion with Tibetan Buddhism and its guru system. Searching for
a spiritual truth that could spring them free of their inherited agonies and also for a
“good parent,” they both became in the seventies, like so many other seekers,
enamored of the “crazy wisdom” teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche. As Nancy Steinbeck
writes, “A magnetic aura surrounded Rinpoche .... Infamously wild, in his mid-
thirties, wearing Saville Row suits, he smoked Raleighs, drank whiskey, ate red meat,
and sampled the entire panoply of hippie pharmaceuticals.” Initially intoxicated by
Trungpa’s extravagance and brilliance, the Steinbecks came gradually to see how
abusively and absurdly, dangerously grandiose he could be. They began to understand
how sick with denial of his alcoholism and sexual cruelty the community that
surrounded him was. This shocked them both into awakening from “the guru
dream.” Inspired by their own struggle with abuse and codependency, they were
compelled to speak out, especially when Trungpa’s successor, Tom Rich, ran the risk
of spreading AIDS with a complete lack of conscience and with the corrupt
connivance of his “henchmen.” Just as the Steinbecks had both lived through the
exposure of their own family myths, they now lived together through the equally
anguishing process (one that I know too well) of recovering from the delusion of
projecting their own power onto a so-called enlightened master and from the savage,
intricate cruelties of a community rotten with denial. Their account of this devastating
time is one of the triumphs of their book. Both admit they learned a great deal from
Trungpa and praise his sometimes astounding acumen. It is this fairness that makes
all the more unarguable their analysis of his hypocrisies and ruthlessness, along with
those of his community. All those who continue, despite a mountain of damning
evidence, to believe that Trungpa and his obscene Regent were “enlightened masters”
and who, in the name of “crazy wisdom” continue to threaten and deride their critics,
need to suffer and read The Other Side of Eden. So, in fact, do all serious seekers,
especially those still in the thrall of the various contemporary manifestations of the
guru system. The New Age at large is still horribly vulnerable to the fantasies of
brilliant maniacs and the all-explaining, all-absolving circular rhetoric of a guru
system that is now, to any unbiased eye, wholly discredited. The Steinbecks make
clear that the alternative to the worship of false gods is not despair; it is freedom and
self-responsibility, the dissolving of a brilliant illusion into a far more empowering if
less glamorous truth.
The most moving of all the different facets of The Other Side of Eden is that it
is a great love story, all the more greater and challenging because it shows how the
jewel of unconditional love is only revealed when all the fantasies about love are
incinerated. In the course of their extreme and extraordinary marriage, the Steinbecks
explored and exploded all love’s ravishing but lesser myths. In the end, they were left
not with disillusion, but with a mystery, the mystery of a love that transcends all
known categories to exist simply in the boundless and eternal. As Nancy Steinbeck
writes, “1 rode astride the razor’s edge with John and although we place our bets on
victory, the odds were on insanity or death, or both. As a result, I learned about
unconditional love. There is a bond so profound that it can surpass the ravages of
child abuse, a garbage pail of addictions, and finally even death.” The road to such a
love cannot be smooth or dragon-free. Because it gives everything, it costs
everything. One of the permanent contributions this book makes to the exploration of
the nature of love lies in its blistering honesty about the price of authentic
commitment and about the continual leaping-off into darkness and mystery beyond
all dictates of sense or even, sometimes, self-preservation. At stake in the alchemy of
such a love is nothing less than the forging of the whole human and divine self of
both partners. The final, amazing grace of the Steinbecks’ marriage reveals that this,
in fact, took place. Their long, often tormented struggle yielded the golden peace that
passes understanding and the divinity of human passion lived out to its end in
acceptance.
If The Other Side of Eden were simply an exorcism, expose, and account of a
transfiguring marriage, it would still be a most haunting and remarkable book. It is,
however, something more than the sum of its parts. After many readings and
rereadings, I have come to experience it as an account of the cost and joy of real
awakening in a modern world largely controlled by competing lethal myths.
Those who want true and unshakable self-knowledge have to be prepared to
sacrifice every inner and outer comfort, every consoling fantasy or dogma, every
subtle hiding place, everything that prevents them from taking full, stark, scary
responsibility for themselves and their actions in and under the Divine. There is no
other way to full human dignity and no other way to the radical self-empowerment
beyond the betrayal of dogma, religion, and system of any kind. The human race now
needs to reach for this degree of honesty if it is going to meet, embrace, and survive
the challenges of our time.
All systems, religious or political, have clearly failed us. We stand, naked and
afraid, before doors that are opening into the apocalypse of nature and the massive
degradation of the entire human race and Creation. If we go on letting the lies or half-
truths of the past haunt and mold us, we will die out. If we risk the terrible and
dangerous journey into naked truth beyond illusion, we have a chance of discovering
what John and Nancy Steinbeck both discovered at the exhausting but exalted end of
this book—an unshakable belief in the sacred power of true love to overcome and
transform extreme disaster. The Steinbecks’ eventual ferocious spiritual strength
allowed them to witness truth and justice in all circumstances against all possible
opposing powers. From this marriage of what Jesus called the “innocence of the
dove” and “the wisdom of the serpent” outrageous possibilities of freedom and
creativity can still—even at this late hour—be born.
The questions that this wonderful book leaves us all with are these: Are we
willing to pay the price for this marriage of unillusioned hope and illusionless
wisdom to be born in us? Will we risk, as John and Nancy have done, the stark and
glorious alchemy of honesty and embrace the spiritual Darwinism of the survival of
the most candid? Are we ready to travel through the incineration of every false truth
to arrive in the Real, empowered with its hilarity and mystery?One of the most
moving legacies of this book is that for all its exploration of horror, agony, betrayal,
tragedy, corruption, and sheer brutal psychic suffering, it leaves us with the
conviction that the truth is worth everything it costs because it sets us free. Free to
love and weep and laugh and rejoice, free to witness, with steely and beady eyes, the
rigors of justice. Free to become as Nancy and John Steinbeck became, electric
nuisances to all myth-making systems—personal, political, and religious—that in any
way diminish or imprison the secret of our splendor.
Introduction

My husband, John Steinbeck IV, started to write his autobiography, with some
mixed feelings and much trepidation, in the spring of 1990, after two years of
sobriety. He was excited about finally receiving recognition for his talents, and felt a
renewed sense of direction based upon the positive reaction of his agent and editor.
By that winter, he had traced the serrated edge of his life up to 1979, the year we fell
in love.
John had lived with Promethean intensity. Surrounded by celebrities of the
forties and fifties, he was raised in an atmosphere of shameless, alcoholic abuse and
neglect. At the age of twenty, he was drafted into the Vietnam War. After a year of
service, he remained there for five more, as a civilian and Emmy award-winning
journalist, as a Buddhist monk, and as a father and a junkie. Back in the States, he
became a voice in the antiwar movement. In 1969 he published In Touch,1 a highly
acclaimed book about his experiences in Vietnam. He also studied Tibetan Buddhism
with the notorious Crazy Wisdom guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in Boulder,
Colorado, where we met in 1975.
John’s mother, Gwyn, had launched his massive addiction to various chemical
substances when she medicated him with codeine at the tender age of four. In the last
decade of his life, battling with those demons brought him to death’s door and a
miraculous recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous.
The gentle magic of his writing profoundly touched everyone who read the
first draft of his autobiography. As he mailed it off to his editor, Linda Cunningham,
he threw a handful of mylar confetti in the envelope. He knew how hard it is to
vacuum up the vivid stars and hearts. “I want her to see those sprinkles on her office
floor till they publish the book, so she’ll remember me.” Linda was ecstatic about the
manuscript. After he died, she called to tell me the confetti was still in her carpet.
Since he had quit drinking and using drugs, John replaced alcohol sugars with
pints of ice cream, tranquilizing the pain of unearthed memories with fat-filled food.
His health had been precarious during the 1980s. He was hoping that along with his
recovery, his metabolism would eventually stabilize and he would lose the excess
pounds he had gained. We joined an exercise class together; it was so touching to see
his painstaking concentration on the workouts, and he was enthusiastic about the
endorphines they released. Sadly, it was too strenuous for him and in November of
1990 he ruptured a disc. He worked with a chiropractor for three months in the hope
of avoiding radical procedures. When he grew impatient with the intense pain, he
decided to undergo surgery in February of 1991.
Unfortunately, we were not made aware that the tests taken to clear John for
the operation had come back with abnormal results, though we had cautioned the
doctor of that possibility. Ignoring the red flags, he mindlessly misjudged my
husband’s candidacy for surgery. We had no idea that some surgeons are addicted to
cutting. The knife wields power and, for them, the slash is the answer to
everything. Mirroring John’s needle jones, the orthopedist lusted to use his scalpel.

1 Please refer to the bibliography for a complete list of all books mentioned.
1