Smash hit

“You know the structure of the MOQ,” he says, bringing out the pad again. “Static quality can be divided into intellectual, social, biological, and inorganic realms. Any attempt by a lower order to overcome a higher order represents evil. So those forces which prohibit intellectual freedom are evil according to the MOQ.” Pirsig adds: “Just as those biological forces which tend to prohibit social freedom are evil, and at an even lower level, even the inorganic forces of death that try to destroy biology are evil.”

Pirsig’s insistence on the existence of evil has a painful personal note. In November 1979, his son Chris was stabbed to death in a robbery outside the San Francisco Zen Center. He was two weeks shy of his 23rd birthday. Pirsig was living on a houseboat in England at the time. He came home for the funeral, and wrote a moving epilogue about his son — the child at the heart of Zen — and it has been printed in every edition since. This loss can be felt in Lila and might explain why it took Pirsig almost two decades to write it. “One reviewer said that the shadow of Pirsig’s son’s death seems to hang over this entire book,” Pirsig says, looking bewildered. “I had no idea that was true at the time, but now I see in retrospect. I was very gloomy.”

Pirsig seems to have come into the world capable of thought — but less so of gloom. Born in 1928 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he was a gifted child, whose IQ was measured at 170 when he was 9 years old.

His father was a law professor, who studied in England, so Pirsig learned to read and write in England. He returned to Minnesota and entered grade school so young that he was picked on. He entered university at the age of 15, flunked out, then served in the Korean War, coming home with an interest in philosophy. He eventually finished his degree and went on to get a graduate degree in oriental philosophy from Benares Hindu University in India. And here’s where the drifting begins. Pirsig returned to the US in the 1950s and began to study journalism.

To make a living he began technical writing and doing some editing at a university newspaper where he met his first wife. For 20 years they would move around, Pirsig doing odd jobs, occasionally teaching English composition, raising their two kids.

Without knowing it, he had begun a kind of internal philosophical quest, but the heat of his intellectual searching pushed him over the edge.

In 1960, he began the first of a series of hospital treatments for mental illness. Pirsig’s father obtained a court order to commit him to a hospital where he received electro-convulsive shock therapy. It seemed to work, but Pirsig maintains that he was not insane. “I never thought I was crazy. But I wasn’t about to tell anybody that at the time.”

Pirsig took to writing as a life raft. In 1965 he bought a motorcycle, and in 1967 began what he thought would just be a few essays on motorcycle maintenance — he was, after all, a technical writer — but the book grew into a fully fledged project.

In 1968 he wrote to 122 publishers offering sample chapters. Only one wrote back. This was enough encouragement for him. He rented a room at a flophouse and would go there from midnight until 6am to write.

Then he would go to work. Each night he went to bed at 6pm. “When I talk about compulsion in that book,” Pirsig says, “that’s what I mean. I was compelled to write that book.”

Pirsig admits that this regimen had as much to do with his ambitions as with “problems at home”, as he calls them. When the book finally became a bestseller, Pirsig dealt with it as best he could then felt he needed to get away. He and his wife bought a yacht and planned to travel the world. Instead they divorced.

Pirsig’s response was to keep moving, and it was in this fashion that he met his second wife, Wendy Kimball, on a boat of course, in Florida. She was a freelance writer who wanted to interview him. He hung around for two years in Florida while she worked as a reporter, and then they started a life of travel together, down to the Bahamas, up to Maine, where they were married, and across the North Atlantic to England — a trip so rough that Pirsig thought they might not make it. “I saw this bank of icebergs moving toward us very fast, and I turned to Wendy and said, well, hon, it’s been nice knowing you.”

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