THE ROAD HE TRAVELLED: The Revealing Biography of M Scott Peck

by Arthur Jones

Rider Books £16.99

After The Road Less Travelled was published in 1978, it sat in the New York Times best-seller lists for longer than any other nonfiction book by a living author. It was kept there by women: anxious, middle-class ones with “issues” around martinis, Valium or whatever. The author, a handsome, grey-haired psychiatrist called M Scott Peck, offered practical advice on building loving relationships that would keep his readers clean, sober and out of the fridge. (“Ultimately, love is everything,” he revealed.) Marital fidelity was one of his themes, as well it might be. He had been married to the same rather plain Chinese-American lady for 40 years.

Actually, right from the start there were clues that Peck might not be following his own prescriptions. Much of his writing was centred around his own escape from his Wasp background (educated at America’s smartest prep school and Harvard, father a judge living on Park Avenue). To prove the point, Peck would make a big deal out of reaching out to black folks: “He ain’t no white boy, he’s a Southern Preacher,” gushed Maya Angelou. Unfortunately, he could never achieve the same rapport with white people of a lower class: although he insisted he had turned his back on his father’s snobbish values, they had a habit of reappearing at hotel reception desks and in the checkout queue at airports.

Sobriety was a challenge, too. Fans who heard Peck preach the virtues of self-restraint at speaking engagements ($15,000 a pop by the end) might have been surprised by how rapidly the mini-bar emptied back at the hotel. They would certainly have been shocked by his coldness towards his children, whose main function in life, according to family friends, seemed to be to roll joints for Daddy. Peck had been an army psychiatrist during the late 1960s, and missed out on the sex and drugs; now he was making up the deficit. (Rock’n’roll was never his thing, though in later life he wrote some comically banal pop songs.) Are you a good-looking woman? The doctor will see you now.

And that was how the media first got a whiff of the real Peck. In the 1990s, a flirta-tious female reporter asked him where he got the idea for The Road Less Travelled. She sounded like a “cool chick”, he thought, and so he told the truth. The words “discipline”, “love” and “grace” (the book’s key ingredients for recovery from drug addiction) came to him one evening while he was stoned.

Arthur Jones had the benefit of long conversations with Peck in the year or two before the latter’s death in 2005 at the age of 69. That is not as much of a privilege as it sounds, since just about anyone could hold conversations with him so long as the subject was the ever-fascinating M Scott Peck, MD. Jones has not interviewed Lily Peck, so we do not learn why she decided to walk out on her husband after four decades of marriage. But he has spoken to their son, Chris-topher, who knows how to settle a score: Peck’s veneer of saintliness, he tells Jones, was “creepier than his cruelty . . . His past behaviour I did not hold against him. I just found him insufferably annoying. He just couldn’t manage to put together a sentence that wasn’t like a nail on a blackboard”.

Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad description of Jones’s prose. The writing is unimaginably awful. (A sample sentence: “His weaknesses he had phrases to excuse himself with.”) There are, however, some good stories. At the height of his fame in the 1980s, Peck received a call from the only family in America who were greedier and more sanctimonious than him. Would he care to visit Hyannis Port to address the Kennedys? No problem, said Peck: that’ll be $3,000. Oh, there’s no fee, came the reply, “but if you come here on Sunday morning you can go to Mass with Mrs Rose Kennedy”.

When he was working on this biography, Jones told Peck, “We both know that this will never be the book you would have written about yourself.” That’s true: despite what his son says, Peck wrote rather good, plain prose. But, once you know what a ripe hypocrite he was, it is impossible to read The Road Less Travelled with a straight face. “I love this book, it’s my spiritual refuge,” says Boy George on the back of the British paper-back edition. You have been warned.

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