Elmore Leonard on A.A. and Sobriety

From Rich Seeley's journal for March 25, 1998:

Elmore Leonard is my unofficial, in absentia, A.A. sponsor. At Barnes & Noble in Coolidge Corner [Brookline, Mass.] I found a book – THE COURAGE TO CHANGE by Dennis Wholey – which I first bought and read in Orange County when I was married to S and trying to stay sober. It is a sort of celebrity version of the A.A. Big Book with famous people making their pitches for sobriety. The one that resonated with me then, and did again yesterday, was the interview with Elmore Leonard. Here are some of his encouraging words about what he’s gotten out of sobriety and the A.A. philosophy:

• It’s almost inconceivable to me now, all those games I played, all those things I went through to justify drinking. The big difference nowadays is that I don’t have to look forward to anything. I get up in the morning and being is enough. There isn’t anything that I want to go to see or anything I want.

• I don’t have to do anything. I am much more aware of things going on but in a very quiet way. I don’t need excitement. I’m into my work now, all the way and I’m not straining.

• My personal relationships are better … Getting out of myself and seeing other people and trying not to see me is the key. I’m not going to be able to play roles if I’m not thinking about myself. I just present myself as I am, optimistically, with natural, normal confidence. Here it is. This is who I am. This is what I do. Would you like to buy this book? If you don’t like it, O.K., fine. Someone else will buy it … The key is getting out of yourself.

• Today I realize I have complete trust in God. I’m in His hands. Now, what I’m going to do is try to live according to His will. God’s will, I think, is misinterpreted. God’s will to me means one thing – love – and if I look at this as my primary reason for being here, all the specific things fall into line. When I get up, before I get out of bed, I say, “O.K. Let me be an instrument of Thy will.” I want to be His agent. I want to be used any way He wants to use me. I want to do His work. This is my main reason for being. My reason is not to be a writer, it’s to be with everyone else and see what happens. I see a lot of people I don’t like, but I see the humanness in them. We’re all pretty much in the same boat. A lot of people have ugly dispositions and are fighting life for any number of reasons. But nobody wants to be that way. Nobody really wants to be antagonistic or hard to get along with. After a while, it becomes their nature. I think there is hope for everybody.

• Today I don’t drink. That’s all there is to it. That dismisses the problem.

• I can sit down and write anytime, anywhere. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be prepared.

The Day Bukowski Died

BY RICH SEELEY

Charles Bukowski, who died today at age 73, was the only Los Angeles writer I was ever totally proud of.

Other famous writers -- Henry Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name two -- lived here at the end of their careers when their best work was behind them.

But Bukowski didn't come to L.A. with a pocket full of royalty checks and a career made in Europe and New York. For worse and later better, he grew up and made his career here.

And he made his stories and his poems here.

He worked with what the City of Angels gave him and in the early years, it didn't give him much. Then again, he wasn't exactly the kind of guy the chamber of commerce was likely to pick for L.A.'s poster boy.

Bukowski was, to begin with, ugly as sin. Teenage skin diseases did a number on his face and a lifetime of heavy drinking did nothing to improve it. He permanently looked the way most of us have felt on the worst morning we ever had.

And he was not a nice guy. Television, with its Mister Rogers idea of what a writer should be, has taught an entire generation of jelly brains to believe that authors should be sweet, kindly, polite and, most importantly, politically correct.

Bukowski was none of the above.

As his girlfriend said in terms he would have endorsed, "He didn't like people.'' Most serious authors don't. Socializing, with the kind of fawning literary hangers on who circle famous poets like the sharks of boredom, is death to a writer. These people want to ask inane questions about how the great author writes when all the great author wants is to be left alone to write. Or perhaps to howl at the moon or stare at the ceiling while waiting for the wild dogs of inspiration to arrive.

Anyway, an author doesn't want to have tea with the gentle readers of The Atlantic Monthly.

In Bukowski's case, he'd probably rather be pounding on typewriter keys, doing the only thing a real writer is really good at.

"If I die,'' he once told an interviewer,  "I hope I go with my head on that typewriter. It's my battlefield.''

For a dirty old man who learned his life lessons in skid row bars, Bukowski was as prolific as any literary lion who ever grazed on the tenured lawns of academe. He published 32 books containing selections of his 1,000 poems, five collections of short stories and six novels. More than two million of his books are in print.

Pretty good for a guy who lived the low life and who never had a job more prestigious than mail sorter at the downtown L.A. post office.

And why did all of those readers buy the books of this skid row bum?

I'm not sure. I only know why I bought them and read them and loved them.

Charles Bukowski wrote about the Los Angeles I was born in, grew up in and lived in most of my life. It was not the picture postcard Disney version that tourists are fed. It was not the superficial "let's do lunch"' world of Beverly Hills.

Bukowski didn't create yet another one-dimensional movie poster of Los Angeles.

In his stories and poems, L.A. was a dirty, ugly place where telephone wires blocked the view of the smog shrouded downtown office buildings. His L.A. was filled with rowdy, drunk, crazy people living in stucco apartments where the paint flaked off the walls and ants patrolled the kitchen. It was an L.A. where not every pretty woman got discovered by a Hollywood agent and where promising young men got ground down by a system they never quite understood.

Charles Bukowski did not paint a pretty picture. But then L.A. is not a pretty town. He captured it honestly in ways that few writers would ever dare.

His clear-eyed view of Los Angeles, warts and all, was a reality check for a generation of readers in the '60s and '70s, who couldn't believe the bull pumped out by the public relations factories in town.

He gave us a real gritty city filled with lost souls and failures, drunks and survivors. It takes great courage to resist the social, economic and political pressures that cause weaker writers to tell people pretty lies that they ultimately cannot believe.

Charles Bukowski's legacy is a kind of honesty about life that is so rare that when you encounter it in his books, it sets you free.

Originally published in The Outlook, Santa Monica, March 1994 

 

My Name Is Barbara

By Rich Seeley

Barbara used to get up in the morning, go to the window of her second floor apartment and look down to see if she could spot her car.

If it was there, it was a good morning. If it wasn't, it meant she would have to call a cab and drive around to the Westside bars she frequented. She couldn't remember where she had been when she blacked out and someone drove her home. So with a cabby, she had to cruise one watering hole after another until she spotted her car.

Other mornings, when she had her car, she would drive to a tavern that was on her way to work. It opened at 6 a.m. and Barbara would be parked outside at 5:45 a.m. waiting for the morning bartender to come open the doors and let the heavy odor of a hundred spilled beers waft out into the morning air.

“I loved that smell,” she says.

She had plenty of time for a couple drinks before heading off to work. The morning drinks helped to cut the hangover from the night before. Sometimes, she had time for a couple more drinks and then she'd realize she was a little too drunk to start her work day. So she'd go get a burrito to help her sober up a little. But the fast food breakfast would make her sick instead, and she'd go back to the bar to have a few beers to settle her stomach. It would get to be too late to go to work and she would be too drunk anyway. So she'd call in sick again. After so many sick days like that, Barbara wasn't totally surprised when she got fired from her job as a bookkeeper.

Born and raised in Santa Monica, she'd been drinking since she was 16. By the time she was 30, she had a history of strange mornings to look back on. In an alcoholic blackout in 1984, she gotten married to a guy she met in a bar. She woke up after her wedding night to find herself in a Las Vegas hotel with this strange man who was now her husband. The marriage ended in divorce after a year. Barbara's ex-husband later died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 44.

Barbara seemed to be on her way to the same fate, when one morning before Christmas 1987, she finally realized she wasn't going to survive too many more years of 6 a.m. visits with bartenders. At this point, she was alternating between drinking a fifth of vodka a day or a case of beer. She weighed 200 pounds. She was 31 and had known she was an alcoholic since she was 25. But she had not found a way to stop drinking.

That early December morning in 1987, she made it to work at yet another of her string of bookkeeping jobs. But she only stayed long enough to write a resignation letter to her boss. “I don't know if you know it,” her note began, “but I'm an alcoholic....”

Then she left the office and went to get help. Her physician helped her get into the Alcoholics Anonymous program. It didn't work right away. Barbara would quit drinking and then be sledge hammered by withdrawal symptoms.

“Sometimes it felt like my arms were screaming for vodka,” she recalls. During that Christmas season, she went through a discouraging cycle of getting sober and then going back to drinking. Finally just a few days before New Year's Eve, she stopped drinking and broke the cycle.

 

Working with the AA program, going to three or four meetings a week, Barbara has remained sober for six years. She is now happily married to an old boyfriend she had dumped during her drinking days because she thought he was too sober and boring. After all those jobs that ended badly, she now runs her own bookkeeping service.

Barbara wrote me a letter last month after reading a column I wrote about a woman who died of alcoholism at age 32. Barbara feels she was headed for the same fate when she found her way to AA at age 31.

In keeping with the anonymous nature of that program, she requested that her last name not be printed in the newspaper. But she wanted to tell her story so that people would know there is hope for recovery.

She asked me to mention that Alcoholics Anonymous is listed in the white pages. There is someone there to answer the phone 24 hours a day. There are 2,000 AA meetings held in the Los Angeles area every week.

Published Sunday, March 6 1994, The Outlook, Santa Monica  

Eileen’s Last Beach Party

BY RICH SEELEY

I am standing on the beach at Paradise Cove in Malibu. The sun is out and the sky is so clear I can see the southern reaches of Santa Monica Bay all the way to Palos Verdes. I can see Catalina Island.

The wind, which clears the air on this late Saturday morning in mid-February, is gusting and chilly. I am with a group of maybe 60 people gathered around picnic tables and open pit barbecues on the edge of the asphalt parking lot near the Sand Castle restaurant.

A CD player with large speakers is set up on one of the picnic tables. The deep tones of the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack vibrate in the cool air. It is not exactly beach party music.

With the wind, this is not a good day for a beach party and this is not exactly a beach party and not exactly not a beach party.

My mother has driven here from Leisure World in Laguna Hills. She picked me up at my apartment in West L.A. to help her navigate north on the sometimes treacherous Pacific Coast Highway.

Now, sitting at a picnic table, we clutch our sweaters against the cold, looking out of place at a beach party.

But, as I said, this is not really a beach party. It is a memorial service for a young woman who loved beach parties and Paradise Cove.

The mourners, dressed in blue jeans and sweats, try to stay warm against the chill. They are mostly young friends of Eileen. Eileen died last week from the complications of alcoholism at age 32.

I did not know her. She was the daughter of my mother's best friend from grade school. My mother did not know Eileen, either. My parents lived in Hawaii during the years when Eileen was growing up in the Valley and spending summer days at her mother's mobile home in Paradise Cove.

Attending a memorial service for someone you don't know is a little like looking at those framed computer images that appear at first as meaningless color patterns but if you stare long enough, the 3D image of a dolphin appears.

The young minister, officiating in blue jeans and a denim jacket, asks friends and family members to offer anecdotes about Eileen.

What emerges is a portrait of a California beach girl who could have been a model for a Malibu Chamber of Commerce poster. Tan, blonde, perfect nails, exquisite figure shown off in a French-cut bikini, she must have turned a lot of heads on the beach at Paradise Cove.

The mourners tell stories of this beautiful young woman with a sweet disposition who was fun to be with at parties.

But the picture I get of Eileen seems incomplete. What nobody on the beach explains is how someone who symbolized the California dream could be dead from drink at 32.

I am wondering how there could have been so much time for parties and so little time for life.

Nobody answers my unspoken question. Maybe nobody can. Alcoholism is a mysterious disease and no respecter of beauty or dreams.

Midway through the memorial service a plane flies over sprinkling Eileen's ashes on the waves of the bay. At the end of the service, family and friends walk out on the little fishing pier in the cove and drop flowers and wreaths into the water.

Returning to the picnic tables, the music is upbeat as Jimmy Buffet now sings of good times and old friends. It is beach party music. There is food and drink as there always is at a beach party. The wind calms down and the afternoon sun is warmer. But the gathering remains somber.

As the afternoon drifts toward evening, the flowers and wreaths wash back to shore, decorating the dark rocks exposed by the erosion of the white sand.

The winter sun is sinking. The chill is returning. Friends and family members say goodbye. Eileen's last beach party is coming to an end.

Published in The Outlook, Santa Monica, Tuesday Feb. 15 1994

 

My Interview with Christopher Isherwood from August 1980

An Interview with Christopher Isherwood

My Guru and His Disciple

By RICH SEELEY

HOLLYWOOD – If it is true that opposites attract, outside the world of physics, then Christopher Isherwood’s friendship for Swami Prabhavananda is an example of the drawing power of polarity.

On the one side we have Isherwood, an English novelist transplanted in Hollywood in the ‘30s where he enjoyed a gay Hollywood lifestyle.

On the other side we have Swami Prabhavananda, a monk from India with a deep resentment toward English imperialism, who was transplanted in Hollywood to run the Hindu Vedanta Center where he practiced celibacy as part of the road to spiritual enlightenment.

It must have been a friendship made in heaven because it seems there was no way on earth that it could have worked.

It did work. The Swami was Isherwood’s friend and spiritual mentor from the day they met in 1939 until the Swami died in 1976 at the age of 80.

Isherwood celebrates their friendship in “My Guru and His Disciple” (Farrar-Straus-Giroux, New York), the second in his cycle of autobiographical books which began in 1976 with “Christopher and His Kind.”

There is a strong sense of worldliness emanating from Isherwood, a small man with a soft spoken voice that carries just a hint of an English accent his years in Hollywood have failed to erase. He seemed very resigned and disillusioned as he talked about his life during a recent interview at the Hollywood Brown Derby. “I’m not at all sure that I believe in reincarnation,” he said. “It’s quite a toll going through one long life. There is no more virtue to long life than there is to a long marriage. Both can be hell.”

Sharp and in relatively good health at 75, he said long life is “pretty much depends on the parents you choose.”

Asked if he thought it was extraordinary that an openly gay author could become friends with a celibate Hindu – he says, “A misunderstanding has arisen about that. It is no different than say I got to be friends with a Catholic priest. They wink at things like that. Most religions do.”

Here is a man of few illusions. A man who has been disillusioned and now has the quality that you get from that. One recalls a passage in “My Guru” where Isherwood is talking about the mythical King of Death in the Katha Upanishad: “Outwardly, he is a figure of majesty and terror; inwardly he is disillusioned and therefore wise.”

There is a link between the two poles. The spiritually wise guru and the world-wise writer had one thing in common.

In “My Guru,” Isherwood explained the link in a story about Ramakrishna, one of the spiritual leaders of Vedanta.

“Ramakrishna had been known to get out of a carriage to dance with drunkards on the street. The sight of their reeling inspired him because it made him think of the way a holy man reels in ecstasy. He danced with his friend G. C. Ghosh, a famous dramatist and actor, when Ghosh was drunk, and encouraged him to go on drinking. Ghosh took advantage of Ramakrishna’s permissiveness and visited him at all hours of the night, sometimes on the way home from a whorehouse.

“Ghosh became a kind of patron saint for me….”

Isherwood said that while Swami believed that sex led to worldly attachment and blocked the road to spiritual peace – “He was not a puritan. He had no use for puritans.”

If Isherwood was an unlikely seeker after the spiritual life, his Guru never pretended to be Simon Pure. Prabhavananda, for all his opposition to drugs, was a chain-smoker who enjoyed a nip of sherry in the evening. He was criticized by some for his smoking and he sometimes sipped sherry on the sly.

Isherwood defends this saying: “Swami wasn’t being hypocritical when he refrained from drinking in the presence of those who would have been shocked by it; he simply tolerated their prejudice, which he anyhow found unimportant.”

After reading “My Guru,” one gets the feeling that the reason the friendship worked so well is that both men may have admired the opposite in the other. Isherwood admired the saintly acceptance of his Swami and the holy man in turn may have been more than a little fascinated by the worldly life enjoyed by his famous disciple.

The other thing that worked for them is that they had the wisdom to be accepting of each other.

In the early ‘40s, Isherwood tried to become a monk and live at the Hollywood Vedanta Center. But try as he would, the monastic life wouldn’t take and he would find himself drifting away to the sensual pleasures of Santa Monica.

He would come back to the center shame-faced and Swami would say, “Chris even if you eat dirt I won’t reject you.”

Isherwood could accept the Swami’s way because the Swami accepted Isherwood’s lifestyle.

When asked if it wasn’t wonderful to find a spiritual mentor who could be that understanding, Isherwood said, “Yes, it was. And how wonderful for him to be able to be that accepting. It’s wonderful to be in a state of mind where you can truly accept the way someone is.”

That is the other side of acceptance, which the Western mind might see as an invitation to be trampled over. There is strength in acceptance and Isherwood became fascinated with that in his Guru.

“It was entirely Swami’s personality that attracted me,” Isherwood said. “There were Vedanta societies in London and New York when I was there and I never had any involvement with them.

“One felt about Swami that he was a vessel that this extraordinary thing passed through. He wasn’t charismatic. Some people met him and were not impressed with him in the least. But when he had this thing we all felt it. It was a kind of authority that he had about him and great peace.

“Over the years that I knew him it was like seeing somebody develop into a major genius. Yet, it was illusive like genius.”

It is the mystery of a worldly observer watching his friend climb to the highest spiritual peak that infuses “My Guru” with power.

As the Swami continues to make his way up while Isherwood watches, a love develops between the two men that makes platonic seem like a weak term or perhaps one that needs redefinition.

On Feb 21, 1957, Isherwood notes in his diary: “It’s as if he were exposing me to stronger and stronger waves of his love – yet, all the while, making almost no personal demands on me.”

In his diary for March 2, 1961, Isherwood notes that he had turned down an invitation to come to the Hollywood center for dinner. Then he writes: “A bit later, Swami called me and said, ‘I’m lonely for you, Chris.’ It wasn’t that he was nagging at me to come. He just felt like saying this, so he picked up the phone and said it. There are no strings attached to his love, therefore it is never embarrassed. The ordinary so-called lover is out to get something from his beloved, therefore he is afraid of going too far and becoming tiresome.”

At the end of “My Guru,” Isherwood indicates that he is not sure what kind of book he has written.

What he has written is a kind of love story that no major author has attempted since Somerset Maugham wrote “The Razor’s Edge.” And if he was trying to get beyond any other book that sits on the high shelf, he has got it.

from The Orange County Register, Aug. 10, 1980

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