January 6, 2020

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Four Men Shaking

By Lawrence Shainberg
Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications: 2019
134 pp. Paperback $16.95.

“I’ve always hated Zen.” That, of course, is Norman Mailer shortly after meeting Lawrence Shainberg, author of the new memoir Four Men Shaking. Published in 2019 by Shambhala, the main narrative arch of the memoir takes place over a short time, recounting the final visit of Kyudo Nakagawa, a Zen master, to his SoHo zendō in New York. Though brief, Four Men Shaking, a series of tight vignettes, flows back and forth over the last fifty years detailing significant moments of Shainberg’s life and his attempts to reconcile his career as a writer with his pursuit of Zen. This contradiction establishes the fundamental conflict of the memoir and the relationships Shainberg develops mainly with his literary influences Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer, and his Buddhist teacher, who Shainberg calls Roshi, or “old master.”

There's much in this memoir that will be of interest to readers of this journal, especially Shainberg’s accounts of his meetings with Beckett and Mailer. Shainberg links the former’s interest in “not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness” to his interest in Zen, while Mailer’s influence is one of conflict and passion about the external world. Half-serious, Mailer’s above assessment of Zen was both a reaction to Shainberg’s first memoir, Ambivalent Zen, and a friendly goading of the writer that begins their friendship.

Shainberg’s succinct and eloquent accounts of the relationships he developed with these three personalities in the last years of their lives underscore Shainberg’s attempts to find sanity in his own life. His memoir reads like a puzzle he’s trying to assemble where some pieces might be too big, some are misshapen, and some maybe missing. Pieces like his friendship with Mailer and his zazen, or the Zen practice of “seated meditation,” seem antithetical to one another, like Shainberg is trying to assemble one puzzle from the pieces of several. This metaphor seems an appropriate one for describing his life specifically, and everyone’s generally. This seeming contradiction represents his interest in the “logical contradiction” of Zen and its goal, as articulated by Zen master Eihei Dogen, “To study Zen is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.”

And here lies Shainberg’s dilemma: “How could I forget my self when I was obsessed with the brain that generated it?” Here, he refers to his earlier work as a journalist and novelist and his interest in neurology and the functioning of the brain. His early success as a writer stems from this interest. Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World (1980) is a non-fiction portrait of a prima donna neurosurgeon who can do no wrong, even when he does. Godlike, Dr. James Brockman, or “the boss,” seems the epitome of the inflated ego that is as far from a Zen-self as one can be. In his novel Memories of Amnesia (1988), Shainberg’s protagonist, a talented neurosurgeon—perhaps a fictional Brockman, begins to suffer from brain damage which leads to his questioning reality and his own sense of self. It seems that Four Men Shaking is the logical descendant of this interest in the self vis-a-vis reality finds its focus in the author.

In this context, Shainberg’s friendship with Mailer does not seem too paradoxical. He discovered Mailer through The Armies of the Night wherein “Mailer had found his voice by letting go of himself, discovered his vision with total surrender to objective reality.” While this last statement may be debatable, Shainberg borrows Mailer’s approach in Armies—“a perfect combination of of real-world description and novelistic skill”—for Brain Surgeon. Mailer’s influence leads to the success of Shainberg’s book, and, as Beckett will tell him later, that his strength as a writer is “witnessing.” Indeed, while Four Men Shaking is about Shainberg’s self-discovery, its strength seems to be in Shainberg’s accounts of meeting with Mailer, Beckett, and his Roshi during the last years of their lives.

While not an explicit theme in Men, mortality for the four men weighs significantly on the narrative. Part of Shainberg’s interest in the brain is derived for its deviant pathology, or the brain damage that skews perceptions and therefore one’s relationship with the external world. Early in his account, Shainberg associates his interest in the workings of the brain with his writing and concludes that these lead to an obsession that reinforced a false send of self: “That was the real brain damage—self-absorption and the fixations it engendered.” Shainberg seems to link brain damage with a desire to impose a fictitious forms on reality, like his attempts as a novelist. As a journalist, Shainberg is able to witness and break through the ego. Shainberg’s relationship with Beckett in his declining years illustrates this point, as the latter ruminates on his aging brain: “With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence—what you, I suspect, would call ‘brain damage’—the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is.” Ultimately, the search for meaning and order is futile when that which is used to process it ultimately breaks down and dies.

Shainberg’s ultimate understanding does not seem quite as grim as my assessment might sound. It's a short book, light but dense. It is difficult to encapsulate in a short book review, and it seems a crime to try to do so.