God Knows
Wells, Joel
exempted herself from clinical observa- tion. "For the upper ten percent of the upper ten percent, she once contended, there is no analyst." It is tempting to read such personal detachment...
...David finds God inexplicable in any case, and not terribly bright...
...Margaret, you must understand, never did unimportant things," com-mented Luther Cressman (her first hus- band), with a touch of bitter irony...
...Partly it was the quick subtlety of Mead's perceptions of those around her, a quality that is evident in a thousand details of observation, but in no A psaltery of one liners general theory...
...H e bitterly resents the fact that not a single book in the Bible is named for him whereas Samuel "that crude, blundering jackass" has two...
...He protests far too often that the lines about his love for Jonathan surpassing that of man for woman will be misconstrued ("I am David the king, not Oscar Wilde") and boasts about his sexual prowess ("Oh, boy, did I cleave to her...
...He began to reach far beyond the monastic walls, writing articles and letters on ra- cial justice, Vietnam, and nuclear war (his statements on the last find significant parallels in the 1983 American bishops' Pastoral, The Challenge of Peace...
...Yet Mary Catherine Bateson was left in the good and loving hands of a devoted extended "family...
...Her stature is also con- nected with her courage in bridging con- ventional gaps in our comprehension of human activities...
...In the end it's like inviting the Two-Thousand-Year-Old-Man to prove that he has total recall or like accidentally sitting down beside the Ancient Mariner on a long bus trip...
...As he has Bathsheba tell David when he boasts about his psalms: "Some are masterpieces but, like everything you write, they're flawed by excessive length...
...The voyeuristic roof-top bathing seduction scene is re-created with variations at least four times, and the sole suspense provided is whether Bathsheba, the only woman David feels sure can stir him from impotence, will agree to lie with him one last time if he will agree to name Solomon king...
...The lucidity of her mind, and her extraordinary perceptiveness are re- peatedly attested to by friends and col- leagues...
...David finds this niggardly of God since it was a mere peccadillo on his slate: "Gory deeds?I've got more than enough for every taste...
...Michael Mott has managed to put together a remarkable, coherent, and eminently readable portrait of the differ- ent Mertons that emerge from the pub- lished writings, the journals, the life- events, and the many friendships of Gethsemani's most famous monk...
...Catch-22 is a hard act to follow and even it may have been too protracted...
...Joel Wells T O EXEGETE John L. McKenzie the biblical David was a bloodthirsty bandit, a sort of Old Testament Robin Hood with little or no redeeming social value...
...exempted herself from clinical observation...
...She stood between the academy and the-world of practical wis- dom...
...GOD KNOWS Joseph HeHer Knopf, $16.95, 354 pp...
...David has a weakness for tacos...
...God knows...
...The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Continued from page 560) publisher the love poetry occasioned by this relationship...
...She had a way of ener- gizing others and conveying her heady self-confidence in the powers of reason and passion in the service of humanity...
...we hardly need to be told, as Heller does tell us, that David has married the original J.A.P...
...Did I kill Uriah to avoid a scandal," he wonders, "or because I al- ready had settled in my soul that I wanted his wife...
...That's gross...
...One does not~have to agree with everything that Mott has said, but nonetheless from now on any- one who writes about Merton must Commonweal: 562...
...Her friend Colin Frank likened the job of getting Mead where she was supposed to go to "wheeling a giant brain around...
...Far too early on in God Knows the temptation to start skimming all the biblical prose for the jokes and naughty bits becomes overpowering...
...I have suicide, regicide, patricide, homicide, fratricide, infan-ticide, adultery, incest, hanging, and more decapitations than just Saul's...
...Actually, Heller has made him a lie- down comedian because the whole book is a flashback monologue delivered by a garrulous David from his deathbed...
...She was both a celebrated iconoclast and an ardent traditionalist who was religious to the end of her life...
...Yet Margaret Mead was no simple romantic...
...Jane Howard has not quite gotten in- side the skin of Margaret Mead, for which Mead herself would be grateful...
...She could be ludicrously'glib one moment, then incisive and penetrat- ing the next...
...Yet that was it: she had the rare capacity to make things matter...
...Outside her own field she was often viewed as an oracle...
...Mead explored so many places and themes in anthropology, yet it is difficult to specify a single seminal idea associ- ated with her...
...She was in the forefront of the cross-cultural study of women and adolescents...
...Mead became associated with the doc- trine of cultural relativism, yet stressed equally the importance of innate tem- peramental differences among individu- als that sometimes resisted cultural con- ditioning...
...Perhaps most perplexing is the gap be- tween Mead's popular and professional reputations...
...To his knowledge God has only managed to outsmart him on one occasion and proba- bly resents David's brains and the fact that he refused to play by the book or pay much attention to what God tries to tell him through his muddled prophet Nathan...
...This man of many talents and lofty ambitions was not a contradiction, but surely a paradox--and more than that, a mystery, not only to others but often to himself, as he strove to integrate his enormous spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and emotional capabilities into a unified life...
...He sought solitude relentlessly, yet he needed to be with people...
...Mostly, I suspect, Mead's stature comes from the combination of energy and optimism that made her special to those around her...
...It is tempting to read such personal detachment into Mead's own mothering: she was absent for much of her daugh- ter's childhood...
...Always make sure that your hair is combed, es- pecially in the back...
...God, for his part has never forgiven David for sending Bathsheba's husband off to the front to be killed...
...Not all Merton's enthusiasms bore fruit in a book or an article...
...I swear to God...
...He lies there shivering and impotent, minis- tered to by a nubile virgin and visited periodically by a now middle-aged Bathsheba who hectors him to leap-frog their son Solomon to the top of the list of successors to the throne...
...To enliven the mandatory plod- ding through dead patches of scriptural narrative we are given David's com-ments and complaints about everything from plagiarism (it wasn't just Solomon who stole from him, but Shakespeare and Milton, among others) to Michelangelo's outrageous portrayal of him as uncir-cumcised...
...Her literary virtues sometimes in- spired misgivings among her colleagues...
...So commanding a thinker could sometimes "overstand" her sub- jects, and she was not above bullying her "native" subjects into providing infor- mation for her...
...Heller has done his homework in Samuel and Kings and the story holds close to Scripture in chronology and detail...
...And even this com- mitment has its ambiguity...
...Her mind, it seems, was always several steps ahead of her body...
...Yet these are innovations in methodology rather than substantive ideas...
...Howard's triumph is to have made quite clear the sources of Margaret Mead's greatness...
...David is waiting for an apology from God for letting the son which Bathsheba bore him as a result of their illicit cou- pling die...
...In years to come . . . people would recognize that her contributions had been enormous, without being able to say quite why...
...Surely no small feat...
...she bridged anthropology and psychology...
...she linked the concerns of men and women by making women's issues matter in anthropology...
...The vividness of her cultural portraits, her dramatic contrasts between cultures she happened to study, and the too-perfect set of variations in sex roles she found in three New Guinea societies made Mead's critics question her objec- tivity...
...What we get instead are one-liners ("A harem is a warm climate, not an easy thing to keep in mint condition"), outrageous anachronisms (Bathsheba designed bloomers, the caftan and the mini-skirt...
...After listening to the honeymoon prescriptions laid on him by David's first wife, King Saul's daughter princess Michal ("I will want you to bathe every night and to brush your teeth after every meal...
...Most char- acteristic of Margaret Mead was neither her excessive distance nor intimacy, but rather her tendency to blur the line be- tween them...
...The fact that so many did is amazing when one realizes his rigorous commitment to prayer and solitude...
...The danger in being a king is that after a while you begin to believe you really are one...
...Howard's fascination with Margaret Mead turns on Mead's numerous con-tradictions...
...Always use deodorants...
...Don't pick your nose in front of me...
...She helped pioneer the use of film in anthropology...
...Yet she has skillfully recreated the dazzl- ing and frenetic world that surrounded Mead, giving us more of Mead than we had before, and perhaps as much as we shall ever have...
...Tll let you in on a secret about my son Solomon: he was dead serious when he proposed cutting the baby in half, that putz...
...Heller does a brisk and diverting job with the slaying of Goliath, but keeps coming back to other key incidents like a pesky, droning fly...
...Even mine...
...But Solomon is a hopeless klutz who cribs all of David's best lines on a clay tablet so he 19 October 1984:561 will get credit for them in the Bible...
...For the upper ten percent of the upper ten percent, she once contended, there is no analyst...
...Yet her legacy within anthropology is more equivocal...
...Of all Mead's contradictions none is so intriguing or appealing as her ultimate dependency in a world in which she seemed naturally to take charge...
...Yet his in-volvement in the social issues of his day never shook his conviction that he was irrevocably a monk...
...Now all this may sound fairly divert- ing in the telling and it's admittedly churlish for a reviewer to rip off some of a book's better gags and then put it down, but the formula gets more than tedious at book length...
...Perhaps Heller i~ aware that he runs on a bit...
...The dumb son of a bitch was trying to be fair, not shrewd...
...For this alone her friends were willing to forgive much in Mead that was not appealing...
...Gregory Bateson put it best: "Margaret Mead was hard if not impossible to pigeonhole...
...She was too American to be comfortable with simple cultural deter- minism...
...She ap- peared to choreograph the lives of every- one she knew, while all the while nurtur- ing an elaborate set of dependencies on others...
...You must wash your hands with strong soap after defecating and urinating, especially be- fore you start preparing my food...
...She could seem clinical in recording Mary Catherine's birth and her early development, yet her scientific ob- servations of exotic peoples could be colored by her own passions, theoretical and personal...
...But the seriousness largely ends there, with no real attempt to get inside the heads of any characters other than David, or to get down the ethos of the period as Thomas Mann managed so splendidly in Joseph in Egypt, or to dazzle with arcane imagination as Mailer did less successfully in'Ancient Evenings...
...To Joseph Heller, who makes him the raunchy protagonist of his fourth novel, he is the first stand-up Jewish comedian, a forerunner of Mel Brooks, Lennie Bruce, and Woody Allen, and God is his straight man...
...For not only is the heart deceitful in all things, it is also desperately wicked...
...Moreover, by the sixties a new and demanding dimension was added to his monastic life that further complicated his desire for solitude...
...Her bisexuality, obliquely revealed in How- ard's narrative, is in fact an extension of Mead's characteristic "betwixt and be- tween" status, and is not the revelation it might have been...
...She was, furthermore, a meticu- lous fieldworker...
...When he was forbidden to write on war and peace, he went underground with mimeographed articles...
...She published best sellers but has left behind no unquestionable mas- terpiece in academic anthropology...
...This was, at least, good Samoan parent- ing as her mother saw it...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 18
