Spare Days:
Wilkes, Paul
THE SWEET CHARIOT SWINGS LOW
SPARE DAYS Marvin Barrett
Arbor House/William Morrow, $16.95, 200pp.
Paul Wilkes
Marvin Barrett's path to spiritual whole-^^H^P^^H ness had indeed been a rocky-but...
...Spare Days offers no easy answers, no apocalyptic vision...
...A green slope: not slippery, not furry-like sealskin- irregular, but not bumpy...
...Spiced with shrewd and dazzling insights, Mr...
...and analytical for that...
...Barrett is too intelligent, wry...
...He was haunted by what Gerald Heard told him as Barrett sorrowfully left the Trabuco community (having been converted "from Ivy League skepticism to post-Bloomsbury piety"): that he would go into the world, forget the religious life and then, in old age, find it ten times as hard to reconstitute...
...He distributed food with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity on their Grand Central Station rounds and regularly attended Episcopal services...
...The faith he had struggled to nurture did not, as he might have hoped, immediately infuse him in those trying days before and after his surgery...
...Letting go...
...That is the tone of his book, at once self-conscious (as a writer must be) and self-deprecating...
...Barrett kept a diary of the six months in which he faced death, but more importantly, faced life...
...He traveled to visit holy men of India and to Assisi to experience the world of Francis...
...THE SWEET CHARIOT SWINGS LOW SPARE DAYS Marvin Barrett Arbor House/William Morrow, $16.95, 200pp...
...While his interior life was stormy, outwardly he seemed to be doing just fine: well-married, well-employed, the father of four children and a coveted guest at the fanciest of dinner parties in New York's posh Hamptons...
...But when, at the age of sixty-three, he faced a life-threatening cancer of the stomach-which doubly surprised him for its audacity, as he was already the victim of a heart attack-he looked squarely at himself and, regardless of what his resume or friends might say, found he was "boring and ill-used...
...Here is a testament to faith...
...Paul Wilkes Marvin Barrett's path to spiritual whole-^^H^P^^H ness had indeed been a rocky-but fasci-nating-one...
...He was resuscitated from this, his second heart attack, which occurred after the cancer operation, and dismisses it with: "The heart was obviously jealous of all the attention my cancerous stomach had been getting...
...At the end of his book, we find him "lying, not in a puddle of blood, or water, or a dirt-lined hole, but in that lukewarm funny soup that God brewed a billion years ago, waiting to be born...
...Barrett's description or his "death" (which was excerpted in the New Yorker), is classic-in a strange way, a wonderful advertisement for not being alarmed when the Sweet Chariot swings low for each of us...
...And to humor...
...he asked Krishnamurti for guidance and participated in Gurd-jieff groups...
...Again...
...Me alone...
...The rattling and shaking, the dull roar, the low murmuring voices are back...
...But it shows that a lifetime of faith, regardless how variegated, does indeed stand a soul in good stead for the great trials...
...He left the Navy in World War II as a conscientious objector to live in Gerald Heard's Trabuco community with the likes of Aldous Huxley...
...I am doing as I should...
...Relaxed....No question of turning back, getting off...
...Slipping but not grabbing to hold on....No one on the bank cheering me on...
...Barrett's funny soup is a treat for the rest of us as we struggle through our spare days.ur spare days...
...I have returned...
...Then all of a sudden the delicious ride is over, the friendly green blinks out...
...At once admitting his human frailties and cleaving to that strong, but patchwork faith he had woven and assembled in his lifetime...
Vol. 115 • December 1988 • No. 22
