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Gin, cigarettes, women: I'm a prophet, not a saint
Andrew Billen
M. Scott Peck, author of the ultimate self-help manual, has Parkinson’s and his wife of 43 years has walked out. Our correspondent finds him strangely ebullient
ON A FINE spring day I walk up the path from a tranquil lake in rural Connecticut and knock on the door of M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled. Although it was written 27 years ago for people in therapy, it is now regarded as the granddaddy of self-help manuals and among the wiser of them. I nurse a qualm, however, for Dr Peck, who long ago embraced the honorific of “prophet”, has now published a not so sensible book called Glimpses of the Devil, an account of the exorcisms he performed on young women in the early Eighties. I fear the prophet and I may fall out over this one, so I am relieved to discover him in skittish mood. As if to forestall my scepticism, on top of his balding pink head he has clamped a pair of devil’s horns that flash like Belisha beacons. “In case,” he says, “you think I’m devilish.”
Peck is 69 and has Parkinson’s disease, so we are making quite slow progress towards his garden’s seating area when I realise that although I have met his assistant and been offered coffee, I have not been introduced to his wife. Lily, the Chinese medical student whom Dr Peck married in 1959, is a frequent presence in his books. In the introduction to the one that made him famous he writes that she is “so giving that it is hardly possible to distinguish her wisdom as a spouse, parent, psychotherapist and person from my own”.
Where’s Lily, I ask. “Lily,” he says as we prepare to roast in the midday sun, “left me 15 months ago.”
I’m sorry, I say. He was, too. To lose his companion, I add, must have been a terrible blow after 40 years. His boyish face momentarily droops. “Forty-three years. It was a blow, yeah. And a surprise.” In the interests of transparency he would like to tell me more but to do so would only worsen relations with his family. It is just, I say, that he has written so extensively about marital love. People will ask how come his life fouls up if he knows all the answers?
“Obviously, I didn’t know them well enough to prevent a divorce after all those years.” And by then he was sick? “Yes. Whether the two things are connected, you can guess.”
So there is bitterness there, as well as regret. On the other hand, things could be worse. Although he wishes The Road Less Travelled had been a bestseller in hardback rather than soft cover, for it would have made him four times as much, its 10 million plus sales have left him more than comfortably off, even if the divorce has cost him half his fortune. He has also remarried. The second Mrs Peck is an educationalist from California called Kathy, 14 years his junior, a pleasant, intelligent woman who faces the task of tending for Peck in his final years.
“You may be aware,” he says, “that I’m sensitive that my speech is not normal. I can’t find the right word. I ramble. I lose my train of thought. I drool. Sometimes I shake. Sometimes I don’t.”
If there is an upside to his illness, it is that he is fascinated by it. As the afternoon wears on I listen as his symptoms and diagnoses are related as if cherished anecdotes. As a doctor — albeit a psychiatric doctor — he find his pathology absorbing, but his fascination is also of a piece with his belief that avoiding life’s problems and “the emotional suffering inherent in them” is the primary cause of mental illness. It is this not particularly fashionable thought that has helped his many readers endure their own burdens and, surely, lessened, his own.
Oddly, however, it has not helped much with Peck’s impatience with the burdens of others. In the early Eighties, complaining that his patients were “slow” and “do not listen”, he wound down his private psychiatric practice and, on the back of the success of The Road and its sequels, took to the lecture circuit, charging by the end $15,000 a pop. The financial rewards compensated him for the enforced proximity with his readers, the more importunate of whom he condemned as “ghouls” and “leeches”. He has been as frank about his assessments of his family. He and his father, a wealthy New York lawyer in denial that he was half-Jewish, did not get on and Peck spent years in analysis sorting out his resentment of male authority figures (the old man died muttering that he still could not “get” The Road’s success). Peck, meanwhile, hated his elder brother David, whom he considered a sadist (before he died, David noted that, growing up, he had never seen Scotty’s “spiritual side”). He did like his mother, yet in Glimpses of the Devil he mentions her death with almost eerie dispassion, telling a priest who commiserated that she had been ill for years: “I was actually glad she had finally gotten her dying over with.”
I ask how he would rate himself as a father to his three children, two of whom, or so I gather, no longer speak to him. “There’s no question that I was less of a father than I should have been. On the other hand I’m not sure that I would have written books had I been the father I wished I’d been. I was not a bad father. I didn’t beat the children. I didn’t pay them no attention whatsoever, but I didn’t pay them the attention they deserved.”
Were the books worth the sacrifice? “You speak as if I had a choice.”
I am speaking, after all, to the adult version of the eight-year-old boy who fantasised about making speeches to “the nations of the world”, a man who regularly hears God speak to him. Prophets do not select their vocations.
As for what kind of husband he made, it is for Lily to say and she seems to have voted with her feet. His books insist that his concept of a wife’s role matured over time and that he learnt to respect Lily’s own need to grow. This did not, however, prevent a patronising tone entering his discussions of her. In his 1995 spiritual autobiography In Search of Stones, he chides her for using science fiction and fantasy literature as a “resort”. “ One of mine,” he goes on, as if there were an equivalence, “was to resort to sexual infidelity.” He writes that he is not proud of these affairs but that he was “questing through sexual romance for at least a brief visit to (God’s) castle”. I suppose, I say, women threw themselves at him on lecture tours. “I had opportunities, but it was not so many as you might think,” he replies, noting that a chronicler of the New Age movement praised him for maintaining boundaries between himself and his audience. “I used to protect myself very stringently.”
His stringency, however, did not stop one woman coming forward to claim he had bedded her at a spiritual growth seminar and recording her verdict that he was “a drunk and a womaniser”. Kathy too, I suspect, was one of his conquests. They met when he was lecturing in Sacramento, California, and he had been “dumped” at the boarding house she ran. He “manipulated” her into taking him to dinner and prefers not to say what happened next. “But I want to say Lily and I had ten really good years from about 1991 to 2001. I was not unfaithful any longer. For one thing I’d become impotent, totally, and not subject to help from Viagra — although that doesn’t end one’s sexuality, as I learnt with Kathy.”
So impotence was almost a blessing? “I went to my doctor and told him I’d lost most of my libido and I said: ‘Don’t you dare do anything about it. It feels much more like a healing to me than a disease.’ It was a monkey off my back. I have a distrustful attitude toward the gonads, as you can tell.”
In his writing, if not his life, in this he has been consistent. In The Road, he writes: “If one can say that one has built genuinely loving relationships with a spouse and children, then one has already succeeded in accomplishing more than most people accomplish in a lifetime.” He goes on: “There is frequently something pathetic about the individual who has failed to build his or her family into a loving unit, yet restlessly searches for loving relationships outside the family.”
To be taken into consideration alongside his actual domestic record is Peck’s addictive personality. He disputes whether, despite his heavy gin intake, he was an alcoholic. If he was, he is a “dry alcoholic” now, since pancreatitis has stopped him drinking. He still chain smokes, however, and it is a little pitiful watching the difficulty he has working his lighter in the breeze.
“A fellow who was thinking of doing my biography once asked me: ‘God man, have you ever denied yourself anything?’ And I said: ‘Well, I’ve never smoked or drunk as much as I would like to.’ That’s about as close as I could come.” It is curious, I say, for a man whose reputation has been built on his advocacy of self-discipline. Does he still see himself as a prophet or is he more modest now? “Probably less modest. Yes and no. I ’m more modest in some ways. I’ve had it thrown at me so much, the designation of prophet, that I’ve come to accept it — as long as a prophet doesn’t have to be a saint.”
This convenient formula, of course, allows him considerable personal latitude while still keeping him on a higher plane than most of us. Peck regards himself as a “stage-four evolved person”, the highest spiritual stage a mortal can attain (in his arcane model, an atheist such as myself ranks above an orthodox believer: I come in at a stage three). His identification with other prophets is marked. In the past he has said that when in doubt he asks himself what Jesus would do. Today he confines his comparisons to Daniel, another “bright Jewish boy” who interpreted dreams: “Ultimately he begins reading words written on walls and he was a prophet, which, of course, people have accused me of . . . ”
Nor have his ambitions been confined to psycho-spiritual affairs. In 1983 he initiated a bid for the American presidency in order to become a “healer on a national level”, abandoning it only when he feared that the stress might kill him, having pondered but rejected the possibility that his destiny might be to die a martyr. Today he is working with a group of clerics launching a third force in American politics, a spiritual one. So, I joke, he still sees it as his personal mission to save the earth. “No,” he replies seriously, “American democracy is the most I can take on.”
The paradox of this colossally self-deluded man is that he is, on his better pages, a font, or conduit, of clear-headed advice. The precepts of The Road Less Travelled — that life is difficult and is best approached by discipline, delaying gratification and taking responsibility — could not be more grounded. His dismissal of the myth of romantic love as “a dreadful lie” and insistence that real love is not a feeling but an act of altruism is useful too. As his original intended publisher said, it is a phenomenal book until he blows it in the third section and brings God into it. Yet Peck, who was not actually baptised until 1980, is not a doctrinaire Christian. He takes a moderate line on euthanasia and does not believe pain is necessarily redemptive. His eccentricities of thought cannot simply be blamed on the Bible. He believes, for instance, that “virtually all diseases are psycho-spiritual-socio-somatic”, although, naturally, when it comes to his own Parkinson’s he has concluded that this is the exception that proves his rule.
But injecting God into the psychological equation is, as he knows, a most unusual thing for a psychiatrist to do, and it is probably only his fame that prevented him being drummed out of the profession. But as a block to being taken seriously, his faith evaporates beside his certainties about Satan as a real and specific entity straight out of the Book of Revelation, a fallen angel, jealous of man’s superiority to the angels and out to take over the good. In his more optimistic moments, Peck refers to the defeat of evil as a “mop-up” operation, the main battles having already been won by Christ, but this does not mean the remaining ones will not be hard fought.
In Glimpses of the Devil Peck recounts two of them, the exorcisms he performed at the time of his presidential bid on two, as he claims, “possessed” women named Jersey and Beccah. These stories are grippingly written but quite fantastic, as if Peck and his helpers have been victims of mass hallucination, at one point seeing Jersey acquire the beaky features of an old woman and at another watching Beccah’s face mutate into the “triangular head of a snake ”. Peck speculates that Satan is using Beccah to kill him (presumably to thwart his future presidency), although the worst that happens is that he gets pneumonia. Obviously, there are explanations for their behaviour a million times more likely than diabolic possession. Jersey, for instance, had been molested by her father as a girl and Beccah was terrified as a child by a creepy book about the Devil.
To give him his due, Peck worries about his conduct at the time. Performing an exorcism is, he says, a bit like being party to a gang rape. Yet, funnily enough, although neither woman was entirely cured, he probably helped them both. As a metaphor, demonic possession is not much weirder than Freud’s trilogy of Ego, Id and Super-Ego or Jung’s shadow. The problem is that Peck takes it literally, indeed proposes that demonology should become a psychiatric sub-discipline.
But then there’s no reality check on Peck these days. I ask him how he met Kathy again and find I have prompted a long diversion on the intervention of grace in his life. Kathy wrote to him on his birthday last year, five months after Lilly walked; she had been a long time divorced although she had intended to remarry. “But four or five years ago he dropped dead in his apartment of a brain haemorrhage. So maybe he sacrificed himself for me.” Well, maybe.
Peck’s days as an author are now behind him but he takes comfort from a new career as a songwriter. He has a long story to tell me about a song he wrote about faithlessness. He listened to a CD of it 30 times, predictably pleased with how it had turned out, but then the “still small voice of God” started up, telling him to listen “properly”.
“ Finally it says: ‘Be objective.’ I said: ‘I’ve been trying to be objective for Christ’s sakes! What more can I do?’ But I went into a sort of guided meditation and I imagined that there were a million people around the globe, Japan, Ethiopia, Brazil, America, what not, all with headphones on listening to this thing and that their consensus would somehow be objective. Well, it was what I needed. I played it for the 62nd time and I said: ‘ Holy ******! It’s not good. It’s great’.”
And so, the musical climax to my long al fresco seminar on the prophetic talents of M. Scott Peck (the M, incidentally, stands for Morgan), comes about. He takes me inside to listen to what he promises I will find a “very challenging” song. I do listen to it — not, admittedly, 62 times, but twice. Great, I promise, it is not.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8123-1606175,00.html
