The Geist Goes West

HOT SPRINGS: THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST NEW YORK JEWISH LITERARY INTELLECTUAL IN THE HUMAN-POTENTIAL MOVEMENT by Stuart Miller. 341 pages. Viking. $7.95.

The time was the mid-'60s. The restrained ways of the previous decade were retreating before creeping sideburns and widening ties. Despite a touch of residual acne, Stuart Miller saw himself as Stuart the Magnificent. A New Yorker, he had buried his middle-class Jewish background beneath dashing consumer goods. His degrees included a Ph.D. from Yale. He had acquired a vaguely British accent and was, fittingly, the author of The Picaresque Novel, a study of rogues in literature.

Life promised Miller a glorious, fun filled imitation of picaresque art. He had persuaded his bosses at the State University of New York to spring him for a year at the Esalen Institute. The university was searching for new routes to learning, and as a 29-year-old bachelor, Miller would be its one-man Lewis and Clark Expedition to the encounter-group center in Big Sur, Calif.

Objective: Girls. He arrived at Esalen in a silver Corvette. In the trunk, as Miller tells it, were "a properly scuffed Florentine leather suitcase, a gray-green but charmingly ineffective Olivetti, and a Cardin-imitation blue blazer bought at Barney's." Miller was to participate in Esalen's curriculum as a member of one of its residential programs. But his first objective was girls. Martha, Catherine, Sandra, Lorraine--all proved cooperative. What Miller did not count on was thai his sex life would become data for encounter sessions. Catherine told Martha that she did not enjoy going to bed with him. Martha concurred, noting that Miller was rather cold. "I was sort of expecting that," said Catherine. Turning to Miller, she added, "After all your talk, you didn't seem to know that much." In addition, no one seemed overly impressed by his car, his haberdashery or his pretensions as the flamekeeper of Western culture.

Miller fought back with his persuasive critical intelligence. He mocked the jargon of the human-potential movement. He described Esalen as a typically vulgar California contradiction--"the pursuit of the spirit without adequate traditions." But the confrontation had mortally wounded Miller's vanity. Far from home ground, he had no one to buttress his top-heavy personality. "Who would tell me I was good?" he whimpered when an Eastern colleague failed to respond sympathetically to his complaining letters. By this time his ego began to resemble a shriveled eggplant. Waves of anxiety paralyzed his will.

Even as an Esalen dropout back in New York, Miller could find no solace or direction. Eventually he forced himself to write down a few simple resolutions. Among them: try to smile at others; be nice to your mother and father; treat women as people.

Unofficial Conversion. Miller also decided to return to Esalen, where the residents had taken over the maintenance and service chores to offset the center's financial deficit. He pitched in as a combination waiter, bartender and supply sergeant with the exalted title of "wine steward." Team spirit worked miracles. So did the New Testament, which he began to read regularly, eventually undergoing an intense--though unofficial --conversion to Christianity.

Enough of the old Miller was still alive, however, for him to reject a monastic existence and declare for life, a risk that had to be played out somewhere between Stuart the rogue and Stuart the saint. And that is precisely the equivocal condition of Hot Springs itself. Miller's finely paced narrative of ego death and transfiguration freely mixes elements and intentions. Ironic self-awareness vies with variations on the old-fashioned confessional and conversion tale. Frank disclosures are offset by pretentious allusions to existential phenomenology that could have come straight out of Sartre's Nausea. But the most worldly aspect of Hot Springs is as a testimony of a man remade; it also functions as a superior form of public relations. Stuart Miller, former literary intellectual and wine steward, is currently an Esalen vice president in charge of program development. He is also the editor of the Esalen Publishing Program, of which Hot Springs is a product.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.