Returning: A Spiritual Journey
By Dan Wakefield
Doubleday, 288 pages, $17.95
Dan Wakefield has usually seemed a step closer to the nerve with his journalism than his invented stories. This new book is Wakefield`s most personal nonfiction to date, an often emotionally terrifying account of how he came back to Christianity after wandering in the neon wilderness for 30 or more years. What gives this narrative its impact is the writing-which gets those little hairs bristling.
Even if he were still an ”intellectual atheist,” we would still be putty in his hands. He is not only exceptionally candid about such bedevilments as aborted suicide attempts, alcoholism, even a heart-wrenching crackup while actually in the midst of a medieval brand of psychotherapy; he has the professional skill to re-create the scenes of his downfall. The way Wakefield begins his book can give you a sharp idea:
”One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my 48th birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch and screamed again. This was not, in other words, one of those waking nightmares left over from sleep. . . . It was, rather, a response to the reality that another morning had broken in a life I could only deal with sedated by wine, loud noise, moving images, and wired to electronic games that further distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being. . . .”
The tension and candor of this opening rarely let down before Wakefield finally finds relief. But the beginning also reveals other characteristics-Wakefield is an unusual combination of utter sincerity and knowing
commercialism, getting maximum mileage by converting his pain into suspense and melodrama. It is no accident that he begins his tale in the cinema capital, where he had been writing a TV series called ”James At 15.” In fact, a touch of Hollywood runs all the way through this book, from the very opening sentence, whose uncredited clincher was the title of a famous `40s film: ”I Wake Up Screaming,” starring Victor Mature and Betty Grable.
Such lapses, or borrowings, are not all that frequent, but they are evidence of a certain carelessness very much at odds with the high religious quest of this journey.
But such complaints seem petty compared to the true guts of this story, which in a sense is an existentialist tale of American male adventure, where even the protagonist rarely knows what is going to happen next. Although he began his pilgrimage in the sports-crazy heart of the country, Indianapolis, and grew up wanting ”to be a minister instead of a football coach,”
Wakefield was totally derailed by what he has called ”the fury of adolescence.” His face broke out in a riot of acne that was no ordinary case; the already sensitive youth was separated from the pack and inevitably started along that path of public introversion known as writing.
Wakefield escaped the Midwest in his sophomore year at Indiana University, transferring to urbane Columbia in New York City. It was here that he threw away the last shreds of his church-going upbringing and exulted in his new freedom. Though he now looks back at his New York ”agnostic” days with suspicion, one thing is clear: When Wakefield wouldn`t be caught dead in a church, the Protestant Ethic was still working on him like a tiger.
Regardless of the darkness he walked in philosophically and no matter how adrift emotionally, Wakefield always paid his dues via the typewriter.
He had barely graduated when he started publishing the freelance pieces that made a name for him in his eary 20s, and soon began work on his first book.
A final note: this ”return” should also be seen as a middle-aged man returning to his youth, his innocence, his Indianapolis, his perished family- it isn`t all mystery and salvation. There is acute nostalgia here.
