Peter Pantheism

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE SORCERER OF BOLINAS REEF

by CHARLES REICH

266 pages. Random House. $8.95.

First there was Charles Reich outstanding law student, clerk of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and button-down member of an aggressive Washington law firm. Then came Charles Reich Two: the Yale professor who put his pulse on the thumb of the nation when he ratified and amplified the '60s counterculture in The Greening of America, the most profoundly naive bestseller of the period. The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef introduces the third Reich, a San Francisco homosexual who now quotes Joni Mitchell and Walt Whitman and preaches an herbal-essence philosophy called "evolutionary rebellion."

Who said there are no second acts in American life? The desire to make radical changes in what is now called one's "lifestyle" is a fundamental of American character. "A man builds a house for his old age and sells it before the roof is finished," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote some 140 years before Charles Reich sublet his leaky Consciousness III to follow the sunset to California. Reich's evolutionary rebellion is, in fact, a mobile-home version of Consciousness III--that pot-scented notion that mankind can somehow escape civilization and its discontents. Gnomic and unpolitical, ER is part of the new solipsism and characteristic of a lot of people who, disillusioned by the radical politics in the '60s, withdrew into the various styles of the "personal growth" movement. Reich's version is a kind of Peter Pantheism in which he offers his own autobiography as a guide to a never-never land. Natural beauty and loving friends heal the troubled soul there, and such things as lust, jealousy, guilt and evil hardly seem to exist.

Reich's account of his life is essentially a thin outline on which he strings the cliches of the gray flannel '50s and the youth rebellion at Berkeley and Yale. As in The Greening of America, he wafts nonsensical generalizations like dandelion seeds: "An alienated society is no less a political tyranny because the oppression is found within each individual, rather than coming from a single source such as an army or a dictator."

As to Reich's own sex life, the hard news is that Reich did not have sex with another person until he was 43. The disclosure elicits a certain amount of sympathy, but his account of that first time--with a San Francisco male prostitute--reads a bit like one of those dated popular English novels in which the schoolmistress has a fleeting love affair during her holiday in Italy. It is difficult to imagine that Reich's lonely years and late-blooming sex life have not affected the way he looks at the world. This, however, is not a critical issue. Attempting a vision, Reich has only come up with a rosy view--as if Rod McKuen had turned Rousseau's Social Contract into a TV special.

R.Z. Sheppard

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