Piecing Together a Lifetime of Success : Books: 'Composing a Life,' Mary Catherine Bateson's biography of five women who turned roadblocks into opportunities, has struck a chord with readers.

By PAMELA WARRICK

May 1, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — Suppose life were a quilt. Not just any quilt, but a grand and crazy quilt, its odd pieces coming together in patterns of bright surprise.

Imagine life as many beginnings and many endings--like the pieces of a quilt that can fit into a satisfying and creative whole.

If the notion sounds intriguing, then welcome to the circle. The idea of life as a work in progress is suddenly popular, thanks to author Mary Catherine Bateson and a slim volume of unusual biography.

Two years after its debut, “Composing a Life,” Bateson’s book about five women (including herself), is climbing best-seller lists. And, like a precious heirloom, the book is being passed from woman to woman.

Readers meet Johnnetta Cole, the first black woman president of Atlanta’s Spelman College; Joan Erikson, an artist in her 80s and quiet collaborator of psychologist husband Erik; Alice d’Entremont, an electrical engineer who worked on Skylab, and Ellen Bassuk, a psychiatrist who helps the homeless.

The loves and lives of this quartet are woven throughout as Bateson, who profiles herself along the way, seeks to show how women go about composing their lives.

Each of the women has suffered sorrows, stunning blows that sent them reeling--the death of a child, the loss of a lover--and the common career sacrifices many women make for family. But each of the women adapted and was changed forever in the process.

Together, they witness the truth to Bateson’s observation that “of any stopping point in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on, as well as a good place to remain.”

Since the hardcover went out of print and the book was issued in paperback last fall, the book has set off a series of small explosions in the literary world.

“Reading ‘Composing a Life’ made me gnash my teeth and weep,” confessed feminist author Jane O’Reilly in a New York Times review. The book “offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement,” crowed the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a column on Jane Pauley’s job changes, Ellen Goodman invokes the book as “a reverie,” and Bill Moyers, a minister-turned-publisher-turned public TV guru, holds it up as a bible for both sexes, noting, “Everyone can gain from this book-- me especially.”

Its publishers--surprised by the book’s popularity--insist without exaggeration that the book is “changing lives.”

“The first three people I lent this book to left or changed their jobs shortly after reading it,” said Rachel Klayman, senior editor at Plume Publishing, which put out the paperback. “It inspires readers to take the usual roadblocks and detours and turn them into opportunities for remaking your life.”

The book’s hardcover publisher issued 20,000 copies. Another 53,000 paperbacks have been printed, and another printing is planned.

“The popularity of this book is almost entirely due to word-of-mouth recommendations. Not tours, not advertising,” said Klayman.

Ann Godoff, editor-in-chief of Atlantic Monthly Press, edited both “Composing a Life” in hardcover and the wildly popular feminist manual, “The New Our Bodies, Our Selves.” Both books, she says, have engendered “that sort of cult feeling that comes with a new approach, with the idea that you can change women’s lives.”

From quiet reading circles in Georgetown to group houses in Santa Cruz, the book has been embraced for offering women--and men, if they want it--a kinder, gentler definition of what constitutes a successful life.

On a sunny morning outside the Beltway, Mary Catherine Bateson is making coffee, baking croissants, talking on the telephone--”No, I really don’t see how I can go to Africa just now”--and entertaining a guest.

She is, of course, distracted. And that’s her point.

“What I’ve argued more and more strongly since the book came out is that having to pay attention to more than one thing at a time, thinking about relationships, family, children, as well as about work--and not being able to turn it off--means that women have a capacity for complexity that men have not been encouraged to develop.”

At 51, Bateson, daughter of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, has had a lifetime of divided attentions. At various times, she has led the life of traditional wife and mother, of linguist, of scholar, of anthropologist, of teacher and of author.

She and husband Barkev Kassarjian and daughter Vanni lived several years in Iran, where he taught and she did research. When the Iranian revolution forced them out, both lost years of work--and everything they owned.

Years later, with the family living in Boston, Bateson was named dean of faculty at Amherst College on the other side of the state. Kassarjian stayed behind to continue his work. “It turned out his idea of being together was weekend commuting,” she writes, “which left me running a single-parent household.”

Today, with her daughter in college and her husband working in Switzerland, Bateson spends six months a year teaching at George Mason University in Virginia. She and her husband speak on the telephone every week and get together a few days every month or so. During her months off campus, husband and wife are reunited and Bateson devotes herself to him and to her writing.

According to Bateson, her mother built a life “around professional constancies and made her (three) marriages fit.” The life of Margaret Mead’s daughter, while disjointed, has been more traditional.

“As a young woman,” she says, “I never questioned the assumption that when I married, what I could do would take second place to what my husband could do.”

And for at least 20 years, she writes, “Whenever I interrupted my husband when he was busy, he finished what he was doing before he responded. (But) when he interrupted me, I would drop what I was doing to respond to him, automatically giving his concerns priority.”

To please their husbands, bosses, parents, children, friends and even their pets, Bateson argues, women willingly put aside their own needs and goals. To accommodate everyone, women are forced to lead highly interrupted lives.

But what if the most successful lives were those with the most interruptions? Or as Bateson puts it: “What if the capacity for distraction, the divided will, represents a higher wisdom ?”

The first week of her presidency at Spelman College, Johnnetta Cole had to leave her duties to care for her son, hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy in New York.

“Somebody’s got to be the mommy,” Cole said with a shrug. And in our society, it’s usually the mother, adds Bateson.

When Joan and Erik Erikson’s three children were very young, Erik went to live with the Sioux for one of the first great efforts to explore cross-cultural psychology. While he was gone, their daughter contracted scarlet fever, and the two boys had to be isolated--one upstairs, one down--for six weeks. “So that’s what I did while Erik was with the Sioux,” said his wife and collaborator.

Well, says Bateson, “even the continuity of self-sacrifice and dependency can be used to bridge painful discontinuities.”

Such talk troubles feminists who worry that it puts a perilously positive spin on the sacrifices of women.

Bateson disagrees but concedes that it “does make it possible for women to find meaning and value in their situation, even when it’s unfair.”

Some feminists also chafe at Bateson’s embrace of “the interrupted life.” Broadcast journalist Diane Abt, for one, worries that this premise could stifle ambition.

“It’s a relief to be told you need not commit your entire life to pursuing a single goal,” said Abt, who left her job in Seattle to follow husband Michael Zielenziger to a Stanford University fellowship.

“I don’t believe Bateson is saying it’s OK to be a dilettante, but I fear some might pull out that message,” said Abt.

“Personally, I’m crazy about the idea that you can have many lives,” said Abt, 49, who has been a caseworker, textbook editor, job counselor and reporter. “Now, when I look back on my jumbled work history and ask, ‘Did I waste time here or there?’ I see that every job I had in some way helped make me better.

“Even if on the surface it looks like some goofy quilt,” she said, “it really does make sense.”