TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070891/0708470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 58

Bang the Drum Quickly


Sam Keen, author of the best-selling Fire in the Belly, is the
latest preacher to hit the male-consciousness circuit

By RICHARD STENGEL


    The men's movement is a misnomer. It is neither political
like the civil rights movement nor activist like the women's
movement. It is a convenient catchphrase for something that is
bubbling up around the country -- men attending
consciousness-raising seminars, men tramping off for weekends
in the woods, men crying, men laughing, men drumming -- which
suggest that the state of American guyness is kind of shaky.

    These activities do constitute a kind of movement, but it
is a spiritual one. The white-haired guru of this
transformation is the poet Robert Bly, whose book Iron John has
been on the best-seller list for more than seven months. Bly and
his fellow wise men believe that since the Industrial
Revolution, when fathers left the home to work in offices and
factories, boys have been raised by women and co-opted by a
female view of masculinity. Later, the women's movement came
along, creating an epidemic of what Bly calls "soft males," men
who lacked fierceness, decisiveness and a clear sense of what
being a man means. The requiem of the movement is that modern
man feels an inexpressible sense of loss, but its battle cry is
that boys will be boys, and that's a damn good thing.

    The latest addition to the maleness canon is Sam Keen's
Fire in the Belly (Bantam; 272 pages; $19.95), which is
beginning what may be a long residence on the best-seller lists.
While Bly provides the pragmatic poetry of contemporary manhood,
Keen offers some poetic pragmatism. His book does not so much
compete with Bly's as complement it, offering the yin of
personal experience to Bly's yang of mythological precedent.

    Fire in the Belly is that rare thing: a literate and
lyrical self-help book. Like Bly, who uses a Grimm brothers'
myth as his framework, Keen takes up the ancient theme that each
man is on a spiritual journey, a quest for the grail of
manhood. Bly's book is an original song of the road, a literary
Walkman piping background music for the journey. Keen attempts
to provide a rough road map for the trip, advising the spiritual
traveler how to avoid the dead ends of combative machismo and
the blind alleys of romantic obsession.

    Keen's book arises from his belief that men have lost a
unifying vision of masculinity, and are "involved in a night
battle in a jungle against an unseen foe." That foe is not woman
(or WOMAN, as Keen puts it, in one of the book's annoying New
Age constructions), but man's unconscious bondage to women.
Modern man, he suggests, easily won his Oedipal battle: the boy
snags Mom because Dad is preoccupied at the office and she's
hankering for a little affection. This Oedipal victory ties men
to women in an unhealthy way, and Keen believes a man has to
leave the world of women, and define himself on his own, before
he can rejoin it.

    The women's movement helped create what now seems to be a
vanishing species -- the Sensitive Guy. He's become scarce
because most men could never emulate Alan Alda, and most women
-- oh, mercurial creatures! -- now seem to think they turned men
into wimps. Keen, like Bly, suggests that men can be sensitive
without becoming worm-boys. Whereas Bly sketches out how a man
can be sensitive and fierce, Keen calls for a rebirth of wonder
and empathy among men.

    On his answering machine at his 60-acre ranch in Sonoma
County, Calif., Keen sings Cole Porter's Don't Fence Me In. Keen
grew up in Alabama, Tennessee and Delaware ("more Huck Finn
than Holden Caulfield," he says in his high-pitched foghorn of
a voice) and has a doctorate in philosophy of religion from
Princeton. His thesis concerned the idea of mystery. "I've
always been interested in talking clearly about things that can
never really be known," he says.

    In the late 1960s, Keen left academia and eventually moved
to Northern California, becoming a contributing editor to
Psychology Today. Over the past 20 years he has been conducting
seminars on personal mythology. Fire in the Belly is his 12th
book, and he regards it as another effort in his lifelong
exploration of modern mythology, in this case, the mythology of
manhood.

    Like Bly and most of the other men's-movement figures,
Keen is a kind of hairy-chested Jungian, having adapted Jung's
scholarly theories of the inner journey to the American guy's
daily struggle. Both Bly and Keen are also spiritual disciples
of Joseph Campbell (Keen and Campbell often conducted seminars
together), and all three are linked to that great facilitator
in the satellite-dotted sky Bill Moyers. Moyers has conducted
PBS interviews with Campbell, Keen and Bly, giving each of their
books a video assist onto the best-seller list. What Oprah is
to books like Men Who Hate Women & the Women Who Love Them,
Moyers is to intellectual fare like Campbell's Hero with a
Thousand Faces.

    Keen attributes the success of his book to his sense that
we are in an epochal moment in history. "All the metaphors of
Western culture are beginning to change," he says. "The warrior
metaphor has shaped men's lives for hundreds of years. That is
changing, but it will take another hundred years. The code we
have to break is that of the warrior psyche." Keen, like Bly,
regards the recent gulf war as a return to old and discredited
metaphors, more a problem of George Bush's unresolved male
identity than geopolitics. Man, he says, must become a
custodian, not a conqueror, of the planet.

    In conversation, Keen recalls how he wrestled
competitively in graduate school, and that his matches were
aggressive, never hostile. Aggression, he says, is focused
energy, not enmity. He wants men to be able to be aggressive
without being hostile. That is the focused if occasionally fuzzy
mission of his book. Fire in the Belly is as much about being
human as being a man.