TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.3 KB | 248 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 52

The Child Is Father Of the Man


How ROBERT BLY transformed his struggle with an alcoholic dad
into a strange, mythicized phenomenon of celebrity and mass
therapy

By LANCE MORROW


    Failure is the toughest American wilderness. Robert Bly,
who is now a leader of the men's movement and author of Iron
John, spent some years in the territory. His wilderness lies
three hours west of Minneapolis, out toward the South Dakota
border, in flat farm country around Madison (pop. 2,000), Minn.,
"the Lutefisk Capital of the World."

    Bly was the high school valedictorian who went to hell,
who might have amounted to something as a farmer but instead
lived on a spread his father gave him. He raised four children
but otherwise, in Madison's eyes, produced nothing except
obscure poetry for 25 years. He drove old cars and wore old
clothes, and when Vietnam came around, he talked like a
communist. His father, Jacob Bly, was a respected farmer who
turned alcoholic. Robert had to fetch him out of the bars
downtown sometimes.

    A double humiliation: his father's alcoholism, his own
failure. Why did Bly stay on all those years, during the prime
of his life, on the nonworking farm half a mile from his
father's boozing? "The alcoholic parent is not satisfied with
his own childhood," Bly says, using the bruised rhetoric of
recovery. "He wants yours too." When the father vanishes into
alcohol, the son lingers and lingers, searching for a lost part
of himself.

    The old man, Jacob Bly, was living on a diet of Hamm's
beer and doughnuts in the last days: the breakfast of
champions. Robert confronted him about the drinking one day, and
his father said, "Go to hell!" Robert had been meaning to bring
up that subject for years, and he felt much better after he did.

    Tolstoy was wrong when he said all happy families are the
same, and all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways.
It is surely the other way around. Family misery has a sameness,
a sort of buried universality: "I come from a dysfunctional
family," people always say when they start their 12-step
testimonies, and then they all launch into the same story,
though with a thousand different shadings and details.

    It is Bly's story, to some extent, with the difference
that whatever Madison may have once thought, Bly is a gifted
poet, critic and showman who has transformed his long struggle
into a strange, mythicized American phenomenon of celebrity and
mass therapy. Bly is the bardic voice of that interesting but
vaguely embarrassing business, the men's movement, which strikes
many men as somehow unmanly. Well, says Bly, that shame is
something they will have to get over.

    Bly's book Iron John has been 38 weeks on the best-seller
list; he addresses men's gatherings around the country, speaking
a fairy-tale code about "bringing the interior warriors back to
life" and "riding the Red, the White and the Black Horses." He
talks about each male's lost "Wild Man," that hairy masculine
authenticity that began getting ruined during the Industrial
Revolution, when fathers left their sons and went to work in the
factories. The communion between father and son vanished, the
traditional connection, lore passing from father to son. And
with it went the masculine identity, the meaning and energy of
a man's life, which should be an adventure, an allegory, a
quest. Bly, with some validating help on television from Bill
Moyers, has brought the masculine psyche onto the stage of
Oprah-consciousness. There it is either enjoying its 15 minutes
of fame or remaking Americans' understanding of men, and
therefore of men and women and of life itself.

    "You cannot become a man until your own father dies," Bly
says. Bly's father died three years ago at the age of 87 in a
Minnesota nursing home. Bly is 64, so by his own reckoning, he
did not become a man until he was 61. He was a long time working
on it.

    A man's goal in his quest is a kingliness, a regal
self-possession. Bly looks kingly enough at moments as he sits
in his new Minneapolis house -- a handsome, substantial
Midwestern paterfamilias place that he has just acquired. He
divides his time among this house, another on Minnesota's Moose
Lake and stops on his lecture tours. The Minneapolis house feels
cleansed of ghosts and even gentrified. A poet named Louis
Jenkins (author of a splendid collection called All Tangled Up
with the Living and other books) is doing some work around the
place for Bly and emerges from the basement from time to time
as if he had been down there rewiring the house's unconscious.
Bly sautes scallops for his solitary lunch, which he takes at
the kitchen table in the company of a new biography of Goethe
and Robert Fagles' translation of The Iliad.

    Bly is too much a showman (with a touch of the mountebank)
to stay in the king's role for very long. I have a theory that
children of alcoholics make brilliant mimics, because reality
and identity for them are unstable, subject to sudden
disappearances and weird transformations. They are constantly
auditioning nuanced identities in hopes of pleasing insanely
unpredictable parents. At the kitchen table now, Bly becomes his
spiritual and poetic mentor, William Butler Yeats, going trancey
and reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a high Irish
singsong, tone-deaf Yeats sliding up and down at the end of the
line searching for the note.

    For many years, Bly supported his family by giving poetry
readings. His voice is a highly developed instrument that he
uses to take many different parts: monsters, little boys,
savages, princesses and even his mother years ago whining at his
father, "Why do you always have to behave like this?" which, of
course, gave old man Bly the signal he needed to head off in an
explosion of dudgeon for the bar.

    Bly says it was around 10 years ago that he began working
on the Iron John story. "I had been giving seminars in fairy
tales to support myself -- mostly to women. I realized that I
had no fairy stories to teach men. In Grimm, only a few are
about men. Iron John was the first I found that was clearly
about the growth stages of men."

    The book is an explication of the tale of a boy who frees
a Wild Man, Iron John, whom the boy's father, the king, has
locked in a cage. Iron John takes the boy into the forest and
step by step teaches him the secrets of being a man. In the
fullness of maturity, he becomes a man and marries his princess.
Bly tires of repeating that the men's movement is not against
women. Nor does the Wild Man imply savagery, brutality,
aggression, obtuseness, smashing beer cans against the forehead
or shooting small animals for the pleasure of watching them die.

    In fact, by Bly's calculation, there are at least seven
different men's movements: 1) a sort of right-wing men's
movement that is, in fact, frequently antifeminist; 2) feminist
men; 3) men's rights advocates who think, for example, men get
a raw deal in divorce; 4) the Marxist men's movement; 5) the gay
men's movement; 6) the black men's movement, extremely important
in Bly's view because of the devastation to black males in
American society; and 7) men in search of spiritual growth, the
Bly wing of the idea, dealing with mentors and "mythopoetics."
The mythopoetic characters, Bly points out, are dividing into
two groups: those concentrating on recovery and those, like Bly,
who are interested in men's psyches as explored by art,
mythology and poetry.

    "The recovery tone can trap you into being a child," says
Bly. "The myth honors your suffering; it gives images of an
adult manhood that you will not meet in your community. It takes
you out of your victimhood."

    Bly's ice-blue Norwegian eyes and white hair give him a
theatrical air. His complexion sometimes radiates up to an
alarming red, and he puffs a little after marching up the
stairs. A large cast of characters of many ages flickers around
his eyes and face. He strikes one as a struggling man, something
like a difficult older brother. As he says, "The shifts take
place with incredible speed. When I sit down at the table with
my wife, do I speak to her as a self-pitying little boy or a
victim? If I slip into the depressed victim of six years old,
I'll be no good to anyone."

    He sees the men's movement -- and his own celebrity --
from the inside. It is a deeply formed, logical part of his own
biography. It is an outcome of his years as a student at Harvard
just after World War II, studying poetry with Archibald
MacLeish, and then of a long depressed period, when he lived
alone in New York City, subsisting on three-day-old bread,
reading Rilke in the New York Public Library. "I thought I would
end as a sort of bag lady," he says. "I lived like an orphan.
I said, `I am fatherless.' " After a stretch at the Iowa
Writers' Workshop, he married Carol McLean, a writer he had met
at Harvard. (They were divorced in 1979, and he is now married
to Ruth Ray, a Jungian analyst.)

    In 1955 Robert and Carol Bly "went to hide out at the
farm" on the edge of the Lutefisk Capital of the World. Lutefisk
is a Norwegian dried fish, an item of sentimental immigrant
nostalgia and distinctly an acquired taste. Madison has a large
metal sculpture of the lutefisk beside the main road into town.
(Another artistic item in town: a wooden sculpture with a sign
that says INDIAN DONE BY LOCAL CHAIN-SAW ARTIST.)

    Bly published his first book of poetry, Silence in the
Snowy Fields, in 1962. "The land was flat and boring," he says.
"That was my whole problem in writing poems about that country.
I called it Silence in the Snowy Fields because at least it was a
little more interesting with snow on it."

    Bly may not be alive to certain absurdities in the men's
movement that others see. Ask him about the drumming, for
example, which strikes some as a silly, self-conscious attempt
at manly authenticity, almost a satire of the hairy chested, and
he pours forth a thoughtful but technical answer: "The drum
honors the body as opposed to the mind, and that is helpful. It
heats up the space where we are." As a spiritual showman
(shaman), Bly seeks to produce certain effects. He is good at
them. He could not begin to see the men's movement, and his
place in it, as a depthless happening in the goofy circus of
America. It is odd that Bly is not more put off by the earnest
vulgarity of the enterprise.

    Perhaps the men's movement is a very American exercise
anyway: it has that quality of Americans' making fools of
themselves in brave pop quests for salvation that may be
descendants of the religious revivals that used to sweep across
the landscape every generation or so in the 18th and 19th
centuries. The men's movement belongs as well to the habits of
the '60s baby boomers, who tend to perceive their problems and
seek their solutions as a tribe.

    A Bly theme lies there. The boomers are a culture of
siblings. Their fathers are all dead. The '60s taught that the
authority of fathers (Lyndon Johnson, the Pentagon, the
university, every institution) was defunct. The boomers
functioned as siblings without fathers. Is it the case that now,
like Bly, they are looking for the vanished father in
themselves?

    Something in American men is distinctly boyish -- a
quality that can be charming or repellent, depending. Unlike men
from other cultures, they sometimes seem to be struggling every
day to make the transition from boyhood to manhood. George Bush
constantly enacts, within the course of a single crisis (the
gulf war, for example), the drama of his own growing up: a
period of passivity and confusion is followed by a mobilization
of manhood. Blowing up Iraq, Bly thinks, was the product of all
the wrong male qualities -- aggressiveness addicted to
high-octane power that goes foraging elsewhere in the world for
a mission while its own house is rotting away.

    The kingly man is a public man, even if he is a poet.
Shakespeare used to adorn the British 20-lb. note. Perhaps, I
suggest jokingly, Bly's face will one day be on the $20 bill.
"I hate being a pop figure," he winces. But he has made the
transition from private trauma to public stage. His testimony
in effect now begins, "I come from a dysfunctional country."