The Child Is Father Of the Man

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."