Iron John and Fire in the Belly
Bly, Robert & Keen, Sam
BOOK REVIEWS ha male over 16 who has to read a book on ow to become a man is already in deep—well, you know. Robert Bly, author of Iron John and Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly, appear to...
...comes from identification with...
...I don't know about you, but if I ever suggested to my wife that we individuate together and explore each other's wholeness she'd kick me out of the nest faster than I could say "personal growth," and find herself an Old Man...
...from Princeton in something or other (I assume that if it had any relevance to the book, they would have said so...
...Those poor devils—their clients, or followers, or patients, or whatever, who pay to hear their sermons, and hug trees and beat tom-toms, and bay at the moon, and weep in each others' arms in their search for "personal growth"—may indeed be more deeply troubled than others about their manhood and the women in their lives, but it is an error to generalize from this unhappy group to all men...
...Funny little motions of the shoulders and weird cries are waiting inside us...
...Make no mistake about it, Mr...
...They also tell us that he has been interviewed by that pathologically earnest man, Bill Moyers, on PBS...
...Keen an M.A...
...The key, of course, is Bly's notion of the Wild Man...
...So after all this spiritual journeying, this self-exploration, this pawing around in our grief and pain, this questing and searching, what have we got...
...The boy becomes frightened by what he has done, so lion John takes him back to the forest with him...
...Goddamn it, it is wrong for us to pursue progress at the cost of destroying ten thousand species a year, the wetlands, the forests, and the watersheds...
...The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored...
...The Wild Man can only come to full life . . . by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work...
...Contrary to what Bly and Keen may believe, most men do not lead lives of quiet desperation, even as a result of the feminist revolution...
...Fire in the Belly is far more pretentious than Iron John, the childish nonsense of which gives it a redeeming nalivete...
...He sets the boy a task which the prince fails...
...It is for men who are willing to undertake a spiritual journey beginning with the disillusioning awareness that what we have agreed to call "normal" is a facade covering a great deal of alienation...
...Eventually the prince finds a menial job in another kingdom working for the king...
...His publishers claim for Mr...
...men began to notice what was called their feminine side and pay attention to it...
...Eventually, a wily hunter discovers the cause and captures Iron John, the culprit...
...His head, with powerful sculpted features, a powerful beard, and powerful curly hair, looks like one you might see on a visit to Mount Rushmore...
...Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room...
...Let's get a few glimpses of him: One trace of the Wild Man is the spontaneity we have preserved from childhood...
...During the sixties...
...So, in case you didn't realize it, you, buddy, are alienated, which is nothing compared to what you will be when you find out what Sam Keen means by fire in the belly...
...If trouble does develop, it will be in childhood that it happens, not out of a clear blue adult emotional sky because of cultural or social changes, as Bly and Keen suggest...
...Robert Bly, author of Iron John and Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly, appear to have found a way of turning deep—well, you know—into gold...
...Most children, however, will weather the passage into masculinity or femininity...
...Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover...
...I'll leave it to the reader to judge which Messrs...
...The signs of this change are everywhere in the culture, and the response to it has varied, from unself-conscious acceptance to poignant outcries of protest, regardless of gender...
...Thus, the New Man must spend much of his time and energy in what in the old days we used to call soulsearching (or worse) but now call "self-exploration...
...The prince routs the enemy and wins the day, but refuses to identify himself as the hero-warrior...
...But behind this figure there is another on the back cover...
...Some men are open to ashes . . . [such] as Richard Pryor, John Cassavetes, James Baldwin, Reshad Field . . . Woody Allen, the recent Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez...
...There have always been individuals—men and women—who have suffered lives beyond ordinary everyday unhappiness, lives that were full of neurotic misery...
...Iron John outfits him with magical armor, a magical horse, and a magical army...
...When he isn't listening empathically to his friends, he is-full of wonder at pieces of driftwood and Indigo Buntings...
...What is his sermon on Manhood...
...But they couldn't help it because they were themselves victims of that granddaddy of all social villains: the Industrial Revolution...
...Get the idea...
...The 30-second version of the Iron John tale goes something like this: The king's hunters mysteriously disappear in a forest...
...The prince decides to fight for his new king and country and he goes to his old friend Iron John for help...
...And, deep down, we are grieving over our inner wounds and don't even know that either...
...And these individuals have sometimes sought solace in quasi-religious organizations...
...Keen says, in his apocalyptic missionary style, that his book is for a new kind of man who is being forged in the crucible of the chaos of our time...
...The book is a long-winded sermon by a theologian manqué—a pastoral counselor who preaches not God or righteousness, but a pseudo-religious mishmash of watered-down Tillich, warmed-over Jung, tarted-up Campbell, and oversimplified anthropology, with some nineties buzzwords like "compassion" and "intimacy" and "self-exploration" and "personal growth" thrown in...
...In my solitude, I listened and had many good conversations with myself...
...Twill spare the read- er too much of the tortured rationalizations which make up Keen's argument for disavowing the traditional values of masculinity, except to say that "traditional rites [of passage] prevented the development of individuality...
...Iron John is the name of a forgotten folk tale collected by the Grimm Brothers in the nineteenth century, and is probably a condensed version of many tales hundreds of years old—which may explain its fragmented and confused quality...
...But things got better, according to Bly...
...He persuades the king's son to steal the key from under the queen's pillow and set him free...
...Keen's New Man has a full agenda indeed...
...Bly and Keen will turn out to be...
...No better example of this preoccupation with self can be found than Keen's description of his own narcissistic habits: "A man The American Spectator January 1992 65 gradually becomes poor in spirit and loses any relationship to richness of his own being unless he enters into a love affair with himself—a menage a moi...
...And if reading his book isn't enough to put some starch in your collar, Bly and his business associates will initiate you into manhood personally at one of the many ritual gatherings they conduct around the country for about roughly what it would cost to have a brain transplant...
...And these sometimes lead to adolescent and adult problems...
...But it goes beyond the valley of the shadow to celebrate a new vision of manhood—a vision of man with fire in his belly and passion in his heart...
...And because of the Industrial Revolution, and Christianity, and our wounds and our grief, we have lost touch with the Wild Man—the Iron John—within each of us...
...With the little time he has left after his exhausting program of moral outrage, the New Man has to do his wildness thing: Recently many men have become aware that they are overdomesticated and have lost a certain quality of wildness that is essential to manhood...
...Nor do they contribute to an understanding of masculinity, its meaning, its development, or its place in the scheme of things...
...These symbolic measures are helpful, but . Wildness...
...Among men who identify themselves as belonging to a men's movement many have taken up drumming and dancing and have adopted native American rituals in an effort to recover their lost fierceness...
...In the world of writers and social critics, the response to this change has also been varied, and the variations also transcend gender...
...Bly's book itself—Iron John—is about as tough and steely as a plum pudding...
...Perhaps Bly will rejoice in the wide variety of snakes, jackals, vultures, and jackasses who who took part in the recent Senate hearings...
...The reason they do not is their basic but false assumption that all or most men are alienated or deeply disturbed about their masculinity or their relationships with women...
...The trouble with us men is that we're wounded—and we don't even know it...
...has an amazing capacity to entertain a very large number of ambiguous, contradictory, and mutually exclusive ideas...
...Listen to him on the man of the fifties: The fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide...
...The New Man that Keen promised us turns out to be made in his own image: a kind of nature-loving pastoral counselor who has no responsibility except to his personal growth and his sense of moral outrage, and who has one heck of a lot of leisure time for wonder, empathy, and communion...
...From the silly, magical world of Robert Bly's mythology we move to the slick world of Psychology Today and one of its former consulting editors, Sam Keen...
...It is this spirit of androgyny—femininity masquerading as masculinity—that informs the New Masculinity...
...Ten years ago, after remarriage and beginning a second family," Mr...
...Iron John is a hairy wildman who is then caged and displayed in the palace courtyard...
...Although most men will acknowledge that there is trouble in paradise, they will add that that's life in paradise...
...On the other five days of the week, Mr...
...Where once there was a father there is now a vacuum...
...But now somehow things have gone wrong...
...Even in my own profession, psychoanalysis, Mr...
...Depending on whether or not these charismatic leaders can divine the deeper and most meaningful fantasies of their flock, and how exemplary they are as individuals, they will turn out to be true prophets or false prophets...
...The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People...
...Bly and Keen have their way, the rest of us, I am afraid, will be in deep—well, you know—very soon...
...Once my cabin was finished I began my practice of solitude...
...Despite their claims, neither of these books is a serious contribution to the dialogue about the androgynous changes in our culture, their origins and consequences...
...One or two nights a week I prepared my own dinner, ate alone . . . smoked my pipe in front of the fire, sat in the rocker, considered my days, slept by myself, caught my dreams—and vowed to accept myself "for richer or poorer...
...The main aim of our New Man is to "gain personal authority and find our unique sense of self...
...Bly has a thing or two to teach: "If a therapist doesn't dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal with words...
...The psyche lacked compassion in a way that encouraged the unbalanced pursuit of the Viet Nam war, just as, later, the lack of what we might call "garden" space inside Reagan's head led to his callousness and brutality toIRON JOHN: A BOOK ABOUT MEN Robert Bly Addison-Wesley/268 pages/$19.95 FIRE IN THE BELLY: ON BEING A MAN Sam Keen Bantam Books/272 pages/$19.95 reviewed by YALE KRAMER 64 The American Spectator January 1992 ward the powerless in El Salvador, toward old people here, the unemployed, schoolchildren, and poor people in general...
...Now what meaning does Robert Bly give to this story...
...Bly uses quotations the way movie kidnappers used to use words clipped from the newspaper—arranged to mean anything he wants them to mean...
...But receptive space or intimate space was missing in this image of a man...
...Lacking the universal appeal and beautiful simplicity of classic fairy tales like Cinderella or Rumpelstiltskin, "Iron John's" ambiguity lends itself to Bly's messages...
...The fact is that a boy's sense of masculinity—gender identity, as it is called by the professionals—is formed relatively early in life, by about two-and-a-half or three years of age...
...Here's Bly on fitness and health: "We need to build a body, not on parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires...
...Little dances are helpful in the middle of an argument as are completely incomprehensible haikus spoken loudly in church or while buying furniture...
...rugged mountains, virgin forests, barren tundras...
...Their non-books about manhood have found a place on the New York Times Best-Seller List for a combined total of sixty-eight weeks with well over a quarter of a million copies sold...
...In some children, conflicts over their sense of masculinity or femininity may develop at that time or a little later...
...One doesn't have to be a particularly astute social observer to know that a sea change has occurred in the lives of American men and women and in their relationships over the last twenty years...
...from the Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D...
...It's bad for Dad to work late, but it's good for Dad to explore himself two days a week...
...There's something wonderful about this development—I mean the practice of men welcoming their own 'feminine' consciousness and nurturing it...
...Oh yes, the New Man does occasionally make some time for the New Woman...
...He thanks the prince and confers all his wealth on the happy couple...
...Dad belongs more to the world of work than to the family...
...And this prescription for self-love, self-marriage (for richer or poorer), and award-winning self-satisfaction occurs only a hundred pages or so after he bemoans the fact that "Dad is no longer present to teach his sons how to be men...
...Next I turned the cabin into a personal sanctuary...
...Soon his newly adopted kingdom is attacked by enemies from without...
...And if Messrs...
...This one, Robert Bly himself, is a flabby person, with white hair—arranged George Washington–style—spectacles, a bit of a belly, and looking, for all the world, like your grandmother...
...In the case of Iron John the front cover shows the figure of a man towering above the reader...
...When it comes to politics, though, Bly transcends petty party differences: "A Kingwithout enough Wild Man will be a king for human beings, but animals, oceans, and trees will have no representation in his Senate...
...F ire in the Belly is another story...
...The king's daughter falls in lovewith him, but he demurs...
...Iron John then kicks the young prince out of the enchanted forest and tells him that he is on his own...
...And when he runs out of driftwood to wonder about he has a lot of moral outrage to do: "Goddamn it, it is wrong for governments to spend billions on weapons while children starve...
...The androgynous dissonance between these two figures reminded me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the fierce, fire-breathing wizard is revealed to Dorothy as kindly, bumbling old Frank Morgan...
...At the wedding feast, guess who shows up—Iron John, showered, shaved, and nattily attired as the king he truly is...
...Eventually, his heroism is discovered and he is given the hand of the princess...
...When we are in a boring conversation, we could, instead of saying something boring, give a cry...
...Furthermore, we come from more or less "dysfunctional" families in which our parents abused and wounded us...
...Keen confides, I built a small cabin near the house...
...Bly has been a student of men for many years...
...And Keen is full of high-flown, meaningless prescriptions for the New Man, e.g.: "In marriage, an individual man and woman join, for better and for worse, to create an arena within which they may individuate together and explore their wholeness with each other...
...0 66 The American Spectator January 1992...
...The book is a mushy sermon studded with as many quotations as Bartlett's...
...Men have become too soft, out of touch with the Wild Man inside of themselves...
...At times these organizations have been led by charismatic individuals—Mary Baker Eddy or the Reverend Jim Jones come to mind—who can intuitively articulate the appropriate mixture of penitence, forgiveness, love, and hope to the suffering group...
...And here are some of those fortunate men who have received Bly's Kitchen and Ashes award: "But if a man doesn't descend to the kitchen, he won't know ashes...
...There are apparently a large number of American males who, perplexed and confused about their manhood, seek solace and guidance from these pundits of The New Masculinity...
...Bly Yale Kramer is clinical professor of psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
