LEONARD
KRIEGEL
455
prose. "It's becoming clear to us that manhood doesn't happen by itself; it
doesn't happen just because we eat Wheaties." Substitute any word for
"manhood" - "womanhood ," "fishing," "death," "paraplegia,"
"consciousness" - and the sentence makes as much, or as little, sense. Or
try
taking the symbolic leaps of faith Bly makes so facilely:
A
man's moustache may stand for his pubic hair. A friend once grew a
moustache when he was around thirty. The next time he visited his
mother, she looked into the corners of the room as she talked to him,
and would not look at his face, no matter what they talked about.
Hair, then, can represent sexual energy.
Perhaps Mother thought Sonny Boy looked ugly in a mustache. A
man's mustache may stand for pubic hair; it also may stand for itself One
wishes someone had reminded Bly of Freud's cautionary "Sometimes a
cigar is only a cigar."
Iron John
was catapulted to bestsellerdom by the interviews Bill
Moyers did with Ely on national public television. And those interviews
captured the book's true importance. It is as much a symptom of the
growing sense of victimization and self-pity that runs through American
life as it is an analysis of manhood. Ely's book has been taken up by a cul–
ture intent on burying critical analysis beneath what late-night talk show
hosts are fond of calling "creativity." What is important about
IronJohn
is
its reception, a reception that speaks of how terribly unsettled American
men feel at this moment in history. Viewed as a cultural phenomenon,
Iron John
is worth all the attention it has received. Viewed as an analysis of
men and their problems, it is silly and pretentious . Apparently, a
"revolutionary" message that contains a "mythic" emphasis does not have
to make sense.
It
must merely absorb its time, as did a now almost-forgot–
ten bestseller of the 1970s,
The Greening
if
America .
The author of
The Greening
if
America
was a Yale law professor named
Charles Reich. Reich's ideas embraced a good deal of the intellectual
softness of the late sixties and the seventies. And yet, if his ideas were ba–
nal, the eagerness with which Reich's book was embraced remains in–
teresting.
The Greening of America
was another in that long line of
prophetic works designed to burn a candle in our American darkness.
Reich sought salvation not in men who wept and went through male
bonding rituals that should embarrass Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts
(although Reich did call for softer, androgynous men) but in men and
women able to play basketball in blue jeans and eat unhomogenized
peanut butter. Ely's passion for hairiness is matched by Reich's passion for
