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PARTISAN REVIEW
"natural" fabrics and "natural" foods.
Like
Iron john, The Greening ofAmerica
was a runaway bestseller, serial–
ized in
The New Yorker
prior to its publication as a book. While Reich did
not have Bill Moyers, his book inspired critical symposia and at least one
collection of essays examining its paean to the "new" American youth.
(In America, newness is necessary for the advancement of even so radical
an idea as eating unhomogenized peanut butter. Poets may not have got–
ten the message, but at least one Yale Law School professor took to heart
William Carlos Williams's advice, "Make it new.")
That Ely structures his call for male bonding around a fairy tale taken
from the Brothers Grimm is indicative of the problems facing men who
are trying to convince themselves that they, too, are oppressed. No one
can argue against the fairy tale's encapsulation of social tensions. Like
myths, fairy tales possess a great deal of symbolic importance. But it is in
ourselves, not in our myths and fairy tales, that we are validated as men
and women.
Iron john
is as arbitrary a tale of manhood wrested from the
world as any John Ford Technicolor Western. And Ford, at least, is enter–
taining. In the name of rugged individualism, Ford conspired with the
nineteenth century's idea of manhood. Yet Ford's mythic creations, those
cavalrymen dressed in blue and gold and as false to manhood's actual de–
mands as Technicolor could make them (soldiers in the United States
cavalry during the nineteenth century were more likely than not to be
drifters, criminals, misfits, or teenage boys running away from home), are
as accurate a representation of the masculine as the Wild Man of the
Woods whom Bly wants to minister to our battered male egos.
As a Jungian and as a poet, Bly has a natural interest in myth and
symbol. But in
Iron john
that interest turns him into a kind of pre–
pubescent adolescent exposing his "primitive" self to the full view of the
world. Had he been more truly political (Ely now sees politics, too, in
terms of myth and symbol), he might have learned from the history of our
century that primitivism decked out in symbols is a prescription for au–
thoritarian catastrophe. When one writes about manhood, one should
have a better idea of what it is than this hogwash: "The true radiant en–
ergy in the male does not hide in, reside in, or wait for us in the feminine
realm, nor in the macho John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of
the deep masculine ." (Bly here achieves what I once thought impossible:
He makes me feel sympathy for John Wayne, that non-soldiering
Hollywood warrior.) God and Bill Moyers may understand what "the
magnetic field of the deep masculine is"; I don't. I doubt Ely does either.
His nonsense has its equal-opportunity equivalent in feminists who are
eager to bring back goddesses and witches and who pontificate about
"feminine" sensibility (neither Anna Karenina nor Emma Bovary being,
