DaCapo press is about to issue a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Iron John, the classic book about men by poet Robert Bly. Hopefully, an entire new generation of men will discover Bly’s work, which is more relevant than ever.
I was reminded of just how much Bly’s voice is needed when I stumbled across a story about the new Polished Man campaign, an effort to raise awareness of child abuse by getting men to paint their fingernails.
Modern men, from soft Pajama Boy liberals to pave-the-forest conservatives, have forgotten what it means to be men. Even Robert De Niro’s charming, well-mannered gentleman Ben in the recent film The Intern—a character who has been praised by people who believe in manly virtue—falls short. But I’ll get to that.
In Iron John, Bly retells a story, “Iron John,” that has been around for thousands of years: A king hears that there is a part of the forest that men go to but don’t return. He asks a hunter to find out what is happening to them. The hunter travels to the forest and finds a Wild Man who is at the bottom of a lake. The Wild Man, covered in hair and mud and dirt, is taken back to the castle and imprisoned.
Soon after, the king’s son is playing with a golden ball when it accidentally rolls into the cage holding the Wild Man. The Wild Man agrees to give the ball back, but only if released from the cage. To do this the boy must steal a key from under his mother’s pillow. The story is symbolic of a boy’s separation from his parents. But the prince can only achieve full manhood if he also integrates the dark fierceness of the Wild Man.
Writer Tom Butler-Bowden has noted:
Bly makes the important distinction between the Wild Man and the savage man. The savage is the type who has wrecked the environment, abused women and so on, his inner desperation having been pushed out onto the world as a disregard or hatred of others. The Wild Man has been prepared to examine where it is he hurts; because of this he is more like a Zen priest or a shaman than a savage. The Wild Man is masculinity’s highest expression, the savage man its lowest. . . . A civilized man tries to incorporate his wildness into a larger self.
Since the publication of Iron John in 1990, the world of men has become even more bifurcated between weak, liberal, Social Justice Warriors on the one hand and boorish, savage men on the other. Politicians like President Obama and the weepy Republican John Boehner are well mannered but seem to lack a certain brio, the kind of toughness that was on display in former men of high office like Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Donald Trump talks tough, like most New Yorkers, but his aggression seems soulless, the junior high taunts of a spoilt rich kid.
Modern feminism and social pressure have created confusion about how men should behave. Consider the character played by Robert DeNiro in The Intern. Part of the conceit of the film is that DeNiro’s character, 70-year-old Ben, has to show Millennial boys how to act like men. Critics have praised The Intern as a roadmap back to the days when men acted with grace and matured with distinction. Yet something is missing in the film—the Wild Man. De Niro’s Ben has dedicated his life to selling phone books, which is not exactly dramatic. He wears a passive smile and shows up for work early and stays until the boss leaves, quietly stationed at his desk. He doesn’t talk back or get angry.
Supposedly a contrast to the slouchy, wimpy Millennials who bow and scrape before alpha woman boss Jules, in reality Ben has wasted his life just as much as his younger desk mates. (De Niro’s Ben is quite a contrast to the brutes the actor has played before, from Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver to boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull to Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. It’s worth noting that these are not Wild Men, but destructive, savage men.)
When I was growing up in Maryland in the 1970s and 1980s, I was surrounded by men who had jobs and families, who dressed properly, and were responsible. Yet they also seemed to have integrated a Wild Man into their psyches, and he would occasionally be unleashed, no matter what the ladies and the authorities had to say about it. Today those men have been replaced by Millennial boys who can’t make a decision or grow up, and by misbehaving male celebrities, whose antics are driven by desperation rather than masculine energy. Today’s Millennial princes keep the Wild Man in his cage while they polish their nails. The reissue of Iron John couldn’t have come at a better time.
The post Why Today’s Man Still Needs ‘Iron John’ appeared first on Acculturated.