The Inner Warrior : Robert Bly Tells Men to Heed the Voice Within and Do What’s Right

Robert Bly crouched like a middle linebacker and let out the sort of aggressive roar that coaches coax from high school football players.

Behind him, 800 men of every age and hairstyle roared along in unison. But Bly is hardly a typical American coach, and this “men’s gathering” at the Japan America Theater in Los Angeles was hardly in the spirit of a gridiron competition.

In the course of the recent event--sponsored by a Los Angeles group calling itself “the Lost Dog Men’s Council”--the men beat the bejabbers out of drums, danced around like dervishes, linked arms and chanted, spoke to each other about childhood travails and angrily shouted out examples of how their fathers had wounded their young psyches.

Mainly, though, they sat and listened as Bly and storyteller Michael Meade wove poems and myths into a daylong analysis of masculinity. Afterward, about 400 men and women marched through the streets of Los Angeles in what Bly termed a “grief walk” to honor the men and women, American and Iraqi, killed in the Persian Gulf.

Bly has been a well-known figure in certain subcultural circles since the ‘60s. Since 1980, he has been leading men’s gatherings, becoming a central figure in the so-called “men’s movement.”

But Bill Moyers’ widely viewed interviews of Bly on PBS last year suddenly thrust the poet into the mainstream consciousness. Bly’s new book “Iron John”--essentially an exploration of an ancient tale about a hairy “Wild Man” who lives at the bottom of pond--has become a surprise commercial success, battling past all the financial self-help and pop psychology how-to books to the highest reaches of the bestseller list.

But then “Iron John” might be viewed as something of a “mythopoetic” self-help book: “How to be a man in the last decade of the 20th Century.”

As Bly sees things, the male gender is in big trouble. Between 20% and 30% of American boys live in a home with no father present. And since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, even fathers who stay with their families no longer work with their sons by their sides. As a result, boys have no one from whom to absorb masculinity.

Therefore, Bly says, many men experience “father hunger,” often filling the void left by an absent father with a distrust of older men.

Meanwhile, America is bereft of the sort of initiation rituals common in more traditional cultures, in which older men guide boys through a series of rites that lead to manhood.

And without these rites, says Bly, it is no wonder that so many American men are weak, naive and ignorant of their “interior warrior,” the force that urges them to fight for what is right and protect their own internal “psychic boundaries.”

Q. What kind of men go to the sort of gathering that you just led and what kind of men wouldn’t be caught dead there?

A. We have noticed that most of the men are over 35. I think that’s because the images of manhood we’re given in high school--Gen. (William) Westmoreland or John Wayne or some fool like Clint Eastwood--may last us through our 20s to some extent. But by the time you’re 35, it’s clear that those models are not working. The myths and ancient stories we tell provide models of masculinity with more soul, more range and a greater integration of the feminine.

Also, a man is usually 35 before he realizes that his job life and his relationships with women and with other men are not working. So usually the men who attend have accepted a little sense of failure. I admire them for that. The ones who don’t come are the ones in the “I’m all right Jack,” category; they wonder, “Who are these wimps down there?”

Q. How are men’s gatherings of the sort you lead different from gatherings at a Moose Lodge or Masonic Temple?

A. I think our gatherings are a form of adult education. What we do is teach poetry and mythology, including the fairy tales which are to some extent the oldest literature we have.

Unlike those lodges, our gatherings are not meant to be comfortable. We’re not asking for a conventional life. We’re asking men to get in touch with their souls. To do that, they must have what D. H. Lawrence called “a purpose.”

A purpose is not the same as wanting to be rich. Or wanting to control the junk bond market. Or wanting to be dominant over other men in the business world. Or to have many mistresses. We ask men to become dissatisfied with their own lives. In that way it’s almost the polar opposite of the Moose Lodge.

Q. Some writers have found a lot to make fun of in men’s gatherings. What are the reasons for the ridicule?

A. The ones who are the most hostile are usually male journalists in their late 20s. Many of them are in this category in which they think they’re doing fine. Also, a journalist is trained not to participate but to be an observer. Since these events are directed more at the heart--through the singing and drumming--than at the head, those who maintain a distance through the discipline of observing don’t become moved themselves.

Q. Cultural taboos don’t usually evolve without reason. Aren’t there good reasons why men in this culture have been trained not to openly vent their emotions?

A. This business of men not expressing their emotions is an error built into the culture. I know as a father that when something happens to one of my children, when a child is climbing on a stone wall and falls off and is hurt, the mother feels the pain and gets excited. It’s my job to say, “This is going to be all right--the hospital is only three miles away.”

Both fathers and mothers tell their boys, “Don’t be a sissy. You’re a little man now.” Both men and women endorse this idea that men are to control their pain. But the amount of pain in most men’s lives is absolutely astounding. What often happens when a group of men get together is that the older men begin to talk about their pain by telling their stories. The younger ones are silent. But after a while they begin to weep too.

Q. You’ve said that the men’s-group phenomenon crystallizing around your book is not a reaction to the feminist movement. That doesn’t ring entirely true.

A. The pain that women have been suffering has been going on intensely for 1,500 years, since Christianity contributed to the loss of women’s rights that they had in the pagan cultures. And before that there has been patriarchal oppression for 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 years.

The suffering that men are going through has to do more, I think, with the remoteness of the father, the coldness of father, the distance of father. What I said to Bill (Moyers) is that what is happening is a kind of harvesting of that grief. The women’s movement has been wonderful in talking about pain and oppression. At the same time, if the woman’s movement had never existed, young men would be in the same situation with regard to the father: Extremely dissatisfied. Extremely wounded.

I ought to say too that there are about seven men’s movements.

Q. Would you define those movements?

A. The first one is the right wing men’s movement that wants the family returned to its old situation. The second is the feminist men’s movement. They are very aware of the oppression of women. On the other hand, they reject all masculinity. One of their texts is called “Refusing to be a Man.”

A third one would be the men’s rights movement. That’s completely different. It argues for different disposition of children in divorce cases.

A fourth would be the “mythopoetic” movement, which is an attempt to put men in touch with poetry and mythology and the stories of the past. The men working with that primarily are psychologist and writer James Hillman, theologian and psychologist Robert Moore, mythologist Michael Meade and myself.

Another would be the gay rights movement. That’s completely separate. A sixth would be the Marxist men’s movement, in which the griefs of men are thought of in relation to class structure.

And then you have to mention also the black men’s movement. We are now working to make a connection with the black men’s movement, and we’re having our first conference in Washington in May, with 60 black men and 60 white men, and three black teachers and three white teachers.

Q. We’re on the verge of the 21st Century. Space shuttles slip in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Few of us have time to learn all the new scientific information we now need to survive. Why should anyone--man or woman--treat ancient myths as more than entertainment?

A. What we have is not a flood of knowledge but a flood of information. We literally can’t take in any more information. But myths contain knowledge.

In the beginning of “Iron John,” I say that birds and bees apparently have their possible responses to the environment hard-wired into their nervous systems. When a bird has a song that’s interrupted it has to go back and start again. Human beings decided to take all that vital information and store it outside the nervous system. They stored the possibilities of responding in fresh ways to life situations in myths.

Myths do not belong to two centuries ago, or 10 centuries ago. They belong basically to the entire human endeavor. One turns to myths when the old patterns become destructive.

Q. At what point does all this introspection become mere psychological navel gazing and narcissism? Isn’t one problem with men and women in this culture that they are already “over-therapized?”

A. There is a danger there. I agree completely that that can become an absolute dead end. But remember, the stories we tell also contain modes of action.

A lot of therapists themselves are now bringing in stories because they’re tired of their own narcissistic jargon.

Q. There are probably people who would like to confront some of the men who attend these gatherings with a couple of current cliched phrases, such as “Just do it” or “Get a Life.”

A. We would tell them: Get a genuine life. A life that has purpose in it. Stop trying to make your life out of numbers, out of computers.

Q. What is a life of purpose as you see it?

A. A man who is working to save the Earth has a purpose. The man who is trying to become a saint has a purpose. The man who wants to create great art has a purpose, a serious life. A man when he is trying to get better education for his children has a serious life.

Q. In “Iron John” you are particularly hard on corporate men, referring to them in the old “gray flannel suit” stereotypes. What about the corporate raiders, the bond traders--the “Masters of the Universe” as Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” characters call themselves? It would seem that their masculinity, their “inner warrior,” is at least as well defined as that of a poet.

A. Well, I may be unjust to some of them. However, some of the oldest ideals of masculinity are like those exemplified by the American Indians. In that ideal, men are part of community that includes their families, the animals they hunted, the old men, the young men whom they helped, and the Earth.

So, the problem is that when you’re working in a corporation that is polluting or exploiting the Earth, you’re not part of the old masculine community. You’re setting yourself up in antagonism to the Earth. One of the greatest griefs we hear now is from men who say how hard it is to get a job that does not harm the Earth.

I wouldn’t confuse someone like Michael Milken with a man, myself.

Q. Isn’t there a sense in which all that’s merely nostalgic now? Isn’t it too late to go back to being hunters and gatherers?

A. We’re not talking about going back to being hunters and gatherers. But the true nostalgia is of men who believe that they can still have the expansionistic attitude of England in 1930--with endless resources, putting endless amounts of smoke into the air. That’s real nostalgia. It’s out of the question now.

Bush, for example, is totally nostalgic. He’s not only nostalgic for the second World War--he couldn’t wait to bomb people from the air so that he would feel 28 again--he’s nostalgic for the old expansionism. He reminds me of an old Saturday Evening Post cover.

Q. Everyone in Los Angeles is talking about a videotape in which several Los Angeles police officers beat the hell out of a young man without apparent provocation. Does such an incident say anything about the state of masculinity in America?

A. One of the things that Robert Moore would say is that when you have wife beating, when you have bullying of minorities, you are not dealing with men. You are dealing with boys. If this culture does nothing to initiate boys into manhood, you are going to continue to have 50-year-old boys with billy clubs.

Q. What do you have to say to the American soldiers returning from Kuwait, who are being greeted with a deeply moving sense of appreciation?

A. One thing I would say to them is, I think they should be very grateful for their returning celebrations. War is a kind of insanity. And it’s really important for a country to remember that some kind of ritual and celebration is needed to bring men back into the civilian life.

I would also say please go to the Vietnam veterans and understand that this did not happen to them and that a lot of them are still in that agony of having done more than you did, having lived in terror for two years, and then never being thanked by the country.

Q. Did the men who fought in Kuwait experience the initiation rites you talk about?

A. I don’t think so. The difference between ancient initiation and going into the military is that the sergeant doesn’t care about your soul. His job is to make you into a good fighting machine so that you’ll be less likely to be killed. That’s a perfectly honorable aim, but it doesn’t involve the soul. In fact, the soul is usually shut down during that time.

You can say that young men know that something important should happen to them. That when an older man asks them to go to war, they believe they are going to be initiated.

But there’s something cruel about offering them initiation and giving them, instead, military training.

BLY’S BACKGROUND

Name: Robert Bly

Age: 63

Education: Attended Harvard University.

Personal: Grew up on family farm in rural Minnesota. Lives with his second wife, Ruth, in Moose Lake, Minn. Has five children.

Professional: Won National Book Award in 1968 for a book of poetry, “Light Around the Body.”