Failure is the toughest American wilderness. Robert Bly, who is now a leader of the men's movement and author of Iron John, spent some years in the territory. His wilderness lies three hours west of Minneapolis, out toward the South Dakota border, in flat farm country around Madison (pop. 2,000), Minn., "the Lutefisk Capital of the World."
Bly was the high school valedictorian who went to hell, who might have amounted to something as a farmer but instead lived on a spread his father gave him. He raised four children but otherwise, in Madison's eyes, produced nothing except obscure poetry for 25 years. He drove old cars and wore old clothes, and when Vietnam came around, he talked like a communist. His father, Jacob Bly, was a respected farmer who turned alcoholic. Robert had to fetch him out of the bars downtown sometimes.
A double humiliation: his father's alcoholism, his own failure. Why did Bly stay on all those years, during the prime of his life, on the nonworking farm half a mile from his father's boozing? "The alcoholic parent is not satisfied with his own childhood," Bly says, using the bruised rhetoric of recovery. "He wants yours too." When the father vanishes into alcohol, the son lingers and lingers, searching for a lost part of himself.
The old man, Jacob Bly, was living on a diet of Hamm's beer and doughnuts in the last days: the breakfast of champions. Robert confronted him about the drinking one day, and his father said, "Go to hell!" Robert had been meaning to bring up that subject for years, and he felt much better after he did.
Tolstoy was wrong when he said all happy families are the same, and all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. It is surely the other way around. Family misery has a sameness, a sort of buried universality: "I come from a dysfunctional family," people always say when they start their 12-step testimonies, and then they all launch into the same story, though with a thousand different shadings and details.
It is Bly's story, to some extent, with the difference that whatever Madison may have once thought, Bly is a gifted poet, critic and showman who has transformed his long struggle into a strange, mythicized American phenomenon of celebrity and mass therapy. Bly is the bardic voice of that interesting but vaguely embarrassing business, the men's movement, which strikes many men as somehow unmanly. Well, says Bly, that shame is something they will have to get over.