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Bly's book Iron John has been 38 weeks on the best-seller list; he addresses men's gatherings around the country, speaking a fairy-tale code about "bringing the interior warriors back to life" and "riding the Red, the White and the Black Horses." He talks about each male's lost "Wild Man," that hairy masculine authenticity that began getting ruined during the Industrial Revolution, when fathers left their sons and went to work in the factories. The communion between father and son vanished, the traditional connection, lore passing from father to son. And with it went the masculine identity, the meaning and energy of a man's life, which should be an adventure, an allegory, a quest. Bly, with some validating help on television from Bill Moyers, has brought the masculine psyche onto the stage of Oprah- consciousness. There it is either enjoying its 15 minutes of fame or remaking Americans' understanding of men, and therefore of men and women and of life itself.
"You cannot become a man until your own father dies," Bly says. Bly's father died three years ago at the age of 87 in a Minnesota nursing home. Bly is 64, so by his own reckoning, he did not become a man until he was 61. He was a long time working on it.
A man's goal in his quest is a kingliness, a regal self-possession. Bly looks kingly enough at moments as he sits in his new Minneapolis house -- a handsome, substantial Midwestern paterfamilias place that he has just acquired. He divides his time among this house, another on Minnesota's Moose Lake and stops on his lecture tours. The Minneapolis house feels cleansed of ghosts and even gentrified. A poet named Louis Jenkins (author of a splendid collection called All Tangled Up with the Living and other books) is doing some work around the place for Bly and emerges from the basement from time to time as if he had been down there rewiring the house's unconscious. Bly sautes scallops for his solitary lunch, which he takes at the kitchen table in the company of a new biography of Goethe and Robert Fagles' translation of The Iliad.
Bly is too much a showman (with a touch of the mountebank) to stay in the king's role for very long. I have a theory that children of alcoholics make brilliant mimics, because reality and identity for them are unstable, subject to sudden disappearances and weird transformations. They are constantly auditioning nuanced identities in hopes of pleasing insanely unpredictable parents. At the kitchen table now, Bly becomes his spiritual and poetic mentor, William Butler Yeats, going trancey and reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a high Irish singsong, tone-deaf Yeats sliding up and down at the end of the line searching for the note.
For many years, Bly supported his family by giving poetry readings. His voice is a highly developed instrument that he uses to take many different parts: monsters, little boys, savages, princesses and even his mother years ago whining at his father, "Why do you always have to behave like this?" which, of course, gave old man Bly the signal he needed to head off in an explosion of dudgeon for the bar.