Bang The Drum Quickly

By Richard Stengel

The men's movement is a misnomer. It is neither political like the civil rights movement nor activist like the women's movement. It is a convenient catchphrase for something that is bubbling up around the country -- men attending consciousness-raising seminars, men tramping off for weekends in the woods, men crying, men laughing, men drumming -- which suggest that the state of American guyness is kind of shaky.

These activities do constitute a kind of movement, but it is a spiritual one. The white-haired guru of this transformation is the poet Robert Bly, whose book Iron John has been on the best-seller list for more than seven months. Bly and his fellow wise men believe that since the Industrial Revolution, when fathers left the home to work in offices and factories, boys have been raised by women and co-opted by a female view of masculinity. Later, the women's movement came along, creating an epidemic of what Bly calls "soft males," men who lacked fierceness, decisiveness and a clear sense of what being a man means. The requiem of the movement is that modern man feels an inexpressible sense of loss, but its battle cry is that boys will be boys, and that's a damn good thing.

The latest addition to the maleness canon is Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly (Bantam; 272 pages; $19.95), which is beginning what may be a long residence on the best-seller lists. While Bly provides the pragmatic poetry of contemporary manhood, Keen offers some poetic pragmatism. His book does not so much compete with Bly's as complement it, offering the yin of personal experience to Bly's yang of mythological precedent.

Fire in the Belly is that rare thing: a literate and lyrical self-help book. Like Bly, who uses a Grimm brothers' myth as his framework, Keen takes up the ancient theme that each man is on a spiritual journey, a quest for the grail of manhood. Bly's book is an original song of the road, a literary Walkman piping background music for the journey. Keen attempts to provide a rough road map for the trip, advising the spiritual traveler how to avoid the dead ends of combative machismo and the blind alleys of romantic obsession.

Keen's book arises from his belief that men have lost a unifying vision of masculinity, and are "involved in a night battle in a jungle against an unseen foe." That foe is not woman (or WOMAN, as Keen puts it, in one of the book's annoying New Age constructions), but man's unconscious bondage to women. Modern man, he suggests, easily won his Oedipal battle: the boy snags Mom because Dad is preoccupied at the office and she's hankering for a little affection. This Oedipal victory ties men to women in an unhealthy way, and Keen believes a man has to leave the world of women, and define himself on his own, before he can rejoin it.

The women's movement helped create what now seems to be a vanishing species -- the Sensitive Guy. He's become scarce because most men could never emulate ^ Alan Alda, and most women -- oh, mercurial creatures! -- now seem to think they turned men into wimps. Keen, like Bly, suggests that men can be sensitive without becoming worm-boys. Whereas Bly sketches out how a man can be sensitive and fierce, Keen calls for a rebirth of wonder and empathy among men.

On his answering machine at his 60-acre ranch in Sonoma County, Calif., Keen sings Cole Porter's Don't Fence Me In. Keen grew up in Alabama, Tennessee and Delaware ("more Huck Finn than Holden Caulfield," he says in his high- pitched foghorn of a voice) and has a doctorate in philosophy of religion from Princeton. His thesis concerned the idea of mystery. "I've always been interested in talking clearly about things that can never really be known," he says.

In the late 1960s, Keen left academia and eventually moved to Northern California, becoming a contributing editor to Psychology Today. Over the past 20 years he has been conducting seminars on personal mythology. Fire in the Belly is his 12th book, and he regards it as another effort in his lifelong exploration of modern mythology, in this case, the mythology of manhood.

Like Bly and most of the other men's-movement figures, Keen is a kind of hairy-chested Jungian, having adapted Jung's scholarly theories of the inner journey to the American guy's daily struggle. Both Bly and Keen are also spiritual disciples of Joseph Campbell (Keen and Campbell often conducted seminars together), and all three are linked to that great facilitator in the satellite-dotted sky Bill Moyers. Moyers has conducted PBS interviews with Campbell, Keen and Bly, giving each of their books a video assist onto the best-seller list. What Oprah is to books like Men Who Hate Women & the Women Who Love Them, Moyers is to intellectual fare like Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Keen attributes the success of his book to his sense that we are in an epochal moment in history. "All the metaphors of Western culture are beginning to change," he says. "The warrior metaphor has shaped men's lives for hundreds of years. That is changing, but it will take another hundred years. The code we have to break is that of the warrior psyche." Keen, like Bly, regards the recent gulf war as a return to old and discredited metaphors, more a problem of George Bush's unresolved male identity than geopolitics. Man, he says, must become a custodian, not a conqueror, of the planet.

In conversation, Keen recalls how he wrestled competitively in graduate school, and that his matches were aggressive, never hostile. Aggression, he says, is focused energy, not enmity. He wants men to be able to be aggressive without being hostile. That is the focused if occasionally fuzzy mission of his book. Fire in the Belly is as much about being human as being a man.