I had dinner with Robert Bly last week. Now you may think the biggest perks of my job involve food and wine and freebies but it’s not true. The best thing is meeting people like Bly and being able to ask anything I want.
And here’s what I wanted to know: What’s up with men?
I was sitting in a booth at Cue, drinking a glass of M. Chapoutier Côtes du Rhône, which you may know by now is one of my favorite affordable wines. I also like that Chapoutier is one of only two winemakers in the world who puts a braille label on all of his bottles because, he says, wine selection shouldn’t be limited by people’s ability to see.
Bly was sipping a Bombay Sapphire martini while eating roasted ringneck pheasant. And we were discussing Peer Gynt, the 1867 Norwegian play about a hapless, self-absorbed young man, which Bly had — just hours before — finished adapting so that it contains, for the first time in history, Ibsen’s original rhyme scheme in English.
"This is a great play about a wild young man," Bly told me. "Gynt is loved by women but hardly knows his own father. And the play asks what happens to such a man?"
This, of course, is a perennial theme of Bly’s as well. In addition to being an internationally-recognized poet and translator, he wrote Iron John: A Book About Men and helped found the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, a 1990’s-era self-help method for men that involved storytelling, new age shamanism, forest gatherings and drums. Yes, it sounds like voodoo.
But ask Bly about the rites, as I did that night, and his explanation is clear: "We were just pleased to be with other men who weren’t brutal or cruel," he told me. "The men who came weren’t angry with women, they loved women. If anything, they were angry at their fathers." The one thing his followers shared was a hunger to be recognized by older men. "The question they were asking," Bly said, "was, Am I worthwhile as a man? That’s all they needed to know."
It happens, coincidentally, that I have for several months been reading books by men: those muscular, intelligent but addled, sex-fueled American types ranging from Saul Bellow to Richard Ford. Currently, I’m in the middle of Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, a novel as uneven as a hastily-gathered deck of cards, but one that I nevertheless like.
It’s about a man named Lucy. (You can imagine, I’m sure, why he needs assurance that he is worthwhile.) As a child, Lucy is accosted by a bunch of older boys and locked in a trunk down near the blood-red Cayoga River. Terrified, he passes out and awakens hours later to the sounds of a couple having sex on the ground at his side. (Why they didn’t wonder about a trunk on a riverbank, I cannot say. . . .this is one of the ragged elements of the book.) The woman hears him shifting and throws open the lid of the trunk — naked from the waist up, of course — thus freeing the boy who gets out, walks home along the river, and finds his father waiting for him on the bridge by their house.
It cannot be coincidence that there is everything in this scene that Bly described: the brutality of boys and the joy at seeing a bare-chested woman and the desire only to be gathered up by his father and safely transported home. It is, I’m beginning to see, a ubiquitous and rather winsome theme in men’s literature and lives — this need to be comforted, to be carried, to be loved.
I’m a big fan of men: wife to one and ex-wife (still good friend) to another, as well as the mother of two nearly-grown sons. I can speak to the softness that exists in all of them, the hunger, as Bly put it.
So I found myself wondering one day about men and wine. There is a strange, swooning, wide-eyed fever that men bring to their drinking. The same one, it seems to me, they bring to most everything else, be it war or stamp collecting or golf. And maybe it is the reason that most of the world’s winemakers and tasters and raters and vendors even today are men, though women have been proven, scientifically, to have a far more acute sense of smell. Biologically speaking, Robert Parker should be a woman in her 30’s, not a 60-year-old guy with an outdated JD.
As a woman wine writer, I can hardly claim prejudice. After all, you’re reading me. But I’ve been examining these men and their stories, thinking about what I can take from them — Bly and his moonlit drum beating, Russo and his childhood fear and fantasy, Chapoutier and his gallant but quixotic mission to make wine buying easier for the blind. Then there’s the man I met the other day.
I was at Costco, where I’d gone to buy a case of the Chapoutier Cotes du Rhone for a party. Why would I battle the traffic and noise and hotdog stink of that hellhole? Because here the Chapoutier sells for $8.59 a bottle rather than $12. This fact — and a Xanax — were enough to get me through the horror of a Christmas shopping throng. Only then, there was no wine! Luckily, I found a man in a red apron who lifted another case off a high shelf.
Selling wine was his hobby, the man told me. And he wasn’t just a fan of the wine I was buying, he was avid, recommending it to everyone he knew. As I was checking out, he came running over to hand me a sheaf of background materials. I mentioned that I was a writer, told him my name, and said I might post the information. . . .then felt ill and called it an early night. He called the Rake first thing the next morning and demanded to know where my new column was, leaving his number so we could alert him the moment it went up.
I’m not complaining. In fact, I think if there’s something we women can learn from men, it’s to indulge in a little reckless enthusiasm and genuine need. Men in the woods, telling each other fairytales and beating drums. It kind of makes sense.
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