The Broken Men

a kind of prayer

Recently, at a family cookout at which five of my six sons and one of my three daughters were in attendance, my eldest son told me he recently ran into one of my oldest friends—one of those friends that your kids call “uncle,” even though he’s not. My son said my friend had lost lots of weight (he was not very big to begin with) and that he doesn’t look well—even though my son had seen him a month before and he looked fine. I know this friend has struggled with depression and, at times, alcohol through much of the last three decades. I really don’t know what mechanisms may have caused this, but it’s hard to watch your friends struggle.

The older I’ve gotten, I’ve been able to witness the same phenomenon over and over again with friends, relatives, acquaintances: men broken on the wheel of life. Living is not easy, and, in our day and age, it seems to be particularly hard on men. Now, I’m not saying women don’t struggle, don’t get broken; but this is something I have seen far more with the men I’ve known than the women. I don’t know exactly why this is, but I would venture to guess that this is the case with at least half of the men I have known over the course of my life. So much for smashing the patriarchy. If these guys are the patriarchy, they were smashed a long time ago, even before they were born.

After my son related this news to me, I found myself haunted by some lines from Philip Levine’s poem “Sweet Will”:

And in truth I’m not worth a thing
what with my feet and my two bad eyes
and my one long nose and my breath
of old lies and my sad tales of men
who let the earth break them back,
each one, to dirty blood or bloody dirt.

Levine, who was born in Detroit in 1928 and died in 2015, often wrote about the working class from which he arose, the men who let the earth break them back to dirty blood or bloody dirt, men like many of my friends and relatives. Levine loved these men, their struggles, their humor in the face of darkness, their inherent dignity.

This is the Detroit in which I grew up. This wasn’t the Detroit of Motown elegance and sophistication, but the Detroit of the working-class white kids with no options or prospects, with nowhere to place, no words to voice their anger and defiance, and no one to speak on their behalf. This wasn’t the Detroit of the Supremes and Smokey Robinson. This was the Detroit of the MC5 and the Amboy Dukes.

This is the reason why, when I hear those of the intelligentsia wax on about “the patriarchy” and “privilege,” I just wonder who the fuck they’re talking about. In the words of another poem by Philip Levine, if this is privilege “you can have it.”

In one of my recent posts discussing the dire situation of marriage and fertility, a commenter named Caroline had this to say:

“I don’t know. I think there is more to the puzzle than just the bare bones physical reality of baby making and poisons in the sky and whatever else. I think men are no longer men in our society. They no longer act as the leaders and heads of households that women need. That probably has to do with propaganda and media leading men to prioritize the wrong things. We need to respect, celebrate and submit to well-adjusted, capable, hardworking men in order to have a society made up of healthy marriages.”

She is not wrong, of course, though I don’t think breaking the spirit of men is a recent phenomenon. But I do think something has happened to men today, certainly to a sizable proportion of men, that discourages them to even risk being broken in the first place. As I responded in that thread:

“It’s remarkable when you consider all the anti-male propaganda over the past 50 years—‘Smash the patriarchy,’ fathers on sitcoms always depicted as morons, cries against ‘toxic masculinity’ 🙄, putting boys on Ritalin to suppress natural boyness, and much more...and it’s a wonder any solid men exist at all.”

So this is a kind of prayer, an angry one, for the men the world has broken and continues to attempt to break.

In closing, here is Levine’s poem, “You Can Have It”:

You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop   
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window   
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember   
that moment when suddenly I knew each man   
has one brother who dies when he sleeps   
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man   
sharing a heart that always labors, hands   
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps   
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I   
stacked cases of orange soda for the children   
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty   
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes   
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,   
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,   
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.   
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose   
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.   
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon   
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse   
for God and burning eyes that look upon   
all creation and say, You can have it. 

*from New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).