The Mighty Irritating Naomi Wolf

By SANFORD PINSKER

THE TREEHOUSE
Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See
By Naomi Wolf
288 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.

I was not surprised to learn that my daughter, Beth, had her share of problems with Naomi Wolf’s The Treehouse—after all, Beth inherited good literary taste—but I was a bit surprised, maybe even a bit disappointed, that she concentrated most of her negative firepower on Leonard Wolf, Naomi’s father. This is surely a case of misplaced anger because it is Ms. Wolf who ought to give one the gripes. In the years since her 1991 best-seller, The Beauty Myth, she has cashed in on her 15 minutes of fame by growing ever cheesier, culminating with her highly paid efforts to give Al Gore an alpha-male makeover, and now, with her self-conscious, calculated effort to write her father an extended thank-you note.

The Treehouse is several narratives stitched uncomfortably together: a history of her bohemian, 82-year-old father; an on-the-fly sketch of American culture from the 1940s onward; and the tale of how a treehouse, both as a tangible object and as the book’s overarching metaphor, got built. Leonard Wolf, Naomi’s father, who sounds like a muffled echo of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19-century transcendentalist who assured his large audiences that there was a Shakespeare inside each of them, and if they would only let it out, they could write Hamlet, or King Lear, or Henry IV, Part I.

Nothing, alas, is sadder than an aging hippie, and that is precisely what Mr. Wolf is, despite the scattered moments when his warmth shines through without a feel-good maxim attached to it. He really does know about the grains of various woods and how to construct a sturdy, well-designed treehouse. I don’t and can’t, so when my new grandchild gets older I’ll probably have to hire somebody to strap on a tool belt and swing into action. What Mr. Wolf and I share is a lifetime spent writing and teaching literature, although here, too, there are important differences that don’t break through in Ms. Wolf’s book. She reports, rather late in the volume, that her father believed in equal amounts of inspiration and discipline, and that when his students at San Francisco State University figured that transcendence was as close as their next tab of LSD, he was rightly appalled. As Woody Allen used to say, laughs when people are high don’t count, and the same is true of transcendence on the cheap.

So far, so good, but there are just too many instances of the senior Wolf cheerleading for any, absolutely any, instances of the imagination at work. No doubt this is because Mr. Wolf lives inside his poetic head, where being a “universalist” means that words ending in ism need not apply. This, of course, includes Judaism, which struck Mr. Wolf as too parochial by half.

Curiously enough, with all the aphorisms and tid-bits of moral pabulum that Mr. Wolf provides, I can’t remember any talk about the old-fashioned truth that “all art is selection.” I mention this because when Naomi tells us that her family once celebrated Hanukkah in Guaymas, Mexico, what stands out are the pink clams they dug up and roasted. About the Maccabees she is strangely silent, as she is equally silent about the scary possibilities of the Yom Kippur War, which her family inadvertently got caught up in while visiting Israel. In short, she brushes up against Jewish life from time to time, and so far as I can tell, nothing of significance brushes off.

Instead, what we follow is a young woman who learned about Marxism from a college boyfriend and had to face views about “historical necessity” and the political dimensions of art that sharply contrasted with her father’s, and while a graduate student at Oxford, she was told, again and again, that the literary canon was nothing more than the hegemonic tyranny of so many dead white males and those professors who (artificially) kept their reputations intact. “Feminist theory,” Naomi teaches us, “compounded personal experience; the words that had seemed to express my own soul’s longings could never truly do so, I was taught, because the writers did not know what it meant to be female.” In those confused, angry, and rebellious years Wolf dressed the part of a no-nonsense feminist: straight-leg black jeans, black boots, and bad hair. She became, in short, an extension of her cultural moment, just as her father had when he first donned a pair of Birkenstocks over his heavy woolen socks.

My point is not that Wolf fell into bad postures and ever-crappier language (“phallocentric patriarchy”) when she was in graduate school but that the drift toward various strains of psychobabble never entirely went away. To imagine that Al Gore could reverse his disastrous presidential campaign by donning earth tones is simultaneously sad and silly. And to cook up a book about a poet-father is just as unseemly.

D. H. Lawrence once urged readers to “Trust the tale, not the teller,” and Naomi’s father says virtually the same thing when he proudly declares that he makes “a distinction between the author’s intention and the work’s intention, which is not always the same thing. You might say in that sense that I am thinking mystically because I strongly believe that the work has a life of its own.”

The mystical turn aside, Mr. Wolf numbers himself in the camp of Lawrence and the New Critics who held sway during the l940s and 50s. I, too, retain an affection for this general position, and that is why I feel that there is a disconnect between Ms. Wolf’s intentions and her book itself. We are supposed to ooze sympathy for the Mr. Wolf who bought an astrolabe, an ancient instrument used to navigate the oceans, rather than a washing machine because, as Naomi points out, a little ring-around-the-collar never hurt anybody, but the truth is that reverse snobbery no longer packs the power it once did. And the same thing, for better or worse, is true of ostensibly heart-felt books like The Tree House. Every father—and I am hardly an exception—would like to be the centerpiece of a book written by his daughter, but if Beth wrote something this saccharine, I’d hide her laptop.