We assume this, anyway, because The New York Times billed the program as “a face-to-face, word-to-word confrontation,” and even though Bly insisted at the outset that this was just typical media exaggeration, what else could account for the sellout crowd to hear a discussion between a mythic poet and a sociolinguist? We could picture just how it would happen, too: Bly droning on about the search for the warrior within and Tannen pointing out that this is just the kind of self-indulgent spotlight hogging men have been doing in our culture for centuries and then… well, actually, we couldn’t picture that part, exactly, but that mandolin is a savage-looking instrument, and Bly, for all his white-haired, bespectacled gentility, fills out his trade-mark sweater pretty well.
But they began the evening, which was sponsored by the New York Open Center, on a friendly note, plugging each other’s books. Bly said he now understood that when his wife asks, “Would you like to stop somewhere for a drink?” she is not inquiring whether he’s literally thirsty, but indicating in her feminine way that she’d like a few minutes of conversation. Tannen said that she approved of Bly’s emphasis on the importance of the father-son bond because “at last, here’s someone who isn’t blaming mothers for all our problems.”
Things looked a little more promising when Bly asserted that “both men and women want to fight in a healthy way … that’s sexy to me.” But he didn’t do any fighting with Tannen, healthy or otherwise. Finally he did pick up the mandolin, but only to pluck a few mournful notes to lend the right air of portentousness to his closing poem, and suddenly we were struck by the thought that, if all the men in the world were like Robert Bly, and all the women in the world were like Deborah Tannen, they probably still wouldn’t agree on everything. But at least they could do it to music.
