Despite all her success, Naomi Wolf realised she had to return to her father's teachings to be happy. Now she is encouraging everyone to follow their heart, writes Kate Holmquist.
Marketed as the feminist voice of her generation, Naomi Wolf has always had the earnest manner of the star pupil.
She's familiar to Irish audiences from her appearances on TV chat shows, speaking passionately about sexual politics and the oppressive female body ideal that traps women into feeling never good enough.
Articulate, feisty and intellectually brilliant, she rose precociously to fame while still in her 20s with The Beauty Myth, then endured as one of those rare academics who shine bright on the international stage due to their communication skills.
However, she admits in her new book, both her career and personal communication skills lacked heart. In her teaching life, she was unaware that her strident manner reduced some students to tears. Self-doubt wasn't in her vocabulary. Yet despite the powerful persona, by age 40 Wolf herself was in crisis. In the win-or-lose world of politically correct intellectual discourse, she was a winner. But in her soul - she realised shortly after her 40th birthday - she was a loser close to burn-out in an unhappy marriage.
Where did she go wrong? When she rejected the teachings of her father, Leonard Wolf, an eccentric, womanising, Bohemian poet, she now believes. The world of her father taught her everything she needed to know and, at university, she spurned it at her cost. Leonard taught that the poet, not the psychologist, held the key to happiness, and that each individual had an inner artistic voice that would speak, if we sat quietly enough.
Growing up in the Wolf family in a crooked house in San Francisco, the core parental value was an insistence that she and her brother always honour their innermost inclination. "I discovered only when I was older that this insistence is exactly what many children are cautioned against," she writes.
Feminism, deconstructivism and post-modernism have produced a mechanical, passionless generation of young women who don't know their own voices, so busy are they looking over their shoulders for the approval of the political correctness police, Wolf has realised. She was unable to nurture the voices of her students at the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which she co-founded, because she herself lacked the ability to follow what her father advocated: the gentle pull of the heart's desire.
Twenty years after rebelling against her father in favour of Oxford-taught dialectics, Wolf has come full circle to champion his philosophy in her latest book, The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love and See.
The treehouse reference relates to the quiet space she began to build with her daughter, Rosa, in the garden of the rural farmhouse that Wolf purchased on a whim. As she stripped away the house's layers of grime, she was unconsciously stripping away the persona she'd created for herself.
When her daughter requested a treehouse, Wolf pursued the project with a passion and enlisted her father as consultant. Treehouse-building sessions were transformed into teaching sessions after Naomi asked him to give her the course on life, love and poetry he had taught in San Francisco for generations.
Leonard, by his daughter's account, has the power to convince people to leave marriages, abandon careers and generally uproot themselves in the pursuit of happiness. Naomi, under his influence, divorced her husband, David Shipley. Wisely, she avoids writing directly about the rift, but does recount the experience of a friend, "Sophia", who left her marriage. Sophia was convinced by Leonard's argument that "if there is no passion, forget it".
"As I was growing up, I would observe my dad giving my mother this leaven of romance, this daily noticing of her as a woman," Wolf writes. Paraphrasing Rilke, her father said of romantic love that it is the greatest risk, but a risk worth taking. Better to be alone for a while to find yourself, in the hope of finding your soulmate, than to remain unnoticed, Wolf decided.
Born in Romania, Leonard entered the US through Ellis Island with his mother in the 1920s. His father, Joseph, had gone ahead to Cleveland and had already begun the disappointing process of becoming poorer in the US than he ever was in the Old Country, due to the Depression.
Leonard never bought the American Dream. He represented a generation of Bohemian roués and scoundrels, Wolf writes proudly. During the Beat period of the 1950s, all a man had to do to pull women - according to Leonard - was "to be tall and a poet", a lifestyle that resulted in a half-brother Naomi found out about only in adult life. Fellow poet Delmore Schwartz accused Leonard of seducing his wife at Yaddo - the California artists' commune - and threatened to kill him. Leonard wasn't intimidated, having worked with "nutters" in mental hospitals in the army before himself being honourably discharged on psychological grounds.
Has Naomi taken honourable discharge from feminist polemic? We'll see. She seems to have embraced her father's view that a poet, even if she is read only by a handful of people, is more significant to humanity in the long run than if she writes a thousand books and articles as a media and political darling. Wolf's next book, if she follows the logic of her father's philosophy, could well be poetry.
The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love and See, is published by Virago Press, £12.99 UK
