Your hands are freezing!" Naomi Wolf exclaims, immediately after "Hello." In the foyer of her parents' apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the feminist and social critic best known for her controversial bestseller The Beauty Myth slides easily into the role of host. She is warm, energetic, animated: "You haven't eaten lunch? Let me run out and get something around the corner. No? Are you sure?" She laughs. "I can't help it, I'm a Jewish mother."
In the kitchen, the subject of her fifth book is making coffee. Leonard Wolf—poet, teacher, father of Naomi—emerges to shake hands. Quieter but equally solicitous, he offers a bowl of yogurt. The Greek kind, he clarifies, explaining that he likes to eat it with raisins.
When Simon & Schuster publishes The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love and See in May, readers will discover a softer side of Naomi Wolf. They will also meet the spirited, indulgent father who critiqued her adolescent poems, choked down the headcheese she served in a misguided dinnertime homage to Chaucer, and insisted, earnestly and faithfully, that "the creative act is the secret of joy."
A warm, deeply personal book, The Treehouse is a patchwork of cultural history, biography, memoir and advice of the inspirational, rather than practical, variety. At its foundation are 12 lessons about learning to write—and, by extension, learning to live—that Leonard Wolf taught his students when he was a professor at San Francisco State. They direct readers to uncover and exercise the artist inside them ("Use Your Imagination"; "Do Nothing Without Passion"; "Be Disciplined with Your Gift"). They are lessons, Naomi says, that, at 40, she finally decided she wanted to learn.
"Identify Your Heart's Desire"
The Treehouse is set during the summer of 2003, when Leonard visited Naomi's country house in upstate New York, educating her in his humanist philosophy and helping her build a treehouse for her daughter. Interspersed with Leonard's instruction are vignettes from his youth and slices of postwar bohemian life; Naomi's reflections on the challenges she experiences as a teacher at the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which she cofounded with journalist and talk radio producer Margaret Magowan in 1997; and sketches of a handful of Naomi's friends who benefited from Leonard's advice.
Tall, white-haired and 82, Leonard has the voice and mien of a sage. As in the book, he seeds his conversation with references to Rabelais, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, Mary Shelley, Shakespeare, Milton and, blithely, "either Coleridge or Wordsworth." The lines he quotes invariably have to do with art: feeling it, seeking it, making it.
"When people spend time around my dad," Naomi writes, "they are always quitting their sensible jobs with good benefits to become schoolteachers, or agitators, or lutenists.... His students are always leaving safe but not essential relationships and finding something truer."
Leonard believes that following the "heart's creative wisdom" is a person's highest duty. After Candide "has gone through the whole universe and discovered it's a goddamn mess, what does he come up with but something profoundly optimistic?" Leonard asks. " 'Il faut cultiver sa jardin.' You must cultivate your garden.... Then you build delight into your life."
The word "delight" pops up regularly in Leonard's discourse. When asked about the potential conflict between practicing one's art and meeting one's financial responsibilities, Leonard chuckles. "You didn't ask me about paying the bills," he says. "I don't know about that."
"Destroy the Box"
Leonard sees anything that limits a person's potential as a "box," and he has spent his life discarding boxes: he abandoned the Orthodox Judaism he was born into in Rumania and the Marxism he was drawn to in Cleveland, and he chafed against the strictures of the army he joined in World War II. He went to be a poet in postwar California, where he met Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Kenneth Rexroth and attended the kind of booze-soaked parties where men danced with other men's wives and people vomited into wastebaskets. But the undisciplined life of the Miller-Rexroth circle and, later, the Beats, was not, ultimately, for him. He got his Ph.D.; he began teaching at San Francisco State; he tried to get his hippie students high on poetry instead of drugs.
And it was poetry that, four decades later, Naomi realized she was missing. While in person and in The Treehouse Naomi tends to reference the personal rather than the literary, she recalls, in her book's first chapter, the lost narrator in the beginning of Dante's Inferno and registers a similar confusion: "In the middle of my own life, I was lost, in some ways. I realized... that it was high time my adolescent rebellion was over."
But she's not casting more than a decades' worth of writing and political activism as youthful defiance. "It's just that they weren't the whole picture," she says. She runs her hand through her famous hair, which is now streaked with red. "I'm a girl, so this seems odd, but there is an Oedipal resistance. You've got this teacher who's all about this canon, and the humanist tradition, teaching beautiful humanistic lessons.... Especially at Yale, when I was an undergraduate, they were putting a silver stake through the heart of that." She describes how she had to turn her back on Leonard's teaching to understand feminism, Marxism and material analysis. "These were useful tools," she says. "But you have all these tools, and you reach a point where you wonder, so now where's the heart and soul? Where's the poetry?"
The poetry, Leonard would probably say, is in the power of the imagination. Poetry is a metaphor for a person's creative destiny. But right then, flanked by his effusive daughter and a very chatty interviewer, he sips his coffee and listens. Naomi is so excited by the possibility of uniting the rigor of politics and the spirit of poetry (which will be the subject of her next book, she says) that she fairly crackles with energy.
"Frame Your Work"
The Treehouse reveals Leonard as a man of deep convictions about art and passionate whimsy about his outfits. One day he wears a red Basque shepherd's shirt and gaucho hat; another day he sports a tie from the 1970s decorated with stylized naked women. Naomi considers these sartorial adventures "costumes."
Reading his daughter's book, Leonard says, is "reading about myself from a person who's seeing her father through a glass brightly," he says.
"Oh, that's nice, Dad!" Naomi says. "But you don't think you wear costumes."
Leonard points across the room to a glass bust, on top of which sits a cowboy hat. "I paid someone to make that out of shearling. It ain't an ordinary cowboy hat," he says. "You should have your fantasy life on occasion. There's no reason in the world not to wear a sheepherder's long Persian coat, as I used to do. It was fun! We're entitled to be immortal in this life." Then Leonard begins to sing, in a soft, tuneful voice. " 'Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think!' Do you know that song?"
"That's kind of ominous, Dad."
"It is not ominous. It is an imperative to delight!"
"Okay," Naomi says.
"If you know there is a frame, you will make vibrant what is inside that frame. That's the point of your book."
Naomi does not look entirely convinced. But if she does not quite play the acolyte's role she gives herself in the book, she is comfortable with friendly disagreement. So is Leonard: later, they will debate, rather heatedly, the pleasures of writing poems versus the pleasures of writing nonfiction.
"Your Only Wage Will Be Joy"
Though Leonard has written novels, plays, short stories, poetry collections, writers' handbooks and a "connoisseur's guide" to Dracula, his work has not received the kind of attention that his daughter's has. This makes him a more typical author—after all, how many writers pen a bestseller at 26, as Naomi did?—but he seems not to have a shred of the bitterness that even highly compensated, critically lauded authors sometimes express. "If we're lucky, we discover that the source of our delight is the work itself," says Leonard.
Ironically, though, he once planned a book very much like The Treehouse. "Five or six years ago, I proposed a book to my agent that was going to be called Confessions of a Happy Man, because I suddenly realized that I had had a wonderful life. Among other things, I have great kids, I have a superb wife who has been with me X number of years and I can never get over how remarkably beautiful she is. And my agent thought it was an unpublishable book. She found a way to extrapolate the happiness of my life in a way that would serve more people," he says, nodding toward his daughter.
"What a lovely way to put it, Dad," she says.
"Well, that's what happened," he says.
And writing the book gave a woman famous for mixing memoir with manifesto the chance to blend counsel and character study. "I got to really talk to my dad and listen to him and get to know him in a different way," Naomi says. "And I feel so lucky to have had the chance to do that while there's time."
"You want to hold on to the people you love forever," she writes in The Treehouse's lovely, elegiac final pages. "But the way they live in you, and the art they make in you, means that it has to be okay that you can't."
"It's very gratifying to discover the depth of your child's intelligence and the degree of respect that she has either rediscovered or conveyed to me that she now has," Leonard says. He smiles. "It's much better than a funeral oration."
