Secret Life: An Autobiography
By Michael Ryan
Random House
357 pp.; $25; Vintage, $13, paper

The turning point in Michael Ryan's life came one day in his forties as he was driving from Boston to Albany. A prize-winning poet, he had recently been fired by Princeton University for seducing women students. His marriage had fallen apart. Yet, as he drove, he could think of nothing else but his planned seduction of the 15-year-old daughter of the friends he would be visiting in Albany. What happened to keep him from making the visit, he "still cannot explain." He simply stopped his car, filled with a panic that was followed by an overwhelming sense of loneliness, and then by a mental blankness. He turned around and drove home to Boston. In his one effort to provide an explanation, he reaches for theological categories: He was rescued by "the grace of God, or luck (the secular term for grace)."

I read Ryan's autobiography not too long after rereading Kierkegaard's Either/Or, and I was struck by some key differences between the two accounts of sexual seduction. The fictional antihero of Kierkegaard's "Diary of the Seducer" treated sexual conquest as a case in point for a larger "aesthetic" project, orchestrating his affair with the proud and beautiful Cordelia as if he were creating a work of fiction. He distanced himself from any subjective involvement in the relationship: passion, the appearance of commitment, and individual pleasures all had their place only if they were important to the unfolding of the overall plot. In all of this, Kierkegaard's seducer took special pains to avoid "giddiness."

While Ryan also insisted on maintaining subjective distance from his sexual partners, his sex life was nothing if not giddy: he uses words like "drunk" and "insane" to describe his typical sexual mood. Ryan's report of his struggle with sexual compulsion has the feel of a traditional theological account of idolatry:

[It] determined what I thought and what I felt. My personality was formed around it. All of my talents, all my good qualities as a human being, were devoted to serving it, and I was willing to sacrifice anything to it. Although I could perform practical tasks perfectly well, it was running my life.

In addition to shunning giddiness, Kierkegaard's seducer made a big point of staving off the intrusion of "the ethical" into his sexual manipulations. "Under the heaven of the aesthetic," he wrote, "everything is light, beautiful, transitory; when the ethical comes along, then everything becomes harsh, angular, infinitely boring." Such defenses were not available to Ryan; his sexual conquests brought regular moral attacks that were anything but boring: he regularly experienced intense shame, guilt, and self-loathing.

Kierkegaard would have approved. He did not take his seducer's professed aestheticism at face value. In the Kierkegaardian scheme, such an approach to life ultimately ends in despair, thus allowing for the invasion of the ethical--and ultimately an opening up to the spiritual.

But many contemporary portrayals of the sexual life are permeated with the very aestheticism whose inadequacies Kierkegaard meant to expose. For example, the New York Times Book Review ran a review a few years ago (Jan. 10, 1993) of a book that suggested that the philosopher Michel Foucault deliberately engaged in unsafe sexual practices with unwitting partners after he knew he had contracted aids. The reviewer concluded by commending the book for its "portrait of a vibrant, incandescent, fearless and luminous mind--yes, perhaps self-destructive and all too human, but one that can never be accused of banality, mediocrity, pettiness or naivete." The Joy of Sex, deconstructionist style!

We need books like Michael Ryan's to counter the highly aestheticized tone of our present-day talk about sex. This contribution--the maintenance of an alternative mode of sexual discourse in contemporary culture--requires special emphasis here, lest Christian readers simply be distracted by other elements of Ryan's narrative: No one who scans his book in search of graphic accounts of masturbatory fantasies and erotic gropings will feel shortchanged. But for all of that, Ryan seems to have less interest in titillating the reader than in engaging in a thoroughgoing confessional exercise.

Ryan emphasizes the highly eroticized view of reality that dominated his life for several decades as he made his way through a "social world [that] was a thin, irritating haze covering the real world of sex." But this thin haze was surprisingly thick with diverse experiences: his agonies as he witnessed his father's alcoholic decline, the lines he forgot at a critical moment in the school play, teenage sports, the spiritual guidance offered by a gentle nun, Elvis hairdos. His account of such things is captivating, and even though he obviously wants us to know what a conniving person he was through all of the seemingly normal trials and joys of a pilgrimage through Catholic high school, undergraduate years at Notre Dame, graduate study, and the early years of teaching and writing, we come away with the clear impression that there is much that is winsome and talented in this human being who is now revealing his darkest obsessions.

Indeed, the positive impressions are so strong that one cannot help wishing for a villain who worked his evil designs on Michael Ryan. And such a one is easy to find. He shows up on page 11, and his sinister presence broods over every page that follows. Bob Stoller, a neighbor who had returned in the 1950s from military service in Korea, repeatedly molested Ryan when the author was five years old.

Given the fact that advocates of "man-boy love" have recently begun to step out of the dark alleys to attempt to put their "preference" in a favorable light, Ryan's account of this sordid experience is an important piece of reality therapy. Not that he reduces the situation to the simple categories of abuser and abused. While the affair with Bob Stoller seemed to provide the child Ryan with no physical pleasure, it contained at least a semblance of a trusting friendship that was held together by a shared secret and by a primitive recognition of the adult's deep sense of vulnerability with a child who now had some control over his fate.

Traveling the road to recovery from his sexual addiction meant that Ryan had to acknowledge the life-shaping role of the Stoller affair in his own social development. The basic analysis that he offers is as follows. As a five-year-old, Ryan experiences a profoundly traumatic series of events, in which he is manipulated by a sexual aggressor. The memory of this trauma is never erased, although it is too painful simply to acknowledge and consciously "own." So Ryan takes his sense of shame and guilt and projects it onto other persons. He in turn takes on the Bob Stoller role, treating each of his real or imagined conquests as the kind of manipulable sexual object that he had been for Bob Stoller. Thus the obsession with anonymous sexual encounters. But the project never fully succeeds; the compartmentalization of selves does not work. Hence the misery of Michael Ryan's sexual existence, as he is regularly invaded by guilt and shame.

This is the stuff of theological reflection, and I wish that Ryan had offered some explicit thoughts along those lines. As it is, he provides us only with hints, the most intriguing being this comment near the end of his book:

I am no longer Bob Stoller. . . . For all these years, he has been my false self. He isn't inside me anymore. A benevolent, loving God has replaced Bob Stoller. This is the gift, a surprising gift, better than anything I could have asked for or imagined: myself. I can begin to be my (God-given) self.

At first glance, Ryan's story can be seen as yet another instance of the current fascination with multiplying selves. (Waiting for a plane recently, I heard this snatch of conversation: "Whenever we are together I find myself slipping into my victim-self role!" I changed seats.)

Sometimes, however, the multiplication of selves actually happens, and when it does, it is important to acknowledge their reality. The demoniac in the gospel account was not lying when he gave his name as "Legion." Even the apostle Paul used the language of "splitting": "it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me."

I think Michael Ryan is right: Bob Stoller had indeed functioned as Ryan's false self. To put it that way can sound like psychobabble. But it can also be good Augustinian theology. The psalmist rightly informs us that we are "fearfully" as well as "wonderfully" created. The fearfulness of our created makeup is evidenced in Ryan's self-analysis, which comports well with a perspective that insists the human heart is capable of deep and complex deceptions.

It is significant that Ryan does not simply exorcise the false Stoller-self by cleaning house and taking control over his own psyche. Another self has settled in. Bob Stoller, he tells us, has been replaced by a benevolent, loving God. Again, I wish that Ryan had elaborated on his theological understanding of the situation. (One reviewer of Secret Life referred to Ryan's recent return to active Roman Catholicism, a development not explicitly mentioned in the book.) I hope we will hear more from him on this subject. Let me try briefly to point to some matters such an elaboration might touch upon.

The motifs of victimization and power permeate the drama of human sin and salvation. Our first parents started off in a healthy relationship with a benevolent, loving God, but they soon allowed the serpent to convince them that they were being victimized by a manipulating despot. When they rebelled against their Creator, they took on the characteristics of the serpent's version of what it means to be a god: they themselves became manipulators, organizing reality in conformity to their despotic designs. This drama is replayed in the psyche of each of their descendants.

When Michael Ryan was molested by Bob Stoller, he took on the characteristics of his molester. In the end, he was able to rid himself of this false self. There is a very real danger, however, that when one manipulative self is evicted, another will take its place. Ryan was fortunate to have been visited by divine grace: his false self was replaced by a very different model of healthy personhood. Ryan was restored, by his own testimony, to the image and likeness of his Creator. He has received the gift of his own self.

Not all of us have had to struggle with sexual compulsions in the extreme way that Michael Ryan has, but neither will his experiences be completely discontinuous with many of our own. Sexuality is not all there is to our humanness, but it does reach surprisingly far into our depths. As the frequent biblical references to sexual intercourse as "knowing" suggest, the connections between sexuality and self-knowledge are profound and mysterious. Much of what Christian scholars have attempted to say on the subject in a systematic fashion has failed to probe these depths.

Maybe that is all we can hope for. Or maybe a richer understanding of this subject requires more Christians to speak in detail out of the agonies of their own struggles. In either case--whether we must be content to stand in awe before a mystery, or whether it is possible to increase our understanding of these deep connections--Michael Ryan has helped the cause by telling us his painful story.

-Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of Consulting the Faithful: What Christian Intellectuals Can Learn from Popular Religion (Eerdmans).

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.