Edmund Kean — How Can a Man Have Real Self Expression?

Should We Be Impressed by the World or Fight It

"Expression," Mr. Siegel said, "is activity, but it begins with how we think." And he says this which I love: "We have to be impressed before we can be expressed." Hearing this, you know it is something true that was never put in words before. That sentence, too, describes Edmund Kean's tremendous, untrammelled expression—he was said to be the best listener on the stage.

In a matter of weeks after his Drury Lane debut, he went from poverty and obscurity to fame and great wealth—nothing like it ever happened in the history of the theatre. Yet, as men have, Kean also had come to see his expression as fighting the world, seeing it as an opponent to vanquish. Said Mr. Siegel, "Kean was more sensible as an actor than a human being: that happens to be the moral of most actors' lives."

Kean could apparently be brutal to anyone he saw as a possible threat to his new position. "The throne is mine," he wrote," I will maintain it," and there are accounts of his fierce competitiveness with other actors. Kean never knew that desire to squash a seeming rival came from an utterly different source than that which made for great expression in him.

The early years of poverty and the death of their child took its toll on Kean's marriage. And I believe he did not relish thinking about the depths of his wife the way he thought about a character in a play. Early, their marriage became one of distance and bitterness, and they eventually lived apart but never formally divorced.

I am immensely fortunate to be learning what men have ached to know for centuries about love—that the true, scientific, romantic purpose a man needs to have for love to go well is to use a woman to like the whole world.

Like many men, I thought a woman should make me feel I was wonderful just by being me. And I was in a fight between being honestly impressed, swept by a woman and proud that my self was, as Mr. Siegel said, going "abroad," and wanting to use her to serve and make much of me. And so, when I was interested in a woman I would be strategic—"How can I get her to show that she likes me?"—while acting cool myself. To my great shock every time, the woman objected. Once, when I asked a woman out in this offhand way, she said "No" in no uncertain terms, and I was mortified. In an Aesthetic Realism class when I spoke about this, Miss Reiss said:

You have a manner which can...seem very at ease...But at a certain point what a person wants is passion. You find it hard to say passionately, "I want to know you for the purpose of being fair to the world, and you can be sure that I want that for you. We may have only one conversation, or we may have them all our lives, but you can count on this." You don't like yourself for not being able to talk that way, being passionate, assuring a woman you're the man to have her like the world. No woman worth her salt will trust you if you don't.

Miss Reiss was right and I have changed! I have a different purpose with the woman who I hope to have conversations with all of our lives—my dear wife of one year and three months, Meryl Nietsch, who is studying to teach Aesthetic Realism. I need Meryl's perceptions of the world and of me, her beautiful radiance and depth, her criticism and kindness to be a fully expressed man, and I am proud to say so. And I love Meryl Nietsch's meaning for women all over America through what she has seen and presented through her study of Aesthetic Realism about the cause of eating disorders and how they can end in a woman's life, and for wanting this urgently needed knowledge known.

Edmund Kean's life—his greatness as an artist, his hopes as a man—show the magnificent truth of Aesthetic Realism and what it can teach every man about how to have the honest, vibrant, joyous self-expression men have longed for. I am so glad that people from Washington state to Florida, from Texas to Michigan, are meeting this great education at last!

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