Writing "like a man."
A review of Ronnie Grinberg's fascinating book on Jewish masculinity and the New York Intellectuals
I reviewed Ronnie Grinberg’s new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, for The Chronicle of Higher Ed. My essay begins like this:
The origin story of the New York Intellectuals long ago acquired the status of myth. (Genesis, to be precise.) The details can be recited catechistically: Paradise was City College of New York, whose cafeteria was divided, like Babel, into numbered niches by ethnicity, hobby, and sect. In “alcove one,” the non-Stalinist left, devotees of Trotsky, Marx, and modernist literature, sharpened their dialectical swords for combat against the middlebrow Communists of “alcove two.” The CP crowd had an easy answer to every question, so long as they’d read that morning’s Daily Worker; the Trots, by contrast, relied on theory and wits alone to metabolize the world’s information and make with it an argument for world socialism and against Stalin’s perversion of that dream.
On both sides, the combatants were predominantly Jewish, but only alcove one produced thinkers like Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell. (Kristol would mordantly joke that the most illustrious alumnus of alcove two was Julius Rosenberg.) Not every New York Intellectual graduated from City College; some weren’t even Jewish or from New York. But Alfred Kazin, Sidney Hook, Harold Rosenberg, and the Partisan Review co-founder William Phillips all passed through what Phillips affectionately called “the poor boy’s steppingstone to the world.” And it was from this roughly shared experience — of working-class life in immigrant New York, of Marxist quarrel and quandary — that a shared intellectual sensibility was forged.
It goes on to engage with the substance of Grinberg’s thesis: that the New York Intellectuals shared a preoccupation with manliness, and that this manliness had a specifically Jewish character. It’s hard to contest, and indeed, Grinberg does a fine job drawing it out. The place where I found myself disagreeing with Grinberg (or at least getting nervous) was on the subject of whether the distinctive critical style innovated in the pages of Partisan Review, Commentary, and Menorah Journal can or should be described as specifically manly. (She doesn’t quite say, but it’s difficult to read the book without asking oneself what it could possibly mean to write “like a man” or “like a woman,” especially when it comes to the women writers in the New York Intellectual milieu.) “At some point,” I argue, “an overemphasis on the sociological constraints placed on these particular women writers risks diminishing their distinctive accomplishments as stylists.” Did Elizabeth Hardwick really write like a man? No. She wrote like Elizabeth Hardwick. And thank God for that.
Somewhat impishly, I also suggest that perhaps the best woman writer of the bunch was Norman Podhoretz.
By Trilling’s criteria, Podhoretz was by far the most womanly writer among them: His memoirs are shockingly revealing (and sometimes perceptive) about his own psychological hang-ups, and they’re far more concerned with relationships (marriages, affairs, and betrayals) than with political ideas. Podhoretz described Making It, his disastrously received 1967 memoir, as a “confessional work” that “deliberately set out to expose an order of feeling in myself, and by implication in others.” The backlash to Making It could be summarized thus: It was too self-exposing, too indiscrete, too ingratiating, too entitled. In other words, like many women before him, Podhoretz was accused of being too much.
Anyway. I hope you’ll read the whole review — and check out Grinberg’s book. We also hosted her for a (lively) conversation on Know Your Enemy, which will be out (on all the platforms) soon.
Thanks as always.
Sam