Book Review: ‘Write Like a Man,’ by Ronnie Grinberg

Howe is a central figure in Grinberg’s book, someone who eventually admitted his own “habits of condescension” toward women and remained steadfast in his left-wing ideals. His quarrels with a younger generation of New Leftists show how both parties deployed the language of masculinity, even if they disagreed over what true manliness entailed. “Rudeness,” Howe wrote, “became a spear with which to break the skin of complacency.” But that spear was contained in ideas and argument, not activism. In the 1960s, the New Leftists exalted protest and action; they derided middle-aged leftists like Howe as “armchair intellectuals.”

The New Left, Howe scoffed in turn, was only playing, dabbling in “a strange mixture of Guevarist fantasia, residual Stalinism, anarchist braggadocio and homemade tough-guy methods.” Each side saw itself as the genuine embodiment of virility. Once, when Howe was being taunted by “a gang of New Left kids,” he yelled at one — a “very bright boy named Cohen” — the worst insult either of them could imagine: “When you grow up … you are going to turn out to be a dentist!”

Grinberg’s book is filled with such lively anecdotes, attentive to both the energy and absurdity generated by a coterie of brilliant eggheads who identified as fearless brawlers. In 1971, Norman Mailer (who graduated from Harvard, but fancied himself a pugilist nonetheless) lamented that women lost their respect for men when “pregnancy lost its danger” — thanks to declining rates of maternal mortality. Thus “insulated from the dramatic possibility of a fatal end,” he wrote, women no longer feared that a man would “introduce a creation to her which could yet be her doom.” This was just a baroque way of saying that women could only respect a man who might kill them. Mailer, who stabbed his wife at a party, was always trying very hard to be macho. The novelist Ann Birstein, who was married to Kazin, called Mailer “a Jewish mama’s boy, who longed to be taken for a tough Irishman.”

The few women who were allowed into the club had to be formidable with their pens — as Jason Epstein, a co-founder of The New York Review of Books, put it, they had to “write like a man.” But also, Grinberg says, they were expected to be “attractive and alluring.” Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt fit the bill; Diana Trilling, who was married to the eminent critic Lionel Trilling, had a rougher time of it.