Jennifer Szalai

“Write Like a Man”: The title of Ronnie Grinberg’s group portrait of the midcentury New York intellectuals sounds both confrontational and comic, aggressive and anachronistic. What used to be considered a compliment (albeit an inherently chauvinistic one) now sounds so ridiculous that it can only be an ironic joke. The transformation is a mark of how much has changed since the moment Grinberg writes about, when a cohort of writers clustered around small but influential journals like Partisan Review and Dissent made virtues out of intellectual provocation and polemical combat.

Those intellectuals were mostly men, and they were mostly Jewish. They have also been amply written about, not least by the men themselves, in their memoirs. But what distinguishes “Write Like a Man” is its frame — one that seems deceptively simple at first, but turns out to be capacious enough to contain all kinds of fascinating contradictions. Grinberg, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, argues that Jewishness informed a particular understanding of masculinity: “Men and women, Jews and non Jews in the group all came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo.”

This isn’t an essentialist argument; what Grinberg calls “the ideology of secular Jewish masculinity” was forged from the specific experience of growing up outside the American mainstream. Protestant ideals of manliness venerated athleticism and physical prowess — a sentiment that became even more pronounced in nativist reaction to the influx of new immigrants in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Antisemitic stereotypes “had long cast Jewish men as weak, passive and effeminate,” Grinberg writes. After World War I, a young generation of American-born Jewish men found a way to carve out a space for themselves by merging a Jewish emphasis on learning and scholarship with an American emphasis on swagger. “It was new,” Grinberg writes, “both uniquely American and uniquely Jewish.”

Ground zero for this budding subculture was City College of New York, with its free tuition and absence of quotas, along with a student body that in the 1930s, for example, was 80 to 90 percent Jewish. Graduates included the sociologist Daniel Bell, the philosopher Sidney Hook and the literary critics Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. For those who studied there at the time, the philosophy professor Morris Cohen was, as one student put it, “the Paul Bunyan of Jewish intellectuals,” with an axe-wielding pedagogical style to match. “You went to a Cohen class in order to be ripped open,” Howe recalled, later adding, “It was a terrifying, sometimes even a sadistic method of teaching.” Howe clearly meant this as a compliment.

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.

Diana Trilling was known to be supremely “difficult,” Grinberg writes. Of course, the same could be said of most of the men in the group. But Trilling’s reputation was dogged by her disagreeableness in a way theirs wasn’t. Her early literary criticism contained the kind of gendered language that was taken for granted at the time. Virginia Woolf, she complained, “took refuge in female sensibility,” which “made it impossible to meet her head-on like a man.” Women writers, Trilling said, lacked “courage.” But her willingness to use sexist tropes wasn’t enough to compensate for not being “viewed as seductive or flirtatious,” Greenberg writes. Trilling eventually staked her own ground with her “‘hard’ anti-communism.” At one dinner party, she stood up and yelled at the other intellectuals at the table, “None of you men are HARD enough for me!”

The book is populated by people who loved to pick sides, but Grinberg stays above the fray. She coolly recounts her subjects’ wildly divergent political trajectories, from the committed leftism of Irving Howe to the rightward drift of Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, who became a neoconservative insider. Podhoretz, now 94, has said that he initially disliked Donald Trump, but then began to warm up to him, becoming “anti-anti-Trump,” before deciding that he liked Trump after all, because Trump “fights back” and wasn’t a “sissy.” Trump’s “virtues” were those “of the street kids of Brooklyn.”

This form of reasoning, if you could even call it that, shows how the love of a fight can turn into a fetish. The hearkening back to childhood is, in itself, a tell. Grinberg alludes to the little-boy feelings of shame and insecurity that undergird much of the swagger described in her book. As she writes of Podhoretz, licking his wounds after one of his books was widely trounced by his friends: “They had laughed at him, left him feeling exposed.”