The New York Intellectuals Were a Boys’ Club

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’s salient — though, of course, hardly unusual, given the times — that the New York Intellectuals were not only Jews, but Jewish men. As the historian Ronnie Grinberg argues in her new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, writing for these critics was a form of masculine performance, closely linked to aggression. They “prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.” And through their “muscular,” “pugilistic” style, honed in small magazines like Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent, they crafted a new model of Jewish masculinity — one that rejected, in one exuberant swoop, the shtetl ignorance of their immigrant fathers, the servile pretensions of the Jewish cultural elite, and the weakness, effeminacy, and passivity of Ashkenazi stereotype and schoolyard taunt.

Marxism was their first political passion because it provided an escape from both the emasculation and the parochialism of their fathers: “It was,” in Grinberg’s words, “cosmopolitan and virile at once — a fighting faith, which found strength in numbers.” In argument, the New York Intellectuals were athletic, “skilled infighter[s] juggling knives of dialectic,” per Irving Howe. On the page, they were daring, strutting, and rude. “But rudeness,” said Howe, “was not only the weapon of the cultural underdog, but also a sign that intellectual Jews had become sufficiently self-assured to stop playing by gentile rules.” As Grinberg writes, “Men and women, Jews and non-Jews in the group all came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo.” Theirs was a model of the intellectual-as-contender, infusing older traditions of Jewish learning and argument with avant-garde flair and bellicosity: They were Talmudic gladiators in a modernist colosseum.

The thesis of Grinberg’s book — that the New York Intellectuals shared a preoccupation with manliness, and that this manliness had a specifically Jewish character — is hard to dispute. The gendered anxieties of the men in the group could be comically exaggerated. Norman Podhoretz, who edited Commentary for over 30 years, is the most symptomatic case. In his essay “My Negro Problem — and Ours” (1963), Podhoretz describes his envy for the Black boys he grew up around in Brooklyn, more “free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, [and] erotic” than himself. In Making It (1967), he compares writer’s block to sexual impotence and claims that “many men have a strong impulse to masturbate when they are about to start on a piece of writing, as though to persuade themselves that they are in control, that they can get it up and make it come.” As his politics turned toward neoconservatism, Podhoretz blamed what he saw as a timorous American foreign policy on homosexuals and feminists, who disdained the family and emasculated our common culture. After the 1967 War, Podhoretz looked to Israel and Zionism for a virile, martial culture capable of sustaining Jewish potency.

Unsurprisingly, given how closely the New York Intellectuals associated literary and sexual performance, they evinced a transparent fear of being unmanned by the women in their midst, many of whom were formidable critical intellectuals in their own right. For some, this trepidation merged with a perverse, perhaps unconscious, desire to be humiliated just so. The New York Review of Books cofounder Jason Epstein recalls Diana Trilling yelling, in a fit of anti-communist pique, “None of you men are HARD enough for me!” After Podhoretz insisted to Hannah Arendt that he had written his pan of Eichmann in Jerusalem “reluctantly, out of a sense of duty,” he says she flashed him a “patronizing smile,” which “said as clearly as words would have done, ‘You’re lying, of course, but it was foolish of me to expect that you would be man enough to tell me the truth.’” Observing the tensed shoulders of two “older men” at a Partisan Review party upon spotting Mary McCarthy, William Barrett wrote, “Here was this attractive and engaging woman, all smiles, and their recoil was as if an ogress, booted and spurred, had entered the room brandishing her whips.” Perhaps most poignantly, there is Norman Mailer’s outrageously fetishistic response to being heckled by feminist intellectuals at Town Hall in March 1971: “I’m perfectly willing, if you wish me to act the clown … I will take out my modest Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it, and then I’ll walk away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown the real one.” (A fantasy of humiliation and castration at once!)

While none of the (male) New York Intellectuals could credibly be called feminists, there was a sort of grudging respect ––— mixed with terror — for female intellectual achievement. The highest accolade that could be bestowed on a woman was that she could “write like a man.” “With women in that crowd,” Epstein remarked,

the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough. You wanted a piece, a piece of writing—you’d forget everything else for a good piece.

Grinberg takes her title from this appalling, revealing, self-ironizing, self-deluded quotation, and all the pieces of her argument are here in miniature: the heterosexual bravado with a whiff of impotence (if you could sleep with her; what if you couldn’t?); the slippage between libido and artistic expression (a piece of writing / a piece of ass); the glib misogynist confession that women — even the geniuses — were sexual objects first and intellectual peers only contingently; and the aspirational if not completely credible assertion that, in the last instance, it was words on the page, artfully arranged, that mattered most. (Good writing could make you forget everything.)

When it comes to the women on the New York Intellectual scene, Grinberg is especially good on Diana Trilling, the withering literary critic and cold warrior whose career was nonetheless overshadowed by her more famous husband, and on Midge Decter, Podhoretz’s wife, whose revisionist Freudian notions of gender prefigured the anti-feminist backlash and likely inspired her husband’s later tendency to diagnose Cold War appeasement as a psychosexual response to feminism and gay liberation. That these women managed, with effort, to escape their husbands’ shadows and be seen as New York Intellectuals in their own right was an uncommon triumph. Women like Ann Birstein and Pearl Kazin Bell, both married to prominent New York Intellectuals, were never accepted as members of the clique, despite their own distinguished careers as writers and thinkers.

Write Like a Man is on shakier ground, however, when it discusses those women who managed to gain favor without spousal sponsorship. Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Hannah Arendt, “the PR girls,” as Diana Trilling derisively called them, began writing for Partisan Review in the 1940s, but their “sharp wit and prose,” Grinberg intimates, was not all they had going for them. “McCarthy, Hardwick, and Arendt were perceived as attractive and flirtatious,” Grinberg writes. “McCarthy and Hardwick were shiksas while Arendt was a striking European émigré who had trained under some of Germany’s most revered philosophers.” This, she suggests, was an advantage over the “married Jewish women writers who orbited this group.” As outsiders, McCarthy, Hardwick, and Arendt, could be “seen as seductive without being reduced entirely to sex objects.”

Grinberg is here ventriloquizing the views of “the PR boys,” and indeed, there is ample evidence of their lascivious designs. I understand, too, that she is attempting to elucidate the narrow terms on which women were permitted into the fold (as wife, mistress, or would-be lover). But it seems perilous to repeat these perceptions without qualification, or without spending more time on these writers’ distinctive contributions. (For what it’s worth, McCarthy, Hardwick, and Arendt are among the best writers of the 20th century, far more accomplished than the men who tried to sleep with them; the same could be said of the younger Susan Sontag, whose erotic allure was also noted.) Likewise, it’s not obvious to me that being an object of sexual fascination was preferable to being somebody’s wife, from the point of view of being taken seriously. Sexism toward “the PR girls” merely manifested in different ways. Podhoretz dismissed McCarthy’s novel The Group as “a trivial lady writer’s novel”; William Barrett attributed McCarthy’s genius, her consistently “unwearied, buoyant” prose, to childishness. (“Perhaps a certain adult ballast never weighed her down.”) Meanwhile, Barrett described Arendt as “much more womanly” than he had anticipated, and Hardwick, per Epstein, was “the prettiest and sexiest and easiest to have a love affair with.”

The above is a minor issue, a matter of emphasis and clarity. But it relates to another, thornier question raised by Grinberg’s book: What does it actually mean to “write like a man”? As an arch shorthand for the pitiless critical style and ranging intellectual gusto invented in the pages of Partisan Review, the phrase seems perfectly fine. But, as the book progresses, the concept is ill-served by repetition. Eventually, it’s asked to do far too much work: Hardwick and Sontag, Grinberg writes, both assumed “a good writer wrote like a man”; Hannah Arendt, having “trained in philosophy in Germany … already wrote like a man”; the feminist Kate Millett “did not write like a man”; Diana Trilling, having once written like a man, was convinced by feminists in the 1970s that “one did not have to write like a man.”

What does any of this mean? I sympathize with Grinberg’s instinct to remain vague. Simply invoking the distinction between male and female writing seems to reify essentialisms the book otherwise sets out to trouble. (Uncomfortable questions naturally arise: Are intellectual rigor, coolness, and confidence inherently masculine qualities? If these women were free to write “like women,” how would they then write?) At some point, an overemphasis on the sociological constraints placed on these particular women writers risks diminishing their distinctive accomplishments as stylists. Leave gender out of it: Nobody — male or female; alive or dead — writes like Elizabeth Hardwick. As Grinberg notes, Hardwick was hard on female writers, suggesting in a 1962 essay that they lack the “vigor” of males, but she also wrote with a thrilling and peculiar perceptiveness about women in novels and women as novelists, about wives and mistresses and critics like herself.

What Hardwick was not — or only rarely — was confessional. This is notable. If readers today are willing to hazard any correlation between gender and genre (etymologically linked, comparably vexed), it is the confessional mode that remains the perceived domain of women. Women are imagined to be the archetypal authors of personal essays, especially those with a strong dose of abjection, embarrassment, self-loathing, self-license, or undignified longing. The archetypal personal essay is unguarded, plainspoken, and only obliquely intellectual. When women write, they write about themselves, their emotional lives, their relationships, and they do so in a more personal than political register (or as the women’s liberationists encouraged, a blend of the two). In 1944, long before her feminist awakening, Diana Trilling disparaged this feminine confessional mode: “Our women writers, especially when they deal with their sexual emotions, have a way of filling the world with themselves alone.”

And yet, of the writers in this circle, it is the men — memoirists like Norman Podhoretz and Alfred Kazin — who best fit this description. 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.

Likewise, it was not Hardwick but her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, who wrote in a confessional mode, often cruelly and irresponsibly so. “What makes Lowell’s brand of confessional poetry … so troubling,” writes Dan Chiasson, “is its tendency to ‘confess’ not merely his private shame but his ways of injuring others.” In the case of The Dolphin, Lowell’s 1973 book of unrhymed sonnets incorporating (without permission) private, anguished letters from Hardwick, his poems are not merely a “confession of injury, but an injury in and of themselves.”

By contrast, Merve Emre writes, Hardwick “never strayed from her anti-confessional ethic, never abandoned her belief in reticence or her contempt for writers who made art by betraying the secrets of those they had loved.” Even in her autobiographical novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), Lowell is conspicuously absent. As McCarthy remarked to her friend about this “brilliant technical stroke,” the husband “becomes a sort of black hole … condemned by the form to non-existence— you couldn’t do that in a conventional autobiography.” In other words, Hardwick had found a form to transcend the confessional memoirs of her one-time peers: a style which precluded the twin satisfactions of self-insertion and humiliating exclusion. On the final page of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick’s narrator muses on “the torment of personal relations”:

Nothing new there except in disguise, and in the escape on the wing of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance on memory.

Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for. Public assistance, a beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.— those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.

For writing like that, you could forget everything.