The New York Intellectuals’ Battle of the Sexes

Yet
in the 1960s, the New York intellectuals disintegrated as a group. They
splintered along ideological lines—some defending and some reviling the Vietnam
War—and along generational lines. On the conservative side of the barricades
was Norman Podhoretz, who is the archetypal personality in Write Like a Man.
His apprenticeship to Philip Rahv and William Phillips, the editors of Partisan
Review, and to Lionel Trilling brought Podhoretz professional prominence,
which he eventually used to defend “family values,” to excoriate homosexuality, and to celebrate the national-security state, conjoining the cause of American
power to the cause of Israeli power. The neoconservatism Podhoretz helped to
invent would last beyond the Cold War. The foreign policy pillars of the George
W. Bush administration, Grinberg writes, “were linked to neoconservatives,” and
the neoconservatives were but a branch of the New York intellectual family tree. 

Another
thread of Write Like a Man concerns the women. They did not attend City
College of New York, though Elizabeth Hardwick studied at Columbia and Mary
McCarthy at Vassar, and McCarthy and Hardwick were not Jewish. They were joined
in the 1940s by Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher who emigrated to the
United States from Germany because she was Jewish, and by Diana
Trilling, a Jewish graduate of Radcliffe College and the wife of Lionel
Trilling. If these women were treated as equals by the men, which they
sometimes were, it was because they wrote like men, Grinberg argues. Imitating
the men, they went into intellectual combat. They could be ruthless in their
use of parody and invective, and they became a part of the club. After World
War II, Susan Sontag would join their ranks. 

Women
paid a price for becoming New York intellectuals. The sexual politics of the
period gave spouses (such as Diana Trilling and Midge Decter) an entrée, although
more as wives than as writers, and pegged those who were not married as
romantic or sexual objects. And there was the outright sexism, the assumption
held by the men that women did not measure up. Norman Mailer felt no
compunction about dismissing Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel, The Group, as
“a trivial lady’s novel,” a turn of phrase intended to be doubly insulting. Grinberg
characterizes the writing of the New York intellectual women in the 1950s and
1960s as a performance: Mary McCarthy “performed secular Jewish masculinity
through her polemical writings and her fiction,” Grinberg writes. These women
were playing a part, Grinberg implies, in a script that men had written.