Why Are There No Great Male Writers?
Daniel Manus Pinkwater, one of the two or three last great male writers alive, is putting his new novel, The Yggyssey, online, one chapter each week. He is up to chapter four! Mr. Pinkwater, like so many men after him, attended Bard College (most probably concurrently with former feminist pioneer and current outcast Phyllis Chesler, as she is a year older than he), but some decades before Bard and Bennington and that sort of school became factories for today’s malformed, self-centered boy-writers.
The male writers we find on the pay-for-placement bookstore tables today could be the unhappy real-world future of Mr. Pinkwater’s narrator, Yggdrasil Birnbaum, who attends, near the corner of Sunset and Vine, the Harmonious Reality School, founded by a doctor of fruitopathy (it is what you would think), and where “the teachers are polite, and the kids, while confused and mostly illiterate, are friendly.”
It all sounds rather like a barely disguised parody of Deep Springs.
These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly. And ambitious and ashamed of ambition. At night they plot. “He knew about every little magazine that ever was,” the late New York Times editorial board member Mary Cantwell wrote in her memoir Manhattan, When I Was Young, of the boy-writer she married in the 1950s.
Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?
Related: American Cutie
