Somewhere in the family photograph albums is a picture of me as an infant. I’m cradled in my father’s lap as he sits in the kitchen, leaning back on a chair, legs extended in front of him. He’s looking down, over my head, at a copy of Time magazine. It’s right in my line of sight, though I have no idea if an infant’s eyes could focus enough to see the text. But it sure looks like I’m reading.
I grew up in a family of readers.
Most of the books in the house were my mom’s, as Dad is a magazine sort of guy. Maybe some non-fiction, art technique books (landscape painting is a hobby of his) or something about sailing ships or aircraft, heavy on pictures and diagrams. Dad’s not a novel reading guy. But he had his fair share of books on the family books shelves.
The kid books were on a separate shelf in the den (yes, it was the 1980s), Time-Life informational books, a Collier’s encyclopedia, various science and geography and nature educational guides. When we got a bit older my sister and I got our own bookshelves in our rooms for our own books. The start of my personal library leaned heavily into science fiction and Don Pendleton adventure books. Because, dear reader, back in the days of Gen X childhood we could read crazy stuff that was way beyond our years but no one minded, because we had parents that gave us good moral grounding and trusted us to know right from wrong. Hence, children were made into responsible, self-regulating adults.
Books were bought and checked out from libraries. Books were discussed, loved and re-read and shared. Knowledge was valued, intelligence was expected in the family. One time, jokingly fed up with my voracious appetite for books, Dad bought me a stack of ten Pendleton novels, meant to last a summer. I knocked them out in a couple weeks, much to his bemused frustration.
At the time, culturally, men read. This was not considered strange or unmasculine. Quite the opposite; a real man, a good man, was a reader, and a writer. A man of knowledge. What used to be called a Renaissance Man. Intelligence was manly.
When I’m at my parents house, or when they are visiting me, there is always a moment when Dad and I are in the living room, reading quietly together. Maybe there’s some quiet music; there’s certainly a beer or brandy within arm’s reach. But that comfort with reading together, two men reading, me past age 50 and he almost 80, is a life-long bond between father and son. We’ve never said it out loud but I think it feels like home for both of us. We feel like men together when we read together.
Recently I thought I would submit a short story to the Hemingway Shorts yearly contest run by the Hemingway Birthplace foundation of Oak Park, Illinois. But as I was getting my story ready, I read this:
I won’t dignify this with a link but if you follow through their “article” link it goes to a Poets & Writers piece about something something micro-aggressions something White people don’t understand Black writing something blah blah blah we know the rest. No point in recapping it here. In other words, don’t bother applying unless you meet the current most favored victim criteria.
The irony is that this is a contest honoring Ernest friggin’ Hemingway, run by the foundation that maintains his childhood home. Hem cared about quality, nothing else. Put your soul into your writing. Write one perfect sentence. He read widely, and cared only about authenticity. “Identity” meant nothing. Good was good.
If the editor of this contest told Papa that he would be choosing a story not based on merit but on some Woke anti-racist, anti-patriarchy nonsense Hem would drink seven martinis, punch the editor out cold, then write a brilliant short story about it with one arm around Martha Gellhorn’s waist. When the editor woke up Gellhorn would sneer at him, say “I hit the beach on D-Day, you coward,” then break his jaw while holding a glass of Scotch in her other hand.
I noted in another an earlier ‘Stack post, and Alex Perez has said the same thing, that American literature is dominated by people who hate literature. They hate books. They hate authors. The goal is no longer making timeless literature or describing the American experience. Books are propaganda for the illiberal Left; they tell you what to think, not give you something to think about.
For myself, books are my identity. Along with the bucolic scenes of family reading above, the household was also a yelling household. My parents fought often, and loudly. The safest thing for me to do as a child was read, quietly, out of the way and hoping not to be drawn into the line of fire. Books gave me a world away from the anger.
And they are still my primary means of entertainment. I don’t watch much TV, almost never go to the movies. But every single day, I will pick up a book and read a section. I write them, as well. Two so far, Peaceful Meridian and The Lay-Off House, and there’s more on the way. Books are my life.
I will never give up reading, but the industry certainly is changing. The number of literary fiction books by men being published has diminished greatly. Male readers are vanishing. News and commentary websites about books, like LitHub and BookRiot, focus of women and Queer writers. And I’ve noticed in industry news articles the vast number of publishing workers are women. Men are disappearing from both sides of literature, production and consumption.
I was going to include some long bitter analysis of the way misandry is driving men out of literature. And I was going to talk about how toxic masculinity disdains reading as a girly pastime. But we are all Substackers; we know this. But instead I want to end with positive statements, fierce mantras to reestablish truth.
Men can read. Men can read books. Men can read magazines. Men can read fiction. Men can read non-fiction. Men can read about men. Men can read about women. Men can read books by men. Men can read books by women. Men can read literary fiction, genre fiction, history, science, science fiction, romance, comedy, philosophy, poetry, art, biography. They can read anything and everything. Men can read.
Men can write. Men can write fiction and non-fiction. The can write about men and they can write about women. Men can write literary fiction, they can write genre fiction, they can write history, science, comedy, philosophy, biography, poetry and art. The can write novels and short stories and plays and screenplays and sagas and satires. Men can write.
This should not be a radical idea, but it is nowadays.
Please please please...we need male writers and female writers of all types....we need literature and memoire and essay and poetry that shares the stories of life, the ugliness and the beauty, the challenge and the perseverance....and we need it to be real and not to conform to a certain view....reading helps us to understand the world and if we can only read a preferred viewpoint, we will never come close to understanding the real complexity of the world around us....
I can’t tell you how much I love this article. I did not grow up reading, and I don’t remember anyone in my family reading either; but now that we have our own (4) kids we’re trying to establish a culture of reading great books. We have one TV that’s rarely used and a beautiful library. If I don’t know where a kid is I usually find them curled up somewhere with a book and it makes me very happy. Do you have any other tips on how to establish such a culture? Especially for those with young kids?
Thank you again!!