The Answer Has Finally Arrived: Be Cooler

     Will Lloyd, writing for the New Statesman with his collar popped (one hopes), diagnoses the problem with today’s “literary man”:

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to.

Despite the claim of Woolflike penetration into the pathetic gender, it’s unclear precisely what's meant by cool. After all, there’s a simple definition and there’s the subjective standard. Women writers apparently meet his standard. So what is it? In any case, he does provide a couple of relatively more precise examples of what it’s not, in the form of uncool bestselling modern writers, one of whom, loyal readers will recall, I became intimately familiar with recently. And he reminds readers that the currently unfashionable Ernest Hemingway was once considered the standard of male cool, overlooking something that would give him a clue as to the ultimate value of his subject: Times change and what was once cool, sooner or later, rightly or wrongly, is going to be far from it, because fashions and loci inevitably change with them. Jazz was once synonymous with cool. Now most people don’t know anything about it, won’t deign to sit through it. My first encounter with the word “misogyny” was as praise in the pages of Rolling Stone, when the publication esteemed the Rolling Stones’s Aftermath for its “misogynistic cool.” A line like that probably wouldn’t slip by unnoticed in a major (centrist or leftwing) publication today. A later generation will define itself by rejecting what was once cool, labeling it antiquated, oldfashioned. So, in a way, it doesn’t matter if Lloyd elaborates on his image of cool because whatever it is won’t be. No one and nothing in history has ever sustained that status in the wider world.

Nor does Lloyd enlighten the reader on why it matters to be cool in the first place, or why men are too inept to write anything of literary merit without a living paragon of cool to shepherd them. This implies that a living paragon to all younger, aspiring women writers does exist, the unanimous model and inspiration and shepherdess for them all. In his lack of fine distinctions, Lloyd is paying these writers less of a compliment than it would at first seem.

I haven’t banished that word from my vocabulary. It makes for a good dry monosyllabic response. Sometimes, depending on the situation and my degree of wonder or approval, I spell it with upwards of six o’s. It has its uses. As does its opposite: I've been known to find things uncool too. However, when faced with what I consider to be a great work and a great writer, searching for the words to convey my enthusiasm and admiration, to settle on “cool” would be glib at best. “Cool,” as a concept taken seriously, is better fit for more self-obsessed pursuits like branding and influencing.

Almost all the writers I think of as models are dead. And there isn’t a single one I desire to emulate in every way, down to style of dress. In an imagined meeting between us, it’d surely make things awkward, especially as one gets older. And it’d kill any chance of being original. And it’s a better tribute not to dare. My model, my guide of guides, is necessarily a composite figure, with parts that aren’t me cut out, and imbued with qualities derived from men and women. In the future, this could extend to people who identify as neither. Some of those qualities include: Bravery. Intelligence. Scrupulousness. Humor. Compassion. “Cool”: fine as a casual compliment, tawdry compared to the higher virtues.

A satire: the man who, fearful of his irrelevance and the irrelevance of all male writers, takes up the mantle of cool.

For someone so confident and unsparing in his ridicule (a ridicule devoid of irony) of the sad and deluded and uncool (who could easily be man or woman or neither), the quality of Lloyd’s argument—a straw man, a glaring factual error, general shakiness due to lack of support—is surprisingly poor. Quite uncool of him. Was he wearing a pair of aviator shades when he wrote this? Dizzy from the AXE body spray fumes? Use responsibly!

And, no, I don’t secretly care about cool.