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The opening sentence of a book can make or break it at times. Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” intrigued to no end. No, it wasn’t Captain Ahab speaking but a minor character in the hard-to-read novel. The great Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a great fortune,” and so on really got the ball rolling for Pride and Prejudice. My hero Papa Hemingway began A Farewell to Arms by describing the dust raised by the boots of soldiers going off to battle settling on the trees. But as far as I’m concerned, the greatest opening line ever was “On Thursday, August 28, 1947, a millionaire named Manolete and a Miura bull named Islero killed each other, and plunged a nation into mourning.” This was Barnaby Conrad’s opening of his book on the death of the great bullfighter Manolete, and the irony of it is that speaking the opening has even more effect on the listener than the actual written words. I have recited it time and again, and its effects have never wavered: On August 28 comma 1947 comma in Linares comma Spain comma a millionaire and a bull killed each other comma and plunged a nation into mourning period.

Barnaby Conrad senior; I specify this because his son, also Barnaby, is a good friend and was a hell of a writer, among many other things. Conrad senior was a good amateur boxer at Yale, fought many corridas in Spain and Mexico, was seriously gored three times, and corresponded with me—a great fan—many times. I think he was one of the very few men Papa Hemingway might have been jealous of, but this is just conjecture. Papa never seriously fought a bull, never seriously boxed, but got the better of Conrad when it came to writing—but not always.

Barnaby’s Matador was a classic, as good as anything ever written about that cruel—I will not call it a sport—way of testing a man’s courage. Now his son Barnaby Conrad III has published a short memoir of his father’s apprenticeship with Sinclair Lewis—for some of you young whippersnappers, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Most of Lewis’ books became Hollywood films, and he was considered the richest American author. “Red” Lewis was a chain-smoking Midwestern scarecrow, a lonely, cantankerous, humorous, and driven personality. I’ve read some European writers about Lewis, and he doesn’t emerge too well. I’ll blame jealousy on the part of the Euros.

Barnaby and Red got along fine, however. Lewis died of alcoholism in 1951. Barnaby remained slightly haunted by the departed and wrote a novel based on the summer he had spent on Lewis’ 700-acre farm called Dangerfield. All this is depicted in a short book by Barnaby father and son called Writers Like Us: My Life With Sinclair Lewis. What I’d like to know is why they don’t make them like Barnaby Conrad—or Ernest Hemingway, Red Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner—anymore. (In the major New York airport JFK, a saying by Steinbeck misspells his surname as Steinback. Nice.) Norman Mailer is another case, a writer willing to mix it up with his fists with anyone, despite his small physical stature. They don’t write like the great Tom Wolfe nowadays; his last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is as good and as deep as anything written.

The irony is that Joan Didion’s name is yet again up in lights, so to speak, but here is an author lionized by the cognoscenti that I cannot read a single sentence of without flinching. She’s too neurotic and too depressed, and it translates in her writing. In fact, most American female writers are just as unreadable as she is. This is my opinion, of course, one that will not endear me to the millions of Didion followers, but so what? I do not and could not give a damn what they think.

There is a wonderful picture of father and son Conrad in the back of the slim volume and some very nice blurbs by writers like Chris Buckley and Jeffrey Meyers. The opus deserves them and then some. Mind you, I might have been too down on present-day American writers. But they simply don’t inspire me the way Scott and Papa inspired me, and Barnaby. And perhaps things might change, in the same way they did where politics are concerned. Trump cannot be explained without reference to the corruption and incapacity of the Biden years. Perhaps with Trump some new writers might emerge, writers who resemble Papa and Scott, and Barnaby. At least I hope so, because I’m sick and tired of reading The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night for the hundredth time.