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Mary (Therese) McCarthy (1912-1989) |
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Witty
and sophisticated American
writer and
theater critic, noted for her satirical commentaries on marriage,
intellectuals, and the role of women. Mary McCarthy's novels were often
drawn from autobiographical sources; she put friends, enemies,
ex-husbands, thinly disguised, into her fiction. And she used
autobiographical details in her fiction. McCarthy's bestselling
novel, The Group (1963), was
about her classmates at Vassar and their subsequent lives. McCarthy's attraction to Communism ended
in 1936-37, but in the mid-1960s she re-emerged as a political
essayist, writing against the Vietnam War. He had invited me to pose, and it was no problem to "sit" for him in the afternoons. I did not have to account for my doings in the daytime, and nobody in the family was likely to be in that neighborhood and spot me hurrying along the shaky approach to his door. He did not invite me to pose nude, but naturally we "went the limit" when he set down his brushes-he mostly did oils. Even after several times (and horseback riding at school), it still hurt; my defloration two years before had not been complete. (from How I Grew by Mary McCarthy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, p. 153) Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle, WA. Orphaned at the age of
six, when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918-1819,
she was brought up by her rigid aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, where
she spent six miserable years, after which her rich grandparents took
care of her. Her virginity McCarthy lost at the age of 14 in the front
seat of a Marmon roadster to a man twice her age. McCarthy was educated at the Annie Wright Seminary, Tacoma, Washington and Vassar College, New York, where she studied literature and met Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Rukeyser. After graduating with honors aged 21, she married the first of her husbands, the playwright Harold Johnsrud, and moved to New York. After the marriage ended, she had a series of affairs, writing later provocatively that at one point she stopped counting the number of men she slept with in her Greenwich Village apartment. During the 1930s McCarthy was active on the American left, becoming a Trotskyist and an anti-Stalinist. "Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing." (from 'My Confession' (1954), in The Art of the Personl Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, selected and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, New York: Anchor Books, 1995, p. 573) McCarthy worked as an editor in Covici-Friede publishers in 1936-37, and then coedited with Philip Rahv Partisan Review for a short time, and had also an affair with him. From 1938 to 1962 McCathy wrote theater reviews for PR, the premier journal of the New York intellectuals; she was also the only woman of her Vassar friends, who was accepted in the inner circle of the magazine. In 1938 McCarthy married her second husband, the critic Edmund
Wilson (1895-1972), with whom she had her only child. McCarthy was
Wilson's wife number three. In Intellectual
Memoirs
(1992) she confessed that she never loved him, an "old"
man who was "fat, puffing" and had bad breath. They looked strikingly
different – McCarthy slim, twenty-five, and Wilson two hundred pounds,
and forty-two, when they met. "So finally I agreed to marry Wilson as
my punishment for having gone to bed with him." she wrote. "Marrying him, though against my inclination, made it make sense. There is something faintly Kantian here. But I did not know Kant then. Maybe I was a natural Kantian." (Ibid., p. 101) Both
became soon experts in attacking each other's weak points. It has been
claimed, that Wilson beat her up in 1938, after which she suffered a
mental breakdown. During World War II, McCarthy began to support the
war effort but Wilson remained skeptical. They divorced in 1946. The
couple lived for several years in Wellfleet, a small community south of
Provincetown on Cape Cod. During her Wellfleet years, McCarthy commuted
regularly to New York City to escape from her husbands overpowering
presence and to meet her lovers. McCarthy's seven novels appeared between the years 1942 and 1979. Most of McCarthy's fiction and nonfiction explored the response of intellectuals to political and moral problems. Her first book, The Company She Keeps (1942), was a collection of loosely linked stories. The satire about New York intellectuals depicted the failure of a marriage, and the search for personal identity through psychoanalysis. McCarthy herself had a new psychiatrist in the early 1940s, who had been analyzed by Freud. Vladimir Nabokov praised McCarthy's novel in his letters to her husband. The Oasis (1949) was
a short novel about artists and intellectuals living in a utopian
society. The Group was a sexually outspoken depiction
of eight Vassar graduates in the 1930s. It followed the group of
friends through their first sexual experiences, marriage, and domestic
duties. Intended to be a partial parody, it portrays women as they
embrace or oppose ideas of political and social progress fashionable in
the 1930s and 1940s. The book was made into a movie in 1966. Comically
titled Birds of America (1971) focused on a young American named Peter Levi whose
harpsichordist mother refuses to accept modern
conveniences. Peter travels to Paris with a copy of Kant's Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals,
asking himself what Kant would do in his position. He concludes, "Maybe
the categorical imperative is not the best guide for Americans abroad.
When you think of it, the rule of thumb about tipping is just the
opposite of Kant: watch what everybody else does and do the same." (Ibid., p. 125)
At the end, in delirium he sees a melancholy Kant who tells him, "Perhaps you have guessed it.
Nature is dead, mein Kind." (Ibid., p. 318) McCarthy met in 1944 the philosopher Hannah Arendt in a hotel bar, a year later they quarreled, but eventually they settled their differences and became dear friends, confidantes, and devoted correspondents. Their correspondence was later collected in Between Friends (1995). When Arendt was attacked by the Jewish community for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) McCarthy rushed to her aid and wrote a defence of her views in Partisan Review: "To me, Eichmann in Jerusalem, despite all the horrors in it, was morally exhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it – not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paen of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro or the Messiah." Arendt herself was a German-born Jew. As a result of the storm following the publication of the book, Arendt lost many friends, but not McCarthy. In 1967 McCarthy made trips to South Vietnam, recording her views of the war in essays in the New York Review of Books. After visiting Hanoi, McCarthy wrote favorably about the Vietcong. The two collections of her essays, Report from Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), received less attention than she expected. Years later she admitted, "My dear, I arrived in Hanoi wearing a Chanel suit, and carrying many suitcases!" Among McCarthy's other publications are critical works, travel books, and the autobiographical Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). As important as her fiction are criticism and political reporting, such as The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1971). Cannibals and Missionaries(1979) was a topical novel about the psychology of terrorism. A plane carrying Americans, rich art collectors and politicians, is hijacked by terrorists. At first they intend to use the politicians in the flight as hostages, but then decide to trade the art collectors for their artworks. Professor Victor Lenz says, "We all know in our gut that art educates. In other societies, they've aware of the power it has of speaking directly to the masses, teaching them to be better socialists, better citizens. The trouble is that with us it's fallen into the wrong hands. Forget the speculators. I mean you proud possessors that claim have a corner in it. This isn't eighteenth century. The concept of the collector is so rotten by now that it stinks." (Ibid., p. 315) In her essays McCarthy explored a wide range of subjects from sexual emancipation, communism, nuclear weapons, Vietnam and Watergate to the work of contemporary playwrights and novelists. In one of her most controversial essays, 'America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub' (1947), McCarthy wrote that consumerism has created pseudo-equality, "an equality of things rather than of persons... We are nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub. One such humanist I used to hear of on Cape Cod had, on growing rich, installed two toilets side by side in his marble bathroom, on the model of the two-seater of his youth. He was a clear case of Americanism, hospitable, gregarious, and impractical, a theorist of perfection. Was his dream of the conquest of poverty a vulgar dream or a noble one, a material demand or s spiritual insistence?" (from 'America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub,' in A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays, edited and with an introduction by A. O. Scott, New York: New York Review Books, 2002, p. 232) McCarthy's theatre reviews were published in 1956 under the title Sights and Spectacles 1932-1956. McCathy taught or lectured at Beard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York (1945-1946 and 1986), Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York (1948), University College, London (1980), and Vassar College (1982). From 1962 McCarthy spent with her fourth husband, James West, half of her time in Paris. Much of the last years of McCarthy's life was dominated by her
legal battle with the writer Lillian Hellman. In
a taped interview with Dick Cavett, first aired in 1980, McCarthy said
about Helman, with only slight hyperbole, that "every word she writes
is alie, including and and the." Hellman's defamation
suit against McCarthy – she demanded $2.25 million – was dropped after
Hellman's death in June 1984 on Martha's Vineyard. The Hellman-McCarthy case was turned into a Broadway musical, Imaginary Friends
(2002) by Nora Ephrom, where the two women have a final meeting in
Hell. "LILLIAN: . . . I was old and sick and blind and looking for a
reason to go on getting out of my bed every day, and you were as good a
reason as any. I sued you so you would be awake at three in the
morning, like me. I sued you so that when you looked in the mirror and
saw another line on your face, you would blame me for it. I sued you so
that when you went to the doctor with the next awful thing wrong with
you, you would see me smiling through the X rays. I sued you to shorten
your like. Did I shorten your life?" (Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron, lyrics by Craig Carnelia, New York: Vintage, 2003, p. 109) In 1984 McCarthy had an operation to relieve the pressure of water on her brain. James West once said, that she was "more interested in ideas than in her health." McCarthy died of cancer in New York Hospital, on October 25, 1989. She was a member of the American Academy, National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her several awards include Edward MacDowell Medal (1982), National Medal of Literature (1984), and the first Rochester Literary Award (1985). She had honorary degrees from six universities. For further reading: Pioneers and Caretakers by Louis Auchincloss (1965); The Company she Kept by Doris Grumbach (1967); Mary McCarthy by Willene S. Hardy (1981); Mary McCarthy: A Life by Carol Geldeman (1988); Writing Dangerously by Carol Brightman (1992); Mary McCarthy: An Annotated Bibliography by Joy Bennett and Gabriella Hochmann (1993); Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy by Frances Kiernan (2000); Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals by David Laskin (2000); To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod by Reuel K. Wilson (2008); Self and Society in Mary McCarthy's Writing by Marina Sagorje (thesis, 2015); Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil by Deborah Nelson (2017); Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White (2019); New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century by Sabrina Fuchs Abrams (2024) - Note: McCarthy was married four times: Harold Johnsrud (1933-1936), Edmund Wilson (1938-46), whom the author called "the monster", Bowden Broadwater (1946-1961), James Raymond West (1961). Selected works:
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