Eminentoes/Mary McCarthy: The Expatriate from Seattle
Brantingham, Philip
EMINENTOES by Philip Brantingham Mary McCarthy: The Expatriate from Seattle During one of William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" shows a few years ago, a renowned American intellectual was...
...The truth is that for a number of years her star as a perceptive critic and writer had been waning, eclipsed in part by her obsessive interest in politics and foreign policy...
...forces...
...In fact, throughout Mary McCarthy's fiction there is a marked paucity of ordinary people-an intrinsic defect of that outlying district of literature known as Critic's Fiction...
...On the other hand, she continued, the bread in France is delicious, always fresh and nourishing...
...This was a collection of old reviews and previously published essays...
...Like most young reviewers, she thought it her duty chiefly to criticize rather than understand...
...Murdstone in person, cruel philistines who gave the child a loveless upbringing...
...Yet her critical acuity was something less than keen...
...By 1936, the circles in which she moved came to include a more soignee collection of leftists, the staff and friends of Partisan Review, a formerly Stalinist quarterly under reorganization by Philip Rahv...
...but he had set Mary on her way...
...Of her politics in high school, she has confessed to having been a vociferous monarchist (doubtless her love of Caesar and Latin led her to this), but her monarchism, like her earlier piety, went the way of all her adolescent passions, and in her final year at secondary school she fell in with a group whose hallmark, like so much of Mary's later writing, was a pervasive, iconoclastic, and often destructive cynicism...
...She sounded like a feature writer for the New Statesman...
...Having been severely neglected in childhood, she became particularly good at attracting attention to herself...
...It purports to be a study of eight Vassar girls, their destinies after graduation and, for many, their failures...
...She openly despised the contemporary legitimate theater, calling it philistine and bourgeoisthis at a time when American drama was in its golden age (remember Winterset, Our Town, The Little Foxes, Biography...
...Luckily for Mary, she was rescued from them at the age of eleven, when her maternal grandfather, a successful lawyer, came and took her back to Seattle...
...She now seemed to be merely one of her own fictional creations, one of those ridiculous "committed" people who feed their self-esteem by defending Liberty Philip Brantingham is an editor at Scott, Foresman and Co...
...In How It Went, she said her mission to Vietnam was "like an apostolic 'call,' to put aside my work and go...
...Indeed, she sought painfully to find something, anything, wrong with the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, from haircuts to PXs...
...It had not always been thus for Mary McCarthy...
...The Groves of Academe (1952) was the result...
...Mary grew restless...
...So she decided to visit Vietnam...
...This puzzled Mary...
...Yet, despite the inanity of her utterance, this intellectual was no ninny...
...Their marriage could hardly be called a success-it ended three years later-but it was through Johnsrud that Mary came to know the trendier side of the New York intellectual community, the radical chic set of the thirties...
...They were poorly written, badly intended, and ludicrously presented...
...Among them was one of her best demolition jobs, "J.D...
...But her sword was irreparably bent...
...She was no Alexander Woolcott, but instead a gifted outsider and something of an ivory-tower aesthete...
...The critical response to each of these weightless tomes was a thundering silence and the reader response was little better...
...She flung herself once more into the fray when Watergate became a major scandal...
...Buckley inquired...
...We are in dire need of good literary critics, essayists, and satirists, and at one time, Mary McCarthy was one of our best...
...Mary was a precocious child and a good student, but psychologically she had much to overcome...
...Before the Americans came, there could have been no rusty Coca-Cola or beer cans or empty whiskey bottles...
...He realized that anyone who judged a nation, or its people, by the freshness of its bread belongs among the likes of Ezra Pound, with his mania for usury, and Colonel Bat Guano of Dr...
...Watergate marked Mary McCarthy's last appearance as a political journalist, and since then the Paris reporter of American evil-doing has lapsed into occasional literary criticism, chiefly for the NYRB...
...The American Spectator January 1979 against imagined dangers...
...Let us hope her case of intellectualoidism is in remission...
...But the closest she ever came to the boards was marrying Harold Johnsrud, an actor with whom she moved to New York City shortly after graduating in 1933...
...Mary became fascinated with PR (Philip Rahv, not Partisan Review...
...In the same year, On the Contrary: Articles of Belief appeared...
...She talked herself into becoming an atheist, though the "loss" may ultimately have been her own...
...At any rate, by 1967, when her first article on Vietnam was printed in the New York Review of Books, she was no longer the suave critic with the careful Latinate prose style...
...Moreover, her characters were limited to one rather elite level of society-writers, artists, and professors...
...What was her evidence, Mr...
...Even so, she still relished the role of political reporter...
...More important to her literary development, she married an academic and writer, Bowden Broadwater, and through him came into direct contact with the academic community...
...Even her occasional reviews for the Nation and the New Republic, those weeklies for the establishment Jacobite, did not attract much attention...
...Then, in 1963, came The Group...
...She was very active in the student drama group and, for a time, considered making the theater her career...
...America, she declared with some delight, was rotten and decayed...
...An astute critic and gifted novelist, she hardly seemed the type to end up mouthing the cliches of the lunatic fringe...
...Even so, she remained steadfast in her convictions: "At any rate, one thing was clear...
...By her own admission, her visits were hardly undertaken in the spirit of evenhanded reportage: "I confess that when I went to Vietnam..., I was looking for material damaging to the American interest...
...Her reviews were clever and well-written, but often indiscriminately cruel: She would resolutely strip a third-rate play with the skill of a cook flaying a rabbit, without wondering if the work were really worth the effort...
...Thus the articles and books recounting her Vietnam experiences were a complete turnabout for the former iconoclast, Class of '33...
...Gossip increased when she divorced Broadwater in 1961 and married, two months later, James West, a State Department official...
...But when she was in the North, she fawned abominably over the Communists, all captiousness gone: "I tried to restrict myself to innocent questions and speculations, such as 'Was that thunder and lightning or a bomb?' " Even more bizarre than this onesidedness was her martyr-like pose...
...it was too much a la mode...
...When her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918, she was sent to live with a great-aunt and -uncle who turned out to be Mr...
...By the end of the fifties, after adding to her opera another satirical novel (A Charmed Life), as well as two excellent travel books (Venice Observed and The Stones of Florence) and the bitter though illuminating Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy was something of a celebrity, and a woman about whom much was gossiped-a definite sign of success...
...For years she had been considered one of our country's leading literary lights...
...What had happened to Mary McCarthy...
...He is not, of course, but the whole academic community goes into one of those self-righteous tizzies that periodically plague our universities...
...Her interests now had broadened from purely literary subjects to international affairs, and she began to fix an increasingly jaundiced eye on America, particularly American foreign policy...
...M ary McCarthy was becoming more and more known to the great world...
...But all her efforts were in vain: The soldiers refused to listen...
...She began writing for such popular magazines as the New Yorker and Holiday...
...It was a hurtful experience, this connection with a brilliant but unpleasant man...
...Brown coughed and said, "Soon...
...Yet Mary's great passion at Vassar was theater, not politics...
...Throughout her accounts of her Vietnamese travels, she barely concealed her loathing for all members of the U.S...
...Merciless in its satire of academic politics and people, the novel was a magnificent tour de force...
...It was not long before her first fictional effort, "Cruel and Barbarous Punishment," appeared in the Southern Review (it does help a fledgling novelist to have the nation's leading critic as spouse...
...She created a sensation indeed, but also came to believe her act...
...They were divorced in 1946...
...Back to the bad bread again...
...Suitably, the culmination of Mary's career as a student was Vassar, that hotbed of radicalism (at least, during the thirties) about which she was to write so caustically years later in The Group...
...She was in fact canonizing herself...
...Temperamentally she grew to be more cutting than kind, a process assisted by an innate perspicacity for spotting the weaknesses of both teachers and classmates...
...But there she was, babbling about the fall of gluten as if it were one of Coleridge's touchstones of greatness...
...She was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1912...
...Moreover, she seldom showed any understanding of the theater itself...
...They reminded one, in a way, of her early drama criticism, where she had flailed against the "corruption" of the bourgeois theater...
...Strangelove, who believed that fluoridated water polluted our bodily fluids...
...She was often disillusioned when she met the radicals of her :day: The Communists seemed to her mindlessly doctrinaire, and the socialists, vapid...
...Buckley did not follow up with the necessary question: Would you trade the government of France with its tasty bread for the government of the United States with its puffy kid's stuff...
...Vietnam policy...
...Throughout this novel, Americans are inevitably portrayed as crass philistines and Babbitts...
...and Mrs...
...No less vacuous than Hanoi, Vietnam, and Medina was a novel of nostalgia called Birds ofAmerica, wherein a sensitive child prodigy has his heart broken (in Paris, of course) when he hears that North Vietnam has been bombed by the Americans...
...Yet despite its snobbishness, the fiction of Mary McCarthy is redeemed by its wit and stylistic verve-and by the author's lust for blood...
...Despite her brilliant brashness, her reputation was not great...
...The book was moderately successful...
...Some say that living in Paris does that...
...Although she deplored capitalism, she distrusted leftism...
...While attending a convent school, for instance, she once staged a "loss of faith" in order to be fawned over by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart (this according to her Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood...
...At the time of this success she was living in Paris with her husband...
...Whereas in earlier days she had devoted her art to mocking the clercs or analyzing Simone de Beauvoir and Flaubert, now she was engaging in sneering matches with State Department officials and bitter tirades against U.S...
...Wilson, a learned writer of catholic taste but singularly intolerant of differences of opinion, was hardly the perfect mate for the equally opinionated, and no less obstinate, McCarthy...
...It is an enormously clever book, and, for those in the know, portrays several recognizable people (Mary McCarthy among them...
...She came to know it, but she was not completely taken in by it...
...A well-to-do American expatriate, a celebrity of sorts, she was listened to by many on the Left Bank...
...It is puffy white stuff with no taste and little nutrition...
...In the introduction to The Seventeenth Degree, the 1974 collection of her journalism on the Vietnam war, she wonders why her efforts did not sell, and why they were so seldom reviewed...
...Her Watergate articles were wildy partisan, and her book, Mask of State: Watergate Portraits, quickly sank beneath the tide of similarly hysterical books on the subject...
...She finally moved in with him, and, coincidentally, joined his magazine as drama critic...
...Her marriage with the disagreeable and domineering Wilson, however, was not even that...
...In this scathingly satiric novel, an incompetent instructor, upon learning of his imminent dismissal, suddenly claims that he is being discharged because he is a radical...
...in Chicago...
...Indeed, it was not until she married the literary critic Edmund Wilson that she began her rise to fame...
...Yet he sensed her talent, and encouraged her to take up fiction...
...This, along with several other long stories, was published in 1942 as The Company She Keeps, purportedly a novel but in fact a collection of stories with one leading female character...
...There was something medieval about her approach: Mary visiting suffering natives, Mary bandying words with an evil American colonel, Mary preaching to the troops that Communists are people too...
...The Oasis, her second novel, won the 1949 Horizon prize, and her mordant lampooning of intellectual posturings proved that she had a sharp eye for human frailty...
...As she sat in her flat reading Flaubert, the streets of Paris filled with demonstrating intellectuals linked arm-in-arm (the European version of the hokey-pokey...
...Even so, she also showed a weakness for overdescription, for reciting dress labels, quoting trendy writers, and overusing foreign phrases...
...She really believed that she was a Force for Good crusading against the Forces of Evil...
...Gossipy, snobbish, and often lubricious, the novel satirizes the foolishness of the privileged and progressive elite...
...American bread is bad, she said...
...The view from Paris was, of course, somewhat removed...
...EMINENTOES by Philip Brantingham Mary McCarthy: The Expatriate from Seattle During one of William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" shows a few years ago, a renowned American intellectual was making much ado about the corruption of American society...
...This was her most successful work of fiction...
...With its heavy symbolism and pervasive philosophical tone, this adjunct of academic exegesis is unavoidably the art of the Precious Few...
...She reports that she actually did her own flackwork and called up Francis Brown, then editor of the New York Times Book Review, and asked why no review of her recent effort had been forthcoming...
...He was making it more literary and less ideological (that is, you could wear sandals to a meeting but couldn't carry a concealed weapon...
...By now she had absorbed the European contempt for American culture and wanted to join the fun...
...Salinger's Closed Circuit," in which the chronicler of the insufferable Glass family is neatly vivisected...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
