Ambassador to a Private World

...Pierpont's Women Rewriting the World contains a more fluent, if no more innovative, discussion of one chapter in McCarthy's life: her friendship with Hannah Arendt...

...However, to the political and literary purists of her day, McCarthy was an inconvenient writer— a political commentator unwilling to renounce rhetorical flourish as its own radical device, and a novelist so taken with the piquant sociological detail that narrative too often suffered...

...Pierpont's portrait of the two confirms this impression, describing how the flow of inspiration moved from Arendt to McCarthy, and rarely in the other direction save for McCarthy's expert advice to Arendt about how best to weather her husband's infidelity...

...McCarthy perfected what Sontag described as a style of radical will—a private and cultural interrogation that McCarthy practiced as a habit of mind...

...Legend has it that Edmund Wilson, shortly after their marriage, forced McCarthy to write fiction by locking her in a room...

...This fact hasn't deterred two separate generations of biographers...

...McCarthy's allegiance to her critical agenda left her with subjects and survivors often ungrateful for the honor of serving as her material...

...Although he wasn't completely successful in shifting her creative allegiances away from criticism, McCarthy's relatively unhappy experiences as a working journalist surely contributed to her motivation to concentrate on fiction, memoir, and book-length nonfiction as her career progressed...

...Having told most of the really good stories herself— particularly in the volumes How I Grew and Intellectual Memoirs—she has remained not only the expert on, but the best writer of, her own life...

...Stating in the preface that she wished to circumvent the "fait accompli" quality of the first generation of McCarthy biographies, Kiernan has chosen to bring together a chorus of voices, cutting across time, to achieve an intended effect that "is not unlike that of a novel, tracing the shape of this life, while conveying a sense of what it was like day to day...

...Laskin's book, a group biography of the female members of the New York Intellectuals who contributed to Partisan Review, is largely concerned with the contradictions between the feminist aspirations of McCarthy and her peers and their rather traditional social arrangements...

...what is striking about Kiernan's preamble is that it is one of the few places where she makes her intentions and her feelings about McCarthy known...

...Seeing Mary Plain is less a biography than a kind of biographical happening for which the biographer's signature contribution is a tightly edited guest list...

...Perhaps this is why Frances Kiernan opted for the title Seeing Mary Plain...

...Having made a vow to the reader to remain faithful to a conception of McCarthy that she herself would recognize and even enjoy, and having succeeded in the almost penitential act of refraining from excessive commentary or speculation, Kiernan fails to mention that the task of posthumously pleasing her subject, in any but the most coyly rhetorical way, is, of course, impossible or at the very least impossible to substantiate...

...When she was unencumbered by assignment, McCarthy was free to develop a sub-genre (fiction set to resolve worldly predicaments, nonfiction with the sheen and style of fiction) to accommodate her sensibility— one that retained the aesthetic hardheadedness mastered at Partisan Review with a vivid public imagination that took full advantage of the artistic (and for McCarthy the free exercise of the imagination was a political act) license afforded by fiction...

...In an era of growing factionalization of identity and agenda, Mary McCarthy looms as a relic of a time in which the terms "national concern" and "the private life of citizens" could be broached in a single sentence...

...McCarthy is best known as the author of The Group, a work of late-career juvenilia that brought her hundreds of thousands of readers and muchsoughtafter financial security...

...The failures of this method are clear...

...David Laskin's Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals and Claudia Roth Pierpont's Passionate Minds: 124 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS Women Rewriting the World offer mini-biographies of Mary McCarthy that do little more than elaborate on the well-known historical record...

...The approach to McCarthy's life that Kiernan favors has all but obscured what could have been its most interesting contours...

...The dilettantism with which she was often charged was the source of her popular genius: McCarthy was the perpetual good student at the lifelong lesson of American politics and culture...

...The first group, which wrote while McCarthy was still alive, included Carol Gelderman, Carol Brightman, and Doris Grumbach, and the second, each of whom published recent books dealing in part or in whole with McCarthy's life, includes David Laskin, Frances Kiernan, and Claudia Roth Pierpont...

...In addition to having wed four times, McCarthy spent the better part of her years as a young writer in a series of relationships with a few of the mid-century's more notable intellects: Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, and Edmund Wilson...

...McCarthy's friendship with Arendt is often cited as the sole evidence of McCarthy's gravitas...

...Having chosen to favor the opinions and impressions of McCarthy's peers, her correspondence, and excerpts from her work, over a critical and historical synthesis, Kiernan has provided a quaint picture of a writer who, in life, took exception to the sort of historical myopia that Kiernan confuses for biographical intimacy...

...She was also an ambassador into the private world of the middle class—what men and women really said to each other, what women thought about it, and what a shift in America's private arrangements had to say about public life...

...Bringing together a uniquely American plainspokenness rooted in personal experience with a distinctly Catholic preoccupation with ethical purity, McCarthy coined her own brand of literary cosmopolitanism that produced methodical critiques dazzling with wit and force of personality...

...This leaves curious piecework for her biographers...

...The apex of McCarthy's influence may be in the present moment: you don't have to read far into the trenchant satire of Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to encounter McCarthy's influence...

...Laskin appears to think that a recitation of the number of births, deaths, affairs and fallings out experienced by this group will amount to a history significant enough to add nuance to the already wellchronicled story of these women's careers...

...Kiernan's intentions are, as she declares to the reader, to create a portrait of McCarthy that "might have made her crinkle her eyes and grin...

...BIOGRAPHIES of women writers so often tend to rely on speculative back story to contradict the "official" account of their lives that it is difficult not to observe the similarities between the lives of women writers and those of political dissidents...

...Even "The Hue and Cry," McCarthy's defense of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was published in Partisan Review the same year that McCarthy's The Group received its own nearly career-devastating reviews, is regarded by Pierpont as "in parts so morally devastating and in other parts so clumsy" that the dynamic between McCarthy and Arendt—two contrarian women thinkers arguing in defense of each other's right to challenge comfortable orthodoxies (with all due acknowledgment of the difference in scale)—is lost...

...The absence of a new critical take on her life is particularly regrettable, for McCarthy, a writer whose veneration of the critical encounter between writer and subject was at the center of her inimitable prose style...

...The Group—a novel detailing the post-college fortunes of her Vassar class of 1933—had its debut, in 1954 in the pages of PR, as the short story "Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself...

...McCarthy was fiercely committed to the integrity of her life as a woman and a writer, and her career is a fascinating chronicle of just how long a feminist sensibility can survive—in deed if not name—through several different eras in American cultural and political history, but Kiernan sheds little light on this...

...Perhaps Kiernan is arguing both against the traditional "plot" of women's biographies and the traditional role of biography in general as one writer's creation of literary drama out of the life and work of another...

...The Group can be read, as it was at the time, as a roman a clef containing just enough bracing news from the world to be original, or as a women's novel—not a novel of ideas but merely a novel of novelties...

...By treating the lives of McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Gordon as curiosities, he is unable either to account for their success in their time or translate the importance of their lives for today's readers...

...If McCarthy had a critical signature, it was her entertaining and relentless dismissal of what George Orwell called "the smelly little orthodoxies presently contending for our souls," and she developed it through a variety of genres throughout her career...

...Never thoroughly satisfied with the sturdiness of her own ability to discern good and evil, McCarthy regularly interrogated her friends, their work, and her own work...

...Having earned a reputation as a contrarian theater and book critic at PR—where criticism was conducted under a similar sign of social accountability as politics—McCarthy moved on to memoirs, essays and novels...

...Knowing that McCarthy didn't like biography (which had the gall to traffic in the hearsay and conjecture for which McCarthy had other, perhaps more noble, uses), Kiernan has diluted her biographical authority so as to safely ensure that she will not be indicted as the kind of biographer who seeks the last word...

...She maintained her right to contradict herself on issues of both public and personal significance as a way of preserving, and investigating, her own originality...

...Settling down later in life with men of less literary renown, she set her most popular work during the early years of her career when her legendary sexual appetite and professional ambitions were first forged...

...In everything she wrote, McCarthy's intenDISSENT / Winter 2001 123 BOOKS tion to be original was paramount, which resulted in a body of work that is at once unlike any other and, in most critics' estimation, too much like itself...

...McCarthy's aspirations for herself were contradictory— witness her vigorous disavowal of feminism and yet her principled support of other female writers and thinkers, her rather sleepy acknowledgment of the nuts and bolts of political engagement and her trips to Hanoi in 1968 and 1972—and they can be even further confused by her literary persona's appetite for both dolorous self-examination and exalted selfmythologization...

...The suspension in which these interests was held is the key to McCarthy's appeal, and it is fittingly a phrase from a woman Kiernan identifies as one of her successors— Susan Sontag—that captures McCarthy's method...

...The book is an eclectic appreciation of modern women writers who re-imagined social and literary conventions, and the chapter on McCarthy and Arendt retreads the familiar ground of hypothesis about what they had in common and how their friendship flourished...

...Dottie" is the story of a naive, eczema-plagued co-ed who is persuaded by her bohemian lover to get herself fitted for a "pessary" (diaphragm...

...VANESSA MOBLEY is an editor at Basic Books...

...It is the same constant worrying about the role of private will in the flow of larger events (for instance, is McCarthy's decision to marry four times a flouting of social convention or a slavish observance of it...

...McCarthy's writing career, which began in 1937 with theater criticism for Partisan Review and continued until her death in 1989, spanned literary and political criticism, short stories, the popular novel, memoir, and journalism...

...The more closely McCarthy's most recent biographers examine her life, the more they favor tidy resolutions of some of the fantastically complicated, messy, and potentially instructive implications of the personal and historical predicament that McCarthy herself examined and dramatized so well...

...The bulk of the day-today observations of McCarthy's life are conveyed through excerpts from her letters, while Kiernan achieves a unified biographical voice chiefly in the brief passages in which she introduces and contextualizes McCarthy's own writings and the selections of criticism and interviews that make up the chorus of opinion...

...All three biographies seem to have been written without benefit of the wisdom, and the failings, of earlier McCarthy biographies...

...The contemporary paradigm of the popular writer/critic/media impresario (Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Tom Frank) who communicates through a broad range of media (journal of opinion/novel/essay) has at least some of its roots in McCarthy's example...

...In the characters of Dottie and her beau, McCarthy composed a devastating portrait of the timorous modernity of the "new woman" and the traditional caddishness of the "new male...

...Today's public intellectuals rarely provide dispatches from the home front...

...The problem with Seeing Mary Plain is that we simply never find out...

...Discussing the breadth of McCarthy's life and career is daunting given her contentiousness as a public and private figure, and yet that is why "getting it right"—preserving for the reader those places where McCarthy inserted a satiric, and original, voice into the culture— is so important...

...McCarthy's fiction and memoirs—with a few notable exceptions, such as Birds of America—display an evolving mastery of style that amounts to a kind of critical breakthrough...

...What is really missing from the new generation of McCarthy biographies are new facts and a new synthesis about what McCarthy's life meant to the culture of her time and what her life could mean to readers now...

...Apart even from the influence of her writing and persona, McCarthy represents something like a last ember of literary character, an example of personality as a fusion of persona and product...

...Her tone—blithe but serious—and marked in turns by stealthily accurate argument and quirky aside, has influenced at least three successive generations of writers...

...McCarthy's was a prevailing intelligence, equally curious about questions of literary merit, the use of military force abroad, personal furnishings, and the internecine battles of the Communist Party...

...For McCarthy, originality and oppositionality were indivisible...

...Save for a brief recitation of the contretemps between McCarthy and Doris Grumbach over the interviews that would form The Company She Kept (the first McCarthy biography), Kiernan fails to provide either a historical account of McCarthy's legacy or her own critical gloss for the judgments of McCarthy heaped upon her by her circle...

...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 125...

...Much like her earlier, equally well-known story "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit," "Dottie" shows McCarthy as a master of the socially acceptable satire...

...McCarthy's critics and biographers seem undone by this question of intention: was McCarthy a brilliant satirist or an accidental provocateur...

...Keeping score as to exactly where and how a subject veers from the intended script of her life is a common trope of biography that displays telling limits in regard to Mary McCarthy...

...Parallel to her prolific career, McCarthy led a social and domestic life widely chronicled by her and others that was shocking enough for readers to conelude that McCarthy flouted at least as many social conventions as the protagonists of her fiction...

...that reduces so many biographies of women writers to territorial maps of lands gained and lost, and rarely in equal measure...

...Such bonhomie on the part of a biographer is not uncommon...

...It is ironic that Mary McCarthy, for whom deep engagement with a subject was synonymous with combat, would be the recipient of this dubious honor...

...In the case of McCarthy, who was as apt to find political resonance in negotiations of the bedroom as in the public referendum, the final tally continues to prove elusive...

...Kiernan has chosen to write a public biography that rarely hypothesizes about its subject, favoring instead a critical consensus of the opinions of McCarthy's friends, contemporaries and heirs to her influence, and failing to look for any larger design in the quality and content of the chorus's observations...

...In an attempt to answer this question, McCarthy is captured in the most recent biographies in the amber of her greatest public renown—as a social climber, rabid gossip, voracious consumer of male literary genius, and erratic, if productive, talent—so that the shadow cast by her reputa122 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS tion as a cultural touchstone obscures the more intimate biographical drama of how she became who she was...