Mary McCarthy's Literary Journalism
Fyvel, T.R.
PERSPECTIVES Mary McCarthy's Literary Journalism By T. R. Fyvel London As news stories have tended to become increasingly mechanical exercises, like many other readers over here I have welcomed...
...So is the phenomenon of working-class support for Enoch Powell's anticolored policies...
...even Miss McCarthy momentarily thought so...
...Embassy in Grosvenor Square...
...And how had this dread secret escaped the lynx-eyed British New Left...
...In a postmortem, one cynical journalist observed that if London's press, radio and television were under one diabolically clever director, they could not have done their job better...
...This gives their reporting that extra dimension of insight...
...How much of this did Miss McCarthy catch...
...Yet Britain has an urgent problem at home involving immigration and race...
...Since the student demonstrators came from scores of universities, teachers" colleges, and technical schools...
...she hopes the Embassy will be entered, if only by a handful...
...for Mailer, Miami and Chicago are familiar ground...
...It would be hard to imagine any English writer of equal stature feeling this way—in damp England this is just not done...
...The genre is perhaps best represented today, I think, by Norman Mailer in his pieces on the Pentagon march and the political conventions, and by Mary McCarthy's writing on South Vietnam...
...the confrontation was turned by London's skillful police into a placid fiasco—or as Miss McCarthy says, with a lyricism foreign to London, "an occasion to cherish in our memory books, for short of Utopia we shall not see its like again...
...Next, Miss McCarthy joined the Maoists leading the march to the Square...
...Miss McCarthy in London was clearly not on her home ground...
...The color question is statistically still a long way from American proportions, even in the younger age groups and the main British cities...
...She then concludes by both praising the amused passivity of the London police toward minor breaches of the law and pointing to its dangers...
...Such a situation would cause a public uproar in America she notes, adding indignantly: "I am against police spies on campuses...
...If Tariq Ali and Manchanda were to set up their speakers' stands in St...
...Vietnam policy, its comparative failure did not help Harold Wilson's support of American policy...
...Secondly, while the predictable effect of Tariq Ali's and Manchan-da's leadership upon the well-to-do inmates of the West End hotel whom Miss McCarthy observed does not matter, their impact via television upon countless British households does...
...Not so: The press and television gave the jitters to the public, while London's Police Commissioner said persistently that the situation was completely in hand?as it was...
...One hopes?with some confidence—that British good sense and the efforts of dedicated schoolteachers and social workers will cut the problem down to size...
...First, the racial problem is not one that can be tackled in the West End, in fashionable Grosvenor Square in front of the tv cameras and Miss McCarthy...
...Didn't the German police stand by while the Nazis beat up Jews...
...But this total irrelevance is surely the crucial point—the one Miss McCarthy missed...
...But instead of the violence half-promised by the organizers, T. R. Fyvel frequently comments on English politics and literature...
...What about us, our reasoned protests, all ignored...
...Helped by journalists who scented a story, the two groups attracted crowds of students who joined in a march...
...At times quite a bit, and then she writes amusingly...
...My confidence in this re-emerging style has been a little shaken, however, by Miss McCarthy's account of the October 27 London demonstration against the Vietnam war, which appeared only recently in the color supplement of the London Sunday Times and in the New York Review of Books (December 19...
...As she shrewdly observes, while she as an American felt passionately concerned with the Vietnam war, the young British students seemed basically concerned with their "demo...
...and above all, she identifies herself with the young protesters with an enthusiasm strange to London...
...but at other times her London becomes a tourist scene...
...Nevertheless, in the industrial Midlands schools with 80 per cent colored exist, and the ghettos are half formed...
...Miss McCarthy says that before the demonstration Scotland Yard had the jitters...
...To give only one example, the 100 per cent trade-unionized London docks are almost lily white...
...Well, no, I say to myself...
...It has been increasingly remarked that young British protesters agitate mainly over issues Britain cannot affect—like Vietnam, race problems in the U.S., apartheid in South Africa...
...in George Orwell's case, once called "the dilatory eye...
...Because five demonstrators got brief prison sentences, for instance, she claims that British justice, administered by "a seasoned ruling class trained in the public school system," is summary and harsh...
...one comes back, in fact, to that same British moderation with its middle-class, middle-aged look which Miss McCarthy did not altogether like in Grosvenor Square...
...From the Teddy boys of the '50s to the Mods and Rockers and the Committee of a Hundred of yesterday, and the football rioters and rebellious students of today, perhaps 95 per cent of those arrested in youthful affrays have gotten off with a small fine or mere warning...
...Alas, too late: By their incautious boasts the organizers had allowed the media to turn the event into their own happening...
...It would be unfair to go on listing such errors of detail...
...Catherine's Dock, they might face the same odds as the early trade-union organizers (or World War I pacifists), but they would also be taken more seriously...
...So she decided, after much deliberation, that Tariq Ali's Trot-skyites were wrong in wanting to avoid a crush in Grosvenor Square, and that Manchanda's Maoists were right in marching on the U.S...
...The next days, the correspondence pages of the Times were filled with letters from the anguished majority in Hyde Park...
...The issue's connection with Miss McCarthy's protesters is two-fold...
...This is surely standing facts on their head...
...But there is no evading it...
...But a seed of doubt still remains...
...Well, it is true the radical students have promised that there will indeed be fights and arrests on their next demonstration, but even short of Miss McCarthy's Utopia they may again be outwitted...
...First, seizing upon imprudent Trotskyite or Maoist boasts, the media whipped up tales of impending violence, of insurgent demonstrators arming themselves, and of help pouring in from abroad...
...Embassy, the true foe...
...When the handsome Tariq Ali answers questions about violence with smiling ambiguities, what will viewers in the workers' clubs in the industrial Midlands and North think, what will the impact be on British race relations...
...I felt my first doubts over this passage...
...As a result, almost every middle-aged sympathizer stayed away and the diminished columns ended up marching with cheerful police escorts through largely empty streets...
...Still, she could hardly take any occasion concerned with Vietnam lightly...
...But the question of the impact of such occasions upon the industrial back streets of Britain is one I have heard asked often enough...
...In her account she employs a few embarrassing adjectives of praise for the protesters (and the opposite for their opponents...
...A pro-Vietcong, anti-U.S...
...One hopes it will be none, or to the good...
...If Miss McCarthy could miss all this, while paying so much attention to the minutiae of Trotskyite and Maoist pop ideologies, I am worried about the future of literary reporting...
...Surely no local writer would argue so solemnly about what, in an English context, were only differences between pop ideologies...
...Miss McCarthy also quotes a police officer as telling her that a member of Special Branch, i.e., Scotland Yard, was "assigned" to every university...
...I can vaguely see what Miss McCarthy is driving at by this tortuous comparison, yet on the way she falls into a series of misconceptions...
...When the demonstrators split, the majority followed Tariq Ali to Hyde Park to listen to reasoned speeches on Vietnam, but they were totally ignored by the media in favor of the minority who marched with Manchanda toward the police cordon guarding the U.S...
...I rather doubt that Scotland Yard, which is at the moment overworked and overstrained in trying to cope with a steadily rising adult crime wave, had the numerical strength to employ all those informers...
...Here the tv camera's concentrated on the 300 or so anarchists as they shoved and were cheerfully shoved back by the police, who deflated the whole occasion by laughing at the missiles and epithets hurled at them and using an absolute minimum of force in retaliation...
...In Saigon Miss McCarthy was among her own Americans...
...PERSPECTIVES Mary McCarthy's Literary Journalism By T. R. Fyvel London As news stories have tended to become increasingly mechanical exercises, like many other readers over here I have welcomed the return of literary reporting (what V. S. Pritchett...
...affair, it was jointly initiated by a local Trotskyite group headed by Tariq Ali, an upper-class Pakistani (ex-president of the Oxford Union), and a Maoist group headed by one Manchanda, an Indian schoolteacher...
...For someone like myself, who first wrote in defense of West Indians in London 29 years ago, the present popular reaction against years of unorganized colored immigration, which has forced the Labor government to gradually close the gates, is profoundly depressing...
...Her account starts off with the 40-odd Left-wing doctors, also deceived by the advance publicity, who waited in the London School of Economics for the wounded who never came...
...Could it be that Miss McCarthy was equally subjective on Saigon, or Norman Mailer on the conventions...
...I agree with her, too, that although the demonstration probably did not have the slightest effect on U.S...
...To local observers, they were a bit of a joke...
...To recapitulate, since American readers will hardly recall it, the event became briefly famous for the violence that did not happen (like Sherlock Holmes' dog that did not bark...
Vol. 52 • January 1969 • No. 1
