Two Critical Sensibilities

...Writers & Writing TWO CRITICAL SENSIBILITIES BY PEARL K BELL A, collection of essays is always risky, for the light of contiguity reveals flaws and crow's-feet that can go undetected when articles and reviews appear m separate places What gives any gathering of disparate pieces its distinctive value, then, is not so much the specific subjects or the literary evaluations but the unique sensibility and character of the writer himself On this single and severely personal ground the value of a book of random essays must stand or fall, and one is forced to make a judgment of the person that in other contexts might be unforgivable In speaking of Mary McCarthy, the word "unforgivable" may seem to lose much of its resonance because it has so frequently been applied to her work and her temperament For more than 30 years, in her theatrical, political and literary discourse and her overtly autobiographical fiction, she has often appeared to be a one-woman Inquisition, marshaling her very considerable intellectual and rhetorical resources to find a crime to fit her ready punishment Since age cannot wholly wither nor custom completely stale the habits of a lifetime, her new book, The Writing on the Wall (Harcourt, Brace & World, 213 pp, $6 75), still has the occasional heartless smile gleaming like brass knuckles through the elegant prose But happily there is something more, a facet of her talent that she first began to show plainly in the travel-cum-art-history tours of Italy-her scholarship-which is a return to the Mary McCarthy she was before joining the New York intelligentsia Miss McCarthy has written about her remarkably thorough classical education in several stories, but the scholarly aspect of her Catholic upbringing is not usually noted It is this invaluable training that she brings to bear on Nabokov's Pale Fire, Nathalie Sarraute, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Madame Bovaiy m essays of extraordinary penetration, exhibiting a kind of literary-detective skill that will be remembered long after the smoke of battle and the emotional rubble of her hatchet-jobs are forgotten As Renata Adler points out m one of her essays, which I'll come to later, "A critic is measured not by the books he prosecutes but by the ones he praises " Faced with the tantalizing wizardry of Pale Fire...

...a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers-Miss McCarthy is at once m her element, unraveling and deciphering and disentangling the intricacies of the Great Antificer's poem with a nimble and confident skill that makes much academic scholarship read like the stuttering of amateurs And she brings to the and domestic geometry of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels a dazzling sociological lucidity I have found m no other writing about this strange English genius "What flashes out of her work is a spirited, unpardon-lng sense of injustice, which becomes even sharper in her later books In her own eccentric way, Compton-Burnett is a radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics " Unsurprisingly, there are also her tiresome assassinations of Orwell, Salinger and Lionel Abel The by now notorious review of Orwell's essays, journalism and letters, in contrast to the best essays in this volume, seems regressive, as though the middle-aged Mary McCarthy were locked in stifling tandem with the young predator that made her famous Orwell is taken to task for letters his correspondents threw away His life from early on, she declares, was a self-mflicted "succession of coffin nails hammered home " In an impeachment that sounds strange coming from this source, she denigrates his literary essays because "he was on the lookout for the hidden flaw in an author " Though one comes to feel that her distaste for Orwell is partly just squeamish snobbery about the bad smells of poverty, her main indictment is clearly political Because ot "his belligerent anti-Communism," she is sure that Orwell, had he lived into the '60s, would have opposed the opponents of the war in Vietnam, for "the word 'protest' would make him sick " Great are the uses of omniscience, one can scold the dead not only for what they did not do but also for what they might have done It is a pity that she chooses the title of the Orwell essay for the volume as a whole, giving it prominence when in fact it stams a book gratifymgly free of the enfant-ternble egotism that defines her earher reputation Still, the voice is unmistakable, commanding-if sometimes shrill and defeated by its facde fluency, hers is a recognizably powerful, though at moments contradictory, presence Reading through Renata Adler's 14 pieces of reporting and criticism (Toward a Radical Middle, Random House, 259 pp $7 95), one does not get the same immediate sense of a willfully singular mind and nature that has always flashed out of Mary McCarthy's writing And this may perhaps be the best thing about Miss Adler's intelligence, the quality most promismg for her intellectual future If her collection of essays at times seems more the work of an extraordinarily versatile but disembodied spurt than the writing of a particular human being, this is partly explained by some remarks m the introduction to her collected movie reviews, A Year m the Dark "I particularly detested, and detest, the 'new journalism, which began as a corruption of a form which originated in The New Yorker itself There sprang up almost everywhere a second growth of reporters, who took up the personal and didn't give a damn for the events The facts dissolved The writer was everything " Yet in trying to avoid the exhibitiomstic ego mihi, Miss Adler, in some of her New Yorker reporting-at-large, strains too far in the other direction Her accounts of civil-nghts marches, Sunset Strip teenybop-pers, and group-therapy sessions are too impersonal, too strongly dominated by the mechanical energy of the tape recorder But just as a literary conundrum can bring out the best in Mary McCarthy, the cant of fashion-esthetic, literary, political-brings Renata Adler to the top of her form As far back as 1966, she went straight to the core of what is wrong with McLuhamsm and "art as happening" "[There is] a simple failure to distinguish between levels of discourse Boredom is the state of utmost fascination The ultimate plan is to be completely random The facts are irrelevant to the real truth of the matter All these are ideas that it can be useful or amusing to entertain at the level of metaphor Taken at all literally, however, they involve a serious misunderstanding of the way language works " The uproar about her report of the 1967 National New Politics Convention m Chicago was stoked as much by her unsparing appraisal of its rhetoric as it was by her refusal to support "the right side " As she watched the convention become a ranting, self-defeating shambles, she realized that "a radical movement born out of a corruption of the vocabulary of civil rights-preempting the terms that belonged to a truly oppressed minority and applying them to the situation of some bored children committed to choosing what intellectual morsels they liked from the buffet of life at a middle-class educational institution in California?now luxuriated in the cool political vocabulary, while the urban civil-rights movement, having nearly abandoned its access to the power structure, thrashed about in local paroxysms of self-destiuction " At her best, Renata Adler has perfect pitch for the high-toned slogan that is first self-righteous and within minutes of being uttered turns nasty The consistent soundness of her judgment seems immeasurably valuable m a time when even the most sensitive liberal intellectuals seem unable to avoid the boobytraps set for them by the young If each of these books of essays is to be measured by the character of its writer, what then remains'' In her middle age Mary McCarthy still hungers for the Leftist assurance of the 1930s, but such longing brings out her worst I say this not because of ideological disagreement but because Mary McCarthy, Girl Reporter, dispatching cables from Hanoi seems a pointless waste of her rare gifts as a scholar and literary essayist Renata Adler, in her early 30s, keeps her distance from such disabling arrogance Though her detachment makes her appear less involved, it also allows her intelligence to move more freely around political subjects Miss McCarthy has divided her sensibility, reserving her reason for literature and devoting her passion to politics, and it is a tragic division Miss Adler has a more unified character, and a remarkably even voice While less brilliant than Miss McCarthy, she pursues the steadier course...