Plumbing the Heights
KAPP, ISA
Writers & Writing PLUMBING THE HEIGHTS BY ISA KAPP MANY READERS will come to Mary McCarthy's new novel after decades of admiration for her wit, for her determination to become involved (though...
...Once more we enjoy the shock of recognition that our author has not changed all that much...
...Yet as far back as 1946, in one of her most polished reviews (of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh), she was already piling on the domestic images: "The play itself is like some stern piece of hardware in one of those dusty old-fashioned stores into which no Pyrex dish or herb shelf or French provincial earthenware had yet penetrated, which dealt in . . . staples, saws and nails and knew nothing more sophisticated than the double boiler...
...the second, that those elite few who are tender to plants and animals are likely to despise humans...
...That is the problem perplexed Peter ponders葉he frailty of ideas under the strain of application...
...Birds of America leads us from the kitchen into the modern garden, in shabby disrepair and disgracefully empty of story-book flowers like heliotrope, spicebush...
...In any case, who has ever heard of a mother like the fair Rosamund: Crossing the ocean and finding her son unconscious in a hospital, she declares, the moment he opens his eyes, "Well, Peter, you've had quite an adventure...
...Ugly, durable, mysteriously utilitarian, this work gives the assurance that it has been manufactured by a reliable company...
...At any rate, on his own terms the subject seems to concern an overwhelming enigma: why, theoretically democratic, does he find intolerable the human traces in the bathroom and the human voices in the Sistine Chapel...
...It's merely ecological justice...
...There is no point in imagining who the models might have been for Peter or his implausible parent...
...It is, then, to our intellectual vanity . . . that Miss McCarthy's satire appeals...
...Mary McCarthy has always been process- and appliance-haunted, as quick to deduce a culture from its gadgets as to locate a flaw in the character of a Yale Man by the Ritz crackers and Snappy cheese he selected for his midnight snack...
...Peter had succumbed to the same pathetic fallacy that Thoreau eventually uncovered in himself in Walden容xpecting nature to respond to his human needs, even as he turned to it in order to escape the demands of other humans...
...Indeed, so much adventitious chatter and brooding and righteousness are set loose that the only pleasure left us is sleuthing, and we seize upon the next mystery: Why has such detail and passion been expended on the dirty condition of French toilets...
...nowadays we like to cast our moral reformers more in the image of Ralph Nader, modest, active and ready to examine the outside world instead of himself...
...As we recall her satires of liberals, Utopians and academics, we have to admit that it was never their hearts that were under attack, or even their imaginations, but a more functional target: their intellectual plumbing...
...But that was long ago, in an era of fervent political vision and revision...
...An unprepared reader, at least one safely out of spattering range of his kitchen stove, will be amazed at Miss McCarthy's burning preoccupation with cooking and canning utensils...
...Section two takes place mainly in Paris, where Peter is spending his junior year at the Sorbonne...
...How well she seems to understand our predicament, we who have lost our innocence by knowing too much, the over-conscious, the over-critical...
...In the first section these two unbeguiling eccentrics spend a New England summer together in search of great horned owls, waterfalls, pure foods葉hat is to say, Nature uncontaminated...
...Can it be that although he has accused his opinionated mother of basing her ethics entirely on Style, he is himself a chip off the old esthetic block...
...How cunningly she salvages my essential purity from the wreck of my life...
...During the preceding episode, which is very close to the end of the book, we have finally seen some action...
...While he is delirious, Peter receives a visitation from his favorite philosopher, and understands him to have said that God is dead...
...Birds of America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 344 pp., $6.95) is less a novel than a tract about our modern condition, in two equally glum parts...
...Peter, 19 and full of exasperating scruples, takes a plant for a walk, "kicks the habit" of masturbation because it would be "undemocratic" to his temporarily unhusbanded mother (appallingly dubbed "the fair Rosamund"), and invokes Kant on anything from filial duty to tipping chambermaids...
...Perhaps, since the star of Women's Liberation is now ascendant, it ought to be observed that the practicing woman intellectual (the most liberated woman of them all) is often seriously incapacitated in the crucial areas of her life, sex and motherhood...
...Our spirits lift, in the hope of some collegiate frolic, but the narrative sags into the inevitable complaints about American tourists, and an incredibly stale discussion of the Vietnam Situation that might have been more enterprising whenever Miss McCarthy first undertook her book...
...Writers & Writing PLUMBING THE HEIGHTS BY ISA KAPP MANY READERS will come to Mary McCarthy's new novel after decades of admiration for her wit, for her determination to become involved (though critically) with the political movements of our time and用robably most of all庸or those crisp, disarming phrases in which her perceptions somehow managed to arrange themselves...
...What can have gotten her in such a stew about bean-pots, jelly glasses, butter churns, and ice-cream freezers...
...The main characters are mother and son, birds of a feather preening themselves, occasionally ruffling each other's egos, and solemnly looking into nature's pools the better to see their own reflections...
...Yet Mary McCarthy did conceive him, for these few hundred pages, as the child of her imagination, and it is discouraging to consider that precisely the relationship of mother to son should have produced her most awkward literary performance...
...Mary McCarthy's art of fiction, however, if not defunct, is certainly in deep hibernation...
...But in Birds of America the conflict is no joke, turning the young hero into a neurasthenic male spinster, permanently tentative, irresolute...
...Peter's friend Silly (no misprint) has taken him to meet the bear in the Paris zoo...
...Of course, even if we could accept Peter's worries about his own contradictions as a solid investigation into morality, they still would not make bouncy reading, nor would he make a charismatic hero...
...Perhaps he represents sanitized America, unwilling to face the facts of life...
...How perfectly she appreciates that the real, the enduring me is the thinking, analyzing me, not the doing, the pragmatic me...
...From the beginning, Miss McCarthy puts herself at a terrible disadvantage by making the heroine a harpsichordist (if there is one art she has never given the least sign of being knowledgeable about, it is music...
...Maybe he is intended as a composite portrait of the nonactivists in the younger generation, children of ideology transfixed by their own abstract questions...
...The food of her obsessions was much the same, except that in those days she was cooking with more gas...
...It was just this resistance to the notion that ideal concepts necessarily lead to heroic fulfillments that made Mary McCarthy so provocative to radical intellectuals and gave such comic ballast to her writing...
...Dahlias bloom, turkeys葉hough destined to be frozen by men用rocreate and black swans bite the hand that feeds them...
...lemon lilies and many others, the mastery of whose names brings much apparent satisfaction to Miss McCarthy (an eternal student) but only dismay to the allergic reader...
...In an unusually interesting review of A Charmed Life written in 1956, Norman Podhoretz described those honest McCarthy heroines who flay the deception out of their souls and make Intelligence seem, by implication, the highest of human virtues...
...As far as we can make out in the course of Birds of America, there is no truth to this pronouncement...
...A bird lover from way back, Peter wanders over to the aquatic birds and tries to feed a brioche out of his hand to the black swan, only to receive three savage, infection-producing bites...
...Soaring, clear, insistent upon our alert participation, her prose had maintained a positively ecclesiastical brilliance...
...The first says that most of us have defiled and forsaken the natural world...
...One could almost hear the sounds of chains and faucets and powerful flushing as she showed us the rust in the pipes...
...THOUGH I am doing my best to stretch the conjectural range of this novel, it is (as opposed to most novels that fire our imagination) excruciatingly subjective熔ne more chapter in Mary McCarthy's life-long infatuation with her own mind, and still another postscript to the elaborate confessional of its inconsistencies...
...It is therefore hard to accommodate to the unhappy style that has now taken hold of her: flat and unshapely as a nose pressed against a windowpane, humorless, skipping from quaint, bookish fancies about King Arthur's knights and millers' daughters spinning gold to tough, pedantic contemporaneity...
...But Kant looks him searchingly in the eyes and corrects him, "Nature is dead, mein Kind...
...In 1947, in an article entitled "America the Beautiful," she was worrying about the humanist in the American bathtub and calculating the spiritual reasons for a rich man installing two commodes side by side...
...If petty symptoms were always Miss McCarthy's stock in trade, so were large indictments, and I take it that Peter's scrubbing of toilets points to something serious...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 14
