Quite Contrary, Quite Right

...It mattered to be up-to-date in literature, although McCarthy was not quite: "I was literary in the wrong way, not really modern, still interested in graduate-student stuff like Shakespeare and the Elizabethans...

...and not from any weakness...

...is always titillating...

...Nevertheless, she is generous with fairly embarrassing, and quite arresting details...

...Against the background of the Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War, these lovers of literature and literary lovers got all heated up politically...

...The book gets some fleshing out from Elizabeth Hardwick's helpful though somewhat overlong Foreword...

...Since the parcel came from the Mexican border, and she had just, almost involuntarily, joined the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, she was afraid of what might be lurking inside...

...What tied the group together was Left-wing politics...

...Evident throughout the memoirs is the way literature permeated these lives and love lives...

...Not quite...

...Loving is here caused, sustained and explained by literature: the other person's writing, one's own, or literature in general...

...Mary McCarthy's ability to say a lot in a little space is abundantly apparent in this tragically truncated memoir...

...In the lovely passage I quoted earlier, Mary, recalling Rahv in the last year of her life, says she still loves him "vividly, as I write these lines...

...Sometimes, though, affection blinds our Mary...

...with all due respect, I find it hard to imagine Diana Trilling "with her dark eyes and flashing nostrils, [looking] like Katharine Cornell...

...Like Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy was often the only goy at a gathering...

...and that stubbornness kept her from getting out ??”she says it was "perhaps the pivotal decision of my life...

...Eventually, Mary, who was already friendly with Dwight Macdonald and other literati, met the editors of Partisan Review, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, and the rest is literary history...

...And they were mostly Jewish...

...In my office at Covici, sitting opposite the ever-disapproving Miss Broene, I embarked on a correspondence with Wilson...

...The sleazy throw confirmed this...

...While writing...

...When she wrote a story about an affair, she did it "to explain it to myself...

...Porter's last hurrah provides a typically toothsome paragraph...

...He wrote, and I answered...

...A "crude-looking package from an unknown sender'' anived at McCarthy's tiny new apartment on Gay Street in Greenwich Village...

...And, a bit later, "Self-deception always chilled me...

...a young woman who was rapidly becoming an esteemed book and theater critic in her own right...

...She says about an early book review of hers, "At least I was forthright and fearless...

...The pages about love and sex here are among the most candid, touching, and humorous McCarthy has written...

...There were Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, Trotskyites and vague Marxists or Socialists...

...And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else...

...There are other troublingly unanswered questions, such as how and why Mary married spouse number three, Bowden Broadwater...

...The changeable Max Eastman, the overinflated and unreliable Malcolm Cowley, the self-deluded Margaret Marshall are revealingly drawn...

...we reach the most revelatory and compelling pages...

...Love, or even the illusion of love, is always connected to writing...

...On a mere 114 pages, Mary McCarthy, at 77, recorded her life from 1936 to 1938, between the ages of 24 and 26...

...She fills in the background of some of her best fictions, such as "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," yet even more interesting than biographical data and gossip are her observations and reflections: "I realized one day that in 24 hours I had slept with three different men...

...Mary and Philip clearly had a swell time living in a small, exclusive Upper-East-Side apartment that embarrassed them when partisan (or Partisan) friends came to visit, and that was most inconveniently located for getting to their respective workplaces...

...I don't think so...

...Upon graduation with the class of 1933, Mary descended on New York City, married the struggling actor-playwright Harold Johnsrud, and embarked on a literary career while also doing bread-and-butter work as a secretary-editor...

...And we are not let down...

...But sex never obscures the political passions...

...With him she sang the Internationale in French at a May Day parade (although she never joined the Communist Party), and made better love than with Johnsrud...

...Even readers who know her two previous autobiographical volumes will be surprised by how much easier, livelier, full of desin-volture this one is...

...No doubt it was another disguise for the class war...

...I am ashamed to say that I asked Johnsrud if he would come over and be with me while I opened [the package...

...affairs that, for further spice, dramatically overlapped...

...Altogether we have here a sparkling account of New York life in the mid-'30s from the vantage point of a young woman who was working in book publishing (at Covici-Friede) and on magazines (the PR board...

...adds inestimably to our enjoyment...

...McCarthy splendidly describes the mixture of generous idealism and essential naivete that frequently informed all that debating, say, at dinner parties where the guests "were mostly Stalinists, which was what the smart successful people in that New York world were...

...McCarthy is relatively discreet...

...Both while reading it and afterward, one is torn between regretting its brevity and rejoicing that it exists at all...

...must have meant that he understood that I loved him...

...On Johnsrud's advice probably, I wrote or wired the sender...

...Taken together, these lines could be Mary McCarthy's worthy epitaph for herself...

...The story that weaves its way through these memoirs is, first, that of the breakup of Mary's early marriage to Johnsrud, largely over her getting involved with John Porter, a handsome young man who looked like a blond Fred Mac-Murray...

...yet it was books and knowledge of them that, with a little help from alcohol, got Mary to bed down with Edmund...

...He taught me their names, for which I am still grateful...

...but inside all we found was a quite hideous pony-skin throw lined with the cheapest, sleaziest sky-blue rayon, totally unlike Porter, who had a gift for present-giving...

...page 47, I think it was...

...He did...

...Does this diminish love, reduce it to an amour de tete, not deep or transcendent...

...Or she might have...

...No psychoanalyst ever offered a clue, except to tell me that I felt compelled to leave the man I loved [and men she did not especially love] because my parents had left me...

...Perhaps because he is still very much alive, Mary might not have told all...

...First we listened, to be sure we could not hear anything ticking...

...Nonetheless, they ended up drunk-enly making love on his couch...

...Noting that a few casual remarks she made led to her being unwittingly conscripted by the Trotskyites...

...she does not go beyond saying that sex with Rahv was good, with Wilson bad...

...Esthetics matters more than gratitude...

...His letters to me are at Vas-sar...

...One lived for three things mainly: politics, literature, and sex, each pursued ardently and recklessly, yet also with a kind of religious earnestness...

...A barely thumbnail sketch aptly describes Lionel Abel as "a malicious, watchful presence out of a Roman comedy...

...I never knew...

...Philip considered himself a plebeian, whereas Mary prided herself on being (somewhat questionably) a patrician...

...One argued in publications, at literary conferences that were often political fronts, at parties, even at home in bed: spouse with spouse, lover with lover...

...Notice how skillfully that passage is written: the "or whatever," the "let him come back," and the final coup de grace, "stable...

...Her distant perspective does add some fogginess to the contours of this or that incident, yet the presence of the critic as enlightened, age-ripened commentator...

...For overstaying his Mexican visa he landed in prison, where he contracted "diphtheria or typhus or whatever it was that killed him when, on his release, the woman he had been living with let him come back and stay in her stable...

...One went to lectures, symposiums, politically oriented dances, May Day parades...

...I greatly liked talking to him but was not attracted to him sexually...

...In reply, I got a telegram: PACKAGE COMES FROM JOHN PORTER MEXICO...

...For example: "Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter...

...for these made up the Trinity of the young intellectuals of the time...

...For intellectual matters are not pondered and debated in these pages...

...If that were true, she would have had to contract several hundred marriages rather than merely four...

...that is why, when she married Edmund Wilson, "there was a certain feeling of coming home, to my own people...

...Only in her best fiction and essays did McCarthy show so much vivacity, so much casual profundity, capture so much of a sense of lived life...

...if anything, chirpily...

...This world and its gossip merrily flicker across the pages of Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936-1938, a somewhat forbidding title that is also a bit misleading...

...I had already ruled out any likelihood that the crudely-wrapped package had anything to do with him, even though Laredo had been on his way...

...A love triangle whose three members are in the same profession...

...Porter, who lived rather hand-to-mouth, planned a book about Mexico, to be based on an extended car trip with a male friend and, he hoped, Mary...

...Well, she is quite outspoken as she admits her weakness in summoning her rejected ex-husband to help open a package from his arch rival (and perhaps be blown to bits), but she tells us even more about herself by noting her disgust with, first, the ugly package, then the sleazy throw...

...But no one doubted her skills as a charming party guest, companion, conversationalist, and lover...

...Also, there was the whole world of Nature and the outdoors, so closed to Philip...

...On a weekend at his home, late at night, she went back to "his study (book-lined, of course)" to continue a literary conversation...

...When did Mary feel close to Edmund...

...Writing about Philip is what conveys to her that she did, and still does, love him...

...They erect a massive end to a relationship...

...More to the point, I think, is this: "Then there were the intellectual attractions he offered, all of which were beyond Philip: We were going to read Juvenal together, for example...

...There is even a certain charm in the occasional dubieties and hesitancies...

...We never find out why...

...And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them...

...The petty puritanism harshly inflicted by uncle and aunt may also have contributed its share...

...That is a priceless summing up of what their relationship was mostly about: literature...

...McCarthy's distaste for this Fred MacMurray look-alike was by now "physical as well as intellectual...

...So, too, with Edmund Wilson...

...the young woman of letters was put off, precisely, by his letters...

...if only because, as Mary notes, "Among Stalinist males, I heard, the Trotskyists were believed to have a monopoly of 'all the beautiful girls.'" Thus, too, she reports reverently that Herbert Solow has had an affair with Adelaide Walker, "well qualified by her beauty to be a Trotskyite...

...What is particularly adroit here is the way the paragraph (I omitted its beginning, which cleverly draws in Sidney Hook as well as Trotsky's future assassination) builds up, over an initial rejection of the thought that Porter could have such bad taste, to that telegram with its stark, capitalized terseness...

...In a couple of sentences, often a couple of words, McCarthy captures the essence, or at least the telling characteristics of a figure...

...something we are kept deliciously aware of...

...Sharp sketches of the famous or once-famous abound in this short book...

...Edmund knew the wild flowers quite well...

...I did, and still do, vividly, as I write these words.' It was Hannah Arendt who, many years later, astonished by Mary's obituary on Rahv, exclaimed, "So, my dear, you loved him...

...The memoirs make clear that love that isn't mere infatuation is always entwined with some kind of learning, and to men and women of letters, writing, like reading, is learning...

...But even what did get written and published would most likely have undergone revision...

...One of Philip's great charms," we are told, "was that he truly loved to learn...

...In the event, Mary, who had gone to Reno for a divorce, was already disenchanted with him...

...It is as if the successful writer of 77 looked back across the five or so decades from a pleasantly cocktail-sipping perspective, perhaps even through a haze of Singapore Slings, her favorite drink when young...

...As a result, the "boys," as the editors of PR were known, "made me the theater critic, not trusting my critical skills in other fields...

...Porter "had become an embarrassment, having served his purpose, which was to dissolve my marriage...

...Mostly, the book is about who was friends with whom, or argued with whom, or bedded down with whom...

...Possibly...

...Porter went on to Mexico alone, and Mary did not hear from him after he left Washington...

...But we never read Juvenal...

...McCarthy comments, "Maybe, till she said it, I had not known it myself...

...At other times, Mary can be gloriously deadpan and nonchalantly incisive: "We took walks in the park, and if we were approached by a beggar, Philip [Rahv] explained to me why charity was an error: The working-class needed to sharpen the contradictions of capitalism.' Which brings us to Philip Rahv, and McCarthy's heart wrenching lines concerning the aftermath of her first confession to him about Wilson: "That he could accept my penitence...

...She began her critical activity with book reviews in the New Republic and elsewhere, but she made her first mark with a five-part series for the Nation, skewering various popular book reviewers of the day...

...It is all told spontaneously, forthrightly, with unsparing truthfulness about oneself as about others, but never with malice...

...The other man, Weston, vanished from his and Porter's Washington hotel room on the first leg of the journey and was never found, alive or dead...

...In the evocation of these affairs with leading critical figures...

...How simple, sad, and suggestive those sentences are...

...Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which...

...The rest of the book concentrates on McCarthy's next two major involvements: the one with Philip Rahv, whom she loved and left, and the one with Edmund Wilson, whom she did not love and married...

...Some malicious tongue (was it Harold Rosen-berg's or Delmore Schwartz...

...A great pity, that...

...mine to him are at Yale...

...I found myself on page 48 and never looked back...

...Though slightly scared by what things were coming to, I did not feel promiscuous...

...Those final block capitals, JOHN PORTER MEXICO, a nonforwarding address if ever there was one, form a wall no answer can penetrate...

...They took her back to Seattle, put her into decent private schools and, finally, sent her to Vassar...

...Maybe no one does...

...She says she married him chiefly out of guilt for having had sex with him without loving him...

...a curious thing to be arguing about, since both of us were atheists...

...But they had furious fun arguing politics and making love, and, when they had exhausted politics, making love and arguing religion...

...whether, say, plastic surgeons or Olympic athletes...

...In sum, the good old days...

...Though the series was ostensibly a collaboration with Margaret Marshall, Marshall contributed only a little to the first installment and virtually nothing to the later ones...

...And, of course, Mary's lovers were mostly Jewish...

...What was the explanation for her indulgence...

...An orphan at six (both her parents died in a flu epidemic), she had a hard Midwestern childhood at the hands of a brutal uncle and aunt until her maternal grandparents rescued her...

...He was too old and too fat...

...I was appalled, for him and for myself...

...But if all three are distinguished literary critics, something really low and dirty is in the offing...

...And everyone read voraciously...

...Whether one was a Stalinist or a Trotskyite, for instance, mattered desperately...

...Earlier in the book McCarthy remarked, "As an English writer said to me, quoting Orwell, an autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good...

...even suggested that Mary left Rahv for Wilson because he had a better prose style...