On the Wing
Hugnes, Catherine
On the Wing Birds of America, by Mary McCar- thy. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 344 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Catharine Hughes Why is it, I wonder, that Mary McCarthy—in essays, in inter- views,...
...Their favorite waterfall seems to have gone...
...That's the trouble...
...On the Wing Birds of America, by Mary McCar- thy...
...As someone tells Peter, "You have to expect changes...
...Or, Peter in the Sistine Chapel, meeting one of his teachers who is working on a book on tourism, and proclaiming the rights of privilege and sensitivity—his, Peter's, rights— over those of the herd when it comes to the opportunity to appreciate art's splendors without the presence of the interfering motley...
...Miss McCarthy seems unwilling to do so...
...He abhors the war...
...Peter himself is a bird watcher...
...Miss McCarthy records it all with characteristically precise and elaborate detail...
...Birds of America has little in the way of conventional plot...
...In the novel's opening section, Peter and his twice-divorced mother, Rosa- mund, a professional musician, have returned to Rocky Port for the sum- mer...
...Peter's ideals are in the right place...
...He even tries to put some of those ideals into practice, when, for in- stance, he lets—almost compels—a fe- male clochard spend the night in his room and is rewarded by having her urinate on the floor and steal his brass doorknob...
...Peter is a collec- tion of attitudes and his personality a compendium of idiosyncrasies passing for character traits...
...It is more a collection of set pieces and episodes...
...The birds of the title are both literal and metaphorical, ranging from the Great Horned Owl young Peter Levi discovers has died, in the opening sen- tence, and the black swan that bites him, in the closing pages, on the one hand, to the human variety on the other: a military hawk he encounters abroad and his mother, who is "like an American bird—the rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance, modest and vivid...
...he is for civil rights...
...He is, in other words, more mouthpiece than character and the result is a fiction- essay more than a novel...
...It is not only the advent of tourism and the flight of nature, however...
...As he admits, he has "this thing about the past...
...In his wallet he carries a maxim from Immanuel Kant, his favorite philosopher: "The other is always the end...
...There is Peter attending a Thanksgiv- ing party given by an American gen- eral attached to nato, discovering ev- erything has come from the PX and looking on while the general chides and embarrasses a young girl who is a vegetarian...
...it and his egalitarian ideals and Kantian ethic...
...That is the discovery nineteen-year-old Peter makes—and struggles against—during the summer of 1964...
...At least they cannot find it...
...When I'm in the Sistine Chapel, I hate my fellow man...
...But there is no flesh on the bones...
...philosophies, positions, argu- ments and rationalizations, not blood, flow through Peter's veins...
...It is 1964 and they find the New England village greatly transformed from the one they knew only four years earlier...
...The same with art...
...The question has never been rhetorical, and Birds of America raises it yet again, and, I think, suggests some answers...
...If he asserts the world is "haunted" by inequality because "it was exported somewhere else" when- ever it came onto the agenda, he also admits: "If you love someone, you want to be alone with them...
...He takes his large plant out for a walk on the streets of Paris...
...Even so, he is an elitist at heart...
...There is no pastry flour, salt codfish, or even fresh fish...
...That "collective American mem- ory of white meeting-houses and vil- lage greens that you acquired at birth or naturalization," that New England that ''looked like the ideal America that you studied in civics," will soon be no more...
...He makes a point of cleaning the communal toilets in the various places where he boards...
...they require the author occasionally to take risks...
...Reviewed by Catharine Hughes Why is it, I wonder, that Mary McCarthy—in essays, in inter- views, occasionally even in photo- graphs—almost invariably seems con- siderably more interesting than the fictional characters she creates...
...When he leaves to spend his junior year abroad, at the Sorbonne, he takes it with him...
...The booths at the country fair are handled by con- cessions and contestants in the flower show pass off florists' products as their own...
...They come up against some hard times in Paris and Rome...
...The tourists have come...
...Novels re- quire passion, not detachment...
...By now it has probably given way to a highway, a motel or some other symbol of prog- ress...
...They cannot even obtain old-fashioned jelly glasses or bean-pots or non-instant tapioca...
...And, when she ends with a delirious Peter having a visit from Kant, who tells him, in the novel's concluding words, "Nature is dead, mein kind',' it is carrying things more than a bit too far...
...He writes to his mother—a long letter in the middle of the book—laying out his concepts concerning morals and ethics, aristoc- racy versus democracy...
Vol. 35 • September 1971 • No. 9
