When my friends and I were in our twenties in the 1950s, we read two writers—Colette and Mary McCarthy—as others read the Bible: to learn better who we were and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live. Their novels and stories, collectively speaking, constituted our Book of Wisdom.
The condition, of course, was that we were young women, and that Marriage and Motherhood was the territory upon which our battle with Life was expected to be pitched. As we were intellectually ambitious girls, English majors whose relation to literature was intensely personal, it was to fiction that we looked for ways to circumvent the conventions we were expected to live out. This was a tricky business, as literature itself was divided on the issue. If we read Henry James or George Eliot, and imagined ourselves Isabel Archer or Dorothea Brooke, it meant that while an intelligent girl could put up a good fight, she was ineluctably headed for pedestrian tragedy at the hands of some deceptively worthy man (if we read Thomas Hardy, the tragedy was not so pedestrian). It was only in the work of Colette and McCarthy—neither on the syllabus of any lit course I ever took—that we saw two gloriously shocking spins put on the narrative that we’d grown up believing was our destiny.
In neither of these writers did marriage or motherhood figure at all. For Colette, Love with a capital L, as she referred to erotic obsession, was the ultimate experience for a woman. To know Passion was the thing, even—or perhaps especially—if it meant the loss of bourgeois respectability; and if, at the end, when youth and beauty were gone, and one was left humiliated by the inability to arouse desire, so be it. One had
lived. On this score not another living writer, it seemed to us, understood the stakes as well as Colette. Her work sounded depths of understanding that were like nothing we had ever encountered. She alone could make high art out of the dilemma of a woman “in the grip,” elevate Love to the same metaphoric heights that another novelist could reach through the contemplation of God or War.
But Mary McCarthy spoke to another kind of romance alive in us, one closer to the bone: that of seeing ourselves as New Women, independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with
experience. In this scenario, sexual love was flatly instrumental, and this too was exciting, as it illuminated a reality many of us were, unwittingly, beginning to inhabit: that of the unexpected setbacks one encountered on the road to experience. Instead of concentrating on the permutations of ecstasy at a high level as Colette did, McCarthy concentrated on the cost of liberated sex: the startling mixture of curiosity, excitement, and dismay that went with
actually taking off your clothes and lying down with a stranger who, before you made love, was tantalizing, and afterward was the catalyst for that which left you with the taste of iron in your mouth.
The thing we prized most in McCarthy was the no-holds-barred honesty with which she nailed the situation. In “The Company She Keeps” (her first novel, published in 1942), she gave us a female protagonist in whom we could see ourselves reflected as we were,
right then and there. Who among us, in the 1950s, could not identify with Meg Sargent, bold as brass when she meets the Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt on a train traveling west and then, next morning, is crawling around on his sleeping-car floor, trying desperately to find her second stocking before he wakes up and forces her to face the humiliating complications of casual sex. The scene was so real that readers like me and my friends could only feel redeemed both by its remarkable verisimilitude and then by the scary brilliance of the prose, edged not in sentiment or social realism but in glittering irony.
It was the irony in McCarthy’s writing that carried the day; inherent in it was a mockery from which no one—not even the protagonist—was safe. But most especially the men were not safe. What fools McCarthy made of her men! Not knaves, fools. Just to see them so portrayed, lowered into a bath of scorn, was to feel ourselves raised up. It would be twenty years more before we, the young women who read her in the 1950s, would understand why those early McCarthy stories had spoken so directly to us. That cold, hard stare of hers at romantic relations between men and women was soon to be ours, as one by one we had graduated into a world every bit as sexist as hers had been, and it was only now, in the 1970s, that many of us were able to see McCarthy’s relentless need to hold her characters up to ridicule as a line of defense equal to that of Clarissa Dalloway’s withdrawal from the marital bed.
* * *
Mary McCarthy was born in 1912 in Seattle, the eldest in a family of four children. When she was six years old her parents died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed nearly fifty million people across the globe. The McCarthy children were taken in by their paternal grandparents and lived for some years in the Midwest under conditions that Mary later insisted, in “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” were Dickensian: brutalizing in mind, body, and spirit.
In her teens, Mary was rescued by her maternal grandparents, returned to Seattle, and thereafter lived in an atmosphere of wealth and kindliness that, nonetheless, did little to mitigate the crude lovelessness of those mean Midwestern years. By the time she entered Vassar she was the fully formed person she would be for the rest of her life: beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm, a sarcasm that for some would always be wickedly amusing, for others just wicked. She married straight out of college in 1933, came to live in New York, soon got divorced, rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, and began her life.
McCarthy and her husband (a man of the theater) had met James T. Farrell, then a well-known novelist on the left, and after her divorce in 1936, it was to Farrell’s Sunday open house that she often made her way. Here she met a wealth of interesting people, made connections among those in publishing, and was soon writing book reviews. Within a year her classy, good-looking, frighteningly clever presence was wanted at literary left-wing parties, where, as her biographer Carol Brightman tells us, she was introduced to “progressive hosts and modernist hostesses” at whose functions voices rose “in lively controversy over the new play, the new strike, the new Moscow trials, the new abstract show at the Modern Museum.”
It was at these parties that she met the men (Philip Rahv and William Phillips chief among them) who, in 1937, decided to revive the defunct magazine
Partisan Review, which had once been the literary arm of the Communist Party. These men were anti-Stalinist Marxists in love with modernism, and bent on defying the CP’s primitive understanding of literature as a tool of polemics; they loved Trotsky because he had said that art could best aid the revolution by being true to itself rather than to political correctness, by which was meant the social realism that dominated the fiction of the 1930s.
As McCarthy had been heard to denounce Stalinism at one party or another, she was invited to join the staff of the new
Partisan Review. Taken on as a drama critic, she quickly and joyously found her youthfully fierce writing voice—and her career as a take-no-prisoners writer was launched. Of Maxwell Anderson, a popular left-wing playwright of the time, she did not hesitate to write, “Once again he has been inspired by a lofty theme and once again the mediocrity of his talent has reduced it to inconsequentiality.” And when Eugene O’Neill’s “Iceman Cometh” was being hailed as a remarkable piece of work, she berated O’Neill for his sentimentality in using a bunch of drunks who (in order to deliver the playwright’s message) became more and more articulate as the play went on, when everyone knew that alcohol meant the dissolution of personality, not its sharpening.
“From the beginning,” Carol Brightman tells us, “
Partisan Review was surrounded by the kind of controversy that quickened Mary McCarthy’s pulse.” She loved the people at the magazine not for their own particular selves but because, in McCarthy’s own words, they were “a self-proclaimed elite whose measure was to be taken not by its nearness to money or to established institutions, including Communist institutions, but by its performance as a harbinger of cultural change.” In essence, this meant endless argument, endless theorizing, endless scoring. McCarthy herself held no real position on any of the issues argued. She was never a serious Marxist, or modernist, for that matter—but she was serious about being the provocative child at the back of the room announcing the emperor had no clothes, the one who was always pointing out the inconsistent and the meretricious in whatever argument was being held among all these self-importantly serious, mainly Jewish, intellectuals.
One among them, however, she
did love for his very own self: Philip Rahv. The central figure in this influential little hotbed of intellectual superiority, Rahv held a passionately uncompromising view of what constituted the real thing, in literature as in politics. It was the passion behind Rahv’s judgments that elevated him to the position of the most feared, and therefore the most respected, of all—editors and writers alike—who encountered him in the flesh. As Elizabeth Hardwick said of him at his funeral, his outstanding characteristic was “a contempt for … the tendency to inflate local and fleeting cultural accomplishments. This slashing away at low levels of taste and at small achievements passing as masterly … was a crusade some more bending souls might have grown weary of. But he was not ashamed of his extensive ‘negativism’ and instead went on right up to the end scolding … unworthy accommodation” not for the sake of establishing his own authority but for “the honor and integrity of history itself.”
Like all the others at
Partisan Review, Mary was seriously intimidated by Rahv’s intellectual self-confidence; so the only way to even things out was to go to bed with him. Surprisingly, the two fell in love and became a couple, living openly together to the priggish dismay of many of their comrades, who, in reality, were as frightened of sex without marriage as any bourgeois or working-class puritan could be—and were even more frightened of women. Among men like Delmore Schwartz, McCarthy was roundly condemned as the vamp who had Rahv, the poor fool, in her clutches. When, in 1938, she suddenly and without warning married Edmund Wilson, with whom she had secretly been sleeping, the men at
Partisan Review felt sneeringly vindicated. Rahv himself was stunned.
Marriage to Edmund Wilson provided Mary McCarthy with an experience of major clarification. For one thing, the Jewish intellectuals had been exotics to her, whereas Wilson, for reasons of class and origin, was her familiar; it came as a surprise that in marrying him, as she said in later years, she felt the relief of “coming home.” Then again, she was now with a man who was essentially literary, not political, and when, at Wilson’s insistence, she tried her hand at fiction, and the first shot out of the box came cool, calculating “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”—the story that would eventually become the startling first chapter in “The Company She Keeps”—she knew that this was where her writing talent best connected. The stories that then began to pour out of her made it icy clear that it was through fiction that she had become, and would remain—irresistibly and irrepressibly—a social satirist of the first order.
It is poignant to see that when McCarthy was writing the kind of satire that involved autobiographical characters like Meg Sargent, or Martha Sinnott in “A Charmed Life,” a strain of sympathetic regret softened her otherwise uncompromising take on characters whom she mainly presented as the sum of their disabilities. It never occurred to her that the models for her characters, those whom she was presenting as pompous or self-deluded, would see themselves any differently—after all, she was only speaking the self-evident truth—and was always taken aback when they either bellowed like wounded bears at seeing themselves skewered in print or simply stopped inviting her to their parties. One who bellowed like a bear was Philip Rahv, who actually thought of bringing suit to prevent the publication in 1949 of “The Oasis.”
The novella tells the story of a group of would-be utopians who, on the eve of the Cold War and just as fear of the Bomb is heating up, gather together to form a cooperative commune that, by its very existence, they think, will lodge a significant protest against the End of the World scenarios that are overtaking the West. The characters were all drawn from McCarthy’s professional and social life: the men at
Partisan Review itself, as well as those who filled the vast, loosely knit world of left-wing sympathizers, bohemians, fellow travelers, and hangers-on in which she moved. Thus we have among the Utopians not only intellectual leaders but “an assortment of persons of diffuse and uncommitted good will, two editors of a national news weekly, a Latinist teacher of boys … , a trade union publicist, several New York high-school teachers … , a middle-aged poet … , an actor and a radio script-writer,” as well as their various husbands, wives, and children.
The ideological leanings of the group are divided between the realists and the purists, led on the one hand by Will Taub (clearly Philip Rahv) and on the other by Macdougal Macdermott (even more clearly Dwight Macdonald). But whether realists or purists, all take themselves and their enterprise very seriously; above all, they take seriously their own internal divisions. They might not know how to come up with a working definition of social democracy, but they certainly know how to obsess over each other’s theoretical differences. (Informed of the large number of people who are with him, Taub instinctively responds with “Never mind that. Who’s against us?”) Whatever the issue, the Utopian leaders will show “far less constraint in characterizing the [opinions of their opponents] as childish, unrealistic, unhistorical, etc., than in formulating a rhetoric of democratic ideals.” This is the failure of moral imagination in “The Oasis” upon which McCarthy will concentrate her mocking attention.
From the get-go, she taunts the mixed motives and self-deceptions with which the Communards arrive in Utopia. Imagining that what they are about to do will provide an example for the world to emulate, they are in fact, each in his or her own peculiar way, more preoccupied with secret self-regard than with Utopia’s large-minded statement of purpose. In the very first paragraph we are told that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia because
Joe, in real life a diabetic businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to get more out of it than anybody else … He intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists … He would not have been in earnest about the higher life if he had failed to think of it in terms of the speed-up.
Then, for (sadly) comic relief, we have Katy and Preston, who, married a bare two years and ardently of the purist party, are mainly involved in strategizing their marital misery. Whenever they have an argument Katy instantly goes on an emotional jag that Preston despises and has never known how to escape; but now he, “no doubt about it, was taking advantage of the Utopian brotherhood to shut her out from himself.” Utopia was giving him “a privacy he had sought in vain during [their] two years of marriage.” Katy, in turn, was discovering that “the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia … [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right … [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief.”
And yet again, there is Taub’s sidekick, Harold Sidney (William Phillips): “A clever and fair-minded man, receptive to discussion and argument, he disliked giving pain, and this, in conjunction with the doctrine of necessity to which he and his colleagues were wedded, had made him somewhat weak and evasive.… His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent’s position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.”
It is Joe Lockman who is the cause of the first moral difficulty the Utopians find themselves in. “My God,” cries the ever impassioned Macdougal Macdermott, upon learning that Lockman has been admitted to the colony, “aren’t we going to have any standards?… This fellow is a yahoo.” When his wife points out that ostracizing Joe would be “an ugly beginning for a community devoted to brotherhood,” Macdermott instantly changes course (as he will time and again), announcing her absolutely right, that Joe must be admitted to their company. But the argument itself has caused unease. “The incident, in fact, had frightened them a little. They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them from themselves.”
Still, there remains a Kantian puzzle. “Was it to follow then that
anyone could be admitted to Utopia—a thief, a blackmailer, a murderer? Why not, declared the purists.… Impossible, said the realists.” The point, thankfully, remains untested. “No murderers or thieves applied, only ordinary people of ordinary B-plus morality, people whose crimes, that is, had been confined to an intimate circle, and who had never injured anybody but a close friend, a relation, a wife, a husband, themselves.”
And there we have the brilliant and quite original thesis of “The Oasis”: the people of the ideological left—intellectuals and plebeians alike—imagine themselves moralists of the first order, when they are in fact possessed of only B-plus morality. In the hands of an Edmund Wilson this thesis might have invoked a sense of tragedy; in the hands of Philip Rahv himself, unmitigated scorn; with Mary McCarthy it becomes an instrument of contemplative ridicule—perhaps the unkindest cut of all.
The reason that Rahv went ballistic when he read “The Oasis” was that McCarthy is caricaturing his own deeply held credo when she tells us that Will Taub’s “whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value.” In practice this meant that he allowed “anyone (this automatically excluded fascists and communists) the liberty of behaving as ineffectually as he wished. But the right of a human being to think that he could resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning was something denied him with all the ferocity of [his] own pent-up nature and disappointed hopes.” And then the
coup de grâce: Taub himself had nothing to offer, by way of a concrete proposal, in the matter of how right-minded people were actually to live out their ideals.
The final test for the Utopians, which they fail badly, comes when a strange family starts picking strawberries in their fields and, after speaking reasonably to the poachers and receiving no response, Preston and another colonist, not knowing what else to do, drive them off the land by taking potshots in the air with a gun filled with blanks. Joe Lockman, of all people, is the one to call them on this appalling solution to the problem with which they thought they had been faced: “ ‘You’ve done a terrible thing,’ he said solemnly, going up to the two young men and putting a hand on the shoulder of each. ‘You’ve driven a man and his family off this property with a gun.… I never thought this could happen here.’ ” McCarthy sums up the incident:
A phase of the colony had ended, everyone privately conceded.… The distaste felt by some … was so acute that they questioned the immediate validity of staying on in a colony where such a thing could take place. The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle-class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.
The mockery ends in self-mockery as one of the Utopians observes, “Nice people like these are always all right, unless you take them off guard.”
“The Oasis” was first published in England in the British magazine
Horizon. Its English readers, who could easily identify the original of all the major players, roared with laughter (as we would have, had the shoe been on the other foot) at this marvelously executed send-up of the American intellectual scene; many American critics, however, pronounced it brilliant but heartless. They were wrong. The book is not heartless. It is not out for blood. True, irony inevitably means some fundamental sympathy is being withheld, but the irony here is not savage. Its deliciously witty sentence structure is rooted in the heartfelt disappointment of a moralist whom the reader feels has really wanted the good (that is, the genuine) in our midst to prevail.
Today, everyone connected with “The Oasis,” including its author, is long dead, and as the world from which it emerged is also long gone, the roman à clef aspect of the novella seems no longer of consequence. What does remain of consequence is the moving sense of familiarity with which we encounter McCarthy’s Utopians who, decked out in their all-too-human shortcomings, are
still hungry to make anew a world in which we can all be saved from ourselves.
t was at a New York party in 1945 that Mary McCarthy, an American, a Roman Catholic, a novelist and a critic, offended the philosopher Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jew. Unable, one imagines, to refrain from an opportunity for wit, McCarthy said she felt sorry for Hitler, who wanted even his victims to love him. Arendt asked how such a thing could be said to her, a Hitler victim who had been in a concentration camp.
