tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7804315864317419502024-02-21T00:55:16.026-08:00Mary McCarthy's CentenaryRichard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.comBlogger180125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-35588324723769522002016-11-28T05:39:00.001-08:002016-11-28T05:39:19.356-08:00McCarthy Iconoclast : '68 Frontiers1; The Genial Host<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-67566082577077307972016-11-26T14:36:00.000-08:002016-11-26T14:39:47.385-08:00Detail from McCarthy Iconoclast 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-71760066322491771652015-12-10T10:10:00.002-08:002015-12-10T10:10:57.013-08:005 new (re-discovered) pics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5gXPYIfEQ2qqRSEHUAECiogAAOOUpL-UJ1gyatFEiMGrLlgb9QhiAUIMuGMIG4PbJ_pjExBI0340WNwlXCor8rTCxRDDs_Vge9iJJxOXRFjCR5xeAIkVAXWBGt8wUN9eGHB9PhHbhDi4/s1600/72404108.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5gXPYIfEQ2qqRSEHUAECiogAAOOUpL-UJ1gyatFEiMGrLlgb9QhiAUIMuGMIG4PbJ_pjExBI0340WNwlXCor8rTCxRDDs_Vge9iJJxOXRFjCR5xeAIkVAXWBGt8wUN9eGHB9PhHbhDi4/s320/72404108.jpg" width="236" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9lFILRedTtbO0k9dplQJ9WoYGjXghupbeT7YC09UMYWgEI6ujO7vXRfSJlYl2P33x92DLVT-W8ZpQc1ryOEKTpetAbgbtYj4ovAldsplg2jgS6vngVG51uwlNqbHmedK7pBSvb70DT1I/s1600/167436087.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9lFILRedTtbO0k9dplQJ9WoYGjXghupbeT7YC09UMYWgEI6ujO7vXRfSJlYl2P33x92DLVT-W8ZpQc1ryOEKTpetAbgbtYj4ovAldsplg2jgS6vngVG51uwlNqbHmedK7pBSvb70DT1I/s320/167436087.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At the Watergate hearings</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirUEpvz3flho1kvNKsFGdaoMU_CZHPCxjVIztd1q99JjTOAoHrQXQltj9Ox0Ma6l4_Bj2ipzBswFN2axBdWNCE3TqTcPvUSoX6_KsLrCFBU10qkf-ou4wdqetYzEBS0wVzE3mVzt-_w7E/s1600/167436088.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirUEpvz3flho1kvNKsFGdaoMU_CZHPCxjVIztd1q99JjTOAoHrQXQltj9Ox0Ma6l4_Bj2ipzBswFN2axBdWNCE3TqTcPvUSoX6_KsLrCFBU10qkf-ou4wdqetYzEBS0wVzE3mVzt-_w7E/s320/167436088.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPrTb0KXGWe-1zySxHqzlRFRgbHSYqKVrUvr3NbzJo5ZKHw7kS4oY1AojuixoTwHxdgCZKXFpT0PLO5U5VBEvQ9-JcB7Tkuo9CVS7pluSg0bTg6aonFNOaJZZe4F8Lc82RtagXLL8kGpE/s1600/522792965.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPrTb0KXGWe-1zySxHqzlRFRgbHSYqKVrUvr3NbzJo5ZKHw7kS4oY1AojuixoTwHxdgCZKXFpT0PLO5U5VBEvQ9-JcB7Tkuo9CVS7pluSg0bTg6aonFNOaJZZe4F8Lc82RtagXLL8kGpE/s320/522792965.jpg" width="241" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">News Conference 1969</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTFYWVNXc6kdDHZVwbzIR_RzOpKmULlADMarcAk9wRTQIvgHphaMCtNl7bN5EMGqXDLf3FJvOlIM9qlhyphenhyphene5cTXnR1qpmN3ObJLTflycqbjJJLzERZ3UYtz43IebZAp5CA8_Vb4G4ep9mg/s1600/586813603.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTFYWVNXc6kdDHZVwbzIR_RzOpKmULlADMarcAk9wRTQIvgHphaMCtNl7bN5EMGqXDLf3FJvOlIM9qlhyphenhyphene5cTXnR1qpmN3ObJLTflycqbjJJLzERZ3UYtz43IebZAp5CA8_Vb4G4ep9mg/s320/586813603.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-54900094686109180412015-09-16T02:02:00.004-07:002015-09-16T02:02:44.109-07:00McCarthy:Iconoclast 9<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8GYUqKFlj1vvuZyP2p-Kt6Dh3e0kzvPBRbbcGrNL9FR0MLdFgqQd59BmI1Cmk_kOMO8QrVSlFuCZCR0Hp5wW4sRZEhlsYqsAsKuUPIDmvEorDoxQpLG2P5SGy49aLUQdn4gway-cjLcY/s1600/DSCF3074.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8GYUqKFlj1vvuZyP2p-Kt6Dh3e0kzvPBRbbcGrNL9FR0MLdFgqQd59BmI1Cmk_kOMO8QrVSlFuCZCR0Hp5wW4sRZEhlsYqsAsKuUPIDmvEorDoxQpLG2P5SGy49aLUQdn4gway-cjLcY/s640/DSCF3074.JPG" width="360" /></a></div>
<br />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-82334180895934271752015-08-02T12:23:00.002-07:002015-08-02T12:23:51.136-07:00McCarthy:Iconoclast 5<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVKzEDu-gNdtVP2q8SaIz2CkzAG4j6XBGAQ553tO5LbmMjxyp50cO8RxpRBcqwhM-bTJykH21HjVgt5YImYeNOakNS8diwxg9V3mdlH1jJOBS1O_Ru1Cs9hG8t_1ZRO2nVXchrw1QiV4E/s1600/DSCF3003.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVKzEDu-gNdtVP2q8SaIz2CkzAG4j6XBGAQ553tO5LbmMjxyp50cO8RxpRBcqwhM-bTJykH21HjVgt5YImYeNOakNS8diwxg9V3mdlH1jJOBS1O_Ru1Cs9hG8t_1ZRO2nVXchrw1QiV4E/s640/DSCF3003.JPG" width="360" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the forthcoming Screen Print Series <em>McCarthy:Iconoclast </em>by Richard Lees</td></tr>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-38270393312232802912015-05-01T02:28:00.003-07:002015-05-01T02:28:30.849-07:00May Day Greetings: McCarthy's Paris May 68<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifArz6RB-TZWON1H53AZLUtTiSmc2ALeaXHISmyaTW1UCmNgUgg4QrjHtEsNOB3qocqXsy4jeGvfybcCrEmI17FXIrSN4x367O_WmmrLRecIzSYBgfLsydeAQUOKfHiKK6nD001fYiLGE/s1600/455_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifArz6RB-TZWON1H53AZLUtTiSmc2ALeaXHISmyaTW1UCmNgUgg4QrjHtEsNOB3qocqXsy4jeGvfybcCrEmI17FXIrSN4x367O_WmmrLRecIzSYBgfLsydeAQUOKfHiKK6nD001fYiLGE/s1600/455_001.jpg" height="640" width="418" /></a></div>
<br />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-11296358360626843462015-04-28T08:14:00.000-07:002015-04-28T08:14:42.316-07:00Rhiannon Tudhope: The Preservation of Disunity: Confronting Pain in The Company She Keeps<h2>
<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%e2%80%9cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%e2%80%9d/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to “The Preservation of Disunity: Confronting Pain in The Company She Keeps”">“The Preservation of Disunity: Confronting Pain in The Company She Keeps”</a></h2>
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<div class="irc_mutc">
<a class="irc_mutl" data-ved="0CAcQjRw" href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.barnesandnoble.com%2Fw%2Fcompany-she-keeps-mary-mccarthy%2F1102849098%3Fean%3D9781480438347&ei=8qI_VcrOEc3davPrgdAC&bvm=bv.91665533,d.d24&psig=AFQjCNEmbytWxNI-C7EYtuTXG8VdYMLlhw&ust=1430320172392490" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" saprocessedanchor="true"><img class="irc_mut" height="402" 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" 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In, “The Virtues of Heartlessness,” Deborah Nelson provides an illuminating analysis of Mary McCarthy’s aesthetic. Nelson explores the professional and personal relationship between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy to reveal the intersection between their ideals. Nelson suggests that McCarthy was deeply fascinated by pain. This observation seems relevant to <em>The Company She Keeps</em>, a compilation of short stories centered around Margaret (Meg) Sargent’s search for self-identity. Sargent’s journey—from a cruel affair to her resistance of healing—can be seen as not only a pursuit of self-knowledge, but an exploration of suffering.<br />
<em>The Company She Keeps</em> is considered autobiographical, as McCarthy herself admits to shaping the novel around her life experiences. As a result, the distinction between McCarthy and Sargent is often blurred in analyses of the novel. Nelson helps to clarify the coldness and cruelty often attributed to McCarthy’s heroine and McCarthy herself. McCarthy rejected empathy and solidarity in favor of confronting the pain of reality. Nelson proposes that McCarthy’s aesthetic is grounded in fact . “What makes something a fact seems to be less its informational content than its capacity to alter the observer.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn1">[i]</a> Through factuality McCarthy attempted to fight against the self-delusion that plagued society followed World War II. As a result of the horrors committed in war and the inconceivable destruction produced by modern technology, McCarthy noted that, “…the leading characteristic of the modern world is irreality.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn2">[ii]</a> In her essay, “The Fact in Fiction,” she pushes for writers to recognize the reality (factuality) of the world and to embrace “common sense”. The influence of Arendt can be seen in McCarthy’s use of the term “common sense.” “Common sense…requires individuals to engage with others in the act of perception, sharing the world in a way that corrects and amends subjective insight.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn3">[iii]</a> In <em>The Company She Keeps</em>, Meg Sargent is an individual who embraces common sense. Sargent is highly critical of others and often very brash, however she is vulnerable. Her intellect allows her to judge others, but her vulnerability allows for a continual process of self-criticism and self-alteration. Terry A. Cooney expands upon Nelson’s point by commenting that McCarthy anchored her novels in reality. “Common sense anchored intelligence to human experience…”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn4">[iv]</a> <em>The Company She Keeps</em> can be viewed as a novel in pursuit of factuality. In each episode Sargent engages with others and exposes herself to their reality. She strengthens her insight, which she ultimately refuses to give it up in the end.<br />
A clear intersection can be found between McCarthy’s fascination with pain and her aesthetic of fact. Real facts resist the delusions of society and cannot be manipulated. Facts of experience are often painful, and therefore people do not want to recognize them. McCarthy recognized this as self-delusion. One must confront reality, and in doing so face the “pain of self-alteration…the discomfort of uncertainty…and the anxiety of unpredictability.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn5">[v]</a><br />
<em> The Company She Keeps</em> opens with the story, “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment.” The reader encounters an unidentified narrator in the midst of an affair with a younger man. She decides she must reveal the affair to her husband because it had, “finally reached the point where it needed the glare of publicity…”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn6">[vi]</a> She measures her relationships through the social commentary they invite. Through confession to her husband she saw her self as, “…both doer and sufferer: she inflicted pain and participated in it.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn7">[vii]</a> This provides a glimpse into McCarthy’s developing interest in suffering. The woman chooses to partake in an affair knowing the pain it will cause her husband, and then decides to submit to a full confession. She exposes her infidelity and accepts the pain that accompanies it. The narrator’s tone remains uncertain, and the reader is left wondering whether she has done the right thing. Her husband’s reaction is unexpected and mature, and the “public” begins to take his side. Her relationship with the Young Man becomes equally monotonous, “They were…merely another young couple with an evening to pass, another young couple looking desperately for entertainment.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn8">[viii]</a> McCarthy addresses all the facts that accompany an affair—the pain inflicted, the social response, and the reality that the narrator is uneasy in her decision. The story closes with the narrator arriving late to board a train due to the Young Man’s tardiness. She admits that she has become disenchanted with him. She finds him repulsive, yet recognizing the weakness of his character, produces an unwilling gesture of affection by blowing him a kiss. As the train departs she cuts all ties with the Young Man, and travels into, “an insubstantial future with no signpost to guide her.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn9">[ix]</a> The story closes with the narrator assuming her first identity, “Young Divorcee.” She rejects the security of bourgeois marriage, and envisions herself as a femme fatale, a glamorous traveler.<br />
This story establishes the female protagonist who we will follow throughout the novel. The “Young Divorcee” is highly aware of taste and social commentary. She appears self-conscious of her social position, andjudges her husband, the Young Man, and her affair all through the public reaction they receive. She contemplates her new reality as a divorcee through the social engagements she will have. The reader views her as cold, abandoning both lover and husband with very little regard to their feelings. She embodies what Nelson describes as McCarthy’s “toughness.” It seems that the protagonist is interested in suffering, as she admits to administering pain but also receiving it. “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” illuminates the aesthetic that will guide the following stories.<br />
In “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” Meg Sargent meets a successful, middle-aged businessman on the train. Initially perturbed by him, she engages with him in conversation, giving her an opportunity to brandish her intellectual superiority. Ultimately she agrees to dine with him in his compartment. The encounter that follows is one that embodies the factuality McCarthy valued. She remains in his compartment for dinner, which then turns into drinks. She shares her favorite quotation with the man, identified as Mr. Breen, “I am myn owene woman, wel at ese.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn10">[x]</a> Sargent believes she has established her ascendancy over Mr. Breen, who responds to her quote with the foolish exclamation: “Golly…you are, at that!”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn11">[xi]</a> Carol Brightman believes the quote provides an “ironic transition” between Sargent’s momentary relief at believing she had escaped Breen, to realizing the next morning that she has woken up in his bed. “For that moment, she had become, in effect, the <em>man’s</em> woman, and she was <em>not</em> at ease.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn12">[xii]</a> Conversely, William Barrett believes this quote to be the motto of <em>The Company She Keeps</em>. “Carrying this Chaucerian blazon…she has entered a man’s world and, faithful to her motto, she intends to hold her own with men—both intellectually and sexually.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn13">[xiii]</a> It seems that Brightman has illuminated the circumstances more accurately than Barrett. Sargent succumbs to the physical advances of Breen and wakes up mortified. While she holds her own intellectually, the embarrassment and shame she feels the next morning reveal that she does not hold her own sexually with men.<br />
Nelson writes that McCarthy believed, “…reality had to be faced in a condition of exposure..”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn14">[xiv]</a> This theory truly takes shape in the form of Sargent’s inebriated, sexual transgression. Sargent wakes up physically exposed in bed with Mr. Breen. The experience can only be described as truly painful. Upon waking Breen declares his love for her. “…[Her] own squeamishness and sick distaste, which a moment before had seemed virtuous in her, now appeared heartless, even frivolous, in the face of his emotion.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn15">[xv]</a> Her pity towards Mr. Breen recalls the pity she felt for the Young Man when she sneered at him on the train platform. The exchange between Mr. Breen and Sargent exemplifies the “toughness” often attributed to McCarthy. Sargent is entirely honest in describing the exchange. When Breen leans in to kiss her Sargent replies that she is going to throw up. Her violent physical response is not only due to a hangover, but a reaction to Breen’s gesture of intimacy. Mary Ann Caws writes of McCarthy that, “…she was fearless about discomfort, hers and the reader’s too.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn16">[xvi]</a> It is through this discomfort that McCarthy is able to ground the novel in reality.<br />
After getting sick, Mr. Breen offers Sargent whisky to cure her hangover. “The vulgarity was more comforting to her than any assurances of love.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn17">[xvii]</a> Sargent resists intimacy with Breen and instead takes comfort in the sheer vulgarity of the situation. She labels her decision to sleep with him a second time as an act of charity and considers it “self-sacrifice.” She remains detached from the situation. After being forced to bathe by Mr. Breen, she reflects on the luxury of Brooks Brothers and Bergdorf Goodman and feels repulsed, her sentiment having greatly changed from the previous day when she enjoyed the luxurious dining experience afforded to the “Best People.” There is evidence of a process of self-alteration. Having faced the sheer embarrassment of her sexual transgression, Sargent is able to remain dignified. He declares his love for her, while she remains aloof. “A proud, bitter smile formed on her lips, as she saw herself as a citadel of socialist virginity, that could be taken and taken again, but never truly subdued.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn18">[xviii]</a> The experience fills her with a passionate revulsion for opulence and wealth. While previously she had felt embarrassed by the safety pin used to hold together her underwear, she now views it as a metaphor for her morality.<br />
Morris Dickstein writes of Mr. Breen that he turns out to be the most satisfactory of all the men Sargent pursues relationships with. He is distinguished by the fact that he is not an intellectual. In, “Fact and Fiction,” McCarthy emphasizes the need for social range within a novel. Through setting the encounter between Breen and Sargent on a train, McCarthy creates a world in which they have something in common. Her interaction with Breen is significant because it enhances Sargent’s perception.<br />
In explaining McCarthy’s aesthetic of the fact, Nelson posits that McCarthy valued the aesthetics of reality (“corporeal, material, natural.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn19">[xix]</a>) Perhaps Sargent gains cognition of reality through her sexual experiences. She often reflects upon her relationships with regret, embarrassment and sometimes revulsion—all a source of pain. Sabrina Abrams provides a different interpretation, noting that the intellectual woman’s separation of the physical from the mental prevents her from enjoying sexual acts.<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn20">[xx]</a> This is an example of Sargent’s disunity between mind and body that she desperately wants to hold on to.<br />
Edith H. Walton reviewed <em>The Company She Keeps</em> in 1942 for the New York Times. In her article she condemns Sargent’s sexual discovery, criticizing it as narcissistic<strong>:</strong><br />
<blockquote>
As assistant literary editor on a famous liberal weekly, one sees her adopting Trotskyism as a kind of brash, romantic pose and as a means—half unconscious—of attracting the attention which she craves. One sees how she uses it to inflame various lovers, and how she prostitutes a very real intelligence to serve a wanton’s goal.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn21">[xxi]</a></blockquote>
Walton is referring to Sargent’s defense of Trotsky on her first day of work in the fourth story of <em>The Company She Keeps</em>, entitled “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man.” Meg Sargent has returned to New York to write for the<em> Liberal</em>, a weekly not dissimilar to <em>The Nation</em> or the <em>New Republic</em> where McCarthy had worked. Walton’s criticism of Sargent seems unjustified, as she overlooks McCarthy’s aesthetic of fact. McCarthy believed that American journalism was plagued with conformity of opinion. There lacked any truly subversive opinions because, “writers were more interested in displaying their cleverness than contending with facts.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn22">[xxii]</a> The<em> Liberal</em> is a reflection of magazines such as the <em>Nation</em> and the <em>New Republic</em>, who were so absorbed in the struggle to defend their ideas that they feared showing any recognition of conflicting opinion. Sargent enters into The<em> Liberal</em> and decides to defend the unpopular opinion. She sarcastically comments that they would have loved to run an article written by Trotsky, to which the managing editor responds, “Well, no, we wouldn’t. . . . Solidarity on the left is so important at this moment. We can’t afford self-criticism now.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn23">[xxiii]</a> Jim Barnett (the “Yale man”) comments that Trotsky made a mistake in publishing his article in <em>Liberty</em>, and might as well have published it in Hearst. Sargent retorts with a compelling defense of Trotsky’s decision, “<em>Liberty </em>is read by the masses, and the <em>Liberal</em> is read by a lot of self-appointed delegates for the masses whose principal contact with the working class is a colored maid.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn24">[xxiv]</a> Not only does she rip apart Barnett’s comment, but criticize the publication she has just been employed by. Yet in doing so she has confronted them with fact. “And facts, rather than writers, are socially offensive.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn25">[xxv]</a> Nelson illuminates McCarthy’s serious emphasis on courage. Sargent was courageous to challenge her colleagues and reveal a disloyalty to their publication.<br />
However, Doris Grumbach takes a position dissimilar to Nelson. She relates Meg Sargent’s attraction to “unpopular causes” as a reflection of McCarthy’s own temperament and romanticism. McCarthy herself stated that she only involved herself in politics because the men who surrounded her were involved in politics, while she had little personal interest.<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn26">[xxvi]</a> This view speaks more to McCarthy/Sargents search for self-identity in the novel. Sargent can be seen as adopting the unpopular opinion in order to distinguish herself from others.<br />
In the aftermath of her defense of Trotsky, Sargent experiences the pain of acknowledging fact. She sits in complete discomfort; calmly drinking her tea that everyone knows must be cold. Her audience stares at her, unsure of how to respond. Contrary to Walton’s interpretation that Sargent is attracting the attention “that she craves,” Sargent instead has courageously defended the unpopular opinion and in doing so is exposed to her peers. Barnett recognizes the fear Sargent felt in defending Trotsky, and applauds her courage, “’The coward dies a thousand deaths,” he murmured. “The brave but one.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn27">[xxvii]</a> Sargent effectively triggers a process of self-alteration in Barnett, in which he seriously contemplates her actions and comes to understand them. There is in fact nothing wrong with her (as he previously had thought), and from this point he begins to question his own ideals.<br />
Barnett becomes fascinated with McCarthy, and pursues an affair with her. He believes himself to be in love with her, and she allows him to feel that way. Sabrina Abrams posits that McCarthy often conflates personal relationships with politics. This tension is felt in “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man”, in which the relationship that develops between Sargent and Barnett is equal part political and sexual. “Jim may conquer Margaret’s body; however, she persecutes his conscience. She represented a certain intellectual integrity that he lacks . . . .”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn28">[xxviii]</a> Similar to her relationship with Mr. Breen, Barnett may possess Sargent physically, but her intellect is out of reach. There remains a disparity, in which Sargent is superior in mind but seems to be used physically by Barnett. Yet she is still able to affect change in him. “He had never been free, but until he had tried to love the girl, he had not known he was bound. It was self-knowledge she had taught him; she had showed him the cage of his own nature.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn29">[xxix]</a> Self-knowledge harms Barnett, as it illuminates the limitations of his existence.<br />
<em></em>Sargent therefore is both fearful and courageous, exhibiting the contradictions inherent to the novel. Carol Brightman seems to disagree with Nelson’s perspective on McCarthy’s “toughness.” Brightman writes of the original publication of the “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” “the story broke like a comet over the heads of McCarthy’s literary generation; and it established her reputation as a writer, a <em>rough</em> writer, and as a woman, a <em>tough</em> woman—neither of which she was at all.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn30">[xxx]</a> It is unclear why Brightman denies that McCarthy was a tough woman. In <em>The Company She Keeps</em> Sargent never shies away from revealing exact truths, and in doing so must face painful situations. Her powerful skills of observation allow her to be highly critical, not only of others but of herself. Here the line between McCarthy and Sargent becomes blurred. It is clear that <em>The Company She Keeps</em> can be treated as a compilation of autobiographical stories (asides from the Yale Man<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn31">[xxxi]</a>) in which case the toughness displayed by Sargent is a reflection of McCarthy’s aesthetic.<br />
<em></em>In the final story of <em>The Company She Keeps</em>, “Ghostly Father, I Confess,” the reader finds Meg Sargent sprawled across a therapist couch. She has been advised by her second husband (Frederick) to seek professional help for her “hysteria.” He criticizes her neurosis and makes judgments on her sanity. Frances Kiernan writes of the episode, “Pinned like some poor broken butterfly to Dr. James’s couch, Meg Sargent views her predicament with an amusement so sardonic as to be almost savage.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn32">[xxxii]</a> She delivers a “malicious portrait” of Dr. James, painting him as a predictable and bland character. However, her confidence falters—what if she was wrong in her analysis? Sargent typically delivers her sharp observations with an assured belief in her superior intellect. Yet in this instance she reveals her vulnerability. Mary McCarthy’s fascination with pain and fact are most evident in the final story. Nelson writes of McCarthy (and Arendt’s) concept of reality:<br />
<blockquote>
They sought not relief from pain but heightened sensitivity to what they called <em>reality</em>. Perversely or not, they imagined the consolations for pain in intimacy, empathy, and solidarity as <em>anesthetic</em>. Their toleration of pain—indeed, their insistence on its ordinariness—is a part of their eccentricity. (88)</blockquote>
Nelson’s analysis of McCarthy’s approach to healing reflects Sargent’s own analysis of therapy:<br />
<blockquote>
First comes the anesthetic, the sweet optimistic laughing-gas of science. After consciousness has been put to sleep…it is a very easy matter to cut out the festering conscience, which was of no use to you at all, and was only making you suffer. Then the patient takes a short rest and emerges as a cured neurotic; the personality has vanished, but otherwise he is perfectly normal (276).</blockquote>
McCarthy confirms Nelson’s idea of the “anesthetic” effect of healing in Sargent’s description of therapy. Sargent dissects the process of therapeutic healing, reducing it to an extraction of personality and consciousness. Sargent views therapy as a weakening force. The sympathy and solidarity provided by Dr. James makes Sargent fear that she will lose her agency. If Sargent’s personality and opinions are suppressed, she can no longer communicate the truth. “…[U]nder the pressure of this, her own sense of truth was weakening. This and her wonderful scruples were all she had in the world…”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn33">[xxxiii]</a> Therefore she chooses to reject healing, and embrace the pain caused by her neuroses and troubled past.<br />
In reflecting upon her childhood, Sargent realizes that as she grew into an adult, she went through a process of self-alteration in which she abandoned the religion, the temperament and the culture of her upbringing. However, after her first marriage she began to resume her old ways. She attempts to restore herself: “[s]he knew that she did not cry or make disgusting scenes or have cheap tastes or commit adultery…”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn34">[xxxiv]</a> yet these elements of her personality continue to reappear. In rejecting her past, Sargent appropriated an identity that was not authentic. She viewed her previous self as an alien personality, until “she came at last to the place where she wondered whether the false self was not the true one?”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn35">[xxxv]</a> Not only is Sargent grappling with her self-identity, but she is coming to terms with her own self-delusion<br />
The reader is led to believe that Sargent succumbs to Dr. James analysis, after he wins her affection by complimenting her beauty and her intellect. However, she recalls his words, “<em>I think you can</em>,” and realizes that the intimacy and solidarity she felt with him had been a therapeutic lie<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn36">[xxxvi]</a> Here McCarthy asserts her rejection of healing. To succumb to psychoanalysis would be a continuation of self-delusion. She recalls a dream in which she kisses a man with a “Byronic air” only to discover he is a Nazi. In recognizing the extremity of her dream she realizes that she is still capable of distinguishing a Nazi from an English nobleman—she could still, “detect her own frauds.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn37">[xxxvii]</a> She realizes that to maintain her self-knowledge she must resist the numbing effects of psychoanalysis.<em> </em><br />
Nelson posits that McCarthy was deeply interested in the human capacity to change. “This continual self-alteration by contact with the world could be secured and enhanced by the cultivation of the organs of perception, that is, in the realm of the aesthetic.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn38">[xxxviii]</a> By cultivating perception one is always aware. A heightened awareness of reality forces self-reflection and thereby self-alteration. Sargent struggles to define her self-identity through her encounters with others without succumbing to group identification. She is open to reality and resists the temptation of self-delusion. Yet the sharp and scathing observation delivered by Sargent was subject to extreme criticism. It must be noted that it is hard to find analysis of McCarthy’s work that does not comment on the severity and cruelty of her heroine. Beverly Gross explores the “bitch” identity imposed upon McCarthy. She accurately notes that, “Her six novels seem less acts of imagination than of social and intellectual criticism, scoring the pretentious vulgarity of American life and the treachery of doctrinal thinking.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn39">[xxxix]</a> Gross attempts to find a positive element in the essentially misogynistic label so often attributed to McCarthy. The term “bitch” acknowledges McCarthy’s, “singular authority, courage, and self-possession.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn40">[xl]</a> Critics are quick to label McCarthy as a cold bitch because she rejects the identity of warmth, empathy and intimacy that is attributed to women.<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn41">[xli]</a><br />
The bold sexuality of Sargent combined with her neurosis and self-doubt make her an unusual and conflicted heroine. Sargent’s final plea for disunity provides a startling conclusion: a flawed heroine who does not wish to become complacent. McCarthy rejects the discourse of healing that flourished in postwar America, instead she chooses to explore pain and suffering. “Her heroines are both intellectually superior and self-sacrificing, both independent thinking and self-doubting, and, as such, they are a realistic representation of the ambivalent position of the woman intellectual in postwar America.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn42">[xlii]</a> Abrams illuminates the contradictions inherent to the novel, yet also hints at the greater aesthetic that guides the narrative. Sargent is a complex and contradicting character because she is undergoing a continual process of self-alteration.<br />
Finally, a parallel can be drawn between Nelson’s position on McCarthy’s politics and Meg Sargent’s search for identity in <em>The Company She Keeps</em>. Nelson posits that McCarthy remained detached from, “[t]he progressive social movements that emerged in the Cold War era, all of which advocated bonds of intimacy and group identification.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn43">[xliii]</a><a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn44">[xliv]</a> McCarthy preferred solitude, and remained uncommitted to any political ideology. This sentiment can also be seen in <em>The Company She Keeps</em>. Katharine Whitehorn interprets the title of the novel as revealing of, “the difficulty a woman on her own has in having any identity that is not just a reflection of each person she meets in turn.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn45">[xlv]</a> The novel opens with Sargent closing one chapter of her life and attempting to start anew. In her relationship with Mr. Breen we see Sargent giving in to a man completely ill-suited for her. He desperately tries to win her affections, and upon succeeding begins to lose interest in her. He visits her in New York, but with each trip his affection wanes. She attempts to please him however, “[a]ll her gestures grew over-feminine and demonstrative; the lift of her eyebrows was a shade too arch: like a <em>pass</em><em>ée</em> belle, she was overplaying herself.”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn46">[xlvi]</a> Sargent realizes that her actions are inauthentic, and gives up trying to win him over. Instead of conforming to the girl he wants to see in her, she accepts that his understanding of her is deluded. Her search for self-knowledge culminates in a dissection of her past. She reflects upon her misguided relationships, her sexual transgressions, and her dysfunctional childhood. However she resists becoming the “creature that Dr. James and Frederick want her to be”<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_edn47">[xlvii]</a> Instead of submitting to healing she chooses to embrace her “disunity.”<br />
<em>The Company She Keeps </em>was McCarthy’s first novel, therefore perhaps Nelson’s hypothesis of McCarthy’s aesthetic is not fully realized in novel. Instead <em>The Company She Keeps</em> reveals the roots of McCarthy’s aesthetic, which she will continue to define throughout her career.<br />
<br />
Rhiannon Tudhope<br />
CHUM338: New York City in the ‘40s<br />
Wesleyan University<br />
May 2011<br />
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<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_ednref">[i]</a> Deborah Nelson. “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy.” <em>American Literary History, Volume 18</em>. Oxford University Press, 2006: 94.</div>
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<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_ednref">[ii]</a> Mary McCarthy. “Fact in Fiction.” <em>A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays</em>. The New York Review of Books: New York, 2002: 200.</div>
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<a href="https://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/%E2%80%9Cthe-preservation-of-disunity-confronting-pain-in-the-company-she-keeps%E2%80%9D/#_ednref">[iii]</a> Deborah Nelson. “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, </div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-29404849833186066832015-04-26T03:06:00.002-07:002015-04-26T03:16:33.801-07:00Mary McCarthy - New York, Paris, Hull (From the forthcoming Screen Print Series)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-KWwH8MPv76wjFiVrm8DGIGO4O303Yahn_kSSU_0Iqk24SFPdzOgqxeb0FShT9h7E7jVwhfotCssiHoG0ZYx0nSd41iUotsC0iYjQPID1iu3VwuBvz9gCKbm8sgt_nYv-gYO_udrmIOU/s1600/mm+-+purple.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-KWwH8MPv76wjFiVrm8DGIGO4O303Yahn_kSSU_0Iqk24SFPdzOgqxeb0FShT9h7E7jVwhfotCssiHoG0ZYx0nSd41iUotsC0iYjQPID1iu3VwuBvz9gCKbm8sgt_nYv-gYO_udrmIOU/s1600/mm+-+purple.png" height="360" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the forthcoming Screen Print Series <em>Mary McCarthy - New York, Paris, Hull</em></td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEXMpwDm8RtYCt-N3VCYXf0ZibF52CrUOX7voy9vAhhHH5On1ueV8wU8FqA-iy7rxWdjklIEBQAiuDLg76n8Ix6NEPkub6XtY_y7YWrWXhH_FRe7LTo4xsOXmVLjRw_1_nNPl1quApBCg/s1600/mm+blue.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEXMpwDm8RtYCt-N3VCYXf0ZibF52CrUOX7voy9vAhhHH5On1ueV8wU8FqA-iy7rxWdjklIEBQAiuDLg76n8Ix6NEPkub6XtY_y7YWrWXhH_FRe7LTo4xsOXmVLjRw_1_nNPl1quApBCg/s1600/mm+blue.png" height="360" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-62953511287394644822014-12-24T08:14:00.000-08:002015-12-19T06:53:47.050-08:00A Very Merry McCarthy Christmas<h1 class="gb-volume-title" dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">From</span> Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy</h1>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Ellen Brady Finn recalls a Christmas party at Wellfleet in 1949 given by Alice Brayton (who McCarthy would later describe as 'The Very Unforgettable Miss Brayton'):</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">The Broadwaters' first Christmas, there was a little auction and the children were given ten pennies to bid on presents. Miss Alice auctioned the presents herself. Reuel was a chubby little boy and he spent all his money on this great big gorgeous tinselly stocking full of candy. It was eleven o'clock in the morning and Reuel was hungry. The rest of us were biding our time and getting wonderful presents....For some reason Mary and Bowden were terribly upset by all this. I think they wanted Reuel to make an impression as a tasteful little boy. Afterwards they came to our house - we had a party after Miss Brayton's every year - and Mary said that Miss Brayton had "cruelly psychoanalyzed her guests".</span></span><br />
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<span class="addmd" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; left: -5px; margin-left: 2px; position: relative;"><br /></span>Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-52507604078761083242014-12-06T05:43:00.004-08:002014-12-06T05:43:58.808-08:00Old money is fully as moronic as new money<img height="299" src="http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-old-money-is-fully-as-moronic-as-new-money-but-it-has-inherited-an-appearance-of-cultivation-mary-mccarthy-322432.jpg" width="640" />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-2608463948253917482014-10-04T06:25:00.000-07:002014-10-04T06:25:44.685-07:00The students of the early '30's, as Miss McCarthy remembers them, were more adventurous and rebellious than us. and had a deeply-ingrained suspicion of anything conventional.<div id="veridiancontentdiv" style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: 'Helvetica neue', Helvetica, 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; padding-bottom: 30px;">
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From The Vassar Chronicle Oct 1949<br />
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Mary McCarthy '33, Author Of "The Oasis," Visits VC Begins Research For "Holiday" Article About Alma Mater</div>
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by Lorraine Adelman</div>
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For the past week. Miss Mary McCarthy, Vassar 'S3 and author of The Oasis, has been on campus collecting material for one of a scries of college profiles, written by outstanding alumni, which is being presented by Holiday magazine. To gather this material, Miss McCarthy has been visiting classes, talking with small groups of students, and reading up on the college publications. Halfway through the week she decided that she "could have written the article much better" if she had stayed at home. Miss McCarthy has found many difference! between the Vassar she knew and the college as she sees it today. For example, she thinks that student dress used to be much "stoppier." "The girls today wear jeans with a sense of design." she said. adding that the P.P. students she knew were really "disreputable." The only changes she has noted in the .physical setup arc that the seniors no longer live together in Main, and that the Warden has kmg since ceased to room girls together in groups of six. She was agreeably surprised to find the advisory system in such good health, since fifteen years ago it was all but "dead."</div>
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The students of the early '30's, as Miss McCarthy remembers them, were more adventurous and rebellious than us. and had a deeply-ingrained suspicion of anything conventional. Miss McCarthy remarked that no place like the Pub could have existed "as an official place for people to go for amusement," and that no one would have dreamed of entertaining her date "under the aegis of the Alumnae Secretary." Furthermore, she added, regardless of what she really thought, no student would have ever considered confessing to the Dean in her freshman autobiography that all she was looking forward to after graduation was marriage and a home. There are. however, some things about a college girl that never change. Bridge, alternating with Pounce, a vicious kind of double solitaire, was the favorite way to waste time, and it was considered "quite chic" to be able to p«S« exams without studying for them The Vassar girl fifteen years ago thought her Bryn Mawr contemporary was "studious in rather a dreary way." and considered Smith and Wcllesley "as sort of country clubs with very km academic stand ards"</div>
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Miss McCarthy believes that tlie Vassar student today is in general more "nicely serious" than she used to be, and that the overall scope of her interests has been broadened, if not raised. She feels that while the avcraKe girl is perhaps more alert to contemporary problems, the intensity of those wlio are really interested is less, and that there has also been a loss of awareness at the cultural level. She finds tliat "something has vanisl>ed" in the way of the student who used to "dedicate herself heroically" to an ideal, be it art, politics, or whatever. Most of the girls here today, she thinks, are better adjusted and more sheltered than the ones she knew, despite the tremendous increase in their personal freedom. The Vassar student, according to Mi«s McCarthy, cannot be fitted into one certain category or type. Although she may be considered by MM to be predominantly "intellectual" or "athletic." she is usually a combination of many qualities and many abilities.</div>
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Miss McCarthy believes that this Amalgamation is a conscious goal towards which Vassar strives, and for which it is peculiarly well suited. When asked what stereotype of the Vassar student she found among her friends, Miss McCarthy answered that her male acquaintances have a "very high" one. "They think of her," she said, "as sort of a glorified Shakespearean heroine, someone who is an ideal combination of beauty, wit, and intelligence." Although the copy for her article is due December 1, Miss McCarthy</div>
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said that it wiil probably not appear fur at least six mouths. "Sine 1 am writing tor ma s circulation," the commented, "the profile will have to be mainly atmospheric—l hope you all won't be disappointed by it." Her one regret, she said, was that she had not been able to. talk to more student* while she was here.</div>
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<table style="color: #404040; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><tbody>
<tr><td valign="top"><b>Page 1</b></td></tr>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-59806449153035234022014-09-13T05:51:00.000-07:002014-09-13T05:51:30.717-07:00SHOULD NOVELS ARGUE?<h2 style="background-color: white;">
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<hdl>SHOULD NOVELS ARGUE?</hdl></h2>
<b style="background-color: white;">Date:</b><dat style="background-color: white;"> January 18, 1981</dat><br />
<b>MARY</b> <b>McCARTHY</b>'S new book transcribes the Northcliffe Lectures she gave some months ago at University College, London. Her main argument is that the classic <b>novel</b> in the 19th century grew up and grew strong upon <b>ideas</b> and arguments provoked by public issues, politics, religion - the questions of Free Trade, Empire, women, Reform and so forth. It was assumed that a serious <b>novel</b> would deal with such questions in their bearing upon the themes of power, money, sex and class. The novelist's relation to his readers was sustained by a shared assumption that these matters constituted reality. Miss <b>McCarthy</b> believes that this assumption was undermined by Henry James, and that James's sense of the <b>novel</b> has dominated the general understanding of fiction from that day to this. She argues that in the typical Jamesian fiction <b>ideas</b>, concepts and public issues are mostly replaced by images, hints, guesses, sensations, nuances of sensibility. James's characters, she says, are mostly interested in themselves and in one another, not in anything as external as Free Trade. They visit art galleries, but they never argue about the pictures they have seen.<br />
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According to Miss McCarthy, the damage James did in practice was given currency and respectability by T.S. Eliot's theories: It was Eliot who praised James for having ''a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.'' Eliot's influence was such that readers started thinking that ideas are crude things, good enough for journalism but not for a work of art. The serious novelist in our own day, Miss McCarthy argues, is discouraged from dealing with ideas or from making debate and argument an important part of his fiction. A few Jewish novelists, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, have demanded the right ''to juggle ideas in full view of the public,'' but this right ''is never conceded to us goys.''<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="hit0000"></a>Miss McCarthy's thesis is not convincing. James did not banish ideas from the <b>novel</b>. His novels ''The Bostonians,'' ''The Princess Casamassima'' and several other of his fictions are full of ideas and relentless in debating them. It is true that James was never content merely to represent an argument as if its interest consisted solely in the nature of the ideas deployed; he always insisted that ideas are vivid when they become motives in the person who holds them and lives by them. His interest in ideas was not in their intrinsic quality, but in the part they played in the imagined lives of his characters. Miss McCarthy finds it odd that in James's ''The Spoils of Poynton'' we are not told in any detail what the furniture is like or why it is valuable, although the entire <b>novel</b> turns upon a quarrel over its possession. This seems to me beside the point: What divides the several characters is not the market value of Poynton and its furnishings but their different relations to these things, differences of taste and appreciation.<br />
But even if it could be shown that James tried to disqualify ideas as constituents of the <b>novel</b>, it would still be clear that he failed. Miss McCarthy thinks that he closed off some of the most vital possibilities of fiction by excluding ideas; but in fact James did not prevent Proust, Joyce, Mann, Lawrence or Forster from writing novels in which ideas and the arguments they provoke are important matters. Miss McCarthy tries to enforce some distinction between ''the <b>novel</b> of ideas'' and ''the <b>novel</b> of images.'' The distinction is unreal. There is no such thing as ''the <b>novel </b>of images,'' for it is impossible to sustain a narrative simply by moving from one image to another - and Miss McCarthy produces no examples as proof. Such categories have more to do with theory than with actual <b>novel</b>s, but there is some merit in countering Miss McCarthy's argument by noting that ideas and arguments are incorporated with little or no fuss in many contemporary novels. Think of novels by Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Solzhenitsyn, Mailer, Styron, Updike, Pynchon, V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. Indeed, the more one thinks of Miss McCarthy's thesis, the more bizarre it appears; almost as weird as that extraordinary remark about Jews and goys. Who are those readers who have denied to gentile novelists the argumentative rights given to their Jewish colleagues?<br />
But even if the proposed distinction between the <b>novel</b> of ideas and the <b>novel</b> of images is unreal, it is still useful to Miss McCarthy if she is mainly interested in defending the kind of fiction she has written. I think whatever verve ''Ideas and the Novel'' has arises mostly from that consideration. As an account of the 19th-century <b>novel</b>, or even of the presence of ideas in it, the book is not persuasive. Miss McCarthy has some fine things to say about ''Les Miserables,'' especially about Jean Valjean's conscience as a dialogue. But her exposition of the larger subject is fragmentary and eccentric. The book becomes interesting not in its bearing upon the official theme, but in its relation to Miss McCarthy's own fiction, especially to ''A Charmed Life'' and ''The Company She Keeps.'' Her later fiction has received a pretty cool response. Is it the case that it has been ill-received precisely because it is, according to Miss McCarthy's enforced distinction, fiction of ideas?<br />
Miss McCarthy's 1973 <b>novel</b> ''Birds of America'' began with a quoted epigraph: ''To attempt to embody the Idea in an example, as one might embody the wise man in a <b>novel</b>, is unseemly. ...''<br />
I don't recognize the quotation; but no matter. ''Birds of America'' made yet another attempt to embody an Idea, and to show ideas in circulation, like Miss McCarthy's Peter rattling around Europe, a few chapters in Paris, a few in Rome, wherever he can find people willing to argue about democracy, Communism, the C.I.A., the Sistine Chapel or Hanoi. This is the kind of fiction Miss McCarthy likes to write and many people, evidently, like to read. Where then is the problem?<br />
I think it is to be located in Miss McCarthy, and not elsewhere. She seems to feel that seriously-minded critics of the <b>novel</b> have taken James and Eliot at their word and have conspired to put a low value upon the <b>novel</b> of ideas. She believes, however, that civilization will be saved, if saved at all, only by the force of ideas. This belief was more widespread in the years immediately after World War II than it is today. Such writers as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv and Miss McCarthy believed that the novel was one of the best means of showing how contingency may be converted into thought, and thought into action. The problem was to distinguish between good thought and bad thought, good ideas and bad ideas; and then to make the good prevail. ''Ideas and the <b>Novel</b>'' issues from the same context of feeling. Miss McCarthy's implication is that ideas are having a hard time and that, so long as this state of affairs persists, civilization can't be saved.<br />
But the case is not as simple as that. Miss McCarthy distinguishes between good ideas and bad, but she does not admit that even a good and true idea may go stale and die. Or rather, she has forgotten the fact. In her essay on Flaubert's ''Madame Bovary,'' reprinted in ''The Writing on the Wall,'' she noted that for Flaubert ''all ideas become trite as soon as somebody expresses them,'' and that this applies ''indifferently to good ideas and bad.'' An idea may begin full of life and spirit but by repetition it is delivered into a dictionary of idees re,cues, as Miss McCarthy noted, ''borrowed ideas and stock sentiments which circulate tritely among the population.'' It is curious that Miss McCarthy accepted the dismal fate of ideas when she wrote about Flaubert, but now, writing from other needs, has persuaded herself that it may be ignored or transcended. She still thinks of ideas as valued objects, social treasures currently held in low repute: She assumes that the mind has a privileged relation to ideas and that it cannot survive without that relation. These assumptions remain, however, unexamined. ''Ideas and the <b>Novel</b>'' takes its own ideas on faith and is consequently diminished.<br />
<br />
Denis Donoghue is the Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University. His new book, ''Ferocious Alphabets,'' will appear this winter.<br />
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<nyt_links_offsite type="barnesandnoble" version="1.0"></nyt_links_offsite>Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-53155715876206309872014-09-12T08:05:00.001-07:002014-09-12T08:05:18.280-07:00Ideas and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’ Mary McCarthy<br />
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Ideas and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’</h1>
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Mary McCarthy</h2>
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You could say that <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crime and Punishment</em> was a novel about the difference between theory and practice. Well, if you were a philistine, you could. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>, too, deals with ideas and their execution. It does so on a wider scale, yet without any such reassuring conclusion. In the earlier book, there was just one theory, Raskolnikov’s, which he fails to prove, owing to his own half-heartedness in applying it – an indication of a possible weakness in the theory itself. In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>, there is a whole band of theorists, each possessed by a doctrinaire idea, and a whole innocent Russian town to practise on. But in the outcome there is no divergence between idea and reality: in most cases theory and practice have fused, which is what makes the novel so frightening. The exception is the superannuated old liberal, Stepan Trofimovich, an idealist in his writings and something more abject in his daily conduct, who naturally holds no terrors for his fellow citizens.</div>
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It is possible to see <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crime and Punishment</em> as a prophecy of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>. There is the seed of a terrorist in Raskolnikov, which cannot come to fruit since he lacks a prime essential: organisation. He is isolated, and his having a devoted mother and sister who bring out the ‘good’ in him makes him feel all the more cut off. He appears to believe in socialism, yet his only friend, the former student Razumikhin, is a conservative and disquietingly thick with functionaries of the law. A minor figure, Lebeziatnikov, is lumped together with Raskolnikov by a spiteful person as one of a pair of ‘notorious infidels, agitators and atheists’. Lebeziatnikov, who keeps talking about a commune and regards Sonia’s being forced into prostitution as ‘a vigorous protest against the organisation of society’, is certainly a socialist, but Raskolnikov, who has no time for idiots, consistently gives him a very wide berth. He is reserved, proud and unsociable, and despite his boldness in theory, never had any plan to commit more than a single murder (the second was unplanned and regretted), obviously not a chain of crimes. A final liability is the difficulty he has in making up his mind.</div>
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In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>, all these deficiencies are made up. There is determination in Pyotr Verkhovensky, an organising gift, complete absence of scruple. He thinks large, in sweeping arcs, not one faltering step at a time. He is highly sociable, almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ‘quintet’ of inconspicuous citizens, each and all inhabited by ideas. These obscure men are chords he knows how to strike at the right moment in a revolutionary overture of his own authorship. The ideas that possess them can be turned to his purposes regardless of intellectual sympathy or pooling for a common aim. Making up the ‘quintet’ are five one-track minds bent on different versions of revolutionary doctrine, but for the purpose their divergences do not matter, any more than those between the first violin and the kettle-drum. The important thing is that each instrument know its cue. And they can function as instruments in Pyotr Verkhovensky’s diabolical concert because each has merged with an idea: they <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">are</em> ideas, so to speak, without ties to anything material, which might serve as a deterrent. Self-persuaded, they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but can merely go from A to B to C by a rigid track of inference.</div>
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The devils of the Russian title are not the quintet, nor Kirilov, nor the young ensign, Erkel. The devils are the ideas in possession of them that have made them into automata. The only demon is Verkhovensky, who believes in nothing, has no ideas or principles. If he is an Idea, which I wonder about, it is an idea without specific content – a principle devoted (but not dedicated) to destruction. Dedication is not his style.</div>
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He is aware of a lack in himself, which is why he turns to Stavrogin. The nucleus needs a centre, and he himself cannot be that, for he is not within but without – a manipulator and strategist. The Byronic figure of the young nobleman appeals to him. His remarkable mask-like beauty, as of Death-in-Life, almost casts him for the central role in Pyotr Stepanovich’s Apocalypse. Or, to put it in more practical terms, from what Pyotr has heard of his exploits in the town he perceives that he can find a use for him: Stavrogin may be able to supply the charisma that is wanting, the seductive spark of the inhuman. Pyotr himself is inhuman enough, but on a lower level of being, as he is aware. He is infernal but cold, sharp, precise, business-like. The very fact that he is greedy to make use of Stavrogin, once the possibility has occurred to him, is typical of the economics of his mind. ‘You will be the leader, I will be your secretary,’ he tells him at one point, showing as concise a grasp as Stalin’s of where the levers of power in revolutionary politics lie. And later, in great excitement: ‘You are the leader, you are the sun and I am your worm.’ It is no shock to see him fawning, but his excited state would be quite out of character if he were not carried away by the vision of what he can<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">do</em> with Stavrogin.</div>
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Verkhovensky can find a use for everything – not just the enigmatic vagaries of Stavrogin, but every failing, every tic, in the community. These are handles he can coolly pull to initiate action, and the ideas of the quintet, which resemble tics, are among the handles he has practised with. There is the theory of Shigalyov, a man with long ears like a donkey’s and a philosophy of despair to match: his final gloomy solution of the social question is ‘the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths.’ There is the thought of the miserly Liputin, a domestic despot and Fourierist who believes in the ‘social harmony’ and gloats at night over visions of a future phalanstery: he has come to the conclusion that, as the necessary massacre of 100 million persons would take no less than thirty to fifty years to achieve, maybe emigration is the answer.</div>
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These two are adherents of Verkhovensky’s quintet, but he has many other instruments in the town, sometimes unknown to themselves – for example, the provincial governor’s wife, Yulia Mikhailovna, who has become so enamoured of the new ideas she imbibes from him that she has virtually converted her salon into a revolutionary cell, arousing jealousy in the other ladies. There is Kirilov, a disciple of Feuerbach and believer in a new man-god, who has resolved to commit suicide in order to free other men from the superstitious fear of death. This could not suit Pyotr’s hand better, since Kirilov gladly agrees to donate his suicide to the cause, leaving the time of it for Pyotr to fix. It will be timed just right to cover the murder of the brooding Slavophil Shatov, who has broken with the ‘Society’ and whose execution as a spy has been voted by the quintet.</div>
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Fedka, the convict, no social idealist, is another of Pyotr’s agents. His need of a passport enrolls him initially, and a gift of money assures his following through. With Stavrogin’s tacit consent, he will murder a drunkard posing as an army captain, who has got tired of distributing leaflets for the cause, and the fellow’s demented crippled sister, whom Stavrogin has secretly married. Even before this, Fedka will undertake another commission: to rob and desecrate an especially venerated icon, with a confederate – no ordinary criminal but a quintet member, who will commit the ultimate blasphemy of placing a live mouse in it. Coming on top of other indignities, this outrage leads to the district governor’s having a nervous breakdown and leaving town for Switzerland. But before his nervous illness is recognised and he is deprived of his functions, this mild bureaucrat has had some striking factory-workers flogged – an error the town will pay dear for.</div>
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The fever of organisation is such that there is no act that does not lead to something else. Sometimes the hand of Verkhovensky is discernible; sometimes not. The vanity of the writer Karmazinov leads him to pronounce an absurd farewell to his public, entitled ‘<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Merci</em>’, at the benefit fête for the governesses of the province, and this oration is a contributing cause of the general disorderly uproar that evening, which leads to fires being set. We know that Pyotr did not suggest the topic of the oration – indeed, having been shown the text, he remembers the title as ‘<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bonjour</em>.’ Yet we feel that he was somehow behind the governesses’ fête – did he slyly urge the charitable idea on Yulia Mikhailovna? – and behind the invitation to Karmazinov, who has already demonstrated what a fool he will be on the platform by his excited, approving interest in the manifestos that are circulating through the town. And who was the guiding spirit in the benefit committee’s decision – catastrophic – not to serve a buffet lunch and champagne to ticket-holders?</div>
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There is a terrible sequentiality in all this as in ‘The house that Jack built’. Events pile up, and every slender straw thrown on the heap is arsonous. The town is tinder, ready to ignite at a touch. Of course this is mainly the work of Pyotr Stepanovich, who has prepared the ground. Yet there are times when the alarming incidents seem to have their source in some indefinable larger causality. Moreover, such implacable sequiturs are not usual in Dostoevsky, where normally there is room for the arbitrary, the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">non</em>-sequitur. Here the only non-sequitur is the unexpected arrival of Shatov’s wife, and this is also the only episode that has <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">no</em> effect on things to come. It is as though the reasoning process going on in the characters’ heads had been copied by outward events, which seem to be obeying Aristotelian logic with never an undistributed middle term. The implacable sequiturs may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it.<br />
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Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoevsky. In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crime and Punishment</em>, the reader was mostly inside Raskolnikov, listening to his thoughts. In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em> – with the exception of the suppressed chapter, ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ – everything is told from the outside, by a gossipy young friend of Stepan Trofimovich’s, who enjoys his confidence as well as that of the governor’s wife, so that he is well placed to tell what went on. He draws no moral conclusions, not being qualified to serve as the author’s representative: he simply and somewhat excitedly reports, as though ‘filling in’ some visitor who had missed out on that momentous period ‘among us’. The events are related from hindsight, as he has pieced them together looking back and verifying where he can. And, like anything seen from hindsight, they fit into a clear sequence of cause and effect – the opposite of what we experience with Raskolnikov, whose perspective is toward the future, hence still open-ended. Moreover, the narrator of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>, in the interests of historical accuracy, feels obliged not to leave out any detail that might complete the picture. Since he is not quite confident, even looking backward, of being able to distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, we get that comical mixture, typical of gossip, of the relevant and the irrelevant. The mountains are confused with the valleys; the whole moral landscape is obligingly flattened for our inspection.</div>
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This unconsciousness of scale on the part of the narrator is one of the delights of the novel. We understand that we can trust his veracity but not always his judgment; some of the opinions he utters echo in our minds more loudly than he seems to expect. For instance, the well-known passage in the introductory chapter: ‘At one time it was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy and godlessness, and the rumour gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but engage in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter.’ He is referring to the circle around old Stepan Trofimovich and is saying considerably more than he is aware of saying. To Dostoevsky’s mind, the little circle, in the last analysis, has been pretty much what rumour said, while maintaining a double screen of illusion about itself. Its members are less dangerous than they generally like to think (here the narrator is right), but more dangerous in their frivolity than he is capable of knowing. In lightly dismissing their talk as harmless, he shows an obliviousness of real consequences that marks him for Dostoevsky as a typical unthinking liberal. The circle of idle chatterers around Stepan Trofimovich was dangerous because it prepared the way for the hyperactive circles that sprang up on the cleared ground.</div>
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There is no doubt that Dostoevsky meant to pass a stern judgment when he made the ‘harmless’ old liberal the father of Pyotr Stepanovich and the former tutor of Stavrogin. The devils that were loosed on the community were incubated in that muddled, innocent brain, which when put the question cannot even say unequivocally whether or not it believes in God: ‘I can’t understand why they make me out an infidel here. I believe in God, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">mais distinguons</em>. I believe in Him as a Being who is conscious of Himself in me only ... As for Christianity, for all my genuine respect for it ... I am more of an antique pagan, like the great Goethe ... ’ Liberalism is the father of nihilism; it is only a step to Kirilov and his ruling idea of the man-god, and Kirilov at least has the manhood – or godhood – to act on his crazed conviction.</div>
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The town was ‘ready’ for Pyotr Stepanovich and his quintet, which was only the inner circle of activists. There was a less clearly defined outer circle – possibly there were several concentric ones – of adherents to a secret organisation referred to as ‘the Society’. And a proof of the town’s ‘readiness’ to catch fire was that there were people in it who did not know whether they were members or not. Long after the scare had died down, an elderly Councillor, wearing the decoration of the Stanislas Order, came forward and confessed that for three months he had been under the influence of the International: unable to produce evidence for the claim, he insisted that ‘he had felt it in all his feelings.’ Earlier, at the height of the strange affair, the quaking Stepan Trofimovich, who has undergone a police search of his rooms, is queried suddenly by the narrator: ‘Stepan Trofimovich, tell me as a friend ... do you belong to some secret society or not?’... ‘That depends, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">voyez-vous</em>.’ ‘How do you mean, “it depends”?’ ‘When with one’s whole heart one is an adherent of progress ... who can answer it? You may suppose that you don’t belong, and suddenly it turns out that you do ... ’ In his uncertainty, which fear and pompous vanity make a half-certainty, he is convinced that he is going to be taken ‘in a cart’ to Siberia. The chosen few of the nihilist inner circle are, on the whole, uncompromising in their positions, but those who are outside and somewhat envious (i.e. virtually the entire educated population) behave vis-à-vis the terrorists with the wildest inconsistency. Stepan Trofimovich professes to abhor his son’s activities – and maybe he does – yet the narrator learns that on his premises the police have found two manifestos. ‘Manifestos!’ cries the narrator. ‘Do you mean to say you ...’ ‘Oh, ten were left here,’ the old man answers with vexation.</div>
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Rumour and imagination, naturally, add fuel to the fire that the devils have set. In fact, it is a question whether Pyotr’s vast organisation is not largely imaginary, an idea in his mind. This is Stavrogin’s suspicion. It has occurred to him more than once that Pyotr is mad, and Pyotr’s worship of him, which he finds repulsive, seems to decide the issue. That happens at a peculiar moment, when Verkhovensky finally articulates a credo. He has been saying that he is a scoundrel and not a socialist. ‘But the people must believe that we know what we are after ... We will proclaim destruction ... Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before ... the earth will weep for its old gods .... Well, then we shall bring forward ... whom? ... Ivan the Tsarevich. You! You!’ After a minute, Stavrogin understands: ‘A pretender? ... So that’s your plan at last!’ He himself is slated to be the pretender. ‘In this we have a force, and what a force! ... the whole gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!’ ‘Madness,’ answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verkhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It had been almost a disappointment to find that he had a ‘positive’ side, a ‘constructive’ side, after all.</div>
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I am willing to accept that Verkhovensky is mad, Stavrogin, the child-violator, is mad, the quintet is mad, Kirilov is mad, and that among the founding members of the local ‘Society’ not even Shatov is sane. A clinical finding to that effect would not greatly alter our understanding of the novel. Possession by an idea is a common form of insanity. But did the entire community go temporarily mad – the governor’s wife, the governor, Stepan Trofimovich’s protectress, who broke with him because he had not kept her abreast of the new ideas, the old gentleman who was sure that he had been under the influence of the Socialist International for ‘fully’ three months? That, too, is not out of harmony, I think, with the impression Dostoevsky wanted to make. The fact that the whole pathological episode, if that is what it was, is viewed from the outside, as though offered to a clinician for judgment, is surely meant to suggest that. As is known, the story was originally planned as a satire on liberal and nihilist ideas, and much that is satirical survives in the final version: the grotesque members of the ‘quintet’, the governor and his wife, Stepan Trofimovich and his domineering sympathiser, the landowner Varvara Petrovna, ‘a tall, yellow bony woman with an extremely long face, suggestive of a horse’. To picture the new ideas as a virulent illness attacking a body politic is a classical strategy on the part of a satirist, and the course of the disease is represented here in what often seems a dry, mock-medical vein: predisposing conditions, first symptoms, onset (Stavrogin biting the governor’s ear), temporary remission, aggravated symptoms, spread to other parts of the body, subsidence, final recovery.</div>
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Once the figures of Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov were developed – they must have been present in germ from the outset – a gloomy religious element began to suffuse the novel, which up to then one could imagine as a sort of Russian <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Headlong Hall</em>, with perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites contentedly discoursing while Squire Headlong-Stavrogin set a charge of dynamite to his property. Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov brought suffering – unacceptable to satire – into the tale. Not a ray of comedy falls on them, and yet by a miracle, which I think is effected through the ‘redemption’ of Stepan Trofimovich, the antagonistic elements are able to co-exist, the satiric metaphor and something like a Slavophil myth of the Passion.</div>
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The loosing of the devils yielded a total of five murders, two suicides, one death-by-manslaughter, one death as a result of exposure (Stepan Trofimovich), two other related deaths, the burning-down of a considerable area of the town, general damage to property. Pyotr Stepanovich, the author of it all, escapes as though in a cloud of brimstone, by taking the train to Petersburg.<br />
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It is clear that Dostoevsky stood in awe of the power of ideas. The most fearful, evidently, in his eyes were socialistic ideas with their humanitarian tinge. And here at any rate he could speak from experience: his having belonged to a group – the Petrashevsky circle – that engaged in discussions of utopian socialism had taken him to Siberia and nearly to the firing-squad. Yet this experience, he believed, had not only taught him a lesson in the ordinary sense (‘Stay out of discussion groups’), but had brought about a spiritual rebirth. His dread of the power of ideas combined with a fatal attraction to them; like so many Russian writers then and now, he was drawn to ideas as if to a potent drug. In Geneva, long after he had returned, a new man, from Siberia, he could not resist going to hear Bakunin expound his theories, and he expressed disappointment that Bakunin was not more constructive. In Dostoevsky, ideas may lead those they fasten on to extreme suffering, but they can also be bringers of redemption, the one in fact leading to the other, as had happened in his own case.</div>
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Moreover, once an idea has possessed Dostoevsky, he seldom lets it drop but continues to examine it from all sides, at the risk of a certain monotony. Thus Raskolnikov’s All-is-permitted theory peeps through at intervals in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>: it is Stavrogin who expounds it in his atrocious practice but also in words. As a ‘prince’, he has given the ‘No barriers’ concept an aesthetic twist, almost a cool-headed twirl. ‘Is it true,’ Shatov asks him, seemingly much worried, ‘that you declared you saw no distinction in beauty between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity?’ Stavrogin does not reply.</div>
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It is curious to turn from all this dark questioning to the homely English novel of the same time. George Eliot was a great moral writer, but no character in her novels, however thoughtful, would be asking a question like that of another character. It is not that she would have shrunk from such a phrase as ‘for the good of humanity’: she thought a great deal about our suffering race and clearly felt that it was her duty to devote her professional life to serving it. Besides, she had an interest in theories of socialism and was perfectly familiar with abstract thought. With her competence in French and German, she must have read many of the same books that Dostoevsky read. But the kind of questions her characters put to themselves and to each other, though sometimes lofty, never cast doubt on basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the inviolability of the moral law. Unlike the great novels of the Continent, the English novel is seldom searching, at any rate not on the plane of articulated thought.</div>
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I doubt, for instance, that it could ever have occurred to George Eliot to wonder about the validity of mental activity in itself. She could not have pictured ideas as baleful or at best equivocal forces. About the worst ideas can do, in her view, is to encourage a tendency towards headstrongness in a heroine. We see this in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Middlemarch</em> with Dorothea Brooke, whose determination to be the helpmeet of Mr Casaubon springs from a fixed longing of her brain. ‘It would be like marrying Pascal,’ she says to herself. ‘I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.’ But it is all a mistake, as with Emma’s obstinate plans for Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel. Mr Casaubon is no Pascal; his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an ‘idea’ he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in his head. In a sense, this, like<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Emma</em>, is an education novel: Dorothea has finally grown up when she learns to stop asking her husband about the progress he is making on his master work.</div>
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Among George Eliot’s novels, the best place to look for an examination of ideas and their influence might be <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Felix Holt, the Radical</em>. On the surface, this short novel has quite a lot in common with the novels I have been discussing in these lectures, especially <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crime and Punishment</em> and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Red and the Black</em>. The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his dress, often proudly contemptuous in his manner, and ambitious, not for himself but for humanity or, more accurately, for the small part of it he knows. He wants them all and particularly Esther Lyon to be better than they are. He is angered by her reading-matter – Byron and Chateaubriand – by her ladylike ways and taste for fine gloves, all of which are proofs of shallowness. He is a reformer in the public sphere, too, who earnestly desires to improve the lot of working men and believes that the first step must be to win them from the slavery of drink through night and Sunday classes: without education, the working man cannot advance his cause. When we meet Felix, on the eve of a parliamentary election, he is deeply troubled by corrupt electoral practices: above all, the habit of treating in public houses. In short, he is a man of the Left with a number of stubborn ideas that unfit him for practical politics.</div>
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Though he is not a religious believer and despises ordinary conventions, he differs from a Raskolnikov in that he would not consider for an instant violating the moral law in order to benefit humanity. In fact, this is precisely what estranges him from the Radical politicians he encounters, who have easy consciences in such matters, accepting with a wink the prospect of violence – a little rough-and-tumble – for the ultimate good of defeating the Tory. Felix would never commit a murder, even in the abstract, turning it over in his mind as a theory. Yet in reality it happens to him to kill a man and to be tried and sentenced for it, though his intention was to halt a riot and the blow he struck was not meant to be mortal. Thus he joins the ranks of principled heroes of 19th-century fiction who end up on the wrong side of the law: Jean Valjean, Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, Nekhludov in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Resurrection</em>, who joins the woman he has wronged – the prostitute Maslova – in the convict gang travelling to Siberia. No reflection, however, precedes the decision that leads Felix unintentionally to take a man’s life: an impulse, rather, rooted in his nature sends him to try to head off the riotous working men who will only damage their cause and other people’s property by a drunken spree of violence. In the style of so many other 19th-century ‘new men’, he has proudly announced, ‘I am a man of this generation,’ but what we find in his actions is a simple old-fashioned boy any mother could be proud of – a testimonial to right training.</div>
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‘If there’s anything our people want convincing of,’ he tells Esther Lyon when she comes to see him in prison, ‘it is, that there’s some dignity and happiness for a man other than changing his station.’ (By ‘our people’ he means his own class, the working people, not the English nation, I assume.) Of course, there is some truth in what he says, but it is a truth that discourages political action. Felix seems to be totally immune to his century, as though he had been vaccinated against the bug of equality. The novel, which ends with him out of jail and happily married (there is even a little Felix), has a lengthy appendix called ‘Address to Working Men’. There the author imagines Felix expounding his political philosophy to a working-class audience: ‘Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved ... is not by any attempt to do away directly with existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody would have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life ... but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties.’ One is grateful for the knowledge that the address <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">is</em>imaginary, with the audience’s reaction mercifully <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">un</em>imagined.</div>
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Despite all her learning and her capacious intelligence, ideas for George Eliot are wholesome moral reflections: she does not seem to have suspected that they could possibly be anything but ‘improving’. Tolerance was her great virtue as a novelist: she always seeks to widen, to make common to all, emotions in her characters’ bosoms that the reader might be inclined to spurn any intimacy with. I take an example at random from <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Middlemarch</em>, where the pious banker, Bulstrode, obliged to face his conscience, at once begins to dodge. ‘If this be hypocrisy,’ the author writes, ‘it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all.’ The effect of such reminders, page after page, is broadening: we are all made of the same stuff, we have to acknowledge. And, side by side with the injunction to look in the mirror, a general cure is suggested whose name is unselfishness. This is the single thought urged on us by her novels. It is stated explicitly over and over and driven home by telling examples. Mr Casaubon is selfish, Rosamond Vincy is selfish, her brother Fred is selfish, Tom Tulliver is selfish, Harold Transome is selfish, Esther Lyon starts out to be selfish but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of unselfishness, Dorothea Brooke is headstrong yet capable of self-sacrifice.</div>
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The limitations of this urgent central idea may explain why George Eliot’s ‘good’ characters are so unconvincing, even when she tries, as with Felix Holt and Will Ladislaw, to give them a rough edge that might make them complicated to know socially. Her selfish characters are far more persuasive since we are forced to recognise ourselves – or part of ourselves – in them. Thus the virtue of tolerance we are called on to exercise by this writer at her fullest and best has no work to do with the characters we are instructed to admire and to imitate. If George Eliot fails, even in<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Middlemarch</em>, to be a very great writer, this is, I think, because of an intellectual deficiency. The division of central characters into self-seeking and non-self-seeking is inadequate as a key to understanding. In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Felix Holt</em>, for example, it tells us nothing about the Radicalism that is presumably the subject of the story, and what we get is something strangely like a less ponderous, more charming <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Romola</em>, in costumes of the post-Reform Bill period.</div>
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Dickens knew that an idea can be dangerous. Unlike George Eliot, he was familiar with the hold of abstractions on human flesh and blood; it is not surprising that Dostoevsky read him with eagerness and perhaps learned from him. Still, the incubus or succuba preying on Dickens’s people is usually nothing as clearly identifiable as a theory or concise programme. The great case to the contrary is Mr Gradgrind in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hard Times</em>. From almost the first page, we see how the Utilitarian doctrines that have taken possession of his brain are blighting the natural life of his family, how they wither any hope of instruction in the model school he has set up in Coketown. Here he is in the schoolroom, lecturing the schoolmaster:</div>
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Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts ... Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts. This is the principle upon which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!</div>
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Then: ‘Girl number twenty ... Give me your definition of a horse.’ Sissy Jupe is too frightened to say anything. ‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’</div>
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Mr Gradgrind’s close friend and business associate is Mr Bounderby, who has his own<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">idée fixe</em> and global explanation: ‘The turtle soup and the gold spoon. And the venison.’ It is apparent that these two upholders of the social order are mad, just as mad as the terrorists of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Possessed</em>. The reader is meant to understand that Gradgrind and Bounderby are dangerously insane and that at the same time they are perfectly normal – that is, that many other people share the maniacal ideas they express. Bounderby is a wicked bounder, but Gradgrind is not altogether a bad man: a philanthropist, even, according to his lights – he actually has <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">girls</em> in his school.</div>
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It seems odd at first glance that the idea that has got hold of Mr Gradgrind should be named by him ‘Facts’. The nature of an idea, surely, it to be abstract: i.e. the polar opposite of the concrete, of the plurality of facts, living and dead, each different from the next, that the world consists of. But we soon understand that Mr Gradgrind’s facts are peculiar, not like the ones we know. Here is a definition of a horse, given by a boy pupil, that he is able to commend: ‘Quadruped, Gramnivorous. Forty teeth, namely 24 grinders, four eye-teeth, and 12 incisors. Sheds coat in the spring, in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in the mouth.’ This sounds like the idea of a horse rather than the fact of a horse. It is as though a drawer labeled ‘Horse’ containing miscellaneous pieces of information, dried and filleted for better storage, had been obediently opened in the filing-cabinet that constitutes the star pupil’s mind. The dehydrated facts Mr Gradgrind favours add up to a fleshless abstraction – horse in general.<br />
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The reason for this curious taste of his is evident in his character: he insists on being in control. And here something of importance for my subject emerges. Ideas are utilitarian. They have a purpose. They are formed in consciousness with a regulatory aim, which is to gain control of the swarming minutiae of experience, give them order and direction. That is Mr Gradgrind to a T. He believes in education and the extension of knowledge. He wants to see laws formulated for every department of life that will push back the ever shrinking areas of ignorance, light up dark corners with modern illumination, keep the streets of the mind patrolled. In the interests of thoroughgoing enlightenment, he has forbidden the reading of ‘idle story-books’ in his house. ‘Idle imagination’, he and Bounderby have concluded, is the chief obstacle to the establishment of reason’s rule in the young.</div>
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Well, it is natural that he should be hostile to novels and natural, in turn, that the novel should be hostile to him, even when it happens that he is not a bad man and means well. If we take Mr Gradgrind as representing in caricatural form, not just his own Utilitarian school of thinking (based, after all, on the greatest good of the greatest number), but the mental faculty that is continuously active in formulating ideas, laws, generalisations, then we can look on the novel, which is wedded to minutiae, as his sworn enemy. All art, of course, objects to the continuously active Mr Gradgrind: but the novel is best armed to do battle with him, in that it appears to have one foot in his camp because of the mass of particulars, resembling his ‘Facts’, that it mobilises for its own purposes.</div>
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But it is a strange conflict, with long truces, and often looks like a mere family quarrel. I mean that the novelist’s effort – any artist’s effort – to impose shape and form on that mass of particulars while maintaining their distinctness has something in common with the mind’s will to absolute rule through the synthesising process. They are similar, but they are not the same. The artist’s concern (especially, I should say, the novelist’s) must be to save the particulars at all costs, even at the sacrifice of the perfection of the design. An idea cannot have loose ends, but a novel, I almost think, needs them. Nevertheless, there is enough in common for the novelist to feel, like Dostoevsky, the attraction of ideas while taking up arms against them – most often with the weapons of mockery.</div>
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We tend to suppose that most novelists take the field against particular ideas, like Dickens in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hard Times</em>, that only a few – say, Tolstoy and Lawrence – show an innate angry suspicion of ideas <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">per se</em>, as though the tender living tissue in their care needed protection from the rampaging will to abstraction. Yet even in celebrated victories over specific sets of ideas (Voltaire’s disposal of Leibnitz in the person of Dr Pangloss – ‘If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?’; Orwell’s disposal of Stalinism – ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others’), there is a certain overkill, as though the work were being enjoyed for its own sake. I believe this is always the case, that the tension is always there, except where the novelist has never felt the fascination of ideas, and this, until our own time, has been rare.</div>
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I said just now that the novelist’s concern must be to save the particulars, and perhaps this needs a little explanation. Even when he shows vast social forces in motion (like Victor Hugo or Manzoni or Tolstoy), the novelist’s care is for individual destinies, and it seems to be proper to the novel that they should be small destinies. Not the kings and noblemen of the tragic theatre or the witty bloods of comedy but Renzo and Lucia, Tess, Jude, Stephen Blackpool, Felix and Esther, Cosette. None of these poor sparrows ‘fits’ into the overall social framework, and if they have a place in a larger scheme, it can only be God’s, which is unknowable: ‘The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.’ Now the habit of concern for the small predisposes the novelist to distrust generalisation – to champion Dobbin against the gramnivorous quadruped. The position, however, is not simple. As we have seen, there appears to be an affinity between ideas and facts, both Mr Gradgrind’s kind and the other – that is, between the lofty and the very small – as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad.</div>
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Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr Gradgrind’s side, his common sense – a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now – and his powers of observation led him to despair of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">any</em> recipes for improvement or else to fall back, like George Eliot, on simple housewifely stand-bys: Forget Self and Think of Others.</div>
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Today there is no longer a dilemma. Ideas are held not to belong in the novel: in the art of fiction we have progressed beyond such simplicities. The doctrine of progress in the arts is a hard doctrine, imposing itself even on those who are fervent non-believers. The artist is an imitative beast, and, being of my place and time, I cannot philosophise in a novel in the good old way, any more than I can write ‘We mortals’. A novel that has ideas in it stamps itself as dated: there is no escape from that law.</div>
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For a time, about twenty years ago, it looked as if there could be a compromise. Though an author of standing knew better than to put explicit ideas in his novels, they could be there implicitly, and the reader was allowed – as a student, even encouraged – to take them out. ‘What are Golding’s ideas in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lord of the Flies</em>?’ ‘Is there a Manichean split in Faulkner’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Wild Palms</em>?’ Today all that is quite impermissible. What the author may not put in, the reader may not take out. There must be nothing said or hinted that is remotely subject to paraphrase. In the place of ideas, images still rule the roost, and Balzac’s distinction between the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">roman idéé</em> and the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">roman imagé</em> appears to have been prophetic, though his order of preference is reversed.</div>
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Nevertheless, there are a few back doors left through which ideas may be spirited in, and some talented authors have found them. One brilliant example was furnished by J.G. Farrell in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Siege of Krishnapur</em>, a novel teeming with ideas that is set in India at the time of the Sepoy Mutiny and has an exciting plot as well. Farrell’s motto might have been stated thus: If because of ideas and other unfashionable components your novel is going to seem dated, don’t be alarmed – date it. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Singapore Grip</em> – Farrell’s last novel, he was drowned this past summer – carries the principle on to the fall of Singapore in the Second World War: ideas, characters and setting have a distinct period flavour – that is, they are as solid as furniture and without any touch of camp. A more recent novel, John Updike’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Coup</em>, performs a rather similar feat, moving back, as it were, in time via geography: a ‘developing’ African country bristles with ideas, mainly in the head of its hero, a Western-educated native dictator who finishes, still reflective, in exile in the South of France. There was also Alison Lurie’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Only Children</em>, set in the late Thirties with the ideas and life-styles of the period. In the USA, a special licence has always been granted to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full view of the public: Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never, never conceded to us goys. In concluding, I might mention an unnsual solution to the problem. This was Robert Pirsig’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</em>, an American story of a cross-country trip with philosophical interludes – one of the chief characters was named Phaedrus. Pirsig’s device was simple: he refrained, probably at a financial sacrifice, from calling his book a novel, and it was listed as a non-fiction title. If the novel is going to be revitalised, maybe more such emergency strategies will have to be employed to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader’s main foe.<br />
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-19632290778324645662014-09-11T13:49:00.003-07:002014-09-11T13:49:52.084-07:00Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and some others by Mary McCarthy<br />
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Ideas and the Novel: Henry James and some others</h1>
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Mary McCarthy</h2>
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‘He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Little Review</em> of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it.</div>
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The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute. Implicit in it is the snubbing notion, radical at the time but by now canon doctrine, of the novel as a fine art and of the novelist as an intelligence superior to mere intellect. In this patronising view, the intellect’s crude apparatus was capable only of formulating concepts, which then underwent the process of diffusion, so that by dint of repetition they fell within anybody’s reach. The final, cruel fate of an idea was to turn into an <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">idée reçue</em>. The power of the novelist, insofar as he was a supreme intelligence, was to free himself from the workload of commentary and simply, awesomely, to show: his creation was beyond paraphrase or reduction. As pure work of art, it stood beautifully apart, impervious to the dry rot affecting the brain’s constructions and to the welter of factuality.</div>
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Thus the separation was perceived as twofold. The reform programme for the novel – soon to be promulgated in a position-paper like <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Jacob’s Room</em> (1922) – aimed at correcting, not only the errors of the old practitioners, who were prone to philosophise in their works, but also the Victorian ‘slice of life’ theory still admitted by Matthew Arnold, and later, permissive notions of the novel as a ‘spongy tract’ (Forster) or large loose bag into which anything would fit. Obviously novels of the old, discredited schools – the historical novel, the novel of adventure, the soap-box or pulpit novel – continued and continue to be written despite the lesson of the Master. Indeed, they make up a majority, now as before, but, having no recognised aesthetic willing to claim them, they tend to be treated by our critical authorities as marginal – examples of backwardness if they come from the East (Solzhenitsyn) or of deliberate archaising if they come from the West (say, Iris Murdoch). The pure novel, the quintessential novel, does not acknowledge any family relation with these distant branches. It is a formal, priestly exercise whose first great celebrant was James. The fact that there are no Jamesian novels being produced any more – if there ever were, apart from the Master’s own – does not alter the perspective. The Jamesian model remains a standard, an archetype, against which contemporary impurities and laxities are measured.</div>
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The importance of James lies not so much in his achievements as in the queerness of them. He did not broaden a way for his successors but closed nearly every exit as with hermetic sealing tape. It is undeniable that this American author, almost single-handed, invented a peculiar new kind of fiction, more refined, more stately, than anything known before, purged, to the limit of possibility, of the gross traditional elements of suspense, physical action, inventory, description of places and persons, apostrophe, moral teaching. When you think of James in the light of his predecessors, you are suddenly conscious of what is not there: battles, riots, tempests, sunrises, the sewers of Paris, crime, hunger, the plague, the scaffold, the clergy, but also minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen – poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples, Mr Collins’s ‘Collins’, the comedy of the infinitely small. It cannot have been simply a class limitation, or a limitation of experience, that intimidated his pen. It was a resolve, very American, to scrape his sacred texts clean of the material factor. And it was no small task he laid on himself, since his novels, even more than most maybe, dealt with material concerns – property and money – and unrolled almost exclusively in the realm of the social, mundane by definition. Nevertheless, he succeeded, this American prodigy. He etherealised the novel beyond its wildest dreams and perhaps etherised it as well.</div>
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To take a pleasant example, he managed in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Spoils of Poynton</em> to relate a story of a contest for possession of some furniture in immense detail without ever indicating except in the vaguest way what the desirable stuff was. We gather that quite a lot is French – Louis Quinze and Louis Seize are mentioned once each (‘the sweetest Louis Seize’) – but we also hear of Venetian velvet and of ‘a great Italian cabinet’ in the red room, though with no specifics of place, period, inlays, embossment, and of a little Spanish ivory crucifix. When you think of what Balzac would have done with the opportunity! Actually <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Spoils of Poynton</em> is a Balzacian drama done with the merest hints of props and stage setting. James’s strategy was to abstract the general noun, furniture, from the particulars of the individual pieces, also referred to as ‘things’. He gives us a universal which we can upholster according to our own taste and antiquarian knowledge. In short, he gives us an Idea. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Spoils of Poynton</em> is not a novel about material tables and chairs: it is a novel about the possession and enjoyment of an immaterial Idea, which could be <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">any</em> old furniture, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">all</em> old furniture, beautiful, ugly, or neither – it makes no difference, except that if it is ugly the struggle over it will be more ironic. James, however, is not an ironist; no Puritan can be. And the fact that with this novel we can supply ‘real’ tables and chairs from our own imagination makes <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Spoils of Poynton</em>, to my mind, more true to our common experience, hence more classic, than most of his fictions.<br />
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But that, for the moment, is beside the point. What I should like to bring out now is another peculiarity: that though James’s people endlessly discuss and analyse, they never discuss the subjects that people in society usually do. Above all, politics. It is not true that well-bred people avoid talk of politics. They cannot stay away from it. Outrage over public events that menace, or threaten to menace, their property and privilege has devolved on them by birthright (though it can also be acquired), and they cannot help sharing it when more than two meet, even in the presence of outsiders, which in fact seems to act as a stimulant. This has surely been so from earliest times, and James’s time was no exception, as we know from other sources. But from his fictions (forgetting <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Princess Casamassima</em>, where he mildly ventured into the arena), you could never guess that whispers – or shouts – ever burst out over the tea table regarding the need for a firm hand, for making an example of the ringleaders, what are things coming to, and so on. Dickens’s Mr Bounderby, although no gentleman, put the position in a nutshell with ‘the turtle soup and the gold spoon’ – his own blunt résumé of the trade-unionist’s unmistakable goals. As James’s people are constantly telling each other how intelligent they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us overhear them speak freely.</div>
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Or let us try art. These people are travelled and worldly and often in a state of rapture over the museums and galleries they visit, the noble façades of mansions and dear quaint crockets of cathedrals. Yet they rarely come away from a morning of sightseeing with as much as a half-formed thought. They never dispute about what they have looked at, prefer one artist to another, hazard generalisations. In real life, they would certainly have had their ideas about the revolutions that were occurring in painting and sculpture. In Paris, if only out of curiosity, they would have rushed to seè the Salon des Indépendants. Wild horses could not have kept them away. A bold pair, armed with a letter from Lady Sackville or Isabella Stewart Gardner, might have penetrated Rodin’s studio. His bronze statue of Balzac in a dressing-gown, shown at the Salon des Beaux Arts, would already have led the travellers to take sides, some finding it disgusting and incomprehensible while others were calling it a ‘breakthrough’. What would they have made of the nude Victor Hugo in plaster in the Luxembourg Garden? Or ‘The Kiss’ (‘Rather too suggestive’?) in marble. Unfailingly, one would have heard judgments as to what was permissible and impermissible in art.</div>
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James himself, however unversed in politics he might have been, had no deficiency of art-appreciation. He wrote well and copiously about painting, sculpture and architecture. But not in his novels. There all is allusion and murmurous, indistinct evocation of objects and vistas, in comparison with which Whistler’s ‘Nocturne’ is a sharp-edge photograph.<br />
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In the novels, a taboo is operating – a taboo that enjoins him, like Psyche in the myth or Pandora or Mother Eve, to steer clear of forbidden areas on pain of losing his god-sent gift. The areas on which neither he nor his characters may touch are defined by the proximity of thought to their surface – thought visible, almost palpable, in nuggets or globules readily picked up by the vulgar. Art in other hands might have been such an area, but James took the risk – after all, it was his own great interest, and he dared make it the ruling passion of several of his figures – at the price, however, of treating it always by indirection, as a motive but never as a topic in itself. If you think of Proust, you will see the difference.</div>
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With religion and philosophy, though, James is as circumspect as he is with politics. As son and brother, he must often have heard these subjects earnestly discussed, which perhaps accounts for his dislike of ideas in general. Or was this only a sense, which grew on him as he sought to find his own way, that he must not trespass on father’s and brother’s hunting preserve? In any case, with the exception of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Bostonians</em> – a middle-period extravagant comedy, which he came almost to disavow, full of cranks, cults, emancipated women, do-gooders, religious charlatanry – neither he nor his characters has a word to say on these matters, nor – it should go without saying – on science. With so much of the stuff of ordinary social intercourse ruled out, the Jamesian people by and large are reduced to a single theme: each other. As beings not given to long silences, who are never seen reading, not even a guidebook, that is what they are condemned to. Whenever a pair or a trio draws apart from the rest, it is to discuss and analyse and exclaim over an absent one – Milly or Maggie or Isabel. Yet here, too, there is a curious shortage of ideas of the kind you or I might formulate in discussing a friend. In their place are hints, soft wonderings, head-shakings, sentences hanging in the air; communication takes place between slow implication and swift inference: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ The word ‘Wonderful!’ returns over and over as the best that can be said by way of a summing-up.</div>
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As James aged, his reticence, or the reticence he imposed on his surrogates, grew more ‘wonderful’ indeed. With <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Wings of the Dove</em>, we arrive at a heroine of whom we know only three things: that she is rich, red-haired and sick. She is clearly meant to be admirable, as we infer from the gasps and cries of the satellite figures around her: ‘Isn’t she superb?’ ‘Everything about you is a beauty,’ ‘beautiful’, ‘a dove’, ‘Oh you exquisite thing!’ But vulgar particulars are never supplied. As James himself observed in his Preface, ‘I go but a little way with the direct – that is with the straight exhibition of Milly; it resorts to relief, this process, whenever it can, to some kinder, some merciful indirection: all as if to approach her circuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with ...’ And he continues: ‘All of which proceeds, obviously, from her painter’s tenderness of imagination about her, which reduces him to watching her, as it were, through the successive windows of other people’s interest in her.’</div>
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It is an extension of the method, of course, that worked so successfully in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Spoils of Poynton</em>. There the ‘treasures’ had only to be called by that name two or three times, the astonished words ‘rare’, ‘precious’, ‘splendid’ to drop one by one from soft young lips, to convince the reader that ‘the nice old things’ were worth squabbling over, at least to those engaged in the squabble. But the moral splendour of a human being needs more demonstration than the museum quality of mobile property, at any rate in a novel. One can decide that the fuss being made about furniture is ridiculous or justified or a little of both, and, as I have been saying, it does not greatly matter which. It is unnecessary to fully sympathise with Mrs Gereth’s emotions to be amused by the lengths to which she will go in single combat, and in fact one senses James’s own moral reserve on her subject. But the fuss made over Milly Theale makes one irritably ask why, what is so admirable about her that cannot be named, unless it is just her money? Similar doubts may be felt about the Ververs, father and daughter, in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Golden Bowl</em>.</div>
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Their creator’s reluctance to furnish them with identifiable traits that might let us ‘place’ them in real life has curious consequences for the principals of the late novels. These figures, one realises, must be accepted on faith, as ectoplasms emanating from an entranced author at his desk – in short, as ghostly abstractions, pale ideas – which explains, when you come to think of it, the fever of discussion they excite in the other characters. Those by comparison are solid. They have bodies and brains, however employed. Motives are allotted to them, such as plain curiosity (the Assinghams, Henrietta Stackpole) or money greed or sexual hunger (both seem to be working, though sometimes at cross-purposes, in Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Charlotte Slant), motives that give them a foot in the actual world. And if, despite their efforts, the principals evade definition, if, unlike furniture, they cannot be established as universals standing for a whole class of singulars, Milly and Maggie and Chad remain nonetheless ideas of a sort. That is, ideas, expelled by a majestic butler at the front door, return by another entrance and stand waiting pathetically to be dressed in words.</div>
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Before leaving James, hoist – if I am right – by his own petard, I want to ask whether his exclusion of ideas in the sense of mental concepts was connected or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">necessarily</em> related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Nightmare Abbey</em> – young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and Flosky, who has named his eldest son Emanuel after Kant, and Listless, up from London, complaining that Dante is growing fashionable. Each has his own bats in the belfry; there is a bad smell of midnight oil in the derelict medieval structure, where practical affairs are neglected for the necromancy of ‘synthetical reasoning’. In hearty, plain-man style (which is partly a simulation), Peacock treats the brain’s sickly products as the end-result of the general disease of modishness for which the remedy would be prolonged exposure to common-or-garden reality.</div>
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But for James, mental concepts, far from being opposed to the ordinariness of laundry lists and drains, seem themselves to have belonged to a lower category of inartistic objects, like the small article of ‘the commonest domestic use’ manufactured by the Newsome family in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Ambassadors</em> – I have always guessed that it was a brass safety-pin. But, safety-pin or sink-stopper, it could not be mentioned in the text, any more than Milly Theale’s cancer (if that is what it was) or, let us say. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Origin of Species</em>. I confess I do not easily see what these tabooed subjects have in common, unless that they were familiar to most people and hence bore the traces of other handling. Yet, though both were in general circulation, a safety-pin is not the same as the idea of natural selection. More likely, James wished his fictions to dwell exclusively on the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">piano nobile</em>, as he conceived it, of social intercourse – neither upstairs in the pent garrets of intellectual labour nor below in the basement and kitchens of domestic toil. And the garret and the basement have a secret sympathy between them of which the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">piano nobile</em> is often unaware. That, at any rate, seems to be the lesson of the greatest fictions, past and present.</div>
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What is curious, though, is that ideas are still today felt to be unsightly in the novel, whereas the nether areas – the cloaca – are fully admitted to view. I suppose that the ban on ideas that even now largely prevails, above all in English-speaking countries, is a heritage from Modernism in its prim anti-Victorian phase. To Virginia Woolf, for instance, it was not a question of what might be brought <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">into</em> the novel – sex, the natural functions – but of what should be kept out. In the reaction against the Victorian novel, it was understandable that the discursive authors, from Dickens to Meredith and Hardy, should stand in the pillory as warning examples of what was most to be avoided. When the young Eliot complimented James on the fact that no rough bundles of concepts disfigure and coarsen his novels, he at once went on to cite Meredith (‘the disciple of Carlyle’) as a bad case of the opposite.</div>
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Actually Meredith, with his tendency to aphorism, was in his own way an experimental writer, which made him exciting to the young. This may have been why he was singled out for rapid disposal. That he went counter to the ‘stuffy’ realist tradition, jested with the time-honoured conventions of the form, even gave hints of something like the interior monologue, did not excuse him. In fact, he has not lasted, except, I think, for<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Egoist</em>; the mock-heroic vein, which he worked and over-worked, failed to undermine the old structure and became a blind alley. Brio was not enough. In any case, his way with ideas, wavering between persiflage and orotund pronouncement, was too unsteady to maintain a serious weight. His contemporaries seem to have known what he was ‘about’, but a reader today finds it hard to determine the overall pattern of his thought.</div>
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This can never be said of Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, in this country. Nor abroad of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, even Flaubert, of Manzoni, and of all the Russians except Chekhov, who was relatively non-committal. The talkative novelist was evidently the norm and always had been. In America, those who have survived – chiefly Melville and Hawthorne – seldom expressed themselves on topics and issues of the day, and their utterances could be somewhat riddling on the great themes of good and evil. Nevertheless they cannot be charged with unsteadiness, lack of serious purpose. They were sermonisers like their contemporaries in the Old World; it was only that their sermon, like the Book of Revelations, required some decoding; the apocalyptic imagery, as with any allegory, called for interpretation.</div>
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The 19th-century novel was so evidently an idea-carrier that the component of overt thought in it must have been taken for granted by the reader as an ingredient as predictable as a leavening agent in bread. He came to expect it in his graver fiction, perhaps to count on it, just as he counted on the geographical and social co-ordinates that gave him his bearings in the opening chapter: the expanse of Egdon Health at sundown crossed by the solitary reddleman and his cart; the mountain heights of the Lecco district looking down on the lone homeward-bound figure of Don Abbondio. Or ‘A rather pretty little chaise on springs, such as bachelors, half-pay officers, staff captains, landowners with about a hundred serfs ... drive about in, rolled in at the gates of the hotel of the provincial town of N.’ Or ‘About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good fortune to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton.’ We are so much in the habit of skipping pages of introductory description and general reflections that interrupt the story that we can scarcely believe that such ‘blemishes’ once gave pleasure, that a novel would have been felt by our ancestors to be a far poorer thing without them. They can be dismissed by the modern reader as ‘mere’ conventions of the genre, but in the old times a novel that lacked them would have been like an opera without an overture, which of course is a convention too.</div>
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The function of geographical descriptions – naming of counties, rivers, and so forth – and social topography is to make the reader feel comfortable in the vehicle he has boarded, like passengers in a plane having landmarks below pointed out to them and receiving bulletins from the pilot on altitude and cruising speed. Yet it was not essentially different from the function performed by ideas. Both gave depth and perspective. And the analogy to air travel is illustrative. The briefings supplied by the pilot (‘On your left, folks, you’ll see the city of Boston and the Charles River’) are a relic of earlier days of aviation – a mere outworn convention we ‘put up with’ in a contemporary airbus. Scarcely anybody bothers any more to rise in his seat to try to make out the landmark being mentioned; you cannot see anything anyway – the plane is going too fast and the view obstructed. Besides, who cares? The destination is the point. But if you put yourself back in fancy to the propeller plane, you will see, as with the novel, what has been lost. So intrinsic to the novelistic medium were ideas and other forms of commentary, all tending to ‘set’ the narration in a general scheme, that it would have been impossible in former days to speak of ‘the novel of ideas’. It would have seemed to be a tautology.</div>
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Now the expression is used with such assurance and frequency that I am surprised not to find it in my <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms</em>, which is otherwise reasonably current. For example, under ‘NOVEL’, I read: ‘In the late 19th and 20th centuries the novel, as an art form, has reached its fullest development. Concerned with their craft, novelists such as Flaubert, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E.M. Forster and Thomas Mann have used various devices to achieve new aesthetic forms within the genre.’ I do not know what Flaubert, who died in 1880, is doing there, but the tenor of the list is clear. If the ‘NOVEL OF IDEAS’ does not figure as an entry (though ‘NOVEL OF THE SOIL’ does), it may be that the authors were not sure what the term covered. I must say that it is not clear to me either, though I sense something derogatory, as if there were novels and novels of ideas and never the twain shall meet. But rather than attempt to define a term that has never been in my own vocabulary, I shall try to discover what other people mean by it.</div>
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Does it mean a novel in which the characters sit around, or pace up and down, enunciating and discussing ideas? Examples would be <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point</em>, in fact all of Huxley’s novels, Sartre’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Les Chemins de la Liberté</em>, Malraux’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Man’s Fate</em>. The purest cases would be Peacock – <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle</em> – if they could be called novels, which I doubt, since they lack a prime requisite – length – and another – involvement of the reader in the characters’ fates. You might also count Flaubert’s unfinished <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bouvard et Pécuchet</em>, where the joint heroes are busy compiling a Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Santayana’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Last Puritan</em>, by now forgotten. But though the term would seem clearly to apply to the works just mentioned (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magic Mountain</em> being the one everybody remembers best, having read it at 19), there are not very many of them and they are rather out of style.</div>
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Solzhenitsyn’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cancer Ward</em>, which belongs to our own time, roughly conforms to the type. Like <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magic Mountain</em>, it takes place in a sanatorium, where patients who have come to be cured have little else to do after their treatments and medical examinations than muse and argue. Isolation is crucial to this type of novel: the characters are on an island, out on a limb, either of their own choosing – Peacock’s crochety castles, Huxley’s grand country house presided over by Mr Scogan (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crome Yellow</em>) – or by <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">force majeure</em>, as in a hospital or a prison (Solzhenitsyn’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Third Circle</em>). Or the island may be moral, self-constituted by a literary clique (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Point Counter Point</em>), by a group of like-thinking, semi-political bohemians (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Les Chemins de la Liberté</em>), by a cell of revolutionaries (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Man’s Fate</em>). What is involved is always a contest of faiths. The debates on the magic mountain between Naphta and Settembrini oppose nihilistic Jesuitry to progressive atheistic humanism but also pan-Germanism to pro-Russian sentiments, prophecies of war to firm belief in peace, repose to work – in other words, you might say, night to day. Beneath the circus-like confrontation of current creeds lies a clash between very ancient faiths. Settembrini is a monist, Naphta a dualist. Settembrini, asked to choose, exalts mind over body: ‘within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature.’ It is like a game of preferences with the aim being self-definition, which no doubt is why young people are dazzled by it.</div>
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On a simpler level and without encyclopedic pretensions, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cancer Ward</em> presents us with various naive faiths – from faith in Stalin to faith in the healing properties of radioactive gold to faith in the mandrake root – sometimes peacefully co-existing, sometimes at odds with each other. It is natural that in a hospital the belief in a cure, in sovereign remedies, should dominate every mind. It becomes vital to have a theory, and world theories, global diagnoses of the body politic or the human state generally, take on, as though of necessity, an importance not usually accorded them by the healthy. The pressing need to have faith, i.e. grounds for hope, gives an urgency to the abstract disputes of both <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magic Mountain</em> and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cancer Ward</em>. Here ideas of any and every kind become, as if by contagion, matters of life and death. It is also true that in these narratives no idea can win out over another. Nobody is convinced or persuaded. The excited debates between patients or between doctor and patient end up in the air. Hans Castorp, whose young mind has been the salient contested for by opposing forces, leaves the sanatorium and returns ‘down below’, to the plains, which should be the level ground of sound, commonplace reality, except for the fact that there he dies as a soldier in the general reasonless catastrophe of the First World War. In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cancer Ward</em>, Kostoglotov, too, leaves his sanatorium, having been let out as cured, which should be a happy ending, except for the fact that the cancer ward whose gates close behind him has been a species of sanctuary: he is slated to return to his real down-to-earth life of penal exile. One kind of death sentence, in both cases, has been exchanged for another.</div>
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It is not especially uncanny (or no more than any resemblance or twinning) that this pair of novels, so widely separated in space and time, so widely divergent in manner, should match in a number of respects. Sanatorium life is much the same, I suppose, everywhere and always. But sanatorium life, as such, did not dictate the ending: a positive conclusion would have been possible if the novel were only about sickness and recovery. The ending is imposed not by the particular case – cancer ward or tubercular clinic – but by the fact that, in general, the so-called novel of ideas (at least the kind I have been describing) does not allow of any resolution. Nothing decisive can happen in it; it is a seesaw. Events that do occur in it are simply incidents, sometimes diverting, as in Peacock. A real event, such as the death of Hans Castorp, is reserved for a postscript; it does not belong to the text proper. The same with Kostoglotov’s re-shouldering of his penal identity. We do not see it happen; in fact, it may not happen ‘for good’, since when he goes to register with the NKVD in the town outside the hospital gates, the <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Komendant</em> speaks cheerfully of an amnesty in the offing. But Kostoglotov cannot make himself believe him – he has heard of amnesties before and nothing came of them – and the reader knows no more than he. It is left in suspension, like the arguments between the sick men, which never ‘get’ anywhere.</div>
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If a secondary character chances to die – for instance, Quarles’s child in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Point Counter Point</em> – that, too, is an incident, outside the work’s proper concerns; the main characters go on arguing as before. When it occurs in a sanatorium, it is just an episode, figuring in the normal mortality rate: a new patient moves into the bed the next day, and the ripple of concern quickly subsides. The sanatorium is an ideal setting for the discussion novel, for time does not count there. Ideas, though some may age, are indifferent to time. Mann speaks of ‘the more spacious time conceptions prevalent “up here” ’. That is an effect, of course, of the routine, which makes one day like another. But there is an endlessness, an eternal regularity, in all such novels; the characters slip into their places like habitués of a corner café. The sense of eternity, of time stopped, may be represented under other aspects. In André Gide’s <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Counterfeiters</em>, which I might have included under this heading, Edouard, the chief character, is shown writing a novel in which a facsimile of him is writing a novel, in which, we suppose, still a third figure ... The black-hatted Quaker on the Quaker Oats box holding a Quaker Oats box portraying a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats box, getting smaller and smaller in infinite regress, like repeating decimals. In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Point Counter Point</em>Huxley borrowed the device.</div>
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Still, when the novel of ideas is spoken of, maybe another type of story is being referred to – a story that does come to some sort of resolution. That is the missionary novel sometimes referred to as a ‘tract’. On the surface, it may look like the kind of novel I have just been trying to analyse, in that it may have the air of a panel discussion, with points of view put forward by several characters speaking in turn and each being allowed equal time. But it soon appears that one speaker is right and the others, though momentarily persuasive, are wrong. I am thinking of D.H. Lawrence.</div>
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Of course there are missionary novels that are not novels of ideas – for example, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</em>. It is animated by a strong conviction, but, if I remember right, does not ‘go into’ the arguments for and against slavery. And there are missionary elements hiding in many tales that pass for thrillers or love stories. In fact, it is hard to think of a novel that in some sense does not seek to proselytise. But what I have in mind are books like <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Women in Love, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, Lady Chatterley’s Lover</em>, where reasoning occupies a large part of the narrative, exerting a leverage that seems to compel the reader’s agreement. The incidents, few or many, press home like gripping illustrations the point being proved. There is something of parable in most of Lawrence’s plots.<br />
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In <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Kangaroo</em> we get a powerful example of Lawrence’s method at work. The ideas, fully expounded in long conversations, far from being unresolved, are boldly lived out and tested. The Lawrence figure, Somers, finds certain already held and seductive ideas made flesh for him in the shape of the Australian working-class leader known as Kangaroo. It is an incarnation Somers had never hoped to come upon, sickened as he is by Europe. He is smitten by Kangaroo’s proto-fascist movement and by the wild fresh country of which working men and their virile matey principles seem to be a natural and harmonious part. The infatuation holds for many pages, as he is drawn into the Diggers movement as a sympathetic foreign observer. He is nearly converted when, rather abruptly, he is startled into closer inspection: Kangaroo, dying, asks for a declaration of Somer’s love, and the sickly plea lets Somers finally see the soft, weak, flabby underside of native fascism. The Australian spell is broken; Somers and his woman leave.</div>
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Up to the end, however, an equilibrium of ideas is maintained, so that the conversations remain interesting, by no means one-sided. In Somers, a genuine intellectual process, going from curiosity to attraction to repulsion and disillusionment, is shown with considerable honesty. It is typical of Lawrence at his best that even when Kangaroo and his ideas are rejected, he is not vulgarly ‘seen through’; something is left for a kind of dry pity and understanding.</div>
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<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lady Chatterley’s Lover</em> is surely the most biased of Lawrence’s books. Yet Sir Clifford, Lady Chatterley’s husband, is nonetheless given his say, not too unfairly represented by and large: it is only that he and his entire set of convictions are refuted out of hand by a quiet adversary, Mellors, whose strong point is not words but <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">performance</em>. His performance is itself an argument, speaking for a view of natural life and sexuality that is hostile to the intellect. Sir Clifford is no intellectual: he is a retired country gentleman who sometimes writes poetry and short stories. But the weapons he is familiar with and falls back on as a disabled champion of a social order and mild way of life are the weapons his education has taught him to use: received notions and principles.<br />
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Lawrence’s hatred of the intellect, of the ‘upper storey’ (there is maybe a class prejudice here), is strange, certainly, in a man who himself lived almost wholly for ideas. The fact that they were his own made the difference, apparently; he had hammered them out for himself. They were not quite so much his own as he thought, one must add. Was he unconscious of being one of a number of writers who disliked and distrusted the intellect, who, like him, held it responsible for most of the ills of modern civilisation? He showed no awareness of such a fellowship, just as he showed no awareness of a paradox underlying the whole position: that is, that without the intellect and its systemising bent neither he nor his fellow thinkers would have been able to carry out their mission of teaching at all. His insistence on blood and instinct as superior to brain was a mental construct incapable of proof except on the mental level.</div>
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Yet if his ideas, true or false, have stayed with us, if he was a novelist of ideas in my second, missionary sense to whom we can still listen – the only one, probably – this must be because he was an artist as well as a cogent, programmatic mind – in other words, because he makes us feel as we read those novels that there is <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">something</em> in what he says. But while despising the intellect, he would not have liked the name ‘artist’ either. For him, it would have been six of one and half a dozen of the other – who could measure which was the less effete? He was unable to get along with any of his own kind, really, and could only associate, finally, with people who shared his ideas, which was bound to mean in practice people who consented to have no ideas of their own.</div>
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His life was a near-tragedy, and his self-infection, quite early, with concepts – which, when he took them for absolutes, made him quarrelsome – shared responsibility with his bad lungs. But if he had not been fevered, he might not have taken to the stump, and we might never have had these burning novels or, if you wish, tracts. Far more than the discussion novels with their eternal seesaw, they are truly novels of ideas. Without ideas none of them, after <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sons and Lovers</em>, could even palely exist. If you cut out Naphta and Settembrini, and the author’s musings on time, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magic Mountain</em> will still hold up as a story of a sort. The equivalent cannot be argued of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Aaron’s Rod</em>, say. I am not sure whether this makes Lawrence better or worse than Mann; at any rate, it makes him special. At the same time, surprisingly, it links him with the old novelists.</div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-65562237816486584702014-06-16T02:22:00.001-07:002014-06-16T02:22:27.463-07:00Picnicking with Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell and Sonia Orwell<img height="640" src="http://loomisdeanphotography.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/325x235/8048e09e434d2c22a3fb806f793fa850/0/1/01001712_2.jpg" width="446" /><br />
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<img alt="Novelist and author Mary McCarthy (C) hosting a picnic attended by poet Stephen Spender (R) and Jack Downie." src="http://loomisdeanphotography.com/skin/frontend/default/photosite/images/transperent.png" />Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-53320534745780615712014-06-10T15:56:00.001-07:002014-06-10T15:56:20.217-07:00TO THE LIFE OF THE SILVER HARBOR: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod By Reuel K. Wilson - reviewed by A. Theroux<div id="articleHeader" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">
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On the Cape, vows rewritten</h1>
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<tr style="width: auto;"><td class="imageVPad" style="padding-right: 10px; width: auto;"><img alt="Reuel and Edmund Wilson at the Wellfleet house, 1949." border="0" height="300" src="http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2009/01/23/1232766586_9105/300h.jpg" style="border: 0px;" title="Reuel and Edmund Wilson at the Wellfleet house, 1949." width="194" /></td><td style="width: auto;">Reuel and Edmund Wilson at the Wellfleet house, 1949. (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Courtesy of Magnum Photos)</td></tr>
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<span id="byline">By Alexander Theroux</span><div class="cf" style="clear: both;">
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<span id="dateline">January 25, 2009</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Edmund Wilson lived in Wellfleet for much of his life, yet wrote little about Cape Cod. Curiously, major writers who have lived in this region have tended to overlook the place. John Dos Passos said nothing of it. Same with Conrad Aiken. "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was Norman Mailer's only book set on the Cape, and he lived in Provincetown for half a century. A good explanation in Wilson's case is that he experienced as much horror as happiness in Wellfleet, as did novelist Mary McCarthy, his third wife - they lived on (and off) Cape Cod together for seven turbulent years, from 1938 to '45.</span></div>
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<strong style="display: block;">TO THE LIFE OF THE SILVER HARBOR:</strong></div>
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<strong style="display: block;">Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod</strong>By Reuel K. Wilson</div>
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Was theirs the "Slough of Bliss" or the "Bower of Despond," as one questioning wag put it? One attempt at an answer is given in "To the Life of the Silver Harbor," an awkward yet decent account written by their only child, Reuel, who probably bears more battle fatigue than either of his parents.<br />
Drawing on a body of unpublished material by his parents, Reuel Wilson looks back not only on his father's four marriages and his mother's three but also on their compulsive sexual affairs and his unpredictable upbringing, at once bohemian and snobbish. Now 70, he had managed to survive the complicated, emotionally fraught lives of his parents, staying in touch with both of them in a remote way until they died.<br />
Edmund Wilson seemed an incompetent, if sporadically devoted, father. Although overweight and unprepossessing, he was not only a compulsive womanizer but a man who needed to be married. Still, Elena Thornton, his fourth wife, would later remark to stepson Reuel, "All the discipline your father had at his disposal went into his work, with little left to temper his dealings with family members." And a long lifetime of majestic work it was - "To the Finland Station," "Upstate," "Axel's Castle," "Patriotic Gore," seven autobiographical books, six volumes of journals, and on and on.<br />
But Wilson was demanding and eccentric. (He adored women's feet; had a fixation for the color brown, preferring brown drapes, brown houses, and wearing only brown clothes; and enjoyed the company of rats.) In 1937 he met McCarthy, then working for Covici Friede publishers in New York; they married early in 1938, and on Christmas Day that year, Reuel was born.<br />
Seventeen years younger than Wilson, McCarthy had a badly damaged soul herself, for "as a young orphan she was cruelly used by her guardians," notes her son. Wilson quickly found her difficult. He attributed her "hysterical" behavior toward him to her experiences with her sadistic "Uncle Myers." What did she see in that portly, overbearing older man? She seems to have fallen for his commanding literary profile, given her own intellectual ambitions. McCarthy was stunning in appearance and a terrible flirt. Each was a good catch for the other.</div>
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Nevertheless, the marriage was rocky from the start. McCarthy was soon subject to Wilson's taunts and combative words and offhand abuse. He struck her at least once, according to their son. Wilson stinted McCarthy with parsimonious caveats. He refused to allow her to maintain a bank account in her own name. She went into psychoanalysis at his urging the first year of their marriage, and spent almost a month at the psychiatric clinic at New York Hospital. (She would later claim that he had committed her against her will.) She got pregnant, miscarried, and was accused by Wilson of aborting the child herself. During the Wellfleet years, 1941 to '44, she began casual liaisons with other men, one with notable French and German translator Ralph Manheim, another with art critic Clement Greenberg. She vamped the ardent Theodore Spencer, a professor of English at Harvard, and then, mocking him, would proceed heartlessly to report the details to others in letters.<br />
While it can be accurately said that Wilson aided McCarthy in her literary endeavors and that she clearly benefited as a writer of fiction from his sustained support, at least during the period he was willing to give it, neither "could peacefully coexist with the other under the same roof," writes Reuel Wilson. They divorced, and by 1946 both had remarried, McCarthy to a "dapper aesthete" nine years her junior named Bowden Broadwater, Wilson to Elena (Mumm) Thornton.<br />
The fact that Wilson and McCarthy were both fiercely competitive and vain in queerly forgiving each other's infidelities surely fostered them. How sad, odd, and ultimately depressing it is to hear their son have to explain many years later that "both partners were capable of two- and three-, and four-timing their spouses or other lovers." McCarthy's posthumous "Intellectual Memoirs," admits her son, was a title "ineptly chosen by the publisher for a book that deals more with sex than intellectual matters." Until she died, in 1989, McCarthy revealingly referred to her domineering husband as the "Minotaur." Wilson, in his son's words, saw each of his many female partners as an "intriguing toy, to be studied and manipulated." It is the wistful acceptance of a son who could do nothing about it then and cannot now.<br />
There seems to be fire missing from Reuel Wilson's history of his parents' time together, his conclusions clinical and abstract. "To the Life of the Silver Harbor" is long on report but rather short on insight. On the other hand, it is fair-minded and remarkably nonjudgmental. Reuel Wilson efficiently evokes the past he knew. He remembers ponds he swam in and rooms he ran through and people he knew who are now long dead, but there remains much in the narrator of the boy who lost his childhood while caught in the hot crossfire of all those bad marriages and transient affairs and being shunted about from the Brooks School to Harvard, from Hyannis to Maine, from one airy house to another dim apartment, from one dipsomaniac blatherer on the beach to another at the Ritz. He knows where all the bodies are buried. But for all he knows, he is forgiving, an intrepid traveler who has sailed through a Scylla of a father on one side and a Charybdis of a mother on the other and somehow managed to survive to tell the tale.<br />
<em>Alexander Theroux is the author of many books, including "Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual."</em><img alt="" border="0" class="storyend" height="8" src="http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/dingbat_story_end_icon.gif" style="border: 0px; margin-left: 4px;" width="6" /></div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-55674603366255356492014-06-05T08:34:00.001-07:002014-06-05T08:34:55.717-07:00Mary McCarthy's Centenary: Mary Mccarthy Quotes<a href="http://mmcentenary.blogspot.com/2014/06/mary-mccarthy-quotes.html?spref=bl">Mary McCarthy's Centenary: Mary Mccarthy Quotes</a>Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-57762859993534915782014-06-05T08:32:00.000-07:002014-06-05T08:32:31.051-07:00Mary Mccarthy Quotes<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/512YUkiKIhY" width="480"></iframe>Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-28218906291082237762014-05-18T12:47:00.004-07:002014-05-18T12:47:47.878-07:00Mary McCarthy on The Jack Paar Show 11/29/63: "It would be indecent to write about happy sex."<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/OmZ2iwng0mY" width="459"></iframe>Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-40424775444053844862014-05-15T00:21:00.002-07:002014-05-15T00:21:55.734-07:00"One of America’s problems is an inability to see itself." MM on the end of the Vietnam War (final part, from NYRB 1975)<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.799999237060547px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
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If anything has been added it is the smell of vengefulness associated with the <i>Mayagüez</i>episode, typical, I fear, of the current mood of this moody nation. It is not proceeding just from the White House and Capitol Hill.<br />
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We read that the American people want to forget about Vietnam; they are sick of it. That, obviously, is the opposite of learning a lesson, where a fact or an experience is imprinted on the memory, with cautionary results. I admit that I myself hoped last summer during the House Judiciary Committee hearings that Vietnam and Watergate, between them, would have caused us, at least, to do some self-questioning. The first awful intimation that this was not so came with the orphan airlift. The competition for Vietnamese babies made clear that Americans were still intent on mass demonstration of their essential goodness—a fatal motive in the Vietnamese enterprise, as hospitals, dispensaries, GI-built schools, improved seed strains, toothbrushes, surplus canned goods were strewn over the bombed, defoliated country, proving good intentions. If this sincere delusion had not been persisted in, the war could not have continued. With the orphans, the national heart again began to swell with the familiar philanthropic sentiments; nobody thought to ask what right we had to appropriate these babies, who in fact were part of the Vietnamese patrimony. Again, we were “saving” them, from disease and malnutrition; at the same time, they were little trophies, keepsakes—war loot salvaged from the wreck of the US involvement, so costly to the taxpayer.<br />
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The American <i>amour-propre</i> was seriously damaged in Vietnam, and the orphans in the end were insufficient restitution, especially since everybody could not have one. In any case, our generous image, not wholly inexact (Americans <i>are</i> kindly and helpful), is a dangerous reflection of our sense of national superiority, of our having more <i>things</i> to give away, like the ballpoints Nixon used to distribute on the streets of West European capitals, imagining that there was still a hunger for them. The idea that some nations would not <i>want</i> our things or our “know-how”—which made them—is inconceivable to most Americans.</div>
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The immense natural wealth of the American continent, ready for exploitation, and the wide internal distribution of that know-how have been a baneful gift. It is not only that the indigenous profit system must keep seeking fresh fields for investment as well as new consumers, but that the feeling of being an enormous creative matrix implies notions of leadership in every sphere of activity: literature and the arts, science, space, communications; democracy is regarded as an American manufacture along with Diners Club cards, happenings, rock music, and what were once called groovy life styles. No American is immune to the conviction of having something to <i>offer</i> the world by virtue of this native plenitude, and rejection (as happened in Vietnam) appears so incomprehensible that quite a few of the GIs who turned against the war turned also and simultaneously against the Vietnamese. Few Americans really drop out; instead they transfer their managerial and entrepreneurial skills, and the burgeoning pride that goes with them, to marginal activities such as the health food network or LSD manufacture, in which again they are “ahead” of other countries.</div>
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One of America’s problems is an inability to see itself. Hence the concern even among intellectuals with how the US <i>looks</i> after the defeat and how the defeat has affected our “position” in the rest of the world, as though what has happened were as much a social snub or slap in the face as a true loss. And the concurrent hope that the loss can somehow be turned into a gain, something positive, which would be true if whole peoples were able to revise their unthinking estimate of themselves, that is, break with all their habits.</div>
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There is no doubt that Germany was profoundly changed and sobered by the Nazi defeat, but it would take an atomic catastrophe, I often think, for the US to recover from the American way of life—the production-consumption cycle that has become an almost biological fact, resting as it does on rapid obsolescence and replacement. Intermittent elections add to the helpless feeling of stasis and eternal recurrence. You watch the same old candidates—Reagan, Jackson, Kennedy, Humphrey, Wallace—on your new color TV set. Anybody in his right mind would rather have it the other way around: fresh voices and faces on a quavery senior citizen TV screen. But for some un-Marxist reason, the constant restyling of the objects among which we live has no effect on the political superstructure, politicians being sent to the junk heap of history at a much slower rate than cars and ice-dispensers.</div>
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I can think of no way in which US political life can now be revitalized. The wistful idea (in which I have fitfully shared) of a “use” to which the Vietnam experience could be put shows that our faith remains a naïve, mechanical utilitarianism, which has no room in it for death in private life or tragedy in politics.<br />
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-30292364434859637032014-05-14T01:36:00.001-07:002014-05-14T01:36:23.096-07:00"...when the last American was withdrawn, nothing basically changed except the color of the corpses" :MM on the end of the Vietnam war from NYRB<img src="http://www.nybooks.com/media/static/assets/_assets/img/icon/NYRB.png" /><br />
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 23.799999237060547px;">In early May 1975, The New York Review asked some of its contributors to write on the meaning of the Vietnam war and its ending. They were asked to consider the questions of the responsibility for the war; its effect on American life, politics, and culture, and the US position in the world; and the prospects of recovery from it—or any other questions they felt to be important. > —The Editors</i><br />
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<b>Mary McCarthy</b></div>
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The only beneficiaries I can see of the event of April 30 are the Vietnamese. As the end approached, it was hoped, by many Americans and their sympathizers abroad, that some domestic benefit would be noticed. A weight, it was argued, ought to be lifted, of taxation, guilt, and shame, and new priorities could be set for the republic. With Vietnam out of the way, liberty and equality, a package, would no longer have to be viewed as articles for export and promotional salesmanship. The “lesson of Vietnam” would have been learned, both by our leaders and by the citizenry, which had been viewing the instructive spectacle on television.</div>
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It is too soon, of course, to be sure that nothing of the kind is happening. Perhaps a subliminal effect has been registered. Yet since so few “lessons” are ever learned in private life, one wonders why the process should be expected to take place in public life, so much less subject to the control of individual conscience and so poorly endowed, comparatively, with the means of reform. In any case, as it seems to me, the time had long passed when an opportunity for “correction of errors” was present and visible to everyone. That time was 1968, when the light had been seen, as Johnson’s “abdication” in the spring had made clear. The war ought to have been terminated then with North Vietnamese cooperation in an American exit. Between April 1968, when the Paris peace talks were agreed upon in principle (though not, in practice, until the fall), and April 1975, when the last American was withdrawn, nothing basically changed except the color of the corpses.</div>
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Had the US gone home then seriously, for good, the result would have been the same as what we are seeing now, with the single difference that third-force elements in the South might have been in a stronger position. At home, the time seemed right for reform or renovation; it looked as if a new leaf might really be turned. The Bobby Kennedy candidacy, the Gene McCarthy “children’s crusade,” the youth rebellion on the campuses, all touched off by revulsion from the war in Vietnam, were signs of a change of heart. The first and last signs. The nomination of Humphrey by the Democratic convention that summer demonstrated that inertia had resumed control of US political behavior. The reaction to Vietnam lost its impact, frittered away in fringe manifestations, such as the various mobilization marches—fun and games dampened by tear gas. Despite all the bloody and sensational events in between—Martin Luther King’s murder, Bobby Kennedy’s murder, Kent State, the attempt on Wallace, Watergate, Nixon’s fall—you could almost say that time had stood still during those seven years.<br />
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Nothing is worse for a private person than to have seen in a moment of clarity the error of his ways and then failed to alter them; the last state of the man is worse than the first. That is where our country is now, and to blame our leaders, with their professional deformations, for not rising to the occasion offered them by the war’s end, in other words for not being different from what they evidently are, is a stupid exercise, itself the product of fatigue. That Ford and Kissinger, anxious about US “credibility” abroad, inflated the <i>Mayagüez</i> incident in their own minds and action as though it were a missiles confrontation, that Defense Secretary Schlesinger “warns” the North Koreans that the US has “learned the lesson of Vietnam” (does he mean that the next time we will use nukes?) only shows that the bruised leopard cannot change its spots. The acclaim of Congress for the <i>Mayagüez</i> performance is nothing new either—the Tonkin Gulf reflex all over again. And when we now hear that our air force tear-gassed and nearly killed the crew it was bent on retrieving, we remember Têt and the officer explaining, “We had to destroy the city in order to save it.”</div>
Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-56681164349185423242014-04-29T05:12:00.001-07:002014-04-29T05:17:55.993-07:00In Conversation: Robert Silvers NYRB: MM's supporting role clearly evident!<div class="nextpage0" style="background-color: white; color: #232323; font-family: Georgia, Garamond, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">
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In Conversation: Robert Silvers</h2>
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As the <i>New York Review of Books</i> turns 50, its founding editor speaks with <i>Review</i> contributor Mark Danner about the poetry of Twitter, hiding the Pentagon Papers, and how his journal of ideas emerged from the flood of “little magazines” as possibly the unlikeliest success story in publishing.</h3>
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<b>I should begin simply by wishing you a happy birthday. </b><br />
Fifty years—50 years of the <i>New York Review</i>.<br />
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<b>From John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis and King’s “I have a dream” to tweets and drones and Barack Obama. </b><br />
You could say the inspiration for the<i>Review</i> went back even further, to 1959 and Elizabeth Hardwick’s “<a href="http://harpers.org/archive/1959/10/the-decline-of-book-reviewing/" style="color: #1f638a; text-decoration: none;" target="new">The Decline of Book Reviewing</a>” in<i>Harper’s</i>. That essay is crucial.<br />
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<b>It was an attack you published on what she took to be the lazy criticism found elsewhere—particularly in the New York <i>Times</i>.</b><br />
She wrote, “The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself—have made the New York <i>Times</i> into a provincial literary journal.”<br />
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Lizzie made it clear something different was needed—something new! About that, she wrote, “Nothing matters more than the kind of thing the editor would like, if he could have his wish. Editorial wishes always partly become true.”<br />
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The newspaper strike came about three years later—114 days without a newspaper printed. Lizzie and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, were having dinner with my friends Jason and Barbara Epstein, and Jason, then a senior editor at Random House, said there was no choice: The time had come to start a new book review.<br />
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<b>This was one time you could start a book review essentially without money. </b><br />
Jason saw that with no other place to advertise, the publishers in New York would cover the costs. He called and asked me if I could leave <i>Harper’s</i> and start a new book review. I went to see Jack Fischer, the editor of <i>Harper’s.</i> He said, good, it’ll be a great experience. You’ll be back in a month.<br />
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<b>You didn’t have any notion this would become an institution in this way?</b><br />
No. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought it was very possible that I would come back, and it was very kind of Jack to say my job would be held open. I asked Barbara Epstein that morning if she would join me as co-editor. She said yes. We met the next night with Lizzie in the darkened<i>Harper’s</i> offices. We looked through the books that had come in for review, and we thought of various people who might write on them.<br />
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<b>The <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/issues/1963/feb/01/" style="color: #1f638a; text-decoration: none;" target="new">first issue</a> appeared dated February 1, 1963. It has been called the best first issue of a magazine ever published. Looking at these names glittering on the cover, it’s astonishing how many, from W. H. Auden to Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy to Norman Mailer to William Styron, John Berryman to Robert Lowell to Robert Penn Warren, and on and on, are still recognizable.</b><br />
I remember Jason called his friend Wystan Auden. Lizzie called Fred Dupee—Lizzie and Barbara both. Lizzie called Mary McCarthy, and so did I. Barbara called Gore Vidal. I called Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Norman Mailer. In the next two days I talked with Jonathan Miller, who wrote on Updike, and then with Philip Rahv, and Dwight MacDonald, who wrote on Arthur Schlesinger.<br />
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<b>What did you say?</b><br />
I said, we’re starting a new book review, and would they write on the book I was sending? They had three weeks. There was no question of payment. No one asked about it. Sometimes they said, “I’d rather do another book.” They all just assumed a new book review was needed.<br />
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<b>Did you feel at the time that you were creating a particular kind of ideological community?</b><br />
No, if anything it was an <i>intellectual</i> community. It was people we knew and admired: a community of writers we knew but who hadn’t come together in that way before, except for some of the critics who wrote for the <i>Partisan Review.</i> It was determined by friendships, by a shared belief in uncompromising quality in writing and by a sense that much conventional criticism was superficial and lazy, accepting the mediocre.<br />
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<b>You describe those early days as a community of friendship, but soon you were publishing very harsh criticism by some of those writers of the work of others in that same “community of writers.” One famous example is Norman Mailer’s attack on Mary McCarthy’s novel <i>The Group</i>.</b><br />
Her book came out just as we started regular publication—a very long novel, a best seller, about women who had been at Vassar and became entangled in each other’s lives, with much about sex and birth control.<br />
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<b>It was considered quite risqué at the time.</b><br />
Lizzie, notwithstanding her old friendship with Mary, disapproved of it and wrote a parody of it entitled “<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1963/sep/26/the-gang/?pagination=false" style="color: #1f638a; text-decoration: none;" target="new">The Gang</a>,” signed “Xavier Prynne.” But who would review it? When I called Norman, he said, “I don’t want to take on Mary.” I told him that no one else was willing to write on the book. And he said, “Well, Bob, that’s a rather deadly challenge.” And he did it. He said our Mary, alas, has fallen short of what we hoped for.</div>
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The <i>New York Review of Books'</i> office.<br />
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<b>In the early days, and especially notable for the time, there were a number of quite strong and distinguished women—not just Barbara Epstein but Susan Sontag and, of course, Elizabeth Hardwick.</b><br />
Aside from Barbara, Lizzie was the major influence. I would send her reviews and she would say, “Oh, yes, this piece is very good. It just needs a little work.” And then she would send it back half as long, with paragraph after paragraph cut or compressed. She had no patience at all for what you would call tired language. One day she called up and said, “<i>Area</i>? Practically everything’s an area now.” And I said, “Well, Lizzie. I’m looking out the window, and there’s Broadway.” And she said, “Oh yes, that’s an area, but the word is used for everything else. It’s simply a vague way of saying nothing.”<br />
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<b>I know from sometimes-painful experience how particular you are about certain tired words. <i>Massive</i>, for example, is strictly forbidden. Or <i>framework</i>.</b><br />
<i>Framework</i> could rightly refer to the supporting structure of a house, or a wooden construction for holding roses or hollyhocks in a garden, but now the word is used to refer to any system of thought, or any arrangement of ideas. And it really means nothing.<br />
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The most heretical thing we do is try to avoid <i>context.</i> <i>Context</i> has an original, useful meaning, now generally lost: the actual language surrounding a particular text—<i>con, </i>meaning “with,” and <i>text</i>—and now it’s used for every set of surrounding circumstances or state of things, and it gets worse with<i>contextualize, sometimes </i>used to mean some sort of justification.<br />
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Even more insidious and common is <i>in terms of, </i>a fine phrase if you are talking about mathematical equations or economic functions in which specific “terms” are defined, but it is just loose and woolly when you say things like “in terms of culture,” for which there are simply no clear terms.<br />
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Then there is the constant movement of every kind of issue—war, treaty, or political feud—on or off “the table.” The question of an independent Palestinian state is on the table! Or is it off the table? It’s become a way of avoiding a more precise account of just what’s happening.<br />
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<b>You also avoid <i>left</i> and <i>right</i> as descriptions of political positions. Do you no longer see a coherent left?</b><br />
There are people who are more interested in liberties than others; there are people who are more interested in a fair distribution of goods and wealth, especially for the poor, and especially the black and Hispanic poor; there are people interested in protection of human rights internationally; there are people interested in control of pollution and climate domestically. You could list dozens of other causes. But lumping all these people into “the left” seems to me incoherent and lazy.<br />
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<b>Of course, the early years of the Review saw the rise of a so-called new left in opposition to the Vietnam War, and in 1967, you sent Mary McCarthy to report from Saigon and Hanoi. When did you get the idea, as editor of a book review, of sending writers into war zones?</b><br />
We felt we could do anything we wanted—we always thought we had control. The first issue came out of a very small group, to whom it was absolutely unthinkable that anyone would tell any of us what to do. We could do anything we wanted as long as we could pay the printer. From the first we had articles and political commentaries either on the Kennedy administration, say, or on totalitarianism in Cuba.<br />
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One night at the Lowells’ we tried to think of who would be the best person to write on the American presence in Saigon. Mary had certainly resented Norman’s review, but when I sent her a telegram, she said she would go next week.<br />
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<b>She was intensely critical of the American presence in Vietnam. What gave you the confidence to do such pieces? Did it have to do with the way you had structured the control of the <i>Review</i>?</b><br />
Jason Epstein brilliantly set it up. There would be two groups of shareholders. The “A” shareholders had control of the appointment of the editor and of editorial matters, and the “B” shareholders would benefit only financially. The A shareholders were the Epsteins, the Lowells, myself, and Whitney Ellsworth, who joined us as publisher with the second issue. When Rea Hederman took over as publisher in the mid-eighties he guaranteed we’d have the same editorial freedom we always had, and we have.<br />
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<b>So six people in control of editorial—but how much in control? Was there ever a question from that group of six?</b><br />
They never tried to exercise any control. Oh, sometimes, after the fact, Lizzie would say, “Honey, you’ve simply got to do better than that.”<br />
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<b>And the B shareholders had no say at all.</b><br />
Brooke Astor was one of the leading B shareholders. A friend had shown her the paper. She said, would we come around to her flat? Whitney and I went. She was there reading the paper. She said, “Boys, I like this, and I’ll put some of my own money into it.”</div>
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<b>Has the <i>Review</i> always been profitable?</b><br />
No. We had a second round of fund-raising after two or three years. That was around ’65. As of ’66 we were in the black.<br />
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<b>And you’ve been in the black ever since. This is nearly unheard of.<i>Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Republic, National Review</i>, even<i>Commentary</i>—none of those has been consistently profitable.</b><br />
I’ve never figured out just why. We used cheap newsprint and had very low costs, including low salaries, and no staff writers. And perhaps most important, once people subscribed, they resubscribed year after year at a very high rate. And publishers, including a good many university presses, decided it was a place to advertise, and they stayed with us. And when he became publisher, Rea improved everything to do with publishing the paper, and he set up New York Review Books, which flourishes.<br />
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<b>I’m holding here the first issue, which declares, in a statement on the second page: “This issue … does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation, or to call attention to a fraud.” This is the only editorial statement that you’ve ever made.</b><br />
That’s it! And that’s still what we try to do. We shouldn’t pretend to be comprehensive. There’s no point in reviewing a book if you can’t find someone whose mind you particularly respect. And even so, we have to turn down every month or so a piece we’d asked for. But I left one thing out of that editorial statement: the freedom of those people to reply at length, to make their case.<br />
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<b>Many of them have.</b><br />
Of course.<br />
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<b>How did the <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/aug/26/letters-the-strange-case-of-nabokov-and-wilson/?pagination=false" style="color: #1f638a; text-decoration: none;" target="new">famous debate</a> between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson come about?</b><br />
What happened was this: Nabokov, after many years, published his translation of <i>Eugene Onegin</i>—that masterpiece of Russian literature that had long resisted translation. He decided that it was impossible to versify in any form that would be faithful to the Russian, so he would do an unrhymed translation with a huge apparatus of explanation—the famous notes, which took up an entire volume.<br />
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<b>I recall in particular a long note about the history of foot fetishes in literature.</b><br />
They’re marvelous to read.<br />
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<b>Unrhymed or not, his translation is rather beautiful. I love it.</b><br />
Most of the Russians hated it. And Edmund Wilson sent us a <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/jul/15/the-strange-case-of-pushkin-and-nabokov/?pagination=false" style="color: #1f638a; text-decoration: none;" target="new">long essay attacking it</a> and contrasting “the Nabokov we know” with the one who “bores and fatigues.”<br />
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<b>They had been friends.</b><br />
Wilson thought “Volodya” was obviously a man of some Russian genius, and published his reviews in <i>The New Republic </i>when he was literary editor there. But his <i>Review </i>article was a big attack on Nabokov’s very idiosyncratic language, such as “rememorating” or “sapajous” (for monkeys). The next big article was by Vladimir, defending it, in the <i>Review</i>. And then came Edmund’s reply.<br />
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<b>How had you met Wilson?</b><br />
I went to visit Barbara and Jason in their house in Wellfleet in 1959. The plane arrived, and we were about to go to the car and I said, “Oh, I have to get my suitcase.” And Jason said, “No, I saw a <i>New Statesman</i> sticking out of it, so I knew it would be you.” He had it already in the back of the car. At Wellfleet, the high point was when we went around to Wilson’s house.<br />
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<b>The most distinguished literary critic of the time.</b><br />
Well, he was a great friend of Jason and Barbara, and I saw him only rarely. But in the second issue of the <i>Review,</i> he did something marvelous. Interviews were appearing in every magazine at the time, and he decided to conduct an interview with himself. And he gave his many views on what was happening, some of them deeply unfashionable. For example, he had no use for the Abstract Expressionists, who at that moment were seen as kings of New York.<br />
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<b>He hated them.</b><br />
He was a man who wanted to see a clear delineation of reality, however various.<br />
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<b>Some might say that’s a fair description of the <i>Review</i>’s cultural stance, which they see as conservative.</b><br />
I would say “critical.” Examining things closely.<br />
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<b>Is <i>conservative</i> not a fair word to use to describe the approach to, say, deconstruction in literary theory?</b><br />
That’s a very interesting question. There were writers called “postmodern,” some of them very interesting and original—in the novel, for example, William Gass and other writers of fiction. We were certainly not hostile to such fiction. We published criticism of some of these tendencies and we also published articles making a case for them, for example by Michael Wood. But the Berkeley philosopher John Searle wrote a devastating analysis of Jacques Derrida’s very influential theories he called “The Word Turned Upside Down,” exposing what he called their “obvious and manifest intellectual weaknesses.” Neither Derrida nor anyone else convincingly replied to that criticism so far as I can see.</div>
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<b>You published many critiques of Freud and psychoanalysis.</b><br />
Particularly Fred Crews’s very intensive analysis of Freud’s changing concepts, and their obscure, sometimes hidden origins. Of course, at the time we started the <i>Review,</i> it seemed everyone was being analyzed. That has changed.<br />
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<b>It seems to me that one secret of the <i>Review</i> is that, even as a rarefied journal of ideas, it is actually meant for a general audience.</b><br />
I always feel I want to learn from the articles we publish. And I have to assume that there’s an audience that wants to learn in the same way.<br />
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<b>You are the audience, in other words.</b><br />
Yes, that’s it. And often I hope the book under review can be brought closer to some reality that’s heretofore often been presented in a rather masked, misleading way.<br />
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For instance, in a recent issue we had a long article on General Petraeus. It’s not a big attack on him. It tries to show how his mind evolved since his days at West Point—in his Ph.D. essay at Princeton on the failures of American policy in the Vietnam War and in his work on the uses of special forces against insurgency in Iraq and in Afghanistan, especially in the Iraq War, which the<i>Review </i>opposed from the first. It took Tom Powers months to finish his review, drawing on more than twenty books. In all that, he has one half of one paragraph on the recent scandal.<br />
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<b>And yet, of course, the interest of readers will be drawn there because of it.</b><br />
No doubt. But the Petraeus of the scandal, the Petraus involved with Mrs. Broadwell and Tampa social life—all that depends on the record and the ideas of Petraeus the warrior, the subject of Tom’s article. That’s the only reason we even know about these small matters of domestic life.<br />
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<b>Speaking of the relationship of the Review to the news, here is a recent issue where the lead piece is by David Cole, “Drones and the CIA: 13 Questions for the New Chief.” Now, this article appeared exactly—</b><br />
On the day of the confirmation hearings for John Brennan.<br />
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<b>So the <i>Review</i> comes out right on time.</b><br />
Or we come out a year later and we say, Here are eighteen questions not asked at the hearing!<br />
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<b>The book-review category is a strange one. It doesn’t constrain you from sending Mary McCarthy to Vietnam, and it also makes possible a new form, in which writers give close readings of public documents that tend otherwise to be mostly ignored—for example, congressional reports.</b><br />
It does give an enormous possibility. In the case of a congressional report or transcript, it’s a text that is there to be consulted, by the entire world, and checked. There’s a big difference between that and the ephemeral, anonymous quote from the cloakroom of the Senate.<br />
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So far as I know, the man who made the most of analyzing such reports was I. F. Stone. He had physical troubles that made it difficult for him to attend public hearings, and he was wary of press conferences. But he took home public documents and subjected them to a kind of Talmudic study.<br />
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<b>I’ve done some of it myself, for you—in particular reviewing the reports on Abu Ghraib and torture. What was interesting to me about those was that the fact of the investigations was taken as proof that the truth had come out but in fact the reports together combined to hide the truth.</b><br />
These reports are often part of a presentation aimed at reassuring the public—closing up the subject and “classifying” it.<br />
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<b>The politics of the <i>Review </i>fascinate a lot of people. For example, one sees pieces that are rather praising of Obama, and other quite critical ones.</b><br />
Any first-rate group of writers will have very different views of Obama. You wrote for us your essay “Obama and Sweet Potato Pie” about his first campaign and the youth and the sexiness and rapport he seemed to evoke. David Bromwich wrote a very caustic and critical piece about his foreign policy. You then wrote critically about his use of “the politics of fear.” Michael Tomasky has argued that he’s brought about a transformation in American life in which a series of different groups have been drawn into politics and that he has in fact succeeded in making some fundamental changes, for example in health care. There must be room for very different, conflicting perspectives, different judgments about Obama and public policy generally.<br />
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<b>But is it not hard to claim that the <i>Review</i> has no political identity at all?</b><br />
We’ve had to have several political identities. As editors, it was as if we were being confronted by successive waves of historical development and challenges—waves like the Vietnam War, like the criminal activities of the Nixon administration, like Star Wars and the economics of the Reagan administration. And these different historical and political forces also loomed in the form of books. We tried to react by asking the people whom we respected as perceptive and as knowledgeable to deal with them, and we sent writers we admired to report on them—Joan Didion, for example, who reported on the war in El Salvador, and the Cubans in Miami. What becomes more and more clear is that victims and persecutors can change parts.</div>
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<b>Your early skepticism about Cuba marked you off from most of the left.</b><br />
In the first regular issue, there was an article by Daniel Friedenberg. He said, there’s a distinct resemblance between the new system in Cuba and the old system in the Soviet Union; they are both totalitarian. In some of the liberal press at the time, there was a general feeling of sympathy for Cuba, Castro, and the glamour of a new kind of society. When I went there in 1969, the poet Heberto Padilla insisted we could only talk while walking in the park, and there he slipped me a sheaf of poems that we published when I got back.<br />
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<b>You’ve said that during the Cold War you wanted to find a place on the left from which you could defend the rights of those under Soviet rule while still opposing the excesses of militarized Cold War policy.</b><br />
Underlying what we did was concern about the effect of powerful, torturing, bullying regimes on human rights. Barbara and I were both very aware that here we were in America with rights and freedoms. At the same time, we’re very aware that poets in Iran or a writer in the Soviet Union or East Germany—that these editors, writers, and people who wanted to express themselves were being suppressed, and we felt from the beginning that we should try to give them a voice. At the same time we published strong criticism of such Cold War follies as Star Wars.<br />
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<b>Does the state of human rights abroad look better to you now?</b><br />
Where there’s the most at stake is clearly in China.<br />
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<br />
There’s a long record of avoidance of reality. When we began the <i>Review</i>, there was wide support for the Chinese Revolution among intellectual and academic specialists. Little was said about the human costs of the Communist revolution, the crushing of the so-called peasant ownership class, the death of millions. Many people felt that in China was being created something like an egalitarian society, of which they could approve. And this included many American liberals, including many professors who studied China. Some didn’t realize the extent to which the attempts by Mao to encourage local industry in the form of backyard steelmaking were irrational and doomed. The country was about to plunge into one of the greatest famines in human history, with more than 40 million people starving to death, and very few pro-Chinese Americans were aware of it when it happened, or of the brutality and killing of millions during the Cultural Revolution.<br />
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<br />
In late 1988, during a visit suggested by George Soros’s foundation, I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Beijing, at a time when the regime was relatively tolerant. I said that an ideal situation for intellectual journalism was to have a paper that a group could organize and own outright, and be free to say what the group wanted. It was an ideal, and by some extraordinary convergence of circumstances, this is what we had at the <i>New York Review.</i> I realized, I said, how entirely unreal and unattainable this ideal might seem, but at least it was a basis from which one might start. If you can’t have complete ownership, you might have some. And if you can’t have full say, you might have some. You could aim for more. The audience seemed extremely enthusiastic. That night my friend Grace Dudley and I met in a rickety apartment with the great Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who promised to write for the <i>Review</i> on the need for freedom in China—and later he did. Then I met alone with a very small group of young Chinese who said they had a plan for a Beijing <i>Review of Books. </i>It wouldn’t be published in Beijing; it would be published in a small town somewhere in the West, where they were in touch with a print shop. They intimated they had some sympathizers—no more than that—in the far reaches of the bureaucracy from people supposedly connected with the relatively open-minded Zhao Ziyang. And could we help them? They seemed extremely attractive young people, and I said they could use our archives and articles. And not long afterward came Tiananmen Square. Fang Lizhi had to take refuge in the U.S. Embassy for over a year, and the members of the Beijing <i>Review of Books</i> group went into hiding. Some were arrested. Some of them escaped through Hong Kong. Some paid large sums to do so—$500,000, I was told. One of the most congenial of them, one of the most intelligent, turned out to be a high-ranking security official. He had been guiding the whole thing.</div>
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<b>For many who read it in the late sixties, the <i>Review</i> retains a distinctly radical flavor—there was that notorious cover with a “how-to” drawing of a Molotov cocktail.</b><br />
That “how to” was misleading. The diagram could not be used to make a bomb. The Molotov-cocktail cover seemed to us no more than an emblem of what was happening at a time when there were violent protests going on, and we were carrying in the paper a long account of the riots in Newark. We were not in any way recommending it. But publishing it on the cover was a serious mistake. It gave many a false impression of the paper, and some made the most of it. And now, 45 years and two generations later, here we are still talking about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>You published Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg …</b><br />
We published Chomsky’s “<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1967/feb/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/" style="color: #1f638a; text-decoration: none;" target="new">The Responsibility of Intellectuals</a>” in 1967. What was it about? He said that many intellectuals in America were in some way complicit with different aspects of the Vietnam War, whether in social and political science, economics, or the uses of science for military strategy. They had been putting forward indefensible rationalizations for it. In academe and out of it, they were contributing to the war effort, and he didn’t think they should. It was the responsibility of intellectuals to seek truth and not to contribute to that kind of government violence. Few essays we published had such an effect. Later I met Dan Ellsberg, who’d been out there in Vietnam as an intelligence expert. Then he went to work for rand. He outlined to me a very cogent critical essay on U.S. policy in Vietnam, and we published it. Not long after, he released to the <i>Times</i> the Pentagon Papers he’d acquired at rand.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Didn’t he leave the papers in your office?</b><br />
Yes. After the New York <i>Times</i> had published them, he said, “Can I keep some papers at the <i>Review</i>?” And we took the papers, and we put them in a corner, next to a radiator, in a suitcase, and they just sat there. For months.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Eventually he retrieved them.</b><br />
A man called and said, I’m from the so-and-so law firm, and I’ve been asked to pick the papers up.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>On the Middle East, the <i>Review</i> has carved out a fairly distinctive role.</b><br />
We’ve had some of the most informed and today realistic articles I know of from Rob Malley, the Middle East Director of the International Crisis Group, and Hussein Agha of St. Antony’s, Oxford, particularly in their very skeptical view of the Arab Spring. They called their essay “This Is Not a Revolution.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>It has become increasingly hard to write about issues involving Israel with any subtlety.</b><br />
You have to get used to the fact that any serious criticism of Israeli policy will be seen by some as heresy, a form of betrayal, and we’ve had a lot of such denunciation. What such critics don’t say about the <i>Review </i>is that much of what we’ve published has come from some of the most respected and brilliant Israeli writers—the late Amos Elon, Avishai Margalit, David Grossman, David Shulman, among them. What emerges from them is a sense that occupying land and people year after year can only lead to a sad and bad result.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I’ll not forget going to see Golda Meir—then prime minister—with Isaiah Berlin in 1969. Golda asked me, “What do you think of all this that you’ve seen?” And I said, “I come from a Zionist family, and I’ve seen, as I expected, remarkable accomplishments in Israel—in agriculture, in education, in technology, in helping people to start new lives. But I do keep asking myself about what happened to the Palestinians who lived here and the Palestinians who are now living under military occupation. And it’s very hard for me to reconcile the two.” And she said, “We’re not an occupying power, an aggressive power. It’s like Pakistan and the break with India. People thought they had to leave and form a different society, have their own country, defend themselves.” And I said, “Is that really the way you want Israel to be seen? As a kind of Pakistan?” She thought and said, “No, I want to say that we’re a moral people, as concerned about the Palestinian people as anybody else.” And then she said, “Isaiah, what do you think?”<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>She put him on the spot.</b><br />
He said, “Military occupation. Seldom a good thing. Seldom works out. Shouldn’t go on and on.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The <i>Review</i> has not only had the sort of life span many of its early contemporaries would envy, it’s also become, for a book review, increasingly adaptable in its subject matter—regular articles about movies and television and now about the Internet and life online.</b><br />
Well, Zadie Smith is a writer I much admire. She reviewed the film <i>The Social Network </i>along with Jaron Lanier’s book <i>You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.</i>She thought there had been illusions about Facebook; she did not feel that the “friendship” on which Facebook was based was truly a coherent idea of friendship at all. As she said, “If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would … What we actually want to do is the bare minimum.”</div>
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Soon the <i>Review </i>will be publishing a piece on video games and on the experience and allure of playing them, among them the games played by the Columbine killers. These games together have sales of $25 billion, much more than the movies.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>From books to texts to video games. What comes next?</b><br />
The other night, I sat next to a woman who said, well, my children now only send Instagrams.<br />
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<b>Instagrams! I don’t even know what those are.</b><br />
You keep in touch with your friends by sending them one picture after another, from your phone.<br />
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<b>Don’t you find this development rather worrying?</b><br />
Years ago my friend John Gross did many anthologies for the Oxford publishing company—the <i>Oxford Book of Essays, </i>the <i>Oxford Book of Aphorisms, </i>and so on. Now I might imagine an <i>Oxford Book of Tweets</i>! That is to say, witty, aphoristic, almost Oscar Wildean remarks, drawn from the millions and millions of tweets. Or from comments that follow on blogs. But I doubt it will ever be done. A great many tweets and follow-on comments are really rather lame or cheap wisecracks, in which you feel behind the tweet the compulsion, simply, to … tweet. To get in on it.<br />
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<b>To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind.</b><br />
And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism.<br />
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<br />
If a novel is published, we have a novel review. If poetry is produced, if a play or a movie or a TV show is produced, there are the forms of criticism we know. With the new social media, with much of the content of the Internet, there are very few if any critical forms that are appropriate. They are thought to be somewhere partially in a private world. Facebook is a medium in which privacy is, or at least is thought to be, in some way crucial. The premise, at least, is that of belonging to a family, a circle of friends. And there’s another premise, that any voice should have its moment. And so there seems a resistance to intrusive criticism.<br />
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<br />
But this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.<br />
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<b>Are you concerned that younger readers form a generation obsessed not with long form but with these very short prose forms?</b><br />
I don’t know. The phrase <i>long form</i> has come in in the last twenty years or so. I’d never heard it before. I’d thought of reports and essays and criticism of different lengths—lengths that the subject seemed to warrant. Long form as opposed to what?<br />
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<br />
<b>To, I suppose, reading on the screen, which is generally thought to limit the length of what can be read.</b><br />
But is that necessarily true? Much of the material on the Internet can be long, very long. And should be.<br />
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<br />
<b>Which brings us to books themselves: Are you concerned about their future?</b><br />
In one way or another, if you include e-books and self-published books, more books are being published than ever. Most people don’t seem to understand that. And there is no falling off, in my view, of very serious books. A major problem for us remains, as I see it, the flood of books that do require consideration for review. That should be reviewed. We’re constantly struggling to master the flood. If you look over the lists of just the university-press publishers, you’ll find literally hundreds of books worthy of review.<br />
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<br />
<b>Until she died in 2006, you and Barbara Epstein co-edited the<i>Review</i> in one of the most fruitful, and certainly the most enduring, partnerships in literary history. How did you do it?</b><br />
Barbara and I had an understanding right at the beginning that we would collaborate on everything. We published nothing that each of us had not read and gone over. We shared every piece, every assignment. We had no division of labor. We both dealt with reviewers of fiction, poetry, science, history, and art. We were extremely close partners.<br />
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<br />
She had a marvelous sense of humor, and one reason I looked forward every day to going to the <i>Review </i>was that Barbara and I saw a lot of what we were doing and a lot of the people we were dealing with as, however admirable and serious, also absurd and funny. It was a kind of weird gamble in which we had quite astonishing freedom, and our general approach, if someone had an idea for something interesting but quite different from anything we’d ever done, was, why not?</div>
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<b>Is that how the personal ads came about?</b><br />
Whitney Ellsworth, who joined us as publisher after the first issue, came to us one day with some ads that subscribers had sent in: “Beautiful Jewish writer seeks sexual partner who can dance,” and so on. And Whitney said, “Well, is this the sort of thing we want to do?” And Barbara and I said, “Why not!” Other papers of course did this later, the <i>London Review </i>and others, but nothing quite as, shall we say, elaborate and bold as many of these ads came to be. People competed for the most colorful description of their fantasies about themselves and their ideal partner.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The ads have attained a kind of celebrity.</b><br />
And some rather famous people we knew actually met people through them. And about once a year, a couple would appear and say, “We met through the<i>New York Review,</i> and we’re just married.”<br />
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<b>When I came to the Review in 1981, just out of college, one of my jobs was to retype manuscripts after you’d edited them. I’d sit at my little desk, and you’d sit at your big desk behind this towering phalanx of books, and every once in a while a piece of paper would come sailing over the parapet, a typewritten manuscript page now completely covered with your penciled changes. Many of these pages, of course, were the work of writers I’d come to greatly admire for their wonderful published prose, and I found myself shocked to discover that you did a great deal of work on it. But I was also fascinated to see that a lot of the work you did with your pencil seemed to be uniquely in the service of making these writers sound—how I should I put this?—like … themselves.</b><br />
Sometimes, of course, they would get very angry and want to restore everything. And often those people who want to restore everything are not very good writers.<br />
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<b>And yet I recall writers whose pieces had been heavily edited—rewritten, really—receiving the galley, in which all the changes had been seamlessly incorporated, and responding: Well, but you didn’t change anything at all!</b><br />
The fundamental point is that if a writer has something interesting to say, you have to ask, sentence by sentence, if it is clear as it should be or could it be clearer, while also respecting the writer’s voice and tone. You have to listen carefully to the tone of the writer’s prose and try to adapt to it, but only up to a point.<br />
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<b>You are famous also for these late-night telephone calls in which you track down a writer in some exotic land to ask about changing a word. Or a comma.</b><br />
When I worked for Jack Fischer at <i>Harper’s,</i> he would look at the final galleys. He would take his pencil and he would go through and make changes—cross things out, put things in—and it would go right off to the press. I was appalled. Writers deserve the final word about their prose.<br />
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I believe in the writer—the writer, above all. That’s how we started off: admiring the writer. We organized the <i>New York Review </i>according to the writers we admired most: Edmund Wilson, Wystan Auden, Fred Dupee, Norman, Bill, Lizzie, Mary among them. Each of them had a confident sense of their own prose, and it meant a great deal to them—the matter of a comma, a semicolon, a word—and it does to our writers today. And so, when it comes to making a change, we should not do it without their permission. If a moment comes at some point where we see something should be improved, we don’t just scribble it in but call them up wherever they are. And that is, I think, crucial.<br />
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<b>Although often you will scrawl a note in the margins saying, “It might be helpful here to have a word or a line about X.”</b><br />
Yes! We do often in the galley.<br />
<br />
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<b>Even though it may be Christmas Eve, as it often was.</b><br />
That has to do with the schedule of the press.<br />
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<b>But it also amounts to a kind of sign, whether the intention is there or not, a signal to the writer that absolutely everything is being done, no matter what the time, to care for this prose.</b><br />
Well, I hope it makes people feel that each word counts. It’s going to be read by a lot of people. It’s going to have an effect. It means everything.<br />
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<b>When I began working for you, there were two shifts for editorial assistants working in your office: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and then a later one.</b><br />
Two-thirty to 10:30 p.m.<br />
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<b>Which I learned often went on to midnight or later. How is it after 50 years you are able to maintain that level of meticulousness and determination?</b><br />
I don’t feel that that kind of work is a matter of decision. There’s simply no alternative to reading every piece attentively and very critically. It would be unthinkable not to. I work my way through several reviews a day. If I’m at home I’ll simply try to stay up until I do it. If I’m here at the office I’ll try to stay until I finish it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Did you always work such hours?</b><br />
I was an editor at <i>Harper’s,</i> a monthly magazine with several editors, and we worked under a number of unstated assumptions—that the readers could take only so much; that radical writers and ideas were taboo. That what Lizzie called the “light little article” was indispensable. No doubt it has changed in many ways. But the <i>New York Review</i> was and is a unique opportunity, an opportunity to do what one wants on anything in the world. Now, that is given to hardly any editor, anywhere, anytime. There are no strictures, no limits. Nobody saying you can’t do something. No subject, no theme, no idea that can’t be addressed in-depth. There’s an infinity of possibilities. Whatever work is involved is minor compared to the opportunity. That is the essence. That is the nature of the magazine.</div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-91501306132783202352014-04-28T13:39:00.000-07:002014-04-28T13:39:01.534-07:00Vassar Unzipped Part 4: 'Flowers of the culture, these young women, but shot from a gun.'<div class="title cn_title" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
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Vassar Unzipped</h1>
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Shocking, titillating, and acid-laced, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel about eight Vassar girls, turned the feared and revered literary critic into a wealthy, world-famous author. But the backlash was brutal, not least from her Vassar classmates. Laura Jacobs explores why the book still dazzles as a generational portrait, falters as fiction, and blighted McCarthy’s life.</div>
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<span class="contributor first last" data-contributor-type="writer" style="background-image: none; border: 0px; float: left; margin: 0px 14px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><label style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: adobe-text-pro-1, adobe-text-pro-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By</label> <span class="name" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;"><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/laura-jacobs" style="color: black; outline-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Laura Jacobs</a></span></span></div>
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<figure class="media " style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; clear: both; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;"><img alt="" src="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/07/vassar-sex-single-girl-ivy-league-mary-mccarthy/.i.0.the-group-vasser-mary-mccarthy.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; margin: 0px 20px 0px 0px; max-height: 100%; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;" title="" /><div class="body credits" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: vf-sans-1, vf-sans-2, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 10px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 2px; padding: 0px; text-align: right; text-transform: uppercase;">
LARGE PHOTOGRAPH © UNITED ARTISTS/PHOTOFEST; INSET BY GORMAN STUDIO.</div>
<figcaption class="caption" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; clear: both; color: #222222; font-family: vf-sans-1, vf-sans-2, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 20px 20px 0px;"><b style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">FLICK LIT</b> A scene from the 1966 film adaptation of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> directed by Sidney Lumet, with Jessica Walter as Libby, Joanna Pettet as Kay, and Shirley Knight as Polly. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Inset,</i> the book’s original, 1963 edition.</figcaption></figure></div>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">E</span>veryone loved Chapter Two. Straitlaced Dottie Renfrew—Vassar class of 1933 and a virgin—has gone home with the handsome but dissipated Dick Brown. He undresses her slowly, so that she “was hardly trembling when she stood there in front of him with nothing on but her pearls.” Dick makes Dottie lie down on a towel, and after she experiences some “rubbing and stroking,” and then some “pushing and stabbing,” she starts to get the hang of things. “All of a sudden, she seemed to explode in a series of long, uncontrollable contractions that embarrassed her, like the hiccups … ” No hearts and flowers here, simply a female orgasm described by a female writer who was as empirical and precise as the male writers of her day—perhaps more so—yet always attuned to the social niceties imprinted upon a certain class of female mind. Dick removes the towel, impressed by the minute stain, and in a remark that pulled the romantic veil from the usual novelistic pillow talk, says of his ex-wife, “Betty bled like a pig.”</div>
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It was the first line of Chapter Three, however, that brought mythic status to Mary McCarthy’s fifth novel, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>. “Get yourself a pessary,” Dick says the next morning, walking Dottie to the door. The chapter proceeds to offer a tutorial on the etiquette, economics, semiotics, and symbolism of this particular form of contraception, circa 1933. Diaphragm, ring, plug—call it what you will—when <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was published, in 1963, the subject was still shocking. Sidney Lumet’s movie of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—released three years later, smack in the middle of the sexual revolution—included Dottie’s deflowering and subsequent trip to a gynecologist but substituted euphemisms for McCarthy’s blunt language. Instead, Dick Brown says, “The right lady doctor could make us a lot happier.”</div>
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Critics of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> would call it Mary McCarthy’s “lady-writer’s novel” and “lady-book,” insults meant to suggest it was a falling-off from her previous work. And it <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">was</i> different from what she’d done before. Up until <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> McCarthy was feared and revered in the smart, tight, testy, and frequently backstabbing world of midcentury literary quarterlies and political reviews. Her critical assessments of theater and literature were scathing, and no one was too high to be brought low. Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams—the greats of the day—all came in for vivisection, McCarthy’s own Theater of Cruelty on the page. (“Torn animals,” poet Randall Jarrell wrote of a character based on McCarthy, “were removed at sunset from that smile.”) Her early novels read like moral chess matches where everyone is a pawn. And her memoirs, well, one thinks of brutal honesty dressed in beautiful scansion, Latinate sentences of classical balance and offhand wit in which nothing is sacred and no one is spared, not even the author herself. There was never anything “ladylike” about Mary McCarthy’s writing. She struck fear in the hearts of male colleagues, many of whom she took to bed <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">without</i> trembling or pearls. For aspiring female writers, she remains totemic.</div>
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But <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—a novel that followed eight Vassar roommates from commencement in 1933 to the brink of war in 1940—was her Mount Olympus and her Achilles’ heel, a monster international success that brought world fame yet failed to impress the peers who mattered most.</div>
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“Women’s secrets again,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote to a friend, “told in clinical detail.”</div>
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“No one in the know likes the book,” poet Robert Lowell wrote to fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, a Vassar classmate of McCarthy’s.</div>
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“Mary tried for something very big,” critic Dwight Macdonald wrote to historian Nicola Chiaromonte, “but didn’t have the creative force to weld it all together.”</div>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">A</span>ll true, and all beside the point. Published on August 28, 1963, with a whopping first printing of 75,000, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a sensation. By September 8 it was No. 9 on the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times</i> best-seller list for adult fiction, with booksellers ordering 5,000 copies a day. By October 6 it had dethroned Morris L. West’s <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shoes of the Fisherman</i> to become No. 1, where it would stay for the next five months. By the end of 1964, nearly 300,000 copies had been sold, though now and then Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had to refund the price of a book. Women’s secrets “told in clinical detail” were, for some, tantamount to pornography. The book was banned in Australia, Italy, and Ireland.</div>
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Countless novels have topped the best-seller list for months. Mention them now—<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shoes of the Fisherman</i>, for instance—and people go blank. Not so with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group.</i> While its plot was almost nonexistent and its emotional hold next to nil, the secrets of these Vassar girls were chinked in stone and the racy one-liners etched in memory. As Helen Downes Light, a Vassar classmate of McCarthy’s, told Frances Kiernan, the author of the biography <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Seeing Mary Plain,</i> “I used to keep seventy-five dollars of mad money in a book. We had <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> on the shelf in our guest room and I thought, I’ll remember where it is if I put it in there. Every guest we had would come down the next morning and say, ‘Did you know you had money in that book?’ ”</div>
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Money in that book! Avon paid $100,000 for the paperback rights. Movie rights sold to producer-agent Charles Feldman for $162,500. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> made Mary McCarthy a very rich intellectual, one of America’s first highbrows to receive gargantuan sums, thus changing the financial expectations of serious writers and the scale on which their work could be judged.</div>
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By the time McCarthy began <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> she had been writing about groups for years. It was a fascination of hers, and you could say it was fated. When McCarthy was six, she and her three younger brothers lost both parents in the 1918 flu pandemic. Gone the beatific home created by an adored mother and charismatic father; gone the intimate group that is one’s family. Her father, Roy McCarthy, was the son of J. H. McCarthy, a wealthy, self-made grain merchant in Minneapolis. Roy was charming and handsome, but he was a binge drinker, which made it difficult for him to hold a job. At 30, he went west to Oregon for a fresh start in a timber-brokerage business, and it was there that he met 21-year-old Tess Preston, dark-haired, beautiful, and accepting of Roy’s alcoholism. They married in 1911, and when Mary was born, in 1912 in Seattle, Roy not only stopped drinking for good, he became a lawyer at 32. Unfortunately, the ill effects of childhood rheumatic fever left him increasingly bedridden. The decision to move the family back to Minneapolis, to be close to Roy’s parents, proved fatal. Upon arrival, Roy and Tess died within a day of each other. The orphans would be shuttled between unsympathetic and sometimes sadistic relatives.</div>
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A little girl with a gimlet eye, Mary was acutely aware of her new status—the outsider looking in—and she became well acquainted with the power games played by those on the inside. Her coming-of-age brought more of the same. As a Seattle girl of uncertain class (not to mention—and she didn’t—a Jewish grandmother), she was an outsider at East Coast, upper-crust Vassar. As an Irish Catholic of bourgeois upbringing, she was an outsider among <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review’</i>s gang of first-generation Jews, even as she ruled from within as the magazine’s theater critic and queen cobra, entrancing male colleagues while living with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.R.’</i>s editor Philip Rahv. In fact, being “inside” only brought ambivalence. “A princess among the trolls” is how she came to characterize her position at <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.R.,</i> rather nastily, in her astonishing short story of 1941, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” This frank and often bawdy portrayal of a one-night stand on a cross-country train, its details drawn from McCarthy’s own past tryst on a train, was a dropped bomb that brought career-making notoriety. “I was at Exeter at the time,” the late George Plimpton told Frances Kiernan, “and it made almost as much of an impression as Pearl Harbor.”</div>
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Novel Idea</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span><i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">he Group</i> is considered McCarthy’s fifth novel, but, truth be told, it’s hard to know exactly which of her books is the first. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Company She Keeps,</i> published in 1942 and cited as the first, was actually a collection of previously published short stories, including “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” all sharing a protagonist, Margaret Sargent. Her piercing sensibility takes the place of a plot, sending waves of pitiless social insight and irony rippling through the book. McCarthy’s “second” novel, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis,</i> was the winning entry in a 1949 fiction contest sponsored by the English literary monthly <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Horizon.</i> A novelette in length, a political satire in tone, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis</i> was also a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">roman à clef</i> that spoofed the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> intellectuals, presenting them as Realists or Purists and plopping them into a rural Utopia where they attempt to live outside society, without modern conveniences or class distinctions. Former lover Rahv, caricatured as the leader of the Realists, was so stung by the book he threatened to sue. In an interview with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Paris Review,</i> McCarthy clarified: “<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis</i> is not a novel It’s a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte,</i> a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte philosophique.</i>”</div>
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An interesting choice of words on McCarthy’s part, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte</i> versus “story,” for the French <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte</i> not only translates as “tale,” it also connotes a narration, a story told orally. Setting aside the fact that McCarthy could be quite theatrical when reading her work before an audience, there <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">is</i> a distinctly narrated, documentary-voice-over quality to her fiction, as if her tales came straight from her head—eyes, ears, brain, mouth—without ever having traveled through her heart.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Groves of Academe</i> followed in 1951 and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life</i> in 1954. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Groves</i> is yet another chess match, an example of what the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, a lifelong friend of McCarthy’s, termed her “ideological follies,” this one between academics (recognizable to those in the know, naturally) at a small college modeled on Bard, where McCarthy had taught for a year. As for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life,</i> the plot, not ideological but still a kind of folly, zeroes in on the emotional dynamics of an iffy marriage dropped into a tiny community of bohemians, further complicated when the protagonist’s former husband (based, in part, on McCarthy’s second husband, the writer Edmund Wilson) lures her into a drunken roll on the couch. Booze and bad sex were never far apart in the world of Mary McCarthy, and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life</i> turns on what will be done with the pregnancy that follows.</div>
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In the year that brought forth <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life,</i> the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> published yet another McCarthy tale, this one called “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.” Hard to believe Mary could go one better than “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” but she did. Sandwiched between an Irving Howe essay, “This Age of Conformity,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Tradition and the Modern Age” was the unabashed third chapter of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—“Get yourself a pessary.” It was a scandalous sneak preview that made everyone want more.</div>
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Portrait of the Ladies</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">A</span>ccording to biographer Carol Gelderman (<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mary McCarthy: A Life</i>), the idea was articulated in 1951, when McCarthy applied for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant. She wanted to write about “a group of newly married couples who emerge out of the Depression with a series of optimistic beliefs in science, engineering, rural electrification, the Aga stove, technocracy, psychoanalysis In a certain sense, the ideas are the villains and the people their hapless victims.” It was a concept novel, with not so much a plot as a plan: the characters conned by progress with a capital <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.</i> The grant was denied, but McCarthy went ahead and began writing.</div>
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In 1959, five years after “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself” was published, McCarthy again applied for a Guggenheim, this time describing the book as a “history of the faith in progress of the nineteen-thirties and forties as reflected in the behavior and notions of young women—college graduates of the year 1933 It is a crazy quilt of clichés, platitudes, and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">idées reçues.</i> Yet the book is not meant to be a joke or even a satire, exactly, but a ‘true history’ of the times … ”</div>
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The concept had been simplified and refined. In a way, it was the fictional flower of a nonfiction essay McCarthy had written in 1951, for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Holiday</i> magazine, in which she stated, “For different people … at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner.” <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was now the book McCarthy was destined to write. Her editor, William Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, thought it “might be one of the few important books that is about women without being actually <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">for</i> women.” The jury at the Guggenheim must have thought so too, for the grant was given.</div>
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McCarthy would fulfill her proposal with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">i’</i>s dotted (Dottied?) and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">t’</i>s crossed. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> isn’t a joke, and though satirical it isn’t a satire. The lives of McCarthy’s eight graduates—nine if you count Norine, a classmate who envied the group from afar and is the novel’s lone outsider—do indeed present a crazy quilt that captures the history of the time. Dottie proffers a peephole into the sexual mores of the 1930s and Priss into “enlightened” mothering. Literary Libby wants to be an editor but is steered toward agenting, while Polly’s love affairs shed light on the era’s attitudes toward psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In Kay we have the consumer as climber, a woman in love with the intellectual cachet of modernism; for this she is mocked by her philandering husband, Harald Petersen (modeled on McCarthy’s first husband, Harald Johnsrud). Androgynous Helena writes the class newsletter, and chubby heiress Pokey is present mostly through her butler, Hatton. Empress of them all is Lakey—Elinor Eastlake, of Lake Forest, Illinois—the aloof aesthete who’s studying art in Europe and spends most of the novel offstage. Most of the movie too. “Waiting for Lakey to reappear,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in a 1966 essay on the making of Lumet’s movie, “is about like waiting for Godot.” But worth the wait, for she was played with sublime hauteur by a young Candice Bergen. It is upon Lakey’s return from Europe that the group realizes she is a lesbian.</div>
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Getting the book written would take some doing. Late in 1959, the year McCarthy received her Guggenheim, she met the man who would become her fourth and last husband, the diplomat James West. McCarthy left her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, to wed West, who had to leave his second wife, Margaret. West was posted to Paris, where the couple bought a large apartment, and McCarthy took on extra writing assignments to help pay for its renovation. This annoyed Jovanovich, who’d drummed up huge advance interest in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> and wanted to see it finished and in print pronto. Moreover, in early 1963, just as she should have been perfecting her final manuscript for its April deadline, McCarthy spent intellectual and emotional energy defending <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Eichmann in Jerusalem,</i> an eyewitness report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucratic cog in the Holocaust machine and the man who would embody, in the report’s infamous phrase, “the banality of evil.” First serialized in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New Yorker</i> and deeply controversial, the book was written by McCarthy’s beloved friend and kindred spirit, the political theorist Hannah Arendt.</div>
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Yet even before the move to Paris and the Eichmann explosion McCarthy realized she couldn’t manage <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group’</i>s projected time frame—the Roosevelt 30s to the Eisenhower 50s. In 1960 she told <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Paris Review,</i> “These girls are all essentially comic figures, and it’s awfully hard to make anything happen to them.” She felt that comic figures, as if by Delphic decree, were not allowed to learn or grow. Reducing the time frame to seven years, she still had trouble wrapping it up. “I’ve lost all perspective,” McCarthy told Arendt. “The main thing is to push on and deposit the burden. On Jovanovich’s lap.” That said, when McCarthy suddenly found herself on the verge of best-sellerdom, she was, she wrote, “very much excited by all the excitement about the book.” The question of whether McCarthy had made the girls’ fates feel like more than <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">faits accomplis</i> would be left for the critics to settle.</div>
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McCarthyism</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span>he year 1963 was a big one for what is now termed “second-wave feminism.” McCarthy never rode <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">any</i> wave of feminism. Generously mentored by male editors and lovers, she scorned special pleading based on gender. Nevertheless, her Vassar girls burst upon the world in the same year that saw the publication of Betty Friedan’s <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Feminine Mystique,</i> a groundbreaking study of the nameless unhappiness that was plaguing postwar housewives. (Friedan’s book was sparked by Smith girls, classmates she had surveyed at a 15th reunion.) Also in 1963, Radcliffe girl Adrienne Rich published her third collection of poetry, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,</i> a seismic shift into the terrain of gender politics. “All three of these books,” says Katha Pollitt, essayist for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Nation,</i> “were about the way very smart, educated women get trapped in the lesser life they are compelled to lead.”</div>
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Unlike her sister-school sisters, McCarthy wasn’t taking on the present in a way that was radically or even covertly subversive. She was looking at the past, specifically, she said, at a “vanishing class”—upper-middle, Protestant, educated. Her girls were bluestockings, not rebels. They graduate from Vassar embracing the social responsibilities required of their class and believing that America is inevitably improving. Almost all of them become less acute with the passing of time. One could and probably should read this diminuendo as an authorial statement on life. As W. H. Auden wrote in the poem <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Lullaby,</i> “Time and fevers burn away / Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children … ” But Pauline Kael also had a point when she said, “She beats up on those girls.”</div>
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“I think she looked around at what happened to her classmates,” says the novelist Mary Gordon. “Because she’s really talking about what happened to women after the Second World War. They really got shut down. To give it a rosier coloration is something her honesty would never have allowed her to do.”</div>
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It was honesty on another level that made the book controversial. McCarthy was matter-of-fact and often slapstick about subjects everyone else deemed sacred—sex, motherhood, one’s relationship with one’s shrink. And she was completely unfazed by physiology.</div>
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“ ‘<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Betty bled like a pig,</i>’ ” reiterates the writer Penelope Rowlands. “My mother had a whole circle of friends that were parents. We kids would play in Central Park and they would sit on the bench. I have a distinct memory of the mothers sitting there giggling. One of them had a book and she said, ‘Read Chapter Two,’ and handed it to someone else. I can see them all just savoring it.”</div>
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Mary Gordon remembers “the pessary, that was such a major thing. I was in Catholic school at the time and I thought <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a dirty book. I read it under the covers, and it was very exciting among my friends. Even though it had taken place in the 30s, it still seemed like late-breaking news. Smart women able to be sexual—that just seemed, in 1963, very thrilling. And it had immense stylishness.”</div>
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“There were scenes that were neat and snappy,” recalls writer and critic Margo Jefferson. “Of course, everybody remembers Libby and her secret, what she called ‘going over the top.’ Written in that precise little way.”</div>
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The reviews rolled in as expected, acknowledging McCarthy’s reputation as a critic and trying, in the words of Jovanovich, “not to be wrong about the book.” Some even went as far as to quote back McCarthy’s own description of her objectives (progress, platitudes), a rare deference that attests to the fear factor attached to her name. In <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Saturday Review,</i> Granville Hicks lauded McCarthy’s newfound sympathy for her characters yet suggested it was as “social history that the novel will chiefly be remembered.” In <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Times,</i> Arthur Mizener detected no sympathy at all but decided that while <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was not a conventional novel, “it is, in its own way, something pretty good.” The <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Chicago Daily News</i> called it a “whopper … one of the best novels of the decade.”</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan</i> Politics</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">B</span>acklash arrived in October. Norman Podhoretz, writing in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Show,</i> went after the snobbery he perceived in McCarthy’s novel: “Willfully blind to the spirit of moral ambition and the dream of self-transcendence that animated [the 30s], she can see nothing in it but foolishness and insincerity—despite the fact that she herself was produced by that spirit.” Even worse was the broadside from a new publication—started up during the New York newspaper strike—<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review of Books,</i> edited by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein. McCarthy considered <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review</i> friendly, having written an essay on William Burroughs for its very first issue. Her good friends Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, then husband and wife, were part of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review’</i>s inner circle. So she was stunned when the fortnightly slammed her not once but twice.</div>
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On September 26, 1963, a three-paragraph parody called “The Gang” was published under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne (a play on Xavier Rynne, the famous pseudonym of Francis X. Murphy, who wrote extensively on the Vatican). It zeroed in on Dottie’s—now Maisie’s—defloration, mocking the way McCarthy’s avid, appraising omniscience doesn’t shut off even during a shtup: “Gasping for breath, Maisie giggled and said, ‘Remember Bernard Shaw? Something about brief and ridiculous.’ ”</div>
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McCarthy was not happy to be parodied so publicly and perfectly. And she was dumbfounded when she learned that Xavier Prynne was none other than her close friend Hardwick.</div>
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“Why did Lizzie do it?” asks Kiernan, who is now at work on a book about Robert Lowell and his wives. “Well, it was irresistible. And, to be fair, the one part she mocks is the best part of the book. She hasn’t picked one of the weaknesses.”</div>
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“Lizzie was a great friend of Mary’s, so it was obviously complex,” says someone who knew them both. “She felt it was a matter of justice—justice for literary judgment.”</div>
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Worse would come three weeks later, when <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review of Books</i> published Norman Mailer’s strenuously virtuosic, outrageously sexist takedown. The razor sharpens on the strop in the opening paragraph, with Mailer hailing Mary as “our saint, our umpire, our lit arbiter, our broadsword, our Barrymore (Ethel), our Dame (dowager), our mistress (Head), our Joan of Arc … ” et cetera. He gives <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> one compliment—“It has a conception of the novel which is Mary’s own”—and then goes on (and on and on) to say in a thousand different ways that it is “good but not nearly good enough.” In short, he gave her the Mary McCarthy treatment.</div>
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Negative reviews on such a grand scale are no fun, but they can bring positive publicity to a book, a greater sense of moment. And then there’s the jealousy of friends. “The people at the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> were all very smart,” explains cultural critic Midge Decter, who knew McCarthy in those days, “and very catty with one another because they were all living as literary figures in a shortage economy of fame and money. Mary had published some fiction, but not much attention was paid to it. Then <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a big success and nobody could stand it. Everybody was very mean about Mary and envious of her. It wasn’t unheard of by then; Saul Bellow had had a big success. That was the first major trauma. But the idea that you could actually make money being a writer, that was new.”</div>
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“High art and popular art were in very different worlds,” says Pollitt. “You couldn’t be in both. You might want your book made into a movie, but if you did, that was selling out.”</div>
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“It was a best-seller and she was making all this money,” Kiernan says. “You’ve got to realize, she had always been an intellectual—a New York intellectual. And so the people who had respected her, they look at her again. And she’s now got Susan Sontag nipping at her heels, and Susan is suddenly <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">the</i> intellectual, and she looks a lot purer than Mary does at this point, and styles have changed. So did she sell out deliberately? I don’t think she ever intended <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> to be a big best-seller.”</div>
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The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">O</span>nce critics and friends got their swipes in, Vassar classmates took their turn. For years McCarthy had been wounding friends and colleagues by liberally, transparently, and irreverently using them in her fiction. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was no different. But where her previous novels had highbrow readerships, vastly smaller, this one was titillating everybody. In her 1992 biography of the author, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Writing Dangerously,</i> Carol Brightman notes that among McCarthy’s set “identifying the bodies in the ‘blood-stained alley’ behind <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> quickly became a favorite pastime.” They knew that these girls were based on real people. It didn’t help that McCarthy had hardly changed the names of the victims—for instance, Dottie Renfrew derived from Dottie Newton. Yet she insisted the book could not be called a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">roman à clef</i> because the girls were “unknown to the public.”</div>
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Whatever you call the book, the Vassar class of ’33 viewed it as a betrayal. In a story titled “Miss McCarthy’s Subjects Return the Compliments,” which ran on the front page of the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Herald Tribune Book Review</i> in January of 1964, one of the affronted said, “It’s all there—our parents, our habits, our prejudices, our classmates.” Interviewed by the journalist Sheila Tobias, the “real-life” roommates shot back, remembering McCarthy as narcissistic and unkempt. And they were withering about the bun she wore at the nape of her neck, a signature. “She may,” one said, “be the only Vassar girl not to have changed her hairstyle in 30 years.” Writing to Jovanovich in high dudgeon over the “horrible nasty piece,” McCarthy protested that “The Group is an idea, not a study of the actual group disguised—a Platonic ideal.” Sounds like the old <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte philosophique</i> defense. She did, however, finally cut her hair.</div>
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The provenance of the novel’s most mysterious character, Elinor Eastlake, is to this day a fascinating question. The character is as self-contained as a cat, and in the novel’s final scene—Lakey’s verbal duel, behind the wheel of her car, with Kay’s husband, Harald—she’s mesmerizing, which is to say brilliantly written. Although McCarthy eventually said Lakey owed her “Indian eyes” to Margaret Miller and her “fathomless scorn” to Nathalie Swan, both Vassar classmates, a description that arrives late in the novel superimposes Mary upon Lakey: “They had all cut their hair and had permanents, but Lakey still wore hers in a black knot at the nape of her neck, which gave her a girlish air.” Kiernan believes “she’s many people. I think partly she’s Mary, partly she was Margaret Miller, who had the physical beauty of Lakey. And Helen Dawes Watermulder, from Chicago, she thought she was Lakey.” Others believe that Lakey was based on one person, a Vassar graduate of quiet renown, Elizabeth Bishop.</div>
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Continued (page 4 of 4)</div>
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A distinguished poet, in literary stature right up there with Robert Lowell (and thus above Mary), Bishop happened to be a lesbian. When she first read <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> she’d been amused. But, Kiernan writes, friends had persuaded her that “not only was she the model for Lakey … but Lota de Macedo Soares, her Brazilian lover, was the model for the baroness [Lakey’s lover].” Bishop went cold on McCarthy, who as late as 1979 appealed to her in a letter: “I promise you that no thought of you, or of Lota, even grazed my mind when I was writing <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group.</i>”</div>
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“Mary thought that she had changed certain facts, and Elizabeth thought it was still too close,” says an editor who knew both women. “This is what one thinks: Would there have been a Lakey if there hadn’t been Elizabeth Bishop? The answer is probably no. Lakey is meant to be Mary-like in appearance and Elizabeth-like in superior sensibility. It’s very important to the novel actually, because it’s important to the novel’s tone, which has this superiority, this sense of knowingness about different lives, different people. She clearly had followed these women. Vassar had been very important to Mary as the place where she formed her view of things, and you feel her attempt to locate people socially, where they stood, where their family stood. It’s very much part of her writing and her sensibility, this question of who is superior in American social life.”</div>
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Not until 1976, when <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Esquire</i> published Truman Capote’s “La Côte Basque,” a short story that fouled the society dames he called his “swans,” would another work of fiction upset so many women.</div>
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Groupthink</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">N</span>ovelists lift material from life because they must. First novels are invariably autobiographical, which is why second novels are so difficult: the writer needs to recede and let the characters create themselves. McCarthy never learned to back off and loosen her grip. Maybe she couldn’t. She’d lost so much so young. She once said that the reason you write a novel is “to put something in the world that wasn’t there before,” so she had the artist’s impulse for creation. But she did not have the artist’s trust in stirrings that cannot quite be set to words. She couldn’t leave characters to a fate that was out of her control. This is why the word “novel” keeps slipping off her fiction and why she herself was constantly coming up with other terms for her work.</div>
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McCarthy grew to dislike <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> and the best-seller treatment that accompanied it. “I hated the whole business of interviews and TV. I felt I’d been corrupted,” she told the English newspaper <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Observer</i> in 1979, “that the world which I despised had somehow eaten its way into me.” There were two more novels and reams of nonfiction. She continued hurling judgments like thunderbolts. One in particular, lightly tossed, wreaked havoc. In 1979, on <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Dick Cavett Show,</i> Cavett asked McCarthy which writers she thought were overrated. “The only one I can think of,” she said, “is a holdover like Lillian Hellman.” She then uttered the actionable sentence, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman was watching, and within weeks, citing defamation of character, she sued McCarthy, Cavett, and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation for $2.5 million. Hellman’s lawyer said she would drop the suit if McCarthy issued a retraction, but McCarthy wouldn’t, because she couldn’t lie. It wasn’t until 1984 that a first ruling came down, and it was in Hellman’s favor. McCarthy planned to appear in court, but Hellman died a month later, and with her the lawsuit. In 1989, McCarthy died of lung cancer. She never had another book as big as <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group.</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Roberta Maxwell (Hellman) & Marcia Rodd (McCarthy) last" src="http://www.womanaroundtown.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Roberta-Maxwell-Hellman-Marcia-Rodd-McCarthy-last-520x371.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #f2f2f2; color: #050809; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: start;">Roberta Maxwell (Hellman) and Marcia Rodd (McCarthy)</span></td></tr>
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Until the end, admiring writers and journalists made pilgrimages to the apartment in Paris and to Castine, Maine, where the Wests summered in a 19th-century sea captain’s house. While McCarthy remained politically left and in full support of reproductive rights, more than once she commented on her preference for doing things the old-fashioned way. “I like labor-intensive implements and practices. Cranking by hand an ice cream freezer … pushing a fruit or vegetable through a sieve … leaving some mark of the tools on the marble I think it has something to do with the truth.” And again, “I love recipes that involve pushing things through sieves.” In a way it describes her method as a novelist. McCarthy’s plots, their ingredients measured out and mixed with an almost scientific objective in mind, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">are</i> like recipes—usually for disaster. And instead of fruits or vegetables, it is her characters that get pushed and strained through a sieve.</div>
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The poet Robert Lowell, whom McCarthy adored and revered, said something similar but with more eloquence. In a letter to Mary dated August 7, 1963, he described her Vassar girls as “cloistered, pastoral souls breaking on the real rocks of the time.” He went on to include himself in this group of cloistered souls, writing that in the late 30s “we were ignorant, dependable little machines made to mow the lawn, then suddenly turned out to clear the wilderness.” Leave it to the poet to know an elegy when he sees it. Flowers of the culture, these young women, but shot from a gun.</div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-74862659299215659742014-04-27T02:44:00.000-07:002014-04-27T02:44:13.937-07:00Vassar Unzipped Part 3; plus Xavier Prynne's punishing parody of 'The Group', 'The Gang'<div class="title cn_title" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
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<i>Vassar Unzipped</i></h1>
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Shocking, titillating, and acid-laced, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel about eight Vassar girls, turned the feared and revered literary critic into a wealthy, world-famous author. But the backlash was brutal, not least from her Vassar classmates. Laura Jacobs explores why the book still dazzles as a generational portrait, falters as fiction, and blighted McCarthy’s life.</div>
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<span class="contributor first last" data-contributor-type="writer" style="background-image: none; border: 0px; float: left; margin: 0px 14px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><label style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: adobe-text-pro-1, adobe-text-pro-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By</label> <span class="name" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;"><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/laura-jacobs" style="color: black; outline-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Laura Jacobs</a></span></span></div>
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<figure class="media " style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; clear: both; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;"><img alt="" src="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/07/vassar-sex-single-girl-ivy-league-mary-mccarthy/.i.0.the-group-vasser-mary-mccarthy.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; margin: 0px 20px 0px 0px; max-height: 100%; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;" title="" /><div class="body credits" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: vf-sans-1, vf-sans-2, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 10px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 2px; padding: 0px; text-align: right; text-transform: uppercase;">
LARGE PHOTOGRAPH © UNITED ARTISTS/PHOTOFEST; INSET BY GORMAN STUDIO.</div>
<figcaption class="caption" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; clear: both; color: #222222; font-family: vf-sans-1, vf-sans-2, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 20px 20px 0px;"><b style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">FLICK LIT</b> A scene from the 1966 film adaptation of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> directed by Sidney Lumet, with Jessica Walter as Libby, Joanna Pettet as Kay, and Shirley Knight as Polly. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Inset,</i> the book’s original, 1963 edition.</figcaption></figure></div>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">E</span>veryone loved Chapter Two. Straitlaced Dottie Renfrew—Vassar class of 1933 and a virgin—has gone home with the handsome but dissipated Dick Brown. He undresses her slowly, so that she “was hardly trembling when she stood there in front of him with nothing on but her pearls.” Dick makes Dottie lie down on a towel, and after she experiences some “rubbing and stroking,” and then some “pushing and stabbing,” she starts to get the hang of things. “All of a sudden, she seemed to explode in a series of long, uncontrollable contractions that embarrassed her, like the hiccups … ” No hearts and flowers here, simply a female orgasm described by a female writer who was as empirical and precise as the male writers of her day—perhaps more so—yet always attuned to the social niceties imprinted upon a certain class of female mind. Dick removes the towel, impressed by the minute stain, and in a remark that pulled the romantic veil from the usual novelistic pillow talk, says of his ex-wife, “Betty bled like a pig.”</div>
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It was the first line of Chapter Three, however, that brought mythic status to Mary McCarthy’s fifth novel, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>. “Get yourself a pessary,” Dick says the next morning, walking Dottie to the door. The chapter proceeds to offer a tutorial on the etiquette, economics, semiotics, and symbolism of this particular form of contraception, circa 1933. Diaphragm, ring, plug—call it what you will—when <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was published, in 1963, the subject was still shocking. Sidney Lumet’s movie of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—released three years later, smack in the middle of the sexual revolution—included Dottie’s deflowering and subsequent trip to a gynecologist but substituted euphemisms for McCarthy’s blunt language. Instead, Dick Brown says, “The right lady doctor could make us a lot happier.”</div>
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Critics of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> would call it Mary McCarthy’s “lady-writer’s novel” and “lady-book,” insults meant to suggest it was a falling-off from her previous work. And it <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">was</i> different from what she’d done before. Up until <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> McCarthy was feared and revered in the smart, tight, testy, and frequently backstabbing world of midcentury literary quarterlies and political reviews. Her critical assessments of theater and literature were scathing, and no one was too high to be brought low. Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams—the greats of the day—all came in for vivisection, McCarthy’s own Theater of Cruelty on the page. (“Torn animals,” poet Randall Jarrell wrote of a character based on McCarthy, “were removed at sunset from that smile.”) Her early novels read like moral chess matches where everyone is a pawn. And her memoirs, well, one thinks of brutal honesty dressed in beautiful scansion, Latinate sentences of classical balance and offhand wit in which nothing is sacred and no one is spared, not even the author herself. There was never anything “ladylike” about Mary McCarthy’s writing. She struck fear in the hearts of male colleagues, many of whom she took to bed <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">without</i> trembling or pearls. For aspiring female writers, she remains totemic.</div>
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But <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—a novel that followed eight Vassar roommates from commencement in 1933 to the brink of war in 1940—was her Mount Olympus and her Achilles’ heel, a monster international success that brought world fame yet failed to impress the peers who mattered most.</div>
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“Women’s secrets again,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote to a friend, “told in clinical detail.”</div>
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“No one in the know likes the book,” poet Robert Lowell wrote to fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, a Vassar classmate of McCarthy’s.</div>
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“Mary tried for something very big,” critic Dwight Macdonald wrote to historian Nicola Chiaromonte, “but didn’t have the creative force to weld it all together.”</div>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">A</span>ll true, and all beside the point. Published on August 28, 1963, with a whopping first printing of 75,000, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a sensation. By September 8 it was No. 9 on the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times</i> best-seller list for adult fiction, with booksellers ordering 5,000 copies a day. By October 6 it had dethroned Morris L. West’s <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shoes of the Fisherman</i> to become No. 1, where it would stay for the next five months. By the end of 1964, nearly 300,000 copies had been sold, though now and then Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had to refund the price of a book. Women’s secrets “told in clinical detail” were, for some, tantamount to pornography. The book was banned in Australia, Italy, and Ireland.</div>
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Countless novels have topped the best-seller list for months. Mention them now—<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shoes of the Fisherman</i>, for instance—and people go blank. Not so with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group.</i> While its plot was almost nonexistent and its emotional hold next to nil, the secrets of these Vassar girls were chinked in stone and the racy one-liners etched in memory. As Helen Downes Light, a Vassar classmate of McCarthy’s, told Frances Kiernan, the author of the biography <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Seeing Mary Plain,</i> “I used to keep seventy-five dollars of mad money in a book. We had <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> on the shelf in our guest room and I thought, I’ll remember where it is if I put it in there. Every guest we had would come down the next morning and say, ‘Did you know you had money in that book?’ ”</div>
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Money in that book! Avon paid $100,000 for the paperback rights. Movie rights sold to producer-agent Charles Feldman for $162,500. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> made Mary McCarthy a very rich intellectual, one of America’s first highbrows to receive gargantuan sums, thus changing the financial expectations of serious writers and the scale on which their work could be judged.</div>
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By the time McCarthy began <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> she had been writing about groups for years. It was a fascination of hers, and you could say it was fated. When McCarthy was six, she and her three younger brothers lost both parents in the 1918 flu pandemic. Gone the beatific home created by an adored mother and charismatic father; gone the intimate group that is one’s family. Her father, Roy McCarthy, was the son of J. H. McCarthy, a wealthy, self-made grain merchant in Minneapolis. Roy was charming and handsome, but he was a binge drinker, which made it difficult for him to hold a job. At 30, he went west to Oregon for a fresh start in a timber-brokerage business, and it was there that he met 21-year-old Tess Preston, dark-haired, beautiful, and accepting of Roy’s alcoholism. They married in 1911, and when Mary was born, in 1912 in Seattle, Roy not only stopped drinking for good, he became a lawyer at 32. Unfortunately, the ill effects of childhood rheumatic fever left him increasingly bedridden. The decision to move the family back to Minneapolis, to be close to Roy’s parents, proved fatal. Upon arrival, Roy and Tess died within a day of each other. The orphans would be shuttled between unsympathetic and sometimes sadistic relatives.</div>
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A little girl with a gimlet eye, Mary was acutely aware of her new status—the outsider looking in—and she became well acquainted with the power games played by those on the inside. Her coming-of-age brought more of the same. As a Seattle girl of uncertain class (not to mention—and she didn’t—a Jewish grandmother), she was an outsider at East Coast, upper-crust Vassar. As an Irish Catholic of bourgeois upbringing, she was an outsider among <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review’</i>s gang of first-generation Jews, even as she ruled from within as the magazine’s theater critic and queen cobra, entrancing male colleagues while living with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.R.’</i>s editor Philip Rahv. In fact, being “inside” only brought ambivalence. “A princess among the trolls” is how she came to characterize her position at <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.R.,</i> rather nastily, in her astonishing short story of 1941, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” This frank and often bawdy portrayal of a one-night stand on a cross-country train, its details drawn from McCarthy’s own past tryst on a train, was a dropped bomb that brought career-making notoriety. “I was at Exeter at the time,” the late George Plimpton told Frances Kiernan, “and it made almost as much of an impression as Pearl Harbor.”</div>
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Novel Idea</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span><i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">he Group</i> is considered McCarthy’s fifth novel, but, truth be told, it’s hard to know exactly which of her books is the first. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Company She Keeps,</i> published in 1942 and cited as the first, was actually a collection of previously published short stories, including “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” all sharing a protagonist, Margaret Sargent. Her piercing sensibility takes the place of a plot, sending waves of pitiless social insight and irony rippling through the book. McCarthy’s “second” novel, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis,</i> was the winning entry in a 1949 fiction contest sponsored by the English literary monthly <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Horizon.</i> A novelette in length, a political satire in tone, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis</i> was also a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">roman à clef</i> that spoofed the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> intellectuals, presenting them as Realists or Purists and plopping them into a rural Utopia where they attempt to live outside society, without modern conveniences or class distinctions. Former lover Rahv, caricatured as the leader of the Realists, was so stung by the book he threatened to sue. In an interview with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Paris Review,</i> McCarthy clarified: “<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis</i> is not a novel It’s a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte,</i> a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte philosophique.</i>”</div>
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An interesting choice of words on McCarthy’s part, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte</i> versus “story,” for the French <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte</i> not only translates as “tale,” it also connotes a narration, a story told orally. Setting aside the fact that McCarthy could be quite theatrical when reading her work before an audience, there <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">is</i> a distinctly narrated, documentary-voice-over quality to her fiction, as if her tales came straight from her head—eyes, ears, brain, mouth—without ever having traveled through her heart.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Groves of Academe</i> followed in 1951 and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life</i> in 1954. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Groves</i> is yet another chess match, an example of what the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, a lifelong friend of McCarthy’s, termed her “ideological follies,” this one between academics (recognizable to those in the know, naturally) at a small college modeled on Bard, where McCarthy had taught for a year. As for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life,</i> the plot, not ideological but still a kind of folly, zeroes in on the emotional dynamics of an iffy marriage dropped into a tiny community of bohemians, further complicated when the protagonist’s former husband (based, in part, on McCarthy’s second husband, the writer Edmund Wilson) lures her into a drunken roll on the couch. Booze and bad sex were never far apart in the world of Mary McCarthy, and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life</i> turns on what will be done with the pregnancy that follows.</div>
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In the year that brought forth <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life,</i> the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> published yet another McCarthy tale, this one called “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.” Hard to believe Mary could go one better than “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” but she did. Sandwiched between an Irving Howe essay, “This Age of Conformity,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Tradition and the Modern Age” was the unabashed third chapter of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—“Get yourself a pessary.” It was a scandalous sneak preview that made everyone want more.</div>
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Portrait of the Ladies</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">A</span>ccording to biographer Carol Gelderman (<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mary McCarthy: A Life</i>), the idea was articulated in 1951, when McCarthy applied for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant. She wanted to write about “a group of newly married couples who emerge out of the Depression with a series of optimistic beliefs in science, engineering, rural electrification, the Aga stove, technocracy, psychoanalysis In a certain sense, the ideas are the villains and the people their hapless victims.” It was a concept novel, with not so much a plot as a plan: the characters conned by progress with a capital <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.</i> The grant was denied, but McCarthy went ahead and began writing.</div>
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In 1959, five years after “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself” was published, McCarthy again applied for a Guggenheim, this time describing the book as a “history of the faith in progress of the nineteen-thirties and forties as reflected in the behavior and notions of young women—college graduates of the year 1933 It is a crazy quilt of clichés, platitudes, and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">idées reçues.</i> Yet the book is not meant to be a joke or even a satire, exactly, but a ‘true history’ of the times … ”</div>
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The concept had been simplified and refined. In a way, it was the fictional flower of a nonfiction essay McCarthy had written in 1951, for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Holiday</i> magazine, in which she stated, “For different people … at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner.” <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was now the book McCarthy was destined to write. Her editor, William Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, thought it “might be one of the few important books that is about women without being actually <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">for</i> women.” The jury at the Guggenheim must have thought so too, for the grant was given.</div>
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McCarthy would fulfill her proposal with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">i’</i>s dotted (Dottied?) and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">t’</i>s crossed. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> isn’t a joke, and though satirical it isn’t a satire. The lives of McCarthy’s eight graduates—nine if you count Norine, a classmate who envied the group from afar and is the novel’s lone outsider—do indeed present a crazy quilt that captures the history of the time. Dottie proffers a peephole into the sexual mores of the 1930s and Priss into “enlightened” mothering. Literary Libby wants to be an editor but is steered toward agenting, while Polly’s love affairs shed light on the era’s attitudes toward psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In Kay we have the consumer as climber, a woman in love with the intellectual cachet of modernism; for this she is mocked by her philandering husband, Harald Petersen (modeled on McCarthy’s first husband, Harald Johnsrud). Androgynous Helena writes the class newsletter, and chubby heiress Pokey is present mostly through her butler, Hatton. Empress of them all is Lakey—Elinor Eastlake, of Lake Forest, Illinois—the aloof aesthete who’s studying art in Europe and spends most of the novel offstage. Most of the movie too. “Waiting for Lakey to reappear,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in a 1966 essay on the making of Lumet’s movie, “is about like waiting for Godot.” But worth the wait, for she was played with sublime hauteur by a young Candice Bergen. It is upon Lakey’s return from Europe that the group realizes she is a lesbian.</div>
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Getting the book written would take some doing. Late in 1959, the year McCarthy received her Guggenheim, she met the man who would become her fourth and last husband, the diplomat James West. McCarthy left her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, to wed West, who had to leave his second wife, Margaret. West was posted to Paris, where the couple bought a large apartment, and McCarthy took on extra writing assignments to help pay for its renovation. This annoyed Jovanovich, who’d drummed up huge advance interest in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> and wanted to see it finished and in print pronto. Moreover, in early 1963, just as she should have been perfecting her final manuscript for its April deadline, McCarthy spent intellectual and emotional energy defending <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Eichmann in Jerusalem,</i> an eyewitness report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucratic cog in the Holocaust machine and the man who would embody, in the report’s infamous phrase, “the banality of evil.” First serialized in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New Yorker</i> and deeply controversial, the book was written by McCarthy’s beloved friend and kindred spirit, the political theorist Hannah Arendt.</div>
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Yet even before the move to Paris and the Eichmann explosion McCarthy realized she couldn’t manage <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group’</i>s projected time frame—the Roosevelt 30s to the Eisenhower 50s. In 1960 she told <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Paris Review,</i> “These girls are all essentially comic figures, and it’s awfully hard to make anything happen to them.” She felt that comic figures, as if by Delphic decree, were not allowed to learn or grow. Reducing the time frame to seven years, she still had trouble wrapping it up. “I’ve lost all perspective,” McCarthy told Arendt. “The main thing is to push on and deposit the burden. On Jovanovich’s lap.” That said, when McCarthy suddenly found herself on the verge of best-sellerdom, she was, she wrote, “very much excited by all the excitement about the book.” The question of whether McCarthy had made the girls’ fates feel like more than <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">faits accomplis</i> would be left for the critics to settle.</div>
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McCarthyism</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span>he year 1963 was a big one for what is now termed “second-wave feminism.” McCarthy never rode <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">any</i> wave of feminism. Generously mentored by male editors and lovers, she scorned special pleading based on gender. Nevertheless, her Vassar girls burst upon the world in the same year that saw the publication of Betty Friedan’s <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Feminine Mystique,</i> a groundbreaking study of the nameless unhappiness that was plaguing postwar housewives. (Friedan’s book was sparked by Smith girls, classmates she had surveyed at a 15th reunion.) Also in 1963, Radcliffe girl Adrienne Rich published her third collection of poetry, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,</i> a seismic shift into the terrain of gender politics. “All three of these books,” says Katha Pollitt, essayist for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Nation,</i> “were about the way very smart, educated women get trapped in the lesser life they are compelled to lead.”</div>
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Unlike her sister-school sisters, McCarthy wasn’t taking on the present in a way that was radically or even covertly subversive. She was looking at the past, specifically, she said, at a “vanishing class”—upper-middle, Protestant, educated. Her girls were bluestockings, not rebels. They graduate from Vassar embracing the social responsibilities required of their class and believing that America is inevitably improving. Almost all of them become less acute with the passing of time. One could and probably should read this diminuendo as an authorial statement on life. As W. H. Auden wrote in the poem <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Lullaby,</i> “Time and fevers burn away / Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children … ” But Pauline Kael also had a point when she said, “She beats up on those girls.”</div>
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Part 3<br />
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“I think she looked around at what happened to her classmates,” says the novelist Mary Gordon. “Because she’s really talking about what happened to women after the Second World War. They really got shut down. To give it a rosier coloration is something her honesty would never have allowed her to do.”</div>
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It was honesty on another level that made the book controversial. McCarthy was matter-of-fact and often slapstick about subjects everyone else deemed sacred—sex, motherhood, one’s relationship with one’s shrink. And she was completely unfazed by physiology.</div>
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“ ‘<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Betty bled like a pig,</i>’ ” reiterates the writer Penelope Rowlands. “My mother had a whole circle of friends that were parents. We kids would play in Central Park and they would sit on the bench. I have a distinct memory of the mothers sitting there giggling. One of them had a book and she said, ‘Read Chapter Two,’ and handed it to someone else. I can see them all just savoring it.”</div>
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Mary Gordon remembers “the pessary, that was such a major thing. I was in Catholic school at the time and I thought <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a dirty book. I read it under the covers, and it was very exciting among my friends. Even though it had taken place in the 30s, it still seemed like late-breaking news. Smart women able to be sexual—that just seemed, in 1963, very thrilling. And it had immense stylishness.”</div>
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“There were scenes that were neat and snappy,” recalls writer and critic Margo Jefferson. “Of course, everybody remembers Libby and her secret, what she called ‘going over the top.’ Written in that precise little way.”</div>
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The reviews rolled in as expected, acknowledging McCarthy’s reputation as a critic and trying, in the words of Jovanovich, “not to be wrong about the book.” Some even went as far as to quote back McCarthy’s own description of her objectives (progress, platitudes), a rare deference that attests to the fear factor attached to her name. In <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Saturday Review,</i> Granville Hicks lauded McCarthy’s newfound sympathy for her characters yet suggested it was as “social history that the novel will chiefly be remembered.” In <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Times,</i> Arthur Mizener detected no sympathy at all but decided that while <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was not a conventional novel, “it is, in its own way, something pretty good.” The <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Chicago Daily News</i> called it a “whopper … one of the best novels of the decade.”</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan</i> Politics</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">B</span>acklash arrived in October. Norman Podhoretz, writing in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Show,</i> went after the snobbery he perceived in McCarthy’s novel: “Willfully blind to the spirit of moral ambition and the dream of self-transcendence that animated [the 30s], she can see nothing in it but foolishness and insincerity—despite the fact that she herself was produced by that spirit.” Even worse was the broadside from a new publication—started up during the New York newspaper strike—<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review of Books,</i> edited by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein. McCarthy considered <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review</i> friendly, having written an essay on William Burroughs for its very first issue. Her good friends Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, then husband and wife, were part of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review’</i>s inner circle. So she was stunned when the fortnightly slammed her not once but twice.</div>
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On September 26, 1963, a three-paragraph parody called “The Gang” was published under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne (a play on Xavier Rynne, the famous pseudonym of Francis X. Murphy, who wrote extensively on the Vatican). It zeroed in on Dottie’s—now Maisie’s—defloration, mocking the way McCarthy’s avid, appraising omniscience doesn’t shut off even during a shtup: “Gasping for breath, Maisie giggled and said, ‘Remember Bernard Shaw? Something about brief and ridiculous.’ ”<br />
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<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/xavier-prynne/" style="background-color: transparent; color: #990101; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 23.799999237060547px; text-decoration: none;">Xavier Prynne</a></h2>
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<time><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/issues/1963/sep/26/" style="color: #999999; text-decoration: none;">SEPTEMBER 26, 1963 ISSUE</a></time></div>
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<i>Maisie had always, rather demurely, thought of the great event as a “defloration,” from the Late Latin, defloratio. (To everyone’s surprise, this sociology major had been a whiz in Latin at St. Tim’s.) The funny thing was that never in the world would she have expected it to happen this way: on a rather tacky, flowered couch that opened out nto a day bed. (Mother would somehow have minded the odious couch more than the “event.”) But demure, rather strait-laced as Maisie was, now that she was here in the cold-water flat she was determined to go through with it, like Kierkegaard through clerical ordination. For this squinty, pink-cheeked girl, it was a duty and the old American stock in her (along with the industriousness of Mother’s Chicago meat-money parents) stood her in good stead as the evening wore on. Of course, she was thrilled, too. When Johhn (spelled, oddly enough, with two h’s in the Finnish manner) began, at Pinkie’s little May-wine-and-fresh-strawberry-bowl party, to stare steadily at her, she knew Maisie was shrewd. (Chicago meat again.) She had actually heard about that stare from Marj who had been deflowered—Marj called it “going the limit”—some years ago on a bridle path in Montana, where her family was summering.</i></div>
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<i><span class="dquo">“</span>It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash is added to her wounds!” The grunting, groaning, sweating, bloody deed was o’er at last. Gasping for breath, Maisie giggled and said, “Remember Bernard Shaw? Something about brief and ridiculous.” “Ugh!” Johhn said churlishly. Johhn, Maisie discovered with astonishment, was going to sleep! His clothes were thrown over the chair. Shamefully, she peeked. The label said, simply, MACY’S. She stroked his back, gently, and lay quietly wondering until suddenly, appalled, she felt violently hungry. In her slip she went to the kitchen and opened a can of Heinz Tomato Soup. Carefully she flavored it with a dash of stale curry powder. What she really wanted was a glass of pure, fresh milk, but the soup restored her tremendous Middlewestern energies and she decided to walk home, even though it was after midnight.</i></div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent;">She put on her Lord and Taylor biascut cocktail dress (all the rage this year, just as Hitler was threatening to reoccupy the Rhineland). Johhn was sprawled naked on the flowered couch, snoring. Somehow Maisie felt deeply moved by the snore. (That Marj had forgotten to mention!) In a Kraft cheese glass on the window sill she saw a bunch of paper carnations. Probably something for a still life. Johhn was a painter, not very successful she supposed. She slipped one of the carnations into the buttonhole of the Macy jacket, tiptoed to the couch and pressed a cool kiss on Johhn’s brow. He groaned,Requiescat in pace, dear Johhn, she whispered, as she closed the door which he had rakishly painted bright red, the color of blood.</i><img src="http://www.believermag.com/issues/200805/img/hardwick3.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.4;">McCarthy was not happy to be parodied so publicly and perfectly. And she was dumbfounded when she learned that Xavier Prynne was none other than her close friend Hardwick.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.4;">“Why did Lizzie do it?” asks Kiernan, who is now at work on a book about Robert Lowell and his wives. “Well, it was irresistible. And, to be fair, the one part she mocks is the best part of the book. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.4;">She </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.4;">hasn’t picked one of the weaknesses.”</span><i style="background-color: transparent;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="250" id="google_ads_iframe_/6105283/300x250-ArticleP1_0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" name="google_ads_iframe_/6105283/300x250-ArticleP1_0" scrolling="no" style="border-width: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" width="300"></iframe></i></div>
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“Lizzie was a great friend of Mary’s, so it was obviously complex,” says someone who knew them both. “She felt it was a matter of justice—justice for literary judgment.”</div>
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Worse would come three weeks later, when <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New York Review of Books</i> published Norman Mailer’s strenuously virtuosic, outrageously sexist takedown. The razor sharpens on the strop in the opening paragraph, with Mailer hailing Mary as “our saint, our umpire, our lit arbiter, our broadsword, our Barrymore (Ethel), our Dame (dowager), our mistress (Head), our Joan of Arc … ” et cetera. He gives <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> one compliment—“It has a conception of the novel which is Mary’s own”—and then goes on (and on and on) to say in a thousand different ways that it is “good but not nearly good enough.” In short, he gave her the Mary McCarthy treatment.</div>
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Negative reviews on such a grand scale are no fun, but they can bring positive publicity to a book, a greater sense of moment. And then there’s the jealousy of friends. “The people at the<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> were all very smart,” explains cultural critic Midge Decter, who knew McCarthy in those days, “and very catty with one another because they were all living as literary figures in a shortage economy of fame and money. Mary had published some fiction, but not much attention was paid to it. Then <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a big success and nobody could stand it. Everybody was very mean about Mary and envious of her. It wasn’t unheard of by then; Saul Bellow had had a big success. That was the first major trauma. But the idea that you could actually make money being a writer, that was new.”</div>
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“High art and popular art were in very different worlds,” says Pollitt. “You couldn’t be in both. You might want your book made into a movie, but if you did, that was selling out.”</div>
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“It was a best-seller and she was making all this money,” Kiernan says. “You’ve got to realize, she had always been an intellectual—a New York intellectual. And so the people who had respected her, they look at her again. And she’s now got Susan Sontag nipping at her heels, and Susan is suddenly <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">the</i> intellectual, and she looks a lot purer than Mary does at this point, and styles have changed. So did she sell out deliberately? I don’t think she ever intended <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>to be a big best-seller.”</div>
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The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">O</span>nce critics and friends got their swipes in, Vassar classmates took their turn. For years McCarthy had been wounding friends and colleagues by liberally, transparently, and irreverently using them in her fiction. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was no different. But where her previous novels had highbrow readerships, vastly smaller, this one was titillating everybody. In her 1992 biography of the author, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Writing Dangerously,</i> Carol Brightman notes that among McCarthy’s set “identifying the bodies in the ‘blood-stained alley’ behind <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group </i>quickly became a favorite pastime.” They knew that these girls were based on real people. It didn’t help that McCarthy had hardly changed the names of the victims—for instance, Dottie Renfrew derived from Dottie Newton. Yet she insisted the book could not be called a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">roman à clef</i> because the girls were “unknown to the public.”</div>
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Whatever you call the book, the Vassar class of ’33 viewed it as a betrayal. In a story titled “Miss McCarthy’s Subjects Return the Compliments,” which ran on the front page of the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Herald Tribune Book Review</i> in January of 1964, one of the affronted said, “It’s all there—our parents, our habits, our prejudices, our classmates.” Interviewed by the journalist Sheila Tobias, the “real-life” roommates shot back, remembering McCarthy as narcissistic and unkempt. And they were withering about the bun she wore at the nape of her neck, a signature. “She may,” one said, “be the only Vassar girl not to have changed her hairstyle in 30 years.” Writing to Jovanovich in high dudgeon over the “horrible nasty piece,” McCarthy protested that “The Group is an idea, not a study of the actual group disguised—a Platonic ideal.” Sounds like the old<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte philosophique</i> defense. She did, however, finally cut her hair.</div>
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The provenance of the novel’s most mysterious character, Elinor Eastlake, is to this day a fascinating question. The character is as self-contained as a cat, and in the novel’s final scene—Lakey’s verbal duel, behind the wheel of her car, with Kay’s husband, Harald—she’s mesmerizing, which is to say brilliantly written. Although McCarthy eventually said Lakey owed her “Indian eyes” to Margaret Miller and her “fathomless scorn” to Nathalie Swan, both Vassar classmates, a description that arrives late in the novel superimposes Mary upon Lakey: “They had all cut their hair and had permanents, but Lakey still wore hers in a black knot at the nape of her neck, which gave her a girlish air.” Kiernan believes “she’s many people. I think partly she’s Mary, partly she was Margaret Miller, who had the physical beauty of Lakey. And Helen Dawes Watermulder, from Chicago, she thought she was Lakey.” Others believe that Lakey was based on one person, a Vassar graduate of quiet renown, Elizabeth Bishop.<br />
<img height="400" src="http://bookbox.thet.net:16080/~chapin/WebPage/StudentWebPages/KaylaWebPage/Images/ebish2.jpg" width="314" /></div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-780431586431741950.post-19151961589540882572014-04-26T02:01:00.001-07:002014-04-26T02:01:36.779-07:00Vassar Unzipped: Part 2<div class="title cn_title" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
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Vassar Unzipped</h1>
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Shocking, titillating, and acid-laced, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel about eight Vassar girls, turned the feared and revered literary critic into a wealthy, world-famous author. But the backlash was brutal, not least from her Vassar classmates. Laura Jacobs explores why the book still dazzles as a generational portrait, falters as fiction, and blighted McCarthy’s life.</div>
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<span class="contributor first last" data-contributor-type="writer" style="background-image: none; border: 0px; float: left; margin: 0px 14px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><label style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-family: adobe-text-pro-1, adobe-text-pro-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By</label> <span class="name" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;"><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/laura-jacobs" style="color: black; outline-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Laura Jacobs</a></span></span></div>
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LARGE PHOTOGRAPH © UNITED ARTISTS/PHOTOFEST; INSET BY GORMAN STUDIO.</div>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">E</span>veryone loved Chapter Two. Straitlaced Dottie Renfrew—Vassar class of 1933 and a virgin—has gone home with the handsome but dissipated Dick Brown. He undresses her slowly, so that she “was hardly trembling when she stood there in front of him with nothing on but her pearls.” Dick makes Dottie lie down on a towel, and after she experiences some “rubbing and stroking,” and then some “pushing and stabbing,” she starts to get the hang of things. “All of a sudden, she seemed to explode in a series of long, uncontrollable contractions that embarrassed her, like the hiccups … ” No hearts and flowers here, simply a female orgasm described by a female writer who was as empirical and precise as the male writers of her day—perhaps more so—yet always attuned to the social niceties imprinted upon a certain class of female mind. Dick removes the towel, impressed by the minute stain, and in a remark that pulled the romantic veil from the usual novelistic pillow talk, says of his ex-wife, “Betty bled like a pig.”</div>
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It was the first line of Chapter Three, however, that brought mythic status to Mary McCarthy’s fifth novel, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>. “Get yourself a pessary,” Dick says the next morning, walking Dottie to the door. The chapter proceeds to offer a tutorial on the etiquette, economics, semiotics, and symbolism of this particular form of contraception, circa 1933. Diaphragm, ring, plug—call it what you will—when <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was published, in 1963, the subject was still shocking. Sidney Lumet’s movie of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—released three years later, smack in the middle of the sexual revolution—included Dottie’s deflowering and subsequent trip to a gynecologist but substituted euphemisms for McCarthy’s blunt language. Instead, Dick Brown says, “The right lady doctor could make us a lot happier.”</div>
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Critics of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> would call it Mary McCarthy’s “lady-writer’s novel” and “lady-book,” insults meant to suggest it was a falling-off from her previous work. And it <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">was</i> different from what she’d done before. Up until <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group,</i> McCarthy was feared and revered in the smart, tight, testy, and frequently backstabbing world of midcentury literary quarterlies and political reviews. Her critical assessments of theater and literature were scathing, and no one was too high to be brought low. Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams—the greats of the day—all came in for vivisection, McCarthy’s own Theater of Cruelty on the page. (“Torn animals,” poet Randall Jarrell wrote of a character based on McCarthy, “were removed at sunset from that smile.”) Her early novels read like moral chess matches where everyone is a pawn. And her memoirs, well, one thinks of brutal honesty dressed in beautiful scansion, Latinate sentences of classical balance and offhand wit in which nothing is sacred and no one is spared, not even the author herself. There was never anything “ladylike” about Mary McCarthy’s writing. She struck fear in the hearts of male colleagues, many of whom she took to bed <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">without</i> trembling or pearls. For aspiring female writers, she remains totemic.</div>
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But <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—a novel that followed eight Vassar roommates from commencement in 1933 to the brink of war in 1940—was her Mount Olympus and her Achilles’ heel, a monster international success that brought world fame yet failed to impress the peers who mattered most.</div>
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“Women’s secrets again,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote to a friend, “told in clinical detail.”</div>
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“No one in the know likes the book,” poet Robert Lowell wrote to fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, a Vassar classmate of McCarthy’s.</div>
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“Mary tried for something very big,” critic Dwight Macdonald wrote to historian Nicola Chiaromonte, “but didn’t have the creative force to weld it all together.”</div>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">A</span>ll true, and all beside the point. Published on August 28, 1963, with a whopping first printing of 75,000, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was a sensation. By September 8 it was No. 9 on the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times</i> best-seller list for adult fiction, with booksellers ordering 5,000 copies a day. By October 6 it had dethroned Morris L. West’s <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shoes of the Fisherman</i> to become No. 1, where it would stay for the next five months. By the end of 1964, nearly 300,000 copies had been sold, though now and then Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had to refund the price of a book. Women’s secrets “told in clinical detail” were, for some, tantamount to pornography. The book was banned in Australia, Italy, and Ireland.</div>
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Countless novels have topped the best-seller list for months. Mention them now—<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shoes of the Fisherman</i>, for instance—and people go blank. Not so with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group.</i> While its plot was almost nonexistent and its emotional hold next to nil, the secrets of these Vassar girls were chinked in stone and the racy one-liners etched in memory. As Helen Downes Light, a Vassar classmate of McCarthy’s, told Frances Kiernan, the author of the biography <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Seeing Mary Plain,</i> “I used to keep seventy-five dollars of mad money in a book. We had <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> on the shelf in our guest room and I thought, I’ll remember where it is if I put it in there. Every guest we had would come down the next morning and say, ‘Did you know you had money in that book?’ ”</div>
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Money in that book! Avon paid $100,000 for the paperback rights. Movie rights sold to producer-agent Charles Feldman for $162,500. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> made Mary McCarthy a very rich intellectual, one of America’s first highbrows to receive gargantuan sums, thus changing the financial expectations of serious writers and the scale on which their work could be judged.</div>
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By the time McCarthy began <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> she had been writing about groups for years. It was a fascination of hers, and you could say it was fated. When McCarthy was six, she and her three younger brothers lost both parents in the 1918 flu pandemic. Gone the beatific home created by an adored mother and charismatic father; gone the intimate group that is one’s family. Her father, Roy McCarthy, was the son of J. H. McCarthy, a wealthy, self-made grain merchant in Minneapolis. Roy was charming and handsome, but he was a binge drinker, which made it difficult for him to hold a job. At 30, he went west to Oregon for a fresh start in a timber-brokerage business, and it was there that he met 21-year-old Tess Preston, dark-haired, beautiful, and accepting of Roy’s alcoholism. They married in 1911, and when Mary was born, in 1912 in Seattle, Roy not only stopped drinking for good, he became a lawyer at 32. Unfortunately, the ill effects of childhood rheumatic fever left him increasingly bedridden. The decision to move the family back to Minneapolis, to be close to Roy’s parents, proved fatal. Upon arrival, Roy and Tess died within a day of each other. The orphans would be shuttled between unsympathetic and sometimes sadistic relatives.</div>
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A little girl with a gimlet eye, Mary was acutely aware of her new status—the outsider looking in—and she became well acquainted with the power games played by those on the inside. Her coming-of-age brought more of the same. As a Seattle girl of uncertain class (not to mention—and she didn’t—a Jewish grandmother), she was an outsider at East Coast, upper-crust Vassar. As an Irish Catholic of bourgeois upbringing, she was an outsider among <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review’</i>s gang of first-generation Jews, even as she ruled from within as the magazine’s theater critic and queen cobra, entrancing male colleagues while living with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.R.’</i>s editor Philip Rahv. In fact, being “inside” only brought ambivalence. “A princess among the trolls” is how she came to characterize her position at <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.R.,</i> rather nastily, in her astonishing short story of 1941, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” This frank and often bawdy portrayal of a one-night stand on a cross-country train, its details drawn from McCarthy’s own past tryst on a train, was a dropped bomb that brought career-making notoriety. “I was at Exeter at the time,” the late George Plimpton told Frances Kiernan, “and it made almost as much of an impression as Pearl Harbor.”</div>
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Novel Idea</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span><i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">he Group</i> is considered McCarthy’s fifth novel, but, truth be told, it’s hard to know exactly which of her books is the first. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Company She Keeps,</i> published in 1942 and cited as the first, was actually a collection of previously published short stories, including “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” all sharing a protagonist, Margaret Sargent. Her piercing sensibility takes the place of a plot, sending waves of pitiless social insight and irony rippling through the book. McCarthy’s “second” novel, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis,</i> was the winning entry in a 1949 fiction contest sponsored by the English literary monthly <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Horizon.</i> A novelette in length, a political satire in tone, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis</i> was also a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">roman à clef</i> that spoofed the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> intellectuals, presenting them as Realists or Purists and plopping them into a rural Utopia where they attempt to live outside society, without modern conveniences or class distinctions. Former lover Rahv, caricatured as the leader of the Realists, was so stung by the book he threatened to sue. In an interview with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Paris Review,</i> McCarthy clarified: “<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Oasis</i> is not a novel It’s a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte,</i> a <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte philosophique.</i>”</div>
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<label style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: black; font-family: adobe-text-pro-1, adobe-text-pro-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By</label><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"> </span><span class="name" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: black; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 19.600000381469727px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px;"><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/laura-jacobs" style="color: black; outline-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Laura Jacobs</a></span></div>
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An interesting choice of words on McCarthy’s part, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte</i> versus “story,” for the French <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">conte</i> not only translates as “tale,” it also connotes a narration, a story told orally. Setting aside the fact that McCarthy could be quite theatrical when reading her work before an audience, there <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">is</i> a distinctly narrated, documentary-voice-over quality to her fiction, as if her tales came straight from her head—eyes, ears, brain, mouth—without ever having traveled through her heart.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Groves of Academe</i> followed in 1951 and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life</i> in 1954. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Groves</i> is yet another chess match, an example of what the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, a lifelong friend of McCarthy’s, termed her “ideological follies,” this one between academics (recognizable to those in the know, naturally) at a small college modeled on Bard, where McCarthy had taught for a year. As for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life,</i> the plot, not ideological but still a kind of folly, zeroes in on the emotional dynamics of an iffy marriage dropped into a tiny community of bohemians, further complicated when the protagonist’s former husband (based, in part, on McCarthy’s second husband, the writer Edmund Wilson) lures her into a drunken roll on the couch. Booze and bad sex were never far apart in the world of Mary McCarthy, and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life</i> turns on what will be done with the pregnancy that follows.</div>
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In the year that brought forth <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Charmed Life,</i> the <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Partisan Review</i> published yet another McCarthy tale, this one called “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.” Hard to believe Mary could go one better than “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” but she did. Sandwiched between an Irving Howe essay, “This Age of Conformity,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Tradition and the Modern Age” was the unabashed third chapter of <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i>—“Get yourself a pessary.” It was a scandalous sneak preview that made everyone want more.<br />
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Portrait of the Ladies</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">A</span>ccording to biographer Carol Gelderman (<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mary McCarthy: A Life</i>), the idea was articulated in 1951, when McCarthy applied for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant. She wanted to write about “a group of newly married couples who emerge out of the Depression with a series of optimistic beliefs in science, engineering, rural electrification, the Aga stove, technocracy, psychoanalysis In a certain sense, the ideas are the villains and the people their hapless victims.” It was a concept novel, with not so much a plot as a plan: the characters conned by progress with a capital <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">P.</i> The grant was denied, but McCarthy went ahead and began writing.</div>
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In 1959, five years after “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself” was published, McCarthy again applied for a Guggenheim, this time describing the book as a “history of the faith in progress of the nineteen-thirties and forties as reflected in the behavior and notions of young women—college graduates of the year 1933 It is a crazy quilt of clichés, platitudes, and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">idées reçues.</i> Yet the book is not meant to be a joke or even a satire, exactly, but a ‘true history’ of the times … ”</div>
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The concept had been simplified and refined. In a way, it was the fictional flower of a nonfiction essay McCarthy had written in 1951, for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Holiday</i> magazine, in which she stated, “For different people … at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner.” <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> was now the book McCarthy was destined to write. Her editor, William Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, thought it “might be one of the few important books that is about women without being actually <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">for</i> women.” The jury at the Guggenheim must have thought so too, for the grant was given.</div>
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McCarthy would fulfill her proposal with <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">i’</i>s dotted (Dottied?) and <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">t’</i>s crossed. <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> isn’t a joke, and though satirical it isn’t a satire. The lives of McCarthy’s eight graduates—nine if you count Norine, a classmate who envied the group from afar and is the novel’s lone outsider—do indeed present a crazy quilt that captures the history of the time. Dottie proffers a peephole into the sexual mores of the 1930s and Priss into “enlightened” mothering. Literary Libby wants to be an editor but is steered toward agenting, while Polly’s love affairs shed light on the era’s attitudes toward psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In Kay we have the consumer as climber, a woman in love with the intellectual cachet of modernism; for this she is mocked by her philandering husband, Harald Petersen (modeled on McCarthy’s first husband, Harald Johnsrud). Androgynous Helena writes the class newsletter, and chubby heiress Pokey is present mostly through her butler, Hatton. Empress of them all is Lakey—Elinor Eastlake, of Lake Forest, Illinois—the aloof aesthete who’s studying art in Europe and spends most of the novel offstage. Most of the movie too. “Waiting for Lakey to reappear,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in a 1966 essay on the making of Lumet’s movie, “is about like waiting for Godot.” But worth the wait, for she was played with sublime hauteur by a young Candice Bergen. It is upon Lakey’s return from Europe that the group realizes she is a lesbian.</div>
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Getting the book written would take some doing. Late in 1959, the year McCarthy received her Guggenheim, she met the man who would become her fourth and last husband, the diplomat James West. McCarthy left her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, to wed West, who had to leave his second wife, Margaret. West was posted to Paris, where the couple bought a large apartment, and McCarthy took on extra writing assignments to help pay for its renovation. This annoyed Jovanovich, who’d drummed up huge advance interest in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group</i> and wanted to see it finished and in print pronto. Moreover, in early 1963, just as she should have been perfecting her final manuscript for its April deadline, McCarthy spent intellectual and emotional energy defending <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Eichmann in Jerusalem,</i> an eyewitness report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucratic cog in the Holocaust machine and the man who would embody, in the report’s infamous phrase, “the banality of evil.” First serialized in <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The New Yorker</i> and deeply controversial, the book was written by McCarthy’s beloved friend and kindred spirit, the political theorist Hannah Arendt.</div>
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Yet even before the move to Paris and the Eichmann explosion McCarthy realized she couldn’t manage <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Group’</i>s projected time frame—the Roosevelt 30s to the Eisenhower 50s. In 1960 she told <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Paris Review,</i> “These girls are all essentially comic figures, and it’s awfully hard to make anything happen to them.” She felt that comic figures, as if by Delphic decree, were not allowed to learn or grow. Reducing the time frame to seven years, she still had trouble wrapping it up. “I’ve lost all perspective,” McCarthy told Arendt. “The main thing is to push on and deposit the burden. On Jovanovich’s lap.” That said, when McCarthy suddenly found herself on the verge of best-sellerdom, she was, she wrote, “very much excited by all the excitement about the book.” The question of whether McCarthy had made the girls’ fates feel like more than <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">faits accomplis</i> would be left for the critics to settle.</div>
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McCarthyism</h4>
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<span class="dc" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #e00000; display: inline-block; float: left; font-family: ltc-bodoni-175-1, ltc-bodoni-175-2, 'Times New Roman', Times, Georgia, serif; font-size: 90px; line-height: 90px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px;">T</span>he year 1963 was a big one for what is now termed “second-wave feminism.” McCarthy never rode <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">any</i> wave of feminism. Generously mentored by male editors and lovers, she scorned special pleading based on gender. Nevertheless, her Vassar girls burst upon the world in the same year that saw the publication of Betty Friedan’s <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Feminine Mystique,</i> a groundbreaking study of the nameless unhappiness that was plaguing postwar housewives. (Friedan’s book was sparked by Smith girls, classmates she had surveyed at a 15th reunion.) Also in 1963, Radcliffe girl Adrienne Rich published her third collection of poetry, <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,</i> a seismic shift into the terrain of gender politics. “All three of these books,” says Katha Pollitt, essayist for <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Nation,</i> “were about the way very smart, educated women get trapped in the lesser life they are compelled to lead.”<br />
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Unlike her sister-school sisters, McCarthy wasn’t taking on the present in a way that was radically or even covertly subversive. She was looking at the past, specifically, she said, at a “vanishing class”—upper-middle, Protestant, educated. Her girls were bluestockings, not rebels. They graduate from Vassar embracing the social responsibilities required of their class and believing that America is inevitably improving. Almost all of them become less acute with the passing of time. One could and probably should read this diminuendo as an authorial statement on life. As W. H. Auden wrote in the poem <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Lullaby,</i> “Time and fevers burn away / Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children … ” But Pauline Kael also had a point when she said, “She beats up on those girls.”</div>
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Richard Leeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00345466640687962646noreply@blogger.com0