McCARTHY, Mary (Therese)

Born 21 June 1912, Seattle, Washington; died 25 October 1989, New York, New York

Daughter of Roy W. and Theresa Preston McCarthy; married Harold Johnsrud, 1933; Edmund Wilson, 1938; Bowden Broadwater, 1946; James Raymond West, 1961

Mary McCarthy graduated from Vassar in 1933 and then settled in New York City, where she began her writing career. McCarthy's early book reviews appeared in the New Republic and the Nation, and in 1937 she became drama editor of the Partisan Review. She quickly attracted the attention of the literary establishment, which she often sharply attacked.

Known primarily as a novelist, McCarthy was a very fine expository writer, who covered a wide range of subjects, from theories of the novel to travel observations to art history. Many of her essays are on political subjects. "My Confession" (On the Contrary, 1962) tells of her leftwing associations during the 1930s, and other essays discuss the national anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although liberal herself, McCarthy is unsympathetic toward "liberals" who are ill-informed, careless, or dishonest. Sharply critical of the Vietnamese war protesters who rested their case in a "sterile" and vague "indictment" of American culture, she went to Vietnam in order to oppose America's involvement in the war from an informed point of view.

McCarthy's prose style is graceful and precise, showing the influence of her classical education. She dislikes slang and often uses Latinate diction as well as long, balanced structures, but her writing is generally informal. McCarthy's sentences are often barbed, sometimes given to startling generalizations; but she is usually concrete, meticulous, and reasonable.

McCarthy began writing fiction at the suggestion of her second husband, critic Edmund Wilson, and published her first story in 1939. She was long admired by a small readership, but The Group (1963) was an enormous bestseller and vastly enlarged her public. The novel recreates an era as it follows the lives of eight Vassar girls of the class of 1933 during the seven years after their graduation. It details their experiences with sex, psychiatry, domesticity, and politics; a description of one character's defloration is both funny and shockingly graphic. The book has a unique third person point of view: the narrative "voice" is that of the Group, sometimes in chorus, sometimes individually. The girls are comic characters by McCarthy's definition—ineducable, unchanging, and therefore immortal.

McCarthy is an extremely personal writer whose uses of her acquaintances in fiction are often unflattering. The Oasis (1949), a prizewinning conte philosophique about a utopian experiment, is a case in point; Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald were the "originals" of two satiric portraits which expose the dishonesty and pretentiousness of liberals whose high ideals and rhetoric offer no immunity against human frailty. McCarthy is no gentler with herself than with her friends. Some readers have mistaken "Artists in Uniform" for fiction, probably because of the uncomplimentary light it casts upon the author, but it is fact. So, McCarthy says, are two of the short stories about Margaret Sargent, heroine of McCarthy's first novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), which is actually a collection of stories unified by Margaret's quest for self. Other characters based to some extent on McCarthy include Kay (The Group), Martha Sinnott (A Charmed Life, 1955), and Rosamund Brown (Birds of America, 1971). These characters are self-consciously "superior" but at times self-doubting, and relentlessly honest with themselves, believing that if action is sometimes compromised, thought should never be. Although liberal intellectuals, they believe in ritual and ceremony and abhor the common, the cheap, and the ugly.

These characteristics are discernible in the child described in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957, 1990) McCarthy's autobiography. A collection of memoirs brought together with an introduction and epilogues, the book derives its unity chiefly from the character of the young Mary and from its themes of education, Catholicism, Jewishness, the quest for superiority, and the difficulty of doing the right thing for the right reason. McCarthy, orphaned at six, had a bizarre childhood, and the most striking passages of the book are the ones about the Minneapolis years. The material is Dickensian, but McCarthy treats it with remarkable coolness. There is more bewilderment than anger, and very little that can be called pathos. Indignant, independent of mind, striving to be a "superior girl," the young Mary suffered outrageous abuses until she was taken to live with her maternal grandparents in Seattle in 1923.

Both the child of personal history and the heroines of fiction cultivate the appearance of superiority, but they also hold themselves answerable to rigid moral standards. Margaret Sargent is less anxious about looking ridiculous than about being "hard as nails." When she wakes up in bed with the Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, she must carry on from this undignified moment and see the vulgar "love story" to its conclusion. The need for private truth rather than public superiority requires Martha Sinnott to have an abortion rather than bear a child of doubtful paternity.

In The Company She Keeps, McCarthy experiments with points of view. Margaret is seen both publicly and privately; she is seen from a distance through the eyes of the Yale man and from close through her own eyes as she undergoes analysis. In The Groves of Academe (1952), McCarthy's academic novel, she uses the point of view of a character quite the opposite of herself. Henry Mulcahy is a physically and morally repulsive man, and his voice—whining, raging, pleading, gloating—carries much of the narrative. Fired from his previous position amid suspicions of communism, Mulcahy is hired by the liberal President Hoar to teach, temporarily, at Jocelyn College, a "progressive" school. When his term of appointment is up, Mulcahy fights dismissal by the startling device of falsely confessing to membership in the Communist Party, thereby cynically enlisting the support of faculty liberals. The novel moves with relentless logic from Mulcahy's letter of dismissal to the resignation of Hoar, blackmailed by the triumphant Mulcahy. In conforming to liberal conventions, Hoar and the faculty override their own good sense and powers of observation.

Yet even when not self-deceived, the liberal in McCarthy's fiction finds moral integrity difficult to achieve. In Birds of America, Peter Levi, a nineteen-year-old egalitarian and literary kinsman of Candide, sees that the things he most loves—nature, tradition, art—are threatened by the advance of the thing he believes in most—equality; yet the evils of injustice and poverty persist undiminished. In Cannibals and Missionaries (1979) a committee of liberals en route to Iran to investigate the Shah's regime and a tour group of American art collectors are hijacked by an international terrorist group and held in Holland while the collectors are exchanged for their priceless paintings and a farmhouse is turned into an unlikely gallery. Liberals and paintings are then offered in exchange for Holland's withdrawal from NATO and severing of relations with Israel. The novel's moral center is a senator who comes to the recognition that terrorism is a "kid brother" of minority electoral politics; both are equally ineffectual against the inertia of facts. The outcome is grim, but the mode is comic; people and their institutions are impervious to these events, and at the end, the Reverend Mr. Frank Barber, among others, has survived to go on counting his blessings.

McCarthy's ear is true, and her fiction is rich with the sounds of authentic voices, heightened but not distorted. If her characters are often ridiculous, she tolerates their absurdities even as she exposes them, although she is merciless with self-professed intellectuals who exempt themselves from responsibility to facts. Her most malevolent characters—Henry Mulcahy and Norine Schmittlapp (The Group)—thrive in personal and moral squalor with no foothold in truth.

In 1980 McCarthy's zeal for truth telling landed her in the midst of a legal battle. On the Dick Cavett television show that year she accused Lillian Hellman of being a "dishonest writer." Hellman responded with a $2.25-million libel suit. When Hellman died in 1984, the case was dropped, much to McCarthy's disappointment; she had been looking forward to the public trial. The same year, McCarthy was awarded both the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to literature and the National Medal for literature, only the third woman to have been so honored. She sold her papers—more than 6,500 pages of manuscripts, legal documents, notes, and letters—to Vassar College in 1985.

Occasional Prose (1985) is a diverse collection of McCarthy's essays written since 1970. It includes a discussion of a 1968 demonstration in London against the war in Vietnam, a "postface" to her friend Nicola Chiaromonte's Paradox of History, as well as a tribute to her late friend Hannah Arend. In addition there are critical essays, lectures, book reviews, obituaries, and a retelling of La Traviata.

In 1987 McCarthy published the first of what she had hoped would be a three-volume autobiographical work. Like her earlier Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew (1987, reissued 1989) covers the years from her childhood through her graduation from Vassar College and her marriage to Harold Johnsrud, both in 1933. Unlike the earlier work, however, How I Grew chronicles the intellectual development of its subject, beginning, "I was born as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912." The book was widely criticized for returning to the material of her earlier memoir and generally compared unfavorably with it. Written as a narrative monologue, the style of How I Grew is discursive, at times even deliberately antiquated. The tone is one of comic detachment. Even while relating the abuse she suffered during her orphan years, or her teenage attempts at suicide, McCarthy remains emotionally distanced from her material. "Laughter is the great antidote for self pity," she explains. As a result the emotional force of the work is somewhat diminished.

McCarthy died of cancer in New York City at the age of seventy-seven. At the time of her death, she had published 19 books, including fiction, criticism, journalism, and autobiography. Having declared back in 1985 that it wasn't possible to write a successful novel "after a certain age," she devoted the last decade of her life to writing literary and cultural criticism and autobiography. Her last works were a study of Gothic architecture and another volume of her autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938 (1992), which was published posthumously by the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust. In addition to writing, McCarthy had also been teaching at Bard College, the same institution that first invited her to teach in the 1940s.

As social critic and moralist, McCarthy consistently and scrupulously sought truth. Neither hopeful nor sentimental, McCarthy's messages often fall on unwelcoming ears. Like most satiric writers, she sometimes wrote about the topical. But her range is wide, her eye and ear are keen, and her literary commitment is to the durable and universal facts of human life candidly and often caustically recorded.

Other Works:

Cast a Cold Eye (1950). Sights and Spectacles: 1937-1956 (1956). Venice Observed (1956). The Stones of Florence (1959). Mary McCarthy's Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1962 (1963). Vietnam (1967). Hanoi (1968). The Writing on the Wall, and Other Literary Essays (1970). Medina (1972). The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974). The Seventeenth Degree: How It Went, Vietnam, Hanoi, Medina, Sons of the Morning (1974). Ideas and the Novel (1980). Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 (with H. Arendt, 1995, reissued 1996).

Papers and manuscripts of Mary McCarthy are housed in the Special Collections area of the Vassar College Library in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Bibliography:

Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Writers (1965). Bennett, J. Mary McCarthy: An Annotated Bibliography (1992). Brightman, C., Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992, 1994). Bullis, J. A., Wisely Armed: The Psychology of Self and Satire in the Novels of Dawn Powell, Mary McCarthy, and Muriel Spark (dissertation, 1995). Butler, S. M., Portrait of an Intellectual as a Young Woman: Mary McCarthy, the Early Years (dissertation, 1995). Cahill, S. N., ed., Writing Women's Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by Twentieth Century American Women Writers (1994). Gelderman, C., Mary McCarthy: A Life (1989). Gelderman, C., ed., Conversations with Mary McCarthy (1991). Goldman, S., Mary McCarthy: A Bibliography (1968). Greve, J. J., Inhabiting the Flesh: Trauma and the Body in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiography (dissertation, 1998). Grumbach, D., The Company She Kept (1967). Hardwick, E., A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1963). Hardwick, E., Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998). McKenzie, B., Mary McCarthy (1966). Mailer, N., Cannibals and Christians (1966). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1998). Rutledge, C., "Falling into the Self: A Review of Mary McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor…" (thesis, 1997). Stock, I., Mary McCarthy (University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 72, 1968). Stwertka, E. and M. Viscusi, eds., Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work (1996).

Reference works:

CA (1969, 1990). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1997). TCAS.

Other references:

Columbia University Forum (1973). Esquire (July 1962). Hudson Review (Spring 1981, Spring 1989). Journal of American Studies (1975). NYRB (4 Dec. 1980, 11 June 1987). NYT (1 May 1985, 5 May 1985, 26 Oct. 1989 [obituary], 18 Nov. 1989). NYTM (29 Mar. 1987). NYTBR (18 Jan. 1981, 19 April 1987, 24 May 1992). Paris Review (Winter-Spring 1962). Partisan Review 57 (Winter 1990). TLS (6 March 1981, 31 Jan. 1986, 18-24 Sept. 1987).

—MELISSA BURNS,

UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET