Mary McCarthy, 77, Novelist Noted for Feisty Style, Dies

Mary McCarthy, a novelist and essayist who battled the intellectual elite and questioned the value of history and even the worth of the novel itself, died Wednesday.

The author of “The Company She Keeps,” “Cast a Cold Eye,” “The Oasis” and “The Group”--probably her best known work--was 77. She died at New York Hospital in New York City.

The Associated Press quoted a spokeswoman for Miss McCarthy’s alma mater, Vassar College, who said the famed literary figure had been battling cancer.

With a steely pen and sharp tongue, Miss McCarthy touched a multitude of subjects in a career that began shortly after she was a Vassar student in the early 1930s.

There she had hoped to pursue a career in the theater but soon discovered she had no acting talent. She chose to write instead, and began reviewing books for the Nation and the New Republic.

Even then her willingness to do battle was apparent as she became co-editor of a critical book about book critics.

In a McCarthy biography, Doris Grumbach wrote that the McCarthy signature was to “attack in every direction, without concern for the barriers of established reputation.”

Over the years she turned out nine volumes of fiction and two classic books about the art and history of Venice and Florence, compiled reports from Saigon and Hanoi into two books and wrote of the trial of Capt. Ernest Medina, who ordered the destruction of My Lai in Vietnam.

After visiting Vietnam, she opined that “the worst thing that could happen to our country would be to win this war.”

She also produced works on Watergate, collected her essays on literature and theatrical criticism into several books and turned out memoirs and autobiographies.

She wrote about subjects as diverse as the pretentious world of academia (“A Charmed Life”) and terrorists (“Cannibals and Missionaries”).

Her acidity touched four generations, including the current one. When asked in an interview for “Contemporary Authors” whether the women’s movement had produced any distinguished writing, she answered simply “no.”

Although sometimes critical of Miss McCarthy for not stretching her own creative abilities further, Norman Mailer once called her “our first lady of letters.”

Wrote Alfred Kazin, a chronicler of New York’s Jazz Age intellectuals, Miss McCarthy had an “unerring ability to spot the hidden weakness or inconsistency in any literary effort and every person. To this weakness she instinctively leaped with cries of pleasure--surprised that her victim, as he lay torn and bleeding, did not applaud her perspicacity.”

Although she first made her mark among the brawling New York intellectuals of the 1930s, she managed to reach a wider audience only in 1963 with her novel “The Group.”

The spicy best-selling chronicle of the lives of eight college graduates starting out in the 1930s was made into a movie in 1966 starring Candice Bergen, Joanna Pettet and Hal Holbrook.

More recently she touched a new generation in a celebrated literary feud with Lillian Hellman by declaring, on national television, “Everything she (Hellman) writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ”

Hellman sued for libel, but died in 1984 before the suit reached the trial which Miss McCarthy had eagerly sought.

Most of her writing was autobiographical, beginning with “The Company She Keeps,” published in 1942, a series of interconnected short stories about the people she knew in New York during the Depression.

“Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” published in 1957 and now considered a landmark in autobiographical writing, recounted her sordid childhood in Minneapolis, where she was brutally mistreated by relatives after her parents died.

Miss McCarthy was born the daughter of Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese Preston McCarthy, who died within a day of each other during the flu epidemic of 1918.

Mary, who was 6, and three younger brothers were entrusted to the care of Aunt Margaret and Uncle Meyers, whom their ward later described as sadistic and miserly guardians who dressed the children like paupers, fed them a diet of root vegetables, forbade reading and, at night, taped their mouths shut “to prevent mouth breathing.”

“How I Grew,” published in 1987 as a sequel to “Memories,” described her rescue at 11 by her maternal grandparents, who took her west to Tacoma, Wash., and enrolled her in the fashionable Annie Wright Seminary. The seminary, where the contrary student embraced atheism, prepared her for Vassar, where she hobnobbed with the bright, wealthy Eastern society girls she used as models for her characters in “The Group.”

She moved to Paris in 1962 and divided her time between a comfortable Left Bank apartment and her home in Castine, Me. In recent years, she occupied a creative writing chair at Bard College in Annadale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

One week after graduation in 1933, she married Harold Johnsrud, an actor. The marriage was brief and in 1938, Miss McCarthy married her professor, the eminent critic Edmund Wilson, who encouraged her to write fiction. They had one son, Reuel, before a bitter divorce in which each accused the other of battery.

She met her fourth husband, James West, while on a trip to Warsaw, divorced her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, and married West in Paris in 1961.

Miss McCarthy was often hailed as a feminist before her time. But she always refused that label, saying equality between the sexes was unrealistic.

“Somebody has to give more,” she told an interviewer in 1987. Her belief was simple: women should learn to think for themselves and act accordingly.

Among the dozens of awards she won were the prestigious Edward McDowell Medal and the National Medal for Literature. In May, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Irving Stock, in “Fiction and Wisdom,” wrote that “though Mary McCarthy’s novels are not all equally successful, each has so much life and truth . . . that it becomes a matter for wonder that she is not generally named among the finest American novelists of her period.”

Less sanguine was the author herself.

In 1987, at age 74 on the eve of the publication of “How I Grew,” she proved she could be as cold and hard on herself as she was of others.

Asked for a self-assessment, she replied: “Not favorable.”