BOOK REVIEW : A Posthumous Catalogue of Carousing : INTELLECTUAL MEMOIRS: New York, 1936-1938, <i> by Mary McCarthy,</i> Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $15.95; 114 pages

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me).

That’s what Philip Larkin thought. He should have met the Mary McCarthy crowd back in the 1930s. Very different being a poet/librarian in Northern England--good librarian, I believe; excellent poet--than being a Greenwich Village literary intellectual a quarter-century earlier.

In this brief sequel to “How I Grew,” her memoir of childhood and college, McCarthy catalogues the carousing. She had dismissed her first husband, a would-be playwright, and dispatched a lover who showed serious signs of adoration to Mexico, where he fell ill and died. Liberated, she moved to a tiny apartment on Gay Street and paddled down a stream of brief encounters.

One lover was the man who made the pop-eyed-and-mustachioed dolls used for Esquire’s logo. Another was a truck driver. A third was a very short Communist who wore lifts in his shoes. Once she slept with three men in 24 hours. “It was getting rather alarming,” she notes. She withdrew north to the East Side to live with Philip Rahv, a Partisan Review founder. Subsequently she let herself be seduced and, as she sees it, browbeaten into marriage by Edmund Wilson.

Some lovers she identifies; others she doesn’t. One she names is the man in the Brooks Brothers suit; subject of her celebrated short story about a college student who sleeps with a businessman on a train, then drops him. He was, she tells us, a plumbing executive from Pittsburgh who followed her to New York with an offer of marriage but settled for taking her to a baseball game. There’s no reason to reprint the name, except to point out that it was not Wendell Willkie, as her friends said at the time.

It would be a mistake to think that any of this sex is set down sexily. Catalogue is the right word. One suspects that in their frequent-flier phase, the affairs were the study of an idea. They were the Vassar woman’s passage through Bohemia; a course number might be assigned: Emancipation 202.

Dutiful or not--the longer relationships were clearly much more than that--the telling of them is. McCarthy’s passion was truth. When she didn’t tell it, scars formed. Her memoir, beguiling in its resolve to be dispassionately straightforward, is like numbering the scars of previous concealments.

Or, as Elizabeth Hardwick writes in an evocative preface, suggesting that until she died last year, McCarthy had intended to carry the memoirs forward: “I had the idea she meant to go right down the line inspecting the troops, you might say.” It was a bittersweet relief that Hardwick’s own close acquaintance with McCarthy came too late to be inspected.

All this suggests coldness; low temperatures are characteristic of McCarthy’s writing and to some degree they limit it; but they are used, as in some scientific experiments, to see things more clearly. This posthumous memoir, though it rambles conversationally, with “Well” and “Yes” and “Can You Imagine?” linking her thoughts--was it dictated?--has precious touches of this clarity.

She tells of her early efforts to break into book reviewing. Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic gave her snippets. One day he assigned her unusual space for an account of coal mine conditions by a recent Smith graduate, entitled--how that recalls the political chic of the time--”I Went to Pit College.” She assumed he wanted it praised and confesses writing for the first and only time “to order.” She was wrong, it turned out; humiliatingly for her, the magazine’s editors followed her praise with an acerbic note of condemnation. As an opportunist, she was a miserable failure.

Caught up in the wars of the left, she chose the anti-Stalinist side. Someone asked her at a party if she favored a fair trial for Trotsky. Instinctively answering yes, she found herself put on committees and letterheads. She makes her alignment sound accidental; in fact it was much more than that.

It was also much more than the fact of her liaison with Rahv who, with William Phillips, was turning Partisan Review from Stalinist to libertarian left. Rahv was her mentor--as well as, she realized years later, the man she truly loved and should have stayed with--but mentoring only helped her get to where she was going anyway.

One engaging note that sounds through the memoir is McCarthy’s wry acknowledgment of the gentility gene that underlay her Bohemianism. (“I sometimes thought she felt the command to prepare and serve a first course at dinner ought to be put in the Bill of Rights,” Hardwick writes.) If she left Rahv for Wilson, it was partly a matter of choosing a man who came from a background of country weekends and horseback riding over a proletarian city boy.

But the regret of exchanging a warmly supportive partner for a blustery and bullying one comes through as well. Wilson insisted she take up fiction instead of the witty criticism she had practiced at Partisan Review to Rahv’s delighted encouragement.

“I can see that he was right where Philip was concerned. If it had been left to Rahv, I never would have written a single ‘creative’ word. And I do not hold it against him; on the contrary. His love, unlike Wilson’s, was from the heart. He cared for what I was, not for what I might evolve into.”

Had Wilson not pushed her, she continues with touchingly complicated regret, “I would not be the Mary McCarthy you are now reading. Yet, awful to say, I am not particularly grateful.”