An Opposing Woman

Americans love closure, but we hate finality. We are constantly reviving the famous dead so that we may tell their stories, and we are constantly treating the living--in the form of celebrities--as if they will never die. Frances Kiernan, the author of “Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy,” tells us that she has revived McCarthy in order to write a story that might serve as a guide to reality in much the same way as novels “served as an introduction to the real world” for Kiernan herself when she was a girl. And so the huge quixotic enterprise somehow becomes a sort of Exemplary (not necessarily a good example) Life of the Intellectual Woman, encompassing everything from McCarthy’s shingles to her quarrels to her laurels. In a 1962 interview, McCarthy said, “I suppose in a sense I don’t know any more today than I did in 1941 about what my identity is.” The virtue of Kiernan’s labor of love is that she is not plugging an idea about McCarthy’s identity either. The title “Seeing Mary Plain” is code for seeing McCarthy in both the ether and the mire of human complexity. Born in 1912, McCarthy was orphaned, along with her three brothers, after their parent’s deaths from influenza, days apart from each other. McCarthy went from a cruel childhood spent with distant relatives to a Cinderella-like adolescence provided by her magnanimous if austere maternal grandparents. She transformed her early hardship into a lightness of being that propelled her to Vassar and then to Manhattan, into the heady intellectual circles around Partisan Review, and through an illustrious career as literary and social critic, novelist, magnetic travel writer and always adversarialist par excellence. McCarthy, whose first husband was an actor and whose brother Kevin became a well-known character actor in film, turned her early deprivation into an occasion for endlessly re-creating herself. McCarthy snubbed her traumas as though they affronted her with their bad manners. She objectified herself in the life-world of print; she wrote, as all gifted writers do, with an “unselfish inwardness,” to use Knut Hamsun’s beautiful phrase. How bracing and original McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood” seems now, amid all the ceaseless chronicles of formative pain. McCarthy herself preferred fantasy to self-analysis, a choice that fortified her character, disheveled her relationships with other people, and made her writing simultaneously honest and unfair. Yeats, not a Catholic, said he loved Catholicism for its metaphors; McCarthy laid its metaphors over her imagination like a transfiguring soil. Maybe because her Catholic upbringing accustomed her to reading the lives of the saints, McCarthy recreated herself in the image of the person she aspired to be. She was a great mythomaniac, and she imagined and deceived herself into a kind of exemplary figure of virtue, in whose footsteps she strove to follow. If, in her promiscuous sexual career, McCarthy used sex, as Susan Sontag acutely observes in this biography, as something that she might “have over” men, she perhaps did so as a gesture of kindness to creatures she pitied. McCarthy herself evokes a sort of vengeful tenderness in one recollection of a night of love. If she polemically laid waste deliciously and excessively to Kenneth Tynan, necessarily and overzealously to J.D. Salinger, it was perhaps because any degree of untruth struck her as a travesty on the nurturing lies she lived by, her principal lie being that she knew what the truth was, which is what every good writer believes anyway. The facts of McCarthy’s life are here, and they are also the facts of her time and place, the story of the New York intellectuals. In the last several years, the tale has been told many times, in biographies, cultural histories and documentary films: It is the intellectual equivalent of a jazz standard. It goes like this: They sharpened their wits on the ideological struggles of the ‘30s; organized an anti-Stalinist rebellion around the Partisan Review, which was left-wing Trotskyite in politics and modernist in artistic taste; opposed American entry into World War II; turned mostly to liberalism after the war; became virulently anti-communist; denounced Joseph McCarthy and denounced communism even louder; came to accept mainstream American values; mostly advocated American involvement in Vietnam; turned mostly to neo-conservativism after the war; sharpened their wits on the ideological struggles with the New Left in the ‘60s and ‘70s; organized an anti-liberal rebellion around a magazine called Commentary and ended mostly as right-wing Trotskyites in politics and modernists in artistic taste. Kiernan weaves her subject’s life into this familiar history, but she is mainly interested in McCarthy’s web of personal relationships. This enormous book, half oral biography, is de trop, yet still it fascinates and rivets the attention. Through sheer accumulation of character and incident and commentary, Kiernan persists in her folly and her material prevails. From McCarthy’s work and her letters and the words of her contemporaries, she has created the portrait of an age and the story of a brilliant, personally powerful, sometimes courageous woman. “Seeing Mary Plain” rises to a Thackerayan density and is a book that will appeal to brilliant and personally powerful women who are exasperated by novels about women that never get beyond absorption in the dilemmas and issues of contemporary womanhood. A giant book like this will create the impression of a sudden fascination with McCarthy, but the fascination often is not more than skin deep. Her sexually provocative fiction gets dismissed, for example, in the form of the distracted kudos “groundbreaking” when it was merely in step with the times--sex gets explicit on the page at Please see Page 4 the exact moment when it becomes banal on the boulevards. (When McCarthy championed William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” she shrewdly was trying to ride her own reputation as stormy petrel, but both authors were, in the artistic sense, strictly members of the tabooboisie.) In fact, McCarthy’s vindictive, corrosive, exquisitely observed social novels were too deferential to the social detail and written too swiftly in response to the author’s social wounds to extend very far beyond their place and time. Political radicals frequently pour their snobbery into power relations, and so it was no contradiction that the politically progressive McCarthy retained her snobbery in her social situations. It is what the Catholic theologians call “seamlessness.” Perhaps the reason why McCarthy was so blind to the signs of torture borne by the American prisoners of war whom she interviewed on her famous trip to Hanoi was, simply, that they were working-class boys, and she instinctively condescended to the less powerful with the same defiant certitude with which she glamorously flouted American imperial power. Like her beloved friend Hannah Arendt, McCarthy was profoundly mistrustful of the social consequences of egalitarianism; she sublimated her egalitarian ideals into her often headstrong and obtuse understanding of geopolitical conflict. And because of her mistrust, this thoroughgoing iconoclast would have known exactly what to make of her current magnification into an icon. McCarthy would have seen the mostly hollow acclaim for what it is: the product of a rising tide of democratic schadenfreude. Inflate McCarthy the character to iconic status and the result is the deflation of her true character as a writer and an intellectual. For McCarthy will probably not be remembered, aside from her gorgeous memoir, for her mostly dated writings. People will go to McCarthy’s work, especially her critical essays, less for the work itself than to be enriched by the temperament of opposition that animates the work. McCarthy, like the New York intellectuals, like any memorable writer, wrote in opposition to something, even when celebrating and affirming. Such friction assumes at the moment of writing an ethically superior view. This is unacceptable to the intellectually and ethically leveling culture of money, and that is why adversarialists like McCarthy and the New York intellectuals are often defanged by their critics. Their death knell is tolled by indiscriminate accolades that submerge the idiosyncrasy of the work in the quirkiness of the life. A perfect example of such a respectful assassination is David Laskin’s “Partisans,” a social history of the New York intellectuals. After some boilerplate about that crowd’s “ ‘impassioned, beautifully complex and independent minds,’ ” Laskin gets to his thesis. “They lived the ‘life of significant contention,’ in Diana Trilling’s rather high-toned phrase, and they lived it together. They lived it most passionately, most tellingly in their marriages.” They lived their intellectual lives most passionately, most tellingly in their marriages? What follows is a blow-by-blow chronicle of drinking, depression, infidelity, betrayal, spouse-beating and a whole array of unpleasant human infirmities. It is a kind of freak-show for respectable citizens. Yet the same infirmities exist among doctors, lawyers, architects, bankers, Internet tycoons. It is just that, as someone once said, the great dilemma confronting writers is what to do with their afternoons. Writers simply have more time to get into trouble. And unlike people in other walks of life, writers sit around anguishing and writing about what they’ve done. That’s why Laskin has the goods on them. But Laskin isn’t interested in the reality of temperament and vocation. He wants only to proclaim the death of the intellectuals by inflating the flamboyance of their personalities--or, as he puts it, “to capture the ardor and the shimmering intelligence of an age that is fast slipping away into the fabulous past.” But there is more to thought than ardor and more to intelligence than a shimmering. There is the drab, private, obsessive, undramatic compulsion to say yes by writing no. What ultimately redeems Kiernan’s odd titanic obsession with McCarthy’s personality is her poignant eccentric admiration for McCarthy’s own words, which form the essence of this book. Those words embody McCarthy’s special spirit of acid objection. Such a beautiful insolence--beautiful when it was not merely spleen--cannot be sold off in an hour; and its presence in the world will not slip away so fast, no matter how “fabulous” the posterity offered by the business culture--Initial Posthumous Offering?--in that culture’s moment of smug apotheosis.