Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Her participation in Communist circles was similarly ambivalent, which was half the trouble for her with someone like Malcolm Cowley. At college, she’d met left-wingers but thought their activities “a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.” McCarthy, who was undeniably pretty if not flashily so, felt she wasn’t like them. She lacked any personal compulsion to serve a greater social good by joining any sort of political party. But literary and leftist circles overlapped significantly in the mid-1930s. Meeting for cocktails meant talking of Kafka and of the party and its travails. As time wore on, their impassioned speeches on these subjects impressed her. “They made me feel petty and shallow; they had, shall I say, a daily ugliness in their life that made my pretty life tawdry,” she wrote.

  This was McCarthy’s contrarian streak talking. If people didn’t like something she did, she often wanted to know why. Her curiosity then carried her into conviction. “The mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend,” McCarthy wrote in her essay “My Confession.” In it she explained her unlikely history as a Communist. But not every individual clutches that trend to her chest and marches on. Equanimity was never McCarthy’s way, at least not in print.

  McCarthy chose sides in the Stalinist-Trotskyist debate quite by accident. A novelist friend put her name on a list of members who supported a defense committee for Leon Trotsky without quite explaining to her what it would mean, and that was that. She was anointed a dissident. Flabbergasted at first, she wrote, she started to think about the problem and more or less talked herself into adopting the proper politics for it. It gave her a certain cachet on the social circuit:

  Jeweled lady-authors turned white and shook their bracelets angrily when I came into a soirée; rising young men in publishing or advertising tightened their neckties dubiously when I urged them to examine the case for themselves; out dancing in a night club, tall, collegiate young Party members would press me to their shirt-bosoms and tell me not to be silly, honey.

  This was what Diana Trilling had meant when she said she found McCarthy’s approach to politics “irresponsible.” All of McCarthy’s critics were certain that her uncertainty was a sign of unseriousness. Even someone like Isaiah Berlin, who claimed to admire McCarthy, told a biographer that “she was no good on abstract ideas. She was fine on life in general. People. Society. People’s reactions.”

  Yet to have insight about people rather than about abstract ideas is part of having insight into politics. McCarthy was not a thinker of the type of John Stuart Mill, or Berlin himself. She did not spend her time articulating a full system of rights, or expound on the nature of justice. But insight into humanity is still a valuable skill for political analysis, as was what she would later call the “certain doubt of orthodoxy and independence of mass opinion.” It was a particularly good skill for analyzing politics of the midcentury, in which large systems of abstract ideas—National Socialism, Communism, capitalism—brought humanity to disaster more often than not. In any event, it made her exactly the sort of person who could weather the intramural leftist warfare of the thirties. Standing outside any particular consensus had its value when the consensus holders were at each other’s throats.

  By the time she was tangled up with the Trotsky Defense Committee, McCarthy was living with Philip Rahv, one of the coeditors of the Partisan Review. She also sat on the Review’s board. Rahv was not a conventionally handsome man, but he had a dark, stormy sort of charm. He talked “pungently, harshly, drivingly, in a heavy Russian accent.” He was also deeply steeped in Marxism, having come to New York during the Depression and stood on the bread lines. What McCarthy did not take seriously enough, Rahv more than made up for, and he was not afraid of insulting people as he made his convictions known. “He wasn’t a particularly nice man,” said Isaiah Berlin. He was “a pretty brutal guy in many ways,” per Dwight Macdonald, another member of the Partisan Review set. But McCarthy saw him differently. When she gave his eulogy, she said she was drawn to Rahv because of a review he’d written in the Daily Worker of Tender Is the Night. While the review was mostly negative, McCarthy was struck by its “sympathetic insight” into Fitzgerald, chronicler of the rich. His treatment of the book had a “tenderness” she had not been expecting she said.

  Rahv, McCarthy wrote later, had had to issue “a ukase on [her] behalf” to put her on the Partisan Review’s board. (A “ukase” was a proclamation made by the tsar in pre–Soviet Russia.) That is what it took to get a woman involved in the whole project. In the first issue, published in early 1934, McCarthy was the only woman on the masthead, and the only woman contributor. This mode of her intellectual arrival, she reported with some amusement years later, had made her nervous. The other men who ran the review were all rather more committed to those vociferous debates of politics than either she or they perceived McCarthy to be. The sour aftertaste of Communist Party discipline did not rescue the Partisan Review from all sorts of internal orthodoxies. Anxiety over ideological purity ran rampant.

  The backer, a young abstract painter from a good old New York family, was so “confused” politically that one day he went into the Workers’ Bookshop (Stalinist) and asked for a copy of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed; he was wearing spats that day, too, and carrying a cane, and the thought of the figure he must have cut made the rest of us blanch. “Did anyone recognize you? Do you think they knew who you were?” we all immediately demanded.

  As this episode indicates, the writers and editors who worked with the Partisan Review were all still relatively young, in their twenties and thirties. They were eager to prove their “little magazine” deserved a place in the world. Their anxiety often presented itself on the page as arrogance, and not the kind any of them had earned by some proper channel of apprenticeship. “Only in America, or rather in a tiny section of New York,” of the 1930s, as McCarthy later put it, “could an air of supreme authority be assumed with so few credentials.”

  McCarthy was given the theater because the men doubted her. It was, in the lens of their youthful orthodoxy, a bourgeois art form, one they paid little attention to. “If I made mistakes, who cared? This argument won out.” It proved a good match. She was largely left to her own devices, which meant she could teach herself to write. It helped that McCarthy tended to hate the things all the other critics liked, just as Parker had.

  Overeager to prove her Marxist bona fides at the beginning, at first McCarthy evaluated plays by their politics, sometimes resorting to cliché when doing so. “It was a doctrinaire time, and everybody was engaged in ‘smoking out’ the latent tendencies in works of art, like F.B.I, investigators,” she wrote. Reviewing an Orson Welles production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, she noted his tendency as an actor to use “a kind of viscous holy oil with which he sprays the rough surfaces of his roles.” Clifford Odets and John Steinbeck, meanwhile, suffered from “auto-intoxication,” insofar as they “punctuated [their writing] with pauses for applause that are nearly audible.” The one exception, the one play she actually liked, was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “purely and simply an act of awareness, a demonstration of the fact that in a work of art, at least, experience can be arrested, imprisoned and observed.”

  In one of these reviews she was called to comment on a predecessor. The actress Ruth Gordon was putting on a play called Over Twenty-One, which was among the many attempts by playwrights to put a Dorothy Parker–like character on the stage. “The character of Dorothy Parker,” McCarthy remarked, “belongs as firmly to the theatre as a character in Sardi’s.” The faint echo of Parker’s wit, she thought, was the only reason an audience might enjoy the play.

  McCarthy never met Parker, not really. She’d seen Parker up close only once, spotting her at a Communist event in New York. “I was disappointed by her dumpy appearance,” she wrote. “Today television talk shows would have prepared me.” In later years, as she grew older, people would insult McCarthy by remar
king that she was stout, too.

  McCarthy met Edmund Wilson for the first time in 1931, when he gave a talk at Vassar. She was not enthusiastic. “He was heavy, puffy, nervous, and a terrible speaker, the worst I ever heard, including a stutterer, years later at a New York meeting I chaired, who pronounced ‘totalitarianism’ in twenty-one syllables—someone counted.” In 1937, he was being wooed by the editors at the Review, who all worshipped him and his criticism with a devotion peculiar to young intellectual men. Wilson was, by then, gracing the pages of just about every major publication in New York, usually as a book critic, sometimes as a journalist. His book-length study of symbolism, Axel’s Castle—the book that brought him to Vassar—had made him into a proper public intellectual. The Partisan Review wanted a literary imprimatur to give a higher cultural status. Wilson could provide that.

  McCarthy, ever the antagonist in the group, was not as liable to be impressed by him as her Partisan Review colleagues. Still, she was enlisted to go out to lunch with him, along with five other editors. He also asked that Margaret Marshall, the coauthor of “Our Critics,” come along. Feeling the pressure, McCarthy became nervous and went for predinner daiquiris with another member of the board. Then she showed up for a dinner at which manhattans and red wine flowed like water. McCarthy became so drunk she fell asleep in a hotel suite with Wilson and Marshall, never telephoning Philip Rahv to tell him where she was until the next morning.

  The episode was unfortunate. But somehow, she agreed to go out with Wilson a few weeks later. She ended up back at his house in Connecticut and succumbed to his advances on the sofa. Within a short time, McCarthy would leave Rahv and marry Wilson. She was always at a loss to explain this move. “I greatly liked talking to him but was not attracted to him sexually,” she wrote in her memoirs.

  Bad marriages are often mythologized in retrospect. An oft-quoted characterization of Wilson and McCarthy’s claims it was a union of “two tyrants.” Perhaps this overstates the case. The reasons the pair could not get along were, to say the least, complicated. Their son, Reuel, born in 1938, wrote a book about the couple in which he characterized the pairing thus:

  Suffice it to say that Wilson, goaded by inner demons, was capable of boorish, cruel, and even violent behavior. McCarthy, who carried the stigma of childhood trauma— as a young orphan she was cruelly used by her guardians— reacted emotionally to her husband’s frequent needling and criticism.

  Before he ever met McCarthy, Wilson had been leading a rather chaotic romantic and sexual life. He liked very intelligent women—his first passionate affair was with Edna St. Vincent Millay, though she ultimately broke it off—but he had trouble maintaining relationships generally, including those with his children. He was financially unstable, his earnings coming only through freelance writing, and it was a source of continual stress. To add to all that, he drank too much.

  When McCarthy married Wilson it was with the promise he would take her away from the city and she would live a quieter life. But whatever charms life may have offered in upstate New York, or Wellfleet, or Chicago—all places the Wilsons lived while they were married—they were somehow insufficient. She was unhappy. It surfaced in flashes of hysterical rage that Wilson’s other child, then a teenager, characterized as “seizures.” It was one of these fits, in June 1938, that saw her bundled off to the Payne Whitney psychiatric ward, where doctors diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder. In the second volume of her memoirs, How I Grew, McCarthy claims her fit was triggered when a drunken Wilson punched her. She was, at the time, two-and-a-half-months pregnant.

  This is a shocking episode, and many have been daunted when they tried to sort out the details of it. One of Wilson’s cousins, who had befriended McCarthy and seen much of the worst of it, told his biographer Lewis Dabney that to talk to the pair about their marriage was to hear “visions of reality [that] were as mutually exclusive as those of the characters in Rashomon.” As in that film, there may ultimately be no way to reconcile the stories. In their divorce proceedings Wilson claimed he’d never raised a hand to his wife—”except once.” Perhaps he was describing the incident that ended with the Payne Whitney. In any event, at the divorce hearing in 1945 seven years later, friends sided with McCarthy.

  But there were two unquestionably good results of the marriage. One was her son, Reuel. The other was her transit into fiction. All her life, she would say that Wilson was the one who insisted she try her hand at writing it, feeling the work she’d been doing at the Partisan Review and elsewhere was too narrow for her talents. He lent material support too, hiring help so McCarthy could write even with the demands of a small child.

  The stories McCarthy wrote while married to Wilson fit the compliment he’d given to Parker’s work: they had the same quality of having been written by someone who felt an “urgent necessity to write.” The first she’d publish was called “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit.” It was the first tale of Meg Sargent, McCarthy’s alter ego, which saw the character taking the train to Reno to divorce a first husband. On the train she meets a boring, married midwestern businessman. Ultimately she sleeps with him, but ambivalently, even with regret. Throughout the encounter, Meg Sargent is watching herself, evaluating her own actions. “It was true, she was always wanting something exciting and romantic to happen,” she muses at the beginning. “But it was not really romantic to be the-girl-who-sits-in-the-club-car-and-picks-up-men.” She does precisely that anyway, in part because she likes to make such exercises of her sexual power. Meg is pretty, but she is not precisely vain about it. She knows she is pretty only to a certain kind of American man:

  At bottom, she was contemptuous of the men who had believed her perfect, for she knew that in a bathing suit at Southampton she would never have passed muster, and though she had never submitted herself to this cruel test, it lived in her mind as a threat to her. A copy of Vogue picked up at the beauty parlor, a lunch at a restaurant that was beyond her means, would suffice to remind her of her peril. And if she had felt safe with the different men who had been in love with her it was because—she saw it now—in one way or another they were all of them lame ducks … Somehow each of them was handicapped for American life and therefore humble in love. And was she too disqualified, did she really belong to this fraternity of cripples, or was she not a sound and normal woman who had been spending her life in self-imposed exile, a princess among the trolls?

  Rahv was presumably one of the “trolls” she meant, but he took no apparent offense. They knew the story would raise something of a scandal. Its explicitness was completely unusual for its time. That only whetted their appetite to publish it, and the payoff proved worth it. “I was at Exeter at the time,” George Plimpton told one of McCarthy’s biographers. “And it made almost as much an impression as Pearl Harbor.” Men often complained that the portraits of themselves in McCarthy’s fiction were too harsh. Though Vladimir Nabokov, who happened to be a friend of Wilson’s, loved the eventual collection of Mary’s stories: “a splendid thing, poetic, clever and new.” A very young aspiring writer named Norman Mailer, still then at Harvard, loved it too.

  Women tended to like the story because they related to Meg’s independence of mind, to her self-assurance, as well as to her mistakes. “This was a feminist heroine who was strong and foolish,” Pauline Kael remembered thinking at the time, when she read it as a struggling film writer on the West Coast. “She was asinine but she wasn’t weak.” The nuance was hard to capture. But the quality Meg had, of being opinionated and self-assured without quite being right all the time, was an uncommon combination in feminine archetypes. In films and books, women were only rarely permitted to be both brash and vulnerable.

  The story was so successful that within a year of its publication McCarthy put out a whole book of stories about Meg called The Company She Keeps. It was her first book, and it met with some rapturous reviews, almost all of which made McCarthy out to be a kind of murderer by prose. “Its satire is administered as gently and as m
urderously as a cat administers death to a mouse,” wrote the New York Times reviewer. The (male) books columnist of the New York Herald Tribune declared that he believed McCarthy had “a gift for delicate malice,” though he also called Meg a “spoiled darling.” At the New Republic, Malcolm Cowley himself took it on, at first seeming to dislike the tone of the book’s first four episodes:

  Clever and wicked, but not quite wickedly clever; psychologically acute, but never seemed to go much below the surface … And the heroine who keeps such bad company is perhaps the worst of the lot—the most snobbish and affected and spiteful, the least certain that she has any personality of her own, or even exists outside the book that she keeps rewriting.

  Reasonable people might differ as to whether Meg is snobbish or affected or spiteful, or merely young. Meg goes to see a psychoanalyst and discovers that most of her confusions and pretensions relate back to a horrific childhood—the “poor biography” she was always showing the door. She walks out of that office prepared to “detect her own frauds.” Cowley saw, in a way other reviewers did not, how much this turned the whole book on its head:

  Miss McCarthy has learned the difficult art of setting everything down as it might have happened, without telling a single self-protective lie … “The Company She Keeps” is not a likable book, nor is it very well put together, but it still has the unusual quality of having been lived.

  As Cowley may or may not have known, the book had, indeed, been lived. The autobiographical nature of the stories isn’t really in dispute. Details were fudged, but not the essentials. Meg, like McCarthy, is a girl from the West. She has a dead parent and had a deprived childhood, but is trying to make her name in New York as a writer. Her marriage has fallen apart in the same manner McCarthy’s first marriage did: there was another man in the picture. She has the same kind of first job, the same kinds of friends, and the same kinds of lovers as McCarthy did in her youth. “I don’t think that she ever wrote anything else that was as true a confession,” the critic Lionel Abel once said, though he was no fan of hers.