Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  McCarthy was in any event up to something a little different. While nowhere near as self-lacerating as Parker’s, her fiction tended to be critical. To the extent it reflected her own experiences, she was clearly standing outside them, evaluating them and evaluating herself, and then fictionalizing events according to the judgments she made. The self-awareness of the fiction was something entirely different from the tone of confessional work generally: something arch, aloof, honest but ruthlessly so.

  Evidently, the technique suited her enough that she could apply it to more recent events. Another story she wrote while with Wilson and published in the New Yorker, “The Weeds,” pried open certain painful parts of the marriage. The story begins with an unnamed woman ruminating in her garden about how and when she will leave her husband. She ultimately flees to New York City. The unnamed husband travels there and brings her back. The woman has a fit, and the narrator, in describing it, harshly analyzes her motives:

  She was aware that she cut a grotesque and even repulsive figure, that her husband was shocked by the sight and the sound of her, but the gasping sobs gave her pleasure, for she saw that this was the only punishment she had left for him, that the witchlike aspect of her form and the visible decay of her spirit would constitute, in the end, her revenge.

  The autobiographical elements of the story were self-conscious: McCarthy had shown an early draft to Wilson. He had no complaints about the way he’d been portrayed. After it was published in the New Yorker, he changed his mind. “And he was really quite mad. I said, ‘But I showed it to you before.’ And he said, ‘But you’ve improved it!’”

  In 1944, after seven years of fights and arguments that had inspired this series of brilliant stories, McCarthy finally left Wilson. A fierce divorce battle ensued, one that landed them in court. There were a lot of arguments over the precise size and shape of each spouse’s respective wounds. As bad a marriage as it had been, even though it could have been called, emotionally, a catastrophe, it had somehow midwifed McCarthy’s best work. It did not, in the sense of popular rhetoric, “make up” for anything. But it was the fiction, more than the reviews of plays long ago closed and novels forgotten, that would last. This brings us back to the party at Philip Rahv’s in 1944, the one where McCarthy made the remark that angered Hannah Arendt. The stress in the background, the dissolution of the marriage, perhaps explains the flippant remark about Hitler. It was an unusual misstep for McCarthy, who was a seasoned hostess. In “The Weeds,” the wife arrives in New York only to find her milieu changed; few friends return her calls. In real life, McCarthy had returned to New York in a position of strength. Her critically successful short stories made her a proper writer, far more an object of envy than her theater and book reviews in leftist magazines could possibly have done. Fiction, then as now, was viewed as the pinnacle of literary achievement. She was suddenly in demand and began to get offers to teach and took them up, at Bard and later Sarah Lawrence. She also swiftly turned around and found a husband who was much calmer, much less imperious than Wilson. This was a slender, dapper New Yorker writer with the alliterative name Bowden Broadwater, whom she wed in December 1946.

  By this point, McCarthy had become a very particular kind of household name. She was known to the kind of person who followed literary journals and middlebrow magazines, but her books were not quite bestsellers. Still, suddenly people were noticing things like how she arranged her hair, her style of dress. “There was a period … when she seemed to me to be cultivating a sort of George Eliot plain look,” one observer of such parties remembered. And her fame had begun to leak into the wider culture. The Company She Keeps was written up in Vogue’s “People Are Talking About” column. McCarthy was declared to write “like a brilliant harpy with a harpoon that she jabs around just for fun.”

  That argument—that McCarthy’s style was pure malice—was everywhere. Reviewers always admitted she had a certain perceptiveness, a chiseled style. But they did not like what she saw when she looked at the world, or at least they found her somehow impolite for recording it in prose. They chose imagery that suggested they found her intelligence wounding, destructive, and perhaps catty. This was as true of people who knew McCarthy personally as of those who didn’t. Her friend Alfred Kazin later called the book “deeply serious” but “as maliciously female as one chorus girl’s comments on another.”

  Perhaps nothing about this is female. Perhaps nothing about it is malicious, in the traditional sense of the word. McCarthy’s fictions had a satirical edge, but the characters based on herself were every bit as susceptible to her judgment and ridicule as the ones based on other people. They were, in other words, sharp. But they were not necessarily malicious, or off-putting.

  There was one possible exception to prove the rule. After she married Broadwater, McCarthy began writing a novel, one that took as its subject the leftist-intellectual scene in New York, called The Oasis. It has a somewhat fantastical premise, sending a group of Socialist-leaning intellectuals off to rural Pennsylvania to build a utopia. Naturally, the effort fails, in no small part because of the pretensions of the people who live in the colony. It is hard to see what exactly motivated McCarthy to write The Oasis, a project she dashed off quickly, in a matter of months. There was a fashion for political satire at the time, set off by Orwell’s Animal Farm; perhaps that might have inspired her. In real life, McCarthy had just been through a disastrous attempt to organize, among American intellectual leftists, support for foreign writers. The whole thing had disintegrated in infighting. Perhaps The Oasis was meant as revenge.

  “The whole story is a complete fiction,” McCarthy argued years later, nonetheless. She meant the plot. The people in it, she admitted, were drawn from life. “I do try at least to be as exact as possible about the essence of a person, to find the key that works the person both in real life and in the fiction.” Philip Rahv’s essence was given form in a character named Will Taub. Taub is a leader of the group, but his bluster masks serious insecurities—over, among other things, his Jewishness. He is supported by a silent wife with whom he is “brusque and out-of-sorts … when she tried to think about social problems.” (Rahv had by then married one of McCarthy’s Vassar classmates, a woman named Nathalie Swan, who somewhat answered to that description.)

  Abstractly, the novel is funny. Socially, it was self-sabotage. McCarthy poked virtually direct fun at many of her friends. A round of backbiting about the novel’s apparent nastiness was set off among all the people who, through the years, had been connected to the Partisan Review. “The woman is a thug,” Diana Trilling was said to complain. It is hard to understate the deep sense of betrayal many of those parodied felt. Rahv, in particular, was wounded. He held a meeting to discuss what to do, at which point many tried to talk Rahv off his high horse. But Rahv had his mind made up: he threatened to sue. He had a lawyer send a letter to its American publisher claiming the book “constitutes a gross infringement of his right to privacy, with such material that is utterly false, objectionable, and defamatory.” Eventually he backed off, in part because his friends reminded him he’d have to prove he was recognizable as the silly character in McCarthy’s novel in order to make the defamation claim. The prospect was unappetizing.

  Worse, the book was not much of a hit. It referred to a world that was relatively insular, and certainly not one the general newspaper readership could possibly be expected to recognize. “Miss McCarthy’s very accuracy is a drawback in writing a book for her particular set of concentric audiences,” complained the New York Times reviewer:

  The inner circle is too small. The editor of a little magazine is not the Lord Treasurer of England. And readers outside that circle can get little from The Oasis except a vague sense of defamatory brilliance and a few fine scenes.

  One person who read the book, knew the inner circle quite well, and still loved it was Hannah Arendt. A little while before, she and McCarthy had made up on a subway platform. “We think so much alike,” Arendt apparently told h
er, five years after the fight at the party. And in a letter, she praised the book that everyone else had hated so much:

  I must tell you it was pure delight. You have written a veritable little masterpiece. May I say without offense that it is not simply better than The Company She Keeps, but on an all together different level.

  One thing the book did, then, was bring the “characteristically perverse” McCarthy closer to the conscious pariah, Arendt.

  It turned out to be a match made in intellectual heaven. They would remain friends, without interruption, until Arendt died. A long friendship between like-tempered women is not remarkable in and of itself. But the McCarthy-Arendt alliance had a distinctive tenacity. They were rarely in the same place, therefore much of the friendship took place in letters. These were gossipy letters, but the gossip was always tangled up with the intellectual matters they discussed, too, their views of friends’ books, of each other’s work. Ideas were all fine and good, but they were lived out in the world, and were tethered to the humanity of those who had them.

  For much of the 1950s, McCarthy was living in various small New England towns with her son and Bowden Broadwater. She would write to Arendt to describe a visit from Rahv—he’d proved as quickly moved to forgiveness as he had been to anger over The Oasis—by remarking that “his Marxist assurance strikes me as antediluvian.” Then she proceeds to talk about how “he made me horribly nervous, as if we were screaming at each other on the Tower of Babel. Not unfriendly, just estranged and mutually watchful. Probably it was my fault.” She’d also complain about all the people who had cut her short at parties and talks. Meanwhile, from her apartment on the Upper West Side in New York, Arendt would write back with long, sympathetic disquisitions about those “burlesque philosophers.” She’d add thoughts on Socrates, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Pascal, and of course, Heidegger.

  They traveled across oceans to see each other, too. Arendt would join McCarthy in Europe while McCarthy worked on books about Florence and Venice. She’d ask McCarthy to “English” her work, as other friends of hers had done. After Arendt began living primarily in Europe, McCarthy would always stay in Arendt’s flat in New York. They were, in spirit, inseparable.

  Many of McCarthy’s contemporaries hinted, or flat-out admitted, that they didn’t know what Arendt saw in her. They were so different on the page, people thought: Arendt dense with complicated thought and McCarthy slicing and elegant. At least that was the nicest way it was ever put. Many thought McCarthy wasn’t a thinker on the level of her friend. But Arendt didn’t find her friend’s intellect so obviously minor. She sent McCarthy manuscripts to consider and edit, as well as to “English,” and their letters are laced not only with gossip and household reports but with arguments about what constitutes fiction, about the reach of Fascism, about individual morality and common sense.

  As much as McCarthy and Arendt are retroactively lodged within this circle of men who explain things (the “boys,” in the vernacular of the women’s correspondence), the reality of the situation was more complex for them. They hadn’t been accepted as “one of the boys.” To the extent men admired their work, they were also hostile and defensive when confronted by criticism from Arendt and McCarthy. To be fair, neither one of the pair had much good to say about most of the men in their set. Of Saul Bellow, for example, McCarthy wrote to Arendt:

  I hear that Saul is in poor shape again, attacking what he calls the American Establishment, meaning his critics. He gave a lecture in London and the audience was asked to stay in its seats for ten minutes (or five?) after the lecture was over, so that no one would approach him for his autograph on the way to his getaway car.

  Of Kazin, who’d written an attack on McCarthy, Arendt wrote:

  These people get worse as they get older, and in this case it is just a matter of envy. Envy is a monster.

  Of course, the formulation of these insults was not solely a matter of feminine solidarity. Neither McCarthy nor Arendt would have accepted a definition of their friendship that took it as “feminist.” They disliked other women in their set. They were eager to talk as women but would never have wanted to speak of their gender as a defining characteristic. Some of that had to do with the time they lived in. Some of it was the fact that neither fit in particularly well with anyone but the other. The bond between them was not built on a traditional sense of sisterhood. They were allies who often thought “so much alike,” as Arendt remarked at the outset of their friendship. And that common way of thinking simply thickened into armor they could jointly use, whenever the world seemed to be against them.

  6

  Parker & Arendt

  In the mid-1950s, after nearly two decades in which she published only intermittently and was consumed mostly with screenplay work, Dorothy Parker started trying to write seriously again. She always wrote for the same reason: because she was broke. But she was finding it harder, suddenly, to get work.

  The trouble was political: Parker’s name kept being knitted up with Communism. Parker’s membership in the Communist Party is still a matter of some dispute. But she had written for Communist Party organs, and she had appeared at Communist Party functions. So just as the mood in America turned against Communism, her name kept coming up in government investigations. When the FBI first came to her door, in 1951, her dog kept jumping all over the agents. “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?” she apparently told them.

  Either they were charmed, or Parker was too daunting a target. The FBI never arrested her. Senator McCarthy threatened to call her up before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he never did. The state committee in New York did call her up, and she gave polite testimony and took the Fifth on the question of whether she had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Ultimately, no formal punishment was dealt to her, by any level of the law. Nonetheless, the stain set in. Parker suffered for it, not so much with the public as she did in Hollywood. She suddenly lost what had been, for almost twenty years, a steady source of substantial income. Her personal life, too, became unstable. She had started to drink a great deal. She’d divorced Alan Campbell in 1947, then remarried him in 1950, then separated from him again in 1952. She’d eventually reconcile with him in 1961.

  In the interim period, Parker, at loose ends, returned to New York. She set herself up in a hotel she liked called the Volney. She cowrote a play about lonely and increasingly elderly women like herself called The Ladies of the Corridor. She also began writing stories for the New Yorker again, though none approached the excellence of her earlier work.

  There were hints she was losing whatever remained of her talent, and hints too that she knew it. One story, called “Lolita,” published in the New Yorker in August 1955, appears to have been inspired by the Nabokov book of the same name, although it appeared weeks before the novel was published for the first time in France. Parker’s “Lolita” also follows the events of a lonely single woman whose daughter is seduced by a male boarder named John Marble. Why this book so closely echoed Nabokov’s forthcoming novel isn’t clear; the best theory of scholars who study the matter is that Parker heard of Nabokov’s manuscript from Edmund Wilson, who had read Lolita and disliked it. No explanation of this episode—either an extreme form of forgetfulness, or else her desire to compete with a rising intellectual Russian novelist—suggests that Parker was doing well when she wrote that story.

  In any event, none of the things Parker was writing could hold the dimmest of candles to the popular success of her earlier work. She was no longer interested in or capable of writing the wisecracking items the public still expected from Dorothy Parker. She was, in short, depressed. Benchley had died of a heart attack in 1945. Alexander Woollcott had also died of one, two years earlier in 1943. New York was different from what it was in the twenties and thirties. Now, instead of being a bright young thing at a table of up-and-comers, Parker was more of an éminence grise, a role she evidently fou
nd uncomfortable.

  The only steady income she could arrange, in the end, was through a contract with a newly rejuvenated men’s magazine called Esquire. She was a favorite of the managing editor there, Harold Hayes, and was offered a contract to write about books. It was the last bout of reasonably steady prose she’d produce in her life, sometimes missing deadlines but at least managing to file a few times a year. The resulting reviews don’t quite have the concision of Parker’s earlier Constant Reader work. They were more like meditations delivered from a wandering, elderly mind than the polished bullets of the earlier reviews. But traces of her humor remained. She used them, sometimes, to reminisce about her friends:

  The late Robert Benchley, rest his soul, could scarcely bear to go into a bookshop. His was not a case of so widely shared an affliction as claustrophobia; his trouble came from a great and grueling compassion. It was no joy to him to see the lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, “There— I’ve done it! I have written the book. Now it and I are famous forever.”