Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  The other hand had inserted a question: “The horses of San Marco?” And Sophie had put in her answer: “They can stay.”

  Special problems w. modern art. Went from painter’s studio to dealer or straight to collector. Hard to find a “home” to return it to. Artists’ studios torn down. But statuary—Arp & Brancusi—sh’d be placed somewhere outdoors, where it can have air around it and breathe. Henry Moore “King and Queen” & other big pieces “naturalized” like daffodils in Hampshire landscape. Why not more “earth sculptures”? America big enough & empty enough to accommodate whole cities of sculpture, esp. in the desert. Great Salt Lake? Dakota badlands. Stonehenge c’d give hints.

  Again pages seemed to be missing. Then came two—bloodstained but partly legible—that Aileen remembered watching Sophie write.

  Friday. Lily’s pictures came today. Show perfect taste, like everything about her, including her name—Tallboys. She was born Bocock, I learned. Re her water-colors, I mean not just that they’re exquisite in themselves but that they show restraint in her as a collector. Somehow it’s proper to collect water-colors—not grabby. Anybody has the right to own a few. Some limit like that ought to have been respected in collecting. Maybe in her case it just a happy accident because she’s poorer than the others. Johnnie’s collection rather appealing; at least it reflects his interests. But private collections…Must go public. Happening anyway. A few c’d be maintained as illustrations of history of taste. Preferably in little castles & hunting lodges…But without guards—only guides & not too many. Identification of art with lucre to be discouraged. Then fewer tourists w’d come in bus loads to see it. (Did I write that before?) Correction. “Art & money boon companions.” Holds mainly for easel paintings & things like reliquaries, drinking cups, etc. Things which actually were a species of furniture. Furniture (meubles, meubelen in Dutch, H. says) movable by definition. Frescoes, monumental sculpture, bas-reliefs, altar panels, town-halls paintings are stable, cemented into place & time. Celebrations, vide triumphal arches. Lots carted off in war…pillage. But that felt as desecration, contrary to original intention. Whereas church vessels & easel paintings almost “made” to be stolen.

  4 p.m. L. and B. left. Still light. Days getting longer.

  The remainder of the page and the succeeding ones were badly torn and defaced. “No use trying to read those,” Aileen said, unexpectedly bringing her handkerchief to her eyes. “But here she is, still writing about art. Do you want to go on? We’d better hurry. They’re going to show the movie.”

  …dissatisfied my distinction mobile vs. stable despite germ of truth. Try art as treasure vs. art as celebration. Easel paintings treasure, hoarded by owner for solitary enjoyment. Cf. Jeroen w. “Girl.” Find that disturbing but “Girl” disturbing too. Wonder if I’d want to live with her. She too compelling, like “Mona Lisa.” Doubt she w’d be “good” for one in long run. “Feasting” one’s eyes: miser’s banquet. Mme. Cézanne better for soul—piece of Nature. Cézanne atypical as easel painter; hence failure in own time. Yet whole museum effect here uncanny. We forced to live w. paintings. As punishment? “Girl” consummate example of sin of West; fetish of art as commodity—denial of Marx labor theory of value. Troublemaker maybe. Arabs don’t like her. Upset by pictures here. Islam forbids images. But what about figures in carpets? Only animals, I guess. Awful no books to consult, but awful we so dependent on books. Punishments inflicted here weirdly suited to our bourgeois crimes: forced feeding w. art, deprivation of books, esp. dictionaries, encyclopedias, histories—West’s cabbala. I feel it as lesson.

  She appeared to have let several days pass before the next entry.

  Today Ash Wednesday, Frank tells us. Fast and pray. We fasting all right; kapers too—no distinction made. Must collect thoughts again. Ask self central question: why Jeroen wanted pictures. Well, good “investment” for him; improve bargaining position. But also lend artistry to design—flourish of mockery of capitalist values. Yet much ambivalence in him, surely. Loving the thing you hate. You hate it because you love it. In an evil world—“system,” he w’d call it—the beautiful gets ugly, like a fallen angel, and must be cast out if fresh start to be made. Yet God loved Lucifer better than all the others.

  Thinking this, I am sorry for Jeroen. Greet too. I almost wish them luck. Idealists, I know, are dangerous, but the claim of the ideal (Ibsen) has to be felt or else…. Or else the world, our deteriorating world, will continue on its course by sheer inertia. Inertia is taking over, right here; you can sense it. The effort persists but only of its own momentum, beyond Jeroen’s control, I think. He must act soon somehow to end that. And Henk’s marechaussee out there—the reality principle—don’t have to act. Only wait. Oh, dear. What can happen? I w’d give an arm, as they say, if this thing could end grandly, the way Jeroen w’d wish, whatever that is by now.

  “Good Lord!” Frank smote his brow. “Very chilling,” agreed Aileen. The hostesses had been pulling the blinds to darken the cabin. Now the lights were switched off. “That’s all there is anyway,” Aileen said. “Do you think that was the last thing she wrote? Well, let’s not dwell on it. Too painful. At least she’s alive.” In the dark, she shook down the sheets of the journal. She must have sensed that Frank’s shoulders were heaving, for she waited. Then she went on in her usual bright voice, as if kindly not noticing the fight he had been having with his emotions.

  “I was hoping she’d put down more about terrorism, weren’t you? She actually fell for it, that’s clear from the end. But it would have been interesting if she’d analyzed the state of mind that brought her to that point. Nobody’s going to care about her views on art. Pure Radcliffe term paper—all the right references, with the obligatory New Left twist. Poor Sophie. That isn’t her field.” “What?” said Frank. “Oh, sorry. I was thinking about Gus. It’s funny how it hits you. Something about those torn pages set it off maybe. But you were saying that art wasn’t Sophie’s forte, wasn’t that it?” “Never mind, Frank.” “No, it’s good to keep our brains occupied. But about art and Sophie, I’m really no judge, Aileen. I must say, though, I was impressed by how much she knew. Her European background maybe. This has been my first trip abroad.” She gave a little screech and patted his arm. “Better luck next time.”

  His shoulders heaved again—with appreciation of the joke. “I must remember that, for my youngsters. ‘Father’s first trip abroad.’” He had not seen the risible side. But he was laughing too hard; she was eyeing him with concern. “Seriously,” he continued, “there was another thing…. I was interested in what she had to say about idealists being dangerous. That hit home. I’m a confirmed idealist, as I guess you can tell. And to be honest with you, Aileen, I had a sneaking sympathy for Jeroen myself. You’re a bit too hard on Sophie there. I never felt that he and I were all that far apart. If his gifts could have been turned to a more progressive purpose—gradual betterment of the old society…Platitudinous, yet how else can you say it? And we shouldn’t be afraid of platitudes. But Henk put his finger on it. You remember, the other day when we visited him and he said that Jeroen had fallen into despair—the ultimate sin against the Holy Ghost? That’s true of so many of our young people; they’re driven to violence by despair. I see it with the blacks; we must act to give them hope, Aileen.” “Do you want to watch the movie or sleep?” she interrupted.

  David Niven was on the screen wearing a tropical helmet. He seemed to be in Malaysia or Indonesia, having problems with native guerrillas. They had not rented earphones—Aileen said she never did—but they were able to follow the action quite well. They certainly knew about guerrillas, and watching television plays in Dutch night after night had taught them to do without words. It had been good mental training, the Reverend Frank acknowledged, glad to be reminded of the need to count their rewards.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WITH SO MANY HELPERS to whom my thanks go, this book seems almost like a collaboration. On the Dutch side, I’m grateful, above all, to Cees Nooteboom
—poet, journalist, novelist—for repeated trips to the polder, for an inexhaustible fund of information on proper names and place names, political parties, religion, national customs, for correction of my scanty pocket-dictionary Dutch, introductions to local figures who were themselves sources of information. It was through him and the singer Liesbeth List that I conceived the love of Holland that I believe shows through in the text. Because it was not possible for him to read the manuscript, there must still be many errors, for which he bears no responsibility. I owe him, too, the notion of Holland as an imaginary country and a number of hints for the plot, some of which were acted on, some not.

  Then Hans van Mierlo, till recently deputy and leader of the parliamentary fraction “Democrats ’66,” who aided and abetted in various ways, inter alia by arranging a lively visit to Parliament and introductions to notables. The novelist Harry Mulisch, who went along that day and added his own observations and suggestions both then and later. I’m very grateful to the Prime Minister of the time, Joop den Uyl, for the interest he took, the questions he answered, the hospitality at dinner he and his wife dispensed. I know of no other country where such openness and candor would have been possible and found it significant that at the entry to the Prime Minister’s residence there were then no guards—how it is now I cannot say. I also thank Han Lammers, the Landdrost of the “new polder” complex, for making possible visits to two farmers’ dwellings and for an amusing and instructive lunch in Lelystad. Here in Paris, I’ve had considerable help with Dutch words and expressions from my husband’s boss, Emile van Lennep, and his charming mevrouw, Alexa.

  This leads to James West, my husband, who, more than anyone else, saw what seemed a chimerical enterprise at the start through to the end with continuing good humor and resourcefulness. I thank him for the many car-trips to the polder, for the books on helicopters he produced, for his critical support, as a World War II navigator, of my effort to represent planes and flying in a plausible way, for reading the text in manuscript, galleys, and page proofs with a convincing show of enjoyment. I owe to him the large color reproduction of the Kenwood House Vermeer (I might have settled, myself, for a postcard), Air France schedules, a marked plan of the interior of a Boeing 747, with Smoking and No Smoking sections indicated, information on the location and business hours of the Iranian consulate in Paris, and many other details that I now forget.

  For help concerning the internal politics of Iran, I thank Jonathan Randal of The Washington Post, who was good enough to spend a morning briefing me, also Gavin Young of The Observer (London), who has taken a persevering interest in the book and joined one day in a polder exploration. Concerning the market values of art, I thank William Mostyn-Owen of Christie’s, also for the material he supplied on the Kenwood House Vermeer that has been put to use in the final chapter. For rather different material in the final chapter, I thank James Angleton. For medical expertise, I thank Dr. Jacques Richard d’Aulnay and Dr. Aurelia Potor; also David Jackson. For guidance on New York “social” names, I thank Nicholas King. I thank Werner Stemans for going over the bits of German that appear here and there and Thomas Quinn Curtiss for his own account of being hijacked. And I think warmly of Hannah Arendt, who heard a lecture I gave at the University of Aberdeen on “Art Values and the Value of Art” and said afterwards, “You should draw on that for a novel.” To my old friend E. J. Rousuck of Wildenstein’s, no longer living, I owe what I know about sporting art—see the Ramsbotham collection, Chapter 11.

  More than perfunctory acknowledgments go to the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam for the Philips Koninck landscape reproduced on the jacket. Mr. Frederick de Jong, reached by telephone at the museum, showed eager Dutch helpfulness in having a new transparency made and dispatching it with speed. In connection with this, I’m very grateful, too, to Alison West of the Frick Museum for rapidly hunting down a number of Dutch landscapes to choose among.

  The solution to the “Cannibals and Missionaries” game I owe to Clare Dow of London, who got it from a friend and wrote it out for me. I owe the American Academy in Rome a two months’ residency this past winter which allowed me to finish the book undisturbed and in nice surroundings. Finally, I owe, as always, more than I can say to William Jovanovich and Roberta Leighton for the care they have taken in both large and small matters of copy-editing, design, and production. For this, over the years, they occupy a place like that of Holland in my heart.

  A Biography of Mary McCarthy

  Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963 New York Times bestseller The Group.

  McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

  After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).

  A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in The Group. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the Partisan Review circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Review of Books.

  In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled The Company She Keeps (1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book, The Oasis, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the Partisan Review intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine Horizon’s fiction contest in 1949.

  Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the New Yorker, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College. A Charmed Life (1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. The Groves of Academe (1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution (1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.

  In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.

  McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel The Group, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.

  McCarthy remained an outspoken critic of politics in the decades that followed. Openly opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she traveled to South Vietnam and wrote a series of articles for the New York Review of Books that were subs
equently published as Vietnam (1967). Her coverage of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s is the basis for The Mask of State (1975). Her famous libel feud with writer Lillian Hellman, stemming from McCarthy’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979, formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends (2002) by Nora Ephron.

  McCarthy won a number of literary awards, including the Horizon magazine prize (1949) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1949–1950 and 1959–1960). She also received both the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal for Literature in 1984. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. She received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Bard College, Smith College, and Syracuse University.

  McCarthy passed away on October 25, 1989. The second volume of her autobiography was published posthumously in 1992 as Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938.

  A portrait of McCarthy, taken in 1959.