In America we have had the quiet, isolated genius of Emily Dickinson, on the one hand, and that of Edith Wharton, dignified, worldly, astute, on the other, each holding a prime spiritual location in the national landscape. In the background we might imagine the highly usual romantic glamor of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the romance of lyrics and lovers and tragic endings. Mary McCarthy, because of the radical turn of her mind, has little connection with any of these figures even if there are occasional correspondences to Edith Wharton and Edna Millay. And yet how difficult it is to define the image of this writer. If it is popular fame to figure somehow in the scheme of persons who have not had the time to examine the actual claims of the famous person, then she has popular fame as well as genuine literary distinction. Perhaps to the world her image is composed of the clear eyes of the Cecil Beaton photographs, the strong profile, the steady gaze; and it is certainly made of the candor about Sex in her novels and stories and the “attacks” on gods like Tennessee Williams. This is all very unexpected. There is charm and vigor and an almost violent holding of special opinions. She is, as someone said of Thackeray, “an uncomfortable writer.”
Not so long ago, Brooks Atkinson, the retired dean of American drama critics, had the sobering occasion to report that Mary McCarthy had been very hard, in a review in an English newspaper, on the bright young English drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, whom she found neither very bright nor very young in his literary spirit and style. The event was dismaying. Where are you if Walter Kerr lights into Howard Taubman, an unimaginable act of disloyalty for either of those members of the Establishment?
If there were any real ancestor among American women for Mary McCarthy it might be Margaret Fuller. How easy it is to imagine the living writer as a visitor at Brook Farm, a friend of Mazzini’s, a journalist in Rome during the 1840s. Both women have will power, confidence, and a subversive soul sustained by exceptional energy. A career of candor and dissent is not an easy one for a woman; the license is jarring and the dare often forbidding. Such a person needs more than confidence and indignation. A great measure of personal attractiveness and a high degree of romantic singularity are necessary to step free of the mundane, the governessy, the threat of earnestness and dryness. Moderating influences are essential. Madame de Staël, vexing and far-out as she was, needed her rather embarrassing love affairs to smooth over, like a cosmetic cream, the shrewd image. With Mary McCarthy the purity of style and the liniment of her wit, her gay summoning of the funny facts of everyday life, soften the scandal of the action or the courage of the opinion.
In the novels and stories, the “shocking” frankness of the sexual scenes is very different from the hot prose of male writers. These love scenes are profoundly feminine, even though other women writers do not seem to want to take advantage of this same possibility. In her fiction, shame and curiosity are nearly always found together and in the same strange union we find self-condemnation and the determined pursuit of experience; introspective irony and flat, daring action. In the paperback edition of The Company She Keeps we see on the cover a pretty girl posed for the seduction scene on the train—bare shoulders, whisky bottle, and a reflecting pout on her lips. But the picture cannot give any idea of the unexpected contents of the mind of the actual fictional heroine. The psychological fastidiousness and above all the belligerent mood of the surrendering girl are the essence of the story. The sexual affair with the second-rate “man in the Brooks Brothers shirt” is for the heroine both humbling and enthralling; and so, also in the same way, is the outrageous coupling on the couch in A Charmed Life of the remarried young wife and her former husband. The heroine, in these encounters, feels a sense of piercing degradation, but it does not destroy her mind’s freedom to speculate; her rather baffling surrenders do not vanquish her sense of her conqueror’s weaknesses and absurdities. Of course, these works are comedies; and it is part of Mary McCarthy’s originality to have written, from the woman’s point of view, the comedy of Sex. The coarse actions are described with an elaborate verismo of detail. (The safety pin holding up the underwear in the train scene; in A Charmed Life “A string of beads she was wearing broke and clattered to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered as he dove for her left breast.” The “left” notation is a curiosity, a kind of stage direction, inviting us to project ourselves dramatically into an actual scene.)
Plot and dramatic sense are weak in Mary McCarthy’s fiction. Taste and accuracy are sometimes substitutions. What people eat, wear, and read are of enormous importance. The reader follows the parade of tastes and preferences with a good deal of honest excitement and suspense, wondering if he can guess the morals of the kind of person who would cover a meat loaf with Campbell’s tomato soup. He participates in a mysterious drama of consumption, in which goods are the keys to salvation. Taste is also used as the surest indication of character. “There were pieces of sculpture by Archipenko and Harold Cash, and the head of a beautiful Egyptian Queen, Neferteete.” Accuracy, unusual situations documented with extreme care, mean for the reader a special sort of recognition. The story “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself” is about contraception in the way, for instance, Frank Norris’s The Octopus is about wheat. “Dottie did not mind the pelvic examination or the fitting. Her bad moment came when she was learning how to insert the pessary herself. Though she was usually good with her hands and well-coordinated . . . As she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room and hit the sterilizer. Dottie could have died.” This story, memorable to put it mildly, could not have been written by anyone except Mary McCarthy. Reading it over again, the suggestion came involuntarily to mind that perhaps it was meant as a parody of the excesses of naturalistic fiction, a parody, too, of the brute, prosaic sexual details in, for instance, a writer like John O’Hara. There is an air of imparting information—like whaling in Melville or, more accurately, the examination of dope addiction in Gelber’s play, The Connection. This aspect of information brings to memory the later story by Philip Roth in which a college girl suggests she knows all about contraception because she has read Mary McCarthy.
In a writer of this kind there is an urgent sense of the uses to which a vivid personal nature may be put by a writer’s literary talent. There is very often an easily recognized element of autobiography and it is in autobiography that Mary McCarthy excels—that is, of course, if one uses the word in its loosest and largest sense. The Company She Keeps and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood are richer, more beautiful, and aesthetically more satisfying than, say, A Charmed Life or The Groves of Academe. The condition that made The Oasis somewhat stillborn was that it was more biography than autobiography. In autobiography, self-exposure and self-justification are the same thing. It is this contradiction that gives the form its dramatic tension. To take a very extreme case, it is only natural that critics who find importance in the writings of the Marquis de Sade will feel that the man himself is not without certain claims on our sympathy and acceptance. In Mary McCarthy’s case, the daring of the self-assertion, the brashness of the correcting tendency (think of the titles Cast a Cold Eye and On the Contrary) fill us with a nervous admiration and even with the thrill of the exploit. Literature, in her practice, has the elation of an adventure—and of course that elation mitigates and makes aesthetically acceptable to our senses the strictness of her judgments.
She is not moved by reputation. Indeed her congenital skepticism bears down hardest on the most flattered. Only occasionally, as in her essay on the fashion magazines, does she write about what is known as “popular culture.” She does not bother to discuss television, but she might discuss the imperfections of, for instance, J. D. Salinger. In her dramatic criticism, collected in Sights and Spectacles, there are times—I think of her remarks on Shaw and Ibsen—when she seems in an uneasy relationship with the great men. Shaw’s mad reasonableness is put to the test of her own reasonableness; the toils of Ibsen appear to come off less prosperously than h
er own toils to define them. One sometimes has the feeling of a mistake in tone, rather than a perversity of judgment, as if the meeting of the author and the subject that everyone expected to go so well had unaccountably gotten off to a bad start.
In her new book, On the Contrary, she has written her two best essays: “Characters in Fiction” and “Fact in Fiction.” In their manner and feeling these essays suggest a new gravity and sympathy, a subtle change in the air, a change already felt in her large books on Florence and Venice. As for the ideas in the two essays: they are the only new things said about the art of the novel in many years. Paraphrase is difficult because the examples are very fresh and the insights rather angular.
On “Fact in Fiction”: fact, “this love of truth, ordinary, common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. Putting two and two together, then, it would seem that the novel, with its common sense, is of all forms the least adapted to encompass the modern world, whose leading characteristic is irreality.”
As for “Character in Fiction,” the decline in the ability to create character comes, in this view, from the modern tendency to try to reach character from the inside. The author has become a sort of ventriloquist; he is not content to describe but must try to impersonate the very soul of someone quite different from himself. The reader is perplexed; he feels the strain, the insecurity. Water has been put into the whisky; the dilution is the poor author himself, struggling to blend in.
1961
LOVELESS LOVE
Graham Greene
“Do you love me, Ticki?”
“What do you think?”
“Say it. One likes to hear it—even if it isn’t true.”
“I love you, Louise. Of course, it’s true.”
THIS EXHAUSTED domestic dialogue is used with remarkable power in Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter. Greene has stolen the trivial chatter of marriage from Noel Coward and given it an existential, neo-Catholic varnish, the high polish of fear and trembling and sickness unto death. The petulant archaisms, the white lies, are profanations of the lost ability to love; they bring moral fatigue, not satisfaction (“Say it again, darling!”). The nasty emptiness of the evening compliment (“Dear, how absurd you are. I’ve never known anyone with so many friends”); the anxiety that one’s desperate separateness will be noticed (“He flinched a little away from her, and then hurriedly in case she had noticed, lifted her damp hand and kissed the palm”); the nervous wretchedness of politeness; the anguish edging outrageous promises to provide for another’s happiness (“Don’t worry. I’ll find a way, dear”)—in all of this dry, light material Greene finds the terror of, to use Marianne Moore’s phrase, that “interesting impossibility,” marriage and ideal love.
Scobie, an official in a British-governed town on the west coast of Africa, does not love his wife and so the reckless, embarrassing language of marriage, the optimistic accent, fill him with a dread of such great dimensions that each expected deception appears as a terrible crime. The vocabulary of Scobie’s heart is responsibility, self-hatred, anxiety, and guilt. There is a scalding monotony and desperation in his life because of his supererogatory sense of pity. Scobie is mild, dutiful, just, a Catholic who loves God with the bitter passion that has died out in his earthly attachments. All of his secular life is contained in his reluctance to inflict pain. He suffers the agonies of the dinner table and the bedroom as if they were an immense crime against God; his wife’s tears are a death sentence; her inevitable moments of ugliness fill him with the “pathos of her unattractiveness”; her absurdity, a malicious remark at her expense arouse in him a bereaved, tragic defense of the right of everyone to live without scorn. With intense seriousness he accepts the burden of her dissatisfaction as his due responsibility. With a kind of fury he compromises his deepest principles to get the money for her voyage to South Africa. After she has gone, he expects to find peace in his loneliness, in the honesty of being accountable only to himself, but, instead, and without wishing it, he becomes involved in a love affair. Again his sharpest emotion is pity; again, to avoid pain, he is brought back to the painful depths of “I love you” and “I’ll never leave you.” His very act of adultery is a sin which he cannot repent without dishonoring his mistress; he cannot make the required religious effort to abandon the relationship without bringing unhappiness to the woman who depends upon him. His wife returns and to please her he takes Communion, although in a state of mortal sin. His love of God and his duty to life conflict at every point. At last he commits suicide, sacrifices his soul to be relieved of the torture of sacrificing others.
Greene finds in his weary, sad sinner a great religious personality. Scobie is ordinary, inconspicuous, hiding his profound struggle behind his decent, rather colorless appearance. Apparently Greene had a figure in mind like the knight of faith, of whom Kierkegaard said, “Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!”
“I think he loved God,” the priest says, after Scobie’s impious death. This mystical resolution, weak and perverse as it is, is the only thing the Catholic novelist can salvage out of the modern, secular ruins in which he feels compelled to place his hero. There is this element of snobbishness in serious Catholic writers. They are bored with the regular devotions, the bland submissiveness—modern man is so much more “interesting.” These writers want multiplicity, waywardness, spiritual torment, weakness, and pride; they are in love with sin and intimate with spirituality only as the capacity for suffering from weaknesses. Toward the conventionally pious they are inattentive and Greene is positively churlish. Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited is a drunkard, neurotically enslaved to an evil German boy, and yet he is “holy.” Waugh says, “He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”
Greene, in the dramatic self-slaughter, pushes personal heresy to the limits with a greediness that is convincing neither as fiction nor as religion. His hero must be everything at once. He must not only be a sinner, but must commit the worst sin, and with paradox upon paradox, be nearer to grace than anyone else. Mrs. Scobie, a devoted Catholic, is “furiously” reprimanded by the priest for her impudence in assuming that Scobie will be damned forever. She is guilty of the most sluggish literal-mindedness.
Scobie cannot be understood, cannot be reached or commented upon in terms of psychology or theology. His feeling of responsibility to others approaches arrogance; his death is almost frivolous since it is his last act of pity for a wife whose needs are expressed, “Oh, Ticki, Ticki . . .you won’t leave me ever, will you? I haven’t got any friends—not since the Tom Barlows went away.” As Mary McCarthy wrote about an earlier novel of Greene’s, “One cannot imagine a character whose behavior is wholly governed by pity, and one feels that Greene, in pretending that it is possible, is being pious and insincere.”
And yet, in spite of Greene’s obstinate extension of one emotion, he has done a great deal with Scobie’s pity, his loveless love, his anguish over the uncommitted, unmarried part of himself. The Heart of the Matter is interesting and serious for its plain, grim understanding of the moral pain of exaggerated sentiment, the tragic heroism of watching over another’s life.
1948
“The passenger wondered when it was that he had first begun to detest laughter like a bad smell.”
“. . . I suffer from nothing. I no longer know what suffering is. I have come to the end of all that, too.”
“The boat goes no further.”
“. . . I am sorry, I am too far gone, I can’t feel at all, I am a leper.”
THE PASSENGER, a distinguished church architect named Querry, is the hero of Graham Greene’s last novel
, A Burnt-Out Case. Querry has been loved by many women; he is successful and famous—above all, famous. And from it he has ended up tired, morally despairing, filled with self-loathing, insisting upon his loss of feeling, his deadness. Loss of feeling? What does it mean? Fitzgerald’s “Crack-up”—what is really meant, what has happened? “And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.” The cracked plate, the burnt-out case, the reserved, evasive actually, description of some overwhelming emotional crisis. Fitzgerald: “I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love . . .” Querry: “She was once my mistress. I left her three months ago, poor woman—and that’s hypocrisy. I feel no pity.”
Fame and emptiness. Fame burns out Querry; it surrounds him with horrors who draw near to touch or to fall in love. “Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.” Publicity, the bed sore of the fame-sick, inflicts its pains. Querry has abandoned his career and gone to a leprosy hospital in the Congo. He is at the end of the road; the boat goes no further; his vocation for building and for loving women has given out; he is empty, desperately and courageously “dead.” But his fame runs along after him; he is discovered; he is exposed by a journalist; he is pursued by a European manufacturer of margarine, Rycker, who feels for the famous man the mad, easily resentful but somehow grotesquely transfigured, love made of Querry’s success and their shared Catholicism. The famous architect and lover is now, in some sense, impotent. (“He told me once that all his life he had only made use of women, but I think he saw himself in the hardest possible light. I even wondered sometimes whether he suffered from a kind of frigidity.”) Rycker kills the object of his over-weening curiosity, Querry, because of an imaginary infidelity. “Absurd,” Querry said, “this is absurd or else . . .”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 14