Mary McCarthy: a life. - book reviews

National Review, June 10, 1988 by Janet Larkin Crain

Mary McCarthy: A Life

LIKE MISS HELLMAN, Mary McCarthy is a woman with an enormous talent for living. Carol Gelderman captures both the outline and the substance of her subject's experience of life with an almost novelistic amplitude, and attends to the substance of her work with elegant critical precision. As Miss Gelderman documents, Miss McCarthy--with her broad circle of friends and acquaintances both here and abroad, elegant residences on two continents, extensive travel, exquisite social life, and so forth--has reaped most of the rewards that the literary life has to offer.

To be sure, Miss McCarthy is no mere "personality." She has the genuine snob's contempt for celebrity, and disdains the public side of literary life as "tinny" and "corrosive." Her novels and stories are marked, in William Barrett's words, by "wit, sharp observation, extraordinary intelligence, an unflagging brilliance and elegance of language; they lack only the simple virtue of feeling." Indeed, Miss McCarthy's coldness and acidity have long been her signature, however much this public stance may be at odds with what her biographer assures us is Miss McCarthy's private graciousness and generosity of spirit.

By now, given her several memoirs, the misery of Mary McCarthy's childhood is well known. Orphaned at six, she was consigned to the care of physically and emotionally abusive guardians, and rescued by her maternal grandparents only after beatings and other cruelties had left their mark. But her impulse to embrace the world headlong had not been destroyed. Miss McCarthy has an insatiable appetite for experience.

But her career is fatally marred by a political stupidity that overshadows her literary accomplishments and betrays whatever courage and rectitude she may have demonstrated in her earlier stand against Communism. I refer, of course, to the bizarre bornagain radicalism triggered in her by the Vietnam War. On assignment for The New York Review of Books, she traveled to Hanoi in 1967, and from there wrote to a friend: North Vietnam is "the only `people's democracy' I've ever seen that's run on aristocratic principles and largely by aristocratic persons with a traditional code of manners and morals." She also reported that the North Vietnamese exercised power with "a kind of tentativeness and respect for limit." On the horror and ruin that have overrun Southeast Asia in the wake of America's ignominious retreat, we have yet to hear from Mary McCarthy. Nor does her biographer come to terms with this issue, or even begin to address the larger political arena in which Miss McCarthy has played her part. Like Miss Hellman, she is worthy of attention mostly because she epitomizes a ruinous strain in our political life and because the errors of her ways have been so gravely consequential to us all.