Mary McCarthy, RIP - obituary

AS OFTEN happens in the case of intellectuals, Mary McCarthy's non-fiction was superior to her fiction. Her lucid and relentless ego did not comfortably submit, if it submitted at all, to the relaxation of the sense of self, the "negative capability," that must come into play when a novelist sees other people, if only as in a dream, and lets them be. The powerful novelists create worlds, real ones, that exist only in their pages, as in Fitzgerald's dream of Gatsby's Long Island, or Faulkner's dream of Yoknapatawpha County. Within one sentence, you know you're there.

To be sure, Mary McCarthy wrote many novels. But, tellingly, they tended to stick close to the facts of her life. The Group (1963) won her a wide audience. For many of her fans The Company She Keeps (1942) and A Charmed Life (1955) had more vitality, though they remain in the genre of the roman a clef. The Groves of Academe (1952) is a delicious satire on the "progressive" college.

As might well be expected, her straightforward autobiographical writings are superior in power to her half-fictions. Her early theater reviews for Partisan Review are as clever and biting as Randall Jarrell's poetry reviews, and for about the same reasons. Alfred Kazin went too far when he said that she had a purely destructive genius; but he was close to the mark, and, often, destruction is a healthy necessity. Still, many people found her too formidable, and males who had any tentativeness of personality found her paralyzing.

Her intelligence took time out when she wrote a genuinely asinine book about her visit to Hanoi in 1968, but, then, intelligence was in short enough supply in those days.

She had a diamond-like beauty, black Irish, that remained even as she grew old and grey. She died of cancer, at 77, in New York.