What McCarthy got in exchange for that lost other existence was the inquisitive detachment that became known as characteristic for her writing. Her manner in all her memoirs is the light touch of a black comic, even when she’s writing about tape over the children’s mouths. Having lived through a melodrama, she was somehow reluctant to let her feelings out in full force. A sense of how absurd it had all been made her more comfortable, perhaps. The character in The Company She Keeps mentions her sympathy with those who had “a sense of artistic decorum that like a hoity-toity wife was continually showing one’s poor biography the door.”
The new Catholic school in Seattle in which her maternal grandparents installed her might have looked strict to another child. It was a place of long-established routine, McCarthy wrote, the nuns “versed in clockwork obedience to authority.” McCarthy longed to be popular and self-assured like some of the other girls there, but being nice didn’t seem to garner her many friends. So she changed strategies.
“If I could not win fame by goodness,” McCarthy wrote later, “I was ready to do it by badness.” She promptly set the entire school aflutter by pretending she had lost her Catholic faith. It is an open question whether she had any natural religious feeling to begin with. Her background was a mishmash of indifferent Protestantism and a Catholicism focused largely on formalities. Her mother’s mother was, in fact, Jewish. And as she told the tale in her memoirs, the young McCarthy plotted a precise time frame for the task:
If I lost my faith on, say, Sunday, I could regain it during the three days of retreat, in time for Wednesday confessions.
Thus there would be only four days in which my soul would be in danger if I should happen to die suddenly.
McCarthy found that she enjoyed setting off this sort of scandal, enjoyed garnering the approval of others through staged rebellions. It gave her the nuns’ full attention; it also gave her the status she sought among her classmates, an identifying trait that made her stand out: “There went the girl that a Jesuit had failed to convince.”
It also taught McCarthy that she had a talent for calculating the reaction of others and using it to her own ends. As an adult, McCarthy knew how manipulative she could be in that regard. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she describes her young self, preparing for the episode, as surveying the convent with the “cold, empty gambler’s mood, common to politicians and adolescents.” She saw how they behaved; she saw what they wanted; she made it her job to understand the rules, and then to understand exactly how much she could bend them to her advantage.
This talent didn’t always benefit her socially. Her canny appraisals of other people often came across as, well, harsh judgments. Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote:
There was a scent of the seminarian in Mary’s moral life which for me was part of her originality and also one of the baffling charms of her presence. Very little was offhand; habits, prejudices, moments, even fleeting ones, had to be accounted for, looked at, and written in the ledger.
This habit of assessment and calculation would prove a great boon for a critic who wanted, ultimately, to make great theater of her passions and judgments. Obviously not everyone liked it. McCarthy’s ability to size people up often came across as haughtiness. “She presented herself to the world as the most responsible of people but she was irresponsible really,” Diana Trilling opined to one of McCarthy’s biographers.
Trilling, one of the other women who were regulars at the Partisan Review parties, was something of a hostile witness. McCarthy didn’t like her and let it be widely known. Trilling always felt marginalized as a mere “wife” in the Partisan Review set. She was married to the considerably more celebrated critic Lionel Trilling. And while she repeatedly claimed not to mind the way his towering reputation as a critic eclipsed her own book reviews and journalism, she also could never stop remarking on it. “People celebrate one member of a household but not two,” she wrote in a memoir. “To celebrate two members of a single household doubles the strain on generosity.” She was not incorrect about that, but McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Hannah Arendt managed to find their way into the circle despite being “wives” themselves.
In any event, McCarthy was aware of her tendency to judge. “You use your wonderful scruples as an excuse for acting like a bitch,” the heroine’s husband in The Company She Keeps says. The heroine assures him that she tries not to be so. He doesn’t believe her, and continues, demanding: “Why can’t you be like anybody else?” But McCarthy was never destined to be like anybody else.
During her adolescence in Seattle, McCarthy always insisted on having friends who were different. She left the convent school for public high school, and there she met the friend who gave her a taste for the literary life. This was a black-haired young woman, fond of wearing vests and brogues, named Ethel Rosenberg (not that one). She called herself Ted—”later, I gather, she became an overt lesbian,” McCarthy remarks in a memoir—and she came equipped with a pile of book recommendations. McCarthy already read quite a lot. But it was mostly trash—pulp novels and magazines with titles like True Confessions that chronicled salacious murders and rapes. It was not exactly Kafka.
It was Ted who showed McCarthy that sex could be found in more serious literary work too. It helped that Ted’s taste tended to the aesthetes and the decadents, who had sensuality baked into their work: Aubrey Beardsley, Anatole France. Another young man had tried to introduce McCarthy to the heavier tomes of Melville and Dreiser. But they offered less pleasure. “Moby-Dick,” she wrote, “was way over my head—that I had seen the movie, The Sea Beast, with John Barrymore, was more a hindrance than a help.” It was also Ted who brought McCarthy into her first proper intellectual circle, a Seattle salon run by an older lesbian whose husband owned a bookstore.
Within a year, McCarthy was put back into the more genteel environs of a boarding school. But the bohemians had left their mark. McCarthy would keep writing to Ted; she’d also write, for her classes, stories and essays about prostitutes and suicide. She would keep experimenting with men, traveling through a series of boyfriends before landing on a steady one in the improbable person of Harold Johnsrud, a bald actor several years her senior. He was hardly her first. Another boyfriend had already taken McCarthy’s virginity (“a slight sense of being stuffed,” she’d described the encounter in a memoir). But he was the boyfriend who lasted, and the relationship followed her, ultimately, to Vassar in 1929.
For obvious reasons—writing a bestselling novel casts long shadows—there has always been some tendency to exaggerate the way Vassar “formed” McCarthy. Sometimes she encouraged this mythmaking. In a magazine essay from 1951, she wrote that a single teacher had inspired her to flee to college in the Northeast. This fabled woman—who did exist but was rather more complicated than this—had a “light, precise, cutting voice” and McCarthy found herself enchanted by the way she’d “score some pretension, slatternly phrase or construction on the part of her pupils.” Vassar was supposed to make her just as sharp.
But if friends were the chief engines of an intellectual life, Vassar posed a problem. It provided no gas for the tank. To put it more bluntly: McCarthy’s classmates at Vassar didn’t like her very much. There were one or two exceptions but mostly her college friendships did not stick. Still, McCarthy took pride in being there. She made the standoffishness of the girls into a deliberate quality. “Vassar girls, in general, were not liked, she knew, by the world at large,” one character thinks to herself in The Group. “They had come to be a sort of symbol of superiority.”
Yet even on that scale, McCarthy came across as snobbish to her classmates. When they remembered McCarthy, they pointed to her intelligence and then slammed her with it. “One of the most discouraging things in the world was being in an English class freshman year with Mary McCarthy,” one is quoted as saying in a later biography. “I found her remarkable and intimidating,” said another. “And she absolutely destroyed one’s own ego. Mary would not be rude to your face. It wa
s just an air of superiority.” It would be tempting to write off these bitter recollections as the product of jealousy of McCarthy’s later success. But she too noticed that she didn’t fit. “About college—it’s all right, better than the [University of Washington] anyway,” McCarthy wrote to Ted Rosenberg. “But there is too much smart talk, too many labels for things, too much pseudo-cleverness.”
It was a strange comment for someone who would become known for her enjoyment of “smart talk.” Perhaps the problem owed something to the strict hierarchies of social position in the Northeast. It’s tempting to sentimentalize the upper-class women of the 1930s, sheltered as they were from the Depression, destined mostly for marriage, not careers. But that underestimates the persistence of intrafeminine social competition. The women who went to Vassar in McCarthy’s era were shrewd characters; they were attuned to changes of status and quick to call out what they saw as social climbing. They were from a mix of backgrounds, wealthy and bourgeois. Some of them would see their situations get worse as fathers lost their fortunes in the Depression. McCarthy, arriving from the West without the very strict training in how Northeast society was conducted, was bound to cause friction. She had better luck with her professors. There were two—a Miss Kitchel and a Miss Sandison—about whom she writes in cadences more associated with what Anne of Green Gables called “bosom friends.” She dedicated her memoirs to them, instead of to friends her own age.
In fact, these professors were far more involved in her intellectual and literary passions than the man she was dating—still Johnsrud, who flitted in and out throughout her time at Vassar. They spent a month living together one summer. It was a disaster. They were on-again, then off-again for her entire undergraduate career. McCarthy’s love affairs, in this way, bore much resemblance to Parker’s: the men were mostly background figures.
The truly lasting effect of Vassar on McCarthy’s life came in the form of her very first association with a “little magazine.” She formed a journal with several other literary young women, who included among their number the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Originally to be called the Battleaxe, the magazine was eventually given the name Con Spirito. For it McCarthy wrote what was to be her first book review, one in which she contrasted Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World unfavorably with Harold Nicolson’s now-forgotten Public Faces. She detoured to take shots at the modernists:
One by one the literary demi-gods of the nineteen twenties were collapsing … Virginia Woolf was masking her new lack of hard thinking which was later to appear undisguised in the simple “pretty” femininity of The Second Common Reader, in a pretense of acute feeling and “experimentation with a new form.”
Later McCarthy said this hatchet job demonstrated her “characteristic perversity.” But she was proud enough of it that she took it to New York just before she graduated. She had it in hand when she presented herself to the then literary editor of the New Republic, a man named Malcolm Cowley. Cowley was something of a frustrated artist: he’d been in Paris with Hemingway and the rest in the 1920s, but he never had the big breakthrough they did. He’d turned to editing when it became evident he could not support himself solely on his writing. He’d spend the latter half of his career chronicling the triumphs of others.
Cowley was unimpressed with McCarthy. He told her he’d give her a review to do only if she was a genius or starving.
“I’m not starving,” I said quickly; I knew I was not a genius and I was not pleased by the suggestion that I would be taking bread from other people’s mouths.
Cowley wavered only slightly on the point. McCarthy was given a few very short reviews to write before finally she was assigned a now-forgotten journalistic memoir called I Went to Pit College. Authored by a Smith graduate who’d spent two years living undercover in a mining community in Pennsylvania, it had been favored by the American Communist Party. Cowley was an avowed Communist himself; in fact, his section was widely viewed as being a “megaphone for the Communist Party.” So McCarthy figured it was part of the job to like the book and say so in print. “For the first time, and the last,” she remembered later, “I wrote to order.” But after she filed the review, Cowley pulled a fast one on her. He didn’t think she had been hard enough on it, so he ran a second review as a humiliating correction. “It should never be taken for a gripping social document or even an unstudied and humanitarian gesture,” the second reviewer, the magazine’s film critic, wrote. After that, McCarthy did not appear in the pages of the New Republic for several years.
The Nation was more amenable to McCarthy’s style. She disliked most of the books it assigned her, and dispatched them with curt ad hominem criticism. Of a collection of short stories by a then famous journalist, now forgotten: “It is hard to believe that these stories represent the peak of Mr. Burnett’s achievement. It would be kinder to think that he had discovered the majority of them in an old trunk.” In another review of five books: “There are but two qualities they share, and the first is a splendid, sickening mediocrity.” There was always, in these reviews, a note of wickedness, a sense the writer knew she was testing the conventions of reviewing propriety. Her impertinence became a kind of calling card. Its value lay in its general claim to superior honesty. Never feeling obligated to genuflect to an established reputation gave the reviews a life of their own. As with Dorothy Parker’s Constant Reader columns, it wasn’t so necessary to have read the book yourself to appreciate the spirit.
The Nation was evidently delighted with McCarthy’s bad attitude. Within three years, it decided to send her on a more ambitious outing. The project would evaluate all the book critics at all the magazines and newspapers of America, as a kind of state of the union of book reviewing. McCarthy did much of the work herself. But the Nation’s editor, a woman named Freda Kirchwey, insisted McCarthy share her byline with the deputy literary editor, a slightly older woman named Margaret Marshall. Age and experience, Kirchwey thought, would lend the series more credit. It’s hard to say if her concern was valid. In any event, the pieces were a success. Called “Our Critics, Right or Wrong,” the articles appeared in five fortnightly installments. The tone was polemical; the nation’s critics were called to account for the way their reviews had “on the whole worked for the misunderstanding of works and art and the debasement of taste.”
Such omnibus critiques appear every once in a while in the history of American book reviewing. Critics love to review each other, and they insist on doing it no matter how pointless the general public finds such debates. “Our Critics, Right or Wrong” stands out in the genre for its comprehensiveness. These pieces do not so much advance a coherent theory of reviewing as score zingers on every critic in the land, naming and shaming each and every critic then working. The editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, for example, was mocked for his doddering approach to his subject:
Literature stirs in him simply a number of vague, often undocumented associative thought processes. He is like an old gentleman wandering down a strange street who sees in the faces that pass only flickering resemblances to a dead brother-in-law or a long-forgotten second cousin.
Naturally, this method offered McCarthy the chance to settle some scores. Malcolm Cowley got a sideswipe for reviewing one of his best friend’s books in the pages of a now-forgotten periodical called Books. McCarthy also launched an indirect hit by devoting an entire installment of the series to the poor showing of Marxist critics in the pages of the New Masses. It poked fun at “the curious internal warfare between Marx and aestheticism, which gives to left-wing reviews of bad proletarian books such a hybrid party line.”
As hoped, “Our Critics, Right or Wrong” provoked reactions, not necessarily negative ones, but reactions that professed surprise that women were being so, well, sharp. A New York Times reviewer who’d drawn fire himself devoted an entire column to McCarthy and Marshall. He even took the time to compose a condescending verse about them:
Oh, Mary McCarthy and Margaret Marshall
Are two
bright girls who are very impartial.
He nonetheless thought they’d missed the mark by placing too much emphasis on formal apprenticeship, never once dropping the term “girls” as he addressed them. Others were more direct about their dislike. Franklin P. Adams, who’d been one of Parker’s early fans, complained, “The girls remind us of what Old Hen Strauss used to say of some man whose name we forget: ‘He’s the most even-tempered man in Chicago; always mad.’”
There were a few critics McCarthy liked and she said so: they were “perspicacious,” though “their faint catcalls have been drowned out by the bravos of the publishers’ claque.” One of them was Rebecca West. The others on the list were mostly men, and one of them was singled out for special praise for his ability to “relate what is valuable in modern literature to the body of literature of the past.” The man was flattered. This was Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker’s old friend, who had by now left Vanity Fair and become a prominent man of letters. He was forty by then, twice married, and had become heavy and bald. His first marriage produced a daughter and ended in divorce; his second ended when his wife died in 1932, just two years after their wedding. And very soon he would make McCarthy his third wife.
When McCarthy graduated from Vassar in 1933, she had married Harold Johnsrud. She always described the marriage as a curiously impersonal act. “To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had just done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action,” she once wrote, her embarrassment palpable. He considered himself something of a playwright, but one gets the impression he lived in his own world throughout their marriage. McCarthy never had much to say about him. Each was unfaithful to the other; by 1936, they’d called it quits. McCarthy embarked on a series of love affairs—the one that had nominally broken up her marriage lost its luster after the divorce—but no man stuck for long.
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