On the street, she felt very happy. “He likes me,” she thought, “he likes me the best.” She walked dreamily down Madison Avenue, smiling, and the passers-by smiled back at her. I look like a girl in love, she thought; it is absurd. And yet what a fine rehabilitation of character that had been! The most dangerous action … runs a terrible risk. She repeated these phrases to herself, as if they had been words of endearment. I think you can … Suddenly, her heart turned over. She shuddered. It had all been a therapeutic lie. There was no use talking. She knew. The mind was powerless to save her. Only a man … She was under a terrible enchantment, like the beleaguered princesses in the fairy tales. The thorny hedge had grown up about her castle so that the turrets could hardly be seen, the road was thick with brambles; was it still conceivable that the lucky third son of a king could ever find his way to her? Dr. James? She asked herself the question and shook her head violently. But supposing he should fall in love with her, would she have the strength to remind herself that he was a fussy, methodical young man whom she would never ordinarily have looked at? All at once, she remembered that she had not told him the end of her dream.
She was matriculating at a place called Eggshell College. There was an outing cabin, and there were three tall young men, all of them a sort of dun color, awkward, heavy-featured, without charm, a little like the pictures of Nazi prisoners that the Soviet censor passes. They stumbled about the cabin, bumping their heads on the rafters. She was sorry she had gone there, and she sat down at a table, resolved to take no part in the proceedings. Two other girls materialized, low-class girls, the kind you said, “Hello, there” to on the campus. A sort of rude party commenced. Finally one of the men came toward her, and she got up at once, her manner becoming more animated. In a moment she was flirting with him and telling one of the other girls, “Really he is not so bad as the others. He is quite interesting when you begin to talk to him.” His face changed, his hair grew dark and wavy. There was something Byronic about him. He bent down to kiss her; it was a coarse, loutish kiss. “There must be some mistake,” she thought. “Perhaps I kissed the wrong one,” and she looked up to find that the Byronic air was gone; he was exactly like the others. But in a few minutes it happened again; his skin whitened, his thick, flat nose refined itself, developed a handsome bridge. When he kissed her this time, she kept her eyes shut, knowing very well what she would see if she opened them, knowing that it was now too late, for now she wanted him anyway.
The memory of the dream struck her, like a heavy breaker. She stopped in the street, gasping. “Oh my God,” she demanded incredulously, “how could I, how could I?” In a moment, she told herself that it was only a dream, that she had not really done that, that this time at least she need feel no remorse. Her thirsty spirit gulped the consoling draft. But it was insufficient. She could not disown the dream. It belonged to her. If she had not yet embraced a captive Nazi, it was only an accident of time and geography, a lucky break. Now for the first time she saw her own extremity, saw that it was some failure in self-love that obliged her to snatch blindly at the love of others, hoping to love herself through them, borrowing their feelings, as the moon borrowed light. She herself was a dead planet. It was she who was the Nazi prisoner, the pseudo-Byron, the equivocal personality who was not truly protean but only appeared so. And yet, she thought, walking on, she could still detect her own frauds. At the end of the dream, her eyes were closed, but the inner eye had remained alert. She could still distinguish the Nazi prisoner from the English milord, even in the darkness of need.
“Oh my God,” she said, pausing to stare in at a drugstore window that was full of hot-water bottles, “do not let them take this away from me. If the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity. O di,” she said aloud, “reddite me hoc pro pietate mea.”
It was certainly a very small favor she was asking, but, like Catullus, she could not be too demanding, for, unfortunately, she did not believe in God.
Acknowledgments are due The Southern Review, Partisan Review, and Harper’s Bazaar, in which certain of these episodes first appeared.
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 subsequently 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.
McCarthy with her brother Kevin, circa 1985.
McCarthy with her young son, Reuel Wilson, in 1940.
McCarthy at the wedding of her son, Reuel, in 1981.
McCarthy, circa 1929, on the cover of her autobiography How I Grew.
A flyer for a conference held in 1983 on McCarthy’s work.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1942, 1941, 1939 by Mary McCarthy
Copyright renewed 1970, 1969, 1967 by Mary McCarthy
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-3834-7
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The Company She Keeps Page 24
