Knobbly Chanel suit: Mary McCarthy

updated from The Bangkok Post November 26 1989

Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) was one of those paperbacks, along with The Little Red Schoolbook and Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which circulated under cover of darkness in St. Louis’ Convent in Monaghan, Ireland. The Little Red Schoolbook, published by an outfit in Amsterdam, lived up to its title and could be comfortably hidden inside a folded pair of ankle socks.

But The Group was altogether a larger book, a dirty book, as we would have called it then. It was on the Index Librorum, banned in the south, so that you had to pick it up in Armagh or Belfast and smuggle it across the border. It was Little Women with the stays removed and came my way after a hop when I was fifteen. Those seventies hops were a kind of Catholic glasnost. After The Group I knew what a diaphragm was, what it was for and where it went. The almost half century since the novel’s publication has not been kind to its bluestocking world of Vassar girls on the make, nor to Irish Catholicism. Both now seem dated.

McCarthy was born in Seattle of Irish Catholic, New England Protestant and Middle European Jewish ancestry. Her parents succumbed in the great flu epidemic of 1918 and she was palmed off to relatives who taped her mouth shut at night to encourage her to breathe through her nose.

She won a $25 first prize for an essay “The Irish in American History” and her great uncle took the money and beat her in case she might start having ideas about herself. Lively, clever and forthright, she graduated from Vassar in 1933, the alma mater around which The Group was based.

It was Mary McCarthy’s later, quieter novel, Birds of America (1971), which left a stronger impression on me. It tells the coming-of-age story of Peter Levi, a sensitive American college student in the summer of “integration” – 1964 – when the Vietnam War was escalating, and the Beats bowing to sixties activism. Rereading Birds of America in 2007 gives a strange feeling of déjà vu.

"In this sinister summer of race riots, church burnings, civil rights workers vanishing in Mississippi, in New York, a cop, off-duty, shooting to kill at a negro kid, the fact that tapioca, his old love, had kicked the bucket ought not to matter."

Peter’s preppy “part Italian, part Jewish, part Irish, somewhat Yankee” character is poised for flight from the American nest. On a last holiday in Rocky Port, New England, with his mother - McCarthy’s fictional alter ego, thrice-married Rosamund Brown - they notice the changes:

"A meal had begun with soup or oysters or lobster cocktail or an avocado with Roquefort dressing. Something. But now, it seemed, after large basins of Martinis-on-the-rocks (a drink she considered parvenu, as opposed to the classic Martini), you sat right down to the main course or it was served to you on your lap. Nobody alluded to the vanished first course; it was like a relation that had died and would not be mentioned."

Precient here about the direction American consumerism will take, McCarthy anticipates the current faux-nostalgia of Whole Foods.

"Peter hated it when she sent him around to borrow muffin tins or cake racks or a flour sifter. Nobody had them; nobody used them anymore. 'You don’t get the picture, Mother. You’re out of touch. Americans have stopped cooking. You embarrass them.'”

Besides being a novel of ideas – McCarthy was primarily a critic – Birds of America captures those apparently idyllic New England seaport towns, slightly adrift from history, menacingly conservative, suspended between sea and pinewoods:

"Every clear evening they walked down to the point, past the abandoned lighthouse and the boarded-up whaling museum, to see the sun set; this was their daily contact with the natives, who came in their Fords and Chevrolets for the same reason. It was a local ritual, like the lowering of a flag. They watched the fishing boats come home; the pink sky was full of gulls. Then they would wend their own way back to supper, past the plastics factory and the Doric bank and the Civil War cannon in the square."

The novel’s second half takes up the Jamesian theme of the innocent abroad in Paris and Rome: maids’ rooms, Fulbrights and beatnik bohemia. Europe has a slummy trans-Atlantic glow seen through American eyes, a few years before the student riots of 1968. Peter dines with Cold War generals and girls from Bennington. He epitomises that peculiar American need to be moral and just in alien circumstances, and attempts to rescue a clocharde from the Paris cold. His futile gesture is juxtaposed with news of the war “in giant black letters: U.S. PLANES BOMB NORTH VIETNAM BASE.”

Birds of America’s downward flight is signalled in its opening sentence: “In the Wild Life Sanctuary, the Great Horned Owl had died.” At the end of Peter’s stay in Paris, a black swan in the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes savagely bites him. Allergic to penicillin, he becomes delirious and has a vision of his mentor, Kant. The novel’s bleak final sentence comes from the German philosopher’s mouth: “Nature is dead, mein kind.” While being a parable of American fate, McCarthy’s novel also seems to prefigure the ecological concerns that are only now catching up with us.

Living in Paris when I first read Birds of America, I haunted some of the same places as McCarthy’s foot-loose protagonist – the little winding path up to the labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, the maids’ rooms in the sixteenth arrondissement, with the sink in the corner. I taught English in a language school in Montmartre called Swann Formation. The owner claimed a family connection with the character in Proust - I half believed him. It was the last year of the little blue pneus, those envelopes that travelled under the city along mysterious tubes. The concierge would bring their bittersweet message: class cancellations. Birds of America went with me in the metro in case students didn’t turn up.

I did some typing work for James Joyce’s old singing partner, Maria Jolas, who had founded, with her husband, Eugene Jolas, the seminal Thirties literary magazine transition. She was then, in 1978, a sprightly and voluble eighty-five year old, translating the work of Nathalie Sarraute as well as working in connection with troops returning from the Vietnam War. She would check the typing for mistakes and then we would have a sherry while she reminisced about Joyce, Beckett, Hemingway et al. I must have mentioned that I liked McCarthy’s Birds of America because she asked me: “Would you like to meet her? She lives up the road.”

Up the road was an elegant apartment on the rue de Rennes where McCarthy lived with her fourth husband. Paris had been her home for many years. A maid dressed in black, with a white apron, answered the door and showed me into the drawing room. Picasso lithographs were on the wall and the parquet creaked. I remember the lovely sculpted outlines of her face, straight from the pioneer melting pot, her brown hair tied back in an elegant bun, the knobbly Chanel suit and low-slung shoes. The old Vassar girl had become Europeanised. We spoke about Jolas’s health and stamina, about Irish writing, about the weather. She had an indulgent, warm bonhomie; I was rather in awe of her.

We met again at Hallowe’en in 1979 and she was scooping out a pumpkin for a lantern. She said she was going to make soup from the pulp – that economical resourcefullness whose passing is lamented in Birds of America. Did they have pumpkins in Ireland? How did we celebrate Hallowe’en?

Later, I read her critical essays, the lacerating account of the trial of the perpetrators of the Mai Lai massacre and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, her best book. The non-fiction has a sparkle and acuity that the ideas-driven fiction sometimes lacks. Helen Vendler, in a 1971 review of Birds of America, is right to point to the limitations of fiction so rooted in the zeitgeist. And yet, no other book quite captures for me the feel of those early years in Paris. Surely, now more than ever, in our torture-degraded twenty-first century, America has need of her critical intelligence.