Mary McCarthy, who died at age 77 in 1989, was one of the most brilliant, and also the most polarising, of American writers. Championing ethics over ideology, she was a warrior for truth, writing freely from her own life and never assessing the possible consequences of what she might say. McCarthy’s nerve, courage and wit are almost unthinkable now, when the whole (online) world can be instantly mobilised in hate against a public figure – no matter how small – should they misspell a name or misuse a pronoun or otherwise step off the ideological rails.
First published in 1963, Mary McCarthy’s The Group is being republished this fall in the United States and in several new translations. Almost 60 years after its debut, the book is more timely – and timeless – than ever. Adapted as a Sidney Lumet film in 1966, McCarthy’s novel re-emerged in the mid-Nineties as the inspiration for Candace Bushnell’s ‘Sex and the City’ columns in the New York Observer.
The Group famously traces the lives of eight friends over seven years, beginning with their graduation from Vassar, the then-elite women’s college, in 1933. They emerge from college at the beginning of the Great Depression determined to remake the world, bursting with ideas and idealism. But the personal and intellectual freedom they enjoyed at Vassar hasn’t prepared them to navigate the unbridled cruelty of their employers, husbands and boyfriends. Except for the mysterious Lakey, who escapes the US for Europe and a lesbian relationship, the girls stumble over the conflicting mores of their generations’ sexual liberation. Within seven years, most of the girls have settled into their lives as young society matrons, except for the protagonist Kay Petersen, whose violent and drunken philandering husband, Harald, commits her to a psychiatric ward when she confronts him. But The Group is a comedy – in fact, it’s outrageously funny. McCarthy describes all these horrors through the women’s deluded perspectives. Breathlessly, Kay explains her psychiatric incarceration to her friend Polly as a kind of mistake. “We’d had some people in for cocktails, and we all got quite high. Then when they left, about seven-thirty, I needed a cucumber pickle for a sauce. So I sent Harald out to a delicatessen, and he never came back. I realise it was stupid; I could have used India relish. But the recipe called for a cucumber pickle. Anyway he didn’t come back till morning. I ought to have pretended to be asleep – I see that now. Instead I confronted him … whereupon Harald said he was tired of my dirty mind, and he hit me … It was silly, but I hit him back. Then he knocked me down and kicked me in the stomach. What should I have done, Polly?”
"And I wonder why certain writers become so instantly polarising to the point they’re considered fair game for the most rancorous effusions of hate."
McCarthy makes ambitious and independent Kay’s unwitting victim-hood seem plausible. In fact, the whole fracas – down to the name of the hospital – was drawn from events in McCarthy’s own life during her marriage to the critic Edmund Wilson. And Kay’s husband shares a name with McCarthy’s first husband, Harald Johnsrud, whom she married, just as Kay does, within days of her graduation in 1933.
McCarthy didn’t make very much up, she was one of the most truthful and least inventive American writers. As she told the Paris Review in 1962, replying to the tiresome question – asked only of women – about whether her novels were actually memoirs, “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” Her books hew close to events in her life, and the characters – especially those based on McCarthy herself – parody real people with cruel and shocking precision. It’s unthinkable that Carrie Bradshaw or any of the Sex and the City characters would ever encounter an act of domestic violence, let alone confess her comic ambivalence about it.
McCarthy was always a realist. She was punished for this, both in her lifetime and for years after her death. Writing in The New York Times in 2000, Larissa MacFarquhar described her as “a viperously clever but minor writer, much admired, much detested”. As a kind of revenge for the success of The Group, in 1964 the New York Herald Tribune tracked down some of McCarthy’s old classmates, who were delighted to tell ‘the truth’ about her: “Mary was sort of a beatnik,” one anonymous respondent recalled. “She appeared unwashed and unbrushed – always kind of gray. You certainly wouldn’t have thought of her as a sex object.”
“It was the book that ruined my life,” McCarthy would concede in a 1989 interview shortly before her death. Crank letters sent to her publisher from religious readers asking “What kind of filthy perverted mind do you have to write such a novel?” weren’t hard to withstand, but she was devastated by the hateful criticism unleashed by her peers in the New York intellectual world. Oblivious to McCarthy’s irony, they found The Group too middlebrow and its commercial success was repugnant to them. The New York Review of Books, a publication she’d helped to found, commissioned a 4000-word hit job by Norman Mailer. The Group, Mailer wrote, was “a trivial lady’s writer’s novel”, infused with “a communal odour that’s a cross between Ma Griffe perfume and contraceptive jelly”. The writer Lillian Hellman called it, in the Paris Review, the work “of a lady writer, a lady magazine writer”, and McCarthy’s close friend, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, pseudonymously published a mean-spirited parody in the New York Review.
Taken alone, each of these attacks seems ridiculous. And yet cumulatively they led to a general diminishment of McCarthy’s work and her gifts, functioning very much like cancel culture today. Few of her peers defended her work publicly. Even the most positive critical considerations of her writing were careful to acknowledge its ‘controversy’, withholding full approval and praise. I wonder about this. And I wonder why certain writers become so instantly polarising to the point they’re considered fair game for the most rancorous effusions of hate. But the attacks on McCarthy don’t matter now. 56 years later, Mailer’s review reads like a misogynist parody, and his bombast loses its sting. The Group, she explained during a reading in 1963, was conceived as “a novel about the idea of progress … What I’m trying to do in this book is to make some kind of study of what it means to be a young American trained in progressive ideas, and trained to be a consumer.” New readers will be free to enjoy McCarthy’s brilliance and wit, and maybe recognise themselves, even now, in its world.