Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World
By Carol Brightman
Harvest, 1994. 714 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Mary McCarthy tends to be remembered, if at all, as the US author of a sexy novel from the 1960s, The Group, which was banned as an offence to public morals in Australia. This was the peak of McCarthy's public notoriety but the literary and political landscape of her life had many more features, many worth celebrating for their lively challenge to orthodoxies of all kinds.
Brightman's biography of McCarthy paints in vivid detail the evolution of McCarthy from her birth in 1912 into a middle class Catholic family, to her antiwar political journalism from Hanoi in the '60s, to the $2.25 million libel suit taken out against her by the playwright Lillian Hellmann a few years before McCarthy's death in 1989.
By 1930, McCarthy had, by dint of rich grandparents, entered the privileged realm of the all-female Vassar university, but even as the tide of '30s radicalism lapped at Vassar's gates and a few of its Republican daughters declared for socialism, McCarthy remained an artistically sensitive but apolitical bystander. Leaving Vassar as a writer, she was unable to avoid the ferment of revolutionary politics amongst the New York literary set, but she initially regarded left-wing politics as a bit of a lark, just another part of her dizzying social whirl.
Yet the communists she met made her feel "petty and shallow", and their moral authority gradually won her over. Her fleeting involvement with the Communist Party in 1935-1936 was "a Rubicon of sorts" as she replicated the progress of many of her co-intellectuals from literary aesthete to liberal to Communist sympathiser and, more by accident than design, to anti-Stalinism following a brief infatuation with Trotskyism.
Marxism, however, was only ever a doctrine to McCarthy — she was never seized by a commitment to Marxism as an inspiration for revolutionary social change. She found the pacifism and moralism of Simone Weil and the "windy, Hegelian abstraction" of Hannah Arendt more congenial.
McCarthy was as much attracted to personalities as to issues. Her personal relationships swayed her political ideas, enabling her to slip easily from one position to another on the left-liberal end of the political spectrum, with occasional stumbles into liberal conservatism, succumbing to the "end of inequality" myth in the '50s and denying the CIA financial sponsorship of the cultural magazines she published in.
She never went as far to the right, however, as many of her '30s colleagues did in the '50s. Dedicated followers of fashion, they had embraced Marxism when it was fashionable and seemed the power of the future, only to abandon it during the Cold War, often under the guise of a vehement anti-Stalinism which McCarthy saw as a "Trojan horse" for their real interest in serving and being rewarded by capitalist power.
So when Vietnam raised the question of commitment again in the '60s, McCarthy turned up the wick of her radicalism, providing shelter to draft resisters and AWOL soldiers and visiting Hanoi and Saigon to write against the war.
More receptive to critical left ideas than her embittered anticommunist friends, McCarthy responded to a New Left sensitivity, writing that because "Vietnam was a symbol of the right of US capital to flow freely throughout the globe", the Vietnamese resistance had made Vietnam "a neo-imperialist proving ground", thus accounting for the extraordinary levels of carnage the US was prepared to commit over so many years.
Unlike many liberals, particularly the Kennedy liberals ("pale fish out of university think-tanks infatuated with counter-insurgency doctrine"), McCarthy favoured unilateral withdrawal, but as the antiwar protests died down she lapsed into her former liberal ways, proclaiming the Vietnam war a "mystery".
Still emitting sparks of political energy over the coup against Allende in Chile, and over Watergate, but with a steadfast opposition to what she saw as "the shrillness and greed" of feminism, she served out her remaining decade in the '80s as a celebrity, not so much for her "twenty-two books of fiction, criticism, art history, political journalism and memoirs" as for Hellmann's $2 million lawsuit.
Hellmann, a progressive and talented writer but an unreflective '30s supporter of Stalinist orthodoxy, harboured a grudge against McCarthy, whom Hellmann saw as "the young Trotskyist grown old". The literary world was abuzz with controversy over the lawsuit, as "intellectuals were summoned to their old shooting positions ... articulating 'one's attitude to communism' all over again."
Yet McCarthy's political life was usually overshadowed by the social life. Her fiction is focused on the personal, even with its political settings, though she does display a refreshing taste for satirical humour and a candour about sex that was liberating in her era. Literature reflected her life, with her four husbands and serial affairs.
McCarthy's, and her biographer's, obsession with literary gossip yields some diverting glimpses into the lives of the intellectual eminences of the period (Arthur Koestler's attempted seduction of McCarthy amounted to near rape, and the theologian Paul Tillich's pursuit of McCarthy was highlighted by his foot fetish), but the personal detail is often excessive.
Brightman's biography, however, does successfully take the pulse of the literary generation which came of political age in the '30s and '40s and the paths that the revolutionary intellectuals followed in subsequent decades. The "starry-eyed Stalinists" and "bickering anti-Stalinists" of McCarthy's circle, where literary debates were often "the pursuit of politics by other means", all retreated from their revolutionary visions, but some, like McCarthy, deployed their skills against those who went all the way with LBJ.
McCarthy's decades of literary and intellectual explorations left a body of work that has a stylistic grace and a political energy that has preserved the creative freshness and topical relevance of her work for today's readers and activists.