 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
Mary (Therese) McCarthy (1912-1989) | |
|
Witty and sophisticated American writer and theater critic, noted for her satirical commentaries on marriage, intellectuals, and the role of women. McCarthy's novels were often drawn from autobiographical sources; she put friends, enemies, ex-husbands, thinly disguised, into her fiction. Her bestselling novel, THE GROUP (1963), was about her classmates at Vassar and their subsequent lives. McCarthy's seven novels appeared between the years 1942 and 1979. Most of her fiction and nonfiction explored the response of intellectuals to political and moral problems. McCarthy's attraction to Communism ended in 1936-37, but in the mid-1960s she re-emerged as a political essayist, writing against the Vietnam War. "When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing." (from How I Grew, 1987) Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle, WA. Orphaned at the age of six, when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918, she was brought up by two sets of rich but austere grandparents - in both a strict Catholic environment and in a Protestant one. Her virginity McCarthy lost at the age of 14 in the front seat of a Marmon roadster to a man twice her age. McCarthy was educated at the Annie Wright Seminary, Tacoma, Washington and Vassar College, New York, where she studied literature and met Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Rukeyser. After graduating with honors aged 21, she married the first of her husbands and moved to New York. During the 1930s McCarthy was active on the American left, becoming a Trotskyist and an anti-Stalinist. She worked as an editor in Covici Friede publishers (1936-37) and Partisan Review (1937-38), taught or lectured at Beard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York (1945-46 and 1986), Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York (1948), University College, London (1980), and Vassar College (1982). From 1938 to 1962 she was a theatre critic for the Partisan Review. In the 1930s she was the mistress of one of the co-editors, Philip Rahv. In 1938 McCarthy married her second husband, the critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), with whom she had her only child. In INTELLECTUAL MEMOIRS (1992) she confessed, that she never loved him, an "old" man who was "fat, puffing" and had bad breath. "So finally I agreed to marry Wilson as my punishment for having gone to bed with him..." she wrote. McCarthy was Wilson's wife number three. During World War II, McCarthy began to support the war effort but Wilson remained skeptical. They divorced in 1946. McCarthy's first book, THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS (1942), was a collection of loosely linked stories. The satire about New York intellectuals depicted the failure of a marriage, and the search for personal identity through psychoanalysis. THE OASIS (1949) was a short novel about artists and intellectuals living in a utopian society. The Group (1963) was a sexually outspoken depiction of eight Vassar graduates in the 1930s. It followed the group of friends through their first sexual experiences, marriage, and domestic duties. Intended to be a partial parody, it portrays women as they embrace or oppose ideas of political and social progress fashionable in the 1930s and 1940s. The book was made into a movie in 1966. Comically titled BIRDS OF AMERICA (1971) focused on a boy whose mother refuses to accept modern conveniences; gradually the boy understands his mother's views of "progress". Among McCarthy's other publications are critical works, travel books, and the autobiographical MEMOIRS OF A CATHOLIC GIRLHOOD (1957). As important as her fiction are criticism and political reporting, such as THE MASK OF STATE: WATERGATE PORTRAITS (1971). CANNIBALS AND MISSIONARIES (1979) was a topical novel about the psychology of terrorism. A plane carrying Americans, rich art collectors and politicians, is hijacked by a terrorist. At first the terrorist intends to use the politicians in the flight as hostages, but then decides to trade the art collectors for their artworks. "We all know in our gut that art educates. In other societies, they've aware of the power it has of speaking directly to the masses, teaching them to better socialists, better citizens. The trouble is that with us it's fallen into the wrong hands. Forget the speculators... The concept of the collector is so rotten by now that it stinks." (from Cannibals and Missionaires, 1979) In her essays McCarthy explored a wide range of subjects from sexual emancipation, communism, nuclear weapons, Vietnam and Watergate to the work of contemporary playwrights and novelists. "Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing." (from 'My Confession,' 1954) After visiting Hanoi, McCarthy wrote favorably about the Vietcong. When her close friend, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, was attacked by the Jewish community for her book on Adolf Eichmann, McCarthy rushed to her aid and wrote a defence of her views. Arendt herself was a German-born Jew, and had subtitled the work "A Report on the Banality of Evil". Their correspondence was later collected in BETWEEN FRIENDS (1995). In her most controversial essay 'America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub' (1947) McCarthy wrote that consumerism has created pseudo-equality, 'an equality of things rather than of persons... We are nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.' McCarthy's theatre critics were published in 1956 under the title SIGHTS AND SPECTACLES 1932-1956. From 1962 McCarthy spent with her husband, James West, half of her time in Paris. In 1984 she had an operation to relieve the pressure of water on her brain. James West once said, that she was "more interested in ideas than in her health." McCarthy died of cancer in New York on October 25, 1989. She was a member of the American Academy, National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her several awards include Edward MacDowell Medal (1982), National Medal of Literature (1984), and the first Rochester Literary Award (1985). She had honorary degrees from six universities. For further reading: Pioneers and Caretakers by L. Auchincloss (1965); The Company she Kept by D. Grumbach (1967); Mary McCarthy by Willene S. Hardy; Mary McCarthy: A Life by Carol Geldeman (1988); Writing Dangerously by Carol Brightman (1992); Mary McCarthy: An Annotated Bibliography by Joy Bennett and Gabriella Hochmann (1993); Seeing Mary Plain by Frances Kiernan (2000) - Note 1: McCarthy was married four times: Harold Johnsrud (1933-1936), Edmund Wilson (1938-46), whom the author called "the monster", Bowden Broadwater (1946-1961), James Raymond West (1961). - Note 2: In a taped interview with Dick Cavett, first aired in 1980, McCarthy said about Lillian Helman, with only slight hyperbole, that "every word she writes is alie, including and and the." Hellman's defamation suit against McCarthy was dropped after Hellman's death. ''If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. I didn't want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that.'' Selected works:
© 2003 |
