The Critic as Artist

The Company She Keeps and The Oasis from Mary McCarthy Novels & Stories 1942-1963.  The Library of America.  pp. 1-287  ****

In everything I’ve read by Mary McCarthy so far, it seems that a social critic/satirist is in charge and an artist is struggling to be set free.  The Company She Keeps, her first book, is billed as a novel, but it reads like five distinct stories, all about the same young woman perhaps, but they don’t add up to a single narrative.  (I spoke in my last review about Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, which she had written as stories but her publisher put out as a novel.  In my memory, at least, that book forms more of a single narrative than this one.)  That doesn’t mean they’re not good reading.  But I wouldn’t call them a novel.

The first, “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment,” describes the dissolution of a marriage almost from the outside, from the standpoint of someone observing it, someone—to be sure—who could get into the heads of her characters, but who couldn’t seem to make the narrative dramatic.  She was reporting on bad behavior on the part of a young woman, somewhat gleefully, and I enjoyed the razor-sharp wit, but I thought, she’s not dramatizing this story, she’s talking about it.

“Rogue’s Gallery,” concerns a young office girl working for an unscrupulous employer, aware the entire time of what a turd he is, but unable to leave the job because she needs the money.  “The Genial Host” moves on to New York social life, talking about the parties of a man who is a perfect host but is utterly vapid himself.  “Portrait of an Intellectual” tells a long story about a Yale man trying to be a leftist intellectual, straddling those two worlds, orchestrating his career so it will lead to the book that will make him famous, but then he can’t write the book.  His career fizzles.

In all these stories, we have a feeling that McCarthy has particular people in mind, and that the New York intellectual world knows who she’s talking about.  It’s not quite kissing and telling, but it’s like that.

I would guess, though, that “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” caused the greatest stir, because it is the story, told in the late 1930’s, of a one-night stand, on a passenger train, no less.  It would be fascinating to get a group of the Me Too women in 2024 to read this piece, which opens in the mind of a working woman traveling on a train, sitting in the club car looking for someone interesting to spend her time with.  She’s not exactly looking to pick someone up, but she almost is.  All that would seem fine forty years later, written by Erica Jong, but this woman is in my mother’s generation.  Good girls weren’t supposed to think this way.

She decides the guy who shows up isn’t terribly interesting.  He’s older, married, getting thick through the middle, kind of a boor.  But he invites her to his Pullman car for a drink, and he’s got plenty of booze.  They have a meal and drink some more.  The next thing she knows, she’s waking up in a boozy stupor in the man’s pullman berth, they’re both naked, and oh my God, she must have had sex with him.  She can’t believe it.

Worse yet is that this poor sap, married with grown children, has fallen in love with her, wants to divorce and marry her.  Marry her?  She was just hoping her destination would arrive a little sooner.  She does, nevertheless, after taking a bath and having breakfast (it’s amazing what these Pullman cars offered) have sex with him again, apparently because there’s nothing better to do.  In the meantime, he’s come to his senses and seen that, well, maybe divorce isn’t quite in order yet.  Except when he thinks it is.  But really it isn’t.  Or is it?

This is a groundbreaking story.

“Ghostly Father, I Confess” is the final piece in the book, a story about a young woman talking to her shrink (literally doing analysis, I believe); it seems the most personal piece in the book, and in many ways the most fascinating.  Ordinarily I’d say this is a terrible idea for a story, but McCarthy somehow pulls it off.  The woman, I must say, had a wretched, difficult early life.  Born in 1912 to parents who had married the year before, she had three brothers by the time, in 1918, when they moved from Seattle to Minneapolis and the whole family contracted the flu in that year’s disastrous epidemic.  Both of her parents died; she and her brothers were shipped off to live with a great-aunt and great-uncle who treated them cruelly, whipping them with a razor strop, among other things, and sending them to Catholic schools.  Their maternal grandfather rescued them eventually, but not before five years had passed.  It’s astonishing that this brilliant woman emerged from such a background—her grandfather’s extensive library was a major factor—and no surprise that she turned out to be rebellious.  That, in her case, was a sign of life.

I would say, also, that we see her talent develop in the course of the book.  The narratives become progressively more dramatic, the sentences bolder and more confident.  She still analyzes too much, but the woman has a brain, and she sees these things, so she says them.

The Oasis, which I think would properly be called a novella, takes the whole world from “Portrait of an Intellectual”—leftist magazines, communists and Trotskyites, free thinkers and free lovers (and probably some freeloaders) and sends them off to a utopian community.  The place actually calls itself Utopia, about as sure a way to damn itself to failure as I can think of.  By an odd coincidence, I’ve recently read a similar novel (though much longer) about my generation, in the Sixties.  The Oasis reminds me a little more of The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne’s novel about a utopian community, where people could easily identify intellectuals from his day.  I imagine that is just is true of The Oasis, though editor Thomas Mallon doesn’t give us a cheat sheet.  I read somewhere the Dwight MacDonald was one of the prominent people in the story.  It’s not clear that a young Mary McCarthy is there, or which character she is.

If anything, the writing is more brilliant in this short novel, the sentences longer and bolder, but once again, the critic seems to have taken over.  McCarthy is so busy picking the whole enterprise apart that she doesn’t create much of a story.  It’s almost as if she’s too smart for her own good.  But she’s definitely in the tradition of bold, iconoclastic, brainy, sexually adventurous women—there’s nothing like a Catholic gone bad—and these books show enormous promise.  I keep waiting for the novelist to break free.