I’d Call Them Battlefields

The Groves of Academe a novel by Mary McCarthy.  From Mary McCarthy Novels & Stories 1942-1963.  Library of America.  pp. 289-508.  *****

I’ve always loved novels of academic life.  I love the academy, as bonkers as it often is, and love reading about the odd, distorted presences that inhabit it.  I would also say that, in The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy wrote her first true novel.  The Company She Keeps was really a group of stories.  The Oasis was more like a novella.  But in The Groves of Academe she hit her stride, focusing on a single protagonist and the lives he managed to influence.  For such a nerdy man, he wreaked havoc.

The nerd in question is Henry Mulcahy, “a tall, soft-bellied, lisping man with a tense, mushroom-white face, rimless bifocals, and graying thin red hair.”  The description says it all.  He’s an instructor of literature at a small college in Pennsylvania named Jocelyn, in a city by the same name.  Though this college is fictional, McCarthy compares it to a number of existing institutions, including Bard College, where she herself had taught.  As the novel opens, Mulcahy has received a letter from the college president advising him that his employment will be terminated at the end of that academic year.  I will step in as a casual observer and say that, having taken in all the discernible facts (the man skips appointments with students, doesn’t get his work in on time, does a half-ass job in classes, bullies and berates students.  He even tells a student he’s received this letter, just minutes after first reading it), I believe that was a good decision.  But Mulcahy immediately begins scheming to find some way around it.  He’s pacing and scheming on p. 2 of the book.

The situation is complicated.  He was hired on a provisional basis in the first place, with an understanding that his employment might be temporary, to help him get back on his feet.  He has a wife and four children, is making a minimal salary, and his prospects of finding a new job are—to say the least—not great.  His wife suffers from a vague medical condition which doesn’t amount to much, but which he exaggerates into the possibility that a shock of any kind (like her husband losing his job) will kill her.

He also has a secret weapon.  At a time when the issue of the day—corresponding roughly to one’s position on the Middle East today—was “being a Communist,” he decides to tell a colleague, whom he has enlisted as his closest ally, that he was briefly a member of the party many years ago.  At a large state university, that would probably have gotten him fired immediately.  But Jocelyn is a liberal arts college that prides itself on being open to all viewpoints.  If he can make it look as if he was fired for being in the Party, or make that fact even seem part of the decision, that will work to his advantage.

The woman he has chosen as his ally, Domna Rejnev, is a twenty-three-year old Radcliffe grad who teaches Russian literature and French.  Not only is she hard-working and principled, she feels for Mulcahy in his current situation, and is new to academic infighting.  The very thought that his supposed membership in the Party might have influenced his dismissal sends her through the roof.  She immediately jots down a list of other allies who she believes will go to bat for him.  And, as Arthur Conan Doyle would say, the game is afoot.

McCarthy beautifully captures the true nature of the faculty at any college, which is that they are all utterly obsessed with what they do and care not at all for what anyone else does.  Their real interests are so narrow that they almost seem like caricature; Mulcahy, for instance, teaches a class in Joyce, Proust, and Mann, but he is actually a Joyce scholar who is dismissive of the other two (?), while the chairman of the Department teaches the same course but is a Proust man.  The chairman also knows how slack Mulcahy has been, about all kinds of things, also what a general pain in the ass he is, to him and to the college administration.  He’s actually in favor of letting the man go and won’t be persuaded otherwise.  Domna, in the meantime, finds enough confederates to deputize herself and go with another young professor to visit the president and make their case.

By the time they get there, we realize how much Mulcahy has been lying through his teeth.  His whole employment has been provisional, and the president can prove it by the correspondence, which he’s kept (and which contradicts what this small delegation has been told).  He has no idea of any connection with the Communist party.  But because these earnest young people have come to him, he decides to go to the bursar and try to keep Mulcahy on.  By the time he’s decided that, they’re no longer sure they want him to; Domna in particular comes to wish she hadn’t.  But what’s done is done.

Things come to a crashing climax when Jocelyn hosts—of all things—a poetry conference, which Mulcahy and a new young confederate organize and manage to keep Domna off their committee, despite the fact that she is a published poet.  Who would have thought that a poetry conference could bring about the denouement of a novel (if there is any group more self-absorbed than college professors, it is poets).  I shouldn’t even hint at all the plot machinations that take place (I’ll simply say that one of the poets knew Mulcahy in his past life), but we wind up becoming absolutely furious at the man and the way he’s twisted things around—he should have been a politician!—and the way he continues to twist them at the end.  He’s foiled by a clever administrator.  But not before some blood has been spilled.

I still wish McCarthy wouldn’t create such massive blocks of type, and that she would split dialogue into separate paragraphs, the way the rest of the world does.  And I sometimes think she goes on a bit long.  The fact that she sees so much makes her tell us too much.  But the woman is as her satirical best in this novel, even more than in The Oasis.  She’s become a novelist.