Aspiration Meets Reality

The Group a novel by Mary McCarthy.  From Novels 1963-1979.  Library of America.  pp. 1-359.  *****

I said here recently, in my study of outrageous women from several generations, that All Fours is a better novel than anything Mary McCarthy or Erica Jong had written.  That may still be true.  But at that point I hadn’t read The Group, McCarthy’s most famous and best-selling novel.  I’m not sure I’d make that statement so cavalierly at this point.

For one thing, after the wildly imaginative but truly weird world of Miranda July, it’s an enormous relief to get back to everyday reality as we know it, especially Manhattan in the mid-thirties, a rich locale for literature.  And the subject is irresistible, at least to me.  The Group doesn’t just portray a cluster of young women at Vassar who formed a group, and share their hopes and dreams and ideals, but it follows them for a number of years afterwards to see those ideals meet reality.  It’s not a pretty sight.

It’s an ultimately sad and moving novel, because it ends when one of the women has died at the age of 29; one last time the group gets together is for her funeral.  I hadn’t expected that, somehow.  Most of the novel was a wicked social comedy.

I have great affection for The Group because it was one of the books I raided frequently for its dirty parts when I was a teenager (it came out when I was fifteen).  My father was a great reader of American literature, and my mother followed his lead; this book was right up his alley, since it was written by one of the major intellectuals of the day and was also a bestseller,  I felt that in McCarthy’s earlier books she was too much the cultural critic, more a satirist than a realistic novelist, but in this book she got into the lives of the characters and deeply sympathized with them.  Since they were all women who followed the intellectual currents of their day, at least while they were in college, McCarthy could talk freely about subjects that interested her.  The Library of America volume is studded with endnotes about important cultural figures, also references to Vassar professors who were influential on these lives.  I love reading such things.

The novel opens with a wedding and ends with a funeral, in contrast to what Jane Austen might have done, the first wedding for anyone in the group, a woman named Kay Leland Strong.  And I would have to say that my youthful interest in this book was not entirely unfounded.  Sex is a major focus, how the women think about it, talk about it, and feel about it.  The story doesn’t hurry off to the wedding night—that would be a cliché—but instead follows one of the more timid of the group, Dottie Renfrew, as she goes out with a man she met at the wedding and soon realizes, before much happens, that it is her intention to seduce her.  She decides, though she barely knows the man, to go through with it.  She wants to have the experience.

It’s a good one! (almost unprecedented in the work of McCarthy).  The man knows she is a virgin, takes care of her feelings, makes sure she’s okay with everything he does (though she’s never quite sure what’s going on), even practices birth control, coitus interruptus, the most primitive and least reliable (don’t try this at home), ejaculating on her tummy (shocking me when I was fifteen).  He even gave her an orgasm.  Her first.  The whole thing was miraculous.

Except that he also told her that he wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship with any woman.  She was welcome to give him a call anytime she was interested in sex (he tells her to “buy a pessary,” once again confounding my fifteen-year-old brain), but he didn’t want anything more.  Unfortunately—but predictably—she fell in love with him, creating a hopeless situation.  Eventually she fled New York to get away from it.

Also in The Group is a near-rape scene, a common occurrence in the work of McCarthy (suggesting something not about her, I would say, but more about the sexual mores of her day).  A woman named Libby has staged a party in the company of a man she thinks of as cultivated and refined, in a way the opposite of the man Dottie was with.  But once other guests have left, he turns abusive, almost entitled, as if a woman should have sex with him just because he exists.  He finally stops when he finds out she’s a virgin, but until then the scene was terrifying and infuriating.  The road to sexual fulfillment and happiness seemed a rocky one in the mid-thirties.

It’s interesting, though, how much the lives of these women revolve around men, and how often it is men who prevent them from doing what they want.  The groom in the wedding at the beginning is a case in point.  His name is Harald, and he was widely considered a real catch for Kate.  He’s associated with the theater, has been an actor, director, and aspiring playwright; he seems to be the man of their acquaintance who is headed for a notable career.  Kate works at Macy’s to supplement their income so they can have a decent apartment, but soon—after he’s been fired from a job as stage manager because of a fit of temper—she becomes the sole breadwinner, hardly a career that she envisioned for herself at Vassar.

Harald condemned Dottie’s lover as a dipsomaniac and a lecher, but at least that man was honest about what he wanted; Harald drinks as much as anyone and before long is sleeping with other women, including Kate’s friends from the group.  Woman after woman falls for something about him, some weird combination of arrogance and brilliance and authority, and he spends more time screwing around and drinking than writing.  A producer does take an option on one of his plays, which looks hopeful for a while, but then that falls through, and he reacts with depression and more drinking.  His kind of “brilliance” doesn’t seem to understand that the life of a writer includes as much failure as success, and that the job of a true artist is to persist through it all.  His supposedly promising career fizzles out.

Editor Thomas Mallon tells us that McCarthy originally intended to follow the group all the way into the Sixties, but she was wise to alter that and stop after seven years.  Those years tell a rich story.  And the novel has an uncanny symmetry that I didn’t notice until I stepped back from it.

Despite the sadness of the ending, there is also a huge feeling of satisfaction, when the one member of the group who has come out as a lesbian encounters Harald and more or less tells him off.  She seems to have seen through him the whole time.  One can only wish they all had.

Also that they didn’t let men be so much the center of their lives.  Maybe that is something that has changed, almost a century later.  All Fours would suggest that.