Tag Archives: Mary McCarthy

Poets at Large: Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe”

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Near the end of Mary McCarthy’s satire, The Groves of Academe, the squabbling English department at Jocelyn College sponsors a poetry conference.  My reaction to poetry conferences is awe.

But Mary McCarthy is not awed; she explains the mechanics of the conference.  The poets have attended so many (for a small fee) that they can predict the trajectory. They know that  the president of the college will stand up at the last event and ask an intelligent but very long question.  

One of the most charming moments is when Miss Mansell, wearing “a high- necked black heavy crepe blouse encrusted with with sequins and a long black crepe skirt” (an outfit that would suit any poet), announces she intends to speak about and recite Virgil.  The faculty and students are both shocked.

McCarthy explains, “From the point of view of the students, the choice was not a happy one.  The majority of the students present had never heard of the Mantuan; they supposed he was a modern poet whom their faculty had not yet caught up with…”

Those who know Virgil are equally upset.  “A few scowling students who had not had the good fortune to be educated progressively moved restlessly in their seats, as though fighting being awakened from a dream tto their Latin teacher and the abhorrent learning by rote.  There were stifled cries of ‘Let me out of here.”

This made me laugh because – full disclosure – I used to teach Latin.  So did my husband. We loved being T.A.’s at the university, and in my case I was also a Visiting lecturer while my husband finished his thesis.  I taught Virgil and two first-year Latin classes, and required my students to memorize the opening lines of the Aeneid. I knew from experience during a protracted illness that reciting Virgil (silently) is calming.

This is one of McCarthy’s best satires, and poets would doubtless enjoy it. And if you can’t wander off to a poetry conference, read this book instead.

My Favorite Academic Satire: Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe”

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Mary McCarthy, the 20th-century novelist, critic, and essayist, taught English for two semesters in 1945 and 1946 at Bard College, a progressive college. McCarthy taught a class in The Modern Novel that only went as far as Henry James.  This may have been a low point for McCarthy, because she wrote an academic satire of Bard.

The Groves of Academe, set during the Communist witch hunts and McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, mocks the instructors and professors, the “progressive” curriculum, and the college bureaucrats.  The hero, Henry Mulcahy, a brilliant, lazy professor who doesn’t turn in his evaluations on time and sometimes forgets to meet with “tutees,” receives a letter from the college president informing him that his contract won’t be renewed at Jocelyn College.

Hen is not as broken-hearted as you would think.  Instead, he goes into battle mode, plotting and scheming to save his job.  This is the end of the line for him: he has been fired from so many colleges and universities that there’s no going back, and he must support his wife and five children. He considers this job beneath him (he is the only Ph.D. at Jocelyn College), but he got the job only because two of his friends asked the college president for a favor.  

And yet it is simply unimaginable that Hen would get fired!  Jocelyn College might be a step above “Drake and Montana,” he muses, but isn’t he the best professor here (perhaps on his good days!)? Well, this is comic hubris, but it is true that some of his colleagues are similarly lax, and don’t get fired.

Hen is a comic character, but he is not a sympathetic character. The effect of his campaign on his supporters , especially Domna, a new instructor, almost witchily alters her character. She fibbed, almost lied, during a meeting about Henry with Maynard, the college president. And she wonders coldly why she didn’t tell Maynard that Henry’s confession of party membership implicated Maynard as well in these times.

McCarthy writes, “As soon as this devilish idea reached her full consciousness, she expelled it as wicked and useless – it could only end in ineffectuality or in both men’s losing their jobs. Yet the fact that it could have proposed itself to her so readily, easily, and naturally gave her a disturbing shock.”

Hen, of course, has no such doubts. Unlike stumbling, sweet-natured Jim in Kingsley Amis’ academic satire, Lucky Jim, McCarthy’s Hen, a famous Joyce scholar who also writes for The Nation, has few moments of sweetness.   Hen is a trickster, like so many comic heroes.

And yet I am surprised to say that, on a third reading of The Groves of Academe, I dislike Hen less.  His actions at the college are still despicable, but he is a good husband and father, and has good friends at Jocelyn College.

On this reading, I also find that Hen’s politics and philosophy are not entirely wrong, and it’s touching the way his colleagues support him.  One woman even resigns her job.  Pity the woman who resigns her job for a trickster.

During the McCarthy hearings, leftist writers, actors, and professors, and of course others lived in fear.   Hen hints to his colleagues that he is being fired for his Communist affiliations:  he has in fact never been a member of the party, though has attended some Communist lectures.  His colleagues are so indignant about the state of intolerance in the U.S. that they rally round him and work to topple the college president’s vendetta. Hen also claims that his wife is so ill she might die from the shock. It never occurs to them that Hen might be lying, or at least exaggerating.

My guess is that some people at Bard College might have been offended by this satire, but probably most of them laughed. However, McCarthy made a lot of enemies through her writing, and she burned a lot of bridges. Perhaps this wasn’t a bridge she minded burning.

Reading Mary McCarthy on My Birthday

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I celebrated a Big Birthday this month.  We put many, many candles on the cupcakes, but it was too windy to light them.

There was singing. “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you…”

“Happy Birthday to me…”

After a long walk my husband laid down his head on a picnic table and gently snored.  I skootched next to him and read Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life, a brilliant satiric novel about life in an artists’ colony in New England. Martha, an aspiring playwright, reluctantly renews her relationship with her domineering ex-husband, Miles. Both are remarried, but he is determined to seduce her. The place abounds with writers, artists, and spouses who drink too much at parties and criticize each other’s lack of talent.  They’re fascinated by the relationship between Martha and MIles.

Such a fun book to read! But McCarthy’s satire was so pungent that she didn’t dare  return to Wellfleet.

I can’t quite imagine the artists’ colony, but I’ll read anything by Mary McCarthy.

Mary McCarthy’s “Birds of America”

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“How can we not write satire? ” Juvenal asked in the second century CE.

That’s why I appreciate Mary McCarthy.  I recently reread her brilliant novel Birds of America (1971), set in the 1960s in Rocky Port, Massachusetts, Paris, and Rome. 

McCarthy aims her savage wit at American politics (the 1964 presidential election and the Vietnam War), the rise of “canned” culture, literally canned and frozen food, the creation of faux history in American small towns, and the growing mistrust of the American government in the U.S. and Europe.

The protagonist, Peter Levi, a birdwatcher and amateur philosopher, moves to Rocky Port with his mother after she separates from her second husband, a Berkeley professor.  They had enjoyed a stay in Rocky Port a few years ago, but the small town is no longer idyllic: it has been infected by urban culture, the disappearance of fresh vegetables in stores,  and the death of the Great Horned Owl at the nature preserve, which only Peter mourns.

But the changing American traditions, old and new, are most sharply illustrated by McCarthy’s descriptions of two Thanksgivings, one in Rocky Port, the other in Paris.

Thanksgiving in Rocky Port is the most fun, because Peter’s mother, who plays the harp and is a professional musician, organizes it. She resolves to make a tradtional Thanksgiving dinner using only ingredients available to the Pilgrims and indigenous Americans of the time.

And still she can’t find a bean pot!  Peter wonders,”Can’t you use a casserole?” Fortunately, a neighbor provides one. And of course the unique traditional meal is scrumptious, and both family (Peter’s cynical aunt and joyful cousins), and friends (lonely Mrs. Curtis, who takes most of her meals at the Portuguese diner), enjoy the food and have fun. 

And then there’s another Thanksgiving dinner in Paris, where Peter spends his junior year abroad. He is acquainted with a general attached to NATO, and his wife invites Peter to “partake of turkey ‘n’ trimmings” on Thanksgivlng.  Naturally, the victuals at Thanksgiving in Paris are of the all-American kind, of the modern frozen tureky era, because the general’s Southern wife wants to be as American as possible.

But Peter is appalled when the general’s wife holds forth on Thanksgiving. 

He observes,

“Then, at table, she actually explained the principle of Thanksgiving to the French. ‘It isn’t a social event, you see.  It isn’t exactly a family event, either…  It’s the day when we Americans – help me, Chuck – as we thank God for our blessings trying to gather under our roof some of our fellow countrymen who might be lonely….'”

Peter, a little tired of being a waif, can’t resist saying, “It’s just a harvest festival, isn’t it?”

And that’s the thing about Peter: he is philosophically prepared, from reading Kant and living with his radical mother, who gets arrested in Rocky Port for refusing to post a faux historical plaque on her house, to jeer at undercooked thought and oppose American imperialism.

McCarthy also mocks Peter’s American obsession with European toilets:  In his rooming house in Paris, he is so disgusted by the filthy toilet that he rises early every morning to scrape the shit off the seat and walls. In Rome, he has to repeat the process.  He had hoped for better. So it’s not only America: France and Italy are also full of shit. (No, I’m only pretending to parse the text. That’s not at all what Mccarthy means!)

McCarthy’s slings and outrageous arrows strike everything in sight, not just American smugness but French chauvinism and tourism in Italy. In the process she makes you laugh aloud, but she also reveals both affection and criticism of flawed American culture.

This is one of my favorite books.

Women and Sexuality in 20th-Century Literature:  Cynthia Heimel,  D. H. Lawrence, Mary McCarthy & Erica Jong

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Why, one wonders, this sudden interest in sex?  As a woman of a certain age, I already feel I could write an instruction manual. But as I laughed over Cynthia Heimel’s Sex Tips for Girls (1983), I was astonished by her detailed instructions on how to give a blow job.

There’s no casual hopping into bed in a camisole and gym shorts, then shedding layers. Heimel is a diva obsessed with oral sex. It’s as if she suddenly decided to rewrite The Joy of Sex in the middle of her book.  But of course she’s very witty, albeit perhaps too detailed in her instructions.

And so I began thinking about the portrayal of women and sexuality in 20th-century literature, about what worked and what didn’t.

D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is his best-known novel, and that’s a shame: it was far from his best.  But of course it’s very popular, because it was banned in England for the sex scenes till 1960.

It is a novel of sexual unhappiness. Sex is always important to Lawrence, and this is one of the few books where he doesn’t philosophize about it. But the characters are very sad: Lady Constance Chatterley married her husband in 1917; he came back from the war a paraplegic.  There is no sex: Constance is unhappy; he is unhappy, everyone is unhappy.  But then Constance begins an affair with Mellors, the virile gardener, and she and he are ecstatic.  Lawrence is always brilliant, but I must admit the sex scenes are slightly comical, because Mellors refers to their genitals as Lady Jane and John Thomas.  If you’re a Lawrence fan, you should read it; and if you’re not a Lawrence fan, start with something else.

His better banned book, Women in Love, is much more complicated, and one of the main characters, Rupert, philosophizes about sex, but there is also much humor. His girlfriend Ursula tolerates his orations and grounds him. They are the perfect couple.

Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about eight women who graduate from Vassar in 1933,  was a best-seller, and no wonder: it is the perfect beach book. Everyone apologizes for liking this book.  I’m not sure why.  Some of McCarthy’s intellectual friends (she was political, outspoken, and made a lot of enemies) deemed it too commercial.

But is it too commercial?  That’s not how I remember it.  Although I prefer Birds of America, her satiric novel about a young American abroad in the 1960s, The Group is a fascinating portrayal of an earlier generation with fewer choices. In one memorable scene, two women put on fake wedding rings before going to a doctor to be fitted for diaphragms. And, if I remember correctly, the diaphragms zoom around like frisbees as they practice inserting them. Perhaps they were easier to insert by the time I got mine! But the characters in The Group can’t take birth control for granted: if they’re not married, the doctor might refuse to prescribe it.

Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying was a sensation when it was published in 1973. The heroine, Isadora Wing, is afraid of flying , but accompanies her psychiatrist husband to a conference in Germany anyway. She is tired of her marriage, and on the lookout for the “zipless fuck,” as she calls it. (She finds it. )And she finds it again in a couple of sequels, which I actually preferred to Fear of Flying. 

All four of these writers were groundbreaking in their approach to women’s sexuality.

Mary McCarthy’s “Cannibals and Missionaries”

The brilliant writer Mary McCarthy is perhaps too intellectual and acerbic for today’s American culture, though I would love to have read her take on it.   She is best-known for The Group, her best-selling 1963 novel about a group of women whose lives take different directions after graduating from Vassar in the 1930s. But my own favorite is Birds of America, her scathing satire of American innocence and hypocrisy with the funniest Thanksgiving scene ever.  

Her varied oeuvre, a mix of fiction, essays, and memoirs, fascinates me. This week I read McCarthy’s last novel, Cannibals and Missionaries, a  political novel about terrorism, published in 1979.  Forty years later, it is a powerful historical novel about liberals and terrorists, art and property, economics and class, mediation and violence.  It was billed as a thriller by the publisher, but it is really a psychological novel.  

In Cannibals and Missionaries, terrorists have targeted a small committee of liberals traveling  to Iran to investigate the reputed tortures in prisons in the Shah’s regime.  The members of the committee are mostly innocents who have no idea their mission could take them into danger:  they are Aileen Simmons, the frighteningly loquacious president of an elite women’s college; Senator Jim Carey, who once ran for president but joked so much he was not considered “committed”; Frank, a sentimental minister; Gus, an ancient, fragile, retired Bishop; Victor, a professor (and, we learn later, CIA agent) who brings his cat along for the ride; Sophie Weil, a New Journalist; Cameron, a Scottish professor and Middle Eastern scholar; and Henk Van Vliet de Jonge, a Dutch member of Parliament.  By the way, the two politicians, Jim and Henk, are both poets.

McCarthy masterfully develops their characters while analyzing politics and the psychology of liberals and terrorists. Two  Arabs and a Dutch couple hijack the plane.  When they appear with their guns, only the Senator and Henk understand what must be done to keep the peace.  The  irritating Aileen keeps chatting compulsively and wondering where her meal is. (Some Orthodox Jews are served first with a Kosher meal.) And she is so pissed off that she loudly wonders why their group has been targeted rather than the tour group of millionaire art colletctors in first-class, who also headed for Iran.  And so the terrorists also take the collectors hostage.

The terrorists take the hostages to a Dutch farmhouse. Nothing much happens at first.   McCarthy chronicles the intensity of their boredom: there is nothing to read, and no one can play games all the time.  The Senator introduces them to a match game called “Cannibals and Missionaries” which Navy flyers played in   World War II.  Not surprisingly, when a terrorist plays it he favors the cannibals. 

The flippancy of Charles, a witty, flamboyant elderly gay man who was headed for Iran with the art collectors, even befriends the terrorists.   His reactions to the terrorists’ demands—Holland must drop out of NATO and cancel relations with Israel and they must release criminals from trisons—are hilariious but also thought-provoking.

“It only needs a weensy change of perspective, doesn’t it? A little bird tells me we’re not the enthusiasts for ‘law and order’ we were a few days ago.  It was that interesting third demand that brought it home to me.  Why, my dear, if the whole criminal population of Holland were turned loose…I’d have no objection as long as it meant that I’d be able to journey to Naqsh-i -Rustan with my ears and toes and fingers safely about me….Till today, I’ll confess, I’d tended to look on our penal institutions as a necessay evil.  And, as for the second demand, can we honestly say that it would be a tragedy if Holland were to leave NATO and suspend relations with Israel?  My own answer, I admit, woudl be prejudiced.  As a pacifist, I hold no brief to NATO, and though I’m not unsympathetic to Israel, I feel she could use a little lesson.”

The art collectors are told they will be released if they arrange for their families to deliver some of their most valuable works of art to the terrorists.  A Vermeer painting becomes a symbol both of first world privilege and civiliation, when Helen announces she would rather die than endanger it.

A fascinating, important book for today. 

Against Anxiety: Beat Your Reading Slump with Three Fun Tomes

In all probability, the “reading slump” was invented by a non-reader. “I can’t read Proust, baby;  I’m in a reading slump.”  Someone must have tweeted it, and then everybody had the syndrome.  Pity the poor person with retro-major depression.

Here’s what we know:  honey,  you’re not in a reading slump.  You are (a) lazy, (b) anxious and depressed, or (c) having a full-fledged nervous breakdown.  The reading slump is not in the DSM!

At the hospital I don’t read Proust.  I sit beside my husband’s bed, trying to persuade him to sit on it. He is on the floor picking up the phone charger he dropped.   And he wants to go to the Starbucks down the hall, though his robe is untied–he can’t use one of his arms–and he has no money.  I rush out and stand in a long, long line to get us coffee and tea.  When I get back, he’s pacing.

It is hard to get much reading done, period, because people are in and out of the hospital room.  Blood pressure, menus, the whole bit.  Between trying to get him to take it easy and my own selfish existential crisis (I never knew his existence was fragile!),  I metaphorically chewed my fingernails,

He’s almost cured–a few more weeks, they think–and now everything is back to normal.  But I’ve done a lot of escape readings, and here are three fun books to help you beat anxiety, though I shall never call it a reading slump!

1. Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites. Yes, du Maurier’s Rebecca is a classic, but The Parasites is almost equally brilliant.  This fascinating story of three siblings, Maria, an actress, Niall, a songwriter, and mousy Celia, who has a  talent for drawing,  begins on a Sunday in the country when Maria’s husband explodes with rage and calls them parasites. As du Maurier tells the story of the tight-knit talented brother and half-sisters, who are the children of an actress and singer, we have our own opportunity to judge.  Du Maurier narrates the novel in the first-person plural–and we never know quite who  the “we” is!

2.  Elizabeth Goudge’s The White Witch.  Goudge’s writing is sometimes breathtaking, other times sentimental, and I love her vivid Dickensian characters.  I recently reread The White Witch, a historical novel set in England in the 17th century, during the English civil war between Charles I and the Puritans.  Most of the novel is set in a village temporarily left to its own peaceful ways since the not-very-bright Puritan convert Squire, Robert Haselwood, has gone to war.  In the opening chapters, we meet his cousin  Froniga, who is half-gypsy and a white witch with healing powers and benign spells;   the Haselwood twins, Will, a very ordinary little boy, and his unusually percepitve sister, Jenny; Francis Leland, a traveling artist who paints the twins and is secretly one of the king’s men; Yoben, Froniga’s long-time boyfriend and a gypsy with  a mysterious past; and the eccentric, very wise village priest, so kind he tries to help the black witch in the village, an evil soul who digs up graves and casts obscene spells.  How will they all come together?  This is not her absolute best, but I enjoyed it very much and some people love it.

3. Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America.  This 1971 satire, set in New England, Paris, and Rome in the 1960s, skewers American innocence and hypocrisy, and I think it’s McCarthy’s best work.   You don’t have to know about the 1960s to be amused by her mockery of frozen foods, a pious Thanksgiving abroad (which the hero calls “a harvest fest”), the faux-historicism of New England villages, and tourism in Europe (the protagonist thinks tourists should be licensed to go to art museums).