Mary McCarthy: Self-Portrait with Sunglasses

‘After Mary, everyone else will seem bland.’ – Alfred Kazin (October 1989)

Mary McCarthy is still a really good story. Her reckless, libidinous adventures in life were candidly and stylishly recorded in her autobiographical fiction. They also occasioned some fine journalism, political activism and several near-perfect memoirs. Her celebrity and notoriety prefigured that of the noisier Norman Mailer, who learned from her example and wrote, like her, with intermittent brilliance. From 1942’s scandalous The Company She Keeps to 1963’s The Group and on to her posthumously published Intellectual Memoirs (1992), McCarthy delighted and outraged readers while keeping her peers on tenterhooks.

Satirising her own follies inevitably drew in those from her intellectual sets. Many were pained by the roman-à-clef nature of it all, especially since McCarthy barely concealed her targets. As her friend Elizabeth Hardwick observed of her revenge on her second ex-husband, the eminent critic Edmund Wilson, ‘She has disguised him in satirical portraits in her fiction, a disguise on the order of sunglasses’. In a 1962 piece for Esquire, the novelist Brock Brower calibrated the general damage: ‘She has given such a detailed record of her affairs, marriages, political leanings, and other follies – and, incidentally, arrogated to her own use so many of the trials she has caused others – that she really has become her own central idea’.

Certainly McCarthy was her own best subject. In her novels and stories she is to be found everywhere. She is Meg (The Company She Keeps), Kay (The Group), Rosamund (Birds of America). And ...