AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--May 2021--MARY McCARTHY

Mary McCarthy was intelligent, witty and sharp. So were her characters. Her personal life had lots of ups and downs….she didn’t really have life figured out. Neither did her characters. Although she rejected the feminist label, her fictional women were “modern” in their time, which may be a bit hard to appreciate when reading her work today. She has been called a “literary rapier”, “quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced”, “relentlessly intelligent” on one hand, and “silly”, lacking in creative force, a “duncey broad” on the other. Her literary and theater criticism, which appeared in New Republic, the Nation, and Partisan Review, could slash and burn; no one was immune from her satirical gaze when she took to writing fiction. Her intellectualism and leftist politics gained her both friends and enemies, leading to some public feuds—even with presumed friends like Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell. Lillian Hellman famously sued McCarthy for libel, which backfired when the scrutiny of the “truth defense” threatened to prove Hellman was the liar McCarthy had called her in a Dick Cavett interview.

McCarthy had a classic unhappy childhood, losing both parents to the 1918 flu epidemic, then being taken in by her father’s parents, devout Catholics who treated her and her three brothers badly. Later Mary moved in with her maternal grandparents, a Jewish grandmother and a Presbyterian attorney, who saw to her education and exposed her to more liberal thinking that would help form her ideological views for the rest of her life. She graduated from Vassar, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She was an opponent of the Vietnam war, traveling to both North and South Vietnam in the late 1960s to report on life there and the horrors of war. She wrote two books on that subject, Hanoi, and Vietnam.

McCarthy’s fiction has been published in two volumes by the Library of America, and some of her non-fiction writing is also available in various LOA anthologies. Viewers of Mad Men may remember seeing Betty reading McCarthy’s most popular novel, The Group, in the bathtub. Her literary reputation remains a bit ambivalent in the 21st century, but when so many prominent male contemporaries felt compelled to revile her at length, rather than ignoring her, there’s probably something of value in her work. Let’s see.

I have The Stones of Florence sitting unread on my shelves so that's the one I'm planning to read.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: I had one or two of her books forever. I remember Birds of America but I don't seem to have any catalogued which likely means I purged them at some point. I'll have to see what I might snag from the library. On the other hand I've been going through some boxes stashed in a closet so you never know what might turn up in my personal time machine!

I'll take a Wildcard name substitute with two books about
(Mary Mc)Grory: The Best of Mary McGrory
and her biography, Mary McGrory: The Trailblazing Columnist Who Stood Washington on Its Head.

She also caught the eye of Joe Welch's famous Great-Grandfather!

If I can put my hand on my copy of The Group I shall aim to read that. I read Lara Feigel's homage of the same name last year, and really enjoyed it.

I loved her book The Stones of Florence, which I read many years ago in Florence. My sister and I took it in turns reading chapters aloud at the end of the day.

I have now read the selection from Hanoi which is contained in the Library of America's Reporting Vietnam collection. It was very well-written, and made me want to read more of that collection, which contains work by every major journalist who covered that war for the US press.

I finished The Group last night. Mary McCarthy is a masterful writer and I enjoyed the book overall although at times I was ready to give up on it because the plot was unfolding very slow. I'm glad I did not give up on it.

I failed to put my hand on my copy of The Group. Hopefully it will turn up and I'll get to it later in the year.

I have finished McCarthy's Birds of America, which I found "masterful", to quote Annushka, in many ways. It isn't gripping, however, and its plot is practically non-existent. It also has a rather abrupt and ambiguous ending, which I think was almost inevitable given the novel's lack of direction; this is a character portrait, with philosophical musing, but not a lot of story arc. I loved reading it, and that's saying a lot for McCarthy's skill with the language, because I do love "story" and navel-gazing ain't my thing.

I hope to get Ken Kesey's thread up and ready sometime today or early tomorrow. I get lost in the research sometimes!

>10 laytonwoman3rd: Ken Kesey is waiting for you here..