Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 23

MARY MCCARTHY DIED, IT’S safe to assume, unreconciled and unconciliated. The salad of genes and traditions that went into her making – Catholic on father’s side, Jewish and Protestant on mother’s – was a good start for a life-long balancing-act, and also for laying claim forcefully to the elusive middle ground of American cultural life. She was a liberal. She was the liberal, it sometimes seemed, but then the very label had already joined the ranks of near-unusable words, degenerated into a term of abuse. She was to compile, during her life in literature and politics, a sort of informal lexicon of these, rising to heights of comic indignation during the Watergate hearings when she realised that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Krogh and company thought of themselves as an intellectual elite. Her characteristic tone was cool, fastidious, reasonable and despairing. And this may have had to do with the other basic autobiographical datum – that she was orphaned in early childhood, which was what led to being passed around the various sides of the family, and perhaps helps to account for her deep distaste for dramatics, shows of sincerity and breast-beating.

She cut her teeth and honed her pen during the McCarthy era. The eerie coincidence of the name was itself a portent of a career of needling the histrionic public figures by getting inside their rhetoric and gutting it. Her essays from the period – like ‘The Contagion of Ideas’ from 1952 – are a series of extraordinary and almost exotic exercises in ‘balance’. For her, the real casualty was not so much the Left as the language of sanity and criticism, drowned out by the clamour of accusations, betrayals, confessions, excommunications and conversions. It was in the midst of this collective paranoia that she became (to quote an ironic Norman Mailer) ‘our saint, our umpire, our lit. arbiter’, and uttered one of her most memorable sentences – ‘the liberal’s only problem is to avoid succumbing to the illusion of “having to choose”’. She makes the whole thing sound like a bad movie, a vulgar and untruthful projection of private grey areas into public technicolour. The leading characteristic of the modern world, she said a bit later, was its ‘irreality’, by which she meant the packaging and marketing of life-styles and the erosion of cultural common ground which had made democracy a media event.

In her own account of her early years she attributes her style to having fallen in love with Julius Caesar in the Latin class. (In real life she fell in love with Edmund Wilson, not quite the same thing.) Caesar was, she said, ‘the first piercing contact with an impersonal reality … just, laconic, severe, magnanimous, detached’. He wrote about himself, moreover, in the third person (‘the very grammar … was beatified by the objective temperament that ordered it’). In our times, though, more desperate and satiric measures were called for. Her first fiction is characteristed by acts of near-Swiftean impersonation, where she puts on the voice of the detested enemy in order to expose him, and where the ironies are compounded by the fact that the plot is about the defeat of ‘the ordinary liberal imagination’ by some authoritarian, devious poseur. I’m thinking about The Groves of Academe in 1953, in particular, where a boring right-winger gets tenure by insinuating that he’s a secret Red and so enlisting all the campus wets in his defence. McCarthy is of course ‘dry’ about all this; though during these years she wrote several pieces on the death of the novel, or at least the realist novel, dedicated as it used to be to common sense and characters who were more solid than the bright, grotesque types the present threw up. Comic characters, for her, were always secret codes for authorial despair, just as the abuse of the word ‘hopefully’ was a sign of the utter absence of hope.

Once upon a time novelists had heroes who, however flawed, represented our subjective conviction of human freedom. She was to have no heroes on the page, nor heroines either, though in life she admired and loved Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Nicola Chiaramonte and many others. Her greatest novel, The Group, is structured around absences – the absentee hero/heroine, the (unwritable) novel of the common ground, and it still has the dangerous flavour of savage laughter about it. At the time (1963) she managed to get furious reviews from both Norman Mailer and Norman Podhoretz (those failed male Norms): Podhoretz grandly accused her of being ‘wilfully blind to the spirit of moral ambition and the dream of self-transcendence’ (though he was talking about the Thirties, when the novel was set); Mailer accused her of not being a ‘good enough woman’ to write a great book, because she devalued ‘the horror beneath’, and had ‘no root’ (so wasn’t a good enough man either). Her power to offend couldn’t have been more graphically illustrated. It was, and remains, a marvellous book about the transmogrification of life, and style, into ‘life-style’ and meaningless freedoms. It was also a prophetic book, which set the scene – the theatrical metaphor is appropriate – for the novels of protest and Liberation in the next decade, where women writers rose up to demand to be listened to in their own first persons, the ‘I’ without the irony.

She, on the other hand, might well have taken refuge in nostalgia – nostalgia for the cultural conditions that would give a voice like hers a more direct part in the script. The thing was, I suppose, that she could never reconcile herself to the notion that literature and life should fall apart, nor to the notion (which she’d have thought utopian in the extreme) that they could come together again. Like Humpty Dumpty, the realist novel and the high liberal tradition, were irretrievably shattered, and you almost feel that it was a point of honour with her not to pretend otherwise. During the Seventies she became more what she had always been, an ‘occasional’ writer – that is, more essayistic, more concerned to inject the sceptical, cajoling, quizzical tone into the turn of events. In one piece about visiting a press-briefing in Vietnam she’d declared ‘If I had dropped straight from Mars … I would have known from the periphrastic, circumspect way our spokesmen expressed themselves that an indefensible action of some sort was going on …’ It’s a characteristic thought, she was a bit of a Martian, but then the Martian perspective is precisely the one favoured by sceptics from Socrates to Swift, who set themselves up as public eyes, and she doesn’t dishonour that great tradition. For her creation and criticism were inseparable, and circumstances saw to it that she was more of a critic when she created than the other way around. She paid attention unwaveringly, wittily, and without bitterness. She was in public more admired than liked. Gore Vidal says about her, ‘She was our most brilliant literary critic, uncorrupted by compassion’ – and says it with admiration, without irony.