Kiernan Frances - Seeing Mary plain: a life of Mary McCarthy

A Life of Mary McCarthy

SEEING

MARY

PLAIN

Frances Kiernan

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London

M any people helped me during the long, nine-year process of trying to see Mary McCarthy with clarity, in all her many aspectsto see her plain.

This book would not have been possible if I had not had the assistance of Thomas Mallon. A friend and keen observer of Mary McCarthy, he encouraged me at the outset, steered me past many pitfalls, read early versions of the manuscript, and put me in touch with important sources.

I am enormously grateful to Margo Viscusi and Eve Stwertka, McCarthys literary trustees, for their assistance, their patience, and their faithful support.

I would like to thank Nancy MacKechnie, who presides over the Vassar Librarys Special Collections, where Mary McCarthys papers are housed. I would also like to thank Patricia Willis at the Beinecke Library at Yale, who assisted me with the Edmund Wilson Papers, and Judith Ann Schiff at the Sterling Library, who helped with the Dwight Macdonald letters. In addition, I would like to thank Lisa Browar, who during her time as Assistant Director for Rare Books and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library helped me find my way to The New Yorker papers and the archives of Farrar Straus Giroux.

Toward the end of her life, Mary McCarthy asked if all her efforts had been in vain. I wish I could tell her, no, that her work and her example live on through her friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues, and students, many of whom talked to me about her and are quoted in this book. Almost two hundred people shared their thoughts and stories about Mary McCarthy from her childhood through her years at Vassar, in New York, on the Cape, at Newport; her time in Italy, in Paris, in Vietnam, in Maine, and at Bard. Their names appear in the text and they also form a part of the Cast of Characters, so I will not list them all here again.

In particular, I would like to thank James West, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alison West, Lotte Kohler, and Nicholas King.

I would also like to thank those people who helped with this book whose names do not appear in the book. First of all, I would like to thank Steven Barclay and Robert Pounder, who assisted me in more ways than I can count. In addition, I would like to thank: James Atlas, Lu Ann Walther, Maria Campbell, Cleo Paturis, Vickie Karp, Linda Healy, Idanna Pucci, Vincent Giroud, Susan Gillespie, Corlies Smith, Pat Strachan, Vance Muse, Lori Masuri, Barbara Epstein, Glenn Horowitz, M. G. Lord, Alice Gordon, Charles Michener, Linda Davis, Marcelle Clements, Patricia Towers, Carlos Freire, Heloisa Freire, Mark Rudkin, Nancy Crampton, Vincent Crapanzano, Little Mary McCarthy, Robert Jones, David Rieff, Emily Maxwell, Kate Risse, Edith Kurzweil, Sophie Consagra, Patricia Weaver, Virginia Foote, Matt Wolf, Nicholas Macdonald, Liz Calder, Irene Skolnick, Daphne Merkin, Dee Wells, Edgar and Charlotte de Bresson, Caroline Blackwood, Andrew Solomon, Cynthia Macdonald, Chris Barnes, William Banks, George Nicholson, John Murray, Linda Asher, Tom Putnam, Betty Ann Solinger, Helen Wilson, and John Heilpern.

I especially want to thank Frani Blough Muser and the other women who knew Mary McCarthy at Vassar and were willing to share their memories.

My agent, Virginia Barber, first encouraged me to write this book and has been encouraging throughout. Two previous biographers, Carol Gelderman and Carol Brightman, have been unfailingly generous. Michael Wreszin, the biographer of Dwight Macdonald, provided me with precious tapes.

At Norton, my original editor, Gerald Howard, helped me shape the manuscript; this book bears his stamp and I thank him. Starling Lawrence and Patricia Chui were wise and resourceful in guiding me through the final stages.

Along with Thomas Mallon, I would like to thank Sally Arteseros, Andrea Chapin, and Bobbie Bristol for their astute early reading of the manuscript; George Nicholson for his help at the end; Trent Duffy for expert copy editing; and Charlotte Staub for the design of the book. Phillip Lopate and Wendy Weil were helpful to me from the beginning.

Finally I would like to thank my dear friend Alice Adams, my family, and especially my husband, Howard, for unwavering support.

To Howard

CREDITS FOR PHOTOGRAPHS

Courtesy of Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries: photographs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41

Courtesy of Alison West: 35

Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil: 24, 44, 45

Courtesy of Betty Rahv: 15

Courtesy of Nicholas Macdonald: 21

Courtesy of Lotte Kohler: 39

Courtesy of Thomas Mallon: 43

Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, pages 81114 constitute an extension of the copyright page.

In all cases where it has seemed appropriate, I have tried to reach the owner of the copyright for photographs and textual material included in this book. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in future printings.

Copyright 2000 by Frances Kiernan

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

The text of this book is composed in Veljovic, with the display set in Serlio and Garton. Composition by Alice Bennett. Manufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group. Book design by Charlotte Staub.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kiernan, Frances.

Seeing Mary plain: a life of Mary McCarthy / Frances Kiernan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-393-03801-7

1. McCarthy, Mary, 1912 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. I Title.

PS3525.A1435 Z69 2000

818.5209dc21

[B] 99-041098

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you,

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems and new!

ROBERT BROWNING from Memorabilia, 1855

M ost writers lives are sadly lacking in drama. The dullest of people, it turns out, write witty and intelligent books. Once they push back their chairs and get up from their desks, they do little to warrant our attention. We would do best to grant them their privacy and turn our attention to the work itself. But if Mary Therese McCarthy had never written a single word, we would still want to know about her. Beautiful and never boring, reckless and endlessly maddening, this most analytical of writers shares with the great Romantic poets a gift for capturing the imagination by the simple, or not so simple, details of her life.

Only once did I see Mary McCarthy. She was smoking a cigarette in the twentieth-floor ladies room at The New Yorker. It must have been the midseventies, when she was working with William Shawn on an excerpt from Hannah Arendts The Life of the Mind. You did not smoke in William Shawns office, even if you were Mary McCarthy. Standing at an open window with her cigarette, she was not the glamorous dark lady of letters I remembered from photographs. Her hair, as I recall, fell just above her shoulders. It was not pulled back in a sleek black knot. There were enough gray strands to make her seem pale and washed out and even a bit dowdy. I had to look twice to make sure who she was.