Biography

Overview

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) is one of the leading American women intellectuals of the twentieth century who is known for her sharp wit and keen perception of the American intellectual landscape.   A fiction writer, cultural critic, and political commentator, McCarthy is associated with the anti-Stalinist liberal magazine, Partisan Review, in the 1930s and 40s.  

From her early autobiographical writing, including Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and the collection of autobiographical sketches The Company She Keeps (1942), to her political satire of anarcho-pacifist movements of the 1940s in The Oasis (1949) and of fellow-traveling liberal intellectuals in the 1950s in The Groves of Academe (1952),to her best-selling mock- chronicle novel of a group of Vassar graduates of the class of 1933, The Group (1963), and her later political commentary on the war in Vietnam and the Watergate trials, Mary McCarthy looks at the changing political, cultural, and social scene with a critical eye.

McCarthy is perhaps best known for her open treatment of what were considered taboo subjects of sexuality, from contraception to abortion to infidelity and sexual promiscuity, presenting both the comic overtones and the complex psychological and moral undertones to issues of female sexuality.  McCarthy’s caustic wit has earned her the reputation among certain male critics of being a “modern American bitch” with a “devastating female scorn” while some feminists have criticized her for not creating stronger female characters and not taking a stronger stand on women’s issues.

McCarthy’s life has been the subject of numerous biographies, including Doris Grumbach’s The Company She Kept (1967), Carol Gelderman’s Mary McCarthy: A Life (1988), Carol Brightman’s Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992), and Frances Kiernan’s Seeing Mary Plain (2000). Her writing has been the subject of several critical studies, including Barbara McKenzie’s Mary McCarthy (1965) and Sabrina Fuchs Abrams’ Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (2004). 

Early Life

Mary Therese McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington to Roy McCarthy and Therese (Tess) Preston McCarthy.  She was of mixed religious origins from her Irish Catholic father and her half-Jewish/half-Protestant mother, which in part shaped the marginalized identity she depicts in her autobiography,  Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). McCarthy’s parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 en route to Minneapolis, leaving Mary (age 6) and her younger brothers Kevin (4), Preston (3), and Sheridan (1) orphaned at a young age. The McCarthy children were raised by what she characterizes as her austere and harsh guardians, their great-Aunt Margaret Sheridan  and her husband, Myers Shriver, in a modest home in Minneapolis.

McCarthy chronicles these early years of denial and deprivation in her autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and describes being “saved” by her maternal grandparents, the prominent Seattle lawyer Harold Preston and her genteel Jewish grandmother, Augusta Morganstern Preston, who brought Mary to their home in Seattle, Washington while her younger brothers went off to boarding school. In her later autobiography, How I Grew (1987) McCarthy describes the intellectual awakening she experienced in Seattle, which began by reading works by Dickens, Tolstoy and Dumas among others in her grandfather’s library and through the public library.

McCarthy enrolled in the Sacred Heart Convent, where she describes having a crisis of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, then briefly attended Garfield public school where she was introduced to a more bohemian outlook and democratizing influence, and was finally schooled at the Annie Wright Seminary, where she was mentored by a Vassar graduate, Dorothy Atkinson, who encouraged her to go East to Vassar for college.

Education and Early Career

Mary McCarthy attended Vassar College from 1929-1933, where she was initiated into a more elite, East-coast intellectual and social scene, which became the subject of her best-selling novel, The Group (1963). McCarthy describes The Group as a “mock-chronicle novel” about “the idea of progress” as “seen in the female sphere.” She exposes the disparity between the progressive beliefs and professional aspirations of a group of highly educated, liberal minded women in 1930s America and the traditional reality of their lives in the domestic world of marriage, child-rearing, decorating, and divorce. While at Vassar McCarthy formed a rebel literary magazine, Con Spirito, with fellow classmates Elizabeth Bishop and Frani Blough. She also started a relationship with actor and aspiring playwright Harold Johnsrud, whom she married upon graduation.   Like the ill-fated relationship of Kay and Harald Peterson in The Group, McCarthy’s marriage to Harold Johnsrud ended three years later. Upon graduation from Vassar McCarthy moved to New York City where she wrote reviews for The Nation and The New Republic. After her divorce from Johnsrud in 1936, McCarthy moved to Greenwich Village and started work as an editorial assistant for the publisher Covici-Friede.  She also began making theatre contributions to Partisan Review, a leftist literary and cultural magazine which had begun in 1934 as an organ of the Communist sponsored John Reed Club under editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips. With the Moscow Trials (1936-38) and the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact (1939) many New York intellectuals suffered a disillusionment with Marxism and turned in the 1950s toward revisionist liberalism and liberal anti-Communism in the so-called “end of ideology.” Though McCarthy traveled in left intellectual circles, she describes her “accidental conversion” to Trotskyism in the essay, “My Confession,” when she found herself on the letterhead of the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky after a conversation she had at a party hosted by James T. Farrell. In 1937, after making a formal split with the Communist Party, the “new ” Partisan Review was formed as an independent, anti-Stalinist liberal magazine with a leaning toward Marxist politics and modernist aesthetics. Mary McCarthy became theatre editor of the “new” Partisan Review joining founding editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips, leftist intellectual Dwight Macdonald, literary critic F.W. Dupee, and art critic George L.K. Morris as the new editorial board.  

Mary McCarthy and Philip Rahv began a romantic relationship, which lasted until she took up relations with renowned literary and cultural critic and former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Republic, Edmund Wilson, who was seventeen years her senior. McCarthy and Wilson were married in 1938 and had one son, Reuel Wilson. Under Wilson’s influence McCarthy left the editorial board of Partisan Review  (though she continued to write theatre reviews until 1962) to focus on her career as a fiction writer. While McCarthy credits Wilson with fostering her career as a fiction writer (she published several autobiographical sketches that were later collected in The Company She Keeps toward the start of their relationship), they had a tumultuous relationship, including allegations of alcoholism and physical abuse against  Wilson and accusations of mental instability for which Wilson had McCarthy briefly institutionalized.  McCarthy’s relationship with Wilson is fictionalized in A Charmed Life (1955) and her ambivalent attitude toward Wilson is further explored in her late autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs: 1936-38 (1992).

Middle Life and Career

For McCarthy the post-World War II period was a time of personal and political liberation.  In 1945 McCarthy divorced Edmund Wilson and returned with their then six year old son to New York City.  She took a one year teaching position at Bard College, and met Bowden Broadwater, a staff member at the New Yorker and eight years her junior, whom she married in 1946 and remained with for fifteen years.

She spent summers in Truro near Wellfleet at the home of Italian anarcho-pacifist and anti-fascist Nicola Chiaromonte among other leftist intellectuals.  With the advent of the atomic bomb and the emerging totalitarian threat of Soviet Russia, some New York intellectuals turned toward anarcho-pacifism as an ideological ideal.  Under Chiaromonte’s influence she helped form Europe-America Groups in 1948, a non-partisan organization for international aid to European intellectuals after World War II.  The organization dissolved a year later due to factionalism.  The factionalism of leftist intellectuals and the failure of intellectuals to put their ideas into action are parodied in McCarthy’s satire, The Oasis (1949). McCarthy was strongly criticized for writing this roman à clef in which both Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald were mercilessly satirized.

In the postwar period, many intellectuals questioned the value of Marxism and of ideology in general in a turn toward revisionist liberalism and liberal anti-Communism.  While McCarthy was sympathetic with the non-Communist left, in her 1952 novel The Groves of Academe she satirizes the progressive idealism of the fellow-traveling liberal intelligentsia in the faculty’s unwitting defense of an alleged Communist professor at a small, progressive college.  In 1952, McCarthy, along with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, and Richard Rovere attempted to form Critic , an independent liberal magazine devoted to politics and civil libertarian issues.  While the project never came to fruition, it foreshadowed McCarthy’s increasing interest in radical politics and social action which peaked in her outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.

During the fifties McCarthy also published a collection of short stories, Cast a Cold Eye (1950), including the autobiographical story “The Weeds” based on her destructive relationship with Wilson as well as the novel,  A Charmed Life (1955), a more extensive indictment of her involvement with Wilson. She also published her travel writing in Italy with Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959) as well as a collection of her theatre reviews, Sights and Spectacles: Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1956 (1957).

In 1959 on a trip to Poland with the U.S. Information Agency, McCarthy met and fell in love with James Raymond West, an officer with the American embassy in Poland.  After securing divorces from their respective spouses, the two were married in 1961 in a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives.  The couple moved to Paris, where McCarthy completed work on her best-selling novel, The Group (1963) and split their time between their homes in Paris, France and Castine, Maine.

Later Political Writing, Fiction, and Criticism

During the 1960s and 70s McCarthy assumed more of the role of a public intellectual in her outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam.  While many New York intellectuals were critical of U.S. military action in Vietnam, they were wary of the consequences of unilateral withdrawal to supporters of anti-Communism in South Vietnam. For McCarthy the 1960s brought a revival of her more radical, utopian impulses of the forties.  Having abandoned the possibility of forming small, libertarian communities with the failure of Europe-American Groups in the forties, she retained the ideal of “libertarian socialism” or “decentralized socialism”, though she conceded little possibility of actually attaining such an ideal.

McCarthy wrote a series of articles for The New York Review of Books between 1967 and 1972 based on her reporting in Saigon and Hanoi which were printed as pamphlets, Vietnam  and Hanoi to raise public awareness and opposition to the war.  McCarthy’s writing on Vietnam is an indictment of what she sees as the corrupting influence of American capitalist culture on a rural, agrarian folk culture. She further criticizes the hypocrisy of intellectuals and experts for their equivocal language, their hedging policies for “limited war” and “Vietnamization,” and their incorporation into government in seeking to find “solutions” to crisis in Vietnam.

McCarthy then covered the Medina trial (1971) for The New Yorker, in which commanding officer Ernest L. Medina was accused of ordering the destruction of a Vietnamese village which resulted in the My Lai massacre of 1968. Medina (1972) explores the danger of ideology, both from the Right in its defense of U.S. military policy and from the Left in its indictment against the U.S. military –industrial complex.  McCarthy’s writings on the war in Vietnam were collected and reprinted in The Seventeenth Degree (1974), reinforcing her reputation as a public intellectual engaged in radical politics.  In 1973 McCarthy covered the Watergate hearings for the London Observer and The New York Review of Books, considering the hearings somewhat dubiously to be a public act of “atonement and purification” for guilt over the war in Vietnam.

While McCarthy’s politics in the sixties and seventies were more radical, her late fiction is “conservative” in the literal sense of “preserving the past” against the encroachment of modern, industrial society. In Birds of America (1971) set against the backdrop of the student protests and social upheaval of the 1960s, McCarthy’s protagonist is confronted by the moral failure of mass, industrial society in his search to restore a natural, ethical past.  His egalitarian principles are tested by the mass industry of tourism and in particular by the mass consumption of art in expressing the liberal dilemma between High Culture and Mass Culture, between quality and equality or between aesthetic values and egalitarian principles. In Cannibals and Missionaries (1979) McCarthy uses a terrorist hijacking en route to the Middle East as a forum to discuss the conflict between liberal, egalitarian principles and aesthetic values. When a team of liberals on a humanitarian mission to Iran are taken hostage with a group of wealthy art collectors on a cultural expedition, it raises a number of interesting questions about the value of art versus life and the ability to put one’s principles into action.

Later Life, Honors, and Awards

McCarthy’s later life is notable for an ongoing dispute she had with playwright and Stalinist sympathizer Lillian Hellman when, on the Dick Cavett show, McCarthy accused Hellman of being a dishonest writer, stating, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Hellman countered by filing a $2.25 million lawsuit against McCarthy for libel, which ended with Hellman’s death in 1984. This literary feud was the subject of a play by Nora Ephron, Imaginary Friends.

Mary McCarthy’s contribution was acknowledged in later life; she received the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal in 1984 and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989.  She died on October 25, 1989 of lung cancer at New York Presbyterian Hospital at the age of seventy-seven. McCarthy continues to be remembered as a shrewd chronicler of twentieth-century American intellectual, social, and political life.