For a time, about twenty years ago, it looked as if there could be a compromise. Though an author of standing knew better than to put explicit ideas in his novels, they could be there implicitly, and the reader was allowed—as a student, even encouraged—to take them out. “What are Golding’s ideas in The Lord of the Flies?” “Is there a Manichean split in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms?” Today all that is quite impermissible. What the author may not put in, the reader may not take out. There must be nothing said or hinted that is remotely subject to paraphrase. In the place of ideas, images still rule the roost, and Balzac’s distinction between the roman idée and the roman imagé appears to have been prophetic, though his order of preference is reversed.
Nevertheless, there are a few back doors left through which ideas may be spirited in, and some talented authors have found them. One brilliant example was furnished by J. G. Farrell in The Siege of Krishnapur, a novel teeming with ideas that is set in India at the time of the Sepoy Mutiny and has an exciting plot as well. Farrell’s motto might have been stated thus: If because of ideas and other unfashionable components your novel is going to seem dated, don’t be alarmed—date it. The Singapore Grip— Farrell’s last novel; he was drowned this past summer—carries the principle on to the fall of Singapore in the Second World War: ideas, characters, and setting have a distinct period flavor, that is, they are as solid as furniture and without any touch of camp. A more recent novel, John Updike’s The Coup, performs a rather similar feat, moving back, as it were, in time via geography: a “developing” African country bristles with ideas, mainly in the head of its hero, a Western-educated native dictator who finishes, still reflective, in exile in the south of France. There was also Alison Lurie’s Only Children, set in the late thirties with the ideas and life-styles of the period. In the U.S.A., a special license has always been granted to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full view of the public; Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never conceded to us goys. In concluding, I might mention an unusual solution to the problem. This was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an American story of a cross-country trip with philosophical interludes—one of the chief characters was named Phaedrus. Pirsig’s device was simple; he refrained, probably at a financial sacrifice, from calling his book a novel, and it was listed as a nonfiction title. If the novel is to be revitalized, maybe more such emergency strategies will have to be employed to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader’s main foe.
A Biography of Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963 New York Times bestseller The Group.
McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.
After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).
A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in The Group. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the Partisan Review circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Review of Books.
In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled The Company She Keeps (1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book, The Oasis, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the Partisan Review intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine Horizon’s fiction contest in 1949.