The Bitch Is Back: A Reappraisal of Mary McCarthy for the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the Mary McCarthy special issue of Women’s Studies asks, why Mary McCarthy? Why now? Mary McCarthy is one of America’s leading women intellectuals – fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, editor, and public intellectual. Her career spanned over fifty years as theatre editor of Partisan Review; autobiographical writer of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and the later Intellectual Memoirs and How I Grew; best-selling novelist of The Group; satirist of the New York intellectual scene in The Oasis and The Groves of Academe; public intellectual and reporter on the war in Vietnam, the Medina Trial, and the Watergate Hearings; and recipient of the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal. Yet her literary and critical contribution have been largely eclipsed by her cultural celebrity as a sharp wit with an acerbic tongue, striking good looks, and a penchant for taking on taboo subjects of female sexuality. This essay looks at how limited gender expectations have shaped McCarthy’s reputation as a “modern American bitch” and “our leading bitch-intellectual,” and why new feminist readers are ready to embrace her distinction as a smart, sharp, sexy woman of wit

There was a moment in the early 1990s when we seemed to be experiencing a Mary McCarthy revival. After her passing in 1989 there were the largely laudatory remembrances, the posthumous publication of the second installment of her later autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–38 (1992), Carol Brightman’s biography of McCarthy, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992), followed by the collection of her correspondence with longtime friend and intellectual compatriot, Hannah Arendt, Between Friends: the Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (1995). In 1993 a conference on McCarthy was held at Bard College – where she once taught and what many consider the model for her satiric portrait, The Groves of Academe – which culminated in the publication of Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and her Work (1996), edited by then executors of the Mary McCarthy literary trust, Stwertka and Viscusi. At the time I was a doctoral student at Columbia University, writing my dissertation on Mary McCarthy and the postwar intellectual, based on newly available archival materials bequeathed to Vassar College after the author’s death, which was later published as; Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (2004). This, surprisingly, is still the only book-length study of Mary McCarthy as a fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, and public intellectual. Why has McCarthy’s literary contribution continued to be overlooked or downplayed beside her celebrity as a biographical subject? The answer lies perhaps with her place as a sharp woman of intellect and passion – notoriously termed a “modern American bitch” by novelist Norman Mailer in the 1960s – a reputation that is due for reappraisal.

We are in the midst of another Mary McCarthy moment, one that will hopefully have lasting impact. With the recent publication of Mary McCarthy’s complete fiction and the anticipated collection of her nonfiction by Library of America, along with the electronic publication of her fiction, memoirs, travel writing, essays, and political writing by Open Road Media starting in 2014, Mary McCarthy’s oeuvre is more accessible than ever. Further, she is the subject of a number of collected portraits of fierce and fabulous women intellectuals who had strong opinions and were not afraid to voice them, notable among them Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2017) and Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018), both reviewed in this volume. What has changed is not McCarthy’s contribution but the critical reception in the post #MeToo era of a pioneering woman of wit who took on taboo subjects of female sexuality and gender inequality who is now celebrated and not silenced for her courage and conviction.

Who is Mary McCarthy and why has her literary contribution been somewhat overlooked or undervalued? Mary McCarthy is one of the leading American women intellectuals who was affiliated with the anti-Stalinist journal, Partisan Review, in the 1930s and had an influential career as a fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, and public intellectual through the 1970s. The daughter of an Irish Catholic father and a part-Protestant, part-Jewish mother, McCarthy was raised by her austere Catholic aunt and uncle in Minneapolis and later by her Protestant grandfather, a prominent lawyer in Seattle, Washington and her Jewish grandmother after the death of her parents from influenza when she was six years old. This unorthodox upbringing is the subject of her famed autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), and shaped her marginalized identity among the largely Jewish, New York intellectual scene in later life. McCarthy went East to Vassar for her college years, which became the subject of her best-selling novel, The Group (1963). At Vassar she briefly formed a rebel literary magazine, Con Spirito, with fellow classmates Elizabeth Bishop and Frani Blough.

McCarthy’s literary career began in the 1930s, when she moved to New York City with first husband, actor Harald Johnsrud, and wrote reviews for The Nation, The New Republic, and Partisan Review, which was then an organ of the Communist sponsored John Reed Club under editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips. McCarthy 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 author James T. Farrell. This seemingly accidental conversion to Trotskyism was a defining moment in her personal and professional life. After her divorce from Johnsrud, McCarthy became romantically involved with Philip Rahv and was asked to join the “new” anti-Stalinist Partisan Review as theater editor in 1937. According to McCarthy, “They let me write about theatre because they thought the theatre was of absolutely no consequence”; the PR boys considered her to be “absolutely bourgeois throughout. They always said to me very sternly, ‘You’re really a throwback. You’re really a twenties figure’ … I was a sort of gay, good-time girl, from their point of view. And they were men of the thirties. Very serious” (quoted in Gelderman, Conversations, 14). This split, between her intellectual convictions and her bourgeois and feminine appearance, continued to be a source of conflict in McCarthy’s ability to be taken seriously in New York intellectual circles.

According to Partisan Review editor William Barrett, the New York intellectuals were defined by “The two M’s then – Marxism in politics and Modernism in art” (Barrett 11), neither of which defined McCarthy’s sensibility. Of Marxism she joked, “Marxism, I saw, from learned young men I listened to at Committee meeting, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing” (McCarthy, On the Contrary, 102). She further rejected the estheticism of the modernists and insisted on the referentiality of art to life. In “The Fact in Fiction,” she defends realism in fiction, maintaining that “the distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics” (On the Contrary 250). McCarthy’s penchant for realism can further be seen in her valuation of such nineteenth-century European novelists as Austen, Dickens, Balzac, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky as well as her insistence on detailed description and factual accuracy in her own writing.

McCarthy turned toward fiction writing and left the editorial board of Partisan Review in the late 1930s under the influence of Edmund Wilson, reputed cultural critic and former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Republic, with whom she took up relations and eventually married and had a son, Reuel Wilson. It was 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: New York 1936–38 (1992).

McCarthy’s contribution as a fiction writer include the acclaimed autobiographical novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), in which liberal magazine writer and sexually liberated woman Margaret Sargent assumes the role of “princess among the trolls” to a string of inadequate intellectual and sexual partners to whom she brings a kind of enlightenment at her own expense. The role of the self-doubting and intellectually superior female intellectual figures prominently in McCarthy’s fiction, and is modeled somewhat on her own life. In the posthumously published Intellectuals Memoirs, as much a memoir of her sexual life as her intellectual life, McCarthy recalls her bohemian time of free love as a divorcee living on Gay Street in Greenwich Village in the 1930s: “It was getting rather alarming,” confesses McCarthy. “I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else. Though slightly scared by what things were coming to, I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no one does” (McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs, 62). Though her promiscuity was part of her provocative persona, the conflicts of the sexually liberated woman are addressed in her fiction.

McCarthy is reputed for her frank and satiric treatment of sexuality and gender relations in her best-selling novel, The Group (1963). Drawing on her experiences as a member of the Vassar class of 1933, McCarthy describes The Group as a “mock -chronicle novel” about “the idea of progress” as “seen in the female sphere” of “home economics, architecture, domestic technology, contraception, childbearing; the study of technology in the home, in the play-pen, in the bed” (McCarthy, “Notes on The Group,1). With memorable scenes of Dottie getting fitted for a pessary and watching it slip across the floor of the doctor’s office, Priss feeling deflated at her inability to breast feed in the hospital at her physician husband’s command, Libby masturbating on the bathroom floor and being nearly raped by an Alpine ski instructor, Norine’s son playing in his own excrement as a form of progressive toilet training, and Lakey returning from Europe with her lesbian lover, the Baroness, McCarthy became a sensation for taking on taboo subjects of female sexuality and gender roles in a bold and satiric style. Her Vassar classmates were less than amused.

In the 1940s and 50 s in the aftermath of World War II, McCarthy turned to more intellectual politics. Under the influence of Italian anarcho-pacifist and anti-fascist Nicola Chiaromonte, McCarthy helped form Europe-America Groups in 1948, a nonpartisan 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), a roman a clef in which the characters of Will Taub and Macdougal Macdermott are modeled on Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald respectively. Rahv threatened a lawsuit, which he later dropped when he realized that to win he would need to prove in court his likeness to the loathsome Will Taub, though McCarthy’s transgression was not forgotten by the critics.

In her 1952 novel The Groves of Academe, based loosely on her experience teaching at Bard College, McCarthy 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. 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 theater reviews, Sights and Spectacles: Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1956 (1957).

During the 1960s and 70 s McCarthy assumed more of the role of a public intellectual in her outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam. 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 critiques 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 the crisis in Vietnam. McCarthy also covered the Medina trial (1971) for The New Yorker and the Watergate hearings in 1973 for the London Observer and The New York Review of Books, cementing her reputation as a public intellectual.

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 esthetic values and egalitarian principles. In Cannibals and Missionaries (1979) McCarthy in a moment of eerie foreshadowing uses a terrorist hijacking en route to the Middle East as a forum to discuss the conflict between liberal, egalitarian principles and esthetic 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. These later ideological novels are widely considered to be less poignant than her more autobiographical works that focus on the conflicts of sexually and intellectually liberated women confronted by the ongoing obstacles of an oppressive society.

Not one to shy away from controversy and with a penchant for honesty and truth-telling, McCarthy had a notable dispute with playwright and Stalinist sympathizer Lillian Hellman in later life, 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 USD 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, and continues to be one of the most often noted associations with the writer.

Given the importance of her contribution to the New York intellectual scene and her bold and satiric representation of intellectual and sexual politics in modern American society, why is she remembered primarily for her sultry good looks and sharp tongue? The explanation may lie in the gendered assumptions about humor going back to Freud, and the false belief that the aggressive, intellectual, and often sexual stance associated with humor is reserved for men and not women. Sociologist Paul McGhee notes: “Because of the power associated with the successful use of humor, humor initiation has become associated with other traditionally masculine characteristics, such as aggression, dominance, and assertiveness. For a female to develop into a clown or a joker, then, she must violate the behavior pattern normally reserved for women.” This identification of humor with knowledge and ultimately power or social control is at the root of much resistance to women’s humor.

Many mostly male critics consider McCarthy as a kind of femme fatale, at once threatening and beguiling. In his essay aptly titled, “The Dark Lady of American Letters,” New York intellectual Norman Podhoretz describes Susan Sontag as carrying the sexual/intellectual mantle from Mary McCarthy: “the next Dark Lady would have to be, like [McCarthy], clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing … criticism with a strong trace of naughtiness” (Podhoretz 154). Other male reviewers describe McCarthy in similarly beguiling and menacing terms. Norman Mailer brands McCarthy “a modern American bitch” and Hilton Kramer calls her “our leading bitch-intellectual” while Brock Brower says she has “one of the most knifelike female intelligences” and a “devastating female scorn.” Fellow Partisan Review editors William Barrett and Dwight Macdonald describe her as “brandishing her whips” and having a “sharkish smile.” MacDonald, who was the object of her satire in the depiction of Macdougal Macdermott in The Oasis elaborates: “when most pretty girls smiled at you, you felt great. When Mary smiled at you, you checked to see if your fly was undone” (quoted in Gelderman, Mary McCarthy, 154). Many of these images revolve around violence and aggression (knives, whips, sharks) and serve as threats of emasculation.

For a woman, assuming an aggressive and intellectually/sexually dominant position is seen not as a sign of strength but as a form of transgression deserving of negative judgment, hence the label “bitch.” While at the same time, in a review of The Group, Norman Mailer dismissed McCarthy as a “trivial lady’s book writer” for her focus on domestic issues of marriage and childrearing and for her use of detailed description in the style of a Victorian novel. Female satirists are thus caught in a double bind, seen as either not “feminine” enough or too “feminine”. According to humor scholar Regina Barreca, this split between the “Good Girl”, who doesn’t swear, tell jokes, or engage in sexual or aggressive behavior, and the “Bad Girl”, who does all of the above creates a double bind for women of wit. “Learning to sound like a Good Girl, while half-concealing the text of the Bad Girl,” says Barreca, “has been the subject of a great deal of women’s humor” (Barreca 16). It is through double-voiced irony and the indirection of satire that McCarthy and other female humorists have found a socially acceptable form of social critique, with a smile.

McCarthy’s reputation is further complicated by her cool reception among many feminist critics in part because of her embrace of what she terms the traditional domestic arts of fashion, gardening, and cooking as well as her overt disassociation with the women’s movement of the time.¹ McCarthy is known for her elegance and sense of style, whether it is in her wearing Chanel suits (as a correspondent in Vietnam, no less), her penchant for fresh flowers, or her insistence on fresh ingredients when preparing haute cuisine. This esthetic appreciation was cultivated at an early age in her attraction to church architecture and ritual (not belief) and extended to her late novel, Birds of America, where she laments the mass production of food, art, and culture as a corruption of Nature and Beauty in what many considered an elitist view. McCarthy’s stance on feminism is related to an overall resistance to what she would see as identity politics and mass movements over individual choice. Like Hannah Arendt, who resisted the category of Jewish or woman philosopher, McCarthy resisted her identification as a “woman writer.” In a 1963 interview, when asked if she had any “special role in society to play as a woman,” she replied: “I think of myself as a person, not as a woman; belonging, you know, to the world, not to a lot of other women. I can’t stand people who hold themselves together, in pressure groups and interest groups, and are motivated usually by envy of other people … I am for equality, but, at the same time, with the idea of equality envy inevitably quickens and can become absolutely ferocious” (quoted in Gelderman, Conversations, 60). In later interviews, she clarifies her stance on women’s rights: “I believe in equal pay and equality before the law and so on,” (quoted in Gelderman, Conversations, 176) but she does not see these as gendered issues. “As for public issues, like the right to legal abortion? I’m for that. But that has nothing to do with feminism … To me it’s just a question of freedom. If men could have abortions I’d be for that” (quoted in Gelderman, Conversations, 245). Her characterization of second-wave feminism as at times “shrill” and “self-pitying” and her seeming lack of awareness of the class, race, and gendered obstacles to women’s equality at home and in the workplace reveal her privileged and dated point of view. At best, she might be seen as anticipating what some have termed “post-feminism” in looking beyond gender difference in an attempt to assume a universal, human perspective. Despite her disassociation with feminism as a movement, her female characters often express the conflict and complexity of being a smart, progressive woman in a society and in relationships that continue to exploit and subordinate outspoken women.

Why Mary McCarthy? Why now? Ironically, the very traits that incited critics of McCarthy – her keen and at times scathing critique of the foibles of intellectual and sexual relations – have made her relevant to a new generation of bright, bold, brash women readers. The insult of being deemed a “modern American bitch” has been raised as a mantle of female empowerment in the era of Bitch Media when titles like Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women; Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman; Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and The Rise of Raunch Culture; Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman are gaining popularity. Female comedians like Amy Schumer, Ali Wong, and Hannah Gadsby are taking on issues of female sexuality and gender inequality, while acknowledging their own vulnerability. McCarthy might have expressed her own ambivalence at what some see as the mass marketing of female empowerment² or her association with feminism or any ism for that matter, but it is a positive sign of the new and welcome company she keeps.

We have made some progress since the publication of the last Mary McCarthy special issue of Women’s Studies in 2004 – when the editor called for a reappraisal of McCarthy’s work beyond the biographical to include her fiction and criticism – though we have further to go. I would like to acknowledge editor Wendy Martin – whose early essay, “The Satire and Moral Vision of Mary McCarthy,” is still among the best and was formative in my own interest in Mary McCarthy and women’s humor – for recognizing the timeliness of a critical reexamination of McCarthy’s work. Several of the essays included arose from a special session of the Mary McCarthy Society at the American Literature Association Convention in Boston, M.A. in 2019. Thanks to Sophia Wilson Niehaus, Maureen F. Curtin, and Marcel Inhoff for their valuable and varied contributions both at the ALA and to this volume. The collection is rounded out by a remembrance of Mary McCarthy from former student, friend and executor of the Mary McCarthy literature trust, Eve Stwertka; an essay by Ellen McWilliams on McCarthy as an Irish American memoirist; featured prints from British artist Richard Lee’s exhibition, “McCarthy Iconoclast,” and book reviews of recent primary and secondary texts by and about Mary McCarthy that help us to see her in new and provocative contexts.

Mary McCarthy was known for her enduring and at times tumultuous friendships with other writers and intellectuals that affected her personal and ideological growth. Notable among them were her friendships with Hannah Arendt, Nicola Chiaromonte, Nathalie Sarraute, and Monique Wittig. In “The Discreet Friendship of Mary McCarthy and Monique Wittig,” Sophia Wilson Niehaus, executor of the Mary McCarthy literary trust and granddaughter of Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, “discusses the implications of McCarthy’s stance against feminism through the prism of her friendship with Monique Wittig, a militant lesbian feminist theorist, whose letters push us to look past McCarthy’s public statements against feminism for a more nuanced understanding of her position.” Drawing on unpublished letters from their more than thirty- year correspondence for which Niehaus, a scholar of French studies, has provided original translations, this essay shows how the two “scaffolded a lasting friendship through strategies of role-play, selective disclosure about themselves and their lives, and tendentious but respectful interpretations of one another’s work.” She argues how the mutual use of the term “discretion,” “taken to designate both a personal quality and a social practice deployed to avoid conflict” helped to sustain their ongoing friendship.

In his essay, “‘Ladies and gents, ladies and gents’ – Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop and Female Autobiographies in American Postwar Literature,” Marcel Inhoff uses McCarthy’s acquaintance with poet Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College as a launching point to discuss issues of privacy and autobiography in the authors’ writing. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and field, as well as connections with the work of Simone Weil, Inhoff explores “how their work engaged in questions of selfhood and community in order to understand how the community of female writers that graduated from colleges like Vassar created a new voice in American literature.”

Mary McCarthy is perhaps best known for her critical writing on literature, politics, and issues of esthetic and moral meaning and value. A strong proponent of what she saw as truth in politics and realism in fiction, McCarthy was a novelist of ideas with an eye for detail. In “Drag and the Aesthetics of Free Speech in the Mosaic of Mary McCarthy’s Postmodern Affinities,” Maureen F. Curtin draws on a 1987 lecture on free speech that McCarthy delivered at Bard College entitled “Useless Freedom,” “as a text that cultivated and promoted esthetics as politics in ways that speak to a postmodern sensibility in McCarthy’s corpus – one that dates back to The Company She Keeps where it has a queer inflection, on the one hand, and to the influence of Hannah Arendt on McCarthy’s vision.” According to Curtin, “Useless Freedom” “illuminates the radical and conservative dimensions of postmodernism itself … offering a compass for navigating how to interpret McCarthy’s contradictory views of Marxism … while simultaneously fostering its antithesis in neoliberalism.” In this way, says Curtin, we might better understand how McCarthy’s writing “has come to represent so many conflicting legacies among scholars.”

Much of the recent scholarship on Mary McCarthy focuses on her place in the canon of Irish American writers as well as her contribution to the field of life writing with her famed autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), her later memoirs, How I Grew (1987) and Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), as well as her early autobiographically-inspired fiction like The Company She Keeps (1942). In “Looking for Irish America in the Memoirs of Mary McCarthy,” Ellen McWilliams “examines McCarthy’s relationship with life writing and self-fashioning and its importance to understanding the complicated position that she occupies as an Irish-American woman writer.” According to McWilliams, McCarthy at times actively resists and at other times strategically evades what are viewed as conventionally Irish-American themes and official narrative strategies of progress in part as a form of self-protection. This complicated relationship to her Irish American identity and the limiting archetypes of Irish-American womanhood, argues McWilliams, “should not in any way preclude McCarthy from inclusion in the Irish American canon, rather she can be read as one of its most vibrantly dissenting voices.”

One of the most valuable perspectives on McCarthy is that drawn from her personal relationships, for which we turn to the personal reminiscence by Eve Stwertka, McCarthy’s former student at Bard, long-time friend, and former co-executor of the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust along with Margo Viscusi. Drawing on previously unpublished diaries, “Weekends at Mary’s” fondly recreates a vivid image of summer visits with Mary at her home in Castine, Maine in the 1980s. The reader catches a glimpse of a gracious and genteel Grande Dame in her later years, who still has an eye for arranging flowers and presenting a sumptuous table, interspersed with moments of literary gossip and keen perception, albeit at a more stately pace.

In “Mary McCarthy Iconoclast,” visual artist Richard Lees shares highlights from two recent exhibitions inspired by the art and politics of Mary McCarthy: “McCarthy Iconoclast,” a 2017 print exhibition shown in Hull, London, and at the Edinburgh Festival, and “Writing Dangerously,” a 2018 exhibition reimagining in Lino Prints her work as a Vietnam war correspondent for The New York Review of Books, reporting from both north and south of the front line. In all these prints, says Lees, “I wanted to share my vision of McCarthy as a courageous, committed, sometimes contradictory, always fascinatingly multi- faceted woman, as someone whose insights continue to inspire.”

The Book Review section of this volume has been selected to represent the most recent primary and secondary source material that illuminates McCarthy’s life and works. Most importantly is the new Library of America edition of Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction (2017), edited by Thomas Mallon and reviewed by Sophia Wilson Niehaus. This is a significant acknowledgment of McCarthy’s recognition among the canon of twentieth-century American writers and one that we anticipate being followed by the publication of her collected nonfiction. What follows is a review by Vincent Giroud of the memoir, Holding the Road: Away from Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy (2018) by Reuel K. Wilson, son of Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson and professor emeritus of modern languages at the University of Western Ontario. Unlike his earlier reminiscence, To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod, (2008) this is more a narrative of self-growth, turning away, as the title implies, from his illustrious parents to look at the formative influences on his personal and intellectual growth, though their influence is never too far away. The two books that follow–Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018) reviewed by Margaret D. Stetz and Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2018) reviewed by Mena Mitrano – put McCarthy in the context of tough-minded, sharp-thinking women artists, writers, and intellectuals, who were at once critiqued for their strong views and inspired a new generation of smart, outspoken women. The last book, Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers, edited by myself and reviewed by Teresa Prados-Torreira, places McCarthy in the broader context of female satirists who use humor as an indirect form of social protest.

While this volume does the important work of recognizing and reevaluating McCarthy’s contribution as a fiction writer, cultural critic, and public intellectual, it is hopefully the renewal of an ongoing conversation about McCarthy’s life and works for the next generation of scholars of American literature and culture, women’s and gender studies, humor studies and more. Beyond the scope of this volume are essays on McCarthy as memoirist, McCarthy as satirist, McCarthy as New York intellectual, McCarthy and feminism, McCarthy in the classroom, McCarthy as travel writer, McCarthy and politics, McCarthy and ecocriticism and the list goes on. With her sharp wit, her keen insight, her intellectual daring, and her undeniable style, Mary McCarthy was the voice of a generation that continues to resonate with us today.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Wendy Martin, the editor-in-chief, and Lauren Hartle, the managing editor, of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for inviting me to guest edit a Mary McCarthy special issue of the journal and for smoothly overseeing the process. Thanks as well to the original panelists of the Mary McCarthy Society special session of the American Literature Association Conference, 2019, whose outstanding and varied contributions form the basis of this collection, and to the additional essayists and book reviewers for their valuable contribution to the issue. Special thanks to Richard Lees, for permission to reprint his original artwork inspired by McCarthy’s life and writings, and to Ronald Patkus, Head of Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Library, for permission to reprint the cover image from The Vassarion, 1933. As always, thanks to Sophia Wilson Niehaus, Executor of the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust, for her guidance and generosity in sharing Mary McCarthy’s work.

Notes

¹ See Elaine Showalter, 339–353; Wendy Martin, 187–206.

² See Andi Zeisler.