Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction: A Library of America Boxed Set

by Mary McCarthy, Thomas Mallon (Editor)

Overview

For the first time in a deluxe collector's edition, all seven novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation

Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature—"mutual plagiarism," she called it—became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition. The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. In McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group (1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and family. McCarthy's final two novels—Birds of America (1971), a coming of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the 1960s, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a thriller about a group of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers—are both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents of radical social change to the psychology of"terrorism" Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time. As a special feature, the second volume contains McCarthy's 1979 essay "The Novels that Got Away," on her unfinished fiction.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781598535181
Publisher:	Library of America
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Pages:	2220
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 2.80(d)

About the Author

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), novelist, critic, and political activist, was born in Seattle and orphaned at age six, thereafter raised by various relatives in Minnesota and Washington. She graduated from Vassar College in 1933 and went on to work as a critic for The New Republic, The Nation, and the Partisan Review, for which she was an editor from 1937 to 1948. She married four times, most notably in 1938 to the critic Edmund Wilson. She is the author of seven novels as well as many other volumes of autobiography, travelogues, essays, and criticism.

Thomas Mallon, editor, Thomas Mallon is the author of nine novels, including Watergate, Finale, and Fellow Travelers, as well as seven books of nonfiction.  A protégé and friend of McCarthy's, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.

Editorial Reviews

Mary McCarthy, a preeminent voice in mid-twentieth- century American political journalism and literary criticism, was also a bestselling fiction writer. Norman Mailer savaged her and by extension all those whose reviews of her most popular novel, The Group, "came in on wings of gold." Now that the Library of America has issued her complete fiction in two volumes, all the evidence is in one slipcase. We can decide once and for all if McCarthy wrote "lady-books," as Mailer so dismissively sniped.

If your last acquaintance with her 1963 succès de scandale about Vassar's class of 1933 was decades ago, a rereading may not trigger recall so much as wonder. Wonder at, for one thing, such dewy immediacy in eighty-five-year- old characters. And for those who press on into a first encounter with the work that came both before and after her career-defining bestseller, even bigger surprises await. This is a perfect moment, in terms of the progress of our political development as well as the sand through feminism's hourglass, for the Library of America's release of McCarthy's complete fiction. The two volumes comprise a body of work that retains startling and unsettling relevance. Her novelistic output (seven in total, plus several masterful and biting stories) shows the breadth of one of the fiercest minds in American letters. Considered from a new century, the works that span 1942 to 1979 provide a finely calibrated scope through which to assess how much, and how little, has changed. They also demonstrate the singular power of fiction itself to present complexities unavailable to any other mode of writing.

McCarthy (1912&ndash89) produced nonfiction aplenty, reviews, and political commentary for The New Republic, The Nation, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books. She ran in powerful intellectual circles, associating with the likes of Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv, and — in this case marrying, too — Edmund Wilson. Her life and influence were the subjects of notable biographies by Frances Kiernan, Carol Brightman, Doris Grumbach, and her own autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. She published lengthy dissections of Vietnam and Watergate, preceded by critical examinations of the varieties of Communism. Her views often contradicted the prevailing trend and sometimes her previously expressed ideas: she became known as Contrary Mary. For as long as she lived she remained outspoken politically and personally, reserving the right to be "difficult," long the peculiar slur for women who presume to speak and be heard. (It's hard not to wish we could have had her around to pronounce on the campaign of the first female major party nominee for president.) Her famous feud with Lillian Hellman turned litigious when she declared, on the Dick Cavett Show, that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " McCarthy may have had genuine ideological differences with Hellman, primarily over Stalinism, but this epic putdown is McCarthy in a quip: lacerating, precise, supremely clever, edged with self- destruction, and above all opportunistic. For McCarthy was a dizzying font of intellect, one that sometimes overran its basin.

In The Group the author drew from real life with the mercilessness that would become legendary — a distressing experience for the classmates who found themselves undressed both literally and figuratively in the novel. Her practice of borrowing others' lives and animating them to serve her fiction's social critiques would indeed have been as cruel as her detractors claimed, if she had not also used herself even more brutally. One finds McCarthy, or prismatic parts of her, in characters everywhere. Her first novel, The Company She Keeps, is a collection of interlinked stories about women and men deeply contextualized in the world of '30s intelligentsia. It heralded one of her abiding themes: the trap of gendered expectations. McCarthy claimed she was not a feminist, but she could disavow only the label; she wrote deeply, and painfully, of having an exquisitely trained mind, one that naturally yearned for real use. Instead, it was a talented woman's misfortune to be schooled (and especially at Vassar!) for a world that demanded higher education only as finishing- school polish for upper-class females, a string of pearls to be worn in public and taken off at night. And so politics infuses every act in her stories, from choosing a sexual partner to the type of cocktail served; McCarthy was so honestly feminist she used class hypocrisy and the abuse of power in the bedroom, the office, the marriage, in order to postulate its presence in every sphere of human being.

She wrote at a canter, an artfully controlled gait just shy of a gallop — "How Hemingway would have written had he gone to Vassar," claimed Jack Paar in 1963. With one telling detail she would illuminate the essence of character, as with the Ivy Leaguer who tries on Das Kapital to discover it's a good look for him. A stand-in for McCarthy herself, simultaneously satirized and elevated, opines, "Liberty is read by the masses, and the Liberal is read by a lot of self-appointed delegates for the masses whose principal contact with the working class is a colored maid." (Her work's frank depiction of sex was enormously shocking for the time; its casual racism is likely more so for ours.)

McCarthy's is characteristically modern fiction in that it eschews heroes and villains: everyone sucks in some ways, suffers pitiably in others. Everyone, in short, is like McCarthy herself. In the only nonfiction piece in these volumes, a reminiscence titled "The Novels That Got Away," she sums up her own fractured personality best. (She was not the type to give anyone else the last word, especially about her.) "I was a natural rebel who was also in love with law. This was my autobiography, and it was not going to change."

Also unchanging is the ever-turning wheel of history, which appears to move forward but merely comes round again. Nearly every circumstance that might otherwise be relegated to a quaint past in some fictions of a bygone century seems near again, not only on account of McCarthy's lively, engaged, emotionally charged prose. In reading the deluded bluster of characters who know what's right for the world and brook no alternative view, we are unfortunately apt to feel the shiver of a lot of Plus ça change . . . The dangers of illegal abortion, a plot element in the perfectly realized A Charmed Life — an acid condemnation of self-deception as embodied by the denizens of the fictional New Leeds standing in for Wellfleet, the site of McCarthy's own private drama when married to Wilson — are terrifying. They threaten to become real again.

The easy, natural politicism of her early work — shown, not told, in action and interior monologue, her usual method — gives way in her final novel to a more forced form of satire. Published in 1979, Cannibals and Missionaries presciently ushered in the subject that consumes ever more of our cultural bandwidth, not to mention human lives: terrorism. A plane carrying a bunch of largely clueless do- gooders is hijacked by terrorists and tragedy, along with pontificating, ensues. The characters are so striated with opposing views and perverse qualities — and endless chatter — there is no one who appears feeling, thinking, real, whole. There is no one, more to the point, who is McCarthy with another name.

The great revelation of this collection is the lesson that politics can be, and necessarily are, most fully expressed in fiction. The news peg will fall out of the wall; timeliness will always be rendered past. What remains forever is the variegated humanity of people who seek and search, suffer and fail — the people McCarthy wrote into being. All the people she was.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of nonfiction: The Perfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training.

Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The Barnes & Noble Review