Arts and Letters

I first met Mary McCarthy nearly half a century ago—in the winter of 1940 at dinner at Harry Levin's in Cambridge. She was married to Edmund Wilson. I can remember still how transfixed I was by Mary—so beautiful, so intelligent, so witty, so much fun to talk to, her smile so lustrous and penetrating. I also remember how outraged I was by the marriage of this lovely young woman to a man who, however interesting and distinguished, seemed to me at the age of 23 infinitely old. In fact, Mary was then 28 and Edmund 45—a smaller gap in age than I presently enjoy in my own marriage.

I fell in love with Mary on that winter night; and, when I saw her in recent weeks in the intensive care ward at New York Hospital, embraced by the awful technology of modern medicine, she appeared, for all the tangle of tubes and wires, somehow youthful again, almost as beautiful as when we first met so many years ago. But then she never lost her youthfulness—in the sense of endless delight in the oddities of life, endless curiosity about people and ideas and human predicaments, endless interest in the way things worked, endless passion to learn new things, endless anger over hypocrisy and mendacity and cruelty. Mary never grew old.

Memories crowd in—Mary in New York, in Newport, in Wellfleet, in London, in the charming Paris apartment in the rue de Rennes, in the lovely house in Castine. One summer in the early 1950s in Wellfleet I used every morning to go over to her farmhouse from our cabin in the woods and write The Crisis of the Old Order in a room in her barn. Later she read the manuscript and returned it with a series of acute, indeed rather devastating, criticisms. I remember her remark about the prologue, a portentous account of FDR’s first inauguration: “almost Pre-Raphaelite,” she said. She was absolutely correct. This was shortly after Adlai Stevenson's 1952 campaign, and I was writing history as if I were still writing political speeches. Her comments shifted my whole perspective on the text. I withdrew the manuscript from the publisher and spent a month going over it sentence by sentence and purging it of its flourishes and excesses.

This was typical of Mary—both of her generosity in giving time to her friends and her absolute fidelity to her own exacting standards. As her marvelous essays in autobiography show, she saw her own earlier selves with that same scrupulous objectivity. Inevitably she changed course from time to time in a vitally engaged life. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” she once wrote. “...If you start an argument with yourself, that makes two people at least, and when you have two people, one of them starts appeasing the other.”

There used to be a fine phrase, now banned, I suppose, in this supersensitive age—“man of letters.” “Woman of letters” doesn't sound right; “person of letters” is wholly unacceptable. Whatever the contemporary equivalent of the old phrase, it applies vividly to Mary. She wrote with analytical power, startling clarity, keen human insight, silken wit, dispassionate ruthlessness, on an enviable diversity of subjects: the novel, painting, architecture, opera, theater, politics, manners, tastes, religion, language, museums, universities, Vassar, Venice, Florence, France, America, Vietnam. Her novels, stories, and essays constitute a brilliant commentary, interpretation, panorama of our disordered age.

“She approached the great problems of her time,” as Fernando Pivano wrote in the Corriere della Sera, “—sexual freedom in the 1930s, radicalism in the 1940s, the Vietnam tragedy in the 1960s, Watergate and terrorism in the 1970s—always from a moralist's point of view. She was obsessed by the idea of justice... with a logical and cold tone, in Voltaire's illuministic tradition.”

From early childhood, Mary had more than her share of troubles in life. She triumphed over them almost to the end by sheer force of an exceedingly strong will, allied to drastic intelligence, boundless courage, and a joyous instinct for living. She faced down the various illnesses that harassed her in recent years with a quite extraordinary absence of complaint and self-pity.

Nothing rejoiced her friends more than the singular felicity of her last marriage. In Jim West she found a perfect companion. I can claim some small credit for bringing them together. After I returned from a trip to the Soviet Union and Poland in 1959, the USIA asked me what American writers might be usefully sent to Poland. I urged them to send Mary, and she soon met Jim in the Warsaw Embassy. It was one of the best things I have ever done.

Mary was a sublime mixture of astringency and tenderness. For an intensely liberated woman, she luxuriated in housewifely detail. She was a superb cook, kept an immaculate house, and loved being Jim's wife; she generally referred to herself as “Mary West” rather than “Mary McCarthy.” She may have cast a cold eye, but she had the warmest of hearts. Her death is a grievous loss to American culture, and her friends will miss her to the end of their days.