The Higher Unfairness
The Groves Of Academe.
by Mary Mccarthy.
Harcourt, Brace. 302 pp. $3.50.
I am sure that a good deal of the pleasure I find in reading Mary McCarthy arises out of my sense of how offensive she is (and cannot help being) to a certain kind of reader whom it is important that somebody offend. There is a particular kind of “right-thinking” mind that is reduced to a frantic rage not only by what she says, but by her tone, her metaphorical habits, the very shape of her sentences. I should say that it is impossible to have voted for Henry Wallace in 1948 and to admire the cold, underground wit of Mary McCarthy—the wit from which she seems recently to be unhappily relaxing; but which made her drama reviews in Partisan Review and her earlier stories so painfully attractive, and which flickers fitfully in The Groves of Academe.
Her original gift seems compounded not only of the traditional detached virulence of the satirist (with its roots in self-hatred, and its hostility to pride), but also of the special bitterness of the rebel, grown hard and cagey in his fight against a society which he cannot even persuade to listen to his declaration of war. If in the past Miss McCarthy has often turned her cold eye on the individuals and types on her own side of the (theoretical) barricades, it has not mattered finally; since she has flayed and pilloried them from a point of view impossible for the “soft” liberal or literate philistine to share, even for the sake of rejoicing in the discomfiture of a despised category of intellectuals. Mary McCarthy’s appeal has been a snob appeal of a particularly fortunate sort, since the group for whom she has written, far from considering themselves a “happy few” have prided themselves on being a very miserable minority indeed—and she has represented with rare agility and grace the ability of that group at once to despise themselves and the society from which they have withdrawn.
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The proper milieu for such a mind was provided by the avant-garde magazines and their readers; and it seems to me that both Miss McCarthy and that milieu have suffered since their separation from each other. As a kind of Apostle to the Gentiles, mingling unnoticed among the contributors to the New Yorker, and expounding to its readers (not a few of whom have, of course, always found Partisan Review, for example, “negative and trotskyite”) the vagaries of “one side of contemporary American intellectual life,” Miss McCarthy has tended to lose precisely those troublesome spiritual qualities, once her greatest asset.
I think it becomes (alas!) more and more possible to read her with the sense that someone else is always being satirized, and without the acute and embarrassing awareness of the in-dignity of being human which she once so masterfully controlled. There are basically two kinds of satire, I suppose: the kind that attacks eccentricity with the comfortable feeling that the writer belongs to the group which embodies a true center and norm (this is preeminently represented among us by the New Yorker); and the kind that finds the human condition essentially ridiculous. The first kind is often rooted in a smug, conservative sort of optimism (confusingly known in our world as “liberalism”), while the other kind usually tends toward a religious point of view (often concealed in our world under the rubric of “radicalism”). There had always seemed to me the possibility that Miss McCarthy’s wit might flower into such a Christian-Swiftian sort of satire, when its bitterness had recognized itself as a sign of humility; but I do not find such a flowering in her most recent work.
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The Groves Of Academe has found a subject which seems especially apt as a vehicle for Miss McCarthy’s insights and hostilities, dealing as it does with the confrontation of the Liberal and the Underground Man (just such a confrontation as Mary McCarthy’s own work provides a certain kind of reader). The scene is the campus of a small “advanced” college; the antagonists Mulcahy, a seedy Machiavellian and self-despiser, obviously “chosen” by his immense unattractiveness to be the Victim of a hundred minor persecutions, and Maynard Hoar, a handsome, loved, earnest, and empty Liberal with no sense of how complicated it is to be human. These two have come to seem by now almost archetypal figures, confronting each other over and over again in Congressional committee rooms and before the bench, in the tragi-comedy of revelations about Communism that have filled the columns of our daily newspapers for the last several years.
But Miss McCarthy with a rare comic twist (it is the first successful gimmick she has ever come on, having no essential talent for the machinery of fiction) has made Mulcahy falsely accuse himself of having been a Communist, in an involved strategy to hold on to his job as professor of literature in the school of which Hoar, a pledged friend of freedom, is president. The book does not quite live up to the promise of its device, though there are, indeed, many delightful and telling passages—in particular, the description of a poetry conference, that typical cultural event of our time, heretofore not memorialized in fiction. In a sentence here and there, a turn of phrase, an unexpected metaphor, there is a touch of the old wit, but what is lacking in the style is the excess that once characterized Miss McCarthy’s work, the overloading of each sentence, the lovely vicious gags thrown away out of the sheer fertility of her malice and invention.
Besides, though the book asserts a claim to being a novel, it contains none of the rich novelistic texture of interwoven relationships, none of the large rhythms of change which mark a true novel. Miss McCarthy’s talent lies in the framing of sentences, and in the art of composing what used to be called “characters”—set pieces of static description in epigrammatic phrases, the fixing of individuals and types in a way essentially hostile to the dynamics of fiction. It is a shame that the older genre has disappeared; or that Miss McCarthy cannot, at least, continue to practice it under the guise of writing drama reviews—for as a novelist she cannot move, in any of the senses of the word.
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I do not mean to say that Mulcahy is not magnificently realized, or that certain aspects of student life (though there are no real students in the book) and academic procedure are not neatly caught, or rather, caught out—but nothing happens, it is all presented. The secondary plot of the book, a fable of initiation into the dark tangle of human motives, in-volves a most improbable ingénue, called Domna Rejnev, who convinces us neither that she is Russian (though she talks about Tolstoy and insists on importing tins of borscht into the groves of academe), nor, indeed, that she is a real person.
As a matter of fact, none of Miss McCarthy’s “control” characters—those normal types against whom the eccentricity of the eccentrics is defined—are at all convincing. The juvenile, an over-solemn neo-orthodox Protestant, the vestigial Proletarian Poet (an egregious example of the sort of pastoral glorification of simple types into which Miss McCarthy occasionally falls), the incredibly principled Alma neither amuse us nor impose their reality upon us. It is only in contriving “humors” and caricatures that Miss McCarthy is at home.
She is even less adequate in stating abstractly the center of values from which the eccentric deviates than she is in creating the innocents who embody those values. Explicit “ideas” are even less her forte than ingénues; and when she is telling us why progressive schools are false Utopias, why it is wrong to teach students to be “critics rather than readers,” or why certain kinds of modern poets are despicable, she falls into a smugness and flatness that betray the wit and unmercifulness of her simple seeing. When she descends, for instance, to a quip about the poet who cannot find time enough to attend all the poetry conferences eager to hear his remarks on the Neglect of Poetry, she is engaging in the satire of condescension rather than that of implication. It is the other who is seen as absurd, with a merely vulgar kind of unfairness, quite different from that Higher Unfairness, that unwillingness to pander to any aspect of our own or her self-esteem, which once marked Miss McCarthy’s work, and to which I hope she will return.
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