• It would be an understatement to say that Mary McCarthy’s novels haven’t aged well—I don’t know anyone without tenure who now reads them—and I can’t say that I get much out of her essays, either. But Memories of a Catholic Girlhood still has its admirers, myself (with reservations) among them, while the drama criticism that was collected in 1963 in a volume called Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles 1937-1962 hasn’t dated in the least. This trim little volume is still available in paperback, if only after a fashion—it was reissued a few years ago by the Authors Guild Back-in-Print Bookstore, a service of iUniverse, a print-on-demand publisher—but it deserves much wider circulation.
Theatre Chronicles is prefaced by a very funny essay in which McCarthy tells how a young Vassar graduate with no apparent qualifications other than the fact that she was sleeping with Philip Rahv came to be the drama critic of Partisan Review:
I was a source of uneasiness and potential embarrassment to the magazine, which had accpted me, unwillingly, as an editor because I had a minute “name” and was the girl friend of one of the “boys,” who had issued a ukase on my behalf. I was not a Marxist; I should have liked, rather, to be one, but I did not know the language, which seemed really like a foreign tongue….
The field assigned me was the theatre, because, just before this, I had been married to an actor. It was often debated whether we should have a theatre column at all. Some of the editors felt that the theatre was not worth bothering with, because it was neither a high art, like Art, nor a mass art, like the movies. But this was also an argument for letting me do it. If I made mistakes, who cared?
McCarthy was not always the most reliable of autobiographers—that, too, is an understatement—but her rueful confession has the smack of plain truth. So do her theater reviews, which are remarkable for the cold-eyed, clear-headed way in which she saw through the pretenses of a great many people who continue to be handled with kid gloves by far too many critics. It was McCarthy, for instance, who said that Eugene O’Neill was “a playwright who—to be frank—cannot write,” that Orson Welles “has always seemed to secrete a kind of viscous holy oil with which he sprays the rough surfaces of his roles,” and that Stanley Kowalski, the Napoleonic Code-spouting anti-hero of A Streetcar Named Desire, was something less than a believable portrayal of a recognizable human being: “Dr. Kinsey would be interested in a semi-skilled male who spoke of the four-letter act as ‘getting those colored lights going.'”
Like most critics, McCarthy had her limits, the chief of which was an inadequate appreciation of theater as spectacle. Her orientation was almost entirely verbal, to the point that one occasionally suspected her of having reviewed scripts rather than live performances. Thus she was incapable of grasping the fundamentally spectacular virtues of the young Welles’s Elizabethan revivals or the young Marlon Brando’s acting. At the same time, though, it was salutary to hear on a regular basis from a drama critic who insisted that a play must ultimately be held to the same literary standards as a novel:
“Yes,” some people will agree of a play by Tennessee Williams, “it is badly written, but it’s good theatre.” I have never been able to make out what this expression means, exactly. “Strong” situations? Masochistic grovelling? Sexual torture? Is Sophocles “good theatre”? Is Shakespeare? Apparently not, for the term is always used defensively, to justify a kind of shoddiness, which is held to be excusable for the stage.
And while one comes away from Theatre Chronicles suspecting that McCarthy had no great love of theater for its own sake, it is untrue that she was only capable of writing well about that which she disliked. The mark of a good drama critic is the ability to know a good thing when he sees it—and the courage to say so regardless of fashion or political pressure. Not only was McCarthy fearless, but she was even capable of appreciating art to whose style she was temperamentally unsympathetic. Who would have guessed, for instance, that she would have written one of the most intelligent contemporary appreciations of Our Town? Or that she would have responded so favorably to Laurence Olivier’s intensely theatrical, textually high-handed film of Hamlet?
I was still in college when I first ran across McCarthy’s theater criticism, and had seen next to none of the plays she reviewed. As a result, I responded more to her wickedly precise phrase-making than to her capacity for thoughtful judgment. After having spent the past four years writing about two plays a week for the Wall Street Journal, I now know exactly how good Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles is: I rank it with Stark Young’s Immortal Shadows and John Simon’s Uneasy Stages as one of the handful of first-rate collections of theater criticism to have been written by an American.
