Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy's The Group is an interesting history. It traces the careers of a handful of upscale Vassar grads through through about their graduation into the early part of WWII, but the focus is not on public events. McCarthy starts chatty. The plot progresses less like a sequence of events than a slowly gathering pattern.

The focus that finally orients the piece is the marriage of Kay. Her probably-gay theater-hopeful husband fools around on her, particularly with one of her fellow grads, who had been tangentially involved with The Group. The better to carry on his affairs, he enlists his mistress to help have Kay committed. Kay's fortunate enough to run into Polly, another old grad who has just happened to marry a shrink, and eventually they manage to get her released. Of course, in the meanwhile, Kay has had to recognize that she's not really going home to Honest Harald, her unharmless hubby.

Just after the war breaks out Kay jumps or falls from a building to her death. Boom. War and funeral give The Group another chance to torque their variously conceived needs against each other. Their grand mutual misunderstanding is, of course, thematic. It's a pity McCarthy couldn't have recycled Katherine Porter's title Ship of Fools. Not only do none of the particulars show any contrated concern for anyone else, they seem utterly mystified about what they themselves want.

The conversation of Corinne and Polly over their kids was probably the most straightforwardly revealing part of the book. Each has extensively defined and intrusive, yet vague and inconsistent ideas about childrearing. Neither has decided to give the matter any serious study, despite some vague feelings, at least on Polly's part, that what they're doing has consequences.

Meanwhile, the experts on childbirth have all been men, oddly, though oddly consonant with historical accuracy. Polly has the odd idea that babies scream bloody murder because they actually do feel things, while the so-called experts prefer to deny the obvious. Yet this obvious insight gets no attention, even from Polly. The two wonder whether their education at Vassar was a good idea or whether it has just gotten in their way. The various women have done various jobs since graduating, the reader would be justified in asking why, besides a wage, any of them would have bothered. Their ideas about childraising are painfully useless as well as unexamined, and the ideas of their male experts, who have had the benefit or ill of direct academic examination of the subject, understand still less.

Enfin, at the funeral, supposed genious __, who has turned out to be lesbian, pins a little point of revenge on supposed genius Harald. He has the odd idea that the Kay that he seems to want to feel he owned has had some kind of lesbian affair. Out of spite, ___ refuses to affirm or deny it, and in a rage he insists on stepping out of the car, which she quickly allows him to do.

Ending score: Bad guys 0; good gals 0.

The book held my attention better than I might have indicated. This kind of post 19-Century naturalism disappoints me. It's not that McCarthy has learned nothing from the preceding 50 years or so. The focalization shifts from point to point in ways that reflect the intervening presences of Faulkner and Woolf, and her willingness to dwell on outwardly insignificant detail reflects probably Proust as opposed to Joyce, and all of that is all fine and well and good. But I wonder: if all the Vassar education and crown-of-creation social puffery just screwed the ladies up, what is it they would have needed? Granted that McCarthy isn't supposed to moralize about it, but why can't we get the guts of that idea on the table somehow? A lot of relevant things get ignored here.

• These folks have servants, but there's no consciousness of class struggles for the servants


• Harald writes plays, and could have some consciousness of a reason why. All we get of his motivation is petty vanity, though he's obviously an ideologue.


• McCarthy seems to place all social ideas always at the same level. All are expressive of their bearers' insanity, regardless of how true or false, useful or useless, any of them are. McCarthy may wish to argue that the realism of this makes the ideas themselves inconsequential, but if so, she seems to assume the point she wishes to prove.

Altogether, this kind of realism seems retrograde after Joyce and Faulkner, frankly. The trouble is that Kay's breakdown cannot exist without Kay's past and her hopes. But here McCarthy gives us one without the other by showing us the trauma of one character through the eyes of another character. So we may recognize that an It is there, without recognizing what it is.

The operation of this kind of novel, then, operats actively on some planes, but insists on staying closed and sterile on another. The presentation of a rather narrow framework of social problems as social problems omits the social dynamic that produces the problems, and also omits the psychological nature of the problems themselves, leaving us with a rather thin image of them.

I'm going to refer to Dostoyevsky again. In some ways, McCarthy's work reminds me of a Dostoyevskian plot. She has a group of people, with characters coming and going, if not long Russian names. She has important themes. She has an even that could have made the newspapers, like the murder of Raskolnikov's pawnbroker or the old Karamazov. But Dostoyevsky's characters would have engaged the issues that drove them somehow. They would have directly addressed us or each other in their attempts at resolution.

Does this seem unrealistic for these characters? For Kay? For Harald? I don't think so. Why would Kay have never confessed to Polly? Why would Harald have never confessed to Corinne? But to show this level of response might have required a different kind of focus for the novel.

This does not seem to me a question of realism or irony or identification or objective correlative.