The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties by Jonathan Leaf

An indication of how extreme this could be was evidenced at her death, when the ever-fatuous Gore Vidal asserted that she was America’s preeminent critic. The uncommon union of bitchy cleverness and apposite word choice which characterizes her work caused some of it to be overvalued in her lifetime. Indeed, it may be that no American since Scott Fitzgerald has written so felicitously. While it’s been a common jest that she left her lover Philip Rahv for her second husband, Edmund Wilson, because Wilson offered better prose, neither one’s came close to hers. If she could write off her looks by saying that she was merely invariably the prettiest girl at benefits for sharecroppers, let us admit that few admired women writers were ever comely enough to make men stare, or sufficiently informed about fashion that female friends sought their advice on wardrobe and jewelry.Ī worthier motive lies in her witty, highly wrought writing. Her appeal for biographers derives partly from her beauty and glamour. So who is right? Her faithful readers or the university intellectuals she so mocked and derided in her essays and novels, and who have belatedly returned the (dis)favor? And there will surely be more accounts of her life both in print and, no doubt, on the screen.

Still, there have been at least three full-length biographies of McCarthy, plus a son’s reminiscences, and a Broadway play about her contretemps with Hellman. Although a lifelong leftist, she is adjudged (if she is thought of by bien-pensant intellectuals at all) as a conceited, viperish figure who took delight in attacking such patron saints as Lillian Hellman. Nor does McCarthy have a partisan cheering section any longer, if she ever had one. Yet it is rarely assigned-or even well regarded-in colleges and while highly entertaining, The Group is not generally recognized as a classic, is not romantic, and is not a potboiler. The centenary of Mary McCarthy’s birth falls on this year’s summer solstice, and August is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her most famous novel, The Group, which sold more than five million copies by the time of McCarthy’s death in 1989, and continues to sell.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties by Jonathan Leaf