The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink) Read online

  PRAISE FOR MARY MCCARTHY AND THE OASIS

  “Quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced.”

  —TIME

  “Her prose is economical without being austere, witty without extravagance, tense and dramatic in its development from sentence to paragraph, clean as a chime … Her intelligence and learning are dazzling.”

  —CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT,

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt.”

  —CYRIL CONNELLY

  “I just read The Oasis and must tell you that it was pure delight … A veritable little masterpiece.”

  —HANNAH ARENDT

  “The she-intellect supreme … The First Lady of American letters.”

  —NEWSWEEK

  “Mary’s smile is very famous. It’s not what it seems at all. It’s a rather sharkish smile. When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open.”

  —DWIGHT MACDONALD

  “She thoroughly believed in offending people. She believed in provocation as incitement to thought, to reform, to life itself.”

  —ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

  “She had such tremendous confidence so young, it was as if she came out of the head of Zeus. I remember reading a piece of hers in The New Republic, a review of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. I violently disagreed with what she said, but I still found it brilliantly written. I was struck by the confidence and gracefulness of her prose and how she had it from the beginning.”

  —ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  “There was a shine on everything she wrote, and whatever she wrote was always a statement of her sense of her own power.”

  —DIANA TRILLING

  “She had, I thought, a wholly destructive critical mind, shown in her unerring ability to spot the hidden weakness or inconsistency in any literary effort and every person. To this weakness she instinctively leaped with cries of pleasure—surprised that her victim, as he lay torn and bleeding, did not applaud her perspicacity.”

  —ALFRED KAZIN

  “Each [of her novels] has so much life and truth, and is written in a prose so spare, vigorous, and natural … yet at the same time [is] so witty, graceful, and, in a certain way, poetic.”

  —IRVIN STOCK

  “A well-deserved fiasco, if you ask me.”

  —NORMAN PODHORETZ

  THE OASIS

  MARY MCCARTHY (1912–89) was born in Seattle, Washington, but when her parents died in the 1918 influenza epidemic she was left with relatives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They kept her, she later recalled, under “circumstances of almost Dickensian cruelty and squalor,” but at age twelve she was rescued by her wealthy maternal grandparents and returned to Seattle. Enrolled in a series of exclusive schools—including a convent school—she went on to attend Vassar College, then stayed in New York to write for The Nation. In 1937 she became founding editor of Partisan Review, and in 1938 she married the noted critic Edmund Wilson. She left him in 1946, just as her story “The Weeds”—in which a woman leaves her overbearing husband—appeared in The New Yorker. The story caused a furor, as did much of her fiction: “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” for its sexual frankness; The Company She Keeps (1942) and The Oasis (1949), for their scathing portrayals of her literary counterparts; and her hugely successful The Group (1963), for its depiction of women at her alma mater—which led Vassar to attempt to revoke her degree. Her leftist journalism—including war correspondence from Vietnam—similarly courted controversy, once even prompting Norman Mailer to challenge her to a boxing match. And when she called the writer Lillian Hellman a liar on television in 1979, Hellman sued for defamation and nearly bankrupted her. But McCarthy would outlive Hellman—and thus the lawsuit—to die at age seventy-seven in New York City.

  VIVIAN GORNICK is the author of many books, including The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Fierce Attachments: A Memoir; and The Men in My Life.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  THE OASIS

  Copyright © 2013 by The Mary McCarthy Literary Trust

  Introduction © 2013 by Vivian Gornick

  First Melville House printing: May 2013

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-229-1

  Design by Christopher King

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  To Bowden

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Vivian Gornick

  First Page

  INTRODUCTION

  VIVIAN GORNICK

  When my friends and I were in our twenties in the 1950s, we read two writers—Colette and Mary McCarthy—as others read the Bible: to learn better who we were and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live. Their novels and stories, collectively speaking, constituted our Book of Wisdom.

  The condition, of course, was that we were young women, and that Marriage and Motherhood was the territory upon which our battle with Life was expected to be pitched. As we were intellectually ambitious girls, English majors whose relation to literature was intensely personal, it was to fiction that we looked for ways to circumvent the conventions we were expected to live out. This was a tricky business, as literature itself was divided on the issue. If we read Henry James or George Eliot, and imagined ourselves Isabel Archer or Dorothea Brooke, it meant that while an intelligent girl could put up a good fight, she was ineluctably headed for pedestrian tragedy at the hands of some deceptively worthy man (if we read Thomas Hardy, the tragedy was not so pedestrian). It was only in the work of Colette and McCarthy—neither on the syllabus of any lit course I ever took—that we saw two gloriously shocking spins put on the narrative that we’d grown up believing was our destiny.

  In neither of these writers did marriage or motherhood figure at all. For Colette, Love with a capital L, as she referred to erotic obsession, was the ultimate experience for a woman. To know Passion was the thing, even—or perhaps especially—if it meant the loss of bourgeois respectability; and if, at the end, when youth and beauty were gone, and one was left humiliated by the inability to arouse desire, so be it. One had lived. On this score not another living writer, it seemed to us, understood the stakes as well as Colette. Her work sounded depths of understanding that were like nothing we had ever encountered. She alone could make high art out of the dilemma of a woman “in the grip,” elevate Love to the s
ame metaphoric heights that another novelist could reach through the contemplation of God or War.

  But Mary McCarthy spoke to another kind of romance alive in us, one closer to the bone: that of seeing ourselves as New Women, independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience. In this scenario, sexual love was flatly instrumental, and this too was exciting, as it illuminated a reality many of us were, unwittingly, beginning to inhabit: that of the unexpected setbacks one encountered on the road to experience. Instead of concentrating on the permutations of ecstasy at a high level as Colette did, McCarthy concentrated on the cost of liberated sex: the startling mixture of curiosity, excitement, and dismay that went with actually taking off your clothes and lying down with a stranger who, before you made love, was tantalizing, and afterward was the catalyst for that which left you with the taste of iron in your mouth.

  The thing we prized most in McCarthy was the no-holds-barred honesty with which she nailed the situation. In The Company She Keeps (her first novel, published in 1942), she gave us a female protagonist in whom we could see ourselves reflected as we were, right then and there. Who among us, in the 1950s, could not identify with Meg Sargent, bold as brass when she meets the Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt on a train traveling west and then, next morning, is crawling around on his sleeping-car floor, trying desperately to find her second stocking before he wakes up and forces her to face the humiliating complications of casual sex. The scene was so real that readers like me and my friends could only feel redeemed both by its remarkable verisimilitude and then by the scary brilliance of the prose, edged not in sentiment or social realism but in glittering irony.

  It was the irony in McCarthy’s writing that carried the day; inherent in it was a mockery from which no one—not even the protagonist—was safe. But most especially the men were not safe. What fools McCarthy made of her men! Not knaves, fools. Just to see them so portrayed, lowered into a bath of scorn, was to feel ourselves raised up. It would be twenty years more before we, the young women who read her in the 1950s, would understand why those early McCarthy stories had spoken so directly to us. That cold, hard stare of hers at romantic relations between men and women was soon to be ours, as one by one we had graduated into a world every bit as sexist as hers had been, and it was only now, in the 1970s, that many of us were able to see McCarthy’s relentless need to hold her characters up to ridicule as a line of defense equal to that of Clarissa Dalloway’s withdrawal from the marital bed.

  Mary McCarthy was born in 1912 in Seattle, the eldest in a family of four children. When she was six years old her parents died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed nearly fifty million people across the globe. The McCarthy children were taken in by their paternal grandparents and lived for some years in the Midwest under conditions that Mary later insisted, in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, were Dickensian: brutalizing in mind, body, and spirit.

  In her teens, Mary was rescued by her maternal grandparents, returned to Seattle, and thereafter lived in an atmosphere of wealth and kindliness that, nonetheless, did little to mitigate the crude lovelessness of those mean Midwestern years. By the time she entered Vassar she was the fully formed person she would be for the rest of her life: beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm, a sarcasm that for some would always be wickedly amusing, for others just wicked. She married straight out of college in 1933, came to live in New York, soon got divorced, rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, and began her life.

  McCarthy and her husband (a man of the theater) had met James T. Farrell, then a well-known novelist on the left, and after her divorce in 1936, it was to Farrell’s Sunday open house that she often made her way. Here she met a wealth of interesting people, made connections among those in publishing, and was soon writing book reviews. Within a year her classy, good-looking, frighteningly clever presence was wanted at literary left-wing parties, where, as her biographer Carol Brightman tells us, she was introduced to “progressive hosts and modernist hostesses” at whose functions voices rose “in lively controversy over the new play, the new strike, the new Moscow trials, the new abstract show at the Modern Museum.”

  It was at these parties that she met the men (Philip Rahv and William Phillips chief among them) who, in 1937, decided to revive the defunct magazine Partisan Review, which had once been the literary arm of the Communist Party. These men were anti-Stalinist Marxists in love with modernism, and bent on defying the CP’s primitive understanding of literature as a tool of polemics; they loved Trotsky because he had said that art could best aid the revolution by being true to itself rather than to political correctness, by which was meant the social realism that dominated the fiction of the 1930s.

  As McCarthy had been heard to denounce Stalinism at one party or another, she was invited to join the staff of the new Partisan Review. Taken on as a drama critic, she quickly and joyously found her youthfully fierce writing voice—and her career as a take-no-prisoners writer was launched. Of Maxwell Anderson, a popular left-wing playwright of the time, she did not hesitate to write, “Once again he has been inspired by a lofty theme and once again the mediocrity of his talent has reduced it to inconsequentiality.” And when Eugene O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh was being hailed as a remarkable piece of work, she berated O’Neill for his sentimentality in using a bunch of drunks who (in order to deliver the playwright’s message) became more and more articulate as the play went on, when everyone knew that alcohol meant the dissolution of personality, not its sharpening.

  “From the beginning,” Carol Brightman tells us, “Partisan Review was surrounded by the kind of controversy that quickened Mary McCarthy’s pulse.” She loved the people at the magazine not for their own particular selves but because, in McCarthy’s own words, they were “a self-proclaimed elite whose measure was to be taken not by its nearness to money or to established institutions, including Communist institutions, but by its performance as a harbinger of cultural change.” In essence, this meant endless argument, endless theorizing, endless scoring. McCarthy herself held no real position on any of the issues argued. She was never a serious Marxist, or modernist, for that matter—but she was serious about being the provocative child at the back of the room announcing the emperor had no clothes, the one who was always pointing out the inconsistent and the meretricious in whatever argument was being held among all these self-importantly serious, mainly Jewish, intellectuals.

  One among them, however, she did love for his very own self: Philip Rahv. The central figure in this influential little hotbed of intellectual superiority, Rahv held a passionately uncompromising view of what constituted the real thing, in literature as in politics. It was the passion behind Rahv’s judgments that elevated him to the position of the most feared, and therefore the most respected, of all—editors and writers alike—who encountered him in the flesh. As Elizabeth Hardwick said of him at his funeral, his outstanding characteristic was “a contempt for … the tendency to inflate local and fleeting cultural accomplishments. This slashing away at low levels of taste and at small achievements passing as masterly … was a crusade some more bending souls might have grown weary of. But he was not ashamed of his extensive ‘negativism’ and instead went on right up to the end scolding … unworthy accommodation” not for the sake of establishing his own authority but for “the honor and integrity of history itself.”

  Like all the others at Partisan Review, Mary was seriously intimidated by Rahv’s intellectual self-confidence; so the only way to even things out was to go to bed with him. Surprisingly, the two fell in love and became a couple, living openly together to the priggish dismay of many of their comrades, who, in reality, were as frightened of sex without marriage as any bourgeois or working-class puritan could be—and were even more fright
ened of women. Among men like Delmore Schwartz, McCarthy was roundly condemned as the vamp who had Rahv, the poor fool, in her clutches. When, in 1938, she suddenly and without warning married Edmund Wilson, with whom she had secretly been sleeping, the men at Partisan Review felt sneeringly vindicated. Rahv himself was stunned.

  Marriage to Edmund Wilson provided Mary McCarthy with an experience of major clarification. For one thing, the Jewish intellectuals had been exotics to her, whereas Wilson, for reasons of class and origin, was her familiar; it came as a surprise that in marrying him, as she said in later years, she felt the relief of “coming home.” Then again, she was now with a man who was essentially literary, not political, and when, at Wilson’s insistence, she tried her hand at fiction, and the first shot out of the box came cool, calculating “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”—the story that would eventually become the startling first chapter in The Company She Keeps—she knew that this was where her writing talent best connected. The stories that then began to pour out of her made it icy clear that it was through fiction that she had become, and would remain—irresistibly and irrepressibly—a social satirist of the first order.

  It is poignant to see that when McCarthy was writing the kind of satire that involved autobiographical characters like Meg Sargent, or Martha Sinnott in A Charmed Life, a strain of sympathetic regret softened her otherwise uncompromising take on characters whom she mainly presented as the sum of their disabilities. It never occurred to her that the models for her characters, those whom she was presenting as pompous or self-deluded, would see themselves any differently—after all, she was only speaking the self-evident truth—and was always taken aback when they either bellowed like wounded bears at seeing themselves skewered in print or simply stopped inviting her to their parties. One who bellowed like a bear was Philip Rahv, who actually thought of bringing suit to prevent the publication in 1949 of The Oasis.