Friday, June 22, 2012

Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story That Ruined a Marriage


June 18, 2012 - The New Yorker

Posted by

Mary-McCarthy.jpg
This year marks the hundredth birthday of both Mary McCarthy and John Cheever, two celebrated New Yorker writers. Mary McCarthy’s fiction first appeared in the magazine’s pages in 1944. Although we tend to think of Cheever as a quintessential post-war writer, he was always one step ahead of McCarthy. Born a few weeks earlier than she was, he arrived at the magazine almost a decade before she did. Later on, the author of “The Enormous Radio” and “Goodbye, My Brother” was dismissive of his own early stories, perhaps because they fit in all too well with the kind of very short fiction favored by Harold Ross back then. At its best, in the hands of a master like John O’Hara, an early New Yorker story would speed along until everything was called into question with a deft shift in tone. At its worst, it could amount to little more than a tepid memoir or entertaining anecdote.
Sometimes a début is more like a dress rehearsal, sometimes a début can seem long overdue. Mary McCarthy arrived at The New Yorker as a fully formed writer known for her immaculate prose, her wit, her glamour, her sexual adventures, and her vexed marriage to the eminent critic Edmund Wilson, as well as for the impossibly high standards of her Partisan Review theatre criticism and the shocking candor of her fiction. Word had it that she never made anything up.
Not one to shy away from controversy or from probing the limits of sexual embarrassment, Mary McCarthy wasn’t a likely writer for Harold Ross’s New Yorker, much less for any “old lady in Dubuque.” “The Man in The Brooks Brothers Shirt,” published in Partisan Review in 1941—which begins with a young bohemian intellectual setting out to raise the consciousness of a middle-aged businessman encountered in the club car of the train taking her West, only to wake up the following morning, naked and hungover, alongside the man, who looks like “a young pig”—had made her a heroine a certain kind of young woman. For Alison Lurie, studying at Radcliffe, the story made clear “you could have a relationship with a man just for the fun of it and you didn’t have to feel guilty or upset.” For Pauline Kael, “it was tonic.” This was partly because it offered a heroine who “could be asinine but she wasn’t weak.” For a sixteen-year-old George Plimpton, “that somebody could write a story about things like that” made it remarkable. He added that, at Exeter, the story “made almost as much an impression as Pearl Harbor.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/mary-mccarthy-edmund-wilson-and-the-short-story-that-ruined-a-marriage.html#ixzz1yVYcONGT

No comments: