Mary McCarthy
From Philosopedia
McCarthy, Mary (Therese) (21 June 1912 - 25 October 1989)
An acerbic and witty novelist, the Seattle, Washington, born McCarthy described the Dickensian nightmare of her growing up in Minnesota in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1935). She was a drama critic for Partisan Review, and her works include The Groves of Academe (1952), in which she satirized faculty life at a women’s liberal arts college. She also wrote The Group (1963), about eight Vassar alumnae of 1933 for the thirty years following their graduation. Her posthumous Intellectual Memoirs, New York 1936–1938 (1992) emphasized, according to Jean Strouse in The Times (24 May 1992), her lifelong crusades “against inaccuracy, cant, evasion, cliché, self-deception, bad writing, weak principles, and fraud—most famously when she said of Lillian Hellman, on Dick Cavett’s television show, that ‘every word she says is a lie, including and and the.’ ” (Hellman sued her but died before the case came to trial.)
Although as a youth McCarthy was convent-bred, she no longer considered herself a Catholic once she left her paternal grandparents’ home. In her memoirs she reflects upon having had a maternal grandmother who was Jewish, but McCarthy the Trotskyite was a self-declared freethinker.
McCarthy wrote of her sexual exploits with Harold Johnsrud, John Porter, Philip Rahv, Max Eastman, even of three different men in the course of twenty-four hours. As for the males’ sexual equipment, “there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. . . . [One married man had] a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil,” and tall men she found usually to be the most generously endowed. After she slept with the critic Edmund Wilson, in very short order the two married and she endured seven tempestuous years with him, bearing one child.
An outspoken atheist, McCarthy in The Company She Keeps (1942) has a character speak lovingly about a person to whom she is drawn sexually, “ ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘. . . do not let them take this away from me. If the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity. ‘A di,’ she said aloud, ‘reddite me hoc pro pietate mea.’ (Oh gods, render me this in return for my devotion.). It was certainly a very small favor she was asking, but, like Catullus, she could not be too demanding, for, unfortunately, she did not believe in God.”
McCarthy died in New York City of cancer. Her husbands had been Harold Jonsrud (21 June 1933 - 1936); Edmund Wilson (February 1938 - 1946); Bowden Broadwater (6 December 1946 - 1961); and James Raymond West (married 15 April 1961). Her brother was actor Kevin McCarthy.
