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Cast a Cold ‘ I ’: Mary McCarthy on Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Gordon O. Taylor
Gordon O. Taylor
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

‘ There is always one theme in Mary McCarthy's fictions ’, writes Alfred Kazin in Bright Book of Life: ‘ none of these awful people is going to catch me. The heroine is always distinctly right, and gives herself all possible marks for taste, integrity and indomitability. Other people are somehow material to be written up. ’ Whether or not one accepts this as fair, one is inclined to agree that a pattern of identification exists between the novelist and her fictional heroines. A reader of McCarthy's non-fiction is also often struck, particularly of late, by the extent to which self-portrayal can become central to her treatment of a subject. The inward play of her imaginative response is frequently as much the substance as the servant of her outwardly avowed literary purpose, or the onward momentum of her narrative line. The intellectual, aesthetic or moral assurance of her self-characterization exerts defining pressure on her materials, be they those of the critic or the polemicist, the autobiographer or the reporter. This pressure of personality indeed relates more than it distinguishes, sometimes even fuses, these various literary roles, along with a number of their respective techniques.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 1975 , pp. 103 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 Kazin, Alfred, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 188Google Scholar.

2 All published in New York by Harcourt, Brace; all quotations are from these editions. These texts have recently been re-issued, together with a new essay dealing further with the circumstances of their composition, as The Seventeenth Degree (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974)Google Scholar.

3 Portions of Vietnam and Hanoi first appeared in The New York Review of Books; excerpts from Medina first appeared in The New Yorker.

4 She notes as well that the regenerative themes of Western nineteenth-century fiction are central to North Vietnamese popular art, as if surfacing there after fading here; the ‘Free World, to judge by its [twentieth-century] artifacts’, now unfree to choose another course in the current conflict.

5 In ‘How It Went’, an autobiographical essay accompanying these texts in The Seventeenth Degree, McCarthy speaks of novelists as ‘curious – in both senses – beings’, whose impressions, whatever their biases, are therefore received with curiosity by readers. ‘But there was something that went deeper than the mere feeding of curiosity in the reader-storyteller relation. I had the conviction (which still refuses to change) that readers put perhaps not more trust but a different kind of trust in the perceptions of writers they know as novelists from what they give to the press's ‘objective’ reporting. … This belief of mine was what was prompting me … to go.’

6 Now published as The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974)Google Scholar.