In 1947, Simone De Beauvoir visited America and, in the course of her investigations, met Mary McCarthy, whom she described as "a cold and beautiful novelist who devoured three husbands and a crowd of lovers in the course of a neatly-managed career". In this succinct piece of unsisterly analysis, McCarthy's writing - "novelist" and "career " - is subordinated to the far more exciting life - "cold and beautiful", "three husbands", "crowd of lovers". In fact, one of the interesting things about McCarthy's novels was the degree to which they faithfully, and often maliciously, reflected her life. Her husbands, lovers, friends and family had good reason to fear each publication, where they might, and often did, find themselves mercilessly portrayed with McCarthy's characteristic febrile astringency.
McCarthy is probably best remembered for her memoir of childhood, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which recounts her experiences with unsympathetic and often abusive relatives after the tragic deaths of her parents when she was six years old. The book was remarkable for its unflinching disclosure of a dysfunctional family, with everyone having to take their lumps at the hands of the narrator, triumphant because she was prepared to expose herself as well as the rest. McCarthy was a harsh judge of others all her life, but was equally hard on herself.
Her work spans the period from 1942 (The Company she Keeps) to 1987 (How I Grew), with Intellectual Memoirs, her account of her life from 1936 to 1938, published posthumously in 1993. It includes seven novels, three volumes of memoirs, three volumes of literary criticism, two classic travel books, two volumes of theatre criticism, and two volumes of collected journalism, on Vietnam and Watergate respectively. The novels appear slightly timebound these days, with a sociological sheen which has deepened with changed intellectual, political and sexual habits. However, the work as a whole presents a solid and still admirable achievement, with a thread of commitment to good writing and good causes apparent in nearly all of it.
McCarthy disclaimed feminism towards the end of her life, although she said she liked Betty Friedan, but her success and status as a writer were achieved on her own terms, in an intensely male environment. Although her second husband, Edmund Wilson, was a well-known literary figure who defended and promoted her work assiduously, there is no evidence that his efforts made much difference to her recognition. It could be argued that her best work was produced during her long and tranquil marriage to Bowden Broadwater, who dedicated himself to taking care of her and her son by Wilson, and whom McCarthy left after 13 years to marry James West, an American diplomat with whom she fell in love at the age of 49. Some of the issues addressed in her novels - sexual freedom, contraception, ambition, women in the academy - fit very well with a feminist agenda, and many women, writers and otherwise, were heartened by her ability to take on female American life in a realistic and unsentimental way.
Frances Kiernan has produced a monumental biography of McCarthy, greatly enlarged and enriched by the vast quantity of interviews and correspondence from which she quotes. These give the volume almost the quality of an oral history, with conflicting opinions and accounts of events placed side by side. The contributors are most impressive: John Updike, gentlemanly but critically firm: "Like Hemingway, she began at the top of her form; her fiction never got better than The Company She Keeps"; Saul Bellow, disparaging but affectionate: "You would never be bored in her company, but you could get tired of her antics"; Gore Vidal, concerned about homophobia: "When Mary dismissed Tennessee Williams, it wasn't merely envy. She was deeply anti-fag"; Hannah Arendt, always a loyal supporter: "I just read The Oasis and I must tell you that it was sheer delight"; Isaiah Berlin, rigorous and kind: "She was a great wit, but she was not a great thinker".
Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Elizabeth Bishop, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Diana Trilling and Eileen Simpson are among the many others whose voices are to be found here. These interviews and excerpts from correspondence are the real heart of this biography; they have the immediacy of the contemporary source and the salty flavour of direct speech and intimate letters. Without them, we would be reduced to Kiernan's own account of events, which is often presented with a sort of laboured coyness which is at odds with the forthright tone of most of her sources.
For example, she mentions, almost jokingly, "the plight of the working man " on several occasions when recounting McCarthy's years of involvement with the anti-Stalinist, left-wing Partisan Review during the 1930s. There is also a distinctly girlish tone on sexual matters which chimes strangely with her subject's life and work. However, the book is worth reading for the wealth of contemporary quotes, and for McCarthy's own distinctive voice.
Catriona Crowe is an archivist at the National Archives of Ireland and a board member of the Women's History Project.