Reading Mary Plain in the Penny Press!

The July issue of Vanity Fair has many standard features that are depressing. First and most noticeably, there’s the cover story-hand job common to most glossy magazines; in this case it’s a ‘profile’ of Hollywood’s current top box office Everyman, Channing Tatum, whose he-man pouting on the cover over the banner reading “Channing Tatum: An Action Star Who Can Act!” The banner might be true, but if Tatum can act it hasn’t yet been caught on film, and probably the piece’s talented author Rich Cohen knows that and was under orders to produce a standard-issue bro-file fawning all over Tatum in supposedly ‘up front’ ways that are nevertheless carefully choreographed to conceal everything the chunk of meat’s management wants concealed (Cohen makes no mention of Tatum’s tobacco habit, for instance, nor does he even lightly allude to the fact that Tatum isn’t exactly brightest warbler in the aviary).

The depressing features extend well beyond the cover, of course. There’s a culture-clash/French-bashing article by James Wolcott that reads like it was assembled from a kit and depresses in exact proportion to how talented Wolcott used to be; there’s yet another fawning puff piece, this one on Pippa Middleton’s love of tennis. Ingrid Sischy’s long profile of the odious John Galliano at least works in some uplift amidst its own depression: true, Galliano is a toxic, self-aggrandizing former pretty-boy piece of pastry who was a waste of protoplasm even before he exiled himself from civilized society with The Anti-Semitic Outburst Heard Round the World, but in compensation the reader gets to spend some time in the wonderful presence of Sischy’s writing, which is always a treat. Likewise Michael Joseph Gross’ long article on the cyber-war currently being waged between the U.S. and Iran, which was upliftingly well-written but depressing as all get-out to read.

But no issue of Vanity Fair ever entirely disappoints (not since Graydon Carter took over, much as I begrudge to admit it), and this one has a true gem underneath all the depressing mud: Laura Jacobs has an absolute corker of a piece about Mary McCarthy’s blockbuster 1963 novel The Group and the shockwaves it set off, both in the literary world and among McCarthy’s Vassar classmates.

Although even in this piece, there were plenty of slightly depressing elements. True, Jacobs can be wonderful about McCarthy’s prose:

And her memoirs, well, one thinks of brutal honesty dressed in beautiful scansion, Latinate sentences of classical balance and offhand wit in which nothing is sacred and no one is spared, not even the author herself. There was never anything “ladylike” about Mary McCarthy’s writing. She struck fear into the hearts of her male colleagues, many of whom she took to bed without trembling or pearls. For aspiring female writers, she remains totemic.

But I don’t agree with the weird reduction in that penultimate line, that oddly sexist equating of sexual predation with literary fearlessness – it makes a troubling lead-in to the following line, where you’re left wondering just which of McCarty’s traits these female writers are aspiring to (not that it matters in this case, since no aspiring female writer under the age of 35 has even heard of Mary McCarthy, let alone read her)(one of the sharpest young female writers I know, for instance, would scorn the very idea of reading somebody who’s actually had the bad grace to be dead – if the ink isn’t still wet on your latest chapbook, you might as well be one with Nineveh and Tyre).

Likewise troubling is the bit where Jacobs relates some of the withering critical responses to The Group and then blandly agrees with them. She quotes Robert Lowell: “No one in the know likes the book.” And she quotes Dwight Macdonald: “Mary tried for something very big but didn’t have the creative force to weld it all together.”

To which Jacobs nods, “All true, and all beside the point,” even though it’s not true, nor is it true that the book’s “plot was almost nonexistent and its emotional hold next to nil.”  And worst of all is the piece’s resort to psychobabble in defense of a flawed assumption:

Novelist lift material from life because they must. First novels are invariably autobiographical, which is why second novels are so difficult: the writer needs to recede and let the characters create themselves. McCarthy never learned to back off and loosen her grip. Maybe she couldn’t. She’d lost so much so young.

Or, alternately, there’s the faint possibility that Mary McCarthy knew what she was doing, that she wasn’t just some helpless fawn banging her head against the iron cage of her Freudian childhood hangups – that, ultimate heresy, she might have understood more about what was happening in her own fiction than virtually all of her critics, then or, apparently, now. It was McCarthy’s best friend Elizabeth Hardwick who once said, “When it comes to the written word, I wouldn’t bet against Mary.” Maybe Jacobs was emboldened by the fact that Hardwick herself nevertheless frequently did bet against her friend.

But then, Hardwick didn’t write The Group