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Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938: Mary McCarthy's Early Years in Literary New York – Reviewer, Activist, Wife
Mary McCarthy vividly recalls her early years in New York before she began writing novels and stories. At that time, she wrote reviews for the Nation and the New Republic , was active in the American Communist Party, and was married to activist actor/playwright Harold Johnsrud. Foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick.
144 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1992
About the author
Mary McCarthy
130 books309 followersPeople note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels
The Groves of Academe
(1952) and
The Group
(1963).
McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933. McCarthy moved to city of New York and incisively wrote as a known contributor to publications such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), initiated her ascent to the most celebrated writers of her generation; the publication of her autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in 1957 bolstered this reputation.
This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel The Group , the New York Times bestseller in 1963.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McC...
McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933. McCarthy moved to city of New York and incisively wrote as a known contributor to publications such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), initiated her ascent to the most celebrated writers of her generation; the publication of her autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in 1957 bolstered this reputation.
This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel The Group , the New York Times bestseller in 1963.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McC...
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 26, 2017
"Well. As an English writer said to me, quoting Orwell, an autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good."
February 25, 2010
I know nothing about the author and randomly got this because it sounded so pretentious I couldn't pass it up. For that I recommend it! She was in with the tippy top of "intellectuals," who come off as racist, homophobic, self-righteous and classist. Everyone was quibbling about what kind of communist they were and how the Trotskyites had all the hotties. She keeps saying "oh I described this in detail in one of my books, which I'll now quote" and talks about all the guys she "made love" with, including a random guy from Philadelphia she met on the subway. The best part was her completely humanizing relationship with Philip Rahv. So basically, there are like 10 very good pages, and the rest is a pretty hilarious description of quibbling ("I had just converted to Stalinism") and a boring list of people you've never heard of that she had dinner with. Also, New York has been the same forever. Being in your twenties has been the same forever. The end.
May 5, 2016
It shocked me that in the 30's a woman's voice could sound so modern and straight forward. I'd never heard of Mary Mcarthy before I found her memoirs in a little used bookstore but after reading this, I definitely wish that I did.
July 8, 2020
(FROM MY BLOG) I guess my first literary disappointment -- aside from wondering whether We Come and Go offered the same rich character development as did the original, We Look and See -- was with the Oz books.
Like most kids, at least in my generation, I loved The Wizard of Oz. I soon learned that the author had written a whole list of Oz sequels. In response to my pleading and demands, my folks over the birthdays and Christmases of the next year or so, gave me The Scarecrow of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Tik-Tok of Oz. What a let-down. It wasn't just that they weren't as good as the original. They were essentially boring.
The latest -- of my many similar disillusionments with sequels -- has been Mary McCarthy's memoir, Intellectual Memoirs, New York, 1936-1938 (published posthumously, 1992).
Why did I read it? In 2015, I wrote some comments on this blog about McCarthy's earlier memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1972), describing her life from earliest memories up until her graduation from a girl's prep school in Tacoma. It was a favorable review. I read the book again last month, and liked it even more. I asked myself the dread question that I never ask after reading a work of fiction -- "but what happened next?"
Mary McCarthy actually wrote, at age 75, the first volume of her autobiography, How I Grew (1987), covering her life between the ages 13 to 21. Maybe I should have read this book first, but I didn't. She had already described her life through age 17 in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I wanted to leap ahead. Intellectual Memoirs, the second volume, begins in 1936, three years after McCarthy had graduated from Vassar.
Long before I first read Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, I had read two wonderful works of hers --The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed -- each of which combined a history of an Italian city with a description and analysis of the art that city had given to the world. They are jewels of that particular form of writing. I had also read Birds of America, a whimsical novel about a teenage boy and his mother, a mother who -- it appears -- had certain traits in common with Mary McCarthy herself. I thought -- and think -- that it was a well written and very enjoyable piece of fiction. Based on these prior readings, I was anticipating something exciting in Intellectual Memoirs.
And the book isn't terrible. It's just not what I anticipated.
Intellectual Memoirs is full of interesting and not so interesting facts. I was reading the musings of a 77-year-old woman, a woman who had led an eventful life and who now felt that every detail of that life was fascinating and worth preserving for posterity. Thus on one page we read of her conversations with famous people whose names still resonate today; on the next, we read all the details of the construction and decoration of the small apartment in which she was living in 1936.
And the book rambles. It needed editing; maybe McCarthy died before she had revised it. It reads as though she had mused over her memories into a dictation machine, and allowed someone else to type her musings up, unedited. She will describe an event, and then a few sentences later recall another fact that changes her just-stated interpretation of the event. Instead of going back and correcting the error, she admits that she was probably mistaken, or isn't sure which memory is correct, and continues charging forward. This brilliant woman sounds like your elderly relative reminiscing about experiences good and bad out of her past, trying to make sense out of it all, and getting a bit befuddled as she does so.
That said, the book has its interesting aspects, especially, I imagine, for historians and for English thesis writers who seek to find the source of her novels in the events of her life. In the period 1936 to 1938, she was living in New York, immersed -- so far as possible for a girl just out of college -- in the intellectual life of that time. She viewed everyone she knew as belonging to one of two classes -- either Stalinists or Trotskyists. The USSR still was a bright beacon of modernity and hope for persons of her class, although the Moscow show trials were already causing doubts and defections, and were increasing hostility between the supporters of Stalin and those of Trotsky.
By age 24, the refined and somewhat ethereal girl of the girlhood Memories had become considerably more casual in her relationships with men. She, of course, married four times during her life, but as with an Ottoman sultan, those four marriages were only the tip of the iceberg. She admits that she found it almost impossible to live without being in a current relationship. She goes through a period of several months without a "date" early in the book, and finds eating in an inexpensive restaurant alone with a book to be the ultimate in humiliation. As she became more immersed in New York intellectual society, she happily met plenty of men. She admits that she rarely met a man without going to bed with him at least once.
I guess I'd call the book "good of kind." If you really want to dig in to Mary McCarthy's life -- to learn how her one bedroom apartment in the West Village had "eleven sides," and had a bathroom with a window through which you could peer out at the sky while bathing -- then this work is a must. Otherwise -- well, it's not long and it's a fast read.
Like most kids, at least in my generation, I loved The Wizard of Oz. I soon learned that the author had written a whole list of Oz sequels. In response to my pleading and demands, my folks over the birthdays and Christmases of the next year or so, gave me The Scarecrow of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Tik-Tok of Oz. What a let-down. It wasn't just that they weren't as good as the original. They were essentially boring.
The latest -- of my many similar disillusionments with sequels -- has been Mary McCarthy's memoir, Intellectual Memoirs, New York, 1936-1938 (published posthumously, 1992).
Why did I read it? In 2015, I wrote some comments on this blog about McCarthy's earlier memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1972), describing her life from earliest memories up until her graduation from a girl's prep school in Tacoma. It was a favorable review. I read the book again last month, and liked it even more. I asked myself the dread question that I never ask after reading a work of fiction -- "but what happened next?"
Mary McCarthy actually wrote, at age 75, the first volume of her autobiography, How I Grew (1987), covering her life between the ages 13 to 21. Maybe I should have read this book first, but I didn't. She had already described her life through age 17 in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I wanted to leap ahead. Intellectual Memoirs, the second volume, begins in 1936, three years after McCarthy had graduated from Vassar.
Long before I first read Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, I had read two wonderful works of hers --The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed -- each of which combined a history of an Italian city with a description and analysis of the art that city had given to the world. They are jewels of that particular form of writing. I had also read Birds of America, a whimsical novel about a teenage boy and his mother, a mother who -- it appears -- had certain traits in common with Mary McCarthy herself. I thought -- and think -- that it was a well written and very enjoyable piece of fiction. Based on these prior readings, I was anticipating something exciting in Intellectual Memoirs.
And the book isn't terrible. It's just not what I anticipated.
Intellectual Memoirs is full of interesting and not so interesting facts. I was reading the musings of a 77-year-old woman, a woman who had led an eventful life and who now felt that every detail of that life was fascinating and worth preserving for posterity. Thus on one page we read of her conversations with famous people whose names still resonate today; on the next, we read all the details of the construction and decoration of the small apartment in which she was living in 1936.
And the book rambles. It needed editing; maybe McCarthy died before she had revised it. It reads as though she had mused over her memories into a dictation machine, and allowed someone else to type her musings up, unedited. She will describe an event, and then a few sentences later recall another fact that changes her just-stated interpretation of the event. Instead of going back and correcting the error, she admits that she was probably mistaken, or isn't sure which memory is correct, and continues charging forward. This brilliant woman sounds like your elderly relative reminiscing about experiences good and bad out of her past, trying to make sense out of it all, and getting a bit befuddled as she does so.
That said, the book has its interesting aspects, especially, I imagine, for historians and for English thesis writers who seek to find the source of her novels in the events of her life. In the period 1936 to 1938, she was living in New York, immersed -- so far as possible for a girl just out of college -- in the intellectual life of that time. She viewed everyone she knew as belonging to one of two classes -- either Stalinists or Trotskyists. The USSR still was a bright beacon of modernity and hope for persons of her class, although the Moscow show trials were already causing doubts and defections, and were increasing hostility between the supporters of Stalin and those of Trotsky.
By age 24, the refined and somewhat ethereal girl of the girlhood Memories had become considerably more casual in her relationships with men. She, of course, married four times during her life, but as with an Ottoman sultan, those four marriages were only the tip of the iceberg. She admits that she found it almost impossible to live without being in a current relationship. She goes through a period of several months without a "date" early in the book, and finds eating in an inexpensive restaurant alone with a book to be the ultimate in humiliation. As she became more immersed in New York intellectual society, she happily met plenty of men. She admits that she rarely met a man without going to bed with him at least once.
It was getting rather alarming. I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men.If I had read McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group -- considered scandalous when published in 1963 -- rather than limiting myself to her more rarified and tasteful works, I might have found her life as described in Intellectual Memoirs to be less startling.
I guess I'd call the book "good of kind." If you really want to dig in to Mary McCarthy's life -- to learn how her one bedroom apartment in the West Village had "eleven sides," and had a bathroom with a window through which you could peer out at the sky while bathing -- then this work is a must. Otherwise -- well, it's not long and it's a fast read.
May 29, 2017
These personal reflections about intellectual and amorous pursuits were published posthumously with a Foreword written by her friend Elizabeth Hardwick. As Hardwick describes her: "Intellectual responses are known as opinions and Mary had them and had them. Still she was so little of an ideologue as to be sometimes unsettling in her refusal of tribal reaction — left or right, male or female, that sort of thing."
Hardwick speculates about McCarthy's friendship with the more famous Hannah Arendt:
An example from McCarthy's memoir:
These memoirs from McCarthy's mid-twenties do not wrap up with a neat conclusion or teaching.
Hardwick speculates about McCarthy's friendship with the more famous Hannah Arendt:
"As for Hannah, I think perhaps she saw Mary as a golden American friend, perhaps the best the country could produce, with a bit of our western states in her, a bit of the Roman Catholic, a Latin student, and a sort of New World, blue-stocking salonière like Rachel Varnhagen, about whom Hannah had, in her early years, written a stunning, unexpected book. The friendship of these two women was very moving to observe in its purity of respect and affection. After Hannah's death, Mary's extraordinary efforts to see her friend's unfinished work on questions of traditional philosophy brought to publication, the added labor of estate executor, could only be called sacrificial."
An example from McCarthy's memoir:
"At a party at the Knoxes' I met Harold Loeb, the technocrat and former editor of Broom, and a character in The Sun Also Rises (related also to Loeb of Leopold and Loeb, murderers). Leaning back on a couch while talking to him about Technocracy and having had too much to drink, I lost my balance in the midst of a wild gesture and tipped over onto a sizzling steam radiator. Since he did not have the presence of mind to pull me up, I bear the scars on the back of my neck to this day."
These memoirs from McCarthy's mid-twenties do not wrap up with a neat conclusion or teaching.
March 31, 2010
Mary McCarthy "drunkenly made love" with Edmund Wilson, wrote him some letters, and married him, reader. The day after their wedding, Wilson accuses McCarthy's brothers of being spies for Stalin's secret police. One day into their vows, McCarthy solemnly declares to herself that the "marriage was over."
Such a story exemplifies what this book is largely about--the manner in which actual or perceived communist sympathies colored social life for McCarthy's 1936-38 NYC social circle. This is an important and interesting chapter of American history, but it was frankly hard to relate to a world in which the nuances of Trostkyism or Stalinism could make or break relationships, romantic or otherwise. How did these subtle differences become to important to American intellectuals? The quasi-Scholasticism of their parsing each other's allegiances bores me.
On the positive side, I liked learning, albeit in a gossipy way, about Philip Rahv and Edmund Wilson, and McCarthy's attitude to sexual mores is bracingly progressive.
Such a story exemplifies what this book is largely about--the manner in which actual or perceived communist sympathies colored social life for McCarthy's 1936-38 NYC social circle. This is an important and interesting chapter of American history, but it was frankly hard to relate to a world in which the nuances of Trostkyism or Stalinism could make or break relationships, romantic or otherwise. How did these subtle differences become to important to American intellectuals? The quasi-Scholasticism of their parsing each other's allegiances bores me.
On the positive side, I liked learning, albeit in a gossipy way, about Philip Rahv and Edmund Wilson, and McCarthy's attitude to sexual mores is bracingly progressive.
October 5, 2012
This book offers an insiders view as to the literary scene of rhe prominent writers of their time. Mary was a major literary player In a period of history when there was not respect for women's writings. She lived her life on her own terms, changed the form of literature, shocked the public by her openness about her many liaisons, and the definitely had qualities that were not always admirable. Love her or hate her, she was a major player of her time
July 30, 2007
A swift but informative read; a continuation of McCarthy's How I Grew (parts 2 and 3 of her series of memoirs). She is a confounding character (um, WHY Edmund Wilson?!) and describing her as "promiscuous" is almost an understatement (once, she slept with three different men in 24 hours). Touching, at times; too bad she died before writing about the rest of her life.
February 8, 2016
I'm not actually familiar with most of these people so a great deal was lost on me
February 15, 2022
Pretty sure she's smarter than me.
May 17, 2023
Mary McCarthy's Intellectual Memoirs covers the years 1936 to 1938 in the author's life. As it was written while McCarthy was in her 70s, it represents amazing feats of memory. It shows the author to be fairly promiscuous in her mid-20s, and a bit of a lush at times. Intellectually, the big discussions were between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites. (No one in her circle of friends could be described as outside this particular spectrum.)
This is the first work I have read by this author, but it won't be the last -- God willing.
This is the first work I have read by this author, but it won't be the last -- God willing.
May 24, 2021
This is a very odd book! Mary ran in circles with people who are pretty well known, but they come and go like ghosts in her stream-of-consciousness reminiscences. The period of time here is the thirties in NYC. She mixes insights about her life with very trivial details like what hat she had on and who exactly was at the table or what season it was. This should not be that interesting, yet she kept me reading! I will be interested to see more of her work, both memoir and fiction.
October 19, 2023
"John and I read Malraux’s Man’s Fate, in English, without noticing that it had a Trotskyite slant on the Chinese revolution. We read Céline (I never liked him), and one Sunday afternoon the two of us read The Communist Manifesto aloud—I thought it was very well written. On another Sunday we went to a debate on Freud and/or Marx—surely a Communist affair. More hazily I remember another debate, on the execution of the “White Guards” in Leningrad in 1935; this may have been a Socialist initiative, for the discussion was rancorous. Actually, that mass execution was a foreshadowing of the first Moscow trials in the summer of 1936, which ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev."
December 6, 2016
I remember enjoying McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I don’t think I would have liked it as much if it had been written in the same cynical tone as her Intellectual Memoirs. Although this book covers the years 1936-1938, it turns out it was written at the end of her life, in the late 1980s, when McCarthy was in her seventies; perhaps that explains it. I must say, though, her candor is refreshing. Rarely are authors so willing to expose themselves as hypocritical, insensitive, unkind, dishonest and disloyal to the extent McCarthy is. Perhaps it’s because she intended for these memoirs to be published posthumously, as they were.
Strangely, these so-called “intellectual” memoirs focus primarily on identifying the political orientations of individuals McCarthy met, worked with, and associated with, on describing the jobs she held, and on revealing intimate details of her many love affairs. I was expecting an account of her intellectual development, or a focus on her writing of the era, not quite so much gossip and snarkiness. She is surprisingly candid about her infidelities to various partners, about the inconsistencies of her political loyalties, and about how she became “the ‘Mary McCarthy’ you are now reading.” I would recommend this book only to those with a passionate interest in Mary McCarthy.
Strangely, these so-called “intellectual” memoirs focus primarily on identifying the political orientations of individuals McCarthy met, worked with, and associated with, on describing the jobs she held, and on revealing intimate details of her many love affairs. I was expecting an account of her intellectual development, or a focus on her writing of the era, not quite so much gossip and snarkiness. She is surprisingly candid about her infidelities to various partners, about the inconsistencies of her political loyalties, and about how she became “the ‘Mary McCarthy’ you are now reading.” I would recommend this book only to those with a passionate interest in Mary McCarthy.
June 10, 2024
I enjoyed the brief third volume of Mary McCarthy's memoirs which takes place among a treasure trove of New York City based intellectuals during 1936-1938. McCarthy seems to have known and slept with a whole lot of the in crowd of writers and thinkers that dominated the City during this period. The book was published posthumously and based on its rather abrupt ending I have to think ther was more that MCarthy intended to depict in this very slim volume.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews