Remembering Mary McCarthy’s Style - NYTimes.com

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Mary McCarthy, the American writer, was known also for her elegant style.

 

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October 19, 2012
A Woman of Intellect and Style
By CELIA McGEE


MARY McCARTHY would have been 100 this year, a milestone commemorated last spring by her alma mater, Vassar College, and again last Tuesday, at the American Library in Paris.


Among those who spoke or sent contributions memorializing the literary rapier whom Time once called “quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced” were the novelist Diane Johnson; Robert B. Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books; a McCarthy biographer, Frances Kiernan; an executor of her literary estate, Margo Viscusi; the author Laura Furman; and a granddaughter, Sophie Wilson.


A small exhibition of Ms. McCarthy’s articles and books accompanied the Paris celebration. Seattle-born and arguably Partisan Review-bred, she spent most of her later years in Paris and donated many articles and books to the library.


Those among us who do not remember our first time with “The Group” (now somehow mixed up with our crush on “Mad Men”), raise a hand.


“Any female critic writing today owes something to her,” said Sarah Weinman, a publishing columnist. “And she’s been held up as comparison for so much big women’s fiction. She was a sharp critic, a great champion of underappreciated writers. She was caustic, and she spoke her mind.”


Ms. McCarthy, who died in 1989 at age 77, also created an aura, trading up from her scruffy image at Vassar to an elegant look all her own.


“If you were to make a movie of Mary McCarthy’s life,” the editor William Abrahams told Ms. Kiernan in the early 1990s, “Grace Kelly could have played the part.”


Could we possibly be having a McCarthy Moment in fashion? This season’s little black cutaway dress from Balenciaga? Or that pretty tie-neck blouse from Lanvin (just look at the author’s portrait-sitting with Cecil Beaton)? She visited both design houses and shopped for leather goods at Mark Cross, cashmere at Brooks Brothers, suits at Bonwit Teller and gloves and scarves at Hermès. All last summer we had espadrilles (hers came from Lanvin); this fall features 1940s-ish cropped jackets, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is grooving on Peter Pan collars.


“She combined sexy and tailored,” Ms. Kiernan said. “It’s cool now.”


Many female writers whom Ms. McCarthy inspired intellectually reflect her style as well. A. M. Homes’s new McCarthy-ish novel, “May We Be Forgiven,” earned her an austere, short-waisted photo straight out of the McCarthy playbook. The cover art of Susanna Moore’s latest, a World War II novel called “The Life of Objects,” elicits a McCarthy double-take: a woman’s photograph from the ’30s, in profile, naturally, hair in a bun.


Mentioning her name evokes not only the extraordinary number of images of the writer published over the years, but “a literary figure, a political figure, an urbane figure, a very witty figure who had honesty and wasn’t shy about expressing her opinions,” said Ronald Patkus, who organized the Vassar show. “It’s time for people to think about the role she played in the early and mid-20th century.”


Claire Messud, a novelist and critic, refers to the intertwining of Ms. McCarthy’s appearance and pointed intellect as a stance inherited from Edith Wharton and “the glamorous Europeans, like Louise de Vilmorin or the Mitfords or Elizabeth Bowen.”


She added, “McCarthy was probably one of the first female intellectuals I was aware of, and there was this sense of the presentation of yourself as not so much distinctive as elegant, of presenting yourself with respect — self-respect was manifest.”


This packs a particular relevance for young female writers today, said Elissa Schappell, a novelist and a founding editor of the literary magazine Tin House.


“The way she looked had the mark of someone who knows herself,” she said. “Like with her inner life and writing: she could be zingy and ruthless but never sloppy. There was a certain precision and candor, very incisive and sharp. I didn’t know she wore designer clothing, but it doesn’t surprise me. There’s always something very clean, thought-out. The look was very curated.”


In “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” Ms. McCarthy wrote: “It was the idea of being noticed that consumed all my attention. The rest, it seemed to me, would come of itself.”


The writer’s likeness was used as cover art for many of her books. Among the photographers were Philippe Halsman, Evelyn Hofer and Mr. Beaton. The cover drawing of the 1955 paperback of “The Company She Keeps” was based on a seminude photograph of the writer from the back, a particular favorite of Edmund Wilson, to whom she was tempestuously married for seven years.


Ms. McCarthy’s husbands (she had four) and affairs were strung like the pearls she wore around her neck. But she refused to call herself the feminist she was in everything but name, dismissing the movement as whiny, greedy and shrill. As evinced by her notorious standoff with Lillian Hellman, she also loved a good fight. Norman Mailer challenged her to a boxing match.


“Women writers are still dealing with that whole thing we were taught since the playground: if you’re smart, you can’t be pretty,” Ms. Schappell said. “Well, of course you can be both, and from Mary McCarthy you get that. Just because I want to be taken as seriously as a man doesn’t mean I have to dress like a man.”


Despite her fear of becoming a “hausfrau,” Ms. McCarthy entertained a lot, and her surroundings were as important to her as her clothes (as they are for her characters). Throughout her fiction, she recycled her Russel Wright cocktail shaker and taste for Scandinavian modern furniture. She took eight suitcases to report on Vietnam.


Alison West, Ms. McCarthy’s stepdaughter (the author’s last husband was the diplomat James West), lives in New York with many of the possessions she inherited from the writer’s later mode: neo-Classical bronzes and furniture, some jewelry, many books.


“I just finished a piece for the centenary on the fact that Mary would read to us, whether it was Howard Pyle’s ‘King Arthur’ or the blue and red guides” for sightseeing, Ms. West said.


“She was a person of exacting standards: she loved beautiful language and very exact grammar,” she added. “She was absolutely individual.”

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The cast of The Group”(1966), clockwise from lower left: Candice Bergen, Shirley Knight, Joanna Pettet, Jessica Walter, Kathleen Widdoes, Mary-Robin Redd, Elizabeth Hartman and Joan Hackett.

Remembering Mary McCarthy’s Style - NYTimes.com




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