Cye

A CHARMED LIFE (313 pp.)--Mary McCarthy--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

Among those puffing their way up the descending escalator of intellectual fashion, many have cause to remember the shrewdly placed elbow and deft umbrella of a comparative shopper in ideas called Mary McCarthy.

In the nylon bluestocking set, she appears to be the most enviable of women. She is still remarkably handsome at 43. She is renowned among her friends both as a wit and a cook. She is currently in Venice, long after the mere tourists have gone, and in Manhattan her husband is shopping for an apartment suitable to her taste. With her latest novel, A Charmed Life, barely on the counters, a new book (about Venice) is already commissioned. She is quite possibly the cleverest writer the U.S. has ever produced.

Out of the Sweater. Mary McCarthy has marked most stages of her life with a book or story or critical essay--not to mention several thousand yards of the brightest conversation ever to come from a pretty woman's lips. Her first book, The Company She Keeps (1942), told of a girl who suffers guilt by association of one kind or another with a Yale man, an art dealer, and, most painfully--because the fellow was no intellectual--in a Pullman compartment with a man in a Brooks Brothers shirt. The Oasis (1949) was a sailor's farewell to the remnants of New York's intellectual Left; it began with the arrival of a bunch of New Utopians, their cars laden "with whisky, cans and contraceptives," and left them at the end without even their illusions. After The Groves of Academe (1952), the U.S. progressive college will never be the same again; in that book Mary McCarthy (who taught at Bard and Sarah Lawrence) posed the dilemma of the liberal president who could not fire an incompetent professor because the fellow had cunningly pretended once to have been a member of the Communist Party.

As she herself has told her own story, she was orphaned at six (both parents died of influenza in 1918), passed around among relatives, and sent to a convent in Seattle. She went East to Vassar (class of 1933), became a Phi Beta Kappa in her senior year, and married successively an actor called Harold Johnsrud (divorce), Edmund Wilson, the novelist-critic (divorce, one son, now 16), and finally Bowden Broadwater, an occasional writer some years her junior.

Mary was far from the average Vassar girl who just wanted to beat Emily to the Post. She set herself apart from both the socially conscious and the "blue-eyed Republican girls" by a romantic Royalism and a devotion to the past. She was a Latinist and knew more about St. Thomas Aquinas than about the contemporary Thomas (Norman) for whom many of the faculty members cast their votes. Outwardly, there was nothing much to set her apart from the conventionally unconventionalVassar girls who, on graduation, shec their pearls and Brooks sweaters anc swarm down the Hudson to arrive, after false start or two, in a marriage suitable for mention in the Alumnae Magazine.

Nothing much, that is, except a passion for just relations between men and society, nouns and verbs.

Into the Parade. She had a near genius for words and sharply whittled chips on both her sturdy Irish shoulders. She die not feel at home among the Irish Catholics in Seattle: there were Protestants and a Jew (a maternal grandmother) in her family. She was no ugly duckling, but seemed to think so. She grew her famous wide smile, which is now, according to a friend, "a sort of tic," but could not charm rich, silly and beautiful convent classmates. They called her "Cye" and it was torture. It must mean something terrible, she thought, and it was not until many years later on a Manhattan street that it occurred to her that it meant "Clever Young Egg."

Mary graduated into the intellectual Manhattan of the '303 when all roads seemed to lead to Moscow. She marched in May Day parades "for fun." As a "romantic desperado . . . like all truly intellectual women" (her own phrase), Mary McCarthy found Trotsky her meat. Trotsky saved her from Stalin; when her Irish logic argued that the Great Heretic should be given a fair shake in the jurisprudence of the revolution, she found herself cold-shouldered by her Stalinist friends with whom she had drunk gin for Republican Spain. She, in turn, has cold-shouldered them ever since.

The Gramophones. Every writer must have a country to call his own; Mary McCarthy's is the country of the little magazine, the off-beat college and the mobile-hung menage.-It is more remorselessly competitive than the business world to which it feels superior. It is a world always at war, and Mary McCarthy's far-from-secret weapon is to write her enemies--and friends--into her books. Despite her demurrers, the game of "spot-the-model" goes on. Experts in this game can tell that Taub in The Oasis is really the editor of a certain highbrow magazine; another highbrow editor (his journal is now defunct) won his McCarthy Purple Heart as Macdougal Macdermott in the same book, but both remain good and gallant friends of their satirist.

The total recall of McCarthy heroines suggests that T. S. Eliot simply did not know the first thing about what lovely women do when they stoop to folly. They do not--in McCarthy books--smooth their hair with automatic hand and put a record on the gramophone. They are the gramophone. They come out of the clinches monologizing as they attempt to rearrange reality in a more comfortable shape, pat the pillows and make a man wish he had curled up instead with a good book. Old-fashioned readers may feel that Author McCarthy is adopting the classic line of the British morale officer detailed to lecture the troops on the perils of venereal disease. "I don't suppose anything

I say will stop you, but I'm here to see that you won't enjoy it."

All Words. A reflective, suffering, tough-minded woman with cadenced self-recriminations occurs in book after book.' A husband cuts his hand: she is too honest to pretend distress, or mask her female contempt for his histrionics. A man behaves in bed like a clumsy ox: perhaps it is her fault. She is spared neither abortions, psychoanalysis, nor "a schoolteacher-on-holiday voice," nor, crudest of all, conversational defeat. Mary McCarthy's books end, like Elizabethan drama, on a composed but corpse-encumbered stage. But hers are paper corpses, and the dead rise to share with their murderer the glamour of her peculiar stage.

Her latest, A Charmed Life, is about several intellectual families in New Leeds, a place which sounds very like Wellfleet,

Mass., where both the then Mrs. Edmund Wilson and the now Mrs. Bowden Broadwater have had houses. Martha announces to her husband: "I love you." The character has just cut his hand, and she has comforted him with a bourbon oldfashioned, "a sign of love" with Martha. But the man is still glum. " 'Sometimes, Martha,' he went on, raising his eyes, 'I think it's all words with you.' Martha's eyes widened. 'That's what He used to say,' she cried--so they usually spoke of her first husband, as a capitalized pronoun." The book's plot hinges on an impromptu seduction, and ends with the heroine's death as she drives happily along with the money in her purse for the abortionist's fee. Author McCarthy denies that the capitalized pronoun belonged to ex-Husband Edmund Wilson. "The character in question," she said, "is a wasteful literary bum, and those words alone make it clear it isn't Edmund Wilson."

And so "Cye" goes on, year after year, being the brightest girl in class. The "Clever Young Egg" that was brooded over by the good kind nuns, hatched at Vassar and grew a set of strongly pinioned flight feathers in Manhattan, may remind her less fortunately feathered friends of a pretty bird of prey, but that is probably no one's fault.

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