Portrait of a Dark Lady

By LANCE MORROW

Mary McCarthy was beautiful when young and sharply handsome later on. She was the "Dark Lady of American Letters," tart tongued, astringently brilliant, a fierce gossip. Edmund Wilson, to whom she was married for a thoroughly horrible seven years, quoted a man who told her, "You're the only girl I ever knew who had the same kind of brains as a man and yet at the same time was perfectly beautiful."

In Seeing Mary Plain (Norton; 939 pages; $35), Frances Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert Lowell and Isaiah Berlin. And of course there is McCarthy's archenemy, Lillian Hellman. In a taped interview with Dick Cavett, first aired in 1980, McCarthy said, with only slight hyperbole, that "every word she writes is is a lie, including and and the." Hellman, the self-mythologizing Stalinist Blackglama legend, sued, but died before the matter came to trial.

McCarthy was a gifted minor writer with a penetrating mind and, for all her coldness, considerable charm. She had the treacherous habit of putting real people (friends, enemies, ex-husbands), thinly disguised, into her fiction--a matter, she said, of baking real plums into an imaginary cake. Her unusual compulsion to tell the truth could also be an instrument of vicious distortion. The technique proved lucrative with The Group, her best-selling 1963 novel of her classmates at Vassar and their subsequent lives.

In describing McCarthy's life, Kiernan interrupts her narrative constantly in order to quote, at length, dozens of witnesses who knew her. The technique represents a gamble; it has produced a monster of nearly a thousand pages. But it works.

Many of those peers had a high opinion of Mary. Janet Flanner ("Genet") called her "the most educated female mind of our time in both America and England." The New Yorker editor William Shawn went so far as to say, "There aren't many people you could mention in connection with Samuel Johnson. But you could mention Mary McCarthy." That's going too far. McCarthy left some good travel writing, interesting memoirs and some biting stories. Her best sustained work was her personality--forceful, witty, sometimes generous, often merciless.