A Tale of Two Cultures

By Martha Duffy

BIRDS OF AMERICA by Mary McCarthy. 344 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

It has been seven years since Mary McCarthy published The Group, her witty, intricate chorale of the '30s, which was praised at the cash registers and patronized by the critics as a popular piece of junk. Such a misunderstanding is unlikely to befall her ambitious new book. Birds of America is so deeply plunged in thought that, despite attractive characters and immaculately constructed scenes, it often seems less like a novel than one of the author's admirable essays. The principal thinker, whose mind frames and filters the events, is a 19-year-old American boy named Peter Levi. What he and the author are up to is nothing less than a tenacious examination of certain American ideals and shibboleths--among them human equality and the sacredness of nature.

The reader first meets Peter as he returns after several years' absence to the New England village of Rocky Port to spend the summer with his twice-divorced mother. It is 1964. The village, which seems hard by Stonington, Conn., where Mary McCarthy once lived, is much changed. In vain his mother, who believes in old-fashioned cookery, harangues local grocers for tapioca and fresh fish; she also scours local shops for real jelly glasses. She regards the changes only as part of a dreadful decline in traditional American virtues. What his mother mourns, Peter misses too. But he suspects that her tastes may be more the product of privilege than the frontier spirit. Perhaps the decline of Rocky Port is a corollary of mass-produced equality? One peculiarly American theme of the book lies in the boy's continual worry over the conflict between an educated eye for quality and a blind belief in equality.

In the fall, Peter goes to Paris alone for his junior year. There the author turns him into a familiar figure: the well-meaning American abroad, the fresh, inquiring member of a new generation. The narrative becomes a loose variant of the "road novel," a series of set-piece scenes in which Peter's ideas are tested by experience. In a hilarious initial encounter with retired Kansas schoolteachers on the boat train, Peter learns the depths of his own anti-Americanism. Later a wretched Thanksgiving spent at the home of a U.S. general confronts him with the anguish of American inertia in pursuing un-American aims in Viet Nam. When he retreats to Italy at Christmas to salve his soul among the airy splendors of the Sistine Chapel, his democratic principles are tried again. Everywhere he finds "dark serried groups reminding him of flocks of starlings." "If you love someone," Peter admits, "you want to be alone with them. The same with art. When I'm in the Sistine Chapel, I hate my fellow man."

Maxim from Kant. Peter represents Mary McCarthy's first attempt to write from a male point of view and there are moments, especially those involving sex, when she is not wholly successful. When she is stuck, she tends to rely on a rationalization. For instance, it is one thing to say that Peter is obsessed with fair play, but is it really likely that he would have given up masturbation after his mother left his stepfather, "because she was not even going to parties"?

But if Peter is not totally believable, he is likable, and his concern for his fellow man is real. Along with S.N.C.C. and CORE cards he carries a maxim from his favorite philosopher, Immanuel Kant: "The other is always an end." In other words, never merely use people. Kant's vision of goodness in harmony with nature, a state in which "moral will operates with the force of natural law," is an ideal that Peter does not easily relinquish. He believes that the world is "haunted" by equality because no society has ever given it a chance. "When ever in history equality appeared on the agenda," he writes his mother, "it was exported somewhere else."

Dickensian Lists. High intellectual content is hardly new for Mary McCarthy, and Birds of America is her most cerebral novel so far. The trouble is that her interest in storytelling--always fluctuating--seems to have subsided altogether. There are none of the roller-coaster moral collisions that helped transform earlier intellectual entertainments like A Charmed Life into satisfying fiction. Fortunately her stylistic strengths are well represented: the ability to swirl from a serious thought to its inflated parody in one paragraph, the Dickensian caricatures, the eccentric lists, the echoes of antiquity that freshen the drabbest contemporary commonplaces.

In this era of nonfiction novels, dramatized confessions and other hybrid forms, it may not be so crucial that she has not quite written a novel. Coming right after two volumes of impassioned reporting and polemic on Viet Nam, it is her calmest, most magnanimous, most reflective book.

Mary McCarthy, the cerulean bluestocking. Mary McCarthy, the acid wit. Mary McCarthy, the literary vampire who brings friends and ex-husbands dreaded immortality in her fiction. Very few writers have such formidable personal reputations. It is surprising therefore to find her in a comfortable Left Bank apartment, a smiling, enthusiastic woman with a classic profile, who looks far less than her 58 years.

She moved to Paris ten years ago, after marrying James West, her fourth husband, who is information officer with the OECD. There is a busy social life but, as Mary McCarthy loves to point out, it is impossible for any outsider to know anyone who is 100% French. "They're either Jewish or Italian or they have a Hungarian wife or they're Russian, like Nathalie Sarraute." In conversation she shows a remarkably girlish candor and spontaneity. She does not want to dominate but never hesitates to interrupt a conversation when it is a matter of keeping the record straight.

In some ways, keeping the record straight has been the energizing passion behind her long career. The Group was a time capsule of the '30s. In Birds of America, the decline of both nature and of domestic excellence is at least as important to the author as the philosophical considerations. She brushes aside any thought that the hunt for fresh fish in Rocky Port is comic exaggeration. "It's true!" she cries, indignant. "I didn't exaggerate a thing!" Apparently the exact situation exists in Castine, Me., where the Wests spend summer vacations. Peter's mother, she explains, "connects these concrete things with ethics--as I do. I love cooking, and I think it has an important connection with folkways and tradition."

If Peter's mother is yet another fictional refraction of Mary McCarthy, Peter himself is mainly a product of her imagination. She was writing notes for a long-planned book on equality when suddenly a 19-year-old boy appeared in them. At first he was a nameless Italian student waiting for a communal toilet in Rome; eventually he became Peter Levi.

The author can no more explain this sudden fictional embodiment of an idea than she can account for Peter's age or sex.

But she is sure that this book could not have been written about a girl. "I don't think the problem of general equality presents itself so much to girls. I am not talking about Women's Lib because I'm not talking about selfish equality, equality for you."

Raw Data. She works in a sunny study surrounded by pictures of her brother, Actor Kevin McCarthy, and her baby grandson (whose father is the child of her marriage to Critic Edmund Wilson). The decor also includes huge volumes on the Sistine ceiling and a stuffed bird with florid plumage that Robert Lowell dropped off one day. The desk drawers are crammed with envelopes marked with notations like "Raw data, Peter Levi" or "Variants of Chapter 7, formerly 6." Each chapter draft is lettered, and they often run from A to G. When starting a book she works four hours a day; near the end it is more like ten or twelve, be cause "there is so much behind push ing you forward."

She writes, she says, "to try to find out what one is saying. A wrong word or phrase tells you that what you are saying is not true, but often it is hard to find out why." Like many writers she has a weakness for her latest book, but is a stern judge of her own past work and of contemporary fiction generally.

She found Ada so appalling that she even began wondering if Nabokov's ear lier works, including Pale Fire, which she once praised extravagantly, should be reassessed. On the other hand, she thinks that Norman Mailer may be on to something in his recent reportage.

"It is as if he hit on a new epic form. People like Rocky and Nixon become Pop art subjects because, like the figures in the Iliad, they are already well known.

Then he can bring his sense of conflict, of battle, to bear."

Her own legendary sense of battle, which has in the past fueled literary skirmishes, is currently deployed mostly in her impassioned opposition to the war in Viet Nam. She is philosophic about recent bad reviews of her work, though French reaction to Birds of America will interest her: there are few kind words for the French in the book. She may get the silent treatment. Or she may get a lot of angry letters, as she did after Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, a book that miffed many Catholics. On that occasion, Miss McCarthy corrected her correspondents' errors in grammar and spelling and sent the let ters back without further comment.

-Martha Duffy

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