Reflections Occasional Prose

By Stefan Kanfer

"I'm not sure she isn't the woman Stendhal," wrote Edmund Wilson back in 1941, when his young wife began her first book. Some 40 years, 20 volumes and two husbands later, the evidence is in. Mary McCarthy, 72, has her own wise and distinctive voice, but the cool, analytical approach to art, sex and politics inescapably suggests the 19th century Frenchman.

In Occasional Prose, fugitive pieces range from reportage to literary criticism to the comparative values of wood ash, manure and seaweed in the garden. All of the works are reminiscent of, in Stendhal's memorable phrase, "a mirror walking along a main road." McCarthy's reflections begin with a recollection of her colleague Philip Rahv, longtime editor of Partisan Review. Thousands of words have been spent discussing the unrepentant old radical; this obituary captures him in three sentences: "He never learned to swim . . . He would immerse his body in the alien element but declined or perhaps feared to move with it. His resistance to swimming with the tide, his mistrust of currents, were his strength."

Sudden illuminations occur throughout the collection. In London, an anti-Viet Nam protest is "something like a medieval carnival in a modern setting, with everybody changing places, the fool becoming king for a day . . . the police merging with the populace and even putting on false beards. But no more than a carnival did it 'solve' anything." Vladimir Nabokov, she notes, treats the Russian language "as a national treasure the usurper Bolsheviks appropriated from him, to turn over to the rabble." She ponders the absence of important fiction in prewar Germany: "Common sense tells you the way things are, rather than the way your covetous ego or prehensile will would like them to be. And the sparsity of novels, the great carriers of the reality principle, may help to explain German defenselessness in the face of National Socialism."

In the past, McCarthy's pugnacity sometimes led her to be labeled Mary Mary Quite Contrary, and she still seems to delight in offering a chair for her subject, merely to yank it away at the appropriate moment. In her lecture "Living with Beautiful Things," she discusses collections of great art, then decides, "By contrast to the ear, the eye is a jealous, concupiscent organ, and some idea of ownership or exclusion enters into our relation with visual beauty." From there it is a quick step to the conclusion, "Quite poisonous people, on the whole, are attracted by the visual arts and can become very knowledgeable about them. This is much less true of literature . . . A bookish man will be an omnivorous reader, obviously, but he will not be greedy: by consuming more reading matter than is customary he does not deprive anyone else of his share . . . The same could be said of music."

Let home gardeners pore over seed catalogs and boast of homegrown salads; she knows that "Nature, far from being on your side, is actively against you, attacking with bugs, molds, rot, cankers, neighboring dogs, raccoons, skunks, porcupines, drought, torrential rains, 'black' frosts, snow heaves, winter- kill. And I cannot think that the satisfaction derived is in the results, however beautiful or tasty . . . The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable."

Although Occasional Prose ranges back to 1968, none of it is dated, and little seems forced by headlines. McCarthy writes, therefore she is, and she is everywhere. In the course of a dissertation on cooking, she quotes a parody of Goethe's Werther: "Charlotte, having seen his body/ Borne before her on a shutter,/ Like a well-conducted person,/ Went on cutting bread and butter." Charlotte was a lady after the author's art. Let violence and fatuities pass in review; the well-conducted Mary McCarthy will watch and then slice them into appropriate pieces. Books and events have always been her bread and butter.