Mary McCarthy: Likeness

“As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Writing on the Wall"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

Sport

“Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.”

Mary McCarthy

"My Confession", p. 102
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Wisdom , Communication , Nature , Learning

“When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 6

Pain , Thinking , Memory

“The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.”

Mary McCarthy

"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185. First published in two parts in The Reporter (July 18 and August 1, 1950)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

People , Art , Wealth

“Of all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot: I stopped counting) I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to see Philip Rahv.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

Men

“Judas was not a monster, though his act was monstrous; he was a man, the twelfth part of humanity, and his sin was that he could betray for thirty pieces of silver, like any common informer. Jesus was uncommon, not Judas.”

Mary McCarthy

"The Hue and Cry"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

Parting

“A good deal of education consists of unlearning — the breaking of bad habits, as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 8

Girl , Education , Bad luck , Waiting

“You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 1

Tree , Friendship , History , Marriage

“She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.”

Mary McCarthy book The Group

Polly in Ch. 11
The Group (1963)

Life

“For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved in a tornado.”

Mary McCarthy

"My Confession", pp. 76–77
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Housing

“For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words, modern, secular, experimental, were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation.”

Mary McCarthy book The Groves of Academe

Source: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. VI, p. 383