Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938 (Harvest Book) [Paperback]

Mary McCarthy (Author), Elizabeth Hardwick (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Harvest Book | Publication Date: June 4, 1993

Mary McCarthy vividly recalls her early years in New York before she began writing novels and stories. At that time, she wrote reviews for the Nation and the New Republic, was active in the American Communist Party, and was married to activist actor/playwright Harold Johnsrud. Foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By the end of the first paragraph of this brief companion to her memoir How I Grew , McCarthy (1912-1989) has made clear the centers of her young life: love and work. At a May Day parade in New York City, she is a 24-year-old Communist and married woman. Both will change soon: she will become involved with the "fair young man" walking with her who "looked like Fred MacMurray," and she will become a Trotskyite. As in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood , drivenness and a sense of inevitability here possess McCarthy; as her close friend Hardwick ( Sleepless Nights ) writes in the introduction, there was "a certain Jesuitical aspect to her moral life . . . habits, prejudices, moments, even fleeting ones, had to be accounted for, looked at, and written in the ledger." As a young writer, McCarthy produced a prodigious number of reviews for magazines like Partisan Review and the Nation . Her love life was equally active: at one point she "realized . . . that in twenty-foursic hours she had slept with three different men." Yet she believed in marriage, and in the space of the memoir's three years, she wed twice, the latter time to critic Edmund Wilson, 16 years her senior and the man who egged her on to try "imaginative writing." As the memoir moves through discussions of Stalinism and Trotskyism, the Moscow trials, the founding of the Partisan Review --and detailed descriptions of the furniture in her apartments--we watch an important mind forming.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this volume of her memoirs, McCarthy vividly recalls her early years in New York before she began writing novels and stories. At that time, she wrote reviews for the Nation and the New Republic , was active in the American Communist Party, and was married to activist actor/playwright Harold Johnsrud. The writing style is crisp, the recall unflinching; readers of McCarthy's novels and stories will recognize details from her fictional settings. This memoir, which continues the work begun in the first volume of her memoirs, How I Grew ( LJ 4/15/87), was the last work she completed before her death . Novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, a contemporary of McCarthy, wrote the perceptive and charming introduction to this slim volume. This is recommended for libraries with collections emphasizing women's fiction and workers' fiction. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92.
-Denise Johnson, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, Ill.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 4, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156447878
• ISBN-13: 978-0156447874
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,467,799 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Leftward ho!, September 12, 2010

By 

Lauterprof (Chapel Hill, NC, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938 (Hardcover)

The most striking thing about Mary McCarthy's memoirs is the great divide not between Republicans and Democrats or conservatives and liberals, but between Stalinists and Trotskyites! Everyone she knew -- which seems to be about everyone in New York who was writing for magazines in the 1930s -- was either a Communist or a fellow traveler. Joe McCarthy may have had something, although where he in his paranoia saw sinister plots this memoir suggests that it was really all about social jousting, intellectual games, and argument for the sake of argument. As she herself says in her opening paragraph about a "Workers Unite" march, "We were just having fun." Many of her friends had ascended to the faculty at Columbia when I went there twenty years later. No wonder the university had a leftward tilt (and still does, as does most of academia). The glimpse of the 1930s through her eyes puts the unleashed passions of the 1960s into a context I'd never considered before. It may be that the establishment reaction to the foment of the latter times is what fanned the flames into a near-conflagration; the original protagonists may have been mostly "just having fun." See Woodstock, which was hardly a political movement.

Politics aside, Ms. McCarthy's memoir of those years is a finely detailed portrait of a bygone time, when print was all important and opinions were considered, not blurted on a blog.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Wise, July 10, 2007

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A. St. James "books and more books" (Cambridge) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938 (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

In some ways, I feel MacCarthy's writing soars in her memoirs t even higher heights than in her fiction. She paints a wonderfully compelling picture of a time, a place, gender and politics.