Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.