Customer Reviews

Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy And Her World

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Coming of age in the sixties, no women appealed to me more than Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, both of whom I read, listened to, and met. Arendt's was always the mind I wanted to emulate, a mentor, and my mind was putty in her words. But Mary McCarthy was like a flame, and we were her moths. She raged against the Vietnam war in ways much less convincing than Bernard Fall or even I.F. Stone, but with an eloquent, almost treasonous passion, a self-righteousness that one could not ignore.

I did not know, until I read this biography, and then Brightman's edition of their correspondence, that they were the closest of friends. Biography which reaches in and reveals the essence of the person in all her complexity is well nigh impossible unless you are a Boswell to Johnson or a Craft to Stravinsky. Carol Brightman has taken her brilliant intellect and matched Mary McCarthy's (and Boswell's) in this tour de force, certainly one of the finest biographies written anywhere, anytime. McCarthy obliges Brightman with all possible source material. In her fiction, her essays, her autobiographical musings, her interviews, Mary McCarthy revealed all. She wrote everything, about everything, about herself in many ways. In her relationship with one of her husbands, for example, another great intellectual skywriter, Edmund Wilson, you see all of her, her self-doubts and climbing of the New York intellectual social ladder, her sexuality and coldness, her tenderness and betrayal, her passion and conformity, in short, her humanity. Caught in her own many expressions of fantasy and fact by a mind that sees all connections, McCarthy is peeled like an onion by Brightman for all to see. We love her, we are pained by her vanity and ambition, we are fascinated by her journey, overwhelmed by her intellect and ultimately disappointed by her failure to move as deeply as her gifts could have taken her, so caught up is she in being an intellectual peacock. Brightman uses this material with such force that the biography is riveting, a book impossible to close. Certainly it is one of the greatest pieces of non-fiction and the best biography I have ever read.

What a book! What a life! I've always been fascinated by Mary McCarthy, and have read much of her work. This biography enhances McCarthy's work by highlighting specific passages and relating them to McCarthy's life, which shows a true commitment not just to McCarthy, the person, but to McCarthy, the artist. The text is well-written but also objective and filled with intricate details that truly illuminate the author's subject. If only all biographies could read this way: engaging, astute, insightful, and smart. Bravo!

I bought this book because it was the selection in a monthly reading group for which I belong. I also bought it because I am a huge fan of Mary McCarthy and her straight-forward, no-apologies style of writing. However, I was deeply disappointed in this book.

To be honest, I never got past the first chapter. I just couldn't. Carol Brightman may be a brilliant biographer according to some, but to me she is akin to a Literature Professor with far too much time on her hands. She attempts to intellectualize a woman who lived by one credo: honesty in all things, no matter how ugly it is. Brightman uses heavy language and scholarly processes that bog the reader down and make it impossible to love a brilliant woman like Mary McCarthy.

If you want to know about Mary McCarthy skip this biography and instead, go read one of Mary's many books and enjoy.