Writing on the Wall (28 page)

Curiously enough, landscape painting here shows a development similar to that of the novel. Once the crowds of human figures were subtracted from it—reapers, skaters, shepherds, cottagers, huntsmen, and dogs—the landscape became melancholy and almost saturnine, the more so if such man-made natural facts as watermills, bridges, haystacks, wagons, huts were subtracted too. Without these punctuation marks, aids to composition and indicators of scale, the painter, alone with Nature, confronted an incomprehensible abstraction. This has worked both ways: contemporary non-figurative painting, when it does not base itself on geometry, tends to be “read” as landscape.

Any work of literature in which Nature is deployed as a force—
War and Peace, I Promessi Sposi, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick,
the novels of Hardy, Conrad, Zola,
The Wild Palms, Doctor Zhivago
—is strangely twofold, at once a dark epic and an idyll. They are cosmic myths, sometimes quite frightening ones. And like cosmic myths, they tend to have a standard plot. Forces are loose in the world—war, drink, disease, monomania, sexual passion—which behave like floods or tornadoes. The “senseless” apparition of Napoleon in Russia is very like the apparition of the Imperial army in
I Promessi Sposi. “Passano i cavalli Wolkenstein, passano i fanti di M’erode, passano i cavalli di Anhalt...passa Furstenburg...”
They enter the peaceful Milanese, with its cottages housing spinners plying their useful trade; they ravage it and they leave it. Without rhyme or reason. With them comes the plague, which rages and then subsides. The plague is a symbol of them, and they of the plague. Nobody can foresee when the impetus of either will spend itself, as with one of Hardy’s “twisters”: “The President of the Immortals...had ended his sport with Tess.” Those dreadful visitants from the Germanic lands are viewed by the country people as a periodic natural scourge, and yet the havoc they wreak, the crimes they commit are felt to be “against Nature,” though rape and plunder are just as natural to their time-honored profession as buboes are to the pest. The industrious spinners of the region are simply another and weaker species, like the solitary weavers of English fiction—poor crazed Silas Marner at his toil is likened to a spider. The indigenous great and strong, personified in the
Innominato
(the Nameless One), are another traditional natural element preying on the humble. When this operatic
daimon
finally desists, having seen the light—Lucia—it is as though an insensate whirlwind had been calmed and redirected by a spirit.

The
Innominato
has something in common with Captain Ahab, who has pitted his destructive will not just against the White Whale but against the ship’s community, for which whaling is work or labor—the point of man’s normal interaction with Nature and in which each “hand” has its assigned part. Ahab’s sin, like that of the Ancient Mariner, is an economic crime: the wilful part endangering the whole by a deed of
personal
violence against one of God’s creatures.

In the novels of Zola, economics is itself a superhuman force. A human being or family or social group is slowly consumed by agriculture, coal-mining, the theatre, alcohol (the workman’s demon), by the sex market, by art
(L’Oeuvre),
by speculation
(La Curée),
or simply by a mania for shopping
(Au Bonheur des Dames).
Many of these subjects seem remote from natural scenes of the sort found in earlier authors, yet Zola is the only Naturalist to have a real conception of Nature. What happens to his characters is a sort of rich decomposition, which illustrates not only the modern waste of human resources but also their fertility. In his vision, even a department store has organic life, like that of a voraciously feeding plant, stealing the nourishment and light of its small neighbors of the ribbon and drygoods business. All the institutions described by Zola are heavy feeders—an idea also found in Dickens, though with less precise knowledge of their habits.

Hunger and its perversion, greed
(Le Ventre de Paris),
together with work, the means of satisfying their demands, are Zola’s great themes. He is at his best with poor working people. His passion for documentation allowed him to descend without impiety to the underworld of labor, where his lyricism discovered the sources of primal energy—not Virtue, but Nature with her sleeves rolled up. One of the most lyrical passages of nineteenth-century fiction is the scene in
L’Assommoir
of the quarrel in the laundry, where half-naked washerwomen, like strong goddesses, pink and damp, fight with each other in a mist of steam and a Cytherean foam of soapsuds. In the same book, Gervaise’s wedding lunch is an epic of eating, a banquet of spiteful and inebriate gods and satyrs, which ends with somebody’s throwing the apple of discord. In
Germinal,
the mine-shaft where pit-ponies labor condemned for life to eternal darkness is certainly the bottom of hell but it is also Vulcan’s forge. Zola’s half-medical interest in genealogy is Homeric; he was writing a modern theogony containing, as happened with the Olympians, many misalliances. The idea of an interrelated primal novelistic stock, the children of Kronos, reappears in Faulkner and is suggested in Tess’s connection with the ancient Durbervilles. At the same time, Zola’s mythic force is connected with his pictorial faculty; his scenes compose into pictures, which often recall the Impressionist painters—the boulevards of Pissarro—as well as Degas’ gas-lit world. As happened with those painters and somewhat differently with Cezanne, whose friend he was (it used to be thought that
L’Oeuvre
was based on Cezanne’s “failure”), his sense of light and weather irradiates the most ordinary and humble material. Naturalism without Nature is simply depressing.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution on innocent natural life were apparent to writers, as I have indicated, almost from the beginning. What was not so noticeable was that, owing to the population shift to the cities, farms and isolated cottages were reverting to Nature in the other sense—burdock, brambles, sheer vegetation. The classic
rus
came under double attack. This trend, which has continued right up to the present time, makes nonsense of our old sense of a benign and ordered harmony in which the human species is inserted. It is not only a question of polluting the little unpretending rill but of the encroachment of a new sort of wilderness on the human construct. In the actual countryside, as opposed to the suburbs, there are probably more untrodden ways than there were in Wordsworth’s time—abandoned logging trails, overgrown paths, derelict farms, orchards, and pastures.

Well-meaning efforts to save the scenery from real-estate developers and oil refineries, to create wild-life preserves and national park areas (strictly regulated and policed by rangers) do not and cannot re-establish Nature in her natural place. Modern moves to conserve a patrimony of mountains, gorges, rocky promontories, unspoiled beaches, are like moves to save stage scenery—prop trees and painted flats. It was a Romantic heresy to worship Nature in its elemental majesty, far from the vulgar herd, and to identify the poet with the soaring skylark, on the one hand or shrinking celandine on the other. To the extent that Nature has to be defended from man (with the inevitable recourse to police power), instead of being intrinsic to his species-existence, it is simply a backdrop, a photogenic setting, and has nothing to say, one way or another, in determining values or revealing truth. Indeed, the notion, still harbored by every reactionary heart, including my own, that Nature is itself a value, has become subject to opinion, like any other matter of taste, as is shown by the fact that nobody will give his life to defend Yosemite or the Appalachian Trail. At most a small contribution, a bequest, or a letter to the newspapers. This proves that Nature is no longer the human home.

It cannot be a coincidence that modern physics, by interfering with Nature, has for the first time posed a threat to the species and perhaps to most other forms of organic life on earth. And here is another “coincidence”: the scientific development leading to nuclear fission and then rapidly to fusion is presented as—and maybe really was—a logical process beyond the power of the human will to arrest, in short as possessing resistless qualities assigned to natural phenomena such as hurricanes. In fact it seems that hurricanes can now be “salted” and epidemic disease perhaps brought under control, whereas technical advance is a force “outside” man and “bigger” than the brains that conceive it. Technology, originally associated with the civilizing arts of building and weaving, has replaced Nature as the Number One opponent of human society. And technology too has its two faces, its “good” and its bad—good in quotation marks because the benignant side of modern technology (“Atoms for Peace”), unlike that of sunlight or rain, is not yet demonstrable.

The untoward, uncanny appearance of such a pseudonatural sovereign force on the human scene was noted by Zola and by Hardy—the two nineteenth-century authors who connected the work-process with the laboring of Mother Earth. Take the description in
Tess
(which would be omitted in a modern “shortened version”) of the new mechanical reaper: two broad arms of painted wood forming a revolving Maltese cross and appearing in the field at sunrise like a second Phoebus with a “look of having been dipped in liquid fire.” Or in the same novel the description of the new itinerant steam-thresher and the engine-man with a heap of coals by his side: “a dark motionless being, a sooty embodiment of tallness...a creature from Tophet...in the agricultural world but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun.” The ousting of traditional hand tools by usurping machinery (“the engine which was to act as the
primum mobile
of this little world”) coincide with the depopulation and dehumanization of landscape, and the author wrapped in contemplation of solitary Nature—the encroaching heath-was in fact saying a last farewell to the pantheistic illusions that fevered Wordsworth’s brain in the Simplon Pass, where rocks, crags, raving streams, clouds, and so on “were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity...” As for the poetic effusion itself, far from being an utterance of the Universal Soul, it was coming to be seen as the product of a rather widely distributed sub-species of humanity possessing a gland like the silk-exuding one in spiders that makes them spin webs.

September, 1969

A Biography of Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963
New York Times
bestseller
The Group
.

McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and
How I Grew
(1987).

A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in
The Group
. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the
Partisan Review
circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and the
New York Review of Books
.

In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled
The Company She Keeps
(1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book,
The Oasis
, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the
Partisan Review
intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine
Horizon
’s fiction contest in 1949.

Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the
New Yorker
, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College.
A Charmed Life
(1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod.
The Groves of Academe
(1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel
Pictures from an Institution
(1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.

In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy,
Venice Observed
(1956) and
The Stones of Florence
(1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.