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Knives, Wounds, Bows

John Bayley, 2 April 1987

Randall Jarrell’s Letters 
edited by Mary Jarrell.
Faber, 540 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 571 13829 2
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The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore 
edited by Patricia Willis.
Faber, 723 pp., £30, January 1987, 0 571 14788 7
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... of wives seem as smooth and effortless as the gears on the sports cars Jarrell so much fancied. Mary Jarrell has done a loyal and meticulous job, her comments on friends and situations are humorously vivid: but she also leaves the surface of the literary life quite undisturbed. There is no trace here of the competitive insight which produced the memorable ...

Still Superior

Mark Greif: Sex and Susan Sontag, 12 February 2009

Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-64 
by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.
Hamish Hamilton, 318 pp., £16.99, January 2009, 978 0 241 14431 2
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... misassigned her to the journal’s theatre column, the post that had been held by an unknown Mary McCarthy in the late 1930s. In the diaries Sontag zaps McCarthy’s ‘low-fashion red+blue print suit’ and ‘clubwoman gossip’. An old story has it that when McCarthy met ...

Diary

Wendy Lesser: Surfing the OED on CD-ROM, 3 October 1996

... from poets and novelists. In 1952, Ernest Hemingway was the first to weigh in with rubberiness, Mary McCarthy provided apolitical, Norman Mailer came up with porno (natch), Stanley Kauffmann – a novelist as well as a film critic – originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the ...

Door Closing!

Mark Ford: Randall Jarrell, 21 October 2010

Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy 
by Randall Jarrell.
Chicago, 277 pp., £10.50, April 2010, 978 0 226 39375 9
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... teaching at Sarah Lawrence college in Bronxville, New York; one of his colleagues there was Mary McCarthy, who used the experience to write her own campus novel, The Groves of Academe (1952). As in his analysis of the army, to which he at one point compares the semi-fictional college of Benton, Jarrell sets out to show how an institution is ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... the closest model for a belletrist sans merci was the critic, novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs ...

Diary

Thomas Jones: Death in Florence, 21 June 2012

... up the microfilm for La Nazione from September and October 1913. In The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy says that the ‘Cronaca di Firenze’ in ‘that excellent morning newspaper’ is a ‘daily chronicle of disasters to foreigners’. McCarthy was writing in the 1950s, but there was no reason to think the ...

Spells of Levitation

Lorna Sage: Deborah Eisenberg, 3 September 1998

All around Atlantis 
by Deborah Eisenberg.
Granta, 232 pp., £8.99, March 1998, 1 86207 161 6
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... removes, and meanwhile the war trickles out into the mud. Rob is rather like the student in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America, whose formative experience (this was in postwar Europe) was cleaning the shit out of the shared lavatory in his Paris lodgings. The wider resonances of stories like this one are fleeting and unstated – and it’s perhaps ...

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... apparatus is probably beyond the capabilities of psychiatric case study. Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy might have had a better shot at evoking what makes Rudy tick, much as Mailer examined the biomechanics of the ‘New Nixon’ in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and McCarthy taxonomised the cast of Watergate ...

Short is sharp

John Sutherland, 3 February 1983

Firebird 2 
edited by T.J. Binding.
Penguin, 284 pp., £2.95, January 1983, 0 14 006337 4
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Bech is Back 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 195 pp., £6.95, January 1983, 0 233 97512 8
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The Pangs of Love 
by Jane Gardam.
Hamish Hamilton, 156 pp., £7.50, February 1983, 0 241 10942 6
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The Man Who Sold Prayers 
by Margaret Creal.
Dent, 198 pp., £7.95, January 1983, 9780460045926
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Happy as a Dead Cat 
by Jill Miller.
Women’s Press, 120 pp., £2.50, January 1983, 9780704338982
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... and given a feminist slant), is the weakest offering in an otherwise consistently good collection. Mary McCarthy, whose name somewhat overawes that of the author on the dust-jacket, evidently finds Margaret Creal ‘delightfully wicked’. Pleasing as her stories are, ‘wicked’ is pitching it rather high. The title story has a Canadian minister lose ...

Amor vincit Vinnie

Marilyn Butler, 21 February 1985

Foreign Affairs 
by Alison Lurie.
Joseph, 291 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 0 7181 2516 9
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... dwarf railway engineer’, and, more disturbing to Vinnie, the pubescent Camden Town schoolgirl Mary Mahoney, a punk goblin who demands payment before she will recite her obscene playground rhymes. Not only is this variety of tone a relief: it operates cunningly as the objective correlative of the psychic drama inside Vinnie Miner-Minor’s head, as she ...

Liquored-Up

Stefan Collini: Edmund Wilson, 17 November 2005

Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature 
by Lewis Dabney.
Farrar, Straus, 642 pp., £35, August 2005, 0 374 11312 2
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... in his own mid-forties, in debt and with no prospect of a regular income; his third marriage (to Mary McCarthy) was becoming bumpy; and his country was heavily committed to a war he opposed. It is particularly interesting to learn from Dabney that ‘Wilson sometimes dreamed of an organ of American literature like the Nouvelle Revue française,’ and ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
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The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
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... once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout Presbyterian who believed that to get married was ‘sort of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas ...

Seven Days

R.W. Johnson, 4 July 1985

The Pick of Paul Johnson: An Anthology 
Harrap, 277 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 245 54246 9Show More
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... of the bright young New Dealers from the American Ivy League campuses so tellingly depicted by Mary McCarthy in The Group. For these young people, the best and brightest of their day, the path towards modernity, social justice, and rationally-administered change, led unequivocally towards the Left, whose sweeping rise to power meant that one could ...

How Dare He?

Jenny Turner: Geoff Dyer, 11 June 2009

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi 
by Geoff Dyer.
Canongate, 295 pp., £12.99, April 2009, 978 1 84767 270 4
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... was no real Venice: the real Venice was – and had always been – the Venice of postcards.’ On Mary McCarthy on Venice: ‘Except she’d taken it a step further and said that the thing about Venice was that it was impossible to say anything about Venice that had not been said before, “including this statement”.’ The work of Gilbert and George ...

Stifled Truth

Wyatt Mason: Tobias Wolff and fictions of the self, 5 February 2004

Old School 
by Tobias Wolff.
Bloomsbury, 195 pp., £12.99, February 2004, 0 7475 6948 7
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... formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of its reality. This is not to say that the stories Wolff selected were not interesting stories. Rather, it became abundantly clear that he had very narrow ...

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