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“... apparently, the native American type was awaiting fulfilment in fiction. Take a gangster, wrote Mary McCarthy in an essay called ‘Characters in Fiction’, ‘who was in the slot-machine racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king, sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in-residence or a professor of modern ...”

“... Janet Flanner (New Yorker correspondent from 1925 to 1975), Elizabeth Hardwick’s friend Mary McCarthy, and the Californian novelist and essayist Joan Didion. There is really nothing to compare with it in England, unless one excepts Orwell (who rather resembles Wilson in his analyses of the Depression, of false language and of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”