{"id":110888,"date":"2017-05-18T10:30:17","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T14:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110888"},"modified":"2017-05-22T10:38:54","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T14:38:54","slug":"mary-mccarthy-92nd-street-y","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/18\/mary-mccarthy-92nd-street-y\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary McCarthy at the 92nd Street Y"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mary McCarthy<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201c75 at 75<\/a>,\u201d a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center\u2019s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center\u2019s archive and write a personal response. Here, Chris Kraus reflects on Mary McCarthy\u2019s reading, in November 1963, from her novel <\/em>The Group.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mary McCarthy took the stage of the 92nd Street Y to thunderous applause on a brisk Sunday in November 1963. She was fifty-one and wearing an elegant white dress. \u201cOne thing that gave me the courage to go on with this book, which I was working on since 1952, was reading the first chapter of it out loud here,\u201d she said before she began. \u201cAnd the audience liked it. And I took it up again after this reading I gave that night, for good or ill. So. Uh \u2026 I\u2019m assuming that, uh, most people here have read this book, and I don\u2019t have to explain who the characters are, or what happened before. Is that true? No?\u201d The audience laughs. \u201cIs somebody kidding?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Group<\/em>, McCarthy\u2019s tenth book, had been published in August and almost immediately rose to the top of the best-seller lists. Her depiction of the aspirations and friendships of eight Vassar girls from the class of \u201933 who seek to make their own lives as different as possible<\/em> from those of their mothers was a middlebrow hit. Except for the mysterious Lakey, who escapes the United States for Europe and a lesbian relationship, the girls stumble over the conflicting mores of their generation\u2019s sexual liberation and must navigate the unbridled cruelty of their employers, husbands, and boyfriends; of course they will fail. McCarthy brilliantly captures the anxious, chattering pitch of the women\u2019s conversations and thoughts. Their preoccupations are made even more bitter in contrast to the high-minded concerns they have absorbed from their unmarried Vassar professors. As always, McCarthy treats sex as high comedy. There\u2019s a lot of sex in the book. Never before had a woman attempted such an audacious American comedy of sexual manners.<\/p>\n

Before The Group<\/em>, McCarthy\u2019s work had been almost exclusively read in the hothouse of New York\u2019s feuding leftist intellectual circles. Her relentlessly intelligent, often scathing book and theater reviews were published in the socialist-leaning New Republic<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>, Encounter<\/em>, and The Partisan Review<\/em>, as well as in The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em> and The<\/em> New York Review of Books<\/em>. Rancor over aesthetic and ideological issues was common among that group at the time and was often forgiven; commercial success was not.<\/p>\n