454
MARY McCARTHY
of 0., the scandals of a clique-the Faubourg St. Germain, of a
city-Dublin or Middlemarch, or of a nation-Dickens's Eng–
land, or of the ports and hiring offices--London or Nantucket,
where news of the high seas is exchanged and a black mark
put against a man's name or a vessel's. Here is another criterion:
if the breath of scandal has not touched it, the book is not a
novel. That is the trouble with the art-novel (most of Virginia
Woolf, for instance); it does not stoop to gossip.
The scandals of a village or a province, the scandals of a
nation or of the high seas feed on facts and breed speculation.
But it is of the essence of a scandal that it be finite, for all its
repercussions and successive enlargements. Indeed, its reper–
cussions are like the echo produced in an enclosed space, a
chambered world. That is why institutions ("closed corpora–
tions") are particularly prone to scandal; they attempt to keep
the news in, contain it, and in doing so they magnify it, and
then, as people say, "the lid is off."
It
is impossible, except for
theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe–
wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled
down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydro–
gen bombs, satellites, and space rockets. Nobody can get them
excited about or even greatly interested in what-will-happen–
next to the world; the plot does not thicken. In the same way,
Hiroshima, despite the well-meant efforts of journalists and
editors, probably caused less stir than the appearance of comets
in the past; the magnitude of the event killed even curiosity.
This
was true, to some extent, of Buchenwald and Auschwitz too.
Yet these "scandals," in the theological sense, of the large
world and the universe have dwarfed the finite scandals of the
village and the province; who cares any more what happens in
Highbury or the Province of
o.?
If
the novelist cares, he blushes
for it; that is, he blushes for his parochialism.
Middlemarch
becomes
Middletown
and
Middletown in Transition,
the haunt
of social scientists, whose factual findings, even in the face of
Auschwitz or a space-satellite, have a certain cachet because
