BOOKS
ANTI -CANT
ON THE CONTRARY: ARTICLES OF BELIEF. 1946-1961 . By Mery
Me
Certhy. Ferrer. Streus end Cudehy. $4.50.
The stock response-"intelligent"-to Miss McCarthy needs
to be refined, at any rate to the degree of "intelligent woman," before
one gets close enough to the truth to start talking about her. Most men
retain a vestige of awe for women who think with "masculine" force;
and in England there is still, for historical reasons, a tendency for women
intellectuals to go in for a sort of mental transvestism, to assume that
such a male activity as thought requires its exponents to behave like men
in other ways. In fact it seems to me an under-rated achievement of
American culture to have eliminated this kind of behavior; where it
persists it tends to falsify any dialogue between people of opposite sex.
Miss McCarthy is terribly quick to spot falsity, and in matters of this
sort attends to detail, including sex. Her piece about the anti-Semitic
colonel in the club car shows this: and in a comment on it she emphasises
truthfully the degree to which a faint undercurrent of sexual adventure,
by contributing to the falseness of the debate, hampered her rational
persuasions at the time, and would ruin the value of her account of
the episode if not made sufficiently explicit. Her "Confession"-a beauti–
fully written, ironically entitled version of her intellectual life in the
Marxist 'thirties-is heavily sexed, not only in its account of the girl at
the Party parties, but in its philosophical argument for
passivity,
for a
view of the world in which you suffer things and problems rather than
control or pose them; a career determined by an unwritten letter, the
future of Russia by a decision to go duck-shooting. This is very un-male.
Having got that across, Miss McCarthy is free to do as she wishes
with her specially toughened intellect, to exploit a sense of relevance
and a directness of method seldom found in male intellectuals, who have
a strong tendency to pose and to exude what Miss McCarthy calls "the
slow drip of cant." Reading her "confession,' and remembering the
dramatic and best-selling documents she is satirising, I found myself
thinking, improbable as it may sound, of the young nun in Firbank's
