BOOKS
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in
his work, wishes that "he would let her give him the Binet and
some of the personality tests she had tried on the group at Vassar."
"Extend your antennae, girls," they are told by a favorite teacher,
and they do, with a rapturous, idiot self-confidence as the gates of Eden
clang shut behind them. Then, gradually, retraction occurs, the blunting
of a sense-and-sensibility apparatus that was never (to be candid)
absolutely first-class. They decline to their ordinary American fate. I
am reminded of a bleak declaration in a Harvard Class Report some
years ago: "Life, since Cambridge, has been a disappointment." "Vassar
had inspired us with the notion that the wide wide world was our
oyster," Miss McCarty remarks in her essay. Then (next sentence)
"A few years later, a census was taken, and it was discovered that the
average Vassar graduate had two-plus children and was married
to a Republican lawyer."
It
is this sense of anti-climax, of accomoda–
tion to "the long littleness of life" that haunts
The Group
and gives
its often hilarious comedy a depth and pathos it would not otherwise
. have.
Pathos is to be inferred, not encountered face-to-face : the method
of the novel does not allow for its direct representation. The girls
would daim, on the whole, to be happy and successful, and Miss
McCarthy pretends to believe them. Her style is ventriloquial and
colloquial: the author's voice is silent throughout, we are meant to
have no sense of
her
on the page. Instead there is the chirp, twitter,
gasp, and gabble of the group, betraying themselves to us
in
a remorse–
less cliche of speech, thought, and circumstance:
Last winter she had discovered a beauteous young man who
taught English at one of the private schools and who knew a
nifty picnic spot that could be reached for five cents on the
subway: Pelham Bay Park; you took the Lexington Avenue
Express to the end of the line and then got out and walked.
Libby would pack a lunch of cucumber sandwiches, hardboiled
eggs, and big fat strawberries, and they would throw in a
leather volume of poetry to read aloud after they had eaten
and were lying on a steamer blanket in a sheltered spot over–
looking the water. Libby was crazy about the Cavalier poets,
and he doted on the Elizabethans, especially Sidney and Drayton
("Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part-Nay I have
done, you get no more of me ...") . He told Libby she looked
just the way he imagined Penelope Rich (Penelope Devereux
that
was,
the sister of the Earl of Essex), the Stella of Sidney's
"Astrophel and Stella." "Stella" had blond hair and dark
eyes, from which came killing darts, like Libby's. The combina–
tion of brown eyes and gold hair was the Elizabethan
ne plus
