MARY McCARTHY
733
tion ("You are right. It would be the way.") would enjoin her to defy
a lifetime policy . As you can imagine, it was never put to the test.
Some of her reluctance to involve herself must have sprung
from her reticence. She was shy. She disliked exposing herself to
public curiosity. That was why she was almost never on radio and
only once that I know of on television- in
French,
possibly as a fur–
ther safeguard. She was heard once on a West German program,
but that, I think, was radio, and it was in the context of a panel dis–
cussion. There must be very few recordings of her voice in existence;
the BBC, which did a radio program on her a year or two ago, was
unable to get hold of a single tape of her speaking, which was too
bad, since her voice, more than most people's, seemed to contain the
very essence and fiber of her. Hoarse, deep, guttural, cutting, it was
her political organ, just as her dark, deep eye was her aesthetic organ.
But we are approaching a mystery. Given her shyness, her reti–
cence, her extreme prudence, what was it that drew her to politics?
Where was the fascination? It cannot have been a simple attraction
to power, for, so far as I could observe, she did not especially care to
have power, still less to exercise it when she could not avoid aware–
ness of being in command. As for manipulating the people around
her, a pastime dear to politicians and statesmen, nothing could have
been more foreign to her nature.
It occurs to me that her being Jewish may have had something
to do with the passionate interest she took in political affairs. To be a
Jew is to constitute a problem, for others, and hence for oneself.
It
is
to be born an issue, like a disputed frontier. In the past, the problem
the Jew presented was chiefly administrative: where and how to con–
tain him, as a foreign element, within the framework of Christian so–
ciety. The institution of the ghetto, the definition of the Pale were
regulatory measures, involving curfews, the opening and closing of
gates, which mirrored the continuous closing and opening of certain
activities and professions to Jews. Other measures sought to
eliminate
the problem: the periodic expulsions, forced conversions, pogroms.
In modern times, the Jew remained a problem, albeit a social one,
for a world that was no longer Christian but secularized. Unbeliev–
ing Christians and unbelieving Jews, though no longer separated by
a religion, were still held not to mix- in schools, clubs, buildings,
and neighborhoods. But with this development, the Jew, who, if not
practicing, might be no more than a special history, became even
more of an issue, more problematic to himself and others, than the
Jew of the Middle Ages contained within regulations had been.
