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ting of the stage, with its columns and great proscenium arch. What
is curious here is that, despite her shyness, her reticence and sense
of privacy, she was a dramatic, even theatrical personality. I have
spoken of her before as resembling a great actress, the magnificent
Sarah Bernhardt, and anyone who ever heard her speak from a pub–
lic stage cannot have failed to sense this. It's as if in mounting the
platform she stepped into the public space, acquiring visibility, which
in normal life she shunned. This transformation, this shedding of the
privative, was within the reach of every citizen who consented to be
raised to a political dimension if only for a few moments.
If she loved the act of foundation, the well-laid cornerstones of
republics that constitute their constitutions (she seems to have had
no interest in monarchies), it may be that for her the Founders are
the only true
dramatis personae.
The early, authentic soviets of the
Russian October survive barely as a memory in most minds; for her
the drama ends with that eroded foundation, that false prelude, the
hollow name "Soviet Union." Her zest for the Hungarian Revolution
of 1956, evident in the late editions of her
Totalitarianism,
shows her
hope of a brave new foundation arising there, its contours just emerg–
ing- she loved workers' councils, romantically, like a girl. She had a
great liking for our own Founding Fathers, above all for Madison
and the authors of
The Federalist:
I cannot recall her ever speaking of
Lincoln. Her fondness for the art of foundation and for the political
geniuses who framed new sets of laws perhaps reflects the importance
she gave in her general thinking to beginning and beginners, to man
as the animal capable of incessant novelty, of being born new each
time as unique individual, in the repetitive pattern of species life.
Mary McCarthy has just received the Edward MacDowell Award for
Literature. She is at work on an intellectual memoir.
