Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
MARY McCARTHY:
1912~1989
1 first met Mary McCarthy nearly half a century ago - in the
winter of 1940 at dinner at Harry Levin's in Cambridge. She was married
to Edmund Wilson. 1 can remember still how transfixed I was by Mary - so
beautiful, so intelligent, so witty, so much fun to talk to, her smile so lustrous
and penetrating. I also remember how outraged I was by the marriage of
this lovely young woman to a man who, however interesting and distin–
guished, seemed to me, at the age of twenty-three, infinitely old. In fact,
Mary was then twenty-eight and Edmund forty-five - a smaller gap in age
than I presently enjoy in my own marriage.
I fell in love with Mary on that winter night; and, when I saw her in
recent weeks in the intensive care ward at New York Hospital, embraced by
the awful technology of modern medicine, she appeared, for all the tangle of
tubes and wires, somehow youthful again, almost as beautiful as when we
first met so many years ago. But then she never lost her youthfulness - in
the sense of endless delight in the oddities of life, endless curiosity about peo–
ple and ideas and human predicaments, endless interest in the way things
worked, endless passion to learn new things, endless anger over hypocrisy
and mendacity and cruelty. Mary never grew old.
Memories crowd in - Mary in New York, in Newport, in Wellfleet, in
London, in the charming Paris apartment in the Rue de Rennes, in the lovely
house in Castine. One summer in the early 1950s in Wellfleet I used every
morning to go over to her farmhouse from our cabin in the woods and write
The Crisis of the Old Order
in a room in her barn. Later she read the
manuscript and returned it with a series of acute, indeed rather devastating,
criticisms. I remember her remark about the prologue, a portentous account
of FDR's first inauguration: "almost Pre-Raphaelite, " she said. She was
absolutely correct. This was shortly after Adlai Stevenson's 1952 campaign,
and I was writing history as if I were still writing political speeches. Her
Editor's Note: These remarks were presented at the memorial service for
Mary McCarthy, held on Novembe.- 8th, 1989 at the Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York City.
