This is so informative. And I've recently finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being which, in the scenes of Tomas' quandary to sign or not sign, lends itself to more understanding now as I read this.
This is totally engrossing, Jay. I knew nothing about this and have read no McCarthy (one of many holes in my reading of American literature), but what an interesting figure and what a strange political/literary moment. (By the way, Buckley is such a smug SOB in that interview; the man could smirk with the best of them--or the worst.)
I don’t want to tell you about the holes in my reading, John. Coming of age in New York when I did, an aspiring whatever, I was weaned on this stuff – the lore of Partisan Review and the New York Intellectuals, The NY Review of Books, the mix of literature and political engagement, Mailer, Buckley (who I think was better born to a wig and powder), this whole history. Sydney Hook was a CCNY guy like me (some many decades later) but still when I walked the campus my soul was vied for by Socialist Worker and Labor adversaries. I read Karamazov and Notes from Underground and brooded.
"Mailer, never haunted by the hobgoblin of consistency, also wrote of her in that review of her most famous novel, The Group, that she was a 'duncey broad' who was 'simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.'”
Jay, I chortled at "the hobgoblin of consistency". One part of what makes your writing so engaging is how deftly it weaves the reporting of seasoned data with these gently clever phrases, and in so doing reminds us that we're engaging in reflection, not a simple distillation of what's already on record.
I wasn't greatly familiar with McCarthy (though the famous quote, I recalled!), but your exploration of her life and writing through a later act of revisionist memoir nevertheless told an impressive story I won't soon forget. Not of McCarthy, exactly, but of how strongly held views over multiple periods in our lives make for challenging totalities. Her political and socialite experiences, and later attempts to mitigate them on record, put me in mind of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, a famous exploration of our (to some extent futile!) attempts to stitch disparate lifepaths together.
Wonderful stuff, and lots of food for thought about the revisionist instinct in memoir.
Thank you, M L., You're one of my ideal readers, so your insightful comments (and your chortles!) are always meaningful to me. You get to something essential, I think, with "attempts to stitch disparate lifepaths together." Especially when we're devising the pattern as we go along?
"Especially when we're devising the pattern as we go along?"
And hoping that there will *be* a pattern in the end! There's a lot of aspirational teleology in the way we go about telling the stories of our lives.
I used to counsel people on how to write university admissions essays and grant applications, and the theory of writing in those genres involves building a life story that reads as if everything you've ever done has prepared you for this one, inevitable next step. Even if that's far from the truth! Committees want a sense of momentum, and with it an affectation of self-awareness and long-term planning from the applicant.
When we try to write our life stories in such a way in other contexts, though, what "committee" are we trying to impress? And at what cost to our ability to narrate the broader chaos of our interactions and attitudes over time?
Memoir is supposed to be an honest recounting and analysis of one’s life. And... clarity shifts. What we understand today about events (personal and otherwise) is not always what we understand tomorrow. But then I suppose that’s true of all nonfiction.
Interesting interview w Buckley Jr. Interesting analysis overall.
Thank you, Jan. Yes, it is supposed to be that, isn’t it? An implicit thesis for me in these essays is that it seems to work differently for creative writers. I don’t think the genre of creative nonfiction developed accidentally. There is an unsurprising impulse to reimagining even when writing about their own lives, much conscious, but I think for some writers, unconscious in some instances. I think some writers – Joyce Carol Oates, in the first of this series – actually play with memoir in that creative nonfiction endeavor. We wouldn’t accept any of this in memoir from other kinds of public figures, but creative writers have made a sub-genre out of playing with the truthfulness of memoir.
Thanks for this deep dive, Jay. I often taught Miller's "The Crucible" (in movie form) as part of my early American literature survey, but I never tried to dig into the Red Scare in my contemporary survey. I sympathize with McCarthy's struggle in being forced into those binaries, since it seems that few topics avoid that simplification now. Context is everything.
It's true. Few controversial topics avoid efforts at binary simplification, now too, and many of them, in the American context, can trace their binary divisions to this period and the splits it opened up through the 1960s, the early 90s, and now. One of my links in the essay is to the just published book by Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, another to Jonathan Chait's negative response to it in New York Magazine.
This is so informative. And I've recently finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being which, in the scenes of Tomas' quandary to sign or not sign, lends itself to more understanding now as I read this.
This is totally engrossing, Jay. I knew nothing about this and have read no McCarthy (one of many holes in my reading of American literature), but what an interesting figure and what a strange political/literary moment. (By the way, Buckley is such a smug SOB in that interview; the man could smirk with the best of them--or the worst.)
I don’t want to tell you about the holes in my reading, John. Coming of age in New York when I did, an aspiring whatever, I was weaned on this stuff – the lore of Partisan Review and the New York Intellectuals, The NY Review of Books, the mix of literature and political engagement, Mailer, Buckley (who I think was better born to a wig and powder), this whole history. Sydney Hook was a CCNY guy like me (some many decades later) but still when I walked the campus my soul was vied for by Socialist Worker and Labor adversaries. I read Karamazov and Notes from Underground and brooded.
"Mailer, never haunted by the hobgoblin of consistency, also wrote of her in that review of her most famous novel, The Group, that she was a 'duncey broad' who was 'simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.'”
Jay, I chortled at "the hobgoblin of consistency". One part of what makes your writing so engaging is how deftly it weaves the reporting of seasoned data with these gently clever phrases, and in so doing reminds us that we're engaging in reflection, not a simple distillation of what's already on record.
I wasn't greatly familiar with McCarthy (though the famous quote, I recalled!), but your exploration of her life and writing through a later act of revisionist memoir nevertheless told an impressive story I won't soon forget. Not of McCarthy, exactly, but of how strongly held views over multiple periods in our lives make for challenging totalities. Her political and socialite experiences, and later attempts to mitigate them on record, put me in mind of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, a famous exploration of our (to some extent futile!) attempts to stitch disparate lifepaths together.
Wonderful stuff, and lots of food for thought about the revisionist instinct in memoir.
Thank you for this gem of a read and reprieve!
Thank you, M L., You're one of my ideal readers, so your insightful comments (and your chortles!) are always meaningful to me. You get to something essential, I think, with "attempts to stitch disparate lifepaths together." Especially when we're devising the pattern as we go along?
"Especially when we're devising the pattern as we go along?"
And hoping that there will *be* a pattern in the end! There's a lot of aspirational teleology in the way we go about telling the stories of our lives.
I used to counsel people on how to write university admissions essays and grant applications, and the theory of writing in those genres involves building a life story that reads as if everything you've ever done has prepared you for this one, inevitable next step. Even if that's far from the truth! Committees want a sense of momentum, and with it an affectation of self-awareness and long-term planning from the applicant.
When we try to write our life stories in such a way in other contexts, though, what "committee" are we trying to impress? And at what cost to our ability to narrate the broader chaos of our interactions and attitudes over time?
Memoir is supposed to be an honest recounting and analysis of one’s life. And... clarity shifts. What we understand today about events (personal and otherwise) is not always what we understand tomorrow. But then I suppose that’s true of all nonfiction.
Interesting interview w Buckley Jr. Interesting analysis overall.
Thank you, Jan. Yes, it is supposed to be that, isn’t it? An implicit thesis for me in these essays is that it seems to work differently for creative writers. I don’t think the genre of creative nonfiction developed accidentally. There is an unsurprising impulse to reimagining even when writing about their own lives, much conscious, but I think for some writers, unconscious in some instances. I think some writers – Joyce Carol Oates, in the first of this series – actually play with memoir in that creative nonfiction endeavor. We wouldn’t accept any of this in memoir from other kinds of public figures, but creative writers have made a sub-genre out of playing with the truthfulness of memoir.
Thanks for this deep dive, Jay. I often taught Miller's "The Crucible" (in movie form) as part of my early American literature survey, but I never tried to dig into the Red Scare in my contemporary survey. I sympathize with McCarthy's struggle in being forced into those binaries, since it seems that few topics avoid that simplification now. Context is everything.
It's true. Few controversial topics avoid efforts at binary simplification, now too, and many of them, in the American context, can trace their binary divisions to this period and the splits it opened up through the 1960s, the early 90s, and now. One of my links in the essay is to the just published book by Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, another to Jonathan Chait's negative response to it in New York Magazine.