Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [54]
Pauline’s review offered a fresh point of view about McCarthy’s achievement:
“The Group is the book that Mary McCarthy’s admirers have been waiting for.” The dust jacket is wrong: this is the book that people who have never liked Mary McCarthy before will admire. Her Vassar girls, misled by “progressive” ideas, are the women as victims so dearly beloved of middle-class fiction.... It’s like a Hollywood movie: the girl who wants “too much” gets nothing, is destroyed; the girl waiting for the right man gets the best of Everything.... As a group, the girls are as cold and calculating, and as irrational and defenseless and inept, as if drawn by an anti-feminist male writer. Those who want to believe that the use of the mind is really bad for a woman, unfits her for “life,” miscellanies her, or makes her turn sour or nasty or bitter (as in the past, Mary McCarthy was so often said to be) can now find confirmation of their view in Mary McCarthy’s own writing.
This opening salvo was the strongest part of her assessment; elsewhere, her review did not represent her best work. In dissecting the problems with McCarthy’s overall conception of the book, she seemed to circle without ever quite landing. A few days after she had submitted the review, she received a letter from Elizabeth Hardwick, editorial adviser at The New York Review of Books (and a close friend of McCarthy). Hardwick apologized for the magazine’s tight deadline and then politely, if somewhat condescendingly, rejected the piece, without offering Pauline an opportunity to make revisions. Hardwick told Pauline that it was “rather fruitless to care so much about how fairly or unfairly womankind is treated in this or any other book,” that such questions, unless treated in an entirely new way, “seem a bit tired and irrelevant.” She added that the piece Pauline had submitted did not seem up to her best work.
Pauline delivered the manuscript for I Lost It at the Movies early in the summer of 1964. The Atlantic Monthly Press’s director, Peter Davison, wrote to her in mid-July that he was returning the manuscript with “the general recommendations which are truly not too radical.” In general Davison was delighted with the condition of the book, but he stressed that “some of the very best pieces were marred by being too long. In fact, I was deterred from full appreciation by boredom!”
By the fall, word had gotten around the publishing industry that I Lost It at the Movies was, potentially, at least, a hot project—so much so that Marcia Nasatir, special projects editor at Bantam Books (and future vice president of production at United Artists), wrote to Pauline in October asking to see the manuscript, with an eye toward bringing out a paperback edition.
The intense social upheaval of the 1960s had a curious effect on the arts—and, more particularly, on the audiences for the arts, in whom a certain restless spirit was now in evidence. People who read or attended the theater, concerts, and movies were unsure of what they wanted, and even more unsure of exactly how to react once they had gotten settled into their seats. On the music scene, serial composition had won overwhelming favor with the academic community and music critics; the result was that geniuses such as Aaron Copland more or less lost their footing musically, or in the case of Samuel Barber, languished completely.
In her essay “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?” Eudora Welty commented on reader reaction to her famous short story