Maia Siegel
The Group, by Mary McCarthy. Mariner Classics, 1991, 496pp., $11.99.
Mary McCarthy’s childhood was the kind that would either create a devout nun or, as one critic called her, “a modern American bitch.” She was orphaned at six years old on a train to Minneapolis and shuffled off to an abusive great-aunt and uncle, only to emerge, finally, into the arms of the well-to-do grandparents she had all along; her upbringing had the arc of a Victorian novel. After attending Vassar, she wrote biting criticism and fiction for The Partisan Review. A young George Plimpton said that, on Exeter’s campus, her sexually frank stories “made almost as much an impression as Pearl Harbor.” But it was The Group, her 1963 chronicle of eight new graduates navigating life in New York, that became a runaway success, one that attracted pans from her closest friends and praise from the very young women it mocked. It tackles the question many current seniors are quietly asking themselves, in the dark moments between consulting fairs and society mixers: what if post-collegiate life is, well, worse?
McCarthy doesn’t feel all that bad for her new grads, many of whom were based on her actual classmates at Vassar. For those of us who enjoy vulture attacks, there’s plenty of meat here for her to pick at. The Group opens with a wedding and ends with a funeral (both are for the same girl; it’s a little too neat, but you forgive it). The opening wedding is between Kay, the group’s free spirit and the newest addition to Macy’s merchandising training program, and Harald, a struggling playwright whose love letters read like “accounts of personal successes among theatrical celebrities.” All seven members of the group are in attendance, cutesy nicknames in tow: Pokey, Dottie, Lakey, Polly, Priss, Helena, and Libby. Neither set of the newlyweds’ parents shows up. Harald and Kay take the subway to Coney Island after the ceremony. The wedding is publicly declared a success by the group, despite each privately claiming it “jaggedly ill-at-ease” and “a supreme humiliation,” with its drunken man of honor and the bride’s scuffed black suede shoes. These upsets are forgiven. After all, each member of the group also wants a life in opposition to the one they know, with its perfect church weddings and white satin shoes:
The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a cold-fish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother’s generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet Club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton ‘29.
What the women find is that they’re free, largely, to be miserable in other ways. They’re overeducated for their jobs, laser-focused on marriage, and awkwardly positioned on the upward-sliding end of social modernization, clinging on for the ride. McCarthy said that her novel was not a satire but a social history, covering “sex, politics, economics, architecture, city-planning, house-keeping, child-bearing, interior decoration, and art.”
The book leans more heavily on the sex than the city planning. One member of the group, Dottie Renfrew, gets a pessary — a birth control device that looks a bit like salad tongs attached to a coil — at the instruction of Dick Brown, the divorced man she sleeps with. He warns her “not to get attached.” Naturally, she responds by waiting for hours in Washington Square Park, hoping he will meet her and take the kit to his place for safekeeping. He never comes. She ends up stashing the box under a park bench and walking away. Kay’s Coney Island-blessed marriage suffers from Harald’s drinking and infidelities, and the prison of their marriage becomes concrete when Harald has her institutionalized. Norine Schmittlapp, a Vassar alum with a grudge against the group, cheats on her impotent husband but refuses to leave him because, with the couple’s socialist salon written up in Mademoiselle magazine, “we’ve come to stand for something meaningful to other people.”
Standing for something meaningful takes many forms: Priss Hartshorn breastfeeds her newborn to support her pediatrician husband’s stance against formula. Most of the day, she sits in bed and hears the baby’s constant cries of hunger in the hospital nursery, where it lies waiting for its strictly scheduled feeding times: “In reality, what she had been doing was horrid, and right now, in the nursery, a baby’s voice was rising to tell her so — the voice, in fact, that she had been refusing to listen to, though she had heard it for at least a week. It was making a natural request, in this day and age; it was asking for a bottle.” The group is trapped in whirlpools of scientific and sexual advancement, while the men are in the other room, slugging down martinis. McCarthy called her novel not only a social history, but a “history of the loss of faith in progress.” The unnatural so-called progressive choice, the baby formula, becomes the most natural one. To return to breastfeeding is hopeless, inauthentic. The baby, only a week old, already wants what everyone else has.
It’s tempting to read The Group as a satire, even though we’ve been instructed not to. Pauline Kael said, simply, “She beats up on those girls.” So why do we want to join in on the fight? What about McCarthy’s style, which centers on her exacting meanness, draws us to her so completely? Something about her almost scientific brutality codes for honesty; she builds up details of the girls’ postgrad activities like journalistic evidence of some great wrongdoing. You don’t even notice that there was no crime. McCarthy is like a plastic surgeon, marking up the corners where the lives of her characters drag: everything could use a lift.
As much as McCarthy dealt it, it was dished back to her. Her Partisan Review friends were vicious about The Group, with Elizabeth Hardwick taking aim at McCarthy’s precious style in a parody called “The Gang:”
Maisie had always, rather demurely, thought of the great event as a ‘defloration,’ from the Late Latin, defloration. (To everyone’s surprise this sociology major had been a whiz in Latin at St. Tim's.) The funny thing was that never in the world would she have expected it to happen this way: on a rather tacky, flowered couch that opened out into a day bed. (Mother would somehow have minded the odious couch more than the ‘event.’) But demure, rather strait-laced as Maisie was, now that she was here in the coldwater flat she was determined to go through with it, like Kierkegaard through clerical ordination. For this squinty, pink-cheeked girl, it was a duty and the old American stock in her (along with the industriousness of Mother's Chicago meat-money parents) stood her in good stead as the evening wore on. Of course she was thrilled, too.
It is true that McCarthy describes a lot of “things.” Norman Podhoretz wrote that she was “an intellectual on the surface, a furniture describer at heart,” which is, at the very least, ungenerous. “Stuff” and “things” dictate more lives than not, especially those of upper-class young women looking to impress their friends. It is in her meticulous descriptions of how her characters live that we can understand McCarthy’s insistence on the more serious label of “social history” over satire. When Norine asks Helena for help changing herself, Helena starts with home decor tips. Sweeping her apartment becomes synonymous with sweeping her interior life; changing herself is as easy as switching her dog’s name from Nietzsche to Rover. When Harald loses his job early into their marriage, Kay becomes focused not on his anger and drinking problems, but on her new apartment, for which she had just bought upholstery samples.
McCarthy’s pursuit of the truth — the whole, unwieldy lump of it — is a thread throughout her arguments and writing, The Group included. Nothing escapes her eye, which roves slowly over weddings, apartments, and unfortunate shoes like a vulture ready to pluck. A wedding becomes a pile of missteps in a sacred choreography, an apartment with black walls is “fascist,” and the scuffed shoe is an omen for all that is to come. McCarthy’s sharp, observant tone is an ethical framework in itself: she is a skeptical consumer, even of her own characters. As her group flees their stiff upper-class lives, they find themselves trapped in other frames, beneath new surfaces. Gus LeRoy, a publisher who starts seeing Polly as he separates from his wife, enters psychoanalysis and never seems to exit. Polly’s father does the same with Trotskyism. Norine is still stuck on the groups she was and wasn’t in at Vassar, telling Helena “You people were the aesthetes. We were the politicals. We eyed each other from across the barricades.”
In The Group, people harden prematurely, forced into public images of themselves. Kay, the free spirit, is trapped in her shock-marriage. Norine is so stifled as a housewife she starts reading anthropological texts for baby-rearing advice. Dottie wants sexual freedom, but her hook-up is shocked at the fact that a girl in knit cardigans might want to have an orgasm. McCarthy finds that these public self-images can act as masks, absolving us of the responsibility to correct the gaps between our real lives and our telegraphed ones. Kay’s reputation as the “free spirit” of the group allows her to stay trapped in a stifling marriage, rather than risk true freedom by leaving Harald. In an interview with The Paris Review, McCarthy said “These girls are all essentially comic figures, and it’s awfully hard to make anything happen to them.” But, if anything, the group’s stagnation while being washed over with social progress feels like an accurate social history.
McCarthy wrote that, in The Group, “the ideas are the villains and the people their hapless victims.” But are the ideas the villains, or would those be the men wielding them to absolve themselves of moral responsibility? Dick Brown, the “get thee a pessary” one-night-stand, pretends using birth control makes sex merely a handshake. Kay’s husband Harald institutionalizes her after a fight — patients require a husband’s signature to be let out. Polly’s boyfriend Gus LeRoy uses psychoanalysis as an emotional crutch, keeping both girlfriend and estranged wife in limbo. A myth of the 19th century was that moral and technological progress would go hand-in-hand. Instead, characters experience the opposite: as their lives modernize, the individual responsibility they feel towards each other shrinks. Helena tells the serially cheating and socially conscious Norine, “If I was a socialist, I’d try to be a good person.”
The Group was banned in Italy, Australia, and Ireland. McCarthy said “it ruined her life.” Norman Mailer panned it. Pauline Kael called it “very snobbish.” It was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years straight, either because of its excruciatingly long sex scene right in the beginning, or because people really wanted to read about female friendship.
Its mainstream success is astounding for many reasons, its ending being one of them. The book does not promise that these girls will be happy come Christmas. Instead, seven years after graduation, Kay, the department store girl who “had a ruthless hatred of poor people” but liked the insane, falls from the twentieth floor of the Vassar Club. She had been watching military planes rush past — the ladies who lunch at the club call her “the first American war casualty.” The book’s final funeral scene marks the conclusion of the girls’ post-collegiate dream and heralds the impending global devastation around the corner. A lecherous, drunken Harald gives a last warning to Lakey: in Europe, “the lights are going out.”