The Oasis (2 page)

As McCarthy had been heard to denounce Stalinism at one party or another, she was invited to join the staff of the new
Partisan Review
. Taken on as a drama critic, she quickly and joyously found her youthfully fierce writing voice—and her career as a take-no-prisoners writer was launched. Of Maxwell Anderson, a popular left-wing playwright of the time, she did not hesitate to write, “Once again he has been inspired by a lofty theme and once again the mediocrity of his talent has reduced it to inconsequentiality.” And when Eugene O’Neill’s
Iceman Cometh
was being hailed as a remarkable piece of work, she berated O’Neill for his sentimentality in using a bunch of drunks who (in order to deliver the playwright’s message) became more and more articulate as the play went on, when everyone knew that alcohol meant the dissolution of personality, not its sharpening.

“From the beginning,” Carol Brightman tells us, “
Partisan Review
was surrounded by the kind of controversy that quickened Mary McCarthy’s pulse.” She loved the people at the magazine not for their own particular selves but because, in McCarthy’s own words, they were “a self-proclaimed elite whose measure was to be taken not by its nearness to money or to established institutions, including Communist institutions, but by its performance as a harbinger of cultural change.” In essence, this meant endless argument, endless theorizing, endless scoring. McCarthy herself held no real position on any of the issues argued. She was never a serious Marxist, or modernist, for that matter—but she was serious about being the provocative child at the back of the room announcing the emperor had no clothes, the one who was always pointing out the inconsistent and the meretricious in whatever argument was being held among all these self-importantly serious, mainly Jewish, intellectuals.

One among them, however, she
did
love for his very own self: Philip Rahv. The central figure in this influential little hotbed of intellectual superiority, Rahv held a passionately uncompromising view of what constituted the real thing, in literature as in politics. It was the passion behind Rahv’s judgments that elevated him to the position of the most feared, and therefore the most respected, of all—editors and writers alike—who encountered him in the flesh. As Elizabeth Hardwick said of him at his funeral, his outstanding characteristic was “a contempt for … the tendency to inflate local and fleeting cultural accomplishments. This slashing away at low levels of taste and at small achievements passing as masterly … was a crusade some more bending souls might have grown weary of. But he was not ashamed of his extensive ‘negativism’ and instead went on right up to the end scolding … unworthy accommodation” not for the sake of establishing his own authority but for “the honor and integrity of history itself.”

Like all the others at
Partisan Review
, Mary was seriously intimidated by Rahv’s intellectual self-confidence; so the only way to even things out was to go to bed with him. Surprisingly, the two fell in love and became a couple, living openly together to the priggish dismay of many of their comrades, who, in reality, were as frightened of sex without marriage as any bourgeois or working-class puritan could be—and were even more frightened of women. Among men like Delmore Schwartz, McCarthy was roundly condemned as the vamp who had Rahv, the poor fool, in her clutches. When, in 1938, she suddenly and without warning married Edmund Wilson, with whom she had secretly been sleeping, the men at
Partisan Review
felt sneeringly vindicated. Rahv himself was stunned.

Marriage to Edmund Wilson provided Mary McCarthy with an experience of major clarification. For one thing, the Jewish intellectuals had been exotics to her, whereas Wilson, for reasons of class and origin, was her familiar; it came as a surprise that in marrying him, as she said in later years, she felt the relief of “coming home.” Then again, she was now with a man who was essentially literary, not political, and when, at Wilson’s insistence, she tried her hand at fiction, and the first shot out of the box came cool, calculating “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”—the story that would eventually become the startling first chapter in The
Company She Keeps—
she knew that this was where her writing talent best connected. The stories that then began to pour out of her made it icy clear that it was through fiction that she had become, and would remain—irresistibly and irrepressibly—a social satirist of the first order.

It is poignant to see that when McCarthy was writing the kind of satire that involved autobiographical characters like Meg Sargent, or Martha Sinnott in
A Charmed Life
, a strain of sympathetic regret softened her otherwise uncompromising take on characters whom she mainly presented as the sum of their disabilities. It never occurred to her that the models for her characters, those whom she was presenting as pompous or self-deluded, would see themselves any differently—after all, she was only speaking the self-evident truth—and was always taken aback when they either bellowed like wounded bears at seeing themselves skewered in print or simply stopped inviting her to their parties. One who bellowed like a bear was Philip Rahv, who actually thought of bringing suit to prevent the publication in 1949 of
The Oasis
.

The novella tells the story of a group of would-be utopians who, on the eve of the Cold War and just as fear of the Bomb is heating up, gather together to form a cooperative commune that, by its very existence, they think, will lodge a significant protest against the End of the World scenarios that are overtaking the West. The characters were all drawn from McCarthy’s professional and social life: the men at
Partisan Review
itself, as well as those who filled the vast, loosely knit world of left-wing sympathizers, bohemians, fellow travelers, and hangers-on in which she moved. Thus we have among the Utopians not only intellectual leaders but “an assortment of persons of diffuse and uncommitted good will, two editors of a national news weekly, a Latinist teacher of boys …, a trade union publicist, several New York high-school teachers …, a middle-aged poet …, an actor and a radio script-writer,” as well as their various husbands, wives, and children.

The ideological leanings of the group are divided between the realists and the purists, led on the one hand by Will Taub (clearly Philip Rahv) and on the other by Macdougal Macdermott (even more clearly Dwight Macdonald). But whether realists or purists, all take themselves and their enterprise very seriously; above all, they take seriously their own internal divisions. They might not know how to come up with a working definition of social democracy, but they certainly know how to obsess over each other’s theoretical differences. (Informed of the large number of people who are with him, Taub instinctively responds with “Never mind that. Who’s against us?”) Whatever the issue, the Utopian leaders will show “far less constraint in characterizing the [opinions of their opponents] as childish, unrealistic, unhistorical, etc., than in formulating a rhetoric of democratic ideals.” This is the failure of moral imagination in
The Oasis
upon which McCarthy will concentrate her mocking attention.

From the get-go, she taunts the mixed motives and self-deceptions with which the Communards arrive in Utopia. Imagining that what they are about to do will provide an example for the world to emulate, they are in fact, each in his or her own peculiar way, more preoccupied with secret self-regard than with Utopia’s large-minded statement of purpose. In the very first paragraph we are told that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia because

Joe, in real life a diabetic businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to get more out of it than anybody else … He intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists … He would not have been in earnest about the higher life if he had failed to think of it in terms of the speed-up.

Then, for (sadly) comic relief, we have Katy and Preston, who, married a bare two years and ardently of the purist party, are mainly involved in strategizing their marital misery. Whenever they have an argument Katy instantly goes on an emotional jag that Preston despises and has never known how to escape; but now he, “no doubt about it, was taking advantage of the Utopian brotherhood to shut her out from himself.” Utopia was giving him “a privacy he had sought in vain during [their] two years of marriage.” Katy, in turn, was discovering that “the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia … [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right … [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief.”

And yet again, there is Taub’s sidekick, Harold Sidney (William Phillips): “A clever and fair-minded man, receptive to discussion and argument, he disliked giving pain, and this, in conjunction with the doctrine of necessity to which he and his colleagues were wedded, had made him somewhat weak and evasive … His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent’s position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.”

It is Joe Lockman who is the cause of the first moral difficulty the Utopians find themselves in. “My God,” cries the ever impassioned Macdougal Macdermott, upon learning that Lockman has been admitted to the colony, “aren’t we going to have any standards?… This fellow is a yahoo.” When his wife points out that ostracizing Joe would be “an ugly beginning for a community devoted to brotherhood,” Macdermott instantly changes course (as he will time and again), announcing her absolutely right, that Joe must be admitted to their company. But the argument itself has caused unease. “The incident, in fact, had frightened them a little. They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them from themselves.”

Still, there remains a Kantian puzzle. “Was it to follow then that
anyone
could be admitted to Utopia—a thief, a blackmailer, a murderer? Why not, declared the purists … Impossible, said the realists.” The point, thankfully, remains untested. “No murderers or thieves applied, only ordinary people of ordinary B-plus morality, people whose crimes, that is, had been confined to an intimate circle, and who had never injured anybody but a close friend, a relation, a wife, a husband, themselves.”

And there we have the brilliant and quite original thesis of
The Oasis
: the people of the ideological left—intellectuals and plebeians alike—imagine themselves moralists of the first order, when they are in fact possessed of only B-plus morality. In the hands of an Edmund Wilson this thesis might have invoked a sense of tragedy; in the hands of Philip Rahv himself, unmitigated scorn; with Mary McCarthy it becomes an instrument of contemplative ridicule—perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

The reason that Rahv went ballistic when he read
The Oasis
was that McCarthy is caricaturing his own deeply held credo when she tells us that Will Taub’s “whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value.” In practice this meant that he allowed “anyone (this automatically excluded fascists and communists) the liberty of behaving as ineffectually as he wished. But the right of a human being to
think
that he could resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning was something denied him with all the ferocity of [his] own pent-up nature and disappointed hopes.” And then the
coup de grâce
: Taub himself had nothing to offer, by way of a concrete proposal, in the matter of how right-minded people were actually to live out their ideals.

The final test for the Utopians, which they fail badly, comes when a strange family starts picking strawberries in their fields and, after speaking reasonably to the poachers and receiving no response, Preston and another colonist, not knowing what else to do, drive them off the land by taking potshots in the air with a gun filled with blanks. Joe Lockman, of all people, is the one to call them on this appalling solution to the problem with which they thought they had been faced: “ ‘You’ve done a terrible thing,’ he said solemnly, going up to the two young men and putting a hand on the shoulder of each. ‘You’ve driven a man and his family off this property with a gun … I never thought this could happen here.’ ”

McCarthy sums up the incident:

A phase of the colony had ended, everyone privately conceded … The distaste felt by some … was so acute that they questioned the immediate validity of staying on in a colony where such a thing could take place. The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle-class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.

The mockery ends in self-mockery as one of the Utopians observes, “Nice people like these are always all right, unless you take them off guard.”

The Oasis
was first published in England in the British magazine
Horizon
. Its English readers, who could easily identify the original of all the major players, roared with laughter (as we would have, had the shoe been on the other foot) at this marvelously executed send-up of the American intellectual scene; many American critics, however, pronounced it brilliant but heartless. They were wrong. The book is not heartless. It is not out for blood. True, irony inevitably means some fundamental sympathy is being withheld, but the irony here is not savage. Its deliciously witty sentence structure is rooted in the heartfelt disappointment of a moralist whom the reader feels has really wanted the good (that is, the genuine) in our midst to prevail.