The Group – Mary McCarthy

On Goodreads Mary McCarthy’s The Group has many five-star reviews, even more four-star reviews, and quite a few three-star reviews. But there are also several two and one-star reviews, and these dissenters are also worth a hearing. In brief, McCarthy’s novel is, to my mind, the better side of average but it is not without its flaws.

McCarthy had already made her name as a respected novelist, journalist and writer by the time, at 51, she published The Group in 1963. Although her previous work, both fiction and journalism, had won praise, none of her novels achieved the popular success and sales of The Group: within just a few weeks of publication it was a best-seller, rising to No 2 on the publishers’ bestsellers’ list for 1963 and was snapped up by Hollywood.

As McCarthy later admitted, the novel’s success was something of a double-edged sword and its publication rubbed many up the wrong way. For one thing, the early 1960s were not quite as ‘liberated’ as the sunny memories

of ‘the flower power generation’ would like to have it (and there are plenty of other cliched names to use for that gang, so choose another if you prefer).

So McCarthy’s very frank descriptions and accounts of sex – masturbation, attempted rape, orgasm, ejaculation, miscarriages, breast-feeding, adultery and abortion feature freely, though tactfully – might have had quite a few of the matrons of McCarthy’s peer generation in a quandary, and some of the guys were also a little squeamish.

Nor did it help McCarthy that the tone of her novel was slightly satirical, although her book is certainly not a satire as is sometime claimed – the satirical tone, I understand, was McCarthy’s norm and she was said to have had quite an acid tongue.

So New York’s real-life generation of upper, upper-middle and lower-upper-middle class women, pretty much McCarthy’s social circle, were more than a tad put out at how they were gently sent up.

Those unfamiliar with McCarthy’s novel, The Group, should know that it describes eight years in the lives of a group of eight Vassar College girls after they graduate as ‘the class of 1933’.

They had all ‘roomed’ together – I trust that is the right word – and loosely kept in touch in the following years. One or two were rich, most came from wealthy, sometimes very wealthy backgrounds, others were not quite as well-off but reasonably well-heeled, and though the gals might on occasion have found themselves scraping by, they certainly did not suffer from any of the very nasty, often appalling, deprivations that blighted the lives of several million US citizens in the Great Depression.

There’s a great line in the play Six Degrees Of Separation: after one youngish, middle-class man claims he is ‘on the breadline’, he is told – and I must paraphrase – ‘we’re all on the breadline, dear, but we all start from a different base’. Some of the Vassar girls ‘starting adult life’ in New York might have resorted to using ‘tinned food’, but despite money troubles with rent and unemployment, none was even close to being ‘on the breadline’.

For this gang the tribulations of life ‘when they were young’ will be nothing more than the stuff of ‘amusing’ anecdotes to tell their friends and grandchildren when they are older. Oh, and all, upon leaving Vassar, were still virgins.

McCarthy was something of a fixture in New York ‘lefty’ and literary circles and perhaps something of a ‘free spirit’ (although that is not a phrase I much like). Certainly for a women born in 1912, she will not have been the first to engage in a bit of shagging before and outside marriage, but she must have been rare in being so candid about her sexual activities.

When she published what was to become a best-selling novel, the arty and social great and good turned on her, though perhaps there is nothing new there – just as there is ‘no greater liberal than a Conservative in trouble’, I suspect there are few more reactionary folk than progressives when they are the butt of the joke.

Norman Mailer, that self-appointed – and from what I have read not a little self-regarding – rebel, sneered that The Group was ‘a trivial lady writer’s novel’, but it is far, far more than that. There were also contemporary plaudits, yet many in McCarthy’s circle, however, were quite sniffy and one of that circle, her friend the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, sent up the novel in a piece for the left-wing Partisan Review.

McCarthy had also attended Vassar College (and graduated in 1933) and several of her friends believed they could identify themselves in the novel’s characters; and none was too pleased, to put it mildly.

As young women in the early 1930s at a time when contraception was limited, ‘the cap’ was an innovation, and the notion of pre-marital intercourse only whispered about, we follow the group as they negotiate their way into adult womanhood.

McCarthy’s novel might, perhaps, be described as ‘feminist’ or, more cautiously, ‘proto-feminist’, but doing so could also give the work an unfair identity and would-be readers might have wrong expectations. Its ‘feminism’ is definite, but subtle, and McCarthy is too intelligent to resort to tub-thumping

The novel begins with the early marriage of one of the group which the others attend and ends with her funeral, which again they all attend. In between we get to know the progress of the different young ladies – some marry, some have children, some have affairs, some have careers – as they all negotiate the difficulties of being a young woman finding her own ways of coping with the – in hindsight frankly misogynistic – attitudes of a nation which had only just emerged from the hypocrisy of Prohibition.

I say ‘nation’, but McCarthy’s The Group and its ‘action’ is wholly centred on New York, although many of the girls in the group do come from elsewhere. Note my quote marks around ‘action’. There will be as many kinds of ‘novel’ as there are novels, and it would be foolish to lay down the law on what a novel ‘should do’. But The Group is in some ways oddly static: almost all of its chapters read like self-contained short stories.

In fact, the chapters are not all that short and might even have been published individually as novellas. Yes, the stories overlap to some extent but until the last few chapters each is hermetic.

There is cohesion as this or that character will appear in the ‘chapter’ which is mainly concerned with another character or two. Yet one chapter even deals with the world from the point of view of a British butler employed by one of the richer families, and we see the ‘goings-on’ through his eyes.

However, with chapter thirteen and the next two chapters there is a gear change of sorts, and rather than giving us a ‘static’, though complex, overview of the life and circumstances of one character, we get what might crudely be referred to as ‘action’: the character whose wedding and funeral top and tail the novel finds herself sectioned in a mental health facility.

In the next chapter another character encounters a third – who was of the class of 33 but not a member for ‘the group’ as such – and the tone of this and the final chapter are rather different. The writing style and prose of the novel changed in these last three chapters: for most of the book it had been quite complex and reflective and demanded reasonably close reading. In the final chapters the prose is less complex and simpler, although why this should be and whether this was McCarthy’s intention I have no idea.

Out of interest, I looked up several different accounts of McCarthy’s life, and she, too, like her protagonist was at some point sectioned in a mental health facility. In fact there are other parallels between the author and this character, although one main difference is that McCarthy – obviously – did not die.

There are other aspects of the novel – an encounter in a park between two young mothers with their baby or toddler sons – which struck me as distinctly autobiographical whereas the early twelve chapters had not.

The ending of the novel is intriguing: one of the group, the richest who, in fact, does not appear much in the novel and then only in reference, returns to New York. She had taken off to Europe for those eight years to study art and reappears with her partner: the group is surprised but frankly not much disturbed to find she is in a lesbian relationship and, we are told, had been a lesbian all her life, pertinently while she was at college with them all.

Her sexuality becomes a pivotal issue when the dead woman’s former husband unexpectedly turns up at the funeral and interrogates her about her possible relationship with his now dead former wife. Frankly, though, I am at a loss to begin to explain what it might all ‘mean’ (but then I’m not very good at that kind of thing at the best of times and often believe we readers ‘see’ what we want to ‘see’). For any ‘meaning’ and ‘interpretation’ you must look elsewhere.

The Group is a well-written, thoughtful, sardonic and entertaining read. McCarthy might, in a certain sense, have let a little more air into her work, but overall it is better than much that is offered to the reader today.

I am surprised by its ‘ Sixties bestseller’ status as it is certainly not a particularly easy read as are the ‘women’s books’ Mailer was sneering at. There is thought in it and one cannot skip over it. So I suspect its popularity was because, for the Sixties (and describing the lives of middle-class women in Depression USA), its brutally candid take on sex and everything that goes with it was still unusual. Today that is now ten-a-penny, but in the 1960s . . .