The Group – Mary McCarthy, 1963

Read for the  Great Books Group. I found it interesting especially as a time-travel novel of social history—amazingly candid about life for an intellectual woman in the 1930s, prisoners of gender roles and of their class—but the characters are somewhat interchangeable and cardboard. The women in the “group” (eight members of the Vassar class of 1933) are supportive of each other but mostly seem to dislike each other.

I learned about these trends/ideas from the 1930s-1940s:

• Lucy Stone and “Lucy Stonerism” (keeping your own name after marriage)
• the poet Thomas Carew (Epitaph on the Lady Mary Villiers)
• William Dean Howells (I downloaded the first in the Altrurian trilogy, though that’s not mentioned)
• Liebfraumilch (“a May bowle, made of Liebfraumilch and fresh strawberries and sweet woodruff”)
• and indirectly from sweet woodruff I identified a European flower I remember picking in spring, which must be cowslip (Primula veris)
• sortes Virgilianae (and you can do it online!)
• Lovestonites and Musteites
• Old Catholics
• “a D.A. at Macy’s” (direct account—money deposited ahead of time)
• the Morris Plan
• glass straws (must have been terrible to clean!) (Wow, they are a thing again now; much better than plastic, certainly)
• pacifiers were new and trendy
• why one of the theaters at Smith is named Hallie Flanagan
• people smoked cigarettes and served martinis in hospital rooms!

It’s very revealing of the early roots of consumerism, fashionable hipsterism/snobbery, and the role of money. Lots of fascinating discussion of food, very revealing of the times: “a marvelous jellied salad called Green Goddess, made with lime gelatin, shrimps, mayonnaise, and alligator pear” (MINT JELLO???); Maxwell House coffee as status marker; these passages:

They were all tremendously interested in cooking and quite out of patience with the unimaginative roasts and chops followed by molds from the caterer that Mother served; they were going to try new combinations and foreign recipes and puffy omelets and soufflés and interesting aspics and just one hot dish in a Pyrex, no soup, and a fresh green salad.

…yet the prejudice [against canned goods] lingered, which was a pity since many canned products, like vegetables picked at their peak and some of the Campbell soups, were better than anything the home cook could achieve. “Have you tasted the new Corn Niblets?” asked Kay. Dottie shook her head “You ought to tell your mother about them. It’s the whole-kernel corn. Delicious. Almost like corn on the cob. Harald discovered them.” She considered. “Does your mother know about iceberg lettuce? it’s a new variety, very crisp, with wonderful keeping powers. After you’ve tried it, you’ll never want to see the old Boston lettuce again.”

…[M]argarine, Harald maintained, was just as tasty and nourishing, but the butter interests had conspired to keep the margarine people from coloring their product; he was right, yet she could not bear to have that oily white stuff on her table, even if her reaction to the whiteness was a conditioned reflex based on class prejudice.

Consumerism/status distorting lives: “…her training had instilled the principle that it was a mark of low breeding to consider that you might have been wrong in a person”; “…becoming a Trotskyite had merely given him one more thing to be snobbish about.”

Every item in [the apartment] seemed to be saying something, asserting something, pontificating; [they] were surrounded by articles of belief, down to the last can of evaporated milk and the single, monastic pillow on the double bed. It was different from Kay’s apartment, where the furniture was only asking to be admired or talked about. But here, in this dogmatic lair, nothing had been admitted that did not make a “relevant statement…”

[Gus’s] liking for name brands was what had sold him on Communism years ago, when he graduated from Brown spank into the depression. Shaw had already converted him to socialism, but if you were going to be a socialist, his roommate argued, you ought to give your business to the biggest and best firm producing socialism, i.e., the Soviet Union.

Kay has a mental breakdown and wants to go to New York Hospital instead of Harkness because it’s “so much more attractive—I loved the room Priss had with those rough-weave yellow curtains and pure white walls; it had such a modern feeling.” But that’s also poor old Kay, who when they offer her a bed on a different floor says (this also shows McCarthy’s non-standard way of mixing speakers in a paragraph, which gives an interesting effect):

“You mean I can skip the fifth? Do they let patients do that?” “Not as a usual thing. But this isn’t a usual case, is it?” Kay smiled happily; she had always wanted to skip a grade in school, she confided.

It’s revealingly awful about various societal constraints, and difficult to read in parts. Poor Stephen as a baby is let to cry and cry (“It was against the rules for the nurses to pick him up; they were allowed to change him and give him a drink of water, and that was all. The babies were not supposed to be ‘handled.'” “for the doctors agreed it did not hurt a baby to cry; it only hurt grown-ups to listen to him” and they offer her cotton for her ears!) Later he refuses to be toilet-trained and his mother thinks he’s getting back against his father the doctor.

There was a side of Sloan, she had decided, that she mistrusted, a side that could be summed up by saying he was a Republican. Up to now this had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans—it was almost part of being a man. But she did not like the thought of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby. In medicine, Sloan was quite foward-looking, but he was enamored of his own theories, which he wanted to enforce, like Prohibition, regardless of the human factor. She wondered, really, whether he was going to make a very good pediatrician. … [L]ike all doctors, he would not admit openly to having made a mistake or even to having changed his mind.

The awful Harald, one of many awful men, shares a name, profession, and presumably personality with McCarthy’s first husband:

[Being a stage manager] was like starting from the bottom in a factory, of course, which lots of nice boys were doing, and there was probably no difference between backstage in a theater, where a lot of men in their undershirts sat in front of a mirror putting on make-up, and a blast furnace or a coal mine, where the men were in their undershirts too.

Even worse later, one of his mistresses says:

“We had a few rolls in the hay years ago—nothing much. Then for him it was over: Harald is like that. But he kept coming around, as a friend; he made me his confidante, told me all about his other women. Did you know he had other women?” Priss nodded. “Did he ever make a pass at you?” “No. But he did at Dottie. After she was married. He tried to make an assignation with her.” “Women were necessary to him,” Norine said. “But I thought I was special. I figured he was laying off me because of Kay, because he respected our relationship. Every now and then, he used to undress me and study my body. Then he’d slap my flank and go home. Or off to some other woman. Afterward, he’d tell me about it. Whenever he slept with a woman, he told me. What he didn’t tell me, though, was about the women he didn’t sleep with. I wasn’t the only one, I found out. He went around town undressing his old flames and then leaving them. Just to know they were available. Like somebody checking stock.”

—and Harald to Lakey at the very end, on the day of Kay’s funeral:

“You and I understand each other. I might have loved you, Lakey, if you weren’t a lover of women. You might have saved me; I might have saved you. You can’t love men; I can’t love women. We might have loved each other—who knows? We’re the two superior people in a cast of fools and supernumeraries. At last we meet to match swords. Let’s duel in her grave, shall we?”

The women’s relationships with each other never feel like true friendship to me. They are gossipy about each other, busybodies in each other’s lives, treat each other as instruments. For example, Lakey “collecting” girls who “ran true to type”: “In private, they often discussed her, like toys discussing their owner…” “Kay used to take their love affairs… away from them and returned them  shrunk and labeled, like the laundry.”

One of the most fascinating social history passages is Harold on the “pessary” (diaphragm):

This mistrust, Harald said, which was deep in the male nature, made even middle-class and professional men wary of sending a girl for a pessary; too many shotgun weddings had resulted from a man’s relying on a woman’s assurance that the contraceptive was in. Then there was the problem of the apparatus. The unmarried girl who lived with her family required a place to keep her pessary and her douche bag where her mother was not likely to find them while doing out the bureau drawers. This meant that the man, unless he was married, had to keep them for her, in his bureau drawer or his bathroom. The custodianship of these articles (Harald was so entertaining in his slow-spoken, careful, dry way) assumed the character of a sacred trust. If their guardian was a man of any delicacy, they precluded the visits of other women to the apartment, who might open drawers or rummage in the medicine cabinet or even feel themselves entitled to use the douche bag hallowed to “Her.”

With a married woman, if the affair were serious, the situation was the same: she brought a second pessary and a douche bag, which she kept in her lover’s apartment, where they exercised a restraining influence if he felt tempted to betray her. A man entrusted with this important equipment was bonded, so to speak, Harald said, like a bank employee; when he did stray with another woman, he was likely to do it in her place or in a hotel room or even a taxi—some spot not consecrated by the sacral reminders. In the same way, a married woman pledged her devotion by committing her second pessary to her lover’s care; only a married woman of very coarse fiber would use the same pessary for both husband and lover. So long as the lover had charge of the pessary, like a medieval knight with the key to his lady’s chastity belt, he could feel that she was true to him. Though this could be a mistake. One adventurous wife Harald described was said to have pessaries all over town, like a sailor with a wife in every port, while her husband, a busy stage director, assured himself of her good behavior by a daily inspection of the little box in her medicine cabinet, where the conjugal pessary lay in its dusting of talcum powder.

Classism:

Birth control, she argued, was for those who knew how to use it and value it—the educated classes. Just like those renovated tenements; if poor people were allowed to move into them, they would wreck them right away, through lack of education.

She commenced to curl her hair. Soon the smell of singed hair was added to the smell of cigarette smoke, of dog, pipe tobacco, and of a soured dishcloth in the sink. Watching her, Helena granted Norine a certain animal vitality, and “earthiness” that was underscored, as if deliberately, by the dirt and squalor of the apartment. Bedding with her, Helena imagined, must be like rolling in a rich moldy compost of autumn leaves, crackling on the surface, like her voice, and underneath warm and sultry from the chemical process of decay.

The Prothero family, on both sides…, was dim-witted and vain of it, as a sign of good breeding; none of them, as far back as they could trace their genealogy, had received a higher education…

In her ignorance, Polly had thought that you “lived happily ever after,” unless your husband was unfaithful, but the Class of ’33 seemed to feel that you could not relax for a minute in your drive to make your marriage “go.”

I don’t have a category for this final passage, it’s just brilliant: after a couple splits up “… she still felt their love affair had not quite finished: it lived somewhere underground, between them, growing in the dark as people’s hair and fingernails grew after their death.”