American .
farce
Al Capp
The Seventeenth Degree Mary McCarthy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.00) Mary McCarthy is an American novelist who' was known, chiefly, to a small band of other novelists, whose novels she respectfully reviewed in small literary magazines and who respectfully reviewed hers, until she broke out of that rarified circle and, momentarily, into the real world of Hemingway and Steinbeck (the latter whom she refers to in The Seventeenth Degree as a "fool"), when she came up with one called The Group. Buried in it was a passing account of a lesbian, which attracted a film company, because in those pre-Jacqueline Susann days, lesbians were few and far between in novels by respectable lady authors. With that episode highly emphasised, the film was a hit and the titillated rushed out to buy the book, only to find those passages too vague to get much of a kick from, and so Miss McCarthy went back to writing novels which were read by reviewers in the little literary magazines and hardly anyone else. She was reputed to have a private income. She was, of course, devoted to John F. Kennedy and was prepared, one assumes, for there is no evidence to the contrary, to be as devoted to Lyndon Johnson, until she noticed Vietnam. It had been there all along, of course, under Kennedy, but it was not an important war, not important enough, at any rate, to arouse the tigress in Miss McCarthy. No important numbers of Vietnamese were being slaughtered, and not much American money was being spent. But when Johnson followed, to the letter, Kennedy's battle plans (perfected by his previous military adventure, the Bay of Pigs), and the loss of lives and money became noticeable, Miss McCarthy, suddenly aflame, demanded that he stop. Johnson didn't stop, if indeed he ever heard of her demand, any more than Kennedy or any other Commander-inChief would have. Even when Robert Lowell, a poet whose blank verse sways 8,765 Americans, refused to attend a White House. Festival of the Arts unless his host stopped that war forthwith, the Festival simply chugged along without him.
Miss McCarthy, Mr Lowell, and many other of our most prestigious military planners, took out full-pages in the New York Times, denouncing the President as a blood-drinking colossus, obsessed with destroying the little brown people of the world when it was perfectly clear that Vietnam was a nagging circumstance he had inherited from the Kennedys that he didn't know what in hell to do with, except somehow to win, and that his towering achievement, the achievement closest to his damaged heart, was the civil rights legislation, which the Kennedys and the McCarthys and the LoweIls had long whined about and done nothing about, but which he wheedled and bullied through Congress to give dignity, at long last, to the black and brown people of America.
There were lots of Mary McCarthys around in the 'sixties and early 'seventies; Jane Fonda and Joan Baez were the best known. They said and wrote much which they are, understandably, embarrassed by today, but not our Mary. She wrote pamphlet after pamphlet in those days. She should be grateful today that they were ignored even by her friends on the little literary magazines, and that nobody bought them, but like a surly fighter who fought a wild and foolish fight, and lost, she insists on running the videotapes of her performance again in this collection, and to the same empty rooms. The running theme of this new collection is that the North Vietnamese (and their allies, the Russians, the Chinese and the Viet Cong) were saints and the Americans and the South Vietnamese were bums. The disorder of Saigon disgusted her. The perfect order of Hanoi charmed her. We all remember reading stuff like that in the early 'thirties when our fascists were dismayed by the free and easy ways of London and Paris compared to the perfect order of Berlin.
It is astonishing that Miss McCarthy, in editing this collection of pamphlets, did not notice that the picture she drew of herself as a wife makes her Exhibit A in the Dishrag category of Women's Liberation. She was, at the time, married to a minor State Department official named "Jim," then attached to vague, quasi-cultural government projects in foreign countries, which sounded a lot like CIA covers, although there is no shame in that. Could she risk "Jim's" well-being by publicly devoting herself to a crusade which meant more to her than life itself? "I wanted his approval," she wrote, "as with any other project." Can't you See Germaine Creer regurgitating at such a craven admission of the inferiority of women? "I hoped to win his approval. I hoped to win him over at the last moment ... it seemed 'days since I had been able to coax a smile from him." This was the sort of writing the films of 'loan Crawford needed, and often got.
Well, "Jim" finally relented, and any husband will understand why. Miss McCarthy arrived in Saigon. She opens her report with these words: "I was looking for material damaging to the American interest . . . and I found it." Most damaging was the Spectacle of white Americans. (There were over 10 per cent of black Americans in Vietnam, roughly the same percentage in the USA as a whole, but Miss McCarthy never mentioned them, as no true liberal would.) She was repelled by their open-necked shirts, and their wives wearing flower-print dresses, their fondness for whiskey sold at the PX, and their cars. Saigon, she reported, had become Americanised.
Miss McCarthy must be disappointed wherever she goes because, more and more, for better or worse, most of the big cities of the world are becoming Americanised. And along with her, Americans don't like it much either. Makes leaving home hardly worth the trouble. "Saigon," she wrote bitterly, "is like a stewing Los Angeles, shading into Hollywood, Venice and Watts." Why Waif r There is no black colony in South Vietnam, but Watts is a poor black area and by calling it after a poor black American area, you take a shot, a cheap shot, at making American readers feel guilty.
"Even vice in Viet Nam, at least what I was able to observe of it, has a pepless Playboy flavour." Miss McCarthy must have arrived when the party was over. One of the burgeoning American charitable organisations is that which seeks help for the tens of thousands of half-American orphans (both black and white) left in Saigon when the Americans left. Hanoi, however, "was much cleaner than New York. The sidewalks are swept, there is no refuse piled up, there are no prostitutes on the streets, no ragged children with sores. It was rare to see a child with a dirty face." And, if you were a guest of the Communists, you never had to pay for anything: "I never had," says Miss McCarthy, "to change so much as a dollar into dongs." It was in Hanoi "we heard Johnson's abdication speech. All of us . . . dancing . . . kissing, hugging each other, took a bit of credit for ourselves. We had helped to bring the war to an end. It could not last much longer."
What the Mary McCarthys helped to do was bring Nixon into the White House and prolong the war four bloody years longer.
Al Capp, the cartoonist, writes regularly for the Spectator from America
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