Essays: In 1963, introducing a collection of her theatre criticism, Mary McCarthy quoted the views of "an insufferable little-magazine reviewer - myself, twenty years ago". (Twenty-five, in fact.)
For the same book she composed lengthy footnotes correcting the errors of her younger self - regarding Gielgud's technique, Welles's shortcomings as a Shakespearean, and the question of which actor in a 1938 production of The Seagull had "made the play seem 'meretricious'".
These second thoughts and self-chastisements - from a writer famous for strong views and fighting her corner - appear again in A Bolt from the Blue, a welcome new selection of McCarthy's essays, as if to remind us of the provisional, time-bound nature of critical writing in little magazines.
Provisional, time-bound - but also, in the case of 'My Confession', 'America the Beautiful' and two or three of the other essays collected here, immortal. All 28 pieces in the book merit preservation. The most satisfying are those in which McCarthy's subject engages the full range of her powers: her eye for cultural and political ugliness, her broad erudition, her understanding of the connectedness of things.
The least satisfying, with one or two exceptions, are those in which her subject is a single work of art. No matter how great the work - and McCarthy's list of sacred texts includes Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Pale Fire - the canvas in such pieces seems somehow too narrow for her profane intelligence.
The editor, A.O. Scott, a talented critic himself, has perhaps unwittingly highlighted this fact by dividing the book into two parts. Part One consists of eight pieces on the theatre - which amount collectively to a ringing if somewhat repetitive condemnation of what McCarthy calls "the American realist playwrights" - and nine on novels and "the novel". Everything else goes into Part Two.
I closed the book wishing there could have been more of Part Two - more of everything else. Scott, it seems, has tried to present a critical mass of pieces on theatre and fiction, at the expense of essays that can't be so easily grouped; but this is surely a mistake with a writer as gloriously unsystematic and wide-ranging as McCarthy. On Sarraute or Salinger she is very good; on the language of women's magazines or the atmospherics of the Watergate complex she is singular. A more generous selection in Part Two might have exposed McCarthy's political blind spots and misjudgments, but that would have been no harm.
Scott shows no interest in the essay as a form. "One of the ambitions of this book," he writes, "is to make a somewhat paradoxical case for \importance as a novelist." Paradoxical isn't the word. A Bolt from the Blue may be the essays' last outing for a very long time, which makes it particularly disappointing that the reader is not told where they first appeared. Every one of them has been collected in previous books; it seems that Scott spent no time in the back files of the periodicals without which most of the essays never would have been written.
I've dwelt on the oddities of the edition, and on their implications, because McCarthy (1912-89) deserves better - and so do readers who view her, rightly, as a brilliantly engaged writer in several non-fiction modes: her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a classic, her correspondence with Hannah Arendt is extraordinarily absorbing, and her books on Florence and Venice will probably be read after the novels are forgotten.
When she came to New York in 1933, just out of Vassar College, she went to the offices of the New Republic and the Nation to ask for books to review. After its re-launch in 1937, Partisan Review became her most important periodical outlet.
From the beginning her prose had an easy aphoristic sparkle, even when she was being strident. As the decades passed the voice evolved, becoming somehow darker, so that as we read 'The Home Program', McCarthy's April 1967 report from Vietnam, we know that the author, having once been Edmund Wilson's contemporary, was now Joan Didion's.
By this time she was living in Paris. Two Cold War decades earlier, provoked by Simone de Beauvoir's visit to the US, McCarthy wrote 'America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub'.
The essay attempts to evoke an America invisible to European intellectuals (even - or especially - one, like de Beauvoir, who wanted to be brought to echt-American restaurants, movies, plays and factories).
It is an anatomy of mutual misunderstanding among those whose proclaimed function is to understand, and it rings spookily true today. Its wonder - the wonder of a great essay - lies in the way it speaks to us, across time, of a cultural moment that could not have been captured in any other way.
Brendan Barrington is editor of the Dublin Review.
Brendan Barrington