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Café CIA Roma: Mary McCarthy's Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Michael Holzman
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Extract

Mary McCarthy had, and has, a formidable reputation in American intellectual life. Brilliant, beautiful, much feared for her biting wit, she is a major figure in the histories of her time and in the biographies of her friends, lovers, and enemies – notoriously unstable categories. She was, with her great friend, Hannah Arendt, a certain archetype of the independent and engaged intellectual. Although she began life as a member of the provincial Seattle upper middle class, and in her final years she constructed a life in Maine not remote from the ideals of that class, its constraints, and decorous pleasures, in her youth and early maturity she lived a myth of New York bohemia: poverty-stricken, promiscuous, politically of the Left. Such is her image. It is not an inaccurate story. It is merely incomplete. For during much of that time, for fifteen or twenty years, her milieu was defined not so much by the culture of the Left, as by that of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Not that she was an official of the Agency; nor was it that she was one of those – like Arthur Schlesinger or Philip Rahv – who were more or less associated with it. She simply lived in a cultural matrix saturated with its influence, where she published in its journals, attended its conferences, stayed in the homes of those who were in its employee or who were members of the families of CIA officials. It is not, or should not be, controversial that such circumstances had an influence on her thought and work as it had on the thought and work of her contemporaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 25 , October 2000 , pp. 683 - 706
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

NOTES

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