Greetings, writers—
“She could not bear to hurt her husband,” begins the first chapter1 of Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps. “She” is Margaret Sargent, a beautiful, bohemian 20-something in pre-war New York City who’s about to do precisely that. She’s taken up with a Young Man (capitalization McCarthy’s), and now she needs to confess to it, in no small part because “she had an intense, childlike curiosity as to How Her Husband Would Take it, a curiosity which she disguised for decency’s sake as justifiable apprehension.”
She told him at breakfast in a fashionable restaurant, because, she said, he would be better able to control his feelings in public. When he called at once for the check, she had a spasm of alarm lest in an excess of brutality or grief he leave her there alone, conspicuous, and, as it were, unfulfilled. But they walked out of the restaurant together and through the streets, hand in hand, tears streaming “unchecked,” she whispered to herself, down their faces. Later they were in the Park, by an artificial lake, watching the ducks swim. The sun was very bright, and she felt a kind of superb pathos in the careful and irrelevant attention they gave to the pastoral scene. This was, she knew, the most profound, the most subtle, the most idyllic experience of her life.
In other words, passionate, frivolous, self-centered Margaret hurt her husband and liked it, and only in its dissolution did her marriage become real and “complete.”
The New York Times noted in a 1942 review that The Company She Keeps had “very definite merits,” but “suspect” values, in part because McCarthy, then married to the critic Edmund Wilson, had modeled certain of her characters “viciously and unfairly on actual literary figures.” Hissss!
There are a thousand diverting and gossipy articles2 to read about that particular milieu; there’s also, of course, the actual books that came out of it, by McCarthy and others in the company she kept. But the point of all this, besides bringing your attention to the book I’m currently loving, is that in the excerpt, a character says she doesn’t want to do something and then promptly does it, and that, my friends, is a very delightful moment of fictional irony.
And now here’s something similar, though a.) it definitely really happened and b.) the self-deception is of a much smaller magnitude. It comes from The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965. Powell was another brilliant, gimlet-eyed New Yorker, and many more people should read her. (This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned her here, nor is it likely to be the last.)
March 11: Ginny [Pfeiffer] and I, resolving after the Ivens film “400 Million” not to drink, compromise on one highball at the Blue Ribbon which, with great regard for each other’s resolution (“Don’t have another because I know you don't want one but I do…”) rattles out to three. Then, carefully walking to Fifth Avenue, we were obliged to go to the Algonquin Ladies’ Room, passing the jolly-sounding bar. We are not drinking this night and merely glance at the place, but oddly enough we put on all new make-up in the can, for going home on bus to early bed.
Then Ginny finds her hands are very dirty for going on a bus, and we carefully wash our hands. Then her hair needs a little fixing for bed and my coat must be brushed for the bus home. Then, our resolutions still intact, we silently walk into the bar and drink like fish till 3:15 and the scrubwomen are underfoot.
Today, let’s celebrate the hypocrite: annoying or worse in life, delightful in prose.
Write a scene in which someone proclaims they will not do a thing that they then quickly go on to do. Points for comedy. Extra credit for adding in something lost, something misheard, or something broken.
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. I’m back at the river house. Spotted: fourteen mergansers shooting the rapids, one belted kingfisher, many rabbits, robins, squirrels, and jays, and a trio of dudes using what I swear was a standard—not scuba—air compressor so they could dive down to the river bottom in search of treasures. Mostly they seemed to find a lot of hats. My kid (without supplemental oxygen) found an unopened White Claw.
Though it’s packaged as a novel, its chapters were originally published as short stories.
Just to name one, “Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story That Ruined a Marriage.”