Mind’s Eye View of a City

Mind’s Eye View of a City ROBERT PHELPS

Anyone who has ever read one of Mary McCarthy’s books—her theater criticism, any of her novels, her por- trait of Venice—will remember her most impressive faculty: she can gen- eralize at the drop of a hat, and with so much assurance and agility that particulars of every persuasion must shake in their boots when she passes by. Watching her mind at work, I have often wondered if there were any situation at all, any clutter of detail, any heterogeneity of appear- ance which she could not find a gen- eralization to regiment and tidily con- tain. She is a little like the pianist who calls for random notes from the audience and improvises a tune out of them then and there. Of course other writers have been equally apt at this sort of thing: Auden, for one, and Lawrence certainly. But Mary McCarthy is less personal, less need- ful-seeming, than either of these. She is cool, crisp, detached; and indeed it is not so much her generalizations themselves which are fascinating as the parquetry cunning with which she can make so many apparently un- inclined, even balky, minutiae fit into her design. In The Stones of Florence (Har- court, $15.00), her subject is again an entire city—its history, geography, people, traffic, economy, art, genius loct. Venice she had found a city of masks, of make-believe and decep- tion and feminine guile. Florence is just the opposite: “a manly town…

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About the Author

Robert Phelps

Mind’s Eye View of a City ROBERT PHELPS

Anyone who has ever read one of Mary McCarthy’s books—her theater criticism, any of her novels, her por- trait of Venice—will remember her most impressive faculty: she can gen- eralize at the drop of a hat, and with so much assurance and agility that particulars of every persuasion must shake in their boots when she passes by. Watching her mind at work, I have often wondered if there were any situation at all, any clutter of detail, any heterogeneity of appear- ance which she could not find a gen- eralization to regiment and tidily con- tain. She is a little like the pianist who calls for random notes from the audience and improvises a tune out of them then and there. Of course other writers have been equally apt at this sort of thing: Auden, for one, and Lawrence certainly. But Mary McCarthy is less personal, less need- ful-seeming, than either of these. She is cool, crisp, detached; and indeed it is not so much her generalizations themselves which are fascinating as the parquetry cunning with which she can make so many apparently un- inclined, even balky, minutiae fit into her design. In The Stones of Florence (Har- court, $15.00), her subject is again an entire city—its history, geography, people, traffic, economy, art, genius loct. Venice she had found a city of masks, of make-believe and decep- tion and feminine guile. Florence is just the opposite: “a manly town…