"To see Mary McCarthy plain is not quite so simple as it sounds," writes Frances Kiernan, a comment amply borne out in her many-faceted biography of one of America's most famous and controversial women of letters. Interspersing her narrative and analysis of McCarthy's life (1912-1989) with lengthy direct quotes from the writer's friends, lovers, colleagues, and enemies, Kiernan tries to blend the depth of a critical biography with the immediacy of oral history. The mixture doesn't always quite gel, but McCarthy's forceful personality emerges with intimacy and pungency from the chorus of disparate opinions. Her character was formed by her parents' early deaths, a miserable childhood redeemed by intellectual stardom in school, and scads of poorly judged sexual entanglements (including a ghastly seven years wed to Edmund Wilson) that ended only with her happy fourth marriage. There's little in McCarthy's life that isn't already familiar to readers of her fiction, from The Company She Keeps to The Group, and her liberal political convictions are also a matter of record, not least from her own journalism and essays. Kiernan's achievement is to reveal a woman best known for her slashing intellect and feared for her ferocious critical judgments as very human and surprisingly vulnerable. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
In an autobiographical short story by McCarthy, a psychiatrist tells the heroine, "Let me suggest to you... that this ordeal of your childhood has been the controlling factor of your life." In 1918, when she was six, McCarthy's parents died in the flu epidemic then sweeping the U.S. With her siblings, she was raised by a loveless aunt and uncle; these interconnected events became the core of her remarkable Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. The brilliant savagery of her best criticism and fiction has its roots in that defining experience, prodigiously recreated by Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker. After Vassar and the Depression (both figure in her notorious novel The Group), McCarthy joined what Kiernan calls "the increasingly acrimonious and contentious world of New York intellectuals," writing for the new Partisan Review and sleeping with its editors and writers. She had four marriages (with Edmund Wilson, among others) and many affairs, and, as a diplomat's wife, lived abroad, largely self-exiled from the milieu that fed her mordant satire. Kiernan uses a biographical device of setting off from her narrative blocks of quotation from interviewees so that in many places the book reads like oral history, a technique that sometimes works, but adds hundreds of loosely integrated pages. How McCarthy used real life in her fiction, she once explained, was to "take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake." Kiernan applies the method too generously, overstocking her book with myriad details. Yet it evokes a fascinating portrait of a woman with "great personal glamour" and "ferocious intelligence." 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This massive biography of novelist and essayist McCarthy (1912-89) has a unique format. In addition to Kiernan's traditional narrative, the volume also reprints extensive excerpts from McCarthy's writings, quotations from book reviews and books about McCarthy, and the comments of hundreds of people who knew her. This makes for a complex portrait of an American writer who inspired both love and dislike from the individuals who were a part of her fascinating and controversial life. The book, in fact, functions somewhat like the written equivalent of a public television documentary, with both a narrator and witnesses to McCarthy's life taking turns speaking. Occasionally, Kiernan--an editor and longtime McCarthy fan--is repetitious and provides too much extraneous detail. But because of its scope, this biography will replace existing treatments of McCarthy's life. Recommended for larger public library and undergraduate collections.---Morris Hounion, New York Technical Coll., Brooklyn Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
An extraordinary biography of the late essayist and novelist (191289) by a former fiction editor of The New Yorker. Kiernan begins in 1984 as McCarthy accepts a literary prize, then returns to 1910 and chronology. After her parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic, Mary went to live with relatives, attended Catholic schools (experiences she assessed in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 1957), attended Vassar (where she played the Virgin Mary in a pageant and later set her best-known novel, The Group, 1963), and then set out to conquer a literary world not friendly to women, especially those with her acerbic wit and disarming candor. As a drama critic, she savaged plays that have become masterpieces of the American stage, including A Streetcar Named Desire. She went on, however, to enjoy a distinguished, though controversial, literary career, which featured, near the end, a bitter libel suit by Lillian Hellman. Responding to an ``irresistible impulse,'' she abruptly ended the first of her four marriages, then married critic Edmund Wilson (a ``fat squinty-eyed cartoon character with a skull like a squashed melon,'' comments Kiernan). Her final marriageto diplomat Jim Westlasted her remaining 29 years. Kiernan reveals startling details about McCarthy's sex life (She reprints Edmund Wilson's description of his techniques for bringing McCarthy to orgasm, and reveals that both Arthur Koestler and Paul Tillich made unsuccessful passes at her), and discloses how fame and modest fortune engendered McCarthy's surprising fondness for fashion. Kiernan is not always profound, and is sometimes downright banal in her observationsIf you don't like the way things are going, you can stand and fight or you can pick up and leave''and in her use of myriad offset quotations from McCarthy and her circle, which suggest a research paper by an undergraduate determined to use all her note cards. All in all, though, the definitive life of McCarthy, comprehensive in scope and scrupulously researched. (16 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Diane Johnson
I think Seeing Mary Plain is wonderful. What a good idea just to let people speak up, especially in the case of a subject so controversial, whom people reacted to in so many ways. It manages to be very gay and funny: compulsive reading, is the phrase--it's like eating chocolates; and finally the portrait is the most complete and real that we have.


Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay
A rich, juicy, superbly written biography, which brings us closer to Mary McCarthy than anything in print. One of its many pleasures is the slyly astute, delicately wordly way Kiernan renders her judgments in passing, without clogging up the narrative. She is rarely less than amused by her subject, invariably forgiving, but unduped.


Judith Rossner, author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar
As someone who wasn't a fan of Mary McCarthy's fiction, I was surprised to find myself engrossed in Seeing Mary Plain, taking a real interest in the beautifully integrated, often contrary opinions and reminiscences of various husbands, lovers, intellectual godheads and fallen idols. This is a fearless, fascinating work.


David Leavitt, author of Crossing St. Gotthard
With Seeing Mary Plain, Frances Kiernan has crafted an involving, immensely readable, thoroughly affectionate biography on the scale--and in the school--of Michael Holroyd's life of Lytton Strachey. Most striking, however, is the skill with which she marshalls a formidable chorus of secondary voices--friends, enemies, lovers, students--whose vivid and intimate accounts of life with Mary McCarthy make the book sing.


Book Description
At last, a biography absorbing enough to do justice to one of the most controversial American intellectuals of this century. Beautiful, reckless, and endlessly maddening, Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) never failed to leave an impression. From her Partisan Review days as the embattled "dark lady of American letters" to her stormy marriage to (and even stormier divorce from) critic Edmund Wilson, from her huge but controversial success with her best-selling novel The Group to her epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, she brought an almost nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life. Time called her "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced," and she moved in a circle of the most intellectually combative and sharpest tongued Americans of this century--all of whom had plenty to say (some of it complimentary, some distinctly not) about this vibrant woman in their midst. Frances Kiernan has interviewed dozens of McCarthy's good friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries to produce a definitive biography rich in delicious gossip, ironic judgment, and eloquent testimony.


About the Author
Frances Kiernan was fiction editor for The New Yorker for twenty-one years and has also worked as a book editor.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A revealing portrait of the dramatic life of writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy. From her Partisan Review days to her controversial success as the author of The Group, to an epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy brought a nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life. Dubbed by Time as "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced," McCarthy moved in a circle of ferociously sharp-tongued intellectuals—all of whom had plenty to say about this diamond in their midst. Frances Kiernan's biography does justice to one of the most controversial American intellectuals of the twentieth century. With interviews from dozens of McCarthy's friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries, Seeing Mary Plain is rich in ironic judgment and eloquent testimony. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2000 and a Washington Post Book World "Rave". 20 pages of b/w photographs.

Author Biography: Frances Kiernan was a fiction editor for The New Yorker for fifteen years, and has worked as a book editor. She lives in New York.

SYNOPSIS

Kiernan (former fiction editor, ) makes use of interviews with McCarthy's lovers, friends, family, co-workers, casual acquaintances, and fellow writers, many of the latter constituting a pantheon of American arts and letters. Somewhere between scholarly (well-researched and cited) and popular biography (loads of gossip), Kiernan's study does not try for objectivity, but instead, a portrait that might have, she says, made McCarthy "crinkle her eyes and grin." Interviews are supported with McCarthy's archived papers at Vassar and other archives, including Elizabeth Bishop's at Vassar and Robert Lowell's at Harvard. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Carolyn See - Washington Post

Frances Kiernan's Seeing Mary Plain is a biography that fully acknowledges the breadth and depth of its subject but is absolutely enchanting to read in its own right.

Christian Science Monitor

A compelling life story: richly detailed, vibrant and revealing.

Publishers Weekly

In an autobiographical short story by McCarthy, a psychiatrist tells the heroine, "Let me suggest to you... that this ordeal of your childhood has been the controlling factor of your life." In 1918, when she was six, McCarthy's parents died in the flu epidemic then sweeping the U.S. With her siblings, she was raised by a loveless aunt and uncle; these interconnected events became the core of her remarkable Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. The brilliant savagery of her best criticism and fiction has its roots in that defining experience, prodigiously recreated by Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker. After Vassar and the Depression (both figure in her notorious novel The Group), McCarthy joined what Kiernan calls "the increasingly acrimonious and contentious world of New York intellectuals," writing for the new Partisan Review and sleeping with its editors and writers. She had four marriages (with Edmund Wilson, among others) and many affairs, and, as a diplomat's wife, lived abroad, largely self-exiled from the milieu that fed her mordant satire. Kiernan uses a biographical device of setting off from her narrative blocks of quotation from interviewees so that in many places the book reads like oral history, a technique that sometimes works, but adds hundreds of loosely integrated pages. How McCarthy used real life in her fiction, she once explained, was to "take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake." Kiernan applies the method too generously, overstocking her book with myriad details. Yet it evokes a fascinating portrait of a woman with "great personal glamour" and "ferocious intelligence." 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

This massive biography of novelist and essayist McCarthy (1912-89) has a unique format. In addition to Kiernan's traditional narrative, the volume also reprints extensive excerpts from McCarthy's writings, quotations from book reviews and books about McCarthy, and the comments of hundreds of people who knew her. This makes for a complex portrait of an American writer who inspired both love and dislike from the individuals who were a part of her fascinating and controversial life. The book, in fact, functions somewhat like the written equivalent of a public television documentary, with both a narrator and witnesses to McCarthy's life taking turns speaking. Occasionally, Kiernan--an editor and longtime McCarthy fan--is repetitious and provides too much extraneous detail. But because of its scope, this biography will replace existing treatments of McCarthy's life. Recommended for larger public library and undergraduate collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/99.]--Morris Hounion, New York Technical Coll., Brooklyn Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Larissa MacFarquhar - The New York Times Book Review

Kiernan has proved that, in the unlikely event that McCarthy's writing should be forgotten, if there is a question as to whether the story of her life will continue to be engrossing, the answer is yes.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

As someone who wasn't a fan of Mary McCarthy's fiction, I was surprised to find myself engrossed in Seeing Mary Plain, taking a real interest in the beautifully integrated, often contrary opinions and reminiscences of various husbands, lovers, intellectual godheads and fallen idols. This is a fearless, fascinating work. (Judith Rossner, author of Looking For Mr. Goodbar)  — Judith Rossner

With Seeing Mary Plain, Frances Kiernan has crafted an involving, immensely readable, thoroughly affectionate biography on the scale—and in the school—of Michael Holroyd's life of Lytton Strachey. Most striking, however, is the skill with which she marshalls a formidable chorus of secondary voices—friends, enemies, lovers, students—whose vivid and intimate accounts of life with Mary McCarthy make the book sing.
David Leavitt, author of Crossing St. Gotthard)  — David Leavitt

I think Seeing Mary Plain is wonderful. What a good idea just to let people speak up, especially in the case of a subject so controversial, whom people reacted to in so many ways. It manages to be very gay and funny: compulsive reading, is the phrase--it's like eating chocolates; and finally the portrait is the most complete and real that we have. (Diane Johnson)  — Diane Johnson