Books: Eight to Beware

THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy, 378 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95.

Eight little Vassar girls competing hard

for heaven

Payne Whitney got one, and then there were seven.

Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, 20 years in the writing, has been signaled by a first printing of 75,000 copies, and for the first time, highbrow readers who have long acknowledged an athletic and logical brain will meet those who prefer the fictional products of female temperament.

Apparently just a novel that begins with a Vassar lady’s marriage and ends with a Vassar lady’s funeral, with a great deal of pre-and postcoital psychologizing in between, The Group is also tough-minded sociology, in which men will find hints of a matriarchal Mafia, which makes its headquarters at Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The Tribal Rites. In any case, Mary McCarthy, Vassar ’33, brings an insider’s view to a U.S. social phenomenon unique in the English-speaking world: the college-educated woman who stays “college-centered” in a way that English upper-class boys are fixed in patterns by their public schools. The Group is a pioneer work in the anthropology of this female tribe. It describes its initiation ceremonies, its tribal rites, its system of punishment for deviation. Its appeals are neither to God nor to what used to be called prophetically “mere man,” but to the group opinion of the initiated.

The Group is also a compendium of period ideas (the ’30s) in politics, interior decoration, sex, art, child care and the management of husbands. There is Libby, devoutly literary; Dottie, the only Bostonian at Vassar who is not identifiable by tweed; Helena, impeccably educated from birth by a cultivated clubwoman mother; Polly, whose father has gone “loony” after the crash of ’29; Kay, beautiful and serious, most responsive to the conscience of The Group; Priss, hereditary Vassar, destined for social work; Pokey, rich and horsy; Lakey, “the Mona Lisa of the Smoking Room,” who has everything. Rich, beautiful and haughty, Lakey has a taste in clothes, people and ideas that is absolute.

First Casualty. Soon, indeed, they have “snazzy” jobs and “spiffy” apartments. Kay is the first to acquire a husband, from whom she may confidently expect “vicarious success.” The Group gathers at church to handicap the groom, said to be a genius in the theater. “Not bad,” says Pokey, the society girl. Lakey knows better, and Lakey, as always, is right. Kay’s husband has sexual shortcomings, and little success. Kay has a breakdown, is sort of tricked by her unsatisfactory consort into Payne Whitney, New York Hospital’s great psychiatric clinic.

She emerges to lodge at the Vassar Club, housed in Manhattan’s New Weston Hotel, stronger in mind and career, determined to Give All Aid to the Allies Short of War. Indeed, she is engaged in some premature enemy aircraft spotting from the club window when she falls to her death. We last see The Group as they gather to bury their own. They scotch talk of suicide (all “decide” it was an accident), lay her out in one of those spiffy apartments, shoo away the undertaker with his unacceptable cosmetics and dress poor Kay in a white dress from Fortuny’s, the “first casualty,” says a Vassar clublady, “in America’s war against fascism.”

A Need for Referents. Of course the hapless husband, Harald, is really to blame. But it is hard to make out what sort of husband would be right. He must please not only his wife but placate the judgment of the sisterhood. Vassar’s standards are high. One Vassar girl explains of her husband: “Freddy isn’t an intellectual. But before we were married, we had an understanding that he should read Kafka and Joyce and Toynbee. Some of the basic books. So that semantically we would have the same referents.”

Vassar’s vestal mysteries are not always so explicit. This most female of novels is calculated to make the male reader feel like an involuntary voyeur, as if he had blundered into a contemporary version of the Eleusinian mysteries. Is there some kind of sex war going on? Certainly, it is made clear that the task of fitting man into Vassar’s vision of perfection is hard indeed.

The Group (this is before Kay’s death) has gathered to meet Lakey, the Group goddess, fairest link in the Daisy Chain (the prettiest sophomores chosen each year by the seniors), on her return from Europe. How has this incomparable green-eyed beauty defeated the fates that have battered them? Agog, the seven watch Lakey land with 17 trunks and suitcases crammed with clothes, art loot—and a stubby “baroness,” her constant companion. Slowly these green girls (some mothers by now) come to understand that Lakey, the Madonna of the Smoking Room, is a Lesbian. She has defeated man by becoming one. Then, so help us all, they ask each other: will Lakey “look down on” them because they are not Lesbians?

One can only pray that this particular bitchhead in the sex war will prove indefensible. Or can it be true, as Lakey’s baroness believes, that “American women are the fourth sex”?