As we all hunker down for COVID-19—from Seattle to Boston, South Africa to Switzerland—we’re haunted by stories of a similarly frightening influenza pandemic that swept the globe in 1918, just over a century ago. For Mary McCarthy, an important American novelist, essayist, and public intellectual from the thirties through the eighties, 1918 brought a personal tragedy.
Many Americans in the 1920s had little direct connection to soldiers who were lost or injured in the Great War, but nearly everyone experienced brushes with the devastating flu pandemic. In my historical mystery Relative Fortunes, Julia’s friend Glennis Rankin lost both her parents in its wake.
When I was planning my book and imagining Glennis’s situation, I was influenced by my recent reading of two memoirs of Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Childhood and How I Grew. Today McCarthy is best known for her fierce liberalism and her 1963 novel The Group. But she was shaped, in many respects, by the sudden loss of both parents to the 1918 flu when she was just six.
Born to a prosperous family in Seattle, McCarthy recalled an early loving childhood where reading and language were encouraged. That ended abruptly when she and her orphaned siblings were shipped off to Minneapolis, where strict relatives allowed very few books. This, she later wrote in How I Grew, was “to save electricity, or because books could give us ‘ideas’ that would make us too big for our boots.”
Young Mary burst out of her boots with a vengeance. She went on to read ferociously and write with unflinching power. Books did give her “ideas,” and those ideas made an indelible mark on American culture. For more than five decades she published incisive social and political commentary in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Partisan Review, and elsewhere, denouncing Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt in the fifties and the Vietnam War in the sixties and seventies.
She famously feuded with playwright Lillian Hellman over Hellman’s Stalinist sympathies, but more notable was McCarthy’s long and close friendship with Hannah Arendt. Their thriving friendship, rooted in rigorous intellectual exchange, is a model and inspiration for me and many women.
From Mary McCarthy’s personal pandemic in 1918 was forged one of the great minds of the twentieth century.
Image: McCarthy’s 1933 senior photo, Vassar College
