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Mary McCarthy’s brilliantly written, intellectually stimulating and witty satire, _The Groves of Academe _(1952), is based on her experience at Bard College, where she taught from 1945 to

1947.  It had only 80 students and nine faculty; she offered a popular Russian novel course and supervised tutees for an annual salary of $3,000.  Founded in 1860 in Annandale-on-Hudson, 90

miles north of Manhattan, Bard was (and is) a progressive, co-ed, liberal arts college—like Sarah Lawrence and Reed—with the Oxbridge model of individual tutorials to justify the high

tuition fees. Saul Bellow, who taught at Bard during 1953-54, described the same students and teachers who appeared in McCarthy’s novel, and explained why it was difficult for her rebellious

anti-hero to fit into that atmosphere of disappointed failures: Never have I worked so hard at teaching.  Small colleges demand infinitely more of you, and it is a thankless and poorly paid

labor. . . . [It was] progressive for the students, reactionary for the enslaved teachers. . . . [But] it has much to recommend it, the students are bright and those that are earnest are

terribly earnest. . . .  [Most faculty] are mediocre and cantankerous types who couldn’t make it at Bryn Mawr, Antioch or Bennington.  [If the style of students at Bard was bohemian, the

style of the faculty was conservative or Ivy League]: Castaways from ships that had foundered en route to Harvard or characters who had fallen from grace at Yale. McCarthy sets her fictional

Jocelyn College in the triangle of Mennonite farmland between Lancaster, Harrisburg and York in southeastern Pennsylvania.  And she contrasts its ethos to the pretentious ideas of small

colleges in Ohio, North Carolina, New York, Maryland and Illinois: “Its students were neither to till the soil as at Antioch nor weave on looms as at Black Mountain; they were to be grounded

neither in the grass-roots present as at Sarah Lawrence nor in the great-books past as at St. John’s or Chicago; they were to specialize neither in verse-writing, nor in the poetic theatre,

nor in the techniques of co-operative living—they were simply to be free, spontaneous and coeducational.”   Amid recurrent scandals of seductions, abortions, homosexuality and lesbianism,

the most trivial issues provoked the most bitter quarrels, and the faculty engaged in gossip, polemic and backbiting as each faction fought to protect its turf. A crucial passage, ignored by

McCarthy’s various critics and four biographers, briefly mentions the political background in 1950, soon after Russia had invaded and occupied Eastern Europe in 1945. It was the height of

the Cold War, when Russian spies had stolen the secrets of the atomic bomb and undermined American military superiority: “Dr. Fuchs had confessed; Mr. Hiss had been convicted; Mr. Greenglass

and others (including a former Jocelyn physics student) had been tried for atomic spying; Senator McCarthy had appeared.” Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist and atomic spy, confessed

his crimes and was convicted in 1950.  Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official who’d advised President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in 1945, was accused of spying for

Russia and convicted of perjury in 1950.  David Greenglass, a convicted spy, testified in 1951 against his sister Ethel and her husband Julius Rosenberg, who were executed for spying. 

Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin and fanatical anti-communist witch-hunter, destroyed many careers and lives from 1950 until his death in 1957.  The loyalty oath was

required at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950, and during that academic reign of terror, faculty who refused to swear they were not a member of a subversive organisation were

fired.  This recent history, now nearly forgotten, was inflammatory and hotly debated when _Groves_ was published in 1952. The main character and villain of the novel is the Irish-Catholic

Henry Mulcahy: “A tall, soft-bellied, lisping man with a tense, mushroom-white face, rimless bifocals, and graying thin red hair, he was intermittently aware of a quality of personal

unattractiveness that emanated from him like a miasma; this made him self-pitying, uxorious, and addicted also to self-love, for he associated it with his destiny as a portent of some

personal epiphany.”  Educated by the Jesuits, at Brooklyn College and for two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he has a first-class brain, had been awarded a Guggenheim grant, and

contributed to the _Nation_ and the _Kenyon Review._  He’s married, with four young children, and hopelessly in debt. He teaches a course in Joyce, Proust and Mann, and is careless and

irresponsible in his academic duties.  He doesn’t turn in his “achievement sheets” on schedule, report student absences or fill in midterm field-study reports, and also misses his tutorials.

  Worse still, he exploits students by getting them to baby-sit and do menial household tasks without payment, and even has them buy and pay for huge bags of groceries in the village store.

  He’s the only Ph.D. and scholar in the Literature Department, with publications in prestigious journals, but after fifteen years’ troubled and even disastrous teaching experience

elsewhere, he’s still a low-salaried instructor with no hope of achieving tenure.  He desperately needs a job, but scholarly distinction doesn’t count at Jocelyn, and this furious, volatile

and contradictory troublemaker has openly criticised the conformist ideology of the small college. The name of Jocelyn College includes an anagram of Joyce. Mulcahy identifies professionally

and personally with his scholarly idol and hero, who had died in 1941, only a decade before the period depicted in McCarthy’s novel. He’s published “James Joyce, Dialectical Materialist” in

the old _Marxist Quarterly,_ and in the difficult pre-computer days is compiling an unpublishable Joyce concordance.  He sympathises with Bloom in _Ulysses_ and with Earwicker in _Finnegans

Wake,_ and is hated both by Joyce’s academic enemies and by his own rivals in Joyce studies. He sees Joyce, the obscure language teacher in Trieste, as a martyr like himself, oppressed by

poverty and troubled children (Lucia Joyce was mentally ill).  He carries a curve-handled ash-plant cane like Stephen Dedalus, and names his children Stephen and Nora (after Joyce’s wife). 

Like Molly Bloom, his wife Catherine lies dreamily in bed for many hours every day.  Most significantly, his name appears in the “Hades” chapter of _Ulysses,_ when two drunks are looking for

the grave of a friend named Mulcahy.  They find it and one reads out his name on the tombstone while the other looks up at a statue of the Saviour erected over the grave. “_Not a bloody bit

like the man_, says he. _That’s not Mulcahy_, says he, _whoever done it_.”  McCarthy’s character is also a confusing and deceptive _homo duplex_, a sympathetic, mendacious and ambiguous

“chiaroscuro of good and evil”. It’s not surprising, when Mulcahy is informed that his appointment will be terminated at the end of the academic year, that he refuses to go quietly and

struggles for survival.  His Celtic name means “warlike”, and his cunning plot involves two bold lies: medical and political.  He claims that his wife has a weak heart and the shock of his

dismissal would actually kill her, though she would recover if he were allowed to stay.  Perri Klass, a doctor writing in _Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy_, quotes Mulcahy

telling an ally that Catherine has “ ‘a heart and kidney condition brought about by Stephen’s birth. . .  . There’s low blood pressure too and a secondary anemia.’  Later on, he adds a

retroverted uterus.”  Klass explains that “pregnancy-related kidney problems usually involve high blood pressure, not low, and that a woman with a retroverted uterus has most likely always

had one.” In his crusade for academic freedom, at a time when many people were falsely accused and ruined, Mulcahy ingeniously but falsely accuses _himself_ of being a member of the

Communist Party for the last ten years—grounds for instant dismissal almost everywhere but in crusading Jocelyn College.  McCarthy described her fictional paradox: “My point in _The Groves

of Academe _is that there were certain small progressive colleges [like Bard] where the one way of guaranteeing your job was to say you were being fired for being a communist.” McCarthy

challenges the reader to recognise the learned allusions that illuminate the themes of the novel.  The ironic (and untranslated) Latin epigraph from Horace’s _Epistles_ means, “And seek

truth in the groves of academe,” a rare thing to find in duplicitous Jocelyn.  The title of chapter 7, “Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave,” continues unquoted “when first we practice to

deceive.”  It comes from Walter Scott’s poem _Marmion_ (1808) and hints at Mulcahy’s deceit.  The title of chapter 13, “A Tygres Heart Wrapt in a Player’s Hyde” from Shakespeare’s _Henry VI,

Part 3, _suggests Mulcahy’s ferocity as he surprises and defeats his enemy.  “Springes to catch woodcocks” from _Hamlet_ reveals Mulcahy’s cunning ways to trap his foolish adversary.  When

the college president  is forced to resign, he quotes in Latin from Cicero’s _Against Catiline, _a conspirator who failed to seize control of the Roman state: “How long, O Catiline, will you

abuse our patience?” Mulcahy enlists the support of faculty members, who believe his lies without asking for proof, and McCarthy immediately brings their appearance and characters to life.

  His main ally is an idealistic colleague in the Literature Department, Domna Rejnev, whose surname suggests Reine and Queen.  Domna’s grandfather, exactly like Vladimir Nabokov’s father,

“had been a famous Liberal, one of the leaders of the Cadet party in the Duma” (Parliament).  She has a White Russian background and teaches Russian literature, but she’s 23 years old in

1950 and was born in Europe or America ten years after her family (like Nabokov’s) fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution: “She herself was a smoldering anachronism, a throwback to one of

those ardent young women of the [Eighteen] Sixties. . . . She gave the appearance of stifling in conventional surroundings; her finely cut, mobile nostrils quivered during a banal

conversation as though, literally, seeking air. . . . Her very beauty had a quality, not of radiance or softness, but of incorruptibility.”  When Catherine accidentally reveals that she’s

not seriously ill and knows about Mulcahy’s firing, Domna feels implicated in a frightful swindle. Domna’s colleague in the fight to save Mulcahy is Alma Fortune: “a widow of forty, small,

dark, wiry, energetic, with a passion for Jane Austen and Goethe, the poles of an unusual temperament, which was at once rough-hewn and fanciful, delicate and dynamic. . . . She was both

extremely outspoken and extremely reserved; her personality was posted with all sorts of No Trespassing signs and crisscrossed with electric fences, which repelled the intruder with a smart

shock.”  Before his lies are exposed and when the Department refuses to give Mulcahy a vote of confidence, the high-minded Alma shocks everyone by declaring that even if he’s rehired she

will definitely resign. The biographer Frances Kiernan identifies the real-life models of the fictional characters without explaining (with one exception) who they were.  For Maynard Hoar:

Harold Taylor (1914-93), the high-minded nullity and president of Sarah Lawrence College, where McCarthy taught in the spring of 1948.  Randall Jarrell, who also taught there, described

Taylor as shrewd, pretentious and hypocritical, with a “perpetual youngness, perfect adjustment to his surroundings .  . . likes to sound as cultivated as possible, as versatile as

possible.” The first name of the handsome smoothie Maynard Hoar, the exact antithesis of Mulcahy, recalls Robert Maynard Hutchins. President of the University of Chicago and influential

educational philosopher, he advocated Great Books courses, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive exams and early admission for exceptional students.  Hoar’s whorish surname undermines his

high-minded beliefs, and suggests that the guitar-playing “gadfly of the philosophical journals” and “photogenic, curly haired, evangelist of the right to teach,” who opposed the witch-hunts

and loyalty oath, is always subservient to the reactionary college bursar and the fund-raising trustees.  Mulcahy claims that the president, upholder of academic freedom, has fired him for

his communist beliefs, and that by publicising their conflict he could blackmail Hoar and ruin his reputation as a public liberal.  Harold Taylor, ignorantly or insouciantly, praised the

novel that had satirised him and with his last three words alluded to Nietzsche’s comment on what would happen when God was dead: “It’s packed with authentic detail. . . . I don’t think

there’s anybody who has better caught the flavor of an intellectual community where everything is permitted.” For Howard Furness, a low-heat furnace and chairman of the Literature

Department: Fred Dupee (1904-79), McCarthy’s friend, important literary critic and later professor at Columbia University.  She wrote that Furness has a “sharp, dapper mind . . . bright

delft-blue eyes. . . flat, rather wooden features.”  For Alma Fortune: Irma Brandeis (1905-90), author of an important book on Dante, _The Ladder of Vision_ (1962), was the lover and muse of

the major Italian poet Eugenio Montale.  For Aristide Poncy: Artine Artinian (1907-2005), ironically called Aristide the Just after the leading Athenian statesman and general in the Persian

War.  Armenian, born in Bulgaria and educated in America, he was a French literature scholar.  His surname suggests that he’s pretentious and affected and, like Hoar’s, undermines his

positive image. For Mulcahy: Lincoln Reis (born 1908), who wrote his Berkeley dissertation on Aristotle.  McCarthy privately called him “strange and creepy”, with a kind of “glistening

malignancy”. Frances Kiernan adds that Reis, “a widely published assistant professor of philosophy in the division of social sciences and a veteran of more than one institution of higher

learning, was not about to conform to standards and rules he regarded as foolish, even though he had a wife and two young daughters to support. . . . Reis himself was in great need of

support, having been told by Bard’s president that his contract would not be renewed at the end of the school year.  As he saw it, he had been fired without cause.”  All these cosmopolitan

faculty members, born between 1904 and 1914, belong to the same divisive generation. Under pressure, Hoar works out a compromise and tells Domna, “I could carry him as an instructor, pro

tem, but I couldn’t promise him promotion and tenure. . . . Let him try and find another post and if nothing turns up for him by June, say, or mid-summer, we will try [to see] what we can do

with the bursar.  In the long run, I don’t suppose, Domna, that we’ll literally turn him out into the streets.”  The dramatic climax is reached about three-quarters of the way through the

novel, when Mulcahy is retained and signs a new contract.  The structure then weakens and shifts into an amusing satire on a poetry conference, which excludes almost all the leading poets

and invites a lot of grateful but disoriented duds. The one exception is modeled on the Presbyterian insurance executive Wallace Stevens: “a very old poet, clean and fresh as a rose, a bank

president in private life, very mild and courteous, with a gentle quavering voice and a tight set of long soft lips, like a Presbyterian pew-holder.  He had a style of old fashioned

elaborate compliment.”  His poetry is notoriously difficult and few in the audience understand it.  During the conference, in the only significant connection to Mulcahy’s crisis, Hoar grills

a proletarian poet who knew Mulcahy in the old Marxist days and categorically states that “Mulcahy was never in the Party or near it”. Mulcahy had previously explained his ruthless methods:

“when you’ve got a pistol to a man’s head, you don’t pull the trigger until you get what you can out of him. . . We must show that we mean it,” and he used them to defeat Hoar.  It is not

enough to succeed, as Gore Vidal remarked: your enemy must fail.  Hoar’s whole career would be threatened if Mulcahy revealed the despicable ways Hoar used to get rid of his adversary: “the

story of his personal molestation, spying, surveillance, corruption of students by faculty stool-pigeons.”  In the final pages Hoar, fond of nautical metaphors, “concludes that it was best

for me to resign . . . . The college would never get rid of him as long as I was at the tiller.  With another skipper, who can’t be blackmailed, there’s a fair chance of getting him out.” 

During these complex and unexpected machinations, Mulcahy-Catiline achieves a temporary victory, but McCarthy suggests that he will ultimately be defeated when the college loses patience and

can no longer tolerate his abuse. McCarthy’s ex-husband Edmund Wilson told Nabokov that _The Groves of Academe _was “the best thing she has done” and urged his friend to read it.  Nicola

Chiaromonte, the Italian-born _Partisan Review_ critic and close friend of McCarthy, noted some of the reviewers’ criticism of the novel — too smart, too superior, too satiric — but

emphasised her finest qualities: “I found it very clever and confused.  If Mary only learnt to stick to some line of consistent development, instead of showing off in all directions. She has

a genuine talent for satire, and she is really intelligent.  But she should make up her mind about some conclusion—nihilistic satire, or just play.  But not both at the same time. . . .

However I like Mary’s mind very much.  There is something really generous and passionate about it, for all her smartness.” Mary McCarthy portrays the conflict between idealism and

corruption, and passionately believes in the honest and decent values of her noble characters, Domna Rejnev and Alma Fortune.  She describes how Henry Mulcahy’s struggle to attain job

security in a poorly paid profession leads to his deceit and Maynard Hoar’s hypocrisy.  She also satirises the bitter political interference with academic freedom in American colleges and

universities that is still a contentious issue today. _Jeffrey Meyers has just published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist.  His Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and

Plath will appear in August or September 2024, both books with Louisiana State University Press._ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every

angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a

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