From the Bottom of the Kennel

THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS--Mary McCarthy--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

The appearance of The Company She Keeps is a big event in the small world of Manhattan's gossipy literary lefts & liberaIs. Coruscating with private cracks and local allusions, it is arousing furious debate among the author's friends and victims. Despite its shortcomings, it also sets a standard of bilish sharpness in social, psychological and self-analysis with which few U.S. writers are equipped to compete. A friend of Miss McCarthy's wrote her rom childbed: "Before I read it I felt almost like the Virgin Mary. . . . Now . . . I salute you from the bottom of the kennel."

The book is made up of six stories, four of them long, none of them dull, all as needle-toothed and portentous as so many black cats. Among them they put together the tortuous, semiautobiographical figure of Margaret Sargent, a youngwoman-about-Manhattan, from the callow moment in which she breaks her first marriage to the hour when, twisting on a psychoanalyst's sofa like an unable phoenix in hot ashes, she discovers in her childhood the source of her emptiness.

> Cruel and Barbarous Treatment, in a mere 20 pages, squeezes all but the last few drops of ugliness out of those elements of boredom, vanity, theatricality, sadism and cowardice which, if undiluted by so simple a thing as love, often destroy marriage.

> Rogue's Gallery, the funniest story, tells of Miss Sargent's experiences as assistant to a Mr. Sheer, a borrowed-shoestring art dealer.

> The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt does at full length a U.S. type common on the hoof but so new to U.S. letters that the author, unfortunately, can't quite get over her smartness in bringing him back alive. He is the intelligent, morose, lonely U.S. businessman. He and Miss Sargent pick each other up on a transcontinental train and their Scotched-up frictions throw a yellow light on various aspects of U.S. money, snobbism and sex.

> Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man examines the callow liberalism and the not-so-united-frontage of the '30s in the presumably hard, gemlike flame of the heroine's radicalism (Trotskyish) and personal integrity (self-righteous). There are some eloquent paragraphs on The Old Man, as Trotsky's disciples used to call him; some sore and salutary ones on the queasy performance of the liberal weeklies during the Moscow Trials; some sour clinical notes on the habits of college-bred intellectuals.

> Ghostly Father, I Confess is both a vivid criticism and an ambiguous endorsement of the favorite emetic of Miss McCarthy's circle, psychoanalysis.

Often the blind develop a telepathic sense of touch. Mary McCarthy's remarkably cold, black-jettish brightness at socio-psychological criticism similarly seems to proceed at least in part from the lack of another faculty: the faculty which theologians still call charity. Nowhere, in the whole of the volume, does any character act out of genuine kindness, or even out of those uneasy spurts of selfless confusion which, in actual living, so complicate the moralist's task.

Seattle-born Mary McCarthy was a Phi Beta Kappa at Vassar (1933). In 1935, in the Nation, she collaborated with Margaret Marshall on a St. Valentine's Massacre of reviewers and critics from which only Edmund Wilson emerged unriddled. In 1938 she married Survivor Wilson, now lives with him and their son in Wellfleet, Mass.

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