Quite High on a Mountaintop

THE OASIS (181 pp.)_Mary McCarthy --Random House ($2).

Honest Joe Lockman was distressed when he discovered that his destination, Utopia, wasn't marked on his Socony Automobile Guide. But Joe enjoyed a good gag, and when he checked up on the mysterious region he was tickled to find that it derived from the Greek ou (not) and topos (a place).

"Notaplace, get it?" he chuckled to his wife Eva--though with a sinking heart, because he knew that poor Eva, whose life depended on a well-ordered battery of labor-saving devices, was probably not going to relish the simple life of Utopia one bit. Only what she and Joe took to be the advancing shadow of World War III had scared her into agreeing to pull up her bourgeois roots and join him in the new colony being formed on a New England mountaintop.

Anybody Want a Cormorant? Joe

and Eva are the only more-or-less average Americans in Mary McCarthy's satirical fantasy about a bunch of highbrows who decide that it is time for people like themselves to hit it for the grass roots. This is not the first time that sprightly Author McCarthy, onetime wife of Critic Edmund Wilson and former drama critic of the fiercely intellectual Partisan Review, has peppered the left wing with birdshot. In The Company She Keeps (TIME, June 1, 1942), she made a novel of sorts out of a series of lively, only-too-lifelike portraits of Manhattan intellectuals. Her new book, The Oasis, appears in the U.S. with advance laurels: it has already won the 1949 short-novel prize of Britain's own uncompromisingly cerebral monthly, Horizon.

Most of the 50 McCarthy Utopians in

The Oasis come from one or other of two emphatic and talkative echelons. First are "the purists," who believe that in these tough times the best hope for mankind is for idealists to build "oases" of humaneness and brotherly love. Stringing along with them, largely out of spiteful hope of seeing the experiment fail, are "the realists," cynical ex-Commies who still retain ("from their Leninist days") the smug and fanciful notion that they are a revolutionary elite. Steeped in a Marx-cum-Freud conviction that no man can "resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning," the realists take for granted that all oases which spring from mere individual initiative are sure to be mirages.

To both groups, simple-souled, common-sensical Joe Lockman is a freak--"a stray bird of the cormorant capitalist species" who has somehow blundered into their nest. Similarly, to Joe, both purists and realists are crazy products of a U.S. he has never known.

Anybody Got a Commodity? It is on this split between the active but lowbrow man-in-the-street and the wrangling but ineffectual man-of-intellect that Author McCarthy spins her tale. In McCarthy's fable, the incidents of everyday life on the mountaintop soon show that the split is in fact a bridgeless gulf, and Utopia itself a creation without foundations-doomed not so much by "history" as by the colonists' inability to produce "a commodity more tangible than morality" and hopeful hot air.

"How very good it is," exclaimed Horizon Editor Cyril Connolly, "how brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt." Less susceptible readers are likely to emerge from The Oasis with drier emotions. Author McCarthy's wit sparkles very nicely as long as she is standing the false gods of contemporary intellectualism on their heads and displaying her theory-ridden victims against a backdrop composed of the simple facts of life. Nonetheless, most of The Oasis has just the same fatal flaw as the Utopia it describes--it is built entirely of disembodied ideas and peopled with puppets. As an intellectual essay it tinkles some pretty bells, but as fiction it is about as robust and complete as a lopped-off head.

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