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I 5 : MARY MCCARTHY ON CAPE COD THE POST-WILSON YEARS, FROM THE UNFINISHED “LOST WEEK” TO A Charmed Life n January  Mary McCarthy definitively left Wilson and the house he was renting at Henderson Place, off East Eighty-seventh Street, by the East River in Manhattan. She took me with her, and we led something of a gypsy life over the next few months in the city. The divorce would be finalized in October of the same year. In the meantime my mother rented Polly Boyden’s house in Truro for the summer. My father spent that summer in Europe, covering the postwar scene for the New Yorker. Now my mother found the Cape highly stimulating, largely owing to the presence of a newfound mentor, Nicola Chiaromonte. In addition, Dwight Macdonald was there, as were other friends from her Partisan Review days in New York. She had seen little of this circle while married to Wilson, who viewed its members with condescension. Chiaromonte, a refugee from fascism in his native Italy, and his American wife Miriam were renting a cottage near Balston Beach in Truro. A philosopher by training and inclination, Chiaromonte had his own ideas on how postwar Europe should be reconstructed. He was both anticommunist and anti–U.S.-style capitalism. Dwight Macdonald, to whose magazine Politics (–) Chiaromonte contributed, described him as “a kind of Prudhonian anarchist” (Wreszin, Moral Temper, ). Another Italian writer, Nicola Tucci, was also vacationing in Truro. (It was at the Tuccis’ apartment in New York that McCarthy remembered meeting for the first time, her younger, future husband Bowden Broadwater.) Also on the scene were James T. Farrell; Lionel Abel (who wrote for Partisan Review and later became a university professor); Philip Rahv (for a visit); Robert Nathan, the poet and popular novelist; Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend; and the sculptor Tino Nivola (Gelderman, ). Next door to the Boyden house that my mother was renting lived Eben and Phyllis (née Duganne) Given. As mentioned earlier, Eben was a nonpracticing artist; Phyllis was a prolific writer of short fiction for popular journals. Their son, Eben Jr., was just my age, and we kept constant company. My  : to the life of silver harbor mother and Phyllis commiserated with each other for spending much valuable writing time overseeing two very active seven-year-olds. Over the summer, my mother entertained a succession of houseguests. One of these was the art critic Clement Greenberg, with whom she had had a short affair a few months earlier. During the visit he volunteered to spank me, if it should become necessary—an offer that she deeply resented. Other guests included Hardwick Moseley, a courtly southerner who had replaced her former editor at Houghton Mifflin’s New York office and with whom she was having “a transient love affair” (McCarthy quoted in Gelderman, ), as well as Herbert Solow, an editor at Fortune magazine , and his consort Silvia Salmi, a professional photographer. (On several occasions, both during and after his marriage to McCarthy, Wilson hired Salmi to take pictures of him and his family.) McCarthy also invited Jack and Eunice Jessup and their child. Jack was an editorial writer for Life magazine; Eunice, née Clark, had been McCarthy’s classmate at Vassar and is a likely prototype for Norine Schmidtlapp in her later novel The Group. It seems, however, that McCarthy ended up finding the Jessups a rental house in Wellfleet, while their renters came to stay with her as nonpaying guests in Truro (McCarthy to Bowden Broadwater, in a letter written around July , , Vassar). Possibly my mother went to all this trouble because she wasn’t keen on having another live-in child. An important repeat visitor that summer was Bowden Broadwater, a recent Harvard graduate whose poor eyesight had spared him induction into the army. At the time Bowden was working odd jobs, one of them at the New Yorker. During that summer, which McCarthy later felt had been the happiest of her life, she saw a lot of Dwight and Nancy Macdonald . They were living with their children Mike and Nicky in a house called “Four Winds” perched on a bluff in North Truro; next door was a small fish-packing operation called the “Ice House.” Mike was just a few months older than I—we were to become lifelong friends. Ruth and Gardner Jencks, whom she had known while married to Wilson, also surfaced on McCarthy...

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