Katy Waldman Mary McCarthy One Touch of Nature Review
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Mary McCarthy’s Enduring wit and the Shifting Landscape of Nature in Literature
Introduction: A Rediscovery of McCarthy’s Brilliance
I first encountered mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended that I read “The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits” before covering Paul Manafort’s arraignment in 2017. (Were we ever so young?) I loved McCarthy’s witty cameos of malefactors-behold Maurice Stans, Nixon’s erstwhile Secretary of commerce, “a silver-haired, sideburned super-accountant and magic fund-raiser, who gave a day-and-a-half-long demonstration of the athletics of evasion, showing himself very fit for a man of his age.” McCarthy’s sentences were like mousetraps, snapping shut on both visual data and something deeper, the kind of quintessence that fictional characters possess and that we often long for real people to have, too.
“One touch of Nature”: A Literary riff on the Absence of the Natural World
In January, 1970, The New Yorker published McCarthy’s “one Touch of Nature,” a tour-de-force essay that stretched across nineteen pages and was animated by a simple question: What happened to nature imagery in fiction? McCarthy contends that novels have drifted far from “when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess”-Dickens’s London fogs, Melville’s Pacific. Now, she observes, “rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys” are thin on the literary ground.
The technical term for the piece-a loose, sprawling, associative freestyle, in wich McCarthy seemingly wheels through as many proper nouns and pithy summaries as she can-is a “riff.” It spans movements (classicism, Romanticism, modernism), regions (Continental Europe, England, the U.S.), and art forms (painting, poetry, fiction). McCarthy aims to account for nature’s mutable presence across three centuries of Western cultural production. As she proceeds, grudges are revived: ”What betrays the bad faith of Hemingway is the invariable intrusion of the social into a natural context.” Politicians are etherized: Joseph McCarthy’s vision of the outdoors is “doubtless based on a frozen-food locker.” Opinions are tossed in the manner of house keys. Zola is “the only Naturalist to have a real conception of Nature.”
A reader trusts this voice instinctively, charmed by its opaline assessments and zinging aperçus, forgiving a shortage of textual evidence because each claim feels spot-on. “The characteristic of truth for Tolstoy was its recognizability,” McCarthy submits.
The Evolution of Nature’s Role in Literature: A Comparative Timeline
McCarthy’s essay highlights a notable shift in how authors approach nature. Initially, nature served as a backdrop, a source of symbolism, and a demonstration of an author’s descriptive skill. Over time, particularly with the rise of modernism, the focus shifted inward, towards psychological realism and social commentary, diminishing the prominence of detailed natural descriptions.
| Literary Period | nature’s Role | Key Authors | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Romanticism (late 18th – early 19th century) | Central; source of inspiration, sublime experience, emotional resonance. | Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron | Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” |
| Realism (mid-19th century) | Detailed depiction of natural settings as part of social context. | Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy | Dickens’s London fogs, Tolstoy’s descriptions of russian landscapes |
| Naturalism (late 19th – early 20th century) | Nature as a force of determinism, indifferent to human fate. | Zola, Dreiser | zola’s Germinal, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy |
| Modernism (early-mid 20th century) |