Please Take This Summer to Become Obsessed With The Group
Unfortunately, I have become obsessed with a book from the 1960s, not an undiscovered gem or a long lost secret that I can press into people’s hands but one that I am willing to bet is on your shelf—or maybe your mother’s—right now. My book is a 1963 New York Times bestseller, a book regularly trotted out in reading clubs and best-of lists, a book with a movie adaptation and fans around the world.
But reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group is an obsessive experience, and one that, despite McCarthy’s and the novel’s fame, still feels like discovering a thrilling secret. Its prose shows a master stylist at work, its aesthetics are striking—all ivory-tipped cigarettes, hand-pureed pâté, Vassar socialists in dungarees—and it has a surprise queer romance that twists the whole narrative into new shape. It’s my new standard for a summer read: lavish, hilarious, smart and mean, like a glamorous friend you’re torn between fearing and crushing on.
The Group, published in 1963 and set in 1933, is the story of eight friends who graduate from Vassar College and their post-graduate lives. (From this point on: spoilers abound.) Though its politics are deeply rooted in the 1930s—the novel addresses the idea of the New Woman, the optimism of socialism before WWII and the Eastern Bloc, and the rise of fascism—it is as much about the feminist movement of the 60s and the pitfalls of cultural movements that posit themselves as revolutionary and instead find new ways to minimize, cage, and hurt women.
“It’s a novel about the idea of progress, really,” McCarthy told The Paris Review in 1962. “The idea of progress seen in the female sphere … the study of technology in the home, in the playpen, in the bed. It’s supposed to be the history of the loss of faith in progress … during that twenty-year period.” But the 20-year period might as well be 80: The Group is alarmingly modern.
In writing about the 30s during the 60s, the novel’s characters wrestle with misogyny that is both period-specific (much has been made of the detailed scene where one character, Dottie, sets out to buy contraception for the first time) and ominously general. Its series of awful men, for example, could easily be a roll call from Tindr.
Harald, whose marriage to Kay kicks off the story, is a lit bro obsessed with his terrible play, shifting from coolly aloof (“Consider yourself kissed,” he signs his love letters, or just CYK) to a lying, cheating, abusive gaslighter so skilled he commits Kay, against her will, to a mental institution. Kay is considered difficult, blamed for not being progressive enough to accept Harald’s affairs. Harald considers himself anti-establishment, but his acts of civil disobedience are comically unimpressive, such as when he dresses in evening wear and gets arrested in an attempt to help waiters unionize that ultimately has nothing to do with the waiters who need working rights, and everything to do with Harald’s own ego. (Unsurprisingly, his attempt does more harm than good.) Political posturing by useless men for clout, clearly, is not a new phenomenon.
It is this steady, unflinching eye on men, which doesn’t much like what it sees, which makes The Group so grimly truthful and so strangely modern.
If Harald is the chief villain, none of the other men make up for him, either. Priss spends days in a hospital listening to her newborn scream while her pediatrician husband keeps her on a strict breastfeeding schedule. Priss doesn’t have the energy or power to protest, which should remind us of Victorian misogyny—instead, it feels uncannily like the grey areas of consent explored in stories like Cat Person, where it’s easier to give into the lesser evil of going along with an unpleasant experience than try to fight it and have your agency destroyed.
Libby finds her romance with a Norwegian baron shattered when he attempts to rape her; only by reconstructing the event into a breezy anecdote can she attempt to regain some control over her lost narrative. Polly has a love affair with an older man, Gus, who spends hours in psychoanalysis trying to find out what’s wrong with him. The answer is nothing—apart from the fact that he can’t commit to a relationship—but Gus is determined to find a clinical diagnosis for his inability to pick between Polly and his ex-wife.
It is this steady, unflinching eye on men, which doesn’t much like what it sees, which makes The Group so grimly truthful and so strangely modern. These heterosexuality-as-prison novels usually fascinate me even as they push me to the outside: how could anyone possibly want this? They make heterosexuality seem like a baffling choice, even as they reject any other option; many of the same women who wrote and railed against heterosexual cruelty are frequently deeply lesbophobic. (Call it The Golden Notebook effect.) But in The Group, there is an escape—just one.
The hidden, compelling hero of The Group is Elinor Eastlake, known as Lakey. For most of the book, the “taciturn brunette beauty” is away studying art history in Paris. But from the moment she appears, Lakey is a ticking clock. Her first line is delivered with “murder in her long, green eyes,” and so her beauty and her fury are coupled, one leading to the other. The story does not treat Lakey’s beauty as something to be quelled, like Priss’s, or won, like Polly’s. It feels like the stamp of a god: up to something, but with an indeterminate direction. The rest of the group are obsessed with Lakey—“they often discussed her, like toys discussing their owner”—and though Lakey understands them instinctively, she herself is not understood.
There are occasional, disdainful mentions of Lesbianism (always capitalized) within The Group, which I sailed past, confident that even if McCarthy hadn’t quite known what she was writing about when it came to Lakey, I knew enough to recognize an arch dyke when I saw one. And then Lakey comes back from Europe. With her, comes the Baroness.
“Maria is a bear,” Lakey explains to her friends, with pleasure that does not dim at their shocked discovery of her sexuality. “She growls at strangers.” In a bizarre, exhilarating twist, Lakey and her Baroness appear like a vision from a better world; there is a possibility of happiness, of equality, of sexual pleasure and love. You just can’t get it from a man.
The Group understands that sometimes, being seen just means new ways for someone to hurt you.
Of course, you also cannot get it uncriticized, or even understood. The group feel “that what had happened to Lakey was a tragedy.” Even as they mouth their shocked society protests, though, the relationship that so repels them comes with its own elements of danger and excitement. Lakey is the “exquisite captive of a fierce robber woman, locked up in a Castle Perilous, and woe to the knight who came to release her from the enchantment.” On the one hand, this is a homophobic judgment call; on the other, it is also essentially a sexual fantasy.
McCarthy’s balancing act is at its finest in this tension between lesbophobic censure and queer sexuality. Maria and Lakey are never seen from within their own world, only through the judgment and pity of their friends. But their friends’ judgment is tainted with doubt, with suspicion that they are not being shown the whole story; that they are, in fact, incapable of seeing the whole story. McCarthy never came out as a lesbian or queer, and the novel shows a a surprisingly diplomatic resistance to providing a sense of lesbian interiority, which McCarthy was perhaps unqualified to write. As the vanguard of white/cis/heterosexual writers complaining about not being given carte blanche to represent the minorities of their choice continues to expand, McCarthy, back in 1963, offers a reasonable alternative: give a glimpse of lesbian sensibility and autonomy without attempting to speak for a group to which she does not publicly belong.
The Group is wary of simple political narratives; it wants to embrace the idea of sweeping change, but does not trust the actors who seize the main stage. The time gap in the novel’s setting and its conception instructs us to be on our guard—it’s wonderful to think that the growing freedoms of 1933 changed everything for the good, but as McCarthy shows, it’s also not that simple. The modernity that allows the women in The Group to pursue their own careers has also created the society in which women are systematically underpaid. Progress as an idea alone is not to be trusted, but to be grappled with, examined under a microscope, hotly contested. Progress for who? And how?
As I write, queer people have never before been so culturally represented and supported; as I walk the streets of the city in which I live, men eye my wife and I with a newly enlightened eye, speculative and dangerous. The Group understands that sometimes, being seen just means new ways for someone to hurt you.
But it doesn’t deny us hope, either; The Group holds fragments of potential out to us like a gift. Putting them together in 2019 leaves us with the promise and pleasure of a queer world simmering underneath heterosexual misery and banality. Lakey and her Baroness are doing just fine.
