Classics Paired: The Artist and the Clique

At the start of this year, I suggested you read Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, two novels which trace the development of artists in opposition to the provincial communities in which they grow up. During March and April, try two very different accounts of the artistic sensibility: Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood and The Group by Mary McCarthy. These novels are about circles of friends who discover themselves through one another.

Isherwood subtitled his novel ‘An Education in the Twenties’. His generation—McCarthy was six years younger than Isherwood–came to maturity just in time for the Thirties. On leaving university, they were greeted by the Depression, and many of them were attracted to communism, the ideology of the group. They were concerned with the material condition of society, and as artists they were aware of themselves as part of a wave of events moving in a broad historical and cultural context.

To them, the Romantic individualist was a forlorn, old-fashioned figure. Theirs was a rebellion of all youth against age, of children against authority. They shifted fiction closer to fact, inventing the new genre, reportage. And despite what may seem like earnest political inclinations or journalistic preoccupation with accuracy, they dared not take themselves too seriously. Their wit is aimed most mockingly at themselves; both of these novels are very funny.

Lions and Shadows is an autobiography, but Isherwood introduced it by saying “it contains no `revelations’; it is never `indiscreet’; it is not even entirely `true.’” Yet it’s impossible not to recognize their real life originals in his extravagant portraits of himself, Edward Upward, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, among others. Isherwood fictionalizes in order to enhance his impressions of life, and he thereby achieves a sharper truth, a set of insights about how his generation thought and conducted themselves at school, at university, and in young adult life.

He shows the way in which their shared obsessions, their taste, their jokes, their excited, highly literary sense of humour, the peculiar style and slang of their clique, began to evolve into the predominant artistic language of their time. It was the bond among them which gave them the nerve to defy established values; when Isherwood writes joke answers on his Cambridge exams and is asked to leave the university (just as he hoped), he is thinking all the while how thoroughly his recklessness will entertain his friends when he tells them.

McCarthy’s novel The Group is about eight women who graduated from Vassar together in 1933—as McCarthy herself did. It opens at the determinedly unconventional wedding of one and proceeds, almost as a group of linked stories rather than a novel, to “cover” the various milieus and social strata into which the young women disperse in their new lives in, mostly, Manhattan.

The characters are individuals, but they are also types, and they illustrate a broad sociological spread, considering they are united by possessing a diploma from Vassar. Their sexual adventures are told with candour that, even now, is both shocking and heartbreaking. Lions and Shadows seems comparatively shy, but Isherwood’s book appeared in 1938; McCarthy published hers in 1963, by which time Isherwood was writing even more outspokenly than she about sex. Plenty of McCarthy’s material is surprisingly up to date; her episode on breast feeding could easily appear in a novel published today.

The Group is fraught with the jostling tensions of a female clique in which the struggle to join and to stay in never really abates. It portrays a Vassar education as about the most progressive and challenging a young woman could receive at the time, yet, perhaps paradoxically, this very education leaves nearly every member of the group convinced that her Vassar classmates are the only members of her generation who really matter. The men they keenly pursue can’t make the inner circle, and most of the women are more concerned to impress one another than anyone outside the clique. For some, their obsession with one another is more destructive than supportive. Only a few break free of it.

If you find that The Group lags a little in the middle, persevere; the ending gives the book shape and reveals with a predictable but satisfying twist what kind of love formed the epicentre of the clique and made it unrefusable.