Birds of America.
Inscribed to James and Gloria Jones
McCarthy, Mary [Therese]. Birds of America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Inc., (1971).
8vo.; black topstain; mustard endpapers; dark mustard cloth, spine stamped in brown and blue; dark mustard dust-jacket printed in blue and black; fine. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed to James Jones and his wife: For Jim and Gloria, with much affection, Mary McCarthy. Mary McCarthy met James and Gloria Jones in 1960, according to biographer Fran Kiernan, and formed a relationship that lasted until Jones’s death in 1978. They met in Paris through McCarthy’s son Reuel:
Four Americans in a city that had very little use for Americans, they made it a point to celebrate Christmas and birthdays together. They were good dinner friends and good conversation friends and they liked one another. Together they lived through the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the great student rebellion of 1968, and the Vietnam War. No matter what, there were wonderful dinners and wonderful car trips, with fine food and fine wine, and one wonderful night when they polished off an entire bottle of perfectly chilled framboise.
When they first met she was an essayist and a novelist known to a small and elite audience. He was famous: his first novel, From Here to Eternity, had been a major bestseller and then gone on to be made into an Academy Award winning motion picture. Her heroines, like their creator, were articulate and highly educated. His best known hero belonged to the working class. In her first book she anatomized the world of left-wing intellectuals. In his first book he shocked the critics with his brutal and realistic portrayal of army life.
As writers Mary McCarthy and James Jones were nothing alike, but living in a country that cared only for writers who wrote in French they shared an immediate bond. Then in 1963 she, too, became a celebrity, with the publication of The Group, her sexually explicit tale of the misadventures of eight Vassar graduates from the class of ‘33. She, too, learned what it is to earn more money than you ever dreamed of... (Fran Kiernan, letter relating information gleaned from an interview with Gloria Jones, 1992).
The same year that Birds of America appeared, Jones published a book containing a character he had modeled none too subtly on his friend McCarthy:
In 1971, he brought out his sixth novel, The Merry Month of May, which was set in Paris during the recent student uprising and had as a minor character the famous lady American writer Magdalen McCaw who wears her hair “skinned back” and is known for her “toothy grin” which many call “sharklike” but which the narrator finds “innocent.” (Kiernan, letter).
A lovely association copy linking two vastly dissimilar but significant American novelists.
(#6743)
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