Company She Keeps, The.
Inscribed To Vladimir Nabokov
McCarthy, Mary. The Company She Keeps. (New York): Simon and Schuster, 1942.
8vo.; grey cloth, gently bumped; dust-jacket with wear to extremities. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of McCarthy’s first book, arranged in six separately titled episodes which follow a girl in her early twenties around the urban jungle of New York; number of copies unknown—the publisher’s records were destroyed in a warehouse fire in the ‘50s. Goldman A1a. A presentation copy, inscribed to Vladimir Nabokov on the front endpaper with an entomological allusion: To Vladimir, without protective coloration, Mary.
At the time of this publication, McCarthy (1912-1989) was known primarily for her book and theatre reviews which appeared in the Nation and the New Republic on a regular basis, as well as in the Partisan Review, where she was an editor. The Company She Keeps, a collection of related stories with some autobiographical elements, loosely arranged as a novel, was her first attempt at fiction, though she had likely experimented with the form in college as co-founder with Elizabeth Bishop of a radical literary journal at Vassar. One episode in particular, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” became exceptionally popular, remaining something of a touchstone coming-of-age tale for subsequent generations of female readers. Though she would continue to be more prolific with her non-fiction and critical writings, publishing a major autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in 1958, McCarthy struck gold in 1963 with The Group, a savage, if fictional portrayal of eight Vassar graduates. In 1984 she received the National Medal for Literature.
McCarthy’s relationship with Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Véra, dates from her marriage in 1938 to Edmund Wilson, the second of her four husbands (she was his third wife). Wilson and VN had a close, if contentious, relationship for nearly forty years, until severe critical differences ended their friendship in a rather public manner; by that time, however, McCarthy was long gone from both their lives. McCarthy presented this copy of her book to VN the summer after its publication, at Wellfleet, the literary Cape Cod retreat she shared with Wilson. VN’s biographer reports that he read The Company She Keeps “and was very agreeably surprised, ‘quite flabergasted’ in fact” (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 44). In presenting this book “without protective coloration,” McCarthy no doubt references a conversation with VN in which the accomplished lepidopterologist explained a concept he much later defined in an interview for Vogue:
A useful purpose is assigned by science to animal mimicry, protective patterns and shapes, yet their refinement transcends the crude purpose of mere survival. In art, an individual style is essentially as futile and as organic as a fata morgana. The sleight-of-hand you mention is hardly more than an insect’s sleight-of-wing. A wit might say that it protects me from half-wits. A grateful spectator is content to applaud the grace with which the masked performer melts into Nature’s back-ground. (June 26, 1969; Strong Opinions, p. 153)
Given this definition, McCarthy’s apprehensive presentation “without protective coloration” of her first novel to so accomplished a literary guru as Nabokov seems sweetly self-deprecating in light of the turn her social and professional careers were to take.
The only copy, to date, of this uncommon book we have encountered with a significant literary association.
(#3533)
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