Occasional prose.

Occasional Prose,

MARY MCCARTHY is the American Rebecca West. Both writers are lucid, intelligent, incisive; severe, irreverent, committed. Both have a steady moral seriousness and a wide range of interests, and are equally at home in art or history. Like Miss West, and also like most contemporary American novelists--Mailer, Baldwin, Updike, Vidal, Capote, Gass, Theroux, Oates-- Miss McCarthy is better at nonfiction, which permits her to strengthen her work through the discipline of fact, while using novelistic techniques to describe character and setting.

These essays have a common manner and style, but are rather arbitrarily arranged. They would be more effective if they were divided into sections on literature and politics, as in her collection On the Contrary, and if she had placed together the essays on Nicola Chiaromonte and on F. W. Dupee, whose amusing and observant flashes of insight exemplify her own best qualities. Miss McCarthy, now a septuagenarian eminence grise, has mellowed considerably. We miss, in these remarkably unvituperative essays, her impressive ferocity. She loyally overrates Philip Rahv (once her lover) and Hannah Arendt (whom she unaccountably calls "a beautiful woman'). The only negative essay is on Joan Didion's novel Democracy.

There are a few lapses in the book. Miss McCarthy writes that the Great War produced only a single major novel in English, Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune, and seems unaware of Ford's Parade's End, Aldington's Death of a Hero, and David Jones's In Parenthesis. She discusses the paucity of present-day expatriate writers, but does not mention Robert Graves and Gerald Brenan in Spain, Anthony Burgess in Monaco, and V. S. Naipaul in London. And she makes some strange assertions about Hemingway. He actually went to Paris in 1921, lived as a journalist, and did not receive royalties from Scribner's until 1927. He did have problems with censorship: "Up in Michigan' was excluded from the Liveright edition of In Our Time, and A Farewell to Arms was banned in both Boston and Italy. And it seems odd to remark that Hemingway is a more elitist writer than, say, Henry James.

The longest and least substantial piece was prompted by the Metropolitan Opera's commission to tell "in her own words' the story of La Traviata: "On the theme of that pure maiden, Germont waxes eloquent.' Miss McCarthy mentions that Violetta is devoured by passion and consumption, but she does not place Verdi's opera in its context by discussing the mystique of tuberculosis, which extends from Schiller and Keats to Orwell and Simone Weil, and reaches its literary and operatic apotheoses in La dame aux camelias and Traviata.

The four lectures in this collection were probably more impressive when heard than when read. The most perverse talk--on art forgery (portrayed in Wyndham Lewis's The Revenge for Love), acquisitiveness (portrayed in D. H. Lawrence's "Things'), and museums --has an elitist bias but offers no solutions. Miss McCarthy argues that museums make art all but inaccessible, that "once a work of art enters a museum, instead of belonging to everybody, it belongs to nobody.' She feels it is essential to be alone in order to commune with a work of art and that the presence of a crowd is a sacrilegious intrusion. Yet this difficulty does not prevent people from praying in a cathedral.

Most of the essays are filled with shrewd insights, informed by the metaphor of theater and unified by the theme of paradox. In "Language and Politics,' strongly influenced by Orwell's "Politics and the English Language,' Miss McCarthy observes that the Watergate politicians "would not know how to tell the truth if an occasion favoring truth-telling should arise.' The playwright Pirandello is "locked into a set of once-current notions and sealed off from posterity as though in a time capsule'; "nobody breaking with Stalinism ever seemed to suffer regrets'; gardening, like love-making, "confronts us with the inexplicable.'

In a brilliant report on the war games of street protest during the demonstration against the Vietnam War in London in 1968, Miss McCarthy exposes a series of paradoxes. The wouldbe tragedy turned into a comedy of manners. "The Trotskyists, in slogans and stance to the left of the Maoists, in practice were to the right of them.' The police practiced passive resistance and the crowd created its own police force.

Miss McCarthy writes that while so many Soviet citizens were trying to leave the country, "Solzhenitsyn insisted on his right to stay and to receive the Nobel Prize.' And in the best essay in the book, a masterly analysis of Solzhenitsyn's complex novel August 1914, she shows how the Soviet writer, despite the profound influence of Tolstoy, opposes the master's view of history: He "holds that leadership is determining in war and uses examples from the tragic Eastern campaign to prove it.'