Katy Waldman on Mary McCarthy's "One Touch of Nature"

"I first encountered Mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended that I read "The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits" before covering Paul Manafort's arraignment in 2017. (Were we ever so young?) I loved McCarthy's witty cameos of malefactors—behold Maurice Stans, Nixon's erstwhile Secretary of Commerce, "a silver-haired, sideburned super-accountant and magic fund-raiser, who gave a day-and-a-half-long demonstration of the athletics of evasion, showing himself very fit for a man of his age.""

"In January, 1970, The New Yorker published McCarthy's "One Touch of Nature," a tour-de-force essay that stretched across nineteen pages and was animated by a simple question: What happened to nature imagery in fiction? McCarthy contends that novels have drifted far from "when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess"-Dickens's London fogs, Melville's Pacific. Now, she observes, "rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys" are thin on the literary ground."

"The technical term for the piece-a loose, sprawling, associative freestyle, in which McCarthy seemingly wheels through as many proper nouns and pithy summaries as she can-is a "riff." It spans movements (classicism, Romanticism, modernism), regions (Continental Europe, England, the U.S.), and art forms (painting, poetry, fiction). McCarthy aims to account for nature's mutable presence across three centuries of Western cultural production. As she proceeds, grudges are revived: "What betrays the bad faith of Hemingway is the invariable intrusion of the social into a natural context.""

Nature imagery in Western fiction has declined and mutated across three centuries, with descriptive prowess once marking authorship now diminished. Classic descriptive scenes—Dickens's London fogs and Melville's Pacific—contrast with contemporary scarcity of rivers, lakes, mountains, and valleys. The change intersects with movements such as classicism, Romanticism, and modernism, and spans regions and art forms including painting and poetry. The thinning of nature ties to shifting aesthetic priorities, the intrusion of social contexts into natural settings, and the politicization or etherization of outdoor vision, altering how landscapes function in narrative.

Read at The New Yorker