They’re very rare, these particular contemporary American authors – like the mythical chimera, which with compromised appeals to three radically, even genetically different constituents, they have managed, against all odds, to win a place in the hearts of all three of Open Letters The Take divx ’ founding editors. They elude Sam Sacks’ dislike of cheap, easy prose; they elude John Cotter’s dislike of clumsy, inelegant phrasings; and they elude Steve Donoghue’s dislike of, well, everything. A small, select group of 20^th century writers has managed to please all three of these exacting critics, and Open Letters My Bloody Valentine dvd pauses today to acknowledge the birth date of one such: the great novelist and critic Mary McCarthy was born in Magnifique, Le ipod Seattle on this date in 1912.

She attended Vassar College and then later immortally vivisected it in her bestselling 1963 novel The Group. Her 1957 autobiography Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood was, to put it mildly, incendiary. Her 1971 novel Birds of America was as deeply subversive in its own subtle way as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would be three years later.

And she was equally famous in her own lifetime for her personal life. She married her second husband, renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson, in 1938, and in 1979 on The Dick Cavett Show, she famously said of Lillian Hellman “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’

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Over the course of all these events, year after year, she turned out exactly the kind of sharp, witty, clear-eyed and unencumbered literary criticism to which Open Letters is devoted. In everything she wrote, she presaged Sam Sacks’ belief in the internal vitality of fiction:

I would say to the student of writing that outlines, patterns, arrangement of symbols may have a certain usefulness at the outset [of writing a novel] for some kinds of minds, but in the end they will have to be scrapped. If the story does not contradict the outline, overrun the pattern, break the symbols, like an insurrection against authority, it is surely a stillbirth. The natural symbolism of reality has more messages to communicate than the dry Morse code of the disengaged mind.

And she likewise held respect enough for the intersections of history to please even Steve Donoghue:

We not only make believe we believe a novel, but we do substantially believe it, as being continuous with real life, made of the same stuff, and the presence of fact in fiction, of dates and times and distances, is a kind of reassurance – a guarantee of credibility. If we read a novel, say, about conditions in postwar Germany, we expect it to be an accurate report of conditions in postwar Germany; if we find out that it is not, the novel is discredited. This is not the case with a play or a poem. Dante can be wrong in The Divine Comedy; it does not matter, with Shakespeare, that Bohemia has no seacoast, but if Tolstoy was all wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon, War and Peace would suffer. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me trailer

And as for John Cotter: look at the pure tensile economic beauty with which those lines are constructed.

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She died in 1989, and virtually everything she wrote in her long productive life was equally beautifully done. Most writers make their mark in either fiction or criticism; she adorned both and shaped our minds in the process. Open Letters honors her birth date and salutes her memory.

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