Where are they? Well, Daisy is working for Vogue, forging her own future, living the circle that binds us together in its lovely and ratifying spin. I believe in magic. We all have extraordinary powers, if only we could access them. One way of accessing them is to be happy. One sign of the magic of happiness is how things connect, of how you do one thing that seems arbitrary at the time and then turns out to be the first and most necessary step in a process that leads to fulfillment. So much is circular. Vogue lay in my past, I thought, but it was streaming through my future, and that child who was pondering the vexed question of what to do about me was already connected to Vogue.
I see Daisy now and yet continually also see her as she has been through all the stages of her life. I see her different ages, different sizes, image superimposed on image, growing up in an endless shadow play, always herself in all her different manifestations, one melding into the other, a magma, an archaeological dig that only I can turn up. And yet she could always escape me. The child who asked what could yon do with a mother like me saw that I was a spy and took her own measures. She silently slipped away, withdrew from the tempestuous encounters endemic to the rest of the family.
Do you know that poem by Seamus Heaney about the hare?
Choose one set of tracks and track a hare
Until the prints stop just like that in snow.
End of the line. Smooth drifts, where did she go?
Back on her tracks, of course and then took a spring
Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.
Daisy was like that; all the evidence of her was there. Room like an ice palace, possessions in place. But the impeccable girl had sprung. I think about her all the time. Does she remember what it was like to cry passionately over a sad story, to mourn a dead bird, to lie awake dreaming of hunting with her pony?
What goes around comes around. I remember showing a beautiful-limned big-eyed silent young girl with hair like a polished blade around the Vogue offices in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue. Her name was Anna Wintour. She is now Daisy's editor. I doubt if she would remember. But the fact that the circles are so clean and fitting is a sign of hope to me, a sign that we are all linked, that the magic that is coincidence and synchronicity works, that the world is not an arbitrary place.
I recently came across an article Daisy had written for a newspaper. She hadn’t bothered to tell me. In it, she wrote, “I wonder at our shared blood. I pore over photographs of her, not just at the way she looks, but to try to gain some sense of her. It still mystifies me that she bore me, that we are of the same ilk.” I am glad I am no longer the oracle or the know-nothing, neither the solution nor the problem, neither the dispenser of justice nor the very opposite. Where once I went ahead, and they followed, I now follow in their footsteps, an old page to their young Saint Wenceslas. I have all the time in the world and all the space I need. And at some level, I want to be back in the wig room to see them on the window seat discussing what to do about the most important person in their world. I telephone to ask her how she is, She’s in her new office, in Times Square. I am looking out at a fox stalking across a field. There's no one at the magazine who remembers me. Except her. My daughter, who works at Vogue. Vogue, 12.2000
7. People are talking about books.
What happens when smart, ambitious female writers marry smart, combative male writers? Good books, bad marriages.
Or so would appear the lesson of David Laskin’s illuminating new book Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals (Simon and Schuster). Focusing on the women of The Partisan Review, the magazine that started in 1934 and for the next three decades reigned as New York’s most influential journal, Laskin brings a fresh perspective to the lives, careers, loves, and marriages of such literary legends as Vassar grad and the Group author Mary McCarthy, novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, and Boston Adventure author and Pulitzer Prize – winner Jean Stafford.
Of course, they didn’t sleep their way into the boy’s club of the PR, but rather were published and listened to because of the quality of their writing and the acuity of their opinions; yet the women in McCarthy circle were what Laskin calls “sexual adventures”. Indeed, they racked up numerous – and some overlapping – lovers, many of whom were editors and writers for the PR. McCarthy and Hardwick both slept with PR editor Philip Rahv; both Stafford and Hardwick were married to Boston aristocrat and poet laureate Robert Lowell. And get this: It was her then – boyfriend Rahv who first sent McCarthy out to have drinks with critic Edmund Wilson to try to woo him for the magazine. Eventually Wilson did, but not before he had bedded and wedded McCarthy.
Given that all of these marriages between men and women of letters were veritable knock-you-out cocktails of ambition, talent, and passion, it’s unsurprising that they would be ruinously affected by intellectual and sexual competitiveness. As McCarthy once told an interviewer, “There is no real equality in sexual relationships – someone always wins.” Laskin concedes, “even in a marriage of well-matched literary luminaries, one career usually takes precedence over the other. Rivalry poisons the atmosphere or smothers one or another’s flame.”
Laskin also suggests that the era in which these intellectuals were living and loving played a huge role in their marital dissolutions: “Lowell and the literary men of their generation were all bigamists of a sort and their marriages broke under the weight of their double desires, for the women they married could never play both parts [that of wife and of writer] and hold on to their sanity. Either they drank and cracked up, like Jean Stafford; or They divorced and had affairs, like Mary McCarthy; or they toughed it out for as long as they could stand it, only to be chucked in the end, like Hardwick.” Not only did Lowell leave Hardwick for another woman, he doubled the blow by subsequently quoting entire sections of her private, desperate love letters to him in his published poems.
Stafford, McCarthy, and Hardwick. What these American women had in common besides being supremely talented and tough and “marriers to the core” is that all came to New York from disparate places to carve out lives for themselves as writers. Stafford was from Boulder, Colorado; McCarthy from Seattle; Hardwick from Lexington, Kentucky. Of course, coming to New York to be a writer wasn’t a new phenomenon when McCarthy and her group were doing it, nor is it one now. In fact, what becomes strikingly evident when you compare the women of the PR with the new wave of writers like Melissa Bank (author of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing), Amy Sohn (Run Catch Kiss), and other practitioners of the relationships novel is that there has been a New York School of young female writers whose collective pen has focused on the relationships between men and women. A New York male school of fiction is not so easy to identify. So, in the end, Partisans not only serves as a well-researched, unobtrusively written history of a fascinating group of female writers in a prefeminist era but also sheds light on many facets of today’s writing and dating scene.
Of course, there are substantial differences between the PR’s heyday and now: Intellectual culture is probably less vibrant and certainly more diffuse today, and politics doesn’t play as much a role in the writings of our new belletrists off the bedroom. Not to mention that when today’s young New York School of female authors write about their characters’ relationships, they tend to detail the dating game itself rather than marriage. And what about the men these women fall for? They’re more likely to be bartenders, aspiring musicians, or filmmakers than critics, writers, or even McCarthy ‘s famous archetypes of The Man in the Brooks brothers Shirt. However, it is curious, though not wholly unsurprising, that the most intriguing suitor in The Girls’ Guide – and the one who sustains the protagonist’s enduring interest – is a well-regarded, aging editor who could have been around long enough to throw back a few stiff drinks with those intellectuals who once upon a time wrote and lived for The Partisans Review. – Vendela Vida. (Vogue December 1999).