Mary McCarthy has a remarkable insight into the weaknesses of others. This is not a clumsy wisecrack but a simple statement of a simple fact. Give her a book or a play or an acquaintance to fictionalize and she spots with unerring accuracy a cloven hoof, an Achilles heel, or a fly in the ointment. And, as the play reviews in her book "Sights and Spectacles" long ago demonstrated (some were written as far back as 1937), her diagnoses are usually sound as far as they go. The fault she has to find is nearly always there. What she says is nearly always true even though it is often only the harshest part of the truth.

Unlike other notable hatchet-women (Dorothy Parker for instance), Miss McCarthy is not a Sophisticate but an Intellectual…. [Though] time and circumstance cast her in with the young radicals for whom Marxian criticism of "the system" furnished that rationalization of their discontents which the previous generation had found in the war against "provinciality," she never committed herself wholeheartedly to that either. In fact, if she ever discovered what she believed, admired, or wanted she never devoted much time to praising or expounding it. But she can justify her contempt for what she does not like—and that is almost everything including other intellectuals—with telling thrusts and shrewd analyses.

As her preface here frankly admits, this is precisely what Partisan Review wanted her to do when it appointed her its drama critic. The editors did not think the theatre important even as a manifestation of decadent bourgeois culture. Just for the sake of completeness, however, they thought it might be well to have its nullity exposed…. [Miss McCarthy] was less than half convinced that her employers knew why the plays and playwrights were contemptible. But she believed (and still believes) that on the whole "American playwrights cannot write" and that "American actors cannot act." They would do to sharpen her claws on, and if anybody wanted to assume that their inferiority could be explained on good Marxian grounds, why let them….

Perhaps none of [Miss McCarthy's] judgments … is unsound in itself. Miss McCarthy nearly always has a real point to make and she makes it. We "know what she means" and it is a genuine meaning. Probably most journalistic critics of the theatre would admit as much and admit that they were as generally anxious to set their subjects in the best possible light as she was to set them in the worst. But it is not certain that their bias always led them any further from the whole truth. As Miss McCarthy says, O'Neill for example is often inarticulate. But is it really true, as she seems to conclude, that he was therefore nothing; that his sincerity, his passion, and his desperate involvement are not worth so much as a nod of recognition?

Her method is one of the safest. If you deny permanent significance to every new book or play time will prove you right in much more than nine cases out of ten. If you damn what others praise there is always the possibility that your intelligence and taste are superior. But if you permit yourself to praise something then some other superior person can always take you down by saying "So that is the sort of thing you like." More courage is required to go sometimes out on a limb. And that Miss McCarthy has seldom been rash enough to do. Not even when it comes to embracing even the most impeccably fashionable of intellectual fashions. She always turns up her nose even at those who turn up their noses at everybody else.