[Isherwood is an English-born man of letters who is known for his largely autobiographical accounts of pre-Nazi Berlin and for his detached, humorous observations on human nature and manners. As a young man during the 1930s, he was a member of the Marxist-oriented Oxford group of poets that included Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. In the following review, Isherwood questions McCarthy's artistic intention in The Company She Keeps but nevertheless hails the six portraits that comprise the volume.]

The publishers' somewhat pretentious synopsis and Miss McCarthy's amusing foreword unintentionally do their best to mislead us as to the character of [The Company She Keeps]. So let us begin with a synopsis of our own.

The Company She Keeps is divided into six episodes. The first, "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment," describes, with the disgusted objectivity of a dyspeptic anthropologist, the various stages of an adultery which lead to divorce and the decision not to marry the other man. Neither the girl, the husband, nor the lover is given a name; passion is purely algebraical; the authoress unfolds her theme with the gusto of a scientist developing a favorite thesis. The result is brilliant and highly convincing, but it is the weakest thing in the book.

In "Rogue's Gallery" we meet Mr. Sheer, a dealer in doubtful antiques, who gives the girl her first job. (This episode is, of course, a flashback to Margaret's earlier pre-marital life.) Mr. Sheer, with his debts and deceits and baroque imagination, is quite somebody. We see far too little of him. Miss McCarthy could easily have expanded this portrait into a short novel. That she has not done so shows either the folly of a literary spendthrift or the liberality of vast inventive wealth. Here is a figure who might have stood beside the Great Gatsby.

And now we are on a westbound train. Margaret is traveling to visit an aunt in Portland—to tell her that she is going to marry again. Once more, however, she changes her mind: this time because of her encounter with "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt." Here is a little masterpiece, carried through in perfect detail from the come-on to the brush-off—the classic study of the Business Man conquering the Tired Bohemian Girl. Even those who have never been seduced in a railway compartment will recognize here the accents of utter and awful truth.

"The Genial Host" is another portrait, crueller but equally well balanced, of one of those arachnidan entertainers who weave spider's webs around their guests and exact from each a character performance in exchange for a good dinner. Margaret, growing weary of this technique, tries to walk out of her role, but is promptly lassoed and yanked back into position by a silky thread.

"Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man" is good, too. Its central figure is Jim Barnett, the clean-limbed Bright Young Pinkist whom everybody likes; in the end, of course, he sells out to weekly pluto-imperio-reportagejournalism—accepts, in other words, the Facts of Life. Margaret appears here at second remove. She is seen through his eyes. She is his bad conscience: sexually, because Jim has an affair with her while his wife is in childbed; politically, because in the obstinate integrity of her Trotskyism she seems to him to symbolize loyalty, idealism, honorable poverty, and freedom.

But Margaret, when we see her last, in the consulting room of a psychoanalyst, is neither loyal, idealistic, nor free. Remarried at last to a successful architect, she is no longer even poor. "Ghostly Father, I Confess" is the annotated report of a typical hour spent with Dr. James—the annotations being Margaret's childhood memories. "Here," says Simon and Schuster's back flap, "for the first time, we see the girl plain and whole. . .. Psychologically she has come to a dead end and can only act and reenact the childhood drama of estrangement that has left her permanently in doubt as to her moral identity, turned her into a human chameleon who can only know herself vicariously, through those whose company she keeps."

This kind of talk seems to me, as I have said above, misleading and anyhow superficial. There is nothing special, or inviting to pity and terror, about Margaret's case; we are all "human chameleons," every one of us. The stupid are not aware of this fact, the wise accept it, and the rest make a terrible fuss. The search for what Miss McCarthy calls "the ordinary indispensable self is as futile as the "search" for one's own reflection in a mirror: the object sought is infinitely protean, and it can never be grasped or possessed, since it moves on another plane of being. Between the eternity of the animal, which is reproduction, and the eternity of the spirit, which is awareness of its life in ultimate reality, there is nothing firm, nothing solid, nothing "indispensable." The personality, which we value so much, is only a swirling nebula, a looking-glass at a fair—or, as the Hindus put it, the skins of the onion, which, when they are peeled of leave nothing at all. "But," the reader will object, "surely you'll admit that the 'ordinary indispensable self,' however illusory it may be in our human life, is very real in fiction, Surely this is the paradox of the novelist's art: in his work he must square the convention of 'the personality' with his empirical knowledge that the personality does not, in any final sense, 'exist'."

Needless to say, I agree. And I am bound to add that this was really Miss McCarthy's original artistic intention and not a regrettable highbrow afterthought, I think she has made a very bad job of it. Margaret does not appear as a series of striking contrasts and apparent contradictions; in fact, this idea seems hardly to have been exploited at all. Actually, she is a somewhat colorless though sympathetic and attractive minor figure who serves as a stooge for feats of really dazzling social analysis or as second fiddle to the principal characters.

But why carp? Why be ungrateful? Never mind if the book is wrongly presented; never mind the slightly dated almost twentyish intellectualism. Miss McCarthy has given us Mr. Sheer and Mr. Breen and Pflaumen and Jim Barnes and Dr. James. She is a real novelist, a vivid original talent whose warmth and charity and insight need no pompous introductions. We should rejoice in her, and wait eagerly for more.