Mallory's Camera

Continuing my tour of 60s movies, last night I managed to track down The Group, the film version of a controversial, bestselling novel by Mary McCarthy—which I suppose you could call a kind of forbearer to Sex and the City—starring the insanely beautiful Candice Bergen as a real live lesbian.

I read the novel shortly after it came out. I think I was twelve.

The book provided me with some of my first descriptions of real live sex, which, of course, were mesmerizing.

I was one year away from starting my own real life sexual adventures—with much older men (which would net them long prison terms and a place of honor on the sex offender registry had they happened to take place today) as well as with girls my own age.

I have no regrets.

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Mary McCarthy is probably best known today for her legendary literary feud with Lillian Hellman about whom she once told an interviewer, “every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

She was also Hannah Arendt's literary executor as well as the third wife (1938-1946) of Edmond Wilson, well known as a literary critic in his lifetime although today relegated to minor footnote status in the scores of F. Scott Fitzgerald biographies that were something of a literary cottage industry five years ago.

(That’s the fourth time I’ve used “literary” in a single paragraph! But really, what other word could suffice?)

The Group was a totally engrossing novel about the intertwining lives of a group of eight Vassar graduates.

The sex was fascinating, totally unlike the sex in any of the other novels I had heretofore read (Lady Chatterley’s Lover and I forget what else) because it obviously was not written to entrance, enthrall, or propagandize heterosexual intercourse. The sex was functional and descriptive.

In Chapter 2, for example, Dottie Renfrew has her first orgasm: All of a sudden, she seemed to explode in a series of long, uncontrollable contractions that embarrassed her, like the hiccups …

Smart women able to be sexual in a non-sentimental way!

This was thrilling to me.

But it wasn’t the sex that made the novel extraordinary. The whole novel—in my memory, at least—was terrific because it documented the many ways in which smart women get trapped—not as a cautionary tale but as a simple chronicle. In that sense, The Group laid groundwork for the more dialectical classics of second-wave feminism that began piling up fast and furious just a year or so after The Group was published.

I’m not arguing cause and effect here.

But maybe I am arguing midwifery.

The Group sold like a gazillion copies but—no surprise!—was widely lambasted by critics. Most of those critics were male.

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What else?

It was simply gorgeous out yesterday, so I spent most of the day outside.



The trees are bursting with green! Not leaves but tree flowers, which are weird-looking little things:





I gave my new ESL student a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

(Marketing analysts may be puzzled by this sudden spike in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sales! It's because I keep giving A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to all my ESL students.)

Lois Lane got the particulars wrong: Lola is from Albania not Sarajevo, and her name is really Aureola.

“You are very European-looking,” Aureola told me, so naturally I had to take a selfie after I got back to the car: