“Mary McCarthy: Ice Queen” by Sam Sacks in Wall Street Journal: His essay on the eminent novelist and critic does not mention her split personality.

As an epigraph for the print version of his essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks quotes Mary McCarthy: “Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.” This quote is a metaphor for McCarthy’s multiple personality, which his essay does not mention (1).

Carol Brightman’s biography of Mary McCarthy does mention her multiple personality:

“A fatal ambiguousness has crept into her twelve-year-old mind. Now she begins to see everything in doubles…And that is when she seems to split into two people…For Mary McCarthy, this doubling of consciousness, this splitting of one mind into two warring halves, is the very breath of life” (2, pp. 40-41).

“With [Harold] Johnsrud a new cycle had begun, one that would repeat itself when McCarthy settled down with Edmund Wilson, a much older man. In the first stage of these relationships, the persona of the brash young intellectual began to unravel under the pressure of a darker self, one that McCarthy characterizes in The Company She Keeps as ‘the fugitive, criminal self [who] lay hiding in a thicket’ of half-remembered terrors from childhood” (2, p. 84).

“Like Byron, Mary McCarthy is also aware of the division in her nature. At the end of The Company She Keeps, the heroine…begs the ‘Ghostly Father’ of the tale to allow her to repossess herself, all of herself, the ‘sick,’ impulsive, attention-craving, love-starved side, along with the conscience-stricken side that reasserts itself, coldly reasoning, the morning after. ‘Preserve me in disunity,’ she implores” (2, p. 170).

“With the publication of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy was relieved of some of the burden of personality, one might say; of that peculiar fragmentation of personality that was her lot” (2, p. 413).

“…a Jekyll and Hyde drama far from unusual among writers…” (2, p. 266).

1. Sam Sacks. https://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-mccarthy-ice-queen-1492189399

2. Carol Brightman. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York, Clarkson Potter, 1992.