The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy

The Groves of Academe Reviews

• 
  Justin Evans

  Interesting to wonder why Mary McCarthy's 'Groves' is so little read, while 'Stoner' is re-released to great acclaim seemingly every five years I hear my wife calling, she says, "Gee, why could this book by a woman that's just like that book by a man be less highly rated even though it's just as good and about the same tings: English department at a small regional school that's a little bit quirky and prone to infighting and incompetence. Gee, I wonder why? WHATEVER COULD IT BE, MISOGYNIST?.
  
  Leaving aside routine sexism, which could well play a role, and the fact that Williams only admitted to writing 3 novels, whereas McCarthy wrote a lot about a lot: I suspect the reason is that 'Stoner' is the perfect, self-contained novel. It's about a guy, Stoner, and his college, and although it does take jabs at incompetent English faculty and students, it really is self-sufficient. This is what a lot of people want from their novels.
  
  'Groves,' on the other hand, drags in McCarthyism, imitatio Christi, Joyce scholarship, the merits and demerits of modernism, and the tremendous moral complexities involved with all of this. In other words, Groves demands that you think, constantly, in a way that I, at least, found fairly uncomfortable. Just when I thought I had a good handle on the moral framework of the book, McCarthy compares the 'villain' to Christ, in a good way. Nobody's deeds are easily explicable, but they all seem perfectly realistic. That doesn't mean they're impossible to understand, just that there's a lot more going on than we usually want to think. Heroes and villains, in the right setting, swap roles without changing their behavior; the selfless are revealed as the most selfish and and vice versa.
  
  And just when you think the you've got the point--the fathomless difficulty and complexity of morality!--it turns out that the 'moral' is really a very minor, almost unimportant way of thinking about the world. The closest thing we have to a hero is an ex-communist, now anarchist, poet, named Keogh (named by McCarthy, I assume, for a beloved Irish boxer in Ulysses). He's disgusted by the bickering and time-serving of the University faculty, and does the 'right' thing--in this case, helping the villain--but mainly just wants to get the heck out of the place.
  
  Your beloved moral complexity looks very different to a man who's spent his life on the barricades for justice.
  
  Also, McCarthy's syntax is complex and subtle. Not so long ago, that counted as good writing, and hopefully it soon will again.
  
  I should add that my friend JP told me about this book, and he includes pertinent quotes in his review:
  
  
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• 
  John-Paul

  Regarding the faculty:
  
  “Everyone felt called to stipulate, like a lawyer, his own degree of interest in the case, and to distinguish his own area of human solidarity from that of his neighbor, carefully set up boundaries and limits, eminent domain.” “These continuous factional disputes and ideological scandals were a form of spiritual luxury that satisfied the higher cravings for polemic, gossip, and backbiting without taking the baser shape, so noticeable in the larger universities, of personal competition and envy. Here, living was cheap and the salary-range was not great. The headships of departments were nominal, falling, by common consent, to the member with the greatest taste for paper-work. Such competition as there was centered around vying for the better students.”
  
  Regarding the students:
  
  “This very rawness and formlessness in the students made them interesting to teach. Badly prepared, sleepy, and evasive, they could nevertheless be stirred to wonder and pent admiration at the discovery of form and pattern in history or a work of art or a laboratory experiment, though ceding this admiration grudgingly and by degrees” “The better students, in general, adjusted themselves without repining to what the faculty had to offer, pointing out to their juniors that it was better to allow Mr. Van Tour to teach you what he knew than what he didn’t, patently; but the poorer students complained constantly of having to study things in which they were not ‘interested,’ i.e., those who had no real interests and no capacity for absorption but only passing whims with which they quickly grew bored felt genuinely deprived and disenfranchised at having to study a subject which someone else also was studying. They viewed the course of studies as a tray of sweetmeats held before their greedy and yet suspicious eyes and cried out in fury when the tray was whisked away from them, still gluttonously hesitating, or when they were forced to accept a piece that another child had nibbled.”
  
  As these quotes indicate, Mary McCarthy is funny, spot-on, and merciless. Academe hasn't changed that much since 1952, except that in the fictional Jocelyn College of this book, only one of the English professors has a Ph.D. and all of them know Greek.
  
  The story is just good enough to sustain the observations, lists, and analyses. Everyone is a caricature in precisely the ways that human beings in the academic world are caricatures. If it bothers you that the hero isn't "likeable," that's because you haven't noticed that he's not the hero.
  
  Just loved it. McCarthy is terribly underrated.
• 
  Jonfaith

  My least favorite McCarthy so far. The reading of this novel was but series of misconceptions, failed predictions about the narrative course. There’s something to commend in that sort of plotting. I did read much of this in airports and then today when I’ve discovered I’m infected again. Sigh.
  
  Groves regards a struggling academic at a time of HUAC and loyalty oaths. I had this nebbish chap pegged as a Pnin but then he wasn’t. It is what everyone else reveals that makes intriguing. I particularly enjoyed the conclusion threading Cattalus into university politics with satirical skewers on display on every page.
• 
  carlageek

  I just love the kind of wry, clever writing that was Mary McCarthy’s stock in trade. I might have highlighted more passages in this book than in any other I’ve read. I also looked up more words than in any other—if I may say so, I have an above-average vocabulary (particularly passive vocabulary), but McCarthy still sent me scurrying to the dictionary not infrequently. Often these were words whose meaning I could deduce from their Latin roots but whose particular forms I had not seen before, like “dubiety” and “descried.” Others just had me stumped, like “blague,” “morganatic,” and “orgones.” McCarthy’s erudition is nothing to sneeze at.
  
  The thing is that the stuff in McCarthy that I don’t get--whether it’s advanced vocabulary, deep-cut references to Greek or Christian mythology, or references to such popular intellectual grist of her time as poetry or light philosophy-- it doesn’t make me feel stupid, the way certain modernists make my head hurt to read. McCarthy, rather, makes me feel aspirational, as though as long as I highlight each of these words and come back to them later, and go read Edith Hamilton a little more carefully, and go learn a little Jesuit philosophy, I too might be as smart as Mary McCarthy one day, or at least smart enough to understand everything she says. Her showing off inspires me, somehow.
  
  Anyway, what about the book? This book, the platonic form of the academic satire genre, is a lot of fun, particularly as a companion piece to Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, which I also thoroughly enjoyed without thoroughly understanding. Both the college of Jarrell’s book and McCarthy’s Jocelyn College are said to be loosely based on Sarah Lawrence, where both writers taught for a time. But while Jarrell’s book is a collection of vignettes without much connective tissue (the “pictures” of the title), The Groves of Academe has something more of a plot. This revolves around the firing and rehiring of one Henry Mulcahy, a literature professor, Joyce expert, possible former Communist, and manipulator extraordinaire. When, at the book’s opening, Mulcahy receives word from the college president that his contract is not to be renewed, he begins a series of maneuvers to work the internecine politics of the faculty into manipulating the president into rehiring him. As the vantage point moves from faculty member to faculty member—are these characters or archetypes? It’s not clear, but it doesn’t much matter—you see how everyone’s perspective is a little warped by his or her own prejudices, principles, and ambitions. A young instructor named Domna Rejnev is the most buffeted about, a staunch friend and supporter of Mulcahy until she comes to see how much he has manipulated her in particular, taking advantage of her naïveté and idealism. These qualities have no place in the political gamesmanship of an academic faculty, it would seem; those who suffer from them are quickly ground into mincemeat.
  
  The book’s climax occurs at a poetry conference taking place on the campus, which tells you something of the kind of book it is, and also gives McCarthy a chance to sling some mud at non-academic intellectuals, lest you think the professors and administrators are the only ones in her crosshairs here. This is where another of McCarthy's stalwart theme comes into play: the tendency of the political left to eat itself. The “was he or wasn’t he” around Mulcahy’s possible membership in the Communist party causes a lot of hand-wringing. The Jocelyn faculty—particularly its president, Maynard Hoar—prides itself on intellectual freedom and open-mindedness. It can’t condemn a faculty member for any views he might hold. But in the time of the novel (published in 1952 at the height of the McCarthy era) Maynard Hoar has a very fine line to tread; he can’t be perceived as firing Mulcahy for his politics, but he also can’t be perceived as having actual card-carrying Communists in his faculty, supposedly indoctrinating students into their anti-American beliefs. So much of the thematic content of the book centers on whether it matters what faculty believe, and whether they actually have the power to indoctrinate students into anything at all. Sound familiar?
• 
  Judy

  
  
  Another campus novel of the several I read this fall. (You Deserve Nothing; The Secret History) I wonder if Donna Tartt read Mary McCarthy. One difference from Tartt's book is that in The Groves of Academe the professors and President of Jocelyn College are the focus of the novel rather than the students. A similarity is that in both books the colleges are small and progressive though the stories are 30 years apart in time.
  
  Henry Mulcahy, middle-aged, unsuccessful, overburdened, renegade literature instructor, gets a letter from President Maynard Hoar informing him that his appointment will not be confirmed in the next academic year. Henry has a wife and four children living with him in substandard conditions. They are permanently in debt and his wife has had health issues since the birth of their last child.
  
  In desperation, he cooks up a plot based on exaggerations of his wife's condition and an untruthful account of his political past. He intimates these "facts" to one of his students and to a young, beautiful, Russian colleague in his department. The student is responsible for a viral rumor line and Domna Rejnev becomes his accomplice, tirelessly gathering faculty support for Mulcahy. The gist is that by means of pity and political pressure, President Hoar will be forced to keep Mulcahy. Hoar is a published opponent of the current loyalty oath and Mulcahy claims to have been a communist in his youth.
  
  It is all quite complex to read about in 2011. As much as I have come across about the anti-communist witch hunts in the fiction of the early 1950s, I felt that I would have caught on faster if I had been reading the newspapers in those years. More than that, the political implications aside, the entire novel is a continuous spoof on colleges, progressive education, the claustrophobic infighting and personality conflicts on a small campus, topped off by a hilarious send up on poets.
  
  Mary McCarthy is a perceptive, intellectually rigorous writer and assumes that her readers are on a similar level. She is also a savage satirist given to mocking pretensions and dearly held ideas. Once I got my head around the various views and vested interests of the characters, I was amused, intrigued and a victim of the suspense inherent in her story. Most hilarious of all, after all the drama is over, nothing really has changed. Life goes on at Jocelyn College.
  
  This is McCarthy's third novel. She achieved bestseller status with her fifth, The Group, in 1962 and made her name through political journalism. I think her novels were almost too brilliant and intellectual for the male dominated publishing world of the 1940s and 1950s. I love fiction written by dazzlingly intelligent women. If only they could run the world.
• 
  El

  I went great guns with this book for the first 50-60 pages or so as a passenger on a road trip last weekend. Then I put it down and after that it was a real pain to pick back up and continue with the same level of enthusiasm.
  
  I thought it would be good to read after finishing Owen Johnson's
  Stover at Yale - Stover was an undergraduate beginning his first year at Yale, and the protagonist of McCarthy's book was Henry Mulcahey, a professor at a progressive college. Stover spent the majority of his time trying to figure out where and how on campus he would fit, while Mulcahey discovers in the first chapter of his story that he has been denied reappointment in the academic field. Stover's society were other undergraduates - his classmates, his girlfriends, secret campus societies such as Skull and Bones; Mulcahey's society is comprised of his fellow academics - his peer professors and president of the college mostly, but also a touch of interaction with his wife.
  
  McCarthy's story is a satire on the whole academic field, and anyone who has spent time with professors can see the connection even today. Professors can be, and often are, just as catty, gossipy, and out for blood as the students they teach. But the story itself is also rather cold, not all that humorous, and honestly a little on the Big Yawn side. I actually enjoyed the discussions of literature and philosophy, and the philosophy of literature, but when having to try to understand Mulcahey's own choices and motives I found myself a little fuzzy.
  
  On a side note I read this book specifically because I had read and enjoyed McCarthy's
  How I Grew... and I could have sworn I had read some others by her. I have it in my head that I really dig her work all around, but upon closer inspection through Goodreads discovered that perhaps How I Grew was the only McCarthy I had read prior to The Groves of Academe. Now I'm just annoyed.
• 
  Catherine

  *whistles* Goodness, what a scathing literary commentary on liberal arts schools. It says something about McCarthy's ability to discern the archetypes humans tend to inhabit that while reading Chapter IV: 'Ancient History,' I could have sworn I was reading about my own college, now, not a fictional college in 1952. She has nailed the aspirations of liberal arts schools, the petty politics, the process of mellowing (or radicalizing) that comes with age, the physical feel of such a campus - and it makes for an incredibly amusing read. It's a morality play, of sorts - the protagonist is a horrible, horrible man, full of pretension and gall and bare-faced lies, so much so that he often begins to believe his own interpretation of himself as a superior sort of man - and I love that the moral actors are women (although not all women are moral in the novel), and that poetry is the means by which the building crisis of the book is finally expressed.
  
  For all its timelessness, it's also a product of the McCarthy era, of a pre-Civil RIghts America, of a time when anti-Semitism ran rife in plain sight, and McCarthy is as unforgiving in skewering the way self-avowed liberals are still prejudiced creatures as she is in damning her protagonist through his foibles. A wonderful piece of prose, for all that it created real moments of discomfort in me!
  
• 
  Richard

  Imagine Nabokov's Pnin. Then imagine the protagonist is Pnin's evil twin.
• 
  Shoshana G

  Yeah, I just don't care.
• 
  Marina Morais

  I might have not appreciated this book as much had I not gone to Film school for five years - or any other Arts/Humanities course for that matter.
  
  The description of the minds and quarrels and attitudes and dialogues of scholars is just perfect. It's a very toxic environment established by smart people who were led to think at some point in their lives that they are smarter than the others.
  
  There are many interesting discussions concerning all the different branches connected with thought: philosophy, morality, religion, social sciences, politics and, of course, literature. It's quite enriching, I have to say, and it makes the reading easier.
  
  Of course, as I have stated before, this might not be the case for those who have not attended an Arts/Humanities course at university, thence confronted with the constant ego battles between teachers, coordinators and students. I don't mean to sound patronising with this comment, but merely to warn readers on what they are going to find in this book.
  
  I really enjoyed Mary McCarthy's writing, it reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut - more specifically, in this case, "Hocus Pocus", which is also set in a so-called progressive college that admits a number of rejects within their student body.
• 
  Leslie

  Begins as a character and social study of a brilliant, arrogant academic at a small progressive private college in the fraught political climate of post-war America trying to save his job while stoking up his sense of misunderstood martyrdom, then veers into an entertaining satirical portrait of academia, the academic tendency to argue oneself into immobility, and the contemporary art scene (with the very funny scenes at a poetry conference held at the college). Insightful, fascinating bits along the way, but the book as a whole never quite coheres into a narrative whole.
• 
  Lucy Barnhouse

  This is an enjoyably brutal romp through the absurdities of academia and academics. McCarthy's prose is deliciously and mercilessly precise as she skewers the foibles of a small liberal arts college community during the heady days of the Red Scare and experimental poetry. Much in the machinations of college administrators, faculty, and students is firmly rooted in this specific cultural context; much, for better and for worse, is instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time among the groves of academe.
• 
  Chris Bull

  A fierce battle for little gain
  
  Those argumentative people in your classes who would argue for its own sake, well many of them became academics. After 45 years in academia, I had the bad fortune to see many of them split departments and colleges into factions, with no one the winner.
• 
  Caroline Bartels

  I really wanted to like this book as I found McCarthy’s book, The Group, to be quite fascinating. But I was bored to tears by this and found it tedious. There was quite a bit of humor in it, and as a person with a masters degree in English there were certainly members of Jocelyn’s English Dept. faculty that I recognized, but it just felt like McCarthy was trying too hard.
• 
  Janet Gardner

  I generally love campus novels, and this one started out with real promise. But by the second half, I was dragging myself through because I cared just enough (barely) to want to see how things wrapped up. Uneven, to say the least.
• 
  William Francis

  Hard to finish and dated
  But I finished it
• 
  Bob

  I think of Mary McCarthy, perhaps imprecisely, in the same breath with Dawn Powell and Janet Flanner as the quintessence of a certain urbane, New Yorker magazine-centric, Manhattan literary sensibility of the mid-20th century.
  Whether that appraisal is here or there, I believe this kind of satire is what is called "wickedly funny." Her eye for the material details of clothes and food and furnishings that correlate with every character's social class and beliefs is brilliant and her similes and metaphors are often breathtaking - even though they disrupt the flow of the story in a way, they are well worth the interruption.
  The story concerns a perhaps intellectually gifted scholar of Joyce who is a persistently troublesome faculty member, perhaps not a great teacher, though the subjectivity of that is an ongoing point of discussion with his colleagues.
  After losing a series of jobs, his friends pull strings to land him at the fictional Jocelyn College in central Pennsylvania. The hint (we are in the early 50s) is that his youthful Communist Party affiliation is at the root of all this, but that ultimately appears to be part of his artifice as a sort of con man in the academic world.
  Jocelyn itself has "...a ratio of one teacher to every 6.9 students, which made possible the practice of 'individual instruction' as carried on at Bennington (6:1), Sarah Lawrence (6.4:1), Bard (6.9:1) and St. John's (7.7:1). It had been founded in the late Thirties by an experimental educator and lecturer...who wished to strike a middle course between the existing extremes.... Its students were neither to till the soil as at Antioch nor weave on looms as at Black Mountain; they were to be grounded neither in the grass-roots present as at Sarah Lawrence, nor the great-books past, as at St. John's and Chicago."
• 
  Nathanial

  satire of a 'progressive' private school, circa '50s Red Scare. Shifts characters from chapter to chapter, possibly to show instability of point of view during the plots of scheming, manipulation, and revenge. Caps it off with a 'conference of poets,' which gives ample opportunity for a more removed perspective to provide commentary.
• 
  Joe

  A classic academic novel. McCarthy writes beautiful prose, and can be quite funny, but the novel feels dated and arch. All of the characters are eloquent but self-absorbed, and the pleasure of seeing through the self-interestedness of everyone's motives in each and every scene soon begins to pale. A plot would have been nice, too.
• 
  James

  Ugh... This novel started out so promising. Then it very quickly descended from an interesting character study to a mess of intellectual rivalries and literary allusions that gave me a headache. I'm a pretty well read and intelligent guy. When your novel descends to a point where I can hardly follow what's going on, your text is wayyyy too obscure.
• 
  Mark

  Unless you're in college (as I was the first time I read it), you're not interested.
• 
  Elizabeth

  A biting academic satire. The first chapter was truly brilliant.
• 
  l

  The first chapter is great.
• 
  John Mccullough

  An interesting and entertaining book about academic retribution. Not McCarthy's best, but better than SOOOOOO many other books on academia.
• 
  Tina Huntz

  A unique and challenging novel. One that I must revisit in the future.