Katy Waldman on Mary McCarthy's "One Touch of Nature"

I first encountered Mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended that I read “The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits” before covering Paul Manafort’s arraignment in 2017. (Were we ever so young?) I loved McCarthy’s witty cameos of malefactors—behold Maurice Stans, Nixon’s erstwhile Secretary of Commerce, “a silver-haired, sideburned super-accountant and magic fundraiser, who gave a day-and-a-half-long demonstration of the athletics of evasion, showing himself very fit for a man of his age.” McCarthy’s sentences were like mousetraps, snapping shut on both visual information and something deeper, the kind of quintessence that fictional characters possess and that we often long for real people to have, too.

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January 24, 1970

In January, 1970, The New Yorker published McCarthy’s “One Touch of Nature,” a tour-de-force essay that stretched across nineteen pages and was animated by a simple question: What happened to nature imagery in fiction? McCarthy contends that novels have drifted far from “when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess”—Dickens’s London fogs, Melville’s Pacific. Now, she observes, “rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys” are thin on the literary ground.