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Around the time I was 13 or 14 (I’m 28), I read [Mary] McCarthy’s story “The Company She Keeps” in a short story anthology. Well, needless to say, I loved the story so much that I went on to read just about everything McCarthy wrote. At first I was swept by her satirical prose; then, later, I was amazed to discover that she was extremely erudite, too. I do not remember the particulars, but McCarthy herself mentions her sexual escapades in her collection of stories of the same name, as well as her autobiography “How I Grew.”

In any case, I do not think McCarthy would have characterized herself as a feminist. Indeed, the “isms” she was concerned about were those of the day: communism, socialism, Trotskyism, etc. Nor do I think feminists would have been the only ones to admire her. As I write this, I recall a letter I discovered in a book of Philip Roth correspondence, in which Roth neurotically gushes over McCarthy’s realistic criticism of something he wrote. That is the type of reach and sway she had.

No matter what, it is nice to see someone evoking Mary McCarthy’s name. Next time, perhaps you could do it without mentioning Justin Timberlake.

Alexandre Bejerman
Montreal, Quebec

How delightful to hear from another McCarthy fan! Typical of the systemic philistinism of women’s studies programs from the 1970s on, strong voices like those of McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer were excluded from the maudlin, victim-centric curriculum. Things began to change in scattered quarters in the 1990s, thanks to a new generation of more open-minded feminists, but it is certainly the case that the overwhelming majority of women literature majors in this country are graduating without ever having heard Mary McCarthy’s name. More TV broadcasts of Sidney Lumet’s wonderfully acted ensemble film of “The Group” (1966) would help. (It’s an amusing bitch fest like “The Women.”) The political aspirations and disillusionments of McCarthy’s left-leaning Vassar College class of 1933 speak directly to our own time.

You wrote: “Two weeks after my return, I am still trying to process the enormity of my experience in Salvador, which was staggering on every level.”

I understand that usage is subject to change, but I feel a duty to my old English teacher, Fr. McFadden, SJ, to use “enormity” with the traditional sense of “great wickedness or evil.” I hope that you will agree that the standard definition of “enormity” is worth preserving. The president has been misusing that word for a while, and I fear that without the help of respected writers, it may soon be lost.

Steve Miner

Well, I certainly got an earful from Salon readers about this one! I appreciate the grammar protests from everyone who wrote in. But I honestly have never accepted that sharp distinction in English. In French, one can use enormité in either sense, and it seems to me a very useful duality. I was certainly signaling that the carnival in Salvador had both a physical and a spiritual dimension; neither “immensity” nor “enormousness” (which other readers suggested) would have been quite right.

From the swaying top of Daniela Mercury’s cruising trio elétrico, I was reminded of many things — Wordsworth’s sonnet about sleeping London at dawn as a “mighty heart” and Baudelaire’s spooky poem about beauty as a goddess-like stone sphinx with bruising breasts. With apologies to irate English teachers everywhere, “enormity” with a French twist really nails it!

I am a second year master’s student at York University. Two of the themes you constantly return to are your admiration for the creative instinct in gay male artists, and the profound influence European art cinema has had upon you throughout your life. I wonder, then, if you’ve ever seen any films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder — one of the most fascinating confluences of the two I’ve seen yet. The best of them bristle with a renegade vision of egomania, promiscuity, kleptomania and suicide that has virtually no equivalent in living memory for my generation.

Fassbinder was generally acknowledged to be the foremost figure of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, to the point that his premature death in 1982 is commonly used as a convenient point to mark the end of the movement. At various points, he managed to contain within his own work the combined styles and thematics of almost all of his New German Cinema peers — Wenders, Herzog, Schlondorff, von Trotte, Reitz, etc. — as well as reviving the style of Douglas Sirk to deliver a series of blistering body blows to the Adenauer era, Germany’s 1950s equivalent of America’s Eisenhower era.

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