Dear readers, I spent most of this summer hunting for a new apartment, a soul-testing endeavor that, at least in New York City, requires a degree of “Squid Game” cunning and commitment I do not, alas, naturally possess. In my romantic and wildly impractical imaginings, home is a place that finds you; a witchy collision of luck and happenstance. Or at least it should feel less like one long algorithmic slog across the internet, waiting for your two-bedroom-one-bath Godot. Both memoirs in this week’s newsletter recount housing misadventures — various hairy episodes that their authors manage to spin into charming anecdotes of crumbled-plaster bohemia or tart little nuggets of emotional truth. I’m not there yet. Still, it comforts me to know that even the brilliant, undauntable Mary McCarthy, adrift between marriages, once took up residence in a wonky Greenwich Village studio with 11(!) walls, a minuscule kitchen and “a bath suited to a bird.” —Leah “Real Estate,” by Deborah LevyNonfiction, 2021
Levy, the prolific South African novelist and playwright, is leaning into what you might call the future hopeful tense with the title of “Real Estate,” the second installment in her Living Autobiography trilogy. Because she is still recovering from the collapse of a 20-year marriage and has only recently become “mainstream successful” at nearly 60, Levy lacks the capital of her more affluent London friends, rich in mortgage-free townhouses and second homes in France or Italy. Instead she’s invested, at least emotionally, in “unreal estate”: her ever-shifting but potent fantasy of owning a grand old house with an egg-shaped fireplace, a pomegranate tree and some form of burbling fountain. (Or scratch that, she might decide a few pages later; keep the egg and the tree but set it by a river or the sea.) In the meantime, Levy’s actual holdings consist of one tumbledown North London apartment, shared with her two mostly-grown daughters; three e-bikes; and a trio of antique wooden fairground horses from Afghanistan, bought for a song. Also precious: a complete, decadent set of turmeric-colored silk bed linens, purchased “when a royalty check came in and I took it literally and began to sleep like royalty.” After Levy passes through a nine-month fellowship in Paris and several London writing sheds, the book ends with her ensconced in another seasonal rental, a disintegrating 18th-century villa on the same Greek island where Leonard Cohen once wrote his odes to Marianne, surrounded by donkeys and night jasmine. Maybe, Levy acknowledges, she will never get the dream house with the pomegranate tree. But to be a tenant of the world instead isn’t such a terrible thing. Read if you like: High thread counts, the bells of Sacre Coeur, lurking on Zillow. “Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936-1938,” by Mary McCarthyNonfiction, 1992
“Intellectual Memoirs” is the kind of book that bursts with sentences like this one, about an acquaintance’s summer house in Connecticut: “We all swam naked there and argued about Henry James.” Its cast of characters is vast and evanescent; McCarthy tosses off names and biographical details like a mad hostess introducing you to several hundred fascinating people at a cocktail party, most of whom you’ve never heard of and will never meet again. When the narrative kicks off in 1936, the future author of “The Group” and “The Company She Keeps” is only 24, fresh out of Vassar and already several years wed to the theater actor Harald Johnsrud, though not for much longer. New York had too much else to offer a girl of her aptitude and appetites, intellectual and otherwise. Between writing occasional reviews for The Nation, McCarthy scraped by on a series of odd jobs and odder apartments — including the aforementioned Village birdbath, acquired in haste after her Reno divorce. An heiress friend lends her a swank apartment on Beekman Place for a while, a palace of glass and steel that unnerved McCarthy’s new boyfriend Philip Rahv, a Ukrainian Jew and dedicated Marxist who worked as an editor at the left-wing journal Partisan Review. (Class justice is served in the end: The maid there, she later realized, most likely stole her small inheritance, a handful of family jewels left by her late mother.) You can’t say McCarthy isn’t self-aware. “An autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good,” an acquaintance says to her at one point, quoting George Orwell. And oh, Mary, does the lady itemize her flaws here: the drinking, the promiscuity, the petty feuds and fallouts played out among her prewar Manhattan set of artists, gadflies and Trotskyites. Readers hungry for a fuller meal might be better off picking up another McCarthy; “Intellectual Memoirs” is a minor entry for sure and a little scattershot, maybe because it wasn’t fully finished before the author’s 1989 death. Still, it’s a gutsy and honest and occasionally wonderful book, and I read it as a guest in someone else’s beautiful, impossible townhouse, very happily. Read if you like: Swizzle sticks, “The Communist Manifesto,” dinner parties where somebody starts a fight. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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