Hanoi

by Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy went to North Vietnam for two-&-a-half weeks in March to report, &, like Harrison Salisbury, to reveal & verify; she saw the manhole shelters in the sidewalk (tho no one acknowledged using them, preferring communal facilities), a remote Catholic hamlet in ruins, victims of zigzag pellets from cluster bombs; she saw everywhere determination to endure the shelters, the prominence given to growth statistics, the dispersal of schools, hospitals, plants; she saw moreover a return to 1st principles (folk medicine, bamboo); she saw, in substance, what she expected to see. Except in herself; the scrupulous observer was working at her own salvation, trying to assuage her discomfiture with the war but in assuming the role of witness, & implicitly of judge, she had found a further discomfiture--the North Vietnamese value formulation, both guileless & jargon-ridden. (A fascinating interview with Prime Minister Pham Ban Dong substantiates the determination to preserve Vietnamese traditions & the traditions of socialism.) McCarthy has, as always, a sharp eye for the tangible, an astute awareness of the nuances of speech, a wide field of historic referral; she has also, here, no comfort for those who take comfort in certitudes.--Kirkus

138 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

People note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963).

McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933. McCarthy moved to city of New York and incisively wrote as a known contributor to publications such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), initiated her ascent to the most celebrated writers of her generation; the publication of her autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood in 1957 bolstered this reputation.

This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel The Group , the New York Times bestseller in 1963.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McC...

Reviews

[Sportyrod · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like the third wheel in this one. Or that feeling you have when you are out with friends and they keep talking about people you don’t know to each other.

This book was about an American foreign correspondent, a journalist or a diplomat (there was only a small brief about the author) who writes about her encounters in Vietnam during the war. The experience is at the rear.

I think this book would have been good to read closer to the time when it happened. There was no introduction on the lead up to her visit. No major events were explained. It was just ‘I’m here and this is what I’m seeing’. And I know very little about this topic.

I think I ripped myself on this one. I’m nearing the end of my around the world challenge and this book was less 200 pages. I did read The Happiest Refuge by a Vietnamese author previously but it was mostly set outside of Vietnam so I couldn’t count it. But I did learn more about the country in that one.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had, of course, heard of Mary McCarthy in high school, she being so much part of the East Coast intelligentsia, but I hadn't read her. Still, when I found a copy of her account of visiting N. Vietnam during one of the bombing lulls, I got it, recognizing that her account would be respectable.

By 1968, much of the Establishment had become critical of the US involvements in SE Asia, LBJ was frantically trying to get peace negotiations started with the Vietnamese and, by the spring, was confronting the challenge of a peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, from the liberal wing of his own party (no relation to the author). Ms. McCarthy's visit to Hanoi was indicative of how unstable US policy in SE Asia had become.

For me, a high school kid facing the draft, such an account of our "enemies", any account of our enemies which allowed them their own voices, was subversive. It is difficult to imagine killing other persons or the killing of them. Although the account given in this book is complex and multilayered, the Vietnamese portrayed as themselves complex, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, they do come across as persons, much like one might imagine oneself in similar circumstances.

Within two years, of age by then, I had become a draft resister.