The Groves of Academe, by Mary McCarthy, is a hilariously satirical campus novel from the 1950s. It makes a striking contrast with its contemporary in the genre, Lucky Jim, by Kinglsey Amis: where Lucky Jim is focussed on the frustrated antics of one character, and narrated from his point of view, The Groves of Academe is detached, ironic and ranges over a number of characters, never letting quite letting the reader know everything.
The plot of The Groves of Academe revolves around a minor liberal college in the 1950s, and particularly the problems in the literature faculty. The possible dismissal of the devious, self-serving professor Henry Mulcahy takes up much of the book, with running political battles being fought on the basis of alleged verbal promises about contracts, suspicions of past Communist affiliations, and triple-distilled emotional blackmail. The professors hog the limelight in this campus novel: students, when they appear at all, tend to be either provide general; scenery and atmosphere, or anecdotes with which to praise or blame a faculty member in committee.
Like many campus novels, The Groves of Academe makes a great deal of material out of rather few events. Everything is analysed, discussed, analogised, and even at one point submitted to the demand “What would Tolstoy do?” Far from being irritating, however, this over-analysis provides much of the novel’s claustrophobic atmosphere, and McCarthy is evidently satirizing the characters whose meticulous and sometimes tortuous thought patterns she records. In a telling line, a “poet of the masses”, who has been invited to a conference at the college tells himself “Possibly they were all very nice high-minded scrupulous people, with only an occupational tendency toward back-biting and a nervous habit of self-correction”. Even in this brilliant barb however, McCarthy leaves ambivalence in the “perhaps” and “only” – and leaves the reader wondering how far the poet has appreciated what is going on around him.
Unlike the academic novels of Tom Sharpe (Porterhouse Blue, Grantchester Grind), her satire does not rely on farcical capers or grotesquerie, but rather on giving her characters enough rope, if not to hang themselves, then certainly to become hopelessly entangled. Her lightness of touch whilst indulging in pages of apparently academic discussion or the Byzantine politics of the college, recalls Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, but there is an edge of criticism in McCarthy which Davies’ good-humoured humanism lacks.
Though it deals with a very enclosed and parochial world, at a very specific point in history, The Groves of Academe has failed to date over the last fifty years. It is still an absorbing, devious comedy, and its implied critique of academic life comes quite close to the bone at times.
