Katie Waldman talks about Mary McCarthy’s “One Touch of Nature.”

I first met Mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended I read “The Mask of State: Watergate Pictures” before covering the trial of Paul Manafort in 2017. (Were we too young?) I loved McCarthy’s slick cameos of criminals — look at Maurice Stanis, Nixon’s former Commerce Secretary, “the silver-haired, super-accountant, magic fundraiser, who gave a day-and-a-half show of dodgeball sports and showed himself very fit for a man his age. McCarthy’s sentences were like mousetraps, closing Both visual information and something deeper, the kind of essence that fictional characters have and that we often long for real people to have as well.

In January 1970, The New Yorker McCarthy published One Touch of Nature, a fascinating essay that ran across nineteen pages and was driven by a simple question: What happened to images of nature in fiction? McCarthy asserts that novels drifted away from “a time in which the author’s skill was felt through his descriptive prowess”—Dickens’s London Mists, Melville’s The Pacific. She now notes that “rivers, lakes, mountains and valleys” are weak on the literary scene.

The technical term for the piece — a loose, sprawling freestyle, in which McCarthy seems to move through as many proper nouns and pithy summaries as possible — is “motive.” It includes movements (Classicism, Romanticism, Modernism), regions (continental Europe, England, United States), and artistic forms (painting, poetry, fiction). McCarthy aims to explain the changing presence of nature across three centuries of Western cultural production. As they continue, the grudges come back to life: “What exposes Hemingway’s bad faith is the constant social interference in the natural context.” Politicians are ethereal: Joseph McCarthy’s vision of the outdoors is ‘undoubtedly based on the frozen food cupboard’. Opinions are tossed around like house keys. Zola is “the only naturalist who has a true conception of nature.”

The reader trusts this voice instinctively, charmed by its vague assessments and sharp insight, tolerating the lack of textual evidence because each claim seems valid. “The property of truth for Tolstoy is its recognizability,” says McCarthy. “Truth (compare Socrates) is what we have always known.” However, one could object. “The novel (unlike the tale) is a social medium,” she declares with complete confidence. Over twelve pages we are told that “at this point, a definition is needed” – of nature. in this a point?

Like the pine forest interludes, McCarthy’s style of criticism seems endangered. Refreshing authority, ridiculous exuberance: these adjectives point to an era more hospitable to the printed word, even if you prefer today’s meticulous efficiency. That McCarthy rarely bothered to explain her voluminous references recalls a time when a writer’s job was less to make thinking easy than to make it rewarding. One Touch of Nature presents the beauty it extols, pausing to describe the “quiet ribbon roads that lead nowhere” in Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael’s paintings (while the essay itself is a collection of colorful lines on an MTA map, leading everywhere at once) and “the snow in The Dead falls softly over Ireland, a universal blanket.” As McCarthy explores her subject, she evokes a living artistic ecosystem that is constantly evolving, including its relationship to the natural world. The implication is that this system, like the carbon-based system, is beautiful and worth caring about; McCarthy, a novelist, encodes her themes on her way to illustrating them.

Bursting with so much ingenuity and enthusiasm that you might forget it’s a whodunit, “One Touch of Nature” sets out to solve the mystery of why organic landscapes have disappeared from the imagination. But in the final paragraphs McCarthy provides the answer. She wrote that “nature is no longer a home for man” thanks to technology, which has become “the first enemy of human society.” This shift seems especially poignant in 2025, when much of modern life has moved online and the devastating environmental impact of artificial intelligence is only just beginning. One wonders what McCarthy might do in our moment, when runaway machines seem poised for further degradation of nature and art, along with her career in literary criticism. She will definitely have some choice words. ♦

The absence of plot in the modern novel is often commented upon, but no one calls attention to the disappearance of another element, as if no one had overlooked it.