McCarthy and Wilson enjoyed sex and picnics in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They often picnicked at the freshwater ponds dotting the mid-Cape, but during the summer of 1942, their marriage was wobbly.
Wilson was fond of remembering his sexual relations with McCarthy. One outing at Gull Pond, where they enjoyed the pond’s freshwater, dined, and had sex. This picnic menu was the standard fare of boiled eggs, bean salad, cucumber sandwiches, chopped herbs, cottage cheese sandwiches, sliced green cucumber pickles, sliced tomatoes, and bananas. There was iced lemonade and a good supply of cool white wine.
After a meal like this, one might be indolent. But not McCarthy, who was eager to move on and apt to wander off for a casual fling. (McCarthy and Wilson were sexually adventurous in and out of marriage.)
The Wilson/McCarthy marriage (his third and second) was contentious long before they divorced in 1946. Negative aspects of women in Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) are allusions to McCarthy. McCarthy never overcame her contempt for Wilson. Fifty years after McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs (1992) declare that he was a fat, puffing old man with bad breath, whom she never loved. By then, Wilson was dead, and she had the last word.
See David Castronovo and Janet Groth. Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson. New York, 2005; Ruel K. Wilson‘s To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod (New York, 2008)