Say Ah-h-h!

CAST A COLD EYE (212 pp.)--Mary McCarthy--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

"I can only approve," wrote Pascal in one of the more peevish passages of his Pensees, "of those who groan aloud in their search for the truth." Literature, from Greek tragedy to T. S. Eliot, has been vastly benefited by truth-seekers who could out-groan a Maine fog horn; but it has also had to put up with a host of novelists and poets who forget that the surest way to ruin a good groan is to work it to death and stuff its remains into the machinery of their writing.

This forgetfulness is changing talented Author Mary McCarthy from a sharp satirist into a hollow groaner. Taut little early McCarthy opuses such as The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt and Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man would never have let a female character get away with a remark like "Ah, you hate it because it is mine. You would like to see it all go to ruin." Still less could an earlier McCarthy character have murmured to herself, "She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias had bloomed." But The Weeds, first of the four short stories that make up the bulk of Cast a Cold Eye (the remainder consists of New Yorkerized skeins of personal history), is a large bedful of just such dim petunias, wherein every muted "Ah!" suggests hoarse response to a throat specialist rather than the valid sound made by a Pascal truth-seeker.

"Mary McCarthy ... is something so rare today, an original, tough-minded word-lover," notes Cyril (Horizon) Connolly. But it is the McCarthy pursuit of sonorous words and elegant expression that makes puppets of her characters in these stories and gives to her most truthful perceptions an air of very intellectual, very elegant emptiness. Only in The Cicerone, a story about Americans in Italy which contains a bawdy, hilarious caricature of an expatriate heiress, does Author McCarthy recall what good company she can be when she stops her hollow groans and starts kicking her words around.

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