Mary McCarthy's Birds of America (1971) ends with the ominous final line: ‘Nature is dead, mein kind’ (344). The words are uttered by a hallucination of the Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who appears to the novel's protagonist after he is bitten by a black swan in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Despite this enigmatic final sentence, however, McCarthy's presentation of mid-century Nature in Birds of America cannot be summed up so neatly or easily. This chapter will demonstrate that, quite apart from portraying Nature as destroyed and departed, McCarthy writes Nature into the novel as a complex, abiding and powerful presence. It will also place the novel's depiction of Nature within the context of McCarthy's wider literary and theoretical consideration of the place of Nature in mid-century American society and culture.

Birds of America was contextually influenced by the legacy of the Second World War, and by the Vietnam War. McCarthy interrupted the writing of Birds, which she began in 1964, in order to devote herself to opposing American military involvement in Vietnam. She began work on Birds in the spring of 1964, but took breaks from the novel in order to travel to Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. McCarthy's opposition to American involvement in Vietnam was galvanised when the American Air Force began to bomb North Vietnam in 1965. However, her stance on Vietnam also reflected her personal politics, and her self-declared ‘utopian’ and ‘anti-Stalinist’ socialism is evident in the strong bias that her Vietnam War reports display against the American military-industrial complex, and in favour of North Vietnamese communism. Birds was finally published in 1971, but the novel and McCarthy's Vietnam writings share the same period of genesis, and consequently exhibit a cross-pollination of ideas and influences. This is particularly apparent in her exploration of the implications of American attitudes to Nature and the environment across both texts.

In order to fully appreciate McCarthy's complex depictions of mid-century American Nature, it is necessary to read Birds of America alongside her nonfiction writing from the period of the novel's composition. McCarthy's Vietnam War journalism and her essay theorising contemporary environmentalism and literary depictions of Nature, ‘One Touch of Nature’ (1970), are particularly illuminating in this regard. Reading these texts alongside the novel helps to expose the multifaceted presentation of Nature that the novel exhibits.