A near-capacity crowd showed up last night at Sanders Theatre to hear a woman who is a phenomenon of our time as well as one of the keenest critics and satirists in America. But more than a few were disappointed. It was a quiet night for Mary McCarthy.

There was no freeing of closeted literary skeletons or butchering of local sacred cows. She mentioned the John Birch Society only in passing and alluded to Joe McCarthy (no relation) with a smile. What had happened to the fires of yesteryear? Only in the closing minutes of an unexpectedly academic talk on the novel did the trenchant moral critic emerge to express the full force of her contrary spirit.

She had been talking for almost an hour on the diminishing interest in physical nature in twentieth century fiction and had noted the vivid joy in nature of 19th century romantic poets and painters. So far, so good, for a Gen Ed lecture, but this was Mary McCarthy and everyone was still waiting for the punchline.

Her voice became more vibrant as she gradually worked her way up to the present, resting on Zola for a moment, deftly controverting recent critical opinion about the author of Germinal. He was rooted in the cycle of nature and his novels of defeat contain an affirmation of life, invincible and forever, she insisted. Somehow, in the next moment, Wordsworth and Fenimore Cooper had been left far behind, and Miss McCarthy was talking about Marx and Hannah Arendt, the cycle of nature and the encroachment of modern industrial civilization on nature.

And now it was the disruption of nature's eternal cycle, the solitude of nature versus the Joneliness of modern alienated society, the threat of filling stations and ranch houses wiping out the last remnants of physical nature. Mary McCarthy was no longer giving a Hum 2 lecture, and the little ladies from the Adult Education League looked a little flustered. Then it came. Physical nature is being eradicated by man, so that only the cell, the final, (once) indestructible unit of life remains.

But even the integrity of the cell is now lost, she noted, as man has invoked science to complete the disruption of nature's organic unity. Disintegration and chaos, disorder and eternal sorrow. We got up from our seats to leave Sanders a little stunned, not quite sure how she had gotten from Fenimore Cooper to the horror.

But in her talk last night, sponsored by the Poets' Theatre, Miss McCarthy largely avoided the acidulous sting of her satiric fiction. She was not the cruelly self-conscious McCarthy of The Company She Keeps (1942), with its heroine's interminable self-dissection and motive-mongering after making love in a Pullman car with "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt." This famous sketch, which had run previously in the Partisan Review, established her reputation and set the pattern for the heroine of her subsequent novels.

The Oasis (1949), the least-known of her novels, took some pot-shots at Manhattan's leftist intellectuals, with whom she had broken in the late '30s as one of the renegade editors of the Partisan Review. The Groves of Academe, in 1952, renewed her public fame and represented the familiar, unillusioned satirist at her best, with its caricature of a progressive college (Miss McCarthy had taught at Bard and Sarah Lawrence). As with her last novel, A Charmed Life, readers tried to match the characters with real people in the McCarthy coterie--and not always without success.

Besides the novels, she has written travel books on Venice and Florence and an autobiography called Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, which carried her through a youth spent partially in a convent up to her entrance into Vassar in 1929. The rest of her life can be read between the lines of the novels, essays, and New Yorker stories published over the years.