Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  But no, I do not believe that. I don’t mean about myself—how can I judge?—but about how Vassar struck me when I was seventeen, a bright wild girl from Seattle. What the letters seem to hint at is something I have forgotten: that I was not very happy during my first term before I got close to cool, beautiful, glamorous Ginny and warmed to Miss Kitchel’s course. Yet already I was impressed by what I still see as the spirit of the college at the time, the gay and tolerant empiricism, the love of reality, the rejection of what I called “labels” in my first letter. If anybody was guilty of sticking labels on things, surely it was Johnsrud. That is not a Vassar habit, and it has never been one of my own faults, congenital or acquired. What I must have been doing in those letters to Ted was a bit of mourning plus a bit of impersonation, speaking to her in a soprano rendition of the Johnsrud voice. Or, more simply, I was trying to speak a language that he would approve of. And the courting of approval, I am sorry to say, is in my character. So it fits.

  Johnsrud, or “John,” as I began to call him, was rehearsing in a play called The Channel Road, an adaptation by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott of a Maupassant story, “Boule de Suif.” Arthur Hopkins was the producer—the same who had done The Jest—and it was going to open, as most of his plays did, at the Plymouth Theatre. So at Johnsrud’s invitation, in the middle of October, I took my first weekend and went down to see him in it, staying at the Vassar Club in the Allerton House, an all-women’s hotel.

  The story had to do with a group of French aristocrats and rich business people trying to reach the coast by diligence during the War of 1870, when the northern part of the country had been taken by the Germans. The party has a laisser-passer from the German commander in Rouen, which they trust to see them through. A last-minute addition to the party is a high-class prostitute with her bountiful hamper of provisions. On this fat girl’s virtue, or, rather, on her sacrifice of it, the fate of her companions depends: a German officer in whose power they find themselves demands that she sleep with him, but to the horror of the French respectable people she is too patriotic to want to. John played the count, an aristocratic figure in a redingote who was the spokesman of the French group—the villain, you might say. It was a good part, but the best male part was the German’s, played by Siegfried Rumann, a Hopkins discovery of that year—and later a popular movie villain—who became a great friend of John’s. The play was witty, with well-written lines, well staged and well acted, and was counted among the three best of the season, or so I wrote to Ted. But it did not last long.

  Sixty performances. Whether the poor business they did was connected with the stock-market crash, which had taken place in late October, I cannot guess now. At Vassar that fall news of the crash did not reach me or not for some time. Insofar as the public world impinged on us freshman year, it was mainly in the shape of the Oxford pledge (for peace), Moral Rearmament, Buchmanism, none of which was my cup of tea. The phrase “merchants of death” about the armament-manufacturers was pronounced in chapel, and a favorite villain was Sir Basil Zaharoff. Not till sophomore year, I think, were there apple-sellers in the streets of New York and unemployed men sleeping on park benches. At college it was said that a few girls’ fathers jumped out of windows; certainly more girls applied for scholarships. And yet for her engagement present, in 1931, the Goss family gave Ginny a silver-gray Pierce-Arrow touring-car with a folding bar and ice-chest in the middle. The gift, one later heard, “ruined” them: when Ginny came home from her honeymoon, she and Dick had to move into what had once been the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage.

  I remember seeing my first bread-line in New York that second winter. Yet if it had not been for John, I might not have been really conscious that there was a depression. He moved into a cheap apartment on Bank Street with a friend who was a half-employed architect’s draftsman. When The Channel Road closed, John was out of work till Uncle Vanya with Lillian Gish opened in mid-April—Jed Harris gave him a job in it as assistant stage-manager, with a tiny part. Though he did not have a real kitchen, he was doing his own cooking a lot of the time—things like chile con carne and spaghetti and a recipe for meat loaf his mother sent him. He started making an awful milky colored drink out of raw alcohol, water, and oil of anise which he called anisette and said was Italian; he got the recipe from the actor Eduardo Ciannelli, another great friend. Finally in May of freshman year he took the train up to Vassar, where he met Ginny and was driven around the country in her Packard—this was pre-Pierce-Arrow; one of her admirers had brought it over from Waterbury. That winter in the studio-couch bed of the Bank Street furnished apartment I lost my virginity for the third time. John and I were engaged, I told my friends, not knowing for sure whether we were or what it meant.

  8

  A GOOD DEAL OF EDUCATION consists of un-learning—the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational. No girl, it was felt, could be the same after Kitchel’s English or Sandison’s Shakespeare, to say nothing of Lockwood’s Press.

  For example, English 165 swiftly learned that a bowdlerized text would not be tolerated in Miss Sandison’s classroom. If one turned up, it was banished with a shudder like a deck of cards removed by fire-tongs from a Baptist home. In our sophomore year, poor Maddie Aldrich (Margaret Chanler Astor Aldrich, later one of “the group”) innocently brought an expurgated version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona to class, and Miss Sandison spotted it; it was not like the big blue Oxford that most of the rest of us had. Maddie’s little book, suede or tooled leather, was probably a family hand-me-down that had already done service with her brother Dickie at Harvard. The Aldriches, who were related to John Jay Chapman and “Sheriff Bob” Chanler (the one that married Lina Cavalieri and got the famous “WHO’S LOONY NOW?” cable from his brother Archie, who had changed his name to Challoner and was doing time in a madhouse for shooting his butler), dear souls, were land-poor and practiced the strictest economy at Rokeby, their Hudson River property, where Mrs. Aldrich (known as “the American Florence Nightingale” and “the Angel of Porto Rico” in the Spanish-American War) distributed home-made pen-wipers for Christmas. Maddie’s punishment, to get back to that, was to read aloud, from Miss Sandison’s copy, Launce’s speech to his dog (Act IV, Scene 4): “He had not been there (bless the mark) a pissing-while, but all the chamber smelt him.”

  No doubt it taught Maddie some sort of lesson. I can still hear the bad word bravely pronounced in her pretty Saint Tim’s voice. And I can still hear Miss Sandison’s own delicate light voice—she was Bryn Mawr—lecturing us, apropos The Two Gentlemen and the sonnets, on the Platonizing tendency—male homosexuality—of the Elizabethan period. I knew about homosexuals, but it woke me up to learn that the subject could be talked about so coolly in the classroom by a small pretty gray-haired full professor with dark eyes and a face like a Johnny-jump-up, which unfortunately had a purple birthmark across one finely boned cheek. It was that, we assumed, which had kept her an old maid; in our senior year a product called Covermark was put on the market, and, though she was quick to use it and it completely hid her disfigurement, I felt almost sad for her because it had come too late, when she was over forty. Well! Darling Miss Sandison, whose scholarly specialty was Sir Arthur Gorges (pronounced “Gorgeous”), 1557-1625, love poet, translator of Lucan, Ralegh’s friend; her edition of his English poems was published in 1953 … It was she, I discovered, who had written the college catalogue, so very clear, that had made me at Annie Wright Seminary choose Vassar in preference to the two others. I hope I told her that.

  Then there was Lockwood’s press course (Contemporary Press), a junior year offering renowned for the un-learning she made girls in it do. According to the course description, the class was taught to read the press critically—doubtless a healthy thing. But it was not
just the fine art of reading behind the news that the girls learned, sitting around a long table seminar style; they were getting indoctrinated with a potent counter-drug. The class, we heard (I never took it), was the scene, almost like a camp meeting, of many a compulsory transformation as hitherto dutiful Republican daughters turned into Socialists and went forth to spread the gospel. It was said that Miss Lockwood insisted that a girl completely break with her mother as the price of winning her favor. The effect on the girl was a kind of smug piety, typical of the born anew, that could last for years, long after the one-time converts, now alumnae (married, with 2.4 children), had turned back into Republicans.

  Needless to say, I was in no danger. Having never been influenced by the politics of my grandparents, I did not require conversion. A young person who disliked certitudes of any kind was proof against the recruiting methods of the “charismatic” Miss Lockwood, who had a moustache and a deep “thrilling” voice. There was instant antagonism between us, which did not come to a head, though, until junior year when the Blake-to-Keats course, which I had been taking with my own dear favorite, Miss Kitchel, was turned over at mid-years to Miss Lockwood. We knew that Miss Kitchel was going on a half-sabbatical to work on George Eliot in the British Museum but we did not expect to be handed over to Miss Lockwood. The Blake-to-Keats course was given in two sections­, and most of us in Kitchel’s were there because Lockwood taught the other. Even though there had already been ructions—over Words­worth’s “Michael,” which we hated—in Miss Kitchel’s class, our section­ felt cheated by the transfer. With me, it was war from the very first day.

  Many years later, over an Old-Fashioned in a downtown Poughkeepsie restaurant, Miss Kitchel told me the story, as she had heard it, of a famous passage-at-arms between the dread Miss Lockwood and a very pert me. One morning, it seemed, Miss Lockwood, who was much given to leaning across the professorial desk, chin in hand, and raking the class with her burning dark gaze, had fired an opening question at us in her profoundest bass: “GIRLS, what is poetry?” At which, from a back row, I put up a saucy hand and sweetly recited: “Coleridge says it’s the best words in the best order.” She could have slapped me, I imagine.

  Today the portentous Miss Lockwood seems like a grotesque caricature of the Vassar teacher as shaker-up. At the time I hated her too fervently to view her as a simple exaggeration. One day I actually cried during an argument with her after class, and of course that made me hate her all the more. Miss Kitchel and Miss Sandison shook up their girls more gently. They were not at all partial to Helen D. Lockwood but were too high-minded to let us see it when we were students. The idea that English majors were drawn up in hostile camps, one pro-Kitchel (or Sandison), the other pro-Lockwood, was a myth propagated by Lockwood’s disciples (cf. Norine in The Group). One of the delights of Kitchel and Sandison was that they would never seek to make a disciple of a young person or encourage the formation of any kind of alignment. They were trying to teach us to stand on our own.

  I suppose that the “two hostile camps” myth (“You people were the aesthetes. We were the politicals. We eyed each other from across the barricades”) included the notion that Kitchel and Sandison were political conservatives. I must have half-believed that myself, for I remember the surprise I felt when a poll of the college taken just before the 1932 election (when Roosevelt, our trustee and Dutchess County neighbor, was voted into the White House) showed the faculty as overwhelmingly pro-Socialist (perhaps 80%) and that Miss Sandison, when I exclaimed on it, seemed surprised by my surprise, which let me understand—correctly—that she and Miss Kitchel belonged to the 80%. It is easy to see now that they were Norman Thomas Socialists, which eventually I, too, became, but the only directly political discussion I remember with either of them (as long as I was an undergraduate; afterwards it was different—we were equals) took place in Sandison’s Shakespeare: someone—was it I?—compared King Lear to Woodrow Wilson.

  Unlike Sandison and Kitchel, Miss Lockwood was a rich woman, though apparently few had suspected it till she left her fortune to the college on her death. Miss Peebles (Contemporary Prose Fiction) was rich, too, and lived in a well-furnished house of her own off campus, rather than in a spare college dormitory like Miss Sandison and Miss Kitchel, who had apartments opposite each other on the first floor of Williams Hall with a screened porch in the back that they shared. Until recently I had not grasped the fact that they took their meals, with the rest of the Williams women, in a sort of mess-hall.

  With all the enmity I felt and possibly still feel for Miss Lockwood, looking back on her, I can now see that she embodied in her aggressive way faculty traits that could be found even in the mildest of teachers such as the retiring, duteous Miss Swenarton, who lived with her mother. Almost twenty years after graduation, coming back to write something about the college, I was amazed to hear Miss Swenar­ton, now gray-haired, gently teaching English 105 to a docile class of freshmen in the tried-and-true icon-smashing way. Shades of Miss Kitchel; who had retired, suffer­ing from heart disease—evident in her flushed cheeks—only the reading-list was different. Under Miss Kitchel, we had started with Benedetto Croce and Tolstoy’s What Is Art? Miss Swenarton was giving them High Wind in Jamaica. The effect was the same: to disturb the girls’ preconceptions. Our class had been told by Tolstoy that Shakespeare was a meretricious author, above all in King Lear; this class was hearing that children are moral monsters (“said to have ended the Victorian myth of childhood­,” the Oxford Companion to English Literature observes of the book), and reacting with shock and anger. Miss Swenarton’s soft persistent questions were aimed at their unexamined epistemology: how did they know what they thought they knew about children? With a faint smile, she called on a student who had worked as a babysitter and had direct experience to contribute.

  It was in English 105, writing my weekly “effusion” (“Girls, hand me your effusions”) for hearty Anna Kitchel, that I un-learned the ugly habit, picked up at Annie Wright, of putting those circles like fish-eyes, instead of dots, over my “i”s. By May of 1930, in a letter to Ted Rosenberg, the circles, as if on tip-toe, had disappeared. I wonder what other practices under her cheery blue eye folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away.

  She was our Class Advisor and my faculty adviser, too, and she must have undertaken to reform my taste. It was done so matter-of-factly that I was unaware of any change. It must have been Miss Kitchel’s doing that I stopped being crazy about Swinburne. Perhaps that happened during the “fourth hour” I elected with her—a once-a-week session for which she let me write a paper on Turgenev. Or at tea in her apartment as she puffed on her English Ovals, inducing on my part a shift from Marlboros.

  She was an expansive woman, big-boned, high-colored, with a shock of fair, graying hair and very light-blue eyes. Smith was her college, but she was a middle-westerner, from Milwaukee, and had a rich middle-western diction. Her graduate work had been done at Wisconsin, considered advanced at the time, and she had an admiration for Alexander Meiklejohn, the educational reformer, who had been at Madison after she came east. Her usual method of conveying instruction was to find the comical side of the book, person, institution she was seeking to open our eyes to. “Oh, he was a rare bird!” she exclaimed of Wordsworth in Blake-to-Keats, after telling us the whole story (then generally unmentioned) of the French girl Annette Vallon and the illegitimate child the great revolutionary disowned. I loved hearing Miss Kitchel marry the classic rara avis to the derisive American “that bird,” with a rolling “r” that no Daniel Jones dictionary of phonetics could ever do justice to. Surely she would have chuckled over naughty Algernon Swinburne, both life and works—all those verses too easily memorized occupying valuable space in my brain. “From too much love of living,/ From hope and fear set free … ” I don’t remember when those dearly loved words turned to derision in my ears. I guess I just dumped Swinburne without a backward thought. And Edna Millay? “You might as well be calli
ng yours/ What never will be his,/ And one of us be happy,/ There’s few enough as is.” Did Anna Kitchel “kill” her for me with a jovial dart of satire? And James Branch Cabell? When did he go?

  From his furnished room in Bank Street Johnsrud, too, was taking my reeducation in hand. Like Shaw, he was a born pedagogue. His own father had been a school principal back in northern Minnesota, who had lost his post through the chicanery of local officials and been reduced to selling encyclopedia sets and artificial limbs for a living. John was thinking of writing a play about him, to be called University, in which he made him the president of a state university instead of the principal of a high school. He spoke of his parents as “Iver” and “Molly,” and I did not think I would like them. Older people were attracted to John—Adrienne Morrison, the agent (mother of Joan Bennett); Jed Harris; Arthur Hopkins; Paul Reynolds, the editor of Red Book … But there was one older man that he took me to meet who was a surprising friend for John to have.