Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  We of Con Spirito would meet in a room in Students (later in the Poughkeepsie red-wine-and-white-coffee-cups speakeasy owned by Signor Bruno); manuscripts for submission were put, unsigned, on a wooden chair, to be read and argued over. Though the make-up of our board was supposed to be a secret from the campus at large, naturally we knew each other, in most cases well: Frani, Bishop, Eunice Clark, her sister, Eleanor, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Miller, me. Margaret was an Art major, in Bishop’s class, who wrote a remarkable piece on Surrealism for us, afterwards studied with Meyer Schapiro, and worked for years at the Museum of Modern Art. The others are self-explanatory. Occasionally we published something not written by one of our number (though there was no way we could know for sure), and once, according to rumor, a hoax was perpetrated on us by somebody who sent us a poem, which we accepted, by a patient in the state insane asylum. “So what?” was our reaction, but on campus there was a lot of crowing at the sight of that poem in print.

  Con Spirito was my first encounter with “motiveless malignity” touched off by a good or morally neutral deed. The phrase is used of Iago; “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly,” which he says of Cassio, being the best explanation of his conduct he ever vouchsafes. Our magazine, which we advertised by posters we nailed up on trees in the dark of night, contained nothing libelous or obscene, attacked no person by name or insinuation, was well printed, inexpensive (15 cents), in other words incapable of harming anyone, yet it was met, dear frail gay little bark, by a tide of hatred. Because it was unsigned. That was the outrage, the shameful crime, treated as such even by some of the faculty, who breathed the word “anonymous” as though it were married to the word “letter,” denoting something so scurrilous that it dared not sign its name. We were reviled as cowards since we did not come forward to claim our publication; in all the furor, nobody stopped to think of the Times Literary Supplement, which had been publishing unsigned articles and reviews for years.

  Miss Sandison was torn between amusement and anger on our behalf. She at once picked out Frani, Bishop, and me as the arch-Conspirators and wanted to hear who the others were. I don’t remember Miss Kitchel’s part in this; evidently she was still working in the British Museum when our first number appeared. But Miss Sandison, as she put it, “went to the mat” for us, and Miss Kitchel must have taken our side on her return. It would not surprise me if Miss Sandison had even used her position as head of the English Department to overpower our enemies. This delicate small person was a fighter.

  Looking over old copies of the magazine, I see that her sharp literary eye must have had no trouble identifying the authors of quite a number of the pieces. I can find myself—a prose poem against Hitler and Mussolini and two long book reviews; I find Frani doing an extended metaphor on the structure of an onion; I find Margaret on Surrealism and Eunice Clark in a story called “The Bite,” about (so we thought) her sister, Eleanor (“the Baby”), herself (“Sister”), and their mother, who bit the Baby to teach her a lesson for biting Sister. Finally and far beyond the rest of us, I find Bishop with “Then Came the Poor,” a marvelously amusing story, laid in the near future, of a revolutionary takeover. In November, 1933, after our graduation, there is Eunice again, surely, reviewing John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and The Menace of Fascism. But I do not find any “crazy” poem nor any Muriel Rukeyser, unless she was the author of “Lecture by Mr. Eliot” in the third number:

  The audience crumbles in cerebral whoredom

  devoted lustfully to a conceit’s expansion

  to an obscure line’s scansion.

  These Fantastics bow and nod

  homage to prosody as a god.

  Somewhere beyond these windows,

  China moans …

  In Alabama are beated nine dark boys, and quenched—while poets practice smiling

  contemptuously at the seventh row.

  The Scottsboro Boys. Yes, that sounds like Muriel, and the reference would be to a reading by Eliot in Avery during our senior year, when he gave us one of the early Possum poems. Too bad about the typos: “crumbles” was probably “crumples,” and “beated” certainly “beaten.”

  Another appearance in Avery, that fall or winter, escaped the notice of Con Spirito. That was when Edmund Wilson, known to us as the author of Axel’s Castle (1931), which none of us can have read, lectured to us on Flaubert—manifestly a try-out of one of the essays in The Triple Thinkers. He was heavy, puffy, nervous, and a terrible speaker, the worst I ever heard, including a stutterer, years later at a New York meeting I chaired, who pronounced “totalitarianism” in twenty-one syllables—someone counted. Wilson’s delivery was characterized by harrowing pauses when we did not know whether he was going to continue or had stopped altogether. Watching this happen, Miss Sandison, who had introduced him, hurried down to the basement to try to find a glass of water—none had been provided at the lectern. “Vox exhaurit in faucibus,” she said to me afterwards: his voice was expiring in his jaws. I have never identified the Latin quotation. Her shock—and Miss Kitchel’s—at my marriage to Wilson, and relief at the end of it, went back to that evening in Avery. “Tell us,” said Miss Kitchel, over her Old-Fashioned in the Poughkeepsie restaurant when I was back in the Hudson River Valley, teaching at Bard, and a divorce was impending. “Tell us,” her fading blue eyes supplicated, “you didn’t marry him for love.” It was in love’s name that the two spinsters begged for reassurance, and we all three laughed when I said no.

  Frani and I were both taking Miss Sandison’s Renaissance seminar. My senior thesis I divided into two parts, one on Sir John Harington, Elizabeth’s witty godson and translator of Ariosto; the other on Robert Greene (“For he left his pretty boy,/ Father’s sorrow, father’s joy”), Shakespeare’s immortal detractor (“His tygres heart wrapt in a player’s hide … the onely shake-scene in a countrey”) and friend of Nashe, author of a manual on the art of cony-catching and of a very curious work of deathbed repentance (Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance) whose sincerity is impossible to determine. Both halves of my thesis were portraits of a kind, and you could say that the sitter for each was a distant cousin to Sir Gawain. The one on Harington (also the inventor of the toilet, described in his Metamorphosis of Ajax—a jakes) was published in the Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies and won half the Furness Prize, given for a work on an Elizabethan subject. I was happy with these honors and even more so in Miss Sandison’s approbation. If I have ever had an academic field, it is English Renaissance, and there I feel my home is, in the music of the period, too. I did not greatly care for Spenser—the only parts of The Faerie Queene I really responded to were the mutability cantos—there were quite a number of Elizabethans, poets and wits, major and minor, that I preferred. My real and lasting love, not counting Shakespeare, was Thomas Nashe (“Brightness falls from the air”), to my mind the embodiment of the genius of English prose. I am thinking not so much of The Unfortunate Traveler, often called the first English novel, as of the high-spirited pamphlets, for instance, Have With You to Saffron Walden, an attack on Spenser’s crony, the ineffable pedant Gabriel Harvey.

  Frani was smitten with the Elizabethans, too; in the apple country, not far from the college there was an inn, the Silver Swan, that we used to frequent with our friends, partly on account of its very Elizabethan name. On occasion, Elizabethan airs were sung at table. In classes, as I said, I had been taking Renaissance French with Miss De Schweinetz and Renaissance Latin with Miss Tappan.

  Yet despite my love of Elizabethan language and sense of being at home in the period (still powerfully operative the instant I hear the lascivious pleasings of a lute, and/or William Byrd, Dowland, Campion), the course senior year that had the greatest visible influence on my future life was Miss Peebles’ Contemporary Prose Fiction, in which we studied the “river-novel” and something she called “multiplicity.” As I have related elsewhere (Occasi
onal Prose), we read Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel (perhaps merely as an example of multi­plicity), and, one thing leading to another, I was prompted to go to the library basement and find Dos Passos’ pamphlet on Sacco and Vanzetti, which turned me around politically from one day to the next (or so it seemed). There was no more talk from me about royalism; instead, I was pursuing the Tom Mooney case through the back numbers of The New Republic.

  That was how it happened that one day in the spring I went to The New Republic offices on West 21st Street and asked to see the book editor, who (though I did not know it) had once been Wilson and was now Malcolm Cowley, smoking a pipe. I had brought along a copy of Con Spirito, which had in it “Two Crystal-Gazing Novelists,” my review of Huxley’s Brave New World and of Public Faces, a future-laid satire by Harold Nicolson. With characteristic perversity (you may think), I had preferred the second and said so, roundly. Cowley looked over the magazine, pursing judicious lips and making no comment. If I had brought the second number—April—also, he might have found “In Pace Requiescamus,” in which my doggerel verselets (“The Jews gave Heinrich Heine,/ Felix Mendelssohn, too;/ But the Prussians taught the goose-step./ Take your choice of the two”) alternated with syncopated prose (“The Vatican doors open and the Pope steps out. But the Pope is an ex-mountain climber of seventy-odd, who composes new encyclicals on birth control, and sets new red hats on his prelates’ bald heads, while the Italians increase and multiply as the Lord commanded them, and the Nazis, Poland looking, test their clubs on Communist pates”). Clearly, I had been “radicalized.” Cowley, who was one of theirs, pulled at his pipe and nodded. Finally he told me that to get a review assignment from him, I would have to be either a genius or starving. “I’m not starving,” I said gayly. In the end, he allowed me to do a tiny review for him, of Glenway Wescott’s A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers, a sort of deadpan Lives of the Saints, for which the magazine paid me three dollars. When the check came, after we were married, John wanted to frame it.

  None of this, as they say, was happening in a vacuum. During the summer, while I was working for Mannie and living at Barbara Mosenthal’s parents’ house, newspaper headlines proclaimed an important election in Germany: “Hindenburg Wins” sounded good, but in reality it was a Nazi victory, as old Hindenburg rapidly stepped down and was replaced by Hitler. In the fall came Roosevelt’s election and, after that, in the spring, the bank holiday, when we at Vassar, like everyone else, lived for a surprising week without money. I also remember the milk strike—farmers were dumping huge cans of milk on the roads; I wrote a story about it for Miss Swenarton in Advanced Composition. Miss Newcomer of the Economics Department kept going to Albany, and Prexy had lunch with Roosevelt on a tray in the White House. 3.2 beer became legal, and a repeal of the Volstead Act was promised.

  But while the nation was enduring the Bonus March and experiencing the first labor pains of the New Deal, I myself was getting to know the rich. The South Tower group, being well brought up, was always good about inviting me to stay with one or another of them during holidays, which were too short to permit my taking the long train trip back and forth to Seattle. Thanksgiving, Christmas, mid-years, Easter—this year I might have spent them at college since John was not around. Instead, I stayed at town and country houses, with Kelly or Maddie; at Thanksgiving I had visited Julia on Cape Elizabeth and would go to Frani (though not a group member) in Pittsburgh for part of Easter. I had become familiar with butlers. Already, junior year, Nathalie Swan had had me to stay with her in the country and, in town, in the East 80’s. I learned the uses of parlormaids: having my suitcase unpacked and my clothes laid out or taken away to press. I grew accustomed to morning trays and hot milk with coffee.

  The Swans’ butler (French) was named Charles. Mr. Swan, who was something of a sybarite, was interested in old furniture and in his rock garden; in the country, he drank wine with his meals and in New York, in his Georgian town house, he drank a whiskey-and-soda. It must have been a New York custom—Mr. Kellogg, I think, did the same. Mr. Swan was an investment banker, and Mr. Kellogg was in the contracting business, which sounded less elegant, but his wife was a Winthrop.

  At Maddie’s country house, Rokeby, where I spent Christmas, austerity was the rule. The Aldriches were elderly and fairly poor (he had been the music critic of the New York Times), and Mrs. Aldrich, the Angel of Porto Rico, was a fanatic teetotaler. The nicest part of staying there—in Hudson River estate country, near Barrytown—was listening to the two-piano duets played by Mr. Aldrich and his brother Chester, of Delano and Aldrich, architects. Tall, white-haired, dark-eyed Mrs. Aldrich, a strong Democrat, often spoke about the Webbs (“dear Sidney and Beatrice”), and one night at dinner (estate-bottled grape juice) she interrupted one of her historical reminiscences to ask graciously, “And what part did your ancestors play in the Civil War?” I was able to answer that my great-grandfather had been a colonel, retired as general, on the Union side. I did not say that he had commanded a Negro regiment, because I did not know it then. On another evening I was surprised to hear Mr. Aldrich, who had a speech impediment, stammer out an objection to the conservative politics of young Dickie, just out of Harvard and working at Proctor & Gamble. “It is qu-qu-quite all right for me,” he said, “at my age to be a Republican but not right for Dickie.” Chester agreed. It was interesting that the most civilized of the families I stayed with—the Aldriches and the Denisons—were also the only poor ones.

  I was conscious, naturally, of seeing my girlhood wishes—all those mornings spent immersed in Vogue—come improbably true, and it delighted me to be staying not merely with rich society people but with old-family patricians unable to afford central heating. And it was a strange coincidence—the return of the repressed?—that my old Seminary friend the very fast Helen Ford, from Montana, should turn up close to Rokeby, in the very same neighborhood, indeed just down the road, near the old country town of Red Hook, as a widow and running a chocolate factory painted the color of a Hershey bar, with a house to match next door. She had married the son of the popular author James Oliver Curwood, whom she met on a world cruise of “the Floating University”; he died, leaving her a chocolate business, originally located in Barrytown and named Baker’s, but which was not the same as the Baker’s. After going over from college, once, for dinner, I did not pursue the relationship and was startled years later to find that Maddie knew about her and had been curious to meet her.

  In the sitting-room of the Tower, Clover had painted a mural of us all in the nude, which produced the inevitable scandal even though the likenesses were no closer to photographic realism than “Les demoiselles d’Avignon” by Picasso. It was felt to be very shocking that we invited men to tea in the presence, so to speak, of ourselves in the altogether. That was the only scandal. Among us, there was occasional dissension as to who should wash the bathtub—we had one for eight people. Otherwise there were no special incidents unless we made the mistake of playing Truth or Consequences.

  Yet my relation with the group underwent a change. Extra­ordinary to relate, they became possessive about me. Besides Bishop and Frani, I had a lot of other friends—Betsy Strong, Fran Rotter, Martha McGahan, Rosemary Paris (who had played Perdita to my Leontes and later married Arthur Mizener)—and the group did not like it if I ate dinner at their tables or went off campus with them to the Popover Shop or the Lodge. Or down to Signor Bruno’s to drink wine out of coffee cups with the Con Spirito board, though this was usually not at meal-times and it was the dining-room—an empty place at table—that bothered them most. I was unaware of this and perhaps should have been flattered when a delegation came to me to suggest that I eat a bit more often with my own group. But actually, I was depressed by the clannishness of their behavior, typical, I now know, of society people, who are great stickers-together.

  It was mid-June the morning we graduated, and I fainted in the chapel from the heat. Afterwards Frani’s parents took several of us to lunch at
the Silver Swan. My grandparents had not come on for the occasion, to hear me get my cum laude (no magna); they sent me the money the trip would have cost them. That was my graduation present, and perhaps it was just as well that they were spared Clover’s mural. Besides that, my grandfather sent me a check for what they might have given me for a trip to Europe, such as Frani was getting from her parents—that was a wedding present, he wrote. Yes, the decision had eventually been made. We had even sublet an apartment, furnished, on East 52nd Street, from Miss Sandison’s sister, Lois Howland, who taught Latin at Chapin. Feeling the depression, she and her husband were moving down to the National Arts Club and leaving us their very nice things. It was over a “cordial shop” (liquor store) and next to a dry-cleaner’s; at the end of the summer, when the Howlands’ lease ran out, we would have to find a place of our own.

  We spent the night in the apartment, then took a taxi down to St. George’s Church, on Stuyvesant Square. We had already had an interview with the curate, and it was exactly one week after Commencement and my twenty-first birthday when we “stood up” together in the chapel. I had a beige dress and a large black silk hat with a wreath of daisies. Most of the group were present; Frani had already sailed for Fontainebleau to study music, and Bishop, I think, was not there either. We had a one-night honeymoon at an inn in Briarcliff, and there all of a sudden I had an attack of panic. This may have had something to do with an applejack punch we served at the reception or with the disturbing proximity of Scarborough, suffused with bad memories of the summer before. As we climbed into the big bed, I knew, too late, that I had done the wrong thing. To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had just done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action, I saw. Stiff with remorse and terror, I lay under the thin blanket through a good part of the night; as far as I could tell from what seemed a measureless distance, my untroubled mate was sleeping.