Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  The pages of this memoir represent the beginning of Mary McCarthy’s literary life. She was a prodigy from the first. I remember coming across an early review when I was doing some work in the New York Public Library. It was dazzling, a wonderfully accomplished composition, written soon after she left college. As she began, so she continued, and in the years ahead I don’t think she changed very much. There was a large circle of friends in France, England, and Italy as well as here at home, but Mary was too eccentric in her tastes to be called snobbish and I would not find her an especially worldly person. She was not fashionable so much as discriminating; but beyond it all there was the sentimental and romantic streak in her nature that cast a sort of girlish glow over private and public arrangements.

  Year in and year out, she made fantastical demands on her time and her budget for birthdays, Christmas; presents, banquets, bouquets, surprises, a whole salmon for the Fourth of July, traditional offering. I remember Natasha Nabokov, the mother of Ivan Nabokov, a publisher in Paris, telling me of a Thanksgiving in Paris where Mary found an approximation of the American turkey and brought forth “two dressings, one chestnut and one oyster.” Keeping the faith, it was. I often thought the holiday calendar was a command like the liturgical calendar with its dates and observances. Perhaps it was being an orphan, both of her parents having died in the flu epidemic of 1918, that led her to put such unusual stress on the reproduction of “family” gatherings.

  Here she speaks of her “patrician” background, a word I never heard her use about herself. It was true that she came from the upper middle class, lawyers and so on, but all of it had been lived so far away in Minnesota and the state of Washington that one never thought of her as Middlewestern or Western but instead as American as one can be without any particularity of region or class. In any case, she created even in small, unpromising apartments a sort of miniature haute bourgeois scenery, without being imitative. And she would arrive in New York with Mark Cross leather luggage, a burdensome weight even when empty, pairs of white leather gloves, a rolled umbrella, all of it bringing to mind ladies of a previous generation—and no thought of convenience. Of course, she didn’t believe in convenience.

  Wide friendships and hospitality, yes, but there were, in my view, only two persons outside the family circle for whom she felt a kind of reverence. The two were Hannah Arendt and Nicola Chiaramonte, both Europeans. They met for Mary every standard of intellectual and moral integrity. Chiaramonte, a beautiful man with dark curls and brown (I think) eyes, was a curiosity in the Partisan circle because of his great modesty and the moderation of his voice in discussion, a gentle word for what was usually a cacophony of argument. An evening at the Rahvs was to enter a ring of bullies, each one bullying the other. In that way it was different from the boarding school accounts of the type, since no one was in ascendance. Instead there was an equality of vehemence that exhausted itself and the wicked bottles of Four Roses whiskey around midnight—until the next time. Chiaramonte, with his peaceable, anarchist inclinations, was outclassed here.

  I suppose he could be called a refugee, this Italian cultural and social critic and anti-Fascist. Here he published essays but did not create a literary presence equal to his important career when he returned to Italy in the late 1940s. After his death, Mary wrote a long, interesting essay in order to introduce an American edition of his writings on the theater. I remember an anecdote she told me about Chiaramonte, and it alone is sufficient to show why she so greatly admired him. The story went as follows: stopped at a border, trying to escape the Nazi drive across Europe, Nicola was asked for his passport and he replied: Do you want the real one or the false one?

  Hannah Arendt, of course, was or became an international figure with The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and other works. I can remember Mary at Hannah’s apartment on Riverside Drive, a setting that was candidly practical, a neat place, tending toward a mute shade of beige in its appointments. For an occasional gathering there would be drinks and coffee and, German style it seemed to us, cakes and chocolates and nuts bought in abundance at the bakeries on Broadway. Mary was, quite literally, enchanted by Hannah’s mind, her scholarship, her industry, and the complexities of her views. As for Hannah, I think perhaps she saw Mary as a golden American friend, perhaps the best the country could produce, with a bit of our western states in her, a bit of the Roman Catholic, a Latin student, and a sort of New World, blue-stocking salonière like Rachel Varnhagen, about whom Hannah had, in her early years, written a stunning, unexpected book. The friendship of these two women was very moving to observe in its purity of respect and affection. After Hannah’s death, Mary’s extraordinary efforts to see her friend’s unfinished work on questions of traditional philosophy brought to publication, the added labor of estate executor, could only be called sacrificial.

  I gave the address at the MacDowell Colony when Mary received the Medal and there I said that if she was, in her writing, sometimes a scourge, a Savonarola, she was a very cheerful one, lighthearted and even optimistic. I could not find in her work a trace of despair and alienation; instead she had a dreamy expectation that persons and nations should do their best. Perhaps it would be unlikely that a nature of such exceptional energy could act out alienation, with its temptation to sloth. Indeed it seemed to me that Mary did not understand even the practical usefulness of an occasional resort to the devious. Her indiscretions were always open and forthright and in many ways one could say she was “like an open book.” Of course, everything interesting depends upon which book is open.

  Among the many charms and interests of this unfinished memoir are the accounts of the volatility of her relations with the men in her life. She will say that she doesn’t know why she left her first husband, backed out on John Porter, and deserted Philip Rahv. That is, she doesn’t know exactly but can only speculate. What, perhaps, might be asked nowadays is why the gifted and beautiful young woman was so greatly attracted to marriage in the first place, why she married at twenty-one. She seemed swiftly to overlook the considerable difficulties of unmarried couples “living together” at the time: the subterfuge about staying overnight, facing the elevator man, hiding the impugning clothes when certain people appeared, keeping the mate off the phone lest there be a call from home—unimaginable strategies in the present-day cities. There were many things Mary didn’t believe in, but she certainly believed in marriage, or rather in being married. She had no talent at all for the single life, or even for waiting after a divorce, a break. However, once married, she made a strikingly independent wife, an abbess within the cloister, so to speak.

  In a foreword to the paperback edition of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she speaks of the treasures gained from her education in Catholic convent and boarding schools, even finding a benefit in the bias of Catholic history as taught: “To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”

  Nonconformity may be a tiresome eccentricity or arise from genuine skepticism about the arrangements of society. Think of the headache of rejecting charge cards, the universal plastic that created a commercial world in which trying to use a personal check could bring oneself under suspicion. Going along with fidelity to old-fangledness, Mary and her husband declined the cards and had to carry about large sums of money, rolls of bills, that reminded me of nothing so much as men in fedoras in gangster movies. Still they did it and I think with some amusement in a trendy restaurant or Madison Avenue shop.

  So, we meet her here in 1936, marching in a Communist May Day parade, marching along with John Porter, a new man who looked like Fred MacMurray. The conjunction of romance and the events of the day is characteristic of Mary
at all points in her life. At the end of her memoir two years have passed and she has covered a lot of ground: divorce, a new marriage, unhappy, that lasted seven years, “though it never recovered.” Never recovered from Wilson’s mistakes and shortcomings as she saw them. I would have liked Mary to live on and on, irreplaceable spirit and friend that she was; even though I must express some relief that her memoirs did not proceed to me and my life, to be looked at with her smiling precision and daunting determination on accuracy. She had her say, but I never knew anyone who gave so much pleasure to those around her. Her wit, great learning, her gardening, her blueberry pancakes, beautiful houses. None of that would be of more than passing interest if it were not that she worked as a master of the art of writing every day of her life. How it was done, I do not know.

  —Elizabeth Hardwick

  New York, December 1991

  One

  FELLOW WORKERS, JOIN OUR RANKS!” It was 1936, and there I was, Mary Johnsrud, marching down lower Broadway in a May Day parade, chanting that slogan at the crowds watching on the sidewalks. “FelLOW WORKers!” Nobody, I think, joined us; they just watched. We were having fun. Beside me marched a tall fair young man, former correspondent of the Paris Herald, who looked like Fred MacMurray. Johnsrud was on the road with Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, playing his Broadway role of the blind man. I had been out of college and married to him nearly three years.

  The May Day parade was, of course, a Communist thing. The American labor holiday was the first Monday in September and marked by its own parade, with union bands, which certainly did not play the “Internationale.” I had watched those parades in Minneapolis with our uncle Myers. Now, as we marched, singing the “Internationale,” “Bandiera Rossa” (my favorite), “Solidarity Forever,” “Hold the Fort for We Are Coming” (by Hans Eisler, I thought), the marshals, mostly girls, who stepped along beside us, keeping us in line, were noticeably blond and blue-eyed, what one would today call Wasp types. That must have been Party strategy, to give the march a face-lift, in keeping with the new line, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” The previous year had seen the end of so-called third-period Communism and the launching of the Popular Front by Dimitrov at the Seventh Party Congress in Moscow. The point was to meet the menace of Hitler with a merging of working-class and bourgeois parties. In France last February the Popular Front (Radicals, Socialists, and Communists) had won a big victory; next month the Léon Blum government would take office and give the working class its first “congés payés.” France being one of my “fields,” I had followed these developments, suggestive of a René Clair film (A Nous la Liberté), but I was unaware of any change in the policy of the U.S. Party, even though I myself (I now see), swinging along lower Broadway, was part of it. I only observed that what people said was true: our marshals were very blond and blue-eyed, and the cadres of the Party, on the whole Jewish in appearance, were making themselves less visible by staying in the center of our ranks, like the filling of the sandwich. John Porter and I had been placed on the outside, where the onlookers could not fail to see us. Or hear us. Belting out “C’est la LUT-te fin-A-A-L-e,” when the others were rendering “’Tis the final conflict.” Having lived and worked in Paris (he had been with Agence Havas, too), John Porter knew the words in French. And of course I chimed in with him. We were both conscious of being young and good-looking, an advertisement for the cause, and it did not bother us that the comrades had caught on to salesmanship; we were amused that the Party, in our eyes the height of innocence, could be shrewd.

  Though I had been to dances organized by them at Webster Hall, the parade was my first experience of being, or looking like, a recruit. That spring and summer marked the high point of the slight attraction I felt toward Communism. I knew something about it because I had been writing book reviews for the liberal magazines The Nation and The New Republic, and Johnsrud had been acting at the Theater Union—a downtown group that was doing left-wing plays in Eva Le Gallienne’s old Civic Repertory Theatre (Peace on Earth, Stevedore, Black Pit, The Sailors of Cattaro, Gorky’s The Mother; he had been in all of them except the first two). With his Populist background, he was full of japes at the expense of the faithful among his fellow actors—Martin Wolfson, Abner Biberman, Howard Da Silva. Over his dressing-room door he had put up a sign saying “Through these portals pass some of the most beautiful tractors in the Ukraine,” and on his mirror he wrote with a wax crayon “Lovestone is a Lovestoneite!” Very funny, I thought, and the comrades forgave him. As emerged a bit later, the two leading spirits of the Theater Union, Charles and Adelaide Walker, were turning into Trotskyites while John was acting there. In 1937 Adelaide’s mother, Mrs. Robert Latham George, would be thanked by the Trotsky Committee for putting up members in the house she took in Mexico City during the great John Dewey hearings, but no word of that imminent crossover reached the acting company, as far as I can tell. Or maybe it did. Was that the motive behind a short-lived actors’ strike—scandalous for a radical theatre, which depended on trade-union “benefits”—that Charlie Walker somehow settled?

  It was at the Theater Union, at a Sunday-night benefit, that Waiting for Lefty was first performed. John and I were in the audience; we had an interest in how the Odets one-acter would go: a producer named Frank Merlin held an option on John’s play “Anti-Climax” and also on Awake and Sing!, then called “I Got the Blues,” which was Odets’s first play. Merlin was a fat, fortyish Irishman given to deriding “ca-PIT-alism” (possibly that was how they pronounced it in Ireland); his backer, whom we called “Mrs. Nightgown,” was the wife of a man named Motty Eitingon who traded in furs, with Russia. A six-month option cost $500, and neither Odets’s nor John’s was taken up. “Merlin’s backer faded out on him,” I wrote my Vassar friend Frani Blough in Pittsburgh. John’s play never did get produced. Odets had better luck. He was an actor-member of the Group Theatre, which had been reluctant to do Awake and Sing! (Lee Strasberg did not like it), but the immense wild success of Waiting for Lefty downtown that night at the Theater Union—audience and actors yelling together “Strike!” “Strike!”—assured that the Group would take over Awake and Sing!, with Harold Clurman directing and Stella Adler as the Jewish mother (“Have a piece of fruit”)—to my mind, among the few good things Odets or the Group ever did. Well. When he and John were both under option to Merlin and would meet in his office above the Little Theatre, there was some edginess between them—John with his Standard English diction, stage presence, English-style tweeds and Odets, a Party-lining Jewish boy from Philadelphia, in an old turtleneck jersey. Possibly Odets, an aspiring actor but never at home on the stage, envied John’s aplomb while despising it. Or he was envious because Merlin was planning to do John’s play first. It was John who thought up “Odets, where is thy sting?”—he coined it one night at our dinner table while old Clara, who ran a funeral parlor in Harlem, served smothered chicken and mashed potatoes. Afterward the witticism passed into circulation and was in Winchell or Leonard Lyons, I think.

  As for Merlin, I have never found anyone who knew where he came from or where he went to. Variety has no obituary notice of him in its files; though, if still alive, he would be close to a hundred. Maybe, like his Tennysonian homonym, the old necromancer is shut up somewhere in an ancient oak tree. Thinking back (to “ca-PIT-alism”), I see him as a left-wing Socialist, or even, like O’Casey, a queer kind of unorthodox Communist. Unlike Merlin, his backer, Bess Eitingon, and her husband, Motty, the importer of Russian furs, resurfaced in my life several years later, in a house in Stamford, Connecticut, but that is for another chapter. Till now, I have never put two and two together and realized that John’s “Nightgowns” were they.

  I had had my own class-war problems with The New Republic. The pipe-smoking Malcolm Cowley—“Bunny” Wilson’s successor as literary editor—though a faithful fellow traveler, was too taciturn usually to show his hand. After the first time, he almost never gave me a book to review, but let me come week after w
eek to the house on West 21st Street that was The New Republic’s office then—quite a ride for me on the El. Wednesday was Cowley’s “day” for receiving reviewers; after a good hour spent eyeing each other in the reception room, one by one we mounted to Cowley’s office, where shelves of books for review were ranged behind the desk, and there again we waited while he wriggled his eyebrows and silently puffed at his pipe as though trying to make up his mind. Sometimes, perhaps to break the monotony, he would pass me on to his young assistant, Robert Cantwell, who had a little office down the hall. Cantwell was a Communist, a real member, I guess, but unlike Cowley, he was nice. He was fair and slight, with a somewhat rabbity appearance, and he, too, came from the Pacific Northwest, which gave us something to talk about. “Cantwell tells me the story of his life,” I wrote to Frani in December 1933. In 1931 he had published a novel, Laugh and Lie Down, and in 1934 he published a second, The Land of Plenty. Both were about Puget Sound and were described to me later by a Marxist critic as “Jamesian”—he counted as the only proletarian novelist with a literary style. I had not read him then; nor had I read Cowley’s Blue Juniata or Exile’s Return (on a theme dear to Helen Lockwood’s Contemporary Press course), but with Cantwell that did not matter. After The New Republic, he went to work for Time and moved to the right, like Whittaker Chambers, who may well have been his friend. The other day someone wrote me that Lillian Hellman tried to stage a walkout from Kenneth Fearing’s funeral service because Cantwell was one of the speakers. Can you imagine? Yes. Now he is dead himself. I should have liked to thank him for his interesting book The Hidden Northwest, which led me to Washington Irving’s Astoria—a happy discovery. I learn from my 1978–79 Who’s Who (he was still living then) that he was named Robert Emmett Cantwell. A misnomer, typically Northwestern, for Robert Emmet, the Irish patriot? A spelling error by Who’s Who? Or just no connection?