It was an idyl he was offering me, and not wholly false. He, too, must have hoped that it would be like that. Probably I was stirred by memories of Lake Crescent and the morning walk to Marymere Falls, of Major Mathews and the spring woods near Tacoma. Those had been the happiest moments of my life. Though Wilson could furnish me no waterfalls, no carpets of violets, he had a wonderful gorge, I found, just up the river, with an icy green transparent pool at the bottom. I loved that. His own anticipation must have centered on having an intellectual girl for a wife—the first one. After a protracted siege to Edna Millay, he had been “stuck on” the poet Léonie Adams. But Léonie had cared about women (Margaret Mead had been his principal rival), and now she was married to Bill Troy.
Besides the inducements of a shared classical education and the outdoors, he offered me the promise that marrying him would “do something” for me, that is, for my literary gift. “Rahv doesn’t do anything for you,” he argued, meaning that Rahv was slothfully content to have me do those theatre columns, which, according to Wilson, were not up to my real measure. “You draw a crushing brief against a play,” he said. I did not exactly see what was wrong with that, but in fact he had put his finger on a limitation. I was not as narrow as Sidney Hook but I did treat most of the authors I wrote about as though they were under indictment. The tendency, evidently, was aggravated by Trotskyism. It was Wilson’s belief that I ought not to be writing criticism—I had a talent, he thought, for imaginative writing. This was the opposite of what dear Miss Kitchel had decided for me at Vassar.
Looking back, I can see that he was right where Philip was concerned. If it had been left to Rahv, I never would have written a single “creative” word. And I do not hold it against him; on the contrary. His love, unlike Wilson’s, was from the heart. He cared for what I was, not for what I might evolve into. Whatever I might be made to be, with skillful encouragement, did not interest him. To say this today may seem hard on Wilson, as well as ungrateful on my part for what he did, in the first months of our marriage, to push me into “creativity.” If he had not shut the door firmly on the little room he had shepherded me into (the same room Margaret Marshall had slept in), I would not be the “Mary McCarthy” you are now reading. Yet, awful to say, I am not particularly grateful.
At the time, I was not swayed by the argument of what he, compared with Philip, could do for me. It seemed mercenary. The picture of a powerful man trying with various baits and lures to rob a weaker man of his chief treasure was not very appealing. But Wilson never saw that angle. He saw what he perceived as my self-interest, to be furthered by my marriage to him. From the outside, however, things looked different. I remember that somebody of the PR circle—Delmore or Harold Rosenberg—was widely quoted as saying that Mary left Philip for Wilson because Wilson had a better prose style. I am not sure that Wilson did, or not always, and it would have been a bad reason, had it been operative, which of course it was not. My own explanation (if I must give but a single one) for my yielding to Wilson is the Marxist explanation. It was the same old class struggle that Philip and I had been waging from the moment we fell in love.
Wilson, relatively speaking, was upper class. That was all there was to it. Though he commanded a higher word rate, he was scarcely better heeled than Philip on the WPA. Wilson made more money, which he spent on taxis, liquor, long-distance phone calls. There was nothing left for clothes or furniture or jewelry, all of which I cared about. He could not do without taxis, booze, the long-distance telephone, and hence regarded them in the light of necessities. Another addiction (I almost forgot) was book-binding, which was just then beginning to take hold of him. In terms of wealth, he was hard to situate. Though he could seldom pay the phone bill without hasty recourse to his mother, you could not call him poor, since he always had enough to eat. Neither could you say he was rich.
One material inducement that counted in the decision I was being pressed to make was his promise that we would have children. Philip was in no position to offer that; he was still not free to marry, lacking the price of a divorce, and he was not keen on the idea of progeny even in later life, when he was free and could afford it—he never had any children. But Wilson made good on that. He took me to New York in a taxi for my lying-in, though we had no clothes of our own for the newborn Reuel. My friend Florine Katz gave me her baby clothes, rubber pants, and diapers; her baby scales, I think, too. Wilson’s mother had to be appealed to for the baby carriage when we were leaving the hospital. Once we were back home, the Bathinette gave rise to a crisis (he thought we didn’t need one), and I forget how we managed for a playpen. No doubt it was old Mrs. Wilson once again to the rescue.
But I am going too fast. There was a time when I had not yet agreed to marry him but was taking the train out to Stamford and the milk train back while Philip, somehow, remained in ignorance. I also met Wilson at least once for dinner in New York, and there was some question of a showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (his choice). As he continued to “press his suit,” each time I managed a stolen meeting—once I pretended to have gone to a prize fight (with Mannie, I suppose)—I was risking the unthinkable: Philip’s discovery. Possibly I hoped that the affair with Wilson would come to an end all by itself somehow, thus relieving me of having to tell Philip.
Well, finally I told him. Wilson was “at” me to do it, till one night I did. But before I go ahead with that melancholy story, I must make a confession. Since starting this chapter I have been rereading the letters I wrote on Covici-Friede Inc. stationery to “Mr. Edmund Wilson, Westover Road, Stamford, Connecticut.” And they tell me, among other things, that Peggy Marshall was very much present at lunch with Wilson on that morning after at Trees. Listen to this, from my second letter, written on a “Tuesday afternoon” in reply to one from him; the postmark is November 30, 1937:
“Sunday was a bad day for me...When you took Peggy on your lap, something happened to my face that I couldn’t stop. Philip leaned over to me and said, ‘I know something about you,’ and I said, ‘I know you do,’ and he said, ‘You’re jealous,’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ He attributed it, however, to an extreme coquettishness, and didn’t look further for explanations.”
When he took Peggy on his lap, was he sitting at the table or was it on the sofa? Grotesque! Did he do it to throw Philip off the scent? If so, it was a good move. Incredibly, though the letters were going back and forth for more than a month and a half, right through Christmas, and I was meeting Wilson about once a week, Philip seems to have had no suspicion. How shameful a successful deception is! But maybe he was so secure in his own manhood that he was unable to think of Wilson as any kind of rival.
When at last I told him, after the first starts of surprise, he took the news very soberly. He was struck by the marriage proposal into a kind of thoughtfulness. It was as though the situation was too grave for anger. His big dark eyes with their prominent whites grew still, as if wounded. “What do you want to do, Mary?” he said gently. Probably I cried and told him that I didn’t know: Wilson was in such a hurry; he was rushing me.
Obviously I don’t remember the details of the conversation; probably there was more than one. Maybe I cooked our dinner in the middle of it. Or we went to bed and got up. The gist was that Philip begged me, for both our sakes, to take my time. He appeared to consider for me, like a more experienced brother. With Wilson, there was the age difference, he pointed out. And I was young enough to wait a while to have children. Before deciding anything I ought to talk it over with an older person, not my grandmother (she was too old) but someone who could be told that he and I were living together. Why not Nathalie Swan’s mother, a society woman but rather intellectual?
Reluctantly, Wilson agreed that I could think about it. Late in January, I telephoned Mrs. Swan and went up to stay with her at the Swans’ country house near Salisbury, Connecticut. Nathalie came along or followed in a day or two. Being the person I was, in the midst of my grief for Philip, I was excited by the momentousness of
it all. Having such a big decision to mull over made me feel important. Mrs. Swan, no doubt, was flattered to be consulted; she was aware of Wilson as a literary figure. It did not subtract from the solemnity of the occasion to be waited on by a butler and maids, to drink Mrs. Swan’s society Martini (gin and two vermouths) before lunch and Joe Swan’s vintage wine with meals, and to have coffee with hot milk on my breakfast tray. In other words, I enjoyed myself. It was a long time since I had stayed in the Swan country house, where everything was perfect. Meanwhile, Philip waited for the result in our apartment. I don’t recall where Wilson was. Probably he was besieging me with impatient telephone calls.
Mrs. Swan had the good sense to listen while remaining neutral. If she gave me any advice, it was “Wait a little longer.” Yes! Precisely! But that was wise counsel I did not want to hear. To resist that advice was to precipitate myself into Wilson’s arms. He understood that very well, though I did not. To this day, I can’t make out whether I “really” wanted to marry Wilson or prayed to be spared it.
I took the train back from Salisbury. After that, I remember nothing till days later, when I was on the train with Edmund, going down to his mother’s place in Red Bank, New Jersey. I had told Philip my decision, spent a few nights at Trees, had a Wassermann (or didn’t you need a Wassermann in New Jersey?), quit my job, and was feeling miserable. I looked at the tall grasses outside the train window and looked the other way, into Wilson’s closed face, the narrow lips set in a tight line. I do not know whether Philip and I had made love in our bed when I came back from staying at Salisbury. I hope so. Then had come the chilly day when we divided our possessions. I remember the result but not the painful event: Philip took the tall steel lamp and the tweed-covered armchair, as I’ve said; I took some boldly designed Italian plates, my mother’s silver, and the red love seat, which stayed with me through two more marriages. Each took his own books. Did we have the 1911 Britannica or had that gone to Johnsrud?
Needless to say, Wilson and I were being married in a civil ceremony, at the Red Bank city hall. Our witnesses were two town employees. Afterward we went back to Edmund’s mother’s house. She was a stumpy downright old lady with an ear trumpet and a loud, deaf voice. She looked like a warthog, Bowden eventually decided, basing himself on my description and an illustration in Webster’s Collegiate—he had never seen Mrs. Wilson nor an actual warthog in the flesh. But that was pretty much how she looked. Wilson inherited his body structure from her family, the Kimballs. His nose and forehead came from his father. At lunch—a pretty fruit jelly for dessert—I was introduced to Jenny, her companion, rather elderly herself, and to a cook and a driver. Mrs. Wilson was in the habit of sitting all day long at a living-room window of her sizable house on Vista Place, ticking off the people that had died in the houses across the street. This was her house. According to Edmund, her first words on watching her husband die in the house they had always lived in were “Now I can have my new house.” She was a gruff personality who did not much approve of Edmund; he believed that she held it against him that his large head had torn her vaginal tissues as he was being born. There was not much love lost between them. Yet there was a kind of grumbly, unwilling attachment. They were more alike than they knew. When Dos Passos’ beautiful wife, Katy, was decapitated in an automobile accident, Edmund’s first remark, made after visiting Dos in the Boston hospital, was “Now he can get married and have some children.”
He was dependent on his mother for money, because his father’s estate (not large) had been left entirely to her. What Edmund saw as his rightful share she doled out to him as though it were bounty. Yet the fact was that the bulk of her capital was hers by family inheritance, wisely invested for her by a stockbroker brother, Edmund’s uncle Win. She had a good head for money and rated her brothers higher than her husband.
One of her complaints about Edmund was his proneness to marry unsuitable women. She had already brought up a child of his first marriage, to the actress Mary Blair. When the little girl (according to Edmund) had been left by her mother in front of an open window while sick with the flu, he had removed her bodily to Red Bank and deposited her with his mother, where she remained till now. I did not meet Rosalind on the day of our wedding because she was fifteen and away at boarding-school. But her home was still Red Bank. His second wife, Margaret, was a drinker, his mother thought. And now he had married me.
After lunch, he left me to sit opposite the old lady and shout into her ear trumpet, while he himself climbed upstairs to “his” room to read or sleep. I was surprised when he did this on our first, newlywed visit, but I soon understood that it must have been his habit with all his wives: part of a wife’s function was to address his mother’s defective hearing. She appeared to like me well enough; the complaints she voiced to me about Edmund could be taken as a sign of friendship. I imagine that she handed him a nice check for a wedding present as we were leaving for New York. She gave me her cheek to kiss.
It had been arranged that in the evening he would meet two of my brothers in the bar of the New Weston Hotel, where we were spending our wedding night. Since neither of my brothers remembers anything of this except the fact that it happened, it looks as if it had gone all right. Kevin and Preston had come to New York from Minneapolis this January with a friend to try their luck, Kevin and the friend as actors, Preston as a photographer. They were living in a room on West 23rd Street and had very little money. It was Preston who got discouraged first and went home, where he got a little help from our uncle Lou in Minneapolis. Kevin hung on. On the day of the meeting with Wilson, all three still had hopes.
My brothers were both good-looking boys in the McCarthy way—dark hair, light eyes, long dark eyelashes. And of course they were shy as they talked of their plans. Wilson took no exception to them that I noticed while we were sitting with drinks—no more than two or three. But upstairs in the bedroom (this was our honeymoon), he suddenly burst out and told me my brothers were agents of the GPU. He was very drunk, more drunk than I had seen him before, and at first he did not make himself clear. He had started with innuendo, lurching on to accusation. I could not believe I was hearing right; it was some sort of joke, I guessed. When I finally knew he was serious, I was at a loss as to how to refute the charge, since I could not see what had led up to it. Even now, I still have no notion. I may guess that in the bar he had sensed a plot thickening against him: I had tricked him into marriage so as to deliver him to the GPU through these brothers of mine who were agents. He grunted some threats, but he did not hit me. Abruptly he fell asleep. I lay awake, silently weeping. The marriage was over, I had to assume.
In a sense that was true. It was the end of my high hopes for a “classical” life. No more idyl. The next morning is a blank for me. If I confronted him with “Why did you call my brothers GPU agents?” he evaded an answer with “Come along now; we have a train to catch,” or something of the sort. If I said nothing, he said nothing. And he never reverted to the subject. When Kevin came out to Trees that spring to ask for help, he gave him a five-dollar bill. No mention to me of “Your brother, the agent.” I suppose that the wedding night had brought on an access of paranoia—dread of being “tied down”? The political arena at that time was highly sensitized. We both thought in those terms. Probably he saw me as a Trotskyite girl, the reverse, of course, of a Stalinist agent, but in hallucination extremes meet. Had he faced up the next day to what he had done, we might have been friends again, and the charge would have been reason for laughter: “I thought Mary’s brothers were GPU agents.” But perhaps he did not know me well enough to expose himself by an admission of error. In later years sometimes he would feel sorry and apologize.
During that bad night I assessed my situation. I was alone, with no one to turn to. Philip and my job were gone. Grandpa was dead; my only friends were people like Eunice Clark who were not real friends. Martha McGahan, whom I loved, had moved to California. My marriage was a mistake. I clearly saw that I never should have marrie
d this peculiar man, yet I did not have the courage to take my suitcase and go off somewhere by myself. That would have been Miss Sandison’s counsel. And where was she, dear Miss Sandison, when I needed her? Probably in the British Museum working on Arthur Gorges.
Yet in reality nothing is as bad as it seems (or as, in logic, it ought to be). That badly injured marriage lasted seven more years, though it is true that it never recovered.
A flyer for a conference held in 1983 on McCarthy’s work.
NOTES
BY CAROL BRIGHTMAN
CHAPTER ONE
1 Johnsrud: Harold Cooper Johnsrud, Mary McCarthy’s first husband, known as John, had been active in the theatre since 1927, when he appeared with the Provincetown Players.
2 uncle Myers: McCarthy’s great-uncle Myers Shriver married her grandmother McCarthy’s sister Margaret Sheridan not long before the middle-aged couple was put in charge of the four McCarthy children when their parents died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Uncle Myers is the villain of McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
2 The German-born Hans Eisler, once described as the world’s “foremost revolutionary composer,” later wrote scores for Hollywood films before being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. He left the country in 1949.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 62