Looking back, I see that if I had ever burst into tears publicly, begged for quarter, compunction would have been felt. Some goddess of the college department would have comforted me, spoken gently to Elinor and Mary, and the nickname would have been dropped. Perhaps it might even have been explained to me. But I did not cry, even alone in my room. I chose what was actually the more shameful part. I accepted the nickname, made a sort of joke of it, used it brazenly myself on the telephone, during vacations, calling up to ask a group of classmates to the movies: “This is Cye speaking.” But all the time I was making plans, writing letters home, arranging my escape. I resolved that once I was out of the convent, I would never, never, never again let anybody see what I was like. That, I felt, had been my mistake.
The day I left the Mother Superior cried. “I think you will grow up to be a novelist,” she said, “and that can be a fine thing, but I want you to remember all your life the training you have had here in the convent.”
I was moved and thrilled by the moment, the prediction, the parting adjuration. “Yes,” I said, weeping, but I intended to forget the convent within twenty-four hours. And in this I was quite successful.
The nickname followed me for a time, to the public high school I entered. One of the girls said to me, “I hear you are called Cye.” “Yes,” I replied easily. “How do you spell it?” she asked. “S-I,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “That’s funny.” “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know why they called me that.” This version of the nickname lasted perhaps three weeks. At the end of that time, I dropped the group of girls who used it, and I never heard it again.
Now, however, the question has been reopened. What do the letters stand for? A happy solution occurred to me yesterday, on Fifteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. “Clever Young Egg,” I said to myself out loud. The words had arranged themselves without my volition, and instantly I felt that sharp, cool sense of relief and triumph that one has on awakening from a nightmare. Could that have been it? Is it possible that that was all? Is it possible that Elinor and Mary really divined nothing, that they were paying me a sort of backhanded compliment, nothing certainly that anybody could object to? I began to laugh at myself, affectionately, as one does after a long worry, saying, “You fool, look how silly you’ve been.” “Now I can go back,” I thought happily, without reflection, just as though I were an absconding bank teller who had been living for years with his spiritual bags packed, waiting for the charges against him to be dropped that he might return to his native town. A vision of the study hall rose before me, with my favorite nun on the platform and the beautiful girls in their places. My heart rushed forward to embrace it.
But, alas, it is too late. Elinor Henehan is dead, my favorite nun has removed to another convent, the beautiful girls are married—I have seen them from time to time and no longer aspire to their friendship. And as for the pale, plain girl in the front of the study hall, her, too, I can no longer reach. I see her creeping down the corridor with a little knot of her classmates. “Hello, Cye,” I say with a touch of disdain for her rawness, her guileless ambition. I should like to make her a pie-bed, or drop a snake down her back, but unfortunately the convent discipline forbids such open brutality. I hate her, for she is my natural victim, and it is I who have given her the name, the shameful, inscrutable name that she will never, sleepless in her bed at night, be able to puzzle out.
A Biography of Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963 New York Times bestseller The Group.
McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.
After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).
A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in The Group. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the Partisan Review circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Review of Books.
In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled The Company She Keeps (1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book, The Oasis, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the Partisan Review intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine Horizon’s fiction contest in 1949.
Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the New Yorker, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College. A Charmed Life (1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. The Groves of Academe (1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution (1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.
In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.
McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel The Group, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.
McCarthy remained an outspoken critic of politics in the decades that followed. Openly opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she traveled to South Vietnam and wrote a series of articles for the New York Review of Books that were subsequently published as Vietnam (1967). Her coverage of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s is the basis for The Mask of State (1975). Her famous libel feud with writer Lillian Hellman, stemming from McCarthy’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979, formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends (2002) by Nora Ephron.
McCarthy won a number of literary awards, including the Horizon magazine prize (1949) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1949–1950 and 1959–1960). She also received both the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal for Literature in 1984. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. She received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Bard College, Smith College, and Syracuse University.
McCarthy passed away on October 25, 1989. The second volume of her autobiography was published posthumously in 1992 as Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938.
A portrait of McCarthy, taken in 1959.
McCarthy with her brother Kevin, circa 1985.
&
nbsp; McCarthy with her young son, Reuel Wilson, in 1940.
McCarthy at the wedding of her son, Reuel, in 1981.
McCarthy, circa 1929, on the cover of her autobiography How I Grew.
A flyer for a conference held in 1983 on McCarthy’s work.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1950, 1948, 1947, 1946, 1944 by Mary McCarthy
Copyright renewed 1978, 1976, 1975, 1974, 1972 by Mary McCarthy
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-3842-2
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Cast a Cold Eye Page 15