Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (3 page)

I sometimes wonder what I would have been like now if Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula had not come on, if the journey had never been undertaken. My father, of course, might have died anyway, and my mother would have brought us up. If they had both lived, we would have been a united Catholic family, rather middle class and wholesome. I would probably be a Child of Mary. I can see myself married to an Irish lawyer and playing golf and bridge, making occasional retreats and subscribing to a Catholic Book Club. I suspect I would be rather stout. And my brother Kevin—would he be an actor today? The fact is, Kevin and I are the only members of the present generation of our family who have done anything out of the ordinary, and our relations at least profess to envy us, while I do not envy them. Was it a good thing, then, that our parents were “taken away,” as if by some higher design? Some of my relations philosophize to this effect, in a somewhat Panglossian style. I do not know myself.

Possibly artistic talent was already dormant in our heredity and would have come out in any case. What I recall best about myself as a child under six is a passionate love of beauty, which was almost a kind of violence. I used to get cross with my mother when she screwed her hair up on top of her head in the mornings; I could not bear that she should not be beautiful all the time. My only criterion for judging candidates who presented themselves to be our nursemaids was good looks, I remember importuning my mother, when I was about five, to hire one called Harriet—I liked her name, too—and how the world, for the first time, seemed to me cruel and inexplicable, when Harriet, who had been engaged, never materialized. She must have had a bad character, my mother said, but I could not accept the idea that anyone beautiful could be bad. Or rather, “bad” seemed to me irrelevant when put beside beauty, just as the faithful Gertrude’s red warts and her ugly name made me deaf to anything alleged to me about her kindness. One of the great shocks connected with the loss of my parents was an aesthetic one, even if my guardians had been nice, I should probably not have liked them because they were so unpleasing to look at and their grammar and accents were so lacking in correctness. I had been rudely set down in a place where beauty was not a value at all. “Handsome is as handsome does,” my grandmother McCarthy’s chauffeur, Frank, observed darkly, when my uncle Louis married an auburn-haired charmer from New Orleans. I hated him for saying it; it was one of those cunning remarks that throw cold water on life.

The people I was forced to live with in Minneapolis had a positive gift for turning everything sour and ugly. Even our flowers were hideous: we had golden glow and sickly nasturtiums in our yard. I remember one Good Friday planting sweet peas for myself next to the house, and I believe they actually blossomed—a personal triumph. I had not been an especially pretty child (my own looks were one of my few early disappointments), but, between them, my guardians and my grandmother McCarthy turned me into such a scarecrow that I could not look at myself in the mirror without despair. The reader will see in the photographs that follow the transformation effected in me. It was not only the braces and the glasses but a general leanness and sallowness and lankness.

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint’s picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order for fallen women called the Magdalens. Λ desire to excel governed all my thoughts, and this was quickened, if possible, by the parochial-school methods of education, which were based on the competitive principle. Everything was a contest, our schoolroom was divided into teams, with captains, for spelling bees and other feats of learning, and on the playground we organized ourselves in the same fashion. To win, to skip a grade, to get ahead—the nuns’ methods were well adapted to the place and time, for most of the little Catholics of our neighborhood were children of poor immigrants, bent on bettering themselves and also on surpassing the Protestants, whose children went to Whittier, the public school. There was no idea of equality in the parochial school, and such an idea would have been abhorrent to me, if it had existed; equality, a sort of brutal cutting down to size, was what I was treated to at home. Equality was a species of unfairness which the good sisters of St. Joseph would not have tolerated.

I stood at the head of my class and I was also the best runner and the best performer on the turning poles in the schoolyard, I was the best actress and elocutionist and the second most devout, being surpassed in this by a blond boy with a face like a saint, who sat in front of me and whom I loved, his name, which sounds rather like a Polish saint’s name, was John Klosick. No doubt, the standards of the school were not very high, and they gave me a false idea of myself; I have never excelled at athletics elsewhere. Nor have I ever been devout again. When I left the competitive atmosphere of the parochial school, my religion withered on the stalk.

But in St. Stephen’s School, I was not devout just to show off, I felt my religion very intensely and longed to serve God better than anyone else. This, I thought, was what He asked of me. I lived in fear of making a poor confession or of not getting my tongue flat enough to receive the Host reverently. One of the great moral crises of my life occurred on the morning of my first Communion. I took a drink of water. Unthinkingly, of course, for had it not been drilled into me that the Host must be received fasting, on the penalty of mortal sin? It was only a sip, but that made no difference, I knew. A sip was as bad as a gallon, I could not take Communion. And yet I had to. My Communion dress and veil and prayer book were laid out for me, and I was supposed to lead the girls’ procession, John Klosick, in a white suit, would be leading the boys’. It seemed to me that I would be failing the school and my class, if, after all the rehearsals, I had to confess what I had done and drop out. The sisters would be angry; my guardians would be angry, having paid for the dress and veil. I thought of the procession without me in it, and I could not bear it. To make my first Communion later, in ordinary clothes, would not be the same. On the other hand, if I took my first Communion in a state of mortal sin, God would never forgive me; it would be a fatal beginning. I went through a ferocious struggle with my conscience, and all the while, I think, I knew the devil was going to prevail: I was going to take Communion, and only God and I would know the real facts. So it came about: I received my first Communion in a state of outward holiness and inward horror, believing I was damned, for I could not imagine that I could make a true repentance—the time to repent was now, before committing the sacrilege; afterward, I could not be really sorry for I would have achieved what I had wanted.

I suppose I must have confessed this at my next confession, scarcely daring to breathe it, and the priest must have treated it lightly: my sins, as I slowly discovered, weighed heavier on me than they did on my confessors. Actually, it is quite common for children making their first Communion to have just such a mishap as mine: they are so excited on that long-awaited morning that they hardly know what they are doing, or possibly the very taboo on food and water and the importance of the occasion drive them into an unconscious resistance. I heard a story almost identical with mine from Ignazio Silone. Yet the despair I felt that summer morning (I think it was Corpus Christi Day) was in a certain sense fully justified: I knew myself, how I was and would be forever; such dry self-knowledge is terrible. Every subsequent moral crisis of my life, moreover, has had precisely the pattern of this struggle over the first Communion; I have battled, usually without avail, against a temptation to do something which only I knew was bad, being swept on by a need to preserve outward appearances and to live up to other people’s expectations of me. The heroine of one of my novels, who finds herself pregnant, possibly as the result of an infidelity, and is tempted to have the baby and say nothing to her husband, is in the same fix, morally, as I was at eight years old, with that drink of water inside me that only I knew was there. When I supposed I was damned, I was right—damned, that is, to a repetition or endless re-enactment of that conflict between excited scruples and inertia of will.

I am often asked whether I retain anything of my Catholic heritage. This is hard to answer, partly because my Catholic heritage consists of two distinct strains. There was the Catholicism I learned from my mother and from the simple parish priests and nuns in Minneapolis, which was, on the whole, a religion of beauty and goodness, however imperfectly realized. Then there was the Catholicism practiced in my grandmother McCarthy’s parlor and in the home that was made for us down the street—a sour, baleful doctrine in which old hates and rancors had been stewing for generations, with ignorance proudly stirring the pot. The difference can be illustrated by an incident that took place when I stopped off in Minneapolis, on my way to Vassar as a freshman, in 1929. In honor of the occasion, my grandmother McCarthy invited the parish priest to her house; she wanted him to back up her opinion that Vassar was “a den of iniquity.” The old priest, Father Cullen, declined to comply with her wishes and, ignoring his pewholder’s angry interjections, spoke to me instead of the rare intellectual opportunities Vassar had in store for me.

Possibly Father Cullen was merely more tactful than his parishioner, but I cannot forget my gratitude to him. It was not only that he took my grandmother down a peg. He showed largeness of spirit—a quality rare among Catholics, at least in my experience, though false magnanimity is a common stock in trade with them. I have sometimes thought that Catholicism is a religion not suited to the laity, or not suited, at any rate, to the American laity, in whom it seems to bring out some of the worst traits in human nature and to lend them a sort of sanctification. In the course of publishing these memoirs in magazines, I have received a great many letters from the laity and also from priests and nuns. The letters from the laity—chiefly women—are all alike, they might almost have been penned by the same person; I have filed them under the head of “Correspondence, Scurrilous.” They are frequently full of misspellings, though the writers claim to be educated; and they are all, without exception, menacing. “False,” “misrepresentation,” “lying,” “bigotry,” “hate,” “poison,” “filth,” “trash,” “cheap,” “distortion”—this is the common vocabulary of them all. They threaten to cancel their subscriptions to the magazine that published the memoir; they speak of a “great many other people that you ought to know feel as I do,” i.e., they attempt to constitute themselves a pressure group. Some demand an answer. One lady writes: “I am under the impression that the Law forbids this sort of thing.”

In contrast, the priests and nuns who have written me, apropos the same memoirs, strike a note that sounds almost heretical. They are touched, many of them say, by my “sincerity”; some of the nuns are praying for me, they write, and the priests are saying masses. One young Jesuit tells me that he has thought of me when he visited Forest Ridge Convent in Seattle and looked over the rows of girls: “I see that the startling brilliance of a slim orphan girl was fairly matched with fiery resolve and impetuous headlong drive. Nor was it easy for her those days. I suppose I should be thinking that technically you are an apostate, in bad standing, outside the gate. ...” An older priest writes me that I am saved whether I know it or not: “I do not suggest to you where you will find your spiritual home—but that you will find it—of that I am certain—the Spirit will lead you to it. Indeed for me you have already found it, although you still must seek it.” A Mary-knoll nun invites me to visit her mission. None of these correspondents feels obliged to try to convert me; they seem to leave that to God to worry about. Some of them have passed through a period of doubt themselves and write me about that, to show their understanding and sympathy. Each of the letters has its own individuality. The only point of uniformity is that they all begin: “Dear Mary.”

I am grateful to these priests and nuns, grateful to them for existing. They must be a minority, though they would probably deny it, even among the clergy. The idea that religion is supposed to teach you to be good, an idea that children have, seems to linger on, like a sweet treble, in their letters. Very few people appear to believe this any more, it is utterly out of style among fashionable neo-Protestants, and the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else’s morality, that is, of the supposed pernicious influences of books, films, ideas, on someone else’s conduct.

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others, it is too great a temptation—a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth. My grandmother McCarthy, I am sure, would have been a better woman if she had been an atheist or an agnostic. The Catholic religion, I believe, is the most dangerous of all, morally (I do not know about the Moslem), because, with its claim to be the only true religion, it fosters that sense of privilege I spoke of earlier—the notion that not everyone is lucky enough to be a Catholic.