Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (56 page)

The reader has guessed that this Red Cross Knight is going to be my husband. Yet for a while that summer in Seattle I could not even find out who “Harold Johnsrud” was. I might have forgotten about him had it not occurred to me that a person to ask was Ted Rosenberg. As I feared, Ted knew nothing of the Bar Association pageant, but her brother Dan did, the tall older brother who was in the Speech Department at the University and who was the family’s real intellectual, played the jazz violin, and in later years, under the name Van Dragen, went to Hollywood and became a speech coach for big film stars. Not only did he know about the pageant; he knew Harold Johnsrud.

Dan said that he had come to Seattle from New York to help his friends Burton and Florence James start the Seattle Repertory Theatre—real repertory (as opposed to stock), our first. Mrs. James would be directing, and Burton James and Harold Johnsrud would share the principal male parts. Right now they were looking for a theatre, with the idea of eventually building one in the University district. I don’t recall what else I heard, but probably the Magna Carta pageant had been entrusted to the Jameses by the local bar association.

Ted promised to introduce me to Johnsrud the next time he came to their house. In her program for my intellectual development, introductions—to people as well as to books—played a big role always. She had already engineered my admission to Czerna Wilson’s “salon” (her idea) and now (my idea) she would bring me together with a real actor from New York. The introduction to Czerna in the long run did not lead far, even in its side effects, except that it deepened my grandmother’s suspicions of my truthfulness. But the meeting with Dan’s friend was deeply consequential: so many long roads in my life lead back to it. Indeed, if anybody ever played the Fates to me, it was the Rosenberg family in their little frame house not far from the Madison Avenue streetcar line. My own grander house, with its carriage block incised “1893” and its view of Mount Rainier, was ten minutes walk farther along, above the Lake.

So Ted got her hospitable mother to invite me to lunch. It was a Sunday, and Johnsrud had been invited to lunch by Dan. For me the great problem, naturally, was what to wear. The August weather decided me to put on my new dress. It was a tennis dress, sleeveless, in soft white cotton with a big green V inset in the front, at the décolleté, which made a V of its own against the bare skin of my chest. I pictured it, except for the green V, as something Helen Wills or Helen Jacobs might wear on the courts. My grandmother and I had sent in for the pattern from
Vogue,
and I had cut the dress out with her help, and sewed it on the machine, not counting the hem, which of course was hand-sewn. It had only just been finished, the first dress I ever made.

There was only one slight drawback. It was a bit short, showing half of my kneecaps at a time when this was not “in.” But I persuaded myself to wear it anyway; it was the only new thing I had. Unfortunately, my grandmother, absorbed in the rituals of her own toilet, did not see me before I left for the Rosenbergs’; otherwise, she would have made me change. As I walked along the sidewalks, the dress got shorter, or so it felt: cut rather close to the body as far down as the hips, it was twisting around and hiking up. My entire knee was now showing. At the Rosenberg house, they were too kind to make any comment. And if they had, what could we have done? Little Mrs. Rosenberg could hardly have let it down for me while cooking lunch.

Out the window on the landing leading up to her room, Ted and I could see Johnsrud and Dan in the backyard below; they were fencing. Tall, big-boned Dan, with his owly glasses and buck teeth bared, looked a little ungainly. But Johnsrud was lissome, with a perfect fencer’s body; only his bald head, seen from above, like a skull fitted on for a fancy-dress party, appeared incongruous—I had not been prepared to find him bald on top, with that slender figure. Ted and I did not know enough about fencing to tell who was winning.

I have the sense that I talked a lot at the lunch table, to cover my shame about the dress. The whole family was there: Dan and little Jess, who was two years behind Ted at Garfield High School and would grow up to be a lawyer, Mother and Father, Till and Ted. While I talked, Johnsrud’s eyes came to rest on me curiously from time to time, as though he could not put me together. Something I said made him smile to himself and glance quizzically at Dan. There could be no doubt that he had observed my too-short dress. Misled by my bare knees, he was treating me as a child, and the books I knowledgeably mentioned—wasn’t that the summer I was trying to read
Zarathustra?
—in order to seem
older
than I was, far from correcting the visual impression, only confirmed it, making me sound weirdly precocious, I guess. Though I was still forbidden to wear real lipstick, starting on my sixteenth birthday this last June 21, I was allowed Tangee, a stick of colorless salve supposedly good for chapping, that turned a brilliant orange when you applied it to your mouth; no doubt I had applied it as thickly as possible that morning. Needless to say, my Helen-Wills, Helen-Jacobs dress, apart from its shortness, must have looked crudely home-made.

It was the pits, as people say now, a fierce humiliation of all my pretenses. There was a quality in Johnsrud that, together with Dan’s lofty manner, made my brave performance more painful than it might have been with a different young man as witness. His was a mocking nature, as was shown by the quizzing wrinkles around the eyes and the habitual lilt of one dark eyebrow. If he understood (as I feared he might) that I had come here especially to meet him and was doing my utmost to make an impression on him, that ironical look of his twitted me for my girlish folly. Sympathy with failure was not a strong point with Johnsrud. In short, he was cruel, like so many young men of the period (a debt they owed to Nietzsche or, more directly, to Shaw). When they were kind, it was condescension.

The next time I saw him was at the Metropolitan Theatre, when he played in
The Wild Duck
in the late autumn, probably during Thanksgiving vacation. Ted and I went to a matinee and afterwards she took me backstage to his dressing-room. It was a production that I still clearly remember, the best Ibsen I have seen to this day. Burton James played the photographer Hjalmar Ekdal, and Johnsrud was his friend and evil genius, Gregers Werle, intruding on the Ekdals’ semi-bohemian and self-deceived family life with “the claim of the ideal.” Immersed in that performance, from Mrs. Sorby’s tinkling laugh in the first scene to the gunshot at the end, I came to understand Ibsen, at least as fully as I ever shall. Johnsrud as the baleful Gregers (often thought to be based on Kierkegaard, with his thirst for the absolute, but why not on Ibsen himself, the Ibsen of
The Enemy of the People
and
Pillars of Society?
)
wore a tightly fitting gray suit of an old-fashioned cut that brought out something knifelike in his appearance; I remember his Gregers always in profile, with that bald skull and mended broken nose, while Hjalmar was mostly full face to the audience, soliloquizing even when speaking dialogue. This effect—the relation of a knife and a spoon—must have been carefully studied by Florence James, the director, possibly seeing a dramatic use for a narrow, two-dimensional quality in the character of Johnsrud himself. There was a lot of Gregers in him, of the pontificator, the home-truth teller; maybe it is a Scandinavian type of being. In any case, when it was over, Ted took me to his dressing-room. He met us in the doorway, and as he talked to Ted and listened to our praises, he glanced at me and appeared to search his memory. “Ah. So this is the child Mary.” That was all. I heard the amusement in his voice, the Standard-English accent drawing my name out to ¢meari—the correct pronunciation, as I learned the following summer when studying the Daniel Jones phonetic system.

I saw him play once more at the Metropolitan Theatre—the Seattle Repertory still did not have its own house—when he and Burton James were doing
The Jest,
a John and Lionel Barrymore vehicle that had played on Broadway in 1919. It was adapted from a play by the Italian Sem Benelli that Sarah Bernhardt (in the John Barrymore part) had staged and toured in before the war. The story, a florid melodrama set in Renaissance Florence, had to do with two bitter enemies, one a moody artist and the other a brutal mercenary. In Seattle, the John Barrymore part (the artist) was played by Burton James, and Johnsrud took Lionel’s. Of his performance, not much comes back to me—chiefly the use he made of his shoulders to suggest primitive strength. They were high and surprisingly broad, as if built out by pads, like those in football uniforms, in contrast with his lithe slender frame and tapering waist; in fact, he had played football in college and owed his broken nose to it. I thrilled to
The Jest,
so baroque and violent, though it did not move me as deeply as
The Wild Duck
had done, but I don’t recall visiting him backstage in his dressing-room this time. Perhaps I had gone in the evening with Grandma and Grandpa rather than to a matinee with Ted.

I did not see him again till late the following summer, after I had graduated from Annie Wright. But I began to hear his name spoken at the Cornish School, where I was taking a summer course with Ellen Van Volkenburgh Browne, before going to Vassar in September. Ted and Till were impressed to know that I was studying theatre under her at Cornish, and I was impressed myself. She had great prestige as a director, though I could never quite find out why, unless it was that she and her husband, Maurice Browne, the inventor of the term “little theatre,” were in some way connected with the Elmhirsts, who owned Dartington Hall in England—a famous Devonshire property that had an experimental school and an arts center—and the Elmhirsts were in some way connected with the Whitneys. In fact, Dorothy Whitney, who first married Willard Strait, founder (with Croly) of
The New Republic,
after his death married Leonard Elmhirst, an Englishman, and started the Dartington Hall complex with some more of her Whitney money. But I did not know that then, though doubtless Johnsrud did; it was the type of information he was master of. All I knew or, rather, learned was that studying theatre—which to me meant acting—under Mrs. Browne really meant
under
:
one was supposed to be content to look up to her.

At Cornish, I did not study acting, let alone act; with the rest of the enrollees, I was put to doing eurhythmics, which were taught by Miss Louise Soelberg, a pale young woman in gray dancing tights with a bun. Our class took place in an exercise room; to the music of a piano, we pranced about, girls and gangling boys, in a long line that formed an ill-shapen circle. Sometimes we extended our arms and waved them; at other times we skipped. The one accomplishment I learned at Cornish was skipping, which I still do quite well, bounding springily through the air. The idea, of course, was that we were training our bodies to be expressive on the stage. We also took phonetics with a Mrs. Lois Hodgson to purify our diction. I acquired the Daniel Jones phonetics’ dictionary and learned how to write my name in phonetic symbols: ′mεari máka: thε. But wild horses could not have got me to pronounce it that way.

Finally, at the end of the summer, the school staged a theatrical event, with parts for everybody. Mrs. Browne directed; it was a fantasy with a good deal of miming and perhaps had to do with a voyage of exploration. We summer-school students were assigned the role of pirates in a corps-de-ballet interlude that was imagined as happening under water, in Davy Jones’s locker, at the bottom of the sea—our pirate ship had been sunk. Obviously none of us had lines to speak; the sub-aqueous illusion demanded that we not open our mouths. During rehearsals, dark-eyed, gracious, twinkling Mrs. Browne (she was Medea, Burns Mantle tells me, in a 1920 Broadway production of the Euripides) waxed eloquent to the cast on the subject of illusion in the theatre, using our band of pirates to illustrate the principle. We were to move so as to create the illusion of a resistance offered to us by the water, that is, slowly, heavily, with groping hands extended against a counter-force—veering, twisting, turning, drunkenly reeling when a current swayed us. We wore black caps with the Jolly Roger emblem and loose black trousers, carried cardboard knives and cutlasses, which we were meant to wave in murderous style, always bearing in mind, though, the resistance of the water in those lower depths. And we were supposed to undulate as a single body acted on by the watery force, as a whole rather than as individuals—no one was to stand out.

In Maurice Browne’s autobiography,
Too Late to Lament,
I find the explanation. The play, called
The Princess Who Wouldn’t Say Die,
had already been put on by the Brownes in Carmel and was repeated—I’m not sure when—in London. It was one of their workhorses. Here is his word-picture of the scene (
our
scene) in the watery depths: “ … passengers and crew, sunk to the bottom of the sea with Davy Jones and all his pirates, wavered rhythmically but not realistically with teetering arms and legs … Enchanted audiences grew helpless with laughter. We had learned to apply to comedy those lessons which
The Trojan Women
had taught us in tragic dance,
Medea
in lighting,” etc.

I do not know what my grandparents made of this performance, my grandfather, in particular, who was used to applauding me in the leading part in school plays: “Toy Yah, Toy Yah, he have call me his
son
-daughter!” “And I shall extinguish the flames of my own ruin in the conflagration of all Rome!” Watching me sway and reel with a dozen others, he may have dryly regretted his investment in the Cornish School training. Or he may have been indignant, quite simply, at what he felt was a misuse of my talent.

I understand now what a sad cheat it all was, almost necessarily so. Any summer theatre, calling itself a school or not, takes on groups of fees-paying students or “apprentices” with the unspoken reservation that none of these aspirants will ever set foot on the stage in a speaking part. Actually, in most summer theatres, the apprentices never get to tread the boards even as walk-ons. Today’s domestic farces and “situation comedies” have no parts for spear-carriers. Instead they are put to work building and painting scenery and are grateful for the privilege of being physically close to “names.” Summer theatres are in business, and audiences come to see professionals; the principle applies wherever tickets are sold.