Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (59 page)

Johnsrud had given me his address: 50 Garden Place, Brooklyn. Not to seem too eager, maybe I let a week elapse before writing. My letters to him are lost—if he kept them, like me, he probably failed to pay the storage bill on old trunks he sent to the warehouse when we broke up—so I cannot cite what I told him. But I can
guess,
from my word-perfect recollection of a sentence in his reply. “I thought you would find Vassar brittle, smart, and a little empty,” he wrote.

“Brittle, smart, and a little empty”—wow! The words ravished me. I kept saying them over and over. But did I believe them? I cannot tell. Maybe they described Flea Lee and Peter Westermann, but they certainly did not apply to my gang in Davison; none of whom with the exception of Ginny could remotely pass for smart, let alone the rest of those things. And hearty, outspoken Miss Kitchel, my faculty adviser, whom I had in freshman composition (English 105)? Or the seniors I admired—tall, serene, beautiful, blue-eyed Elizabeth Beers, for instance, who had just been elected chief justice.

I would think that my letter to him recounting my first impressions had simply been telling him what I thought he would like to hear, feeding him his own idea of Vassar; I would think that if I did not have copies of letters I wrote that same year to Ted Rosenberg in Seattle and that her family thoughtfully saved. There Johnsrud’s phrasing (without attribution) recurs as my own observation. On November 1: “But there is too much smart talk, too many labels for things, too much pseudo-cleverness. I suppose I’ll get that way, too, though I’m doing my best to avoid it. The scenery is nice in a way, but it’s much too pastoral, if you see what I mean. Nice little rounded hills and shorn fat trees. It looks like an English countryside. It is too domesticated. I am homesick for geometric lines, points, and angles.” Again, after Christmas: “As for me, I do nothing but bewail my fate for being in this damned assured stupid college and write letters even more assured and stupid than the college. What the hell?”

I wonder how much of this can have been sincere. The only thing I remember is the feeling about the scenery. The gently rolling Hudson River countryside was so like the landscapes in English literature that I
recognized
it in a way. And this was a sort of coming home—pleasurable, though perhaps at first I really did miss the “geometric” firs and spruces of the Puget Sound country. In other words, the feelings I remember, of rapturous discovery that was like a rediscovery, are almost the
opposite
of those I wrote down.

This is alarming, above all to one who has set out to write her autobiography. It raises the awful question of whether there can be multiple truths or just one. About truth I have always been monotheistic. It has been an article of faith with me, going back to college days, that there is a truth and that it is knowable. Thus Vassar either repelled me on the whole by “cleverness” or it didn’t. Even allowing for variance of moods, both cannot be true. I see only one way out of the dilemma I am placed in by my own letters. It is an Einsteinian solution, basing itself on the premise that time fatally intervenes between what is seen and the seer. What I foresaw in the first letter—“I suppose I’ll get that way, too”—has in fact happened: I have changed; I have become like Vassar or, better, Vassar changed me while I was not looking, making me more like itself. If I can no longer feel what I felt about the college when I wrote to Ted, it is because I, too, the product of a Vassar education, am now brittle, smart, and a little empty. And oblivious of it.

But no, I do not believe that. I don’t mean about myself—how can I judge?—but about how Vassar struck me when I was seventeen, a bright wild girl from Seattle. What the letters seem to hint at is something I have forgotten: that I was not very happy during my first term before I got close to cool, beautiful, glamorous Ginny and warmed to Miss Kitchel’s course. Yet already I was impressed by what I still see as the spirit of the college at the time, the gay and tolerant empiricism, the love of reality, the rejection of what I called “labels” in my first letter. If anybody was guilty of sticking labels on things, surely it was Johnsrud. That is not a Vassar habit, and it has never been one of my own faults, congenital or acquired. What I must have been doing in those letters to Ted was a bit of mourning plus a bit of impersonation, speaking to her in a soprano rendition of the Johnsrud voice. Or, more simply, I was trying to speak a language that he would approve of. And the courting of approval, I am sorry to say, is in my character. So it fits.

Johnsrud, or “John,” as I began to call him, was rehearsing in a play called
The Channel Road,
an adaptation by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott of a Maupassant story, “Boule de Suif.” Arthur Hopkins was the producer—the same who had done
The Jest
—and it was going to open, as most of his plays did, at the Plymouth Theatre. So at Johnsrud’s invitation, in the middle of October, I took my first weekend and went down to see him in it, staying at the Vassar Club in the Allerton House, an all-women’s hotel.

The story had to do with a group of French aristocrats and rich business people trying to reach the coast by diligence during the War of 1870, when the northern part of the country had been taken by the Germans. The party has a
laisser-passer
from the German commander in Rouen, which they trust to see them through. A last-minute addition to the party is a high-class prostitute with her bountiful hamper of provisions. On this fat girl’s virtue, or, rather, on her sacrifice of it, the fate of her companions depends: a German officer in whose power they find themselves demands that she sleep with him, but to the horror of the French respectable people she is too patriotic to want to. John played the count, an aristocratic figure in a redingote who was the spokesman of the French group—the villain, you might say. It was a good part, but the best male part was the German’s, played by Siegfried Rumann, a Hopkins discovery of that year—and later a popular movie villain—who became a great friend of John’s. The play was witty, with well-written lines, well staged and well acted, and was counted among the three best of the season, or so I wrote to Ted. But it did not last long.

Sixty performances. Whether the poor business they did was connected with the stock-market crash, which had taken place in late October, I cannot guess now. At Vassar that fall news of the crash did not reach me or not for some time. Insofar as the public world impinged on us freshman year, it was mainly in the shape of the Oxford pledge (for peace), Moral Rearmament, Buchmanism, none of which was my cup of tea. The phrase “merchants of death” about the armament-manufacturers was pronounced in chapel, and a favorite villain was Sir Basil Zaharoff. Not till sophomore year, I think, were there apple-sellers in the streets of New York and unemployed men sleeping on park benches. At college it was said that a few girls’ fathers jumped out of windows; certainly more girls applied for scholarships. And yet for her engagement present, in 1931, the Goss family gave Ginny a silver-gray Pierce-Arrow touring-car with a folding bar and ice-chest in the middle. The gift, one later heard, “ruined” them: when Ginny came home from her honeymoon, she and Dick had to move into what had once been the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage.

I remember seeing my first bread-line in New York that second winter. Yet if it had not been for John, I might not have been really conscious that there was a depression. He moved into a cheap apartment on Bank Street with a friend who was a half-employed architect’s draftsman. When
The Channel Road
closed, John was out of work till
Uncle Vanya
with Lillian Gish opened in mid-April—Jed Harris gave him a job in it as assistant stage-manager, with a tiny part. Though he did not have a real kitchen, he was doing his own cooking a lot of the time—things like chile con carne and spaghetti and a recipe for meat loaf his mother sent him. He started making an awful milky colored drink out of raw alcohol, water, and oil of anise which he called anisette and said was Italian; he got the recipe from the actor Eduardo Ciannelli, another great friend. Finally in May of freshman year he took the train up to Vassar, where he met Ginny and was driven around the country in her Packard—this was pre-Pierce-Arrow; one of her admirers had brought it over from Waterbury. That winter in the studio-couch bed of the Bank Street furnished apartment I lost my virginity for the third time. John and I were engaged, I told my friends, not knowing for sure whether we were or what it meant.

8

A
GOOD DEAL OF EDUCATION
consists of
un
-learning—the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a
Vassar
education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational. No girl, it was felt, could be the same after Kitchel’s English or Sandison’s Shakespeare, to say nothing of Lockwood’s Press.

For example, English 165 swiftly learned that a bowdlerized text would not be tolerated in Miss Sandison’s classroom. If one turned up, it was banished with a shudder like a deck of cards removed by fire-tongs from a Baptist home. In our sophomore year, poor Maddie Aldrich (Margaret Chanler Astor Aldrich, later one of “the group”) innocently brought an expurgated version of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
to class, and Miss Sandison spotted it; it was not like the big blue Oxford that most of the rest of us had. Maddie’s little book, suede or tooled leather, was probably a family hand-me-down that had already done service with her brother Dickie at Harvard. The Aldriches, who were related to John Jay Chapman and “Sheriff Bob” Chanler (the one that married Lina Cavalieri and got the famous “WHO’S LOONY NOW?” cable from his brother Archie, who had changed his name to Challoner and was doing time in a madhouse for shooting his butler), dear souls, were land-poor and practiced the strictest economy at Rokeby, their Hudson River property, where Mrs. Aldrich (known as “the American Florence Nightingale” and “the Angel of Porto Rico” in the Spanish-American War) distributed home-made pen-wipers for Christmas. Maddie’s punishment, to get back to that, was to read aloud, from Miss Sandison’s copy, Launce’s speech to his dog (Act IV, Scene 4): “He had not been there (bless the mark) a pissing-while, but all the chamber smelt him.”

No doubt it taught Maddie some sort of lesson. I can still hear the bad word bravely pronounced in her pretty Saint Tim’s voice. And I can still hear Miss Sandison’s own delicate light voice—
she
was Bryn Mawr—lecturing us, apropos
The Two Gentlemen
and the sonnets, on the Platonizing tendency—male homosexuality—of the Elizabethan period. I knew about homosexuals, but it woke me up to learn that the subject could be talked about so coolly in the classroom by a small pretty gray-haired full professor with dark eyes and a face like a Johnny-jump-up, which unfortunately had a purple birthmark across one finely boned cheek. It was that, we assumed, which had kept her an old maid; in our senior year a product called Covermark was put on the market, and, though she was quick to use it and it completely hid her disfigurement, I felt almost sad for her because it had come too late, when she was over forty. Well! Darling Miss Sandison, whose scholarly specialty was Sir Arthur Gorges (pronounced “Gorgeous”), 1557-1625, love poet, translator of Lucan, Ralegh’s friend; her edition of his English poems was published in 1953 … It was she, I discovered, who had written the college catalogue, so very clear, that had made me at Annie Wright Seminary choose Vassar in preference to the two others. I hope I told her that.

Then there was Lockwood’s press course (Contemporary Press), a junior year offering renowned for the un-learning she made girls in it do. According to the course description, the class was taught to read the press critically—doubtless a healthy thing. But it was not just the fine art of reading
behind
the news that the girls learned, sitting around a long table seminar style; they were getting indoctrinated with a potent counter-drug. The class, we heard (I never took it), was the scene, almost like a camp meeting, of many a compulsory transformation as hitherto dutiful Republican daughters turned into Socialists and went forth to spread the gospel. It was said that Miss Lockwood insisted that a girl completely break with her mother as the price of winning her favor. The effect on the girl was a kind of smug piety, typical of the born anew, that could last for years, long after the one-time converts, now alumnae (married, with 2.4 children), had turned back into Republicans.

Needless to say, I was in no danger. Having never been influenced by the politics of my grandparents, I did not require conversion. A young person who disliked certitudes of any kind was proof against the recruiting methods of the “charismatic” Miss Lockwood, who had a moustache and a deep “thrilling” voice. There was instant antagonism between us, which did not come to a head, though, until junior year when the Blake-to-Keats course, which I had been taking with my own dear favorite, Miss Kitchel, was turned over at mid-years to Miss Lockwood. We knew that Miss Kitchel was going on a half-sabbatical to work on George Eliot in the British Museum but we did not expect to be handed over to Miss Lockwood. The Blake-to-Keats course was given in two sections, and most of us in Kitchel’s were there because Lockwood taught the other. Even though there had already been ructions—over Wordsworth’s “Michael,” which we hated—in Miss Kitchel’s class, our section felt cheated by the transfer. With me, it was war from the very first day.