Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (73 page)

The account of the moral struggle is a most curious and interesting one, an entangled conflict between inclination and obligation; the inclination to stay with Rahv and the obligation to herself, her principles, incurred when she got drunk and slept with Wilson and therefore had to marry him. The most engaging part of this struggle is not its credibility or inner consistency but the fact that Mary believed it to be the truth. There was a certain Jesuitical aspect to her moral life which for me was part of her originality and one of the outstanding charms of her presence. Very little was offhand; habits, prejudices, moments, even fleeting ones, had to be accounted for, looked at, and written in the ledger. I sometimes thought she felt the command to prepare and serve a first course at dinner ought to be put in the Bill of Rights.

I remember telling her about some offensive behavior to me on the part of people who were not her friends but mere acquaintances, if that. When she saw them on the street up in Maine she would faithfully “cut them”—a phrase she sometimes used—while I, when her back was turned, would be waving from the car. Yet it must be said that Mary was usually concerned to make up with those she had offended in fiction, where they were amusingly trapped in their peculiarities, recognizable, in their little ways, not to mention their large ways. Among these were Philip and Nathalie Rahv, whom she had wounded, painfully for them, in a novella,
The Oasis
. They too made up, after a time, after a time.

Details, details. Consider the concreteness of the apartments, the clothes, the inquisitive, entranced observing that had something in it of the Goncourt brothers putting it all down in the Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century. They will write: “On today’s bill of fare in the restaurants we have authentic buffalo, antelope, and Kangaroo.” There it is, if not quite as arresting as Flaubert making love in a brothel with his hat on. Mary remembers from the long-flown years that they on a certain occasion drank “Singapore Slingers.” And the minutiae of her first apartment in New York: “We had bought ourselves a tall ‘modernistic’ Russel Wright cocktail shaker made of aluminum with a wood top, a chromium hors d’oeuvres tray with glass dishes (using industrial materials was the idea), and six silver Old-Fashioned spoons with a simulated cherry at one end and the bottom of the spoon flat, for crushing sugar and Angostura.” The cocktail age, how menacing and beguiling to the sweet tooth, a sort of liquid mugger.

Unlike the Goncourts’ rather mad nocturnal stenography to fill their incomparable pages, I don’t think Mary kept a diary. At least I never heard mention of one nor felt the chill on rash spontaneity that such an activity from this shrewdly observing friend would cast upon an evening. From these pages and from the previous volume, it appears that she must have kept clippings, letters certainly, playbills, school albums, and made use of minor research to get it right—to be sure the young man in Seattle played on the football team. In these years of her life, she treasured who was in such and such a play seen in an exact theater. On the whole, though, I believe the scene setting, the action, the dialogue, came from memory. These memories, pleasing and interesting to me at every turn, are a bit of history of the times. Going to
Pins and Needles
, the Federal Theater’s tribute to the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, a plain little musical with fewer of the contemporary theater’s special effects than a performance of the church choir.

The pages of this memoir represent the beginning of Mary McCarthy’s literary life. She was a prodigy from the first. I remember coming across an early review when I was doing some work in the New York Public Library. It was dazzling, a wonderfully accomplished composition, written soon after she left college. As she began, so she continued, and in the years ahead I don’t think she changed very much. There was a large circle of friends in France, England, and Italy as well as here at home, but Mary was too eccentric in her tastes to be called snobbish and I would not find her an especially worldly person. She was not fashionable so much as discriminating; but beyond it all there was the sentimental and romantic streak in her nature that cast a sort of girlish glow over private and public arrangements.

Year in and year out, she made fantastical demands on her time and her budget for birthdays, Christmas; presents, banquets, bouquets, surprises, a whole salmon for the Fourth of July, traditional offering. I remember Natasha Nabokov, the mother of Ivan Nabokov, a publisher in Paris, telling me of a Thanksgiving in Paris where Mary found an approximation of the American turkey and brought forth “two dressings, one chestnut and one oyster.” Keeping the faith, it was. I often thought the holiday calendar was a command like the liturgical calendar with its dates and observances. Perhaps it was being an orphan, both of her parents having died in the flu epidemic of 1918, that led her to put such unusual stress on the reproduction of “family” gatherings.

Here she speaks of her “patrician” background, a word I never heard her use about herself. It was true that she came from the upper middle class, lawyers and so on, but all of it had been lived so far away in Minnesota and the state of Washington that one never thought of her as Middlewestern or Western but instead as American as one can be without any particularity of region or class. In any case, she created even in small, unpromising apartments a sort of miniature
haute bourgeois
scenery, without being imitative. And she would arrive in New York with Mark Cross leather luggage, a burdensome weight even when empty, pairs of white leather gloves, a rolled umbrella, all of it bringing to mind ladies of a previous generation—and no thought of convenience. Of course, she didn’t believe in convenience.

Wide friendships and hospitality, yes, but there were, in my view, only two persons outside the family circle for whom she felt a kind of reverence. The two were Hannah Arendt and Nicola Chiaramonte, both Europeans. They met for Mary every standard of intellectual and moral integrity. Chiaramonte, a beautiful man with dark curls and brown (I think) eyes, was a curiosity in the
Partisan
circle because of his great modesty and the moderation of his voice in discussion, a gentle word for what was usually a cacophony of argument. An evening at the Rahvs was to enter a ring of bullies, each one bullying the other. In that way it was different from the boarding school accounts of the type, since no one was in ascendance. Instead there was an equality of vehemence that exhausted itself and the wicked bottles of Four Roses whiskey around midnight—until the next time. Chiaramonte, with his peaceable, anarchist inclinations, was outclassed here.

I suppose he could be called a refugee, this Italian cultural and social critic and anti-Fascist. Here he published essays but did not create a literary presence equal to his important career when he returned to Italy in the late 1940s. After his death, Mary wrote a long, interesting essay in order to introduce an American edition of his writings on the theater. I remember an anecdote she told me about Chiaramonte, and it alone is sufficient to show why she so greatly admired him. The story went as follows: stopped at a border, trying to escape the Nazi drive across Europe, Nicola was asked for his passport and he replied: Do you want the real one or the false one?

Hannah Arendt, of course, was or became an international figure with
The Origins of Totalitarianism
,
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, and other works. I can remember Mary at Hannah’s apartment on Riverside Drive, a setting that was candidly practical, a neat place, tending toward a mute shade of beige in its appointments. For an occasional gathering there would be drinks and coffee and, German style it seemed to us, cakes and chocolates and nuts bought in abundance at the bakeries on Broadway. Mary was, quite literally, enchanted by Hannah’s mind, her scholarship, her industry, and the complexities of her views. As for Hannah, I think perhaps she saw Mary as a golden American friend, perhaps the best the country could produce, with a bit of our western states in her, a bit of the Roman Catholic, a Latin student, and a sort of New World, blue-stocking
salonière
like Rachel Varnhagen, about whom Hannah had, in her early years, written a stunning, unexpected book. The friendship of these two women was very moving to observe in its purity of respect and affection. After Hannah’s death, Mary’s extraordinary efforts to see her friend’s unfinished work on questions of traditional philosophy brought to publication, the added labor of estate executor, could only be called sacrificial.

I gave the address at the MacDowell Colony when Mary received the Medal and there I said that if she was, in her writing, sometimes a scourge, a Savonarola, she was a very cheerful one, lighthearted and even optimistic. I could not find in her work a trace of despair and alienation; instead she had a dreamy expectation that persons and nations should do their best. Perhaps it would be unlikely that a nature of such exceptional energy could act out alienation, with its temptation to sloth. Indeed it seemed to me that Mary did not understand even the practical usefulness of an occasional resort to the devious. Her indiscretions were always open and forthright and in many ways one could say she was “like an open book.” Of course, everything interesting depends upon which book is open.

Among the many charms and interests of this unfinished memoir are the accounts of the volatility of her relations with the men in her life. She will say that she doesn’t know why she left her first husband, backed out on John Porter, and deserted Philip Rahv. That is, she doesn’t know
exactly
but can only speculate. What, perhaps, might be asked nowadays is why the gifted and beautiful young woman was so greatly attracted to marriage in the first place, why she married at twenty-one. She seemed swiftly to overlook the considerable difficulties of unmarried couples “living together” at the time: the subterfuge about staying overnight, facing the elevator man, hiding the impugning clothes when certain people appeared, keeping the mate off the phone lest there be a call from home—unimaginable strategies in the present-day cities. There were many things Mary didn’t believe in, but she certainly believed in marriage, or rather in being married. She had no talent at all for the single life, or even for waiting after a divorce, a break. However, once married, she made a strikingly independent wife, an abbess within the cloister, so to speak.

In a foreword to the paperback edition of
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, she speaks of the treasures gained from her education in Catholic convent and boarding schools, even finding a benefit in the bias of Catholic history as taught: “To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”

Nonconformity may be a tiresome eccentricity or arise from genuine skepticism about the arrangements of society. Think of the headache of rejecting charge cards, the universal plastic that created a commercial world in which trying to use a personal check could bring oneself under suspicion. Going along with fidelity to old-fangledness, Mary and her husband declined the cards and had to carry about large sums of money, rolls of bills, that reminded me of nothing so much as men in fedoras in gangster movies. Still they did it and I think with some amusement in a trendy restaurant or Madison Avenue shop.

So, we meet her here in 1936, marching in a Communist May Day parade, marching along with John Porter, a new man who looked like Fred MacMurray. The conjunction of romance and the events of the day is characteristic of Mary at all points in her life. At the end of her memoir two years have passed and she has covered a lot of ground: divorce, a new marriage, unhappy, that lasted seven years, “though it never recovered.” Never recovered from Wilson’s mistakes and shortcomings as she saw them. I would have liked Mary to live on and on, irreplaceable spirit and friend that she was; even though I must express some relief that her memoirs did not proceed to me and my life, to be looked at with her smiling precision and daunting determination on accuracy. She had her say, but I never knew anyone who gave so much pleasure to those around her. Her wit, great learning, her gardening, her blueberry pancakes, beautiful houses. None of that would be of more than passing interest if it were not that she worked as a master of the art of writing every day of her life. How it was done, I do not know.

—
Elizabeth Hardwick

New York, December 1991

One

F
ELLOW WORKERS, JOIN OUR RANKS!”
It was 1936, and there I was, Mary Johnsrud, marching down lower Broadway in a May Day parade, chanting that slogan at the crowds watching on the sidewalks. “FelLOW WORKers!” Nobody, I think, joined us; they just watched. We were having fun. Beside me marched a tall fair young man, former correspondent of the Paris
Herald
, who looked like Fred MacMurray. Johnsrud was on the road with Maxwell Anderson’s
Winterset
, playing his Broadway role of the blind man. I had been out of college and married to him nearly three years.

The May Day parade was, of course, a Communist thing. The American labor holiday was the first Monday in September and marked by its own parade, with union bands, which certainly did not play the
“Internationale.” I had watched those parades in Minneapolis with our uncle Myers. Now, as we marched, singing the “Internationale,” “Bandiera Rossa” (my favorite), “Solidarity Forever,” “Hold the Fort for We Are Coming” (by Hans Eisler, I thought), the marshals, mostly girls, who stepped along beside us, keeping us in line, were noticeably blond and blue-eyed, what one would today call Wasp types. That must have been Party strategy, to give the march a face-lift, in keeping with the new line, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” The previous year had seen the end of so-called third-period Communism and the launching of the Popular Front by Dimitrov at the Seventh Party Congress in Moscow. The point was to meet the menace of Hitler with a merging of working-class and bourgeois parties. In France last February the Popular Front (Radicals, Socialists, and Communists) had won a big victory; next month the Léon Blum government would take office and give the working class its first “congés payés.” France being one of my “fields,” I had followed these developments, suggestive of a René Clair film (
A Nous la Liberté
), but I was unaware of any change in the policy of the U.S. Party, even though I myself (I now see), swinging along lower Broadway, was part of it. I only observed that what people said was true: our marshals
were
very blond and blue-eyed, and the cadres of the Party, on the whole Jewish in appearance, were making themselves less visible by staying in the center of our ranks, like the filling of
the sandwich. John Porter and I had been placed on the outside, where the onlookers could not fail to see us. Or hear us. Belting out “C’est la LUT-te fin-A-A-L-e,” when the others were rendering “’Tis the final conflict.” Having lived and worked in Paris (he had been with Agence Havas, too), John Porter knew the words in French. And of course I chimed in with him. We were both conscious of being young and good-looking, an advertisement for the cause, and it did not bother us that the comrades had caught on to salesmanship; we were amused that the Party, in our eyes the height of innocence, could be shrewd.