Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (80 page)

Also to enter on the plus side was Philip Rahv. Remembering him from Farrell’s parties, I called him one day when we needed a reader for a German text Mr. Covici was considering. Or it may have been the memoirs in Russian of the wonderful Angelica Balabanov, who had been close to Mussolini in his socialist days, then close to Lenin, and was now a left-wing anti-Communist. Rahv, who had been born in the Ukraine of Zionist parents, knew Russian, German, and Hebrew and he was able to read some French. When I called him, he came to the Covici office, and we talked a little in the waiting-room. He had a shy, soft voice (when he was not shouting), big, dark lustrous eyes, which he rolled with great expression, and the look of a bambino in an Italian sacred painting. I liked him. Soon he was taking me out to dinner in the Village, holding my elbow as we walked, and soon we were lovers. I gave up Bill Mangold with a small pang. Politically Rahv and I were more alike—he was breaking at last with the Party and joining the Trotsky Committee—and I was greatly excited by his powerful intellect, but Mangold, with his Yale background, was
more my kind of person. Had I not got to know Rahv, I might have married Mangold, if he ever got his divorce. Years later an avatar of him took form in
The Group
, in the figure of Gus Leroy, the publisher, with whom Polly Andrews, poor girl, is in love.

Rahv worked on the Writers’ Project—part of President Roosevelt’s WPA program—and did occasional reviews for
The Nation
. But he had no other source of income, except odd jobs like the one he was doing for Covici. That did not trouble me. It only meant that we couldn’t get married. Somewhere there was a wife named Naomi, whom I never saw. He had lived apart from her for a long time but could not pay for a divorce. But we did not think of marriage anyway. I believed in free unions, and so, I guess, did he. He and William Phillips dreamed of reviving
Partisan Review
, but for that they would have had to have money or an organizational tie, such as the one with the Party that they had lost when they crossed over. When we first became lovers, Philip, as I recall, had not yet met Dwight Macdonald, who in turn would introduce him to his Yale friend George L. K. Morris (of the Gouverneur Morris family; his brother was Newbold), an American abstract painter and our future backer.

I believe I had been instrumental in the de-Stalinization of Dwight. When he left
Fortune
, over their censoring of his U.S. Steel article, I took him downtown to lunch with Margaret Marshall, so that he could have an outlet for his views in
The Nation
’s back pages.
In the course of one of those lunches I discovered that dear Dwight actually believed in the Moscow trials. Once he was set straight by the two of us, he swiftly rebounded as far as one could go in the opposite direction; characteristically, he did not come to rest at a mid-point, such as entering the Socialist Party. Almost before I knew it, he was an embattled Trotskyite, of the Schachtmanite tendency. Meanwhile, through me or through Fred Dupee, he met Rahv and Phillips, who were already seriously talking to Fred with a view to his leaving
New Masses
to join them in a revived, anti-Stalinist
PR
and take a list of their subscribers with him. Dwight brought George Morris into the project, proposing to make him the art critic, with a monthly column, and the new
PR
was born.

By early summer, while all this was starting to happen, Philip and I had moved in together. The Gay Street apartment was too small for us (Philip, though still slender then, was a big man), but by good luck I had friends, Abbie Bregman and his wife, Kit, a descendant of Julius Rosenwald—Sears, Roebuck—who had a Beekman Place walk-up apartment that was going to be empty all summer. Unless I wanted to use it? Of course I accepted; the problem was how to convey that there would be another occupant, to them a complete stranger. Well, I told them, and they still urged me to use the place and the maid who came with it. Thus Philip and I found ourselves living amid severely elegant modern furnishings, all glass, steel,
and chrome on thick beige rugs. I think Philip felt compromised by that apartment (which did not resemble either of us) and by the Sears, Roebuck money behind it, which did not resemble us either. He was embarrassed to receive his friends, such as Lionel Abel, whom I remember there one night as a malicious, watchful presence out of Roman comedy.

That was perhaps why we quarreled so much that summer, although we were greatly in love. It was a class war we fought, or so he defined it. I defended my antecedents, and he his. He boasted of Jewish superiority in every field of endeavor, drawing up crushing lists of Jewish musicians and scientists and thinkers—Einstein, Marx, Spinoza, Heine, Horowitz, Heifetz—with which no Gentile list could compare. He invited me to look at the difference between Marx and Engels. I could only argue that in literature and the visual arts Jews did not excel:
we
had Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the Russians, Flaubert...Philip retorted that literature and the visual arts were mindless in contrast to mathematics and music. And what about Proust and Kafka? His forceful assertions, punctuated by short, harsh laughs, were arousing anti-Semitic feelings in me, which, to my shame, were put into words. Scratch a Gentile and you find an anti-Semite was his reply.

He was a partisan of what he called “plebeian” values—he loved that word. I stuck up for patrician values, incarnate, as I imagined, in the professional
class I issued from, exemplified by my grandfather. Lawyers were the hirelings of the bourgeoisie, he rebutted—petty-bourgeois parasites. I did not even belong to the big-bourgeois class. That was the crudest thrust. As for the other side of my family, it delighted him to say that the Irish were the bribed tools of imperialism—he had found the phrase in Marx. I always wondered what it applied to. Marx could hardly have been thinking of Irish cops—New York’s finest. In the England of his day, there were no Irish bobbies. But whether or not Marx said it, the phrase amused me and has stuck in my mind.

Anyway we argued amid the glass and the chromium. Philip brought an enormous zest to the exercise. Dispute was his art form. In some part of his quite complex mind, it entertained him to hear us go at it. For example: Trotsky maintained that you could not build socialism in one country. “In one country!” Philip would comment, listening to us. “Why, you can’t build socialism in one apartment!” That did seem to be so. We polarized each other. He could always offend me by declaring that I was bourgeois because I could not learn to think like a Marxist. I was far from being bourgeois, compared with the genuine article, but I do have a bourgeois side, which comes out in my love of possessions, cooking, gardening. Yet aren’t those peasant traits, too?

During that summer the maid who came with the apartment must have stolen my mother’s diamond
lavalliere and other odd bits of jewelry—my sole remaining links with my “bourgeois” or, as I thought, patrician past. I do not see who else could have taken them, since nobody else had access to the apartment and I never locked anything up. I was sorry for the loss, so irreparable, and because thieving is vile. But that was the price I paid for the loan of a Beekman Place apartment. Maybe the woman had reasoned that Philip and I were “robbing” the Bregmans by living in their apartment rent-free.

To earn a little more money, I worked that summer with a collaborator on a book called
Kaltenborn Edits the News
, a collection of writings and radio broadcasts by the well-known commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. It was really a ghost-writing job, because Mr. Kaltenborn had sold the publisher a stack of manuscript that proved to be mainly carbons—not just in duplicate, but in triplicate—of old, unusable broadcasts. Possibly he had done so in good faith; he had just never looked at the mass of copy he turned in. Faced with the fact, my collaborator and I wrote a new book for him, dividing the material into chapters according to our tastes: I did France, Spain, and the U.S. automobile industry; my co-worker, a
New York Times
writer, did England, Germany, and a wonderfully named chapter about the Balkans, “Little Firebrands.” We met once a week in Mr. Kaltenborn’s pleasant garden in Brooklyn Heights, drank spritzers with Mr. and Mrs. Kaltenborn (a charming German woman), and reviewed
our work to date. I doubt that Mr. Kaltenborn ever read the entire text—an amalgam of
New York Times
middle-of-the-road politics, my Trotskyizing, and the deep conservatism of his original broadcasts, bits of which we used as filler. Then, toward the middle of the summer, his son turned up from Harvard and actually read a good part of the book his father would be signing. The young man, a Stalinist and a fairly bright boy, was horrified—especially, I guess, by my contributions—and tried to undo the damage by rewriting parts himself. In the end, probably not even the publisher, still another Stalinist, read the whole book through. But it came out, this all-around rip-off, and I own a copy of it that Arthur Schlesinger bought me as a present in a second-hand bookstore in Cambridge. Since only Mr. Kaltenborn was on a royalty basis, I have no idea how the sales had been.

Philip had no interest in my work on the Kaltenborn book; I am not sure that he ever met my collaborator. He and the others were busy lining up articles for the new
PR
. During the hot weather we went out sometimes to a little house Dwight and Nancy were renting at Brookfield Center, in Connecticut, where there was a natural pool made by a pot-hole in a stream. We all swam naked there and argued about Henry James. Philip’s long love-affair with James had begun; at Vassar I hadn’t cared for him—neither had Miss Kitchel and Miss Sandison. Fred Dupee was a natural Jamesian; I no longer remember where Dwight
stood. One Sunday morning on the breakfast table I typed out a devastating review for
The Nation
of Frederick Prokosch’s
Seven Who Fled
, which the others read and approved. Despite our failure to “build socialism in one apartment,” it was a happy time. We looked fondly on each other. I read
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and liked it. He liked Frani and Nathalie and Martha McGahan, who despite being a Catholic supported the Loyalists, saying “I’m a Basque” with her dark twinkle. Johnsrud came once to Beekman Place to have drinks or dinner with us and was not very friendly.

We followed with passion and anger the fortunes of the war in Spain; before it was over, I knew more about the Ebro than I ever knew about the Battle of the Bulge. On account of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, I was boycotting silk, buying cotton-mesh stockings at Wanamaker’s, which in those days was a downtown department store near Astor Place. I was smoking cigarettes with the union label—Raleighs, I think they were—though I liked Luckies better. Philip was less committed to consumer boycotts, suspecting, I guess, that they were bourgeois.

The Second Congress of the League of American Writers occurred early in June, before we moved into the Bregmans’ apartment. This was a pure Stalinist front. With a certain temerity our small group of Trotsky defenders, all writers, elected to take part, to disrupt the proceedings if we could. William Phillips’s
account in his memoir,
A Partisan View
, is quite different from my memory of the event. He says that he and Philip did not want to go (to the panel on literary criticism) but that Dwight and I insisted. I don’t remember any disagreement among us. At the meeting I chiefly recall one orator declaring, in evident reference to us, that there were some who “looked for pimples on the great smiling face of the Soviet Union”—those pimples were the Moscow trials. And I remember Philip’s saying to me of another orator that he “waved the bloody shirt”—an expression I had never heard before and did not understand. It may have been that day that I first saw Martha Gellhorn—blond and pretty, talking about Spain. Or was it Martha Dodd, daughter of our former ambassador to Germany? Either one could have served as a marshal in the previous year’s May Day parade. That night, at a vast meeting in Carnegie Hall, Hemingway spoke and Donald Ogden Stewart, to a tumult of applause. We all went and sat in the gallery but did not try to heckle; we would have been
too
unpopular. On another night, I went to a
Nation
-sponsored appearance by André Malraux, who spoke for Spain at Mecca Temple; I noticed the trembling of his hands. In Spain he had been converted to Stalinism, and I thought it was sad.

I remember a downtown meeting of some Trotskyist group where I first saw Diana Trilling; with her dark eyes and flaring nostrils, she looked like Katharine Cornell. Among Stalinist males, I heard, the
Trotskyists were believed to have a monopoly of “all the beautiful girls.” That included Diana and Eunice’s sister, Eleanor Clark, who would soon marry a secretary of Trotsky’s to get him U.S. citizenship. It was said to have been a “white” marriage, like Auden’s with Erika Mann. Pretentious, I thought. I didn’t like Eleanor Clark, and we barely acknowledged each other, though we belonged politically to the same circle and had been a class apart at Vassar. She was Lockwood, needless to say. While I was married to John, she was with an intelligent misanthrope named Herbert Solow. It amused me to think that the self-absorbed Eleanor was paired with a “Mr. Solo.”

By the summer’s end the “boys”—as the two
PR
editors came to be called by their staff—were looking for an office for the magazine, and I was looking for an apartment for Philip and me. Thanks to a friend of Lois Howland’s, I found one on
East End Avenue—quite pretty and only moderately expensive. For Philip, it was too far uptown; he clung to his Eighth Street ways. And perhaps also too close to Yorkville, an enclave of Germans, i.e., Nazis. But he bore it with good grace. Nathalie Swan, still studying architecture, helped us with furnishing advice—a room-divider to make two rooms out of the long, narrow living-room, and bookcases that would be built along one wall by a carpenter and that I could stain myself. Philip and I bought our furniture at Macy’s. I remember a tall, very “contemporary” steel lamp, and it must have been on East End Avenue that I first owned the very square, bright red love seat that followed me for years to my various domiciles. There was an easy chair covered with gray tweed that went with Philip. When we split up—oh wellaway!—we divided the furniture. But that had not happened yet. No. After we moved to East End Avenue, into a ground-floor apartment across from Gracie Mansion, we had months still together, months in which I took the 86th Street crosstown bus and transferred to the Madison Avenue bus to get to work at Covici-Friede, on 32nd and Fourth, and came home by the same route at five, stopping in Yorkville to buy meat and groceries for the dinner I would cook that night.