Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (37 page)

Today journalists are not considered intellectuals. But in 1925, in the West, high-school and college newspapers seemed secure stepping-stones to literary and intellectual fame. There was no such thing as “creative writing” then; there were no “Writers’ Workshops,” no “writers in residence.” Rather, the cub reporter was the man of destiny in our still half-pioneering Far Western cities, just as in the small towns of the prairie the newspaper editor was the town philosopher. Jack London, Frank Norris, Dreiser, Mencken, Ben Hecht, Burton Rascoe had blazed the trail to the city room or afield to the foreign correspondent’s tent—in Seattle we did not know yet of “Bunny” Wilson and Hemingway, who had been making their start in the same way. Such figures as Mencken and Dreiser, rather than V. L. Parrington (
Main Currents in American Thought
)
,
actually teaching in the English Department of the University, were the intellectual giants, resembling Rodin’s “Thinker,” that our locals sought to emulate. Giants and titans, like Dreiser titles or Gutzon Borglum likenesses hammered into a mountain face, peopled the cultural scenery, above all west of the Mississippi. The sheer size of the country gave the effort to write a narrative an epic thrust, and the notion of genius, hard for Americans to relinquish, was still very much alive in the pages of our school yearbook. The genius (I now slowly perceive), like the intellectual, is a product of mass culture.

I have only to summon up in memory the hushed study halls of Forest Ridge and Annie Wright, with the
surveillante
or teacher-on-duty raised above us at her desk on the dais, I have only to see morning chapel, with the girls in dark-blue serge uniforms and black net veils, like widows, intoning
“Oui, je le crois,”
or else in Episcopalian middy blouses and bare-headed tuning up on “Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear, It is not night if Thou be near,” to admit that an intellectual cannot be the product of an elite education. Rough plebeian democracy is the breeding-ground of the class of intellectuals, springing up like the dragon’s teeth to fight and kill each other down to the last five men before they can found the City.

Yes. I think of evening chapel at the Seminary: the day girls are gone; the organ plays; the boarding department stands up in its poorly fitting colored-silk dinner uniforms to sing the dirge for the day (“Now the day is o-over, Night is dra-awing ni-igh,” my favorite), whereupon our principal, Miss Preston, dark-eyed, in a polka-dot dress, kneels down on her stout knees at her prayer-desk and clears her wattled throat to begin the Collect for Aid against Perils, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, o Lord,” in her deep New England voice. Stubby Miss Preston is a Smith woman;
her
favorite hymn is Number 117 (Bunyan’s “He who would valiant be”); she cries easily, like her billowy blue-eyed counterpart, Madame McQueenie, the acting Reverend Mother of Forest Ridge; they are both fond of taking repentant girls onto their slippery laps—Miss Preston’s, usually silken in the evening, being worse. Now our voices follow hers in the General Confession: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us”—how true! Chapel and study hall, Church of Rome and P. E. merge. I listen to the scratch of pens, the bell of the
surveillante,
the soughing of the organ, the creaking of pew benches, and I could weep for it all, for the waste of it.

Those hard-working women, our teachers, not always brilliant themselves, gave a sound education, tried to inculcate good morals and a respect for excellence, and accomplished hardly more than a finishing-school. What they taught (like the art of making buttonholes we had to master in sewing class in the convent) was never used afterwards. Or only by that tiny percentage that was going to teach school itself or find some other employment for Boyle’s Law and the subjunctive after French verbs of saying, thinking, and the like, when uncertainty is conveyed. Annie Wright prepared you for college, that was the idea, but you did not need any special preparation to go to the University of Washington, and in my year—1929—only two of us went on to an institution that required College Boards. The Ladies of the Sacred Heart made no pretense of college preparation; they had a so-called College Department, consisting of two years, for the tall, blue-ribboned older girls like the Lyons sisters, and that was it. What both schools imparted to their graduates was something like old-fashioned “accomplishments,” but these were mostly out-of-date (those buttonholes!) or bizarrely irrelevant to the future lying ahead. Was Latin prosody a grace that would sit prettily on a girl who was going to marry a lumber executive? And the
pas de chat
and correct ballet positions we were taught at the convent, the schottische and polka we got at the Seminary, how were we going to use them? In the years of the tango and the Charleston, we were learning clog-dancing.

In a sense, I suppose, I was the chief beneficiary of Forest Ridge and Annie Wright in that I was able to find a use for what we learned. I don’t mean that
Sans Famille
and “Belling the Cat” served to get me into Vassar, though, multiplied, evidently they helped. I mean that I was peculiarly fitted to “get the good out of” the convent and the Seminary, not because I was more gifted or cleverer than my classmates but because, thanks to Garfield’s plebeian incentives, I was an intellectual by the time I reached Annie Wright. And no one else was.

I will explain. A superior education, such as, on the whole, we got in those private schools, can only be used by those it was not intended for. By the fluke of having gone—for a single year—to a big-city high school, I happened to be one of them. The point of a private school in the U.S.A. is to represent in its curriculum the purest conspicuous waste. Unlike the English public schools, our private schools do not aim to prepare a ruling class to govern—the exception used to be Groton. Our usual private schools are not vocational schools even in that remote sense. If there is anything “exclusive” (aside from the cost) in the whole system of private education, it is the
exemption
of a class of students from evident vocational goals. Some at Annie Wright strove harder for grades than others, but this seemed to be a matter of temperament, rather than need. There were no grinds (that I remember) among us. As with high jump and shot-put, the act of surpassing rivals in doing a sight translation was performed for its own sake or for purposes of showing off. I am not saying that there were no professions besides teaching for which Latin could not some day be useful. There was medicine, for instance. In our class at Annie Wright, besides a future French-teacher, we had a future doctor. Yet if those two girls—and I—profited from the curriculum, it was through the fact of being—or becoming—anomalies.

Just to make it clear: I am in favor of the teaching of Latin and Greek, plus one modern language, on the secondary-school level or even earlier. It is probably the best way of teaching history—Western history, evidently, to which as a nation we can claim an inheritance. But I believe that this has no meaning, even as a Utopian dream, unless the entire nation’s children are given the “basics” of a culture we all share, as Jews and unbelievers, like it or not, once shared the culture of Christendom. When the classics are offered as ornaments or status symbols for the few, they become otiose, and this had happened at some point during the Coolidge era: the public high school of a New England mill town, say Fall River, Massachusetts, on the retirement of its old-maid classics teacher, ceased offering Latin and even Greek to the progeny of mill workers and thus obliged the owners, who wanted “advantages” for their children, to send them “away” to school. (This was a sign, evidently, of an impoverishment of our culture as a whole. It is the same with food: in countries with a superior cuisine—France, Italy, China—allowing for regional variations based on climate, everybody eats the same diet, though the rich have more of it and more often; in nations famous for bad cooking—England, the U.S.—rich and poor have utterly different food cultures.)

For Latin to be rescued from oblivion (to which even the Church has relegated it), there would have to be general agreement on its absolute value and desirability—not just some faint persuasion of its utility, such as the argument now put forward that it can help teach ghetto children English, however true that contention may be. The average intellectual today has no Latin; indeed, he may have no language other than English. Though the class of intellectuals can trace its ancestry to the clerks and pedants of the medieval and Renaissance “schools,” learning is no longer an earmark—it is optional, and the lack of it avoids confusion with the horde of academics. Here is a better criterion: an intellectual, as opposed to a dutiful classroom performer but like the “upstart clerks” of Elizabethan times, is always self-made. Finally: it is a mistake to think that an intellectual is required to be intelligent; there are occasions when the terms seem to be almost antonyms.

But to return to Garfield. Instead of study hall, there was an auditorium in which school assemblies were held, though not every morning, and sometimes the school band played. Since you were expected to study at home, you did not have your own desk here in which you kept your books and equipment. We each had a locker for that purpose, and we hung our coats, scarves, and so on, in an adjacent hall lined with hooks. I cannot remember what provision there was for overshoes and rubbers; it hardly ever snowed in Seattle, but it rained a lot.

Nor can I remember where and how we ate. I think some brought school lunches, to be supplemented with milk from the school cafeteria, and some brought money and bought food there, and a few bought more glamorous and unwholesome food in nearby eating-places catering to the fast crowd. Certainly we did not go home for lunch. And what strikes me now, looking back at that big high school, is a sense of being adrift, having no settled place in it.

It was mainly not having a desk, I imagine. In the grade-school “room” and the study halls of boarding academies, the pupil’s desk holds the tools of his trade (“Student”)—pen nibs, blotters, ruler, compass, books, pencils, erasers, plus the usual contraband—and bolts him firmly into the system. For all eternity I am the eighth-grader who sits next to one of the Berens twins, pretty, dark Louise, and behind “Phil” Chatham (whose father’s name, spelled “Ralph,” is pronounced “Rafe”), on the dictionary side of the room, four rows from the front, where the Mistress of Studies is on watch. In chapel, it was height that determined your place: big girls in the back pews, little girls in front. The effect to be made, entering two abreast in procession, was the main concern of our supervisors. Since growing girls grow at different rates, continual readjustment was required. This was particularly true at the Seminary, where our principal had processions on the brain. On a great occasion like Founder’s Day, prepared for by many a rehearsal, suddenly at the last minute a teacher with a measuring stick would pass along the double line of girls and move some of us ahead or back; then another teacher would move us again.

At table, evidently, we had our established places. A Seminary “table” consisted of ten or twelve girls moving every second week to sit with a different teacher till the “top” table headed by the vice-principal, Miss Justine Browne, was reached, after which new tables were formed. By what sort of shuffle those combinations were made up, nobody knew. Why the “two Gins”—Virginia Barnett and Virginia Kellogg—were sometimes put at the same table, although roommates, while I repeatedly drew one of my
bêtes noires
—a pale, spectacled, black-haired, sneering underclassman by the name of Catherine MacPherson—was beyond understanding. In general, if there was a principle to be discerned, it was the negative one of keeping friends apart, to insure that Miss Preston’s golden rule of “M.C.G.” (“Make Conversation General”) would be maintained. In the Forest Ridge refectory, conversation was limited by having to be in French, by retreats (when the only utterance permitted was “Passe le sel”), by Lent and Advent, and by sudden arbitrary silences imposed by the
surveillante’s
clapper. There, too, our place at table was not chosen but assigned. It was all decided for us and sealed by our napkin ring marking the spot like the name-tapes sewn to our clothing. Similarly, with our library book, the precise hour of our weekly bath (which we took under a canvas shift so as not to have to see our bodies), we occupied the station to which God or some Madame in her infinite wisdom had seen fit to call us. Garfield, by contrast, was a churning millrace of apparent free will.

Here the classrooms were long, and we sat in rows, rather than around an oak table, seminar-style, as we had at the convent. In those long classrooms, the teacher, up front by the blackboard, seemed a great way off, and it was possible not to be called on if you made yourself small. I was quite often unprepared. In freshman English, we had the Old Testament and
Ivanhoe
—both boring. Instead of the English history and French history, with kings and favorites, that I had learned by heart in the convent, Garfield started us with World History, which did not have any interesting people in it—nobody like Warwick, the King-Maker, Jack Cade and Perkin Warbeck, or Ganelon, the traitor. The result is that I can still name you the rulers of England and quite a few of their prime ministers, down to whiskered Lord Palmerston; the Capets and Valois did not stick with me so well. At the Sacred Heart, in eighth-grade French, I had been memorizing Victor Hugo (
“Cette étoile de flamme,/ Cet astre du jour,/ Cette fleur de l’âme,/ S’appelle l’amour”
);
Garfield’s Intermediate French was all exercises and grammar.

At home, having finished
Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes
and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” I felt I had outgrown my grandfather’s library.
Pickwick Papers,
one of his great favorites, had put me off Dickens for years to come. I had loved
A Tale of Two Cities,
when it was read aloud to us during sewing class in the convent by a tiny, Irish-accented Madame, and some of
Oliver Twist,
but I could not abide “Boz” and refused to open anything with a name like
Martin Chuzzlewit.
In my school crowd, insofar as I had one, nobody read; our entire mental apparatus was bent on grading boys and girls in terms of appearance, dress, antecedents, though the last category was not too important unless it conferred mystery. Our curiosity, such as it was, centered on a white-faced fat boy who had entered with us and was said to be a “morphodite.”