Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (44 page)

The girls I admired and wanted to copy were juniors and seniors, some of whom had fiancés who wrote every day. To those girls, who were not all as unapproachable as I originally feared, it was irresistible to pretend that Mark was mine. His letters, running to several pages, tended to bear it out, and a bloodstone ring given me by my great-aunt Alice for Christmas made a “perfect” engagement ring. In case doubts were inspired by the flat stone in its filigree silver setting (to carry 100% conviction it should have been a solitaire diamond), I explained that Mark was poor and bent on being a great writer. He had chosen the bloodstone, I added, to match my green eyes.

The center of my life, though, during that second term in Annie Wright’s new buildings, gabled, dormered, casemented, and beginning to be creeper-covered, with a cloister to walk in on rainy days, which had a camellia tree blooming beside it, was not a man or a boy but Mary Ann Lamping, a senior. Every night after study hall I sat in her room till bedtime with the rest of her clientele, doing my best to amuse that fair-haired, dry-spoken engaged girl, who came from a “social” family in Seattle (her father’s name was Roland), wore a black riding-habit with a stock and bowler hat, was not going to the U after graduation but heading instead for a big wedding with ushers, and already had a “settled” air about her that was part of her allure. An absence of drive was part of it, too: her clipped, dark-blond hair was untouched by marcel iron or water wave; she had indolent, slightly broad hips and elegant tapering legs, never crossed, never folded under her, never wound around a chair leg, but squarely held apart, giving her the lap of a young matron as she sat in her armchair idly buffing her nails. Unusually for a senior, she did not have a roommate; she had no “best friend” in her class and took no part in school activities—riding was not considered an “activity,” not being a team sport or competitive, and cost extra.

In Lampie’s ambience, a fiancé’s lack of “family,” his, not having a car or belonging to a fraternity, ought to have been severe liabilities, yet these shortcomings in Mark, if she knew of them, seemed to leave her indifferent. I never had to admit to her that Mark’s father was a policeman, since she never asked; the “engagement ring” elicited no sign of disapproval (never more, anyhow, in her case, than a mild wrinkling of the short, lightly freckled nose) or quiet comparison with her own sparkler, and, looking back, I cannot decide whether she was sweet-natured—rare in a social girl—or lazily permissive, disinclined to raise questions. Although she had to hear parts of Mark’s letters whenever one came (they were over her head, I imagine), only once did she query me about him, and that was to wonder aloud where he took me dancing when I was home. The Butler Hotel, I answered, lying. A safe choice: though my uncle Harold went there (he liked the band), Lampie never would.

Mark’s motive in writing me was surely kindness. He had a fiancée and didn’t need another. But there must have been something in me that brought out the pedagogue in young men, and he was still taking an interest in what went into my mind. He may have feared that Annie Wright would be just a fancy finishing-school—the same fear that my real (or semi-real) fiancé voiced about Vassar three years later. Mark’s letters (typed with two fingers, newspaperman style) were tutorials of a sort, recommending books, making cryptic jests, copying out lines of poetry, maxims of Schopenhauer, aphorisms. Like Don Marquis’s archy, he never used the shift key or any mark of punctuation beyond a few dots.

how odd

of god

to choose

the jews

he wrote, quoting Hilaire Belloc, he said, and always signed himself “mark,” typewritten like that. I cannot remember how he closed his letters; it was my first husband, not Mark, I think, who used to type “S.L.S.O.C.Y.K.” at the end of his, meaning “So long, sweet one, consider yourself kissed.” No, it couldn’t have been Mark because the funny acronym (looking like a Polish surname) was in capitals and had periods. When Dwight Macdonald called his dissident magazine
politics
(and note the small “d”
in what is more commonly written “MacDonald”), I at once thought of Mark. That was in the forties, but they were the same generation. For a young male of those days (cf. e.e. cummings, a forerunner, born 1894), such graphic devices, like armorial bearings, were a “statement,” a machine-age manifesto. They took their cue from the typewriter, with its upper and lower cases indistinguishable on the keyboard, like Everyman at birth; the elimination of the shift key was a kind of capital punishment. Females were unaffected by this revolution. In handwriting, distinction was sought at our school in the cramped practice of backhand (which in fact did express quite well the personalities of those laboring to perfect it), or in florid capital letters (I practiced and practiced on my “M”s and “C”s), while in the other hemisphere the aristocratic Isak Dinesen, writing of her African farm on an old Corona, strewed capitals about with a munificent feudal hand: “the trunk of an Elephant,” “the Native People.”

An additional motive for Mark’s writing me was no doubt the act of writing itself. Probably he sat down to the typewriter late at night after a party, the way someone else—my uncle Harold, for instance—might tickle the ivories on the piano. I was receptive, and he was literary—the editor of the college magazine. In his free time, he was writing squibs and short stories and sending them to
College Humor
and maybe the old
Life
and
Judge.
Among the modern books he was reading that year, I remember
Count Bruga
(1926),
The Mauve Decade
(1926),
Nigger Heaven
(1926), and perhaps Huneker’s
Painted Veils
(1920). And it was during that year (1926-27), my first at the Seminary, that he got into trouble with the U for an issue of the magazine he had published and mainly written, the February number, evidently—the offending lead piece was called “Lincoln Apple Sauce.”

He must have sent it to me at school; there was no other way I could have got hold of it. It was a shellacking of Abraham Lincoln or, more precisely, of the Lincoln myth, as I now realize. But at the time I did not distinguish between the two, and in that I was no exception. In suspending Mark, the University (which had just fired its liberal president at the instance of the governor) was punishing him for blasphemy against the martyred President as much as for irreverence toward the Lincoln myth. Perhaps the two were all but inseparable, just as Christ cannot be pried loose from Christianity or Communism from Stalin despite many “highly motivated” attempts. Perhaps all efforts at repristination are doomed to failure because anti-historical, like over-cleaned frescoes, which always look so glaringly new, worse than fakes. In any case, “Lincoln Apple Sauce,” which pleased me inordinately, very much grieved my grandfather, not only for Lincoln but for Mark. He felt Mark had done himself a lasting injury at the very start of a promising career. My grandfather, a lifelong Republican, was a democrat, one of the few I have known, but he must have thought that the upward-mobile son of a police officer had to watch his step on the swinging rope-ladder of success.

“Lincoln Apple Sauce” owed its inspiration to Mencken, obviously. It was a piece of debunking. But that was not why I liked it. My reason was simpler: I hated Lincoln. All through school, and in the convent, too, our teachers had the habit of confronting us with opposites and making us choose between them. Evidently it was a form of head-counting, but its purpose I cannot guess. A pet opposed pair was Washington and Lincoln (later on, in college, it would be monism and dualism or Voltaire and Rousseau), and at Garfield High the previous February they had made us fall into line on opposite sides of the gym and march to music to show our preference. Even in the convent, where you would expect Mount Vernon to outshine a log cabin and a powdered wig a scraggly set of chin whiskers, Washington’s claque was always smaller, and that was enough, naturally, to keep me loyal to it.

Actually I did not care all that much for Washington. I was bored by the cherry tree, by the “Father of His Country” label, by Martha Washington’s neckwear, by his flat red Gilbert Stuart face. Among presidents my real liking was for Jefferson, with Martin Van Buren second, but in school they never gave you that choice. And if the alternative to Washington was Lincoln, I had no hesitation about where I stood. My sympathies were aristocratic, which was also to say with the few against the many. Yet my dislike of Lincoln did not mean that I was pro-slavery. I had mentally freed my slaves long ago, in the wake of John Randolph and John Calhoun. But I was passionate about states’ rights, which made me support the South in the Civil War.

In any conflict I was almost automatically for the losing side; that was an appeal that George Washington lacked. I loved Bonnie Prince Charlie, Mark Antony, Vercingetorix, Beauregard, General Jeb Stuart, the absurd Charles the First, and despised any victory that was not won against fearful odds. One might think that John Wilkes Booth’s bullet would have softened my heart to Honest Abe. But no. His myth was stronger than the bullet, and the myth was too uncouth, too plebeian, for me. It was not till I was much older, nearly thirty, that I developed a real sympathy for and interest in Lincoln. But it was his intellect and, above all, his melancholy that did it. Neither had a place, naturally, in the common Lincoln applesauce, which Mark was deriding.

It should be evident from his literary tastes that Mark did not share my aristocratic views, even though, like Mencken, he hated and scorned the “booboisie.” Yet Mencken in later life became what is called a reactionary, and maybe that is how a true hater of the bourgeois (look at Flaubert) is pretty well bound to end. By what criteria, if not simple lack of money, can the antique
demos
—“the people”—be told apart from the mass of middle-class boobs? In a country like America, which has shed its proletariat, except for coal-miners and an under-class of permanent relief clients, no distinction is visible. In any case, Mark did not live long enough to sour into a reactionary. When he died (of TB, I think) during the war, he was arrested at a stage of pure misanthropy—normal in a newspaperman.

At the University he was soon reinstated, and the only penalty I remember his suffering was the confiscation of that issue of the magazine. I continued to be proud of his temerity, and for a while he kept on writing to me, probably till he finished the University and found a job on a paper. It seems to me that he did not come to Lake Crescent with us the next summer and that, shortly after, our correspondence ceased. Maybe he got married. But he had been there when I needed him, like a pair of water wings; his letters saw me through my sophomore year. After that, I was
somebody
in the school, even when under a cloud; the teachers had noted me.

My sophomore year marked, too, the first time I was turned loose in a library, like a colt in green pasture. There was no librarian to hover over me; I was usually alone in the tall, dark-paneled room lined with books, not just sets as in my grandfather’s library at home but modern books. And there were periodicals laid out on two round tables under central lamps where you could sit and leaf through
L’Illustration, The Illustrated London News
and
Punch,
as well as (I think)
The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, Scribner’s, The Century.
It was like entering a house with a little table all set as in a fairy tale. I would climb up to explore the shelves and bring down booty—all of Sinclair Lewis, for instance, to choose from, including one called
Free Air,
featuring a filling-station; Galsworthy, of course (
The Forsyte Saga
and a new one in a violet cover called
The White Monkey,
about Fleur); Arnold Bennett (
Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, The Old Wives’ Tale
)
and Wells’s
Ann Veronica;
a whole line of dark-green volumes (
Fortitude, The Green Mirror, The Dark Forest, The Duchess of Wrexe
)
by an author, Hugh Walpole, whom no teacher admired as much as I did. In twentieth-century books the taste was mainly English. I remember May Sinclair but not Willa Cather or Ellen Glasgow and am unsure about Dreiser … I can see a yellow volume, though, with a colored sketch of a Friend on the linen cover—
Hugh Wynne, Quaker,
by S. Weir Mitchell, America’s first psychiatrist.

But the great thing was to find the complete Tolstoy. I raced straight through it, and the volume that really struck me was not
War and Peace
or even
Anna Karenina
but
The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
I think I had fallen in love with the title. Of
War and Peace
I remember most my disappointment with Natasha for marrying fat Pierre after Prince Andrei. The letdown was familiar; it was what happened to the reader when an author was a moralist and had to punish his heroine for her own good. I knew the sensation from having heard
Emma
read aloud in the convent—by the little whiskered Madame who also read
A Tale of Two Cities
and
The Gentleman from Indiana
while we learned to make buttonholes and sew a French seam—well, you know how the story ends, with “headstrong” (read “high-spirited”) Emma forced to marry Mr. Knightley. In
Anna Karenina,
I of course fell for Vronsky and did not notice his bald spot, any more than I had the sense to notice Prince Andrei’s small white hands.

Did I know that Tolstoy was better than Hugh Walpole? Unfortunately I am not really sure. What I do remember is my immense surprise on learning that my grandmother had read Tolstoy, indeed all the Russian classics, which she spoke of, tartly but half-fondly, as “those old books.” She and Aunt Rosie had gone through them when they were young and—wonderful to think of—when the books were still young, too.