Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (45 page)

Poetry at the Seminary was kept in study hall, rather than in the library. It was there that I discovered Swinburne and “So we’ll go no more a-roving” after the Cavalier Poets. None of this can have furnished material for letters to Mark, who was fonder of prose than of poetry and more partial to Americans and to French than to the English. That year he was talking of
Jarnegan,
the new book by the hobo named Jim Tully, now forgotten—if you look “Tully” up in a current book of reference, you are told “See Cicero.” In the summer he brought me
The Hard-boiled Virgin,
by Frances Newman, a new writer thought by us in Seattle to be H. L. Mencken’s mistress.

Mencken, in fact, was the taste-maker, not only for apprentice journalists like Mark but for various young provincials seeking a direction. I remember trying to read
Thus Spake Zarathustra
—a typically limp volume lent me by my Garfield friend Ethel (“Ted”) Rosenberg, who normally would have been more likely to press
The Rubáiyát
on me or Rabindranath Tagore. Indeed, putting the donor together with the title, I supposed I was being initiated into some new branch of Oriental wisdom. I did not know that Nietzsche had been launched by Mencken more than twenty years before, and perhaps neither did Ted. Yet it was he who had made
Zarathustra
a must for young aesthetes like her, who considered themselves far beyond the reach of his influence. More consciously a Menckenite and somewhat older (though surely still in her twenties) was Miss Dorothy Atkinson, a Vassar graduate and
American Mercury
subscriber, who in sophomore English was giving us
As You Like It,
the de Coverley papers,
Silas Marner,
“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Macaulay’s essay on Johnson, and Thomas Huxley’s “On a Piece of Chalk.”

Like that reading list (more or less standard in private schools at the sophomore level, though we did not suspect it), Miss Atkinson was exacting and in appearance severe. She wore her ash-blond soft hair in funny puffs or whirls over her ears and her folding eyeglasses on a long chain or ribbon, had pale, slate-blue eyes, thick milk-white skin, and a satiric way of talking. Though I had her only that one year at Annie Wright (her successor, very different, was her popping-eyed younger sister, Miss Marjorie Atkinson—
Macbeth,
Burke, “Lycidas,” the
Essays of Elia
—whom I made cry one day), Miss Dorothy Atkinson must count as a major influence in my life since it was in order to be like her that I went to Vassar.

Her room at Annie Wright was across the corridor from mine, and I used to bring her the stories I was beginning to write, one of which—“A Wife and Mother”—she advised me to send to H. L. Mencken. It was unlikely that he would take it, she explained, but he might return it with comments and possibly words of encouragement—he had an interest in new, young writers. She was wrong in my case; I never heard from him. But to be given that advice by her, the cool essence of bluestocking, was flattery enough; I was amazed.

The stories I wrote (in study hall, behind the screen of an open textbook) were gloomy satires on respectability and received ideas. Long ago, someone—myself, I suppose—saved them, and then they must have been sent on to me when my grandmother died and the Seattle house was sold. Anyway here they are. On ruled exercise-book paper, the kind we used for our themes, they confront me with a total absence of early talent. Miss Dorothy Atkinson must have been out of her mind. The heroine of “A Wife and Mother,” unalluring to begin with, in a few pages reaches an acme of repulsiveness (“She is more than fleshy; she rolls in fat. Her English is poor; her whole person carelessly tended. She has plenty of flashy jewelry and wears it often”), along with a complacent, self-made, Republican husband (“Old honest Abe is his ideal”), who calls all foreigners Wops. “So they live on, contented, average American citizens … The wife and mother of whom sentimental songs are written.” Poor Mencken.

Another one tells of a prostitute named Gracia (the Wife and Mother was Daphne), whom we first meet as a department-store clerk selling cosmetics. She loses her job because, at twenty-seven, she is losing her looks (“she would soon join the ranks of the waddling, middle-aging women who insist on buying their clothes in the ‘Misses’ section”); next she is seduced by a coarse Jewish businessman “with great pouches under hard bright eyes”; when, after six months this Mose Nordstrom tires of her (“The brute!” “The cur! He couldn’t have me again now if he wanted to … He was really awful fat and funny looking, anyhow”), Gracia, now a “middle-aged, fussy, dumpy woman,” gets work as an usher in a cheap movie-house, where she meets solitary men and, unaware of what is happening, seeing each of her clients as a new Prince Charming, sinks into professional vice. The final sentence sums it up. “What did she amount to? What was she? Just another prostitute with ideals.” The theme of both stories is self-deception, reality being represented by fat; both heroines have a grave figure problem; both “waddle.”

Another, unfinished or only partly preserved, “The Story of a Suicide,” seems to have started out as an essay—“Those People Called Suicides.” Both story and essay begin with a quotation from the Gospels and proceed: “Life is a wild, bitter, brutal thing, a thing that sears, that kills. Life is the reason for death. Most people picture death as a grim, old specter, whose all-destroying hand reaches out and clutches us. But to many, death is a calm, white spirit with a soothing hand, and a tender eye, that takes us away from that horror, life, when we are able to bear it no longer. To some it comes voluntarily; they are usually the ones that it hurts. But to those who cry for it, beg for it, pray for it, it does not hearken, so they are driven to summon it against its will. These people men call suicides.”

Beside this passage, a hand has written in the margin: “Very good, Mary—I like your theme but don’t make it [illegible] inhuman—I hope, Mary dear, that this version of suicide isn’t your own!” So I had turned the essay in as a class theme. More important, to my surprise, I notice that the “y” of the teacher’s “Mary,” just like mine even today, has a long sweeping flourish of a tail, and that the “i”s are dotted with circles, just as mine were before Miss Kitchel in freshman English at Vassar discouraged the practice. Till this moment, I never knew where I had got those circles from: what Vassar gave, apparently, Vassar took away. As for the fear that I might be thinking of suicide, I can’t decide whether Miss Atkinson (for of course it was she) was being whimsical with her gay little exclamation mark or whether she was worried. A little of both perhaps, which would be the Vassar way.

A fragment of still another story, “What Doth It Profit a Man,” has to do with suicide, too. A young woman, Diana Stone, seemingly pregnant, waits in vain for her lover to return to her in the woods by a mountain lake, where she lives. “Ordinarily she would be described as a tall, slender, green-eyed black-haired creature with a glowing natural complexion. But tonight the sorrow, the regret, the pensiveness of her face, as she stood gazing at the beauties of the mountain lake, made her beauty a matter beyond any doubt.” Her man, named Keith, had left her. “Oh, God, why should it be?” It was finished. “Perhaps he had never cared, never meant those fond caresses, those words, those looks! Perhaps she had been just one more girl to pet with … Keith … the man of her dreams had gone … she was alone, alone to face the consequences.” For they had done more than pet. They had sinned and sinned gravely against the great commandment. After he left her, he intended to write, to ask her to forgive and to marry him. “But the lure of his bachelor life was too strong and the letter remained unposted.” Nevertheless “his thoughts and dreams were haunted by those gay, yet wistful eyes of Diana Stone. He should marry her, by all the rights on earth, he should. He hesitated, for his will was weak.” Finally (“her time was near”) she wrote to him. “One pleading childish letter ending with ‘I tell you, no matter what happens I will love you forever and ever, Keith darling, from your waiting Di.’” But her letter, misaddressed, had been too long in reaching him. When he got it, he at once telephoned for a ticket on the next train. “For he loved her, really, you see.” But by the time he reached the familiar house in the woods she had taken strychnine. That night, she died. And: “The man that left the house that evening had snow-white hair.”

If Miss Atkinson saw “What Doth It Profit a Man” (which looks earlier to me than “The Story of a Suicide”—heroine Ardena Passy), it can hardly have occurred to her that Di’s misadventure was rather autobiographical. Yet the strange thing is that this tritest and trashiest of all my study-hall narratives is the only one to correspond with anything in my experience. Underneath the embroidery I recognize “Keith,” a girl’s green eyes, a mountain lake, a path through the woods, seduction and abandonment. Except that I was not pregnant and did not have a glowing natural complexion (my skin was rather pale) the account was not far from the truth, while in none of the other tales, despite what a reader might surmise, is there the slightest trace of direct experience: I myself had no figure problem and, unlike poor Daphne of “A Wife and Mother,” no pimples. The sole reference to real life that I can find in these determined-to-be-lifelike fictions is the first name of Gracia’s Jewish seducer: Mose. Uncle Mose was Aunt Rosie’s husband. I cannot imagine what prompted me to give his first name (unless it was the only one I knew that sounded Jewish or, to be frank, Jewy) to a coarse little rotter; I
liked
Uncle Moses Gottstein.

This brings us up against the mysteries of creation, from which trash seems no more exempt than “serious” literature. Even with trash, sources, like Psyche’s Cupid, hide themselves from the light of inquiry. But, apart from Uncle Mose, apart from the absence of waddlers from my personal history, another puzzle rises to meet me as I study those numbered pages of crumbling yellowed paper with torn holes running down one side. What made me write those things? If they had been autobiographical, like so many juvenilia, there would be no need to ask the question. Or if a teacher had set us to writing stories. But I was not responding to any visible pressure, from within or without.

If I could ignore a strange ferocity of treatment, I would say that the urge that seized me was purely literary, by which I mean an urge to write words on paper regardless of any connection with myself or the world immediately surrounding me. In “Suicides,” for example, it is almost as if my motive had lain in the epigraph: “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (John xi: 25-26), which opens the Episcopal burial service. This was one of my favorite passages from the New Testament and doubly dear to me because Dickens had used it in
A Tale of Two Cities
as a lead-in for the dissipated Sydney Carton’s valediction (“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known”) as he steps up to replace his high-born rival, Charles Darnay, at the guillotine while the knitting women count. I think I may have written both essay and story simply to have a pretext for setting down in my own hand those tremendous words from the Gospel. If that is so, I sensed, in my fifteenth year, that I belonged to the order of scribes.

In fact (now it comes back to me), those very words of Holy Writ are bound up with my awakening to literature: in the convent, during sewing hour, the tiny black-eyed nun, Irish or French, is reading to us from Dickens in a deep voice with a strongly rolled “r” the indictment of the tribunal (“Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay”) to be followed, next week, by the speech of the dissolute barrister (“‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord’”), while, bent over my embroidery hoop, like Kant awakening from his dogmatic slumbers or the child Samuel hearing the Lord’s call in the house of the high priest or Archimedes in the bathtub, I feel the short hair rising on my scalp. A voice has summoned me, from the lips of a small hoarse old Madame with gray hairs straggling out from under her pleated wimple. Come to think of it, those words recur, uncannily, as though completing the circle, in my last novel,
Cannibals and Missionaries,
and in
The Group,
though maybe the strangeness is not so strange if you know that in both cases the dearly loved John xi: 25-26 is cropping up at an Episcopal funeral.

It is true that I was fond of epigraphs, scriptural or not, that over a text I liked to set headings, like tomb inscriptions, which gave me great pleasure to copy out and had little to do with the story. Among these same Annie Wright relics, I find entire poems—Edna Millay, Margaret Widdemer, unidentified others—written out as though for commonplacing. Yet I cannot think that such an instinct for magical safekeeping, for the tracery of groups of words carefully indited in my ornate hand with those fish-eyed “i”s, was my whole motive in writing. I spoke just now of a “ferocity” of treatment. Or “vehemence,” I could say. I cannot escape the impression that I wrote in anger. The aesthetic urge was secondary. I had “something to say.” Those waddling Daphnes and Gracias had got under my skin.

But, as I say, I did not know any women like that. There were none in my family—both my grandmother and my mother, I was often told, had been in their time “the most beautiful woman in Seattle,” and my other grandmother, while stout, was solid and bulldoggy—and I was in no danger of becoming one myself. A school picture shows a thin, somewhat tense girl, a little taller than average, not too different from “Diana Stone,” allowing for some romantic footlighting. Those Gracias and Daphnes must have represented, for some reason, the enemy. Clearly they embodied some thing or quality I hated with passion. That cannot have been fat or shortness of stature, however displeasing when combined, but moral traits—triteness and self-deception. In my study-hall compositions, they are allied, occurring together like elements in the periodic table. And in fact I believe I was right to have noticed that: triteness, the resort to well-worn counters, is an evasive device that protects you from reality’s rough edges, which may hurt if you bump into them. But is reality, or truth, always so uncomfortable? That is not my opinion now (truth produces elation, surely, because of its closeness to beauty), but I evidently thought so when I was fourteen, for what was I doing but rubbing my heroines’ noses in it, furiously, as though to wake them up? E.g., You are a prostitute, fat stupid Gracia, admit it, don’t pretend you do it because the fellows find you irresistibly attractive; you are the same as a streetwalker, no matter what, like the Pharisee, you tell yourself: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are.” That was what the anger, the ferocity, the vehemence were all about. They sound excessive because the provocation is not disclosed. What was biting me, after all? Even if I was surrounded, at school and at home, by triteness and hypocrisy (and adolescents do feel that), why take it out on a notion of the average housewife, the average prostitute—in other words on total strangers?