Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (60 page)

Many years later, over an Old-Fashioned in a downtown Poughkeepsie restaurant, Miss Kitchel told me the story, as she had heard it, of a famous passage-at-arms between the dread Miss Lockwood and a very pert me. One morning, it seemed, Miss Lockwood, who was much given to leaning across the professorial desk, chin in hand, and raking the class with her burning dark gaze, had fired an opening question at us in her profoundest bass: “GIRLS, what is poetry?” At which, from a back row, I put up a saucy hand and sweetly recited: “
Coleridge
says it’s the best words in the best order.” She could have slapped me, I imagine.

Today the portentous Miss Lockwood seems like a grotesque caricature of the Vassar teacher as shaker-up. At the time I hated her too fervently to view her as a simple exaggeration. One day I actually cried during an argument with her after class, and of course that made me hate her all the more. Miss Kitchel and Miss Sandison shook up their girls more gently. They were not at all partial to Helen D. Lockwood but were too high-minded to let us see it when we were students. The idea that English majors were drawn up in hostile camps, one pro-Kitchel (or Sandison), the other pro-Lockwood, was a myth propagated by Lockwood’s disciples (cf. Norine in
The Group
)
.
One of the delights of Kitchel and Sandison was that they would never seek to make a disciple of a young person or encourage the formation of any kind of alignment. They were trying to teach us to stand on our own.

I suppose that the “two hostile camps” myth (“You people were the aesthetes. We were the politicals. We eyed each other from across the barricades”) included the notion that Kitchel and Sandison were political conservatives. I must have half-believed that myself, for I remember the surprise I felt when a poll of the college taken just before the 1932 election (when Roosevelt, our trustee and Dutchess County neighbor, was voted into the White House) showed the faculty as overwhelmingly pro-Socialist (perhaps 80%) and that Miss Sandison, when I exclaimed on it, seemed surprised by my surprise, which let me understand—correctly—that she and Miss Kitchel belonged to the 80%. It is easy to see now that they were Norman Thomas Socialists, which eventually I, too, became, but the only directly political discussion I remember with either of them (as long as I was an undergraduate; afterwards it was different—we were equals) took place in Sandison’s Shakespeare: someone—was it I?—compared King Lear to Woodrow Wilson.

Unlike Sandison and Kitchel, Miss Lockwood was a rich woman, though apparently few had suspected it till she left her fortune to the college on her death. Miss Peebles (Contemporary Prose Fiction) was rich, too, and lived in a well-furnished house of her own off campus, rather than in a spare college dormitory like Miss Sandison and Miss Kitchel, who had apartments opposite each other on the first floor of Williams Hall with a screened porch in the back that they shared. Until recently I had not grasped the fact that they took their meals, with the rest of the Williams women, in a sort of mess-hall.

With all the enmity I felt and possibly still feel for Miss Lockwood, looking back on her, I can now see that she embodied in her aggressive way faculty traits that could be found even in the mildest of teachers such as the retiring, duteous Miss Swenarton, who lived with her mother. Almost twenty years after graduation, coming back to write something about the college, I was amazed to hear Miss Swenarton, now gray-haired, gently teaching English 105 to a docile class of freshmen in the tried-and-true icon-smashing way. Shades of Miss Kitchel; who had retired, suffering from heart disease—evident in her flushed cheeks—only the reading-list was different. Under Miss Kitchel, we had started with Benedetto Croce and Tolstoy’s
What Is Art?
Miss Swenarton was giving them
High Wind in Jamaica.
The effect was the same: to disturb the girls’ preconceptions. Our class had been told by Tolstoy that Shakespeare was a meretricious author, above all in
King Lear;
this class was hearing that children are moral monsters (“said to have ended the Victorian myth of childhood,” the
Oxford Companion to English Literature
observes of the book), and reacting with shock and anger. Miss Swenarton’s soft persistent questions were aimed at their unexamined epistemology: how did they know what they thought they knew about children? With a faint smile, she called on a student who had worked as a babysitter and had direct experience to contribute.

It was in English 105, writing my weekly “effusion” (“Girls, hand me your effusions”) for hearty Anna Kitchel, that I un-learned the ugly habit, picked up at Annie Wright, of putting those circles like fish-eyes, instead of dots, over my “i”s. By May of 1930, in a letter to Ted Rosenberg, the circles, as if on tip-toe, had disappeared. I wonder what other practices under her cheery blue eye folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away.

She was our Class Advisor and my faculty adviser, too, and she must have undertaken to reform my taste. It was done so matter-of-factly that I was unaware of any change. It must have been Miss Kitchel’s doing that I stopped being crazy about Swinburne. Perhaps that happened during the “fourth hour” I elected with her—a once-a-week session for which she let me write a paper on Turgenev. Or at tea in her apartment as she puffed on her English Ovals, inducing on my part a shift from Marlboros.

She was an expansive woman, big-boned, high-colored, with a shock of fair, graying hair and very light-blue eyes. Smith was her college, but she was a middle-westerner, from Milwaukee, and had a rich middle-western diction. Her graduate work had been done at Wisconsin, considered advanced at the time, and she had an admiration for Alexander Meiklejohn, the educational reformer, who had been at Madison after she came east. Her usual method of conveying instruction was to find the comical side of the book, person, institution she was seeking to open our eyes to. “Oh, he was a rare bird!” she exclaimed of Wordsworth in Blake-to-Keats, after telling us the whole story (then generally unmentioned) of the French girl Annette Vallon and the illegitimate child the great revolutionary disowned. I loved hearing Miss Kitchel marry the classic
rara avis
to the derisive American “that bird,” with a rolling “r” that no Daniel Jones dictionary of phonetics could ever do justice to. Surely she would have chuckled over naughty Algernon Swinburne, both life and works—all those verses too easily memorized occupying valuable space in my brain. “From too much love of living,/ From hope and fear set free … ” I don’t remember when those dearly loved words turned to derision in my ears. I guess I just dumped Swinburne without a backward thought. And Edna Millay? “You might as well be calling yours/ What never will be his,/ And one of us be happy,/ There’s few enough as is.” Did Anna Kitchel “kill” her for me with a jovial dart of satire? And James Branch Cabell? When did he go?

From his furnished room in Bank Street Johnsrud, too, was taking my reeducation in hand. Like Shaw, he was a born pedagogue. His own father had been a school principal back in northern Minnesota, who had lost his post through the chicanery of local officials and been reduced to selling encyclopedia sets and artificial limbs for a living. John was thinking of writing a play about him, to be called
University,
in which he made him the president of a state university instead of the principal of a high school. He spoke of his parents as “Iver” and “Molly,” and I did not think I would like them. Older people were attracted to John—Adrienne Morrison, the agent (mother of Joan Bennett); Jed Harris; Arthur Hopkins; Paul Reynolds, the editor of
Red Book …
But there was one older man that he took me to meet who was a surprising friend for John to have.

That was Albert Parker Fitch, D.D., pastor of the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church, a handsome white-haired product of Harvard College and Union Theological Seminary, celebrated as a fighting liberal and as a preacher. It seemed that he had taught religion at Carleton College when John was an undergraduate and they had somehow kept up a friendship, partly no doubt because Dr. Fitch loved the theatre. Maybe he had gone to see
The Channel Road
or John had got him tickets, and on Sunday evenings John was often invited to the rectory—I guess it should be “manse” for a Presbyterian—to read poetry aloud with Dr. Fitch and drink a few highballs. One Sunday when I was down from Vassar he took me along and again on other nights. So that when Dr. Fitch came up that winter to preach in chapel, I could boast of actually knowing him, I a “lowly” freshman.

“Known as a university preacher,” his obituary in the
Times
said, and I was puffed with pride in him when I went up to speak to him outside after chapel was over. He had shocked the Vassar congregation by SWEARING in the pulpit! Yes, he had thundered “God damn them!” in a wonderful voice; his sermon had been on the munitions-makers, “merchants of death.” I am not sure whether he was actually a pacifist; to denounce munitions-makers at that time you did not have to be. But he was some sort of radical; that was clear. I think Miss Kitchel was aware of him; he had been at Amherst, where Meiklejohn had been president. Certainly he knew Durant Drake, whose silly Philosophy course I was taking; “the last of a long line of maiden aunts,” Dr. Fitch recalled, and I must have quoted the
mot
to Miss Kitchel. It was a good description, and I have occasionally thought of it since. All the more eerie to find it, applied to quite a different Harvard figure, in a strange, slightly Jamesian novel he published in the twenties and that I have just now come upon.
None So Blind,
Macmillan, 1924, and all about Harvard—you would never guess a Presbyterian minister had written it.

In any case, Dr. Fitch’s sermon really upset a lot of people at Vassar. He was not asked to preach there again. I could not understand the attitude. If you were going to pronounce an
anathema sit,
the pulpit was the place to do it: he had only been calling on God to do His rightful job of damnation. But if you said that, few would recognize what an
anathema sit
was. Vassar had a capacity for ignorance that did not suit its style, and I myself was always shocked and startled to see it displayed.

Dr. Fitch well knew what an
anathema sit
was. He knew classics and had a passion for language. He and John shared a weakness for Robinson Jeffers; he loved to have John read
Roan Stallion
aloud.
Tamar,
too, one night, and
The Tower Beyond Tragedy,
and above all a short poem beginning “Shine, perishing republic” that was about the U.S. Both Dr. Fitch and Johnsrud were crazy about that poem (Jeffers’ best, said John), which evidently said something to them politically. Today that seems a bit odd, since to modern ears the poem, hymning the decline into the west of our setting republic, sounds slightly fascistic. Neither of them was that, but both may have been Nietzscheans, enamored of the notion of the superior individual—a far cry from Hitler, as it turned out.

“Divine bombast!” pronounced Dr. Fitch when John had finished reading. Or was that what he would say about Marlowe, his great favorite, whom he always read aloud to us himself? In the “manse” I thrilled to his voice intoning
Tamburlaine,
which I was hearing for the first time; “Come live with me and be my love” was all the Marlowe we had had at Annie Wright. He would let his voice linger over the name of the fierce Timur’s captive and only love, the Egyptian sultan’s daughter: “Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate,/ Fair is too foul an epithet for thee.” “Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,/ As sentinels to warn th’immortal souls,/ To entertain divine Zenocrate.” As though he wanted to make the rafters of the paneled clerical study ring with the praises of the sultan’s daughter. I do not remember a Mrs. Fitch’s being present. Perhaps she had died. The New York
Times
tells me that there was one, and apparently she was English.

I would listen raptly, too, to
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,
especially the end, when Faust is waiting for the devil to come and get him.
“O lente, lente currite noctis equi,”
down to the awful screams for mercy: “See see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,/ One drop would save my soul, half a drop, ah my Christ.”

The connection was obvious with
Don Giovanni,
which Johnsrud took me to that same winter at the Metropolitan, the first opera I ever saw. We were way up in the highest reaches of the gallery, in standing room, but I understood the plot and understood from the way John behaved that he attached importance to this occasion on my behalf, as an initiation. He had chosen the opera with care and not mainly for the singers; there was Rosa Ponselle, I think, and Beniamino Gigli as Don Ottavio, but I cannot even remember who sang Don Giovanni. John saw the piece as theatre certainly (which most operas aren’t) and maybe he was fond of the sulphurous ending, as in
Dr. Faustus:
the soul of a great sinner being carried off howling to hell. He was much taken with the devil; his broken nose and raised eyebrow gave him a devil’s face, which he treated as a saturnine mask. And possibly one thing he and Dr. Fitch had in common was a certain diabolism, which had come to John through Shaw (who had his own Luciferian set of eyebrows), while Dr. Fitch may have gone straight back to the source—Holy Writ—for an interest in damnation. In his novel,
None So Blind,
there is a clear representation of satanism in an epicurean graduate student (who is also given to secret drinking and reading pornography in the Latin original); he has an intensely Puritan mother and a very Bostonian sister (not badly drawn) who could stand in for Lilith. Flirtations with the prince of darkness are fairly common among religious men, though less so, I would say, among Calvinists; it is more a High Church Episcopalian proclivity. Without a mass, it is harder to have a black mass.

But Dr. Fitch, with his love of the pomp and circumstance of the language, was a strange kind of Presbyterian anyway. Enlarging on the
“O lente, lente currite noctis equi”
(“Run slowly, slowly, ye horses of the night”: Faustus, awaiting the hour of his certain damnation), he explained that the quotation was from Ovid’s
Amores;
there the licentious Roman poet was begging the night hours, figured as swift horses, to slow down for him while he made love to his Corinna or whoever it was. “Delicious blasphemy” or words to that effect was the minister’s appreciative verdict. But Marlowe was an atheist, and Dr. Fitch, I assume, was not.