Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (66 page)

Byron and Kay were an aggravation, in every sense of the word. Something in the relation between them made them feel and act superior, above all to me. She in particular behaved with an incredible tactlessness; Byron was just rather boorish in a young man’s way. They kept dropping in, on me alone or on the two of us together, frankly to size up how things were going between us on that day or night. Kay was positive that I was losing him, in fact had already lost him. It was all over, she told me repeatedly in her loud, authoritative voice. “Yeah,” confirmed Byron, from better knowledge of his brother. They both found food for derision in my claim that we were engaged. “You’re just another feather in the Johnsrud cap,” Kay assured me; that phrase, dinned into my ears throughout a month, is “memorable” to me still.

I do not know whether or not John was aware of their prophecies. As long as either of them was around, I did not let my misery be visible. My pride was at stake. Even to myself, I was not going to admit that John was on the verge of “throwing me over,” as we said then. Yet when I went back to Vassar in September to take my place in the South Tower, I really did think, numbly, that it was over with John. And with Kay living in the room next to mine, it seemed likely that the other group members had heard that he was “ditching” me, that I was just another feather, and so on. My senior year, with the prospect at the end of it of returning to Seattle with my tail between my legs, ought to have been grim. Yet it was not, even at the beginning, when John went off to Hollywood. Senior year was a peculiar mixture; several streams of experience ran through it, independently and as though oblivious of each other, like in one of those “histo-maps,” colored pink, yellow, pale blue, green, showing the rise and fall of cultures. There was John, there was the group in the Tower, there was Miss Sandison’s Renaissance seminar—we did
The Faerie Queene
that year. There was the
Con Spirito
stream, with Frani and Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser and the Clark sisters; there was the placid stream of Miss Peebles’ Contemporary Prose Fiction, which led to Sacco and Vanzetti and thence to
The New Republic.

There were other streams that felt like torrents but that eventually dried up: Waterbury and Dick Goss’s cousin, Harry Wayne; my paper for Miss Beckwith on Ge, the Earth Mother; dictatorial Mlle. Monnier, whom I foiled. It is hard to describe these individual trains of experience while keeping to a linear narrative, and it must have been hard, also, to live them side by side, all at the same time. A few chapters back, of my senior year at the Seminary, I said that it was a jungle of incompatibles. That was even more applicable to my senior year at Vassar. Perhaps senior year is when everything comes together before, once again, separating.

In the fall, John was hired as a writer by MGM at a salary of $200 a week. Out there he lived in a house in Laurel Canyon and did not come back till May of the following year. In time to see me play Leontes in
The Winter’s Tale
in the Outdoor Theatre and tell me I could never be an actress. I have told how the year before he had seen me play Arcite, also in the Outdoor Theatre, in a modern-language version of Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale
and how the audience had roared when I, a supposed corpse struck down by a dragon, reached out a hand as I lay on the floodlit grass, and pulled the skirt of my costume down. Yet it was not that girlish performance that decided John on my unfitness for the stage. No, it was my Leontes the next spring: “Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one!/ Go play, boy, play; thy mother plays/ And I play too, but so disgraced a part whose issue/ Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour/ Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play.” In the tryout I had read brilliantly (often true of bad actors, I hear) but all through rehearsals I had been getting worse and worse and did not know what to do about it.

John told me that I would never make an actress. Miss Kitchel had told me not long before that my gift was for criticism, not for imaginative writing. Perhaps they were both right. At any rate I accepted their judgment. Nor did my prospects for marriage look good. That awful month in New York, with Kay and Byron Johnsrud acting as chorus, had somehow put an end to whatever there had been between John and me. From Hollywood he wrote to me often and with a peculiar energy—very strange repellent letters that were about screen writers and sex, studio executives and sex, stars and sex, nothing but that. I knew some of the names or came to know them—Thalberg, Harry Cohn, Paul Bern—but all those men sounded like characters in Krafft-Ebing (“He was first immoral with a hen at the age of eight”), whose
Psychopathia Sexualis,
at John’s recommendation, I had just bought. John did not say that he took part in the incessant saturnalia he described, but he did not say that he didn’t. I was left to draw my own conclusions. There was no word of love in those letters, not even the S.L.O.C.Y.K., which had become his mechanical sign-off. And they were too shocking to show to anybody—certainly not the group—so that the pain of reading them could be lightened by submitting them to someone else’s judgment.

Yet in the end it let up. I had passed the limit of suffering, I concluded: whatever he did, I could not feel it any more. In fact, as I decided afterwards, he had killed my love for him. And it struck me that I had made a discovery: it really could happen that a person you had loved could exhaust your capacity for suffering. That cannot be true for everybody, I now see—not for masochists, surely. But I think it is still true for me. In any case, that spring, when he wrote me that he was coming back east (Metro was letting him go), I did not know what to feel.

Neither then nor later did he ever let me know what his own feelings had been during that winter. Presumably he was still attached to me despite those letters. Because, on his way back from California, he stopped in Seattle and stayed with my grandparents. According to his account, he made a conquest of them. My grandfather came to his room in the mornings with a little shot glass of bourbon—surely a friendly indicator—and he must have taken him to the Rainier Club for drinks and a rubber or two of bridge. I do not know what my grandmother served him at home—no doubt Olympia oysters, for one thing—but it sounded to me as if they were treating him as a future son-in-law, or, rather, grandson-in-law. For my critical grandmother, his bald dome and broken nose could not have been a great shock, since after all she had seen him more than once on the stage. On his side, certainly, his
going
to Seattle represented a decision about me.

What a pity, then, that just at that juncture, I had started on a little love affair of my own, with a young man a year or so out of Yale who lived with his mother, Flora, in the Westbury Hotel and was trying to write the novel that so many just out of Yale, Williams, Harvard were trying to write—it was a purely male drive. A friend of John’s, Lois Brown, took me to a Sunday-afternoon cocktail at Alan’s. Everyone was getting fried, as he called it. He shook Bacardis in a silver shaker; there were little things to eat on trays; he had friends there like Winsor French and George Antheil and Jerome Zerbe, the fashion photographer, who while at Yale had received in his rooms in an evening gown; Alan himself was very charming, with dark-brown witty eyes and a slight lisp; when the others started leaving, he asked me to stay.

That was during Easter vacation, while John was still in California, and it was over almost before it began. But if Alan had wished to continue it, I would have been responsive. Instead, we became friends, and the friendship, with some hiatuses, lasted a lifetime. He did not write “the” novel and eventually turned into a newspaperman, getting his start on a paper in Beaumont, Texas. Then, as Alan Barth (his mother’s name; his own, Lauchheimer was too hard to spell), he went to work for the Washington
Post,
where for years he was chief editorial writer, specializing in constitutional questions. Despite the rather fast and worldly friends he had made at Yale, there had always been a civic streak in Alan; in his first years in New York, living with Flora at the Westbury and writing unsalable fiction, he got himself taken on as a poll-watcher for the Democratic Party in the silk-stocking district.

After our affair—of a very few days, I think—I had gone back to Vassar beglamoured by Alan’s familiarity with night clubs and with entertainers like the black pianist Jimmy Daniels, and John had come back East from California. Maybe this was when he lived at the Wellington Hotel, on Seventh Avenue; he had moved out of the Bank Street place that he shared with his friend Phil Huget. He got onto some new friends, very quickly, as always happened with him: two artists, Harry Sternberg, a Communist, who painted his portrait, making him look like Lenin, and Dick Kingsbury, a commercial artist, very good-looking, very unhappy, and a drinker, whose social wife from Rahway, New Jersey, had left him because of that last. Dick had a studio on 8th Street, where he drew men’s clothing ads, but he also spent time in Sullivan County, on the Delaware, in a place called Callicoon, where he invited John to come and stay. The house was what in Maine they call a “camp.” There were other people living there, too, an old man called George and a young man called Ralph, possibly his grandson; the two of them drank and quarreled, arguing about who had more true Scottish blood in his veins (“Yer nae a MacGregor,” the boy would yell, sobbing, at the ossified old man). In Callicoon it was easy to get applejack—I did not like the taste—and when John came up to college, he brought a bottle to Miss Sandison and Miss Kitchel, from which we had drinks on their porch in the late spring night. This may have been the time when he saw me play Leontes and pronounced his verdict (he was right, by the way).

It was not clear to anyone whether John and I were going to be married or not. This was partly because John in his histrionic style could not accept the thought of being predictable. But, as I said, my own feelings had changed, mainly because of what John had put me through, overestimating my capacity for suffering. Yet I was slow to recognize what had happened; at first, I think, I was barely aware of my lack of joy in having him back—smiling ironically, quirking his eyebrows, bowing, being courtly. What must have made it harder to “sort my feelings out” was that his return was a great triumph for me, to put in the eye of the egregious Kay McLean (whom I had come to positively hate) and all other doubters and skeptics. Just to have him on campus was to show them.

Around that time I “made” Phi Beta Kappa. One morning, in the tower, I heard my name called from below, and, looking down from my window, I saw the whole group making signs to me and clapping; they had my cap and gown, which they had brought down when they found the announcement in my mailbox, so that I could don them and go to the chapel for the ceremony. John had been Phi Bete at Carleton and as soon as he heard, he offered to give me his key, so that by not sending for mine I could save the six dollars. This struck us as clever, I am afraid, like a highbrow equivalent of being “pinned” by your man’s fraternity pin—the little gold key in my eyes was a convention-defying kind of engagement ring. An alternative we considered was that I should order mine and wear the pair as earrings. Having rejected that piece of silliness, I have never had a Phi Beta Kappa key of my own.

Clearly I still considered myself engaged to him. I am not sure whether he had noticed a cooling in me—at Vassar, when he came up, or when I went to Callicoon one weekend to see him. As a performer, he was bound to be sensitive to audience-reaction, and it is conceivable that he noticed a change in me before I noticed it myself. That would explain his attempted suicide, if it
was
an attempted suicide rather than a case of O.U.I.

What happened was this: late one night he drove his car off the road and over a bank heading toward the Delaware River. Instead of going into the stream, the car hit a tree and turned over. All the way: Johnsrud was able to let himself out, climb up to the road, and walk jauntily home. The car—a second-hand Hupmobile that he had driven back from California—was undamaged except for some holes in the ceiling upholstery where acid from the battery had dripped. There were also some small holes in John’s hat.

He told me that he had been trying to kill himself, but he told Dick Kingsbury that he had been operating under the influence and missed a turn. I don’t know what he told the police—the tow truck that pulled the car out must have reported the accident. On the whole, I believed the suicide version and was much impressed. If there was a single factor that decided me to go on and marry him, it was probably that. Obviously I would have wanted to keep him from trying it again, but that was not the whole reason. No, it was that I admired him for what he had done, and the picture of those little acid-holes in the ceiling upholstery and in his snap-brim hat kept that admiration vivid.

I did not imagine that he had sought to kill himself on my account—I had too much sense. I felt that he had done it from an immense and wild misery, which I honored, and if drinking had played a part in it, that fitted, for he drank to drown his sorrows, being a Norwegian and Irish, too. Though I might be tired of John, it did not affect the awe in which I stood of him. I firmly believed that he was a genius, that he was going to win, first the Pulitzer and then the Nobel prize, that he had a more than Shavian wit, and finally, to cap it all, I now discovered that he was
colossally
unhappy. Byronism, Miss Kitchel could have told me, but Byron was always my favorite among the Romantics. As our class prepared for graduation, I was wearing his key on a chain.

In the meantime, there was
Con Spirito.
This was the rebel magazine that Frani, Bishop, and I, working now with some others, finally started in December of senior year. The title was a joke on the idea of a conspiracy, for our magazine was anonymous. All our contributions were unsigned; we did not know ourselves, except by guessing, who had written what. The point was to protest against the tame
Vassar Review,
which we thought was run by a clique too well acquainted with each other and too fearful of disturbance from the “outside.”