Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (70 page)

Frani Blough

Cushing dining hall

Uncle’s Been Dreaming
, adapted from Dostoevsky, Hall Play, 1932. Elizabeth Bishop is the little man in black, in front of the fireplace; Mary, standing, is in profile at right

Elizabeth Bishop, from 1933 yearbook photo of Vassar
Miscellany News
staff

Main Hall with “soap palace” and South Tower in background

Vassar yearbook photo

With “Mannie” Rousuck of the Carleton Galleries in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, 1950

Wedding photo, June 21, 1933. Harold Cooper Johnsrud and Mary, at the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Sunde

Brief Biographical Glossary
of Lesser-Known Figures

by Carol Brightman

GEORGE ANTHEIL
(1900-1959): American pianist and composer. His
Zingareska
for orchestra, one of the first symphonic works to incorporate jazz, was performed in Berlin in 1921. When he moved to Paris in 1923, he was taken up by Joyce, Yeats, Satie, Picasso, and Pound (who wrote a book about him). In November 1923, two violin sonatas commissioned by Pound—who performed the part for tenor and bass drums at the end of the second—had their premiere. In 1924 Antheil began working with Léger and the film maker Dudley Murphy on
Ballet Méchanique,
which was scored for sixteen player pianos controlled from a switchboard, but the synchronization with the abstract film proved impossible, and they became autonomous works.
Ballet Méchanique
was performed in Paris in 1925 with eight pianos, one player piano, four bass drums, and a siren; in 1927 it was done at Carnegie Hall.

He became musical director for the Berlin Stadttheater in 1928. In May 1930 his first opera,
Transatlantic,
was performed at Frankfurt am Main. The libretto centered on an American presidential campaign and presented a wild caricature of life in the United States. During these years he also wrote ballet scores for George Balanchine and Martha Graham. He returned to the United States in 1933 and became music director for Eastern Paramount Studios. In Hollywood, starting in 1936, he composed incidental music for major films. He also did a syndicated lonely-hearts column, acted as a war-analyst for press and radio, and under a pseudonym published several detective stories inspired by a fascination with “glandular criminology.”

SARAH HENRY ATHERTON
(1889-1975): child-welfare activist and novelist—
Blow Whistles, Blow!
(1930; as a play, 1938),
Brass Eagles
(1935),
Mark’s Own
(1941). A Bryn Mawr graduate, 1913, she made a study of female adolescence for the National Consumers League, investigated child-labor conditions for the Department of Labor, and in 1934 supervised the WPA’s Federal Art Project in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

ALAN BARTH
(1906-1979): editorial writer for the Washington
Post
and author. As Eric Pace wrote in an obituary in the
New York Times:
“Mr. Barth advanced his liberal political views tirelessly over four decades in books and speeches … In the strongly partisan atmosphere of the McCarthy era, his book, ‘The Loyalty of Free Men,’ an indictment of what he called ‘the cult of loyalty,’ was removed from the public shelves of United States Government-run libraries abroad on orders from Washington. But Mr. Barth went on to write other outspoken books, including ‘Government by Investigation,’ which decried abuse of the power of legislative bodies to investigate … In his 1961 book, ‘The Price of Liberty,’ Mr. Barth contended that neurotic anxiety about crime was helping breed a police-state frame of mind in the United States; an exaggerated concern for order, he said, was endangering liberty.” A graduate of Yale, Barth worked in Washington for the McClure Newspaper Syndicate from 1938 to 1941; then at the Treasury and the Office of War Information. In 1943 he began thirty years as a Washington
Post
editorial writer. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1948-49 and won awards for distinguished writing and for his service to journalism.

AL BEIN
(1902-1990): American playwright and novelist born in Rumania. One of his earliest works,
Little Ol’ Boy
(1933, adapted from his novel,
Road Out of Hell
),
dealt with a juvenile delinquent, played by Burgess Meredith; it marked Joseph Losey’s debut as a director.
Let Freedom Ring
(1935) was based on Grace Lumpkin’s novel
To Make My Bread. Heavenly Express
(1940) starred John Garfield as the Overland Kid who leads an army of hoboes (one played by Burl Ives) to whiskey heaven. In 1943 Bein wrote, directed, and produced
Land of Fame,
in which Greek guerrillas battle Nazis.

MAURICE BROWNE
(1881-1955): founder of the Little Theatre movement in the United States, and producer of the great theatrical success
Journey’s End.
Before the First World War he married the young actress Ellen Van Volkenburgh and migrated to the United States. In 1912 they started the Chicago Little Theatre, parent to all the others. In 1918 Browne organized a repertory company that presented
Medea, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Candide,
and
Dr. Faust.

Then in 1928 Browne found himself penniless in San Francisco and worked his way back to England, where he became a success as an actor in the West End; he played Adolf in Strindberg’s
The Creditors.
He produced
Othello,
with Paul Robeson, Peggy Ashcroft, and himself as Iago. Then he met the young insurance agent R. C. Sheriff, whose first play,
Journey’s End,
earned its producer a fortune. In the 1940’s Browne lost his fortune on less-favored productions, including a John Gielgud
Hamlet
and the blockbuster
Wings Over Europe
(1942), which starred Van Volkenburgh, and nearly bankrupted him. In 1949 he returned to California to become artist-in-residence at the University of California; there he wrote a peculiar autobiography,
Too Late to Lament,
and married another woman. The marriage failed, and he went back once more to England. He and Van Volkenburgh were associated with the Elmhirsts and Dartington Hall.