Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (74 page)

Though I had been to dances organized by them at Webster Hall, the parade was my first experience of being, or looking like, a recruit. That spring and summer marked the high point of the slight attraction I felt toward Communism. I knew something about it because I had been writing book reviews for the liberal magazines
The Nation
and
The New Republic
, and Johnsrud had been acting at the Theater Union—a downtown group that was doing left-wing plays in Eva Le Gallienne’s old Civic Repertory Theatre (
Peace on Earth
,
Stevedore
,
Black Pit
,
The Sailors of Cattaro
, Gorky’s
The Mother;
he had been in all of them except the first two). With his Populist background, he was full of japes at the expense of the faithful among his fellow actors—Martin Wolfson, Abner Biberman, Howard Da Silva. Over his dressing-room door he had put up a sign saying “Through these portals pass some of the
most beautiful tractors in the Ukraine,” and on his mirror he wrote with a wax crayon “Lovestone is a Lovestoneite!” Very funny, I thought, and the comrades forgave him. As emerged a bit later, the two leading spirits of the Theater Union, Charles and Adelaide Walker, were turning into Trotskyites while John was acting there. In 1937 Adelaide’s mother, Mrs. Robert Latham George, would be thanked by the Trotsky Committee for putting up members in the house she took in Mexico City during the great John Dewey hearings, but no word of that imminent crossover reached the acting company, as far as I can tell. Or maybe it did. Was that the motive behind a short-lived actors’ strike—scandalous for a radical theatre, which depended on trade-union “benefits”—that Charlie Walker somehow settled?

It was at the Theater Union, at a Sunday-night benefit, that
Waiting for Lefty
was first performed. John and I were in the audience; we had an interest in how the Odets one-acter would go: a producer named Frank Merlin held an option on John’s play “Anti-Climax” and also on
Awake and Sing!
, then called “I Got the Blues,” which was Odets’s first play. Merlin was a fat, fortyish Irishman given to deriding “ca-PIT-alism” (possibly that was how they pronounced it in Ireland); his backer, whom we called “Mrs. Nightgown,” was the wife of a man named Motty Eitingon who traded in furs, with Russia. A six-month option cost $500, and neither Odets’s nor John’s was taken
up. “Merlin’s backer faded out on him,” I wrote my Vassar friend Frani Blough in Pittsburgh. John’s play never did get produced. Odets had better luck. He was an actor-member of the Group Theatre, which had been reluctant to do
Awake and Sing!
(Lee Strasberg did not like it), but the immense wild success of
Waiting for Lefty
downtown that night at the Theater Union—audience and actors yelling together “Strike!” “Strike!”—assured that the Group would take over
Awake and Sing!
, with Harold Clurman directing and Stella Adler as the Jewish mother (“Have a piece of fruit”)—to my mind, among the few good things Odets or the Group ever did. Well. When he and John were both under option to Merlin and would meet in his office above the Little Theatre, there was some edginess between them—John with his Standard English diction, stage presence, English-style tweeds and Odets, a Party-lining Jewish boy from Philadelphia, in an old turtleneck jersey. Possibly Odets, an aspiring actor but never at home on the stage, envied John’s aplomb while despising it. Or he was envious because Merlin was planning to do John’s play first. It was John who thought up “Odets, where is thy sting?”—he coined it one night at our dinner table while old Clara, who ran a funeral parlor in Harlem, served smothered chicken and mashed potatoes. Afterward the witticism passed into circulation and was in Winchell or Leonard Lyons, I think.

As for Merlin, I have never found anyone who
knew where he came from or where he went to.
Variety
has no obituary notice of him in its files; though, if still alive, he would be close to a hundred. Maybe, like his Tennysonian homonym, the old necromancer is shut up somewhere in an ancient oak tree. Thinking back (to “ca-PIT-alism”), I see him as a left-wing Socialist, or even, like O’Casey, a queer kind of unorthodox Communist. Unlike Merlin, his backer, Bess Eitingon, and her husband, Motty, the importer of Russian furs, resurfaced in my life several years later, in a house in Stamford, Connecticut, but that is for another chapter. Till now, I have never put two and two together and realized that John’s “Nightgowns” were they.

I had had my own class-war problems with
The New Republic
. The pipe-smoking Malcolm Cowley—“Bunny” Wilson’s successor as literary editor—though a faithful fellow traveler, was too taciturn usually to show his hand. After the first time, he almost never gave me a book to review, but let me come week after week to the house on West 21st Street that was
The New Republic
’s office then—quite a ride for me on the El. Wednesday was Cowley’s “day” for receiving reviewers; after a good hour spent eyeing each other in the reception room, one by one we mounted to Cowley’s office, where shelves of books for review were ranged behind the desk, and there again we waited while he wriggled his eyebrows and silently puffed at his pipe as though trying to make up his
mind. Sometimes, perhaps to break the monotony, he would pass me on to his young assistant, Robert Cantwell, who had a little office down the hall. Cantwell was a Communist, a real member, I guess, but unlike Cowley, he was nice. He was fair and slight, with a somewhat rabbity appearance, and he, too, came from the Pacific Northwest, which gave us something to talk about. “Cantwell tells me the story of his life,” I wrote to Frani in December 1933. In 1931 he had published a novel,
Laugh and Lie Down
, and in 1934 he published a second,
The Land of Plenty
. Both were about Puget Sound and were described to me later by a Marxist critic as “Jamesian”—he counted as the only proletarian novelist with a literary style. I had not read him then; nor had I read Cowley’s
Blue Juniata
or
Exile’s Return
(on a theme dear to Helen Lockwood’s Contemporary Press course), but with Cantwell that did not matter. After
The New Republic
, he went to work for
Time
and moved to the right, like Whittaker Chambers, who may well have been his friend. The other day someone wrote me that Lillian Hellman tried to stage a walkout from Kenneth Fearing’s funeral service because Cantwell was one of the speakers. Can you imagine? Yes. Now he is dead himself. I should have liked to thank him for his interesting book
The Hidden Northwest
, which led me to Washington Irving’s
Astoria
—a happy discovery. I learn from my 1978–79
Who’s Who
(he was still living then) that he was named Robert Emmett Cantwell. A misnomer, typically
Northwestern, for Robert Emmet, the Irish patriot? A spelling error by
Who’s Who
? Or just no connection?

Cowley had another cohort, very different, by the name of Otis Ferguson, a real proletarian, who had been a sailor in the merchant marine. “Oat” was not in the book department; he wrote movie reviews. But he carried great weight with Cowley, though he may not have been a Marxist—he was more of a free-ranging literary bully without organizational ties. I had a queer time with him one evening when John and I went to look him up at his place on Cornelia Street, the deepest in the Village I had yet been. At our ring he came downstairs, but instead of asking us up to his place, he led us out to a bar for a drink, which seemed unfriendly, after he had given me his address and told me to drop by. I am not sure whether it was John or me who made him edgy, or the pair of us—
notre couple
, as the French say. Perhaps he and John argued about films—John had worked in Hollywood, after all. Or could it have simply been that we had come down from Beekman Place? Anyway, whatever happened that evening and whatever caused it cannot have been the reason for my sudden fall from favor at
The New Republic
. No.

It was a book:
I Went to Pit College
, by Lauren Gilfillan, a Smith girl who had spent a year working in a coal mine—one of the years when I had been at Vassar. Cowley must have thought that here at last was a book I was qualified to review, by having had
the contrary experience. The book was causing a stir, and Cowley, as he handed it over to me, benignly, let me understand that he was
giving me my chance
. I sensed a reservation on his part, as though he were cautioning me not to let the book down. He was allowing me plenty of space, to do a serious review, not another three-hundred-word bit. And with my name, I dared hope, on the cover. I got the message: I was supposed to like the book. For the first time, and the last, I wrote to order. It would have been nice if I could have warmed to the task. But the best I could do was to try to see what people like Cowley saw in the book. With the result, of course, that I wrote a lifeless review, full of simulated praise. In short, a cowardly review. Rereading it now, for the first time in more than fifty years, I am amazed at how convincing I sound. In my last sentence I speak of a “terrific reality.”

But then came the blow. Cowley had second thoughts about the book. Whether the Party line had changed on it or whether for some other reason, he now decided that it was overrated. I cannot remember whether he tried to get me to rewrite my review. I think he did, but, if so, he was unsatisfied. In any case, he printed my laudatory piece and followed it with
a correction
. The correction was signed only with initials: O.C.F. Oat, of course. In fact, it must have been he who changed Cowley’s mind. As a blue-collar reader, he had looked over the Smith girl’s book—or read my review of it—and responded with disgust. Which he
expressed to Cowley. And, “Write that,” said Cowley. Whereupon Oat did. A three-hundred-word snarl; merited or unmerited—who knows? I cannot really blame Oat for the effect of those jeers on my feelings. Cowley would hardly have told him that he had virtually
ordered
a favorable review.

But had he? Trying to be fair to him, I ask myself now whether I could have misread the signals: Could he have been telling me to pan the book? I do not think so. But either way the lack of openness was wrong. And it was a mean trick to play on a beginner; when my review came out, in May 1934, I was not yet twenty-two. I agree that a lot of the fault was mine: I should have written my real opinion, regardless of what he wanted. But abuse of power is worse than girlish weakness, and Cowley was a great abuser of power, as he proved over and over in his long “affair” with Stalinism; for this, see, in
Letters on Literature and Politics
by Edmund Wilson, edited by Elena Wilson, under “Cowley.” But it cannot have been all Stalinism; he must have taken a personal dislike to me. I leave it to the reader to decide between us.

I did not write for
The New Republic
again (nor was I asked to) till six years had passed; Cowley was gone, and Wilson had returned temporarily to his old post as book editor. Meanwhile, I reviewed for
The Nation
, where kindly Joe Krutch was book editor, assisted by Margaret Marshall. For the
Herald Tribune
’s weekly “Books,” Irita Van Doren, wife of Carl, told me, in
her Southern voice, “We on this paper believe that there’s somethin’ good in evvra book that should be brought to the attention of evvra reader.” No hope there for me, then, and the
Times
Sunday book review (edited by J. Donald Adams) would never let me past the secretary—their usual policy toward untried reviewers. To make some money while John was “resting,” as actors say, between jobs with a series of flops and writing plays his agent could not sell, I decided to try to write a detective story, since I read so many of them. It was to be called “Rogue’s Gallery,” and the victim was to be based on Mannie Rousuck, but I got so interested in describing our old gallery in the French Building, with the dogs and Mannie and types like Nick Aquavella (later of the Aquavella Gallery), that I had reached the fourth chapter without managing to produce a corpse. It was a sign to me to give up.

Since October 1, 1933, John and I had been living in a one-room apartment at 2 Beekman Place, a new building opposite 1 Beekman Place, where Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller lived. Most months we could not pay the rent. It was a pretty apartment, painted apricot with white trim; it had casement windows and Venetian blinds (a new thing then), a kitchen with a good stove, a “breakfast alcove,” and a dressing-room with bath, besides a little front hall and the main room. Good closet space. Nice elevator boys and a doorman. Fortunately, the man at Albert B. Ashforth, the building agent, had faith in John, and,
fortunately also, the utilities were included in the rather high rent. The telephone company, being a “soulless corporation,” unlike dear Albert B. Ashforth, kept threatening to shut the phone off, but gas and electricity would keep on being supplied to us unless and until we were evicted.

If we
were
evicted and the furniture put out on the street (which did not happen in good neighborhoods anyway), it would not be our own. We were living with Miss Sandison’s sister’s furniture, having not a stick to our name except a handsome card table with a cherrywood frame and legs and a blue suede top, which someone (Miss Sandison, I think it was) had given us for a wedding present. When we moved into Beekman Place, the Howlands (Lois Sandison, who taught Latin at Chapin) let us have their Hepplewhite-style chairs and the springs and mattresses of their twin beds, which we had mounted on pegs that we painted bright red and which we set up in the shape of an L, with the heads together—you couldn’t have beds that looked like bedroom beds in a living-room, as our one-room was supposed to be. Instead of spreads, we had covers made of dark-brown sateen (Nathalie Swan’s idea, or was it Margaret Miller’s?), and at the joint of the L, where our two heads converged, we put a small square carved oak table, Lois Sandison Howland’s, too, with a white Chinese crackle table lamp that we had found at Macy’s.