Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (76 page)

In the apartment they shared on Lexington Avenue, the guests were all intellectuals, of a kind unfamiliar to me. I could hardly understand them as they ranted and shouted at each other. What I was witnessing was the breakup of the Party’s virtual monopoly on the thought of the left. Among the writers who had been converted to Marxism by the
Depression, Farrell was one of the first to free himself. The thing that was happening in that room, around the drinks table, was important and eventful. An orthodoxy was cracking, like ice floes on the Volga. But I was not in a position to grasp this, being still, so to speak, pre-Stalinist in my politics, while the intellectuals I heard debating were on the verge of post-Stalinism—a dangerous slope. Out of the shouting and the general blur, only two figures emerge: Rahv and Phillips. Farrell made a point of introducing them, and I knew who they were—the editors of
Partisan Review
. As the popular song said, my future just passed.

It was odd, actually, that I knew of the magazine; it must have had a very small circulation. But a couple who ran a stationery store on First Avenue, around the corner from our apartment, had recommended it to me, knowing that I wrote for
The Nation
. They were Party members, surely—of the type of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though the wife was much prettier than Ethel. And
Partisan Review
was a Party publication, the organ of the local John Reed Club. But I had no inkling of that then; skill in recognizing Communists came to me much later. When the pair of stationers showed me an early issue of the magazine, the husband running from behind the counter to fetch it, the wife proudly watching as I turned the pages, I found that it was over my head. It was devoted to an onslaught on the American Humanists—Stuart Sherman and Paul Elmer More—with a few rancorous sideswipes at the
Southern Agrarians—Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, the group called the Fugitives. I do not remember any fiction or poetry, only long, densely written articles in a language that might as well have been Russian. I was distantly familiar with the Humanists, having read about them in the
Bookman
, but these Agrarians were a mystery to me, and
PR
’s crushing brief against them left me bewildered. As for the dreary Humanists, I was surprised that they needed so much attacking. In fact, Rahv and Phillips and their colleagues were beating a dead horse there.

Nevertheless, to please the stationers, with whom we were friendly, I kept buying the magazine and trying my best to read it. There is a sad little sequel to my introduction to
PR
. It ceased publication when the Party cut off funds from the John Reed Clubs (it was announced that they would be replaced by an American Writers’ Congress); this may have already happened when I met the editors at Farrell’s. And when
Partisan Review
resumed, still edited by Rahv and Phillips but without Jack Conroy
et al.
on the masthead, it had changed color. Dwight and Fred Dupee and I and George L. K. Morris, our backer, were on the new editorial board, and
PR
was now anti-Stalinist. Some time later, maybe when my first book was published, out of the blue came a shrill letter, many times forwarded, from the Mitchell Stationers accusing me of running out on a bill John and I owed them. I cannot remember what I did about it, if anything.

In our Beekman Place apartment, besides
PR
, I was trying to read
Ulysses
. John, in the breakfast nook, was typing his play “University” (about his father and never produced), and I was writing book reviews. Every year I started
Ulysses
, but I could not get beyond the first chapter—“stately, plump Buck Mulligan”—page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us:
Ulysses
gradually—but with an effect of suddenness—became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove. During the modernist crisis this was happening in all the arts: imitators and borrowers taught the “reading” of an artist at first thought to be beyond the public power of comprehension. In the visual arts, techniques of mass reproduction—imitation on a wide scale—had the same function. Thanks to reproduction, the public got used to faces with two noses or an eye in the middle of the forehead, just as a bit earlier the “funny” colors of the Fauves stopped looking funny except to a few.

Meeting the challenge of modernism, John and I went downtown to the New School for Social Research to hear Gertrude Stein; while we were there we looked at the Orozco frescoes and compared them to Rivera. Gertrude Stein’s Indian-like face and body commanded our respect, and what she said was not very difficult.
I was shocked to hear Louis Kronenberger, who wrote for
The Nation
, say angrily that she was a charlatan. “Kronenberger is a fop,” declared Farrell, without pronouncing on Gertrude Stein.

John and I read Malraux’s
Man’s Fate
, in English, without noticing that it had a Trotskyite slant on the Chinese revolution. We read Céline (I never liked him), and one Sunday afternoon the two of us read
The Communist Manifesto
aloud—I thought it was very well written. On another Sunday we went to a debate on Freud and/or Marx—surely a Communist affair. More hazily I remember another debate, on the execution of the “White Guards” in Leningrad in 1935; this may have been a Socialist initiative, for the discussion was rancorous. Actually, that mass execution was a foreshadowing of the first Moscow trials in the summer of 1936, which ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev.

The eternal fellow traveler Corliss Lamont, son of a J. P. Morgan partner, persistently tried to seduce me when John was working or away. This pawky freckled swain sought to suborn me by invitations to dance at the new Rainbow Room, at Ben Marden’s Riviera on the Palisades, and at a place in the West 50s that featured a naked girl in a bottle. But, as we danced, while I reminded him that I was married, he tried to gain his end by reasoned argument: “You wouldn’t want to have just one picture, would you?” Fifty years later, he was taking my friend Elizabeth Hardwick to
the Rainbow Room, still up to his old tricks. “Transitory phenomena,” he said of the Moscow trials.

Besides going to the Savoy Ballroom on Friday nights, John and I had black friends, who used to come to our apartment, nervously ushered by us past the elevator boys: Nella Larsen, the novelist (
Passing
), Dorothy Peterson, the actress (she played in the Negro
Macbeth
), and her brother, who was a doctor. They were high up in the black bourgeoisie. Nella Larsen told stories that always contained the sentence “And there I was, in the fullest of full evening dress.” She lived downtown, near Irving Place. The Petersons had a house in Brooklyn—we liked them, not simply because they were black, and were proud of the friendship. We also liked Governor Floyd Olson, Farmer-Labor, of Minnesota; Selden had taken us to a nightclub with him. Then he died rather young of cancer of the stomach. Probably I would have approved of his working with the Communists in his home state in 1936. In Washington, where we went with a play of John’s, we saw Congressman Tom Amlie, of Wisconsin, the secretary of the bloc of Progressives in the House; he got us visitors’ passes to the House and had drinks with us in our hotel room, where he told us that his committees were “Patents, Coins, and Public Buildings—that’s bottoms in committees.” A sad, nice man, who, unlike Olson, could not agree to working with Communist factions.

For
The Nation
, I was reviewing a number of
biographies, which taught me some history—I had not taken any at Vassar. From Hilaire Belloc’s life of Charles I, I learned that inflation, which entailed a shrinking of the royal revenues in terms of buying power, was the cause of the martyred king’s fall. Of all the books I reviewed I was most enthusiastic about
I, Claudius
; the sequel,
Claudius the God
, I liked somewhat less. Another enthusiasm was Vincent Sheean’s
Personal History
, which gave me my line on Borodin and the Communist failure in China. I was greatly excited by a historical novel,
Summer Will Show
, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which ended with the heroine sitting down in revolutionary Paris to read
The Communist Manifesto
. “Book Bites Mary,” Joe Krutch quipped in a telegram on receipt of my copy from Reno. Writing that review was the closest I came to a conversion to Communism (as indeed may have been the case of the author, for whom the book seems to have been a mutant in a career whose norm was one of wild, apolitical fancifulness—
Lolly Willowes
,
Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
).

As is clear from Krutch’s telegram, the Warner book reversed my ordinary practice with fiction. Usually I was rough. Steinbeck’s
In Dubious Battle
, Stark Young’s
So Red the Rose
,
Marching, Marching
by Clara Weatherwax,
February Hill
by Victoria Lincoln—I laid about me right and left. My standards were high—higher for fiction than for biography, which could justify itself by instructiveness—as my still Latinate style seemed to attest, nay, to vaunt. I am embarrassed to
recall (textually) a concluding sentence that spoke of the lack, in current fiction, “of bitter aloes and Attic salt.” Oh, dear. At least I was forthright and fearless, and I was gaining a certain renown for it; I think I can say that I was truly hated by a cosy columnist in
Herald Tribune Books
who signed herself “IMP” and doted on the books I attacked.

It was this reputation, evidently, that led Charles Angoff of
The American Mercury
, a disciple of Mencken, to invite me to lunch one day. It was a business lunch; he was working as a consultant to liven up
The Nation
, and he had an idea for me: to take on the entire critical establishment in a five- or six-part series, to be called “Our Critics.” Would I want to try it? Obviously I would. The state of reviewing in the United States was a scandal, far worse than today. Book-review pages, daily and Sunday, and periodicals like
The Saturday Review of Literature
(edited then by Henry Seidel Canby) were open adjuncts of the best-seller lists, book clubs, and advertisements of the publishing industry. Among the dailies and big weeklies, the one exception was the young John Chamberlain, in the daily
New York Times
, but he rarely reviewed fiction, and I doubt that he reviewed every day. Moreover, his tenure was brief.

Margaret Marshall, Joe Krutch’s assistant, had come to lunch, too. We talked excitedly for a couple of hours and before we separated it was agreed that I would take on the job. Later, there were second thoughts. Freda Kirchwey, who was running the paper
under Villard, decided that I was too young to be entrusted with a series of such importance; knowing what I know of her, I suppose she was afraid of me, that is, of what I might write. So a compromise was worked out: Margaret Marshall would be assigned to work on the articles with me. We would divide the research equally; then she would write half the articles, and I would write half. For instance, she would do
The New York Times Book Review
, under J. Donald Adams, while I would do
New Masses
, under Granville Hicks. There would be five articles; the first, or introductory one, we would write together. For all five articles, both our names would be on the cover.

We had fun in the New York Public Library reading-room, doing our research in back issues of magazines and newspapers and using lined cards to copy out quotations, some of them unbelievable. Peggy Marshall came from a Mormon family in Utah or Montana; she was about ten years older than I, around thirty-three, and was divorced from her husband; they had one little girl, whose custody they shared. Peggy, I soon discovered, did not have much energy; she was having an affair with a labor writer named Ben Stolberg, and both of them would lie on a sofa or daybed in her living-room, too tired to do anything, apparently too tired to go to bed and make love. Nor can I remember her ever cooking a meal.

Neither was very attractive; she was blond, grayish-eyed, and dumpy, with a sharp turned-up nose,
and Stolberg was blond, blue-eyed, and fat and talked, snorting, through his nose, with a German accent. I don’t know what view Stolberg took of himself, but Peggy, to my horror, saw herself as seductive. Once, when we were talking of Ben and whether he wanted to marry her, I saw her look in the mirror with a little smile and toss of her head; “Of course I know I’m kinda pretty,” she said.

Not long after this, on a weekend when we were starting to do the first piece, we decided to work on it in the
Nation
office, dividing it in two. I typed my part and waited for her to do hers, so that we could turn our copy in and leave. But she could not get it written; on the sheet of paper she finally showed me, there were a few half-finished sentences. She was giggling and making a sort of whimpering sound. This was the first writer’s block I had witnessed, if that is what it was. At length I took her notes and the sheet of paper from her and sat down and wrote what I thought she wanted to say. She thanked me a bit weepily, and I assured her it was O.K. I guessed that she was having a nervous breakdown, from the tension of the divorce, which was quite recent, and living with Judy, the little girl. Stolberg was probably no help.

That was how it was, for five weeks, except that soon she stopped trying and just let me write the pieces, using her notes and mine. She did manage to do half of one—the one on
The New York Times Book Review
—and made no further effort, though we talked
about what would be in the articles and perhaps she suggested small changes of wording. I told Johnsrud of course but nobody else. When the pieces started coming out, the only other person to know that Peggy was not really the co-author was Freda Kirchwey. Peggy had had to tell her something to account for the fact that she was asking for more money for me, but I never knew what Freda knew exactly. They did pay me more money, and after the first week our names, at Peggy’s prompting, were reversed on the cover and in the headings: my name now came first.