Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (82 page)

Meanwhile, the Moscow trials continued; the Spanish Republic was tottering, thanks to non-intervention, though we could still claim some victories. The second Moscow trial—Radek and Pyatakov—had taken place in January; again confessions were followed by executions as the revolution devoured its own children. In June, the great civil war hero Marshal Tukhachevsky and several lesser Red Army generals were secretly tried and executed as Hitler agents; this coincided with the second meeting of the Writers’ Congress—“pimples on the smiling face of the Soviet Union.” But a real and terrible coincidence, which, as they say, was “no coincidence,” was with the disappearance and probable execution of Andrés Nin in Spain; as is now recognized, the two occurrences were related.

A thrill of horror had shot through our group when we heard what had happened,
unbelievably
, to Tukhachevsky. Emotionally, we did not mind so much the fates of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Radek and Pyatakov, and (soon to come) Bukharin—Old Bolsheviks,
all of them,
civilians
, brain workers like ourselves, not heroes many times decorated, of the Red Army. Our feelings on this subject were strangely mixed, I think; at any rate, mine were. On the one hand, grief and horror; on the other, exultation. The liquidation of Tukhachevsky, we saw, would be fatal for Stalinism, as indeed it nearly proved to have been, in a military sense, when Hitler in 1941 broke the non-aggression pact and invaded: the Red Army, after the bloody destitution of its leaders in 1937, let itself be overrun. Of course we could not see that far ahead, but we sensed that Stalin had overreached himself when he moved against the Red Army. Thus we jubilated in being shown to be right; still, Tukhachevsky’s murder could not make us happy—on the contrary. Much more than I, Philip grieved, I suspect; a boyish part of him was proudly invested in the Red Army. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, when it came, must have had a similar effect on him, validating his arguments and paining his soul. During those years he told Fred Dupee that he sometimes woke up in the night, sweating; the question that jerked him awake was “And what if Stalin is right?”

Now I come to a moment that can still make
me
flinch more than fifty years later. A premonition of worse to come might have been registered by both of us on the night we went to a big party in a strange apartment somewhere uptown. We are living on East End Avenue. Philip is wearing a new suit, very
becoming in purplish browns, which we bought him at Altman’s. Many prominent Trotskyists are present at the party, known to me mostly by name. Among them, lounging on a sofa, is Max Eastman, the editor of
The Masses
and the old
Liberator
, who had nearly been lynched for his principles during the First World War—we had had his
Enjoyment of Poetry
with Miss Kitchel in freshman English. This white-haired spellbinder, the son of preachers from Canandaigua, New York, was handsome, tall, all his life a fascinator of women. His film on the Russian Revolution,
From the Tsar to Lenin
, was just being shown. In sum, all I remember is what I would like to forget: having had a lot of drinks, sitting on Max Eastman’s lap; out of a corner of memory’s eye, I see Philip’s face. The next morning he was still very angry with me. I had an awful hangover and had to stay home from work for two whole days. That was all. Eventually Philip forgave. I did not see Eastman again for many years. Once was at his house at Croton with Charlie Chaplin, and the second time was at a conference at the Waldorf on cultural freedom—he had become a right-winger and upheld Joe McCarthy.

Nonetheless, the stage was set, all right. On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act. In Seattle, my grandfather would soon die (December 30), aged seventy-nine, which, according to a series of psychoanalysts, deprived me of a “father figure.” But Grandpa was still alive, going to
his office and playing his daily golf game, when I first met my fate, in the
PR
office late on a Saturday morning (I must have worked that Saturday at Covici). I appeared in my best clothes—a black silk dress with tiers of fagoting and, hung from my neck, a long, large silver fox fur—having been told by Philip that Edmund Wilson would be dropping in at the magazine and we would all take him to lunch. My partly bare arms tell me that it would have been a fall day. We were all on hand for the big occasion; we were hoping for a contribution from him for our first or second number and we wanted to make a good impression, although my costume, as I look back on it and as I sensed even at the time, was more suited to a wedding reception than to a business meeting in the offices of a radical magazine.

Three

H
E BUSTLED INTO OUR
office, shorty stout, middle-aged, breathy—born May 8, 1895; we others were in our twenties—with popping reddish-brown eyes and fresh pink skin, which looked as though he had just bathed. Perhaps it was this suggestion of baths—the tepidarium—and his fine straight nose that gave him a Roman air. I think he was wearing a gray two-piece suit and a white shirt.

We walked to the Union Square restaurant and took a table on the second floor, above the cafeteria. I was the only woman, but Wilson did not seem to notice me specially. He talked mainly to Dwight and Fred. Somebody asked for our drink order. We were all, except for Dwight perhaps, nervous and tongue-tied, and a drink would have helped. But Wilson shook
his head irritably, as though annoyed by the proposal, and we all meekly followed suit. Probably he didn’t drink and disapproved of the habit. Maybe one of the boys had the courage to order a beer.

That is all I recall of this first meeting. Of course I remembered him from Vassar in my junior year—the year after
Axel’s Castle
—when he had read a paper on Flaubert with such alarming pauses that Miss Sandison, who had introduced him, had run down to the basement in Avery to find him a glass of water:
“Vox exhaurit in faucibus,”
she said later. Now he showed more aplomb as we talked about the new, anti-Stalinist
PR
and what we were going to have in our first issues. He agreed that we ought to have something by Trotsky, if we could get it. He may have tried to interest us in his friend Paul Rosenfeld, to be our music critic. We spoke of André Gide and his revised view of the USSR, exemplified in the piece I was translating for our second number. Wilson had read it in French, he said, cutting the subject off. As I later learned, he did not think much of Gide. The conversation turned to
Travels in Two Democracies
, which had described his own trip to Russia, contemporaneous with Gide’s. The title showed how far he had come politically in a little more than a year; that book had been published in 1936. He could no longer call Russia a democracy unless ironically—the trials had happened in between. Essentially his book belonged to the epoch of the Kirov assassination, and perhaps he was slightly embarrassed by his failure to see ahead.

Over lunch, his voice was light and pleasant; this was not one of his booming days. He was always at his best when he was bookish. By the time we separated, he had promised us a piece for our first number.

The following week Margaret Marshall called me at Covici. She had heard from Wilson, who wanted to take us out to dinner, the two of us. She supposed it was because of the
Nation
series, in which he had been singled out for praise. If so, it seemed odd that he had waited two years, I thought. Peggy, who had met him, was being coy about why he was asking us both, when he “kind of” liked her, she was sure. Perhaps he wanted chaperonage, I suggested lightly. For my part, I could not guess what was in his mind. The whole thing seemed very strange. But if Wilson was “after” one of us, it must be me, I reasoned, since he had just met me in the
PR
office. Fred and the boys puzzled over the invitation, too, when they learned of it. I wondered—maybe we all wondered—whether Wilson knew that I was Philip’s girl.

As the date for the dinner approached, my co-editors did quite a bit of worrying and wondering. Yet nobody, including Philip, thought I should decline. With our high ambitions for the magazine, we could not consider that. Instead, we worried about me. The boys did not hide their fear that my political inexperience could make the magazine look foolish to that experienced older critic who knew such a great deal about Marxism and the U.S. social scene. And I was literary in the wrong way, not really
modern
, still
interested in graduate-student stuff like Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. I was not as big a liability as George Morris; he had gone into the Workers Bookstore and asked for a copy of Trotsky’s
The Revolution Betrayed
, wearing spats and carrying a cane! He had been curious to read it, he said, having heard so much talk about it in the office, and had thought that a neighborhood bookstore with “Workers” in the name would be a good place to find it, never dreaming that it was the official Party place. Even after hearing this explanation, the boys were aghast. I knew better than that, of course, but I was politically undeveloped, prone to wonder whether the Tsar and his family
needed
to be killed. Clearly it nettled my fellow editors that I had been singled out to represent the magazine—why not one of
them
? With their excitable apprehensions, most evident in Philip and William, they were making me fearful myself of what I might say or do. There could be no reprieve: Wilson had called Margaret Marshall again to confirm the date and tell us to meet him at Mary’s—an Italian restaurant deep in the Village known to his generation.

At this point Fred Dupee came to my rescue. Since it looked as if the great critic did not drink, I would need some bucking up for the ordeal ahead, he decided, seeing me white and strained in my “dinner dress,” when I stopped by the office for a last-minute briefing. So he took me to the Hotel Albert bar, on University Place, and ordered Daiquiris, my favorite cocktail at the time. I must have had three.

Wilson and Peggy were already at Mary’s, in an upstairs private dining-room. Far from not drinking, he was ordering a second round of double Manhattans when I arrived. Naturally I took one, then a second, without saying that I had already had drinks with Fred. But if I had, it would have made no difference. Wilson was in a bibulous mood. And I learned why he had said no to drinks before lunch that day in the Union Square restaurant: he had had a colossal hangover, and the hair of the dog was not one of his weaknesses.

His habit, as I came to know, was to get thoroughly soused (which we were on our way to doing at Mary’s), then sleep it off and turn over a new leaf the next day on arising. Bathed and shaved, clad in snowy linen—he wore B.V.D.s—he emerged from his toilet reborn, or like a risen god. That he did not smoke probably helped. The glowing pink man we had taken to lunch was a resurrected Wilson, who had harried hell the night before. The boys, who had read
I Thought of Daisy
(I had not), might have guessed that the respected critic was no teetotaler.

After the double Manhattans, we drank dago red and finally B. & B. This was a favorite potion with Wilson, which I never came to like; for me, the sweetness of the Benedictine spoiled the taste of the brandy. All that liquor loosened my tongue, and I had what was called a talking jag. Since Wilson seemed interested, I told them the story of my life: Seattle, the flu, the death of my parents, Minneapolis, and certainly quite a bit about Uncle Myers, not omitting, I fear, the
razor strop...Then, somehow, we were at the Chelsea Hotel, on West 23rd Street. Possibly we had dropped in on Ben Stolberg, who was living there at the time. I was no longer very conscious of Margaret Marshall, but she was still one of the party. Fairly soon, I hope, I “passed out.”

As I learned the next day, my inert form put them in a quandary. Neither Peggy nor Wilson knew where I lived. Ben Stolberg would not have known either. If they had tried looking in the phone book, they would not have found me—Philip and I had only recently moved in. Wilson, though no doubt very drunk, rose to the occasion. He took a room for himself—he was living in the country, near Stamford—and another for Margaret and me.

Opening an eye the morning after, I looked cautiously across to the next bed, having assessed that I was in a twin-bedded room. With an episode like the one with the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt behind me, I had reason to fear the worst. In the other bed, a yawning Margaret Marshall opened her eyes. There was no one else in the room, so far as I could see, and I guessed that we were in a hotel. I let a cry escape me, a loud groan or moan. It was the same awful certainty speaking that had just awakened me, like a voice in my ear: “Oh, God, oh, God, I’ve disgraced
Partisan Review
.” In my slip, I cried hopelessly while she looked on. Wilson must have gone back to Stamford. At any rate, we did not see him that morning. Doubtless he had paid our bill.

My first action, of course, was mandatory: call Philip. Maybe Peggy was kind enough to get the number for me when she saw how scared I was. They knew each other because he wrote reviews for her, for
The Nation
, but this was the first she knew of our living together. Anyway, while we were still in that hotel room, she talked to him. She told him that I had passed out and that Wilson, not knowing what to do with me, had persuaded her to stay with me in the Chelsea in the next bed. Philip believed her. Angry as he was, he felt pity for me. Either he came down in a taxi to get me or I took a taxi home by myself. I was still wearing my “dinner dress.” Either way, he forgave me. It was the second time, counting the Eastman’s-lap folly. I was horrified to think of the night he must have spent, not knowing what had happened to me. Probably he blamed Fred when he heard about the Daiquiris. But as the helmsman of a young, endangered periodical, he would not have allowed himself to be angry with Wilson.

Philip’s capacity for forgiveness will surprise people who thought of him (and wrote of him) as a gruff, rancorous man. But it is a fact and not to be fully explained by the strong attraction between us. In another man, this could have led to a fierce, jealous resentment. But Philip had an open heart and a childish, somewhat docile nature with those he had opened it to, few as they were. That he could accept my penitence—and not from any weakness—must have meant that he understood that I loved him. I did, and
still do, vividly, as I write these words. Real love, said Hannah Arendt, is mutual. It is something that happens between two people. After much reflection, I agree with that. The other thing, the thing you read about in Proust, is
infatuation
(from
fatuus,
“foolish”); it is much commoner than love, and you can get over it. Years later, when Philip died and I wrote a little obituary on him, Hannah, on reading it, was astonished. “So, my dear, you loved him. I never knew.” Maybe, till she said it, I had not known it myself.