Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (85 page)

2
The German-born
Hans Eisler
, once described as the world’s “foremost revolutionary composer,”
later wrote scores for Hollywood films before being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. He left the country in 1949.

2
“
congés payés
”: a paid holiday.

3
John Porter
was the former correspondent of the Paris
Herald
who briefly became McCarthy’s fiancé after the breakup with Johnsrud.

3
Eva Le Gallienne
was a prominent actress and director whose career, begun in the 1920s, spanned sixty years. She founded the Civic Repertory Theatre in the 1930s.

4
Jay
Lovestone
was an American Communist Party leader expelled from the Comintern in 1928, when Stalin moved against his theory of “American exceptionalism.”
Lovestoneites
argued that as a young imperialist power, the United States was still expanding its economic resources at the expense of Europe; therefore the time was not yet ripe for the radicalization of the working class.

4
Motty Eitingon
and his wife, Bess, later turned up as neighbors in Stamford, Connecticut, when McCarthy married Edmund Wilson in 1938. Wilson suspected Eitingon of being a Soviet agent.

5
Frani Blough
[Muser], Vassar ’33, a music major on whom the character of Helena Davison in
The Group
is based, remained a close friend of McCarthy’s to the end of Mary’s life.

5
Lee Strasberg
founded the Group Theatre with
Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford in 1931. He went on to become artistic director of the Actors Studio, where from 1948 until his death in 1982 he promulgated the Stanislavski method of acting.

5
Clara
, the Johnsruds’ part-time maid, makes a cameo appearance in
The Group
.

6
“Bunny” Wilson
is Edmund Wilson, 1895-1972, McCarthy’s second husband. Probably the most respected American critic of the era, Wilson was
The New Republic
’s literary editor from 1926 to 1931 and then again in 1940, when the magazine’s energetic advocacy of U.S. entry into the Second World War led the isolationist Wilson to resign his post before the year was out.

7
Exiles Return,
published in 1934, memorialized the end of an era for the Lost Generation in Paris—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, among others—who came home after the Crash to an economy in ruins and to a society that Cowley believed was ripe for revolution.

7
Helen Lockwood
, a popular English professor of left-liberal views at Vassar, scorned by the young McCarthy after she locked horns with her in a course on Blake to Keats, has been condemned to an eternity of bad press notices in
The Group
and
How I Grew
.

7
Playwright
Lillian Hellman
sued McCarthy for
$2.25 million in 1980 for calling her a liar on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Hellman died in 1984, before the case was tried.

7
Kenneth Fearing
, like Robert Cantwell, was a proletarian novelist in the 1930s.

11
Mannie Rousuck
is Emmanuel J. Rousuck, the bootlegger turned art dealer who was McCarthy’s first employer at the Carleton Gallery in New York in the summer of 1932.

12
Miss
[Helen]
Sandison
, an Elizabethan scholar who chaired the English Department during McCarthy’s years at Vassar, was both a favorite teacher of Mary’s and a confidante.

12
Nathalie Swan
, a member of McCarthy’s rooming group at Vassar, later married Philip Rahv, the
Partisan Review
editor with whom McCarthy had a much talked about affair in 1937.

12
Margaret Miller
, Vassar ’34, was an art major who contributed to the underground campus paper,
Con Spirito
, founded by McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop in 1932. Both Margaret and Nathalie Swan served McCarthy as models for Elinor Eastlake (“Lakey”) in
The Group
.

13
Harry Sternberg
, an artist friend of Harold Johnsrud’s, taught easel painting and printmaking at The Art Students League in New York for thirty-five years.

13
Elizabeth Bishop
, 1911-1979, was one of America’s foremost twentieth-century poets. She was already exchanging poems with Marianne Moore
and Yvor Winters while still a senior at Vassar in 1934.

14
Maddie Aldrich
[Rand] was a member of the prestigious South Tower rooming group at Vassar that McCarthy joined her senior year.

15
Eunice Clark
, another classmate, for whom McCarthy’s feelings were not tender, was the member of Mary’s senior rooming group who inspired the unsympathetic portrait of Norine Schmittlapp in
The Group
.

16
Dwight Macdonald
, 1906-1982, then a staff writer at
Fortune
, joined Philip Rahv, William Phillips, and McCarthy as a founding editor of the new
Partisan Review
in 1937. After editing his own magazine,
politics
, in the 1940s, Macdonald went on to become one of America’s liveliest dissenting intellectuals.

16
The
La Folletteish Common Sense
espoused a kind of progressive populism identified with Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette.

16
Writer-humorists
Dorothy Parker
and
Alexander Woollcott
and the journalist
Heywood Broun
were twenties figures who still turned heads at the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s.

18
Fred
[F. W.]
Dupee
, 1904-1979, later chaired the English Department at Bard College, where he got McCarthy her first teaching job in 1945.

20
Martha McGahan
, Vassar ’33, inspired one of
The Group
’s most sympathetic characters, Polly Andrews.

24
Jack Conroy
was another proletarian novelist of the period.

30
Oswald Garrison
Villard
was the publisher of
The Nation
.

44
Poor “Hohnsrud”:
Harold Johnsrud died on December 23, 1939, of severe burns incurred while retrieving the manuscript of a play from his room at the Brevoort Hotel, where a fire had broken out. He was 35.

CHAPTER TWO

50
Partisan Review
had come close to not publishing “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” in 1941 on the grounds that it was not fiction but journalism.

52
Miss
[Anna]
Kitchel
was a George Eliot scholar who, like Helen Sandison, served McCarthy as a mentor and confidante at Vassar.

54
McCarthy taught literature at Bard College in 1945-1946. If she had
firmly given up any notion of a new marriage
, her resolve was short-lived; in December 1946 she married the young man who was a frequent visitor at Bard, Bowden Broadwater.

56
The Elizabethan satirists
Robert Greene
and
Thomas Nashe
were more to McCarthy’s taste. Greene, “the first hack-writer of modern times,” as she called him in her senior thesis at Vassar, appealed to her for his irreverent caricatures of contemporary figures, including Shakespeare.

59
Edmund Wilson
was no stranger to political committees. In 1932 he had joined a group of prominent intellectuals to support the Communist ticket of William Z. Foster. With Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, and John Dos Passos, he set out the group’s reasons in an influential pamphlet entitled “Culture and the Crisis.”

61
The
POUM
was a dissident Communist party advocating workers’ control that was purged from Republican ranks by the established Party in Spain in 1938. The leader of the party,
Andrés Nin
, disappeared after his arrest and was presumed (by George Orwell, among others) to have been murdered by Stalin’s agents.

68
Lionel Abel
contributed to
Partisan Review
,
Dissent
, and
Commentary
. In 1984 he published his own memoir of the literary life:
The Intellectual Follies
.

72
the Ebro:
Spanish Republican troops crossed the Ebro River in July 1938 to relieve Valencia, under attack by Franco’s troops, and were then defeated in the bloody battle that followed.

73
Martha Gellhorn
, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, caught McCarthy’s attention again in 1981 when, in a blistering exposé published in
The Paris Review
, she charged Lillian Hellman with fabricating in her memoirs the encounters Hellman claimed to have had with Hemingway in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.

73
Donald Ogden Stewart
, a member of Skull and Bones at Yale in 1916, had become a musical
comedy writer for Broadway and Hollywood after a failed career in business. In 1935, upon reading the British Communist John Strachey as background for introducing a union organizer into one of his plays, Stewart started paying attention to politics for the first time. By 1936, when he apparently joined the Communist Party, he was active in a number of Party-supported organizations, including the Screen Writers Guild and the League of American Writers, whose president he became in 1937.

74
Eleanor Clark
, Vassar ’34, joined Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Fred Dupee, and a reluctant William Phillips and Philip Rahv in the spring of 1937, when the insurgent group made their political debut as anti-Stalinists at the second American Writers’ Congress in New York.
She was Lockwood
is a reference to Helen Lockwood, the Vassar English professor referred to in Chapter One. McCarthy rallied around Helen Sandison.

76
Delmore Schwartz
’s moving story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” appeared in the maiden issue of the new
Partisan Review
, establishing this young American poet as a fiction writer of great talent. While he continued to turn out poems and stories, including both published and unpublished sketches of McCarthy, who fascinated him, Schwartz, 1913-1966, never delivered on his early promise.

76
Bill
[William]
Troy
, a frequent contributor to
Partisan Review
in the 1930s and 1940s, developed his theories about myth and symbolism in critical essays on Henry James, Yeats, Joyce, and Thomas Mann.

76
Léonie Adams
was a poet with whom Edmund Wilson was once romantically involved (see page 103), as he was with other women poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay and, more platonically, Louise Bogan. Adams’s
Poems, a Selection
won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1955.

84
The critic
Harold Rosenberg
, whose influential book
The Tradition of the New
(1959) was reviewed by McCarthy, coined the term “action painting” for the art market. For the masses, and the Advertising Council where he worked as a copywriter, he invented Smokey Bear. Rosenberg’s memoir
Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture and Politics
came out in 1975.

84
–85 As a literary concept,
formalism
, with its emphasis on technique and form over content, originated in Russia immediately before the Revolution and was known as the Russian school of literary criticism. In 1929 the Bolsheviks condemned formalist theory as lacking political perspective; for Russian Jewish intellectuals such as Philip Rahv and friends, the debate was no doubt a family squabble that eluded McCarthy, hence the uncharacteristic obscurity of her interpretation.
     Whether the “valedictory” she mentions is a farewell to formalism or to its Stalinist
denunciations isn’t clear. Nor is the meaning of “Procrustean bed” (
Webster’s Ninth:
“a scheme or pattern into which someone or something is arbitrarily forced”), which probably refers to Bolshevism as the average American encountered it, though syntactically it refers here to the “concept” of formalism. In any event, formalism’s focus on the autonomy of the text, together with the historic endeavor to make critical discourse more scientific and objective, was taken up a decade later by the New Critics, who were not associated with
Partisan Review
.

87
the stage was set:
This account of sitting on Max Eastman’s lap after having had a lot to drink is the prologue to the story of going to bed with Edmund Wilson in the same condition, and for similar reasons, in the next chapter. Eastman, like Wilson, was an older man, a “father figure” as well as a celebrity in the political movement McCarthy had joined. Both men were first introduced to her by her favorite teachers at Vassar—Eastman, in an assignment in Miss Kitchel’s freshman English, and Wilson, in a lecture arranged by Miss Sandison. The
gun waiting to be fired
is McCarthy’s fatal attraction to such spellbinders, as well (though she doesn’t say it) as her formidable talent for seducing them.