Elizabeth Bishop’s story “In the Village” opens: “A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village.” The scream “hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies.” The blue skies were stained by intense loss, the loss of both of Bishop’s parents when she was a child, one to illness, the other to madness. It is close to the scream let out by the grandmother in Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood when she hears of the death of her sister: “A terrible scream—an unearthly scream—came from behind the closed door of her bedroom; I have never heard such a sound, neither animal nor human, and it did not stop. It went on and on, like a fire siren on the moon.”
McCarthy, who was born in 1912 (a year after Bishop), lost both her parents in the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Although she had three brothers, one set of grandparents—the richer ones—seemed to want only her. Thus she was treated much of the time as an only child.
Later, in the New York of the 1950s and 1960s, McCarthy became a kind of legend, enough indeed for the poet and critic Randall Jarrell in 1954 to write a satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution, in which the protagonist, the novelist Gertrude Johnson, was generally recognized as a version of McCarthy. “Gertrude had,” Jarrell wrote, “as her enemies put it, a hard heart and a sharp tongue.” Bishop, who wrote a blurb for the book, had been a year ahead of McCarthy at Vassar College. She wrote to a friend to say how closely Gertrude resembled McCarthy: “I haven’t seen much of Mary for years and years, but it is her. She’s still saying some of the same things she said at college, apparently…. And I still feel mean about writing a blurb for a book about her.”
As an essayist, McCarthy developed a reputation for seriousness; as a novelist, she began to reach a wide American audience. In 1963 The Group, her novel about a group of young women at Vassar, had a first US printing of 75,000. Robert Lowell wrote to Bishop that the novel “will bring her maybe a quarter of a million,” but “no one in the know likes the book.” Norman Mailer wrote a famous takedown in these pages: “She is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.” He concluded, however, that it was “possible now to conceive that McCarthy may finally get tough enough to go with the boys.”
McCarthy was tougher than Mailer could ever imagine, especially in the reviews she herself wrote in the 1960s. For example, in 1961, in a piece for the Observer about the paper’s own theater critic, Kenneth Tynan, she wrote, “Rational discourse is not Tynan’s strong point…. Tynan is less a critic than a performer and mime in his own right.… He can spot a defect or a virtue, but he cannot reason or analyze.” When her fierce scrutiny of J. D. Salinger appeared the following year, William Maxwell wrote, “That piece is totally unjust.”
A writer in Esquire in 1962 wrote of McCarthy that “her hostile critics claim that what she has really defined, for all men to know, is the Modern American Bitch.” He gave her credit, however, in case she might ever need such a thing, for becoming a literary star without help from anyone:
One startling aspect of her present fame, a mark of her rather special position among other famous and intellectual women—is that she has accomplished it all without a man. Not that there haven’t been men in her life. But as her own woman, she has never been bracketed with a man in a way that other outstanding women have been.
McCarthy was often also admired for her actual work, its quality, its daring, its originality. Of her first book, The Company She Keeps, a collection of linked stories written in her twenties, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, “The early stories…could, for once, rightly be called a sensation: they were indeed a sensation of candor, for the brilliant, lightning flashes of wit, for the bravado, the confidence and the splendor of the prose style.”
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In much of the writing about McCarthy, and in comments, memories, and quotations in Frances Kiernan’s astute biography, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (2000), there is a sense that few people could quite place her. McCarthy was an intellectual; she also wrote fiction. She was, as a book reviewer, a street fighter; she also wrote scholarly and well-informed books about culture. She was known for her eccentricity (no modern kitchen appliances, no electric typewriter, no credit cards) and for her elaborate hospitality (she loved cooking and gardening; she also reported from North and South Vietnam in 1967 and 1968).
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Hardwick notes with surprise McCarthy’s use of the word “patrician” to describe her own background in the posthumously published Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992). Indeed, McCarthy writes of her own “patrician prejudices,” liking to think, she adds, that she comes from “a superior class, the professionals, who, together with a few old-family financiers and land-poor gentry, were different from other Americans.” Later she wrote about sticking up for “patrician values, incarnate, as I imagined, in the professional class I issued from.”
In a conversation about class with Philip Rahv, with whom she was having an affair, Rahv, she reported, was not impressed by her “patrician” background. “I did not even belong to the big-bourgeois class,” she said. “That was the cruelest thrust.” And then he alluded to her Irish heritage: “It delighted him to say that the Irish were the bribed tools of imperialism—he had found the phrase in Marx.”
Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review, noted how interested McCarthy was in class: “Mary was fascinated by the workings of American social life, and she was always placing people, very aware of who they were and where they came from.” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop: “Have you ever noticed how snobbish the old rebel bohemians are? No one believes in society except Mary and Philip.” Isaiah Berlin noted, “One had no idea that Mary was part Jewish. It never showed in any way. The Irish Catholic yes.”
The Irish Catholic could also become an American Protestant or indeed an American atheist, as McCarthy wrote at the end of her life: “Insofar as I, a believing atheist, have a foot in any religion, I am a Protestant. When I go to church on Easter Sunday, I go to a Protestant church and when I die I hope that some kindly Protestant pastor will say last rites over me even though I am outside his church.”
This confusion about her place, her heritage, her religion even, offers us not only a context for Memories of a Catholic Girlhood but also a way of explaining the book’s shape and indeed its power. It is not a single, tidy narrative. It was written over ten years. In fact, it could be read as eight essays in autobiography, some of them published as stand-alone pieces in The New Yorker, rather than a seamless, considered version of the author’s childhood and adolescence.
For a childhood so disturbed and an adolescence so fraught, it would be hard, in any case, to find a single, seamless tone. But what McCarthy was doing, in fact, was creating herself and then further reimagining the self she had so skillfully established. She became in her narrative, as she was becoming in her life, hard to pin down. It was not merely her protean personality or her remarkable intelligence that made her book so original, but also the fact that her background was, even in America, strange and new. Her Protestant antecedents hardly made any difference, but the mixture in her of Jewish and Irish and the added sense of money and entitlement were fresh subjects for a writer.
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McCarthy really did come from a patrician background, as these matters were seen in Minneapolis and Seattle. But she would hardly have been patrician in New York, nor would her joint heritage as posh and Irish Catholic, also Jewish and Protestant, have been easy to recognize there. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood was, especially in its later sections, written partly as a way to explain her own rich and strange heritage to the New York in which she flourished once she graduated from Vassar.
Her maternal grandfather was a successful Seattle lawyer, nominally a Protestant, married to a woman who was Jewish. “Neither of them,” Kiernan writes, “gave much thought to religion.” But the paternal grandmother was “a devout and belligerent Catholic and had little use for Protestants or Jews.” The paternal grandfather shrewdly managed, Kiernan writes, “the family’s extensive grain-elevator holdings. In a quiet way he was rich.”
On the Irish side, there was delusion about heritage, the Irish grandmother believing that she came from some sort of faded Irish grandeur. McCarthy seemed almost proud in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood when she wrote, “More precisely, my great-grandfather on this side had been a streetcar conductor in Chicago.”
In later years one of her brothers noted, “The difference between Mary and the rest of us was that Mary knew our parents and we didn’t.” She was six when her parents died. This idea of a memory that she alone had and that others did not share was a gift to her. Accuracy meant nothing, but neither was pure invention required. For her book of memories, she needed a space in between where she could try out various narrative tones, with a kind of delight in a detail or the next shocking scene.
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After each section McCarthy added passages that sought, ostensibly, to correct what had gone before, to insist that brute facts or another person’s version of the story might also be attended to. While she seemed concerned that memory is slippery and false, she was, in fact, teasing herself and the reader by appearing in all earnestness to be searching for the real truth. What she was doing was both more playful and more serious. She was attempting to rise above the mere business of what happened by using style and wit, by writing vividly, by creating scenes and characters that were more memorable than adherence to any set of dull facts might demand.
Compared to some of her other writing, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood was seen as almost soft-hearted. The critic in the New York Herald Tribune wrote:
Miss McCarthy, who writes better than most people, here writes better than herself. In this slow-grown book there is almost none of her dismaying heartless, though brilliant, satire. She records with her customary sensibility, but not with the eye cast coldly; rather, at last, with passion and compassion.
The New Republic agreed: “Miss McCarthy’s new book has a quality of gentleness and warmth for which her earlier fiction scarcely prepared us.”
Compassion and gentleness, nonetheless, were often the very things absent from the book. For example, in one of the early pages, McCarthy wrote, “My grandmother, Elizabeth Sheridan, looked like a bulldog.” Soon the same grandmother was described as “a cold, grudging, disputatious old woman who sat all day in her sunroom making tapestries from a pattern, scanning religious periodicals, and setting her iron jaw against any infraction of her ways.”
McCarthy had little time for the Irish side of the family with whom she was forced to lodge after the death of her parents: “The family had a sort of moral affinity for the root vegetable, stemming, perhaps, from everything fibrous, tenacious, watery, and knobbly in the Irish peasant stock.” At school with Irish girls, she was
the doomed companion of girls with flat, broad faces and huge collections of freckles, girls with dandruff on their uniforms, with spots and gaping seams, wrinkled black stockings, chilblains, owl-like glasses, carrot-colored hair—damp, confidential souls with quantities of younger brothers and sisters just like themselves.
McCarthy added, “And I was one of them.” But she was not. This wasn’t only because of her eloquence and her ability to notice and describe; it also had to do with her orphanhood. She had both no family at all and, at the same time, as if by magic, another family elsewhere, much posher, almost mythical, not a freckle in sight.
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Although McCarthy wrote witheringly about the Catholic side of her family, she described her own interest in the niceties of Catholic theology with relish. In this section of her book, she seemed almost sinfully amused, enough for her to write some brilliant and dry Latinate sentences: “Monthly, in the study hall, the Mother Superior, Madame MacIllvra, adjured us, daughters of dentists and lawyers, grocers and realtors, heiresses of the Chevrolet agency and of Riley & Finn, contractors, against the sin of doubt, that curse of fine intellects.” Surely, also, the pleasure McCarthy must have experienced writing of her Latin teacher that “she took being Scottish personally” had something sinful about it.
When Bernard Berenson, the art historian and dealer, whom McCarthy knew from her sojourns in Italy, read the final section of her book, “Ask Me No Questions,” he expressed his admiration of “that fabulous odalisque, your Jewish grandmother.” He wrote to her, “I am still under the impression of your Catholic girlhood. The wealth of detail, the theological discussions…keep me wondering how much is Wahrheit [fact] and how much Dichtung [fiction].”
Kiernan wondered about the connection between two of McCarthy’s closest Jewish friends—Hannah Arendt and Berenson—and her grandmother Augusta Preston: “Among those who could see no earthly reason for Mary McCarthy’s great attachment to Hannah Arendt,” Kiernan wrote,
not a few had been moved to hypothesize that Arendt was her Jewish grandmother…. At the same time, it could be argued that Berenson with his carefully maintained schedule, his nineteenth-century house with its closed doors and silent corridors, his love of luxury, and his persistence in withholding both the information she wanted [about Italian art] and his full approval, was a truer incarnation of Augusta Preston. As such his power was considerable.
But McCarthy’s power was even more considerable than Berenson’s. In some of the earlier chapters there is an aura of meanness and cheapness—the mean family, their cheap habits—that gives way to a kind of horror as McCarthy’s father’s relatives behave as badly as they possibly can. The young girl, however, is always there to be rescued. In the actual story she tells, she is rescued by her Jewish grandmother. But in the style she uses, she embodies the very transformation of the self she sets out to describe. McCarthy is saved and changed by her own skill as a narrator, by her chiseled sentences, by the rhythms that are perfectly judged, by the flowing narrative confidence and the ironies and by the effortless wit.
Thus Memories of a Catholic Girlhood did not make Mary McCarthy “one of the boys,” as Mailer put it; it placed her in a league of her own. The book became a classic of its kind.
