Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (35 page)

There was another problem connected with my ambition. Should I marry the Duke de Guise, the actual Pretender, or his son, the Count de Paris, who was nearer my age? The Duke de Guise seemed the better bet; though old, he had the acknowledged kingly title, while the Count de Paris was a bird in the bush. Moreover, my source (the Sunday magazine section) did not show any pictures of the Count, so that I had no idea what he looked like. Whereas you could see plenty of photos of the Duke, gray-haired but erect in his bearing, thin-waisted and extremely tall. Or am I fusing newspaper likenesses of the modern Pretender with the old Duc de Guise, head of the anti-Protestant League, a giant seven feet tall, who was felled at Blois by order of Henri III, measuring his full length (I read somewhere) at the foot of the king’s bed? Such leakage or “running” as of non-fast colors is a common occurrence in the memory.

There are also unaccountable holes. What made me choose “Clementina” for a confirmation name when my wish was finally granted (“Perseverance wins the crown,” said old Father Gaughan)? It must have been for St. Clement, an early pope, though I am unaware of having had any special devotion to him. In fact, I remember nothing of any Clement, only the funny fact of becoming Mary Thérèse Clementina McCarthy. What I do remember from that time is an ardent devotion to St. Agnes, symbol of purity, with her white woolly lamb. It was
her
name I wanted to take at confirmation, and how and why I was re-routed to St. Clement I cannot imagine. My only clue comes from San Clemente, on the Aventine, the church of the Irish Dominicans. Did a young priest on Bishop O’Dea’s staff, preparing me for the sacrament, infect me with a bug he had picked up from those Irishmen during a year in Rome? In any case, the author of the “Epistle of Clement” (ca. A.D. 96), designed to heal a rift in the church of Corinth, seems a peculiar choice.

Otherwise my mental life consisted of dreaming, greedily reading whatever I could, telling stories to myself and my brothers. In school I wrote poems and was a champion speller, my nearest rival being a pale blond Polish-American boy named John Klosick, who sat in front of me and whom I loved for his delicacy of frame and feature. My only stage appearance was as “Iris” in a playlet about the flowers. I had wanted to be “Rose,” the heroine, but with my glasses and nervous mannerisms probably I was not pretty enough for the leading part. No doubt I consoled myself with the reminder that irises were the fleur-de-luce, the royal flower of France; in my crepe-paper costume of purple petals and a crown I could therefore feel quite important in flower-land. For the Greeks, as I could have gleaned from
The Book of Knowledge,
I was the personification of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods—nobody had told me that I was also the sister of the Harpies. When the day of the performance came, I was reconciled to my part and prepared to shine. Aunt Mary had taken great pains over my costume, more elaborate than the others, the tiers of scalloped petals fitting my form like a real dress. Yet my first full-scale public humiliation was in store.

When the curtains parted, we were revealed drawn up in rows simulating a flower garden. As a tall, nodding bloom, my place was at the end of the front row, stage left. During rehearsals I had learned the parts of the other flowers as well as my own. It was the same mistake—excessiveness—I had made with my first writing exercise as a first-grader in the convent by dotting my “e”s for good measure as well as my “i”s, so that instead of starring (as I had expected) I was placed at the bottom of the class. Now I let my lips move along with the voices of “Rose,” “Violet,” and “Daisy” as they stepped forward one by one and recited their lines. I am not sure whether this accompaniment was audible or just visible to the parents and relations out front. And I cannot decide whether I was aware, myself, that my lips were moving like a prompter throughout the playlet, whether in fact I intended to be noticed (“Look at Iris! She knows the whole play”) or whether I was oblivious, absorbed in the performance—the first theatre, I realize, that I had ever seen. I am inclined to think it was the second because of the slap in the face my pride received when my aunt Margaret came up to me furiously at the end of the play. I don’t recall the words she used to bring me to my senses, only the derision in her voice—typically Irish, by the way. It’s possible that she mimicked the movement of my young lips with her old ones. I suppose she felt humiliated before all those parents, and some priests, too, probably. Or she angrily considered the work Aunt Mary had put into my costume only to have me put the family to shame. At the time, though, it did not occur to me to imagine her feelings. In my fury, instead, I dared to strike at her (that must have been the time) with a Catholic periodical she was carrying, folded, under her arm and that, sobbing, I wrested from her. The sequel I don’t know. I remember only the awful impiety of hitting out at her on the street and my wild heavy breathing. Afterwards did we walk home together, heading for Uncle Myers’ razor-strop, my petals burning me like the shirt of Nessus?

It was not the last time that my lips moved visibly during a school performance accompanying (even improving on) the other actors as they pronounced their lines. But when it happened again it was in Seattle, at the Sacred Heart, and the correction was administered kindly, softened with praise for my execution of my own assigned part. For a long time, even before I had renounced my Carmelite vocation, nothing could deter me from my wish to be an actress. My writing, though I was held to be good at it, interested me less. I now suspect that my stage ambitions were merely the vehicle for a hope to be acclaimed for my beauty; that must be a large incentive for both sexes to choose careers in the theatre. With my glasses and straight hair I was far from beautiful, but I was not resigned to that. I would study myself in the mirror, frizz my hair with leather curlers, make earrings out of wire and colored beads of glass, and decide, tossing my dark head, that I had a gypsy allure. As my looks finally improved once I had got rid of the glasses (and some braces they had fastened on my upper teeth), I invented other personae (one modeled on the Madonna), giving fuel to my dreams of the stage. It was not till my junior year in college that I began to guess the truth: that I would never be an actress.

It came home to me in the Vassar Outdoor Theatre. We were doing a dramatization of Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale,
put into modern English; I had been cast in the part of Arcite, the second male lead. In the last act, having just been killed by a fire-breathing dragon (a stage effect contributed by the Chemistry Department), I was lying stage center, spotlit, on the grass when I heard a great laugh from the audience—forgetting that I was supposed to be dead, I had pulled down the short tunic of my orange oilcloth costume, as though it were a skirt. And now I perceive that it was all of a piece, consistent, that stage behavior of mine: onstage, unless I was actually speaking my assigned lines (i.e., “acting”), I forgot that an audience could see me. Actors do not do that.

Earlier in that chastening performance—with my husband-to-be, a real actor, watching critically from a front row—titters should have warned me that a cardboard tower, my prison, was noticeably shaking as I quaked with stage fright; to lean against it for support had been a mistake. In school and college, I was given leading parts (usually male) by teachers and student directors because I wanted them so badly and because by that time I had the necessary looks and voice to pass for an actor, not just the ability to learn lines. But I had no more vocation for it than I had to be a Carmelite nun or queen of France. The fact that I was so rarely given the
female
lead (in
The Knight’s Tale
I had longed to be the Fair Emily, a votive of Diana, with whom both the young knights are in love) ought to have tipped me off sooner. My stage appearances, testifying to my need for applause, belonged to my dream life; they had little to do with the life of my mind.

When I was rescued by my Protestant grandfather from the evil spell of the house on Blaisdell Avenue, one of the immediate effects was the opening up of libraries to me. His own, in the first place, in the tall Seattle house looking out over Lake Washington where I was now taken to live. Then there was the library of Forest Ridge Convent, where he was sending me as a five-day boarder (so that I would not lose my religion) and where I had spent a few weeks as a day pupil when Mama was still alive.

My grandfather Preston’s library was strong on sets. The oak shelves, going all the way to the ceiling, held the complete works of Dickens, Frank Stockton, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, Bulwer-Lytton, Dumas, and the complete Elsie Dinsmore books, which had belonged to my mother when she was a little girl. The convent had all of Fennimore Cooper, some Washington Irving, and Stoddard’s
Lectures,
with illustrations. During the sewing hour a nun read
Emma
to us, Booth Tarkington’s
The Gentleman from Indiana,
and
A Tale of Two Cities.
I am not sure where I found Longfellow’s
Tales of a Wayside Inn,
containing as one chapter “The Saga of King Olaf ”; I had hated “Hiawatha,” all too reminiscent of the civics of Minnehaha Park and Minnehaha Falls, but I loved those tales, and they are the main reason I know something of European history—Normans, popes, and German emperors. It was a shock, then, to discover rather recently that “Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urbane and Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine,” who learned the lesson of humility one Easter Sunday in Palermo, was not an historical figure; all my life, from the age of twelve on, I had been taking him for a minor Angevin.

Despite the efforts of the Forest Ridge librarian to “direct” my reading (e.g., Stoddard’s
Lectures
)
,
I was gobbling books in both libraries, in the same spirit as had led me to eat those thirteen bananas one right after the other in Grandma Preston’s pantry, with the result that I could never eat a banana again. It was not like that, luckily, with reading, though, now that books were multiplying before me like the loaves and fishes of the miracle, I did become somewhat more picky.

With Dumas I had a special problem because of my religion. There was a set in the Preston library, a dozen or so purplish volumes, and I could not keep my eyes off them, though I knew that the only Dumas not on the Index was
The Count of Monte Cristo,
which I had already read. The craving was worst for
The Queen’s Necklace,
because it was about Marie Antoinette’s diamonds and the Cardinal de Rohan. Will power, however, enabled me to resist. But when I lost my faith, toward the end of my second year in the convent, there should have been no further hindrance. The pleasure path lay open. And yet by some quirk familiar to me in later life, now that Dumas had become accessible, I lost the desire for him. So far as I can remember, I never got around to reading
The Queen’s Necklace
or, if I did, I never finished it. That applies to
The Three Musketeers,
too. To the best of my knowledge, the only book of Dumas I have read all the way through is, precisely,
The Count of Monte Cristo
—God is not mocked, I guess.

I missed out on Scott’s novels (though he was not on the Index), just as I had on Dumas. I came to him too late, when my first hunger for fiction was sated. Something like that happened with the Little Colonel books and quite a number of older girls’ classics. Basing my judgment on
A Girl of the Limberlost
by Gene Stratton Porter, I may have decided that they were too young for me. The exception was the enchanting
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
a favorite with George Orwell, too, which I read several times, having “fallen” for her handsome father, Lorenzo de’ Medici Randall. I think I had read
Little Women
already in Minneapolis and now I read
Jo’s Boys
and liked it even better, just as I liked
Through the Looking-Glass
better than
Alice in Wonderland.
My tastes were perverse.

I preferred boys’ books to girls’ books. Like Reuel in the next generation, I loved Henty’s
Along the Irrawaddy,
and I made my grandfather subscribe for me (in his name) to
The American Boy.
Yet the only Kipling I read was
The Light that Failed
and “Wee Willie Winkie” (both school), and
Kim
when I was an adult.
The Jungle Book
and
Just So Stories
I missed, because they failed to come my way when I was “right” for them, i.e., in Minneapolis. I was a case of uneven development, like Lenin’s description of the leaps and bounds in the progress of backward countries—or I was rising on one side, like a half-baked biscuit—and thanks to that had few terms of reference in common with the schoolmates I was meeting. Unlike them, at the age of eleven, I had never seen a movie (not counting
The Seal of the Confessional
);
the children’s books I
had
read dated back to my parents’ childhoods; I was unaware of the
St. Nicholas
magazine and, when I finally heard of it, supposed it had something to do with the St. Nicholas Day School for girls in Seattle, where the Protestant upper crust went. I arrived among my Sacred Heart contemporaries like a dropped stitch in time and in some ways I never caught up—I was twice married and driving a car before I could ride a bicycle.

In Seattle my tastes in reading all at once became curiously adult. On weekends I now read trash for adults instead of trash for children:
True Story, True Confessions,
movie magazines. The effect of this low-grade reading-matter was to make me sometimes impatient with “slow” traditional books. That was probably why
Ivanhoe
bored me so when we “had” it my first year in high school, while “The Lady of the Lake,” which could be declaimed, was as exciting as a play, especially the great unmasking: “These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true./ And, stranger,
I
am Roderick Dhu”—a fierce character whom, naturally, I thrilled to far more than to the tame heroes. In fact, my mental life toward the end of my time at Forest Ridge was at a dead low. The loss of my faith had produced no countervailing benefit. Having started, almost by accident, to doubt the reality of God, I lost interest in the subject when I discovered to my surprise that there was no real proof that He existed. Religion left me, to return, if at all, in later years as an amused interest in theology. And I had no other object of thought. Sex remained a closed book despite
True Story
and
True Confessions,
from which I merely concluded that one must be careful not to sleep with a man (not even drop off for a minute) or a baby would begin growing inside one. My interest in my own body centered on my breasts, which I kept a close watch on, hoping they would grow; there were ads in those magazines that recommended creams and massage, and I was tempted to send in for free samples, just as I was tempted by advertisements for a puzzling thing called a truss, which to my ears had a salacious sound—I cannot remember whether a free trial was offered. What I lacked, above all, in this whole field was reliable information.