Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (83 page)

Another way of reconciling the common view of Philip held by his enemies—i.e., by most of the males of the
PR
circle—with my own experience of him is that he
became
unforgiving after what I did to his childlike heart. I
hope
it is not that.

What I have to relate now is painful to tell. To put it “as in a nutshell” (as Hannah, now dead, too, used to say), Philip still had a lot of forgiving to do; I mean forgiving of me. The next occasion was another dinner with Wilson. Again he asked the two of us, Peggy and me, as though we were wedded by our collaboration in his not very flexible mind, and again we accepted and again the scene was Mary’s. Again Philip did not interpose a veto. This time I did not have Daiquiris to prepare me and this time I did not pass out. Alas, no. Instead, after the B. & B.s, the three of us rode in a taxi all the way out to Stamford, where Wilson lived in a house he rented from Margaret De Silver (Baldwin Locomotive, the American Civil
Liberties Union, Carlo Tresca) on the Mianus River. Fittingly, the house was named Trees. Again we did not call Philip, not, at any rate, till the next morning, when I conveyed an invitation from Wilson to take a train at Grand Central and join us.
And Philip did.

At Trees, at one end of the colorless living-room, we had a lunch cooked by an old black maid named Hattie, who occupied a wing of the house with her grandchildren. Wilson was affable; probably he served Liebfraumilch, his preferred table wine after Château d’Yquem, and we talked about books and writers. Then Philip took me home on the train. I cannot remember what happened to Margaret Marshall. Perhaps she took an earlier train back, for I do not see her sharp little face or hear her thin voice at the lunch table. Could she have gone to see her friend and contributor Franz Hollering, who lived with his Czech movie-actress wife in a house on the Eitingon property? Yes, the same name the reader has heard about in the first chapter, in connection with Clifford Odets, Johnsrud, and Frank Merlin; Motty Eitingon, a fur importer, had ties with the Soviet Union. In any event, while Miss Marshall slept in a little guest room just down the hall, I had gone to bed with Wilson.

Yes. That had not been my intention when I followed him into his study (book-lined, of course) to continue, as I drunkenly thought, a conversation we were having. I greatly liked talking to him but was not attracted to him sexually. He was too old and too
fat. Nevertheless, when he firmly took me into his arms, misunderstanding my intention, I gave up the battle. On the couch in the study, we drunkenly made love.

Some time before daylight, I left him and returned to the room that was supposed to be mine. I don’t think I saw him alone till many days later. At breakfast, produced by Hattie, we made no reference to what had happened. I called Philip, and we waited for him to come. It was only then, I believe, that Wilson understood that I lived with Philip. When he started to write to me, it was always to my office.

One day, a bit afterward, when we were finally able to talk—I had come out to Trees on the train, and we did not drink—I tried to explain to him my motives in returning to his study that night. But he would not listen to what I felt sure was the truth; only facts spoke to him, and the fact was that I had let him make love to me. Again, I gave up. You cannot argue against facts. And yet to this very day I am convinced that he had me wrong: I only wanted to talk to him. The reader will find an echo of this in Chapter Five of
A Charmed Life
, where Martha Sinnott, happily remarried, looks back on her first husband, the awful Miles Murphy: “She did not understand what had happened. She had only, she bemoaned, wanted to talk to him—a well-known playwright and editor, successful, positive, interested in her ideas and life-history.” (Let the reader be warned:
A Charmed Life
, though derived,
like all books, from experience, is not an autobiographical novel, and Miles Murphy must not be taken for a disguised portrait of Wilson. Martha, I admit, is a bit like me—I tried to change her and failed, as I failed later with Domna Rejnev in
The Groves of Academe
.) Maybe, when I wrote
A Charmed Life
, I was fooling myself about Martha’s motives and am still fooling myself today, when I should be old enough to know better, about what drove me into Wilson’s study on that long-ago night. At present, my guess is that it was the unwillingness to end an evening that gets hold of people who have been drinking—
anything
, sex included, to avoid retiring. But that is a far cry from Wilson’s fond persuasion.

Whatever the truth was, that I did not confess to Philip what had happened during that night at Trees indicated that a relationship with Wilson was beginning. The two of us had a secret between us, and Philip became the outsider. In my office at Covici, sitting opposite the ever-disapproving Miss Broene, I embarked on a correspondence with Wilson. He wrote, and I answered. His letters to me are at Vassar; mine to him are at Yale. Reading mine over, I am surprised by the intimacy and friendliness of my tone. There is a note of tenderness and teasing. Apparently I liked him much more than I remember, more than I ever would again. What I hear in the letters is not love, though—I never loved Wilson—but sympathy, affection, friendship. Later, I grew to think of him as a
monster; the minotaur, we called him in the family, Bowden [Broadwater] and I. The comparison is exact (he was even related to the Bull family on his mother’s side), and I may have felt a kind of friendship for the poor minotaur in his maze, so sadly dependent on the yearly sacrifice of maidens. But if, sensing that need, I warmed to Wilson, solitary among his trees, I did not guess that I would be one of the Athenian maidens with never a Theseus to rescue me.

If I had no premonition of what was in store, he, on his side, was hell-bent on my marrying him. He needed a wife “the worst way,” to use one of his expressions, having lost his second, Margaret Canby, in a fall down some steep stairs five years before. The women he had been having affairs with were either unwilling to marry him or unsuited to the job or both. When I met him, he must have been desperate. He could not take care of himself; the old black woman, Hattie, was a kind of nurse to him. Herbert Solow used to tell a story of arriving at Trees for a call during this time and hearing Wilson’s voice boom: “Hattie, Hattie! Where are my drawers?” He meant his underwear—those light lawn one-piece B.V.D.s he wore. He was comically dependent on old-fashioned terms. His bicycle was always “my wheel.” Had he owned or driven a car, it would have been “the machine.” His sexual organ, as readers of
Hecate County
discovered, was “my club”: “My club was pressing through the tight confines of my evening dress.”

No, I did not want to marry him. As a radical, I was against marriage. What happened is explained in
A Charmed Life,
in an analysis of the motive behind Martha’s first marriage. “The fatalistic side of her character accepted Miles as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved, she still felt, someone else. Nevertheless, she had naively sought a compromise. She had begged Miles merely to live with him, as his mistress.” That was what I tried to sell Wilson on, quite nobly, I thought. But he was not interested. “I’ve had that,” he replied, without elaboration. So finally I agreed to marry him as my punishment for having gone to bed with him—this was certainly part of the truth. As a modern girl, I might not have called that a “sin”; I thought in logical rather than in religious terms. The logic of having slept with Wilson compelled the sequence of marriage if that was what he wanted. Otherwise my action would have no consistency; in other words, no meaning. I could not accept the fact that I had slept with this fat, puffing man for no reason, simply because I was drunk. No. It had to make sense. Marrying him, though against my inclinations,
made
it make sense. There is something faintly Kantian here. But I did not know Kant then. Maybe I was a natural Kantian.

Of course, other reasons contributed. The death of my grandfather (as I have mentioned) may have been one. It was not that Wilson stood in as a father
figure for me exactly, but he was an older man (there were seventeen years between us) and came from the same stock, Anglo-Saxon, Presbyterian. His father, like Grandpa, had been a distinguished lawyer—Attorney General of New Jersey under Governor Woodrow Wilson. There was a certain feeling of coming home, to my own people.

Then there were the intellectual attractions he offered, all of which were beyond Philip: we were going to read Juvenal together, for example. Also, there was the whole world of Nature and the outdoors, so closed to Philip. We were going to ride horses along the trails above the river; we were going to fish for trout. We would look for wild flowers in the woods: spring beauty, bloodroot, hepatica, trillium. Some of this we actually did. After we were married, we rode a few times, uninspiring horses; we caught perch and sunfish, if not trout, in the Mianus, and Edmund knew the wild flowers quite well. He taught me their names, for which I am still grateful. But we never read Juvenal.

It was an idyl he was offering me, and not wholly false. He, too, must have hoped that it would be like that. Probably I was stirred by memories of Lake Crescent and the morning walk to Marymere Falls, of Major Mathews and the spring woods near Tacoma. Those had been the happiest moments of my life. Though Wilson could furnish me no waterfalls, no carpets of violets, he had a wonderful gorge, I found, just up the river, with an icy green transparent pool at the bottom.
I loved that. His own anticipation must have centered on having an intellectual girl for a wife—the first one. After a protracted siege to Edna Millay, he had been “stuck on” the poet Léonie Adams. But Léonie had cared about women (Margaret Mead had been his principal rival), and now she was married to Bill Troy.

Besides the inducements of a shared classical education and the outdoors, he offered me the promise that marrying him would “do something” for me, that is, for my literary gift. “Rahv doesn’t
do
anything for you,” he argued, meaning that Rahv was slothfully content to have me do those theatre columns, which, according to Wilson, were not up to my real measure. “You draw a crushing brief against a play,” he said. I did not exactly see what was wrong with that, but in fact he had put his finger on a limitation. I was not as narrow as Sidney Hook but I did treat most of the authors I wrote about as though they were under indictment. The tendency, evidently, was aggravated by Trotskyism. It was Wilson’s belief that I ought not to be writing criticism—I had a talent, he thought, for imaginative writing. This was the opposite of what dear Miss Kitchel had decided for me at Vassar.

Looking back, I can see that he was right where Philip was concerned. If it had been left to Rahv, I never would have written a single “creative” word. And I do not hold it against him; on the contrary. His love, unlike Wilson’s, was from the heart. He cared for what I was, not for what I might evolve into.
Whatever I might be
made
to be, with skillful encouragement, did not interest him. To say this today may seem hard on Wilson, as well as ungrateful on my part for what he did, in the first months of our marriage, to push me into “creativity.” If he had not shut the door firmly on the little room he had shepherded me into (the same room Margaret Marshall had slept in), I would not be the “Mary McCarthy” you are now reading. Yet, awful to say, I am not particularly grateful.

At the time, I was not swayed by the argument of what he, compared with Philip, could do for me. It seemed mercenary. The picture of a powerful man trying with various baits and lures to rob a weaker man of his chief treasure was not very appealing. But Wilson never saw that angle. He saw what he perceived as my self-interest, to be furthered by my marriage to him. From the outside, however, things looked different. I remember that somebody of the
PR
circle—Delmore or Harold Rosenberg—was widely quoted as saying that Mary left Philip for Wilson because Wilson had a better prose style. I am not sure that Wilson did, or not always, and it would have been a bad reason, had it been operative, which of course it was not. My own explanation (if I must give but a single one) for my yielding to Wilson is the Marxist explanation. It was the same old class struggle that Philip and I had been waging from the moment we fell in love.

Wilson, relatively speaking, was upper class. That was all there was to it. Though he commanded a higher word rate, he was scarcely better heeled than Philip on the WPA. Wilson made more money, which he spent on taxis, liquor, long-distance phone calls. There was nothing left for clothes or furniture or jewelry, all of which I cared about. He could not do without taxis, booze, the long-distance telephone, and hence regarded them in the light of necessities. Another addiction (I almost forgot) was book-binding, which was just then beginning to take hold of him. In terms of wealth, he was hard to situate. Though he could seldom pay the phone bill without hasty recourse to his mother, you could not call him poor, since he always had enough to eat. Neither could you say he was rich.

One material inducement that counted in the decision I was being pressed to make was his promise that we would have children. Philip was in no position to offer that; he was still not free to marry, lacking the price of a divorce, and he was not keen on the idea of progeny even in later life, when he was free and could afford it—he never had any children. But Wilson made good on that. He took me to New York in a taxi for my lying-in, though we had no clothes of our own for the newborn Reuel. My friend Florine Katz gave me her baby clothes, rubber pants, and diapers; her baby scales, I think, too. Wilson’s mother had to be appealed to for the baby carriage when we were leaving the hospital. Once we were back home, the
Bathinette gave rise to a crisis (he thought we didn’t need one), and I forget how we managed for a playpen. No doubt it was old Mrs. Wilson once again to the rescue.