Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order of fallen women called the Magdalens.

When Mary McCarthy was a little girl, she took a train from Seattle to Minneapolis, where her parents meant to relocate near to her aunt and uncle. On that train, the entire family caught the Spanish flu, and by the time that McCarthy herself emerged from her convalescence, both of her parents were dead, having died within a day of each other. Thus began an unusual childhood, first under the care of her cruel resentful aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, then under her stern but caring Protestant uncle in Seattle. During that time, McCarthy latched onto the Catholicism of one side of her family, perhaps as a way of providing a consistency and continuity in a life of upheaval, or perhaps just because the grand drama of the Catholic religion can be appealing to a young girl. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a series of essays that chronicles these years of Mary's life.

One interesting thing that McCarthy does here is append an italicized afterword to each essay, presumably having been published somewhere else and at some other time, detailing how, where, and why, she'd taken poetic license. There's a great story of a rule-obsessed teacher at the Catholic boarding school who bonds with McCarthy over a love of Cicero's ancient fight with Cataline, but who nevertheless reports McCarthy--at the risk of expulsion--for sneaking out of the dormitory during the last week of school. I liked this one because it's an interesting profile of a recognizable kind of person, who clings to the rules for their own sake, despite the laxity that characterizes the actual figures of authority. But in the afterword, McCarthy describes how the timeline has been compressed to make the teacher's betrayal seem even more quixotic than it really was, how it probably wasn't just the day after they'd concluded their play, to great applause and aplomb from the student body.

As a book of essays, there isn't a strong throughline like a more traditional memoir, but this didn't bother me; McCarthy is such a strong, sensitive, and funny writer. In fact, I enjoyed this book a great deal more than her novel The Birds of America, having the funny-but-true verisimilitude of a real life, though perhaps not as much as the (in some ways, drawn equally from life) novel The Group. As the title suggests, the essays are drawn together perhaps by the strength of McCarthy's not-quite-cradle Catholicism. McCarthy captures well how a childhood religion can mix aesthetic and cultural concerns with deeper, more spiritual ones, how these can often be indistinguishable. As a teenager, McCarthy "loses her religion" as a kind of social ploy to receive sympathy and attention from her boarding school classmates, as well as the school's nuns and priests, but then a funny thing happens: she's not able to find it again. As ever happens, the pretenses we take end up becoming real.

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a coldfish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother's generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton '29. It would be better, yes, they were not afraid to say it, though Mother gently laughed, to marry a Jew if you loved him--some of them were awfully interesting and cultivated, though terribly ambitious and inclined to stick together, as you saw very well at Vassar: if you knew them you had to know their friends. There was one thing, though, truthfully, that made them feel a little anxious for Kay. It was a pity in a way that a person as gifted as Harald and with a good education had had to pick the stage, rather than medicine or architecture or museum work, where the going was not so rough.

Mary McCarthy's The Group begins with a wedding: Kay is marrying Harald, a somewhat untrustworthy and dilettantish playwright. But the real inciting incident, the moment that really sets the novel's action in motion, is the graduation from Vassar of the characters who make up the titular "Group": rich, portly Pokey; beautiful, cold Lakey; literary Libby; lovesick Dottie; poor Polly--and Helena, and Priss, and Norine. Graduation is a moment of dizzying possibility, the moment when you are ushered into "real life," and like presumably every generation before them, the women of the Group are dead-set on not doing things the way their parents did them. They will marry for love, not money, but they will also pass the various tests of success that life lays out for them; they will stretch, but not break, convention. Kay's marriage to Harald only happens to be the first of these many choices, and for the Group, who distrusts Harald (and with good reason), it is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's a sign that that real life really has begun to hurtle at them excitingly, like a train. On the other hand, the possibility that the marriage is ill-conceived is more than a tragedy; it's an omen.

The Group, which famously inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, is perhaps remembered best today because of its frank attitude toward sex. When Dottie goes home from Kay's wedding with Dick Brown, a beguiling but contemptuous artist, he initiates her into the painful world of sex for the first time, and afterward gives her instructions on how to obtain a diaphragm. McCarthy describes in detail the grueling and somewhat humiliating process of Dottie's fitting, followed by the further humiliation of waiting for Dick with a park with the diaphragm on a bag in her lap. Realizing at last that he's not coming for her, she stashes it under a bench, perhaps to be discovered by some unsuspecting park steward.

But The Group is frank about a lot of things, not all of which are explicitly sexual. In fact, one of the more interesting throughlines of the novel is its focus on the girls' medical experiences, of which Dottie's diaphragm fitting is only one. I was struck by Priss' section, in which she, having just had a baby--see how the novel takes us step by step through the various milestones of post-college life--finds herself in a moral struggle between her doctors and her doctor husband as to whether or not she should breastfeed. In The Group, much of a woman's life is determined at the doctor, which can become a staging ground for masculine battles for control. Even in absentia, Dottie's diaphragm visit is a kind of play by Dick for control over her body in the same way that Priss becomes the prize in a war between male doctors. The Group, set at a moment when psychotherapy and analysis are on the rise, and the mind, too, has recently become the property of the medical field, extends this to the world of psychology--see how Polly thinks of her boyfriend Gus' analyst as her unseen enemy. The ultimate example of this comes at the end, when Harald, a true shit, has Kay institutionalized against her will. The hospital, she is told, will only release her to her husband--who has disappeared.

I thought that The Group had a real richness to it--a richness of detail, of character, of irony. I could barely keep the characters apart, but I think that's all right. Though they lead radically different lives--some are rich, some are poor, some married and some not--there is a sense in which the boundaries between the blur. It might be too much to say that they are, like, a collective expression of womanhood, but I do think it's true that in the aggregate they elevate the novel above its materialist and cultural particulars to something more universal. The Group is keenly aware of the changing nature of their world. Sometimes this is funny--I don't think I've laughed at any single line as hard as I did when one of them asks another, "Have you tasted the new Corn Niblets?"--but it also takes in sweeping cultural movements like psychoanalysis and socialism. (One of the divides that develops between the members of the Group is which of them identify as Stalinists and which of them identify as Trotskyites.) And yet, the more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same: the power of sex, the drama of divorce, the specter of rape, the repressive nature of convention, the cage of motherhood. Kay's marriage with Harald provides a throughline for all these stories, and when it explodes, it does so disastrously, giving the book its disquieting ending.

Birds of America by Mary McCarthy

He decided they were sacred birds, an unholy trinity. Standing on their dark piles in the water, they had an evil, old, Egyptian look; gorged, their black wings spread to dry in the sun, they resembled hieroglyphs or emblems on an escutcheon. In their neck was a pouch that bulged when they had been fishing. They did not swim or float on the surface like other birds but darted through the water in a sinuous, snake-like way. He had never seen them squat or sit. They were always erect, spread-eagled; not sedentary--vigilant. They seldom moved, though they occasionally gave a flap of their wings or a turn of their long serpentine necks. They usually stood facing away, surveying the cove like sentries, or, in profile, commanding the open sea, but sometimes he would come back from some private sleeveless errand to find that they had wheeled about and were facing him in glistening formation. Unlike the shrieking terns and squawking gulls, they did not utter a sound. This stillness and fixity were what made them seem so horribly ancient, Peter thought, as though they preceded time. That and their snaky appearance, which took you back to the age of flying reptiles. Moreover, their soundless habit gave their slightest movement a quality of pantomime; from his bedroom window, he could pretend he was watching a drama of hieratic gesture.

Peter Levi is nineteen years old, the son of a famous American pianist and a Jewish-Italian emigre. He's extremely attached to his mother (the pianist), and his only dream is to return to the small New England town (in what seems to be Rhode Island) where they once spent a pleasant summer with her and to live in a little college. But when she's offered a grand European tour, Peter must be sent to boarding school, and form there to a European tour of his own, living in Paris, visiting Rome, getting the kind of "education" that is given to American WASPs. In Europe, Peter finds it a challenge to fit in, either among the French or his fellow Americans. He's deeply empathetic and principled--his maxim is Kant's golden rule, that people must be treated as a means and not an end--but living out this principle is harder than it seems.

Birds of America is a deeply philosophical novel, and becomes moreso as it goes on. A long letter from Peter to his mother is a working-out of his principles, and one of the final chapters takes the form of a long conversation at the Sistine Chapel with his advisor at the Sorbonne, who challenges Peter on the contradiction between his Kantian ethic and his anti-democratic attitudes (that is, he hates the hundreds of uncouth American tourists who converge on the sites of great European art). At the novel's end, Peter is in the hospital--having gotten an infected bite from a menacing swan, which is very funny--and has a vision of Kant himself, who tells him that "Nature," like Nietzsche's God, "is dead." What this seems to mean is that, in an increasingly fraudulent and modernizing world, not only tradition, but also nature, cease to be effective moral guides. As such the end of the novel returns to the beginning, where a sheepish Peter learns that a beloved owl, kept in the Rocky Port wildlife refuge, has kicked the birdy bucket.

Probably a more interested person could tease out the exact philosophical contours of the novel. I'm more drawn to a reading that emphasizes Peter's character, which is that of someone with a detailed set of principles he finds it impossible to apply. He's just too pusillanimous, and most of the novel's drama is him imagining what he might do to put the Golden Rule into practice, and never quite getting the opportunity. (It's impossible to imagine Peter traveling to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders, as his parents forbid him from doing at the beginning of the novel.) When he does try to turn his ethic into practice, the results are comical slapstick, picking pathetic fights with the French police or letting a homeless woman sleep in his bedsit. (She pees everywhere and steals his doorknob.) I

I detect a conservative streak in Birds of America, though its politics are ostensible anti-Goldwater liberalism: a belief that the world is getting worse, or at the very least, in worse taste. This is most evident, maybe, in the Rocky Port sections (the best part of the book) where Peter and his mother become increasingly unable to find the traditional goods they associate with the New England coast. We live in a world, McCarthy suggests, where even on the Rhode Island coast, you can only find frozen fish. Maybe so. It's all very Updike, I think. It's also a book about how the son of a Jewish emigrant becomes, in practical terms, an American WASP--another heritage gone, a moral code without purchase. But true to the novel's title, there are a lot of good descriptions of American birds (like the cormorants described above), and what more can you ask for?