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.

True North by Jim Harrison

My name is David Burkett. I'm actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of freshwater. this naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings. I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

David Burkett hates his father for two distinct, but interrelated reasons. First, his father is the heir of a line of timber barons who have made their wealth from pillaging forests, exploiting workers, and being generally nasty. In this, author Jim Harrison draws from the true history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which often pitted industrial capitalists against the miners, loggers, and Native Americans whose labor their vast wealth required. I was interested to see the historical details crop up along the route of our trip recent trip through the Upper Peninsula. At one point, David's forebears are squarely blamed for a stampede in which hired goons yelled "Fire" in a crowded theater, crushing dozens of children, and which I read about during our visit to the Calumet National Historic Park on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The other reason is that his father is a pederast and a rapist, pursuing underage girls with the doggedness of the truly depraved, including raping the young daughter of his Mexican groundskeeper, Jesse, a crime that stands out in David's mind as the pinnacle and exemplar of all his crimes.

In part, David's response to this is to run from money, living simply in cabins and trucks throughout the U.P. He also responds by trying to write a thorough history of the U.P. in which his family's crimes will play a starring part. This effort is a Casaubon-like attempt that's destined to fail because there's too much history to uncover, and it's hamstrung by the fact that, as it turns out, David is a shitty writer. And yet, nothing he does seems to help David emerge, psychologically speaking, out from under the shadow of his father. As he grows from a teen into a man and begins to accumulate the ordinary sexual obsessions, he finds himself tortured by the possibility that his lusts will make him closer to his father than he would like. And yet, a series of women are on hand to give themselves sexually to David: the youthful Laurie, his abbreviated wife Polly, the poet Vernice, and others. Each of them encourages David, in their own way, to find a way to let go of his obsession with his father.

In this way, True North is very much a masculine novel in a kind of old-school way. Women never seem to say "no" to David, sexually speaking, or if they do, it's only contextual, no woman is ever just-not-interested, and they all represent stages of self-expression or self-growth, the woman as the extension of the man. But Harrison is a talented writer, and he brings them enough to life that you're willing to forgive this hoary old dynamic. I found the book ultimately very engaging and readable, and I was impressed with the way that Harrison keeps David's father largely off the page in order to keep the focus on the psychological damage that David himself carries around. It was a great pleasure to read on the Upper Peninsula (I actually read the whole thing on two long ferry rides to and from Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior), and it gave me a much richer sense of the heritage of the place: the Ojibwe, the Finns, the Cornish, the mines, the timber, et cetera, et cetera. Although it's telegraphed at the beginning of the novel, the extreme and out-of-place violence of the ending shocked me; I'm still not sure how to integrate it mentally with the rest of the novel.

Laughing Whitefish by Robert Traver

It was one of those glorious Northern evenings I was learning to love, the tall reddish sky shot and aflame with great soaring rays and reflections from the dying sun. The Creation must have been something like this, I thought. As my rented horse plodded along the dusty ore-stained road I reflected about this elusive thing called success and material attainment. Who was ever to say with confidence that the Marjis of this world were failures? By and by I found myself thinking about the complex new legal situation in which I suddenly found myself--my first big case--thinking about it and all of its ramifications, thinking, too, about my new client, the withdrawn and aloof but strangely exciting young Indian woman, Laughing Whitefish.

Robert Traver was the pen name of John Voelker, a distinguished judge from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who parlayed his work into a career of popular early legal fiction, including the novel Anatomy of a Murder, later turned into a film by Otto Preminger. Laughing Whitefish, like Anatomy of a Murder, is based on a real legal case that occurred in the Upper Peninsula, though in this case, in the late 19th century: an Ojibwe woman named Charlotte Kobogum sued a mining company for the shares owed to her father, Marji Kobogum, promised to him for showing the mining company the location of a vein of ore. Charlotte's claim hinged on whether or not she could be proved to be her father's legal heir: she was born of his second polygamous wife and raised, after that wife's death, by a third.

To this story, Traver adds a green young defense attorney, William Poe, who has the case fall in his lap after another attorney comes to him wishing to wash his hands of the case. Poe is eager to help the young woman, whose Ojibwe name (in the novel--I don't think in real life, but I could be wrong) is Laughing Whitefish, also the name of a river near Marquette. Poe's eagerness becomes mixed up with an increasing affection for Laughing Whitefish, who returns his affections by the novel's end--a progressive-enough marriage for the civilized outpost of Marquette in the late 19th century, and maybe even in the mid-century when Traver wrote the novel.

Laughing Whitefish is breezy, readable, and largely artless. It suffers from being, in a way, ahead of its time: at the time it was written, we were not yet awash in legal dramas, and the courtroom scenes feel stagey and quaint. Similarly, the legal genius of Poe's ultimate strategy suffers from being entirely obvious with the aid of modern hindsight. Seeing that the opposing counsel tries again and again to settle, he senses that there is something that he's missed about the case that makes it winnable. That turns out to be the supremacy of U.S. treaty law: the American treaty with the Ojibwe, which promises recognition of all traditional Ojibwe relationships, ratifies Laughing Whitefish's claim to be her father's rightful heir. That Poe has to "discover" this bedrock fact of Indian law suggests, perhaps, that this jurisprudence was not quite obvious to everyone in the late 19th or even the early 20th century; after all, the United States has always had a way of forgetting stipulations in its supposedly "supreme" treaties when convenient. Still, Laughing Whitefish is interesting in the way it captures a moment in the changing legal landscape of the frontier, and it's hard not to see the symbolism in the generational shift from the drunk, dissolute Marji to his civilized, shrewd daughter, Laughing Whitefish--Charlotte.