Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  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.

  My ignorance, not so very remarkable in a bright girl (in my experience, sexual wisdom seldom keeps pace with the “higher” kind), points to what was a crucial problem for my development, the real obstacle to the birth of a mind in my teeming brain—the fact that I had no friends. It ought to have alarmed my grandparents if they were watching (which apparently they were not) that I had no one of my own age to talk to, no one to confide in, no one I dared ask, for example, what a truss was. I could not trust my uncle Frank’s wife, named Isabel, active in the younger married set, not to make fun of my strangeness—a thing about myself that I sensed without being able to see. I did not take to my new classmates—a “Pat,” an “Eileen,” a “Joan,” with red hair, freckles, and dandruff on the uniform. Mothers of these and others (I think of a stick named Jane Miller with glasses and a stiff brother, Vincent) invited the class for tables of lotto followed by ice cream and cake on a Saturday, but I was always glad to go home when my grandmother came to pick me up in her electric. None of those girls was ever invited to our house, and at the time that did not strike me as peculiar since nobody but a relative had been allowed to put foot in the house in Minneapolis. When at last a popular girl from the class ahead was demoted to be my desk-mate (a punishment for talking in study hall) and responded kindly to my overtures, it was partly from pity, I now see, and a willingness to be entertained. We did not share thoughts. Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.

  When, at my own urging, then, in the year 1925, I entered a public high school in what is now the black district of Seattle, it was not as though I were leaving a circle of friends behind to embark on the unknown. Certain Sacred heart presences—Marie-Louise L’Abbé, Julia Dodge, Janet Preston, Marjorie MacPhail, the Von Phuls, the Lyonses, the Danz girls, little Abbie Stuart Baillargeon, Eugenia McClellan, Susie Lowenstein—are stored in my memory like fall leaves pressed in a school book, but though I cannot forget their names, faces, figures, the awareness was not mutual. I had arrived among them a stranger from Minneapolis and to those I most worshipped I remained that. At Garfield, again, I knew nobody; I had no former classmates from a city grade school to serve as a launching pad. The convent I had left behind was utterly remote from this new milieu—no connection, another planet—and when, in the second term, the exquisite Julia Dodge appeared among us, as a transfer from Forest Ridge, it was like the transmigration of a soul from a distant heavenly body. Nobody among my new acquaintances could believe that I knew her, and she showed no recognition of me.

  I did not last long at public high school; my grandparents, wisely, withdrew me at the end of the first year when, crazed by liberty, I almost ceased to study. Since the loss of my faith was proving to be permanent, more than an adolescent’s caprice, we decided that I should go to a Protestant boarding-school, where there would be little stress on religion. The choice lay between St. Margaret’s School, in Victoria, B.C., the Anna Head School, in Berkeley, California (where Helen Wills had gone), and the Annie Wright Seminary, in nearby Tacoma. Needless to say, I longed to go to Anna Head, which in fact was a good school, and my grandparents leaned toward Annie Wright, where they could come to see me in the car on occasional Sundays, bringing fruit and cookies and a flowering plant for my room. The principal, a Miss Preston, established a good rapport with my grandfather, and thus my fate was decided.

  In other words, accident—the coincidence of a surname and the driving time from Seattle—determined my entire future. Had I got my wish and gone to Anna Head, I would have become Californian and I would not like myself now. I prefer being a Puget Sound type that had gone east to college, as could happen, though rarely, to Seattle girls; from Anna Head, I would probably have continued on to Stanford, or even Berkeley, and become a sorority girl, a Gamma Phi, maybe, like my mother at the University of Washington. As to what I might have turned into had St. Margaret’s in Victoria been elected, I cannot even guess.

  On the choice of one’s secondary school, one’s course in life seems to be plotted, and often there is no consciousness of a choice being made, no visible bifurcation of the ways: from grade school one continues to the neighborhood high school (as my parents did) or one goes to the boarding-school where “everyone” in the family has gone. Here the part played by chance seems all but unnoticeable, and the future appears to flow inevitably from the past. With relatively rootless people, often transplanted, like myself, destiny’s decisions, on the contrary, may appear highly capricious. I think of Reuel studying school catalogues and voting for Andover—a preference I could not account for until in a corner of a photograph in the Andover catalogue I noticed a Ping-Pong table. In a similar vein Edmund Wilson overruled Milton Academy (girls, proximity to Boston, a good curriculum) for the self-evident reason that T. S. Eliot had been a Milton boy. In fact Reuel was sent to Brooks, in North Andover—a decision that had something to do with the size of the headmaster’s dog.

  But my own fates may have pronounced while I was still in public high school, months before Annie Wright was even thought of or a single name-tape sewed on my underclothes. It may have happened on the day I got my first library card from the Seattle Public Library—an important, even self-important, day for me, although I cannot call it the happiest of my life, as Napoleon is supposed to have said of the day of his First Communion. Nevertheless I remember the feeling of power conferred on me by the small, ruled piece of cardboard still empty except for my name typed at the top and my signature below. I was in the main downtown branch (not far from the YWCA, where I used to swim all by myself on winter Saturdays in the pool), and the fiction shelves frightened me with a bewilderment of choice—a sensation bordering on panic that one can get nowadays in a too well furnished supermarket. The power of choice I held affected me as an urgency, forcing me to take out a book before I was fully prepared, hurrying me to make up my mind as though behind me there were a crowd of other borrowers. Summoning resolution, I picked a book from the shelves and advanced to the counter. It was The Nigger of the Narcissus. The librarian looked at me; I
looked back at her. She took my card and tucked another one, stamped, in a flap at the back of the volume. I had the impression that she might say something, but she let me walk away. In my mind was only the vaguest notion of who Joseph Conrad was or had been.

  2

  IT WAS IN PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL that I became conscious for the first time of a type of person that we would now call an intellectual. In those days the word for such people collectively was “intelligent­sia,” borrowed from the Russian and scarcely used any more, as though the Bolshevik Revolution, in eliminating the social grouping, had consigned the term to “the ashcan of history”—a favorite receptacle. “Intelligentsia” had included bohemians—artists and musicians, people like Pasternak’s parents—as well as narodniki, nihilists, teachers, doctors, sometimes combining several of these vocations in one person as in Turgenev’s Bazarov. It was the enlightened class in society. The characters typically found in Chekhov—army officers, country doctors, small landowners fond of musing on large ideas, students—all belong to the intelligentsia, whatever their occupation or lack of it. They are an epiphenomenon of increased education, hence choiceless in a sense and rather sad; the intellectual, on the other hand, is self-chosen, even when produced in quantity. The term took hold in the thirties, encouraged by Marxism and the depression. In Garfield High School, on the edge of the Madrona district in Seattle, probably neither term was familiar in the year 1925, but the thing existed and was recognized.

  Like most big-city high schools, ours had a star system, expressive of the fact that we were a juvenile mass society. The biggest and most powerful—galaxies distant from a speck of a freshman like me—were the football stars (Larry Judson); then came the track stars (the fleet Bill Albin); then the basketball aces (for some reason less glamorous, although a cheering section of us, wearing beanies and waving pennants, accompanied them to whatever high-school gym they played in, all the way to Ballard, even, or West Seattle). Besides the athletes there were the thespians (Larry Judson, again, in a brown business suit, and black-haired Kathleen Hoyt, who had an “English” voice, very affected, wore a cloak, and was coached by her mother) and the literary “lights” who edited the school paper (the famed Mary Brinker, who married Mr. Post, the English teacher, and thus became Mary Brinker Post, and tiny Estare Crane of the single black side spit curl, who married the wit Mark Sullivan, but of him more anon).

  Garfield had no academic stars, awing the rest of us with their straight A’s. I don’t think grades played any part in the politics of the school, which may be why I let mine sink to D-minus even in French and English, my best subjects. My grandparents thought it was because my head had been turned by boys, after two years of deprivation with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; no doubt they were partly right, since when an end was decreed to Garfield and I was sent the next fall to the Episcopal boarding-school for girls in Tacoma, my marks at once shot up.

  But boys and their effect are not what I want to talk about here (I was not allowed to “step out” with them anyway); rather, I want to trace the onset of intellectual interests in me that I can place during that year. At first this was merely curiosity, awakened by the discovery of what appeared to be a new species of being. We had not had any intellectuals in the convent, unless I count the Mistress of Studies. There had been none in my family (although my father with his invalidism and irregular law practice might have qualified for the old intelligent­sia), and I would not find any at Annie Wright Seminary. This does not mean that brains and scholastic achievement were undervalued in those schools; almost the contrary. In the convent medals for excellence in our subjects were awarded every month like the wide blue, green, and pink moiré ribbons some of us got to wear over our left shoulder and across the chest for good conduct, and books were distributed at the end of term as prizes for scholarship. I don’t recall prizes at Annie Wright, but we had a number of coveted academic privileges and honors, the crowning one being to be chosen valedictorian at Commencement, which was almost as good as having been May Queen.

  The quality of the teaching at both Forest Ridge and Annie Wright was greatly superior to what was offered at Garfield (this cannot have been a matter of better pay, since the nuns received only a cell and unenviable board), and the high quality of the instruction was sensed by the pupils, even the dull ones, as a special kind of electricity given off by certain teachers. There was nothing of the sort at Garfield; maybe some of the teachers were feared; most of them, I felt, were despised. But at the convent, as at Annie Wright, a few (Madame Bartlett, Miss Dorothy Atkinson, Miss Hayward) were the objects, almost, of a cult. There was much vying to be noticed by them, sit by them at table, have them (at the Seminary) as chaperons for shopping trips and play-going, and these were not the most indulgent or youngest and prettiest teachers but the most stiff, sallow, severe. To the more formidable Madames in the convent (Mère Bartlett, in particular, with her shadow of a moustache) legends of prowess clung—how they had been educated at the Sorbonne, how they had read all the forbidden classics on the Index under a special dispensation from the archbishop—and around the more austere women in the Seminary, e.g., Mrs. Hiatt, the widow of a cleric, who wore a gold watch and chain, we wove fables of loss of fortune that had lowered them to the sad point of teaching us.

  Of course, the closed, single-sex atmosphere of boarding-school encouraged such an attitude in the girls: at the Sacred Heart the piano lesson, chaperoned by an old lay nun dozing in a chair, was our unique encounter with a man outside the confessional; at Annie Wright the only males we saw during the week were Mr. Bell, the chaplain, who sometimes “took” the morning service, the janitor, an incomprehensible old Lancashireman, the gardener, an incomprehensible old Yorkshireman, and Major Mathews, the riding-master (married). Having no better food for our hungry imaginations, naturally we romanticized our teachers’ mental acquirements and surely graded some of them higher than they deserved. Even so, the comparatively low esteem in which the teachers at Garfield were held seems rather remarkable. It must have been related to the lack of attention given to high marks, though which was cause and which effect is not clear.

  The “exception” teacher at Garfield, I gather, had been the above-mentioned Mr. Post. He was already in the past tense when I entered, having left (to become a writer?) a summer or so before, but he was still spoken of with reverence by boys and girls who had not had the luck to “have” him in class. What he had taught in the way of English I never found out, but I think he owed his unusual status not so much to his classroom performance as to having been adviser to the newspaper and the yearbook—media-functions that connected him with the reigning star system of the school. I picture him as a sort of coach to Garfield “teams” of budding journalists, which had moved on to the U, across the canal; some, like Mark Sullivan, were already “making their letter” on campus by editing the college newspaper, yearbook, humorous magazine. Certainly­ Mr. Post had the kind of popularity enjoyed by a football coach, and, just as a Husky quarterback trained on Seattle playfields could aspire to be named All-­American and enter the Hall of Fame, so a member of one of Mr. Post’s “winning” high-school teams could hope to have a story accepted by College Humor while still an undergraduate and eventually make it to the Seattle P.-I. or Colonel Blethen’s Times (our afternoon paper, the Star, was lacking in prestige) or even go east and become a columnist like Hearst’s O. O. McIntire or the real Mark Sullivan, a then-famous pundit.

  Today journalists are not considered intellectuals. But in 1925, in the West, high-school and college newspapers seemed secure stepping-­stones to literary and intellectual fame. There was no such thing as “creative writing” then; there were no “Writers’ Workshops,” no “writers in residence.” Rather, the cub reporter was the man of destiny in our still half-pioneering Far Western cities, just as in the small towns of the prairie the newspaper editor was the town philosopher. Jack London, Frank Norris, Dreiser, Mencken, Ben Hecht, Burton Rascoe had blazed
the trail to the city room or afield to the foreign correspondent’s tent—in Seattle we did not know yet of “Bunny” Wilson and Hemingway, who had been making their start in the same way. Such figures as Mencken and Dreiser, rather than V. L. Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought), actually teaching in the English Department of the University, were the intellectual giants, resembling Rodin’s “Thinker,” that our locals sought to emulate. Giants and titans, like Dreiser titles or Gutzon Borglum likenesses hammered into a mountain face, peopled the cultural scenery, above all west of the Mississippi. The sheer size of the country gave the effort to write a narrative an epic thrust, and the notion of genius, hard for Americans to relinquish, was still very much alive in the pages of our school yearbook. The genius (I now slowly perceive), like the intellectual, is a product of mass culture.

  I have only to summon up in memory the hushed study halls of Forest Ridge and Annie Wright, with the surveillante or teacher-on-duty raised above us at her desk on the dais, I have only to see morning chapel, with the girls in dark-blue serge uniforms and black net veils, like widows, intoning “Oui, je le crois,” or else in Episcopalian middy blouses and bare-headed tuning up on “Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear, It is not night if Thou be near,” to admit that an intellectual cannot be the product of an elite education. Rough plebeian democracy is the breeding-ground of the class of intellectuals, springing up like the dragon’s teeth to fight and kill each other down to the last five men before they can found the City.