Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Image Gallery

  Tess and her daughter, Mary McCarthy, one and a half months old, Aug. 10, 1912, Seattle

  From Roy’s desk calendar

  Roy in his office, probably in the Hoge Building, Seattle, around 1914

  Tess against photographer’s ocean, 1910, The Breakers, Oregon

  Tess in her engagement photo

  Harold Preston

  Roy McCarthy

  Four generations, Seattle, around 1916: Mary, Simon Manly Preston (great-grandfather), Kevin, Harold Preston (grandfather), Tess with Preston on her lap

  Uncle Harold Preston, possibly at Lake Crescent

  Kevin, aged five, in Seattle house

  Kevin at his parents’ graves, Minneapolis cemetery

  Miss Preston, Annie Wright principal

  May Queen photo 1929. Queen (seated) is Jean Eagleson; Mary, standing, is in top row, third from left

  Graduating class, Annie Wright Seminary, 1929, with Blanche Ford, class of ’28, in front row next to Mary

  “Marthe” Simpson, art teacher (1898-1984), in 1932

  At Vassar, sophomore year

  1929, Seattle. Leonid Finch photograph

  Main Hall, showing South Tower, on right

  Miss Sandison, in the library

  Vassar library

  Miss Kitchel

  Library

  Frani Blough

  Cushing dining hall

  Uncle’s Been Dreaming, adapted from Dostoevsky, Hall Play, 1932. Elizabeth Bishop is the little man in black, in front of the fireplace; Mary, standing, is in profile at right

  Elizabeth Bishop, from 1933 yearbook photo of Vassar Miscellany News staff

  Main Hall with “soap palace” and South Tower in background

  Vassar yearbook photo

  With “Mannie” Rousuck of the Carleton Galleries in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, 1950

  Wedding photo, June 21, 1933. Harold Cooper Johnsrud and Mary, at the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Sunde

  Brief Biographical Glossary

  of Lesser-Known Figures

  by Carol Brightman

  GEORGE ANTHEIL (1900-1959): American pianist and composer. His Zingareska for orchestra, one of the first symphonic works to incorporate jazz, was performed in Berlin in 1921. When he moved to Paris in 1923, he was taken up by Joyce, Yeats, Satie, Picasso, and Pound (who wrote a book about him). In November 1923, two violin sonatas commissioned by Pound—who performed the part for tenor and bass drums at the end of the second—had their premiere. In 1924 Antheil began working with Léger and the film maker Dudley Murphy on Ballet Méchanique, which was scored for sixteen player pianos controlled from a switchboard, but the synchronization with the abstract film proved impossible, and they became autonomous works. Ballet Méchanique was performed in Paris in 1925 with eight pianos, one player piano, four bass drums, and a siren; in 1927 it was done at Carnegie Hall.

  He became musical director for the Berlin Stadttheater in 1928. In May 1930 his first opera, Transatlantic, was performed at Frankfurt am Main. The libretto centered on an American presidential campaign and presented a wild caricature of life in the United States. During these years he also wrote ballet scores for George Balanchine and Martha Graham. He returned to the United States in 1933 and became music director for Eastern Paramount Studios. In Hollywood, starting in 1936, he composed incidental music for major films. He also did a syndicated lonely-hearts column, acted as a war-analyst for press and radio, and under a pseudonym published several detective stories inspired by a fascination with “glandular criminology.”

  SARAH HENRY ATHERTON (1889-1975): child-welfare activist and novelist—Blow Whistles, Blow! (1930; as a play, 1938), Brass Eagles (1935), Mark’s Own (1941). A Bryn Mawr graduate, 1913, she made a study of female adolescence for the National Consumers League, investigated child-labor conditions for the Department of Labor, and in 1934 supervised the WPA’s Federal Art Project in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

  ALAN BARTH (1906-1979): editorial writer for the Washington Post and author. As Eric Pace wrote in an obituary in the New York Times: “Mr. Barth advanced his liberal political views tirelessly over four decades in books and speeches … In the strongly partisan atmosphere of the McCarthy era, his book, ‘The Loyalty of Free Men,’ an indictment of what he called ‘the cult of loyalty,’ was removed from the public shelves of United States Government-run libraries abroad on orders from Washington. But Mr. Barth went on to write other outspoken books, including ‘Government by Investigation,’ which decried abuse of the power of legislative bodies to investigate … In his 1961 book, ‘The Price of Liberty,’ Mr. Barth contended that neurotic anxiety about crime was helping breed a police-state frame of mind in the United States; an exaggerated concern for order, he said, was endangering liberty.” A graduate of Yale, Barth worked in Washington for the McClure Newspaper Syndicate from 1938 to 1941; then at the Treasury and the Office of War Information. In 1943 he began thirty years as a Washington Post editorial writer. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1948-49 and won awards for distinguished writing and for his service to journalism.

  AL BEIN (1902-1990): American playwright and novelist born in Rumania. One of his earliest works, Little Ol’ Boy (1933, adapted from his novel, Road Out of Hell), dealt with a juvenile delinquent, played by Burgess Meredith; it marked Joseph Losey’s debut as a director. Let Freedom Ring (1935) was based on Grace Lumpkin’s novel To Make My Bread. Heavenly Express (1940) starred John Garfield as the Overland Kid who leads an army of hoboes (one played by Burl Ives) to whiskey heaven. In 1943 Bein wrote, directed, and produced Land of Fame, in which Greek guerrillas battle Nazis.

  MAURICE BROWNE (1881-1955): founder of the Little Theatre movement in the United States, and producer of the great theatrical success Journey’s End. Before the First World War he married the young actress Ellen Van Volkenburgh and migrated to the United States. In 1912 they started the Chicago Little Theatre, parent to all the others. In 1918 Browne organized a repertory company that presented Medea, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Candide, and Dr. Faust.

  Then in 1928 Browne found himself penniless in San Francisco and worked his way back to England, where he became a success as an actor in the West End; he played Adolf in Strindberg’s The Creditors. He produced Othello, with Paul Robeson, Peggy Ashcroft, and himself as Iago. Then he met the young insurance agent R. C. Sheriff, whose first play, Journey’s End, earned its producer a fortune. In the 1940’s Browne lost his fortune on less-favored productions, including a John Gielgud Hamlet and the blockbuster Wings Over Europe (1942), which starred Van Volkenburgh, and nearly bankrupted him. In 1949 he returned to California to become artist-in-residence at the University of California; there he wrote a peculiar autobiography, Too Late to Lament, and married another woman. The marriage failed, and he went back once more to England. He and Van Volkenburgh were associated with the Elmhirsts and Dartington Hall.

  KENNETH CALLAHAN (1905-1986): painter born in Spokane. He had his first one-man show at a stationery store in San Francisco. In 1927 he went to sea as a steward, crossing to Asia and Europe. In 1930 he made his first trip to Mexico and Central America. In Mexico he knew Orozco and Tamayo, and their influence was visible in his work, which appeared in regional exhibitions with increasing frequency. In 1933 he took a job as program director for the Seattle Art Museum, a position he held for many years, and became a regular contributor to local and national periodicals. Like many painters of his time, he worked for the mural division of the WPA during the 1930’s. Murals by him were commissioned for post offices in Centralia and Anacortes, Washington, and Rugby, North Dakota and in 1939 he completed one for the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company in Everett, Washington. In 1942 he got a regular summer job as a ranger in a one-man lookout post in the Cascades, which seems to have encouraged the sweeping vision of nature characteristic of his middle years. By the 1940’s his st
yle was largely non-representational. He taught painting and lithography at Washington State University, the University of Southern California, the Skowhegan School in Maine, and Syracuse University. In 1959 he was one of eight American artists whose work was selected for a State Department-sponsored tour of Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. He was personally invited to accompany the ten-month tour “to explain the position and life of an American artist.”

  In 1963 Callahan lost his entire collection in a fire that burned his Granite Falls, Washington, studio to the ground. He established a new studio in Long Beach, Washington, and began to work on several large murals and a series of terra-cotta sculptures. In 1968 he won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. His work can be seen in dozens of major collections.

  EDUARDO CIANNELI (1887-1969): Italian character actor highly esteemed in Hollywood. Once known as the “thinking man’s gangster,” he played Trock Estrella in the film version of Winterset (1936) and Lucky Luciano in Marked Woman (1937). His last appearance was in the 1959 television series Johnny Staccato.

  WARWICK DEEPING (1877-1950): British physician and novelist. When Love Among the Ruins became a best seller in 1904, he left medicine for fiction writing, publishing sixty-nine books. Praised for his “gentlemanly goodness and fun, and well-woven plots,” he was incapable of penning an unhappy ending; even his World War I novel Sorrell and Son (1925) ended happily.

  MAUD EARL (1848-1943): daughter and student of the nineteenth-century British sporting painter George Earl. She specialized in dramatized portraits of pedigreed and prize-winning dogs. Among her more famous subjects were the dogs of Queen Victoria and of King Edward VII. Her work appeared in several Royal Academy exhibitions between 1884 and 1901; “The Dog of War” and “Dogs of Death” remained two of her best-known pictures. Her work was popularized in England and the United States through engravings, which included twelve dogs engraved for The Sportsman’s Year in 1908. In 1917 she went to the United States, and in 1933, at the age of eighty-five, began to execute decorative screens and murals for the American market.

  ALBERT PARKER FITCH (1877-1944): celebrated Protestant clergy­man and public speaker in the 1920’s and 1930’s. A graduate of Boston Latin School, Harvard University, and Union Theological Seminary, he became president of Andover Theological Seminary in 1909. In 1917 he was named Professor of the History of Religion at Amherst College and later gave similar courses at Carleton College in Minnesota. In 1927 he was made pastor of the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, a post he held until 1932, when poor health forced his retirement. A popular commencement speaker and university preacher, he was well known for his unconventional social views. He was the author of three books about religion and society, including Can the Church Survive in the Changing Order? (1920), and a novel, None So Blind (1924).

  FERDINAND FOCH (1851-1929): French marshal. He planned the strategy that stopped the Germans at the Marne in 1914, directed the battle of the Somme in 1916, was chief of the French general staff in 1917, and became supreme commander of all Allied armies in 1918.

  KAY FRANCIS (1899-1968): From The Film Encyclopedia: “Despite a slight lisp she was one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and most highly paid stars during the 1930’s … portraying stylish, worldly brunettes in romantic melodramas … ” She was convent educated. Among her films were Gentlemen of the Press, Cynara, and The White Angel.

  WINSOR BROWN FRENCH II (1905-1973): society figure and travel writer who was a movie critic and travel columnist for the Cleveland Press from 1933 until his retirement in 1968. He was briefly married in the 1930’s to the stage actress and director Margaret Perry.

  HAROLD COOPER JOHNSRUD (1903-1939): stage actor, playwright, and occasional director. Son of Iver and Molly (Cooper), he was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota. As an actor, sometimes doubling as assistant stage-manager, he worked for Arthur Hopkins, Jed Harris, Guthrie McClintic, and during several seasons for the radical Theatre Union. He played a blind man in two plays simultaneously, commuting by cab between theatres—in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset and Archibald MacLeish’s Panic. He had a part in Max Reinhardt’s The Eternal Road (1937), a pageant of Jewish history designed by Norman Bel Geddes, written by Ludwig Lewisohn, scored by Kurt Weill, starring Lotte Lenya and Sidney Lumet (then a child actor), which was described at the time as “one of the costliest failures in Broadway history.” Though an option was held on his comedy Anticlimax, no play of his had been produced at the time of his death. Only his adaptation of the Viennese comedy Jewel Robbery, with Basil Sydney and Mary Ellis, was done, in 1935. New York Times news stories of December 23 and December 24, 1939, relate the circumstances of his death:

  ACTOR BADLY BURNED IN FIRE IN HOTEL SUITE;

  Harold Johnsrud Hurt Trying to Save Belongings

  “In an effort to retrieve personal belongings from a fire in his rooms at the Hotel Brevoort, Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, Harold Johnsrud, actor, director, and playwright was critically burned early yesterday­.

  “Although the blaze was confined to Mr. Johnsrud’s two-room suite on the second floor, forty of the 150 guests of the hotel went to the lobby after a telephone warning. There was little excitement but a crowd gathered on Fifth Avenue as smoke and flames poured from the room.

  “Mr. Johnsrud, who is 35 years old, discovered the fire at 5:29 A. M. and after notifying the night manager, Lawrence C. Finn, he went to the apartment adjoining, where Mr. and Mrs. Charles Ellis were asleep. The couple are fellow actors of Mr. Johnsrud in the play ‘Key Largo.’

  “Instead of following the Ellises to the lobby Mr. Johnsrud returned to his room, where he collapsed. Fire Lieutenant Clarence Cullen of Hook and Ladder 3 found him slumped on the floor of the bedroom and carried him to the hallway. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital suffering from first, second and third degree burns of the face, hands and body.

  “The cause of the fire was undetermined.

  “Mr. Johnsrud has been active in the theatre since 1927, when he appeared with the Provincetown Players. He has staged plays and recently wrote one, as yet unproduced. His part of ‘d’Alcala’ in the Maxwell Anderson play at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre was played last night by Mr. Ellis.”

  BURNS FATAL TO JOHNSRUD, ACTOR

  “Harold C. Johnsrud, 35 years old, an actor and member of the cast of ‘Key Largo,’ who was burned Friday morning during a fire in his hotel room at the Hotel Brevoort, died yesterday afternoon in Misericordia Hospital. Mr. Johnsrud had suffered severe burns of the face, hands and body.”

  The “belongings” were said to be the manuscript of a play.

  ANNA THERESA KITCHEL (1882-1959): English professor. A graduate of Smith College, she began teaching at West Davison High School in Milwaukee. She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and joined Vassar as an English instructor in 1918. She rose to be full professor. During 1923-24 she held a Markham Fellowship for study at the British Museum. Her George Lewes and George Eliot (1933) was the first biography to approach the relationship between the famous novelist and G. H. Lewes from the side of the latter. She also wrote Quarry for Middlemarch (1950).

  EUGENE MEYER (1885-1959): publisher of the Washington Post and first president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

  LLOYD NOLAN (1902-1985): stage and screen actor. In 1931-32 he played in Robert E. Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna with the Lunts. The following year he was Biff Grimes in One Sunday Afternoon, which closed after an assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt and reopened to run for 338 performances. In 1953-54 he gave the first of his highly praised performances as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, on Broadway. He received a New York Drama Critics award for Queeg. He appeared in Hannah and Her Sisters, released in 1986.

  ADELAIDE B. PRESTON (1871-1965): educator born in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1871. She was graduated from Smith College in 1895 and began teaching at th
e Morgan School, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1895. She taught mathematics and Latin in various private schools and was principal of Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, Washington, from 1913 to 1929. She then founded Miss Preston’s Outdoor School in Phoenix, Arizona.

  HAROLD PRESTON (1858-1938): lawyer and state senator. Born in Rockford, Illinois, he was educated at Iowa College and Cornell University. He studied law in Newton, Iowa, and was admitted to the Iowa bar in 1883. After moving to Seattle that year, he got a job writing abstracts; two years later he opened his own law office. The firm prospered under various partnerships, and Preston’s reputation for intelligence, integrity, fairness, consideration, and a passion for thoroughness and hard work grew. In 1888 he married Augusta Morgen­stern; they had two sons and a daughter.

  Preston was chairman of a commission that, in 1895, formulated Seattle’s second charter, which is the framework for its government today. From 1897 to 1901 he was a member of the state Senate and then and later played a prominent part in the enactment of progressive laws. Among these was a statute he wrote that established employers’ liability for injured workers, passed in 1911. This first workers’ compensation law was upheld by both state and federal Supreme Courts. In 1903 Preston was a candidate for the U.S. Senate, but was narrowly defeated by a vote in the legislature. He served as president of the Washington State Bar Association in 1898 and of the Seattle Bar Association in 1909-10.