Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Three

  HE BUSTLED INTO OUR office, shorty stout, middle-aged, breathy—born May 8, 1895; we others were in our twenties—with popping reddish-brown eyes and fresh pink skin, which looked as though he had just bathed. Perhaps it was this suggestion of baths—the tepidarium—and his fine straight nose that gave him a Roman air. I think he was wearing a gray two-piece suit and a white shirt.

  We walked to the Union Square restaurant and took a table on the second floor, above the cafeteria. I was the only woman, but Wilson did not seem to notice me specially. He talked mainly to Dwight and Fred. Somebody asked for our drink order. We were all, except for Dwight perhaps, nervous and tongue-tied, and a drink would have helped. But Wilson shook his head irritably, as though annoyed by the proposal, and we all meekly followed suit. Probably he didn’t drink and disapproved of the habit. Maybe one of the boys had the courage to order a beer.

  That is all I recall of this first meeting. Of course I remembered him from Vassar in my junior year—the year after Axel’s Castle—when he had read a paper on Flaubert with such alarming pauses that Miss Sandison, who had introduced him, had run down to the basement in Avery to find him a glass of water: “Vox exhaurit in faucibus,” she said later. Now he showed more aplomb as we talked about the new, anti-Stalinist PR and what we were going to have in our first issues. He agreed that we ought to have something by Trotsky, if we could get it. He may have tried to interest us in his friend Paul Rosenfeld, to be our music critic. We spoke of André Gide and his revised view of the USSR, exemplified in the piece I was translating for our second number. Wilson had read it in French, he said, cutting the subject off. As I later learned, he did not think much of Gide. The conversation turned to Travels in Two Democracies, which had described his own trip to Russia, contemporaneous with Gide’s. The title showed how far he had come politically in a little more than a year; that book had been published in 1936. He could no longer call Russia a democracy unless ironically—the trials had happened in between. Essentially his book belonged to the epoch of the Kirov assassination, and perhaps he was slightly embarrassed by his failure to see ahead.

  Over lunch, his voice was light and pleasant; this was not one of his booming days. He was always at his best when he was bookish. By the time we separated, he had promised us a piece for our first number.

  The following week Margaret Marshall called me at Covici. She had heard from Wilson, who wanted to take us out to dinner, the two of us. She supposed it was because of the Nation series, in which he had been singled out for praise. If so, it seemed odd that he had waited two years, I thought. Peggy, who had met him, was being coy about why he was asking us both, when he “kind of” liked her, she was sure. Perhaps he wanted chaperonage, I suggested lightly. For my part, I could not guess what was in his mind. The whole thing seemed very strange. But if Wilson was “after” one of us, it must be me, I reasoned, since he had just met me in the PR office. Fred and the boys puzzled over the invitation, too, when they learned of it. I wondered—maybe we all wondered—whether Wilson knew that I was Philip’s girl.

  As the date for the dinner approached, my co-editors did quite a bit of worrying and wondering. Yet nobody, including Philip, thought I should decline. With our high ambitions for the magazine, we could not consider that. Instead, we worried about me. The boys did not hide their fear that my political inexperience could make the magazine look foolish to that experienced older critic who knew such a great deal about Marxism and the U.S. social scene. And I was literary in the wrong way, not really modern, still interested in graduate-student stuff like Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. I was not as big a liability as George Morris; he had gone into the Workers Bookstore and asked for a copy of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, wearing spats and carrying a cane! He had been curious to read it, he said, having heard so much talk about it in the office, and had thought that a neighborhood bookstore with “Workers” in the name would be a good place to find it, never dreaming that it was the official Party place. Even after hearing this explanation, the boys were aghast. I knew better than that, of course, but I was politically undeveloped, prone to wonder whether the Tsar and his family needed to be killed. Clearly it nettled my fellow editors that I had been singled out to represent the magazine—why not one of them? With their excitable apprehensions, most evident in Philip and William, they were making me fearful myself of what I might say or do. There could be no reprieve: Wilson had called Margaret Marshall again to confirm the date and tell us to meet him at Mary’s—an Italian restaurant deep in the Village known to his generation.

  At this point Fred Dupee came to my rescue. Since it looked as if the great critic did not drink, I would need some bucking up for the ordeal ahead, he decided, seeing me white and strained in my “dinner dress,” when I stopped by the office for a last-minute briefing. So he took me to the Hotel Albert bar, on University Place, and ordered Daiquiris, my favorite cocktail at the time. I must have had three.

  Wilson and Peggy were already at Mary’s, in an upstairs private dining-room. Far from not drinking, he was ordering a second round of double Manhattans when I arrived. Naturally I took one, then a second, without saying that I had already had drinks with Fred. But if I had, it would have made no difference. Wilson was in a bibulous mood. And I learned why he had said no to drinks before lunch that day in the Union Square restaurant: he had had a colossal hangover, and the hair of the dog was not one of his weaknesses.

  His habit, as I came to know, was to get thoroughly soused (which we were on our way to doing at Mary’s), then sleep it off and turn over a new leaf the next day on arising. Bathed and shaved, clad in snowy linen—he wore B.V.D.s—he emerged from his toilet reborn, or like a risen god. That he did not smoke probably helped. The glowing pink man we had taken to lunch was a resurrected Wilson, who had harried hell the night before. The boys, who had read I Thought of Daisy (I had not), might have guessed that the respected critic was no teetotaler.

  After the double Manhattans, we drank dago red and finally B. & B. This was a favorite potion with Wilson, which I never came to like; for me, the sweetness of the Benedictine spoiled the taste of the brandy. All that liquor loosened my tongue, and I had what was called a talking jag. Since Wilson seemed interested, I told them the story of my life: Seattle, the flu, the death of my parents, Minneapolis, and certainly quite a bit about Uncle Myers, not omitting, I fear, the razor strop...Then, somehow, we were at the Chelsea Hotel, on West 23rd Street. Possibly we had dropped in on Ben Stolberg, who was living there at the time. I was no longer very conscious of Margaret Marshall, but she was still one of the party. Fairly soon, I hope, I “passed out.”

  As I learned the next day, my inert form put them in a quandary. Neither Peggy nor Wilson knew where I lived. Ben Stolberg would not have known either. If they had tried looking in the phone book, they would not have found me—Philip and I had only recently moved in. Wilson, though no doubt very drunk, rose to the occasion. He took a room for himself—he was living in the country, near Stamford—and another for Margaret and me.

  Opening an eye the morning after, I looked cautiously across to the next bed, having assessed that I was in a twin-bedded room. With an episode like the one with the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt behind me, I had reason to fear the worst. In the other bed, a yawning Margaret Marshall opened her eyes. There was no one else in the room, so far as I could see, and I guessed that we were in a hotel. I let a cry escape me, a loud groan or moan. It was the same awful certainty speaking that had just awakened me, like a voice in my ear: “Oh, God, oh, God, I’ve disgraced Partisan Review.” In my slip, I cried hopelessly while she looked on. Wilson must have gone back to Stamford. At any rate, we did not see him that morning. Doubtless he had paid our bill.

  My first action, of course, was mandatory: call Philip. Maybe Peggy was kind enough to get the number for me when she saw how scared I was. They knew each other because he wrote reviews for her, for The Nation, but this was the first she knew o
f our living together. Anyway, while we were still in that hotel room, she talked to him. She told him that I had passed out and that Wilson, not knowing what to do with me, had persuaded her to stay with me in the Chelsea in the next bed. Philip believed her. Angry as he was, he felt pity for me. Either he came down in a taxi to get me or I took a taxi home by myself. I was still wearing my “dinner dress.” Either way, he forgave me. It was the second time, counting the Eastman’s-lap folly. I was horrified to think of the night he must have spent, not knowing what had happened to me. Probably he blamed Fred when he heard about the Daiquiris. But as the helmsman of a young, endangered periodical, he would not have allowed himself to be angry with Wilson.

  Philip’s capacity for forgiveness will surprise people who thought of him (and wrote of him) as a gruff, rancorous man. But it is a fact and not to be fully explained by the strong attraction between us. In another man, this could have led to a fierce, jealous resentment. But Philip had an open heart and a childish, somewhat docile nature with those he had opened it to, few as they were. That he could accept my penitence—and not from any weakness—must have meant that he understood that I loved him. I did, and still do, vividly, as I write these words. Real love, said Hannah Arendt, is mutual. It is something that happens between two people. After much reflection, I agree with that. The other thing, the thing you read about in Proust, is infatuation (from fatuus, “foolish”); it is much commoner than love, and you can get over it. Years later, when Philip died and I wrote a little obituary on him, Hannah, on reading it, was astonished. “So, my dear, you loved him. I never knew.” Maybe, till she said it, I had not known it myself.

  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.