Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (79 page)

We talked that day about Granville Hicks and
New Masses
, Marxian criticism, so called then (now it is “Marxist”). I wanted to impress Miss Sandison with the fact that I had become political (“radicalized” was the word in the sixties), yet, finding that she, too, was perfectly abreast of the new tendencies, I was able to open my heart to her and suggest the doubts I felt. These were
literary
doubts, I emphasized; I had no disagreement with the political side of the magazine. But in the literary pages there was a smell of Puritanism. I was reminded of the Marprelate Controversy that we had read about in her senior seminar on the English Renaissance—the same fanatic spirit. Not just “Granny” Hicks, but a lot of those
New Masses
reviewers brought to mind a character in Ben Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
, the hateful Puritan militant wonderfully named Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy. In the Marprelate quarrel, I had been rather on the side of the Established Church, whose pamphleteers had been University Wits. But above all I had responded to the noble, balanced periods of Richard Hooker (
Ecclesiastical Polity
), the great defender of the episcopate and anticipator of Locke—Miss Sandison had inspired me to read him.

It came to me that afternoon that the Elizabethans, her “field,” still constituted for me a sort of wondrous paradigm, a model in which the inflections or “cases” of literary practice were perennially recognizable. Spenser’s friend the pedant Gabriel Harvey, for instance, could have been a perfect
New Masses
contributor and advocate of the prolet-cult in literature. Harvey, the son of a ropemaker in the Norfolk town of Saffron Walden, was a species of crypto-puritan, possessed by a baleful hatred of the University Wits; he attacked the dying Robert Greene and was wonderfully counterattacked by Thomas Nashe. As a Latinist, he wanted to introduce the meters of classical verse into English poetry—in other words, to imprison it in a strait-jacket. I think the pedant and the puritan can never be far apart. To this day, the uncouth Harvey, for me, stands at the antipodes of true talent and its correlate, freedom, and I do not forgive Edmund Spenser, defender of the cruel Irish repression, for being his friend. Have with you to Saffron Walden, I say with Nashe.

Miss Sandison, of course, was pleased to see that the lessons of her seminar had not been lost on a favorite pupil. She was a friend of freedom herself—why else did she go to work for the ACLU? So I wonder how she took the fact that I was still leaning toward Stalinism. As I say, it was their
literary
practices that I found offensive. I had actually been talking of voting for Browder in the November election, casting what would be my first vote. Had I changed my mind? It depends on the date. Did I go up to Vassar before or after I woke up and found myself on the Trotsky Committee? Almost certainly before, since that took place in November. I have told the story in “My Confession,” and the point I made there was that it happened by pure chance. At a cocktail party for Art Young, the
New Masses
cartoonist, Jim Farrell, who seemed to be taking some sort of canvass, asked me if I thought Trotsky was entitled to a hearing, and naturally I answered yes, without any clear idea of what he was being charged with. Having been in Reno and Seattle, I had missed the news stories of the first Moscow trials. And I do not know how it was that I had been invited to what was presumably a Stalinist party, still less why Farrell had. Apparently the lines were not yet clearly drawn. But once I answered yes (and Farrell, it seemed, wrote my name down), my goose was cooked. A few mornings later, opening my mail, I found my name on a letterhead; it was a group that was demanding Trotsky’s right to a hearing, and
also his “right to asylum.” I was angry that my name had been used without my consent, but before I had time to register my protest by withdrawing it, my telephone began ringing: Stalinist acquaintances urging me to
take my name off that committee
. Other signers, like Freda Kirchwey, as I learned from the day’s paper, were promptly capitulating to the application of pressure. This only hardened my resolve, as anybody who knew me could have guessed. I let my name stay—a pivotal decision, perhaps
the
pivotal decision of my life. Yet I had no sense of making a choice; it was as if the choice had been thrust on me by those idiot Stalinists calling my number. I did not feel I was being brave; on the other hand, the Freda Kirchweys hurrying to withdraw their names looked to me like cowards. Though I was unconscious of having come to a turning point, the great divide, politically, of our time, I did know that I had better find out something about the cause I had inadvertently signed up with. Minimally I had to learn the arguments for Trotsky’s side.

Luckily I was the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers. And even more luckily a pamphlet had been issued analyzing the evidence in the first trial from “our” point of view, that is, on the assumption that, despite the defendants’ confessions, Trotsky was innocent of having conspired with the Nazis to overthrow the Soviet state. To my relief, the pamphlet was extremely convincing. I read it with care, testing the arguments as though I were preparing for an exam.
And they held water. Yet I cannot remember who wrote it. I think there was a sequel dealing with the second trial, of Pyatakov and Radek, which took place in January. I remember poring over the verbatim reports of both trials on my studio-couch in Gay Street. Yet I have no recollection of when or how the Trotsky Committee was formed. I know that there was already a committee and I was on it by February 14, 1937, because I remember the meeting that night in Farrell’s apartment and that I was the only one who noticed that it was St. Valentine’s Day, which I guess said something about all concerned.

In recent years I have read more than once that Edmund Wilson was on the Trotsky Committee. What an opportunity for us to have got to know each other! But I never saw him at any Committee meeting.

Being on the Committee marked the end of my awful solitude. Some time around Christmas things began to improve. I was meeting people—
men
. Part of that had to do with the Committee (“Dear Abby” in her column advises her lonely-heart readers to join a group—church group, she recommends), but a lot was coincidence. For instance, Bob Misch of the Wine and Food Society. How had I met him? Maybe through my friends Gene and Florine Katz. Misch was in the advertising business, single, German Jewish, and the very active secretary of the wine and food organization, whose head was André Simon, in London. He fancied himself as a cook and a knowledgeable bon vivant.
His short, stocky, dark, well-fed body made me think of a pouter pigeon. Probably someone took me to one of his Wine and Food tastings: on a series of tables various wines were grouped around a theme—Rhine wines, Loire wines, Burgundies—one sampled them, made notes, and compared. On the tables there were also little things to eat, “to clear the palate,” and probably water to rinse your mouth out. It was educational, it was intoxicating, and it was free. After the first time, my name was on their list, and I always accepted. Soon he was asking me to the little dinners he gave in his West Side apartment, quite evidently as his partner; his specialty was black bean soup with sherry and slices of hard-boiled egg. The reader will find something like those dinners in the chapter called “The Genial Host” in
The Company She Keeps
. If I may give an opinion, it is the weakest thing in the book. No doubt that is because I was unwilling to face the full reality of the relationship. In real life I slept with him and in the story I don’t. I suppose I was ashamed. Misch was eager to make me expensive presents (such as handbags) and to do services for me that I didn’t want. Even after I stopped sleeping with him, which was soon, he kept on asking me to those dinners, and I kept on accepting, because of his insistence and because, as the chapter says (though without mentioning sex between us), I was not quite ready to break with him, being still “so poor, so loverless, so lonely.”

The guests at those little dinners were mostly
Stalinists, which was what smart, successful people in that New York world were. And they were mostly Jewish; as was often pointed out to me, with gentle amusement, I was the only non-Jewish person in the room. It was at Misch’s that I first met Lillian Hellman, who had been brought, I guess, by his friend Louis Kronenberger. But I may mix her up with another Stalinist, by the name of Leane Zugsmith. It was with Hellman, just back from Spain, that I had angry words about the Spanish Civil War. Probably, as happens in the chapter, I grew heated about the murdered POUM leader, Andrés Nin.

That same evening (more or less as related), I started on a brief affair with Leo Huberman (
Man’s Worldly Goods
), who was a suave sort of Stalinist and married. But I no longer needed Misch’s dinners to meet new people, not even new Stalinists. Suddenly the woods were full of them. If I met Huberman there, I was also seeing Bill Mangold (not Jewish; it means a kind of beet in German), a Yale classmate of Alan Barth’s whom I had first met at Webster Hall a couple of years before. Now he took me to dinner, at a fun place where we danced. He was separated from his wife; he was going to a psychoanalyst (the first analysand in my personal history); he was amusing and worked for medical aid to the Loyalists in Spain, a Stalinist front. We did not discuss politics, which no doubt eased the difficulty of having a quite active and friendly love-affair with a distinctly Trotskyist girl. Of
all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot; I stopped counting), I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to see Philip Rahv.

Once I got started, I saw all sorts of men that winter. Often one led to another. Most of them I slept with at least one time. There was Harold (“Hecky”) Rome, who wrote the lyrics for the ILGWU musical
Pins and Needles
(“Sing me a song with social significance”); we cooked a steak together one night in his apartment—perfect. There was a little man who made puppets that appeared on the cover of
Esquire
and another little man, very droll and witty, who was married and worked for a publisher—he came to my place from the office in the afternoon and was a bit nervous despite his aplomb. There was a truck driver whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it, whom I met in the bar at Chumley’s. I did not go to bars alone, so someone must have taken me—probably John—and then left.

It was getting rather alarming. I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else. Though slightly scared by what things were coming to, I did not
feel
promiscuous. Maybe no one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them.

I was able to compare the sexual equipment of the various men I made love with, and there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. One
handsome married man, who used to arrive with two Danishes from a very good bakery, had a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil; he shall remain nameless. In my experience, there was usually a relation to height, as Philip Rahv and Bill Mangold, both tall men, bore out. There may be dwarfish men with monstrously large organs, but I have never known one. It was not till later, after my second divorce, that I met an impotent man or a pervert (two of the latter). Certainly sexual happiness—luxurious contentment—did make quite a difference in my feeling for a lover. Yet it was not always the decisive factor. None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal disease.

The best news was that I had found a job in publishing. Before I went to Reno, Eunice Clark, no longer married to Selden, had taken me to the cafeteria in the Central Park Zoo (really a menagerie), where at some outdoor tables near the seal pool a group of young people of the intellectual sort gathered in the late afternoon to drink beer and watch the seals. There I had met Pat Covici, of the firm Covici-Friede, who was aware of my
Nation
articles. I told him I was looking for a job in publishing. One day in the fall, when I was long back from Reno, there was Mr. Covici again, white-haired and benevolent, who claimed to have been looking for me. “You are as evanescent as a cloud,” he told me, in his accented voice, and offered me a job in his office.

At Covici, I read manuscripts and looked for new
authors in quarterly magazines like the
Southern Review
: when I came on a story I liked, I would write the author and ask for a possible sample of a longer work. One of those I wrote to was Eudora Welty. Besides this scouting and manuscript-reading, I edited, proofread, and farmed out texts in foreign languages to qualified readers to report on. Opposite me, in a medium-sized office, sat a long-nosed Stalinist woman named Miss Broene, who intensely disapproved of my politics, my many telephone calls and long lunch hours, my arrival time at work in the morning. Our boss was Harold Strauss (later at Knopf), who had a lisping disapproval of what he called “photographic realism,” meaning specifically my friend Jim Farrell. Strauss was not especially political, but there were several Stalinists in our top management, not including Mr. Covici, thank God. Mr. Covici read literary books and magazines and was a fatherly sort of person. One day he took me to lunch with his star author, John Steinbeck, at the Prince George Hotel. I did not care for Steinbeck’s work (as I had said in
The Nation
) and I did not care for him. He reciprocated.

I am eternally grateful for having learned the mechanics of publishing at Covici, how to copy-edit and how to proofread. I learned printer’s signs and the marks to make on a manuscript before sending it to the printer. For instance, you lower-cased a capital letter by drawing a slash through it; to upper-case, you drew three lines under a letter and wrote “cap”
in the margin; if you wanted to retain a hyphen, you made it into an “equals” sign. In all this, the dour Miss Broene, who had turned Communist after being fired from Consumer Research for union organizing, was instructive and really quite helpful, all the while she was denouncing me to the office chapter of the Book and Magazine Guild for my persistent lateness to work.