Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (81 page)

It was a tight schedule: living on East End Avenue was highly impractical for me, while for Philip it was only a reason to grumble. Yet it was I who had chosen to do it, so I could not complain. We took walks in the park, and if we were approached by a beggar, Philip explained to me why charity was an error: the working-class needed to sharpen the contradictions of capitalism. At night or over the weekend I would write my theatre pieces, to come out monthly in the magazine—the boys had made me the theatre critic, not trusting my critical skills in other fields. They also gave me the job of translating Gide’s
Retour de l’U.R.S.S.
, his second thoughts on the Soviet Union, which were going to come out in our second number. Sometimes Philip would pick me up at the Covici
office, and we would go for drinks to the Vanderbilt Hotel, where they served you great trays of hot hors d’oeuvres free; you could eat enough over two cocktails to be able to skip supper. One day he brought along the young, high-cheekboned Delmore Schwartz, his latest find. On Saturday mornings, if I did not have to work, I could go down to the magazine for editorial meetings with the boys and Dwight and Fred and George Morris, our backer. Then we would all have lunch at Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place or at a cheaper spot off Union Square. Now and then Philip and I would have people to dinner, and I cooked. I remember an evening with Bill Troy and his wife, Léonie Adams, and Troy’s lecturing us over pre-dinner Tom Collinses on the difference between symbolism and allegory—symbolism, good; allegory, bad—a burning subject with him. Troy, who was about to begin teaching at Bennington, was an arrogant Irish puritan of the type I imagined Joyce to be; I could picture him leaning on an ashplant.

I was conscious of the discrepancy between Philip’s working time and mine. Philip’s day consisted of dropping in at the magazine, arguing with whoever was there, reading the mail, directing the composition of the “Editorial Statement” that would lay down the line of the new
PR
, and writing an occasional book review for
The Nation
. He had to check in every weekday at the Writers’ Project, but that was a formality—necessary to draw the relief check. There he used
to encounter types like Norbert Guterman, whom he had known in Party circles—
Luftmenschen
, he called them. My slight resentment of my heavier load was tempered by the sense of being noble and by pride in being able to do as much as I did. We quarreled but much less than we had. Now the bone of contention was our difference in religion—a curious thing to be angry about, since both of us were atheists. No doubt it was another disguise for the class war.

I discovered that Philip had never read the Gospels. Nor, for that matter, our Christian Old Testament. To me this came as a shock, all the more so as it made one wonder how he had managed to understand Eliot, one of his favorite modern masters. Even before Eliot’s religious phase, there must have been problems. “Ash Wednesday”?
The Waste Land
? The grail? For once, Philip concurred. I was right, he agreed, and there was also Joyce, who, though not a believer, used the Christian myth. The last word made me bridle, despite his conciliatory intention. Did he think the Crucifixion was a
myth
? In any case, we came to an agreement. He promised that he would read the whole Bible if I would leave him in peace. I do not remember whether that included the Acts and the Epistles.

The amazing thing was that Philip did it. It took him a full week, but he enjoyed it. Naturally, while he was doing that, he could not be expected to do anything else.
My
Bible was his alibi for inactivity, and, recognizing it, we both laughed. As a penance, I may have
taught him the Seven Deadly Sins, with emphasis on Sloth. One of Philip’s great charms was that he truly loved to learn. Being impressionable, he could not fail to respond to the beauty of the King James version. All this was part of our love for each other; the shadows that fell across our relationship were still mainly an effect of social differences. For example, he did not like my insistence on our having a drink before dinner every single night—even in Reno, alone, I had had two Singapore Slings at the Riverside Inn before having dinner at my boarding-house. He analyzed my dependence on it as a class thing. Or our having to have a tablecloth and napkins and my mother’s silver for just the two of us at supper. But he learned to help with the dishes, which he had never done before.

On my side, I loved hearing about his Russian childhood. His parents had been storekeepers in a village in the Ukraine; his grandmother lived with them. They were educated people—Zionists, as I said—and spoke Russian. He remembered one day when his grandmother came home with the terrible announcement, “The Tsar has fallen,” and to him and his mother it was as if she had said “The sky has fallen.” He hurried to hide behind the counter or under his grandmother’s skirts. For several days they stayed in the house, fearfully, and this happened more than once during the civil war, as their village was taken and retaken by Reds and Whites and the people hid from both. Toward the end of the war, his family emigrated.
He remembered a time in Austria—his first acquaintance with German—and, after that, Palestine, and his father’s furniture factory—in Joppa, I think it was—where the workers were Arabs. He felt a sympathy for them—the beginning of radicalization?—noting that they ate and slept and prayed lined up against the walls of the big room they worked in; if they had wives and family, they had left them behind. Out of his young boy’s sense of an alien worker caste, separated from him by language and religion, a view of Israel was slowly worked out that was more complex than that of most New York Jews.

In Palestine, Philip had learned some Hebrew, and he liked to tell the story of the implantation of Hebrew in Palestine by a certain forceful rabbi who was an early settler. This rabbi decided one morning to compel his fellow settlers to forsake the corrupt high German (Yiddish) of the East European ghettoes that was the only common language they had. He began to speak Hebrew to anyone who addressed him and would hear only Hebrew when replied to by his co-religionists. If they answered him in Yiddish, the rabbi admonished them in Hebrew, “Jew, speak Jewish!” Since the rabbi was an important figure whom many people wanted to talk with, the whole Zionist settlement was forced to learn Hebrew from one day to the next. I suppose this was a fable based on a core of truth, but it pleased me to believe it literally since it gave Philip such deep delight.

Another of Philip’s charms was the tenderness of his feeling for the Jewish state and its short history. Unlike most of the other Jewish intellectuals around
PR
, he was exempt from what is known as Jewish self-hatred. Philip loved being Jewish, so that if one cared for him one came to love that bit of him, too. This may have been related to his love for his mother, which had kept him sweet, at bottom, underneath his sourness. His given name was Ilya Greenberg; the authorities on New York intellectuals say “Ivan,” which I feel sure is wrong. It is true that “Ilya” does not translate into “Philip,” but neither does “Ivan,” which would lead to “John” or “Hans.” “Ilya,” I guess, could be “Elijah” or “Elias,” either one more appropriate. “Rahv,” his pseudonym, chosen, of course, by him, means rabbi in Hebrew.

Though prone to shout when in polemical vein, he had a soft voice, rather breathy, with a touch of a whisper in it. In speaking English, he never lost his Russian accent and could never pronounce the letter “h”—there is no “h” in Russian. A nice story is told of him at a later period: a young writer had submitted a piece of fiction to the magazine based on the Gian-Carlo Menotti-Sam Barber household; Philip rejected it, instructing the young author categorically, “
Partisan Review
is an ’eterosexual magazine. It does not publish ’omosexual stories.”

The magazine’s initials were usually held to stand for “Philip Rahv.” I am not sure whether Philip, at
the beginning, was aware of this identity. I doubt it, because when we were trying to find a new name to go with the magazine’s new politics, we spent many hours discussing it at Brookfield Center and nobody mentioned the coincidence of the original name with Philip’s initials. In the end, we kept the name. The word “partisan,” which we all liked, had surely been thought up by Philip. I can hear it now, pronounced in his caressing voice, as I can hear his highest term of praise, “modern.” Another adjective, this one derogatory, comes back to me in William Phillips’s nasal Brooklyn tones—“home-made.” I do not know why this should be an injurious description of anything, but perhaps William, as a Marxist, felt that ideas and theories ought to be factory-produced. He would have been unaware of the usual application to cakes and candies.

Philip’s eventual mother-in-law, a founder of the Junior League, liked to say of him to her friends: “Yes, isn’t it remarkable, he got his education in our great public-library system!” That was true. He certainly read Marx and much else in U.S. public libraries. “Philip’s alma mater,” Fred Dupee is supposed to have quipped on passing the lions of the 42nd Street branch.

About his public-school experiences in Providence, Rhode Island, I am a bit hazy. I know he lived there with his older brother before and after his time in Palestine and was sent to grade school wearing long pants. As a little boy in those long pants, he must have
started to speak English; he remembered trying to look up the teacher’s skirts. After a period in high school, getting Americanized, somehow he got to Portland, Oregon, and found a job in advertising, coining catchy names for products. When the Depression struck, he drifted back east, where he became acquainted with breadlines and Central Park benches as well as the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. What he saw and read made a convinced Marxist of him. He joined the New York branch of the John Reed Clubs, where he met William Phillips (alias Wallace Phelps), a former student of Sidney Hook’s at New York University, and the result was
Partisan Review
.

That story is told in a number of memoirs and intellectual histories of the time. John Strachey is said to have given a boost to the new magazine (conceived as an organ of the John Reed Clubs) by donating the take of a public lecture he undertook for the purpose. This must have been when I met him at the beer party in Eunice Rodman’s backyard—during his triumphal visit to the U.S. Otherwise my recollections tend to differ from the now canonical versions. For example, as I remember it, Philip said that William had been in the Party (hence “Wallace Phelps,” his Party name) and he himself had not—a strange fluke of chance, he thought, as he was as much of a Party-liner as William, probably more. In the memoir William has written, it is the other way around. Perhaps my memory of what Philip said is wrong. But then, how does William explain “Wallace Phelps”?

None of the histories I’ve looked at tells how I happened to be on the magazine. I am not sure myself, but I suspect that Philip imposed me on the others. And they were not altogether pleased. It was not that they thought poorly of me. At least Fred and Dwight didn’t, as far as I know. But they resented the blunt exercise of Philip’s will. Yet possibly poor Philip was only responding to pressure applied by me. Until the archives are opened (as we said then), we shall never find out. Dwight, it occurs to me, was in no position to cast the first stone, having himself imposed Nancy as business manager. But on that score, I recall no grumbling, not until Dwight moved the magazine to his apartment, where he could have everything under his and Nancy’s control. But that was later.

Yet before we get to that later, which is coming ineluctably anyway, let me pause and go back to that summer, before we moved uptown to the Bregmans’ apartment, before East End Avenue. What do I remember, besides what I have just been telling? Well, I suddenly hear my voice speaking in a rather affected tone, as though I thought I was Hope Williams in an Arthur Hopkins comedy. “My dear, I’ve got the most
Lev
antine lover.” I am in Nathalie Swan’s apartment—she had moved out of her family’s house—and I am telling her about Philip, with whom I have fallen in love. That is what, in a mode of extreme sophistication, that sentence is trying to say. Perhaps I am only telling it to her in her own patois. It was around that time that her wearied New York “social” voice
remarked to me, “Oh, dear, Father’s getting rich again.”

Next, Philip and I are on the terrace of the Brevoort Hotel. It is after dinner, and we have ordered a pitcher of beer—an inexpensive way of spending an evening on lower Fifth Avenue watching the people go by. Someone has joined us, drawing a chair up to our table. It is Herbert Solow (the “Mr. Solo” I spoke of), and we are discussing Roosevelt’s appointment of Justice Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Philip and I are taking this calmly, but Solow is excited. “But the fellow is a
Klans
man!” We are impressed by the seriousness of this worldly, saturnine man. He has been in Coyoacán with Trotsky and has had an affair with Adelaide Walker, well qualified by her beauty to be a Trotskyite. Before the summer is over, he will have the nerve to ask me to go riding with him in his two-seater, without reference to Philip, with whom I am living and who has answered the phone. I told him I couldn’t.

Then an evening at the Jumble Shop, on 8th Street, with Filipino waiters. Philip is haranguing me about formalism and Paul Valéry, and I do not understand very well. He talks about
Le Cimetière Marin
. Some of his friends join us—Lionel Abel and William? Perhaps Harold Rosenberg. I cannot make out whether they are for formalism or against it, or whether they disagree among themselves. It would seem to me that if Philip is so violently opposed to socialist realism, he
ought to be in favor of what sounds like its opposite. Yet the word “formalism” as they pronounce it sounds condemnatory. In fact what was happening was a slow change of mind. Denunciation of formalism went back to the Bolshevik doctrinal creed, and, once the “boys” had broken with Stalinism in politics, should no longer have incurred their ire; for Americans, the concept had been a Procrustean bed all along. The discussion in the Jumble Shop was almost a valedictory.