A girl's life

Mary McCarthy, whose novel, Birds of America, I discussed last week, was a leading American author and intellectual, with deep roots in Seattle.  In my prior post, I indicated having earlier read her autobiographical Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.  I've since discovered that I "misremembered" (as the word currently in vogue expresses it) having done so.  At most, I merely skimmed portions of it that interested me at the time.

McCarthy, born in 1912, was the granddaughter of Harold Preston, co-founder of the Seattle law firm that later claimed William Gates -- father of Microsoft's Bill Gates -- as a named partner.  Preston's wife was Jewish, at a time when being Jewish was a matter of some social importance.  Her father's family was Irish.

As she recounts in her Memories, both parents died of influenza within days of each other in 1918, while on a family visit to Minnesota leaving McCarthy, age six, and her three brothers orphans.  Her Minneapolis relatives, on the McCarthy side, farmed the kids out to an aunt and uncle who "cared for them" in scenes of Dickensian cruelty and neglect.  When she was eleven years old, grandfather Preston got wind of what was going on, and brought Mary back to Seattle.

While her early years are unsettling to read, her personality as a girl rather than a victim began to bloom during her years at Seattle's Forest Ridge school (since moved across the lake to Bellevue), under the tutelage of strict but caring nuns, the "Ladies of the Sacred Heart."  It was while at Forest Ridge that she "lost her faith" -- not because of mistreatment or intellectual ferment, but almost by accident: she craved more attention from nuns and fellow students, and decided that a spiritual crisis might secure it.  In trying to prove to a skeptical priest the reality of her overnight conversion to atheism, she actually succeeded in talking herself into believing that which she thought she'd been only pretending to believe.

After eighth grade, Mary attended Garfield high school -- my own neighborhood public high school -- for her freshman year, with disastrous consequences academically.  Being in daily contact with boys made algebra and composition seem tedious by comparison.  Her grandparents whisked her off to Annie Wright's -- an Episcopalian girls' school in Tacoma -- for the remainder of high school.

Mary McCarthy is a fine narrative writer -- humorous, detailed, and unexpectedly compassionate to the people who surrounded her in her youth.  She was clearly a brilliant child, with an underlying rebellious streak.  Although popular at times, she was something of a loner.  She feels she must have possessed some qualities, something odd, unknown to herself, that prevented both faculty and fellow students from ever quite accepting her as one of themselves.  She recalls specific students and teachers with both fondness and contempt -- but always with care.

She brings to life long-forgotten eras of education.  Memorably described was the play -- written by her stern Scottish-born teacher -- based on the Roman struggle between Cicero and Catiline.  Presented to Annie Wright's students and their parents, it featured a female Cicero presenting, from memory, Cicero's first Cataline oration:

"How far, at length, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?  To what ends does your audacious boldness boastfully display itself?"

How far, at length, Miss Gowrie, [interposes McCarthy], could you abuse their patience?  Cicero's oration lasted thirty-one minutes by Miss Gowrie's watch.

And the play had barely begun.  Mary played Catiline.  As she recalls the performance, her interpretation of Catiline's response, which she decided upon on the spot, was a tour de force -- one that brought the audience to its feet, in "thunderous applause."  Well, maybe, Ms. McCarthy.

McCarthy, despite her life-long atheism, avoids the common habit of blaming her Catholic upbringing for any adult woes or inhibitions.  Instead, she is pleased with the strong academic foundation it provided, and she recalls "with gratitude ... the sense of mystery and wonder" she absorbed.  Because of both the decade in which she lived her youth -- the 1920s -- and the other-worldly ambience, foreign to today's readers, of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, McCarthy's Memories call to life an alien, and yet oddly alluring, world.

As though in anticipation of this week's clamor over "misremembering," my edition also includes McCarthy's lengthy post-publication discussion following each chapter, analyzing the points about which her memory may have been mistaken, where she had deliberately reshuffled events for narrative purposes, and where she had presented possibilities or probabilities as certainties.  Taken together with the original text, the result is a book the combines the best of both documented history and historical fiction.