Intellectual Memoirs

I guess my first literary disappointment -- aside from wondering whether We Come and Go offered the same rich character development as did the original, We Look and See -- was with the Oz books.

Like most kids, at least in my generation, I loved The Wizard of Oz.  I soon learned that the author had written a whole list of Oz sequels.  In response to my pleading and demands, my folks over the birthdays and Christmases of the next year or so, gave me The Scarecrow of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Tik-Tok of Oz.  What a let-down.  It wasn't just that they weren't as good as the original.  They were essentially boring.

The latest -- of my many similar disillusionments with sequels -- has been Mary McCarthy's memoir, Intellectual Memoirs, New York, 1936-1938 (published posthumously, 1992). 

Why did I read it?  In 2015, I wrote some comments on this blog about McCarthy's earlier memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1972), describing her life from earliest memories up until her graduation from a girl's prep school in Tacoma.  It was a favorable review.  I read the book again last month, and liked it even more.  I asked myself the dread question that I never ask after reading a work of fiction -- "but what happened next?" 

Mary McCarthy actually wrote, at age 75, the first volume of her autobiography, How I Grew (1987), covering her life between the ages 13 to 21. Maybe I should have read this book first, but I didn't.  She had already described her life through age 17 in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.  I wanted to leap ahead.  Intellectual Memoirs, the second volume, begins in 1936, three years after McCarthy had graduated from Vassar.

Long before I first read Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, I had read two wonderful works of hers --The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed -- each of which combined a history of an Italian city with a description and analysis of the art that city had given to the world.  They are jewels of that particular form of writing.  I had also read Birds of America, a whimsical novel about a teenage boy and his mother, a mother who -- it appears -- had certain traits in common with Mary McCarthy herself.  I thought -- and think -- that it was a well written and very enjoyable piece of fiction.  Based on these prior readings, I was anticipating something exciting in Intellectual Memoirs.

And the book isn't terrible.  It's just not what I anticipated. 

Intellectual Memoirs is full of interesting and not so interesting facts.  I was reading the musings of a 77-year-old woman, a woman who had led an eventful life and who now felt that every detail of that life was fascinating and worth preserving for posterity.  Thus on one page we read of her conversations with famous people whose names still resonate today; on the next, we read all the details of the construction and decoration of the small apartment in which she was living in 1936.

And the book rambles. It needed editing; maybe McCarthy died before she had revised it. It reads as though she had mused over her memories into a dictation machine, and allowed someone else to type her musings up, unedited.  She will describe an event, and then a few sentences later recall another fact that changes her just-stated interpretation of the event.  Instead of going back and correcting the error, she admits that she was probably mistaken, or isn't sure which memory is correct, and continues charging forward.  This brilliant woman sounds like your elderly relative reminiscing about experiences good and bad out of her past, trying to make sense out of it all, and getting a bit befuddled as she does so.

That said, the book has its interesting aspects, especially, I imagine, for historians and for English thesis writers who seek to find the source of her novels in the events of her life.  In the period 1936 to 1938, she was living in New York, immersed -- so far as possible for a girl just out of college -- in the intellectual life of that time.  She viewed everyone she knew as belonging to one of two classes -- either Stalinists or Trotskyists.  The USSR still was a bright beacon of modernity and hope for persons of her class, although the Moscow show trials were already causing doubts and defections, and were increasing hostility between the supporters of Stalin and those of Trotsky.

By age 24, the refined and somewhat ethereal girl of the girlhood Memories had become considerably more casual in her relationships with men.  She, of course, married four times during her life, but as with an Ottoman sultan, those four marriages were only the tip of the iceberg.  She admits that she found it almost impossible to live without being in a current relationship.  She goes through a period of several months without a "date" early in the book, and finds eating in an inexpensive restaurant alone with a book to be the ultimate in humiliation.  As she became more immersed in New York intellectual society, she happily met plenty of men.  She admits that she rarely met a man without going to bed with him at least once.

It was getting rather alarming.  I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men.

If I had read McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group -- considered scandalous when published in 1963 -- rather than limiting myself to her more rarified and tasteful works, I might have found her life as described in Intellectual Memoirs to be less startling.

I guess I'd call the book "good of kind."  If you really want to dig in to Mary McCarthy's life -- to learn how her one bedroom apartment in the West Village had "eleven sides," and had a bathroom with a window through which you could peer out at the sky while bathing -- then this work is a must.  Otherwise -- well, it's not long and it's a fast read.