How I Grew
McCarthy, Mary
BOOK REVIEWS ould anybody's education be less L./ sentimental than Mary McCarthy's? Having spent decades insisting on being exactly right about everything, dissecting hundreds of personalities both...
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...There are no indications here that the author recognizes her memory to be a treasure, a faculty that allows her to redeem hard experiences and to re-inspirit happy ones...
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...Readers, on the other hand, may have a more difficult time caring about Miss McCarthy's terribly significant youth, and this is because so much in the book is a great deal less interesting than most of the author's previous writing...
...She is scornful of her classmates, who are all of course less popular with boys than she is: "Poor Jean Eagleson and Barbara Dole, poor Frances Ankeny, Ruth Sutton, Clover Rath, Mary Ellen Warner—if anybody wrote to them, it was a brother...
...In the background of these facts, of course, is a truly interesting story, the tale of the injustices related in Catholic Girlhood about how, after Mary's young parents died of influenza when she was six, she and her brothers were sent from Seattle to Minneapolis to live with stony-hearted relatives in a "jaundiced-colored house...
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...just as in her fiction she elicits only measurements to track and compare over 6,000 listed stocks daily...on price performance, per-share-earnings growth and changes in a stock's daily trading volume, to alert you to unusual buying or selling...
...After "digressing in the middle of a digression," she returns to the subject of the scarcity of books offered her between her seventh and twelfth years, and undergoes an agonizing search through her memory to provide the exact truth about which books she read at which age: "On reflection, I see that I have been exaggerating...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987...
...t this point, one feels, it would not be at all a good thing to come upon the teenaged Mary McCarthy on a dark street...
...PLUS...
...How I Grew repeats much of the same material and adds a bit more, covering Miss McCarthy's years in convent school in Seattle, high school in Tacoma, college at Vassar, and ending with her marriage at age twenty-one...
...As she sees it, her reputation was spontaneously generated and has been kept healthy solely through her own power...
...Thus the best passages in her fiction, from The Company She Keeps to the end of The Groves of Academe through passages in The Group (and the best of her theater and literary criticism as well), rely on this intention to mock a situation or a character and thereby to control it...
...And so it goes, stern corrections after lists of endless facts, throughout Miss McCarthy's account of her schoolgirl days...
...There is no dampness in my emotions, and some moisture, I think, is needed to produce the deeper, the tragic, notes...
...and the red camellia tree by the cloister steps...
...Name Company Address City/State/Zip Daytime Phone Mail to: Investor's Daily, c/o Write Associates 156 East 34th Street, New York, NY, 10016 L1191320 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 37 scorn for her characters because her primary and most successful goal is not to evoke our sympathy for a character's faults but to ridicule him for them...
...If the voice in this memoir emerges as detached or unengaged, then, we may be sure it is for another reason than that the author does not care about how she grew...
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...but when she is good, alas, she is boring...
...As the campaign heated up I was in the middle-school classrooms, haranguing the sixth and seventh grades . . . on how repellent Katie Urquhart really was—that sallow skin, those yellow eyes, those avid nose-holes, almost scary...
...Her usual mocking humor and scourging wit—the mortally sharp observations that have by their -slicing energy sustained even her most lifeless fiction—are here rather blunted, diminished...
...Having spent decades insisting on being exactly right about everything, dissecting hundreds of personalities both fictional and real, and making sure it always hurts, the triumphantly fierce novelist and queen of criticism—La Grande Dame Sans Merci—now gives us the clinical details of her own young life in How I Grew, the first book of what one assumes will be a multivolume autobiography...
...Concisely...
...Few people in How I Grew escape her rage and most are awarded her contempt as well...
...This controlling rationality is also what lies behind Miss McCarthy's keen interest in memory...
...What the book amounts to is what Mary McCarthy's work as a whole has always amounted to: when she is bad, she is very, very good...
...Instead, in How I Grew Miss McCarthy regards her youth as if it were a- laboratory specimen: she looks at it curiously, pokes at it a little, watches it ooze, then wipes her hands briskly and walks away...
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...It is as if these emotions are so strong, and she cares so much, that to unloose them even a little would be to undam a flood beyond her control...
...I cannot have waited more than a decade to read `Thumbelina' and 'Puss in Boots,' or 'Snow White' or `Rapunzer or aumpelstiltskin.' If they were already old friends when I read them aloud to Reuel [her son], it means that in Minneapolis we must have had the usual Grimm and Perrault fairy tales and that secretly or openly I read them...
...Nearly every section of How I Grew, however, while often no less cruel, suffers from a triviality that is either girlish and flirty ("But stop...
...Somehow, she feels, there is a way to get the facts of her life exactly right, which, once found, will give her power over them...
...She even takes an offhanded pleasure in speaking, casually, of a teacher "whom I made cry one day," and of a sixteenyear-old candidate for May Queen, Katie Urquhart, against whom Mary launched a counter-campaign, antagonizing her former friend "with a vengeance and never [forgiving] whatever it was she said or did...
...this seems less an account of how she grew than of how she injured and went in for the kill...
...And elsewhere: "I listen to the scratch of pens, the bells of the surveillante, the soughing of the organ, the creaking of pew benches, and I would weep for it all, for the waste of it...
...And yet, one wonders, what is autobiography if not writhing in retrospect...
...fastly refused to become engaged in the emotions which the events in her life have produced...
...one senses always her jubilationin the act of disposing of someone, and indeed one often comes to share something of that joy...
...hers is the loneliness of the long-distance legend...
...That cannot be true . . .") or solemn and plodding...
...So what readers are left with are the long lists of books, the frequent cutting remarks about old acquaintances,unknown to us and often long dead, those self-checks on the precision of her memory, and some unconvincingly weepy sentiments about pen nibs and camellia trees...
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...The author makes it clear that this book is an essential document and that she considers its publication something of a duty, something future generations will need and want...
...As she advises the reader in a passage about her sexual development: You CAN make money in the market...if you have an intelligent strategy and the right investment tools...
...As these last two remarks indicate, How I Grew is less satisfactorily about Miss McCarthy's growth as a human being than it is about her intellectual development...
...She would rather examine the facts of her life from a safe distance than talk about her weaknesses, her errors, the things that have made her cry...
...How I Grew shows the same preoccupation with the boundaries of memory that Miss McCarthy revealed in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), in which the author devised a kind of dialogue with herself, providing what she remembered to be true about her childhood and then interposing various self-checking corrections throughout the narrative...
...Nothing stirs her interest as much as a moment of hatred, not even her first sexual experience, which she describes as an utterly repulsive episode and which produces in her (at age fourteen) "something between exasperated boredom and disdain...
...ty Minneapolis relatives and brought her back to live with them in Seattle, of making her become a liar because their strict rules "forced me into clandestinity...
...But this new volume, unlike Catholic Girlhood, removes all of the sensations from such recollections and leaves only the facts...
...cruelty has operated as a key element in her novels much as magic does in the books of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, propelling an otherwise lethargic narrative forward...
...And it is her mind, after all, that has always been the important and interesting thing about Mary McCarthy: her swashbuckling ability to carve down to the stupid or the ridiculous in a situation, to cut it out, and to put it on display...
...reading Investor's Daily can help.When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly, over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you...
...In her memoirs, however, she can only ridicule herself to a very limited degree, or readers will stop considering her life important and, what is worse, may stop acknowledging the power she claims to have over her circumstances...
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...In poetry...
...Even though she has been compared to Donna Rifkind is assistant managing editor of the New Criterion...
...The reason How I Grew fails to engage the reader is that its author has steadThe EXCLUSIVE Market Data You Get In Investor's Daily No publication in America -- not The Wall Street Journal, not Barron's -- can match the array of "actionable" market data and research that you get in each issue of Investor's Daily, in easy-to-use tables, charts and graphs...
...Weep with me, Reader," she implores at the end of a chapter about her boarding school, Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, "for all those resolute bishops . . . for all those widows of clergymen . . . for bath schedules, gym bloomers, pen nibs and inkwells, for clog dancing and `quiet hour...
...In the self-revelatory writings of an otherwise bitterly critical judge of character, one would not be surprised to encounter arrogance or complacence—one does indeed at times find both of these here—but one would never have expected that such writings could be so dull...
...Catholic Girlhood was a record of sensations alternately painful and ecstatic: of punishing beatings and valentines and odd things to eat, smells of incense and mustard plasters, images of dead relatives gone fuzzy with time...
...She begins the book by announcing, "I was born as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912...
...In How I Grew, we have been made to relive the facts of the author's young life, to confront them repeatedly, and they have almost immediately lost the power to interest us...
...In previous books Miss McCarthy's meanness, which in other writers tends to be purely a superficial quality, has had texture, depth, dimension...
...What she feels warmest toward, as a matter of fact, are not even people but things like "the faithful Britannica, my life's companion, only one year older than I." And, in a new school, with "nobody to confide in," she remedies the situation this way: "as often happens with lonely young creatures, I found companionship...
...One should not assume, however, that this detachment signifies an indifferent attitude: in fact, the opposite is true...
...At a glance, you'll spot all of the day's gainers & losers and every stock that hit a new high or fell to a new low...
...Miss McCarthy expresses no feelings about these harsh circumstances in How I Grew, however, admitting, "I had the choice of forgiving those incredible relatives of mine or pitying myself on their account...
...These all seem rather unworthy subjects for torrents of tears, but in any case Miss McCarthy has always been more effective in projecting hatred than in conveying a sense of sadness...
...she accuses her maternal grandparents, who rescued her from the nasHOW I GREW Mary McCarthy/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$16.95 Donna Rifkind 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 We want you to try Investor's Daily for 3 months...to prove to you that reading Investor's Daily will keep you abreast of business better and help you to invest your money smarter...so, we're offering you these two valuable gifts...FREE: "A Video Guide to Investor's Daily"...an instructive video cassette, showing you how to use the professional market data in Investor's Daily...
...Nobody alive today, Mary McCarthy will have you know, is anywhere near as smart, as sure, or as prominent as she, and so of course her story is unique and worthy of an audience's meticulous attention...
...If Miss McCarthy is unable to produce tears for an honestly harrowing formative experience, she manages at other points in the book to be inappropriately lachrymose about a curious assortment of details...
...onsider, for example, Miss McCarthy's detailed lists of her childhood books...
...everyone from Colette to Margaret Fuller, Miss McCarthy cannot bear to be associated...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
