Customer Reviews

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As an off-again, on-again admirer of Mary McCarthy, I sometimes wondered if she ever had a childhood or just appeared full-blown, rapier-witted and sword at her side. While never doubting her talent, reading her was frequently as pleasant as drinking a glass of vitriol.

Mary indeed had a childhood, and unusual it was. I am sure it marked her forever to lose both her parents within a week of one another to influenza at age six. To add to the horror, the family was traveling by train to start a new life in Minnesota. Mary, herself, was deathly ill with the virus, and that colored her impressions of the tragic event.

Some reviewers and the book jacket describe her childhood as "Dickensonian," I presume referring to Oliver Twist. I disagree, as Mary came from a well-to-do family that didn't lack for the material things of life. She lived with an aunt and uncle from her 6th to 11th year and was tremendously unhappy, claiming she didn't have enough to eat, was dressed in hand-me-downs and frequently beaten. Yet all photos of this time depict a well-dressed, well-fed child. At age 11, she was taken to live with her benevolent, wealthy grandparents in Seattle. From that time on, she received the kindest attention and was expensively educated. My doubts about those five early years are because Ms. McCarthy all her life was an implacable, unforgiving enemy when her feelings were aroused.

The memoir is beautifully written with sharp and fascinating characterizations of her family. She appends each chapter with an epilogue taking an adult's eye-view of her childhood impressions. It is most effective. You are constantly reaffirming her brilliance. Well worth reading.

Written long before the recent memoir craze, this book stands as one of the best of that genre. McCarthy looks back on an almost Dickensian childhood with wit and discernment. Perhaps most striking is the lack of defensiveness; writing of abuse suffered at the hands of a misguided great aunt and her sadistic husband, she traces the way it shaped her character but never uses it as an excuse. Nor is she more sparing of herself than of her relatives: she not only gives us a portrait of a realistically foolish, self-conscious adolescent Mary--recounting the sorts of youthful episodes many of us continue to blush over as we remember them in adulthood--but in notes appended to each chapter she deconstructs her own memories, noting where she has given in to the urge to dramatize or where her recollections conflict with those of others who were present. A wonderfully honest, bracing book, refreshing in its lack of grievance and its unostentatious, unsentimental good humor.

I have always held a fascination for people who grew up with a real sense of religion that later fell away from the faith. I bought this book expecting something akin to the movies that are so prevalent nowadays about the catholic schoolboys smoking and getting caught by the nuns and hit with a ruler across the wrists. Instead, I was greeted with an amazing tale of Mary and her sad loss of her parents, pitiful existence with her aunt and uncle and twisted "saving" by her West Coast relatives.

The childhood she had was less than perfect, I agree, but the fact that she survived it and lived to create such a wonderful literary account of it almost makes me appreciative of her having to go through it. The chapter on her grandmother is so reminiscent of my own mother that I had to laugh out loud at times.

Well worth the read and the struggle through the many latin references and unfamiliar religious practices.

A book that varies between charming and funny and tragic, this book is a treasure. It is beautifully written and should not be missed. It is not condemnatory of Catholicism but it also does not hesitate to be blunt about the realities of her CAtholic childhood.

In this memoir Mary McCarthy's childhood appears to be marked by two contradictory principles: orphanhood and board study at a Catholic convent. Convent life appears to her as a revelation of the aristocratic principle in life. The Catholic nuncs she encounters are dazzling intellectuals, preoccupied by themes such as purification through sin and the fate of the romantics. The identification of the nuns with the romantics is stressed, and is based on their shared antimodern nonconformity, the spirit of loss and failure flickering at the side of the happy, straight road of Protestant civics. The exact opposite of the romance of Catholicism lies in the prototype exemplified by Uncle Myers, the "rootless municipalized man who finds his plasures in the handouts or overflow of an industrial civilization." The purposeless emptiness of modern municipal life is contrasted with the beautiful heroics of medieval European history.

Yet from the pretty orderliness among the girls at the convent isnot only derived romance, but at times also misunderstanding. When Mary rehearses a "loss of faith" drama to gain popularity, her faked doubts lead to a real breach of faith: "Why can't the universe be self-sufficient?" In order not to disturb the expectations of the nuns, she will be forced to fake her period. The limits between the real and the pretended, both spiritual and organic, seem troublesome inside the convent.

Mary McCarthy's love of Latin language and culture came about at college, where she represented the opposing forces of law and anarchy in the classic play "Marcus Tullius" as a reflection of her own mixed heritage. To her surprise, though, she sides with the Protestant, "law and order" Preston side of her family, which is hardly shocking to us if we take into account the abusive, stingy character of the McCarthys she knew: "The injustices my brothers and I had suffered in our childhood had made me a rebel against authority, but they had also prepared me to fall in love with justice, the first time I encountered it."

As a minute analysis of a developing psychology, we find in Mary McCarthy's memoir a description of her central conflict betwen that which she can give and that which her community needs and expects. Either with the nuns at the convent, at the boarding school before graduation or with her Protestant relatives, Mary finds the need to take refuge in pretension and lying so as to repeatedly restore the precarious balances of peace of the communities she seeks to inhabit. From this psychological need of absolute, unconditional integration we can perhaps trace the origins of her vocation as a novelist: "My whole life was a lie, it often appeared to me, from beginning to end, for if I was wilder than my family knew, I was far tamer than my friends could imagine, and with them, too, as with my family, I was constantly making up stories..." In her view this dilemma is also a designing feature of adult life, or "the trap of adult life in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides."

That Mary McCarthy's childhood was difficult and unpleasant is well recognized. She has created a worthy and literary memoir from the material gathered during the years before she was claimed by her benevolent Seattle grandparents from the truly draconian aunt and uncle who kept her for 5 years prior to that. Somewhere along the way, this child who was probably difficult and moody - and certainly intelligent and scathingly witty - developed the ability to step outside herself, observe what was happening, remember it, then later write about it. The result is a classic memoir that deserves to be read by writers as well as the general reading audience. Funny, heartbreaking, sarcastic, bitingly acerbic - and always excellent.

Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a collection of essays that recall the author's childhood as well as relate her family history. For the most part, the essays are arranged in chronological order (as the events occurred in her life) with the exception of the essay "Yellowstone Park," which, as the narrator explains, is deliberately placed slightly out of sequence since its subject matter is of a more adult nature. The collection begins with a lengthy explanation entitled "To the Reader," in which McCarthy gives some background information but, more interestingly, attempts to justify any errors or inaccuracies in the pages that follow. Moreover, every essay is qualified by several additional pages in italics that contain corrections, further explanation, and / or disclaimers for minor inaccuracies. For many memoir writers, the struggle to remain true to the facts while still telling a good story (and avoiding possible legal or personal backlash) is an agonizing one. Unfortunately, McCarthy errs too much on the side of caution, to the point of being redundant, and too frequently directly addresses (i.e. distracts) the reader, which detracts from the scenes' intensity.

The events that occurred in McCarthy's childhood were both tragic and dramatic: the death of her parents in the flu epidemic of 1918, the subsequent neglect and maltreatment by her great uncle and aunt, and the separation of McCarthy from her siblings. The author is at her best when she loses herself in the poignant depictions of childhood grief and confusion, for example in her depiction of the missing butterfly trinket and the unjustified beating that resulted from the trinket's recovery.

Understandably, when a writer gathers information regarding early childhood experiences, there will be inconsistencies and gaps of one's own knowledge as well as the misremembering and warped perceptions common to childhood imagination; integrate all of that with the input from friends and family members, who contribute their own distortions and biases, and factual accuracy seems unlikely. In her initial essay, McCarthy can be credited with explaining the concept of creative nonfiction before it existed as a genre, yet she apologizes (it seems) that despite her resolve to be as accurate as possible, her memories are often clouded and have since been disputed by the recollections of others: "Then there are cases where I am not sure myself whether I am making something up. I think I remember but I am not positive." It had been said, for example, that her father drank, but she never recalled smelling liquor on him and wouldn't a child notice? Disputes of who did what and when are retold along with the stories themselves: was it Roy (her father) or Uncle Harry who pulled a gun on the conductor? Or did that even happen?? McCarthy is tortured over getting even the minor facts right. Did Grandmother Preston's house really have a bell under the dining room carpet that was used to summon the maid? McCarthy thought she remembered it from her early childhood but years later doubted its existence. However, at age eleven, when she returned to the house to live, the first thing she did was crawl under the table: "I had the great joy, the vindication, of finding the bell just where I thought it should be." If there were supposed facts related by others that refute McCarthy's perceptions - such as her Jewish grandmother's refusal to allow a priest to enter the house - she still tells the story but qualifies: "I do not believe this story, which is contradicted by other accounts."

Other minor departures from fact are deliberate, acknowledges the narrator, as in changing the names of classmates, nuns, and priests to avoid any hard feelings and legal backlash. Additionally, as a writer of fiction, McCarthy allows that, at times, she merely rearranged "actual events" for the sake of a better story, referring to these tweaks as "semi-fictional touches." The italicized section that follows the essay "The Blackguard" actually begins: "This account is highly fictionalized." Obviously troubled that this particular essay as well as the one that immediately follows strayed too far from reality, the author justifies to the reader that "...the conversations...are mostly fictional, but their tone and tenor are right."

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood would be an engrossing, compelling memoir but for its interruptions of apology and attempts to set the record straight. Perhaps, for its time (preceding the understanding of what creative nonfiction entails) McCarthy felt it necessary to hammer home to her "dear reader" the innocence of her intent, but unfortunately, her method of doing so detracts from the quality of the work.

This is an autobiographical account of a child who is passed off to various relatives when her parents die. The vulnerability and mystery of childhood are captured vividly in a narrative full of humor, yearning, and refusal to fail. In some ways a period piece reflecting the views and challenges of a particular era, the book also captures timeless elements of youth in all its vulnerability and rebellion. In both ways, the book is valuable. The passage that describes her strategy for raising her social status at a Catholic girl's high school got me laughing so hard during the bus ride home from work that the person next to me insisted that I read it out loud to her.

This is the type of book that I think of as a conglomeration but not really a book. That is, she had published several magazine articles, then gathered them together and made a book. I find that style difficult to get into. She glossed over too much; so many years were packed into just a couple pages.

It irritated me after I kept reading and reading, and she kept criticizing and criticizing the people who raised her after her parents died. I sure didn't blame her for criticizing her father's side of the family. But her criticism didn't end with them. She didn't have many kind words for anyone.