Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (19 page)

For the out-of-doors, she wore a very old, but real, sealskin coat, of the same color and texture as her hair; from its unfashionable cut, it seemed to have been inherited from her mother, or even her grandmother, as did her long, flat black shoes. Her diction had an odd distinctness; she spoke with a Cambridge accent, but every syllable was formed concisely and separately, as though English were a prized foreign language she had learned young, by the phonetic method. This effect was heightened when she spoke Latin; her teeth clinked and sometimes the draft from the window seemed to whistle through them.

It was Scotland’s pride, she told us, to have been throughout the darker ages a center of classical learning, and her very digestion evoked a dour history of Scottish letters and philosophy; like Carlyle, whom we were studying about in English, and like Carlyle’s wife, she was dyspeptic. Her brown skin sometimes paled to a yellow hue, and after the school luncheon she often had gas on her stomach.

Yet Miss Gowrie was not an unpleasant person. The school admitted that she meant well, probably. But she did not understand about the rules. Our principal was a stout executive with the prejudices of an old chatelaine. Fountain pens were forbidden because girls had spotted the walls and floors by shaking the ink down in the pen. No food but fruit was permitted in the rooms, and we were forbidden to eat between meals on our walks or shopping trips, so that we would be sure to do justice to the school table. Each girl came with a list of ten approved correspondents, signed by her family, and she was supposed to get letters from no one else. All packages received through the mail were subject to inspection. None of these rules, however, was enforced, except by Miss Gowrie. There was a tacit understanding, shared even, I think, by the principal, that many of the rules existed for artistic reasons, for form’s sake. They gave tone to the school. Candy and cookies and modern novels and love letters from unauthorized individuals poured in through the mails; inspection was cursory; fountain pens were rife. Our first stop on our walks was the corner luncheonette, whose main revenue derived from the Seminary, as everybody knew. The Saturday-morning shopping trip and the Saturday-night movie excursion ended, by immemorial custom, at the downtown Puss ’n Boots or Green Lantern, with the girls treating the chaperones to the latest fancy sundaes. The group of us who rode, on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, had our cigarettes tucked in our breeches as we drove out to the riding academy with the chaperone, who usually took advantage of the occasion to have a cigarette herself, privately, with the riding master’s wife, and there was a standing order for hamburgers for the whole party at a barbecue place on the highway. When we were taken out Sunday afternoons by “a person designated by the family,” many of us went out with undesignated men and came back with liquor on our breath. The vice-principal, who signed us in, was careful not to come too close to us, and in my time no girl was ever reported for drinking, though sometimes we must have reeked of gin. A teacher, meeting us downtown on a Sunday with our “brothers” and “cousins,” hurriedly tacked off in another direction. All but Miss Gowrie, who felt it her duty to report.

The young teachers sighed, the girls tapped their heads, the vexed principal wept and took the offender on her lap. Austere and sensible, she hated to impose drastic punishments, because this interfered with the smooth running of the school. In the case of her best students, she was usually satisfied with mere repentance; any clever girl could cry her way out of a jam. Meanwhile, poor Miss Gowrie, rigid and bewildered, pursued her solitary course, deaf to the timid hints of friendly colleagues, who tried to set her on the right course. She was always the last chaperone to be chosen on all-school expeditions, and the ragtail group that got her was looked on with freshened pity: no smoking, no eating, no private jokes would be permitted. At the annual school picnic, hers was the last rowboat to be pushed off from the dock, with a disconsolate trio aboard, while she sat upright, facing the maneuvering oarsman, wearing a bright excursion smile clamped about her teeth. M.C.G. (Make Conversation General), the school rule for table talk, was Miss Gowrie’s buoy still as she floated about the waters, never allowing her boat to be guided into one of the charming little shaded coves, out of the principal’s sight, where you could catch at the weeping-willow branches and broach the idea of wading. It was sad, for when you got to know her, you found that she was a very simple being, a sort of atrophied girl, fond of an outing and what she considered wholesome fun. But she could not grasp at all our American conception of an outing, which consisted in a sort of mass truancy; on any kind of pleasure party, Miss Gowrie’s first concern was to establish an idea of the official. It required character to be a spoilsport on a privileged day, but she rose to the painful occasion with a sort of pathetic, sporting determination, like a trout jumping to the cruel hook.

A cough and a tobacco stain on the second finger of her right hand told us that she was a heavy smoker, but we learned from the riding master’s wife that Miss Gowrie steadily refused to take a cigarette anywhere near the Seminary and blinked with disapproval when she heard that other teachers did it. This watchfulness of conscience brooded likewise over her favorites; that is, her better students, for she knew no other measure. You could tell you were in Miss Gowrie’s good graces by the bad-conduct marks she set firmly opposite your name in the school record book. In fact, in all her ways she was a stoic of the Roman mold, recalling that matron cited in Pliny, the terrible Arria, who, to encourage her husband to commit suicide, plunged a dagger into her own breast, drew it out, saying, “It doesn’t hurt, Paetus,” and handed it to him.

It was the whim of oddity, doubtless, that first decided me to “like” Miss Gowrie. And the other class stars, who happened that year also to be taking Latin, quickly fell in with the notion. The rest of the school, we thought, had been unjust to Miss Gowrie, and it delighted us to watch them marvel as they watched
us
forgo our cigarettes and our hamburgers and our sundaes and invite Miss Gowrie to chaperon us to the movies and the riding academy, where,
mirabile dictu,
heated by the fire and tea, she unbent a little with the shy English major and his wife who ran it, gentlefolk and exiles like herself. We could see by the way the conversation broke off when we tramped into the little sitting room after our hour’s ride that Miss Gowrie had been confiding in the major’s wife. This filled us with indulgent emotions; we were determined to bring Miss Gowrie out and see her round face shine with awkward pleasure. At the same time, we wanted to show the school that we had been right, that there was “another” Miss Gowrie underneath, just as we had been proclaiming. And to display this other Miss Gowrie in her proper setting we revived the moribund Latin Club, elected ourselves officers, proselytized among the freshmen and sophomores, and encouraged Miss Gowrie to start writing “Marcus Tullius.”

It did not, of course, occur to me that there was also “another” me, behind the Catilinarian poses—that my discovery of Miss Gowrie was disclosing, unbeknownst to me, certain strange landscapes in myself. And yet something unforeseeable had happened early in senior year. Not having started Latin until the year before, I was tutoring with Miss Gowrie in Caesar to meet college requirements and at the same time taking Cicero in classwork. The very first day, as we sat at her desk with the
Commentaries
between us and learned the divisions of Gaul, the fantastic thing occurred: I fell in love with Caesar! The sensation was utterly confounding. All my previous crushes had been products of my will, constructs of my personal convention, or projections of myself, the way Catiline was. This came from without and seized me; there was nothing that could have warned me that Caesar would be like
this.

Probably it might have happened with another—with Thucydides, say, if Greek had been offered at Annie Wright. I can experience today the same inner trembling when I read, “Thucydides of Athens has written the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians.” But, as it came about, the first piercing contact with an impersonal reality happened to me through Caesar, just, laconic, severe, magnanimous, detached—the bald instrument of empire who wrote not
“
I
”
but “Caesar.” The very grammar was beatified for me by the objective temperament that ordered it, so much so that today I cannot see an ablative absolute or a passage of indirect discourse without happy tears springing to my eyes. Classicist friends laugh when I say that Caesar is a great stylist, but I think so. I know the
Gallic War
is regarded by historians as simply a campaign document, but in my heart I do not believe it. The idea that critics exist who pretend to tell you, at a distance of two thousand years, what “really” happened at Gergovia or in Britain fills me with Olympian mirth. For me, Caesar’s word is sufficient; he did not palliate his cruelties or stain the names of his opponents.

It needed only a few days for me to discover that Miss Gowrie shared this passion; two lovers of the same person always find each other out. And like two lovers, precisely, we used to tell over the virtues of the beloved in a shared, incredulous delight. We
liked,
we said to each other, that bridge across the Rhine that students had been cursing for centuries; we liked the fortifications and the legions’ feats of engineering. Above all, we liked that mind that was immersed in practical life as in some ingenious detective novel, that wished always to show you how anything was done and under what disadvantages. We liked the spirit of justice and scientific inquiry that reigned over the
Commentaries,
the geographer’s curiosity and the Roman adaptiveness that circumvented the enemy by a study of his own techniques, as when the halyards of the Veneti’s warships were caught in the long Roman hooked poles.

And, as usual in true love, there were obstacles to be surmounted, which gave Miss Gowrie, as a person of conscience, more difficulty than they gave me. For years, it would seem, her imagination had been tethered in the little patch of history that stretched from 58 to 51
B.C.,
and her moral faculty had been poring over this period with a sort of heavy intensity, seeking justification for the relentless course of history, for the northward march of the legions, pillaging and slaying. Miss Gowrie, after all, was a Celt, like me, and to her literalist mind those old whiskered Gauls were her kinsmen. The conquest of Gaul chafed her; as she sat beside me at her desk, her feet in their flat shoes planted straight before her on the floor, a nervous frown puckered her brow whenever the war shifted from the Swiss, the Germans, and the Belgians to deal with dissension in Gaul. As we neared the great rising of Book VII, she began, by slow degrees, to prepare me for something painful that was coming, like an aunt who is going to have to break the news of divorce or death in the family.

To her, this rising was a tragedy, a tragedy that Caesar anticipated and tried to avert up to the very last moment. It was a tragedy not only in the sense that a high civilization was crushed, to the accompaniment of many casualties, when a peaceful assimilation might have been managed, but because a noble nature was brought to dust in it. I mean Vercingetorix the Arvernian. If Caesar was Miss Gowrie’s master, this young Romanized nobleman,
“summae potentiae adulescens,”
was her beau ideal. She never tired of dwelling on Caesar’s praises of him, on the fact that Caesar called him “friend.” It was a point of great significance to her that his conduct in leading the last great conspiracy of the Gauls was never reprobated by his conqueror. In his place, declared Miss Gowrie, warming, Caesar would have done the same thing. Did not Caesar himself say,
“omnis autem homines natura libertati studere et condicionem servitutis odisse”
(“however, all men by nature are zealous for liberty and detest the condition of slavery”)? Caesar, to our minds, must have borne him a manly love, and it must have grieved Caesar’s heart, we both thought, to see the young Gaul, most accomplished of all his opponents, who had won a round from him at Gergovia, ride down the hill from the starved fortress town of Alesia and make the chivalrous submission that saved his people from death. We saw moisture in Caesar’s marble eyes as he waited there and the handsome Arvernian dismounted, as described in Plutarch, and seated himself gently at his feet. And yet, six years later, Vercingetorix was brought out of a Roman jail, driven in Caesar’s triumph, and then executed. ...

It was hard to forgive Caesar this deed, especially as Miss Gowrie recounted it, with a clink of her teeth and a sharp little shake of her head. According to her, Vercingetorix, in the triumph, was mounted on the same black charger on which he had come, in all his youth and generosity, down the hill at Alesia—the horse, too, had been preserved for the occasion and led out, a bag of bones, to mock the wretched captive. This was one of the odd fictional touches that Miss Gowrie’s troubled imagination sometimes invented. History yields no horse and hence no savage stroke of irony to cap a pretty tale.

In Miss Gowrie’s eyes, however, the blame accrued not to Caesar but to the bad Gauls. She had worked up a typical Foreign Office version of the conquest of Gaul, which divided the natives into two categories: good Gauls and bad Gauls. It was the bad Gauls who made Caesar’s task hard and trying by continually playing him false. And it was these same bad Gauls who let Vercingetorix down and thus bore responsibility for the triumph. Vercingetorix eluded these categories by being an honorable opponent, like His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The good Gauls, generally, were exemplified by a certain Diviciacus the Haeduan and the bad by his brother, Dumnorix.

These two Haeduans, who actually play a rather minor part in the
Commentaries,
occupied for Miss Gowrie the very center of the picture. And in my own memory of the Gallic Wars their presence dominates. Diviciacus, the druid, friend of Caesar, principal statesman of the Haedui, a grave and prudent and honorable man who had once made a trip to Rome and stayed the night with Cicero, received Miss Gowrie’s special approbation. He stood for the spirit of the south, the Romanized province; he was capable of keeping sworn oaths, and for Caesar he was the first warning beacon on the hilltop signaling the descent of the northern invader. To Miss Gowrie and me, it was always a comfort to think of Diviciacus, with his reliable Latinized name, and to know that Caesar was not alone there, in turbulent, untrustworthy Gaul, where friends strangely turned into enemies and a Roman defeat sustained at dawn in the north would be celebrated in the south at sundown or before the end of the first watch. Caesar had Quintus Cicero, of course, and Labienus, the legates, but Quintus, like poor Marcus Tullius, was unstable, and the solid Labienus in the civil war was going to go over to Pompey and had, we thought, a coarse, crude personality, quite lacking in the grace and dignity that Caesar required in a friend. It was Diviciacus, Miss Gowrie emphasized, with a stern whistle of the teeth, who had for Caesar
“summam voluntatem, egregiam fìdem, iustitiam, temperantiam,”
and for the Roman people
“summum studium.”