Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (33 page)

Almost no books, but how then, while still in Minneapolis, did I learn about Loki and Balder the Beautiful and Frey and his golden sister Freya, goddess of love and beauty? That was not the kind of thing the Sisters of St. Joseph taught, and there were no comic books then to retell myths in strip language with balloons coming out of the mouths of helmeted gods and heroes—just the funny papers, which showed funny people like Olive Oyl and Miss Emmy Schmaltz. Probably the answer lies in
The Book of Knowledge,
a junior encyclopedia that someone finally gave us—proof that prayers were answered—and that our guardians for some reason let us keep and even use. They must have thought that it was a collection of known facts and figures and therefore no more harmful than the diagrams it carried of chemical retorts and the Bunsen burner. But to me, in that household, that red-bound set was like a whole barrel of bootleg liquor, cut but still the real stuff. Of course there were facts in it (there had to be), but you could ignore those; the main point was that it told you the plots of the world’s famous books from the
Iliad
through
The Count of Monte Cristo.
If the Trojan Horse and the Cyclops were there (and Roland and Oliver), they would have had to have Thor and his iron gloves, blind Hoder and his arrow—at least the “basics.”

Yet the suggestion leaves me unsatisfied. It does not account for the
intimacy
I formed with those scenes and figures of Norse mythology: how Thor lost his hammer, Odin’s raven, the bad dreams of Balder, Sif’s hair—you would think that I had had an entire “Edda for Children” hidden in the swing in our backyard.

Nor can I altogether account for the hold this material, however acquired, had on my imagination, for my so much preferring those gods and goddesses to the “sunny” Greek ones. Perhaps I liked the strong light-and-dark contrasts of the Northern tales. I was a firm believer in absolutes: the lack of shadings, of any in-between, made Asgard a more natural residence than Mount Olympus for my mythic propensity, just as clear, concise Latin was always more natural to me than Greek with all its “small, untranslatable words” (as Mrs. Ryberg at Vassar called them).

But there was more to it than that. For a juvenile half enamored of the dark principle, fond of frightening herself and her brothers with the stories she made up (or just a decided brunette with pale skin that she tried to see as “olive”), there was a disappointing lack of evil in Greek mythology. Obviously they did not tell children about the banquet of Thyestes, and all we knew of Jason was the
Argo
and the Golden Fleece, yet the crimes and horrors that were kept from us “till we were old enough” (like the watches my brothers received from our Seattle grandfather) were the work of mortals and titans, not Olympians. Even in his worst moments, no Greek god could approach the twisted cunning of a Loki. I hated his very name, and yet in a way he “made” the story of the Aesir for me.

In fact, the notion of a thoroughly evil creature sharing in the godhead was thoroughly un-Greek, and I suspect that it did not sit well with me either at the age of nine or ten despite the spell of intrigue and danger he cast on those tales. I could not quite fathom why Loki should go virtually unpunished even for the awful act of plotting the slaying of Balder; did it have something to do with his mixed ancestry, half-god and half-giant? You would think the
least
he deserved was permanent expulsion from Asgard, and yet he crept back, assuming new forms. The weakness of the Aesir (even Thor) in dealing with him was mystifying; they seemed to treat him and his relatives as fixtures of the establishment—his deathly daughter Hel ruled over the nether world. Being already a “confirmed” Catholic, I associated gods with goodness and could not take a standpoint that identified them simply with power—as sheer power of evil, Loki merited worship certainly. If I was unable to see that, it was doubtless because my model for badness was Satan. Proud Lucifer (Loki was a real cringer and fawner) was cast out of heaven once and for all, and such power as he retained, below, among men, was helpless before the saving action of God’s grace.

Yet now that I consider it, I can see that the appeal of Freya, Balder, Loki, and Company was, precisely, to my Catholic nature. The Prince of Darkness, despite his large handicap,
was
a power for us, a kind of god even if we avoided the Manichean heresy of picturing him as dividing the world in equal shares with God the Father. The only surprise is that the Norse cosmogony should have felt so congenial to me given the prejudice against real Norsemen—the “Scandihoovians” of Minnesota—that Irish Catholics learned at their mother’s knee. Evidently I made no connection between the great battle of Ragnarok that was to end the world and the local Olsens and Hansens. In the same way, my grandmother, old Lizzie McCarthy, who was “not over-fond” of Jews, never appeared to notice that Jesus was one, at least on His mother’s side.

The sense of being at home among the Aesir, “speaking their language,” was all the more natural to a Catholic child in that the Northern myths (though I did not guess it then) show clear traces of Christian impaste overlaying very primitive material. Balder, in particular, their pure-as-snow sun god, is a lot closer to Jesus on Mount Tabor than to Phoebus Apollo in his sky-chariot. The gods and Nature weep tears for him, treacherously slain by an arrow of mistletoe, as he descends like Christ crucified to the lower world, but there is a promise of a Second Coming, when all will live in harmony.

So it “fits,” I suppose, that when I left the house in Minneapolis and, before very long, the faith, the gods of Asgard lost their hold on me. I have scarcely thought of them since. Looking them up now, to reaffirm my memory, I am amazed to learn that Balder has a wife (Nanna); I had imagined him as a bachelor like Our Lord or Sir Percival. Otherwise that Northern pantheon has remained surprisingly fresh in my mind, as though deep-frozen in a snow-slide, untouched by any process of wear or tear. I do not think they figure in my writings even metaphorically, unlike King Arthur and his knights, who turn up in the story of Peter Levi (
Birds of America
).
My passion for them was a crush, which I got over so completely that the cure has left me with a perfect immunity to Wagner. Though
The Ring
has been “in” twice during my life, I have never had any interest in it.

But I am digressing in the middle of a digression, piling Ossa on Pelion, we Latinists would say. I was talking about books or, rather, about the scarcity of them that I had to endure between my seventh and my twelfth year. Yet losing the thread (or seeming to) has given me time to wonder about the truth of what I was saying. On reflection I see that I have been exaggerating. I cannot have waited more than a decade to read “Thumbelina” and “Puss in Boots,” or “Snow White” or “Rapunzel” or “Rumpelstiltskin.” If they were already old friends when I read them aloud to Reuel, it means that in Minneapolis we must have had the usual Grimm and Perrault fairy tales and that secretly or openly I read them.

Aladdin and his lamp, too—I have a distinct memory of a genie, somewhat pear-shaped, emerging from a cloud of smoke—Ali Baba, and Sinbad the Sailor, in one of whose adventures I first learned of the roc and pictured to myself fearfully its huge white fabulous eggs. Then there are books I feel I have read that I cannot remember in the Minneapolis house or “place” in the years just following:
Tanglewood Tales
and a
Pilgrim’s Progress
illustrated with dark, Doré-like lithographs. But a Catholic home would not have had Bunyan; still less would the Sisters of St. Joseph have given it to us in school—almost better Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs.
And yet I feel sure that I was a child—not a girl—when I saw the words “Apollyon” and “Slough of Despond” and essayed to pronounce them to myself. The volume with its gloomy illustrations “belongs” in the Minneapolis framework, more specifically in the glass-fronted bookcase in the parlor, and I can only suppose that, like the Dante and
Don Quixote,
it had belonged to our father, more catholic in his tastes than the rest of his family, and that our guardians were too ignorant to confiscate it.

It was not till I left Minneapolis, I think, that a book disappointed me. I could not finish Washington Irving’s
The Alhambra.
That was in the convent, in Seattle. I doubt that such a thing could have happened in the Minneapolis time, for then I could read just about anything—I had an iron stomach for printed matter, like a goat’s. To this day, I have a good digestion in this respect, which I must owe, like my generally good digestion and appetite, to the Blaisdell Avenue regime. The ability to read almost anything was the corollary, obviously, of deprivation, for, exaggerate or not, it is still true that we had very few books.

It is true, too, that at that time children by and large had a far greater power of absorption of the printed word than children do today, and there also scarcity was a factor—children’s books were a comparative rarity, so that children “made do” with books written for adults. The change came between my generation and the next: a book like
The Water-Babies,
which I “ate up” as a child, no doubt like my father before me, was utterly resistant to being gulped down or even tasted by my son. And he rebelled against Cooper’s
The Prairie,
even though it was being read aloud to him—a kind of spoon-feeding. You could blame that on the Hardy Boys, were it not for Henty and H. Rider Haggard, whom he read straight through and begged for more of.

On the whole, children’s taste in books seems to change more slowly than adults’.
Heidi
and
Robin Hood
are still classics, and I have read the Howard Pyle King Arthur books not only to Reuel but to my husband’s children, more than fifteen years his junior. But other old books have become inaccessible to young readers, as though placed out of their reach by the modern child’s shrunken vocabulary. Stylistic mannerisms are another barrier. They can cause books to date alarmingly, like affected fashions in dress, and this applies equally to old and young. We cannot return to the favorites of our youth. It is as much as I can do to read Meredith now, though I devoured him as a girl, to the point where until recently I supposed that my sentences must sound like him. But when a couple of summers ago I reread
Richard Feverel,
I could not see the shadow of a resemblance; the problem was to get through it at all.

Charles Kingsley, a “muscular Christian,” was a contemporary of Meredith’s. There is an old copy of
The Water-Babies
(first published in 1863, four years after
Richard Feverel
)
in the room where I am writing, inscribed “Harry from Uncle Louis, Christmas 1904.” The two names are in my family, “Harry” on both sides of it, but the book is no relation; it came with the house in Maine when we bought it. Nevertheless the bookshelves that face me as I write are confronting me, eerily, with the classics of my childhood:
The Water-Babies,
Andrew Lang’s edition of
The Arabian Nights
(same illustrations),
Black Beauty, Heidi, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
even Manly’s
English Poetry,
where I found “Sister Helen” a few years later on a Tacoma boarding-school shelf. It is as if these ghostly volumes that had formed my persona had been haunting the house on the Maine seacoast that my husband was to buy in 1967.

But to return to the point at hand:
The Water-Babies,
which was written as a children’s story on a theme of child labor, is extremely arch and fanciful, as much so as anything Meredith ever penned. On opening it yesterday, I felt sympathy with the reluctant Reuel of forty years ago; the only plain sentence in the whole narrative is the first one: “Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep and his name was Tom.” In the same way a new look at the first chapter of
Vanity Fair,
borrowed from the Bangor Public Library, makes me wonder how this could have figured in the sixth-grade reader of St. Stephen’s parochial school. Even if ruthlessly cut and preceded by a vocabulary, the need of which is emphasized by the markings in red ink of a previous borrower underlining the difficult words: “equipage,” “bandy,” “Semiramis,” “incident to,” “orthography,” “sensibility.” …

Well! Necessity is the mother of invention: the shortage of books in the Minneapolis house was compensated for by other kinds of reading-matter. We had the funny papers every afternoon and a whole section of them in color on Sunday. There was also the Sunday magazine section, which we were allowed to look at (I can’t guess why), spread out on the den rug after church. I remember best the high-society scandals, constituent elements (come to think of it) of Henry James’s “international theme”—Anna Gould, Count Boni de Castellane, the much-married Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the Marquise de la Falaise de la Coudray—King Tut, the Kohinoor diamond, the curse of the Carnarvons, and some medical curiosities. Then there were religious periodicals: Grandma McCarthy’s blue-and-white
Ave Maria,
which I read in her upstairs sunroom, and old Aunt Mary’s more lowbrow
Extension,
sepia-toned, which I would “borrow” and keep hidden under my mattress; both of these carried short stories. In
Our Sunday Visitor,
sold after church every Sunday, you could read about the scary burning of crosses by the Ku Klux Klan on Catholic lawns, and there was a gripping Question-and-Answer column that advised you, if you were a doctor, which to save, the mother or the child, in a perilous childbirth—readers seemed to write in the same questions week after week, maybe in the hope of getting a different answer. In church after Sunday Mass there were also free distributions of tracts on foreign missions—that was probably where I learned of Father Damien and the lepers on Molokai—Catholics had a great appetite for reading about gruesome diseases, especially those involving the rotting or falling off of parts of the body. But in general the various tracts, flyers, illustrated brochures on missionary work extended our horizons almost like
The National Geographic
of Protestant homes.