Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (77 page)

John did not approve of any of this. He thought I should make Peggy take her name off the whole series; he did not trust her, he said. One could not trust a woman who was as weak as that. They were buying my silence, he said. It all chimed in with things that had happened to his father when he was principal of that Minnesota high school. I said I could not demand full credit because I was sorry for Peggy. I felt sure that she had not told Freda everything. If the truth came out, when our names were already on the articles, Freda might feel she was too compromised to keep her job. That I was not getting complete credit for work I had done was less important than the fact that Peggy was on her own, with Judy, and barely able to perform. I cannot tell even now whether those were my true feelings. I was sorry for her certainly, but not
very
sorry, possibly because of that self-satisfied smile and “Of course I know I’m kinda pretty.”
Self-deception always chilled me. But I was the stronger, and she was the weaker, so I could not expose her. John said I would see how she repaid my generosity. I am not sure it was really generosity, but about repayment he was right, as the reader will see. She has been dead for years now; there is no reason for me to keep silent. And yet I feel guilty, like somebody repeating a slander, as I write this down.

The series on the critics was an immense succès de scandale. It was time someone did it. Peggy and I, our names now linked together for what looked like eternity, were a cynosure. Seeing her respond to the compliments that came to both of us at the parties we were invited to, I was annoyed, I found. I felt that she was
preening
. Repressing my annoyance, I behaved falsely. Between the two of us, once the series was published, no reference was ever made to the division or non-division of labor that had gone into it. Her affair with Ben Stolberg did not last very long, and somehow—I forget the circumstances—he hired me to be his secretary-typist for a book he was going to write on labor.

He was a mine of knowledge, a deviant socialist of some sort, with a witty mind (from the book he was meant to be writing: “Judge Gary never saw a blast furnace till after his death”), but he had a mammoth writer’s block and a genius for wasting time when he should have been working. He had hired me on the theory that if he paid me to come every day
he would have to dictate some sort of text to me. But our first week was spent buying a typewriter; under his direction I typed “Now is the time for all good men” on Remingtons and Royals and L. C. Smiths and Coronas, office models and portables, in the various typewriter stores he found in his neighborhood. I could not get him to make up his mind between them, and finally I chose one myself, and he paid for it—he had a rich woman poet as a patron. Then we spent several more days buying office supplies (choosing between weights of typewriter paper, all-black ribbons or red-and-black, sizes of manila envelopes, et cetera), till finally I was seated before a new Royal in his living-room on just the right chair, and he stood behind me.

Instead of dictating, he talked. On the awful chasm of difference between Harvard and Yale, perceptible in American intellectual history of the present day (e.g., Luce and Archie MacLeish were Yale, Franklin Roosevelt was Harvard); on the early days of John L. Lewis and the rebel mine workers of Illinois; on how I ought to go to graduate school and earn a Ph.D., even at Yale if I had to (Ben of course was Harvard), for without a Ph.D. I could never have a serious career as a critic; on old German cities in the Rhineland (Ben came from Frankfurt am Main); and on the structure of American society (America was the classless society, though not the kind Marx had pictured; Marx could not have foreseen this country of ours, where everybody, workers included, was middle-class).

I listened and laughed, my fingers idle on the keys. Some of his theories offended my patrician prejudices, for I liked to think that I came from a superior class, the professionals, who, together with a very few old-family financiers and land-poor gentry, were different from other Americans, whereas Ben scoffed and snorted at the notion of an American patriciate even more than at the notion of an American proletariat. It was easier for him to convince me of the vast distinction between Yale and Harvard, the more so as it embodied an aristocratic prejudice (Ben being, naturally, a snob in these matters, like most deep-dyed men of the left, not excepting Karl Marx). And he impressed me with the vital necessity of my having a Ph.D., to the point where I got on a train to New Haven to look at the graduate school, spending the night with Arthur Mizener, who was working on a doctorate, and his pretty wife, Rosemary Paris, the Perdita to my Leontes in the Outdoor Theatre at Vassar.

But that was the closest I got to a Ph.D. Something else had happened. When the first Moscow trial took place and Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed in August 1936 (and the Spanish Civil War began), I did not know about it, since I was in Reno. Shortly after that May Day parade, I had “told” John, who was back from playing
Winterset
on the road. I said I was in love with John Porter and wanted to marry him. This was in Central Park while we watched some ducks swimming, as described in “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment.” Except for that detail, there is not much
resemblance between the reality and the story I wrote two years later—the first I ever published. When I wrote that story (which became the first chapter of
The Company She Keeps
), I was trying, I think, to give some form to what had happened between John, John Porter, and me—in other words, to explain it to myself. But I do not see that I was really like the nameless heroine, and the two men are shadows, deliberately so. I know for a fact that when I wrote that piece I was feeling the effects of reading a lot of Henry James; yet today I cannot find James there either—no more than the living triangle of John, John Porter, and me.

John Porter was tall, weak, good-looking, a good dancer; his favorite writer was Rémy de Gourmont, and he had an allergy to eggs in any form. He went to Williams (I still have his Psi U pin) and was the only son of elderly parents. When I met him, he had been out of work for some time and lived by collecting rents on Brooklyn and Harlem real estate for his mother. The family, de-gentrifying, occupied the last “white” house in Harlem, on East 122nd Street, and owned the beautiful old silver Communion cup from Trinity Church in Brooklyn; it must have been given to an ancestor as the last vestryman. After the Paris
Herald
and Agence Havas, Porter had worked in Sweden for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but since then had been unable to connect with a job. Collecting rents on the wretched tenements still owned by his parents was his sole recourse,
and most of the poor blacks who lived in them dodged him as best they could, having no earnings either. The Porters were very close with the little they had; they neither drank nor smoked and disapproved of anybody who did. The old father, who had once been an assemblyman in Albany, was deaf and inattentive, and John hid his real life from his mother.

He was in love with me or thought he was; my energy must have made an appeal to him—he probably hoped it would be catching. Despite his unemployment, dour mother, and rent-collecting, he was gay and full of charm. He was fond of making love and giving pleasure. By the time John came back from the road, Porter and I had a future planned. Together with a journalist friend who had a car, he was going to write a travel book on Mexico. Mexico was very much “in” then among sophisticated people, especially because Europe, what with Hitler and the fall of the dollar, was looking more and more forbidding. Hence John Porter and his co-author had readily found a publisher to advance $500 on a book contract with royalties.

It may be that Porter already had the idea of the Mexican book at the time he met me and merely needed the thought of marriage to spur him on. In any case, I fitted into the picture. After Reno, where my grandfather was getting me the best law firm to file for divorce, Porter would wait while I visited my grandparents in Seattle, and then the three of us would start
out from New York in the friend’s small car. It would be an adventure.

And Johnsrud? He took it hard, much harder than I had been prepared for. I felt bad for him; in fact I was torn. The worst was that, when it came down to it, I did not know why I was leaving him. I still had love of some sort left for him, and seeing him suffer made me know it. Out of our quarreling, we had invented an evil, spooky character called “Hohnsrud” (from a misaddressed package) who accounted for whatever went wrong. Our relations in bed, on my side, were unsatisfactory, and infidelity had shown me that with other men this was not so. It was as though something about John, our history together, made me impotent, if that can be said of women. I had no trouble even with the worn-out little actor in the Adler elevated shoes. Yet I doubt that sex was really the force that was propelling me; had we stayed together I might well have outgrown whatever the inhibition was. I was still immensely impressed by him and considered myself his inferior. Hence it stupefied me, shortly after our breakup, to hear Frani say, by way of explanation: “Well, your being so brilliant must have been difficult for him.”

It is a mystery. No psychoanalyst ever offered a clue, except to tell me that I felt compelled to leave the man I loved because my parents had left
me
. Possibly. What I sensed myself was inexorability, the
moerae
at work, independently of my will, of my likes
or dislikes. A sweet, light-hearted love affair, all laughter and blown kisses, like Porter himself, had turned leaden with pointless consequence. Looking back, I am sorry for poor Porter, that he had to be the instrument fated to separate me from John. And for him it
was
a doom, which took him in charge, like the young Oedipus meeting the stranger, Laius, at the crossroads. I wonder whether he may not have felt it himself as he finally set out for Mexico, where he would die of a fever after overstaying his visa and going to jail. All alone in a stable or primitive guest quarter belonging to a woman who had been keeping him and then got tired of it.

Meanwhile, though, before I left for Reno, Porter and I went out for a few days to Watermill, Long Island, where his parents still owned a moldy summer bungalow in the tall grass high up over the sea. With us was a little Communist organizer by the name of Sam Craig. I have told the story of that in the piece called “My Confession” in
On the Contrary
. The gist of it is that the Party was sending him to California in a car some sympathizer had donated. But Sam did not know how to drive. So he had asked Porter, a long-time friend, to take the car and give him driving lessons on the lonely back roads around Watermill. Sam was a slow learner, to the point of tempting us to despair for him. On the beach, all that week the red danger flags of the Coast Guard were out, and we swam only once in the rough water. In the evenings,
over drinks in the moldy old house lit by oil lamps, Sam was trying to convert me to Communism. To my many criticisms of the Party, he had a single answer: I should join the Party and work from the inside to reform it. This was a variant on “boring from within,” the new tactic that corresponded with the new line; the expression seems to have been first used in 1936. Evidently Sam was thinking of termite work to be done on the Party itself, rather than on some capitalist institution. Very original on his part, and he nearly convinced me.

In the end, I said I would think it over. Sam passed his driving-test and went off by himself in the car, heading west. As I wrote in “My Confession,” I ask myself now whether this wasn’t the old car that figured in the Hiss case—the car Alger gave to the Party. I never learned what happened to Sam, since I never saw or heard of him again. He may have perished in the desert or gone to work recruiting among the Okies or on the waterfront. And here is the eerie thing about the Porter chain of events: everyone concerned with him disappeared. First, Sam; next, the man named Weston, Porter’s collaborator on the Mexican guidebook, who vanished from their hotel room in Washington after drinks one night at the National Press Club, leaving his typewriter and all his effects behind.

Porter searched for a week, enlisting police help; they canvassed the Potomac, the jails, the docks, the hospitals, they talked to those who had last seen him.
The best conclusion was that he had been shanghaied. By a Soviet vessel? Or that he had had some reason to want to disappear. But without his typewriter? A journalist does not do that. He was never found.

Meanwhile, I, too, had dropped out of the picture. I was in New York, at the Lafayette Hotel, and concurring by telephone with the decision Porter came to: to go on without Weston and get the book started, while he still had the car and half the advance. Of course I had qualms. Even though he had taken it with good grace when, on my return from Reno and Seattle, I had got cold feet about the Mexican trip. I forget what reason I gave. The fact was, I had lost my feeling for him. But I let him think I might join him once he had “prepared the way.” From Washington he wrote or telephoned every day; after he left, I wrote, too, day after day, addressing my letters to Laredo, general delivery. I never heard from him again.

Late that fall, a crude-looking package from an unknown sender arrived in the little apartment I had taken on Gay Street in the Village. Having joined the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, whose members were getting a certain number of anonymous phone calls—Sidney Hook, we heard, looked under the bed every night before retiring—I was afraid to open the thing. As far as I could make out from the scrawled handwriting, it came from Laredo, on the Mexican border; conceivably there was a connection with Trotsky and his murderous enemies in Coyoacán.
I am ashamed to say that I asked Johnsrud if he would come over and be with me while I opened it. He did. First we listened, to be sure we could not hear anything ticking—but inside all we found was a quite hideous pony-skin throw lined with the cheapest, sleaziest sky-blue rayon, totally unlike Porter, who had a gift for present-giving. I had already ruled out any likelihood that the crudely wrapped package had anything to do with him, even though Laredo had been on his way. The sleazy throw confirmed this. On Johnsrud’s advice probably, I wrote or wired the sender. In reply, I got a telegram:
PACKAGE COMES FROM JOHN PORTER MEXICO
.