The Irish-Americans are mad keen to be Irish, or so the stereotype goes. Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, first published in the US in 1957 as the Kennedys brought Irish Catholicism a new cultural cachet, looks back on a time when Ireland represented not pride but superstitious provincialism.
After losing her parents in Minneapolis to the 1918 influenza pandemic, a six-year-old McCarthy is left Cinderella-style to the mercy of a cruel, penny-pinching aunt and uncle on her father’s Irish Catholic side of the family. Sheer misery ensues for Mary and her three younger brothers; the “disagreeable middle-aged relations” subject the children to dismal food and regular beatings. Finally Mary – and Mary alone – is rescued from Catholic privation by her maternal grandparents: a Protestant grandfather and Jewish grandmother. She will go on to become a vertiginously successful writer, whose novels include The Group.
The memoir, split into eight parts, does not follow a strictly linear timeline. The first chapter details the death of McCarthy’s parents (“Poor Roy’s children, as commiseration damply styled us”) and the selective blindness of their Catholic paternal grandmother to the children’s mistreatment at the hands of their new guardians: “She appeared not to notice the darns and patches of our clothing, our raw hands and scarecrow arms, our silence and elderly faces.”
The second elaborates on the children’s abuse and their eventual rescue, while the third to sixth detail McCarthy’s schooling with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart. The seventh outlines a trip to Montana and an underwhelming induction to the world of dating, while the final chapter is centred on the glamorous, aloof Jewish grandmother (“This body of hers was the cult object around which our household revolved”).
The family leaves its mark, but ultimately the focus is on McCarthy’s intellectual development. Sandwiched by the grandmothers, the meat of the memoir tracks the young girl’s burgeoning scepticism at a convent school where Shelley is considered “a young man of good family who had contracted atheism at Oxford”.
What begins as affected religious doubt turns into a genuine crisis of fate when the priest will not – or cannot – give McCarthy’s diligently researched questions a straight answer. A maverick impulse to like the disfavoured Latin teacher Miss Gowrie (“I claimed Miss Gowrie as my discovery”) leads to an unlikely passion for Caesar. “Classicist friends laugh when I say that Caesar is a great stylist, but I think so”, McCarthy avers. This growth from bratty contrarian to sincerely rigorous thinker is the arc that matters, the story of how Mary McCarthy became Mary McCarthy.
Towards the end of the chapter on Miss Gowrie, we learn in passing that McCarthy had been secretly meeting a boy. McCarthy invokes this unnamed fellow solely as a catalyst for her conflict with Miss Gowrie, and only in the chapter’s end notes does she assign him any traits: “A strange person, a juvenile delinquent.” A less independent-minded writer might have cut Caesar and focused on the trysts with the tortured soul. But McCarthy has integrity, writes what she wants and keeps you with her all the way.
The end notes following each chapter let McCarthy play a confident game of truth-twisting, flagging her narrative inventions without so much as the whiff of an apology. Even when she admits to misjudged fictionalisations (“The reader will wonder what made me change this story to something decidedly inferior”), she regrets only inept execution, not the fact itself of having fiddled with real events. Mary McCarthy was defending autofiction – or at least its devices – well before the term came into being.
In Fitzcarraldo’s new edition, an introduction by Colm Tóibín contextualises the memoir as a relatively compassionate entry in McCarthy’s sharp-tongued oeuvre – though “relatively” is key. She still gleefully catalogues others’ physical and sartorial flaws: the Catholic grandmother who “looked like a bulldog”, the schoolgirls “with dandruff on their uniforms, with spots and gaping seams”. Such meanness exists in dialogue with the end notes, where McCarthy opens up the moral aperture, seeking other lights, other views. Tóibín argues that the book “could be read as eight essays in autobiography […] rather than a seamless, considered version of the author’s childhood and adolescence”, where McCarthy’s prose itself becomes an imaginative escape from her fairy-tale villain guardians.
I fear McCarthy would be disappointed in me for giving an unqualified rave review, my critical faculties seduced by her rakish pen. Yet the book’s only flaw is an occasional repetitiousness due to its origins as separate pieces. Not even this can truly count against McCarthy; I would happily read her describing the same thing 99 times over and still be first in line to read the hundredth. As a ruthlessly honest interrogation of family dynamics, as an account of a 1920s Irish-American life before it became fashionable, and as a portrait of an intellectual awakening – this memoir stands as a classic.
