Poor Roy's Child

MEMORIES OF A CATHOLIC GIRLHOOD (245 pp.)--Mary McCarthy--Harcourt Brace ($3.95).

When disaster causes the familiar ground to shudder beneath the feet of a child, a neurotic is sometimes born, or a writer, and often both. Mary McCarthy became a writer. Now 44 and looking down at the fallen arches of the years, Novelist-Essayist McCarthy has told some true tales about herself which on other lips might be mistaken for nostalgic prattle. The wary reader might also be scared by the admission that some of these stories have appeared in The New Yorker--which specializes in such stuff to the point where its pages are as snarled up with the inky footprints of tiny feet as the records of a maternity hospital.

Author McCarthy's Memories are sometimes tinily footprinted, particularly when she is talking about her suitably eccentric Jewish grandmother. But the whole thing is not like that. In early childhood, everyone's parents are taken for facts of nature; judgment or love or forgiveness may follow later, in a lifelong search for identity. In that sense Mary McCarthy's art--wearing no makeup here, and armed with little of her famous wit--contrives to make her apparently simple material the story of a search for herself.

The Wound & the Beau. Behaving like her own very private eye on the spoor of a family scandal, Mary McCarthy gives the reader facts about her early self. She was born in Seattle in 1912, daughter of Roy ("poor Roy," the family called him) McCarthy, an Irish-American lawyer. Mary was early conscious of the special Irish-American quality of traditional resentment, liberation, and (on emigration) emergence into a new minority. Furthermore, her family history was complicated not only by a scattering of Protestants but by that Jewish grandmother. The Irish and the Jews, most self-conscious of immigrants, set their friction working in the girl's brain.

Then occurred the kind of event which her second husband, Critic Edmund Wilson, in The Wound and the Bow considered decisive to the character of a writer--the wound for which a life of writing must compensate. In the flu epidemic of 1918 Mary McCarthy's parents died, and she was an orphan in a strange bed in a strange city--Minneapolis. Mary and her brothers were condemned to razorstrop beatings in the downstairs lavatory by a hated uncle. Her Uncle Myers is now dead, but the narrative of life under his hateful roof (presents were taken away because they were "too good'') should serve as a reminder that a child's eye sees more than its guardians think.

The Fall & the Cradle. Other relatives rescued her and sent her to a Sacred Heart convent at Seattle, where the sisters prayed for her Protestant grandfather. Thereafter her story tells the usual girl's things--mysterious grownups, dresses, brothers, journeys, the near fall from virginity. The episodes, trivial in themselves, are good reading because they are by Mary McCarthy; they are also thought-provoking because they suggest something about reminiscing intellectuals in general. Those who fall out of a cradle do not merely scream; they see and live to tell. The Fear of the Fall--in the theological as well as the Freudian sense --is expressed in these tales by a seeing-eye child. In her precarious progress between generations and classes. Author McCarthy developed a sharp sense of reality undeceived by either the sentimentality of Utopia or the sentimentality of cynicism.

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