Mary McCarthy
I recently picked up a copy of Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood re-edited by Fitzcarraldo. I didn’t want it to finish. Gloriously written, each sentence of chiselled perfection, it displays McCarthy’s signature cynicism; yet at the same time it is tender. Often scathing of her childhood’s religion (‘In the Catholic Church, even the most remote eventualities are discussed with pedantic literalness’), she yet recalls exalted moments when ‘the soul was fired with reverence’. There is wonderful comedy in accounts of absurdities, pathos in the retelling of grief. She sums up the persona of an émigrée teacher remarking, ‘she took being Scottish personally‘. The self-irony is delicious: ‘My nose was my chief worry; it was too snub, and I had been sleeping with a clothespeg on it to give it a more aristocratic shape.’ The final essay, on McCarthy’s grandmother, lends this book greatness. I shall not forget the description of an intimate bereavement: ‘A terrible scream – an unearthly scream – came from behind the closed door of her bedroom; I have never heard such a sound, neither animal nor human, and it did not stop. It went on and on, like a fire siren on the moon.’
