How I Grew by Mary McCarthy

First published: 1987

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1925-1933

Locale: Minneapolis, Seattle, and Poughkeepsie, New York

Principal Personages:

• Mary McCarthy, a writer remembering her life during her teenage years
• Harold Cooper Johnsrud, her first husband, an actor
• Ethel (Ted) Rosenberg, her friend at a public high school
• Mark Sullivan, her uncle’s friend, on whom she develops a crush
• Forrest Crosby, her first lover
• Miss Dorothy Atkinson, her English teacher at Annie Wright Seminary

Form and Content

In How I Grew, Mary McCarthy constructs an intellectual autobiography of her adolescence, covering roughly the eight years between ages thirteen and twenty-one. In a sense a sequel to her earlier autobiographical work. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), it is the story of the orphaned McCarthy following the move from the Catholic, Minneapolis household of her McCarthy relatives to the Seattle household of her Protestant grandfather and Jewish grandmother, Harold Preston and Augusta Morgenstern Preston. McCarthy describes her intellectual awakening and development through recollections of influential family members, friends, and teachers. The book is also a literary exploration of the process of memory.

The book is a mostly chronological account of major and minor episodes in her life, largely centered on three sets of school experiences: her year at public school in Seattle; three years at the private girls’ school, Annie Wright Seminary, in Tacoma, Washington; and her college years at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Throughout, she manages a twofold focus: on her developing intellectual interests and influences (books, teachers, and friends) and on her adolescent social life (her forays into sexual and romantic adventure).

For example, she reveals the progress of her reading tastes, the books that she read and the people who influenced her, and her early writings and theatrical performances. Yet she also relates her first sexual experience (at age fourteen, in an automobile); her entry into Seattle bohemian society; her uneven relationship with her first husband, actor Harold Cooper Johnsrud; and her first, rather unflattering glimpse of her second husband, writer Edmund Wilson, when he speaks at Vassar. The narrative presents incisive portraits of a succession of persons whom McCarthy sees as having influenced her development into an intellectual.

Methodologically, the crux of the book is in the texture of overlapping and possibly contradictory memories, as McCarthy searches for as much truth as can be wrung from recollection, accompanied by an ever-alert awareness of memory’s limitations. In addition, McCarthy’s adult commentary is woven into the chronological narrative.

Context

How I Grew provides not only a background for understanding the fiction and nonfiction work by McCarthy, a prolific writer who made it into the mainstream of New York intellectual life, but also a picture of the social and intellectual culture of the period, especially as it pertains to elite women’s education and sexual mores. McCarthy also provides an honest exploration of anti-Semitism. She does not examine the reasons for the ways in which her young self deviated from prevalent norms defining appropriate feminine sexuality.

On the other hand, the break with norms surrounding the educational goals and intellectual interests of young women of her class and upbringing is well analyzed. McCarthy portrays the impetus for her intellectuality as her early deprivation following orphanhood, which produced a craving and appreciation for the privilege of intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment. The loss of her parents, which made her something of an outsider, and the juxtaposition of her materially and spiritually impoverished childhood with her financially secure and elite adolescence also contribute to a sociological outlook which permeates her descriptive interests and analysis, finding expression in her close attention to the issue of social class and to social influence in general.

McCarthy follows the development of her critical eye through a series of personal influences, especially those of teachers. In this vein, she provides a depiction of a continuity of female intellectual tradition carried on by graduates of elite women’s colleges who taught in a network of elite secondary schools during the period.

McCarthy received the National Medal for Literature, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and held the Stevenson Chair for Literature at Bard College. She was the author of novels, such as The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963); short stories; travel memoirs, such as Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959); essays, such as On the Contrary: Articles of Belief (1961) and Ideas and the Novel (1980); and memoirs.

Bibliography

Bennett, Joy, and Gabriella Hochmann. Mary McCarthy: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992. This bibliography contains summaries of critical responses to How I Grew at the time of its publication, as well as to McCarthy’s work as a whole.

Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. In a well-researched biography that was written with McCarthy’s cooperation, Gelderman attempts to show how McCarthy’s public persona in her autobiographical writing does not always correspond to her life.

Grumbach, Doris. The Company She Kept. New York: Coward-McCann, 1967. This early biography analyzes McCarthy’s novel The Group, relating it to her Vassar years, and describes her studies at convent schools and at Annie Wright Seminary. Includes examples of McCarthy’s early essays written at Vassar.

McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957. This earlier autobiographical work by McCarthy covers some of the same years and influences as How I Grew, with a different thematic emphasis on how the narrator of memory constructs the narration in particular ways.

McKenzie, Barbara. Mary McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1966. McKenzie relates McCarthy’s fiction and nonfiction to autobiographical materials—for example, tying McCarthy’s choice of satire as a literary mode to possible influences from her Latin studies.