Posts Tagged ‘Catherine Wolff’

Schoolgirl days (Vassar Library & Archives)

“If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.”

It’s tonight! Another Look takes on Mary McCarthy‘s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, a 1958 National Book Awards finalist for nonfiction. The discussion will take place at 7:30 p.m. on TONIGHT, February 19, in the Bechtel Conference Center of Encina Hall. Directions and parking for the event are here.

An excerpt from Charles Poore‘s 1957 review in The New York Times:

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Mary McCarthy plays a splendid trick on her future biographers by anticipating their researches and confounding their zeal. The book is a collection of stories she has written about her early years. Among them, for example, is “Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?” – one of the most stinging, brilliant and disturbing memoirs ever written by an American.

The autobiographical stories are marinated in italic commentaries that tell how much commonplace veracity or creative mendacity they contain. We are given background and interpretation, amplification and variorum readings on Miss McCarthy’s nomadic childhood from the West Coast to the Midlands, from convent schools to Vassar. And probably the sharpest criticism of her work you can find anywhere.

Now, many an author has done this sort of thing in the past. One thinks, at random, of Henry James‘ wonderfully revisionist prefaces to the New York edition of his works, or the glow of Conrad’s notes for his Canterbury Edition. Didn’t Ring Lardner write a series of brief, confidential overtures to his tales, one of which said: “The story is an example of what can be done with a stub pen”? Miss McCarthy is more generous with her revelations and interpretations. She goes at considerable length into her young religious faith and the agonizing reappraisals that accompanied her loss of it. She traces endlessly the ramifications of a family that contained Roman Catholic and Jewish members, Protestants and agnostics.

The conversation will be led by author Tobias Wolff, National Medal of Arts winner and founding director of Another Look. Panelists include author Catherine Wolff and Another Look regular Inga Pierson, who is also an English teacher at Sacred Heart Preparatory.

We are aware there is a televised Democratic Presidential Debate airing from 6-8 p.m. the same evening. However, we hope you will choose us! (And catch up with the debate or debate highlights afterward. Isn’t that what Youtube is for?) More information on the poster below.

In school, character is fate.” (Courtesy Vassar Archives)

You think the coronavirus is bad? Novelist Mary McCarthy will tell you about about one of the epic plagues of modern times.

Both her indulgent, fun-loving parents died during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Then she and her three brothers were shuttled among relatives, some of them abusive. In her 1957 book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she describes it all with merciless wit and frankness.

Now her book is coming to Stanford. It will be discussed at the Another Look winter event at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19, at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall.

She was first sent to a Catholic convent school in Seattle, later to an Episcopalian seminary in Tacoma. While appreciating the classical foundation her Catholic education gave her, she defiantly and publicly lost her faith during those years – first as a stunt, then in earnest. She eventually graduated from Vassar.

Toby is leading the discussion.

“She never spares herself at all,” wrote Charles Poore in The New York Times. “The vanities and ambitions, the resentments and misunderstandings, the small triumphs and the scarring disasters that marked her early years are set forth with remarkable candor, so that her book is the most incisive contribution to the story of her development as an artist that we shall ever have.” She was “harshly given every opportunity to become one of the lost, and yet went on to create in modern idioms a style based on classic Latin satire.”

The conversation will be led by author Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look and a National Medal of Arts winner. Panelists include his wife, the author Catherine Wolff and Another Look regular Inga Pierson, a former Stanford fellow who brings some personal experience to bear on the subject: she is  an English teacher at Sacred Heart Preparatory in Menlo Park.

Inga’s coming, too.

The event is free and open to the public. Come early for best seats. And Stanford Bookstore on campus, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, and Bell’s Books in Palo Alto are carrying the books.

The Another Look book club focuses on short classics that have been forgotten, neglected, or overlooked—or may simply not have received the attention they merit. The selected works are short, in order to encourage the involvement of Bay Area readers whose time may be limited. Subscription at anotherlook.stanford.edu is encouraged for regular updates and details on the selected books and events.