Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy review – incurable sadness if bravely borne

Mary McCarthy was a formidable, not to say frightening, figure in the literary landscape of mid-20th-century America, one of a cohort of remarkable left-leaning intellectuals that included Elizabeth Hardwick, Dwight Macdonald, Randall Jarrell and McCarthy’s lifelong friend Hannah Arendt. The famous feud between McCarthy and the playwright Lillian Hellman – “every word Hellman writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’” – led to a $2.5m libel suit brought by Hellman but which in the end damaged her own reputation beyond repair.

McCarthy was already an established critic and fiction writer when, in 1963, she published The Group, the novel that was to bring her huge popular success. It is an account of the lives of a set of young women in postwar New York and, for its time, was frank to the point of being scandalous. Anyone reading it now will wonder what the fuss was about, given its bloodless psychologising and wooden prose.

It could be argued that her finest book is Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, first published in 1957 and now reissued in a handsome paperback by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Much of the material had already appeared as autobiographical essays in the New Yorker, and in her preface here she expresses surprise that “some readers… have taken them for stories”. This is somewhat disingenuous, since at the end of each of the eight sections of the book she examines her conscience, as a good Catholic girl should, and confesses to the parts of the preceding narrative that are “made up”.

She was born in Seattle in 1912, the inheritor of a “salad of genes”, as Nabokov would say, from her Irish Catholic, New England Protestant and California Jewish forebears. Both her parents died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Mary and her three brothers, including the future movie actor Kevin McCarthy, lived for a time with their father’s Irish Catholic parents, a markedly unfeeling couple. Some of the most biting passages in the book deal with the grandmother: “An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling: the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart.”

Worse was to come, however, when the children were handed over to an aunt and uncle, a monstrous pair who made their lives a living hell. Among the many torments inflicted upon them was “the adhesive tape that, to prevent mouth-breathing, was clapped upon our lips… sealing us up for the night, and that was removed, very painfully, with the help of ether, in the morning”. It should be noted that the ether was employed not as an anaesthetic, but as a lubricant, which left on the lips “a grimy, grey, rubbery remainder”.

McCarthy was grateful for her Catholic upbringing, particularly her convent education; as a Catholic, she notes, “you have absorbed a good deal of world history and the history of ideas before you are twelve”. Later, she abandoned religion and became a sort of agnostic. She is disdainful of the squalid bargaining the church encourages: “If the kind of God exists who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him… I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.”

Matters improved when the children’s maternal grandfather listened to their tale of woe and set himself to rescuing them. The price, however, was the final break-up of the family: Mary went to live with Grandfather Preston, while the three boys were sent elsewhere. The four did not meet again until they were adults.

Colm Tóibín, in his sympathetic and subtle introduction, notes the similarities between Mary McCarthy and the poet Elizabeth Bishop, both of whom grew up parentless, and used their orphanhood as literary material. Yet the biographies of both women bespeak an incurable sadness and a sense of damage, however bravely borne. McCarthy was the sprightlier and more feisty of the two, and in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood she made a small, or perhaps more than small, masterpiece.

• Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply