Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938

By the end of the first paragraph of this brief companion to her memoir How I Grew , McCarthy (1912-1989) has made clear the centers of her young life: love and work. At a May Day parade in New York City, she is a 24-year-old Communist and married woman. Both will change soon: she will become involved with the ``fair young man'' walking with her who ``looked like Fred MacMurray,'' and she will become a Trotskyite. As in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood , drivenness and a sense of inevitability here possess McCarthy; as her close friend Hardwick ( Sleepless Nights ) writes in the introduction, there was ``a certain Jesuitical aspect to her moral life . . . habits, prejudices, moments, even fleeting ones, had to be accounted for, looked at, and written in the ledger.'' As a young writer, McCarthy produced a prodigious number of reviews for magazines like Partisan Review and the Nation . Her love life was equally active: at one point she ``realized . . . that in twenty-foursic hours she had slept with three different men.'' Yet she believed in marriage, and in the space of the memoir's three years, she wed twice, the latter time to critic Edmund Wilson, 16 years her senior and the man who egged her on to try ``imaginative writing.'' As the memoir moves through discussions of Stalinism and Trotskyism, the Moscow trials, the founding of the Partisan Review --and detailed descriptions of the furniture in her apartments--we watch an important mind forming. (May)