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The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
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. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion 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 Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride review – romantic friction from the new bohemians
In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that 'zip along', editors were saying no to Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn't get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard's Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer Eimear McBride, whose 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women's prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn't so niche after all. McBride's new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016's The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily's age, living overseas after her mother couldn't hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too. The action resumes here in 1995, yo-yoing between the recent past – in particular, a momentous visit by said daughter, Grace – and a narrative here and now in which Eily hasn't been leaving the house after a breakdown and Stephen is in a West End show, kissing his female co-lead on stage, something Eily's sort-of not-quite OK with. McBride's cutting between time frames repeatedly leaves us poised on one ticklish moment only to switch to another – whether Stephen has returned from work to find Eily and Grace drunkenly quizzing each other, or he's just been left bloodied by a shattered jar of piccalilli during a row with Eily at home, where innocuous-sounding exchanges about sandwiches and tea can't mask the volcanic undertow bubbling up from the individual miseries of their past (addiction, abuse, self-harm). What unfolds is a two-for-one trauma plot involving love between bruised souls who aren't walking on eggshells so much as tiptoeing blindfold across a tripwired minefield. This being McBride, it's the telling that's as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it's like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion. And as in The Lesser Bohemians, frequent interruptions in a tiny font are deployed to show Eily quibbling with herself (there are more conventional tools for that, but McBride fights shy of commas and speech marks, never mind brackets). The novel's drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily's thoughts as she decodes Stephen's words, calibrates her own, watching his gestures, craving, ultimately, for the validation she finds in his desire. Anything that makes that place harder to reach, whether Grace's arrival or his refusal to ignore the marks on Eily's wrists, fuels tension. For Eily, Stephen's solicitousness for his daughter represents a threat, even though she likes Grace, who likes her too. The novel is most alive in that humanly messy tangle of almost unaccountable selfishness and anger, not least when her hopes of getting back into bed with Stephen – who is plagued by anxieties of his own – are stymied by Grace throwing up after one too many whiskies with Eily in the pub. While it's not period fiction – there are mentions of Kwik Save and the bookseller Samuel French but not John Major or Britpop – there's an elegiac quality to the still-ungentrified dossiness of its north London setting, where any problem can be eased for a time by the discovery of a forgotten four-pack, a cadged ciggie or nipping out for chips. And while the end of the book leaves us hanging, true, the ceaseless friction to its central relationship means it carries far more oomph than McBride's previous novel, 2020's unsatisfyingly wafty Strange Hotel. You sense that in revisiting The Lesser Bohemians she's continuing a project that's far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be. The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The best poetry books of 2025 so far
Alongside Terrance Hayes, Diane Seuss has a strong case to be considered as the most influential American poet of the last 10 years. A former social worker, over six collections she has become renowned for her fearless excavation of her life in her work. In conversation with poet Hanif Abdurraqib last year, she said of her process: 'Being in movement, being in the midst of everyday life, is my main jam… it counters loneliness to be able to hear my thoughts separate from my actions.' But nor does she want to 'interrupt the loneliness. I think for me it's essential to being able to write.' It's an approach that has seen Seuss garlanded with awards. Her last collection, frank: sonnets, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This, and her newest book, Modern Poetry, now arrive in the UK thanks to the independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions, which is making its first forays into poetry publishing. As the title hints, Frank O'Hara is the presiding spirit of frank. The book is also told with frankness; it's a vivid account of the past few decades of Seuss's life, from her upbringing in rural Michigan through to the New York punk scene of the late 1970s, and then back to small-town America, where she witnesses addiction, friends dying of AIDS and the sheer work it takes to stay alive. What her work shares with O'Hara's, here, is a love of life and living, even in moments of poverty, crisis and pain. That, and an ability to pin down images of astonishing beauty: 'How even gravestones buckle and swell / with the tides. And coffins are little wayward ships making their way towards love's other shore.' These are also very much sonnets. They might not look like their traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan brethren, but in Seuss's 14 lines – 'one frame in a long strip / of celluloid' – you can see arguments being repeatedly probed, turns being made. High and low cultural references – one poem references Gaugin's Christ and the Velvet Underground within a few clauses – are blended with childhood memories into thrilling, emotional payoffs. It's an intense, totalising read; unflinching in the difficulty it depicts and still, somehow, uplifting. 'I belong nowhere, have / never belonged anywhere, not where I was raised, not where I was not raised / … / poems are someone else's clothes I slipped / into so I could skip town.' You can see the book becoming a cult text. Modern Poetry gives readers more space to breathe. Inspired by a poetry textbook of the same name which she read as a child, it's a condensed history of Seuss's reading and learning and what this has given her – primarily, the armour to survive and live in a hostile world. Her reading is smartly selective: as she writes in 'My Education', 'I read most of Joseph Conrad, having figured out / that I could find some things repulsive and still / require them for my project. My project / was my life.' At times it's as though you're eavesdropping on a particularly spiky seminar: it's invigorating to see her stripping away the pretension often associated with writing poetry. While the dominant mode in the book is free verse, Seuss is not above deploying her technique in ways that suggest something of an ars poetica. She opens 'Comma' with: To never be touched again. That linehas a sound. Hear it?I don't want to bring a storyto it. Not even an has a sound. Listen. Part of Seuss's significance has been because she writes 'Of the working class. My class. It's itches and psychological riches. / It's notions and values and humble achievements'; there's no sugarcoating of the hardships, or simmering violence that she might have seen. Thanks to her insistence that, 'objectivity itself – that was beautiful', we get to see a very particular type of Romantic poetry, battered around the edges but alive to the fact that 'Maybe there is such a thing / as the beauty of drawing near. / Near, nearer all the way / to the bedside of the dying / world.' With her formidable voice, Seuss is one of the most important poets writing now. But that's a claim she would, no doubt, puncture and yet also agree with: 'I had no God-given authority. / I had to self-generate it, like God. / At some point, God had to take the leap / to become God.' RD Rishi Dastidar's most recent poetry collection is Neptune's Projects. Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets are published by Fitzcarraldo at £12.99 each. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books 'There lives a young girl in me who will not die,' writes Tove Ditlevsen in a line that gives its poem, and this collection, their titles. 'She is no longer me and I am no longer her / but she stares back at me when I look in the mirror / searching for something she hopes to recover.' Many of the poems here, newly translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith, seem to circle a young girl who is both her and not-her, who lives on and doesn't quite. Past and present overlap in unexpected ways. What is she hoping to recover? Ditlevsen died by suicide at the age of 58 in 1976. She was one of the most famous writers in Denmark, but only became well-known to Anglophone readers when the English translation of her celebrated Copenhagen Trilogy (1967-71) was completed and published in 2021. Comprising a trio of memoirs, Childhood, Youth and Dependency, it chronicles Ditlevsen's childhood in a stifling working-class environment; her marriages and love affairs; her intense drive to write; and her eventual descent into harrowing addictions to painkillers and alcohol. Her prose is plain and unadorned; she doesn't shy from observations that feel harsh, bordering on cruel. She purports to know the darkest stuff of life, and to share it like a weather report: 'Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin. You can't get out of it on your own.' Ditlevsen, however, once wrote that she did much of her best work in poetry. There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, the first English translation of those poems, starts with selections from A Girl's Mind, published in 1939 when she was 21, and ends with poems from To a Little Girl, published posthumously in 1978. Throughout, we see the development of a poetic voice, as she moves from traditional rhyme-schemes and forms into a greater level of enjambment and markedly shorter lines. Her images become more abstract. New motifs emerge. Divorce, for instance, appears late, yet it becomes one of her finest poetic subjects. Poems about anxiety and depression recur, as do those about wanting to be free of obligations. 'Loving badly,' as she calls it, is another great subject: wanting someone close then pushing them away. 'I often wish he would leave,' she laments, 'and so become / distinctly near.' This recurrence of theme is no mere repetition: it's an ethos that defines Ditlevsen's oeuvre. She's never done with the complex dance between who she used to be and who she is now. The spectres of her childhood walk through this book: her mother, her father, the streets where they lived, a whole lost world that seems somehow still present. She's interested in writing about what is commonly called 'trauma' – how childhood wounds shape adulthood, and adults' struggles are passed down the generations – yet she manages to make this chain of exchange livelier, darker, and stranger than many discussions of trauma do. In one poem, she describes the way she turned away from her mother, disgusted by her smell; her mother 'gave up once and for all / on the project of loving me'. Her own children then seem to turn away from her, as though she had taken on her mother's smell – and her son, now, is fond of his grandmother. 'Love often / skips a generation –' she writes, matter-of-fact; but that dash hangs like an open door, gesturing at the estrangement and heartbreak that might lie beyond. 'In childhood's long darkened night / burn little, flickering lanterns': so one early poem in this collection begins. That may be what Ditlevsen does best, emerging from childhood's coffin to and bringing these lanterns up close to the strange moments where past and present collide. Her poems read, at their best, like illuminations, transfiguring her life again and again. SH There Lives a Young Girl In Me Who Will Not Die is published by Penguin at £9.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
