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Growing up American

Birds of America is supposed to be Mary McCarthy’s weakest novel, though it was her own favourite. Yet it is a fine book – a brilliant study of a clever, odd teenager growing into a man. And like all good books it seems to get better each time I read it.

The boy is Peter Levi, ‘a tall boy with a long nose and gaunt features’, but with his mother’s grey eyes, vaguely Jewish on his father’s side, even more vaguely Christian on his mother’s. During the first third of the novel he is living with his mother, Rosamund Brown, a musician, in a small North American town called Rocky Port, after the break-up of her second marriage to a man who teaches Physics at Berkeley. Her first husband, Peter’s father, known as the babbo, a refugee from Italy, teaches History at Wellesley. Peter loves Nature; his moral and spiritual guide is Kant, and he carries in his wallet a card on which he has written: ‘The Other is always an End: Thy Maxim.’

Rosamund Brown is – I have always assumed – a self-portrait of Mary McCarthy herself: ironic, fierce, brave, much married, mainly rational, a passionate purist as a cook, hating anything prefaced by ‘convenience’ (stores and food especially). I had assumed, therefore, that Peter Levi himself must be an affectionate portrait of the son, Reuel, whom she had with her second husband, Edmund Wilson. But it turns out that other models were youngsters she knew, one of whom told her, as a joke, that he took his potted geranium for a daily walk to give it some sunshine (he was thinking of Gérard de Nerval who tried to shock the bourgeoisie by taking his pet lobster for a walk on a lead). His joke was made into a characteristic of Peter Levi.

The first part of the novel ends when Peter and his mother are arrested for standing up to a policeman who is trying to make them put back a sign for tourists that the landlady wants on the front of their rented house; the argument escalates, and Rosamund

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Birds of America is supposed to be Mary McCarthy’s weakest novel, though it was her own favourite. Yet it is a fine book – a brilliant study of a clever, odd teenager growing into a man. And like all good books it seems to get better each time I read it.

The boy is Peter Levi, ‘a tall boy with a long nose and gaunt features’, but with his mother’s grey eyes, vaguely Jewish on his father’s side, even more vaguely Christian on his mother’s. During the first third of the novel he is living with his mother, Rosamund Brown, a musician, in a small North American town called Rocky Port, after the break-up of her second marriage to a man who teaches Physics at Berkeley. Her first husband, Peter’s father, known as the babbo, a refugee from Italy, teaches History at Wellesley. Peter loves Nature; his moral and spiritual guide is Kant, and he carries in his wallet a card on which he has written: ‘The Other is always an End: Thy Maxim.’ Rosamund Brown is – I have always assumed – a self-portrait of Mary McCarthy herself: ironic, fierce, brave, much married, mainly rational, a passionate purist as a cook, hating anything prefaced by ‘convenience’ (stores and food especially). I had assumed, therefore, that Peter Levi himself must be an affectionate portrait of the son, Reuel, whom she had with her second husband, Edmund Wilson. But it turns out that other models were youngsters she knew, one of whom told her, as a joke, that he took his potted geranium for a daily walk to give it some sunshine (he was thinking of Gérard de Nerval who tried to shock the bourgeoisie by taking his pet lobster for a walk on a lead). His joke was made into a characteristic of Peter Levi. The first part of the novel ends when Peter and his mother are arrested for standing up to a policeman who is trying to make them put back a sign for tourists that the landlady wants on the front of their rented house; the argument escalates, and Rosamund Brown pours a jug of water over the policeman. An overnight stay in jail turns out to be a pleasant adventure, and Peter and his mother sit in their nightclothes in company with their elderly jailer on the veranda of the jail-house, watching a firework display. ‘Peter realized that he was happy . . . He and his mother were jailbirds, like Thoreau. True, they were getting preferential treatment, but probably Thoreau got preferential treatment too . . . He felt safe, with his mother, in this clapboard jail; it had a cosy, small-town Yankee atmosphere. Quite near at hand, he heard an owl hoot . . .’ The second, longer part of the novel is set in Paris, with an excursion to Rome. Peter is now without his mother, at least until the very end of the novel, as he has gone to France for his junior year in college. ‘Until he landed in Le Havre, he considered himself fluent in French’ but he quickly learns just how foreign he is. In the process, his self-scrutiny is intensified. He tells his mother in a letter that he is worrying less about the US Civil Rights movement than he has done: ‘What is biting me here in Paris is something different: being who I am at this juncture in history. I sense myself as irrelevant to practically everything: this room, this street, this city, this world, this universe . . .’ Despite his armoury of Kantian moral imperatives, Peter Levi learns both good and bad from those he meets: Silvanus Platt, nicknamed ‘Silly’, who rents from his brother a Phi Beta Kappa key for ostentatious display; Mr Small, his academic adviser, who is trying to get funding for sociological research into the American tourist industry in Europe; Madame Peul, the concierge, determined to keep the clochards, or street-sleepers, out of her apartment block; the urinous female clochard whom Peter finds sleeping drunkenly on the stairs leading to his apartment and whom he allows to sleep in his bed, for which she repays him by peeing on the floor and stealing the brass door-knob. Even before the episode with the street-sleeper, Peter has discovered that ‘he preferred most art to most people’. Because I spent most of my professional life looking after boys – and some girls – of this age-group, I feel peculiarly protective about Peter’s reality. For instance, when his mother gives him a pair of expensive field-glasses for Christmas (note the terminology: fieldglasses, not binoculars), Peter thinks ‘he would rather have bought them himself, second-hand’. And that’s what he would think, too, because that is how other Peter Levis think (one of them happens to be my eldest son). Or consider this little story:
In his school, which was trying to be liberal, he was told that he could be excused from the headmaster’s course in Christian religion – a low blow to Peter because he was quite interested in Christian religion. When he said No, thanks, he would like to take the course, his attitude seemed natural to him but not, he discovered, to the headmaster or to the other kids, who thought he must be nuts to go to a class he could get out of . . . They envied a certain Weinstein, who was allowed Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah off, and a Catholic kid named Ryan, who even got excused from Chapel. Peter would have been glad to belong to some religion that got you out of athletics, but he enjoyed Chapel – it was the only peaceful moment in the school day.
Unfashionable this may seem; but this is what boys like Peter Levi do. Rereading the novel, I was surprised to notice how much it is concerned with ‘being American’. Being an American, Peter Levi thinks, is ‘like being Jewish, only worse: you recognized “your people” everywhere in their Great Diaspora and you were mortified by them and mortified by being mortified; you were drawn to them, sorry for them, amused by them, nauseated by them. Not only that. They spotted you as one of them, infallibly, just as Jews could always spot other Jews . . .’ He does meet some horrible Americans abroad, like the girl who complains about French boys (who want her to pay her share if they ask her out), about the bad manners of postal employees (who make her lick her own stamps), about her landlady, whose only interest in her is collecting the rent (‘She doesn’t think of me as a person’). Or there is the hostess who provides a meal entirely from the PX: ‘a big canned American ham . . . baked with Dole’s pineapple and brown sugar and with it were canned potato balls and frozen peas and lima beans, followed by American vanilla ice cream and Hershey’s chocolate sauce and FFV cookies’. ‘They thought I might be homesick,’ Peter explains to his mother. But one of the things Peter learns is just how American he is, even when the newspapers announce that US planes have bombed Hanoi. At the end of a long and increasingly fractious dinner-party argument about US foreign policy, Peter bursts out, ‘You don’t give a damn about your country, you stupid patriot. You don’t care what it does. Or about its fair name. I love America or what I used to think was America . . . Listening to you, I don’t recognize it any more.’ And the ‘birds’ of the title? Well, birds of passage, plainly enough, but real birds too, like the Great Horned Owl the death of which Peter Levi mourns on the first page of the novel, the other owl which hoots somewhere close by, the thrushes and starlings which the Italians eat with such relish, and the black swan which attacks him near the end of the novel, causing wounds which go septic. The American Hospital gives him penicillin, which sends him into anaphylactic shock, so seriously that his mother is summoned from America. But he has another visitor too: ‘a small man, scarcely five feet high, in an unbuttoned twill jacket with a white stock . . . His hair was curled in sausages and powdered – or was it a periwig? – and fastened behind with a gray bow. He was in the prime of life; around his bright vivacious eyes were crow’s-feet, which showed intensive thought. Peter knew him at once, and he evidently had known Peter for a long time.’ Peter gets a little muddled, and remembers his visitor had written an ode to the West Wind. ‘Theory of Winds,’ the visitor corrects him. ‘Excuse me, sir, you have something to tell me, don’t you,’ Peter says, but when the visitor says ‘in a low thin voice’ what Peter hears as ‘God is dead’, Peter protests: ‘I know that . . . And you didn’t say that anyway. Nietzsche did.’ Will it spoil the novel if I tell you who the visitor is and what he says? If you think it will, please skip the sentences that follow. For the visitor is Kant, and he replies to Peter, ‘Yes, Nietzsche said that. And even when Nietzsche said it, the news was not new, and maybe not so tragic after all. Mankind can live without God.’ ‘I agree,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve always lived without Him.’ ‘No, what I said to you is something important. You did not hear me correctly. Listen now carefully and remember.’ Again he looked Peter steadily and searchingly in the eyes. ‘Perhaps you have already guessed it. Nature is dead, mein kind.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © C. J. Driver 2008


About the contributor

C. J. Driver’s latest book is So Far: Selected Poems, 1960–2004. He has recently become honorary senior lecturer in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

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