"Sovereign Pronouncements with Authoritative Tone"

The Grave of Vassar's Founder, Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, Lucey Bowen, 2009

     

     So Mary McCarthy described the characteristic speech of both the founder of Vassar College and the speech of Vassar girls in general. Mary McCarthy is another writer with which I triangulate my father's adventures between his college years and my birth. Mary McCarthy entered Vassar in 1929, just as my father should have been graduating from Yale. McCarthy graduated in 1933, a decade before my mother. In that period my father spent a lot of time on the Vassar campus, with a variety of women who had the self assurance that McCarthy describes, the last being my mother. There was Meg Hockaday, who went on to establish a very successful New York advertising agency. Theodora Finney was a great beauty who married a doctor instead of my father, the struggling journalist. Journalist Eunice Clark was actually a room-mate of McCarthy's, and was part of the literary scene in New York. After a few years of marriage, my mother's authoritative tone and sovereign pronouncements came to be labeled argumentative.
     McCarthy published the complete text of her novel The Group in 1963. It traced the lives of eight young women, who like McCarthy, roomed in the South Tower of Vassar's Main Building and graduated in the class of 1933. It was a smashing financial success for McCarthy, but it made life miserable for those of us about to become freshman at Vassar:  full as the novel was, of seduction, birth control devices and secret lesbians. I've had a bad taste in my mouth about Mary McCarthy ever since. Probably because, unlike my mother and her mother before her, I missed out on the "Sovereign Pronouncements with Authoritative Tone" seminars.  McCarthy's other specialty was using marriage as a kind of intellectual ladder, on which men older and smarter than her were the rungs. She made a lot of people miserable, most of all herself. I'm neither quick witted nor cruel enough to enjoy the prose combat and sudden death bon mots that were her specialty. What I did learn at Vassar were two things: to love reading in general, and original sources specifically. Whether those sources are reliable has taken me decades longer to discern.

Main Gate and Main Building, Vassar College, Lucey Bowen, 2009