The Company they Kept
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.
by Carol Brightman.
Harcourt, Brace. 392 pp. $34.95.
The two women first met in 1944, when Mary McCarthy was married to the famous literary critic Edmund Wilson, her second and soon-to-be-ex-husband, and Hannah Arendt was, as they say, only three years off the boat from Nazi Europe. In her final book of memoirs (posthumously published in 1992), McCarthy tells us that from the very first moment of her marriage to Wilson, he was embarked on a campaign to convert her from a critic to a writer of fiction. (She published her first collection of stories, The Company She Keeps, in 1942.) For her part, Hannah Arendt was just beginning to make her way as a refugee scholar and political philosopher into New York intellectual life.
According to Carol Brightman, the editor of this new collection of their correspondence and the author of a more or less authorized biography of McCarthy, the two women admired one another immediately, though there is no record of any letters between them for another five years. But from then on, they corresponded for nearly a quarter of a century, until Hannah Arendt’s death in December 1975.
It must be said that in the aftermath of only two decades, the letters make rather curious reading. To begin with, the friendship of these two women, clearly a deep and loving one, was itself more than a little mysterious. In the course of the years covered in this volume, both were to become world-famous—but that, while to be sure not a negligible ground on which to build social relations, is not an adequate one, either. Mary McCarthy, half bohemian literary lady and half would-be arbiter of high Wasp taste, seems an odd companion of the soul to Hannah Arendt, who was herself half and half of something very different—half relentless and imposing intellectual and half gnaedige Frau.
McCarthy, for example, was positively addicted to malice. It was, you might say, her basic mode of apprehension; virtually no one who swam into her ken was ever permanently exempted from her lust for seeking out the frailties of others. This was, indeed, part and parcel of her gift, and no matter how often she might try to overcome the addiction and become an earnest person, she could never stay on the wagon for long. Whatever writing she did without at least some of the propulsive energy of this true appetite—her two nonfiction books on Venice and Florence, say—seems forced and somewhat wan.
Arendt, on the other hand—with a few rather clumsy exceptions, dragged into her letters, one cannot help feeling, in tribute to McCarthy—was rather too lofty to amuse herself with merely clever unkindnesses. In these letters, if and when she takes out against someone or something—and she often does: the Jewish “establishment” preeminently, as well as a number of her associates in the intellectual community—it is with the lofty air of someone who has found herself wandering in a wilderness full of pygmies.
Then again, McCarthy’s mind was a kind of messy jumble of the trivial and the serious: gossip and clothes and literature and decor and politics and food and art all on a single plane. And she could go at all or any of it with equal fervor. This sometimes made her the best and most amusing of companions and sometimes left her seeming little more than a lively but rather reckless girl. Arendt’s mind, by contrast, was given to “thinking through” things—including (as she at one point here discusses a project for a new book) thinking about the mind’s own thinking. This often made her seem considerably more Germanic and forbidding than she in fact was. In any case, though both were brilliant and formidable women, each in her own way, together they were, and remained, an odd couple indeed.
Furthermore, considering the number of years it was carried on, the correspondence seems surprisingly thin—certainly by the standards of letter writers of an earlier day. And a fair number of these letters are little more than notes: won’t you come to visit?; I’ll be arriving in your neighborhood on thus-and-such a date, when can we meet?; thank you for the flowers (they seem to have sent each other numberless bouquets); and so on. Nor do their letters bristle with wit or, except now and then, purvey the kind of literary or political news or give us the kind of vivid sense of the era in which they were written that so often makes posthumous correspondence at the very least great fun to read. It is possible that, spending as much time together as they managed to do in spite of many years lived on separate continents, they saved the juiciest bits for conversation.
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Still, in the end these letters do evoke something of a lost and irrecoverable generation.
The first one, dated March 10, 1949, is a brief admiring note Arendt sent McCarthy about the latter’s new novel, The Oasis, calling it “a pure delight” and “a veritable little masterpiece.” Now, notes of this kind to authors have been known by themselves to cement friendships for life. And for McCarthy, there was the additional fact that a number of the people who had been close to her, far from regarding The Oasis as a “little masterpiece,” had responded to the book by determining to excommunicate her.
For The Oasis happens to be a completely undisguised and thoroughly mean-spirited roman à clef about a group of McCarthy’s friends, among them the co-editor of Partisan Review, Philip Rahv, the man she had betrayed and whose heart she had broken when she married Edmund Wilson; and its publication had set off a noisy (though in the end short-lived) vendetta against her. One can imagine, then, in the midst of all this, her response to receiving Arendt’s praise and support.
The next letter is dated two years later, in 1951, and this time is a letter from McCarthy to Arendt about the latter’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. It can hardly be said that McCarthy’s letter was a case of reciprocal kindness, since Origins, far from requiring support from a friend, had immediately established Hannah Arendt as a major international figure. The letter is, rather, a long and earnest analysis of Arendt’s achievement, and an invitation to discuss certain points in the book about which McCarthy has a question or two. (There is no documentation of Arendt’s response, if any.)
This founding exchange, as it might be called, goes some way toward defining the relation of power between the two women. Through the years, McCarthy frequently engages Arendt in some difficulty she is having. For one thing, she is much bothered by ill health: nothing major, at least nothing lasting, but she suffers one bout of illness after another along with a whole variety of medical problems, including a miscarriage when well into her forties.
Then there are the betrayals at the hands of her critics: McCarthy suffers a number of these, particularly with the publication of each of her novels. Especially hurtful is her experience with The Group (1963). For while this novel becomes a best-seller, providing her with a great deal of money and really for the first time establishing her as a literary figure far beyond her coterie in literary-intellectual New York, once again that world is not kind. Along with an unflattering review of the book by Norman Mailer, the New York Review of Books, a journal that should by rights have been a source of loyal support, publishes a burlesque of McCarthy’s style by, of all people, her good friend Elizabeth Hardwick. (Hardwick’s send-up of The Group is in fact a little classic of the genre, done with perfect pitch and very funny—which perhaps goes to show that, in her circle, McCarthy was not without competition in the malice department.)
Beyond all this, McCarthy has a great deal of trouble with men. By the time the correspondence commences in earnest, she is divorced from Edmund Wilson and married to Bowden Broadwater. Later, in 1960, she will throw Broadwater over for James West, an American diplomat whom she meets while lecturing in Poland and a man who, as it happens, already has a wife and two small children. In between, there is at least one aborted grand amour in London, in which she behaves like an infatuated ingenue and is in return thoroughly humiliated. And finally, both West’s divorce and hers turn out to be far less easy to accomplish than she thinks they should be. She is much worried about the West children and their relation to their father. She is worried, too, about her own son, Reuel Wilson.
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All this McCarthy confides over the years to the ever-wise, ever-sympathetic, ever-loving Arendt, who listens, soothes, offers wise counsel, praises, pets, and sometimes gently offers instruction on, say, the meaning of a passage in Kant that McCarthy wishes to use in her novel, Birds of America. But—and this is key—Arendt confides virtually nothing of her own private problems in return. We learn from her letters about her schedules, her itineraries, her appointments to teach in this or that university, a few but not all of her many thoughts on this or that subject, and her concern for the health of her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, who otherwise remains here an entirely unexposed part of her life.
Just once are the established roles reversed: when, in 1963, Arendt’s book about the Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rouses a storm of protest, particularly among Jews, and is greeted by a large number of extremely hostile reviews. McCarthy—still smarting at the treatment accorded The Group by the New York Review of Books—sets out to organize a defense of Arendt, and especially an attack on her attackers; ultimately, she writes one such defense herself, which appears in Partisan Review.
For Arendt, serious public hostility of this kind was clearly a new and unexpected experience. (In fact, she would never get over it.) In these letters she concludes that the reviews are part of a political campaign against her, “led and guided in all particulars by interest groups and government agencies.” To this last form of reasoning, McCarthy makes no specific response, though she shows herself more than willing to join in Arendt’s judgment of the Jews and of the state of Israel.
For the rest, however, and though the two are only six years apart in age, McCarthy somehow continues to seem like a needy girl and Arendt like the elder she depends on—a teacher, perhaps, who is responsible for passing her on to a higher grade, or a loving aunt in whose care she has been left.
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And what, in all this, of politics? After her marriage to James West, McCarthy settled in Paris, where West had been seconded to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develpment (OECD). Arendt, except for semesters as a guest professor at Princeton, Cornell, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, remained in New York, where she would at some point be given a permanent appointment at the New School for Social Research. So their correspondence in the late 60’s was carried on in two hotbeds of political activity and against the backdrop of civil disorder, student rebellion, and the war in Vietnam, whose shadow would fall across American life for years to come. Yet considering the turmoil with which the two were surrounded, the letters seem oddly detached in tone.
To be sure, they share a fair amount of gossip about who is taking what position on the students and on the war. McCarthy is at her old wicked best, for instance, in describing an encounter with the English poet Stephen Spender on a Paris street during the 1968 student revolt. Spender, she reports, has a house in Provence on which he has spent considerable money and care, and has been thinking about how to respond should the students confront him and demand to know where he stands; he has come to the conclusion that he will simply have to give them the house.
Both women, without having to spell it out, leave no doubt where they themselves stand. Along with their fellow intellectuals they show themselves ever more contemptuous, and ultimately afraid, of Lyndon Johnson and after him of Richard Nixon. And, in a taken-for-granted way, they are opposed to the war in Vietnam. Arendt basically thinks it a mistake stemming from American provincialism and ignorance—an increasingly devastating mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. McCarthy’s analysis evanesces into thin air.
But there is strangely little force in their exchanges on this subject. On McCarthy’s part, some of this may have to do with the fact that she was the wife of an American diplomat and felt somewhat inhibited for his sake. On the other hand, she did go to Vietnam, and on her return she did permit herself to publish, as part of a series of pieces for the New York Review of Books, a flirtatious paean to the North Vietnamese Communist regime that might have made even the most piously anti-American member of the antiwar Left squirm. Making no mention of this hymn to the murderous dictators of Hanoi, Arendt writes McCarthy a fulsome letter about one of the installments in the series: “This still and beautiful pastoral of yours . . . one of the very finest, most marvelous things you have ever done.”
The war, then, was something to lecture about, or an occasion for signing petitions, but clearly nothing to argue over with one’s nearest and dearest. In their most natural and communicative letters, the war and its attendant turmoil float above what seems most real to them: for example, the career of their mutual acquaintance, the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, or the well-being of their beloved friend and publisher William Jovanovich, or the worsening madness of another mutual friend, the poet Robert Lowell.
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It is certainly true that gossip is more engaging to write, and to read about, than politics. But in this instance there had to be other elements at work. In McCarthy’s case, serious politics was not her subject; it slowed her mind and damped her gifts. Hannah Arendt’s case is more complicated, and one must look elsewhere to account for the lack, in these letters, of genuine passion.
Among the hallmarks of the response of American and European intellectuals to the upheavals of the 60’s—leaving aside the generally embarrassing content of that response—were an ever-diminishing role accorded to real, earned experience and an ever-increasing role played by mere conviction. For some intellectuals, the adoption of hard convictions was a tonic; it freed and energized them. But in Arendt, a thinker whose highest gift was her capacity to put her finger on that which is actually, materially experienced, it seems to have brought out the heaviest-handed and least genuinely intelligent of the habits of mind connected with her sense of German philosophical superiority.
In any case, when the chips were down, these two women, each universally accorded high honors for her qualities of mind, confronted the chaos and mindlessness and, above all, the anti-intellectualism of that period we call the 60’s, and each in her own way surrendered. Perhaps of the author of The Group, the steadfastness required to get through the 60’s as a serious person was too much to ask. But the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was someone who might have been expected to join the resistance. That she did not says something one would perhaps rather not know about her. But one cannot help wondering whether it may have had something to do with the company she kept, and the friends she so lovingly looked after.
