Reappraisals (15 page)

When Mary McCarthy seemed vexed that Hannah Arendt continued to maintain friendly relations with Bowden Broadwater, the husband whom McCarthy was abandoning, Arendt chided her: “The fact is that you brought him into my life, that without you he never would have become—not a personal friend which, of course, he is not—but a friend of the house, so to speak. But once you placed him there you cannot simply take him away from where he is now. As long as he does not do something really outrageous which he has not done so far and really turns against you which he has not done either, I am not going to sit in judgment. . . . You say you cannot trust him. Perhaps you are right, perhaps you are wrong, I have no idea. But it strikes me that you can forget so easily that you trusted him enough to be married to him for fifteen years.” The age difference between them was not great (Arendt was born in 1906, McCarthy in 1912), but one is never in any doubt who was the mature woman, who the precocious girl.

The tone of the correspondence is not always serious. Predictably, there is much gossip, some of it funny. Arendt had no time for most French intellectuals, notably those in fashion. In 1964 she wrote to McCarthy, “I have just finished reading
Les Mots
—and was so disgusted that I was almost tempted to review this piece of highly complicated lying. . . . I am going to read les confessions of Simone—for their gossip value, but also because this kind of bad faith becomes rather fascinating.” A few months later she provides a follow-up report: “This [de Beauvoir’s
Force of Circumstance
] is one of the funniest books I read in years. Incredible that no one has taken that apart. Much as I dislike Sartre, it seems he is punished for all his sins by this kind of a cross. Especially since her unwavering true love for him is the only mitigating circumstance in the ‘case against her,’ really quite touching.”

McCarthy, of course, was past mistress at this sort of thing; when in 1966 the Parisian
Nouvel Observateur
ran the headline “Est Elle Nazie?” over its excerpts from
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, she described it as “a sales promotion stunt, coated over with ‘anti-fascist’ piety,” which is about right. A couple of years later the editor, Jean Daniel, sought unsuccessfully to make amends: “Daniel opposed it, I gather. But then he ought to have resigned. To say that here [Paris] is of course ludicrous. No French intellectual would ever resign on a point of principle unless to associate himself with another clique.”

If the pair were prejudiced against French intellectuals, others come off little better. McCarthy gives a wonderfully acerbic report of a London dinner party in 1970, full of “silly zombies,” from which she reports a remark by Sonia Orwell, as recalled by Stephen Spender, to illustrate the depths of British snobbery: “Auschwitz, oh dear,
no
! That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very
minor
death camp.” Arendt’s prejudices come into play at a rather more rarefied level. Of Vladimir Nabokov she writes in 1962: “There is something in [him] which I greatly dislike. As though he wanted to show you all the time how intelligent he is. And as though he thinks of himself in terms of ‘more intelligent than.’ There is something vulgar in his refinement.” In the same letter she replies to McCarthy’s request for her views on
The Tin Drum
: “I know the Grass book but could never finish it. In my opinion, mostly secondhand, derivative,
outré
but with some very good parts in it.”

The most savage comments are, however, reserved for the New York intellectual scene. Philip Rahv’s “Marxist assurance” is compared by McCarthy to conversation with “some fossilized mammoth”; the “PR [
Partisan Review
] boys” in general get short shrift, except “Danny Bell,” whom Arendt grudgingly concedes “is the only one who has got a conscience that bothers him once in a while. He is also a bit more intelligent than the others.” Of the editor of the
New Yorker
, whose office in 1956 had pressed her for more details in a piece she had written, Mary McCarthy comments: “Shawn is really a curious person; he’s a self-educated man and he assumes that everybody, like his own former untaught self, is eager to be crammed with information. A sentence larded with dates and proper names fills him with gluttonous delight—like a
boeuf à la mode
.”
²⁵

McCarthy could be serious; her intermittent comments on Richard Nixon, from the 1959 “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev to a timely reminder from 1974 that the much eulogized late president was also a crook, are well taken, and she was a gifted scene setter, whether traveling in Sicily or describing a European dinner party with the wives of dead writers (“We had a party yesterday. . . . It was full of widows, like
Richard III
”). But in the later correspondence there enters a morbid, even mildly paranoid tone. She doesn’t understand why her books get such a poor reception and feels abandoned by her friends. After one attack on her in 1974 she wrote to Arendt: “I can’t help feeling, though I shouldn’t, that if one of my friends had been in
my
place
I
would [have] raised my voice. This leads to the conclusion that I am peculiar, in some way that I cannot make out;
indefensible
, at least for my friends” (all emphases in original). Even Arendt comes under suspicion—“Something is happening or has happened to our friendship. . . . The least I can conjecture is that I have got on your nerves.” Whether or not this was the case is unclear—Arendt was much too well bred to say anything in reply. But the somewhat brittle texture of McCarthy’s gifts and her fundamentally narcissistic personality may have begun to grate a little. There is a distinctly cooler tone in Arendt’s last letters, many of which were dictated.

Whereas there is something ultimately rather monotonous in McCarthy’s end of the correspondence, caustic and self-regarding, Arendt’s letters have a more measured and cosmopolitan tone. She never tells McCarthy of her own personal dilemmas, for example her frustrations in continuing her long relationship with Heidegger. But a long description from August 1972 of the ambiance at the Rockefeller Center for writers and artists in Bellagio, Italy, not only captures brilliantly the luxuriant, sybaritic, unworldly mood of the retreat, but also nails down some of its comic contradictions, which appear to have changed not at all: “Now imagine this place filled, but by no means crowded, with a bunch of scholars, or rather professors, from all countries, . . . almost all of them rather mediocre (and this is putting it charitably) with their wives, some of them are plain nuts, others play the piano or type busily the non-masterworks of their husbands.”

She writes perceptive and balanced comments on the student events of 1968 (in France and the U.S.), in contrast to McCarthy, who completely misread what was happening and assured Arendt in June of that year that de Gaulle had “made a mistake in his rapid veer to the Right; he will scare the middle voter whom he was
hoping
to scare with his anti-Communist rhetoric.” (In fact de Gaulle and his party scored a huge electoral victory two weeks later by virtue of that very rhetoric.) On the whole it seems fair to conclude that whereas Mary McCarthy’s letters, however entertaining, are rather ephemeral, the contributions by Arendt have a weightier texture and can still be read with profit as a commentary on her times.

Like the
Essays
, moreover, they also help us understand Hannah Arendt herself a little better. While she may indeed have been, in McCarthy’s words, “a solitary passenger on her train of thought,”
²⁶
she was not altogether alone on her journey through the twentieth century. Her elective affinity might have been with the great Germans, past and present, but her true community lay elsewhere, as her friendships and acquaintances suggest. She was born in Königsberg, a city on the geographical periphery of the culture of which it was at the same time a center. This gives her more in common than she may have realized with contemporary writers born in other vulnerable cities at once central and peripheral—Vilna, Trieste, Danzig, Alexandria, Algiers, even Dublin— and accounts for her membership in a very special and transient community,that twentieth-century republic of letters formed against their will by the survivors of the great upheavals of the century.

These lost cosmopolitan communities, in which Germans, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles, French, and others lived in productive disharmony, were torn from their roots in World War I and obliterated in World War II and during its aftermath. This shared experience accounts for Arendt’s understanding of Moritz Goldstein’s “unrequited love” (the very phrase also used by Miłosz in his account in
The Captive Mind
of Polish intellectuals’ longing for a disappearing West), and for her instinctive affinity with Albert Camus.
²⁷
They were all “chance survivors of a deluge,” as she put it in a 1947 dedication to Jaspers, and wherever they ended up, in New York, Paris, or Rome, they were constrained, like Camus’s Sisyphus, to push the boulder of memory and understanding up the thankless hill of public forgetting for the rest of their lives.

In Arendt’s case the responsibility, as she felt it, was made heavier by a conscientious, and perhaps distinctively Jewish, refusal to condemn modernity completely or to pass a curse upon the Enlightenment and all its works. She certainly understood the temptation, but she also saw the danger. The tendency to treat Western liberal democracy as somehow “shallow,” already present in the appeal of “Eastern” solutions before 1914,
²⁸
has revived twice over in our own time. On the first occasion, in the sixties, Arendt’s response was unambiguous: The struggle against the deceptive charms of what we would now call cultural relativism was for her a matter of moral courage, of exercising what she called judgment. In a letter to Jaspers in December 1963 she reflected that “even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.”
²⁹
Hannah Arendt was not afraid to judge, and be counted.

For the recent resurfacing of the critical attitude toward the Enlightenment, notably in certain Central European circles seduced by the post-Heideggerian notion that the soulless, technological, “fabricating” society of our century is an outgrowth of the Godless hubris of the French Enlightenment and its successors, Arendt herself bears some indirect responsibility. It is the very woolliness of her thoughts on these matters that has lent them to just such interpretations, and her reluctance to distance herself definitively from her former lover and mentor did not help. But she would never have made the mistake of supposing that the end of Communism promised some sort of definitive success for its opponents, or that the responsibilities of various strands in Western thought for the woes of our time thereby disqualified the Western tradition as a whole. She made a good many little errors, for which her many critics will never forgive her. But she got the big things right, and for this she deserves to be remembered.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV