Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 Carol Brightman, editor Harcourt, Brace 576 pp. $34.95. Review by Rita Goldberg Featured in BBR April 1995 This collection of letters reads like an enthralling novel. The correspondents, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, were two of the most important American intellectuals of their generation. They were politically engaged, socially active, powerful, gossipy women who became increasingly close during the decades after WWII. A parade of writers and editors passes through their letters: W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, the cliques from the Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, the right-wing rebels of Commentary. The two friends discuss the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, Kennedy liberalism, the student riots of the '60s. When one friend finds herself in hot water, the other flies to her aid. Arendt and McCarthy had no qualms about expressing themselves honestly, even obnoxiously. They were just old enough to rely on letters in a way almost obsolete in the age of the telephone, so plenty of opinions make their way onto these pages. McCarthy was the more frequent correspondent. Arendt's letters don't give much away, and contain homey Germanisms characteristic of the postwar refugee community of Manhattan's Upper West Side-"ends and odds," "take or give a few days," "Thanks God." McCarthy was more confessional and more fun, treating her friend to a Clarissa-like, blow-by-blow account of the love affair that became her fourth and last marriage. Both writers came under enormous pressure in 1963, when each produced the best-known, most controversial work of her career. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in installments in The New Yorker and came out as a book in May. It was immediately attacked for its unflattering portrait of Jewish leaders' cooperation with the Nazi deportations during WWII, though this was merely part of a "report," as Arendt herself put it, on Eichmann's methods of rounding up Jews for extermination. Arendt's book was also criticized for portraying Eichmann as "banal." She saw him as a scrupulous bureaucrat, someone with a lot of ambition and a limited imagination, rather than as a monster, and this, too, infuriated many Jews. Arendt, a German-Jewish refugee herself, was no stranger to controversy. Her friends at the Partisan Review nicknamed her "Hannah Arrogance." "Who does she think she is, Aristotle?" complained the editor, William Phillips. It was true that she was arrogant, or at least self-assured: she had a first-rate mind, a lively career as a writer and teacher, and a strong sense of injustice rooted in her own experience of persecution. She had been the student and lover of Martin Heidegger, and throughout her life kept up close friendships with Karl Jaspers and other stars of pre-war German academic life. She was a philosopher whose favorite activity, as she wrote to McCarthy, was "this thinking business," and she was exceptionally daring in her range. She could write volumes on Kant, or she could turn to political philosophy of the kind illustrated in the Eichmann book. Her Origins of Totalitarianism is considered by many the most original analysis of the subject ever produced. McCarthy's novel, The Group, appeared in August, 1963, to public clamor. Its descriptions of defloration, diaphragm-fitting and breast-feeding seemed scandalous at the time; only Doris Lessing had ventured into such terrain, though these pioneers would be followed, as feminism took hold in the late '60s and early '70s, by far wilder experimenters. Graphic sex was all right for a Philip Roth or a Norman Mailer, but (as Virginia Woolf had observed in A Room of One's Own decades before) women writers had not often dared to cross into the unmapped territory of sexuality. McCarthy was all the more hurt, therefore, when her old friend Elizabeth Hardwick parodied The Group in the fledgling New York Review of Books. Norman Mailer weighed in with a notoriously hostile review, accusing McCarthy of writing like someone in a women's magazine. It's hard to imagine one writer attacking another in those terms today: In the post-Gingrich era, these attacks serve as reminders of the powerful impact feminism has had on mores in general. McCarthy was criticized for fluffy girlishness as well as for sexual explicitness; the furor propelled her onto the best-seller list but made her unhappy. There was, however, much to criticize in her eight works of fiction. It's a wonder, given her prodigious talents, that none of McCarthy's literary lovers or husbands ever took her aside and told her about pruning adverbs or Decapitalizing Nouns and States of Feeling-little things which would have made a significant difference in the quality of the prose in her fiction. The men in her life obviously shared quite a few features with the male monsters who populated her novels. On textual grounds alone, it might be surmised that Edmund Wilson, her second husband, never read anything she wrote. In her letters and essays, on the other hand, McCarthy appeared to full advantage. She dropped the affectations and spoke in her own remarkably controlled and witty voice. In fiction, her narcissism became a handicap. Invention wasn't her strong suit; more than for most writers, her novels were all versions of an autobiography. Her heroines thought more than talked, and were susceptible to every McCarthy obsession, from cooking to politics. Even Peter Levi, the student hero of Birds of America (1971), comes across as a young McCarthy in jeans and backpack. McCarthy must have imagined that she was a novelist of manners, in the tradition of Austen and James, but she didn't have her predecessors' feeling for conversation or plot, or for the inner life of strangers. Her strengths lay in a ferocious intelligence and in her powers of observation. Her travel writing, with its acute awareness of landscape and light and its eye for domestic and aesthetic detail, still ranks with the best of its kind. Her journalism, much of which appeared amid strident argument in the early New York Review of Books, vibrates with happy insight and controlled rage. In these forms, and certainly in her letters to Arendt, McCarthy was an exciting writer. She had total command of a supple style which seized up, like rubber on a cold day, when she turned to fiction. She was well-suited to the polemical battlefield; possibly her narcissism made her gallant. At any rate, she was courageous to the point of recklessness in her personal life and in the expression of her opinions, and, according to these letters, seemed surprised at the fury she frequently aroused in others. She was hurt by Helen Vendler's hostile review of Birds of America in the New York Review of Books of May 16, 1971, which bore the headline: "Mary McCarthy again her own heroine-frozen foods a new villain." But this bruised victim was the same woman who could attack Lillian Hellman's integrity on a television talk show by claiming that every word of Hellman's recently published memoir was a lie, including the "ands" and the "the's." At any rate, the letters make delightful reading. Carol Brightman, the editor, is a graceful writer herself and has supplied a compelling introduction. Her annotations to the letters often contain useful or amusing information, some of which appears in this review. She might have provided more information about these figures and their historical setting; the supporting materials don't tell enough about them or about the nature of the controversies in which they were involved. Arendt and McCarthy were products of a particular moment in American intellectual history, when New York dominated the intellectual life of the nation and to be Jewish, or part-Jewish, was almost a requirement (see John Updike's Bech, A Book, for a wistful parody). That moment is already fading from our national consciousness and needs to be reconstructed for modern readers. Cuts in the letters were made mostly, Brightman writes, to protect people still alive. These elisions probably contribute to a false impression of the women as rather detached from their nearest and dearest. McCarthy, especially, comes across as a distant mother, because so little appears about her relationship with her son by Edmund Wilson. Much of what's left out might have been contained, of course, in telephone calls or in conversations. The absence of comment on the civil rights movement, and on the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, is disturbing, however. But otherwise this collection is a rewarding portrait of two remarkable women who lived and wrote in a remarkable time. Rita Goldberg is a Contributing Editor at the Boston Book Review. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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