Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-75.

Much of the response to Between Friends has been of the odd-couple variety. What in their worlds, so foreign to each other, drew together the German-Jewish emigre, who had been a student of Martin Heidigger and Karl Jaspers and who would write The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind, and the younger, American-Catholic (albeit part-Jewish) woman, whose formal education ranged from parochial school to Vassar College and who wrote drama reviews, political journalism, and fiction about the manners (or lack of same), mores, and amours of a certain Eastern-American internecine literary and social set?

The unsurprising answer is that these very differences seemed to be the tinder that sparked what editor Carol Brightman calls their "passionate friendship." For McCarthy, Arendt was the personification of Intellectual Europe. For Arendt, McCarthy was her American connection, "a golden American friend," in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "perhaps the best the country could produce with a bit of our Western states in her, a bit of the Roman Catholic, a Latin student, and a sort of New World salonniere." But the cliche of the attractive opposite is complicated by the fact that, despite the dissimilarities of their nurture, their natures, as reflected in their letters, seem strikingly similar. In a sense, both were orphans--McCarthy literally, and Arendt circumstantially, as a Jew in Germany, as a stateless refugee from Germany, and as a European in America. In a letter to her mentor, Karl Jaspers, Arendt wrote, "For me, Germany means my mother tongue, philosophy, and literature" but "I am obliged to keep my distance." In a later letter to him, she dismally expanded that obligation to being distanced not only from Germany, but from society in general: "A decent existence is possible today only on the fringes of society." McCarthy, in a letter to Arendt, wrote that, in cases of civil disobedience, she identified with the law-breakers "and not with...society as a whole."

As Brightman notes, both were romantics (or, more accurately, self-romanticizers) who wrapped up their declarations of alienation in heroic codas. Arendt dreaded society's purifying fringes as moral terrain where one "runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death," and McCarthy insisted that she must suffer for her beliefs "by going to jail or into exile" so that her suffering would become "a pain not just to me but to society as a whole." She did not, in fact, much suffer for her beliefs, save those she placed in assorted men, and whatever pain she may have caused a very small segment of society, she inflicted not from behind bars, but from behind a typewriter. Credit for a kind of gutsy bravado, if not good political sense, is due her, though, for her March 1968 trip to Hanoi, where she wrote for the New York Review of Books.

This exploit (unlike Jane Fonda's) failed to rouse America's silent majority, but it did provoke a debate in the New York Review between McCarthy and Diana Trilling, who agreed that the U.S. should get out of Vietnam but warned that there could be no euphoria about what life would then be like for the South Vietnamese--a worry borne out by the ensuing tide of boat people, many of whom still languish in refugee camps. Four years later, McCarthy's sacrificial sense was still intact. When, in December 1972, Richard Nixon celebrated the season of peace and good will with the bombing of North Vietnam, McCarthy, Brightman tells us, "briefly contemplated returning to Hanoi with a delegation of notables (Stephen Spender, Ramsey Clark, among others), who would, in effect, become hostages to U.S. bombs." The Nor h Vietnamese, however, were less than thrilled by the offer, which was probably just as well, since that was a trio that Nixon would have been unlikely to regard as inexpendable.

Arendt did not share McCarthy's sense of vocation about jamming her finger in the dike to turn back the deadly surge of our Vietnam policy. Even though her political ideal was the participatory democracy of the Greek polis, she was determinedly not active in the antiwar campaign. In a May 1968 letter, her advice to McCarthy was, "I don,t think you should do anything; I don,t do anything either, except when I signed one of the many protests on campus."

But, while Arendt was conservative in political action, she was often reckless with prose. In several of her letters, McCarthy, to no avail, suggested clarifications. Had Arendt bowed to McCarthy's editorial outrage, she might have avoided the furious public response to her 1963 report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a reaction guaranteed not by only the tone of the book, but by Arendt's imprecise use of the phrase "banality of evil" and the word "thoughtlessness" ("the inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else") to define the root of Eichmann's particular evil-doing, thus reducing it to a mere lack of empathy. (Although Arendt wrote, in a postscript to the revised edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem, that the concept of a banal evil didn't occur to her until Eichmann's 1961 trial, Karl Jaspers had used it seventeen years earlier in a letter to her.)

McCarthy acknowledged that Arendt was stubborn, easily hurt, and determined, however successfully, to hide her vulnerability. But the fragility of her own feelings did not sharpen her sensitivity to others. When McCarthy wrote to Arendt of her concern that she had gotten on her friend's nerves, Arendt asked in reply, "And what have I done to provoke that [feeling]?...What I do know is that I am...rather obtuse in all purely psychological matters." No wonder, then, that she could not, or would not, foresee the outrage she would provoke by the way she chose to present her case in Eichmann in Jerusalem and that she subsequently refused to grant the critical response any validity, insisting instead that it was all the result of an international conspiracy hatched in Israel. But, if Arendt remained stubbornly trapped in the life of her mind, McCarthy, as a writer, was trapped by the facts of her life. In a February 1975 letter to Arendt, McCarthy, then sixty-three years old, worried that the characters in her different novels came out as variations of each other, that "one's `creative' side cannot learn anything." She concluded that those "confining boundaries...are set by my life experience, which lies in vaguely upper-middle class territory" and that it "all leads to the awful recognition that one is one's life; God is not mocked."

Their lives, of course, are outlined in their letters, in their talk of health, husbands (four of them McCarthy's), lovers (McCarthy's; Arendt is reticent), and bad reviews, which are unfailingly blamed on treacherous editors who assigned their books to unfriendly critics. (They, however, saw no problem in McCarthy reviewing The Human Condition for the New Yorker.) And there is, of course, the requisite gossip and backbiting that is the glue that holds together social, political, or literary groups of any longevity. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Brightman writes, sought in friendship "a refuge from those other parties whose failures beset their generation. These included communism and anticommunism...the parties of progress and social control embedded in the behavioral sciences, and the parties of derision and doubt endemic to their own cramped corner of the Left." Of course, that "cramped corner of the Left" produced some of the most influential art and literary criticism and cultural and political commentary of midcentury America, to which Arendt and McCarthy, in their own little corner of the corner, contributed--Arendt importantly, and McCarthy spiritedly, if not enduringly.

Stephanie Harrington has written for the Nation, the Village Voice, and other publications.