Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Articles like that brought Arendt to the attention of wider leftist publishing circles in New York. The one most key to all her later activities was the small, prematurely dusty collection of ex-Communists and literary critics who circled around a journal known as the Partisan Review.

  For most people the name of that magazine is obscure, its influence unknown. But to a small and influential set of Americans, most of them living or born in the middle of the twentieth century, the Partisan Review came to be emblematic of everything desirable and glamorous about intellectual life in New York. It was a relaunch of an older magazine, one that had been associated with the Communist John Reed clubs. The men at the helm of the second edition—Philip Rahv and William Phillips—had been rebel editors of the first.

  The Communist Party of America, in those years, was splitting into factions. One faction believed that allegiance to the Soviet Union must be maintained at all costs for the Communist experiment to succeed. The other took a more skeptical view, particularly of Stalin and his cult of personality. Rahv and Phillips fell into the latter camp. It was not that they had abandoned their leftist principles; it was only that they were unwilling to follow dogmatic party lines. They were—you could say—conscious pariahs of the Communist movement. Since Arendt’s concerns already lay with an analysis of Fascism and its roots, she fit right in.

  But the Partisan Review, as it developed, became better known as a journal of arts and letters than as a journal of politics. Arendt’s first contribution, published in the fall of 1944, was an essay on Kafka. Arendt was not the only woman on the masthead—she was joined by the short story writer Jean Stafford, and the poet Elizabeth Bishop—but she was the only one who was writing dense intellectual pieces.

  Her early pieces had all the flaws attendant to writing in a second language—she had had to abandon her “Stradivarius,” Blücher wrote to her once, for a “beer fiddle.” This was made all the clearer by the work she did for the Nation, one of the leading magazines of the American left at the time. The editor there was Randall Jarrell, the friend who would help Arendt make her work easier for Americans to read. Evidence of his influence was almost immediate: In 1946, for both the Nation and the Partisan Review, she would write essays on existentialism. But only the one edited by Jarrell had the appealing lead: “A lecture on philosophy provokes a riot, with hundreds crowding in and thousands turned away.” He’d become one of the friends she turned to most frequently to do what she called “Englishing” her work.

  As for existentialism, Arendt had known Jean-Paul Sartre a little in Paris. She pronounced herself impressed by Sartre’s La Nausée and Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. But she had the same concerns about them as she now had about all intellectuals, and their tendency, “symbolically speaking, [to] stick to their hotel rooms and their cafés.” She worried too about their paralyzing retreat into absurdity. If they didn’t get out in the world and act, she worried:

  The nihilistic elements, which are obvious in spite of all protests to the contrary, are not the consequences of new insights but of some very old ideas.

  Arendt had by then begun work on her own omnibus of “new insights,” the book that would become The Origins of Totalitarianism. She was publishing her analyses of anti-Semitism and the plight of stateless people in the Partisan Review and a small constellation of other American leftist journals throughout the 1940s. As early as 1945, she’d persuaded an editor at Houghton Mifflin that the entire analysis deserved to be turned into a book. But it would take her another five years to finish.

  The tripartite, unwieldy text she produced is difficult to describe succinctly. It has, as her biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl observed, no gentle introduction that might situate the reader. In the preface to the first edition Arendt began with a broadside against simplistic interpretations of history: “The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.” She also resisted an easy, causal relationship between good and evil, though of course she believed that totalitarianism was by any measure evil:

  And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.

  The expansive, meandering quality of the book was the result of its long gestation. The means of its production were, alongside experience and research, many rambling late-night conversations with Heinrich Blücher. Throughout much of its writing he had been depressed and unemployed; his English was not good enough for clerical work and he had no PhD that might have allowed him to teach. He spent hours instead in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library, while Arendt went to her day job as an editor at Schocken Books, a publishing house founded by refugees from Nazi Germany. The products of those labors—his knowledge of history and her analysis—were then turned over in the couple’s minds late into the evening. The book and its insights were ultimately hers, but his help was invaluable.

  The linchpin of Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism was the concentration camp, which she described as the ultimate instrument of the “radical evil” of totalitarianism. It was the site of the main Nazi experiment: the total domination of humanity. The terror of the camps succeeded in reducing each person to a “bundle of reactions,” one person interchangeable with the next. This Arendt connected with the feeling many people had that they were, in some sense, “superfluous.” Their lives and their deaths didn’t matter, at least not so much as political ideologies mattered.

  Ideology was another of Arendt’s insights. So much of totalitarianism depended on the simplistic promises of ideology, she wrote, its ability to reassure those feeling adrift that the past and the future could be explained by a simple set of laws. It was, in fact, the simplistic reassurances of ideology—even those promises it could never keep—that made it so powerful. Their promise of solutions meant that totalitarian politics would be a continual threat, in Arendt’s analysis:

  Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

  The reviews of the book, when it was finally published in 1951, were effusive. They praised not just Arendt’s analysis but her erudition in delivering it. (The text had had “Englishing” from the critic Alfred Kazin, and another friend named Rose Feitelson.) Many of them focused on the way Arendt drew a connection between Nazi totalitarian strategies and the Soviets. The subtitle of the Los Angeles Times review was “Nazi and Bolshevik Varieties Rated as ‘Essentially Identical Systems.’” In fact, she had never used that phrase in Origins at all, only highlighted the similarities between the strategies of movement elites. Arendt was married to an ex-Communist. Many of her new friends in New York were current and former Communists. It was Stalinism and the Soviet form of totalitarianism that worried her, not Communism itself.

  The acclaim was so loud and clamorous that Arendt became a household name and Origins sold very well. Even Vogue, not a magazine generally given to covering intellectual affairs, had listed her as an item “People Are Talking About” in mid-1951:

  The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, who has written a freshly conceived, monumental but extraordinarily readable book in which she wrote, “What is remarkable in the totalitarian organizations is that they could adopt so many organizational devices of secret societies without ever trying to keep their own goal a secret.”

  The use of that somewhat random quotation, which by no mean encapsulates the arguments of The Origins of Totalitarianism, was a good harbinger of what Arendt was about to become: an icon whose ideas were, for many of her admirers, secondary to the figure she cut in public life. To other women in her orbit, she had done something incredible. She not only had achieved equal footing with all the me
n who styled themselves public intellectuals, but had vaulted past them to put their ideas about the war—all their painstakingly dense articles about the function of human history—in the shadow of her towering analysis. She hadn’t just joined the constellation of intellectuals who had settled in New York in that era. She had become the polestar, a person others flocked to. Some forty years after the book was published, a journalist named Janet Malcolm would write of being “flatteringly mistaken … for someone who might have been invited to Hannah Arendt’s parties in the fifties.”

  Not everyone liked Arendt’s new status. Many men, notably, reacted badly. Arendt belonged to the so-called New York intellectuals, a name not used until long after many of its members were dead. The name refers to a cluster of writers and thinkers who gathered in Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s, who befriended and dated and married each other, and a majority of whom were incorrigible gossips. They built their own legends by writing incessantly to and about each other.

  Still, we have no record of exactly what their first impressions of Arendt were. We do know that the poet Delmore Schwartz, who hung around the set, called her “that Weimar Republic flapper.” The critic Lionel Abel was said to call her “Hannah Arrogant” behind her back. Even Alfred Kazin, who wrote that she was “vital to my life,” added that he had “submitted patiently to an intellectual loneliness that came out as arrogance.”

  These men were no shrinking violets; they were all self-possessed, even prone to grand pronouncements. The degree to which they mistook intelligence for arrogance is no doubt impossible to parse, posthumously. But it would become a problem for Arendt in a way that it never did for Parker, who rarely touched serious subjects like war, history, and politics, and in any event stopped producing much criticism after the 1930s. It also became a problem for Arendt in a way it never did for West, who perhaps was less proximate to the narcissistic competitions the New York intellectuals liked to enter. Men with brilliant, world-encompassing ideas do not seem subject to the same accusations of egotism.

  At least at this early stage, only a few people were put off by Arendt’s brilliance and even fewer were willing to say so in print. More prominent were men who could rightly be called fanatics. The literary critic Dwight Macdonald was positively reverent in a review of Origins for a small leftist magazine called the New Leader. He first likened Arendt to Simone Weil, the philosopher-mystic who left behind aphoristic writings on religion and politics. Then, perhaps sensing that Arendt was more worldly than Weil, he went in for a still more ambitious comparison:

  The theoretical analysis of totalitarianism here impressed me more than any political theory I’ve read since 1935, when I first read Marx. It gave me the same contradictory sensations of familiarity (“Of course, just what I’ve been thinking about for years”) and shocked discovery (“Can this possibly be true?”) that Marx’s description of capitalism did.

  This was not too far off the mark. Origins has ascended to classic status, a must read for historians and political scientists. Thick and somewhat opaque as it was, the way Arendt described the rise of Fascism in the wake of popular discontent is now widely accepted as the truth. She differed from Marx in that she saw no revolutionary solution to the problem she set out. Having become much more sensible, grounded, and jaded in her old age, having watched so many friends fall prey to currents of stupidity and violence, she shrank from simplistic resolutions. She had learned to rely only on herself, and her friends.

  She would make a new friend, too, from the publication of Origins. One of the Partisan Review set wrote to Arendt not long after publication, describing it in potboiler terms:

  I’ve read your book, absorbed, for the past two weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line at the grocery store. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought of, at the very least, a decade, and also engrossing and fascinating in the way that a novel is.

  Interestingly enough, and perhaps as a sign of respect, the letter writer went on to offer “one larger criticism,” suggesting that in her enthusiasm for her own ideas Arendt had not sufficiently accounted for the role of chance, of luck, in constructing the institutions of totalitarianism. “I don’t think I express this very well, and I haven’t the book to consult, having already lent it,” the letter writer continued chattily, first veering off to criticize an obtuse reviewer as “terribly stupid,” then adding postscripts inviting Arendt and Blücher for lunch and raising the question of anti-Semitism in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Dostoyevsky.

  The author of this simultaneously nervous and self-assured letter was the critic Mary McCarthy. Arendt and McCarthy had known each other since 1944, having met—and quarreled—at one of the never-ending Partisan Review parties.

  5

  McCarthy

  All her life Mary McCarthy was a recognized expert at conversation, chattering just the way she did in that letter to Arendt. She and Parker had that knack for talk and parties in common. In reminiscences of McCarthy, particularly the memories of women, she is always seen from across the room, holding court. The poet Eileen Simpson, for example, remembered meeting McCarthy around the same time Hannah Arendt did:

  She stood in what I later recognized as a characteristic stance, right foot forward and balanced on a high heel. In one hand she held a cigarette, in the other a martini.

  But she was not always sure-footed; she tripped into that friendship with Arendt, at first. The conversation was about the war. In passing, McCarthy remarked something to the effect that she “felt sorry for Hitler” because it seemed to her the dictator had wanted to be loved by the very people he tortured. Arendt lost her temper immediately. “How can you say this to me, a victim of Hitler, a person who has been in a concentration camp?” she exclaimed, then stormed out. She did stop first to harangue the Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv for allowing “this kind of conversation in your home, you, a Jew?” McCarthy, who was usually the soul of social graces, felt embarrassed if not quite ashamed. It was an inauspicious beginning to a friendship that would very quickly become the center of both women’s professional and intellectual lives.

  People have long liked to classify McCarthy as a “dark lady of American letters.” This suggests a femme fatale type, one who was endlessly and even callously self-possessed. McCarthy wasn’t like that. Just as in Parker’s projection of a wisecracker, there were parlor tricks involved in McCarthy’s maintenance of her image, sleights of hand. Her friend Elizabeth Hardwick hinted at this after McCarthy died:

  Her indiscretions were always open and forthright and in many ways one could say she was “like an open book.” Of course, everything interesting depends upon which book is open.

  It also depends on which page you begin. One story McCarthy told and retold was that of her strange Dickens-by-way-of-Horatio-Alger childhood. Born in Seattle in 1912 to the progeny of two rich, respectable families, McCarthy had a toddlerhood full of the comforts bestowed on rich children. But the finances of this idyll were unstable, based mostly on the generosity of McCarthy’s paternal grandfather. Roy McCarthy, Mary’s father, was an intermittent alcoholic who was constantly ill and rarely employed. The grandfather eventually tired of writing Roy checks and recalled him home to Minneapolis.

  The family boarded a cross-country train in the late fall of 1918 amid a countrywide epidemic of influenza. While aboard, every single McCarthy was infected, succumbing one by one to delirium. That they even made it to Minneapolis was a miracle. From the haze of the illness came a story that the train conductor had tried to force the sick family off the train in the middle of nowhere, somewhere around North Dakota. In the cloudy retelling, McCarthy’s father had brandished a gun. It’s not clear this ever happened. In any event, that last stand was futile: within a few days of arriving in Minneapolis both of McCarthy’s parents were dead.

  Their grandparents did not care for children. It fell to other relatives to take on the daily care of McCarthy and her three
brothers. Unfortunately, those available to raise them were somewhat reluctant custodians: an aging great-aunt and her ascetic husband, both of whom seem to have borrowed their opinions on child rearing from the functionaries who ran nineteenth-century orphanages. In their care, the four young McCarthys were fed a diet consisting chiefly of root vegetables and dried prunes. They had their mouths taped shut at night to prevent “mouth-breathing.” They were sent into the freezing Minnesota cold to “play” in the dead of winter. Their amusements were limited, sometimes in bizarre ways:

  Reading was forbidden us, except for school-books and, for some reason, the funny papers and magazine section of the Sunday Hearst papers, where one read about leprosy, the affairs of Count Boni de Castellane, and a strange disease that turned people to stone creepingly from the feet up.

  Punishments were frequent and severe. The cruelty was physical—beatings with hairbrush and razor strop—but also emotional. The great-aunt and uncle had a real flair for wielding humiliation as punishment; in one case McCarthy, having broken her glasses, was told she would simply not receive new ones. This sort of neglect and abuse continued for five years before McCarthy’s maternal grandfather finally intervened, whisking an eleven-year-old Mary back to Seattle, while her younger brothers were farmed out to boarding school.

  McCarthy liked to present herself as a skeptic in regard to the insights of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in particular. In her first book, The Company She Keeps, the main character, lying on a psychoanalyst’s couch, thinks suddenly: “I reject the whole pathos of the changeling, the orphan, the stepchild.” But she also knows that one “could not treat your life-history as though it were an inferior novel and dismiss it with a snubbing phrase.” The fact was that a whole other possible future had evaporated when McCarthy’s parents died, and she knew it: “I can see myself married to an Irish lawyer and playing golf and bridge, making occasional retreats and subscribing to a Catholic Book Club. I suspect I would be rather stout.”