Sharp

by Michelle Dean

Her filing was intermittent, her editors sometimes complaining that there had to be a forceps delivery. But when she managed to write, she seemed to have fun. She praised old friends, like Edmund Wilson. She attacked old enemies, like Edna Ferber. When her editor asked her to look at James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, published some years before, she wrote some of her finest sentences in years, remembering her old boss: “His long body seemed to be only basted together, his hair was quills upon the fretful porcupine, his teeth were Stonehenge, his clothes looked as if they had been brought up by somebody else.”

  She sometimes seemed to want to compete with the writers of the nonfiction books she reviewed; one sensed an eagerness in her to get out into the field and catalog its uncertainties again. One was a book about Aimee Semple McPherson by Lately Thomas, which she thought could have been much livelier:

  (His publishers admit that “Lately Thomas” is the pseudonym of a West Coast journalist and writer. One is led into fascinating mazes of wonderment, seeking to consider whatever could have been the pen names he discarded.) Whatever his name, he has written a completely straightforward and serious-faced account of a nationally— well, no, internationally—known case that might have caused him to go off at any moment into helpless laughter.

  She also mocked, at length, the self-absorption of Kerouac and the beats. But once again she had a clear foothold in the glittering world. She was invited on television with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to discuss the new young poets. She complained that the beat poets just went with a “deadly monotony of days and nights, round and round.” She also averred that she was not really a critic, that at Esquire “I write what I think and hope to heaven there is no libel suit.” A young New Republic writer named Janet Winn—eventually to become Janet Malcolm—caught the program and wrote it up:

  Miss Parker, who is no longer (if in fact she ever were) the “acid wit” of the stories about her, contributed little to the proceedings, but she made a very agreeable impression and reminded one vividly at times of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Parker continued to write the columns at Esquire until 1962. The last book she reviewed was Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which she loved. It “brings back all my faith in terror and death. I can say no higher of it and her.” These were Parker’s last words as a reviewer. Alan Campbell, her husband, died suddenly, just a year after their final reconciliation. Parker began to seriously deteriorate. She wrote one last piece for Esquire, about the work of the artist John Koch.

  To write about art now gives me a feeling of deep embarrassment which, in the long ago, I kept hidden under what was known then as “She’s having one of her difficult days again, ma’am—screaming and spitting and I don’t know what all.”

  Parker would struggle on for another three years before dying in a New York hotel room in June 1967. She had had, by any measure, a brilliant career. All these years after her death, it is still so easy to identify her voice in a piece of prose or poetry; she was one writer who could never help sounding exactly like herself. In her will, she left her literary estate to the NAACP. But it was her “deep embarrassments” that have often been called her legacy.

  In September 1957, a single photograph dominated most newspapers. It showed a fifteen-year-old black girl trying to walk to school in Little Rock, Arkansas. This girl wears a white dress and sunglasses, clutching notebooks to her chest, her face determined. She’s being followed by a mob. Behind her a white girl’s mouth is set in an angry jeer, as though she is midway through yelling a slur.

  The young black woman’s name was Elizabeth Eckford, and she was one of the Little Rock Nine, sent to integrate Little Rock Central High School after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education amid a national crisis provoked when the governor of Arkansas threatened to block desegregation. There was no telephone at Eckford’s home, so she’d missed a message telling her that the other students planned to meet and walk together, with an escort, into the school that day. Instead, Eckford simply walked through the mob, alone.

  Hannah Arendt saw that photograph and was moved. “It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations confessed themselves unable to solve,” she’d write later. But out of that concern for the child in the photograph, Arendt somehow developed an objection to school desegregation in general. She wrote her argument in a piece that a young editor named Norman Podhoretz commissioned for a new then-left-leaning Jewish magazine called Commentary.

  When Arendt submitted the draft, though, her argument was disturbing enough that the editors began fighting among themselves about whether to publish it. First, they commissioned a reply by the historian Sidney Hook, and proposed to run that alongside Arendt’s article to soften the blows of her controversial argument. But upon receiving Hook’s draft they became indecisive again, and held the article. Arendt angrily withdrew it. Sidney Hook claimed later she was afraid of his critique. But as the fight over school segregation dragged on through 1958, she sent the article to Dissent, which published it in early 1959.

  To understand the nature of Arendt’s objection to school desegregation, you must also understand that by 1959, her political theory took a tripartite view of the world. At the top was politics, in the middle was society, and at bottom was the private sphere. In the political sphere, she conceded, it was not only acceptable but imperative to legislate against discrimination. But Arendt was convinced that the private sphere needed to be protected at all costs from any kind of government intrusion. She was equally certain that the social world should be left relatively alone by the government, so that people could manage their own links and associations with each other.

  Somewhat incredibly to a modern eye, Arendt therefore argued that discrimination was intrinsic to a functioning society. When people discriminated in the social world—when they kept to their “own” while shopping or working or going to school—they were simply adopting a modified version of freedom of association, she thought. “In any event, discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right,” she’d write in her article.

  Horrific as it sounds, she meant it out of a kind of myopic kindness. You can connect Arendt’s approach with her notion of the “conscious pariah,” though she didn’t use that term in this article. Clearly what had bothered her about that photograph was the pathos of the girl walking alone to join a group that made it eminently clear it did not want her. This, to Arendt’s thinking, was the wrong strategy. Rahel Varnhagen would never have submitted herself to that walk to school. Varnhagen would have been comfortable holding herself apart from the imperatives of a society that demanded she assimilate. And Arendt evinced clear anger at the parents she saw as forcing the child to make this doomed walk alone.

  It was a shortsighted way of looking at the desegregation issue. And Arendt’s argument did not go unchallenged in her time, to say the least. In fact, Arendt had made such a clearly objectionable argument that the article appeared with an editor’s note in a box at the top of the page:

  We publish [this piece] not because we agree with it—quite the contrary!—but because we believe in freedom of expression even for views that seem to us entirely mistaken. Because of Miss Arendt’s intellectual stature, the importance of her topic, and the fact that an earlier opportunity to print her views had been withdrawn, we feel it is a service to allow her opinion, and the rebuttals to it, now to be aired freely.

  The two rebuttals were by mostly forgotten academics. One, a political science professor, was very temperate in his criticism of Arendt, though he thoroughly disagreed with her argument. The other, the sociologist Melvin Tumin (who Philip Roth has repeatedly said inspired the character of Coleman Silk in his later novel The Human Stain), began with a cri de coeur: “At first one thinks, this is a horrible joke.” Tumin continued in much the same horrified tone for the rest of his critique, which mostly marveled at the
idea that a mind as fine as Arendt’s could be arguing against desegregation. His arguments were forgettable, but it is remarkable, given how often she’d come up against tone arguments herself, how much he got under Arendt’s skin. “Of my two opponents, Mr. Tumin has put himself outside the scope of discussion and discourse through the tone he adopted in his rebuttal,” she began in the space Dissent had given her to reply to her critics.

  Or perhaps, despite her reputation for rarely apologizing, Arendt was beginning to change her mind already. She would eventually have an interlocutor she could not help listening to: Ralph Ellison, the essayist and critic most famous as the author of Invisible Man. His first challenge to her came in a riposte to an essay by someone else, Dissent’s then editor, Irving Howe. Arendt shared with Howe a kind of “Olympian authority,” Ellison remarked, that he would make clear neither white writer had earned. He would elaborate on his problem with Arendt’s argument in an interview with Robert Penn Warren:

  I believe that one of the important clues to the meaning of [American Negro] experience lies in the idea, the ideal of sacrifice. Hannah Arendt’s failure to grasp the importance of this ideal among Southern Negroes caused her to fly way off into left field in her “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Dissent magazine, in which she charged Negro parents with exploiting their children during the struggle to integrate the schools. But she has absolutely no conception of what goes on in the minds of Negro parents when they send their kids through those lines of hostile people. Yet they are aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook of many of these parents (who wish that the problem didn’t exist), the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American. Thus he’s required to master the inner tensions created by his racial situation—and if he gets hurt, then his is one more sacrifice. It is a harsh requirement, but if he fails this basic test his life will be even harsher.

  The ideal of the pariah, who could withdraw from society and survive that way, was not available to a black person facing a racist South. Staying with one’s own, drawing strength from that difference, was not quite so possible in the context of the African American experience.

  It was a convincing argument, convincing enough that Arendt wrote to Ellison herself. She conceded his point: “Your remarks seem to me so entirely right, that I now see that I simply didn’t understand the complexities of the situation.” In an irony that Susan Sontag would later write about in a completely different context, Arendt had made the classic mistake of a person who looks at a photograph. She assumed the picture of Eckford told her enough about the civil rights struggle for her to launch a whole critique of its tactics.

  After writing “Reflections” and a second piece that argued along similar lines, “Crisis in Education,” Arendt seemed to recognize that she had to back down, at least a little, but she also kept reexamining the subject. She wrote that letter to Ellison. She also wrote to James Baldwin, after one of his essays from The Fire Next Time was first published in the New Yorker, to argue with him about the nature of politics. (She was “frightened,” she wrote, of his “gospel of love,” though she also said she wrote “in sincere admiration.”) At least one black scholar still maintains that Arendt was “paternalistic” even in her curiosity. It does not appear she had any black friends, or that she was particularly immersed in the civil rights battle. At that point her star as an intellectual was already so high that when she pronounced on something, it was always with Olympian authority. Arendt would keep that authority for the rest of her life. She’d remain someone who typically pronounced from above. But there was this chink in the armor, and one that was about to get, by some lights, bigger.

  7

  Arendt & McCarthy

  In 1960, Arendt wrote to her old mentor Karl Jaspers that in spite of how busy she’d become, her life filled with travel from one teaching appointment to the next and never having enough time to spend visiting friends, she was trying to clear a swath of time to go to Israel and watch a trial. “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t go and look at this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness, without the mediation of the printed word,” she wrote. “Don’t forget how early I left Germany and how little of all this I experienced directly.”

  “This walking disaster” was a man named Adolf Eichmann. In May of that year, he had been kidnapped in Argentina by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and brought back to Israel for interrogation and trial. Eichmann was such an important Nazi war criminal that the then–prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, had decided not to rely on formal extradition procedures to retrieve him. Eichmann had been a high-ranking SS officer in charge of the department that administered the Final Solution, but after the war, he vanished. Using forged papers, he fled to Austria, then used those papers to get the Red Cross to give him a passport. He had been living in Argentina, using an assumed name, since 1950.

  Eichmann’s capture was an international media sensation from the beginning, the drama of a kidnapping making for dramatic headlines. But it also came at a moment when the West was finally beginning to reckon with the Final Solution. At the war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg, the Final Solution was repeatedly referenced, and Eichmann’s name often came up. But there was a feeling that Nuremberg had not fully reckoned with the monstrosity of the Nazis’ specific crimes against the Jews, and it was felt particularly acutely in Israel. When Eichmann was charged with fifteen different offenses under Israel’s Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law is 1950, it was seen as a chance to rectify that wrong. The rhetoric ran high. When the prosecutor rose to give his opening statement, he claimed to speak on behalf of the dead. “I will be their spokesman,” he promised, “and in their name I will unfold the awesome indictment.”

  There was very little doubt that Eichmann was, at a minimum, responsible for what the Israelis said he was responsible for. They had interrogated him for several months before the trial. They had hundreds of pages of documents. But still, Eichmann pleaded “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” His argument was that he had only been following orders when he had coordinated the logistics that murdered millions of people. In fact, when called to testify, he claimed that “I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter—I never killed any human being.” In sum, he claimed that his bureaucratic distance from the actual gore of killing was enough to remove his guilt.

  His trial would last five months. Arendt was there on its first day in April 1961. By then, Parker’s old friend Harold Ross had died, and his successor as editor of the New Yorker was a short, retiring man named William Shawn. Arendt had gone to him to ask if she could write about this trial. With Shawn she was much less loquacious than she was with Jaspers. She simply said she had been “very tempted” to go, and wondered if Shawn might be interested in an article or two. She had obviously gone in to the proceedings with the sense that the defendant had a “bizarre vacuousness.” And as she watched, and later read transcripts for the portions of the trial she missed, Arendt was only more confirmed in that opinion. The emptiness of Eichmann fascinated her, and it was that emptiness that led her to what is now perhaps her most famous and controversial thesis: this notion of the “banality of evil.”

  Perhaps the best way to understand that phrase is first to accept Arendt’s vision of Eichmann, an interpretation of his gestures and actions that later became controversial. But, to her, he was a puzzle, some lethal combination of pompousness and ignorance. She was fascinated by the excerpts of his memoirs that a German newspaper published, in which he related his origins and his position in what can only be called a most self-unaware manner. A representative passage primly claimed that “I myself had no hatred for Jews, for my whole education through my mother and father had been strictly Christian; my mother, because of her Jewish rela
tives, held different opinions from those current in S.S. circles.” The tone of these passages both bewildered and amused Arendt. She complained that the comedy of these passages stretched right past the absurd into horror. “Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity?” she asked. “Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal … who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it?”

  In spite of all her bewilderment, in her “Eichmann in Jerusalem” New Yorker articles—published in 1962—and her subsequent book of the same title, Arendt made it clear she believed that Eichmann was monstrous. But she also believed that Eichmann’s breed of self-deception was a general condition in Nazi Germany, an element of the mass delusion that made totalitarianism so powerful. The contrast between the grand evil and the small man was what struck her:

  For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar—which he obviously was not.

  Arendt had certainly put her finger on something, as far as the difficulty of coming up with a coherent theory of Eichmann’s personality was concerned. In the half century since Eichmann in Jerusalem was published, his character and personal history have inspired a library shelf’s worth of arguments, all in the name of litigating Arendt’s claims about him. Proving Arendt wrong about Eichmann, by reference to the historical record, became a kind of crusade for many people. It has proved such fruitful soil because there is no clear answer. Silliness is in the eye of the beholder. The criticism was always motivated by a question that pressed just as hard as Arendt’s argument, though: was Arendt somehow diminishing Eichmann’s culpability for the Holocaust by suggesting he had not been clever or calculating?