Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  The mainstream reviews argued that yes, she had diminished Eichmann’s culpability. In the New York Times, the editors had asked one of the witnesses at Eichmann’s trial—the judge Michael Musmanno—to review the book. He accused Arendt of “sympathizing with Eichmann.” He claimed she was making a case for his innocence: “She says it was a terrible mistake to punish Eichmann at all!” She did not do either of these things, as most of the book’s readers would admit. Her friends rushed to the letters pages to support her. Among them was the poet Robert Lowell, who wrote that he knew there would be better “point-by-point refutations” than he could provide but that he wanted “to say merely that my impression of her book is almost the reverse of [Musmanno’s].”

  Intellectuals tended to attack the book on different grounds. Arendt wrote a sentence in the book in which she observed that “the whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” She was referring to the Judenräte, the councils the Nazis set up in the ghettos they forced Jews to live in. Judenräte structure and duties varied from place to place, but among the duties they performed was keeping lists of Jews for the Nazis. Sometimes, they even directed the police how to round Jews up for transportation to concentration camps.

  In the early 1960s, scholars had only begun to write proper histories of the Holocaust. It took until 1961 for Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, still a widely used text, to be published. Hilberg was focused on the administrative machinery that had helped implement the Final Solution; accordingly, his book contained a detailed account of the Judenräte. It also contained a portrait of Eichmann as a very ordinary bureaucrat. Arendt read that book as she reported on the trial, and the facts it conveyed clearly had a deep effect on her. Hilberg’s work was in her thoughts as she wrote that line about the number of victims that “would hardly have been.”

  But not everyone had read Hilberg’s book, and Arendt’s summation of it shocked many readers, particularly Jewish ones. They thought her too casual, and cruel; in our own time, she might have been said to be “blaming the victim.” Arendt’s view was more complex than her line allowed, of course. Even in Eichmann she went back and forth about it. She did refer to the “role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people” as “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” But she had also written that questions of shared responsibility for the Final Solution were “cruel and silly.” She was reaching for a position that reconciled both of those views, but she didn’t explicitly connect them.

  It caused problems. Arendt discussed these questions of responsibility because they came up at Eichmann’s trial, but all her observations on the issue became far more explosive and controversial than anything said in the courtroom. Her critics accused her of wholly recalibrating the scales, of being too kind to Eichmann even as she was too hard on the Jewish people. Norman Podhoretz, now the editor of a new magazine called Commentary, wrote his review in tones of thunder:

  Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the “banal” Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the “collaboration” of criminal and victim.

  Podhoretz was overstating the case. But his sense that Arendt had become morally distracted by the issue of the Jewish councils was widely shared. Another of Arendt’s evergreen critics, Lionel Abel, writing in the Partisan Review, fastened on this argument too. The problem, as Abel put it, was that Arendt had found Eichmann “aesthetically” interesting and the Jewish councils, much less so. (In fact, she’d spent a great deal of her manuscript addressing the councils.) “If a man holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend, “Abel wrote, “the man with the gun will be aesthetically less ugly than one who out of fear of death has killed his friend and perhaps did not even save his own life.” All Arendt’s interest in Eichmann, Abel argued, boiled down to his being a more interesting, fuller character for her book. It weakened her argument.

  But it wasn’t only Arendt’s traditional foes who felt this way. Abel and Podhoretz were gesturing toward an argument about tone that her old friend Gershom Scholem would make to her outright. Scholem had known both Arendt and Walter Benjamin in Berlin, but he had become a committed Zionist and had moved to Israel in 1923. There he became a scholar of Jewish mysticism, especially of kabbalah. He maintained an occasional friendly correspondence with Arendt but when he wrote to her in 1963 it was in extreme disappointment. The problem he identified was, in large part, a tone problem. He felt the mood of the Eichmann book was too flippant. “To the matter of which you speak it is unimaginably inappropriate,” Scholem wrote to her in a letter that was initially a private correspondence. In essence, he asked her to have a heart, and some loyalty to the Jewish people.

  In her reply to him, Arendt surrendered little ground. She could not accept her critics’ view that she lacked some essential compassion, what she would often refer to in her letters to Scholem or others as a lack of “soul.” She also could not accept his premise that as a Jew she owed her people the duty that Scholem had implored her to accept. “I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons,” she argued. “I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person.”

  Scholem, who had asked if he could publish the exchange, surprised Arendt by handing it to Encounter. She had assumed he meant to publish it in Israel. But instead it appeared in a journal that was widely read by Anglo-American intellectuals. Encounter had significant funding that as it would later turn out could be traced back to the CIA’s anti-Communist effort. Thus, as Arendt put it to Karl Jaspers, with whom she was back in touch, the Scholem letter “infect[ed] those segments of the population that had not yet been stricken by the epidemic of lies.”

  Arendt was not an easily wounded person. She could look at the avalanche of criticism with some bemusement and even detachment. Of Abel’s review, she wrote to Mary McCarthy: “This is a piece that is part of the political campaign, it is not criticism and it doesn’t really concern my book.” McCarthy agreed. But she too viewed the occasion as one for political alignment, immediately volunteering to write a loyal rebuttal despite not quite having read Arendt’s book yet.

  The personal element in all of this was hard to escape. “What surprises and shocks me most of all is the tremendous amount of hatred and hostility lying around and waiting only for a chance to break out,” Arendt told McCarthy. There is indeed little indication in Arendt’s letters that she knew some of her set found her haughty and imperious, that Abel and perhaps others called her Hannah Arrogant behind her back, that Saul Bellow chose to express his distaste by insisting that Arendt looked like “George Arliss playing Disraeli.” But Arendt was shrewd. All her writing, and all her theorizing, was grounded not so much in abstract logic as in personal observation. Very little got by her, especially when it came to the darker human exercises of jealousy, pettiness, and cruelty. That people would let such insecurities run roughshod over intellectual honesty could hardly have been a surprise to the person who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. For McCarthy, 1963 also began in a triumph that rapidly soured. However, McCarthy was much more inclined than the stubborn Arendt to be devastated by it. Since the 1950s, she had been working on a long novel. The project was repeatedly interrupted. But suddenly in late 1962 the publisher William Jovanovich had become so obsessed with the idea of the book that he offered her a large advance to finish it. McCarthy seized the opportunity and in September 1963, the book, with its cover image of a chain of daisies, promptly became the bestseller its publisher expected.

  This novel was The Group, which follows eight women through the 1930s as they make their way in New York as wives and career girls
in the brave new world that the decade was for this sort of well-educated-but-not-quite-liberated woman. The famous Barbizon Hotel, a residential dormitory for young women working in New York, was established in 1927 in part to host the young women who were suddenly filling the city’s clerical ranks. To these women a job was still a kind of finishing school, a place to wait until marriage struck. McCarthy’s chronicle of eight such women, worldly and yet not sophisticated, was among the first books to tell these stories. The Group’s characters all fit types: the plain Dottie Renfrew; the sophisticated Lakey Eastlake; the “rich and lazy” Pokey Prothero. It follows them through romantic mishaps, births, triumphs, and losses until 1940, when one of the group commits suicide. This character, Kay Strong, shares a few biographical facts with McCarthy. Many of the other characters shared traits with some of McCarthy’s Vassar classmates.

  The Group does not quite work as a novel. The tone of the book is arch but uncritical; the clear intelligence of its narrator and the rather psychologically uncomplicated view it takes of its characters make for an uneasy marriage. Gone was all the acute self-examination that appeared in the early short stories and The Company She Keeps, and gone was the satirical, biting edge that had made McCarthy famous. Almost none of McCarthy’s intellectual and literary friends could abide the soapy qualities of the book, its occasional flights into melodrama, and its relative earnestness. Robert Lowell prophetically wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that “no one in the know likes the book, and I dread what will happen to it in the New York Book Review.”

  Lowell was referring not to the New York Times Book Review, but rather to the then nascent New York Review of Books. In January 1963, Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, had paired with friends of his, the editor Jason Epstein and his wife, Barbara, to create it. They had very little capital to start a literary magazine, but at the time, New York was in the throes of a newspaper strike that saw the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and a host of other publications suspend operations for months. Their book reviews disappeared with them. The New York Review of Books came at the right moment to fill the gap.

  No one in New York intellectual circles had been very fond of the books coverage the Times churned out, anyway. Like McCarthy some years before, and Rebecca West before both of them, Elizabeth Hardwick had once written a long critique of the state of book criticism. Published in Harper’s in 1959, it has often been read as a kind of manifesto for the New York Review. Hardwick wrote:

  The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself—have made the New York Times into a provincial literary journal, longer and thicker, but not much different in the end from all those small-town Sunday Book Pages.

  McCarthy obviously agreed with this view; over twenty years before she’d articulated a similar attitude in her Nation articles on “Our Critics, Right or Wrong.” So when Hardwick and Lowell asked her, McCarthy volunteered her services to the fledgling magazine in early 1963, writing for no fee in the first issue about William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Somewhat improbably, she was a fan, calling it the “first serious piece of science fiction.”

  It would be, however, the last piece she’d contribute for several years. For when The Group came out, the Review devoted two pieces to it. One was a relatively straight review, by Norman Mailer. The other was a parody, written under the pen name Xavier Prynne.

  It can be difficult now to imagine the kind of position Norman Mailer occupied at this stage of his career. He had had precisely one big commercial success: his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was published in 1948. Then, after languishing for several years with novels both the critics and the public hated, he published a kind of essay-collection-pace-autobiography called, without a bit of irony, Advertisements for Myself. The book expounds at length about Mailer’s personal desire for fame and a larger readership. “If there is anything in Mailer’s new book which alarms me,” Gore Vidal wrote in the Nation, assessing it, “it is his obsession with public success.” The Norman Mailer of 1963 was, in fact, somewhat famous. But he was probably best known to the public for having stabbed his wife at a party in the fall of 1960, and consequently pleading guilty to assault.

  He had had a personal run-in with McCarthy, too, in the fall of 1962. In theory, he was an admirer. He had read The Company She Keeps in college, and it had fitted with his own views of how a writer ought to behave on the page. “She was revealing herself in ways she never did again,” he told one of McCarthy’s biographers late in his life. “She was letting herself be found out.” But he also said he never felt at all close to her until they both attended the Edinburgh writers’ festival in August 1962. That year the festival was notably raucous. “The most striking fact was the number of lunatics both on the platform and in the public,” McCarthy wrote to Arendt. “I confess I enjoyed it enormously.” In the middle of the insanity, Mailer, in a pugilistic mood, had challenged McCarthy to a debate on the BBC. She declined, and he became angry.

  So when the editors of the New York Review of Books commissioned him to review The Group, they must have known what to expect.

  She is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel; not yet; she has failed, she has failed from the center out, she failed out of vanity, the accumulated vanity of being over-praised through the years for too little and so being pleased with herself for too little; she failed out of profound timidity—like any good Catholic-born she is afraid to unloose the demons; she failed out of snobbery— if compassion for her characters is beginning to stir at last in this book, she can still not approve of anyone who is incapable of performing the small act exquisitely well; she failed by an act of the imagination; she is, when all is said, a bit of a duncey broad herself, there is something cockeyed in her vision and self-satisfied in her demands and this contributes to the failure of her style.

  McCarthy was not surprised that Mailer would dislike the book. She was far more worried about what exactly had been going on in the minds of Elizabeth Hardwick and the Review’s managing editor, Robert Silvers, who were the two people she knew had commissioned the review. The week before the Mailer review, in fact, the Review had printed that Xavier Prynne parody of The Group, which had taken McCarthy to task for the same sins as Mailer. The details of the parody are best left to those who read The Group with a fine-tooth comb, as evidently Prynne did. The important thing to remember is what eventually McCarthy discovered: that Xavier Prynne was in fact Elizabeth Hardwick.

  Hardwick was slightly younger than McCarthy. She was originally from Lexington, Kentucky, and when she arrived in New York in 1939, it was as a graduate student. Like McCarthy, she had a reputation for carrying extreme politeness with devastating malice. This was not the only thing they had in common. Not long after she began to fraternize with the Partisan Review crowd, Hardwick found herself becoming Philip Rahv’s lover. Many of Hardwick’s accomplishments have that quality, of coming later to something McCarthy had achieved first. But at least until this episode of Xavier Prynne, McCarthy does not seem to have regarded Hardwick as any kind of rival. They exchanged long, friendly, happy letters, right up to the breach.

  Writers often critique each other’s work in the ordinary course of friendship. Nary a volume of letters has ever been published that did not record some disagreement between writers, otherwise friendly, who simply didn’t like a given story or poem. Nonetheless, in the history of twentieth-century writing, this move by Hardwick has few parallels. It is even stranger to consider that Hardwick had already written to McCarthy privately praising the book, if in somewhat guarded terms:

  What I want to say is Congratulations. I’m so happy to have this wonderful book finished and so happy that you will make money on it as we all “knew you would!” … It’s a tremendous accomplishment, Mary.

  But while writing that letter Hardwick must have known what she
was about to do. The parody was published less than two months later. “I find it strange that people who are supposed to be my friends should solicit a review from an announced enemy,” McCarthy wrote to Arendt. “As for the parody, they have never mentioned it to this day, perhaps hoping that I would not notice it.” She was especially troubled because apparently, throughout this time, the editors of the New York Review had been pestering her to contribute, and had she done so, one of her essays might have appeared alongside this condemnation of her work. Hardwick tried to apologize. “I am very sorry about the parody,” Hardwick wrote a few weeks after it appeared. “That is what I wanted to say. It is hard to go back to the time it was done, but it was meant as simply a little trick, nothing more.” It was not enough. For four years after, McCarthy didn’t speak to Hardwick, or contribute to the New York Review.

  This all raises an obvious question: could McCarthy not take what she dished out? A story also lingers in her biographies about Fred Dupee, one of the New York Review set, a now rather forgotten critic. He and McCarthy were at a party together, and Mary told him she’d heard he didn’t like the book. As Gore Vidal told it:

  Fred, who was exquisitely polite, decorous, and noncombative, said, “Well, Mary, I don’t like it.” Then she made the second mistake. “Why don’t you like it?” And he said, “Well, that’s too much to go into, but you who have set such intolerably high standards for others must be ready to accept them as applied to you.” With which she burst into tears.

  McCarthy took at least some of the other criticism of her book in stride, telling her New Yorker editor that a letter full of criticism of The Group had actually pleased her: “I love you for taking all these pains to tell me the truth.” It was, too, a giant bestseller. Hollywood came calling and made the book into a film just a few years later. It made McCarthy a truly famous writer, and it rescued what had been for many years quite regrettable personal finances.