Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  There was a period: Margaret Shafer, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 267.

  like a brilliant harpy: “People Are Talking About,” Vogue, July 1947.

  deeply serious: Alfred Kazin, “How to Plan Your Reading,” Vogue, July 1947.

  The whole story is a complete fiction: “The Art of Fiction No. 27: Mary McCarthy,” Paris Review (Winter–Spring 1962).

  brusque and out-of-sorts: The Oasis (Harcourt Brace, 1949), 39.

  The woman is a thug: William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Doubleday, 1982), 67.

  constitutes a gross infringement: Letter from H. William Fitelson to Robert N. Linscott, May 3, 1949, in the Mary McCarthy Papers at Vassar.

  The inner circle is too small: Donald Barr, “Failure in Utopia,” New York Times, August 14, 1949.

  We think so much alike: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, March 10, 1949, reprinted in Between Friends.

  his Marxist assurance: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, August 10, 1954, reprinted in Between Friends.

  burlesque philosophers: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, August 20, 1954, reprinted in Between Friends.

  I hear that Saul: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, October 11, 1966, reprinted in Between Friends.

  These people get worse: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, October 20, 1965, reprinted in Between Friends.

  Chapter Six: Parker & Arendt

  Listen, I can’t: Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (Penguin, 1988), 699.

  Lolita: “Lolita,” New Yorker, August 27, 1955.

  had read Lolita and disliked it: See Galya Diment, “Two 1955 Lolitas: Vladimir Nabokov’s and Dorothy Parker’s,” Modernism/Modernity, April 2014.

  The late Robert Benchley: “Book Reviews,” Esquire, May 1958.

  His long body: “Book Reviews,” Esquire, September 1959.

  His publishers admit: “Book Reviews,” Esquire, June 1959.

  deadly monotony of days and nights: Harry Hansen, “The ‘Beat’ Generation Is Scuttled by Capote,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1959.

  Miss Parker, who is no longer (if in fact she ever were): Janet Winn, “Capote, Miller, and Miss Parker,” New Republic, February 9, 1959.

  brings back all my faith: “Book Reviews,” Esquire, December 1962.

  To write about art now: “New York at 6:30 p.m.” Esquire, November 1964.

  walked through the mob, alone: Details here are drawn from Christine Firer Hinze, “Reconsidering Little Rock: Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Catholic Social Thought on Children and Families in the Struggle for Justice,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Spring/Summer 2009.

  It certainly did not require too much: “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, Winter 1959, 50.

  discrimination is as indispensable a social right: Ibid., 51.

  We publish [this piece] not because we agree with it: Ibid., 46.

  At first one thinks: Melvin Tumin, “Pie in the Sky …” Dissent, January 1959.

  Olympian authority: “The World and the Jug,” in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (Random House, 1964), 108.

  I believe that one of the important: Ralph Ellison, quoted in Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (Random House, 1965), 343.

  Your remarks seem to me so entirely right: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Ralph Ellison, July 29, 1965, cited in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 316.

  She also wrote to James Baldwin: “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” New Yorker, November 17, 1962.

  frightened … gospel of love: Letter from Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin, November 21, 1962, available at http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156.

  At least one black scholar: Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014), 5.

  Chapter Seven: Arendt & McCarthy

  I would never be able to forgive myself: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, December 2, 1960, in Correspondence: 1926–1969.

  I never killed a Jew: Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin, 1963), 22.

  very tempted: Letter from Hannah Arendt to William Shawn, August 11, 1960, quoted at http://www.glennhorowitz.com/dobkin/letters_hannah_arendt-william_shawn_correspondence1960-1972.

  I myself had no hatred: Eichmann in Jerusalem, 30.

  Is this a textbook case: Ibid., 51–52.

  sympathizing with Eichmann: Michael A. Musmanno, “Man with an Unspotted Conscience,” New York Times, May 19, 1963.

  point-by-point refutations: Letter to editor of the New York Times by Robert Lowell, June 23, 1963.

  the whole truth was that: Eichmann in Jerusalem, 125.

  a deep effect on her: Hilberg claimed that Arendt owed a huge debt to him and believed she had plagiarized his work. See Nathaniel Popper, “A Conscious Pariah,” Nation, March 31, 2010.

  undoubtedly the darkest chapter: Eichmann in Jerusalem, 117.

  cruel and silly: Ibid., 12.

  in place of the monstrous Nazi: Norman Podhoretz, “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” Commentary, September 1, 1963.

  If a man holds a gun: Lionel Abel, “The Aesthetics of Evil: Hannah Arendt on Eichmann and the Jews,” Partisan Review, Summer 1963.

  unimaginably inappropriate: Letter from Gershom Scholem to Hannah Arendt, June 22, 1963, reprinted in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters Between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” Encounter, January 1964.

  soul: See, for example: “Don’t tell anybody, is it not proof positive that I have no ‘soul’?” in Letter from Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, June 23, 1964, in Between Friends.

  I indeed love “only” my friends: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem, July 24, 1963, in “An Exchange of Letters.”

  infect[ed] those segments: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, October 20, 1963, in Correspondence: 1926–1969 (Harcourt Brace, 1992), 523.

  part of the political campaign: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, September 20, 1963, in Between Friends.

  What surprises and shocks me most of all: Ibid.

  George Arliss playing Disraeli: Saul Bellow, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 354.

  no one in the know likes the book: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, August 12, 1963, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travasino and Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 489.

  The flat praise and the faint dissension: Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” Harper’s, October 1959.

  first serious piece of science fiction: Mary McCarthy, “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963.

  obsession with public success: Gore Vidal, “The Norman Mailer Syndrome,” Nation, October 2, 1960.

  She was letting herself: Norman Mailer, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 189.

  I confess I enjoyed it enormously: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, September 28, 1962, in Between Friends.

  simply not a good enough woman: Norman Mailer, “The Mary McCarthy Case,” New York Review of Books, October 12, 1963.

  What I want to say is Congratulations: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, August 3, 1963, in the Mary McCarthy Papers at Vassar.

  I find it strange that people: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, October 24, 1963, in Between Friends.

  I am very sorry about the parody: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, November 20, 1963, in the Mary McCarthy Papers at Vassar.

  Fred, who was exquisitely polite: Gore Vidal, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 525.

  I love you for taking all these pains: Letter from McCarthy to Katharine White, quoted in Kiernan, 524.

  Oh poor girl, really: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Pearl Kazin, February 22, 1954, in One Art: Letters Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 288–89
.

  Chapter Eight: Sontag

  a picaresque anti-novel: Daniel Stern, “Life Becomes a Dream,” New York Times, September 8, 1963.

  reductio ad absurdum: As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, ed. David Rieff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 237.

  I just finished Miss Sonntag’s [sic] novel: Letter from Hannah Arendt to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August 20, 1963, quoted in Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (Norton, 2000), 73.

  When I last watched her at the Lowells’: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, December 19, 1967, in Between Friends.

  “the imitation me”: Susan Sontag, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 537.

  I hear you’re the new me: Morris Dickstein, quoted in Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Notes on Camp Sontag,” New York Observer, January 10, 2005.

  Mary McCarthy’s grin: As Consciousness, 8.

  Because you smile too much: This anecdote is retold in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 538.

  Mary McCarthy can do anything with her smile: As Consciousness, 10.

  I realize I misspelled your name: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Susan Sontag, August 11, 1964, in the Mary McCarthy Papers at Vassar.

  I still weep in any movie: “Project for a Trip to China,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1973.

  All I can think of is Mother: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 5.

  I felt I was slumming in my own life: “Pilgrimage,” New Yorker, December 21, 1987.

  hadn’t understood any of the essays: See Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag: A Biography (Northwestern University Press, 2014), 22.

  lesser-known Handel operas: Terry Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” London Review of Books, March 17, 2005.

  a writer who had never mattered to me: “Susan Sontag: The Art of Fiction No. 143,” interview by Edward Hirsch, Paris Review, Winter 1995.

  Have you read Nightwood? : Interview with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, November 30, 2015, available at http://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2015/11/harriet-sohmers-zwerling-ex-nude-model.html.

  My concept of sexuality is so altered: Reborn, 28.

  You can imagine what that did to me: “Susan Sontag: The Art of Fiction No. 143.”

  Our investigations thus far: Wilhelm Stekel, The Homosexual Neurosis (Gotham Press, 1922), 11.

  He needs all his money to keep from going to jail: Letter from Susan Sontag to “Merrill,” undated, but found in journal near entry for March 23, 1950, quoted in Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  I marry Philip with full consciousness: Reborn, 60.

  Talked for seven years: As Consciousness, 362.

  Whoever invented marriage: Reborn, 79.

  emotional totalitarian: Ibid., 138.

  no one to talk to about it: Joan Acocella, “The Hunger Artist,” New Yorker, March 6, 2000.

  It took me nine years: In America (Picador, 1991), 24.

  I replied, “Yes, I’m going to”: Interview with Marithelma Costa and Adelaide López, in Conversations with Susan Sontag, ed. Leland A. Pogue (University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 227.

  light her cigarettes as she typed: Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir (Atlas, 2011), 87.

  shrewd, serene, housewifely confidence: Donald Phelps, “Form as Hero,” New Leader, October 28, 1963.

  Mary used to do it: “Susan Sontag: The Art of Fiction No. 143.”

  no one’s interested in fiction, Susan: Ellen Hopkins, “Susan Sontag Lightens Up,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1992.

  Many things in the world: “Notes on ‘Camp,’“ Partisan Review, September 1964.

  Camp is a form of regression: “Not Good Taste, Not Bad Taste—It’s ‘Camp,’“ New York Times, March 21, 1965.

  every kind of perversion is regarded as avant-garde: Letter from Philip Rahv to Mary McCarthy, April 9, 1965, in Mary McCarthy Papers at Vassar.

  It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp: “Notes on ‘Camp.’ “

  too obviously queer, too revealing of her sexuality: See Terry Castle, “Some Notes on Notes on Camp,” in The Scandal of Susan Sontag, ed. Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (Columbia University Press, 1999), 21.

  the revenge of the intellect on art … an erotics of art: “Against Interpretation,” Evergreen Review, December 1964.

  either history-making or a daring sham: “Sontag and Son,” Vogue, June 1966.

  a sharp girl: Kevin Kelly, “‘A’ for Promise, ‘F’ for Practice,” Boston Globe, January 30, 1966.

  Susan Sontag is hardly a likable person: Geoffrey A. Wolff, “Hooray for What Is There and Never Mind Reality,” Washington Post, February 5, 1966.

  Agnès Varda’s sleek bob: Camera Three interview, circa fall 1969, available at https://vimeo.com/111098095.

  the kind of ultra-chic occasion: Letter from Lila Karpf to Susan Sontag, November 22, 1966, quoted in Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 133.

  the Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant-garde: Robert Phelps, “Self-Education of a Brilliant Highbrow,” Life, January 1, 1966.

  Miss Sontag has been undone as a novelist: Gore Vidal, “The Writer as Cannibal,” Chicago Tribune, August 10, 1967.

  Susan Sontag would be ugly, or at least plain: Beatrice Berg, “Susan Sontag, Intellectuals’ Darling,” Washington Post, January 8, 1967.

  I must not quote her: Carolyn Heilbrun, “Speaking of Susan Sontag,” New York Times, August 27, 1967.

  A legend is like a tail: James Toback, “Whatever You’d Like Susan Sontag to Think, She Doesn’t,” Esquire, July 1968.

  Sue. Suzy Q.: Howard Junker, “Will This Finally Be Philip Roth’s Year?” New York, January 13, 1969.

  I’ve always been touched by your personal charm: Letter from Philip Roth to Susan Sontag, January 10, 1969, in the Susan Sontag Archive at UCLA.

  Today’s America: “What’s Happening in America: A Symposium,” Partisan Review, Winter 1967.

  sweet young thing: William F. Buckley, “Don’t Forget—’Hate America’ Seems to Be the New Liberal Slogan,” Los Angeles, March 20, 1967.

  Alienated Intellectual: Lewis S. Feuer, “The Elite of the Alienated,” New York Times, March 26, 1967.

  made miserable and angry: “Trip to Hanoi,” Esquire, February 1978.

  a patient in psychoanalysis: Frances FitzGerald, “A Nice Place to Visit,” New York Review of Books, March 13, 1969.

  an American has no way of incorporating Vietnam: Trip to Hanoi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 87.

  I confess that when I went to Vietnam: Mary McCarthy, “Report from Vietnam I: The Home Program,” New York Review of Books, April 20, 1967.

  do the work of a careful ethnologist: FitzGerald, “A Nice Place to Visit.”

  I was really dumb in those days: Susan Sontag, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 594.

  Interesting that you too were driven: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Susan Sontag, December 16, 1968, in Susan Sontag Archives at UCLA.

  My “I” is puny, cautious, too sane: Reborn, 168.

  last year’s literary pin-up: Herbert Mitgang, “Victory in the Ashes of Vietnam,” New York Times, February 4, 1969.

  I’m assuming you’ve read mine: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Susan Sontag, December 16, 1968, in Susan Sontag Archives at UCLA.

  I don’t write essays anymore: Leticia Kent, “What Makes Susan Sontag Make Movies?” New York Times, October 11, 1970.

  a cross between Hannah Arendt and Donald Barthelme: As Consciousness, 340.

  had difficulty relating: For a thorough accounting of this development and its recurrence as a cyclical phenomenon in feminism, see, e.g., Susan Faludi, “American Electra,” Harper’s, October 2010.

  dull cow … battle-ax: Norman Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex,” Harper’s, March 1971.

  Norman, it is true that women find that: See Town Bloody Hall (1979) dir. D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.<
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  Where did you get that idea?: Leticia Kent, “Susan Sontag Speaks Up,” Vogue, August 1971.

  They should whistle at men in the streets: “The Third World of Women,” Partisan Review, Spring 1973.

  They are a grammar: On Photography (Dell, 1978), 3.

  A way of certifying experience: Ibid., 9.

  Assume that we are born to die: “How to Be an Optimist,” Vogue, January 1975.

  the way women are taught: “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?,” Vogue, April 1975.

  feminists would feel a pang: “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.

  Since I’m a feminist too: Interview with the Performing Arts Journal, 1977, in Conversations with Susan Sontag, ed. Leland Pogue (University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 84.

  My body is invasive, colonizing: From David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death (Simon and Schuster, 2008), 35. Rieff did not include this journal entry in As Consciousness.

  opaque to myself: Ibid.

  I wasn’t in the slightest detached: Interview with Wendy Lesser, 1980, in Conversations with Susan Sontag, 197.

  cancerphobes: Illness as Metaphor (Vintage, 1979), 22.

  a disturbing book: Denis Donoghue, “Disease Should Be Itself,” New York Times, July 16, 1978.

  Nostrils flaring: Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

  Chapter Nine: Kael

  reviewing a novel for the paper: See letter from Robert Silvers to Pauline Kael, August 28, 1963, in the Pauline Kael Papers at Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington.

  As a group: Draft of The Group review, in the Pauline Kael Papers, quoted in Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Penguin, 2011).

  I wonder, Mrs. John Doe: Undated (circa 1962–1963) broadcast on KPFA radio, Berkeley, California, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRhs-jKei3g.

  It was not out of guilty condescension: Pauline Kael, “‘Hud’: Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood,” Film Quarterly, Summer 1964.

  The place is cluttered up: Letter from Pauline Kael to Rosenberg, February 28, 1942, quoted in Kellow, Pauline Kael, 29.

  The Chaplin of Limelight: City Lights, Winter 1953, reprinted in Artforum, March 2002, 122.