Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975

by Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Carol Brightman (Editor)

American writer Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, a philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany, met in New York City, and soon became friends. In Between Friends, a complete record of their epistolary dialogue which lasted a remarkable 25 years, the two intellectual celebrities trade ideas about politics, literature, and morality, and share gossip and intimate domestic details.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction, Literature, Politics, History, Essays

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Reviews

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

He estado pensando mucho en la correspondencia, ese intercambio íntimo y amistoso, cálido, lleno de reflexión, ese arte perdido de escribir cartas.
Al leer este libro me lleno de nostalgia, no porque nunca haya escrito cartas, o porque lo siga haciendo, alguna vez mandé, y también recibí algunas, que todavía guardo, aunque no las lea muy seguido.
Pero hay algo en esa forma de comunicación, que me llena de esperanza en la humanidad, y que ya hemos perdido. Ahora claro, tenemos otros medios, más efectivos por su rapidez, pero no dejo de sentir algo por eso que hemos perdido al ganar rapidez.
Por estas cartas, escritas a través de casi 30 años, pasa de todo; se ve una amistad que va creciendo y asentándose con el tiempo, y ves la vida pasar. Hay chismes, hay comentarios superficiales, y también preocupaciones por acontecimientos desde la guerra de Vietnam, el Holocausto, hay cuestionamientos filosóficos, comentarios que se hacen mutuamente sobre sus libros, o ensayos. Hablan de sus familias, en el caso de Mary mcarthy más sobre sus problemas con sus parejas, la enfermedad y muerte de el esposo de Arendt.

Es realmente una delicia. No puedo dejar de decirlo, y pasan los días, y me quedo con esta sensación, que no sé como llamar, quizás la palabra brasileña, saudade, es lo que más se acerca a este pequeño pellizco que tengo atorado, porque no es algo que yo pueda hacer, como remedio, una campaña, volvamos a escribir! Es que es un arte que existía, y que todos cultivábamos sin darnos cuenta, sin cuestionarlo demasiado, pero era algo que sucedía, y era parte de nuestra vida. Podemos lanzarlo, como una idea, hay que escribir cartas! Pero la verdad es que la tecnología, si algo tiene, es que está hecha para hacernos un poco más flojos, y para olvidar hacer las cosas que nos gustan.

Pasan, claro, muchos escritores como Saúl Bellow, Auden, Nathalie Sarraute, Susan Sontag, Heidegger, etc etc.

Lo recomiendo mucho, así como recomiendo querer mucho a nuestros amigos y parejas, escribirnos y reflexionar sobre la vida, como hacen estas dos tremendas mujeres, que por suerte dejaron este documento que nos recuerda, que la vida es corta, que hay que querernos y cuidarnos,, hay que pausar un poco el paso del tiempo, compartiéndolo con alguien que está lejos, eso siempre será más importante, y más duradero que un "like".

[Julio The Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember the story, possibly apocryphal, about Pauline Kael's reaction to the defeat of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election? "How can that be? Everybody I know voted for him". That's the feeling I got listening in on the literary conversation between Mary McCarthy, a minor American novelist, and Hannah Arendt, towering figure of twentieth-century thought. These two friends live inside an intellectual cocoon where the only people they talk to and write about are other East Coast intellectuals. They make their shared home in an echo chamber, and can't be bothered with silly and trivial issues like the Civil Rights movement or the world nearly blowing up during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. What's that compared to a dinner party at Dwight McDonald's house? There are times when their correspondence verges on self-parody, except I'm not sure about whether this is intentional or not. In one letter, Miss McCarthy confesses she's coming across as "self-absorbed". No, really, Mary? Just because you care more about the plumbing in your Paris apartment than for those dumb French workers out on strike? On the flip side, Ms. Arendt writes that she signed Sartre's Open Letter on Algeria with hesitation and reservations. So, you only kind of, sort of, maybe oppose torture and napalm, Dr. Arendt? Anybody's private correspondence is bound to reveal a dark side; just read the letters of Marx with Engels, with their petty concerns, but these two women were taken, and wanted to be taken, for icons of liberal concern in "Dark Times", to quote Arendt. I earnestly respect the right of all to seal themselves off from worldly matters, or, to quote Bob Dylan, "I mean no harm, or put fault/On anyone who lives in a vault", but it's another matter when they are public intellectuals who pride themselves on being in the thick of controversies from the Hiss Case to Watergate. On that basis, they should be judged.

This collection of four decades in the life of a mutual admiration society is titled in a way that misleads the reader. Roughly ninety percent of the letters are from McCarthy to Arendt, who is either lecturing, traveling, or doing both. Miss Mary's concerns are with keeping her adulteries secret from her current husband, whoever that happened to be according to decade, including a bizarre one with a British boxer turned literary critic, a good combination, actually, raising her son Ruel from that misconceived marriage to Edmund Wilson, her illnesses, ranging from rheumatism to infection from a spider bite in Sicily, finding comfortable housing and good help in Maine, Warsaw, and Paris, both she and Arendt have full time maids, and the divorce dad travails of husband number four, a minor American diplomat who conveniently packed off his two kids to boarding school to live with the Divine Miss M. Ms. Arendt is more caring for her second husband, Heinrich, a professor like herself who apparently never said or wrote anything quotable, and firing off fast letters to McCarthy along the lines of "I'm off to a talk in Heidelberg, and then a quick trip to Scotland to pick up an award, then writing a few weeks in Switzerland, but maybe we can meet at the airport in Bangor". Elsewhere, the Commies and "fairies", a favorite word of Miss McCarthy, are on the march.

The correspondence begins in the Age of Nixon, the HUAC, and that other McCarthy, Joseph. Hannah and Mary are doing their part in the anti-communist crusade by fronting for the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a gathering of liberal anti-Red intellectual creatures and CIA front group whose cover was blown in 1966 by the DAILY TELEGRAPH; not that this bothered McCarthy. First she urged her British friends to sue the TELEGRAPH for libel and then, swallowing her tongue, decided it wasn't so bad after all if that "married homosexual", the poet Stephen Spender, headed the CCF for so long. In one weird letter, she tells Arendt of seeing Robert Oppenheimer at a meeting of the CCF where he looked "weird". Arendt, who saw Oppie on television, agrees Robert is strange, and adds that sadly he had his security clearance lifted before she could decide if scientists, or any intellectual, should work for the government, and, by the way, Heidegger faced the same dilemma. I'm still trying to clean up his reputation. In a display of unusual intelligence, Miss Mary writes Hannah that the little Congressman from California, Dick Nixon, perfectly fits Arendt's description of the rootless rotter in THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM who aims his guns at the stateless and hopeless individual by denying his humanity. No words from either, though, on loyalty oaths, the Hollywood Ten, and the purging of trade unions by Truman; just disappointment that Adlai Stevenson looks terrible campaigning twice against Eisenhower and Nixon. Just to show that some people never learn, let's flash forward to 1974 and the arrival in the United States of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Arendt and McCarthy had both blasted his novel AUGUST 1914, calling it reactionary and anti-semitic. Just as eagerly, they both welcomed and praised his GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. But, wait. Miss Mary is shocked to learn that Alex is hanging out in the United States with ferocious right-wingers, "like our old friend {Norman} Podhoretz", and he thinks socialism, not communism, is the problem of the twentieth century. No matter: "He's just using" that pro-Vietnam War crowd to gain some publicity.

So long as the world was all white, it was alright with the two friends. Alas, once in a while they had to come into contact, instead of reading about, people darker-skinned than the Sicilians. Mary is grossed out during a visit to Libya by "filthy Arabs" who have no intellect, are naturally docile, superstitious, and cover up their women. There's little hope of reforming them, she sighs, but they can carry luggage and cook for her. That's nothing, of course, compared to Arendt's well-known fear of a Black planet. She does her best to deep-six her racist diatribe from the Fifties, "Reflections on Little Rock", opposing federally mandated school integration, and has zero comment on Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other bagatelles. But, hold on. Didn't the Sixties teach her a lesson about race in America? Nope. She writes to McCarthy that integration was acceptable to the white middle class, meaning herself, when it only required "tokenism" towards "well-qualified Blacks" in the workplace. But now "lower-class, less-educated Blacks" want a piece of the action. Is it any wonder many whites voted for George Wallace in 1968 and again in 1972? The "Wallace Man" is being driven to the right by uppity Negroes and liberal hypocrisy. Let's not kid ourselves, she confides to Mary. The urban crime raging in the nation, including just outside Arendt's schoolroom window at the New School for Social Research in New York City, "is really Black crime", no matter what the liberals and sociologists say. Now you know how Nixon got elected twice to the presidency.

The bulk of these letters come from the Sixties. In a decade of rage, upheaval, and revolution, McCarthy is filling page after page with writing of her dizziness at trying to disentangle herself from husband number three, Bowen, so that she may be free to marry number four, Jim, who in turn must divorce that witch of a woman, the mother of his children. Meanwhile, it's back to her novel, that success d'escandale, THE GROUP. She worries that Arendt may find the racy passages too steamy, and reassures her it's really the story of America coming to grips with the Roosevelt revolution. Arendt is headed for scandal herself. One of the advantages of living inside an intellectual greenhouse is knowing everybody worth knowing. She's contacted William Shawn over at the NEW YORKER and asked to be assigned to cover the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann made her laugh with his thoughtlessness; McCarthy tells her there's no such word in the English language, a banal mind, but what followed wasn't funny. If Eichmann was banal, weren't we all equally capable of killing five million people? Hadn't she written that the Judenrat, Jewish Councils in Europe, had collaborated with the Nazis? Did you know, she asks McCarthy, that rabbis in New York are ordering their congregations to shun me? That in England, H. Trever Roper has called me "intellectually arrogant"? Isn't something more important brewing in the United States? Arendt writes that a couple of students in her class have organized a protest over Vietnam, just like at Berkeley: "I wish I knew more about it". McCarthy asks whether she knew their mutual friend, the poet genius Robert Lowell, had refused an invitation to Lyndon Johnson's White House to protest the war. Better to wait until reading what Walter Lippmann has to say in Vietnam; both agree.

Someone once joked that for New York intellectuals, when the going gets tough, they start a magazine. Arendt didn't need one, and McCarthy considers that option, then decides it's too risky, financially and politically. She's smart enough to notice that COMMENTARY, founded by some of her Old Left acquaintances, has turned to the right due to one issue-Israel- and moved to endorse Nixon. Besides, she counsels Arendt: We'll always have THE NEW REPUBLIC. Better still, we'll always have Paris. Mary sits out the Sixties there with her diplomat husband, sans kids, hiding from the horrible reviews of her latest novel, BIRDS OF AMERICA, while Arendt and her hubbie flee the madness of the streets in America for Switzerland. But what to do in 1972? Miss Mary ponders the presidential field: McGovern? Too weak. Dr. Spock? "A joke". Finally: "Are the Black Panthers running a candidate this year?" Yet, while one breathes, one hopes. Maybe those Watergate burglars---Arendt compares E. Howard Hunt to Eichmann---just might bring down their old Nemesis, Nixon. Mary is excited about a book contract she received to cover the Ervin Committee hearings, and Arendt prophetically guesses that the Democrats won't do much to punish Nixon, since that would amount to tyrannicide, bringing down the entire Washington elite. The combination of Vietnam and Watergate, without the level of public outrage and demonstrations that rocked the nation back in the Sixties, and which, incidentally, neither of these two supported, might just spell "the end of the American republic".

Times are hard, and there's only one thing for the fabulous duo to do: Gossip about mutual friends, enemies, and news makers. Did Arendt know that Cal (Robert Lowell) has left his wife Elizabeth Hardwick and gotten his girlfriend Katherine pregnant? Poor Randall Jarrell went and stepped in front of a truck one night to commit suicide. Maybe he shouldn't have gone off his meds. There's that new boy we both met at a party, Jonathan Schell, not too bright but writes well on Nixonian duplicity. Speaking of which, why is Sidney Hook in the Nixon camp now? Good thing for us we're important and respected. Arendt, across the Atlantic Ocean, agrees and spits her venom at those she deems stupid: Pope Paul VI is "politically stupid" for his anti Birth Control Pill stance, and McCarthy, an atheist, adds he also purged all those Catholic saints she grew up with; Golda Meir is monumentally stupid, though Arendt does not give a reason (curiously, Arendt shared one nasty habit with the Israeli PM, chain smoking, even in the hospital); that German kid, Rolf Hochhuth, author of THE DEPUTY, is stupid, yet he made the right call on Pius XII and his silence on the Holocaust; Daniel Cohn-Bendit is not the brightest tool in the shed, but Arendt knows his family. Gunter Grass is no German wunderkind and THE TIN DRUM is just a pastiche of everything he's ever read. "There's no intellectual life any more", Mary whimpers.

On occasion, even out-of-touch intellectuals have their moments of clarity and moral courage. The two friends are no exception. McCarthy used her husband's contacts in the diplomatic world and her own among the literati to win an invitation to visit Hanoi in 1968, risking getting caught in the U.S. bombing. She not only took a public stance against the war but wrote positively of the North Vietnamese leadership, boasting to the end of her life that she received a Christmas card from Communist Prime Minister Phan Van Dong every year. Arendt used the invitation she received from the Mayor of Boston in 1975 to celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution to gift her adopted country an oratory hand grenade. Her address, "Home to Roost", declared the United States was paying for the sins of Vietnam and Watergate---lying in politics, a breakdown in public trust, and American foreign policy in complete disarray. It was a typical gesture by a born rebel, and her last. She succumbed to a coronary attack soon after. McCarthy spoke at her humble funeral, surrounded by the literary luminaries they had cultivated and disdained.

The editor of the correspondence, Carol Brightman, obviously idolizes her subjects. That is not, however, an excuse for sloppy scholarship. She has Mary McCarthy reading THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO in 1968, an impossibility, since it came out in English translation only in 1974. PFLP is not an acronym for al-Fatah. They are separate Palestinian organizations. McCarthy writes often of her tumultuous relationship with PARTISAN REVIEW editor Philip Ravh, and of his death by possible suicide, but Brightman never informs us that McCarthy and Rahv were once lovers. When treating the lives of two women to whom scholarship was a sacred duty, such errors should not be let pass.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, often accompanied by low "animal" cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will--an active preference, and that explains why one is so irritated by stupidity, which is not the case when one is dealing with a truly backward individual.

This was a genuine experience. Perhaps I am self-conscious from the discussions about Will and Judgment, the choice of relative Non-Thinking? The shared intimacy and philosophical exchanges were indeed a wonder to behold. I am the richer for such.

Not only does the reader have access to nascent ideas that would blossom in treatises and novels, but there is a litany of details, the serial illnesses and political observations which make up an informed life. There is a torrent of gossip and regret. There is also effort to speak truthfully from both parties. There is one instance when Arendt doesn't turn around when boarding a plane in Maine. McCarthy thinks something must be wrong. Hundreds of words ensue. It was all just a misunderstanding. Arendt the refugee lives in the States without becoming overly-American. McCarthy succeeds with husband number four to secure residence in Europe. Thus these branded expats are always planning time together and making international calls, perhaps weekly. Forgive me if I simply gush in admiration.

One could look at other variations, aside from repatriation. Mentors and husbands are depicted kaleidoscopically in almost a fugue. Alas, some matters drift from view. Edmund Wilson is nearly forgotten. Only the son he had with with McCarthy keeps such relevant. His passing is not acknowledged. Heidegger lingers. His hold never quite loosens. Other figures such as Dwight McDonald and Philip Rahv have diminished since their prime. Literary highpoints of the era are approached: The Tin Drum, Pale Fire and the Gulag Archipelago. The politics of the time appears to dominate the second half of the correspondence. Both protagonist espouse their fears of both LBJ and Nixon; reflecting on such, I pondered our own age. I told a good friend recently that last month's election moved us from the Weimar Republic to the Ford Administration. This is well worth anyone's time.

[Yves S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enormously enjoyed the reading of that correspondence which started from 1949, shortly after they first met in 1944 and lasted until Arendt's death in December 1975.

During this post-war period, "Fantasy was at work here, fantasies of considerable creative potential for both women, not only for their friendship, which grew by leaps and bounds after an early misunderstanding, but also for their work, much of which was inspired by ideals attached to the other's traditions". (Carol Brightman's introduction).

You will not find in these letters much of the really deep and profound development of thoughts we are used to find in the works of these two major intellectuals, but you will find many of the refreshing daily events that marked this lasting friendship set across the big pond, with Arendt reporting from New York and McCarthy from Paris.

These years are full of important events that have affected their day to day lives, Eichmann's trial, Algeria's independence war, Kennedy's assassination, the Vietnam war, Paris uprisings in spring 68, the Watergate, and these letters give us a first hand insight from two exceptionally bright minds of what this troubled second half of the 20th century was like.

However, mostly this is about friendship and support for each other through the ups and downs of their careers. They certainly both had down times during this period. After the publication of Eichmann for Arendt for example and Birds of America for McCarthy, but this correspondence shows the moral support they provided to each other.
In these letters are also shared "gossips" from the world of intellectuals, and about some tribulations of their respective love lives. In summary, this correspondence shows the human sides of these two immense intellectuals.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sure, this contains some skimmable material (travel logistics, updates on the health of obscure acquaintances, and scenes from The Madness of Robert Lowell), but there’s a wonderful quarter-century dialogue at its core. I liked the letters in which McCarthy, a novelist of manners, picked Arendt’s brain trying to locate the origin (or first reflection) of certain contemporary “intellectual fashions” and trends of taste, in the reaches of Western Thought where McCarthy didn’t feel herself well read. And McCarthy provided Arendt with nuanced guidance on the differences of German and English philosophical vocabularies, and on the traps and quirks of English usage.

Arendt was a great friend, ready with wise counsel during McCarthy’s attempted affair with the bibulous mythomane John Davenport (a very English type, a critic who penned his columns in pub alcoves, and a seedy, charming poser, a child of actors who pretended to noble birth), her divorce from her third husband (a Whit Stillmanian preppie failure named, get this, “Bowden Broadwater”), and during the trials of step-motherhood after her fourth and final marriage. McCarthy is a brilliant satirist, effortlessly elevating her reports of cocktail parties and political meetings into memorable novelistic scenes. I was constantly reminded of David Laskin’s description – in Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals – of how the Partisan Review crowd practiced “gossip as moral inquiry.”


McCarthy on Dwight Macdonald’s second wife:

Dwight has been here, with his new wife [Gloria]. I finally see the point. The girl is a nitwit, but she’s feminine in a positive way, flirtatious with him, lively, full of to him mysterious little graces and unaccountable opinions and mental vagaries. The contrast with poor Nancy [Dwight’s first wife] is very striking. Nancy represented the negative femininity – caution, conscience, moral worth, lugubrious economies. It came to me suddenly that Dwight had never had any fun with Nancy; if he enjoyed himself in her company he was really alone and she was watching him dubiously, meting out a concessive laugh now and then, like a hygienic cookie. He had to escape from her, I now think.

Arendt on Broadwater’s stalling around the divorce:

You write that it is just “too ridiculous” for the two of you (Jim West and you) to be “the passive foils of other people.” If you want to look at the matter in these terms at all, then it seems to me rather obvious that you both are the victims of your own, self-chosen past. This may be inconvenient but it is not ridiculous, unless you wish to say your whole past was not only a mistake, but a ridiculous one.

And to tie these extracts together, a curious observation of McCarthy’s on the death of Philip Rahv:

Philip’s “ideas” weren’t interesting, except as an expression of his personality. Though he certainly wasn’t stupid and had a mental life, it didn’t achieve independence, of the temporal, of him. That may be why that of all the friends who have died, I feel especially sorry that he couldn’t have immortality, couldn’t have gone to his own funeral and commented on it, followed the latest Watergate developments, had a crushing word for the newest marriage or divorce…

--------

The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem have been near the top of my to-read list for a while; and Men in Dark Times is due for a re-read. I love McCarthy's trilogy of memoirs, but I haven't read a word of her fiction. Arendt praised The Group as "beautifully written (the inner balance of the sentences is extraordinary)." These letters have also made me curious about McCarthy's Vietnam reportage, especially her account of the court-martial of Captain Ernest Medina, Lt. Calley's immediate superior during the My Lai massacre. Despite the testimony of three soldiers who saw him gun down a wounded, unarmed teenage girl, Medina was acquitted, left the Army to became a realtor in Wisconsin, and died in his bed aged 81.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends support each other. Support is a major element of the friendship between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, evident here in these warm letters. McCarthy supported Arendt in her controversial writings about Adolf Eichmann. Arendt supported McCarthy during love affairs and breakups and held her up during bad reviews of her novels.

These letters don't contain as much profound discourse as I would have expected, though there is some, primarily from Arendt. What there is plenty of is warmth. These two women were genuinely fond of each other. They were also free in expressing their opinions. Not gossip, though some pokes through, along with the occasional catty hiss about a particular personal dislike. But because their world was the New York and European intelligentsia and because they seemed to know everybody in those circles, the acquaintances generated thought and the thought opinion, but opinion so penetrating that it becomes insight. If the best prose is consistently McCarthy's, most of the intellectual content is provided by Arendt in openly discussing her work with her friend. And quite a lot of the discourse concerns American politics. After all, the years of the letters span the Joseph McCarthy hearings, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, all of which Arendt and McCarthy felt strongly about.

[Hilde Weisert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid, moving thirty-year correspondence between "thinking friends" (a term coined by the philosopher Sara Ruddick) capturing the times, as lived by people in the middle of them, and playing a part. I came away respecting and liking each of them more than I imagined from their other works, returning to read or re-read their books... Approached the end (Arendt's death in 1975) with a deepening sense of anxiety. Especially brought back the Vietnam - Watergate era I lived through but that had partly blurred in my own memory.

[Alba Cantón · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellas siguen dialogando si las seguimos leyendo... Larga vida a Arendt y a McCarthy! Creo que no podré olvidar el dolor de este epílogo; de la interrupción de cartas que llegaban cada vez con más frecuencia tanto como crecía su amistad con los años.

[Blackcal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quelle belle lecture & belle surprise ! L'échange de lettres entre Mary McCarthy & Hannah Arendt est le premier roman épistolaire que je lis, j'avais toujours considéré ce genre comme étant ennuyeux; qui peut bien s'intéresser à du vieux courrier ? En lisant cet échange de lettres, je découvre non seulement deux femmes brillantes et le ton espiègle & sarcastique d'Arendt qu'on ne distingue pas dans ses ouvrages plus sérieux, mais également une amitié puissante qui survit aux scandales, aux divers maris et au temps qui passe. C'est extrêmement intéressant de lire des sujets historiques (mort de Kennedy, mai 68, guerre du Vietnam, Watergate, Black Power, etc.) via des impressions de personnes qui leur ont été contemporaines. Les petits commentaires sur les événements de l'époque qui nous rappelle que l'histoire se répète : par exemple Arendt qui est étonnée qu'on ait remis le Nobel de littérature à Steinbeck m'a rappelé le scandale Dylan, les critique de McCarthy sur le clown Nixon évoquent les critiques actuelles contre Trump ("The Nixon success, if it's really serious, is too horribly Orwellian to contemplate, it would mean that mass society is a reality, which nobody here, even those who have denouced its symptoms, really has ever believed except in talk. The idea that people are influenced, not by their passions or interests, but by advertising techniques, i.e., by mass-conditioning, blows all my conceptions of US like sky-high. [...] In short, do the reflexes that send people out to buy a certain box of soap-flakes, where the choice is really a matter of indifference, all brands being more or less alike, now work in politics ?" en 1952..).
De plus, au-delà des Histoires avec un grand H, on s'amuse également à lire les "petits" soucis quotidiens des deux amies : l'angoisse de la page blanche, les maris, les soirées mondaines ennuyeuses et autres. Hannah Arendt évoque souvent plusieurs livres qu'elle a dû lire en certifiant à leur auteur à quel point elle les avait adoré, avant d'écrire à Mary McCarthy que c'était d'un ennui terrible. Je les ai retrouvées au fil des lettres avec plaisir, comme deux bonnes amies que je connais bien à présent, et je les ai quittées à regret à la fin.

[Kristi Hovington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't have been brave enough to acquaint myself with Hannah, but someone with excellent discernment encouraged me to do so and whose enthusiasm for her was catching. I'm approaching Hannah a bit sideways, taking baby steps and working up to her books.

I adore this book. Hannah's intelligence, her originality, the thoughts behind her thinking, her daily, mundane concerns mixed with the giant concerns are all here, and it is an absolute kind of magic to read her private thoughts about the Eichmann trial, Watergate, McCarthyism, Vietnam and more, whilst also commenting on people she meets (she calls Margaret Mead a "monster" in a very funny letter about the vapidity of being famous) and her thoughts on the joys of teaching students while complaining about grading papers.

I think I admire her most for her bravery and conviction; when everyone (except her husband and Mary!) was against her, she never doubted herself or her thinking. She had doubts about other things, but not about her own intellect or her reasoning and refused to explain, justify, or defend herself in public, rightly noting her work speaks for itself. But she does explain herself, here, to Mary. Which makes her public stance all the more remarkable, to me, and her character all the more compelling. Hannah is the full embodiment of Emerson’s “to thine own self be true” passage. having the courage to be one’s self is vastly more complex, alienating, and arduous than most paths, yet Hannah never seems to struggle with this as seen in these letters. She is fully, confidently, and gloriously herself.

And Mary! I didn't know a single thing about her, but what an intellectual counterweight she is. I wasn't sure about her at first, but by the halfway point of their correspondence, I'd grown fond of her, and by the end, I wanted to be her best friend, too. They are definitely #squadgoals.

If you are a person not interested in Hannah or Mary, this might not be the book for you. But if you are in any way interested in either, this book illuminates both spectacularly.

Also, this book reminds me that I need to read Kant, as both quote from him and reference him frequently, and everything they say about him made me want to know him better, too. More for the TBR list!

[Rdonn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this correspondence between two brilliant women, with their views on politics, literature, people etc. They used each other as sounding boards for their writings, and ideas. They were very loyal to each other, and when one was in trouble, the other would drop everything to help. Hannah flew to Mary when she had a miscarriage in Paris, and Mary flew immediately to Hannah when Heinrich, her husband died. I really feel letters are a wonderful way to get to know someone, especially as these letters were honest and deeply felt. Hannah was often called arrogant, but she doesn't come across this way at all. Most touching was when W.H. Auden came to see her in deep distress, saying he loved her and asked her for her help, though not in so many words. She felt unable to give him the support he needed and sent him away, very drunk. When he died not long after she was distraught. She was haunted by what she might have done to help him. (Probably nothing). The last year of letters is sad, as so many of their friends died, and then Hannah in Dec. 1975. Mary lived 14 years longer.

I must read more in this genre.

[Zoe Tuck]

Taught in spring 2021.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the glimpse into the world of these two formidable thinkers ... the mix of deep thought, worries about children/husbands, gossip about friends (Auden, Robert Lowell, etc.), and the way each would bounce ideas off the other. Really wish I would have had time to follow the footnotes and read through their work in the archives of the New Yorker/Paris Review at the same time.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw, direct, honest, hurt, sincere, affectionate, articulate, genuine, loyal, active, ambitious, perceptive, reflective, gossipy, informational, humane, sneaky, personal, and real: These letters gave me more than a sense of who the two giants were behind their influential books; I felt I knew them and was grieved when it ended (with Hannah's death in 1975).

[Marnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me miss the world of letters -- literal letters, as in sent in the mail. These women used letters to work out their thinking, and the record of that thinking process is for the most part very interesting. Politics of the fifties and sixties -- the start of my life -- are fascinating.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are two smart (and witty!) broads.

[Leka]

Work in progress...perché non resisto

Incredibile! Non mi era mai successo di trovare in un'edizione della Sellerio così tanti refusi. E tutti quei [sic!] agli errori delle due sono a dir poco indisponenti.
Solo la curiosità (sbalordita a volte!) mi fa continuare a leggere. Più o meno.

[April Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me this is not a book that grabs one’s attention immediately but rather it slowly sucks you in. I guess it’s something to do with McCarthy’s and Arendt’s academic celebrity lifestyle that is so different from that of normal people. For example, they are constantly traveling, hence the ever-changing address; they also have alternatingly tranquil and insane schedules. But once you get used to it, the letters really engross you in a part of McCarthy and Arendt’s world fulfilled with friendship, opinions and honesty. Topics covered in their discussions include publications (both their own and others’), politics, traveling & sightseeing, romance endeavors, gossips, etc.

Every now and then, I’m really impressed by how utterly truthful they are about their lives, especially McCarthy. Like when she opens up about her love affairs and depressions. Most people, myself included, are not even that truthful with ourselves - as Arendt put it, a “lying character”.

The last part of the book is very sad, with deaths, health conditions, and even accidents. I was shocked to realize 20 years have already passed since their first letter. Then there comes an end, or is it?

[Rafael Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisito! Este intercambio epistolar entre dos intelectuales liberales de izquierda durante un cuarto de siglo es un placer.
Uno se siente como un voyeur que participa de la conversación entre dos intimas amigas que se cuentan todo. Hablan de romance, maridos, amantes, política, libros, autores, historia, filosofía, periodismo, salud, enfermedad, parejas, familia, amigos, impuestos, dinero, exceso o falta de trabajo, etc. pero con mucho respeto y autoridad intelectual. Hasta cuando no están de acuerdo discuten con la altura de dos damas únicas e irrepetibles.
De lo mejor que leí en el año.

[Susan Barribeau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well edited tome. Has a good index thank god. I read it for the gossip, mostly. I’ve read a lot of and about mccarthy. I know much less about Arendt and still less about the philosophers who are much mentioned in this book. Serious but entertaining. I skip around a lot while reading correspondence. Not a cover to cover read for me.

[Jane]

Interessant

[Eva Hamill]

How fun to insert yourself into the lives of women who think for a living in a time when many women stayed quietly at home. Reading these letters affirms the history background of my childhood making far off news of the country real.

Like an armchair mountain climber, theirs is not a lifestyle I would choose for myself but enjoy slipping into for a peek. Much more gratfying and informative than the more modern reality tv.

[Roxani]

Every time I re-read sections of this book, different sentences light up in my mind. This time, I hold on to this excerpt from Carol Brightman's introduction:

McCarthy liked to watch her friend “think.” “Watching [Hannah] talk to an audience was like seeing the motions of the mind made visible in action and gesture,” she told the mourners at Arendt’s funeral in 1975. “Hannah was a conservationist; she did not believe in throwing anything away that had once been thought. A use might be found for it,” she began. “Thought, for her, was a kind of husbandry, a humanizing of the wilderness of experience—building houses, running paths and roads through, damming streams, planting windbreaks.” (xvi)