Word: arendt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...attraction went deeper than mutual admiration and concern. It was as if each woman saw in the other an uncompleted part of herself. The staid Old World thinker, comfortably married to a college professor, undoubtedly took vicarious enjoyment in McCarthy's romantic affairs. Arendt, six years younger than her friend, personified a high culture unattainable in America. McCarthy died in 1989, having spent nearly the last third of her life in Europe with her fourth and final husband...
...McCarthy's autobiographical fiction (The Company She Keeps, The Group) was sexually brisk and unromantic. It is where many readers first encountered a young woman seduced by an attractive stranger without suffering any ill effect. At a time when the heavy moral lifting was thought best left to men, Arendt bench-pressed the weight of the world in books with such grave titles as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) gave the world a deeply disturbing concept, "the banality of evil." "Who does she think she is, Aristotle?" cracked...
When it comes to backbiting and ridicule, the pair easily keep pace with their literary friends. McCarthy finds Charles Reich (The Greening of America) "smarmily loving" and feminist Germaine Greer "an absurd Australian giantess." Not to be outdone, Arendt declares Margaret Mead "a monster" and Vladimir Nabokov "an intelligent show-off." Her 1957 take on Norman Podhoretz, critic, editor and later author of the confessional memoir Making It: "one of these bright youngsters with bright hopes for a nice career." Only three years later, it is "little Podhoretz, already soooo 'tired' like the proverbial Jewish waiter...
...Arendt is most at home above it all. "Dearest Mary," she writes in 1964, "the chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy ... This constant comparing is really the quintessence of vulgarity." This fact does not stop the two pen pals from making comparisons. Yet the assessments share an ideal of high-mindedness, of scaling some moral peak that towers over fallible theories and suspect ideologies. Parts of letters read like encounters in The Magic Mountain and offer clues to the thematic overload in McCarthy's last novels. Happily, most of the exchanges have the vitality and cutting edge...
Living on different continents, Arendt and McCarthy missed each other's company. Their loss is our gain. Had McCarthy stayed in New York, where Arendt remained until her death in 1975, the irreplaceable contents of this book would probably have vanished into the telephonic ether or gone up in the cigarette smoke of long lunches...