Word: arendt
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MARY MCCARTHY MET HANNAH Arendt at a Manhattan bar in 1944. Wartime New York was jumping, especially for jazz musicians, black marketeers and left-wing intellectuals. McCarthy, then a 32-year-old short-story writer, reviewer and wife of critic Edmund Wilson, was making the most of it. She had come to the red-hot center by way of Seattle and Vassar, class of '33. Arendt, a German Jew, had been an outstanding student at Marburg University, where she was the lover of her mentor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. She arrived in the U.S. in 1941, escaping probable death...
McCarthy started the relationship off badly by making a lighthearted remark about Hitler. Apologies were useless. But Arendt warmed up three years later, after both women took the same unpopular position at a political meeting. "Let's end this nonsense," she told McCarthy. "We think so much alike...
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 (Harcourt Brace; 412 pages; $34.95) reveals just how much these two passionate minds had in common. To begin with, both thought the literary world a circus. The pages glitter with mad poets, deceitful lovers, long-suffering wives and natural-born snobs. The widow of George Orwell is quoted as having said, "Auschwitz, oh, dear no! That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very minor death camp...
...friendship grows, compliments and commiserations, family news and professional gossip flow steadily between the two. McCarthy helps Arendt with her prose; Arendt dispenses wisdom ("Thinking does not lead to truth. Truth is the beginning of thought.") and advises McCarthy about her love life: "Nobody ever was cured of anything, trait or habit, by a mere woman ... Either you are willing to take him 'as is' or you better leave well enough alone...
...today examining gender in the work of Hannah Arendt, specifically in the writer's explorations of the realms of public and private. "I think we have a lot to learn from her insistence [on the importance of the separation between public and private]...where does that line run and how should it be drawn," she says. She is working to "unpack these terms" and find the place of gender in an interpretation of Arendt's thought...