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DWIGHT MACDONALD
DWIGHT MACDONALD
Sms:
When the front page of the
N. Y . Times Book Review
a year
ago carried a "review" of Hannah Arendt's
Eichmann in Jerusalem
which
described it as defending the Nazis, the Gestapo, Himmler and Eichmann
(while slandering their Jewish victims) I shrugged and thought, well,
Musmanno, and well, the Sunday
Times.
(Whose editors echoed their re–
viewer's demagogy with the headline: "MAN WITH AN UNSPOTTED
CONSCIENCE.") For I had read the book and found it the opposite:
a masterpiece of historical journalism that explained the real horror of
Nazi genocide, as against the cliches of forensic indignation mobilized
by Mr. Musmanno.
My shrug was premature. The
Times
review proved to be merely
an early gun in a barrage that was already being laid down in the
Jewish press while the book was being serialized in the
New Yorker.
The headline in the
Intermountain Jewish News
(April 12, 1963) was
a little blunt: "SELF-HATING JEWESS WRITES PRO-EICHMANN
SERIES"-haven't seen "Jewess" in print since those fascist sheets in
the thirties. But it indicated an approach that came to include magazines
I read, respect and even write for. Their strictures were more moderate
and sophisticated, but they followed the Musmanno line: the book was
soft on Eichmann, hard on the Jews. And the closest to Musmanno in
spirit was Lionel Abel's, I'm sorry to say, since I've been associated with
Partisan R eview,
as editor and contributor, for a long time. I thought
Mary McCarthy's "Hue and Cry" brilliantly (and sensibly) dealt with
Mr. Abel-settled his hash you might say-and I shall try not to re-hash
too much.
I
The moral crux of Abel's indictment is that "He [Eichmann] comes
off so much better in her book than do his victims." Because, he claims,
the author takes a heartless aesthetic approach to the whole ghastly
business:
"If
a man holds a gun at the head of another and forces him
to kill his friend, the man with a gun will be aesthetically less ugly than
the one who out of fear of death has killed his friend.... And if we turn
to
the extermination of approximately five million people, does it seem
proper that the executioner and his host of victims should be judged in
aesthetic rather than in moral and political terms?" Miss McCarthy has
shown the logical and moral fallacy in the first sentence, which is so
