COMMENT
169
should be accompanied by a criticism of the communists, otherwise
we would be playing the game of the Stalinists. More important,
however, is the fact that O'Neill never bothered to check with either
Bell or myself-which is most irresponsible, particularly in this age
of oral history, when all living participants in earlier events should
be heard.
I might cite also two other instances of revision and failure to
consult me. One is in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Hannah
Arendt, where she recounts the brouhaha about Lionel Abel's piece
on
The Banality of Evil.
The entire incident is badly reported and
distorted. Some of the things she left out are: the extensive
discussions with Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald,
Mary McCarthy, and Lionel Abel about the piece ; my many efforts
to explain to Arendt that we could not censor a commissioned piece
because it was unfavorable to her; Rahv's hostility to Arendt; and
my arrangement to have comments on the entire issue by Daniel
Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Lowell, and
myself.
Ironically, the same event is not reported accurately in an
otherwise interesting and charming memoir by Lionel Abel, in
which he claims that I should have known he was going to be critical
of Arendt. Perhaps so , but when Abel phoned to ask to review the
book, he said he liked it. Also, in another section of Abel's memoir,
describing-quite amusingly-a meeting at Joseph Buttinger' s
house to discuss a protest against the treatment of Soviet dissidents ,
Abel says I took a typically left position . Actually the issue had
nothing to do with left or right positions. I tried to reconcile a
disagreement between those who thought a protest would hurt the
dissidents and those who thought it would help them. I urged a
protest, but one that would not incite the Soviet government to take
harsher action against the dissidents . Since I have a good deal of
respect for Lionel Abel as a writer, I assume his was a human error.
Such errors of reporting are quite natural, since we all pay more
attention to our own remarks than to those of others, especially
when we think in retrospect of what we should and shouldn't have
said. But this is all the more reason for checking before quoting
other people .
So much for memory, bias, personality, vanity-and history,
which is sometimes the least important of these considerations .
W.P.
