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PARTISAN REVIEW
that respectable editorial practice dictated the printing of a com–
missioned piece unless it was libelous, or personally offensive,
or intellectually below the level, or generally beyond the pale.
Admittedly, we were in the middle of a dilemma that had no
clear resolution, certainly not to everyone's satisfaction. What was
finally done-which was my decision-was to run Abel's piece
and then open up the question in a wider discussion. In the
next issue Daniel Bell tried to act as a peacemaker by judiciously
weighing Abel's arguments against Arendt's thesis and lifting
the whole issue to the contradiction between the ideals of justice
and humanity and the more immediate questions of guilt and
retribution involving the Jewish people.
In the following issue, we published comments by Mary
McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Marie Syrkin, Irving Howe,
Robert Lowell, Harold Weisberg, and myself, with a reply by
Abel to his critics. Most of the comments, as I said in my piece,
which was cast in the form of a letter to Mary McCarthy who had
expressed some doubt about whether I would take a position on
the controversy, were clever, some brilliant, but they were too
polemical, too busy tripping each other up, to add much to the
argument. Syrkin and Weisberg were snarling and sneering,
Lowell Olympian and touching in his affection for H annah,
McCarthy brilliant, especially in the writing, and honest in
stating her bias, though her division of the protagonists into
Jewish and Gentile only fueled the polarization, and Macdonald
journalistically sharp and agile, but going along with Mary's
arguments. In my piece, I tried to be fair and judicious, but that
is a thankless job, especially when extreme positions are fashion–
able, and it makes one look as though he is avoiding taking a
strong stand. (Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's accoun t of this incident
in her biography of Arendt is neither full nor correct.)
The only tangible result of the whole controversy was that
Hannah and I did not speak to each other for a few years. Hannah
felt betrayed by me. And though I tried to explain that my con–
duct was the only proper one for an editor of a magazine that
prided itself on being open to any serious view, and that you
could not just kill things that had been commissioned, I could
understand her reaction. Indeed, I now feel, as I have said, that
our little world was deficient in friendship and loyalty and that
objectivity often has been a mask for competitiveness, malice,
